The People of the Book

If Cromwell favored the Jews for religious as well as economic reasons, Charles, having little interest in religion, Christian or Jewish, simply found them an economic asset. James II continued that benign attitude, not out of any concern for Jews or the economy but rather in accord with the latitudinarian policy that was in the interests of Catholics. Shortly after his accession to the throne, confronted with a proposal that would have penalized Jews for not attending church, James issued an Order in Council reasserting the right of Jews to “quietly enjoy the free exercise of their religion, whilst they behave themselves dutifully and obediently to his government.”² The Jewish community—or communities, the Ashkenazi and Sephardi often going their separate ways, a total of six hundred or so individuals at the time of the Restoration—grew and prospered, and even enjoyed, in some circles, a kind of exotic appeal. The synagogue in London became so much a tourist attraction—Pepys visited it at least twice, in 1662 and 1663—that the congregation had to limit visitors in order to maintain the decorum of the service.^j

The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—a title assigned to it at the time—may be seen as even more glorious in retrospect, for it ushered in a century of remarkable tranquility and stability, certainly compared with the turbulent times that preceded it. It brought to England a monarch who was even better disposed to Jews than his predecessors, perhaps because Dutch Jews had helped finance William’s campaign. It also brought back to England her preeminent philosopher, whose writings were to have a pacifying effect upon the country as a whole and an especially salutary one upon the Jewish community.

John Locke had taken refuge in Amsterdam in 1683 after his suspected involvement in a plot to assassinate the Stuart kings. It is fitting that the man who is often characterized as the philosophical apologist for the Glorious Revolution should have returned to England on February 11, 1689, in the com-pany of Princess Mary of Orange, two days before the Declaration of Right deposing James and two months before the joint coronation of William and Mary. It is fitting, too, that A Letter Concerning Toleration, written (in Latin) while he was in exile, should have been published in English soon afterwards, translated immediately into Dutch and French, and recognized, abroad as well as in England, as the definitive statement of the principle of toleration. Roger Williams’s tract earlier in the century enunciated the principle but did not give it the philosophical rigor and authority that Locke did. Nor were the official toleration acts exemplary models. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 provided toleration only for “trinitarian Christians,” thus including Catholics but excluding Unitarians, atheists, and, of course, Jews. And the English Act of Toleration of 1689 applied only to Protestant Dissenters, granting them freedom of worship but retaining some of their disabilities, such as their exclusion from public office.

Some commentators have a restrictive interpretation of the Letter, reading it as denying toleration to Catholics, Muslims (“Mahometans”), and atheists. They cite Locke’s assertions that Catholics and Muslims owe their allegiance to “the protection and service of another prince,” and that atheists do not feel bound by the “promises, covenants, and oaths which are the bonds of human society.”⁴ The passage on atheists, however, qualifies that exemption: “Yet if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.”⁵

Indeed, the basic premise of the Letter, the distinction between government and religion, suggests a near-universal principle of toleration. Government has to do with life, liberty, and “things of this world,” and nothing to do with “the salvation of souls” or “the world to come.”⁶ This distinction—the separation, in effect, of church and state—would bring within the principle of toleration not only all Protestants but all believers and non-believers, including Catholics, Muslims, pagans, atheists—and Jews.

If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor. If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the word of God, he does not thereby alter any thing in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate, and the estates of the people, may be equally secure, whether any man believe these things or no. I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd; but the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s goods and person.⁷

. . . Neither pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonweath, because of his religion.... Shall we suffer a pagan to deal and trade with us, and shall we not suffer him to pray unto and worship God? If we allow the Jews to have private houses and dwellings amongst us, why should we not allow them to have synagogues? . . . But if these things may be granted to Jews and pagans, surely the condition of any Christians ought not to be worse than theirs, in a Christian commonwealth.⁸

