John Locke had taken refuge in Amsterdam in 1683 after his suspected involvement in a plot to assassinate the Stuart kings. It is fitting that the man who is often characterized as the philosophical apologist for the Glorious Revolution should have returned to England on February 11, 1689, in the com-pany of Princess Mary of Orange, two days before the Declaration of Right deposing James and two months before the joint coronation of William and Mary. It is fitting, too, that A Letter Concerning Toleration, written (in Latin) while he was in exile, should have been published in English soon afterwards, translated immediately into Dutch and French, and recognized, abroad as well as in England, as the definitive statement of the principle of toleration. Roger Williams’s tract earlier in the century enunciated the principle but did not give it the philosophical rigor and authority that Locke did. Nor were the official toleration acts exemplary models. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 provided toleration only for “trinitarian Christians,” thus including Catholics but excluding Unitarians, atheists, and, of course, Jews. And the English Act of Toleration of 1689 applied only to Protestant Dissenters, granting them freedom of worship but retaining some of their disabilities, such as their exclusion from public office.
Some commentators have a restrictive interpretation of the Letter, reading it as denying toleration to Catholics, Muslims (“Mahometans”), and atheists. They cite Locke’s assertions that Catholics and Muslims owe their allegiance to “the protection and service of another prince,” and that atheists do not feel bound by the “promises, covenants, and oaths which are the bonds of human society.”4 The passage on atheists, however, qualifies that exemption: “Yet if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.”5
Indeed, the basic premise of the Letter, the distinction between government and religion, suggests a near-universal principle of toleration. Government has to do with life, liberty, and “things of this world,” and nothing to do with “the salvation of souls” or “the world to come.”6 This distinction—the separation, in effect, of church and state—would bring within the principle of toleration not only all Protestants but all believers and non-believers, including Catholics, Muslims, pagans, atheists—and Jews.
If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor. If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the word of God, he does not thereby alter any thing in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate, and the estates of the people, may be equally secure, whether any man believe these things or no. I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd; but the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s goods and person.7
. . . Neither pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonweath, because of his religion.... Shall we suffer a pagan to deal and trade with us, and shall we not suffer him to pray unto and worship God? If we allow the Jews to have private houses and dwellings amongst us, why should we not allow them to have synagogues? . . . But if these things may be granted to Jews and pagans, surely the condition of any Christians ought not to be worse than theirs, in a Christian commonwealth.8
Whatever ambiguities one might find in other passages in the Letter regarding Catholics or atheists, there are none about Jews. Subject neither to a foreign power, nor wanting in morality or sense of civic duty, Jews come comfortably within the principle of toleration. They are not to be excluded because of their religion—and, by the same token, they are not to be especially favored because of it. There is nothing in the Letter suggestive of any religious disposition in favor of the Jews—nothing like the Leveller’s description of the Jews as “the apple of God’s eye,” or the Puritan’s identification with the Jews as “God’s people,” or the millenarian’s reliance upon the Jews as the instrument of Christian redemption. Indeed, there are few Biblical quotations or allusions in the Letter. This is all the more remarkable because it is in striking contrast to Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, written about the same time and published very soon afterwards. The First Treatise in particular is heavily Scriptural, in substance as well as rhetoric.9k Later in life, encouraged by his good friend Isaac Newton, Locke turned more seriously to Biblical studies, speculating about the conversion of Jews and their restoration to Palestine. But these reflections have no bearing upon the rest of his philosophy, let alone upon his doctrine of toleration. The Letter stands on its own, a bold affirmation of the principle of toleration—toleration for its own sake, not for a higher, religious end.
Unlike Locke, Newton was genuinely passionate about religion, searching the Bible for evidence of “the restoration of the Jewish nation so much spoken of by the old Prophets,” as well as the Second Coming (in the year 2060, he predicted).11 Yet he was not the mystic he is sometimes made out to be. On the contrary, he was a great admirer of Maimonides, whose rationalistic, Aristotelian mode of thought he found congenial. What Newton sought in Scripture was literal, historical evidence for the prophecies and revelations. Uncomfortable with the idea of miracles, he accepted them only for the Biblical period and the first century of Christianity, after which they were supererogatory because the divine will had no need to violate the natural order. His own credo was simple: “We must believe that there is one God or supreme monarch that we may fear and obey him [sic] and keep his laws and give him honor and glory. . . . We must believe that he [sic] is the God of the Jews who created the heaven and earth all things therein as is expressed in the ten commandments.”12 Most of Newton’s theological exegeses were unpublished during his lifetime because they verged on heresy, and the few that did appear then or soon afterward were too erudite (and in Latin) to command public attention. Today some scholars may read them (many still in manuscript), and find in them the real, the esoteric Newton, for whom science was an appendage to religion. But the public, the historic Newton was the scientist who was known to be genuinely religious, but was revered as a scientist above all.
