Part 16

We disclaim all exclusiveness in the exercise of the common rights of man; we denounce all bigotry as a folly, and abhor all persecution as a crime; but we cannot venture an acquiescence in an attempt which we consider as an abandonment of the first dictates of Christianity; we cannot be silent when the intention is avowed to bring into a Christian legislature a sect which pronounces Christianity to be utterly a falsehood, its founder to be an impostor, (we shudder at the words,) and our whole hope of immortality, dependent on his sacrifice and merits, to be wicked and blasphemous delusion. And this attempt, from no additional discovery of the truth of Judaism or the failings of Christianity, but simply from a sense of political convenience, (a most short-sighted sense, as we conceive;) a feeling of liberalism, (a most childish and uncalled for feeling, as we are perfectly convinced;) and the establishment of the general principle that, in the political system or government of nations, religion has no business whatever to interfere, to be regarded, or to be protected in any shape whatever, (an assumption which we believe to be contrary to all the experience of mankind.) Our remarks, of course, are not made with reference to the individual, of whom we know nothing but the name; we speak only of the principle.

But before we inquire into its good or ill, we shall give a glance at the past condition of the European Jews, and the privileges to which they have been admitted by the generosity of the British legislature.

With Charlemagne the political history of modern Europe begins, and with it we shall begin our sketch of the Jews. The soldiership of Charlemagne made him comparatively regardless of ecclesiastical jealousies, and at the same time made him require the services of agents, negotiators, and traffickers of all kinds. In all the wildest barbarism of the past ages, the sons of Israel had continued to sustain their connexion throughout Europe, and the emperor felt all their importance to his polity. But war always impoverishes, and the Jews were the only masters of European wealth. Thus they were essential in all points to the great warrior, who had spent thirty years of his life in the camp; to the great monarch, who ruled three-fourths of Europe; and to the great statesman, who legislated for Christendom, but who could not write his own name. Charlemagne, therefore, protected the Jews, as he did all whom he made useful to himself; and as disregard of opportunities has been at no time their failing, it is probable that the chief currency of Europe passed through Jewish hands.

The successors of the emperor retained his habits, without inheriting his abilities, and the Jews still stood high in the favour of the throne.

It is probable, too, that they profited enormously; for where they had no laws but their own, and no penalties to dread but those in the hand of the sovereign, the possession of the royal ear, and the replenishing of the royal purse, gave them chances which must have proved highly productive to the Rabbinical exchequer.

But their prosperity was soon to have its winter. Enormous wealth was hazardous in baronial times. The descendants of the Gaulish, the German, and the Norman conquerors--bold soldiers, but bad financiers; fond of magnificence, but narrow in rental; valorous in war, but pauperised in peace--saw with lordly indignation the crouching Israelite able to purchase principalities, while they were often obliged to levy the daily meal of their retainers on the high road.

The result was, a general robbery of the Jews. But as there is no robbery so sweeping as that which is performed under cover of law, the unfortunate Jews were charged with the most improbable crimes against popes and princes. They sometimes escaped the dungeon and the sword by large bribes to the judge and the king; but confiscation was too gainful to cease while there was a Jew to be drained. And at length, within the last years of the twelfth century, all the Jews of France were exiled by a stroke of the pen; their whole property was seized, and all their debts were decreed to be irrecoverable!

Still they were too useful to be entirely dispensed with; and the following Jewish generation, which had forgotten the sufferings of their fathers, once more sought admission into France. They there grew opulent again, were there fleeced again, and there were alternately fattened and fleeced, until a general rage against their existence seemed to seize all Europe. Then, with an injustice which scandalises the name of Europe, and with a cruelty which still more scandalises the name of Popery, they were persecuted, plundered, and hunted into the gentler and honester regions of the Mahometan and the idolator.

The history of the Jews in England commenced about the middle of the eighth century, and was a similar succession of persecutions of the purse. Their persons were generally spared, for the piety of the Saxon monarchs was less provoked than their poverty. The Jews were a never-failing spring; and the Egberts and Ethelberts drank of it in all the emergencies of their dynasty, without ever cooling their royal thirst. Still the Jews clung to a land where they had probably become masters of the whole current coin; and though they complained furiously of the royal pressure, they bore it for the sake of the inordinate rent which they levied on peasant and priest, on baron bold, and perhaps on the monarch himself.

