History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  It was Disraeli who first perceived that the Rothschild approach, with its unaffected rejoicing in Jewish capacity, including skill in making money—to be spent equally joyfully—had a lot to be said for it. Early in his career he was enjoying the Gunnersbury hospitality, writing to his sister Hannah (1843): ‘I got well waited on by our old friend Amy, who brought me some capital turtle, which otherwise I would have missed.’30 Disraeli thought the Rothschilds were an immense asset to the Jewish race, to be boosted to the full at every opportunity. He published his novel Coningsby in 1844, the same year in which Marx, as we shall see, took a viciously destructive view of the ‘Jewish problem’. The all-seeing mentor of the tale is Sidonia, the Jewish superman, whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild. This was a very flattering portrait. But then Disraeli was always concerned to exaggerate Rothschild wisdom and foresight, just as he made mysteries and dramas of their activities. It was he himself who sensationalized the purchase of the khedive’s shares in 1876 and he was responsible for much of the absurd, but in Disraeli’s eyes valuable and creative, mythology which grew up around the family.

  Of course Disraeli would have freely admitted that presenting Rothschild success as a magic fairy-tale could only work in a country like England where the political and social climate was hospitable. From 1826, when all restrictions were lifted, Jews were free to come to Britain from anywhere without hindrance. Once in, and naturalized, their position was summed up by Lord Chancellor Brougham in 1833: ‘His Majesty’s subjects professing the Jewish religion were born to all the rights, immunities and privileges of His Majesty’s other subjects, except in so far as positive enactments of law deprived them of those rights, immunities and privileges.’31 These restrictions did indeed exist, and Jews usually found out about them through test-cases. But once a difficulty had been discovered and agitated about, parliament, or the appropriate body, usually acted to give the Jew equality. Thus in 1833, the year of Brougham’s pronouncement, Jews were admitted to practise at the bar. Thirteen years later, a statute resolved in their favour the vexed question of whether Jews could own freehold land.

  Moreover, from an early date, Britain had been prepared not just to welcome and accept Jews, but to help them abroad. The first time occurred in 1745, when Maria Theresa expelled Jews from Prague; her ally, George II, protested through diplomatic channels. In 1814 Lord Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary, instructed his envoy, the Earl of Clancarty, to ‘encourage the general adoption of a system of toleration with respect to individuals of the Jewish persuasion throughout Germany’. No doubt with the Rothschilds in mind, he made special efforts on behalf of the Frankfurt community. Britain also helped the Jews at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.32

  Lord Palmerston was very active on behalf of the Jews, both on general grounds of policy and because his stepfather-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury, believed strongly that the return of the Jews to Jerusalem would hasten the Second Coming.33 Between 1827 and 1839, largely through British efforts, the population of Jerusalem rose from 550 to 5,500 and in all Palestine it topped 10,000—the real beginning of the Jewish return to the Promised Land. In 1838 Palmerston appointed the first western vice-consul in Jerusalem. W. T. Young, and told him ‘to afford protection to the Jews generally’.34 Two years later he wrote to Lord Ponsonby, British ambassador in Constantinople, instructing him to put pressure on the Turks to allow Jews from Europe to return to Palestine. He was to argue that hard-working Jewish settlers backed by Rothschild money ‘would tend greatly to increase the resources of the Turkish Empire, and to promote the progress of civilization therein’. ‘Palmerston’, noted Shaftesbury, ‘has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people’; the letter to Ponsonby was ‘a prelude to the Antitype of the Decree of Cyrus’.

  Palmerston was also instrumental in helping wealthy western Jews to come to the rescue of their beleaguered co-religionists. In February 1840 the murder of a Capuchin friar (and his servant) in Damascus abruptly and horrifyingly resuscitated the medieval blood libel. The local Capuchins promptly claimed that the two men had been killed by the Jews for their blood, in preparation for Passover. Both the Turkish governor and the French consul, officially charged with protecting the Christian community, believed the accusation and conducted a brutal investigation on this basis. A Jewish barber, Solomon Negrin, confessed under torture and accused other Jews. Two of them died under torture, one converted to Islam to escape it, and others provided information, leading to more arrests of Jews. The atrocities culminated in the seizure of sixty-three Jewish children, to be held as hostages until their mothers revealed the hiding-place of the blood.35

  One of the arrested Jews was an Austrian citizen, and this led to the great powers taking a direct interest in the affair. In London, Palmerston’s help was invoked by Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), the president of the Board of Deputies, which represented British Jews. Montefiore, who was actually born in Leghorn, had been one of the twelve ‘Jew brokers’ of the City of London, and through his marriage to Judith Cohen had become brother-in-law to Nathan Rothschild, for whom he acted as stockbroker. He retired from business in 1824 in order to devote his life to oppressed Jews everywhere. He was perhaps the last of the shtadtlanim, prominent Jews whose social standing enabled them to intercede with persecuting governments. He was a friend of Queen Victoria, who as a girl stayed at his ‘marine residence’ in Ramsgate, and later knighted him; he was probably responsible for her marked Judophilia. With Palmerston’s help, Montefiore organized a delegation of western Jews, including the famous French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), and went to see the ruler of Syria, Mohammed Ali, in Alexandria. Montefiore and his colleagues not only secured the release of the Jewish captives, in August 1840, but persuaded the Sultan of Turkey to issue a firman forbidding the circulation of blood libels or the arrest of Jews on such a basis. The success of this mission led to many others in which Montefiore, who lived to be over a hundred, worked with the Foreign Office to help Jewish victims of injustice.36 But the British government also intervened on its own account: in 1854, on behalf of Swiss Jews; in 1856, on behalf of Jews in the Balkans, the Foreign Office instructing the British envoy in Bucharest, ‘The peculiar position of the Jews places them under the protection of the civilized world’; and at the Congress of Berlin in 1876, where Disraeli fought for equality of religious rights.37

  Disraeli, however, had never been satisfied with advancing the claim of the Jews to justice. He believed that the Jews, by their virtues and their glorious past, were entitled to special esteem, and he devoted his tremendous audacity and imagination to securing it for them. Brought up a Christian, his interest in his race was fired by a grand tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land in 1830-1. He was fascinated by the rise of successful Jews throughout Syria, despite all their handicaps, the Rothschilds of the East as he called them. Much of the material he gathered he later used in his novels. He noted that the pashas preferred to use Jewish financial experts, as they could be easily persecuted if necessary: ‘They kept their accounts in Hebrew written in a calligraphy so obscure as to be barely decipherable,’ and he later portrayed one as Adam Besso in Tancred.38 Jerusalem he loved best of all, and in the same novel, published in 1847, he reproduced his vivid impressions of fifteen years before. It was his own favourite among his novels and has been aptly termed ‘a fictional version of the Victorian spiritual autobiography’.39

  Disraeli never took the defensive line that Jews were no worse than other men. He thought they were better. He said he despised ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’. One modern historian has seen him as essentially a marrano, and there is a lot to be said for this analysis.40 He epitomized the incipient arrogance, pride and romance of the Sephardis, which he conferred on the Jews as a whole. The self-destructive Ashkenazi tendency to see Jewish sufferings in Biblical fashion as the merited consequence of Jewish sins meant absolutely nothing to him. He took the Sephardi
view that Israel, being the heart of the human body, had been unfairly made to shoulder the burden of the wickedness of mankind.41 Once liberated, Jewish gifts would shine forth to astonish the world. They were essentially racial gifts. ‘All is race,’ says his superman Sidonia, ‘there is no other truth.’

  Thus Disraeli preached the innate superiority of certain races long before the social Darwinists made it fashionable, or Hitler notorious. He was descended, he says in Contarini Fleming, ‘in a direct line from one of the oldest races in the world, from that rigidly separate and unmixed Bedouin race who had developed a high civilization at a time when the inhabitants of England were going half naked and eating acorns in the woods’.42 ‘Sidonia’, he wrote in Coningsby, ‘and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race.’ This was a privilege the Hebrews shared with the desert Arabs, who were ‘only Jews on horseback’. Disraeli thought that Moses was ‘in every respect a man of the complete Caucasian model, and almost as perfect as Adam when he had just been finished and placed in Eden’ (Tancred). He thought ‘the decay of a race is an inevitable necessity, unless it lives in deserts and never mixes its blood’, like the Bedouin. Jewish purity had been saved by persecution, by constant movement and migration:

  the Mosaic Arabs [i.e. the Jews] are the most ancient, if not the only, unmixed blood that dwells in cities! An unmixed race of a first-rate organization are the aristocracy of nature…. To the unpolluted current of their Caucasian structure and to the segregating genius of their great lawgiver, Sidonia ascribed the fact that they had not been long ago absorbed among those mixed races, who presume to persecute them, but periodically wear away and disappear, while their victims still flourish in all the primeval vigour of the pure Asian breed. [Coningsby]

  He reiterates the point in the same novel: ‘No penal laws, no physical tortures work. Where mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains.’

  What, then, of Disraeli’s Christianity? His brilliant gift for paradox supplied an answer to that one too. ‘I am’, he loved to remark, ‘the missing page between the Old Testament and the New.’ He took great satisfaction in both blaming the Christians for not recognizing the virtues of Judaism, and blaming the Jews for not grasping that Christianity was ‘completed Judaism’. In his 1849 preface to Coningsby he stated: ‘In vindicating the sovereign right of the Church of Christ to be the perpetual regenerator of man, the writer thought the time had arrived when some attempt should be made to do justice to the race which had founded Christianity.’ The Jews had produced Moses, Solomon and Christ, ‘the greatest of legislators, the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers—what race, extinct or living, can produce three men such as these?’ Equally, however, he thought it absurd that Jews should accept ‘only the first part of the Jewish religion’. A note, from around 1863, survives in his papers at Hughenden:

  I look upon the Church as the only Jewish institution remaining—I know no other…. If it were not for the Church, I don’t see why the Jews should be known. The Church was founded by Jews, and has been faithful to its origin. It secures their history and their literature being known to all…publicly reads its history, and keeps alive the memory of its public characters, and has diffused its poetry throughout the world. The Jews owe everything to the Church…. The history of the Jews is development or it is nothing.43

  Disraeli thought it illogical that Tories should oppose the Bill to allow professing Jews to sit in parliament, since Sephardi beliefs in tradition, in hierarchical authority, in the need for the religious spirit to inform all secular life, were essentially Tory ones. He noted in his Life of Lord George Bentinck that when the Jew Bill came up in 1847, only four Tories voted for it—himself, Bentinck, Thomas Baring and Milnes Gaskell, and they ‘almost monopolized the speaking talent on their side of the House’. It was Bentinck’s speech on this occasion, in favour of Jewish rights, which led to his ousting as leader of the Tories in the Commons. So, by one of those paradoxes in which Disraeli delighted, the Tories, by punishing Bentinck for speaking up for the Jews, eventually ended up with Disraeli himself as their leader. But that, Disraeli felt, was right: he believed in a combination of aristocracy and meritocracy, and the Jews were supreme meritocrats. Disraeli not only pointed with pride to the achievements of acknowledged Jews, he detected Jewish genius everywhere. The first Jesuits had been Jews. Napoleon’s best marshals, Soult and Massena (he called him Manasseh), were Jews. Mozart was a Jew.

  Disraeli’s philosemitic propaganda would not have worked on the Continent. The Jews of Europe would not in any case have followed him in the wilder paths of his imagination. Nevertheless, there was in the early nineteenth century a determined attempt by learned Jews to counter the presentation of Judaism as a survival of medieval obscurantism, and to replace the repulsive image of the professing Jew, fashioned by Voltaire on a Spinozan basis, by an intellectually attractive one. The first requisite was to erect some kind of bridge between the best of rabbinical scholarship and the world of secular learning. The assumption of Spinoza, and those who had been influenced by him, was that the closer one studied Judaism, the more objectionable it became. Mendelssohn had never been able to refute this widespread impression: he simply did not know enough about traditional Jewish culture. Some of his more radical followers had no desire to do so. Men like Napthali Herz Homberg and Hartwig Wessely, while strongly favouring the study of Hebrew, wanted to renounce traditional Jewish religious education, scrap the Torah and the Talmud, and embrace a form of natural religion.

  But among the second generation of the maskilim there were those who were both enlightened and learned in Judaism, faithful to their creed yet skilled in secular methodology. Issac Marcus Jost (1793-1860), a schoolmaster from central Germany, produced a nine-volume history of the Israelites which was a half-way house between the traditional Jewish and the modern secular approach. As such it was the first work of its kind to impress the gentile public. More important, however, was the dogged, plodding, highly industrious Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), who devoted the whole of an immensely long life to the refurbishment of the old-style Jewish learning and its presentation in a modern, ‘scientific’ spirit.

  Zunz and his friends of the immediate post-Napoleonic period called their work the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism. They started with ambitious éclat in 1819, immediately after the Hep Hep riots had shown how fragile was the acceptance of Jews even in modern-minded Germany. They set up a Society for Jewish Culture and Science, whose object was to investigate the nature of Judaism by modern scientific methods and demonstrate the universal value of Jewish knowledge. They had an institute, which gave lectures on Jewish thought and history, and a magazine. They started from the assumption that the Jews had once made formidable contributions to the general culture, but then had lapsed into narrow religious antiquarianism. Now Jewish scholarship should come to life again. ‘The Jews must once again show their mettle as doughty fellow workers in the common task of mankind,’ wrote one of the founders, Immanuel Wolf, in the first issue of their Zeitschrift. ‘They must raise themselves and their principle to the level of a science…if one day a bond is to join the whole of humanity, then it is the bond of science, the bond of pure reason.’44

  This was all very fine, but it was open to a number of serious objections. The first was practical. In 1819 German Jews were only half-emancipated. To what extent could you pursue a life of secular study and remain a Jew? One of the most enthusiastic founders of the society was Eduard Gans (1798-1839), a brilliant young lecturer in historical jurisprudence. He got a lectureship at Berlin University and his courses were spectacularly successful. But his path to further advancement in his academic career was firmly blocked by his Judaism. Others found themselves in the same predicament. The ‘bond of pure reason’ did not yet exist, and for most of them the sacrifice to Judaism was too much. The Society was dissolved
in May 1824. The following year Gans underwent baptism and proceeded to a professorship and fame. Several prominent members took the same course. Many Orthodox Jews, who had viewed the entire project with suspicion from the start, nodded their heads sagely: that was where secularization always led, to the extinction of faith.

  Zunz himself plodded on. He translated an enormous amount of Jewish literature, especially the midrashim and liturgical poetry. He elaborated a philosophy of Jewish history. He contributed to encyclopaedias. He visited all the great libraries in search of material, and found himself barred from the Vatican Library. But his work raised a second objection to ‘Jewish science’: was it not contrary to the true spirit of Judaism? What he really envisaged was an encyclopaedia of Jewish intellectual history. In this, Jewish literature, for instance, would be presented alongside the other great literatures of the world, a giant among peers. He said he wanted to emancipate Jewish writing from the theologians and ‘rise to the historical viewpoint’.45 But what did this historical viewpoint involve? In practice it involved accepting, as Zunz did accept, that the history of the Jews, the main theme of their literature, was merely an element in world history. Like everyone else in Germany, Zunz was influenced by Hegelian ideas of progression from lower to higher forms, and inevitably applied this dialectic to Judaism. There had been only one period in Jewish history, he said, when their inner spirit and their external form had matched, and they had become the centre of world history, and that was under the ancient commonwealth. Thereafter they were delivered into the hands of other nations. Their internal history became a history of ideas, their external history a long tale of suffering. Zunz thought that a kind of Hegelian climax of world history would eventually occur in which all historical development would come together—that was what he understood by the Messianic Age. When that happened, the Talmud and all it stood for would become irrelevant. In the meantime the Jews had to show, by their new science of history, that they had contributed to this fulfilment; they had the job of ensuring that the distilled legacy of Jewish ideas became part of the common property of enlightened mankind.46