History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  To intellectuals in Christian society, the question posed by the enlightenment was really: how large a part, if any, should God play in an increasingly secular culture? To Jews, the question was rather: what part, if any, should secular knowledge play in the culture of God? They were still enfolded in the medieval vision of a total religious society. It is true that Maimonides had argued strongly in favour of admitting secular science and had demonstrated how completely it could be reconciled to the Torah. But his argument had failed to convince most Jews. Even a relatively moderate man like the Maharal of Prague had attacked Rossi precisely for bringing secular criteria to bear on religious matters.100 A few Jews, for instance, attended the medical school in Padua. But they turned their back on the world outside the Torah the moment they re-entered the ghetto in the evening, as indeed did Jewish men of business. Of course many went out into the world never to return; but that had always happened. What the awesome example of Spinoza had shown, to the satisfaction of most Jews, was that a man could not drink at the well of gentile knowledge without deadly risk of poisoning his Judaic life. So the ghetto remained not merely a social but an intellectual universe on its own.

  By the mid-eighteenth century the results were pitifully apparent to all. As long ago as the Tortosa dispute, early in the fifteenth century, the Jewish intelligentsia had been made to seem backward and obscurantist. Now, more than 300 years later, the Jews appeared to educated Christians—or even uneducated ones—figures of contempt and derision, dressed in funny clothes, imprisoned in ancient and ludicrous superstitions, as remote and isolated from modern society as one of their lost tribes. The gentiles knew nothing, and cared less, about Jewish scholarship. Like the ancient Greeks before them, they were not even aware it existed. For Christian Europe there had always been a ‘Jewish problem’. In the Middle Ages it had been: how to prevent this subversive minority from contaminating religious truth and social order? No fear of that now. For gentile intellectuals, at least, the problem was now rather: how, in common humanity, to rescue this pathetic people from their ignorance and darkness.

  In 1749 the young Protestant dramatist Gotthold Lessing put on a one-act play, Die Juden, which for almost the first time in European literature presented a Jew as a refined, rational human being. It was a gesture of tolerance, warmly reciprocated by Lessing’s exact contemporary, a Dessau Jew called Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86). The two men met and became friends, and the brilliant playwright introduced the Jew into literary society. Mendelssohn suffered from curvature of the spine, which made him retiring, patient, modest. But he had formidable energy. He had been well educated by the local rabbi, trained as a bookkeeper and remained a merchant all his life. But his powers of reading were impressive and he acquired a great range of secular knowledge. With Lessing’s help he began to publish his philosophical writings. Frederick the Great gave him ‘right of residence’ in Berlin. His conversation was much admired and he became a figure in the salons.101 He was ten years younger than the gaon, nearly thirty years younger than the Besht, but seemed divided from both by centuries. The fiery Talmud scholar; the mystic-enthusiast; the urbane rationalist—the whole of modern Jewry was to be written round these three archetypes!

  Initially Mendelssohn laid no claim to a specific Jewish stake in the enlightenment; he simply wanted to enjoy it. But he was driven to publicize his Jewish convictions by the ignorance and disparagement of Judaism he encountered everywhere in the gentile world. The traditional gentile world said: keep the Jews under or expel them. The enlightened gentile world said: how can we best assist these poor Jews to stop being Jewish? Mendelssohn replied: let us share a common culture, but allow us Jews to remain Jewish. In 1767 he published Phaedon, an inquiry into the immortality of the soul modelled on the Platonic dialogue. At a time when cultured Germans still usually wrote in Latin or French, and Jews in Hebrew or Yiddish, Mendelssohn followed Lessing in striving to make German the language of intellectual discourse and to exploit its magnificent resources. He wrote it with great elegance and decked his text with classical, rather than Biblical, allusions—the mark of the maskil. The book was well received in the gentile world, but in a manner Mendelssohn found distressing. Even his own French translator condescendingly declared (1772) that it was a remarkable work considering it was written by one ‘born and raised in a nation which stagnates in vulgar ignorance’.102 A clever young Swiss pastor, Johan Caspar Lavater, praised its accomplishments and wrote that the author was obviously ready for conversion—he challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public.