Whatever ambiguities one might find in other passages in the Letter regarding Catholics or atheists, there are none about Jews. Subject neither to a foreign power, nor wanting in morality or sense of civic duty, Jews come comfortably within the principle of toleration. They are not to be excluded because of their religion—and, by the same token, they are not to be especially favored because of it. There is nothing in the Letter suggestive of any religious disposition in favor of the Jews—nothing like the Leveller’s description of the Jews as “the apple of God’s eye,” or the Puritan’s identification with the Jews as “God’s people,” or the millenarian’s reliance upon the Jews as the instrument of Christian redemption. Indeed, there are few Biblical quotations or allusions in the Letter. This is all the more remarkable because it is in striking contrast to Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, written about the same time and published very soon afterwards. The First Treatise in particular is heavily Scriptural, in substance as well as rhetoric.⁹ ^k Later in life, encouraged by his good friend Isaac Newton, Locke turned more seriously to Biblical studies, speculating about the conversion of Jews and their restoration to Palestine. But these reflections have no bearing upon the rest of his philosophy, let alone upon his doctrine of toleration. The Letter stands on its own, a bold affirmation of the principle of toleration—toleration for its own sake, not for a higher, religious end.

Unlike Locke, Newton was genuinely passionate about religion, searching the Bible for evidence of “the restoration of the Jewish nation so much spoken of by the old Prophets,” as well as the Second Coming (in the year 2060, he predicted).¹¹ Yet he was not the mystic he is sometimes made out to be. On the contrary, he was a great admirer of Maimonides, whose rationalistic, Aristotelian mode of thought he found congenial. What Newton sought in Scripture was literal, historical evidence for the prophecies and revelations. Uncomfortable with the idea of miracles, he accepted them only for the Biblical period and the first century of Christianity, after which they were supererogatory because the divine will had no need to violate the natural order. His own credo was simple: “We must believe that there is one God or supreme monarch that we may fear and obey him [sic] and keep his laws and give him honor and glory. . . . We must believe that he [sic] is the God of the Jews who created the heaven and earth all things therein as is expressed in the ten commandments.”¹² Most of Newton’s theological exegeses were unpublished during his lifetime because they verged on heresy, and the few that did appear then or soon afterward were too erudite (and in Latin) to command public attention. Today some scholars may read them (many still in manuscript), and find in them the real, the esoteric Newton, for whom science was an appendage to religion. But the public, the historic Newton was the scientist who was known to be genuinely religious, but was revered as a scientist above all.

So, too, it was the public, the historic Locke who was esteemed as England’s great philosopher and whose principle of toleration set the tone for the favorable treatment of Jews. It was in this spirit that Parliament in 1698 exempted the Jews from the onerous provisions of a bill intended to suppress blasphemy; this was the first occasion when Parliament, rather than the King and his Council, officially recognized the religious rights of Jews. The previous year a dozen Jews were admitted as brokers in the London Stock Exchange. Today that might seem a niggling concession, but at the time it was seen as a token of official as well as social acceptance. In his History, Winston Churchill reflected upon the spirit of the time: “The political passions of the seventeenth century had spent themselves in the closing years of Queen Anne. . . . The wrath and venom of controversy were replaced by an apathetic tolerance.”¹³ Churchill was not entirely happy with that turn of events; it reflected the Whig ascendancy that kept his own party out of power for much of the century. But it was an “apathetic tolerance” much welcomed by English Jews and in striking contrast, as the historian Cecil Roth observed, to the situation of their brethren on the continent.

Even in Holland they were excluded from certain towns and provinces, and in Turkey they received only the restricted rights of unbelievers. In Germany and Italy the ghetto system still prevailed; from Spain, Portugal, and much of France, there was complete and even barbarous exclusion; Polish Jewry was terrorized and almost rightless; Danish Jewry was insignificant. In England, on the other hand, the Jews were under the protection of the law, could settle anywhere they pleased, and enjoyed virtual social e quality.¹⁴

That “apathetic tolerance” had its source, at least in part, in Locke’s principle of toleration—a secular principle free of the ideological and religious passions, the apocalyptic visions and millenarian aspirations, which dominated the earlier period. Yet religion, in a much muted form, continued to pervade the culture and subtly modify the principle of toleration itself. Hebraism was no longer the powerful force it had been, but it was by no means dead. Perhaps the highest compliment the English could pay the Jews was to refer to their own country as “Israel” and to their own people as “Israelites.” A Dissenting minister in 1719, translating the psalms, replaced the word “Israel” with “Great Britain.” A sermon in 1746, during the last skirmish with the Jacobites, was dedicated to those concerned with “the welfare of our Jerusalem, and zeal for the British Israel.” The title of another sermon, celebrating the victory of the English in the Seven Years War, was “The Triumph of Israelites over Moabites, or Protestants over Papists.” That triumphal note was later echoed in William Blake’s memorable poem “Jerusalem,” which promised not to cease the good fight “Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green and pleasant land.”¹⁵

