About the middle of the eighteenth century a new spirit had arisen on the Continent of Europe; or rather the spirit of the Renaissance, suppressed in Italy, had re-asserted itself in Central Europe under a more highly developed form. Seventeen hundred years had passed since the heavenly choir sang on the plain of Bethlehem the glorious anthem, “Peace on earth, good-will toward men.” And the message which had been blotted out in blood, while the myth and the words were worshipped, was once more heard in a totally different version. Those who delivered it were not angels, but men of the world; the audience not a group of rude Asiatic shepherds, but the most polished of European publics; and the tongue in which it was delivered not the simple Aramaic of Palestine, but the complex vehicle of modern science. Once more man, by an entirely new route, had arrived at the one great truth, the only true commandment: “Love one another, O ye creatures of a day. Bear with one another’s faults and follies. Life is too brief for hatred; human blood too precious to be wasted in mutual destruction.”

It was the age of Voltaire, Diderot and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; of Lessing and Mendelssohn in Germany. The doctrine of universal charity and happiness which, like its ancient prototype, was later to be inculcated at the point of the sword and illustrated by rape, murder, fire and famine, as yet found its chief expression in poetical visions of freedom and in philosophical theories of equality promulgated by sanguine Encyclopaedists. It was a period of lofty aspirations not yet degraded by mediocre performance; and the Jews, who had hitherto passively or actively shared in every stage of Europe’s progress, were to participate in this development also. Unlike the earlier awakenings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this call for tolerance did not die away on the confines of Christendom. The time had come for the question to be put: “Sind Christ and Jude eher Christ und Jude als Mensch?” Israel was destined to receive at the hands of Reason what Conscience had proved unable to grant. And in this broader awakening both Teuton and Latin were united. The French philosophers served the cause of toleration by teaching that all religions are false; the German by teaching that they are all true.

But, ere this triumph could be achieved, the Jews had to overcome many and powerful enemies. Among these were the two most famous men of the century.

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and ardent friend of philosophy, appears anything but great or philosophical in his policy towards the children of Israel. Under his reign the prohibitive laws of the Middle Age were revived in a manner which exceeded mediaeval legislation in thoroughness, though it could not plead mediaeval barbarism as an excuse. Only a limited number of Jews were permitted to reside in Frederick’s dominions. By the “General Privilege” of 1750 they were divided into two categories. In the first were included traders and officials of the Synagogue. These had a hereditary right of residence restricted to one child in each family. The right for a second child was purchased by them for 70,000 thalers. The second division embraced persons of independent means tolerated individually; but their right of abode expired with them. The marriage regulations were so severe that they condemned poor Jews to celibacy; while all Jews, rich and poor alike, were debarred from liberal professions, and they all were fleeced by taxes ruinous at once and ludicrous.

Voltaire, the arch-enemy of Feudalism, yet defended the feudal attitude towards the Jews. His enmity for the race did not spring entirely from capricious ill-humour. He had a grudge against the Jews owing to some pecuniary losses sustained, as he complained, through the bankruptcy of a Jewish capitalist of the name of Medina. The story, as told by the inimitable story-teller himself, is worth repeating: “Medina told me that he was not to blame for his bankruptcy: that he was unfortunate, that he had never been a son of Belial. He moved me, I embraced him, we praised God together, and I lost my money. I have never hated the Jewish nation; I hate nobody.”136

But this was not all. Whilst in Berlin, Voltaire waged a protracted warfare against a Hebrew jeweller. It was a contest between two great misers, each devoutly bent on over-reaching the other. According to a good, if too emphatic, judge, “nowhere, in the Annals of Jurisprudence, is there a more despicable thing, or a deeper involved in lies and deliriums,” than this Voltaire-Hirsch lawsuit.137 It arose out of a transaction of illegal stock-jobbing. Voltaire had commissioned the Jew Hirsch to go to Dresden and purchase a number of Saxon Exchequer bills—which were payable in gold to genuine Prussian holders only—giving him for payment a draft on Paris, due after some weeks, and receiving from him a quantity of jewels in pledge, till the bills were delivered. Hirsch went to Dresden, but sent no bills. Voltaire, suspecting foul play, stopped payment of the Paris draft, and ordered Hirsch to come back at once. On the Jew’s arrival an attempt at settlement was made. Voltaire asked for his draft and offered to return the diamonds, accompanied with a sum of money covering part of the Jew’s travelling expenses. Hirsch on examining the diamonds declared that some of them had been changed, and declined to accept them. It was altogether a mauvaise affaire, and to this day it remains a mystery which of the two litigants was more disingenuous.