  Thus Mendelssohn was driven, despite himself, into a rationalist defence of Judaism; or, more precisely, into a demonstration of how Jews, while remaining attached to the essentials of their faith, could become part of a general European culture. His work took many forms. He translated the Pentateuch into German. He tried to foster the study of Hebrew among German Jews, as opposed to Yiddish, which he deplored as the dialect of vulgar immorality. As his prestige increased, he found himself fighting the battles of local Jewish communities against gentile authority. He opposed the expulsion of the Jews from Dresden and new anti-Semitic laws in Switzerland. He refuted in detail the common accusation that Jewish prayers were anti-Christian. For the benefit of secular authority, he explained the Jewish laws of matrimony and oaths. But while on the one hand he presented Judaism to the outside world in its best possible light, he sought on the other to encourage changes to rid it of its unacceptable face. He detested the institution of the herem, especially in the light of the witch-hunt against Shabbeteans which took place in Altona in the 1750s. He took the view that whereas the state was a compulsory society, based on social contract, all churches were voluntary, based on conviction. A man should not be compelled to belong to one, nor expelled from one against his will.103 He thought it best to end separate Jewish jurisdiction and opposed those gentile liberals who wanted the state to give backing to Jewish courts. He called for the end of all persecution and discrimination against Jews, and said he believed this would come as reason triumphed. But equally he thought that Jews must abandon those habits and practices which limited reasonable human freedom and particularly freedom of thought.

  Mendelssohn was walking a tightrope. He was terrified of treading down Spinoza’s road and became upset if comparisons were made. He was scared of bringing down Christian wrath if, in his public controversies, his defence of Judaism involved unacceptable criticism of Christianity. In arguing with Lavater he pointed out that it was dangerous to dispute with the creed of the overwhelming majority, adding: ‘I am a member of an oppressed people.’ In fact he believed that Christianity was far more irrational than Judaism. At all times he was anxious to defend the bridge with the enlightenment while keeping in contact with the bulk of believing Jews. So he sometimes tried to be all things to all men. It is difficult to present a summary of his views without making them seem confused. He followed Maimonides in arguing that the truths of religion could be proved by reason. But whereas Maimonides wanted rational truth reinforced by Revelation, Mendelssohn wanted Revelation dispensed with. Judaism was not revealed religion but revealed law: it was a historical fact that Moses received the Law at Sinai, and that Law was the means whereby the Jewish people achieved spiritual happiness. The truth did not need miracles to validate it. ‘A wise man’, he wrote, ‘whom the arguments of true philosophy have convinced of the existence of a supreme deity, is much more impressed by a natural event, whose connections with the whole he can partly discern, than by a miracle’ (notebook entry, 16 March 1753).104 However, to prove the existence of God Mendelssohn relied on the old metaphysics: the a priori or ontological proof and the a posteriori or cosmological. Both were demolished, in the general opinion, by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), published in Mendelssohn’s last decade.

  As an apologist for Jewish religion, then, Mendelssohn was not very successful. The truth is, there was much of it in which he simply did not believe: the idea of the chosen people, the mission
to humanity, the Promised Land. He seems to have thought that Judaism was an appropriate creed for a particular people, which should be privately practised in as rational a manner as possible. The idea that the whole of a culture could be contained in the Torah was to him absurd. The Jew should worship at home and then, when he went out into the world, participate in the general European culture. But the logic of this was that each Jew would belong to the culture of the people among whom he happened to live. So Jewry, which had kept its global unity for 1,500 years despite appalling ill-treatment, would gradually dissolve, except as a private, confessional faith. That was why the great modern apologist for Judaism, Yechezkel Kaufmann (1889-1963), called Mendelssohn ‘the Jewish Luther’—he cut the faith and the people apart.105

