The French Revolution is over. For a while the volcanic forces, which had long groaned in subterranean bondage, broke their prison, burst into the light of day, and brought death and desolation upon the face of the earth. But their task is done. Nemesis has obtained the due and forfeit of her bond, and the Titans have returned to their Tartarean abode, until such time as their services may be needed again. A sentimentalist will, no doubt, find much to lament in the unsparing fury of the avengers. Their hand has struck down everything that stood high—good, evil, and indifferent alike—with elemental impartiality. But the philosopher may, on the whole, see reason to rejoice. At all events, he will, if he happens to be a Jew. For among the ruins of tyranny he will recognise the rusty chains which had for centuries weighed upon the limbs of Israel. They are gone, whatever may have survived. Whatever may be said of the rest, they were an evil. The Jew sees nothing but the hand of God in the desolation wrought by another. For him the Powers of Darkness had broken their prison; for him the proud ones of the earth had been laid low; for him the dreams of freedom dreamt by the poets and thinkers of France had been turned into a reality of despotism. What matter? Cyrus was a despot, and yet a deliverer of Israel; Alexander was another; and Napoleon was doubtless destined to be the third. Strange, indeed, are the ways of the Lord, but His mercy endureth for ever toward Israel.

The hopes of the Jews were not disappointed. The work of enfranchisement, commenced by philosophers like Montesquieu, and carried on by patriots like Mirabeau, was completed by Napoleon. Though deeply sensible of the disagreeable fact that usury and extortion had been the favourite pursuits of the Jews from time immemorial, Napoleon did not allow himself to be biassed by the mediaeval view of the matter. Like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Cromwell, he saw the advantage of securing the support of so numerous, so opulent, and so scattered a nation as the Israelites, and one at least of his motives undoubtedly was to conciliate the Jews of Old Prussia, Poland, and Southern Russia, in the hope of profiting by their sympathy and assistance in the contest in which he was then engaged. While depriving individual Jews, notorious for rapacity, of their civil rights, and restricting the operations of the Jews of the north-east of France by temporarily refusing to them the right to sequester the goods of their debtors, the Emperor decided to hear the Jewish side of the question. ♦1806 July♦ By his order an assembly of Hebrew notables from the French and German departments, as well as from Italy, was summoned in Paris. Twelve questions were put to the delegates concerning the Jew’s attitude towards the Gentile, the authority of the Rabbis, usury and conscription; and, on the answers proving satisfactory, Napoleon astonished the assembly with an announcement which no Jewish ear had ever hoped to hear in Europe. The Sanhedrin, or National Council of Israel, after a prorogation of seventeen centuries, was once more convoked. The Hebrew polity had outlasted the heathen Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Feudalism, and the French Monarchy. Time and the seismic convulsions which had overthrown these mighty fabrics, once regarded as eternal, had respected the humble institutions of the outcasts of humanity. The constitutions of other nations were built upon the earth and were subject to the laws which govern earthly things; the constitution of the Jews was preserved in the archives of Heaven, and was therefore immortal. ♦1807 Feb. 9♦ And so, at a word from Napoleon, seventy-one delegates of the French and Italian Jewries were gathered together in Paris, elected by the synagogues of the two countries in accordance with the ancient forms and usages of Israel.

The fruit of the Sanhedrin’s deliberations was a charter which defined the relations between Jew and Gentile in France. While retaining the essential features of Judaism, the Rabbis wisely conceded much to the demands of the country which so generously adopted them. The Nine Responses of the document form a rational compromise between the rights of God and the rights of Caesar: polygamy is forbidden; divorce is allowed in accordance with the civil law of the land; intermarriage with the Gentiles is tolerated, though not sanctioned, by the Synagogue; French Jews are bidden to regard the French people as brethren; acts of justice and charity are recommended towards all believers in the Creator, without distinction of creed; Jews born in France are exhorted to look upon the country as their fatherland, to educate their children in its language, to acquire real property in it, to renounce pursuits hated by their neighbours, and in every way to endeavour to earn the esteem and goodwill of the latter; usury is forbidden towards the stranger as towards the brother; and the interest raised on loans is not, in any case, to exceed the legal rate. Thus an effective answer was given to all the legal arguments which had been advanced by the opponents of Jewish emancipation, and an honest attempt was made by the doctors and chiefs of the nation to remove from the children of Israel a portion at least of that odium under which they had so long laboured.

