For many humanist Jews, who did not attend synagogue and abhorred the Talmud, Judaism had little appeal as a religion. Was not the logical outcome of assimilation the conversion to the majority religion of the host nation, whether Catholic or Protestant? Such reasoning led half of the Jews of Berlin to convert to Christianity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, according to the estimate of Heinrich Graetz. Very few of these conversions obeyed strictly religious motivations. Some seem to have had social integration as their main objective, as exemplified by those Jews who had their children baptized while remaining themselves Jews. Others may have been motivated by a sincere love of European culture. But in many cases these conversions were followed by disillusionment—and a reinforcement of the racial conception of Jewishness.
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is the most famous example. Converted to Lutheranism in 1825, he conceived of baptism as the “entrance ticket to European civilization.” But he complained of still being considered a Jew by the Germans (and so preferred living in France, where he was regarded as German). Just a few years after his conversion, his writings exhibited a very negative attitude toward Christianity, described as “a gloomy, sanguinary religion for criminals” that repressed sensuality. At the end of his life he regretted his baptism, which had brought him no benefit, and stated in his final book Romanzero: “I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have not left it.”204
It is therefore not surprising that in the eyes of many non- Jewish Europeans, these Jewish converts still appeared to be crypto-Jews; they continued to be called Taufjuden (“baptized Jews”) in Germany. Even the new strictly religious definition of “Jews” was seen as a subtle form of crypto-Judaism, because in practice, Jews retained a solidarity that went beyond that of Christians and seemed to outweigh their status as citizens of their host nation. Endogamy, in particular, remained very strong among the rich Jewish bourgeoisie, whose family bonds were intertwined with commercial ties. Judeophobia fed on this sociological reality, and, in a vicious circle of misunderstanding, reinforced the feeling among Jews that their efforts to assimilate were in vain.
To all these factors must be added the awakening of nationalism on the ruins of the Napoleonic empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century, religion tended to give way again to ethnicity (race, the people) in the definition of Jewishness. Moritz Hess, after twenty years of efforts to assimilate (and a marriage with a non-Jew) underwent a true conversion. He changed his name to Moses and published Rome and Jerusalem (1862). The assimilation that he had previously believed in now appeared to him as a way of lying to oneself, while reconnecting with his “Jewish nationality” meant rediscovering an unalterable truth: “A thought which I believed to be buried forever in my heart, has been revived in me anew. It is the thought of my nationality, which is inseparably connected with the ancestral heritage and the memories of the Holy Land, the Eternal City.” According to Hess, the efforts of the Jews to merge with a nationality other than their own are doomed to failure. “We shall always remain strangers among the nations,” and “the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells.” For “the Jews are something more than mere ‘followers of a religion,’ namely, they are a race brotherhood, a nation.”205 Hess was influenced by Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews (published in German in 1853), and in turn influenced the Austro-Hungarian Theodor Herzl, whose Jewish State (1896) would become the Zionist manifesto. The movement in favor of a land for the Jews met the movement aimed at resurrecting the Hebrew language, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, which became the second pillar of the Zionist project.
Officially, the reformed rabbis were anti-Zionists. On the occasion of their 1885 Pittsburgh Conference, they issued the following statement: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religion community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor the restoration of a sacrificial worship under the Sons of Aaron, or of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State.”206 Yet this theoretical rejection of nationalism was largely eclipsed by a very widespread messianic theory in Reform Judaism, whose spokesman was the famous German-American rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. A star of the Pittsburgh Conference, Kohler argued that by renouncing the expectation of an individual Messiah, “Reform Judaism has thus accepted the belief that Israel, the suffering Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the nations.”207 One can see in this neo-messianism a form of super-nationalism through which Reform Judaism contributed, paradoxically, to the rise of the very Zionism that it claimed to disavow.
