This was the era of famous “court Jews” whose services to governments in many ways anticipated the later role of the Rothschilds, notably Samuel Oppenheimer and Samson Wertheimer in Vienna, and Solomon de Medina in London (knighted for his services by William III). What made them valuable, as Israel notes, was “the wide, not to say pervasive, reach of the closely knit Sephardic-Ashkenazi financial network and its ability to raise large sums with great speed, often on mere trust, and to remit the money swiftly from one part of Europe to another.” Much of the assistance this network provided took the form of loans, but in an age when money was overwhelmingly coin, it also dealt much in metal that could be minted, and this circumstance made the connections wealthy Jews maintained with their much more modest brethren an important element in their success.
The entire system resembled a pyramid, the middle strata of which consisted of the metal dealers of Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Prague and the base of which was composed of thousands of poor Jewish pedlars who scoured the villages and towns of central Europe buying up old metal and coin which they fed into the major ghettoes.
In addition to money transactions, most of these people furnished supplies to armies, an activity for which the same web of connections offered similar support. As with those who have profited from connections with governments in many times and places, they sometimes engaged in practices that were on the edge of the law or outside it, including smuggling and bribery. Non-Jews behaved in the same ways, but public exposure was especially dangerous to Jews, since it provided an excuse for claiming that their wealth rested on the immorality that followed from their faithlessness, justifying governments in not repaying loans and ruining some who made them.8
That Jews were vulnerable in these ways is a reminder that there was a close connection between the services they were called on to provide and the equivocal relationship they maintained with the principles on which European society had long been founded. They were not alone in being bearers of such ambiguity, however; those same principles were being challenged from within mainstream society itself, and precisely by the state powers that turned to Jews for help. Jonathan Israel recognizes this clearly when he writes that “Absolute monarchy and mercantilism tended to protect and favour Jews only because both trends were themselves fundamentally at odds with many features of traditional Christian society.”9 The transformations states undertook rested on principles of legitimacy to be sure, but they often undercut existing hierarchies, attacked established privileges – such as tax exemptions, guild regulations, and communal independence – and sought to stimulate productive energies difficult to contain within inherited frames and limits. This relationship between Jews and states needs to be grasped in more general terms in order to clarify the position Jews occupied in relation to the spread of modern forms of organization and practice. What put states at odds with traditional principles of social organization was their obedience to a logic that developed out of their own existence, a “reason of state” (as early modern writers called it) whose principles substituted purely political aims or goals for the religious, social, or cultural ones expected to guide action in a society regulated by pre-ordained ends. In the terms we are developing here, states were agents for the substitution of autonomous principles for teleocratic ones; that they were such in ambivalent ways, reined in by the simultaneous loyalty of rulers and their agents to traditional values and commitments, and sensing a threat to their own existence in the further development of these principles (a danger realized in many moments of crisis from the end of the eighteenth century), does not lessen the importance of their role in this regard.
It is in these terms, rather than as part of the rise of capitalism, that the role of Jews in European modernization needs to be understood. Jews were far from alone in operating through distant networks of means in the early modern period, but their networks had the singular feature of being excluded in principle from regulation by the preordained values that were expected to guide others (including states, despite their partial dedication to a logic of their own). To recognize this is not wholly to accept Sombart’s view that Jews in general felt free to act immorally toward Christians (even if some of them did), but it points to a kernel of truth within it. Jews were no less committed to the notion that social relations should be governed by a transcendent moral code than their neighbors, and Jewish communities were equally organized in order to embody such a code. But it was a code that neither reflected nor had any purchase on society at large. Because it did not, the specifically Jewish networks through which Jews raised money for loans or mustered goods to sell in various markets were not organized or regulated so as to sustain the social, cultural, or political hierarchies to whose preservation Christian frames of action were in principle dedicated. Christian merchants or financiers whose activities threatened those structures could be called to account on grounds whose validity they could hardly contest without placing themselves outside society, but Jews already bore the freedom such outsider status conferred. It was this that made them harbingers of a form of life where action would break out of the teleocratic frames in which it was presumed to be inserted.
