History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Sometimes it is not clear whether a Jew is intended in a fictional character. Jews were often associated, in Victorian times, with dingy red hair, and some of the more repellent characters possess this attribute: Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, for example; or the Rev. Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Trollope has sometimes been criticized for portraying bad Jews. He certainly disliked Disraeli (who figures as Mr Daubeney in his political novels). But then so did many other people, including Dickens and Thackeray, not necessarily for racial reasons; and Disraeli returned the compliment, caricaturing both Dickens and Thackeray in his last novel, Endymion (1881). Trollope wrote a vast number of novels and portrayed innumerable foreigners (he was the most widely travelled of the nineteenth-century novelists) but a careful reading does not suggest a pattern of prejudice against Jews. Madame Max Goesler, who figures in various of his political novels, is a woman of the highest honour. Anton Trendellsohn, in Nina Balataka (1865), is another of Trollope’s sympathetic Jews. Even Auguste Melmotte, the larger-than-life financial villain of The Way We Live Now (1875), is not actually described as Jewish. Trollope’s point was that his origins were obscure. But he was evidently based on Albert Grant, born Abraham Gotheimer in Dublin in 1831, the son of a pedlar. This man became MP for Kidderminster, developed Leicester Square, was general manager of the Credit Foncier and Credit Mobilier of London, and floated fraudulent companies, dying a pauper in 1899.134

  The Melmotte case was important, however, because it coincided with a watershed in attitudes to Jews. Until the 1870s, educated people in Britain tended to be philosemitic. But during the decade, which was marked by a general economic downturn and many individual financial disasters, there was a subtle change. From the mid-1870s, Jews were associated in many minds with large-scale City manipulation. The same change of mood was observable on the Continent, especially in France, Germany and Austria. But there it was merely an intensification of existing anti-Semitic feelings. In Britain it was new. It distressed the philosemites and inspired some of them to consider ways of tackling what they, too, now recognized as the ‘Jewish problem’. One such was the archaeologist Sir Charles Warren, one of the first to excavate the Temple Wall of Jerusalem. In 1875, the same year Melmotte made his appearance, Warren published The Land of Promise: or, Turkey’s Guarantee. Largely with British help, the number of Jews in the Holy Land had slowly risen, passing the 10,000-mark in the 1840s. Warren now proposed, rather on Disraelian lines, that a British chartered company should be created to colonize Palestine (in return for taking on part of Turkey’s national debt), ‘with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew, pure and simple, who is eventually to occupy and govern this country’. In Warren’s view large-scale finance and systematic and scientific development could eventually enable the country to support fifteen million people.

  In the spring of the same year, Warren’s voice was joined by a far more influential one in Blackwood’s, which began serialization of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda. This book is little read now and was accounted an artistic failure even at the time. But in terms of its practical effects it was probably the most influential novel of the nineteenth century. It was another important piece of the Zionist jigsaw puzzle fitted into place. George Eliot had been passionately interested in the Jews ever since, aged seventeen, she read Josephus. She was immensely learned in Biblical commentary and criticism. She translated Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu and Spinoza. Anti-Semitic jokes revolted her. She could not decide whether Christian hostility to Jews was ‘more impious or more stupid’. In 1866 she met a learned Jew, Emmanuel Deutsch, a book-cataloguer in the British Museum, who had just published a famous article in the Quarterly Review, introducing the Talmud to Christian readers and seeking to build a bridge between the two religions. He gave her lessons in Hebrew. In 1869 he visited Palestine and became a fervent Zionist. ‘The East!’ he wrote from Jerusalem, ‘all my wild yearnings fulfilled at last!’135 Deutsch died of cancer, but George Eliot visited him frequently during his illness and was captured by his enthusiasm. In the early 1870s she began an immense course of reading and visits to synagogues with a view to creating a Jewish novel. She felt, she wrote, ‘the urge to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to…towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious or moral sentiment’.136

