On 31 July 1817 a precocious twelve-year-old boy, Benjamin Disraeli, was baptized into the Anglican Church, at St Andrew’s, Holborn, by the Rev. Mr Thimbleby. This was the culmination of a quarrel between the boy’s father, Issac D’Israeli and the Bevis Marks Synagogue, on an important point of Jewish principle. In Judaism, as we have noted, service to the community was not an option or a privilege, but an obligation. In 1813 the well-to-do Mr D’Israeli had been elected a warden or parnas, in strict accord with the laws of the Bevis Marks congregation. He was indignant. He had always paid his dues and considered himself a Jew. Indeed, as an antiquarian author he had actually written an essay called The Genius of Judaism. But his major work, by contrast, was a five-volume life of King Charles the Martyr. He had a low opinion both of Judaism and of Jews. In his book Curiosities of Literature (1791) he had described the Talmud as ‘a complete system of the barbarous learning of the Jews’. He thought the Jews had ‘no men of genius or talents to lose. I can count all their men of genius on my fingers. Ten centuries have not produced ten great men.’1 So he wrote to the Chamber of Elders that he was a man ‘of retired habits of life’, who had ‘always lived out of the sphere of your observation’; and that such a person as himself could on no account perform ‘permanent duties always repulsive to his feelings’.2 He was fined £40, but the matter was allowed to lapse. Three years later it was resumed, and this time D’Israeli withdrew from Judaism completely and had his children baptized. The breach was significant for the son, for Britain, and much else. For Jews were not legally admitted to parliament until 1858, and without his baptism Disraeli could never have become Prime Minister.
Seven years after Disraeli’s baptism, on 26 August 1824, a similar event took place in the German town of Trier, this time involving the six-year-old Karl Heinrich Marx, as he was now renamed. This family apostasy was more serious. Marx’s grandfather was rabbi in Trier until his death in 1789; his uncle was still the rabbi. His mother came from a long line of famous rabbis and scholars, going back to Meier Katzellenbogen, a sixteenth-century rector of the talmudic college in Padua.3 But Marx’s father, Heinrich, was a child of the enlightenment, a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. He was also an ambitious lawyer. Trier was now in Prussia, where Jews had been emancipated since the edict of 11 March 1812. In theory it was still in force, despite Napoleon’s defeat. In reality it was evaded. Thus, Jews could train in law, but not practise it. So Heinrich Marx became a Christian and, in due course, rose to be dean of the Trier bar. Karl Marx, instead of going to the yeshiva, attended Trier High School, then in charge of a headmaster later sacked for his liberalism. His baptism proved to be even more significant to the world than Disraeli’s.
Conversion to Christianity was one way in which Jews reacted to the age of emancipation. Traditionally baptism had been an escape from persecution, and emancipation should have made it unnecessary. In fact, from the end of the eighteenth century it became more common. It was no longer a dramatic act of treason, a change from one world to another. With the decline of the part all religion played in society, conversion might be less of a religious act than a secular one; it might be quite cynical. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who had himself baptized the year after Karl Marx, referred to the act contemptuously as ‘an entrance-ticket to European society’. During the nineteenth century, in east-central Europe, at least 250,000 Jews bought their tickets.4 The German historian Theodor Mommsen, who was a great friend of the Jews, pointed out that Christianity was not so much a name for a religion as ‘the only word expressing the character of today’s international civilization in which numerous millions all over the many-nationed globe feel themselves united’.5 A man felt he had to become a Christian in the nineteenth century in the same way he felt he had to learn English in the twentieth. It applied to countless non-white natives as well as Jews.
For a Jew, everywhere except in the United States, remaining a Jew was a material sacrifice. The Austrian novelist and newspaper editor Karl Emil Franzos (1848-1904) said that it took Jews different ways: ‘One Jew can’t bring himself to make the sacrifice and gets baptized. A second makes it, but in his heart regards his Judaism as a misfortune and comes to hate it. A third, just because the sacrifice has been so heavy, starts to grow closer to his Judaism.’6 The rewards of baptism could be considerable. In England, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, it removed the last obstacles preventing a Jew from getting to the top. The millionaire Samson Gideon was prepared to make the sacrifice himself but not to impose it on his son. Accordingly he was able to get Samson Gideon Junior made a baronet while he was still at Eton, and in due course the boy became an MP and an Irish peer. Sir Manasseh Lopez accepted baptism and became an MP; so did David Ricardo; a third ex-Jewish MP, Ralph Bernal, rose to be Chairman of Committees (Deputy Speaker).
On the Continent, Judaism remained an obstacle not just to a political career but to many forms of economic activity. Even Napoleon had imposed (1806) some legal restrictions on Jews. They lapsed in 1815 and the restored Bourbons, to their credit, did not renew them; but not until 1831, when Jews were granted equal rights with Christians, did they feel legally secure, and the old Jewish oath lasted another fifteen years. The articles of the German Confederation (1815) deprived Jews of many of the rights they had been granted in Napoleon’s time, especially in Bremen and Lübeck, where they were banned altogether for a time, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Mecklenburg. In Prussia Jews remained subject to poll-tax, the Jewish annual tax, a registration levy and a ‘lodging increment’. They could not own land or exercise a trade or profession. They were confined to ‘authorized emergency business’ which the guilds would not touch, or money-lending. There was a further Prussian reform in 1847, and the following year the revolution produced a list of ‘Fundamental Rights of the German People’, establishing civil rights on a non-religious basis, which were included in the constitutions of the majority of German states. Yet residence restrictions on Jews remained in most of them until the 1860s. In Austria, overall legal emancipation did not come until 1867. In Italy, the fall of Napoleon put the clock back for Jews nearly everywhere, and it took another generation to restore the rights first gained in the 1790s. Not until 1848 did permanent emancipation come in Tuscany and Sardinia, followed by Modena, Lombardy and Romagna (1859), Umbria (1860), Sicily and Naples (1861), Venice (1866) and Rome (1870). This is a bald summary of a long and complicated process, involving many setbacks, retractions and exceptions. Hence even in western Europe, the process begun in 1789-91 in France took eighty years to complete purely in a nominal legal sense. Further east, especially in Russia and Rumania, Jewish disabilities remained severe.
These delays and uncertainties explain why so many Jews took their ticket to society through baptism. But there were other solutions to the ‘problem’ of being a Jew in the nineteenth century. To many Jews, the ideal one had been found by the Rothschilds. They became the most illustrious exponents of the new phenomenon of eighteenth-century finance, the private bank. Such private finance houses were founded by many Jews, chiefly descendants of court Jews. But the Rothschilds alone escaped both baptism and failure. They were a remarkable family because they contrived to do four difficult and often incompatible things simultaneously: to acquire immense wealth quickly and honestly; to distribute it widely while retaining the confidence of many governments; to continue to earn huge profits, and to spend them, without arousing popular antagonism; and to remain Jewish in law and, for the most part, in spirit too. No Jews ever made more money, spent it more self-indulgently, or remained more popular.
