History of the Jews (55 page)

Hence Mendelssohn found it necessary to clarify his attitude to the Jews’ role in society in
Jerusalem, or upon Religious Power and Judaism
(1783). He defended Judaism as an undogmatic religion. It gave a man precepts, a code of living, but did not seek to control his thoughts. ‘Faith accepts no commands,’ he wrote, ‘it accepts only what comes to it by way of reasoned conviction.’ To be happy, men needed to seek and find truth. Truth had therefore to be accessible to people of all races and creeds. Judaism was not the only agent by which God revealed the truth. All men, Jews included, must be allowed to seek it: ‘Let every man who does not disturb the public welfare, who obeys the law, acts righteously towards you and his fellow man, be allowed to speak as he thinks, to pray to God after his own fashion or after that of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it.’ This was a formula for securing civilized treatment of Jews, but it was not Judaism. In fact in religious terms it was a formula for natural religion and natural ethics, to which of course the Jews would make a contribution, but nothing more. Gone, irrecoverably, was the thunder of Moses.

Moreover, if the Jews, by accepting the enlightenment, were to forfeit the particular claims of Judaism, it was by no means certain that they would get a quiet life in return. The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States, where the notions of the enlightenment rested on a solid basis of English parliamentarianism and tolerant religious pluralism. The very year Mendelssohn was writing
Jerusalem
, Thomas Jefferson, in
Notes on Virginia
(1782), argued that the existence of a variety of sensible, ethical religions was the best guarantee of material and spiritual progress, and of human freedom. Mendelssohn’s dualistic solution to ‘the Jewish problem’, later succinctly described by the poet Judah Leib Gordon as ‘a Jew in his tent and a man abroad’, fitted very well into American ideas of religion. Like the population as a whole, a majority of American Jews supported the independence movement, though some were loyalist and some neutral. Others were prominent in the struggle. At the public feast given in Philadelphia in 1789 to celebrate the new constitution, there was a special table where the food conformed to Jewish dietary laws.
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The Jews had something to celebrate. In the light of their history, they stood to gain more from the new American constitution than any other group—the separation of church and state, general liberty of conscience and not least the end of all religious tests in appointments. The constitution worked, too, in giving liberties to the Jews, though feet were dragged in some states. In Protestant North Carolina the last Jewish disabilities, admittedly minor ones, did not vanish until 1868. But the Jew felt free in the United States; even better, he felt valued. The fact that he practised his faith assiduously and was a staunch member of synagogue, far from being a handicap, as in Europe, was a ticket to respectability in the United States, where all conventional forms of piety were esteemed as pillars of society. Jews did not find a new Zion in America, but at last they found a permanent resting-place and a home.

In Europe, the enlightenment brought them hopes which proved illusions, and opportunities which turned into a new set of problems. In some areas the rule of reason did not operate at all. By the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), the Russian empire, which had hitherto refused to admit Jews at all, acquired a million of them as a result of its territorial greed. It now gave them rights of residence but only within a Pale of Settlement, where their numbers, poverty and disabilities all increased rapidly. In Italy, too, at any rate in the papal states, the position of the Jews also deteriorated under the anti-Semitic pope Pius
VI
(1775-99) whose Edict on the Jews, published right at the start of his long reign, led directly to forced baptisms. Jews were obliged by law to listen to contemptuous and insulting sermons, and if some sort of baptismal ceremony had been performed over a Jewish child—perhaps in secret by a Catholic maidservant—the church could claim possession later. The person was then taken to the House of Catechumens, where his consent was required (if an adult), and he might give it just to get out. Ferrara, once liberal to Jews, was now worse than Rome. As late as 1817 the little daughter of Angelo Ancona was forcibly taken away from her parents by armed men employed by the archbishop’s tribunal, on the grounds that five years before, aged two months, she had been privately baptized by her nurse, later dismissed for dishonesty. The case led to a reign of terror in the Ferrara ghetto.
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States which considered themselves more enlightened were only marginally better. The Empress Maria Theresa of Austria actually expelled the Jews from Prague as late as 1744-5, though they were readmitted three years later. Frederick the Great, despite his supposed personal support for the enlightenment, enacted a Jewish law in 1750
which distinguished between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ Jews. The latter had no hereditary rights of residence and even the former’s descended only to one child. Jews had to pay ‘protection’ taxes and fines in lieu of military services and had to make compulsory purchases of state products. They were confined to a limited range of trades and professions. The first genuine reforms in central Europe were introduced by Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph
II
, from 1781 onwards, and even they were a mixed blessing. He abolished the special poll-tax and yellow badge, the ban on Jews attending universities and some trade restrictions. On the other hand, he prohibited Yiddish and Hebrew in business and public records, scrapped rabbinical jurisdictions and introduced military service for Jews. Jews were still under residence restrictions in Vienna and other places, and their new rights were often denied by hostile bureaucrats.

