Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
I. - In the Beginning: The Readmission of the Jews
II. - The Case for Toleration
III. - The Case for Political Equality
IV. - Fictional Heroes and Heroines
Ivanhoe
Tancred
Daniel Deronda
V. - From Evangelicalism to Zionism
Jewish Zionism and English Philo-Zionism
Churchill: Philo-Zionist and Philosemite
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
In memory of my husband, Irving Kristol
Prologue
The scholarly literature on antisemitism is voluminous, reflecting the painstaking attempts by historians to recover and recount the long and horrendous history of antisemitism. The literature on philosemitism, on the other hand, reflecting a favorable view of Jews, is meager, not only because the evidence is slighter and less dramatic than antisemitism but also because it does not challenge the imagination or the indignation of scholars. The discrepancy between the two is understandable but unfortunate, for it reduces Judaism to the eternal recurrence of persecution and the struggle for survival. It also has the effect of debasing Jews, “objectifying” them, making them not subjects in their own right but the objects, if not of hatred and contempt, then of pity and pathos.
Shortly after the end of World War II, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published Réflexions sur la question juive, retitled, for the English edition, Anti-Semite and Jew. It is there that he coined the much-quoted aphorism: “It is not the Jewish character that provokes antisemitism. It is the antisemite who creates the Jew.” He then proposed, as the “necessary and sufficient” solution to “the Jewish question,” a socialist revolution that would finally eliminate antisemitism.1 That solution has long since been discredited. But what has persisted is the image of the Jew as the perennial victim and martyr, of Judaism as an outmoded and discredited creed, and of Israel as the refuge of harried Jews seeking asylum from prejudice, oppression, and, possibly, another Holocaust.
It is not only non-Jews who have this image of Jews. Nor is it a recent phenomenon, an all-too-plausible response to the Holocaust. It was in 1928 that a young Jewish historian, Salo Baron, a recent immigrant to America from Austria, wrote an article in the Menorah Journal deploring the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history which had been perpetuated by the eminent nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholar Heinrich Graetz.2 That article was written well before the Holocaust, but Baron, who went on to write a massive history of the Jews, persisted in his critique of that view of Jewish history—in spite of the fact that his own parents were killed in the Holocaust.
For other Jews, however, seared by the experience and the memory of Nazism, the Holocaust has become the defining event, not only of modern Jewish history but of Judaism itself. The philosopher and rabbi Emil Fackenheim, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany (having escaped from a concentration camp), gave memorable expression to this view in his creation of a “614th Commandment,” supplementing the traditional 613 mitzvot binding on Jews. The new commandment enjoins Jews to remain Jews lest they give a posthumous victory to Hitler.3 This is a dramatic dictum reflecting a deeply moving sentiment. It has, however, the unwitting effect of giving Hitler precisely that posthumous victory by permitting him to intrude into the venerable declaration of faith.
A history of philosemitism may help counteract this “lachrymose” view of Jewish history. This is not to deny or belittle the history of antisemitism, which reached its apogee in the Holocaust, but rather to complement it by revealing another aspect of Jewish experience—the respect, even reverence, for Jews and Judaism displayed by non-Jews before and after the Holocaust. This new history, a counter-history, so to speak, is needed now more than ever, to put in perspective the recent resurgence of antisemitism throughout the world, which has produced, in turn, a formidably scholarly literature on the history of antisemitism. It was the request I received within a week or so from different journals to review three such histories, published within months of each other, that prompted me to undertake this study.4 Surely, I felt, Judaism is more than the history of antisemitism. Surely Jews deserve to be defined—and are in fact defined, by others as well as by themselves—by those qualities of faith, lineage, sacred texts, and moral teachings that have enabled them to endure through centuries of persecution.
The resurgence of antisemitism is most ominous in England because it is so discordant, so out of keeping with the spirit of the country. In 1999, the final chapter of a book on philosemitism in the English-speaking world opened with the comforting assertion that where antisemitism was once the norm and philosemitism the exception, now the situation has been reversed; philosemitism is now the norm and antisemitism the exception. “Indeed, antisemitism in the mainstream has declined to such an extent that it has virtually disappeared, or may well be seen as on the way to disappearance within a generation or two.”5 Less than ten years later, the same historian published a book with the ominous subtitle “The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism.”6 More recently, another historian, introducing a massive history of antisemitism in England, observes that “philosemitism, as an aspect of public discourse, did not survive the passing of the twentieth century.” It is now England’s “past glory.”7
That conclusion may be overly pessimistic. In any case, a history of philosemitism may well start with England, which, more than any other country, has produced, over the past several centuries, a rich literature of philosemitism, reflecting the principles and policies that have made modern England a model of liberality and civility.a
The word “philosemitism,” however, has its difficulties. Applied to earlier periods of history, it is, strictly speaking, an anachronism. But so is “antisemitism.” Both words originated in Germany about the same time. Antisemitismus appeared in 1879 in a book by Wilhelm Marr, Der Weg zum Siege des Germantums über des Judentums (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism), and in the title of the organization he founded, the League of Antisemites. The following year the highly regarded (and avowedly antisemitic) historian Heinrich von Treitschke, in a speech in the Chamber of Deputies, referred contemptuously to the “blind philosemitic zeal of the party of progress”—“Jew-lovers,” one might say, who sympathized with the Jews during the recent wave of attacks on them in Germany. (Treitschke also has the distinction of having coined the phrase, later adopted by the Nazi journal Der Stürmer as its motto, “Die Juden sind unser Unglück”—“The Jews are our misfortune”).8 The word “philosemitism” was soon picked up by other German antisemites in the same derogatory sense. Thus both words, antisemitism and philosemitism, were invented in Germany by antisemites—antisemitism used approvingly, philosemitism disparagingly.