It must be emphasized that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Jews living in Germany for many generations remained indifferent to the Zionist call, and that assimilation continued unabated. This is why one might think that the “Jewish question” would have been resolved, in the long run, by the complete assimilation of the majority of Western European Jews, had it not been for a great upheaval in this community: the emergence on the historical stage of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. Their immigration began in Germany and the Netherlands after the partition of Poland in 1772, expanded throughout the nineteenth century, and became massive in 1880. Until then, the Jews of Western Europe, of Hispanic descent (Sephardim) for the most part, were almost unaware of the existence of millions of Polish and Russian Jews. They found it difficult to adjust to the influx of these extremely poor Jews of Talmudic culture, Yiddish-speaking, living in isolation, practicing backward customs, and so numerous that within a century, they would supplant the Sephardim. These Ashkenazi Jews from the shtetl of Eastern European Yiddishland had, for generations, been considered foreigners in their host nation, and even as a state within the state, subject to their own laws and representatives. It was these Ashkenazi immigrants who reversed assimilationism, stimulating a new movement of contraction toward ethnic-racial identity. After Herzl’s death in 1905 and even at the Zionist Congress in 1903, they took over the Zionist movement.
Chapter 6
THE IMPERIAL MATRIX
“Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you.”
Isaiah 45:1–5
The Two Sides of Albion
The influence of the Marranos in England began under Henry VIII (1509–1547). It initially coincided with that of the Venetians, who, in the 1530s, gained the upper hand over the king’s government by heavily indebting it. The moneylenders also played a crucial role in Henry’s matrimonial life, favoring his divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. The rupture of the king’s marriage foreshadowed that of the Spain-England alliance he had sealed, as well as his schism with the Catholic Church. Francesco Zorzi, a Franciscan monk from Venice, conversant in Hebrew and a collector of rabbinical and kabbalistic works, advised Henry VIII in his request for a divorce between 1527 and 1533. Another influential advisor was Thomas Cromwell, an obscure adventurer who, after serving rich merchants in Venice, returned to England, managed important affairs for the Church, and was elected to Parliament in 1523, becoming “chief minister” in 1532. Having gained the confidence of Henry VIII, he encouraged him to become the new Constantine by founding the Anglican Church, then became his business agent for the confiscation of church property, which he largely diverted for his own profit. Thomas Cromwell was surely a creature of the Venetian Marranos, if he was not a Marrano himself.
Under Henry VIII, England became the stronghold of antipopeism, and its rivalry against powerful Catholic Spain was exacerbated. With his wife Isabella of Portugal, the king of Spain Charles I, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, governed a vast e
mpire including the Netherlands, the kingdom of Naples, and the Habsburg possessions, as well as many colonies. When he was elected emperor of Germany in 1519 under the name of Charles V, he became the most powerful Christian monarch of the first half of the sixteenth century. His eldest son Philip II succeeded him (1556–1598). Raised in the fervor of the Spanish court, Philip II was the leader of the Counter-Reformation and dreamed of reconciling Christianity around the Roman church. Because of his marriage to the Catholic Marie Tudor (daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon), Philip became consort king of England when Mary ascended to the throne in 1554. Mary strove to restore Catholicism, but after only a four-year reign, she was decapitated and replaced by her half-sister Elizabeth. The latter opposed the Catholic Church and initiated a hostile policy toward Spain, encouraging piracy against Spanish shipping. In 1588, Philip II launched a disastrous war against England, which resulted in the rout of his “invincible Armada” and augured the end of Spanish hegemony.
England sought to undermine Spain’s control over its seventeen provinces in the Netherlands, including Belgium, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and part of Picardy. It benefited from the support of many crypto-Jews converted to Calvinism. According to Jewish historian and journalist Lucien Wolf, “the Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism. […] The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition. […] Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism.”208 Deeply involved in the development of printing in Antwerp and Amsterdam, these Calvinist Marranos actively contributed to the propaganda against Philip II, Spain, and Catholicism. In 1566 they triggered a revolt in Antwerp that spread to all the cities of Holland. In one year, 4,000 priests, monks, and nuns were killed, 12,000 nuns driven out of their convents, thousands of churches desecrated and ransacked, and countless monasteries destroyed with their libraries. Many Spanish contemporaries, like the poet Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), discerned a Jewish conspiracy at the source of these revolts and the concurrent decline of Spain.209 The revolts led to the independence of the United Provinces in 1579 (which Spain did not recognize until 1648). When Philip II temporarily took over Antwerp in 1585, Jews, Marranos, and Calvinists transferred their economic activity to Amsterdam. Many returned to Judaism, even bringing with them certain Calvinists of non-Jewish origin.