When the Sanhedrin had brought its labours to an end, the Emperor repealed the exceptional measures of 1806 and recognised the Consistorial organisation which for a century fixed the status of Israel in France. Every two thousand Jews were to form a community under a synagogue and a board of trustees, with Paris for their centre. Napoleon, it is true, while granting this liberal charter, was compelled to yield to the anti-Jewish prejudices of the people of Alsace and other parts of Eastern France, where the Jew was hated more than ever, for the disasters of the Reign of Terror and the distress caused by Napoleon’s campaigns, by impoverishing the peasants, had delivered them up to the tender mercies of the money-lender. In accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants of those districts Napoleon took some steps highly detrimental to Jewish interests. He enacted, for example, that loans to minors, women, soldiers and domestic servants, as well as loans raised on agricultural implements, should be null; that no more Jews should be allowed to enter Alsace; that every Jew should serve in the army; and that no Jew should engage in trade without permission from the Prefect. The duration of this decree was limited to ten years. But, such local disadvantages and the indignation aroused thereby notwithstanding, the well-earned gratitude of Israel was expressed in many Hebrew hymns composed in honour of the Deliverer whom the Lord had raised for His people.

A few years afterwards even these enactments were withdrawn, and the Jews were accorded complete equality, civil and political. From 1814 till 1831 French legislation, despite certain fluctuations under the brief restoration of the Bourbons, was enriched with various Acts, all tending to lift the Israelites to a position worthy of their country, and schools were established for the education of the Rabbis, who since the latter date until recently were regarded as public functionaries and were paid by the State.138 ♦1833♦ Two years later the French Government gave a signal proof of its interest in the welfare of the Jewish portion of the French people by suspending relations with a Swiss canton which had denied justice to a French Israelite on account of his religion. For in Switzerland, when the French domination expired, the old prejudices came to life again, and it was not till 1874 that political equality was accorded to the Swiss Jews.

Meanwhile Napoleon’s arms had carried on, even outside France, the work begun by the philosophers of the preceding generation. The Inquisition was crushed in every Catholic country under the Emperor’s heel, while in Germany Napoleon’s conquest brought to the Jews a relief which departed with the French legions, to return by slow degrees in the succeeding years. It was one of the bitterest examples of irony presented by history. The French autocrat had given to the German Jews freedom, and the people whom the Jews aided with their lives to throw off the French autocrat’s yoke robbed them of it. In Frankfort, where the ghetto had been abolished in 1811, immediately on the French garrison’s withdrawal a clamour arose demanding its restoration. In other “free towns” also, where rights of equality had been granted to Israel while the fear of Napoleon hung over them, the ancient hatred revived immediately on his downfall, and the old state of bondage was restored. Even in Prussia, where the law recognised the equality of the Jews in theory, slavery was their lot in reality: many trades and industries were prohibited to them, the road to academic distinction was barred to them, and Jews who had attained to the rank of officers during the War of Liberation were forced to resign their commissions. Nor were these disabilities removed even when the German Diet, which, by the Act signed in Vienna on June 8, 1815, was to manage the affairs of the German Confederacy, had established the principle of religious freedom among the Christians, and had pledged itself to consider measures for improving the lot of the Jews.

