PALINGENESIA
THE French Revolution is over. For a while the volcanic forces, which
had long groaned in subterranean bondage, broke their prison, burst
into the light of day, and brought death and desolation upon the face
of the earth. But their task is done. Nemesis has obtained the due and
forfeit of her bond, and the Titans have returned to their Tartarean
abode, until such time as their services may be needed again. A
sentimentalist will, no doubt, find much to lament in the unsparing
fury of the avengers. Their hand has struck down everything that stood
high--good, evil, and indifferent alike--with elemental impartiality.
But the philosopher may, on the whole, see reason to rejoice. At all
events, he will, if he happens to be a Jew. For among the ruins of
tyranny he will recognise the rusty chains which had for centuries
weighed upon the limbs of Israel. They are gone, whatever may have
survived. Whatever may be said of the rest, they were an evil. The
Jew sees nothing but the hand of God in the desolation wrought by
another. For him the Powers of Darkness had broken their prison; for
him the proud ones of the earth had been laid low; for him the dreams
of freedom dreamt by the poets and thinkers of France had been turned
into a reality of despotism. What matter? Cyrus was a despot, and yet a
deliverer of Israel; Alexander was another; and Napoleon was doubtless
destined to be the third. Strange, indeed, are the ways of the Lord,
but His mercy endureth for ever toward Israel.
The hopes of the Jews were not disappointed. The work of
enfranchisement, commenced by philosophers like Montesquieu, and
carried on by patriots like Mirabeau, was completed by Napoleon. Though
deeply sensible of the disagreeable fact that usury and extortion had
been the favourite pursuits of the Jews from time immemorial, Napoleon
did not allow himself to be biassed by the mediaeval view of the
matter. Like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Cromwell, he
saw the advantage of securing the support of so numerous, so opulent,
and so scattered a nation as the Israelites, and one at least of his
motives undoubtedly was to conciliate the Jews of Old Prussia, Poland,
and Southern Russia, in the hope of profiting by their sympathy and
assistance in the contest in which he was then engaged. While depriving
individual Jews, notorious for rapacity, of their civil rights, and
restricting the operations of the Jews of the north-east of France
by temporarily refusing to them the right to sequester the goods of
their debtors, the Emperor decided to hear the Jewish side of the
question. ♦1806 July♦ By his order an assembly of Hebrew notables from
the French and German departments, as well as from Italy, was summoned
in Paris. Twelve questions were put to the delegates concerning the
Jew’s attitude towards the Gentile, the authority of the Rabbis, usury
and conscription; and, on the answers proving satisfactory, Napoleon
astonished the assembly with an announcement which no Jewish ear had
ever hoped to hear in Europe. The _Sanhedrin_, or National Council
of Israel, after a prorogation of seventeen centuries, was once more
convoked. The Hebrew polity had outlasted the heathen Roman Empire,
the Holy Roman Empire, Feudalism, and the French Monarchy. Time and
the seismic convulsions which had overthrown these mighty fabrics,
once regarded as eternal, had respected the humble institutions of
the outcasts of humanity. The constitutions of other nations were
built upon the earth and were subject to the laws which govern earthly
things; the constitution of the Jews was preserved in the archives of
Heaven, and was therefore immortal. ♦1807 Feb. 9♦ And so, at a word
from Napoleon, seventy-one delegates of the French and Italian Jewries
were gathered together in Paris, elected by the synagogues of the two
countries in accordance with the ancient forms and usages of Israel.
♦1807 March 2♦
The fruit of the _Sanhedrin’s_ deliberations was a charter which
defined the relations between Jew and Gentile in France. While
retaining the essential features of Judaism, the Rabbis wisely conceded
much to the demands of the country which so generously adopted them.
The Nine Responses of the document form a rational compromise between
the rights of God and the rights of Caesar: polygamy is forbidden;
divorce is allowed in accordance with the civil law of the land;
intermarriage with the Gentiles is tolerated, though not sanctioned,
by the Synagogue; French Jews are bidden to regard the French people
as brethren; acts of justice and charity are recommended towards all
believers in the Creator, without distinction of creed; Jews born in
France are exhorted to look upon the country as their fatherland, to
educate their children in its language, to acquire real property in
it, to renounce pursuits hated by their neighbours, and in every way
to endeavour to earn the esteem and goodwill of the latter; usury is
forbidden towards the stranger as towards the brother; and the interest
raised on loans is not, in any case, to exceed the legal rate. Thus an
effective answer was given to all the legal arguments which had been
advanced by the opponents of Jewish emancipation, and an honest attempt
was made by the doctors and chiefs of the nation to remove from the
children of Israel a portion at least of that odium under which they
had so long laboured.
