It has been frequently observed, that the chief events of the English
history, during the last three centuries, have turned on religion.
Until the Reformation, our history scarcely deserved the name. The
government an iron despotism, the people serfs, the barons tyrants,
and the religion Popery, England possessed neither equal law, nor
popular knowledge, nor security of property. And she suffered the
natural evils of a condition of moral disorder; all her nobler
qualities only aggravated the national misfortune, her bravery only
wasted her blood in foreign fields. Her fidelity to her lords only
strewed the soil with corpses; her devotional spirit only bound her to
the observances of a pedantic superstition. While every kingdom of the
Continent was advancing in the march of power, or knowledge, or the
arts; while Germany in her mail gathered round her the chivalry of
Europe; while Italy began that glittering pageant of the arts which
has left such brilliant remnants behind, even in her dilapidated
archives and tottering palaces; while Portugal was spreading her sails
for the subjugation of the ocean, and Spain was sending Columbus to
the west for a prouder conquest than was ever won by consul or
emperor,--England remained like a barbarian gazer on this passing pomp
of kings.
The Reformation changed all,--gave her a new sense of existence, a new
knowledge of her own faculties, new views of her destination; and
brought her, like the wanderers in the parable, from the highways and
hedges, to that marriage feast of power and fame, from which so many
of the original guests were to be rejected.
The change was remarkable, even from its rapidity. It had none of the
slow growth by which the infancy of nations ascends into manhood. She
assumed the vigour of a leading member of the European commonwealth
with the life of a generation. Actually expelled from the Continent in
the middle of the sixteenth century, she held the balance of European
power in its hand before its close. But the effect of the Reformation
in England was of a superior order to its effect on the Continent. We
shall not say that it lived and died in Germany with Luther; or in
France with Calvin; but there can be no doubt, that its purer and
loftier portion perished with those great reformers. The schools of
the prophets remained; but when the Elijah had been swept upwards on
the chariot and horses of fire, they uttered the prophetic voice more
feebly, and their harps no longer resounded through Israel. But, in
England, the double portion of the spirit had been given; the
Reformation had become _national_; and there is scarcely a national
act, from that period, which has not held some connexion with
Protestantism; been modified by its influence, or required by its
necessities, originated in its principles, or governed by its power.
And it is not the less remarkable, that this continued operation has
existed in England alone.
The gift of the Reformation was, like the gift of Christianity, a
universal offer. It came, as the rising of the sun comes, to all
Europe at once. The preaching of Luther and his contemporaries was
heard in every country of the civilised world, and by a large portion
of that world is retained, in all its substantial doctrines, to the
present hour. Within the lapse of a few years, it had made a progress
scarcely less rapid and triumphant than the career of the apostolic
mission; but in a period incomparably more intellectual, and among
nations more active, intelligent, and vigorous, than the dwellers
among the languor of Asia Minor, the dissolute populace of ancient
Italy, or the rugged barbarians of Thrace and Arabia.
Before the close of the century in which it was born, the Reformation
had founded churches far beyond the German frontier, in the most
active portion of France, in the British Isles, in the north of
Europe; it had even forced its way through the sullen prejudices and
fierce persecutions of Spain; by a still more singular success, it had
given a temporary impulse to Italy itself; made converts in the
natural land of the monk, built churches under the shadow of the
convent; and redeemed at least one generation from the profligate
supineness of their fathers. But this gush of the living breeze into
the cloister was soon overpowered by the habitual heaviness of the
atmosphere of cells and censers. The light, which had shot in through
the chinks of the dungeon, was soon shut out, and all within was dark
as ever. The multitude, at first exulting in their freedom, no sooner
found that they must march through the wilderness, than they longed
for the fatness and the flesh of Egypt, and returned to their house of
bondage. The name of Protestantism still existed on the Continent, but
its power was no more. Statesmen, in their political projects, passed
it by; philosophers, in their calculations of human progress, left it
out of their elements. The popular feelings were no longer roused or
abused at its command. The teacher remained, but the gift of miracles
was gone.
But, in England, it was a political creator. The manners, the
feelings, the laws in a great degree, and the political movements
almost wholly, were impressed with this one image and superscription.
Since her first emergence from feudalism, when, like the traveller
struggling through defiles and forests to the brow of the mountains
which shows him the plain and the ocean before him, she saw the first
boundless sweep of national power and moral renown before her,
Protestantism, in all the casualties of its course, in its purity, or
its profanation, in the vindication of its rights, or in the
sufferance of its wrongs, in the national zeal for its advance, or in
the national zeal for its retrenchment and spoil, has been the great
object of contemplation and interest to every leader of the councils
of England. It has been the voice which has never died in the
statesman's ear, the shape which has met him at every step, the star
which, whether clouded or serene, has never set in his horizon. The
whole line of British sovereignty seemed scarcely more than royal
administrators of the concerns of Religion.
Even the striking variety of royal character, during this long and
stirring period, made but slight difference in their general connexion
with the public belief. The brutish self-will of Henry, the savage
bloodthirstiness of Mary, the proud supremacy of Elizabeth, the
chivalry of Charles, the republicanism of Cromwell, the languid
decline of the Stuarts, the energy of William, and the law-loving
quietude of the Brunswicks, all bore the impress of the same
principle.