Others dealt more prosaically, but no less admiringly, with the subject of Jews. In 1712, Joseph Addison, the well-known essayist, editor of the Spectator, and Member of Parliament, devoted an issue of his journal to his own essay, “The Race of People Called Jews.”¹⁶ The epigram from Horace (in Latin) described the Romans growing stronger because of all the suffering they had endured. Addison applied this lesson to that other long-suffering “race,” the Jews.

As I am one, who, by my Profession, am obliged to look into all kinds of Men, there are none whom I consider with so much pleasure as those who have any thing new or extraordinary in their characters or ways of living. For this reason I have often amused myself with speculations on the race of people called Jews, many of whom I have met with in most of the considerable towns which I have passed through in the course of my travels. They are, indeed, so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world, that they are become the instruments by which the most distant nations converse with one another, and by which mankind are knit together in a general correspondence: They are like the pegs and nails in a great building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together.

Addison found the Jews remarkable, first, for their continued existence in great numbers in spite of the massacres and persecutions inflicted upon them by Christians over the ages; then, for their dispersion throughout the world, in the remotest parts of China, Africa, and America as well as Europe; and finally, for their firm adherence to their religion in spite of that baneful history. These were the “natural reasons” for their survival. The “providential reason” was the fact that they provided every age and every nation with the strongest arguments for Christianity itself. “Their number furnishes us with a sufficient cloud of witnesses that attest the truth of the Old Bible. Their dispersions spreads these witnesses through all parts of the world. The adherence to their religion makes their testimony unquestionable.”¹⁷

This was philosemitism in its purest form—the “natural” and the “providential” in perfect accord. And this from Addison, who was not a crusading Evangelical but a mild-tempered Anglican Whig, addressing a sophisticated middle-class audience, in a popular daily whose avowed purpose was “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.” “It was said of Socrates,” Addison told his readers, “that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee houses.”¹⁸ Although the Spectator suspended publication after two years, it continued to be read in book form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Jews found a very different champion in John Toland, an Irish polemicist, radical, and “pantheist,” as he described himself—a word he coined to suggest something more heretical than deist. (Bishop Berkeley called him a “free thinker,” another word of recent coinage.) Toland was also something of a Hebraist and a great admirer of Harrington, whose Oceana he edited. Unlike Harrington, however, who would have excluded Jews from his utopia, Toland warmly welcomed them in his Britain. In 1714, four decades before the issue of naturalization became a subject of controversy, he published Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland—naturalizing, that is, Jewish immigrants, so that they would enjoy all the privileges, and the disabilities, of English-born Jews.

An appended essay, “A Defence of the Jews against all Vulgar Prejudices in all Countries,” might have been written with Harrington in mind. Ironically addressing the bishops and archbishops of Great Britain, who “as you are the advocates of the Jews at the Throne of Heaven, so you will be their friends and protectors in the British parliament,” Toland recounted the history of English Jews from their “heinous” expulsion four centuries earlier and rebutted the “vulgar prejudices” against them. So far from being liabilities to England, he insisted, an increased number of Jews would be valuable assets to the country. They would not contribute to sectarian disputes, because they were indifferent to the quarrels among Protestants. They would not drain England of her wealth, because they had no other country to retire to; indeed they would bring trade and commerce to England. If they were now money-lenders, it was only because other trades had been closed to them; they had once been “shepherds in Mesopotamia, builders in Egypt, and husbandmen in their own country,” and so they would now be in England. Moreover, immigration in general was desirable because a large population was conducive to productivity, prosperity, and well-being.¹⁹

These were good practical reasons for encouraging the immigration and naturalization of Jews. But there was something more elevating in Toland’s defense of them. It is curious to find an Irish freethinker invoking the authority and echoing the arguments of the seventeenth-century Italian rabbi and scholar Simone Luzzatto, whose Discorso circa il stato de gl’Hebrei (Discourse Concerning the Condition of the Jews) had been published in Venice in 1638. It is remarkable that Toland should even have known of a work by a rabbi in another country, another language, and another time, and should have found his account of the situation of Jews in the “Fair City of Venice” (as the subtitle had it) so instructive for the Jews in England almost a century later. Toland was sufficiently moved by that book to announce his intention of translating it into English. A few years later, he wrote another book that went beyond his (and Luzzatto’s) arguments about the salutary effects of the Jews in their respective countries. He then looked forward to a time when the Jews might be resettled, with the same fortunate results, in their own “Mosaic Republic.”

