THE EVE OF EMANCIPATION
ABOUT the middle of the eighteenth century a new spirit had arisen
on the Continent of Europe; or rather the spirit of the Renaissance,
suppressed in Italy, had re-asserted itself in Central Europe under a
more highly developed form. Seventeen hundred years had passed since
the heavenly choir sang on the plain of Bethlehem the glorious anthem,
“Peace on earth, good-will toward men.” And the message which had been
blotted out in blood, while the myth and the words were worshipped, was
once more heard in a totally different version. Those who delivered it
were not angels, but men of the world; the audience not a group of rude
Asiatic shepherds, but the most polished of European publics; and the
tongue in which it was delivered not the simple Aramaic of Palestine,
but the complex vehicle of modern science. Once more man, by an
entirely new route, had arrived at the one great truth, the only true
commandment: “Love one another, O ye creatures of a day. Bear with one
another’s faults and follies. Life is too brief for hatred; human blood
too precious to be wasted in mutual destruction.”
It was the age of Voltaire, Diderot and Jean Jacques Rousseau in
France; of Lessing and Mendelssohn in Germany. The doctrine of
universal charity and happiness which, like its ancient prototype,
was later to be inculcated at the point of the sword and illustrated
by rape, murder, fire and famine, as yet found its chief expression
in poetical visions of freedom and in philosophical theories of
equality promulgated by sanguine Encyclopaedists. It was a period of
lofty aspirations not yet degraded by mediocre performance; and the
Jews, who had hitherto passively or actively shared in every stage of
Europe’s progress, were to participate in this development also. Unlike
the earlier awakenings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this
call for tolerance did not die away on the confines of Christendom.
The time had come for the question to be put: “_Sind Christ and Jude
eher Christ und Jude als Mensch?_” Israel was destined to receive at
the hands of Reason what Conscience had proved unable to grant. And in
this broader awakening both Teuton and Latin were united. The French
philosophers served the cause of toleration by teaching that all
religions are false; the German by teaching that they are all true.
But, ere this triumph could be achieved, the Jews had to overcome many
and powerful enemies. Among these were the two most famous men of the
century.
♦1740–86♦
Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and ardent friend of philosophy,
appears anything but great or philosophical in his policy towards the
children of Israel. Under his reign the prohibitive laws of the Middle
Age were revived in a manner which exceeded mediaeval legislation in
thoroughness, though it could not plead mediaeval barbarism as an
excuse. Only a limited number of Jews were permitted to reside in
Frederick’s dominions. By the “General Privilege” of 1750 they were
divided into two categories. In the first were included traders and
officials of the Synagogue. These had a hereditary right of residence
restricted to one child in each family. The right for a second child
was purchased by them for 70,000 thalers. The second division embraced
persons of independent means tolerated individually; but their right
of abode expired with them. The marriage regulations were so severe
that they condemned poor Jews to celibacy; while all Jews, rich and
poor alike, were debarred from liberal professions, and they all were
fleeced by taxes ruinous at once and ludicrous.
Voltaire, the arch-enemy of Feudalism, yet defended the feudal attitude
towards the Jews. His enmity for the race did not spring entirely from
capricious ill-humour. He had a grudge against the Jews owing to some
pecuniary losses sustained, as he complained, through the bankruptcy of
a Jewish capitalist of the name of Medina. The story, as told by the
inimitable story-teller himself, is worth repeating: “Medina told me
that he was not to blame for his bankruptcy: that he was unfortunate,
that he had never been a son of Belial. He moved me, I embraced him,
we praised God together, and I lost my money. I have never hated the
Jewish nation; I hate nobody.”[136]
♦1750–51♦
But this was not all. Whilst in Berlin, Voltaire waged a protracted
warfare against a Hebrew jeweller. It was a contest between two great
misers, each devoutly bent on over-reaching the other. According to a
good, if too emphatic, judge, “nowhere, in the Annals of Jurisprudence,
is there a more despicable thing, or a deeper involved in lies and
deliriums,” than this Voltaire-Hirsch lawsuit.[137] It arose out of a
transaction of illegal stock-jobbing. Voltaire had commissioned the
Jew Hirsch to go to Dresden and purchase a number of Saxon Exchequer
bills--which were payable in gold to genuine Prussian holders
only--giving him for payment a draft on Paris, due after some weeks,
and receiving from him a quantity of jewels in pledge, till the bills
were delivered. Hirsch went to Dresden, but sent no bills. Voltaire,
suspecting foul play, stopped payment of the Paris draft, and ordered
Hirsch to come back at once. On the Jew’s arrival an attempt at
settlement was made. Voltaire asked for his draft and offered to return
the diamonds, accompanied with a sum of money covering part of the
Jew’s travelling expenses. Hirsch on examining the diamonds declared
that some of them had been changed, and declined to accept them. It was
altogether a _mauvaise affaire_, and to this day it remains a mystery
which of the two litigants was more disingenuous.
