27 Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006).
28 New Atlantis, reproduced on the Internet.
29 Lewis Feuer, “Francis Bacon and the Jews: Who Was the Jew in the New Atlantis?,” Jewish Historical Studies of England, XXIX (1982–86), 1–25.
30 James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana (reproduced on the Internet), pp. 49 and ff. See also the account of Harrington in Jonathan Karp, “The Mosaic Republic in Augustan Politics: John Toland’s ‘Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews’,” Hebraic Political Studies , Summer 2006.
31 Harrington, Oceana, p. 184. In an otherwise fine biography of Harrington by Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (New Haven, 1960), in the almost seventy-page chapter on Oceana, Panopea and the Jews are mentioned only in a single long footnote (p. 215), and without the concluding sentence. Karp’s essay on Toland is one of the few to do justice to this subject.
32 Harrington, p. 49.
33 John Milton, “Areopagitica” (1644), in Milton’s Prose Writings , ed. K. M. Burton (London, 1958), p. 182.
34 Samuel S. Stollman, “Milton’s Dichotomy of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hebraism’,” PMLA, Jan. 1974, pp. 105–12.
35 Stollman, passim; and Achsah Guibbory, “England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–1660,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Camb., Eng., 2008), pp. 13–34.
36 John Milton, “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth” (April 1660), in Milton’s Prose Writings, p. 243.
37 Stollman, p. 106 (quoting Milton, The Christian Doctrine, XIV, 29).
38 Milton, “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” (1643), in Milton’s Prose Writings, p. 289; Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism,” in Milton and the Jews, p. 72.
39 Guibbory, pp. 18, 34. (Italics in the original.)
40 Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (New York, 1953), p. 219.
II. The Case for Toleration
1 Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (3d ed., Oxf., 1964), p. 171.
2 Roth, p. 183.
3 Diary of Samuel Pepys (London, 1906), I, 414 (Oct. 14, 1663).
4 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, Conn., 2003), pp. 245–6. Among those who interpret Locke as denying toleration to Catholics and atheists are two of the commentators in this edition, Ian Shapiro and John Dunn (pp. , xiii, 276, 319). See also Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, 2003), p. 264; and 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). For the argument against this limited view of toleration, see Adam Wolfson, Persecution and Toleration: An Explication of the Locke-Proast Quarrel, 1689–1704 (Lanham, Md., 2010).
5 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 246.
6 Locke, p. 220.
7 Locke, pp. 240–1.
8 Locke, pp. 249–50.
9 The publication date of Two Treaties is generally given as 1690, which was the date that appeared in the book itself. In fact, it was on sale as early as October 1689 and was deliberately post-dated by the publisher. (Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography [London, 1957], p. 327.)
10 The strongest case for the secularist interpretation of the Treatises and of Locke in general is Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 202–51. For recent discussion of this issue, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies, Fall 2006, pp. 568–92; and Andrew Rehfeld, “Jephthah, the Hebrew Bible, and John Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’,” Hebraic Political Studies, Winter 2008, pp. 60–93.
11 David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994), p. 236.
12 Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton: The Fre-mantle Lectures (Oxford, 1974); and Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 147–48.
13 Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (New York, 1957), III, 105.
14 Roth, pp. 203–4.
15 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 30–31.
16 On the word “race,” see Prologue above, p. 8.
17 Joseph Addison, “The Race of People called Jews,” in The Spectator, Sept. 27, 1712.
18 Spectator, March 12, 1711.
19 Jonathan Karp, “The Mosaic Republic in Augustan Politics: John Toland’s ‘Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews’,” Hebraic Political Studies, Summer 2006, p. 470.
20 Karp, p. 490.
21 Karp, p. 485.
22 Manuel, Broken Staff, p. 125.
23 Diego Lucci, “Judaism and the Jews in the British Deists’ Attacks on Revealed Religion,” Hebraic Political Studies, Spring 2008, pp. 206–7.
24 Thomas W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study of the Jew Bill of 1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 55.
25 On the “Jewish Question” in Germany in the nineteenth century, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (New York, 2009), pp. 18–26.
26 Perry, p. 74.
27 Perry, pp. 74–5. For Perry the party struggle was the main factor in this event, as in English history in general at this time. One of the purposes of his book on the Jew Bill is to dispute Sir Lewis Namier, who made light of the importance of parties in this period.
28 Perry, p. 135; Roth, p. 221.
29 Perry, p. 145.
30 Élie Halévy, England in 1815, tr. E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker (London, 1960 [1st ed. in French, 1913]), p. 148.
31 Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second (2d ed., London, 1846), I, 357–8. (I am indebted to Katz, p. 240, for alerting me to this source.)
32 For these figures, see Perry, p. 5; Katz, pp. 250, 292, 317.
33 Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), pp. 527–8 (Report of 1766).
34 Smith, p. 527.
35 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, Dolphin ed., 1961), pp. 60–1, 67, 97–8.