  The writing and serialization of the novel, completed in 1876, were a tremendous emotional experience for her. She finished it ‘with tears in my eyes’. The mentor of the book, the Zionist ideologue, is Mordecai, the dying scholar, based on Deutsch, ‘a man steeped in poverty and obscurity, weakened by disease, consciously within the shadow of advancing death, but living an intense life in an invisible past and future’. Through the lips of Deutsch-Mordecai, George Eliot voiced her Zionist hopes: ‘The world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West.’ This famous passage later acquired tragic ironies for the generation of 1914 and still more for our own; but at the time it voiced a sentiment universal among philosemitic intellectuals that rebuilding Zion would pacify and civilize a barbarous area. The sentiment also demanded a Messiah-figure, as in Tancred. George Eliot supplied him in the hero of the novel, Daniel Deronda, who is designated by Mordecai. At the end of the story Daniel marries Mirah and prepares to go to the East to restore ‘a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe’.

  George Eliot’s sales were worldwide and immense. Of all the nineteenth-century novelists, she was the one most respected by intellectuals, on the Continent and in North America as well as in Britain. To all of them, and especially to hundreds of thousands of assimilated Jews, the story presented, for the first time, the possibility of a return to Zion. One of the very few who did not read it was Disraeli. Asked if he had done so, he replied: ‘When I want to read a novel, I write one.’ But all the rest did. In New York, it exhilarated the young Emma Lazarus. In his article on ‘Zionism’ in the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), Lucien Wolf was to write that the novel ‘gave the Jewish national spirit the strongest stimulus it had experienced since the appearance of Shabbetai Zevi’.137 The book was particularly widely read in political circles. To the generation of Arthur Balfour, who first met George Eliot in 1877, the year after publication, it was their introduction to the Jewish issue.138 But what everyone wanted to know was: who would be the real Daniel Deronda? When would he emerge? It was, indeed, like waiting for the Messiah.

  The real Daniel Deronda emerged on 5 January 1895, in the freezing cold courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris. The occasion was the public degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew serving on the French army general staff, who had been accused, tried and convicted—on what subsequently emerged to be fabricated evidence—of handing secrets to the Germans. Watching the ceremony, one of the few journalists allowed to attend, was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Vienna liberal daily, Neue Freie Presse. Two weeks before he had attended the courtroom and heard Dreyfus pronounced guilty. Now he stood by as Dreyfus was brought before General Darras, who shouted: ‘Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!’ Immediately, in a loud voice, Dreyfus shouted: ‘Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonoured! Long live France—long live the Army!’ A senior non-commissioned officer cut off Dreyfus’ badges and buttons. He took out his sword and broke it across his knee. The prisoner was marched round the courtyard, still shouting that he was innocent. An immense and excited crowd, waiting
outside, heard his cries and began to whistle and chant slogans. When Herzl left the building, it was beginning to scream ‘Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!’139 Less than six months later, Herzl had completed the draft of the book which would set in motion modern Zionism, Der Judenstaat.

  The Dreyfus case and the conversion of Herzl to Zionism both testify to significant developments in Jewish history. They are two more pieces of the jigsaw and both must be examined in detail. In the first place, the Dreyfus affair, and the dark emotions it revealed, brought to a decisive end an epoch of illusion in which assimilated western Jews had optimistically assumed that the process of their acceptance in European society was well under way and would shortly be completed. In 1871 Graetz had concluded the eleventh and final volume of his History of the Jewish People almost on a note of triumph: ‘Happier than any of my predecessors, I may conclude my history with the joyous feeling that in the civilized world the Jewish tribe has found at last not only justice and freedom but also a certain recognition. It now finally has unlimited freedom to develop its talents not due to mercy, but as a right acquired through thousandfold suffering.’

