The commercial interests of the bourgeoisie coupled with previous Christian antipathy to the Jews evoked considerable hostility towards Jewry in the early modern period. In Germany merchants complained about the infidels living in their midst; in their view Jewish trade undermined the economic life of the country and corrupted the native population. In France similar attitudes were expressed: the bourgeoisie resisted Jewish settlement despite the fact that Jews were perceived by the nobility as particularly useful. In Britain, Jews were also subject to bitter criticism, and attempts to simplify procedures for Jewish naturalization met with resistance. In addition, there was considerable opposition to the suggestion that Jews should possess land. However, in the United States Jews were able to gain a broad measure of freedom. Nonetheless, despite various advances made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jewish life did not radically alter. Stereotyped as alien, Jews were subject to repeated acts of discrimination and persecution during this period.
JEWS IN EUROPE AND THE NEW WORLD
At the beginning of the early modern period from the sixteenth century, Jewish economic progress was often in conflict with the aspirations of the bourgeoisie. As a consequence, commercial aspirations were frequently intermingled with traditional forms of Judaeophobia. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Jewish population of Vienna was expelled by Leopold I, Emperor of Austria. At the start of his reign he had adopted a positive attitude towards the Jewish community. However, in 1669 a series of disasters overtook him: a fire occurred in the palace, the heir to the throne died, and the empress miscarried.
As the empress’s confessor explained, these events were a divine warning about the Jewish population. Thus the emperor decreed the expulsion of Jewry on 28 February 1670. Later, when the Prussian Great Elector, Frederick William, was informed of this proclamation, he took advantage of their exodus to invite thirty rich Jewish families to live in his state to help finance industry and trade. Jews were granted a special and irrevocable charter which declared that they were to possess rights and protections. Yet, not unpredictably, such an influx incited the enmity of the indigenous Christian merchants. In 1673, they complained: ‘These infidels run from village to village, from town to town, offer this and take that, whereby they do not only dispose of their discarded and wretched goods and deceive the people with old rags, but they spoil all commerce and particularly the retail trade, especially in silver, brass, tea and copper.’
The inflammatory mix of Christian religious hostility and perceived thwarted economic interests resulted in an attack on the Jewish population which took place in the Prussian town of Halberstadt. The Jews living there had built a synagogue without obtaining official permission. In response, the Christian population attacked the synagogue. As a Jewish document of the period explains: ‘these traders, accompanied by armed musketeers, burst into our synagogue, seized the windows and doors and partially broke them down and razed the whole building to the ground, destroyed and smashed everything, cut it into pieces and caused such violent tumult and confusion, fear and terror that we could not but think that we were to be cut down and chased away to the last man, and then when the mob came running up from every corner we had to have soldiers on guard day and night for our protection.’
The Prussian government instituted an investigation of this incident. In their defence the Halberstadt bourgeoisie stated that their act was justified because of the pernicious influence of the Jews: ‘it is unfortunately drawn from experience what evil is caused to the Jews and their eternal damnation by the establishment of such seminaries, in which superstition and a perverted understanding of all divine prophecy and revelation as well as contempt for Christ and his holy word is inculcated from childhood onwards, and thus the way to their conversion is made more difficult and remote; also, this people nowhere grows more numerous than where they are permitted to exercise their damnable religion.’
Despite such animosity, princes and nobility continued to view Jews as providing substantial economic advantages even though they were perceived as a corrupt influence on the Christian nation. In this regard, Frederick William advised his son, the future Frederick the Great, how to treat the Jewish population. ‘So far as the Jews are concerned,’ he stated,
there are unfortunately many in our hands who have no letters of protection from me. These you must chase out of the country for the Jews are a locust in a country and ruin the Christians. I ask you, issue no new letters of protection, even if they offer you much money . . . if you need something for your pleasure, then put all the Jews down for 20,000 to 30,000 thalers every three or four years, in addition to the protection money they must give you. You must squeeze them for they betrayed Jesus Christ, and must not trust them for the most honest Jew is an arch traitor and rogue.
