Chapter XXXVIII

THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.
(1780‒1880.)

=1. Light and Shadows.=――The influence of Mendelssohn did not die out with his death. He had stirred the conscience of the Christians, he had roused the consciousness of the Jews. Things could never again be quite as they had been. But there was a danger in the difference, as there is in all sudden and violent changes of feeling, even when the changes are good and right. Cultivated Jews quickly became quite the fashion in the literary circles of Berlin, and the reception-rooms of Mendelssohn’s daughters, and of Henrietta Herz, the charming wife of a Dr. Marcus Herz, and of several other pleasant, intelligent Jewish women were thronged by the leading men of the day. Christians seemed to find a certain delightful flavour, beyond the charm which is common to all cultivated intercourse, in this new taste of what had been for so long forbidden fruit. And almost as quickly, ambitious Jews and Jewesses grew to be a little intoxicated with their success. Many restrictions, both social and political, were still in force against the race, and these people who were so well received amongst Christians thought that they were liked and admired in spite of their Judaism, whereas they owed to it those very qualities which gained for them this flattering notice. One by one, slowly and shyly at first, they dropped Jewish observances; then, more boldly, they dropped Jewish acquaintances; and lastly, and quite in logical sequence, they dropped their Judaism altogether. It was always, and in every case, from first to last, a sacrifice to selfishness and self-interest. And perhaps the first proud step of ‘hiding themselves from their own flesh’ in their fashionable wrappings of superior cultivation, was quite as wicked as that last distinctly separate step which many took of baptism. Mendelssohn’s daughters were baptized, and his grandchildren; so was Heine the poet in 1825, and Börne the patriot in 1818, and so were a host of minor folks in the first forty years immediately succeeding Mendelssohn’s death. These ‘conversions’ were the deep shadows thrown from the light which Mendelssohn had lovingly and loyally let in upon his people. Yet, nevertheless, the light was ‘good,’ and in time it lost its blinding, dazzling quality. If a prism is put in the way of a ray of sunlight, we get a view of the most beautiful colours, but the experiment needs nice handling. If the prism be not of the right shape, and set at the right angle, instead of added colours we get our ray of light obscured. Some of the Jews of Germany managed with their pushing, self-adjusted prisms to hinder the effects of Mendelssohn’s rays of light. When he himself stood as a prism in the beams, we got _Nathan der Weise_ as a result.

=2. Leopold Zunz.=――Eight years after the death of Mendelssohn, in the person of Leopold Zunz another good, steadfast Jew and great scholar was born to Germany. Mendelssohn had done much to free his people from fetters, both external and internal; from the outward shackles of prejudice and oppression, and from the inward rust of ignorance and superstition. Zunz carried on this work, and, perhaps, in a safer, because in a more purely historic spirit. His aim was to build up, rather than to cast down or cast aside, and to make an ideal for Israel’s future out of the actual of Israel’s past. His knowledge of the national literature was wide and profound, and his memory was as remarkable as his scholarship. He began to write from a very early age, and his celebrated monograph on Rashi[65] was published before he was thirty years old. His most valuable work was an historical review of Jewish ethics,[66] which gives the whole account of the development of the spiritual life of Israel from Biblical days to the present time. This book, which took nine years to write, shows forth the thought and the feeling of a nation of ‘witnesses,’ collecting and presenting their evidence of over a thousand years. Zunz wrote, too, standard works on Jewish literature, under the titles ‘Contributions to History and Literature’[67] (1845), ‘The Synagogue Poetry of the Middle Ages’ (1855), ‘The Rites of the Synagogue Service’ (1859), and ‘History of the Literature of Synagogue Poetry’ (1865). In these works we find a history of the sorrows of the Jewish race, and a delightful account of the poets and the poetry of the Jews of the Middle Ages. Zunz’s mind was as accurate and as full of facts as a dictionary, and yet as charming and as full of fancies as a poem. He lived till this year (1886), and up to the very last preserved his faculties, and added to his friends. Throughout his long life Zunz was faithful to his nation, to his religion, and to his national literature. His immense knowledge of Judaism made him its enthusiastic admirer, and it is as well, perhaps, for lesser scholars, who are greater critics, to recall this fact. Zunz was a cultivated man as well as a theologian and a Talmudist. He had received, and he was one of the first Jews in Germany who were permitted to receive, a university education. And his attitude towards the heroes of the past, at whose oddities it is so impertinently easy to smile, was consistently reverent. Zunz felt――

‘If these had not walked
Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?’

