(January 1831) _Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations
affecting Jews in England. 8vo. London: 1829._
|THE distinguished member of the House of Commons, who, towards the
close of the late Parliament, brought forward a proposition for the
relief of the Jews, has given notice of his intention to renew it. The
force of reason, in the last session, carried the measure through one
stage in spite of the opposition of power. Reason and power are now
on the same side; and we have little doubt that they will conjointly
achieve a decisive victory. In order to contribute our share to the
success of just principles, we propose to pass in review, as rapidly as
possible, some of the arguments, or phrases claiming to be arguments,
which have been employed to vindicate a system full of absurdity and
injustice.
The constitution, it is said, is essentially Christian; and therefore
to admit Jews to office is to destroy the constitution. Nor is the Jew
injured by being excluded from political power. For no man has any right
to power. A man has a right to his property; a man has a right to be
protected from personal injury. These rights the law allows to the Jew;
and with these rights it would be atrocious to interfere. But it is a
mere matter of favour to admit any man to political power; and no man
can justly complain that he is shut out from it.
We cannot but admire the ingenuity of this contrivance for shifting
the burden of the proof from those to whom it properly belongs, and who
would, we suspect, find it rather cumbersome. Surely no Christian
can deny that every human being has a right to be allowed every
gratification, which produces no harm to others, and to be spared every
mortification which produces no good to others. Is it not a source of
mortification to a class of men that they are excluded from political
power? If it be, they have, on Christian principles, a right to be freed
from that mortification, unless it can be shown that their exclusion
is necessary for the averting of some greater evil. The presumption is
evidently in favour of toleration. It is for the prosecutor to make out
his case.
The strange argument which we are considering would prove too much even
for those who advance it. If no man has a right to political power,
then neither Jew nor Gentile has such a right. The whole foundation of
government is taken away. But if government be taken away, the property
and the persons of men are insecure; and it is acknowledged that men
have a right to their property and to personal security. If it be right
that the property of men should be protected, and if this can only
be done by means of government, then it must be right that government
should exist. Now there cannot be government unless some person or
persons possess political power. Therefore it is right that some person
or persons should possess political power. That is to say, some person
or persons must have a right to political power.
It is because men are not in the habit of considering what the end of
government is, that Catholic disabilities and Jewish disabilities
have been suffered to exist so long. We hear of essentially Protestant
governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean
just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian
horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace,
for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration
instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to
supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine.
This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is
peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever
propose to themselves as their chief object. If there is any class
of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves
interested, in the security of property and the maintenance of order,
that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the
purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should
be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because
he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays
instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive.
The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much
to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a rabbi. But they have
no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a
minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. Nobody has
ever thought of compelling cobblers to make any declaration on the true
faith of a Christian. Any man would rather have his shoes mended by
a heretical cobbler than by a person who had subscribed all the
thirty-nine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not
because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see
what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion
has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the
army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last
twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of
the Exchequer.
But it would be monstrous, says the persecutors, that Jews
should legislate for a Christian community. This is a palpable
misrepresentation. What is proposed is, not that the Jews should
legislate for a Christian community, but that a legislature composed
of Christians and Jews should legislate for a community composed of
Christians and Jews. On nine hundred and ninety-nine questions out of a
thousand, on all questions of police, of finance, of civil and criminal
law, of foreign policy, the Jew, as a Jew, has no interest hostile to
that of the Christian, or even to that of the Churchman. On questions
relating to the ecclesiastical establishment, the Jew and the Churchman
may differ. But they cannot differ more widely than the Catholic and
the Churchman, or the Independent and the Churchman. The principle that
Churchmen ought to monopolise the whole power of the State would at
least have an intelligible meaning. The principle that Christians ought
to monopolise it has no meaning at all. For no question connected with
the ecclesiastical institutions of the country can possibly come before
Parliament, with respect to which there will not be as wide a difference
between Christians as there can be between any Christian and any Jew.
In fact the Jews are not now excluded from political power. They possess
it; and as long as they are allowed to accumulate large fortunes, they
must possess it. The distinction which is sometimes made between civil
privileges and political power is a distinction without a difference.
Privileges are power. Civil and political are synonymous words, the
one derived from the Latin, the other from the Greek. Nor is this mere
verbal quibbling. If we look for a moment at the facts of the case, we
shall see that the things are inseparable, or rather identical.