  But Mendelssohn does not seem to have appreciated the logic of his rejection of Torah-culture. The idea that the Jews, absorbed into ‘the culture of the nations’, would gradually lose belief in a Jewish God too, would have distressed him. It is true he argued that Judaism and Christianity could come together, if the latter were stripped of its irrationalities. But he hated the idea of Jews converting to Christianity in order to emancipate themselves. He encouraged the Prussian official, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, to publish his well-meaning but condescending plea for Jewish liberties, On the Improvement of the Jews as Citizens (1781), but found its tone unsatisfactory. In effect, Dohm was saying: the Jews are very objectionable people but not intrinsically bad; no worse, anyway, than Christian ill-treatment and their own superstitious religion have made them. The Jews had ‘an exaggerated tendency [to seek] gain in every way, a love of usury’. These ‘defects’ were aggravated ‘by their self-imposed segregation owing to their religious precepts as well as rabbinical sophistry’. From these followed ‘the breaking of the laws of the state restricting trade, the import and export of prohibited wares, the forgery of money and precious metals’. Dohm advocated state reforms ‘by which they can be cured of this corruption so as to become better people and more useful citizens’.106 But the implication, of course, was that Jewish religion would have to undergo radical changes too.

  Hence Mendelssohn found it necessary to clarify his attitude to the Jews’ role in society in Jerusalem, or upon Religious Power and Judaism (1783). He defended Judaism as an undogmatic religion. It gave a man precepts, a code of living, but did not seek to control his thoughts. ‘Faith accepts no commands,’ he wrote, ‘it accepts only what comes to it by way of reasoned conviction.’ To be happy, men needed to seek and find truth. Truth had therefore to be accessible to people of all races and creeds. Judaism was not the only agent by which God revealed the truth. All men, Jews included, must be allowed to seek it: ‘Let every man who does not disturb the public welfare, who obeys the law, acts righteously towards you and his fellow man, be allowed to speak as he thinks, to pray to God after his own fashion or after that of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it.’ This was a formula for securing civilized treatment of Jews, but it was not Judaism. In fact in religious terms it was a formula for natural religion and natural ethics, to which of course the Jews would make a contribution, but nothing more. Gone, irrecoverably, was the thunder of Moses.

  Moreover, if the Jews, by accepting the enlightenment, were to forfeit the particular claims of Judaism, it was by no means certain that they would get a quiet life in return. The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States, where the notions of the enlightenment rested on a solid basis of English parliamentarianism and tolerant religious pluralism. The very year Mendelssohn was writing Jerusalem, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1782), argued that the existence of a variety of sensible, ethical religions was the best guarantee of material and spiritual progress, and of human freedom. Mendelssohn’s dualistic solution to ‘the Jewish problem’, later succinctly described by the poet Judah Leib Gordon as ‘a Jew in his tent and a man abroad’, fitted very well into American ideas of religion. Like the population as a whole, a majority of American Jews supported the independence movement, though some were loyalist and some neutral. Others were prominent in the struggle. At the public feast given in Philadelphia in 1789 to celebrate the new constitution, there was a special table where the food conformed to Jewish dietary laws.107

  The Jews had something to celebrate. In the light of their history, they stood to gain more from the new American constitution than any other group—the separation of church and state, general liberty of conscience and not least the end of all religious tests in appointments. The constitution worked, too, in giving liberties to the Jews, though feet were dragged in some states. In Protestant North Carolina the last Jewish disabilities, admittedly minor ones, did not vanish until 1868. But the Jew felt free in the United States; even better, he felt valued. The fact that he practised his faith assiduously and was a staunch member of synagogue, far from being a handicap, as in Europe, was a ticket to respectability in the United States, where all conventional forms of piety were esteemed as pillars of society. Jews did not find a new Zion in America, but at last they found a permanent resting-place and a home.