=3. Progress of Events and of Legislation in Germany.=――The frequent laxity of observance, and the occasional conversions among the higher class of Jews, had the natural reactionary consequence among the lower class. These became more rigidly, and even repellently, orthodox. The temptations to cultivated society, which hardly assailed them, they regarded with bitter hatred and contempt, and they clung to their own distinctive ways and customs and modes of dress and speech, with a fervour of anger as well as of religion. Thus it came to pass that the main body of the Jews in Germany continued to be almost as little as ever German citizens, and social prejudice against Jews remained at its old high-water mark till Napoleon’s wonderful series of conquests, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a change in the position. In Westphalia, which was then created a kingdom, with Jerome Bonaparte for its king, and in all the Rhenish provinces which were annexed to France, the liberal _Code Napoléon_ took the place of that other written and unwritten code in which Jews were pariahs, liable to be condemned without evidence, and sentenced without appeal. Whether from dynastic reasons, or as a matter of conscience, the Corsican conqueror confirmed the doctrine of full and free emancipation which the Revolution had introduced. All subjects of the French Empire were to be legally looked upon simply as French citizens, and it was henceforward no one’s business to inquire whether such subjects professed the Jewish religion, or the Christian, or no religion at all. The humiliating _Leibzoll_, or body tax, which in Russia had been discontinued since 1790, was now definitely and altogether abolished, and, equally with Christians, office in the army and in all civil departments of the state was thrown open to Jews. Only positions directly under Government were still denied to them.

This happier condition of things, however, lasted but a very few years. With Napoleon’s downfall in 1814 it was at an end, and in the subsequent German reaction against French supremacy the Jews of Germany fared worse than ever. The famous Treaty of Vienna (1815) secured to Jews only such rights as they had possessed before the French occupation. These ‘rights,’ as we know, were all wrongs, and the different States were quick to reassert, and even to add to them. Frankfort led the van. She shut them up again in their _Judengasse_, and ingeniously imposed some extra restrictions, limiting, among other matters, the number of marriages to be annually permitted. Other States celebrated their emancipation from French rule in an equally liberal and grateful spirit, reserving to their own co-religionists not only every office in state, army, law, and university, but forbidding to Jews even the use of Christian names. And then, from legislating, German _savants_ took to the composing of abstruse little pamphlets against the Jews; and, as befitted a nation who were developing into philosophers, they persecuted them pedantically instead of religiously. It came to much the same thing in results. In 1819 these attacks from professional pens culminated in serious riots at Heidelberg and Frankfort, and other towns, in all of which Jews were pillaged to the once again revived cry of ‘_Hep, Hep_.’

Things did not improve during the thirty years that Count Metternich was minister in Austria. But in 1848 the whirlwind of the Revolution brought its breath of liberty to the Jews, and most of the German states, in deference to the new strong tendency of public opinion, at last admitted their Jews to the rank of citizens. In 1850, Frederick William IV. of Prussia, brother of the present Emperor of Germany, although opposed by his ministers, removed all municipal and administrative disabilities from his Jewish subjects, and the new and united Empire of Germany, which was settled in 1866, and consolidated by the issue of the war in 1870, retains in its constitution no traces of any separate and restrictive legislation concerning Jews. Social prejudices, however, are tough, and often outlive legal disabilities. Nations, like individuals, have a predisposition to some especial ailments, and an old writer says that Germany is periodically subject to the distemper of Judea-phobia. Some colour is given to this theory by the dull persistency in persecution which that country has always shown towards the race. It broke out yet once again in 1875, in a sort of violent rash of anti-Semitic essays, a literature which exhibited the fever in a very pronounced form, and which was treated, unfortunately, homœopathically, by as thick a rash of replies. This _Judenhetze_, however, died out by degrees, and in the enlightened views of their Crown Prince and Princess the Jews of Germany look confidently forward to a ‘fair field and no favour’ being by-and-by accorded to them.