But William the Norman came, and the days of the Israelite brightened. William knew the value of having the synagogue for his bank; and though a descendant of those heroic pirates who had exhibited robbery on the largest scale in history, and plundered every sea-coast of Europe every year of their lives, he yet felt all the necessity of paying his fellow-freebooters, and regarded the Jews, next to his men-at-arms, as the main prop of his throne.

But it is a curious feature in the annals of Jewish wealth, that it has never lasted long; three generations, at the most, are sure to see its end. The gourd of Jonah is its emblem to this hour; the surprising growth of a night followed by the equally surprising decay of a morning.

The Jews were desperately mulcted by Stephen, a usurper, who felt that he had but little time to lose, and, of course, plundered accordingly. But these were glorious times for what is called "change of property;" the brave earls of the Norman had already run through their estates. Money was not to be found. The times were turbulent, and the barons were forced to build castles for themselves and their cattle. They kept retainers to rob and fight, and led the life of gallant captains of banditti. Italy, the native land of romance and robbery, (its principal talents to this hour,) never exhibited more elaborate specimens of both, than England did in the days of Stephen. But the royal and baronial necessities were not to be fully supplied by the high road, and the unfortunate Jew was made the paymaster of all.

At last the Romish priesthood attacked them. This was fatal. Isaac evaded the fighting baron and the fleecing king by his habitual adroitness, and by those small sacrifices which he well knew how to compensate. But the monks, friars, and bishops were a body with which all his acuteness was unable to contend. What the Jew gained was obviously lost to the monk; and the counter was forced to yield to the cloister. The thirteenth century is still recorded among the Israelites as a kind of secondary overthrow of their nation, and Edward I. as their English Titus. The act of royal and ecclesiastical atrocity banished nearly twenty thousand Jews to seek existence in some less savage region than the "land of chivalry."

From this period they are nearly lost sight of in our English records, until the reign of Charles II. The York and Lancastrian wars certainly offered but slight temptation to the man of traffic; he must have also remembered the penalty of his former sojourn in England, and he wisely left the Plantagenets, at last, to fight it out by themselves. The reign of Cromwell gave them some hope. It is astonishing how the English spirit of that one man raised the character of England throughout Europe. The world had never seen such a brewer before; whatever he did, or wherever he went, he carried with him the homeliness, the heartiness, and the strength of his trade. He kept the insolence of France in order, soundly punished the pride of Spain, and frightened the Teutonic ferocity of Germany into quiet. If he had lived a thousand years, so long would he have kept the Stuarts in banishment. His game was harder at home, but he played his cards with equal success. He crushed at once the king and the parliament; he crushed the Presbyterians, who had crushed the church; he bridled the Independents, who had bridled the Presbyterians; he tamed the army, who had conquered the constitution; and, highest triumph of all, he tamed Ireland. The _difficulty_ of the Wellingtons, the Peels, and the Greys,--the grand problem of Whig and Tory, was no problem to him; he suffered resistance neither moral nor physical; he would have hanged the orators and the gatherers of the "rent," on the same tree. His remedy was simple. He led his battalions at once into Ireland; stormed the rebel garrisons, hanged the rebel leaders; sent the rebel priests in droves to the West Indies; and in six months he made Ireland a place in which it was _possible_ for an honest man to live; and this was while Ireland was still shouting for joy at Protestant massacre--while she was in the full riot of 1641--while legates, and prelates, and Jesuits were crowding the soil, and while tens of thousands of Protestants were weltering in bloody graves. The bold brewer of Huntingdon settled the country at once, and Ireland was obedient for a century to come.

It is not certain whether Cromwell had made overtures to the Jews, or the Jews to him; but the shortness of his reign precluded any actual measures in their favour. However, it is evident that they had received some impression that they would be protected; for immediately on the Restoration, and apparently without any further permission, they began to flock into England, where they have since remained under the general protection of the law.

The original condition of the Jew in England, was that of a man under the direct protection of the king,--a perilous protection, which gave his majesty the right of the liege lord over his bondsman, the right over property, and even over person. But the Jew was not long permitted to hold land. Of this right they were deprived in the reign of the third Henry, though they were suffered to retain the freehold of houses in towns. Successive acts deprived them even of this poor privilege, and no Jew was suffered to dispose of his house without the leave of the king. But, by a curious anomaly, they were again allowed to purchase houses and lands, provided they were held of the king, and even take farms for ten years. Though it seems probable that those alternations of favour and severity were but so many applications of the legal torture to the purses of the Jews.