36 Burke, p. 97.
37 The Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in the House of Commons and in Westminster Hall (London, 1816), II, 250–51.(William D. Rubinstein and Hilary L. Rubinstein, Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939 [London, 1999], pp. 173–4, called my attention to this speech.) I have found no evidence of how the motion was received or resolved in Parliament.
38 Burke, Reflections, p. 165. The Reflections, I have elsewhere argued, may be taken not as a vindication of Jews as such but rather of Judaism as a religion. (Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Edmund Burke: Apologist for Judaism?” in The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling [Chicago, 2006], pp. 3–11.)
39 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 48.
40 Roth, pp. 234–38.
III. The Case for Political Equality
1 C. C. N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain: The Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828–1860 (East Brunswick, N.J., 1982), p. 44.
2 On the technicalities of the electoral laws, see H. S. Q. Hen-riques, The Jews and the English Law (1908).
3 Robert Grant, speech in the House of Commons, April 5, 1830 (All the speeches cited in this chapter are from Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, reproduced on the Internet).
4 Robert Inglis, speech in the House of Common, April 5, 1830.
5 The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, ed. G. Otto Trevelyan (New York, 1875),
I, 146 (to Macvey Napier, Jan. 25, 1830)
6 Macaulay, speech in the House of Commons, April 5, 1830.
7 Macaulay, speech in the House of Commons, April 5, 1830.
8 Macaulay, Life and Letters, I, 152.
9 John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973), p. 158.
10 Macaulay, “Civil Disabilities of the Jews,” Edinburgh Review, January 1831.
11 Macaulay, speech in the House of Commons, April 17, 1833, in The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. by his sister, Lady Trevelyan (8 vol. ed., London, 1875), VIII, 110.
12 William Hazlitt, “Emancipation of the Jews” (1831), in Collected Works, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London, 1904), XII, 461–2, 466. The phrase, “vulgar prejudices,” was used repeatedly in the eighteenth as well as nineteenth century to refer to antisemites. See, for example, John Toland (pp. 43–45) and Horace Walpole (p. 50).
13 John O. Osborne, William Cobbett: His Thought and his Times (New Brunswick, N. J., 1966), pp. 222–23; George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend (Camb., Eng., 1982), II, 441, 591, n. 79. Osborne is candid about Cobbett’s antisemitism, describing it as “so extreme, it resembled a parody. It was never qualified and was expressed in the grossest terms,” such as admiring the persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages (p. 222). Spater refers to his antisemitism only in passing twice in the text, with a few other examples in endnotes. He says that Cobbett disclaimed any intention to persecute the Jews, only not to encourage them, as that would be a “blasphemy” (II, 41). The suggestion that the Jews be banished from England appears in an endnote. That note concludes, without further elaboration: “After C’s breakdown in 1833, he became increasingly antisemitic” (II, 591, n. 79). Anthony Julius, in Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010), cites other biographers who have neglected or trivialized Cobbett’s antisemitism (p. 402, and notes 339–41, p. 717).
14 James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834–1881 (London, 1884), II, 448–9.
15 Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Camb., Mass., 2010), pp. 110–11.
16 Russell, speech in the House of Commons, Dec. 16, 1847.
17 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols., New York, 1903), I, 376.
18 Gladstone, speech in the House of Commons, Dec. 16, 1847.
19 Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, or the New Crusade (Collected Works, London, n.d. [1st ed., 1847]), p. 196. See below, p. 96.
20 Disraeli, speech in the House of Commons, Dec. 16, 1847.
21 On Disraeli’s situation at the time, see William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli (2 vol. ed., London, 1929), I, 894; Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), p. 260.
22 See below, chapter V.
23 Lord Ashley, speech in the House of Commons, Dec. 16, 1847.
24 John Stuart Mill, “The Attempt to Exclude Unbelievers from Parliament,” Daily News, March 26, 1849, in Mill, Newspaper Writings , ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto, 1986), IV, 1136–37 (in Collected Works, XXV).
25 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, London 1910), p. 201.
26 Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1888), p. 553 (diary, July 1, 1858).
27 Hodder, p. 632 (letter to Gladstone, Dec. 22, 1868).
28 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (New York, 2009), pp. 15–16.
29 Arthur P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (New York, 1910), I, 333 (letter to Rev. Julius Hare, May 12, 1834); II, 39 (to W. W. Hull, April 27, 1836).
30 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Eng., 1966 [published serially in 1867–8 and as a volume in 1869]), p. 142.
31 Matthew Arnold, pp. 13–14.
32 Matthew Arnold, p. 38.
33 Matthew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” Cornhill Magazine, Aug. 1863, in Essays Literary and Critical (London, 1907), p. 121.
34 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, chap. 34. Two other chapters, 62 and 63, have epigraphs from Heine.
IV. Fictional Heroes and Heroines
1 Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of AntiSemitism in England (Oxford, 2010), pp. 167, 151.
2 Lionel Trilling, “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” in Speaking of Literature and Society (New York, 1980), p. 68. (This essay was written in 1930 or 1931 but not published until 1978 in Commentary.)