=4. Progress of Events and Legislation in France (1780‒1880).=――At the time when Moses Mendelssohn’s efforts were producing a reform in feeling and in conduct among and towards the Jews of Germany, the Jews in France thought that his influence might be brought to bear upon their rulers. The Jews in Alsace accordingly, who, numbering by this date some 20,000, were the most numerous of the various French communities, forwarded an appeal to Mendelssohn, setting forth their wrongs and their hopes. In deference to this appeal a very famous memoir in favour of Jewish claims to fair treatment came to be written by a learned and enlightened Christian scholar named Dohm. Dohm was one of Mendelssohn’s influential friends, and thought well of all Jews for Mendelssohn’s sake. When the Jews of Alsace begged Mendelssohn to speak up for them, he wisely thought that a Christian advocate might gain more hearers than a Jewish one; and so, at his friend’s request, Dohm wrote and published in 1781 a book on the Political Reform of the Jews, which work had a great, though indirect, share in the bringing about of better times. Another friend for the French Jews was found in Count Mirabeau, who, before he came to be a power in the stirring events on which the eighteenth century closed in France, was, with Dohm and other noteworthy people, a frequent visitor in the salons of Henrietta Herz and of Mendelssohn’s daughters at Berlin. The Abbé Grégoire was another personage who, having had the opportunity of intimate intercourse with Jews, used such knowledge to their benefit. Both Mirabeau and Grégoire wrote and spoke frequently and earnestly on the subject of Jewish emancipation, which was rapidly becoming one of the questions of the day. Whether French Jews should be admitted to the rights of French citizens, was over and over again debated in the French Assembly. Many ignorant arguments were brought against it. One speaker urged that Jews could not serve the state; that they could not be soldiers, since their laws forbade them to fight on their Sabbath; nor artisans, added another orator, nor agriculturists, for their holidays were too numerous for continuous labour. Such speakers must have forgotten all about the Land and the Book――all about the oliveyards and the vineyards of Palestine, the ‘borders set with precious stones,’ and the battlefields drenched with more precious blood. The discussion went on. Their own friend Abbé Grégoire hurt their cause by remembering something of all this past, and pleading for them as a ‘people.’ This roused the stupid folks. Could a ‘people,’ dispersed among other ‘peoples,’ be patriots? they asked. And when that was answered out of history, and Jewish loyalty and law-abidingness taken as proved to demonstration, then a new doubt was raised on the score of the alleged money-lending proclivities of the race. Robespierre answered this. ‘The vices of the Jews,’ said he, ‘are born of the abasement in which you have plunged them. Raise their condition, and they will speedily rise to it.’

After an immense amount of eloquence had been expended on the question, the Assembly, on September 27, 1791, passed the vote for the emancipation of the Jews, and mainly on the grounds that those who fought against the measure were actually fighting the Constitution, which proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, without reservation or exception, to all subjects of the French republic. By this vote, France gained for herself the distinction of being first among modern nations to give not only tolerance, but liberty, in its full social, legal, and political meaning, to her Jewish subjects. It remained for Napoleon Bonaparte to complete the work. When that extraordinary man came to be Emperor of France, he showed an extreme interest in the history and the position of his Jewish subjects. He summoned an assembly of representative Jews, composed of Rabbis, merchants, and literary men, and calling it a Sanhedrin, he desired this assembly to report on the present religious and political status of their nation, and to define their duties towards God and their country. This so-called Sanhedrin did its difficult work very well. Starting with a quotation from one of the _Amoraim_,[68] that the law of the State is a binding law on the Jews of that State, the Assembly showed, by proof and by principle, that Judaism constrains Jews to be in every sense true and worthy sons of the soil. Passing from declaration to suggestion, the Assembly advised with great sagacity on many subjects, on that especially of mixed marriages, on the practice of ‘usury,’ and on the choice of trades and professions. Napoleon gave the sanction of authority to much of this counsel, and altogether the deliberations of this latter-day Sanhedrin greatly helped forward the progressive movement which had set in. The wave of liberty, which swept over France in such terribly tumultuous fashion at the end of the eighteenth century, has known no ebb tide. The many and various forms of government, which have changed much and effaced much since 1793 in the fair and fickle land of France, have, to their honour, left religious freedom at high-water mark. It has been well said that, from that date to this, one cannot accurately speak of the ‘Jews of France,’ but only of French citizens professing the Jewish religion.[69] Rabbis of the Jewish Synagogue, since 1830, have been considered to hold the same relation towards the state as curés of the Catholic church, receiving, like them, their salaries from the Government. Not only in the army and in the learned professions, but also in every class of society, the Jews of France march, nowadays, shoulder to shoulder with their fellow-countrymen. The war of 1870, which made Alsace and Lorraine German, was a great blow to the loyal French-Jewish inhabitants of these provinces, but the loss to France of her Alsatian Jews was balanced by the gain of some 30,000 Algerian ones; for in 1870 the Jews of Algiers became, in a body, naturalised Frenchmen, and are proving themselves excellent and enlightened subjects of France.