The case ended in a sentence which forced Hirsch to restore the Paris draft and Voltaire to buy the jewels at a price fixed by sworn experts. Hirsch was at liberty to appeal, if he could prove that the diamonds had been tampered with. In the meantime he was fined ten thalers for falsely denying his signature. Voltaire shrieked hysterically, trying to convince the world and himself that he had triumphed. But the world, at all events, refused to be convinced. The scandal formed the topic of conversation and comment throughout the civilised world. Frederick’s own view of the case was that his friend Voltaire had tried “to pick Jew pockets,” but, instead, had his own pocket picked of some £150, and, moreover, he was made the laughing-stock of Europe in pamphlets and lampoons innumerable—one of these being a French comedy, Tantale en Procès, attributed by some to Frederick himself; a poor production wherein the author ridicules—to the best of his ability—the unfortunate philosopher. The incident was not calculated to sweeten Voltaire’s temper, or to enhance his affection for the Jewish people. Vain and vindictive, the sage, with all his genius and his many amiable qualities, never forgot an injury or forgave a defeat.

On the other hand, the Jews could boast not a few allies. Among the champions of humanity, in the noblest sense of the term, none was more earnest than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the prince of modern critics. His pure and lofty nature had met with her kindred in Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, born within the same twelvemonth. ♦1728–9♦ The friendship which bound these two children of diverse races and creeds together was a practical proof of Lessing’s own doctrine that virtue is international, and that intellectual affinity recognises no theological boundaries. ♦1779♦ This doctrine, already preached in most eloquent prose, found an artistic embodiment, and a universal audience, in Nathan der Weise—the first appearance of the Jew on the European stage as a human being, and a human being of the very highest order. The Wise Nathan was no other than Moses Mendelssohn, scarcely less remarkable a person than Lessing himself. Years before Mendelssohn had left his native town of Dessau and trudged on to Berlin in search of a future. A friendless and penniless lad, timid, deformed, and repulsively ugly, he was with the utmost difficulty admitted into the Prussian capital, of which he was to become an ornament. For long years after his arrival in Berlin, the gifted and destitute youth laboured and waited with the patient optimism of one conscious of his own powers, until an unwilling world was forced to recognise the beauty and heroism of the soul which lurked under that most unpromising exterior; and the Jewish beggar lad, grown into an awkward, stuttering and insignificant-looking man, gradually rose to be the idol of a salon—the eighteenth century equivalent for a shrine—at which every foreign visitor of distinction and culture, irrespective of religion or nationality, deemed it an honour to be allowed to worship. Though faithful to the cult of his Hebrew fathers, Mendelssohn was deeply imbued with Hellenic thought and sense of beauty. His famous dialogue, Phaedo, or the Immortality of the Soul, might have been written by Plato, had Plato lived in the eighteenth century; so much so that an enthusiastic pastor and physiognomist of Zurich, enchanted by Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, declared that he saw the spirit of Socrates not only in every line of the book, but in every line of the author’s face. Like a present-day phrenologist, Lavater was anxious to obtain a model of Mendelssohn’s head as an advertisement for his science; but, being in addition a pious evangelical minister, he also nourished hopes of winning Mendelssohn over to the Christian faith. In both these objects of his ambition the well-meaning physiognomist was sadly disappointed.

The great work of Mendelssohn’s life is the partial reconciliation which by his writings he assisted in effecting between the two worlds that had so long misjudged and mistrusted each other. His translation of the Pentateuch into pure German inaugurated for the Jews of Germany a new era of literary activity. By substituting modern German for the barbarous Yiddish in their education the book established an intellectual bond between them and their Christian fellow-countrymen. Lessing made the Jew known to the Gentile; Mendelssohn made the Gentile known to the Jew. And even the hostility of Frederick, the master of legions, the sneers of Voltaire, the master of laughter, and the bigotry of the Protestant public and of the Synagogue prevailed not against the united endeavours of the two apostles. In 1763 Mendelssohn carried off the prize offered by the Academy of Berlin for an essay on a philosophical subject, beating no less a competitor than Kant. In the same year Frederick, who three years before, enraged at some thinly-veiled disparagement of his verses by the Jewish critic, had been prevented from punishing him only by the fear of French ridicule, was induced to honour Mendelssohn by granting him the status of a Protected Jew.