This reaction was partly due to an exaggerated sentiment of nationality and hatred of everything foreign, aroused by the presence of the French legions in the country, and strengthened by the sacrifices and the success of the struggle for independence. National consciousness found an ally in the Christian revolt against the French Religion of Reason. Enthusiasm for the faith, which the French had overthrown, added zest to the enthusiasm for the fatherland, which the French had overrun. “Christian Germanism” became, not only a patriotic motto, but a veritable cult of a novel and jealous god to whom everything that was non-Christian and non-German, including the Jew, ought to be immolated. ♦1819♦ “Hep, hep!” (Hierosolyma est perdita) became the battle-cry of the Jew-baiters in many German towns, and the persecution spread even into Denmark, where the Jews had been placed on a footing of equality since 1814. ♦1828–30♦ The Prussian Government proposed a plan for the improvement of the social and political condition of the Jews, but the measure had to be abandoned owing to the opposition which it met with on the part of the representatives of the Prussian people. ♦1840♦ This return to mediaeval intolerance once assumed in Prussia the mediaeval form of a blood-accusation; but the charge only served to establish the innocence of the Jews and the stupid credulity of their assailants. None the less, it supplied a striking illustration of the retrogression of the public mind. For the prejudice, even when its basis was proved false, continued to subsist in a more or less latent condition among the lower intellectual strata of society—as prejudices have a way of doing for long centuries after they have vanished from the surface—and during the revolution of 1848, on the Upper Rhine, it led to a general persecution of the Jews, who sought refuge in the neighbouring territory of Switzerland. But the reaction was temporary, and the revolutionary movement proved, in the main, favourable to the cause of Jewish emancipation.

Although the Prussians, fired by patriotism, had rallied round their king and unanimously supported him in the effort to deliver the country from French domination, they had not been left untouched by the lessons of the French Revolution. To the Prussian patriots individual freedom was as precious as national independence. So strong was this feeling that Frederick William III. had been obliged to promise that at the end of the struggle he would reward his subjects’ sacrifices by granting to them a representative form of government. But few monarchs have ever parted with power except under compulsion. When the War of Liberation was over, and the country’s independence assured, the king forgot his promises. Hence there arose between the prince and his people a bitter conflict, which continued under his successor. Frederick William IV. as Crown Prince had evinced a lively sympathy with the popular demand for a Constitution; but with the sceptre he inherited the absolutist principles of his ancestors, and strove to prop up the authority of the throne by the help of religion. The German Liberals, however, had outgrown the mediaeval notion that kings rule by the grace of God. They claimed that the will of the people should be the supreme law of the State, and laughed at the Sovereign’s antiquated pretensions. The fate of the German Jews was naturally bound up in that of German Liberalism.

The year 1846 was chiefly distinguished by the agitation which prevailed in Prussia and all Northern Germany in favour of religious toleration and liberty of conscience; and the emancipation of the Jews was one of the demands submitted to the King of Prussia by the Prussian Estates, especially those of Cologne, Posen and Berlin, for various measures of domestic and social improvement, as, for example, the reform of criminal justice, the publication of the procedure of trials and of the debates of the Estates, and the extension of the representation of towns and rural communities. ♦1847♦ In the following year the question of Jewish emancipation was again introduced into the Prussian Chambers and found only two opponents, one of them being Bismarck, who then declared that he was “no enemy of the Jews, and if they are my enemies,” he said, “I forgive them. Under some circumstances I even like them. I willingly accord them every right, only not that of an important official power in a Christian State. For me the words, ‘By the grace of God,’ are no mere empty sounds, and I call that a Christian State which makes the end and aim of its teaching the truths of Christianity. If I should see a Jew a representative of the King’s most sacred Majesty, I should feel deeply humiliated.”

However, the National Parliament which met at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1848, under Liberal auspices, among other steps which it took in order to secure popular freedom, removed all religious disabilities. The Prussian Constitution of 1850 imitated the example; and the establishment of the new régime, in 1871, threw the doors open to the Jews throughout the German Empire. The Reichstag now contains many distinguished members of the Jewish faith.

In Austria the edifice of toleration reared by Joseph II. was overthrown by his successors, Leopold II. and Francis I., who revived most of the antiquated restrictions and regulations against the Jews, and again confined them within special quarters. This barbarous policy lasted far into the nineteenth century. In many parts of the country the Jews were forbidden to own, or even to rent land, except that on which their houses stood, or to migrate from one province to another without special permission. In Austrian Poland, or Galicia, the Jews were especially hated. There, as elsewhere in Poland, they formed a vast multitude, settled in the chief towns and villages. The greater part of their emoluments was derived from the sale of intoxicating liquors, to which the Poles, like all northern nations, were immoderately addicted. From the time of Joseph II. the Jews had been by repeated laws prohibited from trading in alcohol. But these laws were disregarded. The landowners possessed the exclusive rights of distilling, and they had from the first coming of the Jews to Poland farmed out these rights to the latter. Deplorably enough, a number of the Jews, in despair of finding other means of livelihood, allowed themselves to become the go-betweens in this demoralising traffic, and thus the most temperate race of Europe laid itself open to the hostility and scorn of those who would feign have seen a check put to the intemperate propensities of the people and its consequent impoverishment.