On the Continent, the condition of the Jews was always opulent, and always comfortless. But, in general, they escaped with the simple penalty of popular contempt. There is money to be made in every country by parsimony, and a steady determination to do nothing but make money. The Jews thus escaped into the wild regions of the Goth and Vandal, and got rich among the Poles and the Russians. They were sometimes dreadfully fleeced; but the men of frost and snow were not men of massacre, and the Jews got rich again. Even now, with all the competition of all the beggars of Germany, they are the masters of all the shop-dealing and inn-keeping, and money-changing, and all the countless kinds of ingenuity that the smallest of traffics can practise upon a people who divide the farthing into a dozen fractions.

The Jew lives, fattens, and plays the financier in Morocco, as he plays the slop-seller, the quack, and the furrier in the north. He is the banker of his Highness Abderrhaman, and supplies Abd-el-Kader with sequins, Naples' soap, horses, and intelligence. The Jews in Turkey always lived in tremendous insecurity; but there too, they grew rich, they shared the favour of the sultans, (and the certainty of being occasionally plundered,) along with the Armenians, a sort of Epicene religionists, or link between the Christian and the Jew; the profession of both being money in every shape, from the hawking of pipes, and the selling of slippers, up to the court bankers; the last being notoriously a perilous distinction, for on the first necessity of the seraglio, the banker's confiscation was reckoned among the ways and means of the state. The banker's stock of bullion was "sent for," and his head generally accompanied it. His will was drawn up already by the Grand Cadi of Constantinople, and the Emperor of the Faithful was regularly declared "his heir."

The Jew in Algiers was, like the Jew every where, rich and wretched; reaping all the coin of the country, and stripped of it at every caprice of the government. The French invasion threw all the Algerine Hebrews into rapture for a while; but they have continued wringing their hands, and hanging their heads, ever since. The Frenchman is as keen as the Jew in saying, though the Jew altogether distances in gain a man who would spend his last _sou_ on a ball, a theatre, or a billiard-table. The Jew eschews all games of chance; the opera costs a franc in Algiers, when they have one; and the Jew would not spend a franc upon the music of the spheres. He laments hourly the Algerian revolution, gnashes his teeth at the name of Charles X., cautiously anathematises Louis Philippe, (whom he regards as the rival of his reputation,) and when out of the hearing of a French sentinel, vents the reverse of a panegyric on the green excellences of his royal highness the Duc d'Aumale. The burden of his political song, is "the Turks were fine fellows; they cut off our heads, but then they spent money. The French do not cut off our heads, but then they spend no money!" The Jew evidently preferred the chance of losing his head to the certainty of making nothing out of the shabbiness of his new masters. Thus Algiers no longer offers a harvest for the Israelite.

But the Jew had his reign of terror,--and Spain was the scene. Throughout the world,--for where was the Jew not to be found?--he was simply an object of personal scorn and of public plunder; and, fully acknowledging the popular crime in both, it must equally be acknowledged that his life naturally deprived him of public sympathy. The Jew was a being who took no share in advancing the good of the country; he promoted no national object, he assisted in no national advancement, he promoted none of the fine arts, he encouraged neither the painter, nor the poet, nor the student; he speeded neither the plough, nor the ship, nor the pen. He made money, and that was the sole object of his existence. And he made that money in the most obnoxious way,--by enormous interest ground out of enormous distress. Thus voluntarily depriving himself of all the defences which society throws round the promoters of its purposes; without any claims on the respect, the gratitude, or even on the self-interest of mankind; often, doubtless, a desperate extortioner, and always keen on the scent of gain, the Jew, in the best of times, was only endured, in hard times was hated; and when national necessity rose to severe pressure, was the first to be rifled of his hoards, in the midst of a race of rapine, which seemed to take the shape of justice, and of revenge, which seemed a vindication of human nature. There were doubtless, in the lapse of ages, instances of Jewish scholarship, and perhaps instances of Jewish generosity. But the character of the race was coldness, craft, and avarice. The European Jew was the counterpart of the ancient Ishmaelite, "his hand against every man," but without the free spirit, the bold courage, or the wild hospitality of the Ishmaelite. He was seen by mankind at once in the contradictory character of the reckless robber and the crouching slave: suffered in society only for his unwilling uses; and endured, like the jackal or the hyena, for its swallowing the refuse rejected by all the nobler feeders on the common of mankind.