Among Mendelssohn’s young contemporaries three are pre-eminent as representatives of the new Hebrew culture: Herz, Ben David, and Maimon. Herz was Kant’s favourite pupil and distinguished himself as a popular exponent of his master’s philosophy. Ben David was a mathematician and a student of Kant’s philosophy. On the latter subject he lectured at the University of Vienna and afterwards in Berlin. Maimon was a Polish Jew who had inherited restlessness of body from his fathers and restlessness of mind from the writings of his great namesake Maimonides. He wandered over the limitless and cheerless desert of Negation, sought to slake his thirst at the mirage of the Cabbala, or to forget it in the mysticism of the “Pious,” and finally, at the age of five-and-twenty, quitting home and family with the readiness characteristic of the born vagrant, he arrived in Berlin, unwashed, unkempt, and untaught in any tongue but his native jargon of Germano-Polish Hebrew. Some time afterwards, however, he became famous by the publication of an Autobiography—a work worthy to stand beside Rousseau’s Confessions in one respect at least: its unsparing and almost savage unreserve. Its sincerity was doubted by George Eliot and by other critics also. But Schiller and Goethe were both impressed by this work, and Maimon was honoured with the latter poet’s acquaintance.

Gradually there was formed in the capital of Prussia a wide circle of intellectual Jews and Jewesses, which stood in strong contrast to the proud and stupid nobility on the one hand and to the homely and stupid bourgeoisie on the other. Between these two frigid zones spread the Jewish class of men and women rich in money and brains, cultivating French literature, wit, and infidelity. Mendelssohn’s house was at first the centre of this circle, and after his death it was succeeded by that of Herz, whose own brilliancy was eclipsed by that of his wife. In her salon were to be met more celebrities than at Court. Mirabeau was captivated by the gifted Jewess’s charm, and little by little even the wives of distinguished men began to acknowledge the beautiful Henrietta’s attraction. Another literary salon was at the same time opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice; for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue, drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must always be some that is rotten.

The campaign for the removal of Jewish disabilities, begun by the two friends, was continued by others. In 1781 Christian William Dohm, a distinguished German author and disciple of Mendelssohn’s, advocated the cause in an eloquent treatise in which he not only reviewed the pathetic history of the Jews in Europe, and defended them against the venerable slanders of seventeen hundred years, but also discussed practical measures for the amelioration of their lot. The plea was read by thousands, and, though refuted by many, it was approved by more. Its earliest tangible effect, however, was produced, not in Berlin, but in Vienna. The new spirit had penetrated into the remotest corners of the German world. Austria, long a by-word among the Jews as a house of bondage, established an era of toleration under the philosophical monarch Joseph II., who, soon after the appearance of Dohm’s work, abolished many of the imposts paid by the children of Israel, granted them permission to pursue all arts and sciences, trades and handicrafts, admitted them to the universities and academies, founded and endowed Jewish schools, and, in pursuance of his futile plan to secure internal harmony by the Germanisation of the various races of his Empire, he made the study of German compulsory on all Jewish adults. ♦1782♦ The reign of toleration, it is true, ended with the good monarch’s life; but nevertheless it forms a landmark on the road to civilisation.

Meanwhile, in Germany also, the new gospel was fighting its way laboriously to the front. The death of Frederick the Great removed a great obstacle from the path of the advocates of the Jewish cause. Under his successor, Frederick William II., a commission was appointed to investigate the complaints of the Prussian Jews and to suggest remedies; and the Jews were asked to choose “honest men” from amongst themselves, with whom the matter might be discussed. ♦1787♦ The Jewish deputies laid before the commission all their grievances; and the poll-tax, levied upon every Jew who crossed or re-crossed the frontiers of a city or province, was abolished in Prussia. But the Jews justly pronounced this concession as falling far below their hopes and their needs. German public opinion was still averse to Jewish emancipation, and its prejudices were shared even by such men as Goethe and Fichte, both of whom, though representing opposite political ideals and though despising Christianity, yet agreed in the orthodox estimate of the Jew—and that in spite of the admiration which the former entertained for “the divine lessons” of Nathan der Weise. Thus, though the good seed had been sown in German soil, it was not in Germany that the flower saw the light of the sun.

Notwithstanding Voltaire’s unfriendly utterances regarding the Jews, the general tenour of his teaching was, of course, in favour of toleration, and it was on the French side of the Rhine that Lessing’s intellectual dream was to find its first realisation in practical politics. ♦1748♦ Montesquieu, moved to righteous indignation by the sight of the suffering Marranos in Portugal, had already protested against the barbarous treatment of the Jews in his Esprit des Lois, stigmatising its injustice, and demonstrating the injury which it had caused to various countries. Nor did he argue in vain. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there had been Jewish communities in France, consisting of refugees from Spain and Portugal. But they were only tolerated as pseudo-Christians. Dissimulation was absolutely necessary for self-preservation, and these hypocrites in spite of themselves were obliged to have their marriages solemnised at church, and otherwise to conform to rites which they detested. To these immigrants were gradually added new-comers from Germany and Poland, whom the Portuguese Jews despised and persecuted in a most revolting manner. An internecine feud between these two classes of refugees at Bordeaux gave King Louis XV. an opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the community. ♦1760♦ The Portuguese section passed a resolution calumniating their poor co-religionists, and trying to procure their exclusion as sturdy beggars and vagabonds. The communal resolution was submitted to the king, and every stone was turned to obtain his ratification of the iniquitous statute. Truly, there is no tyrant like a slave. Soon after Louis XV. issued an order expelling all the stigmatised Jews from Bordeaux within a fortnight; but in the chaos which pervaded French administration at that time there was a gulf between the issue and the execution of royal edicts, which, happily for the wretched outcasts, was never bridged over. ♦1776♦ Meanwhile the protest against the servile position to which Israel had been doomed for ages gained in strength, and, as its first result, the Jews of Paris obtained a legal confirmation of the right of abode in the capital of France.

Far worse was the condition of the Jew in Alsace—a district German in everything save political allegiance. In that province oppression was of that dull, chronic kind which begets degradation without driving its victims to violent despair. The Jews in Alsace were simply regarded and treated as inferior animals. They lived in jealously guarded ghettos, egress from which had to be purchased from the local officials. The right of abode was vested in the hands of the feudal nobility; the same limitations as to the number of residents and marriages prevailed, and the same extortions were practised there as in Germany. The Jews had to pay tribute to king, bishop, and lord paramount for protection, besides the taxes levied by the barons on whose domains they dwelt, and the irregular gifts wrung out of them by the barons’ satellites. And, while money was demanded at every turn, most of the avenues through which money comes were closed to the Jews, cattle-dealing and jewellery being the only trades which they were permitted to pursue openly. The profits derived from these pursuits were, of course, supplemented by surreptitious and, consequently, excessive usury. This last occupation exposed the Jew to the hatred of the simple country folk, and to blackmail on the part of crafty informers. The discontent, fomented by the clergy and the local magistrates, culminated in a petition to Louis XVI., imploring his Majesty to expel the accursed race from Alsace. But it was too late in the day. The movement in favour of toleration had made too much headway. An enquiry was instituted, and the ringleader of the anti-Jewish agitation—a legal rogue rejoicing in the name of Hell—was convicted of blackmail and banished from the province, instead of the Jews. ♦1780♦ At the same time the latter presented to the King a memorial, drawn up by Dohm, and obtained a considerable alleviation of the burdens under which they groaned, of the restrictions which hampered their commercial activity, and of the missionary zeal of the Catholic priests, which threatened the religion of their children. Finally, they were relieved of the odious capitation tax in 1784, the year which witnessed the triumph of Beaumarchais’ Mariage de Figaro at the Theatre Français—a rapier thrust at the dotard giant of feudalism, none the less deadly because inflicted amid peals of laughter; to be followed by the fall of the Bastille and of other things. In the same year a Royal Commission was appointed to revise the laws concerning the Jews and to remove their disabilities.

The Revolution did not stem the current of toleration. In 1789 the National Assembly met in Paris: a council of twelve hundred spiritual and secular fathers patriotically sworn to formulate a new creed—an object which, despite pandemonic wrangling and jangling and chaotic disorder of thought and action, they contrived to achieve in that memorable document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National or, as it now calls itself, Constituent Assembly is the “station for all augury,” whither repair all mortals in distress and doubt. Petitions pour in from every side, and among these is one from the Jews, especially the down-trodden Jews of Alsace. They also come forward to claim a share in the new Elysium, to assert their rights as men. Mirabeau, who already towers high above his brother-councillors, and is looked upon as the one seer among many speakers—the one living force among fleeting shades—espouses the Jewish claim. Three years earlier he had published a work On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of the Jews. He now sets himself to demolish the remnants of the ancient prejudice still cherished by some of the clerical friends of mankind.

The task was not an easy one. Besides Mirabeau, the Abbé Grégoire, and Clermont-Tonnerre, there were scarcely any politicians of note in France who cared for the Jews. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, while abolishing the religious disabilities of Protestants, made no provision for the Jews. Even the French public of 1789 was not yet quite ripe for so revolutionary a measure as the admission of the Jew to that equality of citizenship which it declared to be the birthright of every human being. A statute of January 28th, 1790, enfranchised the Jews of the south of France who had always held a privileged position; but this exception on behalf of a few only emphasised the disabilities of the many. The bulk of the race, especially in Alsace, continued to be treated as outcasts, until the more advanced section of the Parisian public, under the leadership of the advocate Godard, appealed to the people of the capital for its opinion on the matter. ♦1790 Feb. 25♦ Fifty-three out of the sixty districts voted in favour of the Jews, and the Commune gave a practical expression to the feelings of the majority in the form of an address laid before the Assembly. But it was not till nineteen months after that a definite decision was arrived at, partly by the eloquent advocacy of Talleyrand, who pointed out to the Assembly that the only difference between ordinary Frenchmen and French Jews was their religion. In every other respect they were fellow-countrymen and brothers. If, therefore, religion were allowed to interfere with their enfranchisement, that would be a denial of the principles of the Revolution—a flagrant breach of all those laws of humanity and civil equality for which the French people were fighting. ♦1791 Sept. 27♦ These arguments prevailed in the end, and the French Jews were formally enfranchised. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple the children of Israel, who had hitherto sojourned as strangers in foreign realms, hated, baited, and hunted from place to place, without a country, without a home, without civil or political rights, are citizens. Henceforth the name Juif, made hateful by the horrors of centuries, is to be forgotten in the new appellation of Israelite.

The storm that raged during the next three years left the French Jews comparatively unscathed. Israel had long taken to heart the lesson embodied in the oriental proverb, “The head that is bent is spared by the sword.” In some districts, it is true, the enemies of all religion also tried to suppress the Jewish “superstition”; but on the whole the Jews came through the ordeal better than might have been expected. The Constitution of 1795 confirmed the decrees of the National Assembly.

Holland, as we have seen, had long been a home for the persecuted sons of Israel. But the full rights of citizenship were not conceded to them until 1796, when closer relations with France enabled the gospel of liberty, equality, and fraternity to complete the work of toleration begun by enlightened commercial policy. The gift, however, was not welcomed by the heads of the community. The jealous Synagogue, which had persecuted poor Uriel Acosta to death, and excommunicated Spinoza in the preceding century, was still determined to guard its masterful hold upon its members. The new duties and rights which accompanied the gift, it was feared, would render the Jews less dependent upon their religious pastors. The Rabbis, supported by the Portuguese element which formed the aristocracy of the community and, like all aristocracies, abhorred innovation, offered a strenuous resistance to emancipation. They indited a circular epistle declaring that the Jews renounced their rights of citizenship as contrary to the commands of Holy Writ. They endorsed all the objections raised by the enemies of Jewish emancipation—namely, that the Jews, owing to their traditions of the past and their expectation of the Messiah, are and shall ever be strangers in the land—and they prevented their flock from accepting the invitation to vote in the elections to the National Assembly. On the other hand, the Liberal party, led by Jews of German descent, endeavoured to weaken the power of the Rabbis. The two sections banned each other heartily, and the distance between them grew wider as the Liberals went further and further along the path of reform. This difference of views led to a schism between the lovers of the new and the slaves of the old.

In England prejudice was still so strong that as late as 1783 we find the Jews excluded from the benefit of the Irish Naturalisation Act, passed that year. Yet there appears a faint reflection of Lessing’s teaching in some of the writings which bring the century to a close. Richard Cumberland, the friend of Burke and Reynolds, Garrick and Goldsmith, banteringly eulogized by the last-named author as “the Terence of England, the mender of hearts,” wrote, in collaboration with Burgess, the Exodiad, a long epic, consisting of eight dull books, wherein the two bards sing the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journey through the desert. The work begins, after the fashion of epics, with the orthodox invocation of the Muse in a single breathless period:

It ends with a parting speech from Moses at the point of death:

In charming contrast to this portentous rhapsody stands Goldsmith’s own tender oratorio, The Captivity. It deals with the sons of Israel in exile, working and weeping on the banks of the Euphrates; yet keeping their hearts turned longingly to the fields of Sharon, the plains of Kedron, the cedar-clad hills of Lebanon, and Zion. “Insulted, chained, and all the world their foe,” the captives nourish their faith in the God of their fathers:

Thus sings the chorus of Prophets in Exile. Yet, even in the midst of their woes, they see cause for pride and self-glorification: They are the only worshippers of the true God; the rest of the world worships idle idols:

Faith has its reward. While the captives bewail their lot, deliverance is close at hand. The star of Cyrus has risen; Babylon the proud falls, and the prophecy concerning the restoration of Israel is fulfilled.

But strong as is the sympathy with the fortunes and the spirit of Israel in both these works, neither of them can be legitimately considered as bearing directly on the Jewish question. The Shylock tradition is still powerful in England, for want of a Lessing. It is not ponderous poetasters, like Cumberland and Burgess, nor yet sweet singers like the gentle Goldsmith, who will overthrow a convention hallowed by the genius of a Shakespeare.