Yet the Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them which is both revealing and accurate.7 Libraries of nonsense have been written about them. For this the family is largely to blame. A woman who planned to write a book entitled Lies About the Rothschilds abandoned it, saying: ‘It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth.’8 The family was highly secretive. That was understandable. They were private bankers. They had confidential relations with several governments as well as innumerable powerful individuals. They were Jews, and therefore particularly vulnerable to destructive litigation. They kept no more documentation than was necessary. They systematically destroyed their papers, for all kinds of personal as well as business reasons. They were particularly concerned that no details of their lives should be used to promote anti-Semitism. So their deaths were followed by holocausts of private papers even larger and more drastic than those of Queen Victoria’s family. Their latest historian, Miriam Rothschild, believes there was a further reason. They kept no muniment room. They were not interested in their history. They were respectful towards their ancestors, as a matter of good form, and prudently thought about tomorrow. But they lived for the present and did not care deeply about past or future.9
All the same, the salient facts about the Rothschilds are clear enough. They were a product of the Napoleonic Wars, just as the first phase of large-scale Jewish finance was a product of the Thirty Years War, and for the same reason: in wartime, Jewish creativity comes to the fore and gentile prejudice goes to the rear. In all essentials, the family fortune was created by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London. What happened was this. Until the beginning of the revolutionary wars in France, in the mid-1790s, European merchant banking was dominated by non-Jews: the Barings of London, the Hopes of Amsterdam and the Gebrüder Bethmann of Frankfurt. The war quickly expanded the money-raising market and so opened room for newcomers.10 Among them was a German-Jewish group–Oppenheims, Rothschilds, Heines, Mendelssohns. The Rothschild name derived from the sixteenth-century red shield on their house in the Frankfurt ghetto. The family patriarch, Mayer Amschel (1744-1812), was a money-changer who also traded in antiques and old coins. He branched into textiles, which meant a British connection, and from selling old coins to William IX, Elector of Hesse-Cassel, he became his main financial agent. The elector had made himself very rich by supplying mercenaries to the British army. So that was another English connection.
In 1797 Mayer Amschel sent his son Nathan to England to attend to his affairs there. Nathan went to Manchester, the centre of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution and of what was rapidly becoming a world trade in cotton manufactures. He did not make cottons himself but bought them from small spinners, sent them out for printing, and then sold the finished product to Continental buyers direct, by-passing the fairs. He thus pioneered a path later trodden by other Jewish textile families: the Behrens in Leeds, for example, and the Rothensteins in Bradford.11 Nathan’s direct-selling method involved giving three months’ credit, and that in turn meant access to the London money market. He had already ‘studied’ there under his father’s connection, Levi Barent Cohen, and married Cohen’s daughter Hannah. In 1803 he transferred his operations to London, in time to enter the government loan business as the war expanded. The British government needed to sell £20 million of loan stock every year. The market could not absorb this amount directly, so portions of it were sold to contractors who found customers. Nathan Rothschild, who had already established a good reputation for his bills of exchange in the textile trade, participated in these contractor syndicates and at the same time acted as an acceptance house for international bills of exchange.12 He had one enviable advantage in getting working capital. After the disastrous Battle of Jena in 1806, the Elector of Hesse-Cassel sent his fortune to Nathan in London for investment in British securities, and Nathan built up his own resources while serving William IX’s interests too. Thus Nathan’s reputation in the City was established. But he also excelled in the traditional Jewish skill of transferring bullion quickly and safely under trying conditions. In the six years 1811-15, Rothschild and the British Commissary-in-Chief, John Herries, contrived to get £42.5 million in gold safely to the British army in Spain, of which more than half was handled by Nathan himself or by his younger brother James, operating from France.13 By the time of Waterloo, the Rothschild capital was £136,000, of which Nathan in London had £90,000.14
James’s operations in Paris from 1811 marked the expansion of the family network. A third brother, Salomon Mayer, founded a Vienna branch in 1816, and a fourth, Karl Mayer, set one up in Naples in 1821. The eldest son, Amschel Mayer, ran the Frankfurt branch after the old patriarch died in 1812. This network was ideally suited to the new era of peacetime finance which opened in 1815. Raising the vast sums needed to pay the armies had brought into existence an international finance system based on paper and credit, and governments now found they could use it for all kinds of purposes. In the decade 1815-25 more securities were floated than in the whole of the preceding century, and Nathan Rothschild gradually succeeded Barings as the principal house as well as London’s top financial authority. He did not deal with volatile Latin American regimes but mainly with solid European autocracies–Austria, Russia, Prussia, known as the Holy Alliance; he raised an enormous sum for them in 1822. He handled seven of the twenty-six foreign government loans raised in London, 1818-32, and one jointly, making a total of £21 million or 39 per cent of the whole.15
In Vienna, the Rothschilds sold bonds for the Habsburgs, advised Metternich and built the first Austrian railway. The first French railways were built by Rothschild Frères in Paris, who also raised money, in turn for Bourbons, Orleanists and Bonapartes, and financed the new king of Belgium. In Frankfurt they floated issues on behalf of a dozen German thrones. In Naples, they raised money for the government there, for Sardinia, Sicily and the papal states. The combined Rothschild capital rose steadily, to £1.77 million in 1818, to £4.3 million in 1828, to £34.35 million in 1875, of which the London house controlled £6.9 million.16 The wide spread of the network’s contacts made the money-power the firm could actually deploy very much greater. They exploited to the full the traditional Jewish flair for news-gathering and transmission. Jews by mid-century were already turning from banks to wire-services. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-99), whose name was originally Israel Beer Josaphat, left his uncle’s bank in Göttingen to set up the world’s greatest news-agency in 1848. Adolf Opper, or as he called himself Adolphe Opper de Blowitz (1825-1903), made himself, as The Times Paris correspondent, the centre of Europe’s finest personal news-network with private telegraph lines when necessary. But no newspaper has ever been better served with key financial news than the Rothschilds. As late as the 1930s, their couriers were still recruited in the Folkestone area, descendants of the sailors who took cutters carrying dispatches across the Channel in the age of Waterloo.17
Unlike the old court Jews, the new kind of international firm the Rothschilds created was impervious to local attack. In 1819, as if to demonstrate that newly acquired Jewish rights were illusory so far, anti-Semitic violence broke out in many parts of Germany. These ‘Hep Hep’ riots as they were called (perhaps after a crusader war-cry, or more likely after a goat-drover’s call from Franconia) included an assault on the Rothschild house in Frankfurt. It made no difference. Nor did a further attack during the 1848 revolution. The money was no longer there. It was paper, circulating through the world. The Rothschilds completed a process the Jews had been working on for centuries: how to immunize their lawful property from despoiling violence. Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the financial genius who made the firm’s fortunes, died in 1836 in Frankfurt, while attending the marriage of his eldest son Lionel to Charlotte, daughter of his brother Karl, head of the Naples branch. The Rothschilds nearly always married each other: when they spoke of ‘marrying out’ they did not mean out of Jewry but out of the family. The object of intermarriage was to keep dowries within the firm; though it was said that wives’ settlements were usually shares the men wanted to unload, such as South American railway stock.18 The Lionel-Charlotte wedding was celebrated at the old family houses in the Judengasse, where the eighty-four-year-old matriarch, born Gudule Schnappers, who had produced nineteen children, still lived: she was to survive another decade. Nathan’s death was a matter of considerable importance: the carrier-pigeon dispatched to London with news of it was shot down over Brighton and was said to have borne the cryptic message, ‘Il est mort.’19 But his branch, N. M. Rothschild, heart of the firm’s power, continued to grow in strength, as was natural: London was the financial centre of the world, Rothschilds its most reliable pillar. Thus, in the sixteen years 1860-75, foreign governments raised over £700 million in London. Of the fifty banks involved, ten were Jewish, including such important names as Hambro, Samuel Montagu and Helbert Wagg.20 Rothschilds, however, played the biggest and most varied role of all fifty.