During this period German Jews played an important role in the commercial life of the country. In Leipzig, 25 per cent of those participating at fairs in the eighteenth century were Jews; in Hamburg they were actively involved in trade; in Frankfurt, Jewry comprised 16 per cent of the total population. Confronted by these Jewish tradesmen at the end of the eighteenth century, Goethe caricatured their commercial interests in a poem: ‘If you want to buy a suit, to the Jew run back/ Silver dishes, linen, tin – anything the households lack/ you will find the Jew has by him, taken as a pledge for loans/ Stolen goods, abducted items, with him make their happy homes/ Coats and trousers – what you will, he will sell it cheap/ The craftsmen can sell nothing. To the Jew all creep.’
In the literature of this period the traditional identification of Jews as swindlers was reinforced. Hence, Spener, the founder of Lutheran pietism, declared: ‘As for the poor among them, whose number, as it is among the Christians, is always the largest, it is quite impossible for them to live without cunning and ruses for they, having only a few thaler capital, must turn this over through trade so that they can meet the needs of their family as best they may; so the wretched people can day and night think and rack their brains about nothing else than how to spend their miserable lives in cunning, intrigue, deception and theft.’
Jews had been expelled from France during the Middle Ages; this edict was renewed by Louis XIII in 1615. Nonetheless, Jews lived semi-clandestinely in the kingdom. By the eighteenth century the Jewish community was widely despised. Given such a pervasive sentiment, there was constant resistance to any suggestion that Jews be granted official permission to settle in specific towns. Thus in 1708, the minor clergy of Nancy protested to Duke Leopold of Lorraine concerning just such a plan:
As we are to lose within minutes what has always so happily distinguished us from the most flourishing kingdoms, and will we, like the nations surrounding us, be forced to mourn the deadly wounds that eternally contagious trade can inflict on a state and a religion? These are no vague alarms. . . . How many visions of ruined merchants, devastated fields, oppressed and penniless families rise up before our eyes! Will you grant to the Jews, the most mortal enemies of Jesus Christ, his Church and the Christian name, what you have so firmly refused to heretics who have forgotten nothing in order to settle in your states?
Later in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Jewish request for authorization to engage in commerce in Paris met a similar reaction. The guilds opposed this plan on the grounds of tradition, and 1765 the lawyer Maître Goulleau, who represented the merchants and traders of Paris, drafted a memorandum listing crimes and misdeeds allegedly committed by Jews ranging from unsociableness to ritual murder. In another lawsuit, the lawyer and polemicist Linguet stated: ‘Habit, religion, policy, reason perhaps, or at least an instinct justified by many reasons, drives us to attach both scorn and aversion to the name of the Jews.’ In a similar vein and from another social level, in 1789 the old-clothes-men of Montpellier castigated the Jews for their previous crimes, and recommended their segregation: ‘There is no one who does not carry in his heart the conviction of the evil that the Jewish people does throughout the world. The Supreme Being, when he created nature, expressly wished this race to be confined to a specific area, and forbade it to communicate in any way with other nations.’
In general French anti-Semitism in the eighteenth century was based on Christian religious antipathy combined with commercial interest. Both factors evoked hostility and fear, as the Minister of State Malesherbes expressed to Louis XVI on the eve of the Revolution: ‘There still exists in the hearts of most Christians a very strong hatred of the Jewish people, a hatred based on the memory of the crime of their ancestors and corroborated by the custom whereby Jews in every country engage in trade which the Christians regard as their downfall.’