That a Jew should be a judge in a Christian country would be most
shocking. But he may be a juryman. He may try issues of fact; and no
harm is done. But if he should be suffered to try issues of law, there
is an end of the constitution. He may sit in a box plainly dressed, and
return verdicts. But that he should sit on the bench in a black gown
and white wig, and grant new trials, would be an abomination not to
be thought of among baptized people. The distinction is certainly most
philosophical.
What power in civilised society is so great as that of the creditor over
the debtor? If we take this away from the Jew, we take away from him the
security of his property. If we leave it to him, we leave to him a power
more despotic by far than that of the King and all his Cabinet.
It would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament. But a Jew may make
money; and money may make members of Parliament. Gatton and Old Sarum
may be the property of a Hebrew. An elector of Penryn will take ten
pounds from Shylock rather than nine pounds nineteen shillings and
eleven-pence three farthings from Antonio. To this no objection is made.
That a Jew should possess the substance of legislative power, that he
should command eight votes on every division as if he were the great
Duke of Newcastle himself, is exactly as it should be. But that he
should pass the bar and sit down on those mysterious, cushions of green
leather, that he should cry “hear” and “order,” and talk about being on
his legs, and being, for one, free to say this and to say that, would be
a profanation sufficient to bring ruin on the country.
That a Jew should be privy-councillor to a Christian king would be an
eternal disgrace to the nation. But the Jew may govern the money-market,
and the money-market may govern the world. The Minister may be in doubt
as to his scheme of finance till he has been closeted with the Jew.
A congress of sovereigns may be forced to summon the Jew to their
assistance. The scrawl of the Jew on the back of a piece of paper may be
worth more than the royal word of three kings, or the national faith of
three new American republics. But that he should put Right Honourable
before his name would be the most frightful of national calamities.
It was in this way that some of our politicians reasoned about the Irish
Catholics. The Catholics ought to have no political power. The sun of
England is set for ever if the Catholics exercise political power. Give
the Catholics everything else; but keep political power from them.
These wise men did not see that, when everything else had been given,
political power had been given. They continued to repeat their cuckoo
song, when it was no longer a question whether Catholics should
have political power or not, when a Catholic association bearded the
Parliament, when a Catholic agitator exercised infinitely more authority
than the Lord Lieutenant.
If it is our duty as Christians to exclude the Jews from political
power, it must be our duty to treat them as our ancestors treated them,
to murder them, and banish them, and rob them. For in that way, and in
that way alone, can we really deprive them of political power. If we do
not adopt this course, we may take away the shadow, but we must leave
them the substance. We may do enough to pain and irritate them; but we
shall not do enough to secure ourselves from danger, if danger really
exists. Where wealth is, there power must inevitably be.
The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a
separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over all
the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or a Portuguese Jew as his
countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want of
patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political
functions.
The argument has in it something plausible; but a close examination
shows it to be quite unsound. Even if the alleged facts are admitted,
still the Jews are not the only people who have preferred their sect to
their country. The feeling of patriotism, when society is in a healthful
state springs up, by a natural and inevitable association, in the minds
of citizens who know that they owe all their comforts and pleasures to
the bond which unites them in one community. But, under a partial and
oppressive Government, these associations cannot acquire that strength
which they have in a better state of things. Men are compelled to seek
from their party that protection which they ought to receive from their
country, and they, by a natural consequence, transfer to their party
that affection which they would otherwise have felt for their country.
The Huguenots of France called in the help of England against their
Catholic kings. The Catholics of France called in the help of Spain
against a Huguenot king. Would it be fair to infer, that at present the
French Protestants would wish to see their religion made dominant by the
help of a Prussian or an English army? Surely not, and why is it that
they are not willing, as they formerly were willing, to sacrifice
the interests of their country to the interests of their religious
persuasion? The reason is obvious: they were persecuted then, and are
not persecuted now. The English Puritans, under Charles the First,
prevailed on the Scotch to invade England. Do the Protestant Dissenters
of our time wish to see the Church put down by an invasion of foreign
Calvinists? If not, to what cause are we to attribute the change? Surely
to this, that the Protestant Dissenters are far better treated now than
in the seventeenth century. Some of the most illustrious public men that
England ever produced were inclined to take refuge from the tyranny of
Laud in North America. Was this because Presbyterians and Independents
are incapable of loving their country? But it is idle to multiply
instances. Nothing is so offensive to a man who knows anything of
history or of human nature as to hear those who exercise the powers
of government accuse any sect of foreign attachments. If there be
any proposition universally true in politics it is this, that foreign
attachments are the fruit of domestic misrule. It has always been the
trick of bigots to make their subjects miserable at home, and then to
complain that they look for relief abroad; to divide society, and to
wonder that it is not united; to govern as if a section of the State
were the whole, and to censure the other sections of the State for their
want of patriotic spirit. If the Jews have not felt towards England like
children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother. There
is no feeling which more certainly develops itself in the minds of men
living under tolerably good government than the feeling of patriotism.