Inevitably, such financial pull brought political influence as well. It was the young Disraeli who first argued that Jews and Tories were natural allies, pointing out that the critical City of London elections of June 1841 and October 1843 had both been decided by Jewish votes: in the second, he noted, the Rothschilds brought out the Jews to win the seat for the anti-Corn Law Liberal even on a Saturday!21 Lionel, as head of the family, won the City seat himself in 1847 (though he could not take his place in parliament until disabilities were finally removed in 1858), and the Tory leader, Lord George Bentinck, pointed out in a letter to J. W. Croker the significance of the vote: ‘The City of London having elected Lionel Rothschild one of her representatives, it is such a pronunciation of public opinion that I do not think the party, as a party, would do themselves any good by taking up the question against the Jews. It is like [County] Clare electing O’Connell, or Yorkshire Wilberforce. Clare settled the Catholic question, Yorkshire the slave trade and now the City of London has settled the Jew question.’22
But the Rothschilds wisely did not try to force this issue, or any other. They knew time was on their side and were prepared to wait for it. They hated to make undue use of their financial power or to be seen exercising it at any time. Collectively, the Rothschilds always favoured peace, as one would expect; individually, the branches tended to back the policy aims of their respective countries, as one would also expect.23 In Britain, where they had most power if they chose to exercise it, a recent sifting of the evidence shows they rarely if ever took the initiative in pushing government.24 In moments of doubt over foreign affairs, it was their custom to ask government what ministers wanted them to do, as for instance during the 1884 Egyptian crisis.
They took, in fact, a very English line of deprecating money as such–they always referred to it as ‘tin’–and using it, rather, to build up a social position. They created two palatial ghettos, one urban, the other rural. The urban one was at the bottom corner of Piccadilly, where it joins Park Lane. Old Nathan began the process in 1825, when he stopped living ‘over the shop’ in 2 New Court, St Swithin’s Lane in the City, and bought 107 Piccadilly from Mrs Coutts, the banker’s widow. Other members of the family, English and Continental, followed him. His son Lionel built 148 Piccadilly, next to Apsley House, in the 1860s, providing it with the finest ballroom in London: the housewarming was combined with the marriage of his daughter Evelina to her cousin Ferdinand of Vienna; Disraeli proposed the toast to the bride’s health. Ferdinand himself bought 143 Piccadilly, and that too had a famous ballroom, all in white. Next door, at 142, was his sister Alice. At the back, Leopold de Rothschild bought 5 Hamilton Place. Round the corner, at 1 Seamore Place, was Alfred de Rothschild, the famous dandy. Hannah Rothschild, the heiress who married Lord Rosebery, took over the original 107.25
For a country house, old Nathan paid £20,000 for Gunnersbury, near Acton, in 1835. But that was a false start. The rural ghetto began when his widow bought a house near Mentmore in the Vale of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Gradually they all settled in this part of Bucks, spreading into nearby Hertfordshire. Baron Mayer Rothschild built Mentmore Towers, modelled on Wollaton. Sir Anthony de Rothschild moved into Aston Clinton. In 1873 Lionel bought Tring, in Hertfordshire, for £250,000. He also had a 1,400-acre estate at Halton, later owned by Alfred de Rothschild. Then there was Leopold de Rothschild’s house Ascott, at Wing near Leighton Buzzard. In the 1870s Baron Ferdinand built Waddesdon, and he had other houses at Leighton Buzzard and Upper Winchendon. His sister Alice had Eythrop Priory. So the Vale of Aylesbury became Rothschild country. They owned 30,000 acres there and represented it in parliament from 1865 to 1923.
The rural headquarters was Tring, extended by Lionel’s son and heir Nathan to an estate of 15,000 acres. He became the 1st Lord Rothschild and Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. In the true Jewish tradition, he turned Tring into a miniature welfare state. He supplied the locals with water and electricity, a fire service, a reading-room, allotments, a health service, even a cemetery for their dogs; for employees there were holiday camps, a pension scheme, apprenticeships, an unemployment plan, hampers and parties. The estate engaged in stock-breeding, sylviculture, sheep trials and conservation experiments.26
Lord Rothschild’s father, Lionel, had taken charge of many government loans, to finance Irish famine relief, fight the Crimean War, buy the khedive’s Suez Canal shares; he was very close to Disraeli, much closer than either found it convenient to admit, both in the City and in public life. He was felt to be disinterested because it was known he had forgone a £2 million profit rather than float a £100 million loan for the anti-Semitic Russian government.27 He was on excellent terms with Gladstone and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville. But he got on equally well with the Tories. He transformed Lord Randolph Churchill from a conventional slanger of Jewish ‘vested interests’ into a notable philosemite. He turned round A. J. Balfour too, making him into perhaps the most effective British friend the Jews ever had. He was the unofficial spokesman for the City from his father’s death in 1879 to his own in 1915. In her account of him, his great-niece Miriam Rothschild reflects that in world-wide terms he probably had a greater influence than any Jew since antiquity.28 ‘I should like to know’, asked Lloyd George rhetorically in his 1909 Limehouse speech, ‘is Lord Rothschild the dictator of this country?’ He was nothing of the sort: merely beneficently powerful. In 1915 on his death-bed in 148 Piccadilly, he was visited by Lord Haldane (temporarily in charge of the Foreign Office) who asked him to stop a neutral ship taking gold to Germany. He said: ‘That is a very simple matter,’ and scribbled an instruction on the back of an envelope.29
Rothschild was popular because his princely acts of charity were not just wise and systematic but eccentric. Children who waved to his carriage were liable to experience a shower of glittering half-sovereigns. His wife Emma denounced this as ‘insensitive and insulting’, but he replied that children took a different view and he was right–an old woman at Tring told Miriam Rothschild she remembered such an incident for the rest of her life. The Rothschilds were generally liked in England not just because they ran highly successful racing stables but because ‘they never pulled their horses’. So ordinary folk did not mind if Lady Rothschild’s chef, Grosstephen Senior, probably the world’s best, ran a fishmonger’s bill alone of £5,000 a year. Rothschild gave the East End cabbies he used a brace of pheasants each at Christmas, and when he died the costermongers put black crêpe on their barrows. The Pall Mall Gazette wrote: ‘It is owing to the life of Lord Rothschild that Great Britain has escaped those collections of race feeling…with which so many other countries have been embarrassed during the last generation. He was at once a Prince in Israel and an Englishman of whom all England could be proud.’
It was Disraeli who first perceived that the Rothschild approach, with its unaffected rejoicing in Jewish capacity, including skill in making money–to be spent equally joyfully–had a lot to be said for it. Early in his career he was enjoying the Gunnersbury hospitality, writing to his sister Hannah (1843): ‘I got well waited on by our old friend Amy, who brought me some capital turtle, which otherwise I would have missed.’30 Disraeli thought the Rothschilds were an immense asset to the Jewish race, to be boosted to the full at every opportunity. He published his novel Coningsby in 1844, the same year in which Marx, as we shall see, took a viciously destructive view of the ‘Jewish problem’. The all-seeing mentor of the tale is Sidonia, the Jewish superman, whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild. This was a very flattering portrait. But then Disraeli was always concerned to exaggerate Rothschild wisdom and foresight, just as he made mysteries and dramas of their activities. It was he himself who sensationalized the purchase of the khedive’s shares in 1876 and he was responsible for much of the absurd, but in Disraeli’s eyes valuable and creative, mythology which grew up around the family.