  Nowhere was this feeling of growing security stronger than in France. There, Jews enjoyed the libertarian legacy of the 1789 Revolution. They were few in number. Ironically, France’s defeat in 1870, which cost her Alsace-Lorraine, had removed her largest and least popular colony of Alsatian, German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. At the time of the Dreyfus case Jews in France numbered no more than 86,000 out of a total population of nearly forty million.140 The community was administered through the government-sponsored Consistoire Central, under the Ministère des Cultes, which laid down rules for the elections of rabbis, fixed and contributed to their salaries. So French Judaism had some of the characteristics of a state church—and behaved like one. The ‘Prayer for France’ in its prayer-book read: ‘Almighty protector of Israel and humanity, if of all religions ours is the most dear to You, because it is Your own handiwork, France is of all countries the one which You seem to prefer, because it is the most worthy of You.’ It ended: ‘Let [France] not keep this monopoly of tolerance and of justice for all, a monopoly as humiliating for other states as it is glorious for her. Let her find many imitators, and as she imposes on the world her tastes and her language, the products of her literature and her arts, let her also impose her principles, which it goes without saying are more important and more necessary.’141

  When J.-H. Dreyfus was installed as Grand Rabbi of Paris in 1891 his theme was the links between ‘the French genius’ and ‘the fundamental spirit of Judaism’, especially ‘the moral affinities between the two races’, the French being ‘this elect people of modern times’. Rabbi Kahn of Nîmes called the French Revolution ‘our flight from Egypt…our modern Passover’. Rabbi Herrmann of Rheims said France was ‘designated by Him to direct the destinies of humanity…to spread throughout the world the great and beautiful ideas of justice, equality and fraternity which had formerly been the exclusive patrimony of Israel’. Rather like Reform Judaism in America, French Judaism did everything in its power to blend into the local religious landscape. Rabbis dressed almost like Catholic priests. They even considered holding the Sabbath services on Sunday. They had ceremonies for children very similar to baptisms and First Communions. Flowers on coffins, collection-plates, visits to the bedsides of the dying, singing, organs, sermons—all were modelled on Christian practice. It was estimated that there were only 500 true Orthodox Jews in the entire country.

  The Jewish laity combined an equally low profile with unctuous patriotism. They competed energetically for the glittering prizes of the French state: admissions to the grandes écoles, the concours, the Academie, the Légion d’Honneur. ‘Frenchmen by country and institutions,’ wrote Léon Halévy, ‘it is necessary that all [French Jews] become so by customs and language…that for them the name of Jew become accessory, and the name of Frenchman principal.’142 ‘Let there be neither Jews nor Christians,’ wrote Ernest Crémieu-Foa, ‘except at the hour of prayer for those who pray!’ James Darmesteter, who had risen to be director of the École des Hautes Études, argued in gratitude that Israelite and French cultures were essentially the same. The French Revolution had expressed the ideology of Judaism, and these two chosen peoples with their profound belief in progress would bring about the Messianic Age which would take the form of ‘the terrestrial triumph of justice in humanity’. Such men argued that anti-Semitism was an alien German import, which could never gain anything but a superficial hearing in France.

  That, alas, was far from correct. The nineteenth century was the great age of pseudo-scientific racial theories and the French played their full part in it. It is true that German philologists, exploring the origins of language, first distinguished between the Aryan or Indo-European peoples, with their roots in Sanskrit, and the Semitic peoples, with their roots in the Hebraic group of languages. But it was the French who popularized these notions, in the process confusing language and race. In 1853 the French diplomat Comte Joseph de Gobineau (1816-82) published his notorious Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which distinguished between Aryan virtue and Semitic (and Latin) degeneration. This became the handbook of the German anti-Semites and had an enormous influence on, for example, Richard Wagner. The opinionated polymath Ernst Renan (1823-92) was doing the same for the French, with his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, which won the Prix Volnay in 1847, and still more his Vie de Jésus (1863), the most successful book published in France during the entire century, read with smug satisfaction by anti-clericals and trembling guilt by Catholics. He believed that ‘the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, represents an inferior level of human nature’; and his portrait of Jesus, the humanist hero, was dramatic precisely because it showed him ‘immune to almost all the defects of his race…whose dominant quality was, indeed, limitless delicacy’. Renan’s theory of Jewish racial inferiority was skilfully married to Toussenel’s theory of Jewish financial skulduggery by Edouard Drumont to produce his massive two-volume La France juive (1886), the most brilliantly written and plausible of all anti-Semitic studies. In a short time it ran into over a hundred editions and enabled him to found the Anti-Semitic League and his vicious daily paper, La Libre Parole (1889).