Since the beginning of the world, there never was any nation, or any
large portion of any nation, not cruelly oppressed, which was wholly
destitute of that feeling. To make it therefore ground of accusation
against a class of men, that they are not patriotic, is the most vulgar
legerdemain of sophistry. It is the logic which the wolf employs against
the lamb. It is to accuse the mouth of the stream of poisoning the
source.
If the English Jews really felt a deadly hatred to England, if the
weekly prayer of their synagogues were that all the curses denounced
by Ezekiel on Tyre and Egypt might fall on London, if, in their solemn
feasts, they called down blessings on those who should dash their
children to pieces on the stones, still, we say, their hatred to their
countrymen would not be more intense than that which sects of Christians
have often borne to each other. But in fact the feeling of the Jews
is not such. It is precisely what, in the situation in which they are
placed, we should expect it to be. They are treated far better than
the French Protestants were treated in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, or than our Puritans were treated in the time of Laud. They,
therefore, have no rancour against the Government or against their
countrymen. It will not be denied that they are far better affected to
the State than the followers of Coligni or Vane. But they are not so
well treated as the dissecting sects of Christians are now treated in
England; and on this account, and, we firmly believe, on this account
alone, they have a more exclusive spirit. Till we have carried the
experiment further, we are not entitled to conclude that they cannot be
made Englishmen altogether. The statesman who treats them as aliens, and
then abuses them for not entertaining all the feelings of natives, is
as unreasonable as the tyrant who punished their fathers for not making
bricks without straw.
Rulers must not be suffered thus to absolve themselves of their solemn
responsibility. It does not lie in their mouths to say that a sect is
not patriotic. It is their business to make it patriotic. History and
reason clearly indicate the means. The English Jews are, as far as we
can see, precisely what our Government has made them. They are precisely
what any sect, what any class of men, treated as they have been treated,
would have been. If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during
centuries, been outraged and oppressed, banished from this place,
imprisoned in that, deprived of their money, deprived of their teeth,
convicted of the most improbable crimes on the feeblest evidence,
dragged at horses’ tails, hanged, tortured, burned alive, if, when
manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing
restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults, locked up in particular
streets in some countries, pelted and ducked by the rabble in others,
excluded everywhere from magistracies and honours, what would be the
patriotism of gentlemen with red hair? And if, under such circumstances,
a proposition were made for admitting red-haired men to office, how
striking a speech might an eloquent admirer of our old institutions
deliver against so revolutionary a measure! “These men,” he might say,
“scarcely consider themselves as Englishmen. They think a red-haired
Frenchman or a red-haired German more closely connected with them than
a man with brown hair born in their own parish. If a foreign sovereign
patronises red hair, they love him better than their own native king.
They are not Englishmen: they cannot be Englishmen: nature has forbidden
it: experience proves it to be impossible. Right to political power they
have none; for no man has a right to political power. Let them enjoy
personal security; let their property be under the protection of the
law. But if they ask for leave to exercise power over a community of
which they are only half members, a community the constitution of which
is essentially dark-haired, let us answer them in the words of our wise
ancestors, Nolumus leges Angliae mutari.”