Of course Disraeli would have freely admitted that presenting Rothschild success as a magic fairy-tale could only work in a country like England where the political and social climate was hospitable. From 1826, when all restrictions were lifted, Jews were free to come to Britain from anywhere without hindrance. Once in, and naturalized, their position was summed up by Lord Chancellor Brougham in 1833: ‘His Majesty’s subjects professing the Jewish religion were born to all the rights, immunities and privileges of His Majesty’s other subjects, except in so far as positive enactments of law deprived them of those rights, immunities and privileges.’31 These restrictions did indeed exist, and Jews usually found out about them through test-cases. But once a difficulty had been discovered and agitated about, parliament, or the appropriate body, usually acted to give the Jew equality. Thus in 1833, the year of Brougham’s pronouncement, Jews were admitted to practise at the bar. Thirteen years later, a statute resolved in their favour the vexed question of whether Jews could own freehold land.
Moreover, from an early date, Britain had been prepared not just to welcome and accept Jews, but to help them abroad. The first time occurred in 1745, when Maria Theresa expelled Jews from Prague; her ally, George II, protested through diplomatic channels. In 1814 Lord Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary, instructed his envoy, the Earl of Clancarty, to ‘encourage the general adoption of a system of toleration with respect to individuals of the Jewish persuasion throughout Germany’. No doubt with the Rothschilds in mind, he made special efforts on behalf of the Frankfurt community. Britain also helped the Jews at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.32
Lord Palmerston was very active on behalf of the Jews, both on general grounds of policy and because his stepfather-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury, believed strongly that the return of the Jews to Jerusalem would hasten the Second Coming.33 Between 1827 and 1839, largely through British efforts, the population of Jerusalem rose from 550 to 5,500 and in all Palestine it topped 10,000–the real beginning of the Jewish return to the Promised Land. In 1838 Palmerston appointed the first western vice-consul in Jerusalem. W. T. Young, and told him ‘to afford protection to the Jews generally’.34 Two years later he wrote to Lord Ponsonby, British ambassador in Constantinople, instructing him to put pressure on the Turks to allow Jews from Europe to return to Palestine. He was to argue that hard-working Jewish settlers backed by Rothschild money ‘would tend greatly to increase the resources of the Turkish Empire, and to promote the progress of civilization therein’. ‘Palmerston’, noted Shaftesbury, ‘has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people’; the letter to Ponsonby was ‘a prelude to the Antitype of the Decree of Cyrus’.
Palmerston was also instrumental in helping wealthy western Jews to come to the rescue of their beleaguered co-religionists. In February 1840 the murder of a Capuchin friar (and his servant) in Damascus abruptly and horrifyingly resuscitated the medieval blood libel. The local Capuchins promptly claimed that the two men had been killed by the Jews for their blood, in preparation for Passover. Both the Turkish governor and the French consul, officially charged with protecting the Christian community, believed the accusation and conducted a brutal investigation on this basis. A Jewish barber, Solomon Negrin, confessed under torture and accused other Jews. Two of them died under torture, one converted to Islam to escape it, and others provided information, leading to more arrests of Jews. The atrocities culminated in the seizure of sixty-three Jewish children, to be held as hostages until their mothers revealed the hiding-place of the blood.35
One of the arrested Jews was an Austrian citizen, and this led to the great powers taking a direct interest in the affair. In London, Palmerston’s help was invoked by Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), the president of the Board of Deputies, which represented British Jews. Montefiore, who was actually born in Leghorn, had been one of the twelve ‘Jew brokers’ of the City of London, and through his marriage to Judith Cohen had become brother-in-law to Nathan Rothschild, for whom he acted as stockbroker. He retired from business in 1824 in order to devote his life to oppressed Jews everywhere. He was perhaps the last of the shtadtlanim, prominent Jews whose social standing enabled them to intercede with persecuting governments. He was a friend of Queen Victoria, who as a girl stayed at his ‘marine residence’ in Ramsgate, and later knighted him; he was probably responsible for her marked Judophilia. With Palmerston’s help, Montefiore organized a delegation of western Jews, including the famous French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), and went to see the ruler of Syria, Mohammed Ali, in Alexandria. Montefiore and his colleagues not only secured the release of the Jewish captives, in August 1840, but persuaded the Sultan of Turkey to issue a firman forbidding the circulation of blood libels or the arrest of Jews on such a basis. The success of this mission led to many others in which Montefiore, who lived to be over a hundred, worked with the Foreign Office to help Jewish victims of injustice.36 But the British government also intervened on its own account: in 1854, on behalf of Swiss Jews; in 1856, on behalf of Jews in the Balkans, the Foreign Office instructing the British envoy in Bucharest, ‘The peculiar position of the Jews places them under the protection of the civilized world’; and at the Congress of Berlin in 1876, where Disraeli fought for equality of religious rights.37
Disraeli, however, had never been satisfied with advancing the claim of the Jews to justice. He believed that the Jews, by their virtues and their glorious past, were entitled to special esteem, and he devoted his tremendous audacity and imagination to securing it for them. Brought up a Christian, his interest in his race was fired by a grand tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land in 1830-1. He was fascinated by the rise of successful Jews throughout Syria, despite all their handicaps, the Rothschilds of the East as he called them. Much of the material he gathered he later used in his novels. He noted that the pashas preferred to use Jewish financial experts, as they could be easily persecuted if necessary: ‘They kept their accounts in Hebrew written in a calligraphy so obscure as to be barely decipherable,’ and he later portrayed one as Adam Besso in Tancred.38 Jerusalem he loved best of all, and in the same novel, published in 1847, he reproduced his vivid impressions of fifteen years before. It was his own favourite among his novels and has been aptly termed ‘a fictional version of the Victorian spiritual autobiography’.39
Disraeli never took the defensive line that Jews were no worse than other men. He thought they were better. He said he despised ‘that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of man’. One modern historian has seen him as essentially a marrano, and there is a lot to be said for this analysis.40 He epitomized the incipient arrogance, pride and romance of the Sephardis, which he conferred on the Jews as a whole. The self-destructive Ashkenazi tendency to see Jewish sufferings in Biblical fashion as the merited consequence of Jewish sins meant absolutely nothing to him. He took the Sephardi view that Israel, being the heart of the human body, had been unfairly made to shoulder the burden of the wickedness of mankind.41 Once liberated, Jewish gifts would shine forth to astonish the world. They were essentially racial gifts. ‘All is race,’ says his superman Sidonia, ‘there is no other truth.’
Thus Disraeli preached the innate superiority of certain races long before the social Darwinists made it fashionable, or Hitler notorious. He was descended, he says in Contarini Fleming, ‘in a direct line from one of the oldest races in the world, from that rigidly separate and unmixed Bedouin race who had developed a high civilization at a time when the inhabitants of England were going half naked and eating acorns in the woods’.42 ‘Sidonia’, he wrote in Coningsby, ‘and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race.’ This was a privilege the Hebrews shared with the desert Arabs, who were ‘only Jews on horseback’. Disraeli thought that Moses was ‘in every respect a man of the complete Caucasian model, and almost as perfect as Adam when he had just been finished and placed in Eden’ (Tancred). He thought ‘the decay of a race is an inevitable necessity, unless it lives in deserts and never mixes its blood’, like the Bedouin. Jewish purity had been saved by persecution, by constant movement and migration:
the Mosaic Arabs [i.e. the Jews] are the most ancient, if not the only, unmixed blood that dwells in cities! An unmixed race of a first-rate organization are the aristocracy of nature…. To the unpolluted current of their Caucasian structure and to the segregating genius of their great lawgiver, Sidonia ascribed the fact that they had not been long ago absorbed among those mixed races, who presume to persecute them, but periodically wear away and disappear, while their victims still flourish in all the primeval vigour of the pure Asian breed. [Coningsby]
He reiterates the point in the same novel: ‘No penal laws, no physical tortures work. Where mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains.’