  Hence the first layer of French anti-Semitism was pseudo-scientific. The second was envy. If the Jews were racially inferior, why were they so successful? Because they cheated and conspired. Jewish children of the haute bourgeoisie tended to carry off all the prizes. Years later, Julien Benda was to write: ‘The triumph of the Benda brothers at the concours général appeared to me one of the essential sources of the anti-Semitism we had to bear fifteen years later. Whether the Jews realized it or not, such success was felt by other French people as an act of violence.’143 The immensely clever Reinach brothers, the lawyer-politician Joseph (1856-1921), the archaeologist Solomon (1858-1932) and the classicist Théodore (1860-1928), were another trio of prize-winning prodigies. They beat the French at their own academic-cultural game every time. Then, in 1892, the Panama scandal broke, an immense labyrinth of financial manipulation and fraud, with their uncle Baron Jacques de Reinach right at the middle of it. His mysterious death, or suicide, merely added to the uproar, and to the angry satisfaction of the Jew-baiters-so they cheated all along! The Union Générale scandal in 1882, the Comptoire d’Escompte scandal in 1889—both involving Jews—were merely curtain-raisers to this complex crime, which seemed to confirm the financial conspiracy theories outlined in Drumont’s book and gave Le Libre Parole’s ‘investigative journalists’ the chance to break a new anti-Jewish story almost daily. After London, Paris was the centre of European finance and its bankers’ roll-call was studded with Jewish names: Deutsch, Bamberger, Heine, Lippmann, Pereire, Ephrussi, Stern, Bischoffsheim, Hirsch and Reinach (of course)—that would do to be going on with!144

  There was a third, clerical, layer of French anti-Semitism. The official Roman Catho
lic hierarchy were in a confused state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, locked in endless battles with the French state. They had little control over their clergy, still less over the religious orders, especially the Assumptionists, chosen and backed by the papacy to ‘re-Christianize France’ by organizing mass pilgrimages to Rome and new miracle centres such as Lourdes. The Assumptionists were founded in 1847 and were the first order to bring the methods of big business to religious revivalism. They hired special trains to assemble vast crowds of people. They founded an immensely successful publishing house, La Bonne Presse, and a mass-circulation daily, La Croix (1883).145 Like the Dominican and Franciscan friars before them, whom they resembled in certain ways, they needed an enemy. They produced three, all interconnected: Protestants, freemasons, Jews. As an ultra-Catholic conspiracy theory, the plots of the freemasons long antedated ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism, going back at least to 1789 in France. Much of masonic lore and ritual could be, and was, linked to Jewish kabbalah, in scores of Catholic pamphlets and books. And, since the Assumptionists believed that many Protestants had been secret Jews and marranos ever since the sixteenth century, it was not hard to tie all together in a satanic trio. When the Catholic banking organization Union Générale collapsed in 1882, the Assumptionists contended that it was the work of this conspiracy. They founded their paper the next year to fight it; and the year after, Leo XIII, their protector, formally condemned freemasonry as the work of the devil. La Croix pledged itself to fight ‘the trio of hate…which includes, one, Protestantism which wants to destroy Catholicism, the soul of France; Judaism which wants to rob her national wealth, the body of France; freemasonry, the natural compound of the other two, which wants at the same time to demolish the body and the soul of France!’146