=5. In Italy.=――In Italy, the Popes personally were, as a rule, mild in their treatment of the Jewish race. At the coronation of each new Pope the Jews of Rome had to offer the Holy Father a scroll of the Law, which the Pontiff would take in his hand, and sadly remarking, ‘Your Law is good, but you understand it not,’ would return to them, turning his back on the deputation as he did so. This old custom, somewhat humiliating in its form, and which can be traced back so far as the twelfth century, remained in force until our own times, as if to remind Jews that they were accounted heretics; but with this exception, and with only a very occasional baptism effected by force or by stratagem, there was little done to bring home the fact to them. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the Popes had small need for robbing Jews in the name of religion. They had all Christendom to draw on for revenue, and when the period of paying for indulgences and dispensations had passed away, the period of licensed plundering and proselytising was passing too. And many of the later Popes were learned and enlightened men, who were humane by nature as well as by habit. The downfall of Napoleon caused, for a time, a cloud to spread over that dawn of wider liberty which had broken with the Revolution. Once more, and until the year 1848, the Jews in the Papal dominions were shut up in their ghetto, and in Rome, they were not altogether emancipated, till 1870. From 1848, however, their position throughout Italy steadily, if somewhat slowly, improved. Since 1859, the Jews in Tuscany and Lombardy have been emancipated; since 1861, in Naples and Sicily; since 1866, in Venice; and since 1870, in the capital. At the present time, in all the Italian dominions, Jews are in possession of civil and religious rights.

=6. In Spain and Portugal.=――In 1821, Portugal opened her gates again to her long-expelled Jews. At the consecration service of the first reopened synagogue in Lisbon there was a curious sight. Members of what had always been accounted Catholic families hurried up from the interior of the country to take part in the ceremony. What could these Catholics want in a Jewish place of worship? thought the authorities. The mystery was soon explained. The strangers proved to be Marannos, who, from generation to generation for 300 years, had worn a disguise, and were now anxious to cast it off, and to take upon themselves once again the ‘inheritance of Jacob.’ Spain held longer than Portugal to the old bad policy, but in 1868 she, too, annulled the decree which kept Jews from her shores.

=7. In Austrian Dominions.=――The _Leibzoll_ was abolished by Joseph II. of Austria in 1783. Other reforms followed, and slowly, and not without some occasional relapses into ancient barbaric ways, the Jewish inhabitants of Austria, Hungary, and Galicia were enfranchised. The capital of Austria was slowest at the good work, and in Vienna, until quite recent times, many humiliating restrictions were in force. The last legal disabilities which were in force in the Austrian Empire were, however, removed in 1867, and in Brody, the capital of Galicia, so numerous and so comfortable have the Jews become, that some of its grateful residents call it the ‘Galician Jerusalem.’ The Hungarian capital, Buda-Pesth, boasts an excellent Rabbinical college, and this modern seat of Jewish learning may serve as evidence that the old Jewish spirit, which ever sought cultivated expression directly the barest chance of such expression was open to it, is as active in Europe as it used to be in Babylon.