The case ended in a sentence which forced Hirsch to restore the Paris
draft and Voltaire to buy the jewels at a price fixed by sworn experts.
Hirsch was at liberty to appeal, if he could prove that the diamonds
had been tampered with. In the meantime he was fined ten thalers for
falsely denying his signature. Voltaire shrieked hysterically, trying
to convince the world and himself that he had triumphed. But the world,
at all events, refused to be convinced. The scandal formed the topic of
conversation and comment throughout the civilised world. Frederick’s
own view of the case was that his friend Voltaire had tried “to pick
Jew pockets,” but, instead, had his own pocket picked of some £150,
and, moreover, he was made the laughing-stock of Europe in pamphlets
and lampoons innumerable--one of these being a French comedy, _Tantale
en Procès_, attributed by some to Frederick himself; a poor production
wherein the author ridicules--to the best of his ability--the
unfortunate philosopher. The incident was not calculated to sweeten
Voltaire’s temper, or to enhance his affection for the Jewish people.
Vain and vindictive, the sage, with all his genius and his many amiable
qualities, never forgot an injury or forgave a defeat.
On the other hand, the Jews could boast not a few allies. Among the
champions of humanity, in the noblest sense of the term, none was
more earnest than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the prince of modern
critics. His pure and lofty nature had met with her kindred in Moses
Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, born within the same twelvemonth.
♦1728–9♦ The friendship which bound these two children of diverse races
and creeds together was a practical proof of Lessing’s own doctrine
that virtue is international, and that intellectual affinity recognises
no theological boundaries. ♦1779♦ This doctrine, already preached in
most eloquent prose, found an artistic embodiment, and a universal
audience, in _Nathan der Weise_--the first appearance of the Jew on
the European stage as a human being, and a human being of the very
highest order. The Wise Nathan was no other than Moses Mendelssohn,
scarcely less remarkable a person than Lessing himself. Years before
Mendelssohn had left his native town of Dessau and trudged on to
Berlin in search of a future. A friendless and penniless lad, timid,
deformed, and repulsively ugly, he was with the utmost difficulty
admitted into the Prussian capital, of which he was to become an
ornament. For long years after his arrival in Berlin, the gifted and
destitute youth laboured and waited with the patient optimism of one
conscious of his own powers, until an unwilling world was forced to
recognise the beauty and heroism of the soul which lurked under that
most unpromising exterior; and the Jewish beggar lad, grown into an
awkward, stuttering and insignificant-looking man, gradually rose to be
the idol of a salon--the eighteenth century equivalent for a shrine--at
which every foreign visitor of distinction and culture, irrespective of
religion or nationality, deemed it an honour to be allowed to worship.
Though faithful to the cult of his Hebrew fathers, Mendelssohn was
deeply imbued with Hellenic thought and sense of beauty. His famous
dialogue, _Phaedo, or the Immortality of the Soul_, might have been
written by Plato, had Plato lived in the eighteenth century; so much so
that an enthusiastic pastor and physiognomist of Zurich, enchanted by
Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, declared that he saw the spirit of Socrates
not only in every line of the book, but in every line of the author’s
face. Like a present-day phrenologist, Lavater was anxious to obtain
a model of Mendelssohn’s head as an advertisement for his science;
but, being in addition a pious evangelical minister, he also nourished
hopes of winning Mendelssohn over to the Christian faith. In both
these objects of his ambition the well-meaning physiognomist was sadly
disappointed.
The great work of Mendelssohn’s life is the partial reconciliation
which by his writings he assisted in effecting between the two worlds
that had so long misjudged and mistrusted each other. His translation
of the Pentateuch into pure German inaugurated for the Jews of Germany
a new era of literary activity. By substituting modern German for
the barbarous Yiddish in their education the book established an
intellectual bond between them and their Christian fellow-countrymen.