During the last three hundred years, the world had been singularly
active, and England perhaps its most active portion; but what relics
of its political questions are left to posterity? The passions and the
power of the great parties even of the last century have sunk into
their graves. Even their names, which were supposed to have made an
imperishable fixture in the political strifes of the country, and
under which it was presumed that ministers and opposition would be
marshalled for ever, have gone like the rest, and the difficulty would
now be, to give a name to the political principles of any party in the
state. But the religious questions of our ancestry are still not
merely existing, but absorbing all others at this moment; instead of
clearing up, they are darkening by time; instead of giving way to the
thousand questions which year by year press on public deliberation,
they still exalt their frowning front above them all. Ireland and Rome
are as powerful objects of anxiety as in the days of Pius V. and
Elizabeth; and Protestantism is forced to be as vigilant as in the
days when the Bible was first read at Paul's Cross, or the Long
Parliament drove the bishops out of the pale of the constitution.
In this language we are claiming no peculiar merit for the character
of England; we are not arrogating for her any religious superiority;
we are not pronouncing on her especial sensitiveness to conscience; we
are simply giving facts; and those urge us to one conclusion alone,
that by the determinate and original dispensation of Providence, our
country has been selected as the especial arena for great religious
inquiries, and the establishment of great religious principles.
On this subject we speak with the utmost sincerity. There is nothing
in historical experience to forbid the idea, that peculiar nations may
have been appointed to separate purposes, and that they may be even
divinely placed under the discipline most suitable to those purposes.
If to ancient Greece was almost exclusively given the intellectual
advancement of the world; if to ancient Rome was as exclusively given
the preparative discipline for its government; there can be no doubt
that to Judea was assigned the guardianship of religion.
The process may be diversified in later times; but the principle may
remain. The rapidity with which the derelictions of duty in Judah were
followed by punishments _declaredly_ divine, finds a memorable
counterpart in the annals of England, even down to the present hour.
But we shall limit ourselves to the evidence in Ireland; and on this
point we shall be as brief as possible.
In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Popery, hitherto kept
down, became suddenly triumphant in Ireland, and began its habitual
system of severity to the heretic. Confiscation and exile swept away
the rights of Protestantism. The result was the national punishment by
the scourge of civil war, a renewal of conquest, the expatriation of
the Romish army, and the decay of all the sources of national
prosperity.
Another era came. Under the government of Protestantism the country
had recovered, privileges were successively awarded, and it enjoyed
the peace and gradual opulence which belong to English government. But
a parliamentary faction at length allied itself with Popery;
parliament was subdued by clamour, or seduced by popularity, and the
Popish population obtained the elective franchise. The elections
instantly became scenes of national iniquity. Perjury was scarcely
less than a profession, and that notoriously ruinous system of
"sub-letting," which has covered Ireland with pauperism, became
general, for the sole object of multiplying votes. This was followed
by the foundation of Maynooth, a college expressly formed for the
training of a Popish priesthood, whose tenets, every man who voted for
this foundation, had sworn to be "superstitious and idolatrous." But
when did faction care what it swore? The cup was now full. The
priesthood of Maynooth had scarcely begun to learn their trade, when
vengeance fell upon both Popery and the Parliament. Instead of the
promise of popular gratitude, which had been so ostentatiously given
by the Popish associations, and so ostentatiously echoed by
parliamentary Liberalism, the first act of the Popish peasantry was to
take up arms; a rebellion of the most treacherous and bloody nature
broke out, in which the murder of Protestants was perpetrated in cold
blood, and with the most horrid atrocity. Ireland was convulsed and
impoverished, the rebellion was extinguished and punished by the
sword, and at the cost of ten thousand peasant lives. The next blow
was on the feeble and factious Parliament. The Irish Legislature was
extinguished at a blow; and its fall was as ignominious as it was
judicial. Its national pride and acknowledged talent gave way without
a struggle, and with scarcely a remonstrance. It had already lost the
respect of the nation. The _mind_ of Ireland disdained the
deliberations which had suffered the dictation of a mob. Parliament,
existing without national honour, perished without national sympathy.
Its own principle was retaliated on itself. The Papist sold it, the
Borough-monger sold it, the Protestant sold it, not for the baser
bribe of the populace, but for the prospect of peace; it was given
over to execution, with the calm acquiescence of a sense of justice,
and tossed on the funeral pile amid a population which danced round
the blaze.
Popery now talks of its restoration. It is impossible. The very idea
is absurd. As well might the ashes of the dead be gathered and
reshaped into the living man. As well might the vapours of the swamp
be purified by filling it with the firedamp. Every hour, since that
time, has made the country still more unfit for legislation, more
furious and inflammable. As well might the nakedness of the people be
covered by rags, reeking with the pestilence.