Rulers whose activities also served to undermine those frames may not have considered this implicit harmony as part of what made them turn to Jews, but it contributed to the difference between their attitude and that of their subjects. Jews found little sympathy in the population as a whole, which regularly erupted in anti-Semitic outbursts, as every history of Jewish life in Europe recognizes.10 It is easy to see these flare-ups as evidence of popular irrationality or ignorance, and such qualities were surely involved in them. But so was a less reprehensible sense that a society whose organization and self-conception rested on a commitment to foreordained goals was morally endangered by a group in its midst able to gain wealth and power in ways that escaped regulation on those grounds. People whose well-being was tied up with provisions aimed at protecting local artisans and others from competition by cheaper goods produced elsewhere had special reasons for sharing this sense, giving them common ground with those drawn to anti-Semitism for different reasons, such as rabble-rousing popular preachers in search of a following. Israel notes that Jews in Germany and elsewhere acted as importers of foreign manufactures, and that complaints about them as “eroding local industry and crafts” by introducing lower-priced goods (still produced by traditional methods, to be sure) “by no means lacked force.” The opposition between the interest rulers had in protecting Jews and the hostility to them felt by others was well understood by a participant in the English Restoration debate about whether to rescind the re-admission accorded them earlier by Cromwell. Their presence, he wrote, was “likely to increase trade, and the more they do that, the better it is for the Kingdom in general, though the worse for the English merchant.”11 In these conflicts open material interest was just as much involved as underlying principle, but the point is precisely that the two were deeply intertwined where the relationship of Jews to the rest of society was at issue. Writing about a later period, Fritz Stern considers that the publicity campaign mounted against Bismarck’s Jewish banker Gerson Bleichröder after the Prussian victory of 1871 constituted an indirect attack on the Iron Chancellor himself; similarly, earlier outbursts against Jews were partly assaults against rulers and others whose relations with them implied a less than total loyalty to the principles presumed to regulate social activity as a whole, and to which many ordinary people looked for protection.12
This complex and tension-ridden quality of the relations between European society and Jews made itself felt in later history, first in the knotty and sometimes perplexing status of what came to be called “the Jewish question” in the period between the middle of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, and then in the negative turn marked by the rise of organized anti-Semitism in the decades just before 1900. The era of Enlightenment and revolution saw the emergence of projects to free Jews from earlier restrictions, grant them cit
izenship rights, and provide them with better education (all parts of what was called Jewish Emancipation), but it started out by closing off many of the opportunities that favored their re-entry into European life in the seventeenth century. In a kind of reversal of the same pattern, the remarkable rise in the social and economic position of Jews during the nineteenth century to which we referred earlier was quickly followed by (and contributed to) a situation that exposed Jewish life to much greater dangers than ever before. Behind each turning in this evolution, as the rest of this chapter will seek to show, there stood the precocious orientation toward acting through distant relations that gave Jews much of their distinctive character.
What closed off the seventeenth-century opportunities whose importance we noted earlier was first of all the decline of warfare that followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715, ending the financial needs that had brought court Jews to prominence (although such figures remained important in certain places, notably Vienna). In addition, states whose rulers had once sought their fortunes in armed conflict now turned more toward developing the resources of their territories and populations. Recent scholars have shown that seventeenth-century “absolutist” regimes actually left more autonomy to towns and regions than the label implies; in such conditions Jews no less than others enjoyed considerable independence in governing their communities, especially in the Habsburg lands and in Poland. Eighteenth-century rulers, however, sought to tighten their own control and encourage the internal development of their states by standardizing laws, expanding bureaucratic activity, and stimulating internal trade and manufacture, all elements in the compound named in Germany by the term bürgerliche Gesellschaft. In order to stimulate native commerce and industry, the Prussian monarchy sought to exclude foreign goods, and since Jews had been among their chief importers earlier, the new policy had a negative impact not only on Jewish merchants but also on the poorer co-religionists they had employed as producers. Similar effects were felt in other places.
Nor did Enlightenment principles bring much benefit to Jews. Lessing and a few others advocated toleration and acceptance, but the secular spirit of many philosophes made them no less hostile to Jewish influence in cultural and intellectual matters than to churchly power; indeed some were more negative toward traditional Jewish ritual and practice because some features of it appeared as less restrained and thus more primitive and irrational than Christian ones, and Jewish belief could be attacked with impunity. Such an attitude contributed to the mutual attraction between a figure such as Voltaire, who, despite his reputation for tolerance, referred to Jews as fanatics and barbarians, and Frederick II of Prussia, an “enlightened” ruler but one who excluded Jews from many occupations, restricted where they could live, and grotesquely forced them to buy offensively shaped pottery from the royal porcelain factory.13
In sum, whereas a century earlier it had been precisely Jewish distinctiveness that underlay the recovery of Jewish life from the low point of the Reformation, now that very difference became a drawback. In the 1660s they could appear as important catalysts of English commercial expansion, but by 1750 internally generated development had progressed enough to acquire momentum of its own. To be sure, the role of London Jews in banking and finance remained significant, and once economic expansion began to transform the English North Jews would become active there too (some of them immigrants from Germany). But their role no longer distinguished them from non-Jews in the way it once had. Jonathan Israel, who (taking issue with earlier writers) regards the period after 1715 as bringing a marked and general decline in European Jewish life, finds the dying off of their earlier distinctiveness clearly expressed in the often-noted pronouncement of a speaker in the Assembly that accorded Jews citizenship in Revolutionary France: “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” As we will see in a moment, the abstract humanitarianism suggested by such a maxim was at best irregularly applied, but it remained as an important element in the era of “Jewish emancipation” – much heralded but never free of ambiguity – that now began. We can best deal with this era by taking up the situation of Jews in the three countries on which we focus here one at a time; the differences between them add substance to the comparisons developed above in Part I.