♦1808 March 17♦
When the _Sanhedrin_ had brought its labours to an end, the Emperor
repealed the exceptional measures of 1806 and recognised the
Consistorial organisation which for a century fixed the status of
Israel in France. Every two thousand Jews were to form a community
under a synagogue and a board of trustees, with Paris for their
centre. Napoleon, it is true, while granting this liberal charter,
was compelled to yield to the anti-Jewish prejudices of the people of
Alsace and other parts of Eastern France, where the Jew was hated
more than ever, for the disasters of the Reign of Terror and the
distress caused by Napoleon’s campaigns, by impoverishing the peasants,
had delivered them up to the tender mercies of the money-lender. In
accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants of those districts
Napoleon took some steps highly detrimental to Jewish interests.
He enacted, for example, that loans to minors, women, soldiers and
domestic servants, as well as loans raised on agricultural implements,
should be null; that no more Jews should be allowed to enter Alsace;
that every Jew should serve in the army; and that no Jew should engage
in trade without permission from the Prefect. The duration of this
decree was limited to ten years. But, such local disadvantages and the
indignation aroused thereby notwithstanding, the well-earned gratitude
of Israel was expressed in many Hebrew hymns composed in honour of the
Deliverer whom the Lord had raised for His people.
A few years afterwards even these enactments were withdrawn, and the
Jews were accorded complete equality, civil and political. From 1814
till 1831 French legislation, despite certain fluctuations under the
brief restoration of the Bourbons, was enriched with various Acts, all
tending to lift the Israelites to a position worthy of their country,
and schools were established for the education of the Rabbis, who since
the latter date until recently were regarded as public functionaries
and were paid by the State.[138] ♦1833♦ Two years later the French
Government gave a signal proof of its interest in the welfare of the
Jewish portion of the French people by suspending relations with a
Swiss canton which had denied justice to a French Israelite on account
of his religion. For in Switzerland, when the French domination
expired, the old prejudices came to life again, and it was not till
1874 that political equality was accorded to the Swiss Jews.
♦1805♦
Meanwhile Napoleon’s arms had carried on, even outside France, the
work begun by the philosophers of the preceding generation. The
Inquisition was crushed in every Catholic country under the Emperor’s
heel, while in Germany Napoleon’s conquest brought to the Jews a relief
which departed with the French legions, to return by slow degrees in
the succeeding years. It was one of the bitterest examples of irony
presented by history. The French autocrat had given to the German
Jews freedom, and the people whom the Jews aided with their lives to
throw off the French autocrat’s yoke robbed them of it. In Frankfort,
where the ghetto had been abolished in 1811, immediately on the French
garrison’s withdrawal a clamour arose demanding its restoration. In
other “free towns” also, where rights of equality had been granted to
Israel while the fear of Napoleon hung over them, the ancient hatred
revived immediately on his downfall, and the old state of bondage was
restored. Even in Prussia, where the law recognised the equality of
the Jews in theory, slavery was their lot in reality: many trades and
industries were prohibited to them, the road to academic distinction
was barred to them, and Jews who had attained to the rank of officers
during the War of Liberation were forced to resign their commissions.
Nor were these disabilities removed even when the German Diet, which,
by the Act signed in Vienna on June 8, 1815, was to manage the affairs
of the German Confederacy, had established the principle of religious
freedom among the Christians, and had pledged itself to consider
measures for improving the lot of the Jews.
This reaction was partly due to an exaggerated sentiment of nationality
and hatred of everything foreign, aroused by the presence of the
French legions in the country, and strengthened by the sacrifices and
the success of the struggle for independence. National consciousness
found an ally in the Christian revolt against the French Religion of
Reason. Enthusiasm for the faith, which the French had overthrown,
added zest to the enthusiasm for the fatherland, which the French had
overrun. “Christian Germanism” became, not only a patriotic motto,
but a veritable cult of a novel and jealous god to whom everything
that was non-Christian and non-German, including the Jew, ought to be
immolated. ♦1819♦ “Hep, hep!” (_Hierosolyma est perdita_) became the
battle-cry of the Jew-baiters in many German towns, and the persecution
spread even into Denmark, where the Jews had been placed on a footing
of equality since 1814. ♦1828–30♦ The Prussian Government proposed a
plan for the improvement of the social and political condition of the
Jews, but the measure had to be abandoned owing to the opposition which
it met with on the part of the representatives of the Prussian people.