What, then, of Disraeli’s Christianity? His brilliant gift for paradox supplied an answer to that one too. ‘I am’, he loved to remark, ‘the missing page between the Old Testament and the New.’ He took great satisfaction in both blaming the Christians for not recognizing the virtues of Judaism, and blaming the Jews for not grasping that Christianity was ‘completed Judaism’. In his 1849 preface to Coningsby he stated: ‘In vindicating the sovereign right of the Church of Christ to be the perpetual regenerator of man, the writer thought the time had arrived when some attempt should be made to do justice to the race which had founded Christianity.’ The Jews had produced Moses, Solomon and Christ, ‘the greatest of legislators, the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers–what race, extinct or living, can produce three men such as these?’ Equally, however, he thought it absurd that Jews should accept ‘only the first part of the Jewish religion’. A note, from around 1863, survives in his papers at Hughenden:
I look upon the Church as the only Jewish institution remaining–I know no other…. If it were not for the Church, I don’t see why the Jews should be known. The Church was founded by Jews, and has been faithful to its origin. It secures their history and their literature being known to all…publicly reads its history, and keeps alive the memory of its public characters, and has diffused its poetry throughout the world. The Jews owe everything to the Church…. The history of the Jews is development or it is nothing.43
Disraeli thought it illogical that Tories should oppose the Bill to allow professing Jews to sit in parliament, since Sephardi beliefs in tradition, in hierarchical authority, in the need for the religious spirit to inform all secular life, were essentially Tory ones. He noted in his Life of Lord George Bentinck that when the Jew Bill came up in 1847, only four Tories voted for it–himself, Bentinck, Thomas Baring and Milnes Gaskell, and they ‘almost monopolized the speaking talent on their side of the House’. It was Bentinck’s speech on this occasion, in favour of Jewish rights, which led to his ousting as leader of the Tories in the Commons. So, by one of those paradoxes in which Disraeli delighted, the Tories, by punishing Bentinck for speaking up for the Jews, eventually ended up with Disraeli himself as their leader. But that, Disraeli felt, was right: he believed in a combination of aristocracy and meritocracy, and the Jews were supreme meritocrats. Disraeli not only pointed with pride to the achievements of acknowledged Jews, he detected Jewish genius everywhere. The first Jesuits had been Jews. Napoleon’s best marshals, Soult and Massena (he called him Manasseh), were Jews. Mozart was a Jew.
Disraeli’s philosemitic propaganda would not have worked on the Continent. The Jews of Europe would not in any case have followed him in the wilder paths of his imagination. Nevertheless, there was in the early nineteenth century a determined attempt by learned Jews to counter the presentation of Judaism as a survival of medieval obscurantism, and to replace the repulsive image of the professing Jew, fashioned by Voltaire on a Spinozan basis, by an intellectually attractive one. The first requisite was to erect some kind of bridge between the best of rabbinical scholarship and the world of secular learning. The assumption of Spinoza, and those who had been influenced by him, was that the closer one studied Judaism, the more objectionable it became. Mendelssohn had never been able to refute this widespread impression: he simply did not know enough about traditional Jewish culture. Some of his more radical followers had no desire to do so. Men like Napthali Herz Homberg and Hartwig Wessely, while strongly favouring the study of Hebrew, wanted to renounce traditional Jewish religious education, scrap the Torah and the Talmud, and embrace a form of natural religion.
But among the second generation of the maskilim there were those who were both enlightened and learned in Judaism, faithful to their creed yet skilled in secular methodology. Issac Marcus Jost (1793-1860), a schoolmaster from central Germany, produced a nine-volume history of the Israelites which was a half-way house between the traditional Jewish and the modern secular approach. As such it was the first work of its kind to impress the gentile public. More important, however, was the dogged, plodding, highly industrious Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), who devoted the whole of an immensely long life to the refurbishment of the old-style Jewish learning and its presentation in a modern, ‘scientific’ spirit.
Zunz and his friends of the immediate post-Napoleonic period called their work the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism. They started with ambitious éclat in 1819, immediately after the Hep Hep riots had shown how fragile was the acceptance of Jews even in modern-minded Germany. They set up a Society for Jewish Culture and Science, whose object was to investigate the nature of Judaism by modern scientific methods and demonstrate the universal value of Jewish knowledge. They had an institute, which gave lectures on Jewish thought and history, and a magazine. They started from the assumption that the Jews had once made formidable contributions to the general culture, but then had lapsed into narrow religious antiquarianism. Now Jewish scholarship should come to life again. ‘The Jews must once again show their mettle as doughty fellow workers in the common task of mankind,’ wrote one of the founders, Immanuel Wolf, in the first issue of their Zeitschrift. ‘They must raise themselves and their principle to the level of a science…if one day a bond is to join the whole of humanity, then it is the bond of science, the bond of pure reason.’44
This was all very fine, but it was open to a number of serious objections. The first was practical. In 1819 German Jews were only half-emancipated. To what extent could you pursue a life of secular study and remain a Jew? One of the most enthusiastic founders of the society was Eduard Gans (1798-1839), a brilliant young lecturer in historical jurisprudence. He got a lectureship at Berlin University and his courses were spectacularly successful. But his path to further advancement in his academic career was firmly blocked by his Judaism. Others found themselves in the same predicament. The ‘bond of pure reason’ did not yet exist, and for most of them the sacrifice to Judaism was too much. The Society was dissolved in May 1824. The following year Gans underwent baptism and proceeded to a professorship and fame. Several prominent members took the same course. Many Orthodox Jews, who had viewed the entire project with suspicion from the start, nodded their heads sagely: that was where secularization always led, to the extinction of faith.
Zunz himself plodded on. He translated an enormous amount of Jewish literature, especially the midrashim and liturgical poetry. He elaborated a philosophy of Jewish history. He contributed to encyclopaedias. He visited all the great libraries in search of material, and found himself barred from the Vatican Library. But his work raised a second objection to ‘Jewish science’: was it not contrary to the true spirit of Judaism? What he really envisaged was an encyclopaedia of Jewish intellectual history. In this, Jewish literature, for instance, would be presented alongside the other great literatures of the world, a giant among peers. He said he wanted to emancipate Jewish writing from the theologians and ‘rise to the historical viewpoint’.45 But what did this historical viewpoint involve? In practice it involved accepting, as Zunz did accept, that the history of the Jews, the main theme of their literature, was merely an element in world history. Like everyone else in Germany, Zunz was influenced by Hegelian ideas of progression from lower to higher forms, and inevitably applied this dialectic to Judaism. There had been only one period in Jewish history, he said, when their inner spirit and their external form had matched, and they had become the centre of world history, and that was under the ancient commonwealth. Thereafter they were delivered into the hands of other nations. Their internal history became a history of ideas, their external history a long tale of suffering. Zunz thought that a kind of Hegelian climax of world history would eventually occur in which all historical development would come together–that was what he understood by the Messianic Age. When that happened, the Talmud and all it stood for would become irrelevant. In the meantime the Jews had to show, by their new science of history, that they had contributed to this fulfilment; they had the job of ensuring that the distilled legacy of Jewish ideas became part of the common property of enlightened mankind.46
That was in some ways a most attractive prospect. But it was not Judaism. The pious Jew–and there could be no other–did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it. Hence the ‘science of Judaism’, as a dislocated academic discipline, was contrary to Jewish belief. Worse, it was the exact reversal of the true Jewish attitude to studying. As the Rabbi Hiyya put it in the fourth century AD: ‘If a man learns the Law without intending to fulfil the Law, it were better for him had he never been born.’47 A real Jew did not see Jewish history as a self-contained bit of world history, on a parallel with that of other peoples. To them, Jewish history was history. They believed that, without Israel, there would have been no world and therefore no history. God had created many worlds and destroyed them as unsatisfactory. He made the present one for the Torah, and so it gave him pleasure. But if Israel, when offered by him the Torah, had rejected it–and some talmudic scholars thought it nearly had done–then the world would have simply reverted to its previous formless state. Hence the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt were episodes not in Jewish, but in total history, with God saying (according to the tannaim): ‘Woe to the children on account of whose sins I have destroyed my house, burned my temple and exiled them among the peoples of the world.’48 The Jews had ceased to write history from then on because there was no history, as they conceived it, to write. It had stopped. History would be resumed with the coming of the Messiah. All that had happened in the meantime would be quickly forgotten, rather like, as the Rabbi Nathan put it, a princess-bride forgets the storms of her sea-voyage once she arrives in the country of the king she is to marry.