Militant Judaeophobia was thus largely a bourgeois-Christian phenomenon. Only the nobility, whose position in society rested on birth, showed some sympathy towards the Jewish population. Thus Prince Charles de Ligne composed Memoire sur les Juifs in which he declared that Jews are never drunk, always obedient, precise and attentive to ordinances, loyal subjects to the sovereign in times of revolt, never angry, united among themselves, sometimes hospitable, and charitable to their poor coreligionists. In this tract, he appealed for the emancipation of Jewry. ‘And, lastly,’ he wrote, ‘the Israelites, while awaiting the impenetrable decrees of Providence on their obduracy in the matter of the wrongs of their ancestors, will at least be happy and useful in this world, and will cease to be the meanest people on earth. I well understand the origin of the horror the Jews inspire, but it is time this ended. Eighteen hundred years seems to me long enough for anger to persist.’
Devoid of bourgeois prejudice, priests of aristocratic origin occasionally sought to protect Jews in the realm. Thus the Abbé de la Varenne de Saint-Saulieu declared in a letter to the Lieutenant of the Paris police in 1744 on behalf of a Jewish prisoner: ‘I have not forgotten that you told me that I seemed like a rabbi when I spoke to you of this affair; but when you hear that the Jew on whose behalf I am speaking has done at least as much good in the prison where he is as all the charitable offices, when he has been in good health, and that few prisoners have left it without feeling the effects of his liberality, you will probably no longer accuse me of Judaism, and I am even convinced that you will become as much of one [a rabbi] as me, and that your sense of justice will commit you to imitate the Lord who rewards even in this world the good faith of these miserable victims of their blindness.’ Such philo-Semitism, however, was not representative of the nation as whole. Among the vast majority of the French populace, the Jews were perceived as a malevolent force within society, dangerous to the merchant classes and a threat to Christian values.
The Jewish community in England was expelled at the end of the thirteenth century. In the middle of the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell sought to readmit Jews to the British Isles, but this proposal was met with fierce opposition. Nonetheless, he allowed a colony of rich ex-Marrano merchants to settle in London. Later, a number of these newcomers acted as financiers and political informants on Spanish affairs and in time London became one of the main centres of the Marrano dispersion. By the eighteenth century Jews of German and Polish descent joined their coreligionists so that at the turn of the nineteenth century the number of Jews living in Britain was between 20,000 and 25,000.
English merchants were not unduly anxious about the Jewish presence. Thus in 1712 the statesman and publicist Joseph Addison remarked: ‘They are indeed so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world, that they become the instrument by which the most distant nations converse with one another, and by which mankind are knit together in a general correspondence. . . . They are like pegs and nails in a great building, which, though they are but little value in themselves are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together.’
Despite such general tolerance, Jews were nevertheless subject to virulent criticism at the hands of several contemporary writers. Hence, in one of his satires, Alexander Pope composed a prayer in which he pleaded to be protected from the Jewish population: ‘Keep us we beseech thee, from the hands of such barbarous and cruel Jews, who albeit they abhor the blood of black-puddings, yet thirst they vehemently after the blood of the white ones. And that we may avoid such like calamities, may all good and well-disposed Christians be warned by these unhappy wretches’ woeful example, to abominate the heinous sin of avarice.’ Similarly, Jonathan Swift warned the English public to be on its guard against the perfidious Jews: ‘What if the Jews should multiply and become a formidable party among us? Would the dissenters join in alliance with them likewise, because they agree already in some general principles, and because the Jews are allowed to be a stiffnecked and rebellious people?’
In the same century the government of the Duke of Newcastle submitted a Naturalization Bill to simplify procedures for allowing Jews to become naturalized and acquire land. Even though both the House of Lords and the Commons adopted the bill, it encountered strong opposition from the general public. Petitions were submitted from all sectors of society, defamatory inscriptions appeared on the streets, and pamphlets were issued warning against the settlement of the Jews and their ownership of property. One of the agitators even gave a detailed prediction of the sad state that would befall England: St Paul’s Cathedral transformed into a synagogue, trade ruined by the observance of the Sabbath, a ban on pork, and a Christian Naturalization Bill rejected by the Great Sanhedrin.