We rejoice to escape from the subject. It can be no gratification to
us to trace the progress of disease through the political frame which
it first enfeebles, and then makes a source of contagion. We have no
love for the history of an hospital, or those frightful displays of a
"surgeons' hall," where every skeleton is connected with public crime,
and where science is demonstrated from the remnants of the scaffold.
But it is notorious that the morals even of the Irish peasant have
been degraded in the exact proportion of his rise in political power.
Every favour of the English parliament, from the beginning of the
century until the fatal year 1829, only furnished him with an
additional weapon, to be used with a more seditious violence. In that
year, the British Legislature was thrown open to him, and he entered
it in a barbarian triumph.
From that moment, England and Ireland were sufferers alike. In
England, Irish faction was an insolent mercenary, which openly and
alternately hired its services to both sides alike. In Ireland it was
a ferocious rebel, which, as the notorious preparative for broader
hostilities, exercised its arms in midnight murder.
At length the final endowment of Maynooth came; and an establishment,
solely for the Romish priesthood, without any admixture of laity, and
allowing the means of an increase in the number of those pupils of
Rome, and propagators of Romish doctrines, from about five hundred to
double the number, was fixed on the empire for ever, taken wholly out
of the further deliberation of the Legislature, and conferred, to
three times the amount of its former grant, on a religion which
professes the worship of a _Creature_, the Virgin Mary; which bows
down to _images_; which assigns thrones in heaven to dead men,
promoted by itself to nominal saintship; which offers weekly
absolution for all crimes; which apportions the judgments of the
eternal tribunal in a purgatory, and releases the supposed criminal on
payment of money for masses; and which offers the most solemn
_adoration_ to a composition of flour and water, manufactured by a
baker, distributed by the hands of a priest, and which it actually
declares to be the Eternal God, whom "the heaven and the heaven of
heavens cannot contain."
These are doctrines utterly abhorrent to the feelings of all sincere
Protestants; and unquestionably the encouragement of their teachers,
and the virtual propagation of a belief which they pronounce desperate
defiances of the truth, startled many wise and religious men with fear
of the consequences. We leave the connexion of this most unhappy act
with the subsequent events to the various contemplation of our
countrymen.
The subject is too solemn for the mingling of human conjectures with
its awful reality. But whether in the shape of retribution or warning,
the singular force of the blow which has fallen on both--the Irish
criminal and the English abettor of the crime--may well humble us
before the Power which holds the prosperity of nations in its hand.
Yet even now, while the two countries are still lying struck down by
the same irresistible flash, and while the cloud which discharged it
is still overhanging the horizon--while the only voice which ought to
issue from the national lips would be the supplication for help and
the hope of forgiveness, they are meditating an act more hazardous and
daring than ever.
We disclaim all exclusiveness in the exercise of the common rights of
man; we denounce all bigotry as a folly, and abhor all persecution as
a crime; but we cannot venture an acquiescence in an attempt which we
consider as an abandonment of the first dictates of Christianity; we
cannot be silent when the intention is avowed to bring into a
Christian legislature a sect which pronounces Christianity to be
utterly a falsehood, its founder to be an impostor, (we shudder at the
words,) and our whole hope of immortality, dependent on his sacrifice
and merits, to be wicked and blasphemous delusion. And this attempt,
from no additional discovery of the truth of Judaism or the failings
of Christianity, but simply from a sense of political convenience, (a
most short-sighted sense, as we conceive;) a feeling of liberalism, (a
most childish and uncalled for feeling, as we are perfectly
convinced;) and the establishment of the general principle that, in
the political system or government of nations, religion has no
business whatever to interfere, to be regarded, or to be protected in
any shape whatever, (an assumption which we believe to be contrary to
all the experience of mankind.) Our remarks, of course, are not made
with reference to the individual, of whom we know nothing but the
name; we speak only of the principle.
But before we inquire into its good or ill, we shall give a glance at
the past condition of the European Jews, and the privileges to which
they have been admitted by the generosity of the British legislature.
With Charlemagne the political history of modern Europe begins, and
with it we shall begin our sketch of the Jews. The soldiership of
Charlemagne made him comparatively regardless of ecclesiastical
jealousies, and at the same time made him require the services of
agents, negotiators, and traffickers of all kinds. In all the wildest
barbarism of the past ages, the sons of Israel had continued to
sustain their connexion throughout Europe, and the emperor felt all
their importance to his polity. But war always impoverishes, and the
Jews were the only masters of European wealth. Thus they were
essential in all points to the great warrior, who had spent thirty
years of his life in the camp; to the great monarch, who ruled
three-fourths of Europe; and to the great statesman, who legislated
for Christendom, but who could not write his own name. Charlemagne,
therefore, protected the Jews, as he did all whom he made useful to
himself; and as disregard of opportunities has been at no time their
failing, it is probable that the chief currency of Europe passed
through Jewish hands.
The successors of the emperor retained his habits, without inheriting
his abilities, and the Jews still stood high in the favour of the
throne.
It is probable, too, that they profited enormously; for where they had
no laws but their own, and no penalties to dread but those in the hand
of the sovereign, the possession of the royal ear, and the
replenishing of the royal purse, gave them chances which must have
proved highly productive to the Rabbinical exchequer.