Both words, anglicized, made their initial appearance in England soon afterwards, but with reversed connotations, antisemitism becoming a negative, critical word, and philosemitism a positive, commendable one. But while antisemitism (and its variants, antisemite and antisemitic) immediately entered the English vocabulary, philosemitism was much slower in doing so; indeed it still lags far behind.9 The Encyclopaedia Britannica , even in its latest (2011) edition, has a substantial entry for antisemitism, but none for philosemitism. More surprising is the current (2007) Encyclopaedia Judaica, which has a near-book-length article on antisemitism but none on philosemitism (and only three references to the word in the index). Nor is there any article on philosemitism (or even the word in the index) in the widely available and often quoted 1972 edition, where antisemitism occupies eighty amply illustrated pages. Yet the pref
ace to that edition contains a tribute to its chief editor, Cecil Roth, the dean of English Jewish historians, who had died two years earlier, and who had referred to philosemitism often in his scholarly work.10
One of the difficulties with philosemitism is that the word itself is something of a misnomer. The literal meaning is “love of Jews” (by non-Jews, presumably). Yet “love,” in this context, may be an overstatement, as the Oxford English Dictionary implicitly recognizes. Translating almost all the other compound words starting with “philo” as “love of” or “fondness of”—philotheism, for example, is “love of God”—the OED makes an exception of philosemitism, defining it as in “favor” or “support” of Jews. But if philosemitism generally implies something less than love, it also implies something more than “tolerance” or “toleration,” ideas that, to a philosemite, may seem condescending or patronizing. One may tolerate, after all, that of which one disapproves. Goethe put it more eloquently: “Toleration should really only be a transitory attitude. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to insult.”11 Philosemitism goes beyond toleration to what Goethe, and more memorably Hegel, called “recognition”; a slave “recognizes” his master, is conscious of him as an independent and unique “spirit,” while the master does not “recognize” the slave.b On some occasions and for some Christians—Evangelicals, most notably—philosemitism goes beyond recognition to reverence or adulation, something very like “love.”
More familiar than the word “philosemitism” is an expression often associated with it, “the people of the book.” This too has a curious history. It is said to have originated with Mohammed and appears for the first time, and repeatedly, in the Koran. “The people of the book” are Jews and Christians as distinct from Muslims; and the “book” is the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, as distinct from the Koran. The expression sometimes has a benign connotation: “And there are certainly, among the People of the Book those who believe in God, in the revelation to you, and in the revelation to them, bowing in humility to God.”12 But more often it has pejorative overtones, the people of that older book displaying an obstinate and ominous resistance to the newer and truer revelation.
Ye People of the Book! Why reject ye the Signs of Allah of which ye are yourselves witnesses? . . . Ye People of the Book! Why do ye clothe truth with falsehood and conceal the truth while ye have knowledge? . . . If only the People of the Book had faith it were best for them . . . , but most of them are perverted transgressors.13
Just as philosemitism was converted from a negative to a positive term, so was “the people of the book.” English Protestants—Puritans, especially—proudly adopted it for themselves to describe the Bible-centered culture that distinguished them from Catholics and foreigners. It was in the early seventeenth century, according to the Victorian historian John Richard Green, that “England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible.”14 Although the Bible included, of course, the Old and New Testaments, it was the Old Testament, the “Hebrew Bible,” as Matthew Arnold said, that was “the Book of the Nations.”15 For Evangelicals, the Hebrew Bible, was identified more specifically with one nation, the Hebrew nation—“God’s ancient people” (in Lord Shaftesbury’s famous phrase).16 It is in this sense that “the people of the book” is generally understood today—the Jewish people heir to that most ancient book.