♦1840♦ This return to mediaeval intolerance once assumed in Prussia the
mediaeval form of a blood-accusation; but the charge only served to
establish the innocence of the Jews and the stupid credulity of their
assailants. None the less, it supplied a striking illustration of the
retrogression of the public mind. For the prejudice, even when its
basis was proved false, continued to subsist in a more or less latent
condition among the lower intellectual strata of society--as prejudices
have a way of doing for long centuries after they have vanished from
the surface--and during the revolution of 1848, on the Upper Rhine,
it led to a general persecution of the Jews, who sought refuge in the
neighbouring territory of Switzerland. But the reaction was temporary,
and the revolutionary movement proved, in the main, favourable to the
cause of Jewish emancipation.
Although the Prussians, fired by patriotism, had rallied round their
king and unanimously supported him in the effort to deliver the country
from French domination, they had not been left untouched by the lessons
of the French Revolution. To the Prussian patriots individual freedom
was as precious as national independence. So strong was this feeling
that Frederick William III. had been obliged to promise that at the end
of the struggle he would reward his subjects’ sacrifices by granting to
them a representative form of government. But few monarchs have ever
parted with power except under compulsion. When the War of Liberation
was over, and the country’s independence assured, the king forgot his
promises. Hence there arose between the prince and his people a bitter
conflict, which continued under his successor. Frederick William IV.
as Crown Prince had evinced a lively sympathy with the popular demand
for a Constitution; but with the sceptre he inherited the absolutist
principles of his ancestors, and strove to prop up the authority of
the throne by the help of religion. The German Liberals, however, had
outgrown the mediaeval notion that kings rule by the grace of God. They
claimed that the will of the people should be the supreme law of the
State, and laughed at the Sovereign’s antiquated pretensions. The fate
of the German Jews was naturally bound up in that of German Liberalism.
The year 1846 was chiefly distinguished by the agitation which
prevailed in Prussia and all Northern Germany in favour of religious
toleration and liberty of conscience; and the emancipation of the
Jews was one of the demands submitted to the King of Prussia by the
Prussian Estates, especially those of Cologne, Posen and Berlin, for
various measures of domestic and social improvement, as, for example,
the reform of criminal justice, the publication of the procedure of
trials and of the debates of the Estates, and the extension of the
representation of towns and rural communities. ♦1847♦ In the following
year the question of Jewish emancipation was again introduced into
the Prussian Chambers and found only two opponents, one of them
being Bismarck, who then declared that he was “no enemy of the Jews,
and if they are my enemies,” he said, “I forgive them. Under some
circumstances I even like them. I willingly accord them every right,
only not that of an important official power in a Christian State. For
me the words, ‘By the grace of God,’ are no mere empty sounds, and I
call that a Christian State which makes the end and aim of its teaching
the truths of Christianity. If I should see a Jew a representative of
the King’s most sacred Majesty, I should feel deeply humiliated.”
However, the National Parliament which met at Frankfort-on-the-Main
in 1848, under Liberal auspices, among other steps which it took in
order to secure popular freedom, removed all religious disabilities.
The Prussian Constitution of 1850 imitated the example; and the
establishment of the new _régime_, in 1871, threw the doors open to
the Jews throughout the German Empire. The Reichstag now contains many
distinguished members of the Jewish faith.
In Austria the edifice of toleration reared by Joseph II. was
overthrown by his successors, Leopold II. and Francis I., who revived
most of the antiquated restrictions and regulations against the Jews,
and again confined them within special quarters. This barbarous
policy lasted far into the nineteenth century. In many parts of the
country the Jews were forbidden to own, or even to rent land, except
that on which their houses stood, or to migrate from one province to
another without special permission. In Austrian Poland, or Galicia,
the Jews were especially hated. There, as elsewhere in Poland, they
formed a vast multitude, settled in the chief towns and villages.
The greater part of their emoluments was derived from the sale of
intoxicating liquors, to which the Poles, like all northern nations,
were immoderately addicted. From the time of Joseph II. the Jews had
been by repeated laws prohibited from trading in alcohol. But these
laws were disregarded. The landowners possessed the exclusive rights
of distilling, and they had from the first coming of the Jews to
Poland farmed out these rights to the latter. Deplorably enough, a
number of the Jews, in despair of finding other means of livelihood,
allowed themselves to become the go-betweens in this demoralising
traffic, and thus the most temperate race of Europe laid itself open
to the hostility and scorn of those who would feign have seen a check
put to the intemperate propensities of the people and its consequent
impoverishment.
