The People of the Book

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

  I would make a still higher appeal—an appeal to the principles of Christianity, with which our laws are interwoven. I appeal to you in the name of that religion which is one of love and of charity, to do unto others as you would that others should do unto you. . . . I ask you then, in the name of that constitution, which is a constitution of liberty and of justice—I ask you in the name of that religion, which is a religion of peace and good-will towards men, to agree to the Motion which I have now the honour to make.16

  The Liberal Prime Minister’s speech was in the familiar liberal mode, echoing some of the arguments for toleration (although less provocatively) that Macaulay had advanced on the occasion of the first bill. He may have been surprised to find allies—reluctant ones, to be sure—among some Tories who had opposed the earlier bill. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory leader, supported this one on grounds not of justice or right but of consistency and expediency. Having already conceded the vote to Dissenters and Catholics, Peel reasoned, Parliament had to adapt to changing circumstances and grant the vote to Jews as well.

  William Gladstone was a more surprising ally, making much the same argument as Peel (in whose cabinet he had served), although more tortuously and apprehensively. The member (with Inglis) of the Tory-minded constituency of Oxford, he had not only opposed the bill of 1833 as well as another that admitted Jews to municipal offices, but had written a book refuting the very principle of those bills. The State in its Relations with the Church, in 1838, was in the high-church Erastian tradition that assumed an identification of church and state, hence precluded the presence of Jews in Parliament, the political embodiment of the state.r To the dismay of his father and most of his constituents, and to his own discomfort, Gladstone now spoke in favor of Russell’s motion. “It is a painful decision to come to,” he wrote in his diary. And to his father, after delivering his speech, he explained: “It is with reluctance that I give the vote, but I am convinced that after the civil privileges we have given them [the Jews] already (including the magistracy and the franchise), and after the admission we have already conceded to Unitarians who refuse the whole of the most vital doctrines of the Gospel, we cannot compatibly with entire justice and fairness refuse to admit them.”17

  That one sentence sums up the long, labored speech Gladstone made in support of the measure that Inglis, his fellow-member from Oxford, vigorously opposed and that he knew his constituency did not favor. As a Member of Parliament, he told his electors, he represented them but had to abide by his own judgment and conscience, so that it was with deep regret and pain that he was now voting for the bill. He promised to be brief with regard to the “positive arguments” for the admission of Jews. And so he was, citing the praise of others attesting to the Jews’ “powerful intellect, ... their cultivated minds, ... their ancient and continuous literature . . . , their indefatigable diligence . . . .” On his own, Gladstone added one more argument: “their intelligence and activity and success in many of the pursuits of commerce and of industry.”

  But all that was by way of aside. The burden of Gladstone’s argument was the concessions that had already been made to others who failed the Church of England test. “It appears, then, we have now arrived at a stage in which, after two or three generations had contended for a Church Parliament, and two or three generations more contended for a Protestant Parliament, each being in succession beaten, we are called upon to decide the question whether we shall contend for a Christian Parliament.” Gladstone’s grudging answer was that the admission to Parliament of “an extremely small fraction of Jews,” “a few solitary Jews,” would not “nullify the Christianity” of the vast majority of other members and thus would not bring any “organic change in the connection between Church and State.” He concluded, apologetically, by invoking the spirit of Christianity, which countenanced “an act of justice in spite of prepossessions appealing to our liveliest and tenderest feeling—prepossessions which still attracted our sympathy and respect, almost our veneration.”18

  It was a minimal, even, equivocal, “act of justice” that Gladstone invoked to counteract his natural “prepossessions”—the justice of giving the Jews what had already, unwisely and unjustly, been given to others. Jews had neither a legal nor a moral right to be in Parliament; they were to be there only because it would be a grievance to be excluded when everyone else was included. Moreover, they were to be included only on the assumption that there would be very few of them—and also recognizing that the “prepossessions” against them still held and were still worthy of sympathy and respect, almost “veneration.” Disraeli, in his own speech later in the day, described Gladstone’s speech as “politic.” Gladstone disputed that characterization, insisting that he was reaffirming the principle that had governed his earlier votes as well as his book—the principle that Parliament would remain a Christian institution in a Christian State.

  Disraeli’s speech was to the opposite effect from Gladstone’s, but it was no less strange, if only because it came from another Tory supporting a Whig measure that would have brought another Whig (Rothschild) into Parliament. In the light of their later careers, it is hard to remember that at this time Gladstone and Disraeli sat on the same side in the House. Yet even then they were as far apart as they would later be when they led their respective parties and opposed each other on virtually every issue. While Gladstone was trying to reconcile the bill with his treatise on church and state, Disraeli was approaching it in the light of the novel he had just published. “Half Christendom,” the heroine of Tancred says, “worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. . . . Which do you think should be the superior race, the worshipped or the worshipper?” 19 Echoes of that novel, even the implicit answer to that question, may be heard in Disraeli’s speech, which was as provocative as the novel itself.