Indeed, the impact of these Jew-reforms,
Judenreformen
, and Edicts of Toleration,
Toleranzpatent
, was often spoilt by the spirit in which they were administered by bitterly hostile petty officials who feared that Jews would soon be after their jobs. For instance, an Austrian law of 1787 compelled Jews to adopt German-sounding first and family names. While Sephardi Jews had long since adopted the Spanish practice of family names, the Ashkenazis had been very conservative, still following the antique custom of using their personal, plus father’s personal, name, and in the Hebrew-Yiddish form—Yaakov ben Yitzhak, for example. Hebrew-sounding names were now usually forbidden and the bureaucrats produced lists of ‘acceptable’ names. Bribes were necessary to secure ‘nice’ family names, derived from flowers or precious stones: Lilienthal, Edelstein, Diamant, Saphir, Rosenthal. Two very expensive names were Kluger (wise) and Fröhlich (happy). Most Jews were brutally lumped by bored officials into four categories and named accordingly: Weiss (white), Schwartz (black), Gross (big) and Klein (little). Many poorer Jews had unpleasant names foisted on them by malignant clerks: Glagenstrick (gallow’s rope), Eselkopf (donkey’s head), Taschengregger (pick-pocket), Schmalz (grease), Borgenicht (don’t borrow), for example. Jews of priestly or levitical descent, who could claim names like Cohen, Kahn, Katz, Levi, were forced to Germanize them: Katzman, Cohnstein, Aronstein, Levinthal and so on. A large group were given places of origin: Brody, Epstein, Ginzberg, Landau, Shapiro (Speyer), Dreyfus (Trier), Horowitz and Posner.
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The pain of this humiliating procedure was not lessened by the knowledge that the government’s main object in imposing it was to make Jews easier to tax and conscript.

The internal contradictions of the so-called enlightened despots were perfectly illustrated by Jewish policy during the last years of the
ancien régime
in France. In January 1784 Louis
XVI
abolished the poll-tax on Jews; six months later, the Jews of Alsace were subjected to a ‘reform’ which curbed the rights of Jews to lend money and trade in cattle and grain, forced them to seek crown permission before marrying, and ordered a census so that those without residence qualification could be expelled.
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This directly reflected anti-Jewish feeling in eastern France, where Ashkenazi Jews were now very numerous and much hated at a popular level.

The ambivalence was by no means wholly resolved by the outbreak of the French Revolution. In theory the Revolution was to make all men, including Jews, equal. In return Jews must abandon any separatism. The tone was set by Stanilas Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre who, in the first debate on the ‘Jewish question’, 28 September 1789, argued that ‘there cannot be a nation within a nation’. Hence: ‘The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.’ That was all very well, but it was the voice of the enlightened elite. The voice of the people could be rather different. Jean-François Rewbell, the left-wing radical deputy from Alsace, fought bitterly against equal rights for the Jews there, on behalf of ‘a numerous, industrious and honest class of my unfortunate compatriots’ who were being ‘oppressed and ground down by these cruel hordes of Africans who have infested my region’. It was only after tremendous resistance that the National Assembly voted a decree of complete emancipation for Jews (27 September 1791), to which was added a sinister rider that the government was to supervise debts owed to Jews in eastern France.
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Nevertheless, the deed was done. French Jews were now free and the clock could never be turned back completely. Moreover, emancipation in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the revolutionary spirit with their arms. The ghettos and Jewish closed quarters were broken into in papal Avignon (1791), Nice (1792) and the Rhineland (1792-3). The spread of the revolution to the Netherlands, and the founding of the Batavian Republic, led to Jews being granted full and formal rights by law there (1796). In 1796-8 Napoleon Bonaparte liberated many of the Italian ghettos, French troops, young Jews and local enthusiasts tearing down the crumbling old walls with their bare hands.