Britain and France: paths to inclusion and rejection
The process by which Jews became accepted as part of English life, like many other features of that country’s history, was more gradual and less dramatic than in other places, and a number of factors combined to make England the most hospitable country to Jews (save for the Netherlands) by late in the eighteenth century. Friendly feelings had little to do with it; hostility to Jews was hardly less widespread than elsewhere, and the expulsion imposed on them at the end of the thirteenth century effectively lasted until the middle of the seventeenth. The loud outcries and resistance provoked by an attempt to regularize Jews as British subjects by Act of Parliament in 1753 forced the Bill’s sponsors to give it up, but the fact that it was attempted showed that many individual Jews had become prominent and well-connected enough, especially in London financial circles, to make the attempt worth pursuing. Their rise had taken place under the informal regime set up by Cromwell and continued by later rulers, whereby existing prohibitions were simply not enforced; because the return of Jews was not based on formal legislation, there were no provisions governing them as a community, an important contrast with both France and the German states. They were not subjected to special taxes and most occupations were open to them, as was residence in any part of the country. In many ways the disabilities they faced were much like those of Catholics and Protestant Dissenters: what barred them from voting (in theory, although in fact some did vote), from serving in Parliament, attending Oxford and Cambridge, or being members of the bar was not any statute directed against them but the fact that as non-members of the Church of England they could not or would not swear the requisite religious oath.14 The contrasts between this situation and the conditions under which Jews lived elsewhere provide an example of the far greater degree to which British institutions assigned rights to people as individuals rather than as members of some legally regulated sub-group; this difference was rooted in one we have noted before, namely that English national integration, aided by both geography and history, did not have to be premised on according special status to regions, communities or classes of people whose claims to a separate regime of privileges governments were not powerful enough to deny.
Britain’s precocious modernization, the same features of its history that gave it a national market that encouraged early industrial innovation and an aristocracy prepared to participate in modern institutions more readily than its continental counterparts, provided an additional benefit of great moment to Jews. The rise of anti-Semitic political movements beginning in the 1870s and 1880s on the continent was fed by the sudden and disconcerting social and political disruptions brought by rapid industrialization and the political struggles we considered earlier. England had felt the power of industrial change to destabilize society and politics half a century before, but her earlier start made the impact of modern industry after 1870 less disruptive, as did the country’s earlier urbanization, and the greater integrative power of her political institutions. At a time when organized anti-Semitism was rearing its head in the Dreyfus Affair and the rise of anti-Jewish parties in Germany and Austria, it made no significant impact on British politics.
This weakness too cannot be attributed to an absence of hostile feelings toward Jews, which found expression in numerous literary portraits (Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, or Melmotte in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, to whom an aura of Jewishness clings whether he is actually one or not) and in private speech (such as some highly offensive letters – by later standards – of the liberal Macaulay). For many, the limited degree to which Jews could be part of the nation rested on the old notion that society had to be directed by transcendent moral goals and that only those who acc
epted them – in this case Christians – could be full members. But this teleocratic view was challenged by one that conceived the political nation as the product of interchanges between those who interacted within it, an opposition that was clear in the debates that arose over whether Jews should be allowed to serve in Parliament after Lionel de Rothschild was elected from London in 1847. Conservatives who insisted that he could only take his seat if he swore an oath on the New Testament (by then Dissenters and Catholics, both able to take such an oath, were no longer excluded) supported their case by arguing that the role of representation was not to reflect the will of particular voters but rather to give political substance to the nation’s essential character. Jews could live and work in the country, but not legislate for it, because they were outsiders to “our system,” in which Christianity served as “the vital and essential and fundamental principle.” In contrast, those who favored allowing Rothschild to enter the Commons while retaining his Jewish identity, and who finally prevailed in 1858, acted not only in the name of minority or individual rights (although these were certainly part of what they supported), but on behalf of a sense of the political nation as constituted not by a transcendent principle, but by its members in their actions and relations as citizens. They were seeking, as one historian notes, a shift in constitutional understanding, moving “not only towards an electorate of free-choosing individuals but also towards the electorate as constituting the nation.”15 A teleocratic constitution denied full participation for Jews, since they stood apart from its preordained ends; an autonomous one, deriving its principles from the interactions of those who lived under it, recognized all those who participated as members.
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