And so it was. A decade later, as Prime Minister, he was leading his country through the perils of another wilderness. Two-thirds of a century later, a review of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews bore the headline, “Winston Churchill: A Latter-Day Moses?” The question mark suggests the reviewer’s doubts not only about Churchill’s right to claim that legacy, but also the degree of his devotion to Jews. Yet the review opens by recalling the remark of one of Churchill’s friends: “Even Winston had a fault. He was too fond of Jews.”64
“Too fond of Jews,” that is one way to characterize Churchill’s philosemitism—a love, not uncritical on occasion and sometimes distracted or compromised by political pressures, but deeply held and memorably expressed. Churchill was surely no Moses, no savior of the Jews (although some acclaim him a savior of Western civilization). But in that “event in world history” which he so often spoke of, the establishment of the state of Israel, he has an honorable place. And in the civilization that he so prized, it was no small tribute to Jerusalem to be put on a par with Athens as the guiding lights of mankind.
Epilogue
If the history of philosemitism may recall England to its “past glory,” it may also recall Jews to a glory they themselves tend to forget. In this sense, it is more than a counter-history to antisemitism. It is a history in its own right. While many English philosemites felt obliged to confront and refute the familiar antisemitic gibes, they did so almost as an afterthought, as the protagonists in a debate. But many did not feel the need to do even that. They were not simply reacting to others; they were speaking in their own voice and for their own purpose—which may inspire Jews to speak for themselves, not defensively but proudly. If Lionel Trilling found even in the “counter-myths” of fiction some reality, “a little of what is true,” so Jews may find, even in the extravagant tributes of philosemites, something true.1
Jews may be reminded of what it is that many philosemites found so commendable in the Jewish “race.” That word is anathema today. Yet in that time and context, it was meant as a tribute, denoting a people with an ancient lineage, a spiritual blood-line, as it were. When Lloyd George spoke of the Jewish race, it was in the same spirit that he praised the Welsh as an “ancient race”; and so with Churchill, who as late as 1954, was proud of the English, as a “race dwelling all around the globe.”2 The Jewish race, as both recognized, was different from the others—more ancient than the Welsh, and more dispersed than the English. Today we would translate “Jewish race” as “Jewish people”—again, with the proviso that they are a people unlike others, not only more ancient and more dispersed but also heirs to the most venerable of religions.
This is one of the many ironies of modern Jewish history. The Enlightenment has been, in important ways, a boon to Jewry, relieving them of the persecution and discrimination that have blighted so much of their history. Yet some of the most estimable figures of the Enlightenment, the philosophes, in their zeal for reason, were hostile not only to Judaism as a religion, the fons et origo of Christianity, but also to Jews as individuals who were so benighted as to adhere to that outmoded and regressive faith, and, worse, to the Jewish people as a “nation within a nation,” a discordant element in an otherwise united and enlightened society. Philosemites, on the other hand, not always “enlightened” by conventional standards, have respected, even revered, the Jewish religion as the unique and essential nature of the Jewish people, the cause of their survival, and ultimately the reason for their restoration to their ancient land. The Jews as “the people of the Book,” “God’s ancient people,” “the chosen people,” “the apple of God’s eye”—these are the recurrent motifs in the rhetoric of Christian philosemites, who esteemed Judaism precisely because they esteemed Christianity.
From millenarianism to Evangelicalism, from philosemitism to philo-Zionism—this too reminds us of a history we tend to forget. The horrendous facts of the Holocaust induce a foreshortening of memory, suggesting that Zionism was a response to the Holocaust and Israel a haven for refugees and potential refugees. But long before the Holocaust, Zionism (although not under that label) and Israel (otherwise known as Palestine) inspired Christians as well as Jews, and for different reasons. Millenarians and Evangelicals favored the “restoration” of the Jews to the “holy land” as the precondition of their own redemption, while others sought the establishment of a Jewish state as the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy and command. Mordecai’s fantasy, expressed so graphically by George Eliot, was of a wandering “soul” of medieval sages and poets which could find a resting place only in Palestine. Balfour made the point less dramatically when he said that Palestine, rather than Uganda, was the only home for Jews because it was there that “that race was nurtured and that religion came into being.” So, too, Churchill insisted that Jews were in Palestine “as of right and not in sufferance”—not merely by the legal right of the Mandate, but by the historic right of that ancient people.3
Some of the tributes of the English philosemites are too heady for modern Jews: Ashley’s praise of the Jews as “the most remarkable nation that had ever yet appeared on the face of earth,” or Churchill, unwittingly echoing him, who said that whether one liked Jews or not, no one could doubt that they were “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.”4 Philosemitism may seem too exuberant—irrationally exuberant, in the case of Ashley, who extolled the Jews even while opposing their admission to Parliament. If many American Jews, including Zionists, are wary of Evangelicals, who are among their most faithful allies, it is not only, as is often said, because Jews remember all too well the saga of persecution at the hands of Christians, but also because they are distrustful of any religious zealotry, on the part of Christians or, more ominously today, of Muslims.