Lessing made the Jew known to the Gentile; Mendelssohn made the Gentile
known to the Jew. And even the hostility of Frederick, the master
of legions, the sneers of Voltaire, the master of laughter, and the
bigotry of the Protestant public and of the Synagogue prevailed not
against the united endeavours of the two apostles. In 1763 Mendelssohn
carried off the prize offered by the Academy of Berlin for an essay
on a philosophical subject, beating no less a competitor than Kant.
In the same year Frederick, who three years before, enraged at some
thinly-veiled disparagement of his verses by the Jewish critic, had
been prevented from punishing him only by the fear of French ridicule,
was induced to honour Mendelssohn by granting him the status of a
Protected Jew.
Among Mendelssohn’s young contemporaries three are pre-eminent as
representatives of the new Hebrew culture: Herz, Ben David, and
Maimon. Herz was Kant’s favourite pupil and distinguished himself
as a popular exponent of his master’s philosophy. Ben David was a
mathematician and a student of Kant’s philosophy. On the latter subject
he lectured at the University of Vienna and afterwards in Berlin.
Maimon was a Polish Jew who had inherited restlessness of body from
his fathers and restlessness of mind from the writings of his great
namesake Maimonides. He wandered over the limitless and cheerless
desert of Negation, sought to slake his thirst at the mirage of the
Cabbala, or to forget it in the mysticism of the “Pious,” and finally,
at the age of five-and-twenty, quitting home and family with the
readiness characteristic of the born vagrant, he arrived in Berlin,
unwashed, unkempt, and untaught in any tongue but his native jargon of
Germano-Polish Hebrew. Some time afterwards, however, he became famous
by the publication of an Autobiography--a work worthy to stand beside
Rousseau’s _Confessions_ in one respect at least: its unsparing and
almost savage unreserve. Its sincerity was doubted by George Eliot and
by other critics also. But Schiller and Goethe were both impressed by
this work, and Maimon was honoured with the latter poet’s acquaintance.
Gradually there was formed in the capital of Prussia a wide circle of
intellectual Jews and Jewesses, which stood in strong contrast to the
proud and stupid nobility on the one hand and to the homely and stupid
_bourgeoisie_ on the other. Between these two frigid zones spread the
Jewish class of men and women rich in money and brains, cultivating
French literature, wit, and infidelity. Mendelssohn’s house was at
first the centre of this circle, and after his death it was succeeded
by that of Herz, whose own brilliancy was eclipsed by that of his wife.
In her salon were to be met more celebrities than at Court. Mirabeau
was captivated by the gifted Jewess’s charm, and little by little even
the wives of distinguished men began to acknowledge the beautiful
Henrietta’s attraction. Another literary salon was at the same time
opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree
of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual
emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in
Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain
amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice;
for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue,
drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must
always be some that is rotten.
The campaign for the removal of Jewish disabilities, begun by the two
friends, was continued by others. In 1781 Christian William Dohm, a
distinguished German author and disciple of Mendelssohn’s, advocated
the cause in an eloquent treatise in which he not only reviewed the
pathetic history of the Jews in Europe, and defended them against the
venerable slanders of seventeen hundred years, but also discussed
practical measures for the amelioration of their lot. The plea was read
by thousands, and, though refuted by many, it was approved by more.
Its earliest tangible effect, however, was produced, not in Berlin,
but in Vienna. The new spirit had penetrated into the remotest corners
of the German world. Austria, long a by-word among the Jews as a house
of bondage, established an era of toleration under the philosophical
monarch Joseph II., who, soon after the appearance of Dohm’s work,
abolished many of the imposts paid by the children of Israel,
granted them permission to pursue all arts and sciences, trades and
handicrafts, admitted them to the universities and academies, founded
and endowed Jewish schools, and, in pursuance of his futile plan to
secure internal harmony by the Germanisation of the various races
of his Empire, he made the study of German compulsory on all Jewish
adults. ♦1782♦ The reign of toleration, it is true, ended with the good
monarch’s life; but nevertheless it forms a landmark on the road to
civilisation.
Meanwhile, in Germany also, the new gospel was fighting its way
laboriously to the front. The death of Frederick the Great removed a
great obstacle from the path of the advocates of the Jewish cause.
