It was against this background—from “apathetic” or benign toleration, to enthusiastic philosemitism, interspersed with the familiar antisemitic outbursts—that the Jewish Naturalization Bill was introduced in 1753. Yet the discussion of the “Jew Bill,” as it was generally known, was relaxed, muted, and for the most part impassionate.m The title was something of a misnomer. The bill applied not to Jews in general, but only to immigrants. Jews born in England were naturalized, so to speak, by birth. Whatever “disabilities” they had were those of all non-Anglicans who could not take the required religious oath; they could not hold municipal office, vote, sit in Parliament, or get a university degree. Jews born abroad, however, like all immigrants, were aliens and had additional disabilities, such as the inability to own land and engage in some forms of foreign trade. The Jew Bill was meant to equalize the status of Jews, giving immigrants the same rights and privileges—and disabilities—of native-born Jews.
There had been earlier attempts to solve the problem of all immigrants, non-Jewish as well as Jewish. In 1709 an act to naturalize foreign-born Protestants was passed, only to be repealed the following year. In the 1740s, the Irish Parliament considered, and rejected, bills for the naturalization of Irish Jews. At the same time, bills in the English Parliament for the naturalization of Protestants had to be withdrawn, in spite of the support of the Prime Minister Henry Pelham, because of strong opposition from the City. It is surprising, therefore, that the 1753 bill for the naturalization of English Jews was actually enacted—only to be repealed later that year.
The bill was simple enough. It provided that “persons professing the Jewish religion may, upon application for that purpose, be naturalized by Parliament without receiving the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.” In the House of Lords, the debate was brief, almost pro forma, and the bill was approved without a division on April 16. In the House of Commons the speeches were slightly more animated and overwhelmingly in favor of the bill. Only after the second reading did it begin to attract public attention; four petitions were sent to the Commons, two in favor and two against. The main objections were not religious but economic. A Whig pamphleteer favoring the bill deplored the self-serving motives of the opposition: “The conduct of the merchants who opposed the bill is easily accounted for: narrow principles, and a view to their private interests, were the incentive; they are disgusted at seeing the Jews trade in the same countries with them, and their trade would be more profitable, by there being fewer traders; never reflecting on the generous and certain maxim, that the most extensive trade is the most beneficial.”24
The bill passed on May 22, by 96 votes to 55. While it was awaiting the royal assent, the public “clamor” (as it was always described) started.n It became a party issue on both economic and religious grounds. The Whigs had a more expansive view of trade (the more the better) and a more ecumenical (therefore tolerant) view of religion; the Tories a more restrictive view of trade and a more Erastian view of religion. Antisemitism did intrude itself, but it was less virulent than might be expected. Some of the objections were not to Jews specifically but to all foreigners (xenophobia was the basis for much antisemitism) and to all non-Anglicans (Catholics and Dissenters). The familiar slogan “Church and King” was modified to accomodate all these dissidents: “Church and King, without mass, meeting, or synagogue.”26 The Jews also had the misfortune of being identified with the Whigs, thus playing into the party struggle that occupied the public in the months before the parliamentary elections of 1754. “In the political vocabulary of 1753–54,” one historian explains, “the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Whig’ became practically synonymous.... The ‘anti-Jewish’ clamor of 1753 was meant, even at its ugliest, to prepare the ground not for a pogrom, but for a general election.” 27
Even good churchmen were dismayed by the public outcry against the bill and by the supineness of politicians of both parties. In June, the Bishop of Oxford regretted that the bill “hath not only raised very great clamors amongst the ignorant and disaffected, but hath offended great numbers of better understandings and dispositions, and is likely to have an unhappy influence on the elections of the next year.” But he too shamefacedly confessed the need to bow to “weak and misguided consciences.” 28 A few months later, the Archbishop of Canterbury observed that “faction, working upon the good old spirit of High Church, has made wild work in the nation,” going on, however, to explain that since the passage of the bill was “worth no hazard,” the repeal of it was “hardly worth a debate.”29 Members of Parliament had no change of heart about the bill itself; they merely responded to the passions of the people “out-of-doors” (the public). Lord Hardwicke made the best of this unhappy situation:However much the people may be misled, yet in a free country I do not think an unpopular measure ought to be obstinately persisted in. We should treat the people as a skilful and humane physician would treat his patient; if they nauseate the salutary draught we have prescribed, we should think of some other remedy, or we should delay administering the prescription till time or change of circumstances has removed the nausea.30
The act was was repealed in November, only six months after its passage, with hardly a debate and without a division in either House. Six months later, the Whigs were returned to Parliament with a comfortable margin. Almost immediately, passions subsided and the episode was over. In his memoirs, Horace Walpole (son of the former Prime Minister and himself a Member of Parliament) took the measure of the times and the issue. The repeal, he observed, “showed how much the age, enlightened as it is called, was still enslaved to the grossest and most vulgar prejudices.” The act originally passed almost without comment, only two members of the House of Lords having given “a languid opposition to it, in order to reingratiate themselves with the mobs of London and Westminster.” For the rest, the bishops had concurred in removing the absurd distinctions that “stigmatized and shackled a body of the most loyal, commercial, and wealthy subjects of the kingdom.” But then politics took hold.
A new general election was approaching; some obscure men, who perhaps wanted the necessary sums for purchasing seats, or the topics of party to raise clamor, had fastened on this Jew Bill; and in a few months the whole nation found itself inflamed with a Christian zeal.... Indeed, this holy spirit seized none but the populace and the very lowest of the clergy: yet all these grew suddenly so zealous for the honor of the prophecies that foretell calamity and eternal dispersion to the Jews, that they seemed to fear lest the completion of them should be defeated by act of Parliament; and there wanted nothing to their ardor but to petition both Houses to enact the accomplishment. The little curates preached against the bishops for deserting the interests of the Gospels; and aldermen grew drunk at county clubs in the cause of Jesus Christ, as they had used to do for the sake of King James. Yet to this senseless clamor did the ministry give way; and to secure tranquility to their elections, submitted to repeal the bill.31
The Jew Bill and the protests against it were soon forgotten, by the public and even by Jews. The repeal was only nominally a defeat for the Jews because it left their legal status unchanged. The “clamor” was nothing more than that. There was no physical violence against Jews, no call for their expulsion or even demands for punitive measures against them. On the contrary, two other acts, on monopolies and marriage, passed in the same year as the ill-fated Jew Bill, contained specific exemptions in favor of the Jews. New Jewish immigrants remained aliens, but their English-born children were not. The Jewish community continued to grow and thrive, economically and socially. In the middle of the century, the Jews in England numbered 8,000, one-tenth of one percent of the English population, of whom about a half had been born abroad and most of whom lived in London. By the end of the century there were over 25,000, of whom about 5,000 were in the provinces.32 When the naturalization issue was finally resolved in 1826, it was not in the form of a Jew Bill but by an act abolishing the sacramental test for all immigrants. There was no significant opposition, no public clamor,
no singling out of the Jews for special commendation or disapprobation.
A dozen years after the abortive Jew Bill, Adam Smith (without mentioning it), commented on one of the objections that had been brought against the Jews: the “vulgar prejudice” against them as “traders.” In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith traced that prejudice back to those “rude ages” when people had a “mean and despicable” opinion of all merchants, and of Jews in particular who, because they were outlawed from other occupations, were disproportionately merchants. Even in the present “refined” age, that contempt for trade persisted, to the detriment of commerce and of society. The Jews especially “were grievously oppressed and consequently the progress of opulence greatly retarded.”33 “The progress of opulence”—on Smith’s part, this was no mean tribute to Jews, for it connected them, by way of commerce, to the “opulence” of society, which is to say, the “wealth of the nation.”o
Edmund Burke, a friend and disciple of Adam Smith, may appear to be a less plausible friend of Jews. His references in Reflections on the Revolution in France to “Jew brokers” and “money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews” are the classic rhetoric of antisemitism, as is his diatribe against Lord George Gordon—a “public proselyte to Judaism,” heir to “the old hoards of the synagogue, ... the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver.”35 In the case of Gordon, however, what provoked Burke was not his new-found Judaism but his role in fomenting the anti-Catholic riots of 1780, which resulted in the destruction of Catholic chapels and homes, the killing and wounding of almost five hundred people, and Gordon’s conviction and imprisonment on the charge of high treason. Of his conversion to Judaism seven years later, Burke remarked that he was unworthy of the religion to which he had converted, and recommended that he “meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct more becoming his birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which he has become a proselyte.”36
Shortly after the Gordon riots, Burke had occasion to speak of Jews in quite a different context and spirit. In May 1781, he presented a motion in Parliament to inquire into the condition of Jews in the West Indies island of St. Eustatius, which the British had captured a few months earlier after yet another Anglo-Dutch war. The island had a substantial Jewish community, mainly merchants and plantation owners, and the British, upon taking possession of the area, had confiscated much of their property and ordered their deportation. The Jews appealed in vain to the new authorities and Burke vigorously supported them, urging the British Parliament to reverse their actions and to behave humanely and protectively to a much abused people.
The persecution was begun with the people, whom of all others it ought to be the care and the wish of humane nations to protect, the Jews. Having no fixed settlement in any part of the world, no kingdom nor country in which they have a government, a community, and a system of laws, they are thrown upon the benevolence of nations, and claim protection and civility from their weakness, as well as from their utility. They were a people, who, by shunning the profession of any, could give no well-founded jealousy to any state. If they have contracted some vices, they are such as naturally arise from their dispersed, wandering, and proscribed state.... Their abandoned state and their defenceless situation call most forcibly for the protection of civilized nations. If Dutchmen are injured and attacked, the Dutch have a nation, a government, and armies to redress or revenge their cause. If Britons are injured, Britons have armies and laws, the laws of nations (or at least they once had the laws of nations) to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power, and no such friend to depend on. Humanity then must become their protector and ally. Did they find it in the British conquerors of St. Eustatius? No. On the contrary, a resolution was taken to banish this unhappy people from the island.37
It may go too far to call Burke a philosemite, yet this speech might begin to qualify him as that, all the more because he chose to take up the cause of the Jews on this occasion when apparently no other Englishman did, and when it was not in his own interest to do so. Jews would also have been well served by the principle of toleration he advocated in the Reflections. Criticizing the French revolutionaries for confiscating the property of the church and for undermining religion in the name of reason, he accused them of perverting the idea of toleration.