Some Jewish historians, all too aware of the painful realities of antisemitism, find little evidence of philosemitism and do not credit much of what passes as such. Todd Endelman, writing about English Jewry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, describes many religious philosemites, who promoted causes favorable to Jews, as “hostile” because they looked forward to their conversion, thus seeking to destroy their very existence as Jews.17 Anthony Julius, in his history of antisemitism in England, raises the provocative question, “Are philosemites irrational enemies of the Jews?” Many, he says, are not so much philosemites as anti-antisemites. “They write out of reason, not love; they regard the Jew ‘as just like anyone else’.” Others send out “mixed signals” which may confirm antisemites in their distaste for Jews. Professing to admire Jews for heroically enduring centuries of persecution, they describe, all too graphically, the stereotypically disagreeable Jewish traits resulting from that unhappy history. Still others are so ardent in their praise of Jews that “ostensible compliments” become “covert disparagements.”18
Even today, the effusive rhetoric of some philosemites may strike an uncomfortably discordant note. One character in Disraeli’s novel Coningsby lauds the “pure race” that dominates the intellectual, financial, and diplomatic life in Europe, ending in a roll call of ministers of finance most of whom are Jewish19; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion could not have said it better. Or there is Winston Churchill’s description of Jews as “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world”20—an incitement, perhaps, to the antisemite who finds that “race” all the more fearful and hateful precisely because it is so “formidable.”
In these cases, it was not the word “race” itself that was pejorative or even provocative. In England, well into the nineteenth century (for some Englishmen, well into the twentieth), “race” was not an invidious term. In 1925 Lloyd George spoke of his beloved Welsh as an “ancient race,” although not as ancient as the Jews.21 Almost thirty years later, responding to the tributes paid to him on his eightieth birthday, Churchill used it proudly to refer to his beloved country. “It [England] was a nation and a race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”22 What might be deemed offensive was not the idea of the Jews as a race but the extravagant praise heaped upon them, confirming the worst suspicions and resentments of those implicitly assigned to an inferior race.
Philosemitism, in its many forms and degrees, has its own ambiguities. It also has a rich history in English society, politics, diplomacy, and literature. If the excessive rhetoric of some philosemites sends out “mixed signals,” the modest rhetoric of others may send out no signals at all, yet still be an important presence in political and social life as well as in public discourse. Philosemitism, it may be argued, has been so much a part of modern England that it is not always recognized or labelled as such. Just as antisemitism may be casual or covert—“social antisemitism,” or “country-club” antisemitism as it is known in America—so there is a familiar form of “social philosemitism,” the respectful attitude that most Englishmen, in most circumstances, have extended to Jews. Nor is toleration as demeaning as Goethe thought. Someone moved by the spirit of toleration, writing “out of reason, not love,” and regarding the Jew as “just like anyone else” (or like oneself), is according him a considerable measure of “recognition”—of respect, if not love. This is no mean virtue, certainly by contrast to the antisemite who does not write out of reason, let alone love; who does not regard the Jew like anyone else, let alone like oneself; and who is not inclined to tolerate Jews in any sphere of life. Moreover, toleration coexists comfortably with philosemitism; indeed it may even inspire sentiments that resemble philosemitism.
A proper history of English philosemitism would take all the species of philosemitism, in all their manifestations and complexities, into account, placing them within a comprehensive narrative of modern Anglo-Jewish history. This book is not that history. It is rather a historical essay highlighting crucial ideas and events in that history, from the readmission of the Jews to England in the seventeenth century, through the discourses and disputes of the eighteenth, culminating in the admission to full citizenship in the nineteenth, and beyond that to the achievement of Jewish statehood in the twentieth. To convey the spirit as well as the substance of that history, I have quoted extensively from contemporary speeches and writings, especially by those eminent Englishmen who have, in other memorable ways, shaped the history of their country. Summaries and paraphrases cannot do justice to the varieties and subtleties of phi
losemitism exhibited on these occasions, or to the passion that inspired them and their audiences. Ideally, this essay should be accompanied by the full texts of these documents. Short of that, lengthy quotations, placed in context, may serve to illuminate the past, inform the present, and, perhaps, inspire the future, recalling England to its “past glory.”
I.
In the Beginning: The Readmission of the Jews
There is a poetic justice—or historic justice—in England’s relation to Jews. A notable exemplar of philosemitism in modern times, England was also a notable exemplar of antisemitism in medieval times. It has two dubious “firsts” to its credit: it was the first country, in 1144, to instigate a “blood libel” case (the charge that the blood of Christian children was used in Jewish religious rituals), and the first country, in 1290, to expel the Jews, an expulsion that was more complete than the more notorious one two centuries later in Spain.
Winston Churchill, in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, has a graphic account of that event:Edward saw himself able to conciliate powerful elements and escape from awkward debts, by the simple and well-trodden path of anti-Semitism. The propaganda of ritual murder and other dark tales, the commonplaces of our enlightened age, were at once invoked with general acclaim. The Jews, held up to universal hatred, were pillaged, maltreated, and finally expelled [from] the realm. Exception was made for certain physicians without whose skill persons of consequence might have lacked due attention. Once again the sorrowful, wandering race, stripped to the skin, must seek asylum and begin afresh. To Spain or North Africa the melancholy caravan, now so familiar, must move on. Not until four centuries had elapsed was Oliver Cromwell by furtive contracts with a moneyed Israelite to open again the coasts of England to the enterprise of the Jewish race. It was left to a Calvinist dictator to remove the ban which a Catholic king had imposed.1
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