  Disraeli opened with an audacious proposition. The advocates of the bill favored it on the principle of religious liberty; the opponents objected to it on the principle of religious truth. He supported it for precisely the reason that others opposed it, because “there is something more excellent than religious liberty—and that more excellent thing is religious truth.” And not only religious truth, but “religious truth taking the shape of religious conformity.” The bill, he agreed with the opponents, was about religion, and more particularly about the Jewish religion.

  For who are these persons professing the Jewish religion. They are persons who acknowledge the same God as the Christian people of this realm. They acknowledge the same divine revelation as yourselves. They are, humanly speaking, the authors of your religion. They are unquestionably those to whom you are indebted for no inconsiderable portion of your known religion, and for the whole of your divine knowledge.

  Interrupted by cries of outrage, Disraeli went on to offend members of both parties. If religious faith was a sanction for conduct, then surely those who “profess the religion which every gentleman in the House professes—for every gentleman here does profess the Jewish religion, and believes in Moses and the Prophets [again cries of protest]—well then, I say that if religion is a security for righteous conduct, you have that security in the instance of the Jews who profess a true religion.” However degraded or brutalized a Jew might have become as a result of centuries of persecution, “he has been sustained by the divine law he obeys, and by the sublime morality he professes.” It is as Christians, therefore, and in a Christian assembly, that Parliament should welcome the Jews. Others might support the bill on other grounds—of justice, expediency, or liberty. He was supporting it (again, to cries of protest) as a Christian, who could not exclude those “who are of the religion in the bosom of which my Lord and Savior was born.”20

  It was an extraordinary performance, not least because his audience was well aware of the fact that Disraeli, baptized as a child by his father, had been converted from that “true religion.” They also knew that he had nothing to gain from that speech. Indeed, he had everything to lose by it. He was at a point in his career when he had t
o present himself to his Tory constituency and party as a “sound man,” and there was already much about him that was unsound—his novels, his exotic appearance, and, of course, his Jewish heritage.21 Tancred could be read as a fantasy, a jeu d’esprit—or “Jew d’esprit,” as was said—but a parliamentary speech on an important occasion could not be so easily dismissed. However bizarre or outrageous it seemed to many at the time, it was, in fact, principled and heartfelt.

  Another speech by another Tory, this time against the bill, also had its oddities, because it came from a man who in other respects was an ardent philosemite—indeed, a philo-Zionist. Lord Ashley (as he then was; a few years later he came into his title as the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) was an Evangelical best known for his championship of social reforms—factory, mining, and housing acts, schools for the poor, the abolition of slavery, and the like. But he was also engaged in Jewish causes, in protests against the persecution of Jews abroad, in societies for the conversion of Jews, and, most prominently, in the movement for the restoration of a Jewish holy land in Palestine.22

  On this occasion, however, Ashley spoke up against the bill that would have completed the emancipation of Jews. Like Disraeli, but with the opposite intent, he argued that religion did indeed have “a great deal to do with politics.” He quoted Macaulay derisively: “To talk of essentially Christian government is about as wise as to talk of essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship.” This witticism was unworthy of that great genius, for if Christianity could not play a part in public life, “what was it that Christianity could do?” He also took issue with Russell who distinguished between the private and the public. Russell had admitted that “Christianity must prevail in private life,” in which case, Ashley insisted, it must surely prevail in public life as well. Nor was Russell justified in saying that the exclusion of Jews “savored of persecution.” The exclusion was based not on any personal objection to Jews but rather on a higher principle. Without that principle, why not admit “Mussulmans, Hindoos, and men of every form of faith under the sun in the British dominions”? Moreover, it was not probable but possible (this in response to Gladstone) that there might some day be in Parliament “a majority of the Hebrew nation, and that they might assume and retain the helm of affairs.” In any case, to admit any Jews was to declare that “for all great public purposes Christianity was altogether needless.”

  It was at this point in his speech, very near the end, that Ashley suddenly launched into a passionate tribute to Jews—to modern Jews, not merely to the Jews of the Old Testament—which started almost as an apology and soon became an affirmation of philosemitism in its most extravagant form. He hoped, he said, that he had not given offense to “the Hebrew people,” collectively or individually, for he himself regarded “the very poorest Israelite with feelings akin to reverence, as one of the descendants of the most remarkable nation that had ever yet appeared on the face of the earth.” Others looked upon Jews as “a degraded, illiterate, money-loving race, fit only for the Stock Exchange or to take care of orange stalls.” His view was quite the reverse.

  The Jews were a people of very powerful intellect, of cultivated minds, and with habits of study that would defy the competition of the most indefatigable German. Their literature extended in an unbroken chain from the days of our Lord down to the present time. [“From far beyond that,” Disraeli interjected.] True, for the hon. Gentleman meant, no doubt, to throw into their literature the whole range of the historians and the prophets of the Old Testament. But he was speaking, not of the old Jews in their palmy days, but of the Jews oppressed and despised in their days of dispersion. Even thus, their literature embraced every subject of science and learning, of secular and religious knowledge. As early as the ninth century they took the lead in grammar and lexicography; and towards the end of the twelfth their labours in this respect formed the basis of everything that had since been done by Christian doctors. They had a most abundant literature in French and German, but especially in Hebrew; and the Jews presented, he believed, in our day, in proportion to their numbers, a far larger list of men of genius and learning than could be exhibited by any Gentile country. Music, poetry, medicine, astronomy, occupied their attention, and in all they were more than a match for their competitors. But the most remarkable feature in the character of the Jews in the present day was this, that they had discarded very many of their extravagant and anti-social doctrines. Their hatreds and their suspicions were subdued, and undoubtedly they exhibited a greater desire and a greater fitness to re-enter the general family of mankind.

  Why then, he concluded, did he not support the present measure in favor of that extraordinary people? He was prepared to make every concession that would contribute to “their honour and comfort.” But he could not acquiesce in striking out from the oath the words that asserted the truth and the supremacy of the Gospel, “on the true faith of a Christian.”23

  The 1847 bill elicited the most thoughtful, moving, and sometimes paradoxical debate on both sides of the issue. But the result was the same as the other bills—passage in the House and rejection in the Lords. And so it went with the half-dozen later bills that attempted to compromise on the wording and application of the oath. The formulation of the oath was a problem for some Liberals as well as Tories. It might have been expected that John Stuart Mill, the preeminent liberal philosopher of the time, would have spoken out in favor of the bill. Instead the only public comment he made, in a newspaper article in March 1849, was to criticize the bill introduced by Russell because it was not liberal, not inclusive enough. By proposing to retain the oath “upon the true faith of a Christian” for all Members of Parliament except Jews, it had the effect of excluding “unbelievers.” “He opens the door of parliament,” Mill complained, “just wide enough to allow one particular class of dissenters to slip in and closes it, as far as depends upon him, against all others.... Were Hume and Gibbon improper persons to sit in Parliament?”24s

  Not until July 26, 1858, when Rothschild stood for Parliament again, was yet another bill introduced which, after several amendments (and no very memorable speeches), the Lords reluctantly accepted. That bill empowered either House to alter the form of the oath for a member who objected to the traditional wording, “upon the true faith of a Christian.” Rothschild then took his seat in the House of Commons, wearing a hat (in accordance with Jewish custom but in contravention of English), and swearing the oath “So help me Jehovah” on a large Hebrew Bible. That was not quite the end of the story, however, for that bill provided only for the particular Jew who chose the new oath—in this case, Rothschild. Two years later a further modification converted the exceptional case into a standing order applied to all Jews. Another act in 1866 prescribed for all members a shortened oath concluding with the words “So help me God,” taken on either the Old or the New Testament. (This was waived for Quakers who could merely “affirm” without an oath or Bible.) Five years later, yet another bill removed the one remaining Jewish disability; a Jew could now be appointed Lord Chancellor.

  In his diary before that critical vote in 1858, Shaftesbury, then in the House of Lords, explained why he was going to reverse himself and vote for the measure he had so vigorously opposed a decade earlier. He could no longer resist, “pertinaciously and hopelessly,” the will of the Commons. “I yield to force, not to reason.... More opposition is therefore futile.”26 Ten years later, he recalled that event to Gladstone, who had just succeeded Disraeli as prime minister. “The Jewish question has now been settled,” he reminded him; Jews could now sit in both houses of Parliament. He himself had opposed their admission not because he was “adverse to the descendants of Abraham, of whom our Blessed Lord came according to the flesh,” but because he objected to the mode in which that admission was effected. But all that, he said, was of the past. He now implored Gladstone to take the opportunity to show regard for “God’s ancient people” by giving a peerage to “a noble member of the House of Israel,” Sir Mo
ses Montefiore. “It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords when that grand old Hebrew were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England.”27

  It is ironic that Shaftesbury should be urging Gladstone to elevate Montefiore to the Lords, having once denied Rothschild a seat in the Commons. It is also ironic that he had made the same suggestion earlier to Disraeli when he was Prime Minister, only to be refused because Disraeli felt it would be unseemly for him, because of his heritage, to act on it. Gladstone, who had no such excuse and without explanation, also failed to do so, after inquiring, however, about the size of Montefiore’s fortune and whether he had children (he did not). Montefiore who had been knighted in 1837, never received a peerage; he died in 1885 at the age of a hundred and one. Nor did Lionel Rothschild, who had not been knighted and had been proposed for a peerage in 1858 but was rejected by the Queen; in 1885 his son Nathan became the first Jew to sit in the House of Lords. The final irony is that Lionel Rothschild, having fought so hard and so long for a seat in Parliament, and having achieved that historic goal, spent fifteen years in the House without making a single speech.

  In two centuries, the “Jewish question” had evolved from the question of the admission of Jews to England to that of the admission of Jews to Parliament. The resolution of both issues had much in common; they came about gradually, incrementally, civilly, by way of compromise and conciliation. They differed, however, in the quality of debate they engendered. The Jew Bills of the nineteenth century (as they were referred to) were the occasion for memorable speeches by eminent Victorians, which reveal a political and social ethos strikingly different from that on the continent.