The condition of the Jews was incomparably better in the parts of the Empire upon which the rule of the Hapsburgs weighed less heavily. In Hungary and Transylvania they had long enjoyed freedom of tenure under the protection of the Magyar nobles. These were in the habit of employing Jewish bailiffs, and did not consider it beneath their dignity even to obey the orders of Jewish officers in the war for independence, in which the Jews took an important part. ♦1848♦ After the suppression of the rebellion the latter were made by the Imperial Government to pay for their patriotic ardour; but when the day came for the distribution of prizes they secured their reward. By the Austrian Constitution of 1860, which received its finishing touches eight years later, the Jews obtained full liberty. At present several Jews sit in the Legislature, and the race flourishes not only in Vienna, Budapesth, and other great towns, but even in the Austrian section of Poland.

The daylight of a tolerant and liberal administration has chased the ghosts of the past out of Galicia. Even the most orthodox followers of the Synagogue are fast forgetting their ancient wrongs and prejudices. In olden times Jewish boys on their birth were imprisoned by their parents within a pair of stays, laced tighter and tighter every year, that the child’s chest might remain too narrow for military service—a suicidal training, the evil consequences of which are to this day visible in the form of chest diseases and consumption among the Galician Jews. But the practice has long been abandoned. Humaner conditions in the army, and the spread of education among the Austro-Polish Jews, have reconciled them to the service, and now one half of the Galicia contingent of the Austro-Hungarian Army consists of Jewish recruits. The Empire has gained loyal defenders, and the Jews the benefit of a disciplinary and patriotic education.

In Italy the Papal States were the last retreat of the Middle Age. The Holy Office had disappeared from Parma, Tuscany, and Sicily in the eighteenth century, but in Rome it continued to flourish; and where the Inquisition held sway there was no peace for Israel. ♦1809♦ The Roman Jews, liberated by Napoleon, were thrust back into slavery after his fall. Then the reign of darkness was restored under the double crown of Dogmatism and Despotism. The temporal power enforced the doctrines of the spiritual, and the spiritual was abused to sanctify the decrees of the temporal. How could the lot of the infidel Jew be other than what it was? The Roman Ghetto continued to be the home of squalor and sorrow far into the nineteenth century. As late as 1847 decrees were issued forbidding the inmates to quit their cage, the Jews were still compelled to hear sermons at church, and everything that bigotry could do was done to bring about their conversion.

It is true that Pope Pius IX. inaugurated his reign with a display of toleration till then unparalleled in the annals of the Papacy. In 1846 a general amnesty was proclaimed by which thousands of prisoners and exiles were pardoned for crimes which they had never committed, or of which they had never been legally convicted; two years later the Jews were relieved from the necessity of listening to sermons; and daylight seemed at last to have dawned upon Rome. But this period of liberalism proved as transient as it was unprecedented. The reaction soon set in, and the influence of the Jesuits and of obscurantism was re-established. In 1856 the Pope issued an encyclical condemning somnambulism and clairvoyance, and bidding all bishops to suppress the anti-Christian practices. Nine years later he hurled an anathema against the Freemasons—the deadly enemies of the Inquisition. In brief, the pontificate of Pius IX., despite its promising beginning, is chiefly distinguished for two fresh victories over reason: the discovery of the Immaculate Conception and the invention of Papal Infallibility.

Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Church should not hesitate to allow a nurse to baptize her Jewish charge secretly, and then, on the ground that the child was a Christian, to tear it from the arms of its parents, and rear it to be a monk and a persecutor of its own people. Obscurantism and oppression vanished from Rome only with the Pope’s authority. For the Jews, as for the Christians of Rome, light came in the train of Italian unity. Among other mediaeval barbarities which ceased on the day on which the Italian Army entered Rome were the Inquisition and the bondage of the Jews. Israel has outlived Temporal Power also. In the Vatican all facilities are now given for the study of Rabbinic and Talmudic literature, once condemned to the flames. The pestilent slums of the Ghetto have been wiped off the face of the earth, and there is nothing left to recall the days of darkness, save the grey old synagogue and, close by, the Tiber, murmuring the sad tales of a world that is past.

In Spain also the Inquisition, suppressed by Napoleon, revived after his fall; but only as the shade of its former self. ♦1826♦ Its last victims were a Quaker and a Jew, the former hanged, the latter roasted. But even Spain had to follow the tide of the times. ♦1837♦ The Jews, pitilessly driven out of the country when Catholicism ruled the Peninsula, were readmitted as soon as Catholicism faded into a mere name. In 1881 the Spanish Government actually invited the Jews who fled from Russia to settle in its dominions. Seville, where the Holy Office had instituted its human sacrifices in 1480, now boasts a Hebrew synagogue. Israel has outlived the Spanish Inquisition also.

In Portugal, when early in the nineteenth century liberty of conscience was proclaimed, strange individuals from the interior of the country appeared at the synagogues of Lisbon and Oporto. They were the descendants of the old Marranos. For three centuries they had eluded the ferrets of the Holy Office and, Christians in appearance, had remained Jews at heart, waiting, as only a Jew can wait, for the blessed day of deliverance. They now emerged, and came to participate with their brethren in the worship of their God after the fashion of their fathers.

Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the preceding century brought forth its fruit. England could not long remain a stranger to the march of events. But, slow as usual and averse from hasty experiments, she pondered while others performed. Besides, she had been spared the volcanic eruption of the Continent which, while destroying much that was venerable and valuable, had cleared the ground for the reception of new things.

There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s view of the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century differed in no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary American of the same period, as described by Oliver Wendell Holmes.139 The ordinary Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin, grew up inheriting the traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel. The great historical Church of Christendom was presented to him as Bunyan depicted it. In the nurseries of old-fashioned English Orthodoxy there was one religion in the world—one religion and a multitude of detestable, literally damnable impositions, believed in by countless millions, who were doomed to perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in one of these false religions. It had been true once, but now was a pernicious and abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of their race. No doubt, the individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary Englishman found in the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt to be unpleasing specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing view of it.

The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards the Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Scott in that work gives utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been growing up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season of the novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany, “still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a novel.140 The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye seized on the artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was the group of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in introducing the characters seems to have been innocent of any deliberate aim at propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient proof of his own sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of kindling sympathy in many thousands of readers.

Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of preconceived ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and Nathan the Wise is the same as the difference between Scott and Lessing and their respective countries. The British writer does not try to persuade us that the person whom we abhorred a few generations before as an incarnation of all that is diabolical, and whom we still regard with considerable suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be that there was no need for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition, or Scott was not equal to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not depart too abruptly from the convention sanctioned by his great predecessors. His Isaac is not a Barabas or Shylock transformed, but only reformed. Though in many respects an improvement on both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical attributes of his progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity, cunning, affection for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But, whereas in both Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking precedence of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed. It is with exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order to save his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his merchandise into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-Bœuf, has given his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Isaac throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him to take all he possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the Norman, surprised, exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags.”

“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be, the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young—the despised and persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”

On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac changes his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew, and for his child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from which he had just promised to part even with one thousand silver pounds:

“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens.”

While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author takes care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned as much as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important difference in Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes Isaac as a victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion rather than of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,” “unbelieving dog” are the usual modes of address employed by the mediaeval Christian towards the Jew; just as they are the usual modes of address employed by the modern Turk towards the Christian rayah. The Jews are “a nation of stiff-necked unbelievers,” the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse with a Jew,” his propinquity, nay his mere presence, is considered as bringing pollution—sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those entertained by the Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances Isaac makes his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,” wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired, “he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at the lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make room for him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves, with looks of pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son of a rejected people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place.”

Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with brutal frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the bowels of our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with gauds and toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one road to the favour of a Christian”—money. Hence his avarice. Furthermore, the impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might perhaps be derived from the above presentation, is softened by the author, who hastens to declare that any mean and unamiable traits that there may be in the Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of the credulous vulgar and the persecutions by the greedy and rapacious nobility.”

Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew by dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation: “except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unremitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period.” “The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited.” “On these terms they lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” Thus we are led to the conclusion that the Jew’s vices have grown, thanks to his treatment, his virtues in spite of it. For Isaac is not altogether impervious to gratitude and pity. He handsomely rewards the Christian who saves his life, and he himself saves a Christian’s life by receiving him into his house and allowing his daughter to doctor him.

But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the daughter.141 While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary in singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearls, and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure which “might have compared with the proudest beauties of England.” She is indeed “the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John remarks; “the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the Prior’s warmer imagination suggests. Immeasurably superior to Abigail in beauty and to Jessica in virtue, she equals Portia in wisdom—a perfect heroine of romance. Withal there is in Rebecca a power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises her almost to the level of a saint. Altogether as noble an example of womanhood as there is to be found in a literature rich in noble women. To sum up, in contrast to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there is a great deal of the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in Scott’s Jew.

It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the spokesman of a unanimous public. His Ivanhoe appeared in 1819. Four years later we find the writer who with Scott shared the applause of the age, giving an entirely different character to the Jew. The Age of Bronze, written in 1823, carries on the Merchant of Venice tradition. To Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless and unprincipled rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the New Symplegades—the crushing stocks,”

the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our own greed and recklessness in speculation:

Alas! times have changed since the day of “good King John.” Now the Jews, far from being the victims of the royal forceps,

Nor is this all. Sad as the state of things must be, since Spain the persecutrix has been degraded into a suppliant, the worst of the calamity lies in the circumstance that these new tyrants of poor Spain and poor Russia are a people apart; a people without a country; a people of parasites:

But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether disinterested. He confesses elsewhere, with a candour worthy of his prophetic character,

And not only Byron but piety also was still inimical to the Jew. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose philosophy, in its second childhood, sought comfort in the cradle of theology—a not uncommon development—gives vent to some exceedingly quaint sentiments on the subject. On April 13, 1830, he declares that the Jews who hold that the mission of Israel is to be “a light among the nations” are utterly mistaken. The doctrine of the unity of God “has been preserved, and gloriously preached by Christianity alone.” No nation, ancient or modern, has ever learnt this great truth from the Jews. “But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.”143 Here we find Coleridge, in the nineteenth century, reviving the complaint of Jewish aloofness—of the provincial and non-missionary character of Judaism—which was one of the causes of the Roman hatred towards the race in the first. Nor is this the only case of revival presented by Coleridge’s attitude.

Luther, three hundred years earlier had said, “I am persuaded if the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old Testament, many of them might be won.”144 Coleridge now says: “If Rhenferd’s Essays were translated—if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument—I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year’s time.”145 He is, however, somewhat in advance of Luther, inasmuch as he does not insist upon the Jews’ abandoning circumcision and “their distinctive customs and national type,” but advocates their admission into the Christian fold “as of the seed of Abraham.” He is also in advance of Luther in forgiving the Jews their claim to be considered a superior order; for he finds that this claim was also maintained by the earlier Christians of Jewish blood, as is attested both by St. Peter’s conduct and by St. Paul’s protests. He also refers to the practice of the Abyssinians—another people claiming descent from Abraham and preserving the Mosaic Law—and asks: “Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions?” Coleridge would be satisfied with their rejection of the covenant of works and with their acceptance of “the promised fulfilment in Christ.” But what really distinguishes Coleridge’s missionary zeal from that of the great Reformer is his demand that the Jews should be addressed “kindly.” It is hard to imagine Coleridge in his old age taking a Jew on to London Bridge, tying a stone round his neck and hurling him into the river.146

However, though three centuries of humanism had not been altogether wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor Jew as Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us, “are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race softened in Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature, any more than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic admirer of the Psalms—the book that has played a larger part in men’s lives than any other—and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian Church, had an affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities.”147 But Coleridge’s affection for ancient Hebrew literature deepened, if anything, his contempt for the modern Jew. He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew prophet,” and used this ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for the actual: “The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah—‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!’—and Levi of Holywell Street—‘Old clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe. Immane quantum discrepant!”148 The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.

Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine conversion. He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews, and, finding them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as was his wont, to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on Kant’s text regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things weighty, though incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in undermining the faith of four different victims of his zeal and friendship, or may be of his sense of humour: a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite. “He said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had been arguing with the man in the moon.”149

Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating the hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although he declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one side—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,” can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he frankly confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit of the Synagogue is essentially separative.”150

Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of Coleridgean theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In 1830 Mr. Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness, sounded the trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be admitted to the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first reading by 18 votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial success of the proposal was evidence of the progress of public opinion; its final rejection showed that there was room for further progress. Indeed, the victory of light over darkness was not to be won without a severe conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries had to be assaulted and taken one after the other, ere triumph could be secured. How strong these fortifications were can easily be seen by a glance at the catalogue of any great public library under the proper heading. There the modern Englishman’s wondering eye finds a formidable array of pamphlets extending over many years, and covering the whole field of racial and theological intolerance. But the opposite phalanx, though as yet inferior in numbers, shows a brave front too. In January, 1831, Macaulay fulminated from the pages of the Edinburgh Review in support of the good cause:

“The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political functions.”

This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay sets himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no longer stands in need of vindication.

The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews, encouraged by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the House of Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a constant champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought in a Bill on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly. That a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who knows? even control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a proposition that shocked a great many good souls; while others ridiculed it as preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of opponents in his Eothen. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to the author his wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be denied political recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea, and quotes it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous materialism. “Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet.” Had Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing coming, as he was with the gift of describing current events, he would probably never have written the eloquent page on which the above passage occurs. But in his own day there was nothing absurd in his attitude. Till 1828 no more than twelve Jewish brokers were permitted to carry on business in the City of London, and vacancies were filled at an enormous cost. Even baptized Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City, and therefore no Jew could keep a shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.

The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one operation in a campaign wherein the whole English world was concerned, and on the result of which depended far larger issues than the fate of the small community of English Jews. It was a campaign between the powers of the past and the powers of the future. Among those engaged in this struggle was a man in whom the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of old England, and he was destined to promote the development of the new. His life witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His career is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.

In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities, and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his political supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities.”151 His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast amount of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short years earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be, was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and Roman Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory party had surrendered their first line of defence—Anglicanism, and abandoned their second—Protestantism: was there any reason, except blind bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone could see none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only dictated by justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the Jews in 1833 had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the shrievalty had been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of alderman and of Lord Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846 an Act of Parliament had established the right of Jewish charities to hold land, and Jewish schools and synagogues were placed on the same footing as those of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the repeal of Queen Anne’s statute, which encouraged conversion; of the exception of the Jews from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783; and of the obsolete statute De Judaismo, which prescribed a special dress for Jews. After the bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal of political rights was absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why people should be loth to grant to the Jews nominal, after having admitted them to practical equality. But though prejudice had died out, its ghost still haunted the English mind. Men clung to the shadow, as men will, when the substance is gone. Those orators of the press and the pulpit whose vocation it is to voice the views of yesterday still strove to give articulate utterance and a body to a defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of reasons, were year after year dealt out for popular consumption, and the position was sufficiently irrational to find many defenders. But the result henceforth was a foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not impregnable. Prejudice, resting as it did upon unreality, could not long hold out against the batteries of commonsense.

Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned five times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another Jew, Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured to take his seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in repeating the oath he omitted the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” The experiment cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion from Parliament. Meanwhile, the Bill for the admission of the Jews continued to be annually introduced, to be regularly passed by the Commons, and as regularly rejected by the Lords. The comedy did not come to an end till 1858, when an Act was passed allowing Jews to omit from the oath the concluding words to which they conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red letter day” was added to the Jewish Calendar.

