The People of the Book

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

  On April 5, 1830, a bill “to repeal the civil disabilities affecting British-born subjects professing the Jewish religion” was introduced by Robert Grant, a Whig and prominent Evangelical (a founding member of the Philo-Judaean Society established a few years earlier). Reviewing the history of English Jewry, Grant recalled the persecution of that “unfortunate race” leading to their expulsion, their readmission under Cromwell and the favorable treatment they received under succeeding monarchs, the bill of 1753 which “by the miserable pusillanimity of the ministry” had been repealed, and the unwarranted disabilities under which they still labored. To the objection that the granting of political rights to Jews violated the Christian nature of the polity, Grant replied that the very foundations of Christian-ity were in the Jewish Scriptures and their emancipation was in the best interests of this “Christian kingdom.”

  The Jews spoke, as it were, a universal language, and they would spread the story of British liberality in the remotest corners of the globe. Hitherto they had known Christianity only as the pretext for savage persecutions, and they would celebrate the change, not merely with empty praises, but with the solid advantage of commercial preference. How willingly would they contribute to the welfare and prosperity of a Christian kingdom, which, though tardily, had generously conferred benefits hitherto withheld.3

  The rebuttal to Grant came, ironically, from another Evangelical, Robert Inglis, a Tory member from Oxford. Refuting Grant’s argument that their small numbers (20,000 in London and 30–40,000 in the United Kingdom) would constitute no threat to Britain, Inglis cited Edmund Burke’s observation that a small group could exercise an influence, and an unfortunate one, well beyond their numbers. (Burke had made that comment not about Jews but about any dissident minority.) It was the nature of the Jewish community, Inglis insisted, that was the problem.

  The Jews were aliens, not in the technical and legal sense, when Lord Coke called them “aliens and perpetual enemies,” but in the popular sense of the word: they were aliens because their country and their interests were not merely different, but hostile to our own. The Jews of London had more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they resided.... They were not a sect; but to this day they called themselves a people; and they might avail themselves of their political influence for objects connected with their own aggrandisement.4

  At this point in the debate, two members of Parliament stood up to speak in defense of the bill: Sir James Mackintosh, the philosopher, jurist, and perhaps leading Whig intellectual in Parliament, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, a young man who had just won a seat in the House. In accord with the custom of giving precedence to a new member, Macaulay was recognized first and went on to deliver his maiden address to the House of Commons. It is interesting that he chose this subject on this important occasion, rather than the larger issue of parliamentary reform, which might have made for a more dramatic entry into Parliament. (His speech on the Reform Bill the following year did just that, establishing him as an important presence in the House and a skillful orator.) Macaulay, then thirty years old, the son of the venerable Evangelical Zachary Macaulay, shared his father’s spiritedness and talents (although not his religious zeal), and was already well known as an essayist and frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review. Early that year, he offered to write an article on the bill that was being proposed. “The Jews,” he wrote the editor of the Review, “are about to petition Parliament for relief from the absurd restrictions which lie on them—the last relic of the old system of intolerance.... I would gladly further a cause so good, and you, I think, could have no objection.”5

  Macaulay’s speech in Parliament was a briefer version of the essay that was later to appear in the Review. The bill, he said, was based on the same principle of religious toleration as the Catholic Emancipation Act, and those who had opposed that act had less reason to oppose this one. “There is no foreign power to be feared. There is no divided allegiance threatening the state, . . . there is no priesthood exercising an absolute authority, . . . there are no agitators rousing and exciting the people.” Unlike the Catholics, the Jews did not try to gain proselytes; they sought only to keep their religion for themselves. Nor did they engage in anything like the Gunpowder Plot or similar acts of violence committed by Catholics. On the contrary, the history of English Jews reveals the “wrongs suffered and injuries endured by them, without a trace of any wrong or injury committed in return; . . . atrocious cruelties inflicted on the one hand, and grievous privations endured for conscience sake on the other.” All that was left of the opposition to their emancipation were the “offal,” the “leavings” of intolerance left over from earlier years. The only remaining objection was that “the Jews are not Christians, and that therefore they must not have power.” It was this argument that Macaulay turned against them by insisting that power, real power, was precisely the ground for the emancipation of the Jews.

  The only power that my hon. friend seems to wish to deprive the Jews of is to consist in maces, gold chains, and skins of parchment, with pieces of wax dangling at the ends of them. But he is leaving them all the things that bestow real power. He allows them to have property, and in these times property is power, mighty and overwhelming power. He allows them to have knowledge, and knowledge is no less power. Then why is all this power poisoned by intolerance? Why is the Jew to have the power of a principal over his clerk, of a master over his servant, of a landlord over his tenant? Why is he to have all this, which is power, and yet to be deprived of the fair and natural consequences of this power? . . . As things now stand, a Jew may be the richest man in England—he may possess the whole of London—his interest may be the means of raising this party or depressing that—of making East-India directors, or sending members into Parliament—the influence of a Jew may be of the first consequence in a war which shall be the means of shaking all Europe to its centre. His power may come into play in assisting or retarding the greatest plans of the greatest Princes; and yet, with all this confessed, acknowledged, undenied, my hon. friend would have them deprived of power! If, indeed, my hon. friend would have things thus arranged, I would put a question to him thus:—Does he not think that wealth confers power? If it do, can he be prepared to say that the Jew shall not have power? If it do not, where are we to draw the line? How are we to permit all the consequences of their wealth but one?6

  It was a novel and audacious argument, and could easily have had the opposite of the intended effect. To ascribe to Jews a considerable measure of wealth, and then to go on to assert that economic power naturally translated itself into political power, could confirm the worst suspicions and fears of antisemites. Indeed, it gave good reason to oppose the bill, to deny the Jews political power and even deprive them of some of their excessive and dangerous wealth. That the opponents of the bill did not respond to it in this fashion is itself a measure of the civililty of the debate. Macaulay himself, as if conscious of the unfortunate implications of his remarks, went on to change the tenor of his speech. Recalling the bad old days when Jews were persecuted, “when as a people they were pillaged, when their warehouses were torn down, when their every right was sacrificed,” he now posed the issue not as a legal right to political power but as a moral right. To deprive them of that right on religious grounds alone was “as much persecution in principle as an auto da fé,” the only difference being one of degree. A Parliament that had already passed important acts of religious liberty, he concluded, should put the finishing touch to those good works by passing this “most desirable measure.”7

  Parliament did not pass this “most desirable measure.” It failed in the second reading by 228 to 165 votes. But Macaulay’s maiden speech was a success. Mackintosh, who followed him, gracefully said that he could find no defect in it and spoke only to “absolve his own conscience.”8 The Jewish community was even more enthusiastic. Goldsmid gave a grand party for him in the House of Commons, which Macaulay reported on, in his us
ual jocular manner, to his sister the following day:I dined with a Jew,

  Such Christians are few,

  He gave me no ham,

  But plenty of lamb,

  And three sorts of fishes,

  And thirty made dishes.

  I drank his champagne

  Again and again . . . .

  O Christians whose feasts

  Are scarce fit for beasts,

  Example take you

  By this worthy old Jew.9

  Macaulay’s essay the following January in the Edinburgh Review raised some of the same themes as the speech but the emphasis was different. The point about money and power appeared more briefly and the ironic note was more obvious. “It would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament. But a Jew may make money; and money may make members of Parliament.... That a Jew should be privy-councillor to a Christian king would be an eternal disgrace to the nation. But the Jew may govern the money-market, and the money-market may govern the world.” The heart of the essay was the classic argument for toleration: the irrelevance of religion—Christianity as well as Judaism—to politics.

  We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. . . . The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a rabbi. But they have no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. . . . What is proposed is not that the Jews should legislate for a Christian community, but that a legislature composed of Christians and Jews should legislate for a community composed of Christians and Jews.

  After absolving Jews of the charge of being aliens or otherwise unfit for all the rights of Englishmen—if they were that it was only because the English had made them so—Macaulay concluded by rebuking the writer who claimed that it was a “monstrous indecency” to have introduced the bill during the Easter session with a possible second reading on Good Friday. Macaulay could think of no more fitting time than that holy day “for terminating long hostilities, and repairing cruel wrongs, . . . for blotting out from the statute-book the last traces of intolerance.”10

  Two years later, Macaulay spoke in favor of yet another bill in support of “that religion which first taught the human race the great lesson of universal charity.”11 This time the bill passed easily in Commons only to be rejected in the Lords, mainly because of the opposition of the bishops. The fate of similar bills in 1834 and 1836 was much the same, after which the subject was permitted to lapse for eleven years. But Macaulay’s essay in the Edinburgh Review, often reprinted and widely circulated, helped keep the issue, and his role in it, alive.

  Macaulay was not alone in unwittingly reinforcing the antisemitic image of the Jew, even while supporting the bill and defending the Jews against just that image. An essay by William Hazlitt, written shortly before his death and published posthumously in the Tatler in March 1831, had the same ambiguous effect. Opening on an optimistic note—“The emancipation of the Jews is but a natural step in the progress of civilisation”—he concluded by urging people to get rid of the “vulgar prejudices” that were unworthy of them and by vindicating the Jews against those prejudices.

  If they are vicious it is we who have made them so. Shut out any class of people from the path to fair fame, and you reduce them to grovel in the pursuit of riches and the means to live.... The Jews barter and sell commodities, instead of raising or manufacturing them. But this is the necessary traditional consequence of their former persecution and pillage by all nations.... You drive them like a pest from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, and then call them vagabonds and aliens.12

  Hazlitt may have been provoked by William Cobbett, who shared the most vulgar of those prejudices. The “Poor Man’s Friend,” as Cobbett liked to think of himself, despised a great many people, including Evangelicals, Unitarians, Quakers, and Negroes, but Jews above all. It may have been Cobbett’s pamphlet in 1830, “Good Friday; or the Murder of Jesus Christ by the Jews,” that inspired Macaulay to insist that Good Friday was precisely the appropriate day for the passage of the bill, and that prompted Hazlitt to defend the Jews against the familiar prejudices. What enraged Cobbett was not only the Jew as Christ-killer but also the Jew as financier, merchant, money-lender, and usurer. (He habitually used the word “Jew” as synonymous with those activities.) He praised the rulers on the continent (the king of Prussia, for one) for their repressive policies towards the Jews, holding up to them as a model the persecutions in the Middle Ages. And he proposed that England follow the example of the Czar in expelling the Jews: “The banishment of the Christ-killers from Russia is really a proof to me that the Emperor of Russia is not a tyrant”—perhaps because the Czar merely had the Jews banished rather than killed.13

  Thomas Carlyle, somewhat less virulent than Cobbett, shared his animus against Jews for much the same reasons. James Froude, Carlyle’s friend and biographer, recalled standing with him on Hyde Park corner before the grand house of Rothschild. A latter-day monarch, Carlyle told Froude, might emulate what King John had done in 1210. When one Jew refused to pay the ransom that had been demanded of all Jews, the king had one of his teeth pulled out every day until that ransom had been paid. A more benign torture, perhaps a twist of the wrist, Carlyle suggested, might induce Rothschild to give up some of the millions he had nefariously acquired. Even Froude was taken aback by that not so facetious remark. Carlyle, he noted, had a “true Teutonic aversion for that unfortunate race.”14

  The “vulgar prejudices” Hazlitt complained of persisted well into the century, although in a milder manner. (Cobbett himself died in 1835, and with him went an especially rancorous mode of polemic.) The prejudices expressed themselves more often in private discourse than in public, and never in any organizational form. There was no League of Antisemites (as in Germany), no riots, and no government-sponsored or -sanctioned antisemitic acts or declarations. Instead, there was a growing sense of toleration and social acceptance, accompanied by small but significant measures of amelioration. In 1833, Isaac Goldsmid’s son Francis was admitted to the bar, swearing on a Hebrew Bible. Two years later, the de facto situation became de jure when all oaths for voting were abolished. In 1836, the Jewish Board of Deputies was authorized to certify Jewish places of worship for purposes of marriage. The University of London founded that year (incorporating the previously established University College, London) was open to students and teachers of all religions. (Oxford and Cambridge remained barred to Jews until 1871.) In 1837, Moses Montefiore became sheriff of London and was knighted, the first Jew since 1700 to receive that honor.q Four years later, Isaac Goldsmid became the first Jew to be given the hereditary title of baronet. In 1845, a Jewish Disabilities Removal Act officially removed the mandatory oath for municipal offices. The following year, an act repealed earlier restrictive legislation (some dating back to Norman times and much of it not observed) concerning schools, charities, and places of worship.

  In 1847, attention returned to the remaining conspicuous disability, the seat in Parliament, this time not as an abstract principle but as a practical matter. In the general election of that year, Lionel de Rothschild, together with the Prime Minister, John Russell, were elected by the City of London as their representatives in Parliament. When Parliament met in December, Rothschild presented himself and explained that he could not take the religious oath. He was asked to withdraw, whereupon Russell moved that a committee of the House consider a bill for the removal of the civil and religious disabilities of Jews. The Jewish Disabilities Bill the following year (which focussed on the one disability, admission to Parliament) passed in the Commons by a comfortable margin—and was rejected in the Lords by an equally comfortable margin.

  Although the fate of this bill was the same as the earlier ones, the debate on December 16th was more memorable, engaging some of the most prom
inent political figures, often in unpredictable ways. Russell’s introductory defense was in the classic spirit of toleration. All native-born Englishmen were entitled to all “the honors and advantages of the British constitution.” Anticipating the criticisms of Inglis, who was to follow him, Russell insisted that the entitlement was a matter of right, that religious opinions were no reason to deprive them of that right, and that the admission of Jews to Parliament would in no way undermine the integrity of the Christian nation and state. He also anticipated the familiar criticisms of Jews, citing Cobbett who had complained that they were not employed in “laborious occupations” or in the normal trades of most Englishmen. “But is there not a reason for that?” Russell asked. “What right have we to say, having forbidden them to hold land, or to engage in retail trades, you are disqualified because you show no disposition for acquiring land, and no industry in plying retail trades. Is that justice? Is that sound argument?”

  “Justice” and “sound argument” in refutation of Cobbett, “right” and “birthright” in refutation of Inglis—that might have been enough in defense of the bill. But finally Russell returned to religion itself to vindicate an act that would have disqualified religion as the basis of membership in Parliament.