Jews may be flattered by the philosemitic enthusiasm of Eliot or Churchill. But they are more comfortable with the restrained, prosaic, matter-of-fact toleration accorded them by Locke or Macaulay. One might say of the idea of toleration what Tocqueville said of self-interest: “The principle of toleration rightly understood is not a lofty one, but it is clear and sure. It does not aim at mighty objects, but it attains without excessive exertion all those at which it aims.” Toleration is surely less lofty than philosemitism, but it is more “clear and sure”—witness Macaulay’s arguments in favor of, and Ashley’s opposed to, the admission of Jews in Parliament.
In the course of the history of Anglo-Jewry—from the readmission of the Jews in England, to their admission in Parliament, and beyond that to the founding of the state of Israel—the principles of philosemitism and toleration played different roles at different times, but always in a common cause. In fiction it was philosemitism that prevailed, presenting images of Jews and ideas of Judaism that counteracted the familiar stereotypes and created more favorable, even exalted ones. In politics, it was the principle of toleration that finally bestowed upon Jews the “rights and privileges” of citizenship, not because they were superior beings (the “chosen people”), but because they were human beings, like all Englishmen. And it was the combination of these principles that inspired the idea of a Jewish state—for some a “holy land” for a “holy people,” for others a nation like unto all nations.
If the history of antisemitism is too “lachrymose,” the history of philosemitism may seem too Pollyannaish. And so perhaps it is, on its own. But it is not on its own. There is that other counter-history it is always contending with, the all-too-persistent antisemitism resurgent today. It may be appropriate that the present study of philosemitism has taken the modest form of an essay rather than a history proper, whereas antisemitism, now more than ever, warrants nothing less than a massive tome. Yet even an essay may provide a respite from the dismal reality, a reminder of a “past glory” that is still resonant in the present and gives us hope for the future.
My brother Milton Himmelfarb, in one of his last essays, reflected on the question, “What do I believe?” He concluded by qu
oting the Israeli anthem Hatikvah, “Our hope is not lost.” Those words, he reminds us, were an answer to the contemporaries of Ezekiel, who, more than two and a half millennia ago, had despaired, “Our hope is lost.” “Hope,” Himmelfarb observes, “is a Jewish virtue.”5
Notes
Prologue
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York, 1948), pp. 143, 150.
2 Salo Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View,” Menorah Journal, June 1928. This “lachrymose view” has also been disputed by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain. See the prologue to Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2009).
3 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York, 1982), p. 299. See also The Jewish Return into History (New York, 1978).
4 Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York, 2010); Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010); and Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power (New York, 2010).
5 William D. Rubinstein and Hilary L. Rubinstein, Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939 (London, 1999), p. 189.
6 William D. Rubinstein, Israel, the Jews and the West: The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism (London, 2008).
7 Julius, p. xxxvii.
8 Heinrich von Treitschke, “A Word About Our Jewry” (1880) (reproduced on the Internet); “Philosemitism” in Encyclopedia of Christianity, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch and G. W. Bromley.
9 The 1888 volume of the Oxford English Dictionary cites examples of “antisemitism” in 1881 and 1882 (not as a separate entry but under the prefix “anti-”). But “philosemitism” does not appear, even as a prefix, in the 1909 volume. In the 1989 edition, “philoSemitism” appears as a prefix, the first example dating from 1946. In the 2008 edition, both “antisemitism” and “philosemitism” are elevated to the status of entries, citing earlier examples of “philo-semitic” in 1881 and 1891.
10 The word “philosemitic” appears in 1934 in one of Cecil Roth’s earliest books, The Life of Menasseh ben Israel. One chapter of his seminal work, A History of the Jews in England, in 1941, opens by referring to the “unmistakable philosemitic tendency in certain English circles.” In his essay, “England in Jewish History” (1949), he speaks of the “strong philosemitic movement in the country” even before the readmission of the Jews. (He also cites an essay by a German historian the preceding year, “Der Philosemitismus des 17’ Jahrhunderts.”) His 1949 essay was reprinted in 1962, under the title “Philo-Semitism in England,” in his volume, Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History. Oddly still, Roth is not among those cited in the three references to the word in the index of the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
11 Quoted by Adam Sutcliffe, “Enlightenment and Exclusion: Judaism and Toleration in Spinoza, Locke and Bayle,” in Philosemitism, Antisemitism and ‘the Jews’,” ed. Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (Hampshire, Eng., 2004) p. 193. The comment on toleration appears in Goethe’s Nachlass. For Hegel’s admiration for Goethe, see Walter Kaufman, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary (New York, 1965), pp. 45–6.
12 Koran, 3:199.
13 Koran, 3:70–71.
14 Quoted by Douglas J. Culver, Albion and Ariel: British Puritanism and the Birth of Zionism (New York, 1995), p. 54. Timothy Larsen’s A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, has a more limited scope. For most of the Victorians he discusses—Anglo-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Unitarians—the “book” was largely the New Testament.