As a consequence of these charges, the law was repealed after six months. Underlying this rejection was deep-seated prejudice against the Jews – widely entrenched medieval conceptions of the Satanic Jew polluting Christian society overcame all efforts to grant Jews full civil rights. However, such political opposition to Jewish emancipation led to greater solidarity within the Jewish community. From 1760 representatives of Ashkenazi congregations joined with the Sephardim to oversee matters of common interest. This brought about the formation of the London Committee of Deputies of British Jews (known as the Board of Deputies) which comprised representatives of provincial and colonial congregations.
In the next century important families came to play an increasingly significant role in Jewish affairs. During this period Jewish civil and political disabilities were not acute; Jews enjoyed a considerable degree of social emancipation and were subject to few commercial restrictions. Nonetheless, a number of native-born Jews were influenced by the example of Jewish emancipation in France and pressed for similar changes to take place in Britain. In 1829 there was intense agitation for legislation similar to that which resulted in Catholic emancipation. The cause was championed by Robert Grant and Thomas Babington Macaulay in the House of Commons and by the Duke of Sussex in the Lords. Such pressure led to the Jewish Emancipation Bill being passed by the House of Commons in 1833, but rejected in the Lords. Despite such a defeat, minor disabilities were removed by the Religious Opinions Relief Bill of 1846, and some ten years later the House of Commons and the Lords permitted Jews to formulate their own oath, thereby allowing Jews to become Members of Parliament.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the New World and in particular North America began to see the immigration of Jews fleeing persecution and seeking religious and civil liberties. In the middle of the seventeenth century Jews fleeing the Brazilian Inquisition settled in New York. During this period other Jews settled in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia and Maryland. By the middle of the next century there were several thousand Jews living in the United States. Even though representatives of the colonial power or the local assemblies issued complaints about them, there was little overt hostility directed at these immigrants. Such political figures as James Adams even extolled the Judaism of the Hebrew Scriptures and linked Puritan religious values to the Bible. In spirit, he stated, the Puritans should be considered as Jews rather than Christians: ‘Their God was the God of the Old Testament, their guides to conduct were the characteristics of the Old Testament.’
In line with Christian teaching, the Puritans sought to bring these Jews to Christ. Thus, the Puritan Cotton Mather celebrated every Jewish conversion and wrote a treatise on the subject. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, learned Spanish when he resided in America so that he could better convert Jews of Sephardic origin. ‘Some of them,’ he stated, ‘seem nearer the mind that was in Christ than many of those who call him Lord.’ In the view of the Quaker William Penn, the Jews should be converted with kindness. Other writers were more sceptical, insisting that Jews would never be integrated into the societies in which they lived. Thus Ezra Stiles noted: ‘I remark that providence seems to make everything to work for mortification to the Jews, and to prevent their incorporating into any nation; that thus they may continue as a distinct people. . . . [It] forbodes that the Jews will never become incorporated with the people of America, any more than in Europe, Asia and Africa.’
Nonetheless, America was characterized by a tolerance for the Jewish population that was reinforced by the communal commitment to clear land and create settlements in the New World. Religious egalitarianism was the result of common effort and dedication; in such a milieu, Jews were able to obtain civic and electoral rights during the colonial period. During the War of Independence, a number of Jews served as soldiers; by joining together with their fellow Americans, these patriots won admiration and respect. In this regard, George Washington, the first President of the United States, expressed the desire that Jews enjoy prosperity and safety on American soil: ‘May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.’
By the end of the eighteenth century such liberality was reinforced by the doctrines of liberty and brotherhood enshrined in the constitution, yet other factors also served to improve the position of Jewry in the United States. The existence of a large black community provoked the resentment of the white population, thereby deflecting potential hostility away from the Jews. In addition, waves of immigration brought to the American shores individuals who evoked animosity and xenophobia: all these foreign groups became targets of prejudice in place of the Jewish population.