But their prosperity was soon to have its winter. Enormous wealth was
hazardous in baronial times. The descendants of the Gaulish, the
German, and the Norman conquerors--bold soldiers, but bad financiers;
fond of magnificence, but narrow in rental; valorous in war, but
pauperised in peace--saw with lordly indignation the crouching
Israelite able to purchase principalities, while they were often
obliged to levy the daily meal of their retainers on the high road.
The result was, a general robbery of the Jews. But as there is no
robbery so sweeping as that which is performed under cover of law, the
unfortunate Jews were charged with the most improbable crimes against
popes and princes. They sometimes escaped the dungeon and the sword by
large bribes to the judge and the king; but confiscation was too
gainful to cease while there was a Jew to be drained. And at length,
within the last years of the twelfth century, all the Jews of France
were exiled by a stroke of the pen; their whole property was seized,
and all their debts were decreed to be irrecoverable!
Still they were too useful to be entirely dispensed with; and the
following Jewish generation, which had forgotten the sufferings of
their fathers, once more sought admission into France. They there grew
opulent again, were there fleeced again, and there were alternately
fattened and fleeced, until a general rage against their existence
seemed to seize all Europe. Then, with an injustice which scandalises
the name of Europe, and with a cruelty which still more scandalises
the name of Popery, they were persecuted, plundered, and hunted into
the gentler and honester regions of the Mahometan and the idolator.
The history of the Jews in England commenced about the middle of the
eighth century, and was a similar succession of persecutions of the
purse. Their persons were generally spared, for the piety of the Saxon
monarchs was less provoked than their poverty. The Jews were a
never-failing spring; and the Egberts and Ethelberts drank of it in
all the emergencies of their dynasty, without ever cooling their royal
thirst. Still the Jews clung to a land where they had probably become
masters of the whole current coin; and though they complained
furiously of the royal pressure, they bore it for the sake of the
inordinate rent which they levied on peasant and priest, on baron
bold, and perhaps on the monarch himself.
But William the Norman came, and the days of the Israelite brightened.
William knew the value of having the synagogue for his bank; and
though a descendant of those heroic pirates who had exhibited robbery
on the largest scale in history, and plundered every sea-coast of
Europe every year of their lives, he yet felt all the necessity of
paying his fellow-freebooters, and regarded the Jews, next to his
men-at-arms, as the main prop of his throne.
But it is a curious feature in the annals of Jewish wealth, that it
has never lasted long; three generations, at the most, are sure to see
its end. The gourd of Jonah is its emblem to this hour; the surprising
growth of a night followed by the equally surprising decay of a
morning.
The Jews were desperately mulcted by Stephen, a usurper, who felt that
he had but little time to lose, and, of course, plundered accordingly.
But these were glorious times for what is called "change of property;"
the brave earls of the Norman had already run through their estates.
Money was not to be found. The times were turbulent, and the barons
were forced to build castles for themselves and their cattle. They
kept retainers to rob and fight, and led the life of gallant captains
of banditti. Italy, the native land of romance and robbery, (its
principal talents to this hour,) never exhibited more elaborate
specimens of both, than England did in the days of Stephen. But the
royal and baronial necessities were not to be fully supplied by the
high road, and the unfortunate Jew was made the paymaster of all.
At last the Romish priesthood attacked them. This was fatal. Isaac
evaded the fighting baron and the fleecing king by his habitual
adroitness, and by those small sacrifices which he well knew how to
compensate. But the monks, friars, and bishops were a body with which
all his acuteness was unable to contend. What the Jew gained was
obviously lost to the monk; and the counter was forced to yield to the
cloister. The thirteenth century is still recorded among the
Israelites as a kind of secondary overthrow of their nation, and
Edward I. as their English Titus. The act of royal and ecclesiastical
atrocity banished nearly twenty thousand Jews to seek existence in
some less savage region than the "land of chivalry."
From this period they are nearly lost sight of in our English records,
until the reign of Charles II. The York and Lancastrian wars certainly
offered but slight temptation to the man of traffic; he must have also
remembered the penalty of his former sojourn in England, and he wisely
left the Plantagenets, at last, to fight it out by themselves. The
reign of Cromwell gave them some hope. It is astonishing how the
English spirit of that one man raised the character of England
throughout Europe. The world had never seen such a brewer before;
whatever he did, or wherever he went, he carried with him the
homeliness, the heartiness, and the strength of his trade. He kept the
insolence of France in order, soundly punished the pride of Spain, and
frightened the Teutonic ferocity of Germany into quiet. If he had
lived a thousand years, so long would he have kept the Stuarts in
banishment. His game was harder at home, but he played his cards with
equal success. He crushed at once the king and the parliament; he
crushed the Presbyterians, who had crushed the church; he bridled the
Independents, who had bridled the Presbyterians; he tamed the army,
who had conquered the constitution; and, highest triumph of all, he
tamed Ireland. The _difficulty_ of the Wellingtons, the Peels, and the
Greys,--the grand problem of Whig and Tory, was no problem to him; he
suffered resistance neither moral nor physical; he would have hanged
the orators and the gatherers of the "rent," on the same tree. His
remedy was simple. He led his battalions at once into Ireland; stormed
the rebel garrisons, hanged the rebel leaders; sent the rebel priests
in droves to the West Indies; and in six months he made Ireland a
place in which it was _possible_ for an honest man to live; and this
was while Ireland was still shouting for joy at Protestant
massacre--while she was in the full riot of 1641--while legates, and
prelates, and Jesuits were crowding the soil, and while tens of
thousands of Protestants were weltering in bloody graves. The bold
brewer of Huntingdon settled the country at once, and Ireland was
obedient for a century to come.