The condition of the Jews was incomparably better in the parts of the
Empire upon which the rule of the Hapsburgs weighed less heavily. In
Hungary and Transylvania they had long enjoyed freedom of tenure
under the protection of the Magyar nobles. These were in the habit
of employing Jewish bailiffs, and did not consider it beneath their
dignity even to obey the orders of Jewish officers in the war for
independence, in which the Jews took an important part. ♦1848♦ After
the suppression of the rebellion the latter were made by the Imperial
Government to pay for their patriotic ardour; but when the day came for
the distribution of prizes they secured their reward. By the Austrian
Constitution of 1860, which received its finishing touches eight years
later, the Jews obtained full liberty. At present several Jews sit in
the Legislature, and the race flourishes not only in Vienna, Budapesth,
and other great towns, but even in the Austrian section of Poland.
The daylight of a tolerant and liberal administration has chased the
ghosts of the past out of Galicia. Even the most orthodox followers of
the Synagogue are fast forgetting their ancient wrongs and prejudices.
In olden times Jewish boys on their birth were imprisoned by their
parents within a pair of stays, laced tighter and tighter every
year, that the child’s chest might remain too narrow for military
service--a suicidal training, the evil consequences of which are
to this day visible in the form of chest diseases and consumption
among the Galician Jews. But the practice has long been abandoned.
Humaner conditions in the army, and the spread of education among the
Austro-Polish Jews, have reconciled them to the service, and now one
half of the Galicia contingent of the Austro-Hungarian Army consists of
Jewish recruits. The Empire has gained loyal defenders, and the Jews
the benefit of a disciplinary and patriotic education.
In Italy the Papal States were the last retreat of the Middle Age. The
Holy Office had disappeared from Parma, Tuscany, and Sicily in the
eighteenth century, but in Rome it continued to flourish; and where the
Inquisition held sway there was no peace for Israel. ♦1809♦ The Roman
Jews, liberated by Napoleon, were thrust back into slavery after his
fall. Then the reign of darkness was restored under the double crown
of Dogmatism and Despotism. The temporal power enforced the doctrines
of the spiritual, and the spiritual was abused to sanctify the decrees
of the temporal. How could the lot of the infidel Jew be other than
what it was? The Roman Ghetto continued to be the home of squalor and
sorrow far into the nineteenth century. As late as 1847 decrees were
issued forbidding the inmates to quit their cage, the Jews were still
compelled to hear sermons at church, and everything that bigotry could
do was done to bring about their conversion.
It is true that Pope Pius IX. inaugurated his reign with a display of
toleration till then unparalleled in the annals of the Papacy. In 1846
a general amnesty was proclaimed by which thousands of prisoners and
exiles were pardoned for crimes which they had never committed, or
of which they had never been legally convicted; two years later the
Jews were relieved from the necessity of listening to sermons; and
daylight seemed at last to have dawned upon Rome. But this period of
liberalism proved as transient as it was unprecedented. The reaction
soon set in, and the influence of the Jesuits and of obscurantism
was re-established. In 1856 the Pope issued an encyclical condemning
somnambulism and clairvoyance, and bidding all bishops to suppress
the anti-Christian practices. Nine years later he hurled an anathema
against the Freemasons--the deadly enemies of the Inquisition. In
brief, the pontificate of Pius IX., despite its promising beginning,
is chiefly distinguished for two fresh victories over reason: the
discovery of the Immaculate Conception and the invention of Papal
Infallibility.
♦1858♦
Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Church should not
hesitate to allow a nurse to baptize her Jewish charge secretly, and
then, on the ground that the child was a Christian, to tear it from
the arms of its parents, and rear it to be a monk and a persecutor of
its own people. Obscurantism and oppression vanished from Rome only
with the Pope’s authority. For the Jews, as for the Christians of
Rome, light came in the train of Italian unity. Among other mediaeval
barbarities which ceased on the day on which the Italian Army entered
Rome were the Inquisition and the bondage of the Jews. Israel has
outlived Temporal Power also. In the Vatican all facilities are now
given for the study of Rabbinic and Talmudic literature, once condemned
to the flames. The pestilent slums of the Ghetto have been wiped off
the face of the earth, and there is nothing left to recall the days
of darkness, save the grey old synagogue and, close by, the Tiber,
murmuring the sad tales of a world that is past.
♦1808♦
In Spain also the Inquisition, suppressed by Napoleon, revived after
his fall; but only as the shade of its former self. ♦1826♦ Its last
victims were a Quaker and a Jew, the former hanged, the latter roasted.
But even Spain had to follow the tide of the times. ♦1837♦ The Jews,
pitilessly driven out of the country when Catholicism ruled the
Peninsula, were readmitted as soon as Catholicism faded into a mere
name. In 1881 the Spanish Government actually invited the Jews who
fled from Russia to settle in its dominions. Seville, where the Holy
Office had instituted its human sacrifices in 1480, now boasts a Hebrew
synagogue. Israel has outlived the Spanish Inquisition also.
