ask him how he understands that great commandment which comprises the
law and the prophets. Can we be said to do unto others as we would
that they should do unto us if we wantonly inflict on them even the
smallest pain? As Christians, surely we are bound to consider, first,
whether, by excluding the Jews from all public trust, we give them
pain; and, secondly, whether it be necessary to give them that pain in
order to avert some greater evil. That by excluding them from public
trust we inflict pain on them my honourable friend will not dispute.
As a Christian, therefore, he is bound to relieve them from that pain,
unless he can show, what I am sure he has not yet shown, that it is
necessary to the general good that they should continue to suffer.
But where, he says, are you to stop, if once you admit into the
House of Commons people who deny the authority of the Gospels? Will
you let in a Mussulman? Will you let in a Parsee? Will you let in a
Hindoo, who worships a lump of stone with seven heads? I will answer
my honourable friend’s question by another. Where does he mean to
stop? Is he ready to roast unbelievers at slow fires? If not, let him
tell us why: and I will engage to prove that his reason is just as
decisive against the intolerance which he thinks a duty, as against
the intolerance which he thinks a crime. Once admit that we are bound
to inflict pain on a man because he is not of our religion; and where
are you to stop? Why stop at the point fixed by my honourable friend
rather than at the point fixed by the honourable Member for Oldham,[21]
who would make the Jews incapable of holding land? And why stop at
the point fixed by the honourable Member for Oldham rather than at
the point which would have been fixed by a Spanish Inquisitor of the
sixteenth century? When once you enter on a course of persecution, I
defy you to find any reason for making a halt till you have reached
the extreme point. When my honourable friend tells us that he will
allow the Jews to possess property to any amount, but that he will
not allow them to possess the smallest political power, he holds
contradictory language. Property is power. The honourable Member for
Oldham reasons better than my honourable friend. The honourable member
for Oldham sees very clearly that it is impossible to deprive a man
of political power if you suffer him to be the proprietor of half a
county, and therefore very consistently proposes to confiscate the
landed estates of the Jews. But even the honourable Member for Oldham
does not go far enough. He has not proposed to confiscate the personal
property of the Jews. Yet it is perfectly certain that any Jew who
has a million may easily make himself very important in the state. By
such steps we pass from official power to landed property, and from
landed property to personal property, and from property to liberty,
and from liberty to life. In truth, those persecutors who use the
rack and the stake have much to say for themselves. They are convinced
that their end is good; and it must be admitted that they employ
means which are not unlikely to attain the end. Religious dissent has
repeatedly been put down by sanguinary persecution. In that way the
Albigenses were put down.[22] In that way Protestantism was suppressed
in Spain and Italy, so that it has never since reared its head. But
I defy anybody to produce an instance in which disabilities such as
we are now considering have produced any other effect than that of
making the sufferers angry and obstinate. My honourable friend should
either persecute to some purpose, or not persecute at all. He dislikes
the word persecution, I know. He will not admit that the Jews are
persecuted. And yet I am confident that he would rather be sent to the
King’s Bench Prison for three months, or be fined a hundred pounds,
than be subject to the disabilities under which the Jews lie. How can
he then say that to impose such disabilities is not persecution, and
that to fine and imprison is persecution? All his reasoning consists
in drawing arbitrary lines. What he does not wish to inflict he calls
persecution. What he does wish to inflict he will not call persecution.
What he takes from the Jews he calls political power. What he is too
good-natured to take from the Jews he will not call political power.
The Jew must not sit in Parliament; but he may be the proprietor of all
the ten-pound houses in a borough.[23] He may have more fifty-pound
tenants than any peer in the kingdom. He may give the voters treats to
please their palates, and hire bands of gipsies to break their heads,
as if he were a Christian and a Marquess. All the rest of the system is
of a piece. The Jew may be a juryman, but not a judge. He may decide
issues of fact, but not issues of law. He may give a hundred thousand
pounds damages; but he may not in the most trivial case grant a new
trial. He may rule the money-market: he may influence the exchanges: he
may be summoned to congresses of Emperors and Kings. Great potentates,
instead of negotiating a loan with him by tying him in a chair and
pulling out his grinders, may treat with him as with a great potentate,
and may postpone the declaring of war or the signing of a treaty till
they have conferred with him. All this is as it should be: but he must
not be a Privy Councillor. He must not be called Right Honourable, for
that is political power. And who is it that we are trying to cheat
in this way? Even Omniscience. Yes, Sir; we have been gravely told
that the Jews are under the divine displeasure, and that if we give
them political power, God will visit us in judgment. Do we then think
that God cannot distinguish between substance and form? Does not He
know that, while we withhold from the Jews the semblance and name of
political power, we suffer them to possess the substance? The plain
truth is that my honourable friend is drawn in one direction by his
opinions, and in a directly opposite direction by his excellent heart.