For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew. Clericalists in Italy swore enmity to ‘Gauls, Jacobins and
Jews’. In 1793-4 Jewish Jacobins set up a revolutionary regime in Saint-Esprit, the Jewish suburb of Bayonne. Once again, as during the Reformation, traditionalists saw a sinister link between the Torah and subversion. The subversive Jew appeared in many guises, often as brutal caricature, occasionally as farce. In England it was personified in the eccentric figure of Lord George Gordon, the former Protestant fanatic whose mob had terrorized London in 1780. Three years later he turned to Judaism. The Rabbi David Schiff, of the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place, turned him down. So he went to the Hambro Synagogue, which accepted him. The poorer Jews, reported Dr Watson (who figures as Gashford in Dickens’s novel of the riots,
Barnaby Rudge
), ‘regarded him as a second Moses and fondly hoped he was designed by Providence to lead them back to their fathers’ land’.
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In January 1788 Gordon was sentenced to two years in Newgate for publishing a libel on the Queen of France. He was given comfortable quarters, in the name of the Hon. Israel bar Abraham Gordon, and hung on his walls the Ten Commandments in Hebrew, his bag containing phylacteries and the
tallit
. ‘It was more like the study of a recluse in a private house than a prison,’ said John Wesley, one of his innumerable illustrious visitors, who included the royal dukes, York and Clarence. He had a Jewish maidservant-mistress, Polly Levi, kept a magnificent table, never dined with less than six guests and sometimes to the music of a band. As he refused to give security for good behaviour, the court kept him in prison throughout the early stages of the French Revolution, which he welcomed noisily, playing radical dirges on his bagpipes and entertaining subversives such as Horne Tooke. Edmund Burke, in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, proposed a swop to the new Paris regime: ‘Send us your popish archbishop of Paris and we will send you our Protestant rabbi.’ A few hours after Marie Antoinette had been guillotined in Paris, Gordon died in his cell, shouting the revolutionary song,
‘Ça Ira—les aristocrates à la lanterne!
’
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One of Bonaparte’s earliest moves as First Consul was to ban this song. As part of the same attempt to unite the age of reason with the requirements of order he tried hard to bring the Jews into society not as potential or actual subversives but as solid citizens. During his years of triumph, other monarchs followed in his wake, the most important being Prussia, which on 11 March 1812 recognized Jews already resident as full citizens and abolished all disabilities and special taxes. There was a consensus, at any rate among most educated Jews, that France had done more for them than any other nation, and this feeling persisted for a century, until it was shattered by the Dreyfus case.

But Jews sensibly declined to identify their interests with French imperialism. English Jews were rightly worried by the wave of xenophobia which the Revolutionary Terror inspired and which produced the Aliens Act of 1793. The Wardens of the Portuguese Synagogue in London ordered the rabbi to preach a sermon insisting on the duty of Jews to show their devotion to king and constitution. Rabbi Solomon Hirschell’s thanksgiving sermon on the victory of Trafalgar was the first from the Great Synagogue to be published. It breathed, wrote the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, ‘a strain of true piety, a great loyalty and universal benevolence’.
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The Jews flocked to join the London volunteers. Reviewing them in Hyde Park, George
III
exclaimed, characteristically, on what he called ‘the large number of animal names, like Wolf, Bear, Lion—what, what!’ At the other end of Europe, in Russia, the
hasidim
did not want French-style enlightenment and riches. As one rabbi said: ‘If Bonaparte wins, the wealthy among Israel would increase and the greatness of Israel would be raised, but they would leave and take the heart of Israel far from the Father in Heaven.’
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