♦1821♦
In Portugal, when early in the nineteenth century liberty of conscience
was proclaimed, strange individuals from the interior of the country
appeared at the synagogues of Lisbon and Oporto. They were the
descendants of the old _Marranos_. For three centuries they had
eluded the ferrets of the Holy Office and, Christians in appearance,
had remained Jews at heart, waiting, as only a Jew can wait, for the
blessed day of deliverance. They now emerged, and came to participate
with their brethren in the worship of their God after the fashion of
their fathers.
Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the preceding century
brought forth its fruit. England could not long remain a stranger
to the march of events. But, slow as usual and averse from hasty
experiments, she pondered while others performed. Besides, she had been
spared the volcanic eruption of the Continent which, while destroying
much that was venerable and valuable, had cleared the ground for the
reception of new things.
There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s view of
the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century differed in
no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary American of the
same period, as described by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[139] The ordinary
Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin, grew up inheriting the
traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were a race lying under a
curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel. The great historical
Church of Christendom was presented to him as Bunyan depicted it. In
the nurseries of old-fashioned English Orthodoxy there was one religion
in the world--one religion and a multitude of detestable, literally
damnable impositions, believed in by countless millions, who were
doomed to perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in
one of these false religions. It had been true once, but now was a
pernicious and abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to
be to lend money and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of
their race. No doubt, the individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary
Englishman found in the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt
to be unpleasing specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing
view of it.
The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards the
Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_. Scott in that work gives
utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been growing
up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season of the
novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting
by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke
about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany, “still
locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and suggested
that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a novel.[140]
The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye seized on the
artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was the group
of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in introducing
the characters seems to have been innocent of any deliberate aim at
propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient proof of his own
sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of kindling sympathy in many
thousands of readers.
Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of preconceived
ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and Nathan the Wise is the
same as the difference between Scott and Lessing and their respective
countries. The British writer does not try to persuade us that the
person whom we abhorred a few generations before as an incarnation of
all that is diabolical, and whom we still regard with considerable
suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be that there was no need
for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition, or Scott was not equal
to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not depart too abruptly from
the convention sanctioned by his great predecessors. His Isaac is not
a Barabas or Shylock transformed, but only reformed. Though in many
respects an improvement on both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical
attributes of his progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity,
cunning, affection for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But,
whereas in both Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking
precedence of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed.
It is with exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order
to save his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an
emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his merchandise
into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-Bœuf, has given
his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Isaac
throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him to take all he
possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the Norman, surprised,
exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags.”
“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be, the
hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young--the despised and
persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”
On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac changes
his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew, and for his
child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from which he had
just promised to part even with one thousand silver pounds:
“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood,
dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty
threatens.”
While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author takes
care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned as much
as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important difference in
Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes Isaac as a
victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion rather than
of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,” “unbelieving dog” are
the usual modes of address employed by the mediaeval Christian towards
the Jew; just as they are the usual modes of address employed by the
modern Turk towards the Christian _rayah_. The Jews are “a nation of
stiff-necked unbelievers,” the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse
with a Jew,” his propinquity, nay his mere presence, is considered as
bringing pollution--sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those
entertained by the Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances
Isaac makes his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with
features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,”
wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned
to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired,
“he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and
hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at the
lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make room for
him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves, with looks of
pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son of a rejected
people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his people among the
nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place.”
Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with brutal
frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the bowels of
our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with gauds and
toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one road to the
favour of a Christian”--money. Hence his avarice. Furthermore, the
impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might perhaps be derived
from the above presentation, is softened by the author, who hastens to
declare that any mean and unamiable traits that there may be in the
Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of the credulous vulgar and
the persecutions by the greedy and rapacious nobility.”
Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew by
dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation: “except
perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in
the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unremitting,
general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period.” “The
obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in
opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they
lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which
they were visited.” “On these terms they lived; and their character,
influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid--yet
obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which
they were exposed.” Thus we are led to the conclusion that the Jew’s
vices have grown, thanks to his treatment, his virtues in spite of
it. For Isaac is not altogether impervious to gratitude and pity. He
handsomely rewards the Christian who saves his life, and he himself
saves a Christian’s life by receiving him into his house and allowing
his daughter to doctor him.