It will follow, that as the Jews known at this day, and who are dispersed over Europe, Asia, and Africa, with some in America, are found by good calculation to be more numerous than either the Spaniards (for example) or the French, so if they ever happen to be resettled in Palestine upon their original foundation, which is not at all impossible, they will then, by reason of their excellent constitution, be much more populous, rich, and powerful than any other nation now in the world. I would have you consider whether it might be not both the interest and duty of Christians to assist them in regaining their country.²⁰ ^l

Other Hebraists were equally enthusiastic, proposing the ancient “Hebrew Commonwealth” as the model for the English government. In 1740 the Nonconformist minister Moses Lowman published a Dissertation on the Civil Government of the Hebrews in which the True Designs and Nature of Their Government Are Explained; The Justice, Wisdom and Goodness of the Mosaical Constitution Are Vindicated. The title is eulogistic enough, but the text is even more so.

The Hebrew Commonwealth is, without question, one of the most ancient of the world, and justly looked upon as a model of government of divine origin; it will deserve our attention, as much as any of the forms of government in the ancient times, either among the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans. It should more especially deserve our attention as Christians, who own the laws delivered by Moses to the Hebrew nation to have been given by the oracle of God, and established by authority of the supreme governor of the world; in which therefore, we may expect to find a wise and excellent model, becoming the wisdom of such a lawgiver.²²

If the Jews had notable defenders, even venerators, in this post-Lockean period, they also had their detractors, even vili-fiers—and not only among zealous Christians with taunts of Christ-killing, but among those who professed to be tolerant and claimed tolerance for themselves. Many deists were hostile to Judaism because that was theism’s legacy to Christianity, and contemptuous of Jews, in the present as in antiquity, because they were the practitioners of that odious religion. Thomas Morgan, in 1737, in a curiously entitled book, The Moral Philosopher: In a Dialogue Between Philalethes a Christian Deist, and Theophanes a Christian Jew, ransacked the Old Testament for evidence of everything that was hateful in Christianity and found in Jewry everything that was odious to humanity. Having been “perfectly Egyptianized” in that benighted country, the Jews had left it in a state “of gross ignorance, superstition, and moral wickedness, which ran through all their successive generations, till their final dissolution and destruction.” The law Moses gave them was arbitrary, being nothing more than the voice and will of God. Without any basis in nature, human wisdom, or prudence, it made no distinction between morals and rituals, thus leaving the Jews with a constitution that could “serve only to blind and enslave those that were under it.”²³

It was against this background—from “apathetic” or benign toleration, to enthusiastic philosemitism, interspersed with the familiar antisemitic outbursts—that the Jewish Naturalization Bill was introduced in 1753. Yet the discussion of the “Jew Bill,” as it was generally known, was relaxed, muted, and for the most part impassionate.^m The title was something of a misnomer. The bill applied not to Jews in general, but only to immigrants. Jews born in England were naturalized, so to speak, by birth. Whatever “disabilities” they had were those of all non-Anglicans who could not take the required religious oath; they could not hold municipal office, vote, sit in Parliament, or get a university degree. Jews born abroad, however, like all immigrants, were aliens and had additional disabilities, such as the inability to own land and engage in some forms of foreign trade. The Jew Bill was meant to equalize the status of Jews, giving immigrants the same rights and privileges—and disabilities—of native-born Jews.

There had been earlier attempts to solve the problem of all immigrants, non-Jewish as well as Jewish. In 1709 an act to naturalize foreign-born Protestants was passed, only to be repealed the following year. In the 1740s, the Irish Parliament considered, and rejected, bills for the naturalization of Irish Jews. At the same time, bills in the English Parliament for the naturalization of Protestants had to be withdrawn, in spite of the support of the Prime Minister Henry Pelham, because of strong opposition from the City. It is surprising, therefore, that the 1753 bill for the naturalization of English Jews was actually enacted—only to be repealed later that year.