3 A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford, 1980), p. 156.
4 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Penguin, London, 1986), pp. 405, 407.
5 Ivanhoe, p. 49.
6 Ivanhoe, pp. 521, 525.
7 Ivanhoe, p. 242.
8 Ivanhoe, p. 69.
9 Ivanhoe, p. 70.
10 Ivanhoe, p. 117.
11 Ivanhoe, p. 226.
12 Ivanhoe, pp. 246–7.
13 Ivanhoe, p. 201.
14 Ivanhoe, pp. 424–6.
15 Ivanhoe, pp. 435–6.
16 Ivanhoe, p. 518.
17 Ivanhoe, p. 300.
18 Ivanhoe, pp. 544–45.
19 Ivanhoe, p. 515.
20 Wilson, p. 156.
21 J. G. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott (New York, 1871), pp. 601–2; Tuchman, p. 81.
22 Quoted by Trilling, p. 73.
23 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, Or the New Generation (Collected Works, Longmans, Green, London [n.d.]), pp. viii-ix.
24 Coningsby, pp. 209, 213, 220.
25 Disraeli, Tancred, or the New Crusade (Collected Works, Longmans, Green, London [n.d.] p. 149.
26 Tancred, p. 40.
27 Tancred, pp. 54–5.
28 Tancred, pp. 122–5.
29 Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York, 1968), pp. 221–2.
30 Tancred, pp. 183–4. Some parts of the novel are almost straight historical narrative—e.g., pp. 344–50.
31 Tancred, p. 196.
32 Tancred, p. 262.
33 Tancred, p. 266.
34 Tancred, pp. 485–6.
35 See above, pp. 72–3.
36 Tancred, p. 427.
37 William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli (London, 1929), I, 864.
38 Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (4th ed., London, 1852 [1st ed., 1851]), pp. 482–508.
39 Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York, 1966), pp. 260–61.
40 Blake, p. 191.
41 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn., 1954–5, 1977–8), I, 246–7 (to John Sibree, Feb. 11, 1848). (Italics in original.)
42 Eliot Letters, IX, 282 (Edith Simcox’s Autobiography).
43 Daniel Deronda (New York, 1961), p. 388.
44 Daniel Deronda, pp. 373–5.
45 Daniel Deronda, pp. 400, 402.
46 Daniel Deronda, p. 473.
47 Daniel Deronda, pp. 498–500.
48 Daniel Deronda, p. 606.
49 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (New York, 2009), pp. 137–40.
50 Eliot Letters, VI, 238 (Journal, April 12, 1876).
51 Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York, 1992 [1st ed., 1979]), pp. 63–6. For a survey and analysis of this “post-colonialist” critique of Eliot, see Nancy Henry, George Eliot and the British Empire (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).
52 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York, 1948), pp. 79–125.
53 Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York, 1972), p. 101.
54 Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), p. 22.
55 Trilling, pp. 73–6.
56 Daniel Deronda, p. 284.
57 George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (Iowa Cit
y, 1994), pp. 146–52.
58 Impressions, pp. 162–4.
59 R. H. Horne defended Dickens against this charge in A New Spirit of the Age (New York, 1844), p. 18. See also Amy Cruse, The Victorians and their Reading (Boston, 1936), p. 152.
60 The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Diaries, 1832–59, ed. Harry Stone (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), I, 13 (March 30, 1850).
61 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, 1998), X, 269 (n. 6). (Eliza Davis to Dickens, June 22, 1863; Dickens’s reply, July 10, 1863).
62 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York, 1960), pp. 278ff.
63 Dickens Letters, X, 454 (n.1). (Davis to Dickens, Nov. 13, 1864; Dickens’s reply, Nov. 16, 1864.)
64 Trilling, p. 71. An excellent study of this subject is the essay by Harry Stone, “Dickens and the Jews,” Victorian Studies, March 1959. On this episode in particular see Edgar Johnson, “Dickens, Fagin, and Mr. Riah,” Commentary, Jan. 1950.
65 Shirley Robin Letwin, The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 74.
66 Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (Oxford, 1951), II, 92–3, 277, 263, 362.
67 John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Penguin ed., London, 1956), p. 17.
68 Thirty-Nine Steps, p. 46. I am among those who quoted and misinterpreted this passage as evidence of Buchan’s antisemitism. (“John Buchan: An Untimely Appreciation,” in The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling [Chicago, 2006], p. 144.) The essay originally appeared in Encounter, Sept., 1960, and was criticized by some because it portrayed Buchan as an antisemite, and by others because it vindicated him on that charge. (My title, an “appreciation,” suggests the latter.)
69 Thirty-Nine Steps, p. 90.
70 Thirty-Nine Steps, p. 13.
71 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (London, 1965), p. 156.
72 Buchan, The Three Hostages (Penguin ed., London, 1953), pp. 17, 25.
73 Smith, pp. 316–17.
74 Private letter to me by a participant in the ceremonies.
75 Smith, p. 469.
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