But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the
daughter.[141] While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or
Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his
conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary
in singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely
symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her
eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearls,
and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure which “might
have compared with the proudest beauties of England.” She is indeed
“the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John remarks; “the Rose of
Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the Prior’s warmer imagination
suggests. Immeasurably superior to Abigail in beauty and to Jessica
in virtue, she equals Portia in wisdom--a perfect heroine of romance.
Withal there is in Rebecca a power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises
her almost to the level of a saint. Altogether as noble an example of
womanhood as there is to be found in a literature rich in noble women.
To sum up, in contrast to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there
is a great deal of the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in
Scott’s Jew.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the spokesman
of a unanimous public. His _Ivanhoe_ appeared in 1819. Four years later
we find the writer who with Scott shared the applause of the age,
giving an entirely different character to the Jew. The _Age of Bronze_,
written in 1823, carries on the _Merchant of Venice_ tradition. To
Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless and unprincipled
rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the New Symplegades--the
crushing stocks,”
“Where Midas might again his wish behold
In real paper or imagined gold,
Where Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake,
And the world trembles to bid brokers break,”
the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our own
greed and recklessness in speculation:
“But let us not to own the truth refuse,
Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews?
Those parted with their teeth to good King John,
And now, Ye Kings! they kindly draw your own.”
Alas! times have changed since the day of “good King John.” Now the
Jews, far from being the victims of the royal forceps,
“All states, all things, all sovereigns they control,
And waft a loan ‘from Indus to the pole.’
And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain
Her mild per-centage from exhausted Spain.
Not without Abraham’s seed can Russia march;
’Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror’s arch.”
Nor is this all. Sad as the state of things must be, since Spain the
persecutrix has been degraded into a suppliant, the worst of the
calamity lies in the circumstance that these new tyrants of poor Spain
and poor Russia are a people apart; a people without a country; a
people of parasites:
“Two Jews, a chosen people, can command
In every realm their Scripture-promised land.
What is the happiness of earth to them?
A congress forms their ‘New Jerusalem.’
On Shylock’s shore behold them stand afresh,
To cut from nations’ hearts their ‘pound of flesh.’”
But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether disinterested.
He confesses elsewhere, with a candour worthy of his prophetic
character,
“In my younger days they lent me cash that way,
Which I found very troublesome to pay.”[142]
And not only Byron but piety also was still inimical to the Jew. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, whose philosophy, in its second childhood, sought
comfort in the cradle of theology--a not uncommon development--gives
vent to some exceedingly quaint sentiments on the subject. On April 13,
1830, he declares that the Jews who hold that the mission of Israel is
to be “a light among the nations” are utterly mistaken. The doctrine
of the unity of God “has been preserved, and gloriously preached by
Christianity alone.” No nation, ancient or modern, has ever learnt
this great truth from the Jews. “But from Christians they did learn
it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the
Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm,
which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.”[143] Here we
find Coleridge, in the nineteenth century, reviving the complaint of
Jewish aloofness--of the provincial and non-missionary character of
Judaism--which was one of the causes of the Roman hatred towards the
race in the first. Nor is this the only case of revival presented by
Coleridge’s attitude.
Luther, three hundred years earlier had said, “I am persuaded if
the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament,
many of them might be won.”[144] Coleridge now says: “If Rhenferd’s
Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with the real
argument--I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year’s
time.”[145] He is, however, somewhat in advance of Luther, inasmuch as
he does not insist upon the Jews’ abandoning circumcision and “their
distinctive customs and national type,” but advocates their admission
into the Christian fold “as of the seed of Abraham.” He is also in
advance of Luther in forgiving the Jews their claim to be considered
a superior order; for he finds that this claim was also maintained by
the earlier Christians of Jewish blood, as is attested both by St.
Peter’s conduct and by St. Paul’s protests. He also refers to the
practice of the Abyssinians--another people claiming descent from
Abraham and preserving the Mosaic Law--and asks: “Why do we expect the
Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions?” Coleridge
would be satisfied with their rejection of the covenant of works and
with their acceptance of “the promised fulfilment in Christ.” But what
really distinguishes Coleridge’s missionary zeal from that of the great
Reformer is his demand that the Jews should be addressed “kindly.”
It is hard to imagine Coleridge in his old age taking a Jew on to
London Bridge, tying a stone round his neck and hurling him into the
river.[146]
However, though three centuries of humanism had not been altogether
wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor Jew as
Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us, “are the
very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them;
to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive
occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race softened in
Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature, any more
than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic admirer of the
Psalms--the book that has played a larger part in men’s lives than
any other--and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the
elder divines of the Christian Church, had an affectionate reverence
for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told
me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest
attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so
closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities.”[147] But Coleridge’s
affection for ancient Hebrew literature deepened, if anything, his
contempt for the modern Jew. He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew
prophet,” and used this ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for
the actual: “The two images farthest removed from each other which
can be comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah--‘Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth!’--and Levi of Holywell Street--‘Old
clothes!’--both of them Jews, you’ll observe. _Immane quantum
discrepant!_”[148] The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the
possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.
Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine conversion.
He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews, and, finding
them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as was his wont,
to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on Kant’s text
regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things weighty, though
incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in undermining the faith
of four different victims of his zeal and friendship, or may be of
his sense of humour: a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a
New Jerusalemite. “He said he had made most way with the disciple of
Swedenborg, who might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed
the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that
upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had
been arguing with the man in the moon.”[149]
Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating the
hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although he
declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he
admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse
with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the
one side--of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other,
between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the
blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such
as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,”
can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he
frankly confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and
Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit of
the Synagogue is essentially separative.”[150]
Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of Coleridgean
theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In 1830 Mr.
Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness, sounded the
trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be admitted to
the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first reading by 18
votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial success of the
proposal was evidence of the progress of public opinion; its final
rejection showed that there was room for further progress. Indeed,
the victory of light over darkness was not to be won without a severe
conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries had to be assaulted
and taken one after the other, ere triumph could be secured. How
strong these fortifications were can easily be seen by a glance at the
catalogue of any great public library under the proper heading. There
the modern Englishman’s wondering eye finds a formidable array of
pamphlets extending over many years, and covering the whole field of
racial and theological intolerance. But the opposite phalanx, though
as yet inferior in numbers, shows a brave front too. In January, 1831,
Macaulay fulminated from the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_ in support
of the good cause:
“The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a
separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over
all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as
his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want
of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise
political functions.”
This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay sets
himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic
value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no longer
stands in need of vindication.
The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews, encouraged
by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the House of
Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a constant
champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought in a Bill
on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly. That
a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who knows? even
control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a proposition
that shocked a great many good souls; while others ridiculed it as
preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of opponents in
his _Eothen_. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to the author his
wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be denied political
recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea, and quotes
it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous materialism.
“Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister
of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious
causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet.” Had
Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing coming, as he was
with the gift of describing current events, he would probably never
have written the eloquent page on which the above passage occurs. But
in his own day there was nothing absurd in his attitude. Till 1828 no
more than twelve Jewish brokers were permitted to carry on business in
the City of London, and vacancies were filled at an enormous cost. Even
baptized Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City, and therefore
no Jew could keep a shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.
The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one operation
in a campaign wherein the whole English world was concerned, and on the
result of which depended far larger issues than the fate of the small
community of English Jews. It was a campaign between the powers of the
past and the powers of the future. Among those engaged in this struggle
was a man in whom the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of
old England, and he was destined to promote the development of the new.
His life witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His
career is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.
In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish
Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities,
and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish
Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three
verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow find
us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight
years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his
political supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish
disabilities.”[151] His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast
amount of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short
years earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be,
was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important
things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and Roman
Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory party had
surrendered their first line of defence--Anglicanism, and abandoned
their second--Protestantism: was there any reason, except blind
bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone could see
none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only dictated by
justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the Jews in 1833
had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the shrievalty had
been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of alderman and of Lord
Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846 an Act of Parliament had
established the right of Jewish charities to hold land, and Jewish
schools and synagogues were placed on the same footing as those
of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the repeal of Queen Anne’s
statute, which encouraged conversion; of the exception of the Jews
from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783; and of the obsolete statute
_De Judaismo_, which prescribed a special dress for Jews. After the
bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal of political rights was
absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why people should be loth to grant
to the Jews nominal, after having admitted them to practical equality.
But though prejudice had died out, its ghost still haunted the English
mind. Men clung to the shadow, as men will, when the substance is
gone. Those orators of the press and the pulpit whose vocation it
is to voice the views of yesterday still strove to give articulate
utterance and a body to a defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of
reasons, were year after year dealt out for popular consumption, and
the position was sufficiently irrational to find many defenders. But
the result henceforth was a foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not
impregnable. Prejudice, resting as it did upon unreality, could not
long hold out against the batteries of commonsense.
Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned five
times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another Jew,
Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured to take his
seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in repeating the oath
he omitted the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” The experiment
cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion from Parliament. Meanwhile, the
Bill for the admission of the Jews continued to be annually introduced,
to be regularly passed by the Commons, and as regularly rejected by
the Lords. The comedy did not come to an end till 1858, when an Act
was passed allowing Jews to omit from the oath the concluding words
to which they conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de
Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red
letter day” was added to the _Jewish Calendar_.