Hence, though Zunz’s ‘scientific’ presentation of Jewish history and learning as a contribution to the world stock might make some impression on gentile society, it involved almost by definition a severance from a great part of Judaism. It was subjected to devastating, and in religious terms unanswerable, criticism by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88), the brilliant spokesman of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy. This Hamburg Jew who served as rabbi in Frankfurt for thirty-seven years was not an obscurantist. To begin with, he wrote beautiful German. His presentation of the Jewish faith, designed for young people, which was published under the title Nineteen Letters on Judaism (1836), was immensely effective. He had no objection to secular education; quite the contrary. He used to quote the Rabbi Gamaliel that both Torah knowledge and worldly knowledge were proper objects of study. The ideal ‘man of Israel’, he said, was ‘an enlightened Jew who observes the precepts’.49 Nevertheless, there was all the difference in the world, he argued, between Jews making use of secular knowledge and secular knowledge absorbing Judaism. Israel was not a secular community but a divine one. So any science dealing with the Jews as a community was a form of theology, and necessarily so. The history of what Jews do, and what happens to them, cannot be part of secular history as such because it is the unfolding of God’s will and rightly therefore part of Revelation. General culture and Jewish culture are not in conflict: they are quite different. By confusing the two, you can only damage Judaism. If you merge Jewish with secular history, you desacralize it and kill the living idea which is its theme.
In a bitter and forceful passage, Hirsch explained what this would mean:
Moses and Hesiod, David and Sappho, Deborah and Tyrtaeus, Isaiah and Homer, Delphi and Jerusalem, Pythian tripod and Cherubin-sanctuary, prophets and oracles, psalms and elegy–for us, they all lie peacefully in one box, they all rest peacefully in one grave, they all have one and the same human origin, they all have one and the same significance–human, transitory and belonging to the past. All the clouds have dispersed. The tears and sighs of our fathers no longer fill our hearts but our libraries. The warmly pulsating hearts of our fathers have become our national literature, their fervent breath of life has become the dust of our bookshelves…. Do these departed spirits rejoice in the literary gratitude of our present generation? Whom do they recognize as their true heirs? Those who repeated their prayers but forgot their names, or those who forget their prayers but remember their names?50
Later in the century, the point was to be made still more decisively by Nietzsche: once it became possible to study scientifically the history of a religion, he said, it is already dead.
Yet if the logic of Hirsch’s criticism was followed, Jews would in effect be back where they started before the enlightenment. They would constantly be forced to make distinctions between two types of knowledge. It would not so much be Gordon’s dichotomy of ‘A man in his town and a Jew in his tent’ as ‘secular knowledge for business (or pleasure), Jewish knowledge for true understanding’. That would be a fatal barrier to Jews ever becoming accepted as a legitimate part of the general community. Was it not possible to reach some kind of half-way house?
The effort was made by a Galician Jew, Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), who was part of the original Wissenschaft movement, but did not share its view that the intellectual integration of the Jews could be easily accomplished. He was a kind of Hegelian too, but rather more influenced by Maimonidean rationalism. Indeed, he sought to update the Guide of the Perplexed, though he was very diffident about publishing the results. In the end, his manuscript was worked on by Zunz himself and printed posthumously in 1851. Krochmal believed that the Jewish enlighteners and the unreconstructed Orthodox were alike unacceptable. The first devitalized Judaism, the second made it repellent; both, in nineteenth-century conditions, produced apostasy. The trouble was that neither type of Jew had a sense of Jewish history. The enlighteners thought it was just something you learned as a child, then went on to secular, ‘adult’ history when you grew up. The Orthodox Jews ignored history altogether–as he put it, ‘there is no early or late in the Torah’. What he proposed was to create a Jewish philosophy of history. He took the Hegelian theory of growth, as Marx was soon to do, but instead of turning it on its head, he Judaized it. He divided Jewish history into three cycles: growth, maturity, then decline-and-fall. This was to show how ‘when the days of disintegration and destruction were fulfilled, there was always renewed in us a new spirit and new life; and if we fell, how we arose and were encouraged and the Lord our God did not abandon us’. This was clearly far from being just secular history. It was not wholly unlike the old medieval wheel-of-fortune style of history, or the cycles of growth and decay to be popularized by Arnold Toynbee in the mid-twentieth century. But Krochmal introduced a Hegelian element by adding an upward progression through all these cycles–the process of human awareness from its roots in pure nature to its ultimate identification with pure spirit. All national histories showed this in some degree, but whereas other peoples were transitory, the Jews were eternal because they had a special relationship with the Absolute Spirit (i.e. God). Hence ‘The history of Judaism is thus properly the history of the education of consciousness’–with a beginning, a middle and an end.51
Unfortunately, Krochmal could not satisfy Orthodox Jews with his philosophy of history since he could not, or did not, fit the Messianic Age into his scheme, unless it was seen in some vague metaphorical sense. Still less could his work appeal to the gentile. With Heinrich Graetz (1817-91), on the other hand, the Jews at last produced a historian, and on a massive scale too, who could not only be read and believed by enlightened Jews, but read–and to some extent accepted–by gentiles too. Between 1856 and 1876 he published an eleven-volume History of the Jews which is one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century historical writing. In various condensed forms it appeared all over the world and in numerous translations, and it is still of considerable value today.52 But in structure the work is Judaic rather than secular: it tells Jewish history primarily in terms of the Torah and Torah study. Moreover, his historical dynamic is religious too. In his view, the Jews were emphatically not a people like any other. They were part of a unique politico-religious organic entity, ‘whose soul is the Torah and whose body is the Holy Land’. The Jewish archetype had a central, and dramatic, part to play in the history of the world. In a brilliant passage introducing volume four of his work, Graetz presented the Jew of historical-divine destiny: ‘On the one hand enslaved Judah with his wanderer’s staff in hand, the pilgrim’s bundle on his back, his grim features turned heavenwards, surrounded by dungeon walls, instruments of torture and the glow of branding irons; on the other, the same figure with a questing look in the transfigured features, in a study filled with a vast library in all the languages of man…a slave with a thinker’s pride’.53 Graetz made use of a vast number of sources in many languages, but his vision of the Jew was rooted in Deutero-Isaiah, and especially in the ‘Suffering Servant’. The Jews, he argued, had always been ‘powerful and productive in religious and moral truths for the salvation of mankind’. Judaism was (by divine providence) self-created. In that respect it was unlike any other great religion. Its ‘sparks’ had ignited Christianity. Its ‘seeds’ had brought forth the fruits of Islam. From its insights could be traced the origins both of scholastic philosophy and Protestantism.54 Moreover, the destiny of the Jews was continuing. Graetz did not see the Messiah as a person but as a collective. The Jews were a messianic people. Like Hegel he believed in the concept of a perfect state, and he saw the final Jewish task as preparing a religious state constitution, which would somehow inaugurate a golden age.