Under his successor, Frederick William II., a commission was appointed
to investigate the complaints of the Prussian Jews and to suggest
remedies; and the Jews were asked to choose “honest men” from amongst
themselves, with whom the matter might be discussed. ♦1787♦ The Jewish
deputies laid before the commission all their grievances; and the
poll-tax, levied upon every Jew who crossed or re-crossed the frontiers
of a city or province, was abolished in Prussia. But the Jews justly
pronounced this concession as falling far below their hopes and their
needs. German public opinion was still averse to Jewish emancipation,
and its prejudices were shared even by such men as Goethe and Fichte,
both of whom, though representing opposite political ideals and though
despising Christianity, yet agreed in the orthodox estimate of the
Jew--and that in spite of the admiration which the former entertained
for “the divine lessons” of _Nathan der Weise_. Thus, though the good
seed had been sown in German soil, it was not in Germany that the
flower saw the light of the sun.
Notwithstanding Voltaire’s unfriendly utterances regarding the Jews,
the general tenour of his teaching was, of course, in favour of
toleration, and it was on the French side of the Rhine that Lessing’s
intellectual dream was to find its first realisation in practical
politics. ♦1748♦ Montesquieu, moved to righteous indignation by the
sight of the suffering Marranos in Portugal, had already protested
against the barbarous treatment of the Jews in his _Esprit des Lois_,
stigmatising its injustice, and demonstrating the injury which it had
caused to various countries. Nor did he argue in vain. Since the middle
of the sixteenth century there had been Jewish communities in France,
consisting of refugees from Spain and Portugal. But they were only
tolerated as pseudo-Christians. Dissimulation was absolutely necessary
for self-preservation, and these hypocrites in spite of themselves were
obliged to have their marriages solemnised at church, and otherwise
to conform to rites which they detested. To these immigrants were
gradually added new-comers from Germany and Poland, whom the Portuguese
Jews despised and persecuted in a most revolting manner. An internecine
feud between these two classes of refugees at Bordeaux gave King Louis
XV. an opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the community.
♦1760♦ The Portuguese section passed a resolution calumniating their
poor co-religionists, and trying to procure their exclusion as sturdy
beggars and vagabonds. The communal resolution was submitted to the
king, and every stone was turned to obtain his ratification of the
iniquitous statute. Truly, there is no tyrant like a slave. Soon after
Louis XV. issued an order expelling all the stigmatised Jews from
Bordeaux within a fortnight; but in the chaos which pervaded French
administration at that time there was a gulf between the issue and the
execution of royal edicts, which, happily for the wretched outcasts,
was never bridged over. ♦1776♦ Meanwhile the protest against the
servile position to which Israel had been doomed for ages gained in
strength, and, as its first result, the Jews of Paris obtained a legal
confirmation of the right of abode in the capital of France.
Far worse was the condition of the Jew in Alsace--a district German in
everything save political allegiance. In that province oppression was
of that dull, chronic kind which begets degradation without driving
its victims to violent despair. The Jews in Alsace were simply
regarded and treated as inferior animals. They lived in jealously
guarded ghettos, egress from which had to be purchased from the local
officials. The right of abode was vested in the hands of the feudal
nobility; the same limitations as to the number of residents and
marriages prevailed, and the same extortions were practised there as
in Germany. The Jews had to pay tribute to king, bishop, and lord
paramount for protection, besides the taxes levied by the barons on
whose domains they dwelt, and the irregular gifts wrung out of them
by the barons’ satellites. And, while money was demanded at every
turn, most of the avenues through which money comes were closed to
the Jews, cattle-dealing and jewellery being the only trades which
they were permitted to pursue openly. The profits derived from
these pursuits were, of course, supplemented by surreptitious and,
consequently, excessive usury. This last occupation exposed the Jew to
the hatred of the simple country folk, and to blackmail on the part
of crafty informers. The discontent, fomented by the clergy and the
local magistrates, culminated in a petition to Louis XVI., imploring
his Majesty to expel the accursed race from Alsace. But it was too
late in the day. The movement in favour of toleration had made too
much headway. An enquiry was instituted, and the ringleader of the
anti-Jewish agitation--a legal rogue rejoicing in the name of Hell--was
convicted of blackmail and banished from the province, instead of
the Jews. ♦1780♦ At the same time the latter presented to the King a
memorial, drawn up by Dohm, and obtained a considerable alleviation
of the burdens under which they groaned, of the restrictions which
hampered their commercial activity, and of the missionary zeal of the
Catholic priests, which threatened the religion of their children.