He halts between two opinions. He tries to make a compromise between
principles which admit of no compromise. He goes a certain way in
intolerance. Then he stops, without being able to give a reason for
stopping. But I know the reason. It is his humanity. Those who formerly
dragged the Jew at a horse’s tail, and singed his beard with blazing
furze-bushes, were much worse men than my honourable friend; but they
were more consistent than he.
It has been said that it would be monstrous to see a Jew judge try a
man for blasphemy.[24] In my opinion it is monstrous to see any judge
try a man for blasphemy under the present law. But, if the law on
that subject were in a sound state, I do not see why a conscientious
Jew might not try a blasphemer. Every man, I think, ought to be at
liberty to discuss the evidences of religion; but no man ought to be
at liberty to force on the unwilling ears and eyes of others sounds
and sights which must cause annoyance and irritation. The distinction
is clear. I think it wrong to punish a man for selling Paine’s “Age of
Reason” in a back-shop to those who choose to buy, or for delivering
a Deistical lecture in a private room to those who choose to listen.
But if a man exhibits at a window in the Strand a hideous caricature
of that which is an object of awe and adoration to nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of every thousand of the people who pass up and down
that great thoroughfare; if a man in a place of public resort applies
opprobrious epithets to names held in reverence by all Christians;
such a man ought, in my opinion, to be severely punished, not for
differing from us in opinion, but for committing a nuisance which gives
us pain and disgust. He is no more entitled to outrage our feelings by
obtruding his impiety on us, and to say that he is exercising his right
of discussion, than to establish a yard for butchering horses close to
our houses, and to say that he is exercising his right of property, or
to run naked up and down the public streets, and to say that he is
exercising his right of locomotion. He has a right of discussion, no
doubt, as he has a right of property and a right of locomotion. But he
must use all his rights so as not to infringe the rights of others.
These, Sir, are the principles on which I would frame the law of
blasphemy; and if the law were so framed, I am at a loss to understand
why a Jew might not enforce it as well as a Christian. I am not a Roman
Catholic; but if I were a judge at Malta, I should have no scruple
about punishing a bigoted Protestant who should burn the Pope in effigy
before the eyes of thousands of Roman Catholics. I am not a Mussulman;
but if I were a judge in India, I should have no scruple about
punishing a Christian who should pollute a mosque. Why, then, should I
doubt that a Jew, raised by his ability, learning, and integrity to the
judicial bench, would deal properly with any person who, in a Christian
country, should insult the Christian religion?
But, says my honourable friend, it has been prophesied that the Jews
are to be wanderers on the face of the earth, and that they are not
to mix on terms of equality with the people of the countries in which
they sojourn. Now, Sir, I am confident that I can demonstrate that
this is not the sense of any prophecy which is part of Holy Writ. For
it is an undoubted fact that, in the United States of America, Jewish
citizens do possess all the privileges possessed by Christian citizens.
Therefore, if the prophecies mean that the Jews never shall, during
their wanderings, be admitted by other nations to equal participation
of political rights, the prophecies are false. But the prophecies are
certainly not false. Therefore their meaning cannot be that which is
attributed to them by my honourable friend.
Another objection which has been made to the motion is that the Jews
look forward to the coming of a great deliverer, to their return to
Palestine, to the rebuilding of their Temple, to the revival of their
ancient worship, and that therefore they will always consider England,
not their country, but merely as their place of exile. But, surely,
Sir, it would be the grossest ignorance of human nature to imagine that
the anticipation of an event which is to happen at some time altogether
indefinite, of an event which has been vainly expected during many
centuries, of an event which even those who confidently expect that it
will happen do not confidently expect that they or their children or
their grandchildren will see, can ever occupy the minds of men to such
a degree as to make them regardless of what is near and present and
certain. Indeed Christians, as well as Jews, believe that the existing
order of things will come to an end. Many Christians believe that Jesus
will visibly reign on earth during a thousand years. Expositors of
prophecy have gone so far as to fix the year when the Millennial period
is to commence. The prevailing opinion is, I think, in favour of the
year 1866; but, according to some commentators, the time is close at
hand. Are we to exclude all millenarians from Parliament and office, on
the ground that they are impatiently looking forward to the miraculous
monarchy which is to supersede the present dynasty and the present
constitution of England, and that therefore they cannot be heartily
loyal to King William?
In one important point, Sir, my honourable friend, the Member for the
University of Oxford, must acknowledge that the Jewish religion is
of all erroneous religions the least mischievous. There is not the
slightest chance that the Jewish religion will spread. The Jew does
not wish to make proselytes. He may be said to reject them.[25] He
thinks it almost culpable in one who does not belong to his race to
presume to belong to his religion. It is therefore not strange that a
conversion from Christianity to Judaism should be a rarer occurrence
than a total eclipse of the sun. There was one distinguished convert in
the last century, Lord George Gordon; and the history of his conversion
deserves to be remembered.[26] For if ever there was a proselyte of
whom a proselytising sect would have been proud, it was Lord George;
not only because he was a man of high birth and rank; not only because
he had been a member of the legislature; but also because he had been
distinguished by the intolerance, nay, the ferocity, of his zeal for
his own form of Christianity. But was he allured into the synagogue?