The bill was simple enough. It provided that “persons professing the Jewish religion may, upon application for that purpose, be naturalized by Parliament without receiving the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.” In the House of Lords, the debate was brief, almost pro forma, and the bill was approved without a division on April 16. In the House of Commons the speeches were slightly more animated and overwhelmingly in favor of the bill. Only after the second reading did it begin to attract public attention; four petitions were sent to the Commons, two in favor and two against. The main objections were not religious but economic. A Whig pamphleteer favoring the bill deplored the self-serving motives of the opposition: “The conduct of the merchants who opposed the bill is easily accounted for: narrow principles, and a view to their private interests, were the incentive; they are disgusted at seeing the Jews trade in the same countries with them, and their trade would be more profitable, by there being fewer traders; never reflecting on the generous and certain maxim, that the most extensive trade is the most beneficial.”²⁴

The bill passed on May 22, by 96 votes to 55. While it was awaiting the royal assent, the public “clamor” (as it was always described) started.ⁿ It became a party issue on both economic and religious grounds. The Whigs had a more expansive view of trade (the more the better) and a more ecumenical (therefore tolerant) view of religion; the Tories a more restrictive view of trade and a more Erastian view of religion. Antisemitism did intrude itself, but it was less virulent than might be expected. Some of the objections were not to Jews specifically but to all foreigners (xenophobia was the basis for much antisemitism) and to all non-Anglicans (Catholics and Dissenters). The familiar slogan “Church and King” was modified to accomodate all these dissidents: “Church and King, without mass, meeting, or synagogue.”²⁶ The Jews also had the misfortune of being identified with the Whigs, thus playing into the party struggle that occupied the public in the months before the parliamentary elections of 1754. “In the political vocabulary of 1753–54,” one historian explains, “the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Whig’ became practically synonymous.... The ‘anti-Jewish’ clamor of 1753 was meant, even at its ugliest, to prepare the ground not for a pogrom, but for a general election.” ²⁷

Even good churchmen were dismayed by the public outcry against the bill and by the supineness of politicians of both parties. In June, the Bishop of Oxford regretted that the bill “hath not only raised very great clamors amongst the ignorant and disaffected, but hath offended great numbers of better understandings and dispositions, and is likely to have an unhappy influence on the elections of the next year.” But he too shamefacedly confessed the need to bow to “weak and misguided consciences.” ²⁸ A few months later, the Archbishop of Canterbury observed that “faction, working upon the good old spirit of High Church, has made wild work in the nation,” going on, however, to explain that since the passage of the bill was “worth no hazard,” the repeal of it was “hardly worth a debate.”²⁹ Members of Parliament had no change of heart about the bill itself; they merely responded to the passions of the people “out-of-doors” (the public). Lord Hardwicke made the best of this unhappy situation:

However much the people may be misled, yet in a free country I do not think an unpopular measure ought to be obstinately persisted in. We should treat the people as a skilful and humane physician would treat his patient; if they nauseate the salutary draught we have prescribed, we should think of some other remedy, or we should delay administering the prescription till time or change of circumstances has removed the nausea.³⁰

The act was was repealed in November, only six months after its passage, with hardly a debate and without a division in either House. Six months later, the Whigs were returned to Parliament with a comfortable margin. Almost immediately, passions subsided and the episode was over. In his memoirs, Horace Walpole (son of the former Prime Minister and himself a Member of Parliament) took the measure of the times and the issue. The repeal, he observed, “showed how much the age, enlightened as it is called, was still enslaved to the grossest and most vulgar prejudices.” The act originally passed almost without comment, only two members of the House of Lords having given “a languid opposition to it, in order to reingratiate themselves with the mobs of London and Westminster.” For the rest, the bishops had concurred in removing the absurd distinctions that “stigmatized and shackled a body of the most loyal, commercial, and wealthy subjects of the kingdom.” But then politics took hold.