But the bloody bigotry of Spain taught them that in "the lowest depth" there was a still lower depth. Spain, which, with the climate of Mauritania, appears to inherit all the fury of the Moor, in the first cessation from her war of eight hundred years, began a general persecution of all who would not acknowledge the Virgin Mary for a God, and St Dominic, for her prophet. The Inquisition, the prime instrument of Rome, was let loose against the unfortunate Jews; many of them apostatised under the terror of the sword. Some of the apostates more honourably repented of their cowardice, and returned to their ancient faith. On the relapsed the Inquisition fell with the fury of a wild beast. But even the fury of a wild beast is satiated by being gorged. The Inquisition had the insatiable love of human misery which belongs to the Demon. The wretched people were slain and burned--the rack and the pile were in constant action. At length, after a long period of agony, the sweeping decree was issued in 1492, which banished the whole race from the kingdom. Their number was calculated at half a million! With some pretence of humanity, in allowing them to sell their scanty furniture, they were robbed of every thing. Naked and ruined, branded and bruised, they were driven away as if by a whirlwind, and their wrecks long covered the shores of Africa and Europe.

The present condition of the Jewish people in England is more favourable than, perhaps, in any other country, or in any other age of the world, since their national ruin. The principles of Protestantism _abhor_ persecution; and although Protestant persecutors have existed, their crime has been always in open contradiction to their principle, always has been disavowed by Protestants, and always has fallen into disuse with the progress of Protestantism. But the right of persecution having been always avowed by Rome, being still in the statutes of Rome, and being still claimed as one of the national privileges of infallibility, the Jews are still under ban in Rome, and in every country where power is retained by Rome.

In England the Jews are protected by the Toleration Act of William and Mary. They may hold real estates, may be high sheriffs, and, in fact, may hold every privilege of British subjects, but admission to corporate offices and parliament. From those they are excluded by the 9th George IV., the oath being, "On the faith of a Christian," and the true objection being, not the desire of depressing the Jew, but the fear of injuring the Christian. Because those corporate offices are generally magistracies, which, implying the decision of causes on the oath of parties, as Christians, it might be hazardous to put the power of deciding into hands which disregarded Christian oaths altogether. But, as a sufficient answer to the charge of invidiousness, two Jews have, within these few years, been elected sheriffs of London.

On the Continent, the progress of the eighteenth century produced a general amelioration in the state of the Jews. Some part of this fortunate change was due to themselves; they had begun to enter into general commerce, and take some national interest in public and municipal affairs. A larger part was due to the increased intelligence of the age.

The emperor Joseph, the great "reformer" of every thing, right or wrong, gave them the general protection of the Christian laws. Frederick the Great, always boasting of liberality, and actually indifferent to all religion, gave them the benefit of his neglect. But, as war was his employment, he resolved that they should have no exception from his belligerency. After several bitter disputes with their Rabbis on the subject of Jewish soldiership, he contrived to raise a regiment of cavalry among them, which, in his sarcastic sport, he called Israelousky! But to make the Israelites warriors against their will was beyond the skill even of Frederick.

He first intended to make them lancers, but they entirely disapproved of the weapon; he then tried them with the sabre, but they had no taste for the sword; and, finally, he was forced to disband them. We shall not pledge ourselves for the exactness of this detail, but the story was long the amusement of Germany.

In France, Napoleon, shortly after his accession to the throne, and while preparing for the conquest of the Continent, called the chief Jews together, and formed what he entitled a Sanhedrin. As it is impossible to give his subtle and unscrupulous mind credit for any religious motive, his purpose was, probably, to use their influence in his designs on the North, where they were numerous, and, by their close mixture with the lower population, influential. Twelve questions were proposed to them, nominally to ascertain the general compatibility of Jewish opinions with French law.

But war suddenly absorbed the imperial attention; battles were more congenial to his taste than theology, councils than Sanhedrins, and conquest by the sword than successes by conspiracy. He dissolved the Sanhedrin, and left the Jews to the general protection of the French laws.

In England, the exclusion of the Jews from Parliament depends on the Abjuration Act, George I. and III., and on the 9th George IV.; the latter act being intended to relieve the necessity of taking the sacrament, on appointment to places under government, a custom originally introduced to prevent disguised Papists from becoming members of the Protestant government, or holding offices under it,--it being supposed that the taking of the sacrament was the _only_ test which the Papist was not permitted to evade; but it was a custom which frequently gave room for irreverence, and which thus produced public offence. For this test, a simple declaration was substituted, in which the person appointed pledged himself to the various requisitions "on the faith of a _Christian_," a form which of course excluded the Jew. By the combination of the two statutes, the Jew is still distinctly, and, as we think, with most sufficient reason, excluded from a Christian legislature.