15 See below, p. 81.
16 See below, p. 122.
17 Todd Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Phila., 1979), p. 17.
18 Julius, pp. 38–41.
19 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, or the New Generation (Works, London, n.d.), pp. 249–52.
20 Winston Churchill, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, Feb. 8, 1920. See below, p. 139.
21 William and Hilary Rubinstein, Philosemitism, p. 168. See below, p. 152.
22 Martin Gilbert, “The Origins of the ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech,” in Winston Churchill: Resolution, Defiance, Magnanimity, Good Will, ed. R. Crosby Kemper III (Columbia, Mo., 1996), p. 49.
I. In the Beginning
1 Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (New York, 1956), I, 290.
2 Douglas J. Culver, Albion and Ariel: British Puritanism and the Birth of Political Zionism (New York, 1995), p. 54 (quoting John Richard Green, Short History of the English People).
3 Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Camb., Eng., 2003), p. 46. Sutcliffe makes a large point of the decline of the importance of Hebraism by the early eighteenth century, although the echoes of it can be heard well into the nineteenth. On the scholarly controversy about Hebraism, see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2010, and the review essay by Yoram Hazony, “The Biblical Century,” Azure, Summer 2010, pp. 118–28.
4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1914), p. 222 (part 3, chap. 35), and p. 234 (chap. 36).
5 Culver, pp. 108–9. (I have modernized the spelling of the title as well as of the quotations.)
6 Adam Sutcliffe, “Enlightenment and Exclusion: Judaism and Toleration in Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle,” in Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman, eds., Philosemitism, Antisemitism and ‘the Jews’ (Hampshire, Eng., 2004), p. 179. “The apple of God’s eye” was a familiar quotation from the Bible (Deuteronomy, 32:10).
7 Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (reproduced on the Internet), p. 1.
8 Williams, chap. LXX.
9 Eliane Glaser, Judaism Without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England (London, 2007), p. 95.
10 David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 181–2. This was not the Sir Edward Nicholas who was Secretary of State under Charles II. Cecil Roth suggests that the tract was perhaps written by a Jew or translated by Menasseh ben Israel. Roth, A History of the Jews in England (3d ed., London, 1964 [1st ed., 1941]), p. 286, note d; Roth, Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History (Phila., 1962), p. 88.
11 Cecil Roth, History, pp. 149–50; David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994), p. 114. Both apply the term “philosemitic” to the Hebraic and millenarian movements, but they disagree on the other motives attributed to Cromwell. Katz minimizes the importance of both the economic factor and the idea of toleration. (Unless otherwise specified, other references to Katz are to The Jews in the History of England.)
12 Churchill, II, pp. 303, 315.
13 Roth, History, pp. 153–4; Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York, 1956), p. 121. See also Roth, “Philosemitism in England” (1949) and “The Mystery of the Resettlement” (1956), in Essays.
14 Roth, Essays, p. 91.
15 Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (New York, 1845), II, pp. 51–2.
16 Roth, History, p. 161; Katz, p. 117.
17 Katz, p. 127.
18 Roth, Essays, p. 96; Katz, p. 126.
19 Avrom Saltman, The Jewish Question in 1655: Studies in Prynne’s Demurrer (Jerusalem, 1995), p. 19; Roth, History, p. 162. In spite of Prynne’s “declared hostility to the Jews,” Katz says, his book was not at all the “hysterical denunciation of the Jews” it is sometimes made out to be, and remains “a faithful compilation of the materials available in his day for a history of the Jews in England” (Katz, pp. 129–30).
20 Saltman, pp. 19–20, 43.
21 Carlyle, II, 201; Katz, pp. 130–1. Carlyle dates that closing event as December 12, but
other sources give it as the 18th.
22 Roth, History, p. 166.
23 Katz, p. 132.
24 On the fallacy of “Whig history,” see Katz, pp. vii, 383. Eliane Glaser refers to it as “teleological history” (Judaism Without Jews, pp. 3, 27, 132).
25 Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, Conn., 1984), p. 359; Glaser, p. 21. The biography of Cromwell by John Morley (himself a good liberal) presents much the same view of Cromwell, commending him for adhering to the principle of toleration, “with the two stereotyped exclusions of popery and prelacy.” (Morley, Oliver Cromwell [New York, 1901], p. 367.)
26 Clay Javier Boggs, “‘The Jews’ and ‘the Pharisees’ in Early Quaker Polemic,” April 6, 2007 (reproduced on the Internet). Boggs (a Quaker and a professor of history at Temple University) quotes at length from Fox’s tract “Saul’s Errand to Damascus.” On Margaret Fell, Fox’s wife, see Claire Jowett, “‘Inward’ and ‘Outward’ Jews: Margaret Fell, Circumcision nd Women’s Preaching,” in Kushner and Valman, eds., pp. 155–76.
The People of the Book Page 14