During the reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603), although the Jews remained officially banned in the kingdom, many of them penetrated into the higher spheres of the state under an (often perfunctory) Anglican or Calvinist disguise. Under the double Marrano/Puritan influence, the Hebrew vogue spread through the aristocracy. A Judeophilic climate prevailed in the court of Elizabeth. Jewish and Christian Hebraists were sought after, producing in 1611 the translation known as the King James Bible.
The Kabbalah, one of the Trojan horses of Judaism in European Christianity, also gained adherents among English nobles and intellectuals, and gave birth to a prolific literature. The Hebraist John Dee was the most important promoter of occultism in the Elizabethan period. When in 1558 Queen Elizabeth acceded to the throne, Dee became her close personal adviser in science and astrology, to the point of fixing the date of her coronation. Dee may have inspired playwright Christopher Marlowe’s main character in his tragic story of Doctor Faustus, a man who sells his soul to the devil to satisfy his greed for knowledge.
Elizabethan theater, the flagship of the English Renaissance, reflects the hostility of the people and part of the aristocracy against the economic and cultural influence of the Jews. One alleged prototype for William Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was the Calvinist Jew Rodrigo Lopez, a personal doctor of Queen Elizabeth who was hanged for attempting to poison her. Barabbas, the main character of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, holds his colossal fortune as evidence of the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. After the governor of Malta confiscates his house and gives it to nuns, Barabbas persuades his daughter to become a nun, retrieve his money that is hidden in the house, and seize the opportunity to poison the nuns. Barabbas sometimes allies himself with the Christians, sometimes with the Turks, with the aim of destroying them both in the end: “Thus, loving neither, will I live with both, making a profit of my policy; And he from whom my most advantage comes shall be my friend. This is the life we Jews are used to lead” (V, 3).
Seth and Osiris, it seems, vied for the soul of Elizabethan England. While crypto-Jewish puritanism spread its grip, making its way down from the top thanks to its usurious power, British culture produced the masterpieces of Shakespeare, whose spirit is so little Protestant that he was suspected of being a crypto-Catholic, notably for his ideas on the afterlife.210 Shakespeare’s most cherished gift to European culture is undoubtedly his tragedy Romeo and Juliet, a work of youth that, despite some blunders, surpasses the novel of Tristan and Iseult as a mythic depiction of passionate love. The love that strikes Romeo and Juliet like a thunderbolt has the power of a mystical experience: it is a meeting of the divine in the other, which makes the lovers’ souls blossom and reveals them to themselves. Their love shatters family and social loyalties: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name,” Juliet asks, “And I’ll no longer be a Capulet” (II, 2).
Death becomes the only desirable alternative to the possibility of living this love in this life, for love contains in itself the certainty that it will triumph over death. The double suicide of the lovers is a heroic death, a “martyrdom” of true love, a redemptive sacrifice that triumphs over the social violence that incited it. Seeing the bodies of their children, the Capulets and Montagues decide to end their vendetta. Like Christians before the crucified Christ, they repent of having murdered the noblest of human creatures: man and woman united in true love. In the final scenes of the play, they promise to raise gilded statues of their children placed side by side in the (henceforth pacified) city of Verona.
Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate myth of exogamy, exalting the supernatural power of love that transcends the clan and abolishes war. Though fictitious, Romeo and Juliet has attained the status of a sacred, meta-Christian myth that reintroduces into the Western imagination a mythology of eros transcended by the underlying figure of Christ. It suffuses English Romanticism—which, not surprisingly, Moses Hess judges “decadent,” preferring Jewish novels, since “the Jews alone had the good sense to subordinate sexual to maternal love.”211
The Triumph of Puritanism
Many Marranos, after having transited through Holland, immigrated to England in the years 1630–1650, mixing in with the Calvinist refugees. At the beginning of the century there were about a hundred Marranos among the more prosperous families of London, and by 1650 they possessed a twelfth of all English commerce.212 These Marranos retained the Portuguese nationality and their rallying point was the home of the Portuguese ambassador, the Marrano Antonio De Souza. One of them was Fernandez Carvajal (1590–1659), whose commercial activities, extending from Brazil to the Levant (Near East), and from wine to gunpowder, brought an average 100,000 pounds per year back to England. Carvajal was the first Portuguese to obtain the status of “denizen,” which granted practically the same rights as citizenship. In 1650, when the war between England and Portugal erupted, his ships were exempted from seizure.
Cecil Roth explains: “The religious developments of the seventeenth century brought to its climax an unmistakable philo-semitic tendency in certain English circles. Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.” And so, “Though the Jews were still jealously excluded from England, there was no country in which the Hebraic spirit was so deeply rooted or so universally spread.”213 In other words, Puritanism was a kind of Judeo-Protestantism. Some Puritans went so far as to consider the Levi
tical laws as still in force; they circumcised their children and scrupulously respected the Sabbath. Under Charles I (1625–1649), writes Isaac d’Israeli, “it seemed that religion chiefly consisted of Sabbatarian rigours; and that a British senate had been transformed into a company of Hebrew Rabbins.”214
At the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia put an end to the Spanish dream of universal Catholic monarchy. The Counter-Reformation was contained, and the independence of the Netherlands recognized. The Jews could now practice their religion in broad daylight. At the same time, the antimonarchical revolution of the Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell (kin to the Thomas Cromwell mentioned above), triumphed in England after a civil war that the Puritans, bent on re-enacting the experience of the people of Israel, viewed as a holy war aimed at establishing a biblical type of theocracy on British soil. Cromwell enjoyed the support of many Marranos: Fernandez Carvajal, the main financier of the revolutionary army, put at Cromwell’s disposal his network of spies based in Holland. Antimonarchical propaganda in England was largely dependent on the Dutch press, from whence thousands of tracts clandestinely crossed the Channel. After signing the death warrant against King Charles I in 1649 (the act was drafted by a certain Isaac Dorislaus from Leiden), Cromwell rose to the summit of the ephemeral Commonwealth of England to reign as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. He conquered Catholic Ireland in 1649 and engaged there in a quasi-genocidal repression.
The famous Dutch rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel (born in Madeira of Portuguese Marrano parents who returned to Judaism in Amsterdam) played a decisive role in the final stage of Judaization in England. He took the lead in lobbying for the readmission of Jews in England, that is, the liberation of the crypto-Jews from their pseudo-Christianity. A petition was presented to Parliament in 1648 (the Cartwright Petition). In December 1655, Ben Israel met Cromwell and, one year later, dedicated his book Justice for the Jews to him. In his earlier work The Hope of Israel, published both in Latin and English, he included among his arguments in favor of the return of the Jews to England the idea that their presence would fulfill the prophecy of Deuteronomy 28:64: “Yahweh will scatter you throughout every people, from one end of the earth to the other.” “I conceived,” writes Menasseh, “that by the end of the earth might be understood this Island.” In other words, the Last Days long awaited by the Puritans would not take place until the Jewish Diaspora reached England. Others supported this argument by asserting that “England” means “angel-land, angel of the earth.” Menasseh also asserted that the Last Days imply, among the prophecies to be fulfilled, the return of the Jews “into their own land.”215 Thus the opening of the frontiers of England to the Jews was conceived as a prelude to their reconquest of Palestine—an idea which had also made its way in England since the publication in 1621 of Sir Henry Finch’s The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews.216
From Yahweh to Zion Page 21