It is not certain whether Cromwell had made overtures to the Jews, or
the Jews to him; but the shortness of his reign precluded any actual
measures in their favour. However, it is evident that they had
received some impression that they would be protected; for immediately
on the Restoration, and apparently without any further permission,
they began to flock into England, where they have since remained under
the general protection of the law.
The original condition of the Jew in England, was that of a man under
the direct protection of the king,--a perilous protection, which gave
his majesty the right of the liege lord over his bondsman, the right
over property, and even over person. But the Jew was not long
permitted to hold land. Of this right they were deprived in the reign
of the third Henry, though they were suffered to retain the freehold
of houses in towns. Successive acts deprived them even of this poor
privilege, and no Jew was suffered to dispose of his house without the
leave of the king. But, by a curious anomaly, they were again allowed
to purchase houses and lands, provided they were held of the king, and
even take farms for ten years. Though it seems probable that those
alternations of favour and severity were but so many applications of
the legal torture to the purses of the Jews.
On the Continent, the condition of the Jews was always opulent, and
always comfortless. But, in general, they escaped with the simple
penalty of popular contempt. There is money to be made in every
country by parsimony, and a steady determination to do nothing but
make money. The Jews thus escaped into the wild regions of the Goth
and Vandal, and got rich among the Poles and the Russians. They were
sometimes dreadfully fleeced; but the men of frost and snow were not
men of massacre, and the Jews got rich again. Even now, with all the
competition of all the beggars of Germany, they are the masters of all
the shop-dealing and inn-keeping, and money-changing, and all the
countless kinds of ingenuity that the smallest of traffics can
practise upon a people who divide the farthing into a dozen fractions.
The Jew lives, fattens, and plays the financier in Morocco, as he
plays the slop-seller, the quack, and the furrier in the north. He is
the banker of his Highness Abderrhaman, and supplies Abd-el-Kader with
sequins, Naples' soap, horses, and intelligence. The Jews in Turkey
always lived in tremendous insecurity; but there too, they grew rich,
they shared the favour of the sultans, (and the certainty of being
occasionally plundered,) along with the Armenians, a sort of Epicene
religionists, or link between the Christian and the Jew; the
profession of both being money in every shape, from the hawking of
pipes, and the selling of slippers, up to the court bankers; the last
being notoriously a perilous distinction, for on the first necessity
of the seraglio, the banker's confiscation was reckoned among the ways
and means of the state. The banker's stock of bullion was "sent for,"
and his head generally accompanied it. His will was drawn up already
by the Grand Cadi of Constantinople, and the Emperor of the Faithful
was regularly declared "his heir."
The Jew in Algiers was, like the Jew every where, rich and wretched;
reaping all the coin of the country, and stripped of it at every
caprice of the government. The French invasion threw all the Algerine
Hebrews into rapture for a while; but they have continued wringing
their hands, and hanging their heads, ever since. The Frenchman is as
keen as the Jew in saying, though the Jew altogether distances in gain
a man who would spend his last _sou_ on a ball, a theatre, or a
billiard-table. The Jew eschews all games of chance; the opera costs a
franc in Algiers, when they have one; and the Jew would not spend a
franc upon the music of the spheres. He laments hourly the Algerian
revolution, gnashes his teeth at the name of Charles X., cautiously
anathematises Louis Philippe, (whom he regards as the rival of his
reputation,) and when out of the hearing of a French sentinel, vents
the reverse of a panegyric on the green excellences of his royal
highness the Duc d'Aumale. The burden of his political song, is "the
Turks were fine fellows; they cut off our heads, but then they spent
money. The French do not cut off our heads, but then they spend no
money!" The Jew evidently preferred the chance of losing his head to
the certainty of making nothing out of the shabbiness of his new
masters. Thus Algiers no longer offers a harvest for the Israelite.
But the Jew had his reign of terror,--and Spain was the scene.
Throughout the world,--for where was the Jew not to be found?--he was
simply an object of personal scorn and of public plunder; and, fully
acknowledging the popular crime in both, it must equally be
acknowledged that his life naturally deprived him of public sympathy.
The Jew was a being who took no share in advancing the good of the
country; he promoted no national object, he assisted in no national
advancement, he promoted none of the fine arts, he encouraged neither
the painter, nor the poet, nor the student; he speeded neither the
plough, nor the ship, nor the pen. He made money, and that was the
sole object of his existence. And he made that money in the most
obnoxious way,--by enormous interest ground out of enormous distress.