Was he even welcomed to it? No, Sir; he was coldly and reluctantly
permitted to share the reproach and suffering of the chosen people;
but he was sternly shut out from their privileges. He underwent the
painful rite which their law enjoins. But when, on his death-bed, he
begged hard to be buried among them according to their ceremonial, he
was told that his request could not be granted. I understand that cry
of “Hear.” It reminds me that one of the arguments against this motion
is that the Jews are an unsocial people, that they draw close to each
other, and stand aloof from strangers. Really, Sir, it is amusing to
compare the manner in which the question of Catholic emancipation
was argued formerly by some gentlemen with the manner in which the
question of Jew emancipation is argued by the same gentlemen now.
When the question was about Catholic emancipation, the cry was, “See
how restless, how versatile, how encroaching, how insinuating, is the
spirit of the Church of Rome. See how her priests compass earth and sea
to make one proselyte, how indefatigably they toil, how attentively
they study the weak and strong parts of every character, how skilfully
they employ literature, arts, sciences, as engines for the propagation
of their faith. You find them in every region and under every
disguise, collating manuscripts in the Bodleian, fixing telescopes
in the observatory of Pekin, teaching the use of the plough and the
spinning wheel to the savages of Paraguay. Will you give power to the
members of a Church so busy, so aggressive, so insatiable?” Well, now
the question is about people who never try to seduce any stranger to
join them, and who do not wish anybody to be of their faith who is
not also of their blood. And now you exclaim, “Will you give power to
the members of a sect which remains sullenly apart from other sects,
which does not invite, nay, which hardly even admits neophytes?” The
truth is, that bigotry will never want a pretence. Whatever the sect
be which it is proposed to tolerate, the peculiarities of that sect
will, for the time, be pronounced by intolerant men to be the most
odious and dangerous that can be conceived. As to the Jews, that they
are unsocial as respects religion is true; and so much the better:
for, surely, as Christians, we cannot wish that they should bestir
themselves to pervert us from our own faith. But that the Jews would
be unsocial members of the civil community, if the civil community did
its duty by them, has never been proved. My right honourable friend who
made the motion which we are discussing has produced a great body of
evidence to show that they have been grossly misrepresented;[27] and
that evidence has not been refuted by my honourable friend the Member
for the University of Oxford. But what if it were true that the Jews
are unsocial? What if it were true that they do not regard England
as their country? Would not the treatment which they have undergone
explain and excuse their antipathy to the society in which they live?
Has not similar antipathy often been felt by persecuted Christians to
the society which persecuted them? While the bloody code of Elizabeth
was enforced against the English Roman Catholics, what was the
patriotism of Roman Catholics? Oliver Cromwell said that in his time
they were Espaniolised. At a later period it might have been said that
they were Gallicised. It was the same with the Calvinists. What more
deadly enemies had France in the days of Louis the Fourteenth than the
persecuted Huguenots? But would any rational man infer from these facts
that either the Roman Catholic as such, or the Calvinist as such, is
incapable of loving the land of his birth? If England were now invaded
by Roman Catholics, how many English Roman Catholics would go over to
the invader? If France were now attacked by a Protestant enemy, how
many French Protestants would lend him help? Why not try what effect
would be produced on the Jews by that tolerant policy which has made
the English Roman Catholic a good Englishman and the French Calvinist a
good Frenchman?[28]
Another charge has been brought against the Jews, not by my honourable
friend the Member for the University of Oxford—he has too much learning
and too much good feeling to make such a charge—but by the honourable
Member for Oldham, who has, I am sorry to see, quitted his place. The
honourable Member for Oldham tells us that the Jews are naturally a
mean race, a sordid race, a money-getting race; that they are averse
to all honourable callings; that they neither sow nor reap; that
they have neither flocks nor herds; that usury is the only pursuit
for which they are fit; that they are destitute of all elevated and
amiable sentiments. Such, Sir, has in every age been the reasoning of
bigots. They never fail to plead in justification of persecution the
vices which persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews
less than half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel
for England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves,
and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren. We drive them to
mean occupations, and then reproach them for not embracing honourable
professions. We long forbade them to possess land; and we complain
that they chiefly occupy themselves in trade. We shut them out from
all the paths of ambition; and then we despise them for taking refuge
in avarice. During many ages we have, in all our dealings with them,
abused our immense superiority of force; and then we are disgusted
because they have recourse to that cunning which is the natural and
universal defence of the weak against the violence of the strong. But
were they always a mere money-changing, money-getting, money-hoarding
race? Nobody knows better than my honourable friend the Member for the
University of Oxford that there is nothing in their national character
which unfits them for the highest duties of citizens. He knows that,
in the infancy of civilisation, when our island was as savage as New
Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when
scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome,
this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their
splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of
sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural
philosophers, their historians and their poets. What nation ever
contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence
and religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal
proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair? And if, in the
course of many centuries, the oppressed descendants of warriors and
sages have degenerated from the qualities of their fathers, if, while
excluded from the blessings of law, and bowed down under the yoke of
slavery, they have contracted some of the vices of outlaws and of
slaves, shall we consider this as matter of reproach to them? Shall we
not rather consider it as matter of shame and remorse to ourselves?
Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of the House of
Commons. Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy
can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say
that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism
among the descendants of the Maccabees.
Sir, in supporting the motion of my honourable friend, I am, I firmly
believe, supporting the honour and the interests of the Christian
religion. I should think that I insulted that religion if I said that
it cannot stand unaided by intolerant laws. Without such laws it was
established, and without such laws it may be maintained. It triumphed
over the superstitions of the most refined and of the most savage
nations, over the graceful mythology of Greece and the bloody idolatry
of the Northern forests. It prevailed over the power and policy of
the Roman empire. It tamed the barbarians by whom that empire was
overthrown. But all these victories were gained not by the help of
intolerance, but in spite of the opposition of intolerance. The whole
history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from
persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally. May
she long continue to bless our country with her benignant influence,
strong in her sublime philosophy, strong in her spotless morality,
strong in those internal and external evidences to which the most
powerful and comprehensive of human intellects have yielded assent, the
last solace of those who have outlived every earthly hope, the last
restraint of those who are raised above every earthly fear! But let
not us, mistaking her character and her interests, fight the battle of
truth with the weapons of error, and endeavour to support by oppression
that religion which first taught the human race the great lesson of
universal charity.
NOTES
[1] The full title of the publication which forms the peg for
Macaulay’s essay is _Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations
affecting natural born Subjects of His Majesty professing the Jewish
Religion, commonly called Jews_. It was printed in 1829 by G. Taylor,
Printer, 7 Little James Street. In the article in the _Westminster
Review_, April 1829, occasioned by this same pamphlet, the address of
the printer, George Taylor, is given as _Lamb’s Conduit Passage, Red
Lion Square_. The _Statement_ must have appeared in two forms. Macaulay
describes it as octavo, but the pages of the copy which Mr. Israel
Solomons possesses measure 12½ by 7¾ inches. The margins in this copy
have been cut for binding. It was meant to _fold_ in four, as is shown
by the manner in which the title is repeated on the fourth side. The
title as there printed is _exactly that cited by Macaulay_. Probably
the document was originally a Petition to the House of Commons.
The _Statement_ is anonymous, but bears the clear hallmark of Francis
Henry Goldsmid’s style. _Cf._ D. W. Marks and A. Löwy, _Memoir of Sir
Francis Henry Goldsmid_, 1879, p. 23 [second edition, 1882, p. 27].
The author opens with the general assertion that no man ought to be
deprived of civil or political right because of his religious opinions,
“unless it can be shewn that, from the removal of their disabilities,
injury is likely to result to the community at large.” The _Statement_
goes on to argue that such removal would not injure the religion or
threaten the government of England, for, on the one hand, Jews do not
proselytise, and, on the other, they are noted for their “proverbial
loyalty.” The experience of the happy effect of emancipation in
France, America, and the Netherlands is next appealed to. This leads
up to a short survey of the history of the Jews in England before the
expulsion in 1290, and after the return in the time of Cromwell, and an
able argument as to their legal status—including their right to hold
land—follows. The whole concludes with an appeal for the “Omission in
the Oath of Abjuration and Dissenters’ Declaration, when respectively
taken, or made and subscribed, by persons professing the Jewish
religion, of words obviously inconsistent with such profession.” It is
altogether a moderate and able presentation of the case for the Jews,
and fairly deserved the prominence given to it by Macaulay.
[2] Sir Robert Grant (1779-1838) was born in Bengal, and, after a
distinguished career at Cambridge, entered Parliament in 1818. In 1830
his first Bill was rejected; but a better fate rewarded his effort of
1833. Soon afterwards he went to India as Governor of Bombay. Grant
was the author of some famous sacred poems, one of the best and most
popular of which was his translation of Psalm civ., “O Worship the
King.”
[3] There had been a change of Government. Parliament was dissolved
on July 24, 1830, and in the new parliament the Duke of Wellington’s
ministry fell, to be succeeded by the Grey administration.
[4] See comments on this passage in the Introduction.