The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in certain
cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the Universities Tests
Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew had become Senior
Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to graduate at the English seats of
learning without any violation to their religious principles. At the
present day the House of Commons contains a dozen Jewish members, and
there is scarcely any office or dignity for which an English Jew may
not compete on equal terms with an English Christian. The one remnant
of ancient servitude is to be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the
King, in which the Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into
his Majesty’s heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles,
“that they may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”
Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which history
has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in
Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier Christian princes, and
in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance, the Jews cast off their
aloofness and participated in the intellectual life of the Gentiles,
so now they hastened to join in the work of civilisation. When the
fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel, more than the body
of the people was set free. The demolition of the walls of the ghettos
was symbolical of the demolition of those other walls of prejudice
which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies as so many patches of
ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the mosaic of modern Europe.
The middle of the eighteenth century, which marks the spring-time of
Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-time of Jewish liberalism. It
is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a new birth of the Hebrew soul.
The Jew assumed a new form of pride: pride in the real greatness of
his past. He became once more conscious of the nobler elements of
his creed and his literature. And with this self-consciousness there
also came a consciousness of something outside and beyond self. Moses
Mendelssohn did for the Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for
the Christians. By introducing it to the language, literature, and life
of the Gentiles around it he opened for his people a new intellectual
world, broader and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned
by the persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when
the shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body
and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected
though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth
no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had greeted
the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the Restoration
of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy of the nation
manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe and distasteful
to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself and who set the
interests of sect above the interests of man; but thoroughly sane.
Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the past, to
denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a sin, and to
repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed their feelings in
a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable. Equally inevitable
was another phenomenon: a religious revival springing up simultaneously
with the intellectual awakening. The Jewish race includes many types.
As in antiquity we find Hellenism and Messianism flourishing side by
side, as the preceding century had witnessed the synchronous appearance
of a Spinoza and a Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was
writing Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew,
Israel Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious
hysteria in Moldavia.[152] But the more advanced classes declared
themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which
was forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially
after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great extent
abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent proportionate to the
previous compulsory conformity. There was a vast difference of opinion
as to the length to which reform should go. But one result of the
movement as a whole was a more or less thorough purification of Judaism
of the stains of slavery. The solemn puerilities of the Talmud and the
ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic tradition, grotesque ritualism, and
all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief and practice, with which ages
of barbarism had encrusted Judaism, were relegated to the lumber-room
of antiquarian curiosities, and all that was fresh and truly alive in
the Jewish race sought new vehicles for the expression of new thoughts:
modern emotions were translated into modern modes of utterance and
action. The Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the
night, destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was
taken by an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews,
based on their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic
attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the
emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which
it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who renounced the
faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty to justify
his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The conditions which
produced that vulgar type of renegade having vanished, there began to
appear apostates of another kind--men who, though unwilling to devote
to a sect what was meant for mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice
their own individuality to an obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to
cherish those whom they deserted. In them the connection of sentiment
outlasted the links of religion, and these men by their defection did
more for their people than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich
Heine, born in 1799, was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted
partly by the desire to gain that fulness of freedom which in those
days was still denied to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by
a far deeper motive: “I had not been particularly fond of Moses
formerly,” he said in after life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit
was predominant in me, and I could not forgive the legislator of the
Jews his hatred towards all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this
country was an analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later
examples may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein
who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish
birth, but always spoke of it with pride--and that in a country where
it still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these
ex-Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the
Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation of
aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly baseless.
Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an
even more prominent part in the development of the European mind
under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent
account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution
of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the
fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident
with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials
nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile by
virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied
forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for
progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a
training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools--the school
of adversity--came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and
intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to
conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world.
Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine,
and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to
exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a
professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic thought
and economic practice owe their most daring achievements to Jewish
speculation. Socialism--this latest effort of political philosophy to
reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its constituent
members--is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It would be hard
to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.[153] But a few
will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in politics,
Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein and Joachim
in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine; in psychology
Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and comparative
philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers who have made
themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the press of Europe is
to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people who control the sinews
of war have contributed more than their share to the arts and sciences
which support and embellish peace. And all this in the course of one
brief half-century, and in the face of the most adverse influences of
legislation, of religious feeling and of social repugnance. History
can show no parallel to so glorious a revolution. Mythology supplies
a picture which aptly symbolises it. Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no
prophecy has ever received a more accurate fulfilment than the poetic
conception couched in the following lines received in the Hebrew
Palingenesia:
“Chaos begat Erebos and black Night;
But from Night issued Air and Day.”