  In Europe, the enlightenment brought them hopes which proved illusions, and opportunities which turned into a new set of problems. In some areas the rule of reason did not operate at all. By the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), the Russian empire, which had hitherto refused to admit Jews at all, acquired a million of them as a result of its territorial greed. It now gave them rights of residence but only within a Pale of Settlement, where their numbers, poverty and disabilities all increased rapidly. In Italy, too, at any rate in the papal states, the position of the Jews also deteriorated under the anti-Semitic pope Pius VI (1775-99) whose Edict on the Jews, published right at the start of his long reign, led directly to forced baptisms. Jews were obliged by law to listen to contemptuous and insulting sermons, and if some sort of baptismal ceremony had been performed over a Jewish child—perhaps in secret by a Catholic maidservant—the church could claim possession later. The person was then taken to the House of Catechumens, where his consent was required (if an adult), and he might give it just to get out. Ferrara, once liberal to Jews, was now worse than Rome. As late as 1817 the little daughter of Angelo Ancona was forcibly taken away from her parents by armed men employed by the archbishop’s tribunal, on the grounds that five years before, aged two months, she had been privately baptized by her nurse, later dismissed for dishonesty. The case led to a reign of terror in the Ferrara ghetto.108

  States which considered themselves more enlightened were only marginally better. The Empress Maria Theresa of Austria actually expelled the Jews from Prague as late as 1744-5, though they were readmitted three years later. Frederick the Great, despite his supposed personal support for the enlightenment, enacted a Jewish law in 1750 which distinguished between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ Jews. The latter had no hereditary rights of residence and even the former’s descended only to one child. Jews had to pay ‘protection’ taxes and fines in lieu of military services and had to make compulsory purchases of state products. They were confined to a limited range of trades and professions. The first genuine reforms in central Europe were introduced by Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, from 1781 onwards, and even they were a mixed blessing. He abolished the special poll-tax and yellow badge, the ban on Jews attending universities and some trade restrictions. On the other hand, he prohibited Yiddish and Hebrew in business and public records, scrapped rabbinical jurisdictions and introduced military service for Jews. Jews were still under residence restrictions in Vienna and other places, and their new rights were often denied by hostile bureaucrats.

  Indeed, the impact of these Jew-reforms, Judenreformen, and Edicts of Toleration, Toleranzpatent, was often spoilt by the spirit in which they were administered by bitterly hostile petty officials who feared that Jews would soon be after their jobs. For instance, an Austrian law of 1787 compelled Jews to adopt German-sounding first and family names. While Sephard
i Jews had long since adopted the Spanish practice of family names, the Ashkenazis had been very conservative, still following the antique custom of using their personal, plus father’s personal, name, and in the Hebrew-Yiddish form—Yaakov ben Yitzhak, for example. Hebrew-sounding names were now usually forbidden and the bureaucrats produced lists of ‘acceptable’ names. Bribes were necessary to secure ‘nice’ family names, derived from flowers or precious stones: Lilienthal, Edelstein, Diamant, Saphir, Rosenthal. Two very expensive names were Kluger (wise) and Fröhlich (happy). Most Jews were brutally lumped by bored officials into four categories and named accordingly: Weiss (white), Schwartz (black), Gross (big) and Klein (little). Many poorer Jews had unpleasant names foisted on them by malignant clerks: Glagenstrick (gallow’s rope), Eselkopf (donkey’s head), Taschengregger (pick-pocket), Schmalz (grease), Borgenicht (don’t borrow), for example. Jews of priestly or levitical descent, who could claim names like Cohen, Kahn, Katz, Levi, were forced to Germanize them: Katzman, Cohnstein, Aronstein, Levinthal and so on. A large group were given places of origin: Brody, Epstein, Ginzberg, Landau, Shapiro (Speyer), Dreyfus (Trier), Horowitz and Posner.109 The pain of this humiliating procedure was not lessened by the knowledge that the government’s main object in imposing it was to make Jews easier to tax and conscript.

  The internal contradictions of the so-called enlightened despots were perfectly illustrated by Jewish policy during the last years of the ancien régime in France. In January 1784 Louis XVI abolished the poll-tax on Jews; six months later, the Jews of Alsace were subjected to a ‘reform’ which curbed the rights of Jews to lend money and trade in cattle and grain, forced them to seek crown permission before marrying, and ordered a census so that those without residence qualification could be expelled.110 This directly reflected anti-Jewish feeling in eastern France, where Ashkenazi Jews were now very numerous and much hated at a popular level.