This summary does not do justice to Graetz; but then it is not easy to do justice to him because his views about what exactly it was the Jews would accomplish changed substantially, as his enthusiasm for a ‘Jewish solution’ to the world’s problems waxed and waned. Sometimes he seemed to think Jews would provide actual world leadership. At others it was to be merely ethical example. But in either event he presented the Jews as a superior people. He was not a Zionist. But he was certainly a Jewish nationalist of a kind, and he put forward Jewish claims not, like Disraeli, in an attractive spirit of romantic paradox, but in a tone of voice which even other Jews found aggressive, and which was bound to repel gentiles, especially Germans. So Graetz’s work, though of permanent importance in Jewish historical studies, did not supply an answer either to the problem of bridging Judaism and the secular world. As history it was useful; as a philosophy it was not in the end acceptable to any group. Indeed, German nationalists were not the only ones to be offended. Graetz seems to have known little about Jewish mysticism. For the kabbalah and the hasidim he had nothing but contempt. Contemporary students of haskalah were dismissed as ‘fossilized Polish Talmudists’. He called Yiddish ridiculous. Hence he could have no real message for the great masses of eastern Jewry. But he did not satisfy the enlightened Orthodox either. He began as a disciple of Hirsch. As a young man in 1836, his faith had been saved by reading the Rabbi’s Nineteen Letters. He saw his own beliefs as essentially Jewish. But Hirsch rejected his work as ‘superficial and fantastical’. Was there no pleasing anyone? It seemed so.
If no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of how to relate Jewish to secular culture, was it possible to bring the practice of Jewish religion into harmony with the modern world? That too was attempted. Reform Judaism, as it came to be called, was the product of the second decade of the nineteenth century when the first full effects of emancipation and enlightenment were felt on Jewish communities. Like every other effort to bring Judaism into a new relationship with the world, it was primarily a German initiative. The first experiments were conducted at Seesen in 1810, at Berlin in 1815, then in Hamburg, where a Reform Temple was opened in 1818. These took place against a background of what contemporaries saw as Protestant Triumphalism. The Protestant nations appeared to be doing well everywhere. Protestant Prussia was becoming the most powerful and efficient state in Germany. Protestant Britain was the first industrial power, the conqueror of Napoleon, the centre of the richest commercial empire the world had ever seen. The United States, also Protestant, was the rising power in the West. Was not this link between the reformed Christian faith and prosperity evidence of divine favour–or at least a valuable lesson in religious sociology? Many political writers in Catholic countries, especially France, voiced their fears that Protestantism was taking over the world, and their anxiety that Catholicism should adopt the most socially useful Protestant characteristics. But which? Attention focussed on the outward and visible signs of a religion: its services. Most Protestant services were solemn but seemly, impressive in their simplicity, marked by readings in the vernacular and well-argued sermons. Catholicism, by contrast, retained the embarrassing religiosity of the medieval world, indeed of antiquity: incense, lamps and candles, fantastic vestments, relics and statues, a liturgical language which few understood. All this, it was argued, needed to be changed. But these calls for reform went unheeded within the Catholic Church itself, where authority was centralized and severely imposed. Besides, the traditional mode of Catholicism had its own powerful defenders, such as Chateaubriand, whose Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) laid the basis for a new Catholic populism. In England, the Protestant citadel, the Oxford Movement, was soon to turn to Rome for guidance, not vice versa. The truth is, Catholicism did not on the whole suffer from any inferiority complex, at any rate in the countries which mattered, where it was the overwhelming majority religion. So the changes were delayed for 150 years, to the 1960s, when Rome too would be in manifest disarray.
It was a different matter for the Jews, especially in Germany and other ‘advanced’ countries. Enlightened Jews were ashamed of their traditional services: the dead weight of the past, the lack of intellectual content, the noisy and unseemly manner in which Orthodox Jews prayed. In Protestant countries, for Christians to visit a synagogue was quite fashionable, and provoked contempt and pity. Hence Reform Judaism was, in the first place, an attempt to remove the taint of ridicule from Jewish forms of worship. The object was to induce a seemly religious state of mind. The watchwords were Erbauung (edification) and Andacht (devotion). Christian-style sermons were introduced. The reformer Joseph Wolf (1762-1826), teacher and community secretary at Dessau, and a devoted admirer of Mendelssohn, took the best German Protestant orators as his models. The Jews learned to preach in this style quickly, as they learned all novelties quickly. Soon, sermons at the Berlin Temple were so good that Protestant pastors, in turn, came to listen and learn. Hints were exchanged.55 Organ music, another powerful feature of German Protestantism, was introduced, and choral singing in the European mode.
Then, in 1819, the same year as the Society for Jewish Science was founded, the Hamburg Temple introduced a new prayer-book, and the aesthetic changes spread to more fundamental matters. If liturgical habits could be discarded because they were embarrassing, why not absurd and inconvenient doctrines? The mention of the Messiah was dropped; so was a return to the Holy Land. The idea was to purify and re-energize Judaism in the same spirit as Luther’s reformation.56 But there was an important difference, alas. Luther was not constantly looking over his shoulder at what other people were doing, and copying them. For better or for worse, he was animated by his own crude and powerful inner impulse: ‘I can do no other,’ as he put it. He was sui generis and his new form of Christianity, with its specific doctrines and its special liturgical modes, was a genuine and original creation. Reform Judaism was animated less by overwhelming conviction than by social tidy-mindedness and the desire to be more genteel. Its spirit was not religious but secular. It was well meaning but an artificial construct, like so many idealistic schemes of the nineteenth century, from Comte’s Positivism to Esperanto.
It might have been a different matter if the movement had produced one of the religious exotics of which eastern European hasidic Jewry was so prolific. But Reform waited in vain for a Luther. The best it could produce was Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810-74), who effectively led the movement successively in Breslau, Frankfurt and Berlin.57 He was energetic, pious, learned and sensible. Too sensible perhaps. He lacked the self-regarding audacity and willingness to destroy which the religious revolutionary needs. In a private letter he wrote in 1836, he spoke of the need to abolish all the institutions of Judaism and rebuild them on a new basic. But this was not what he felt able to do in practice. He opposed prayers in Hebrew, but would not eliminate it from the services. He thought circumcision ‘a barbaric act of bloodletting’, but opposed its abolition. He sanctioned some breaches of the Sabbath prohibitions, but he would not scrap the Sabbath principle entirely and adopt the Christian Sunday. He omitted passages on the Return to Zion and other references to what he regarded as outdated historical conditions, but he could not bring himself to surrender the principle of the Mosaic law. He tried to extract from the vast, accumulated mass of Judaic belief what he called the religious-universal element. That in his view involved dropping the automatic assumption of solidarity with Jews everywhere–he thus refused to take an active role in the protest over the Damascus atrocities. But as he grew older, like so many well-educated Jews before and since, he began to feel the pull of traditional Judaism more and more, so that his enthusiasm for change abated.