Finally, they were relieved of the odious capitation tax in 1784,
the year which witnessed the triumph of Beaumarchais’ _Mariage de
Figaro_ at the Theatre Français--a rapier thrust at the dotard giant
of feudalism, none the less deadly because inflicted amid peals of
laughter; to be followed by the fall of the Bastille and of other
things. In the same year a Royal Commission was appointed to revise
the laws concerning the Jews and to remove their disabilities.
The Revolution did not stem the current of toleration. In 1789 the
National Assembly met in Paris: a council of twelve hundred spiritual
and secular fathers patriotically sworn to formulate a new creed--an
object which, despite pandemonic wrangling and jangling and chaotic
disorder of thought and action, they contrived to achieve in that
memorable document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National
or, as it now calls itself, Constituent Assembly is the “station
for all augury,” whither repair all mortals in distress and doubt.
Petitions pour in from every side, and among these is one from the
Jews, especially the down-trodden Jews of Alsace. They also come
forward to claim a share in the new Elysium, to assert their rights as
men. Mirabeau, who already towers high above his brother-councillors,
and is looked upon as the one seer among many speakers--the one living
force among fleeting shades--espouses the Jewish claim. Three years
earlier he had published a work _On Mendelssohn and the Political
Reform of the Jews_. He now sets himself to demolish the remnants of
the ancient prejudice still cherished by some of the clerical friends
of mankind.
The task was not an easy one. Besides Mirabeau, the Abbé Grégoire,
and Clermont-Tonnerre, there were scarcely any politicians of note in
France who cared for the Jews. The Declaration of the Rights of Man,
while abolishing the religious disabilities of Protestants, made no
provision for the Jews. Even the French public of 1789 was not yet
quite ripe for so revolutionary a measure as the admission of the Jew
to that equality of citizenship which it declared to be the birthright
of every human being. A statute of January 28th, 1790, enfranchised the
Jews of the south of France who had always held a privileged position;
but this exception on behalf of a few only emphasised the disabilities
of the many. The bulk of the race, especially in Alsace, continued to
be treated as outcasts, until the more advanced section of the Parisian
public, under the leadership of the advocate Godard, appealed to the
people of the capital for its opinion on the matter. ♦1790 Feb. 25♦
Fifty-three out of the sixty districts voted in favour of the Jews, and
the Commune gave a practical expression to the feelings of the majority
in the form of an address laid before the Assembly. But it was not till
nineteen months after that a definite decision was arrived at, partly
by the eloquent advocacy of Talleyrand, who pointed out to the Assembly
that the only difference between ordinary Frenchmen and French Jews
was their religion. In every other respect they were fellow-countrymen
and brothers. If, therefore, religion were allowed to interfere with
their enfranchisement, that would be a denial of the principles of the
Revolution--a flagrant breach of all those laws of humanity and civil
equality for which the French people were fighting. ♦1791 Sept. 27♦
These arguments prevailed in the end, and the French Jews were formally
enfranchised. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple
the children of Israel, who had hitherto sojourned as strangers in
foreign realms, hated, baited, and hunted from place to place, without
a country, without a home, without civil or political rights, are
citizens. Henceforth the name Juif, made hateful by the horrors of
centuries, is to be forgotten in the new appellation of Israelite.
The storm that raged during the next three years left the French Jews
comparatively unscathed. Israel had long taken to heart the lesson
embodied in the oriental proverb, “The head that is bent is spared by
the sword.” In some districts, it is true, the enemies of all religion
also tried to suppress the Jewish “superstition”; but on the whole the
Jews came through the ordeal better than might have been expected. The
Constitution of 1795 confirmed the decrees of the National Assembly.