So, too, it was the public, the historic Locke who was esteemed as England’s great philosopher and whose principle of toleration set the tone for the favorable treatment of Jews. It was in this spirit that Parliament in 1698 exempted the Jews from the onerous provisions of a bill intended to suppress blasphemy; this was the first occasion when Parliament, rather than the King and his Council, officially recognized the religious rights of Jews. The previous year a dozen Jews were admitted as brokers in the London Stock Exchange. Today that might seem a niggling concession, but at the time it was seen as a token of official as well as social acceptance. In his History, Winston Churchill reflected upon the spirit of the time: “The political passions of the seventeenth century had spent themselves in the closing years of Queen Anne. . . . The wrath and venom of controversy were replaced by an apathetic tolerance.”13 Churchill was not entirely happy with that turn of events; it reflected the Whig ascendancy that kept his own party out of power for much of the century. But it was an “apathetic tolerance” much welcomed by English Jews and in striking contrast, as the historian Cecil Roth observed, to the situation of their brethren on the continent.
Even in Holland they were excluded from certain towns and provinces, and in Turkey they received only the restricted rights of unbelievers. In Germany and Italy the ghetto system still prevailed; from Spain, Portugal, and much of France, there was complete and even barbarous exclusion; Polish Jewry was terrorized and almost rightless; Danish Jewry was insignificant. In England, on the other hand, the Jews were under the protection of the law, could settle anywhere they pleased, and enjoyed virtual social e quality.14
That “apathetic tolerance” had its source, at least in part, in Locke’s principle of toleration—a sec
ular principle free of the ideological and religious passions, the apocalyptic visions and millenarian aspirations, which dominated the earlier period. Yet religion, in a much muted form, continued to pervade the culture and subtly modify the principle of toleration itself. Hebraism was no longer the powerful force it had been, but it was by no means dead. Perhaps the highest compliment the English could pay the Jews was to refer to their own country as “Israel” and to their own people as “Israelites.” A Dissenting minister in 1719, translating the psalms, replaced the word “Israel” with “Great Britain.” A sermon in 1746, during the last skirmish with the Jacobites, was dedicated to those concerned with “the welfare of our Jerusalem, and zeal for the British Israel.” The title of another sermon, celebrating the victory of the English in the Seven Years War, was “The Triumph of Israelites over Moabites, or Protestants over Papists.” That triumphal note was later echoed in William Blake’s memorable poem “Jerusalem,” which promised not to cease the good fight “Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green and pleasant land.”15
Others dealt more prosaically, but no less admiringly, with the subject of Jews. In 1712, Joseph Addison, the well-known essayist, editor of the Spectator, and Member of Parliament, devoted an issue of his journal to his own essay, “The Race of People Called Jews.”16 The epigram from Horace (in Latin) described the Romans growing stronger because of all the suffering they had endured. Addison applied this lesson to that other long-suffering “race,” the Jews.
As I am one, who, by my Profession, am obliged to look into all kinds of Men, there are none whom I consider with so much pleasure as those who have any thing new or extraordinary in their characters or ways of living. For this reason I have often amused myself with speculations on the race of people called Jews, many of whom I have met with in most of the considerable towns which I have passed through in the course of my travels. They are, indeed, so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world, that they are become the instruments by which the most distant nations converse with one another, and by which mankind are knit together in a general correspondence: They are like the pegs and nails in a great building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together.
Addison found the Jews remarkable, first, for their continued existence in great numbers in spite of the massacres and persecutions inflicted upon them by Christians over the ages; then, for their dispersion throughout the world, in the remotest parts of China, Africa, and America as well as Europe; and finally, for their firm adherence to their religion in spite of that baneful history. These were the “natural reasons” for their survival. The “providential reason” was the fact that they provided every age and every nation with the strongest arguments for Christianity itself. “Their number furnishes us with a sufficient cloud of witnesses that attest the truth of the Old Bible. Their dispersions spreads these witnesses through all parts of the world. The adherence to their religion makes their testimony unquestionable.”17
This was philosemitism in its purest form—the “natural” and the “providential” in perfect accord. And this from Addison, who was not a crusading Evangelical but a mild-tempered Anglican Whig, addressing a sophisticated middle-class audience, in a popular daily whose avowed purpose was “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.” “It was said of Socrates,” Addison told his readers, “that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.”18 Although the Spectator suspended publication after two years, it continued to be read in book form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Jews found a very different champion in John Toland, an Irish polemicist, radical, and “pantheist,” as he described himself—a word he coined to suggest something more heretical than deist. (Bishop Berkeley called him a “free thinker,” another word of recent coinage.) Toland was also something of a Hebraist and a great admirer of Harrington, whose Oceana he edited. Unlike Harrington, however, who would have excluded Jews from his utopia, Toland warmly welcomed them in his Britain. In 1714, four decades before the issue of naturalization became a subject of controversy, he published Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland—naturalizing, that is, Jewish immigrants, so that they would enjoy all the privileges, and the disabilities, of English-born Jews.