A new general election was approaching; some obscure men, who perhaps wanted the necessary sums for purchasing seats, or the topics of party to raise clamor, had fastened on this Jew Bill; and in a few months the whole nation found itself inflamed with a Christian zeal.... Indeed, this holy spirit seized none but the populace and the very lowest of the clergy: yet all these grew suddenly so zealous for the honor of the prophecies that foretell calamity and eternal dispersion to the Jews, that they seemed to fear lest the completion of them should be defeated by act of Parliament; and there wanted nothing to their ardor but to petition both Houses to enact the accomplishment. The little curates preached against the bishops for deserting the interests of the Gospels; and aldermen grew drunk at county clubs in the cause of Jesus Christ, as they had used to do for the sake of King James. Yet to this senseless clamor did the ministry give way; and to secure tranquility to their elections, submitted to repeal the bill.³¹

The Jew Bill and the protests against it were soon forgotten, by the public and even by Jews. The repeal was only nominally a defeat for the Jews because it left their legal status unchanged. The “clamor” was nothing more than that. There was no physical violence against Jews, no call for their expulsion or even demands for punitive measures against them. On the contrary, two other acts, on monopolies and marriage, passed in the same year as the ill-fated Jew Bill, contained specific exemptions in favor of the Jews. New Jewish immigrants remained aliens, but their English-born children were not. The Jewish community continued to grow and thrive, economically and socially. In the middle of the century, the Jews in England numbered 8,000, one-tenth of one percent of the English population, of whom about a half had been born abroad and most of whom lived in London. By the end of the century there were over 25,000, of whom about 5,000 were in the provinces.³² When the naturalization issue was finally resolved in 1826, it was not in the form of a Jew Bill but by an act abolishing the sacramental test for all immigrants. There was no significant opposition, no public clamor, no singling out of the Jews for special commendation or disapprobation.

A dozen years after the abortive Jew Bill, Adam Smith (without mentioning it), commented on one of the objections that had been brought against the Jews: the “vulgar prejudice” against them as “traders.” In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith traced that prejudice back to those “rude ages” when people had a “mean and despicable” opinion of all merchants, and of Jews in particular who, because they were outlawed from other occupations, were disproportionately merchants. Even in the present “refined” age, that contempt for trade persisted, to the detriment of commerce and of society. The Jews especially “were grievously oppressed and consequently the progress of opulence greatly retarded.”³³ “The progress of opulence”—on Smith’s part, this was no mean tribute to Jews, for it connected them, by way of commerce, to the “opulence” of society, which is to say, the “wealth of the nation.”^o

Edmund Burke, a friend and disciple of Adam Smith, may appear to be a less plausible friend of Jews. His references in Reflections on the Revolution in France to “Jew brokers” and “money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews” are the classic rhetoric of antisemitism, as is his diatribe against Lord George Gordon—a “public proselyte to Judaism,” heir to “the old hoards of the synagogue, ... the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver.”³⁵ In the case of Gordon, however, what provoked Burke was not his new-found Judaism but his role in fomenting the anti-Catholic riots of 1780, which resulted in the destruction of Catholic chapels and homes, the killing and wounding of almost five hundred people, and Gordon’s conviction and imprisonment on the charge of high treason. Of his conversion to Judaism seven years later, Burke remarked that he was unworthy of the religion to which he had converted, and recommended that he “meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct more becoming his birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which he has become a proselyte.”³⁶

Shortly after the Gordon riots, Burke had occasion to speak of Jews in quite a different context and spirit. In May 1781, he presented a motion in Parliament to inquire into the condition of Jews in the West Indies island of St. Eustatius, which the British had captured a few months earlier after yet another Anglo-Dutch war. The island had a substantial Jewish community, mainly merchants and plantation owners, and the British, upon taking possession of the area, had confiscated much of their property and ordered their deportation. The Jews appealed in vain to the new authorities and Burke vigorously supported them, urging the British Parliament to reverse their actions and to behave humanely and protectively to a much abused people.