The Reformers might have had more impact if they had been able to erect a clearly defined platform of belief and practice, and stick to it. But Geiger was not the only one who failed to find a final resting-point of faith. The leading reformers differed among themselves. Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806-60), who came from Poznan, but ended up as head of a new Reform congregation in Berlin, started as a moderate reformer–he merely wished to end cantillated reading of the Torah. Gradually he became an extremist. Geiger believed in ‘progressive revelation’, whereby the practice of Judaism had to be changed periodically as God’s will was made manifest. Holdheim wanted to abolish Temple and ceremonial Judaism altogether, immediately. Most of the Talmud had to go too: ‘In the talmudic age, the Talmud was right. In my age, I am right.’ He saw traditional Judaism as an obstacle to Jews becoming part of a universal brotherhood of man, which to him represented the messianic era. So he argued that the uncircumcised could still be Jews. He thought a man’s professional duties came before strict observance of the Sabbath. Indeed, in Berlin he not only radically transformed the services but eventually held them on a Sunday. When he died there was even a row about whether he could be buried in the rabbis’ part of the cemetery.
Holdheim’s version of reform was not the only alternative to Geiger’s. In Frankfurt, an anti-circumcision group appeared. In London a Reform movement accepted the Bible, as God’s work, and rejected the Talmud, as man’s. As Reform spread abroad, it appeared in more and more guises. Some groups retained links with Orthodox Jews. Others broke off completely. Rabbinical conferences were held, to no great purpose. New prayer-books were issued, and provoked fresh controversies. In one version or another Reform Judaism clearly provided a satisfactory expression of the religious spirit for many thousands of educated Jews. In England, for instance, both a rather traditional-minded Reform Judaism, and eventually a more radical sub-group, Liberal Judaism, became firmly established. In America, as we shall see, the Reform, in both its conservative and liberal versions, became an important element in what was to become the third leg of the Jewish world tripod.
But what Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism’, was to solve the Jewish problem. It did not normalize the Jews because it never spoke for more than a minority. It was, in essence, an alternative to baptism and complete assimilation, among Jews whose faith, or at any rate whose piety, was strong enough to keep them attached to their religion in some form, but not strong enough to defy the world. By the end of the 1840s, it was obvious that it was not going to take over Judaism, even in enlightened Germany. By the end of the century, it had acquired enough institutional supports to keep going, at any rate in some countries, but its creative force was spent. The traditionalist writer John Lehmann noted in 1905: ‘Today, when complete apathy has overtaken the neologue circles, it is hardly possible to imagine that there were once people who regarded it as their life’s task, and who were determined with their whole heart and their whole soul to reform Judaism, and who each considered himself as a miniature Luther, Zwingli or Calvin.’58
One reason why Jews who wished to participate fully in the modern world without losing their Judaism failed to achieve a workable formula was that they could not agree on a language in which to express it. There were, at this stage, three possible alternatives. One was the ancient hieratic language of Judaism, Hebrew. A second was the language of their own country, whatever it might be. The third was the demotic language which most Jews actually spoke, Yiddish. Or possibly there might be a combination of all three. The men of the Jewish enlightenment wanted to resurrect Hebrew. Indeed, the very word Haskalah, with which they chose to identify themselves, was the Hebrew word for understanding or reason: they used it to signify their commitment to reason, as opposed to revelation, as the source of truth. They produced educational works in Hebrew. They ran a Hebrew publication. But there were a number of reasons why their project lacked dynamism. Few of them wrote much Hebrew themselves–Mendelssohn, their leader, very little. They chose Hebrew not because they wanted to express themselves in it: for that, they much preferred German. Nor did they venerate it for religious reasons. They saw it, rather, as being intellectually respectable, the Jewish equivalent of the Latin and Greek which was the ancient cultural heritage of Christian Europe. The age saw the dawn of modern philological studies. Everywhere in Europe, experts were compiling grammars, putting local tongues into written form and endowing them with rules and syntax–Finnish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Irish, Basque, Catalan were being promoted from local patois to the status of a ‘modern language’. The maskils wanted to subject Hebrew to this process. Logically, of course, they should have picked Yiddish, a tongue which Jews actually spoke. But the maskils regarded it with abhorrence. They dismissed it as nothing more than a corrupt form of German. It stood for everything they most deplored about the ghetto and unregenerated Judaism: poverty, ignorance, superstition, vice. The only people who studied Yiddish scientifically, they argued, were the police, who needed to know thieves’ slang.
So the maskils revived Hebrew. But they did not know what to write in it. Their biggest project was a hybrid presentation of the Bible, using German words in Hebrew characters. This was quite a success. Many thousands of Jews, particularly of the older generation, who had had no access to secular schools, used it to acquire literary German. But this led to less Hebrew, not more. Once Jews read German, and acquired secular culture, their interest in Hebrew declined, or vanished; many even lost their Judaism. Even those who retained their faith found less use for Hebrew as services and prayer-books began to use the vernacular.
There was, indeed, a living if tenuous Hebrew tradition in literature. But the maskils found that distasteful too, for ideological reasons. Great medieval scholars like Maimonides had written in Arabic. But the practice of writing in Hebrew also survived in Moslem Spain, and thence it re-emerged in Renaissance Italy. Some Italian Jews continued to write beautiful Hebrew throughout the seventeenth century. Then the tradition acquired a genius: Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-46). This remarkable man came from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Italian Jewry in Padua. He was a prodigy and had the best teachers, as well as access to the great university. He learned secular science, the classics, modern Italian, in addition to the entire range of Judaic studies. Luzzatto had the unusual capacity of being able to write abstruse material in high academic style, and also to propound complex matters in simple fashion to a popular audience. He could also express himself in various languages, ancient and modern. One of his works is in Aramaic, the language in which the Zohar was originally written. But his customary mode of address was Hebrew. He turned out a great deal of Hebrew poetry, some religious, which has not survived, some secular, in honour of his friends. He produced three Hebrew verse dramas. Above all, he wrote an ethical work, Mesillat Yesharim, or The Path of the Upright, which in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century was the most influential of all Hebrew books, and the most widely read, in the Jewries of eastern Europe.59 Was not he the ideal progenitor of a Hebrew revival? Not for enlightened German Jews. On the contrary: he symbolized what they wished to repudiate and eliminate.
For Luzzatto was a kabbalist and a mystic. Worse: he may well have been a secret Shabbatean, or something very like it. He had acquired, as he admitted himself, a taste for the fatally insinuating writings of Nathan of Gaza, with their ability to explain anything once you had made the first irrational leap. In Padua, he seems to have drawn around him a group of clever young men who dabbled in dangerous thoughts. The Venetian rabbis had his house searched and found evidence of magic. To escape controversy, he went to Amsterdam. There, too, he was forbidden to practise kabbalah. So he finally went to the Holy Land, where the plague got him in Acre.60 Being named Moses, married to a girl called Zipporah, he seems to have reached the conclusion that he was the reincarnation of Moses and his wife. Many Jews in the East agreed; or at least treated him as a saint. No enlightened German Jew could accept that sort of thing. And, even if his personal claims were brushed aside, the contents of his ethics were also unacceptable to maskils. In his Path of the Upright and a further work, Da’ath Tevunot or Discerning Knowledge, he produced a brilliant recapitulation of the history of God’s purpose in the world and the role of the Jews, the covenant and the diaspora. He showed exactly why the Jews were in the world today, and what they had to do to justify themselves. His summary of the purpose of life was uncompromising:
The essence of the existence of a human being in this world is that he should fulfil commandments, perform worship and resist temptation. It is unfitting that worldly happiness should mean anything more to him than a mere aid or support in the sense that satisfaction and peace of mind allow him to devote his heart to this service that is incumbent upon him; and it is fitting that the whole of his attention should be devoted only to the Creator–blessed be He–and that he should have no other purpose in any of his actions, whether small or great, except to draw near to Him–blessed be He–and to break down all the partitions separating him from his Owner.61