Thus voluntarily depriving himself of all the defences which society
throws round the promoters of its purposes; without any claims on the
respect, the gratitude, or even on the self-interest of mankind;
often, doubtless, a desperate extortioner, and always keen on the
scent of gain, the Jew, in the best of times, was only endured, in
hard times was hated; and when national necessity rose to severe
pressure, was the first to be rifled of his hoards, in the midst of a
race of rapine, which seemed to take the shape of justice, and of
revenge, which seemed a vindication of human nature. There were
doubtless, in the lapse of ages, instances of Jewish scholarship, and
perhaps instances of Jewish generosity. But the character of the race
was coldness, craft, and avarice. The European Jew was the counterpart
of the ancient Ishmaelite, "his hand against every man," but without
the free spirit, the bold courage, or the wild hospitality of the
Ishmaelite. He was seen by mankind at once in the contradictory
character of the reckless robber and the crouching slave: suffered in
society only for his unwilling uses; and endured, like the jackal or
the hyena, for its swallowing the refuse rejected by all the nobler
feeders on the common of mankind.
But the bloody bigotry of Spain taught them that in "the lowest depth"
there was a still lower depth. Spain, which, with the climate of
Mauritania, appears to inherit all the fury of the Moor, in the first
cessation from her war of eight hundred years, began a general
persecution of all who would not acknowledge the Virgin Mary for a
God, and St Dominic, for her prophet. The Inquisition, the prime
instrument of Rome, was let loose against the unfortunate Jews; many
of them apostatised under the terror of the sword. Some of the
apostates more honourably repented of their cowardice, and returned to
their ancient faith. On the relapsed the Inquisition fell with the
fury of a wild beast. But even the fury of a wild beast is satiated by
being gorged. The Inquisition had the insatiable love of human misery
which belongs to the Demon. The wretched people were slain and
burned--the rack and the pile were in constant action. At length,
after a long period of agony, the sweeping decree was issued in 1492,
which banished the whole race from the kingdom. Their number was
calculated at half a million! With some pretence of humanity, in
allowing them to sell their scanty furniture, they were robbed of
every thing. Naked and ruined, branded and bruised, they were driven
away as if by a whirlwind, and their wrecks long covered the shores of
Africa and Europe.
The present condition of the Jewish people in England is more
favourable than, perhaps, in any other country, or in any other age of
the world, since their national ruin. The principles of Protestantism
_abhor_ persecution; and although Protestant persecutors have existed,
their crime has been always in open contradiction to their principle,
always has been disavowed by Protestants, and always has fallen into
disuse with the progress of Protestantism. But the right of
persecution having been always avowed by Rome, being still in the
statutes of Rome, and being still claimed as one of the national
privileges of infallibility, the Jews are still under ban in Rome, and
in every country where power is retained by Rome.
In England the Jews are protected by the Toleration Act of William and
Mary. They may hold real estates, may be high sheriffs, and, in fact,
may hold every privilege of British subjects, but admission to
corporate offices and parliament. From those they are excluded by the
9th George IV., the oath being, "On the faith of a Christian," and the
true objection being, not the desire of depressing the Jew, but the
fear of injuring the Christian. Because those corporate offices are
generally magistracies, which, implying the decision of causes on the
oath of parties, as Christians, it might be hazardous to put the power
of deciding into hands which disregarded Christian oaths altogether.
But, as a sufficient answer to the charge of invidiousness, two Jews
have, within these few years, been elected sheriffs of London.
On the Continent, the progress of the eighteenth century produced a
general amelioration in the state of the Jews. Some part of this
fortunate change was due to themselves; they had begun to enter into
general commerce, and take some national interest in public and
municipal affairs. A larger part was due to the increased intelligence
of the age.
The emperor Joseph, the great "reformer" of every thing, right or
wrong, gave them the general protection of the Christian laws.
Frederick the Great, always boasting of liberality, and actually
indifferent to all religion, gave them the benefit of his neglect.
But, as war was his employment, he resolved that they should have no
exception from his belligerency. After several bitter disputes with
their Rabbis on the subject of Jewish soldiership, he contrived to
raise a regiment of cavalry among them, which, in his sarcastic sport,
he called Israelousky! But to make the Israelites warriors against
their will was beyond the skill even of Frederick.
He first intended to make them lancers, but they entirely disapproved
of the weapon; he then tried them with the sabre, but they had no
taste for the sword; and, finally, he was forced to disband them. We
shall not pledge ourselves for the exactness of this detail, but the
story was long the amusement of Germany.
In France, Napoleon, shortly after his accession to the throne, and
while preparing for the conquest of the Continent, called the chief
Jews together, and formed what he entitled a Sanhedrin. As it is
impossible to give his subtle and unscrupulous mind credit for any
religious motive, his purpose was, probably, to use their influence in
his designs on the North, where they were numerous, and, by their
close mixture with the lower population, influential. Twelve questions
were proposed to them, nominally to ascertain the general
compatibility of Jewish opinions with French law.
But war suddenly absorbed the imperial attention; battles were more
congenial to his taste than theology, councils than Sanhedrins, and
conquest by the sword than successes by conspiracy. He dissolved the
Sanhedrin, and left the Jews to the general protection of the French
laws.
In England, the exclusion of the Jews from Parliament depends on the
Abjuration Act, George I. and III., and on the 9th George IV.; the
latter act being intended to relieve the necessity of taking the
sacrament, on appointment to places under government, a custom
originally introduced to prevent disguised Papists from becoming
members of the Protestant government, or holding offices under it,--it
being supposed that the taking of the sacrament was the _only_ test
which the Papist was not permitted to evade; but it was a custom which
frequently gave room for irreverence, and which thus produced public
offence. For this test, a simple declaration was substituted, in which
the person appointed pledged himself to the various requisitions "on
the faith of a _Christian_," a form which of course excluded the Jew.
By the combination of the two statutes, the Jew is still distinctly,
and, as we think, with most sufficient reason, excluded from a
Christian legislature.
In this country, Parliament, in the shape of its three estates, rules
every thing. In making any man a member of Parliament, we, in a
certain degree, make him our master--we give him the power of sharing,
at least, in the making of those laws which are our masters; and
although the individual may be but little, yet he _may_, if he have
talent, or the industry or skill to form a party, or the skill to
direct one, do infinite evil to any interest which he determines to
destroy. Opening the doors of Parliament to the Jew, is actually
opening the doors of power, and of a power which, if he have a
conscientious adherence to his own belief, he _must_ use against ours.
The question, then, is not of mere municipal regulation, but of the
very life of our religion. Religion is the highest concern of human
existence, and the source not only of our immortal hopes, but of
freedom and Protestantism in their purest form; and to possess it in
its freedom, to preserve, it with its rights, and to transmit it
unmutilated to posterity, has been the great struggle of ages, and has
been well worth the struggle. It is unnecessary to detail here the
especial doctrines of Christianity; but the Jew rejects them all,
charges them all with falsehood, and affirms, that it would be our
duty to both God and man, to cast them all under our feet. Therefore,
we cannot expect any _assistance_ from the Jew in defending our
religion, or our religious rights, or the national support of that
religion.
But in the legislature there is already a powerful party openly
hostile to Protestantism, with many individuals who may be willing to
aid that party, though not of their belief. On which side would the
Parliamentary Jew vote? There can be no doubt that, if at all
conscientious, he would vote for the extinction of Protestantism. Can
we then be justified to ourselves, or our country, in giving the
additional strength of a new, opulent, and influential party to the
antagonists of Protestantism?
It is true, that any _direct_ attempt to destroy our religion in
England is not likely to occur, at least for a considerable time; but
are there not a multitude of minor ways, of insidious approaches, of
dangerous artifices, and malignant tamperings, which, without open
violence, would have all the effect of active hostility? And in these,
would the Jew be for or against us?
But there is a still more solemn consideration. God punishes those who
abuse his gifts, or neglect his trusts. Protestantism is both a gift
and a trust, and of the most invaluable order. Must there not be a
public and personal crime in disregarding the interests of both; and
disregarding them for a thing so worldly, contingent, and paltry, as
political convenience? The Jew outside the legislature, however he may
hate our religion, is powerless to injure it; but once inside the
legislature, he may conspire to its ruin. If we put a weapon into the
hand of an enemy, whom but ourselves can we blame for the
consequences. If we do an act which cannot be undone, what sympathy
shall our wailings deserve, when we feel that we have actually
recruited for a hostile faction.
But having disposed of the cant of Liberalism, let, us now turn to the
more dangerous cant of Security. "What reason is there to apprehend
public evil from a single Jew, or from half a dozen at most in
Parliament?" We remember that exactly the same language was used for
the admission of the Papists. "What harm can be done by letting in one
or two Papists? they can never amount to above half-a-dozen, let them
do what they will at the hustings." Yet their votes and partisans now
amount to at least fifty; they carry every object which they determine
to carry; and they have crumbled down cabinets like the discharge from
a battery.
In the instance of the Jew, the answer is clear. They have the means
among them of coming to the hustings with irresistible force. On this
topic we say no more; but every body knows the nature of a popular
election under the Reform Bill.
But then we are to "trust to character;" the individual in question is
unambitious, or immersed in his own affairs, or afraid of the sound of
his own voice, or is a parliament phantom. He may be all this, or
quite the contrary, for any contrary knowledge of ours; but once in
Parliament, with his whole sharp and craving community at his heels,
he _must_ make an effort--or he will be soon driven back to his
counting-house. Or if he were at once as fixed and silent as a rock,
who shall answer for his successors? In no instance of party violence
is the first man the true representative. He comes full dressed into
the levee, bows as he enters the presence, and offers his petition
with the air pleasing to the souls of lords in waiting. His successor
comes; the _sans culotte_ roars at the head of his rabble in the
streets, and storms the palace, stairs. The Jew in parliament will be
no longer the emblem of sly submissiveness that traverses Houndsditch.
History tells us well the fierceness of his day of authority; the
daring zealotry, the bitterness of his national anger, and the mortal
venom of his personal vindictiveness. If those outbursts have seldom
occurred in our days, the loss of political position may be justly
taken for the cause; with every thing to risk and nothing to gain, we
can easily account for quietude. But, give him that position, make him
the leader, the treasurer, or the recruiting officer of a party,--give
him the hope of seizing place,--make his voice the key-note of
doubtful debate,--make his party the prop of a tottering ministry, or
the champions of an aspiring opposition,--give him the power of
carrying fifty votes, or half the number, across the House, the
utterers of the words of life or death to a cabinet standing in the
Dock,--and what measure of revenge or spoliation, of insolent triumph
or irremediable evil, might they not demand, and might they, not
obtain?
We solemnly declare, that much as we deprecate Papist influence, we
think that all its hostility is not to be dreaded the hundredth part
so much as political power in Jewish hands. _There_ would be no lazy
braggadocio, no loose riot of success, none of the vulgar intoxication
that goes to sleep after the victory,--we should have the steady,
sullen, cool antagonism, whose subtlety never slumbers.
But there are other and important considerations. The British empire
extends over a variety of creeds. If the Christian legislature admits
one sect known as the open antagonist of Christianity, why not admit
the neutrals? Why not the Mahometan? Why not the Hindoo? Are they half
as much opposed to Christianity as the Jew? We have conquered a
Chinese island,--why not have a parliamentary believer in the god Foh,
and in his prophet Confutzee? Ceylon is ours,--why reject the votary
of Boodh? We have the Cape, and we shall soon have the land of the
Caffre,--why not admit the worshipper of the Serpent, or the man who
trembles before the mystery of the Fetish? The Dyak of Borneo, and the
Malay of Singapore are already basking under the beams of the British
crown; neither will trouble us with controversies,--why not compile
them all into one imperial representation? They are fully as honest as
the Jew, not much more ignorant, and much less likely to quarrel with
us.
In the largeness of this subject we are forced to pass by a multitude
of pressing considerations; but there is one, to which we cannot avoid
making some slight reference--the actual state of the Jewish religion.
Many, who have not attended to this subject, evidently feel all
interest in the Jew, as the "descendant of the original receivers of
the law, a mistaken and stiff-necked generation, perhaps, but still
clinging to the law of Sinai." On this subject we speak with perfect
reverence, but also with perfect truth, when we say, that it is
scarcely possible to discover the religion of Sinai in the Jewish
ritual of the present day; their religion is Rabbinism, precisely the
same, (except for its additional excesses and inventions) that it was
when the most sacred of all authorities pronounced to the Sadducee,
and the Pharisee, and the nation, that they had made the law of Moses
of "none effect by their traditions." The "oral law," wholly
traditionary, is now the law of all the Jews, (the Karaites, a small
sect, excepted.) Their liturgy is wholly formed from the oral law, and
some of its comments, among an abundance of trivialities, are
dangerous. The "deniers of the law are _cut off_ for ever, and perish
through their wickedness, and have no part in the world to come."
Among those thus condemned for ever are the Christians and Mahometans.
But some of the passages in the Talmud show the personal peril into
which the oral law may condemn the recusants of any kind.
"It is lawful," says the Rabbi Eleazar, "to split open the nostrils of
an unlearned man on the day of atonement, which falls on the Sabbath.
And his disciples said, Rabbi, say rather that it is lawful to
slaughter him. The Rabbi replied, _That_ would require a benediction,
but now no benediction is needful."
But we must leave the subject to be treated by others who have more
time; assuring the reader that Rabbinism is a compilation very much in
the following style:--
"Rabbi Judah said, Every thing that God created in the world he
created male and female. And thus he did with Leviathan the piercing
serpent, and Leviathan the crooked serpent, he created them male and
female. But if they had been united, they would have desolated the
entire world. What then did the Holy One? He took away the strength of
the male Leviathan, and slew the female, and _salted her_ for the
righteous for the time to come."
And of this kind is the Scriptural(!) knowledge of the modern Jew. We
really do not speak of these things in levity, but in deference for
the truth, and to show how distinct the follower of Rabbinism is from
the follower of Moses.
We now close the subject, disavowing all hostility to the Jew, but
distinctly expressing our conviction, that his admission into a
Christian parliament is wholly inconsistent with common right, common
duty, or common sense. How can we offer the homage of either heart or
lip to our Lord Christ, when we give the highest boon within our power
to a sect who pronounce him all impostor? How can we respect his
religion, when we regard it as a matter of total indifference whether
we support its friends or encourage its enemies? or how can we deserve
to retain the inestimable privileges, alike spiritual and temporal,
which we have received from Christianity, when we negligently, or for
some personal object, lay them at the mercy of the unbeliever?
What ought England to do at this moment? It ought to teem with
petitions. Its clergy ought to meet, and give their most solemn pledge
to resist this most fatal innovation. Its bishops ought each to take
the lead in those meetings, and, instead of waiting to make a useless
speech in the House of Lords, come forth and do their duty like men.