But, it is said, the Scriptures declare that the Jews are to be restored
to their own country; and the whole nation looks forward to that
restoration. They are, therefore, not so deeply interested as others in
the prosperity of England. It is not their home, but merely the place
of their sojourn, the house of their bondage. This argument, which first
appeared in the Times newspaper, and which has attracted a degree of
attention proportioned not so much to its own intrinsic force as to the
general talent with which that journal is conducted, belongs to a
class of sophisms by which the most hateful persecutions may easily
be justified. To charge men with practical consequences which they
themselves deny is disingenuous in controversy; it is atrocious in
government. The doctrine of predestination, in the opinion of many
people, tends to make those who hold it utterly immoral. And certainly
it would seem that a man who believes his eternal destiny to be already
irrevocably fixed is likely to indulge his passions without restraint
and to neglect his religious duties. If he is an heir of wrath, his
exertions must be unavailing. If he is preordained to life, they must
be superfluous. But would it be wise to punish every man who holds the
higher doctrines of Calvinism, as if he had actually committed all those
crimes which we know some Antinomians to have committed? Assuredly not.
The fact notoriously is that there are many Calvinists as moral in their
conduct as any Arminian, and many Arminians as loose as any Calvinist.
It is altogether impossible to reason from the opinions which a man
professes to his feelings and his actions; and in fact no person is
ever such a fool as to reason thus, except when he wants a pretext
for persecuting his neighbours. A Christian is commanded, under the
strongest sanctions, to be just in all his dealings. Yet to how many of
the twenty-four millions of professing Christians in these islands would
any man in his senses lend a thousand pounds without security? A man who
should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about
him were influenced by the religion which they professed, would
find himself ruined before night; and no man ever does act on that
supposition in any of the ordinary concerns of life, in borrowing, in
lending, in buying, or in selling. But when any of our fellow-creatures
are to be oppressed, the case is different. Then we represent those
motives which we know to be so feeble for good as omnipotent for evil.
Then we lay to the charge of our victims all the vices and follies to
which their doctrines, however remotely, seem to tend. We forget that
the same weakness, the same laxity, the same disposition to prefer the
present to the future, which make men worse than a good religion, make
them better than a bad one.
It was in this way that our ancestors reasoned, and that some people in
our time still reason, about the Catholics. A Papist believes himself
bound to obey the Pope. The Pope has issued a bull deposing Queen
Elizabeth. Therefore every Papist will treat her grace as an usurper.
Therefore every Papist is a traitor. Therefore every Papist ought to
be hanged, drawn, and quartered. To this logic we owe some of the most
hateful laws that ever disgraced our history. Surely the answer lies on
the surface. The Church of Rome may have commanded these men to treat
the queen as an usurper. But she has commanded them to do many other
things which they have never done. She enjoins her priests to observe
strict purity. You are always taunting them with their licentiousness.
She commands all her followers to fast often, to be charitable to the
poor, to take no interest for money, to fight no duels, to see no plays.
Do they obey these injunctions? If it be the fact that very few of them
strictly observe her precepts, when her precepts are opposed to their
passions and interests, may not loyalty, may not humanity, may not the
love of ease, may not the fear of death, be sufficient to prevent them
from executing those wicked orders which the Church of Rome has issued
against the sovereign of England? When we know that many of these people
do not care enough for their religion to go without beef on a Friday for
it, why should we think that they will run the risk of being racked and
hanged for it?
People are now reasoning about the Jews as our fathers reasoned about
the Papists. The law which is inscribed on the walls of the synagogues
prohibits covetousness. But if we were to say that a Jew mortgagee would
not foreclose because God had commanded him not to covet his neighbour’s
house, everybody would think us out of our wits. Yet it passes for an
argument to say that a Jew will take no interest in the prosperity of
the country in which he lives, that he will not care how bad its laws
and police may be, how heavily it may be taxed, how often it may be
conquered and given up to spoil, because God has promised that, by some
unknown means, and at some undetermined time, perhaps ten thousand
years hence, the Jews shall migrate to Palestine. Is not this the most
profound ignorance of human nature? Do we not know that what is remote
and indefinite affects men far less than what is near and certain? The
argument too applies to Christians as strongly as to Jews. The Christian
believes as well as the Jew, that at some future period the present
order of things will come to an end. Nay, many Christians believe that
the Messiah will shortly establish a kingdom on the earth, and reign
visibly over all its inhabitants. Whether this doctrine be orthodox or
not we shall not here inquire. The number of people who hold it is very
much greater than the number of Jews residing in England. Many of
those who hold it are distinguished by rank, wealth, and ability. It is
preached from pulpits, both of the Scottish and of the English Church.
Noblemen and members of Parliament have written in defence of it. Now
wherein does this doctrine differ, as far as its political tendency is
concerned, from the doctrine of the Jews? If a Jew is unfit to legislate
for us because he believes that he or his remote descendants will be
removed to Palestine, can we safely open the House of Commons to a
fifth-monarchy man, who expects that before this generation shall pass
away, all the kingdoms of the earth will be swallowed up in one divine
empire?
Does a Jew engage less eagerly than a Christian in any competition
which the law leaves open to him? Is he less active and regular in his
business than his neighbours? Does he furnish his house meanly, because
he is a pilgrim and sojourner in the land? Does the expectation of
being restored to the country of his fathers make him insensible to the
fluctuations of the stock-exchange? Does he, in arranging his private
affairs, ever take into the account the chance of his migrating to
Palestine? If not, why are we to suppose that feelings which never
influence his dealings as a merchant, or his dispositions as a testator,
will acquire a boundless influence over him as soon as he becomes a
magistrate or a legislator? There is another argument which we would not
willingly treat with levity, and which yet we scarcely know how to treat
seriously. Scripture, it is said, is full of terrible denunciations
against the Jews. It is foretold that they are to be wanderers. Is it
then right to give them a home? It is foretold they are to be oppressed.
Can we with propriety suffer them to be rulers? To admit them to the
rights of citizens is manifestly to insult the Divine oracles.
We allow that to falsify a prophecy inspired by Divine Wisdom would be
a most atrocious crime. It is, therefore, a happy circumstance for our
frail species, that it is a crime which no man can possibly commit. If
we admit the Jews to seats in Parliament, we shall, by so doing, prove
that the prophecies in question, whatever they may mean, do not mean
that the Jews shall be excluded from Parliament.
In fact it is already clear that the prophecies do not bear the meaning
put upon them by the respectable persons whom we are now answering. In
France and in the United States the Jews are already admitted to all the
rights of citizens. A prophecy, therefore, which should mean that the
Jews would never, during the course of their wanderings, be admitted to
all the rights of citizens in the places of their sojourn, would be a
false prophecy. This, therefore, is not the meaning of the prophecies of
Scripture.
But we protest altogether against the practice of confounding prophecy
with precept, of setting up predictions which are often obscure against
a morality which is always clear. If actions are to be considered as
just and good merely because they have been predicted, what action was
ever more laudable than that crime which our bigots are now, at the end
of eighteen centuries, urging us to avenge on the Jews, that crime
which made the earth shake and blotted out the sun from heaven? The same
reasoning which is now employed to vindicate the disabilities imposed on
our Hebrew countrymen will equally vindicate the kiss of Judas and the
judgment of Pilate. “The Son of man goeth, as it is written of him; but
woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.” And woe to those
who, in any age, or in any country, disobey His benevolent commands
under pretence of accomplishing His predictions. If this argument
justifies the laws now existing against the Jews, it justifies equally
all the cruelties which have ever been committed against them, the
sweeping edicts of banishment and confiscation, the dungeon, the rack,
and the slow fire. How can we excuse ourselves for leaving property to
people who are to “serve their enemies in hunger, and in thirst, and
in nakedness, and in want of all things”; for giving protection to
the persons of those who are to “fear day and night, and to have none
assurance of their life”; for not seizing on the children of a race
whose “sons and daughters are to be given unto another people”?
We have not so learned the doctrines of Him who commanded us to love our
neighbour as ourselves, and who, when He was called upon to explain what
He meant by a neighbour, selected as an example a heretic and an alien.
Last year, we remember, it was represented by a pious writer in the
John Bull newspaper, and by some other equally fervid Christians, as a
monstrous indecency, that the measure for the relief of the Jews should
be brought forward in Passion week. One of these humorists ironically
recommended that it should be read a second time on Good Friday. We
should have had no objection; nor do we believe that the day could
be commemorated in a more worthy manner. We know of no day fitter for
terminating long hostilities, and repairing cruel wrongs, than the day
on which the religion of mercy was founded. We know of no day fitter for
blotting out from the statute-book the last traces of intolerance than
the day on which the spirit of intolerance produced the foulest of
all judicial murders, the day on which the list of the victims of
intolerance, that noble list wherein Socrates and More are enrolled, was
glorified by a yet greater and holier name.