by Paul Johnson
The ambivalence was by no means wholly resolved by the outbreak of the French Revolution. In theory the Revolution was to make all men, including Jews, equal. In return Jews must abandon any separatism. The tone was set by Stanilas Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre who, in the first debate on the ‘Jewish question’, 28 September 1789, argued that ‘there cannot be a nation within a nation’. Hence: ‘The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.’ That was all very well, but it was the voice of the enlightened elite. The voice of the people could be rather different. Jean-François Rewbell, the left-wing radical deputy from Alsace, fought bitterly against equal rights for the Jews there, on behalf of ‘a numerous, industrious and honest class of my unfortunate compatriots’ who were being ‘oppressed and ground down by these cruel hordes of Africans who have infested my region’. It was only after tremendous resistance that the National Assembly voted a decree of complete emancipation for Jews (27 September 1791), to which was added a sinister rider that the government was to supervise debts owed to Jews in eastern France.111
Nevertheless, the deed was done. French Jews were now free and the clock could never be turned back completely. Moreover, emancipation in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the revolutionary spirit with their arms. The ghettos and Jewish closed quarters were broken into in papal Avignon (1791), Nice (1792) and the Rhineland (1792-3). The spread of the revolution to the Netherlands, and the founding of the Batavian Republic, led to Jews being granted full and formal rights by law there (1796). In 1796-8 Napoleon Bonaparte liberated many of the Italian ghettos, French troops, young Jews and local enthusiasts tearing down the crumbling old walls with their bare hands.
For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew. Clericalists in Italy swore enmity to ‘Gauls, Jacobins and Jews’. In 1793-4 Jewish Jacobins set up a revolutionary regime in Saint-Esprit, the Jewish suburb of Bayonne. Once again, as during the Reformation, traditionalists saw a sinister link between the Torah and subversion. The subversive Jew appeared in many guises, often as brutal caricature, occasionally as farce. In England it was personified in the eccentric figure of Lord George Gordon, the former Protestant fanatic whose mob had terrorized London in 1780. Three years later he turned to Judaism. The Rabbi David Schiff, of the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place, turned him down. So he went to the Hambro Synagogue, which accepted him. The poorer Jews, reported Dr Watson (who figures as Gashford in Dickens’s novel of the riots, Barnaby Rudge), ‘regarded him as a second Moses and fondly hoped he was designed by Providence to lead them back to their fathers’ land’.112 In January 1788 Gordon was sentenced to two years in Newgate for publishing a libel on the Queen of France. He was given comfortable quarters, in the name of the Hon. Israel bar Abraham Gordon, and hung on his walls the Ten Commandments in Hebrew, his bag containing phylacteries and the tallit. ‘It was more like the study of a recluse in a private house than a prison,’ said John Wesley, one of his innumerable illustrious visitors, who included the royal dukes, York and Clarence. He had a Jewish maidservant-mistress, Polly Levi, kept a magnificent table, never dined with less than six guests and sometimes to the music of a band. As he refused to give security for good behaviour, the court kept him in prison throughout the early stages of the French Revolution, which he welcomed noisily, playing radical dirges on his bagpipes and entertaining subversives such as Horne Tooke. Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, proposed a swop to the new Paris regime: ‘Send us your popish archbishop of Paris and we will send you our Protestant rabbi.’ A few hours after Marie Antoinette had been guillotined in Paris, Gordon died in his cell, shouting the revolutionary song, ‘Ça Ira—les aristocrates à la lanterne!’113
One of Bonaparte’s earliest moves as First Consul was to ban this song. As part of the same attempt to unite the age of reason with the requirements of order he tried hard to bring the Jews into society not as potential or actual subversives but as solid citizens. During his years of triumph, other monarchs followed in his wake, the most important being Prussia, which on 11 March 1812 recognized Jews already resident as full citizens and abolished all disabilities and special taxes. There was a consensus, at any rate among most educated Jews, that France had done more for them than any other nation, and this feeling persisted for a century, until it was shattered by the Dreyfus case.
But Jews sensibly declined to identify their interests with French imperialism. English Jews were rightly worried by the wave of xenophobia which the Revolutionary Terror inspired and which produced the Aliens Act of 1793. The Wardens of the Portuguese Synagogue in London ordered the rabbi to preach a sermon insisting on the duty of Jews to show their devotion to king and constitution. Rabbi Solomon Hirschell’s thanksgiving sermon on the victory of Trafalgar was the first from the Great Synagogue to be published. It breathed, wrote the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘a strain of true piety, a great loyalty and universal benevolence’.114 The Jews flocked to join the London volunteers. Reviewing them in Hyde Park, George III exclaimed, characteristically, on what he called ‘the large number of animal names, like Wolf, Bear, Lion—what, what!’ At the other end of Europe, in Russia, the hasidim did not want French-style enlightenment and riches. As one rabbi said: ‘If Bonaparte wins, the wealthy among Israel would increase and the greatness of Israel would be raised, but they would leave and take the heart of Israel far from the Father in Heaven.’115
Jews were abundantly justified in viewing radical attitudes to them with grave suspicion. There was a worm in the apple which the revolutionary goddess proffered them. The events of 1789 were a product of the French enlightenment, which was strongly anti-clerical and, at bottom, hostile to religion as such. This posed a problem. Much was permitted to clever writers in eighteenth-century France, but direct attacks on the Catholic Church were dangerous. It was at this point that they found Spinoza’s work particularly useful. Concerned to develop a rationalist approach to Biblical truth, he had inevitably exposed the superstitions and obscurantism of rabbinical religion. He had pointed the way to a radical critique of Christianity too, but in doing so he had assembled the materials for an indictment of Judaism. The French philosophes were willing to follow him in the first, but they found it safer to do so by concentrating on the second. Thus they turned on its head the old Augustinian argument that Judaism was a witness to the truth of Christianity. It was, rather, a witness to its inventions, superstitions and sheer lies. They saw Judaism as Christianity taken to the point of caricature, and it was on this ugly travesty that they concentrated. Here, they insisted, was an example of the distorted effects that the enslavement of religion can produce on a people.
In the Dictionnaire philosophique (1756), Voltaire argued that it was absurd for modern European society to take its fundamental laws and beliefs from the Jews: ‘Their residence in Babylon and Alexandria, which allowed individuals to acquire wisdom and knowledge, only trained the people as a whole in the art of usury…they are a totally ignorant nation who for many years have combined contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all those nations which have tolerated them.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ he added in a condescending afterthought, ‘they should not be burned at the stake.’116 Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, was less abusive but in his article Juifs (philosophie des) he concluded that the Jews bore ‘all the defects peculiar to an ignorant and superstitious nation’. The Baron d’Holbach went much further. In a variety of books, especially his L’Esprit du Judaisme (1770), he portrayed Moses as the author of a cruel and bloodthirsty system which had corrupted Christian society too but had turned the Jews into ‘the enemies of the human race…. The Jews have always displayed contempt for the clearest dictates of morality and the law of nations…. They were ordered to be cruel, inhuman, intolerant, thieves, traitors and betrayers of trust. All these are regarded as deeds pleasing to God.’117 On the
basis of this anti-religious analysis, D’Holbach heaped all the common social and business complaints against the Jews.
Hence the French enlightenment, while helping Jewish aspirations in the short term, left them with a sombre legacy. For these French writers, above all Voltaire, were widely read throughout Europe—and imitated. It was not long before the first German idealists, like Fichte, were taking up the same theme. The works of Voltaire and his colleagues were the title-deeds, the foundation documents, of the modern European intelligentsia, and it was a tragedy for the Jews that they contained a virulently anti-Semitic clause. Thus yet another layer was added to the historical accumulation of anti-Jewish polemic. On top of the pagan plinth and the Christian main storey there was now placed a secular superstructure. In a sense this was the most serious of all, for it ensured that hatred of the Jews, so long kept alive by Christian fanaticism, would now survive the decline of the religious spirit.
Moreover, the new secular anti-Semitism almost immediately developed two distinct themes, mutually exclusive in theory but in practice forming a diabolical counterpoint. On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portray the Jews as the allies and instigators of anarchy. Both could not be true. Neither was true. But both were believed. The second myth was unwittingly aided by Napoleon’s well-intentioned attempts to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ himself. In May 1806 he issued a decree convening an Assembly of Jewish Notables from all over the French empire (which included the Rhineland) and the Kingdom of Italy. The idea was to create a permanent relationship between the new state and the Jews on the lines of those Napoleon had already concluded with the Catholics and the Protestants. The 111-strong body, elected by Jewish community leaders, met from July 1806 to April 1807, and provided answers to twelve questions the authorities put to it, concerning marriage-laws, Jewish attitudes to the state, internal organization, and usury. On the basis of these answers, Napoleon replaced the old communal organization with what were termed consistories, as part of a general Jewish statute which regulated the conduct of those now seen, not as Jews, but as ‘French citizens of the Mosaic faith’.118
By the standards of the day, this was progress, of a sort. Unfortunately, Napoleon supplemented this secular body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah. The response of the more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize Napoleon’s right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it. None the less, the rabbis and scholars met, February-March 1807, in considerable splendour and with suitable ceremony. The body was dubbed the Sanhedrin.119 It attracted infinitely more attention than the serious, secular gathering, and lingered in the European memory long after Napoleon’s Jewish policy had been forgotten. On the right of the political spectrum, already violently suspicious of Jewish activities because of their real or supposed radical purpose, the meeting of the fake Sanhedrin—a body which had not existed for a millennium and a half—set up powerful conspiratorial chemistry. Was this not merely an open and sanctified gathering of a conclave which convened secretly all the time? Memories stirred of the secret international Jewish assemblies which had supposedly met to pick the town selected each year for the ritual murder. Thus a new conspiracy theory appeared, launched the same year by the Abbé Barruel in his book Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme. It adumbrated most of the fantasies later set forth in myths about the ‘Elders of Zion’ and their secret plots. The Sanhedrin also attracted the attention of the new secret police organizations which the autocracies of central and eastern Europe were creating to counter the radical threat, now seen as a permanent challenge to traditional order. And it was from the milieu of the secret police that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was eventually to emerge.
Hence when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion. They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism.
PART FIVE
Emancipation
On 31 July 1817 a precocious twelve-year-old boy, Benjamin Disraeli, was baptized into the Anglican Church, at St Andrew’s, Holborn, by the Rev. Mr Thimbleby. This was the culmination of a quarrel between the boy’s father, Issac D’Israeli and the Bevis Marks Synagogue, on an important point of Jewish principle. In Judaism, as we have noted, service to the community was not an option or a privilege, but an obligation. In 1813 the well-to-do Mr D’Israeli had been elected a warden or parnas, in strict accord with the laws of the Bevis Marks congregation. He was indignant. He had always paid his dues and considered himself a Jew. Indeed, as an antiquarian author he had actually written an essay called The Genius of Judaism. But his major work, by contrast, was a five-volume life of King Charles the Martyr. He had a low opinion both of Judaism and of Jews. In his book Curiosities of Literature (1791) he had described the Talmud as ‘a complete system of the barbarous learning of the Jews’. He thought the Jews had ‘no men of genius or talents to lose. I can count all their men of genius on my fingers. Ten centuries have not produced ten great men.’1 So he wrote to the Chamber of Elders that he was a man ‘of retired habits of life’, who had ‘always lived out of the sphere of your observation’; and that such a person as himself could on no account perform ‘permanent duties always repulsive to his feelings’.2 He was fined £40, but the matter was allowed to lapse. Three years later it was resumed, and this time D’Israeli withdrew from Judaism completely and had his children baptized. The breach was significant for the son, for Britain, and much else. For Jews were not legally admitted to parliament until 1858, and without his baptism Disraeli could never have become Prime Minister.
Seven years after Disraeli’s baptism, on 26 August 1824, a similar event took place in the German town of Trier, this time involving the six-year-old Karl Heinrich Marx, as he was now renamed. This family apostasy was more serious. Marx’s grandfather was rabbi in Trier until his death in 1789; his uncle was still the rabbi. His mother came from a long line of famous rabbis and scholars, going back to Meier Katzellenbogen, a sixteenth-century rector of the talmudic college in Padua.3 But Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a child of the enlightenment, a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. He was also an ambitious lawyer. Trier was now in Prussia, where Jews had been emancipated since the edict of 11 March 1812. In theory it was still in force, despite Napoleon’s defeat. In reality it was evaded. Thus, Jews could train in law, but not practise it. So Heinrich Marx became a Christian and, in due course, rose to be dean of the Trier bar. Karl Marx, instead of going to the yeshiva, attended Trier High School, then in charge of a headmaster later sacked for his liberalism. His baptism proved to be even more significant to the world than Disraeli’s.
Conversion to Christianity was one way in which Jews reacted to the age of emancipation. Traditionally baptism had been an escape from persecution, and emancipation should have made it unnecessary. In fact, from the end of the eighteenth century it became more common. It was no longer a dramatic act of treason, a change from one world to another. With the decline of the part all religion played in society, conversion might be less of a religious act than a secular one; it might be quite cynical. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who had himself baptized the year after Karl Marx, referred to the act contemptuously as ‘an entrance-ticket to European society’. During the nineteenth century, in east-central Europe, at least 250,000 Jews bought their tickets.4 The German historian Theodor Mommsen, who was a great friend of the Jews, pointed out that Christianity was not so much a name for a religion as ‘the only word expressing the character of today’s international civilization in which numerous millions all over the many-nationed globe feel themselves united’.5 A man felt he had to become a Christian in the nineteenth cen
tury in the same way he felt he had to learn English in the twentieth. It applied to countless non-white natives as well as Jews.
For a Jew, everywhere except in the United States, remaining a Jew was a material sacrifice. The Austrian novelist and newspaper editor Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904) said that it took Jews different ways: ‘One Jew can’t bring himself to make the sacrifice and gets baptized. A second makes it, but in his heart regards his Judaism as a misfortune and comes to hate it. A third, just because the sacrifice has been so heavy, starts to grow closer to his Judaism.’6 The rewards of baptism could be considerable. In England, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, it removed the last obstacles preventing a Jew from getting to the top. The millionaire Samson Gideon was prepared to make the sacrifice himself but not to impose it on his son. Accordingly he was able to get Samson Gideon Junior made a baronet while he was still at Eton, and in due course the boy became an MP and an Irish peer. Sir Manasseh Lopez accepted baptism and became an MP; so did David Ricardo; a third ex-Jewish MP, Ralph Bernal, rose to be Chairman of Committees (Deputy Speaker).
On the Continent, Judaism remained an obstacle not just to a political career but to many forms of economic activity. Even Napoleon had imposed (1806) some legal restrictions on Jews. They lapsed in 1815 and the restored Bourbons, to their credit, did not renew them; but not until 1831, when Jews were granted equal rights with Christians, did they feel legally secure, and the old Jewish oath lasted another fifteen years. The articles of the German Confederation (1815) deprived Jews of many of the rights they had been granted in Napoleon’s time, especially in Bremen and Lübeck, where they were banned altogether for a time, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Mecklenburg. In Prussia Jews remained subject to poll-tax, the Jewish annual tax, a registration levy and a ‘lodging increment’. They could not own land or exercise a trade or profession. They were confined to ‘authorized emergency business’ which the guilds would not touch, or money-lending. There was a further Prussian reform in 1847, and the following year the revolution produced a list of ‘Fundamental Rights of the German People’, establishing civil rights on a non-religious basis, which were included in the constitutions of the majority of German states. Yet residence restrictions on Jews remained in most of them until the 1860s. In Austria, overall legal emancipation did not come until 1867. In Italy, the fall of Napoleon put the clock back for Jews nearly everywhere, and it took another generation to restore the rights first gained in the 1790s. Not until 1848 did permanent emancipation come in Tuscany and Sardinia, followed by Modena, Lombardy and Romagna (1859), Umbria (1860), Sicily and Naples (1861), Venice (1866) and Rome (1870). This is a bald summary of a long and complicated process, involving many setbacks, retractions and exceptions. Hence even in western Europe, the process begun in 1789-91 in France took eighty years to complete purely in a nominal legal sense. Further east, especially in Russia and Rumania, Jewish disabilities remained severe.