Holland, as we have seen, had long been a home for the persecuted sons
of Israel. But the full rights of citizenship were not conceded to them
until 1796, when closer relations with France enabled the gospel of
liberty, equality, and fraternity to complete the work of toleration
begun by enlightened commercial policy. The gift, however, was not
welcomed by the heads of the community. The jealous Synagogue, which
had persecuted poor Uriel Acosta to death, and excommunicated Spinoza
in the preceding century, was still determined to guard its masterful
hold upon its members. The new duties and rights which accompanied
the gift, it was feared, would render the Jews less dependent upon
their religious pastors. The Rabbis, supported by the Portuguese
element which formed the aristocracy of the community and, like all
aristocracies, abhorred innovation, offered a strenuous resistance to
emancipation. They indited a circular epistle declaring that the Jews
renounced their rights of citizenship as contrary to the commands of
Holy Writ. They endorsed all the objections raised by the enemies of
Jewish emancipation--namely, that the Jews, owing to their traditions
of the past and their expectation of the Messiah, are and shall ever be
strangers in the land--and they prevented their flock from accepting
the invitation to vote in the elections to the National Assembly. On
the other hand, the Liberal party, led by Jews of German descent,
endeavoured to weaken the power of the Rabbis. The two sections banned
each other heartily, and the distance between them grew wider as the
Liberals went further and further along the path of reform. This
difference of views led to a schism between the lovers of the new and
the slaves of the old.
In England prejudice was still so strong that as late as 1783 we find
the Jews excluded from the benefit of the Irish Naturalisation Act,
passed that year. Yet there appears a faint reflection of Lessing’s
teaching in some of the writings which bring the century to a close.
Richard Cumberland, the friend of Burke and Reynolds, Garrick and
Goldsmith, banteringly eulogized by the last-named author as “the
Terence of England, the mender of hearts,” wrote, in collaboration with
Burgess, the _Exodiad_, a long epic, consisting of eight dull books,
wherein the two bards sing the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and
their journey through the desert. The work begins, after the fashion of
epics, with the orthodox invocation of the Muse in a single breathless
period:
“Of Israel, by Jehovah’s mighty power
From long captivity redeem’d, with loss
And total overthrow of Egypt’s host,
What time the chosen servant of the Lord
From Goshen to the land of promise led
Through the divided sea the ransom’d tribes,
Sing, heavenly Muse, and prop those mortal powers,
Which but for thy sustaining aid must sink
Under the weight of argument so vast,
Scenes so majestic, subject so sublime.”
It ends with a parting speech from Moses at the point of death:
“‘My ministry is finish’d; in thine hands,
Blest of the Lord, O Joshua! I have put
The book of life, and in thine arms expire.’
He ceas’d, and instantly the hand of death
Press’d on his heart and stopp’d its vital pulse;
His eye-lids dropt upon their sightless balls:
One deep-drawn sigh dismiss’d his parting soul;
To heaven it rose; his body sank to earth,
And God’s archangel guarded his remains.”
In charming contrast to this portentous rhapsody stands Goldsmith’s own
tender oratorio, _The Captivity_. It deals with the sons of Israel in
exile, working and weeping on the banks of the Euphrates; yet keeping
their hearts turned longingly to the fields of Sharon, the plains of
Kedron, the cedar-clad hills of Lebanon, and Zion. “Insulted, chained,
and all the world their foe,” the captives nourish their faith in the
God of their fathers:
“Our God is all we boast below,
To him we turn our eyes;
And every added weight of woe
Shall make our homage rise.”
Thus sings the chorus of Prophets in Exile. Yet, even in the midst of
their woes, they see cause for pride and self-glorification: They are
the only worshippers of the true God; the rest of the world worships
idle idols:
“Are not, this very morn, those feasts begun,
Where prostrate Error hails the rising sun?
Do not our tyrant lords this day ordain
For superstitious rites and mirth profane?
And should we mourn? should coward Virtue fly,
When vaunting Folly lifts her head on high?
No! rather let us triumph still the more,
And as our fortune sinks, our spirit soar.”
Faith has its reward. While the captives bewail their lot, deliverance
is close at hand. The star of Cyrus has risen; Babylon the proud falls,
and the prophecy concerning the restoration of Israel is fulfilled.
But strong as is the sympathy with the fortunes and the spirit of
Israel in both these works, neither of them can be legitimately
considered as bearing directly on the Jewish question. The Shylock
tradition is still powerful in England, for want of a Lessing. It is
not ponderous poetasters, like Cumberland and Burgess, nor yet sweet
singers like the gentle Goldsmith, who will overthrow a convention
hallowed by the genius of a Shakespeare.