In the post-Revolutionary period many Jews, especially in South Carolina, where Jews had prospered from the eighteenth century, were highly educated and cultured. Nonetheless, such attributes did not protect them from Judaeophobia, which tended to increase as Jews gained positions of prominence. In federalist papers Jews who entered politics and joined the Jeffersonians were vilified as ‘democrats’; others who sought public office were attacked. Despite such attitudes, emancipation was encouraged in the New Republic. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance guaranteed Jews the same rights as fellow citizens in all new states, and the next year the Constitution granted equality at federal level. By 1820 only seven of the original thirteen states granted Jewry full political recognition, but ultimately Jews were appointed or elected town councillors, judges of lower courts, and members of state legislatures.
By the first decades of the nineteenth century there were about 4,000 Jews in the United States, scattered throughout the country. In the years prior to the Civil War the Jewish population grew dramatically. In 1840 there were about 15,000 Jews; by 1860 the number had grown to 150,000. This vast increase was the result of immigration from German lands. In Bavaria many villages lost their Jewish population to the New World; from Prussian Poland there was a constant flow of immigrants. German Jews from Bohemia and Hungary also emigrated to the United States. During the 1850s this influx reached a peak due to economic recession and the repressive aftermath of the continental revolutions of 1848–9. In the New World these immigrants were able to obtain the freedoms denied them in their countries of origin. Between 1820 and 1860 American Jews also attained considerable social acceptance, and in several cities including Charleston, New York and Philadelphia a number of them entered political life. In this milieu overt anti-Semitism was uncommon, and conversion to Christianity was a rare occurrence despite the activities of missionary groups.
Although there were undoubted improvements in Jewish life in various countries during the early modern period, the majority of Jews in western Europe were still confined to a ghetto existence. Thus the Prince de Ligne characterized German Jews in stereotypical terms, reminiscent of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, as ‘always sweating from running about selling in public squares and taverns; almost all hunchbacked, such dirty red or black beards, livid complexions, gaps in their teeth, long crooked noses, fearful, uncertain expressions, trembling hands, appalling frizzy hair; knees bare and pocked with red; long, pigeon-toed feet, hollow eyes, pointed chins.’
In their quest to earn a living, Jewry was subject to innumerable obstacles. As the apologist Zalkind-Hourwitz remarked:
Here you have the state of the Jews . . . those who run about the provinces may breathe freer air, but are no less wretched for it. Apart from the expense, the difficulties and the dangers inseparable from a wandering life, they are continually harassed by trade, customs and inspection officials and very often arrested by the mounted constabulary on the slightest suspicion: they are obliged to carry their dishes and meat around with them, those of other nations being forbidden them; this annoys the greedy and intolerant innkeepers who make them pay very dearly for the little they sell them. As oppression makes them suspicious, as people are likewise prejudiced against them, and as moreover they have no fixed domicile, they can barely buy or sell at all except for ready cash.
As in previous centuries, Jews were often described in the most negative terms; repeatedly they were depicted as exuding a particular smell (foetor judaïcus) in contrast to the Christian odour of sanctity. This smell was seen as a sign of their depravity. Thus the English author John Toland remarked: ‘Yet so strong is the force of prejudice, that I know a person, no fool in other instances, who laboured to persuade me, contrary to the evidence of his own and my eyes . . . that every Jew in the world had one eye remarkably less than the other, which silly notion he took from the mob. Others will gravely tell you, that they may be distinguished by a peculiar sort of smell.’
Not surprisingly, the Jewish community turned inwards as a result of such prejudice, despising those who denigrated them. According to Zalkind-Hourwitz, Jews inevitably viewed Christians with the same contempt:
What must the Jews think of the people who oppress them solely because of their religion, and treat as friends all who abjure it, that is to say cease to be Jews, without worrying if they become Christians, or if they are decent people; what, I say, must the Jews think of this behaviour? Behaviour which, in this enlightened century, they can no longer attribute either to fanaticism or bad policy. Are they not right in concluding from it that Christianity ordains it, or that Christians, even the most honest and enlightened, are less zealous about moral principles and their own religion, than hostile to Judaism, and consequently to God its author?
Determined to remain loyal to their ancestral faith, Jews mistrusted Christians and rejected their values. Convinced of its own superiority, Jewry held firmly to the belief that God had chosen the Jews as his special people. Devoted to the covenant, they adhered to the ancient laws and customs of the Jewish faith. In response, Christians reviled these aliens in their midst. Even such enlightened and assimilated Jews as Moses Mendelssohn recognized the antipathy of the gentile world. Remarking that he preferred to stay at home rather than venture out into the streets, Mendelssohn stated in a letter to a Benedictine monk: ‘Everywhere in this so-called tolerant country I live so constricted a life, hemmed in on all sides by true intolerance, that for the sake of my children I must shut myself up the whole day in a silk factory.’
As Mendelssohn explained, he repeatedly discussed this state of affairs with his wife and children: ‘“Father,” an innocent child asks, “what does this fellow have against us? Why do people throw stones after us? What have we done to them?” “Yes, father dear,” another says, “they chase after us in the streets and abuse us: ‘Jews! Jews!’ Is it then such a reproach in people’s eyes to be a Jew? And how does that hamper other people?” Oh, I close my eyes and sigh to myself: Men! Men! How have you come to this?’
During this period even the word ‘Jew’ had come to be invested with emotive power, evoking hatred and disgust. Hence, when seeking to illustrate the vices of the Dutch, the writer Montesquieu exclaimed: ‘I do not think that . . . there had ever been Jews more Jewish than some of them.’ Even though some defenders of Jewry sought to improve the condition of the Jewish population, they universally abided by the same meaning of the word: the Jew was only esteemed on condition that he was not a Jew. Hence, the age-old concept of the Jew as a demonic and evil force in society continued to animate the Christian consciousness and evoked considerable resistance to proposals for the acceptance of Jewry on equal terms.
REFORMATION AND BEYOND
It might be expected that the emergence of modernity would bring to an end previous centuries of Judaeophobia. This, however, was generally not the case. Even though the Reformation of the sixteenth century brought many of the doctrines of the medieval Church under scrutiny, this did not include the traditional Christian hostility towards Jews. As we have noted, initially a number of leading Jewish scholars welcomed the Reformation, suggesting that this religious advance heralded the coming of the Messiah: some were encouraged by Luther’s tract That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. Yet Luther’s subsequent writings provided further justification for hatred of the Jewish population. The implications of Luther’s attack on Jewry were far-reaching. If Christians were convinced that Jews were guilty of heinous crimes, then they were obliged to ensure that the Jewish community be prevented from committing further abominable acts. In Hesse another reformer, Martin Bucer, sought to restrict Jews in religious as well as commercial spheres.
There were nonetheless some Reformers who adopted a more sympathetic attitude, even though they shared their coreligionists’ contempt for Judaism and the Jewish nation. Justus Jonas, a companion of Luther, stressed the missionary dimension of Luther’s views: in his opinion, Christians have a duty to lead Jews to Christ. Another Lutheran, Andreas Osiander, the preacher at the Church of St Lorenz at Nuremberg, produced a work that sought to refute the blood-libel charge. In his view, it was ludicrous to believe that Jews should murder children and then use their blood for ritual purposes. Jewish law, he pointed out, specifies that Jews are forbidden to kill any human being, or to make use of blood from animals, much less that of a human child. No Jew, he noted, had ever made such a claim about other Jews. The origins of this charge were due no doubt to the unsubstantiated claims of those whose children had died of neglect or unknown causes.
Other Reform teachers emphasized the total depravity of humankind: in their view, gentiles and Jews stood guilty before God. Thus, it would be a mistake to insist that the Jews were particularly villainous. The reformer John Calvin of Geneva, for example, argued that when Scripture spoke of the Jews and their sinfulness, the Jews were a symbol of all humanity. When Jesus spoke of the hypocrisy of Jews in building the sepulchres for the prophets they themselves had killed, Calvin noted that there was a contemporary parallel: ‘The world, in general, while not daring to scorn God utterly or at least rise up against Him to His face, devises a means of worshipping God’s shadow in place of God: just so it plays a game over the prophets.’ Even though Christians might erect statues of Peter and other saints, their base treatment of the faithful in their own day illustrates how they would react if Peter were among them.
Unlike Luther, who believed that God’s special relationship with the Jews had come to an end, Calvin maintained that God often had to judge Israel. However, this did not mean that God’s covenant with the Jews had been broken. Commenting on the verse: ‘His blood be on us and on our children’ (Matthew 27:25), Calvin stated that even though God had avenged Jesus’ death with fearful means, he had left a remnant so that the covenant would not be destroyed: ‘God in their very treachery displays the constancy of his faith, and to show that his covenant was not struck with Abraham to no effect. He rescues those he freely elected from the general destruction. Thus his truth ever arises superior to all obstacles of human incredulity.’
During this period, it was widely believed in Reformation circles that there would be a large-scale conversion of the Jewish people. In light of this, Calvin’s successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, revived Luther’s early view that Christian churches were largely responsible for the current unbelief among the Jews: ‘Those who today call themselves Christians . . . are very certainly punished and will be in the future, because, solely under the guidance of wickedness and perversity, they have mistreated in every way these people, so holy in their forefathers, actually hardening them further [against Christianity] by setting before their eyes the example of an odious idolatry. As for myself, I gladly pray every day for the Jews.’
Beza then went on to acknowlege the justice of divine anger against the Jewish people, but he pleaded that Christ would remember his convenants: ‘Grant that we [gentiles],’ he prayed, ‘may advance in thy grace, so that we may not be for them [the Jews] instruments of thy divine wrath, but that we may rather become capable, through the knowledge of thy words and the example of a holy life, of bringing them back into the true way by virtue of thy Holy Spirit, so that all nations and all peoples together may glorify thee for eternity.’
The early Reformers thus reformulated previous Christian teaching about the Jewish nation. For Luther, Jews were demonic in nature, exerting a pernicious influence on Christian society. Others, such as Calvin and Beza, despaired of the Jews’ refusal to accept Christ, yet basing themselves on Scripture, anticipated the eventual conversion of the Jewish people. Despite this shift in attitude among a number of Christian thinkers, anti-Jewish agitation, which had led to a series of expulsions from the latter half of the fifteenth century, continued in intensity. Senior clergy as well as secular rulers were involved in frequent attacks on the Jewish population, and expulsions continued to the latter part of the sixteenth century.
There were, however, some Protestant figures who adopted a more positive appraisal of Judaism. The Huguenot scholar, Joseph Justus Scaliger, who served as Professor at the University of Leiden from 1593, argued that it was only possible to establish the true text and meaning of Scripture by gaining an understanding of rabbinic sources. Jews, he maintained, should be permitted to return to western Europe not simply because of their economic importance, but because of their learning. In his view, Christians could not bring Jews to Christ if they were ignorant of talmudic and postbiblical literature.
In the seventeenth century, there was a lively interest in Jewish learning in a number of Reformed circles. In general it was believed that the Church’s future was bound up with the conversion of the Jews. Some even suggested that their conversion would not be an event towards the end of the age, but rather foreshadowed a time of blessing for the Church on earth. Such a notion arose out of intense Bible study, particularly in connection with the Book of Revelation, which was seen as offering a detailed account of church history from Pentecost to the Day of Judgment.
In England the Cambridge scholar Joseph Mede held that the future millennium would be inaugurated or shortly followed by the return of the Jews to Christ in their ancient land. In his view, the Jews would be converted in a supernatural manner. Other scholars believed that Revelation 13–19 contained a divine promise of the overthrow of the enemies of the Gospel, interpreted as both the papacy and the Turks. This would be preliminary to a period of latter-day glory for the Church, which would see the conversion of the Jews as part of the movement of the Spirit of God. Through this process the earthly kingdoms would submit to the Gospel so that they could be said to have become ‘the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ’.
Even among those Reformers critical of millenarianism, there was a widespread belief in the conversion of the Jews. Hence Robert Baillie, one of the Scottish Commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, contended on the basis of Romans 11 that the Jews would eventually return to Christ. In the Netherlands, Protestant churches followed a similar line. In the marginal notes on Romans 11, the orthodox Reformed translators of the 1637 Dutch version of the Bible argued that the ‘whole of Israel’ in this epistle implies the fullness of the people of Israel ‘according to the flesh’. Thus, they maintained that the Jewish nation would eventually acknowledge Christ as Lord.
Such a positive assessment of the role of Jewry in God’s providential plan was counterbalanced during this period by the revival of medieval stereotypical literary and artistic representations of Jews as found in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In addition, in 1594 Rodrigo Lopez, a Portuguese physician of Jewish descent, was convicted of attempting to poison Elizabeth I – not surprisingly, this event led to widespread fear and hostility. Nonetheless, as we have observed, the seventeenth century witnessed a movement for the readmission of Jews to England.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, as the country was suffering from civil war, it was suggested this tragedy was due to God’s judgment for previous cruelty and indifference towards the Jewish people. Those who pleaded for Jewish readmission contended that if Jews were allowed to return to Britain, they would hear some of the best gospel preaching on earth. This, they went on, would surely lead to their conversion to Christ, creating a golden age for the Church. To these religious arguments were added economic and political concerns.
As part of this campaign Oliver Cromwell invited Menasseh ben Israel, an Amsterdam scholar and rabbi, to England to argue the case for the Jews to be readmitted to England. This visit, however, stirred up considerable opposition from numerous critics such as the pamphleteer William Prynne and other Puritans who were sceptical about the mass conversion of the Jews. In their view the reference to Israel in Romans 11:25f referred to the whole New Testament Church of both gentiles and Jews. Other Puritans adopted a more welcoming attitude. Edward Elton, for example, remarked that Christians ought ‘not to hate the Jews (as many do) only because they are Jews, which name among many is so odious that they think they cannot call a man worse than to call him a Jew; but, beloved, this ought not to be so, for we are bound to love and to honour the Jews, as being the ancient people of God, to wish them well, and to be in earnest in prayer for their conversion.’
As we have seen, such sentiments were not widely shared; throughout Europe Jews were viewed with contempt and hostility. Such attitudes reached a climax with the publication of Judaism Unmasked by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, Professor of Hebrew at Heidelberg. In his view, the best way to defend Christianity against the Jewish threat was to rehearse the traditional medieval charges against the Jews. This work illustrated that despite the changing attitudes brought about by the Reformation, deep-seated Judaeophobia persisted in the early modern period.
Undeterred by such an attack the Jewish community believed it could curtail the distribution of Eisenmenger’s treatise. Enlisting the aid of the court Jew, Samson Wertheimer, as well as various German princes, they gained the support of the Emperor Leopold. Although the book was eventually published after Eisenmenger’s death by permission of the King of Prussia, the emperors retained their ban on the book since it was perceived as prejudicial to the public and to the Christian religion. The early modern period thus witnessed the continuation of the long tradition of Christian anti-Semitism alongside a growing awareness of the need to improve the position of Jewry. Voices were ranged on different sides of this debate by leading figures of the Reformation. Yet even those Reformers who encouraged their coreligionists to adopt a more positive attitude towards the Jewish community shared many of the prejudices of previous ages. Basing themselves on Scripture, they prayed for the Jews’ eventual conversion to the true faith. In this way, they hoped for the eventual elimination of the Jewish race, an aspiration shared centuries later by the Nazis, who sought to accomplish the same end but through very different means.