The persecution was begun with the people, whom of all others it ought to be the care and the wish of humane nations to protect, the Jews. Having no fixed settlement in any part of the world, no kingdom nor country in which they have a government, a community, and a system of laws, they are thrown upon the benevolence of nations, and claim protection and civility from their weakness, as well as from their utility. They were a people, who, by shunning the profession of any, could give no well-founded jealousy to any state. If they have contracted some vices, they are such as naturally arise from their dispersed, wandering, and proscribed state.... Their abandoned state and their defenceless situation call most forcibly for the protection of civilized nations. If Dutchmen are injured and attacked, the Dutch have a nation, a government, and armies to redress or revenge their cause. If Britons are injured, Britons have armies and laws, the laws of nations (or at least they once had the laws of nations) to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power, and no such friend to depend on. Humanity then must become their protector and ally. Did they find it in the British conquerors of St. Eustatius? No. On the contrary, a resolution was taken to banish this unhappy people from the island.³⁷

It may go too far to call Burke a philosemite, yet this speech might begin to qualify him as that, all the more because he chose to take up the cause of the Jews on this occasion when apparently no other Englishman did, and when it was not in his own interest to do so. Jews would also have been well served by the principle of toleration he advocated in the Reflections. Criticizing the French revolutionaries for confiscating the property of the church and for undermining religion in the name of reason, he accused them of perverting the idea of toleration.

We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration. That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence, which arises from contempt, is no true charity. There are in England abundance of men who tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the dogmas of religion, though in different degrees, are all of moment.... They favour, therefore, and they tolerate. They tolerate, not because they despise opinions, but because they respect justice. They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, because they love and venerate the great principle upon which they all agree, and the great object to which they are all directed.³⁸

From Locke to Burke—it was a momentous period in the history of English Jews, not because it witnessed any dramatic changes (the small eruption created by the Jew Bill was of no lasting consequence), but precisely because it was so undramatic and uneventful. Other groups did not fare so well. There were anti-Dissenter riots early in the century, anti-Irish riots in the 1760s, and the anti-Catholic Gordon riot in 1780, but no anti-Jewish riots. One historian suggests that anti-Catholicism may have helped “deflect a good part of the hostility that might have been directed at Anglo-Jewry.”³⁹ But it might be also argued that one kind of riot may have whetted the appetite for others. If anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, why not anti-Jew? In fact, it was a relatively tranquil period for Jews of all classes, not only for the rich financiers and merchants who enjoyed the company of high society and literati (of Walpole, for example), but also for more lowly merchants and artisans who plied their trades peacefully, and even for the hawkers and peddlers who were often derided but rarely physically abused—above all, for all Jews who enjoyed complete freedom of worship.

This was all the more remarkable because there was a great influx of Jews into England after a wave of massacres in East Europe in 1768. By the end of the century the number of English Jews had increased more than threefold. Since most of the immigrants were poor, they brought with them the problems associated with poverty, including crime. A particularly heinous murder in 1771 by a band of Jewish criminals provoked antisemitic cries in the streets and some abuse of peddlers. The government responded by imposing a moderate limitation on Jewish immigration; the immigrants had, for example, to pay their passage in advance. The Aliens Act of 1793 (not, it is interesting, a “Jewish Aliens Act”) put foreigners in England under stricter control, but gave the synagogues, not the magistrates, responsibility for the registration of Jews. A Seditious Meetings Bill two years later was modified so as not to penalize Jews. That year the Jewish financier and philanthropist Abraham Goldsmid raised a fund for an institution to ameliorate the condition of the Jewish poor. Of the eighty-seven initial subscribers, forty-one were Christians.⁴⁰

Napoleon scoffed at the “nation of shopkeepers,” anticipating their quick defeat in battle. But Smith, who invented that phrase (with no pejorative intent), would have known better—as did the Jewish shopkeepers, who appreciated the country that was treating them, for the most part, civilly and tolerantly. It remained for later generations of English Jews to seek something more than civility and toleration—political equality as well. This was the ultimate test for Jews who happened to be living in a Christian society, in a state with an established Church, and who had the misfortune to be engaged in occupations that were regarded as “odious.”

It may be that the principle of toleration alone, rigorously applied, would have enabled Jews to pass that test. In the event, something else came to their aid, a respect, even admiration, for Judaism that was often tantamount to philosemitism. The two sentiments, toleration and philosemitism, were philosophically and temperamentally very different, even to a degree contradictory. Yet they worked together in harmony, as “fellow-travelers,” so to speak, using different means to arrive at the same end.