The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in certain cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the Universities Tests Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew had become Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to graduate at the English seats of learning without any violation to their religious principles. At the present day the House of Commons contains a dozen Jewish members, and there is scarcely any office or dignity for which an English Jew may not compete on equal terms with an English Christian. The one remnant of ancient servitude is to be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the King, in which the Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into his Majesty’s heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles, “that they may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”

Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which history has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier Christian princes, and in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance, the Jews cast off their aloofness and participated in the intellectual life of the Gentiles, so now they hastened to join in the work of civilisation. When the fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel, more than the body of the people was set free. The demolition of the walls of the ghettos was symbolical of the demolition of those other walls of prejudice which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies as so many patches of ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the mosaic of modern Europe. The middle of the eighteenth century, which marks the spring-time of Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-time of Jewish liberalism. It is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a new birth of the Hebrew soul. The Jew assumed a new form of pride: pride in the real greatness of his past. He became once more conscious of the nobler elements of his creed and his literature. And with this self-consciousness there also came a consciousness of something outside and beyond self. Moses Mendelssohn did for the Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for the Christians. By introducing it to the language, literature, and life of the Gentiles around it he opened for his people a new intellectual world, broader and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned by the persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when the shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had greeted the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the Restoration of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy of the nation manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe and distasteful to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself and who set the interests of sect above the interests of man; but thoroughly sane.

Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the past, to denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a sin, and to repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed their feelings in a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable. Equally inevitable was another phenomenon: a religious revival springing up simultaneously with the intellectual awakening. The Jewish race includes many types. As in antiquity we find Hellenism and Messianism flourishing side by side, as the preceding century had witnessed the synchronous appearance of a Spinoza and a Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was writing Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew, Israel Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious hysteria in Moldavia.152 But the more advanced classes declared themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which was forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great extent abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent proportionate to the previous compulsory conformity. There was a vast difference of opinion as to the length to which reform should go. But one result of the movement as a whole was a more or less thorough purification of Judaism of the stains of slavery. The solemn puerilities of the Talmud and the ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic tradition, grotesque ritualism, and all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief and practice, with which ages of barbarism had encrusted Judaism, were relegated to the lumber-room of antiquarian curiosities, and all that was fresh and truly alive in the Jewish race sought new vehicles for the expression of new thoughts: modern emotions were translated into modern modes of utterance and action. The Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the night, destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was taken by an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews, based on their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic attachment to the various countries of their adoption.

Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who renounced the faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty to justify his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The conditions which produced that vulgar type of renegade having vanished, there began to appear apostates of another kind—men who, though unwilling to devote to a sect what was meant for mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice their own individuality to an obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to cherish those whom they deserted. In them the connection of sentiment outlasted the links of religion, and these men by their defection did more for their people than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich Heine, born in 1799, was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted partly by the desire to gain that fulness of freedom which in those days was still denied to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by a far deeper motive: “I had not been particularly fond of Moses formerly,” he said in after life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me, and I could not forgive the legislator of the Jews his hatred towards all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this country was an analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later examples may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish birth, but always spoke of it with pride—and that in a country where it still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these ex-Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation of aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly baseless.

Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an even more prominent part in the development of the European mind under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile by virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools—the school of adversity—came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world. Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine, and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic thought and economic practice owe their most daring achievements to Jewish speculation. Socialism—this latest effort of political philosophy to reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its constituent members—is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It would be hard to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.153 But a few will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in politics, Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein and Joachim in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine; in psychology Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and comparative philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers who have made themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the press of Europe is to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people who control the sinews of war have contributed more than their share to the arts and sciences which support and embellish peace. And all this in the course of one brief half-century, and in the face of the most adverse influences of legislation, of religious feeling and of social repugnance. History can show no parallel to so glorious a revolution. Mythology supplies a picture which aptly symbolises it. Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no prophecy has ever received a more accurate fulfilment than the poetic conception couched in the following lines received in the Hebrew Palingenesia: