[Illustration: _JOSEPH JACOBS (born in New South Wales in 1854), one
of our leading scholars and men of letters; managing editor of the
Jewish Encyclopedia; author of many authoritative books on Jewish
subjects, including "Jews of Angevin England," "Studies in Jewish
Statistics," "Jewish Ideals," etc. The present article is adapted from
a chapter in Dr. Jacobs' forthcoming book which will deal
comprehensively with the contribution of the Jew to modern progress._]
THE eighteenth century was the era of the "benevolent despots," like
Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II, who adopted the ruling
principle of the Welfare-State--that the object of government should
be the good of the people--but considered that it could only be
carried out for the people, not by them. The weakness of the principle
consisted in the difficulty of securing a heritable succession of
capable benevolence, and the collapse of Prussia at Jena and of Joseph
II's well-meant but unreflective reforms led, in the nineteenth
century, to the triumph of the principle first enunciated in America
and carried out in France--of government for the people by the people.
The transition to the next stage, from religious toleration to
religious liberty, is marked, as regards the Jews, by the tolerance
edict of Joseph II, in 1781, which for the first time threw open
service in the army to the Jews and placed them to some extent on the
same level with other dissenters from the State-Church of Austria.
But this was still toleration and not liberty, and it was soon cast
into the background by the full religious liberty granted by the
French Revolution in 1791, in imitation of the American constitution
of 1787, which entirely separated State and Church. The granting of
full religious liberty to the Jews had previously been advocated by
Mirabeau, and though Rousseau's influence, which was all-important in
the Revolution, still retained a touch of Genevan intolerance, Jews
came within his religious requirements for citizenship by their belief
in Providence and in future rewards and punishment. It has to be
remembered that in spirit, if not in will-power or influence, Louis
XVI was of the school of the benevolent despots, and it was he who
signed the edict of November 13, 1791, which for the first time in
European history placed Jews on the same level as the adherents of all
other creeds as regards civil and political qualifications. Holland
was appropriately the first country to grant the same religious
equality to its Jews.[B]
The French Revolution, from our present standpoint, is the more
remarkable inasmuch as it is the only great European movement on which
Jews had absolutely no influence, direct or indirect, owing to their
inappreciable numbers and insecure position in the chief centers,
Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. The Revolution principles spread into
the neighboring countries with the advance of the French arms. In
Venice, the walls of the original Ghetto, from which all the rest
received their name, fell at once on the entry of Napoleon's troops.
No wonder they welcomed with fervor the victories of the French
troops; we can catch, in Heine, echoes of the enthusiasm with which
Napoleon was acclaimed the Liberator.
_Napoleon's Recognition of the Jews_
NAPOLEON'S own attitude was not so uniformly friendly to Jews. On his
way back from Austerlitz in 1805 he learnt at Strassburg of the wide
distress caused in Alsace by the exactions of certain Jewish usurers
in that province, and on his return to Paris issued edicts directed
against the Alsatian Jews, restricting their usurious activity. It is
fair to add that these enactments were obviously directed against the
usury of the Alsatian Jews, and not against the Jews in general, since
they were specifically declared not to apply to the Jews of Bordeaux
in the South or Northern Italy, then under Napoleon's control. It
would indeed have been against the whole tendency of his career to
have made the Jews an exception to that principle of the "carrière
ouverte aux talents," which was the key-note of his whole policy, as
it is logically to all war-lords. It was by no accident that similar
indifference toward the creed of their soldiers, or civil servants,
was shown by William the Silent, Wallenstein, Cromwell, William III,
and Frederick the Great.
Napoleon's attention having thus been drawn to the Jewish Question, he
proceeded with characteristic energy to solve it by summoning to Paris
a representative assembly of the Jews of France, Germany and Italy,
who should determine on what terms Jews could be admitted into a
modern Country-State, which had been freed from the shackles of the
medieval Church-State and only recognized a certain prerogative in the
Church to which the majority of Frenchmen belonged (the Concordat of
1802). After summoning an assembly of Jewish Notables for a
preliminary inquiry, in 1806, a more formal Sanhedrin was summoned in
the following year, to which twelve test questions were
submitted,--among them, whether the French Jews could regard France
as their Fatherland and Frenchmen as their brothers, and the laws of
the State as binding upon them. Further points were raised as to
polygamy, divorce, and mixed marriages; other questions related to the
position of Rabbis and the Jewish laws about usury.
All these problems were decided to the satisfaction of Napoleon,
though some of them aroused much searching of heart among the more
strictly orthodox. The outcome legally recognized that there was
nothing in Jewish law or faith which prevented its adherents from
being legitimate and full members of a modern State which, at that
time, practically recognized Catholicism as the State-Church. The
significance of the decision was far-reaching not alone for the Jews
but for the whole European State system; it was a practical
recognition that the Country, not the Faith, was the foundation of a
nation and thus gave the final blow to the conception of a
Church-Empire, which had upheld the contrary principle. It was not
without significance that simultaneously the Emperor of Austria agreed
to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.
_Liberalism Draws the Jews to Its Ranks_
BUT though the Jews had had no influence on the French Revolution and
no share in Napoleon's revolutionary reorganization of West Europe,
the benefit they reaped from both movements was second only to that of
the serfs. For the Jews and the serfs were the two most oppressed
classes under the feudal system still surviving. And so the Jews
imbibed with enthusiasm the libertarian principles of the Revolution
and the "open career" administration of Napoleon. They threw off with
avidity most of the shackles which prevented their joining in general
European culture, and Jewish parents of means immediately began giving
their sons and, what is more, their daughters, the secular education
which would adapt them to the careers now seemingly open to them, as
publicists, lawyers, and civil servants. When the reaction came, under
the Holy Alliance, with its attempt to revive the Church-State and the
closed career of prerogative, Jews everywhere in Western Europe joined
the Liberal forces, from whose triumph alone they could hope for a
dispersal of the clouds which once more obscured the sun of liberty in
which they had basked for a few short years. Jews soon ranked among
the intellectual leaders of continental Liberalism, and from 1815 to
1848 exercised an appreciable influence on the course of public
opinion. In particular a brilliant band of Jewish litterateurs in
Germany helped to mediate between French Liberalism and German public
opinion, and practically led the movement known as Young Germany,
which opposed the cosmopolitan tendencies of the eighteenth century to
the narrow nationalism of the Reaction and advocated the Revolution
principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as against the
revival of the claims of Authority and Privilege by the Holy Alliance.
Boerne and Heine, Hartmann and Saphir, Jacoby and Karl Marx, are
recognized by friends and foes alike as among the leading influences
which led ultimately to the downfall of Metternich and his school.
_The Salons of Jewish Women and Their Liberalizing Influence_
THEY were aided in their Liberal tendencies by a remarkable group of
emancipated Jewesses, who introduced into Germany the vogue of the
political Salon after the manner of Madame Roland and Madame de Staël.
They were mostly from the Berlin Circle, which had arisen around Moses
Mendelssohn, and carried his tendencies towards rationalism and
culture to extreme limits. His two daughters Dorothea and Henriette,
and their friends Henriette Herz and Rahel Lewin, created salons to
which were attracted some of the more liberal spirits of the cultured
world of Berlin. Dorothea Mendelssohn ultimately married Friedrich von
Schlegel and became one of the Muses of the German Romantic School.
Publicists of distinction like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von
Gentz formed, with Dorothea and others of her circle, a "Bond of
Virtue" (Tugendbund) which according to all appearance was named on
the principle of _locus a non lucendo_. Rahel, "the little woman with
a great soul," as Goethe called her, was even a more striking
personality. She numbered, among her friends, men of such different
types as Schelling and Schleiermacher, the Prince de Ligne, and
Fichte, Schlegel and Gutzkow, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick the
Great's nephew, and Fouqué, Gentz, and the Humboldts, and she finally
married Varnhagen van Ense. She was the first to appreciate, in its
full extent, the multiform genius of Goethe, and helped the rise to
fame of Boerne, Heine, and Victor Hugo. She was undoubtedly the most
striking personality among the women of her age in Germany, and she is
nowadays regarded as one of the chief forerunners of the Feminist
movement.[C]
These salons had an air of cultured Bohemianism, which attracted many
men of rank in Mid-Europe who were beginning to be repelled by the
exactions of social gathering in which all associations were
determined by armorial bearings. A similar salon was held in Vienna by
Baroness von Arnstein, in whose mansion all the diplomats of the
Congress of Vienna met as on neutral ground. Such gatherings, while
helping to liberalize good society in Mid-Europe, also brought the
position of Jews to the notice of the ruling classes and, in many
cases, aroused a determination to repair their wrongs. You cannot
accept a man socially yet refuse him the most elementary rights
politically.[D]
_The Liberal Leadership of Heine and Boerne_
THE Revolution of 1830 brought into European prominence the two most
brilliant members of Rahel's coterie, Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich
Heine. Both had made their mark as litterateurs in the preceding
decade, but Boerne's "Letters from Paris" and Heine's "French
Conditions" (contributed to the _Augsburger Zeitung_) drew the
attention of all liberal Germany to the new hopes aroused by the
downfall of the absolutist monarchy in France. Henceforth they were
the dominating voices in arousing among the German Liberals the hope
of similar liberty, while in France itself they helped to make known
to French culture the deeper currents of German thought and
literature. In particular their brilliant wit and incisive sarcasm set
the tone for the feuilleton literature of all Mid-Europe. By their
very isolation they were enabled to regard men and affairs with a
certain detachment, and both wrote with an iridescent insolence which
can only be described by the Jewish technical word _Chutzpah_.
Treitschke complained of their frequent irreverences and flippancies
but in both respects Heine, "the wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire,"
was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessor, and Boerne,
like Diderot, knew that the most effective weapon against authority is
sarcasm.
Under the leadership of Heine and Boerne a whole school of liberal
journalists arose in Germany and Austria, many of them Jews like
Saphir and Hartmann, and they gave a tone to Mid-European journalism
which has lasted to the present day. They thus helped to
internationalize Liberalism of the French form, with its rather vague
and indefinite strivings after liberty, equality, and fraternity, as
contrasted with the Liberalism of the English type dominated by Jeremy
Bentham, which aimed at constitutional, economic, and social reforms
of a definite character. Young Germany, as represented by Heine and
Boerne, left the latter type of Liberalism severely alone.
Yet in the struggle for constitutional liberty, which led to the
revolutions of 1848, Jews took a considerable part on the more
practical side. Everywhere during that critical year Jews had a hand
in the upheaval against absolutism.[E]
_Among the Conservatives: Stahl and Disraeli_
BUT Jews were not altogether unrepresented among the Conservative
forces, counting indeed two of the chief leaders, F. J. Stahl in
Prussia and Benjamin Disraeli in England. Disraeli's is the better
known name, but it is probable Stahl was equally influential. Stahl is
described by Sir A. W. Ward in the Cambridge Modern History, xi. 395,
as "the intellectual leader of the conservative aristocratic party and
the most remarkable brain in the Upper Chamber. . . . He largely supplied
the ruling party with the learning and wealth of ideas on which to
found their claims. Their organ was the _Kreuzzeitung_, and the party
was called by its name." Bluntschli calls him, "after Hegel the most
important representative of the philosophical theory of the State. He,
in many ways, advanced political science by his dialectical and
critical ability in founding new points of view." (_The Theory of the
State_, p. 73). But Stahl's historic influence will probably rest on
his connection with Bismarck at the formative period of his career,
when the future chancellor was also a member of the _Kreuzzeitung_
party.
Disraeli's career and influence is far better known and need not be
further adverted to in this place. The fact that both were converts
has little significance from our present point of view, since many of
the Jewish leaders on the Liberal side had also adopted Christianity.
It is more pertinent to remark that one cannot trace their
conservatism to their Judaism since there was everything in the Jewish
position of their time to range Jews on the Liberal side. Stahl and
Disraeli are, therefore, to be regarded merely as examples of Jewish
ability. There is nothing specifically Jewish in their influence
unless we regard the socialistic strain in Disraeli's conception of
"Young England" as a part of the Jewish sympathy with the "under dog,"
which can be attributed to their own experiences and to the traditions
of the Prophets.
_The Contribution of the Jews to Socialism_
CERTAINLY we find a strong Jewish participation throughout the
socialistic movement which, from its inception up to the present day,
has been largely dominated by Jewish influences. Although modern
socialism can be traced back to St. Simon, the whole movement would
have collapsed at the death of the master but for the organizing
ability of Olinde Rodrigues and the religious enthusiasm of his
brother Eugene. A practical turn was also given by their cousins,
Isaac and Jacob Pereire, who, as bankers, had thought out the best
means of carrying out the principles of the school into practical
life. An extension of the facilities for banking would lower the rate
of interest and therefore leave more to be distributed to the workers,
while the development of railways would reduce the cost of
transportation and thus lower the cost of living and raise real wages.
Accordingly the Pereires devoted themselves, with religious
enthusiasm, to creating the Credit Foncier, and later the Credit
Mobilier, and were the chief agents in developing the railway system
of Northern France, incidentally making themselves multi-millionaires
in the process, though they never lost their enthusiasm for the
socialistic ideals.[F]
Most of these left the St. Simonian Church when it diverged into the
sexual vagaries of Enfantin, though one of his creeds was, "I believe
that God has raised up Saint Simon to teach the Father (Enfantin)
through Rodrigues." Felicien David the musician, however, accompanied
Enfantin on his epoch-making journey to Egypt, during which he
implanted the idea of the Suez Canal in the minds of Mehemet Ali and
Ferdinand de Lesseps, and Gustave d'Eichthal devoted his enthusiasm
and energies to creating, out of the ideas of St. Simon and Enfantin,
a new religion which should revert to the socialism of the Prophets,
while denying or ignoring, like them, any other life than this. It is
said that he consulted Heine as to the best means of founding such a
religion. "Get crucified and rise again on the third day," was Heine's
caustic reply. The socialistic tone of J. S. Mill's _Principles of
Political Economy_, which differentiates it from its Ricardian
predecessors, is undoubtedly due in large measure to his intercourse
with d'Eichthal. Enfantin's vagaries, while they destroyed any direct
practical outcome for St. Simonism, drew wide attention to its views,
and Jews helped to spread them throughout Europe, Moritz Veit
performing that function in Germany, and M. Parma in Italy. The
cosmopolitan position of Jews is seen at its best in such
propagandism, and it is not surprising that they should have been
attracted by views of which the kernel is in the Prophets of Israel,
whom indeed Renan, in his _Histoire d'Israel_, brilliantly
characterized as socialistic preachers.
The later stages of socialism in Europe were, as is well known,
dominated by Karl Marx, who based upon Ricardo's "iron law" of wages
the imposing edifice of _Das Kapital_, for long the gospel of advanced
socialism. The brilliant Ferdinand Lassalle introduced its principles
into German politics, and the most recent stages of German socialism
have been controlled by the opportunism of E. Bernstein, while among
its most prominent leaders have been V. Adler and Paul Singer.
_The Struggle for Political Emancipation_
THIS participation of Jewish intellect and sympathies with the Liberal
current in European politics made Jewish emancipation a part of the
Liberal creed throughout Europe. Jews were fighting for themselves in
fighting for the general liberties, and their position in the
forefront of the struggle was thus justified by the representative
principle at the root of modern Liberalism. Jewish disabilities were
the last stronghold of the old Church-State conception, and the
struggle on the side of the Reaction to retain this fundamental
principle was the more intense. If Jews were granted full civil and
political rights it could no longer be contended that Christianity was
a fundamental principle of the State (or, as the English _obiter
dictum_ put it, "Christianity is a parcel of the common law"). Hence
the extreme violence of the defense which seems, at first sight, out
of all proportion to the interests or numbers involved. Thus the
struggle was as embittered in Switzerland as anywhere, though the Jews
there only constituted a handful, and the traditions of the country
were in favor of toleration.
From this aspect the fight in England is typical. As soon as the
Catholics had obtained emancipation in 1828 (the Jews had stood aside
in order not to complicate the question), Jewish emancipation became
part of the Liberal creed, and the struggle was waged in Parliament,
or rather in the House of Lords, for the ensuing thirty years. England
was the home of toleration, and her Toleration Act, passed as early as
1689, formed the third stage in the European progress towards
religious liberty. Yet the more conservative elements in English life
fought against the removal of Jewish disabilities because it meant the
visible proof of the secularization of English politics. It is perhaps
characteristic that the Tory resistance was mainly broken down by
Disraeli, of Jewish, and by Lord George Bentinck, of Dutch, descent.
_The High Tide of Liberalism_
WITH Jewish emancipation in England Liberalism reached its acme about
1860. Complete civil and religious liberty was gained for Jews
throughout Western Europe during the next decade,--in the German
confederation and in Switzerland, 1866, in Austria and Hungary, 1867,
and in the German Empire, 1871, while even in Spain the expulsion
order was practically repealed and toleration, if not liberty, was
given to Jews there in 1869. By that time Liberalism, both in the
French sense of liberty and equality before the law and in the English
sense of constitutional government and free-trade, had gained its
fullest triumph and had spent its force. Its negative work had been
most valuable; it had freed the human spirit from intolerable shackles
and thrown into the lumber-room the clogging survivals of medieval
feudalism. But to the human spirit thus freed it had little
instruction to give of a constructive kind; its slogan seemed to be,
"Go as you please," or, to use its own formula, "laissez faire,
laissez aller." It was rather superficial in its treatment of national
and social forces and made no appeal to the more generous imaginative
emotions. It was inevitable that a reaction should set in if only to
fill the void. Nationalism which had given vitality to France under
Napoleon, and in Spain, Russia and Prussia had brought down his
downfall, was opposed to Liberal cosmopolitanism. Protection to native
industry, which had, only for a moment and in England, lost its hold,
replaced free trade, and the strong individualism of "Manchestertum"
was drowned in the rising flood of Collectivism, whether in the more
formal guise of socialism or in the vaguer tendencies of philanthropy.
In none of these currents of opinion had Jews a prominent voice
except, as we have seen, in the latter, though there they were mainly
effective in opposition and criticism.
_Bismarck and the Forces of Reaction_
ALL these tendencies, which may roughly be summed up as the
Counter-Revolution, found a home in victorious Prussia and a voice in
Otto von Bismarck, its representative statesman. As we have seen, his
views on the nature of the State had been influenced in his formative
period by F. J. Stahl, and his socialistic sympathies may possibly
have been aroused by Ferdinand Lassalle, but he was of too independent
a character to submit much to external influences, and the tendencies
he represented, Junkertum and Militarism, were entirely opposed to
Jewish Liberalism. For some fifteen years he found it convenient to
work with the National Liberal party, to which all German Jews
belonged, and among whose leaders the most prominent were two Jews,
Eduard Lasker and Ludwig Bamberger. But in 1878 he broke with the
party and let loose the forces of "Anti-Semitism" as a means of
discrediting them. The movement, thus encouraged by Bismarck, soon
spread to Austria and was transformed in Russia into the pogroms of
1881. In France the Royalists and Jesuits conceived hopes of reviving
the Church-State and adopted anti-Semitism as a means of discrediting
not alone Jews but also Protestants and other opponents of
Catholicism. Their adherents, the French nobility, were especially
embittered against the Jews by the bankruptcy of the Union Générale, a
banking establishment in which all their money had been placed in the
hope of wresting the control of French finance from the hands of the
Rothschilds. Their chief hope lay in getting control of the General
Staff, by filling its posts with young men of noble birth, trained by
Jesuits. In order to attain this they schemed to remove all Jews and
Protestants from the Staff and thought they had found a rare chance in
their perverse persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Their scheme
recoiled on their own heads, and the final result of the Dreyfus
Affaire was to break the alliance of clericalism and militarism, at
least in France.
The Dreyfus Affaire was specially significant as bringing into play,
at one time, all the forces that have given vitality to anti-Semitism.
The New Nationalism, based not on Country but on Race and fostered by
chauvinistic anthropologists as well as historians; the revived
Church spirit, which sees in the National Church not so much the
guardian of Christian truth as a spiritual bond of national unity; the
New Collectivism which sees in capitalism the chief anti-social force,
and the revived militaristic spirit which glorifies war as the
regenerator of the nation; all these movements combine to regard the
Jew--considered as alien, infidel, capitalist, and pacificist--as the
representative enemy. All the reactionary forces regard a revival of
the medieval Church-State as both the means and the end of their
strivings, and naturally find the position of the Jew, both
theoretically and practically, one of the chief stumbling-blocks in
their way.
_Church-State versus Welfare-State_
IT remains to be seen whether the ideals of religious and political
liberty, which have been gained through so much blood and tears, will
be preserved intact against the rising forces of the Reaction and
Counter-Revolution which are, at bottom, an attempt at a revival of
the Church-Empire. The slogan "One God, one king, one people," has
again been raised, and armies that are nations in arms are in movement
to the cry. Anti-Semitism is largely the result of this reaction, and
while it is dominant in the councils of certain nations Jews must once
more take up their rôle of martyrs to the wider truth. Nowadays
however they do not fight alone, and it is scarcely possible that in
Western Europe and in lands dominated by Western European ideals they
can be reinterned into their ghetti. But the Colossus of the North
still retains the medieval ideal of the Church-Empire, and while that
controls Russian State policy Jews will have to suffer, in All the
Russias, indignities and disabilities from which they have been freed
in the lands of true civilization and religious liberty.
The ideal of the unified Church-State has been shattered by the
assaults of modern criticism and the growth of true religious liberty.
But the conception of all the citizens of a compact territory animated
by the same ideals still retains its attraction; only the unification
nowadays is with regard to the goal rather than to the roads that lead
to it. In other words, the Welfare-State (interpreting Welfare as
spiritual as well as material) is taking the place of the Church-State
of the Middle Ages and of Reformation times. What then is to become of
the separate churches or religious bodies which are found in profusion
in modern States? That is the sole ecclesiastical problem which the
modern statesman has to face. Except among the extreme parties, such
as the Ultramontagnes, the obvious solution would seem to be that
given by the modern Federal constitution in which each State (in this
case Church) has a corporate life of its own over which it has
autonomous control, except in any case where this conflicts with the
general Federal ideals. The Jewish Synagogue may rightly claim its
place among these churches within the State as having its part in
promoting the general welfare.
_The Rôle of the Jews in European Progress_
OWING to their medieval disabilities Jews, though sharing as we have
seen in the higher life and in the commerce of Europe, were yet kept
in a kind of enclave in each of the European nations, and thus acted,
both intellectually and economically, as a separate body with
distinctive tendencies caused by their isolation and disabilities.
Accordingly we are able to estimate roughly the part taken by the Jews
as a body in the various movements which have made European
civilization what it is to-day. In all these movements (except
possibly one, the French Revolution) the Jews have contributed towards
European culture while sharing in it themselves. Their monotheistic
views and liturgic practices were the foundation of the medieval
Church, both in creed and deed. By their connection with their
brethren in the East and their tolerated existence, both in Islam and
in Christendom, they helped towards that transmission of Oriental
thought, science and commerce, which had so large an influence on the
Middle Ages and led on to the Renaissance and the Reform, in both of
which movements Jews had their direct part to play. So, too, in the
struggle for religious liberty and in the different stages of
toleration which lay at the root of political liberty, Jews had their
part to play, and when freed from their shackles by the French
Revolution took a leading rôle both in Nineteenth Century Liberalism
and in the Collectivism which has now replaced it.
But when fully emancipated, Jews no longer acted in the European world
of ideas collectively but as individuals, often choosing opposite
ideals and in most cases applying the talents thus let free to objects
apart from the general political or religious movements of the time.
Great as has been the influence of Jews in their collective capacity
on the development of European thought and culture up to the present
day, it is possible that their influence as individuals, during the
past fifty years, has been even more extensive though less
discernible, owing to the absence of any general direction to Jewish
intellectuality.
[Illustration: Signature: Joseph Jacobs]