We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration. That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence, which arises from contempt, is no true charity. There are in England abundance of men who tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the dogmas of religion, though in different degrees, are all of moment.... They favour, therefore, and they tolerate. They tolerate, not because they despise opinions, but because they respect justice. They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree, and the great object to which they are all directed.38
From Locke to Burke—it was a momentous period in the history of English Jews, not because it witnessed any dramatic changes (the small eruption created by the Jew Bill was of no lasting consequence), but precisely because it was so undramatic and uneventful. Other groups did not fare so well. There were anti-Dissenter riots early in the century, anti-Irish riots in the 1760s, and the anti-Catholic Gordon riot in 1780, but no anti-Jewish riots. One historian suggests that anti-Catholicism may have helped “deflect a good part of the hostility that might have been directed at Anglo-Jewry.”39 But it might be also argued that one kind of riot may have whetted the appetite for others. If anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, why not anti-Jew? In fact, it was a relatively tranquil period for Jews of all classes, not only for the rich financiers and merchants who enjoyed the company of high society and literati (of Walpole, for example), but also for more lowly merchants and artisans who plied their trades peacefully, and even for the hawkers and peddlers who were often derided but rarely physically abused—above all, for all Jews who enjoyed complete freedom of worship.
This was all the more remarkable because there was a great influx of Jews into England after a wave of massacres in East Europe in 1768. By the end of the century the number of English Jews had increased more than threefold. Since most of the immigrants were poor, they brought with them the problems associated with poverty, including crime. A particularly heinous murder in 1771 by a band of Jewish criminals provoked antisemitic cries in the streets and some abuse of peddlers. The government responded by imposing a moderate limitation on Jewish immigration; the immigrants had, for example, to pay their passage in advance. The Aliens Act of 1793 (not, it is interesting, a “Jewish Aliens Act”) put foreigners in England under stricter control, but gave the synagogues, not the magistrates, responsibility for the registration of Jews. A Seditious Meetings Bill two years later was modified so as not to penalize Jews. That year the Jewish financier and philanthropist Abraham Goldsmid raised a fund for an institution to ameliorate the condition of the Jewish poor. Of the eighty-seven initial subscribers, forty-one were Christians.40
Napoleon scoffed at the “nation of shopkeepers,” anticipating their quick defeat in battle. But Smith, who invented that phrase (with no pejorative intent), would have known better—as did the Jewish shopkeepers, who appreciated the country that was treating them, for the most part, civilly and tolerantly. It remained for later generations of English Jews to seek something more than civility and toleration—political equality as well. This was the ultimate test for Jews who happened to be living in a Christian society, in a state with an established Church, and who had the misfortune to be engaged in occupations that were regarded as “odious.”
It may be that the principle of toleration alone, rigorously applied, would have enabled Jews to pass that test. In the event, something else came to their aid, a respect, even admiration, for Judaism that was often tantamount to philosemitism. The two se
ntiments, toleration and philosemitism, were philosophically and temperamentally very different, even to a degree contradictory. Yet they worked together in harmony, as “fellow-travelers,” so to speak, using different means to arrive at the same end.
III.
The Case for Political Equality
In 1833, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, informed the House of Lords: “His Majesty’s subjects professing the Jewish religion were born to all the rights, immunities, and privileges of His Majesty’s other subjects, excepting so far as positive enactments of the law deprived them of those rights, immunities, and privileges.”1 This was the “Jewish question” that dominated the history of British Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century—the attempt to remove the exceptions, or “disabilities,” as they were called, that deprived them of “those rights, immunities, and privileges.” One of those disabilities was removed by the act of 1826 that eliminated the Sacramental requirement for all immigrants, restoring, in effect, the Jew Bill of 1753 without mentioning Jews. But subsequent measures alleviating the conditions of Dissenters and Catholics were less accommodating to Jews. The repeal in 1828 of the Test and Corporation Acts, requiring the Sacramental oath for all public offices, applied to Dissenters but not Jews; in its final version it retained the statutory oath of allegiance to the sovereign “on the true faith of a Christian.” And the Catholic Relief Act the following year removed the restrictions on Catholics, giving them all the political rights enjoyed by Anglicans and Dissenters. That left only the Jews who were still deprived of those rights. They could, for example, serve as parish officers but not as municipal officers. A more serious anomaly was the fact that although they could normally vote for Members of Parliament on the same terms as other citizens (the technical requirement of a religious oath was rarely, if ever, observed), they could not sit in Parliament, which did require the oath.p The Jewish Board of Deputies, including such eminences as Isaac Goldsmid, Moses Montefiore, and Lionel Rothschild, enlisted the support of leading figures in both parties in a campaign to give Jews the same rights that Dissenters and Catholics now enjoyed.
The People of the Book Page 5