An appended essay, “A Defence of the Jews against all Vulgar Prejudices in all Countries,” might have been written with Harrington in mind. Ironically addressing the bishops and archbishops of Great Britain, who “as you are the advocates of the Jews at the Throne of Heaven, so you will be their friends and protectors in the British parliament,” Toland recounted the history of English Jews from their “heinous” expulsion four centuries earlier and rebutted the “vulgar prejudices” against them. So far from being liabilities to England, he insisted, an increased number of Jews would be valuable assets to the country. They would not contribute to sectarian disputes, because they were indifferent to the quarrels among Protestants. They would not drain England of her wealth, because they had no other country to retire to; indeed they would bring trade and commerce to England. If they were now money-lenders, it was only because other trades had been closed to them; they had once been “shepherds in Mesopotamia, builders in Egypt, and husbandmen in their own country,” and so they would now be in England. Moreover, immigration in general was desirable because a large population was conducive to productivity, prosperity, and well-being.19
These were good practical reasons for encouraging the immigration and naturalization of Jews. But there was something more elevating in Toland’s defense of them. It is curious to find an Irish freethinker invoking the authority and echoing the arguments of the seventeenth-century Italian rabbi and scholar Simone Luzzatto, whose Discorso circa il stato de gl’Hebrei (Discourse Concerning the Condition of the Jews) had been published in Venice in 1638. It is remarkable that Toland should even have known of a work by a rabbi in another country, another language, and another time, and should have found his account of the situation of Jews in the “Fair City of Venice” (as the subtitle had it) so instructive for the Jews in England almost a century later. Toland was sufficiently moved by that book to announce his intention of translating it into English. A few years later, he wrote another book that went beyond his (and Luzzatto’s) arguments about the salutary effects of the Jews in their respective countries. He then looked forward to a time when the Jews might be resettled, with the same fortunate results, in their own “Mosaic Republic.”
It will follow, that as the Jews known at this day, and who are dispersed over Europe, Asia, and Africa, with some in America, are found by good calculation to be more numerous than either the Spaniards (for example) or the French, so if they ever happen to be resettled in Palestine upon their original foundation, which is not at all impossible, they will then, by reason of their excellent constitution, be much more populous, rich, and powerful than any other nation now in the world. I would have you consider whether it might be not both the interest and duty of Christians to assist them in regaining their country.20l
Other Hebraists were equally enthusiastic, proposing the ancient “Hebrew Commonwealth” as the model for the English government. In 1740 the Nonconformist minister Moses Lowman published a Dissertation on the Civil Government of the Hebrews in which the True Designs and Nature of Their Government Are Explained; The Justice, Wisdom and Goodness of the Mosaical Constitution Are Vindicated. The title is eulogistic enough, but the text is even more so.
The Hebrew Commonwealth is, without question, one of the most ancient of the world, and justly looked upon as a model of government of divine origin; it will deserve our attention, as much as any of the forms of government in the ancient times, either among the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans. It should mo
re especially deserve our attention as Christians, who own the laws delivered by Moses to the Hebrew nation to have been given by the oracle of God, and established by authority of the supreme governor of the world; in which therefore, we may expect to find a wise and excellent model, becoming the wisdom of such a lawgiver.22
If the Jews had notable defenders, even venerators, in this post-Lockean period, they also had their detractors, even vili-fiers—and not only among zealous Christians with taunts of Christ-killing, but among those who professed to be tolerant and claimed tolerance for themselves. Many deists were hostile to Judaism because that was theism’s legacy to Christianity, and contemptuous of Jews, in the present as in antiquity, because they were the practitioners of that odious religion. Thomas Morgan, in 1737, in a curiously entitled book, The Moral Philosopher: In a Dialogue Between Philalethes a Christian Deist, and Theophanes a Christian Jew, ransacked the Old Testament for evidence of everything that was hateful in Christianity and found in Jewry everything that was odious to humanity. Having been “perfectly Egyptianized” in that benighted country, the Jews had left it in a state “of gross ignorance, superstition, and moral wickedness, which ran through all their successive generations, till their final dissolution and destruction.” The law Moses gave them was arbitrary, being nothing more than the voice and will of God. Without any basis in nature, human wisdom, or prudence, it made no distinction between morals and rituals, thus leaving the Jews with a constitution that could “serve only to blind and enslave those that were under it.”23
The People of the Book Page 4