=8. In other European States.=――In the Netherlands, from the date of the French Revolution (1793), the Jews were legally emancipated. Practically, however, they had been free, and had enjoyed all the advantages of emancipation, from the time when the Portuguese refugees first found an asylum in Holland. Some of the chief men of the Dutch Jewish communities were not entirely pleased with the decree which, at the close of the eighteenth century, made Jews ‘citizens,’ and substituted the authority of the ‘States-General’ for that of the ‘Mahamad.’[70] This and other causes led to a secession from the more conservative members of the community, and to the establishment in 1796 of a separate synagogue in Amsterdam. The Jews of Holland continue to maintain their respectable and respected position.

Belgium emancipated her Jews in 1830, Sweden in 1848, Denmark and Greece in 1849. Switzerland delayed her claim to take rank among enlightened nations till 1874; and Norway, up to the present day, still only tolerates Jews, and very few are to be found in that country.

=9. In Russia and Poland.=――The two and a half million Jews who are to be found at the present day in these wide and but semi-civilised territories, are still unhappily circumstanced. The ignorance and fanaticism of the native population, and the unintelligent policy of the governing classes, combine to make the position of the Jews a painful and a precarious one. Little progress has been made in the last hundred years. Many of the ‘blunders worse than crimes’ of the Middle Ages seem to lead a charmed life in Russia and in Russian Poland, and to be proof against the educating and humanising influences of these latter days. Jews are still confined to mean trades for their sole occupation, and are separate in dress and in social usage from their neighbours. Numberless legal restrictions are in force, which practically shut out Russian and Polish Jews from any worthy ambition, and condemn them to seek inglorious ends by sordid means. In spite, however, of ‘ukase’ after ‘ukase’ conceived in this ‘Middle Age’ spirit, the Jews are struggling upward in the old good fashion to the light, and a society for the promotion of education, which, since 1870, has been established at St. Petersburg, is helping them much in their efforts to rise.

=10. In Danubian Provinces.=――At the beginning of this century the persecutions in Russia caused a number of Jews to emigrate to those States on the Danube which, by the treaty of Berlin in 1878, at which Lord Beaconsfield presided, received a recognition of independence from the European Powers. The emancipation of the Jewish inhabitants of these provinces was a condition of the treaty, a condition which the conduct of the refugees since their settlement has fully justified. The Jewish immigrants rapidly multiplied, and their intelligence, industry, sobriety, and loyalty bore down prejudice, and won them friends. Of these Danubian states, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro have honestly observed their part of the compact, but Roumania has distinguished itself by its systematic disregard of it――an attitude the more ignorantly ungrateful since, in the Roumanian war of independence, the Jewish Roumanians were among the bravest and staunchest of the soldiery.

=11. A Glance at the Rest of the Map.=――One can scarcely put one’s finger on any part in which there are not some Jews. When, in 1868, M. Joseph Halévy, at the request of the Alliance Israélite, travelled for a year in Abyssinia, he came across some black men whom he believed to be descendants of Jewish refugees from Egypt. This remnant of a tribe is known by the name of Falashas, which in Abyssinian dialect means exiles. M. Halévy made friendly advances, but the little black crowd stood aloof from the white men, silent and suspicious as to their motives in seeking them. ‘Accidentally,’ says M. Halévy, who tells the story, ‘I mentioned the name of Jerusalem. As if by magic, the attitude of the most incredulous was changed. “Oh! do you come from Jerusalem, the blessed city? Have you beheld with your own eyes Mount Zion?” All doubt was gone. They were never weary of asking these questions, and I must confess,’ continues M. Halévy, ‘I was deeply touched at seeing their black faces light up at the memory of our glorious history.’ Travellers, also, in remote mountain recesses of Asia Minor, in the ancient cities of Hindostan, and in the vast empire of China, have come across various small settlements bearing undeniable traces of a Jewish origin, and keeping up, in a greater or lesser degree, the distinctive rites and customs of Judaism.

In the new world of the colonies, and in the United States, the numerous and prosperous Jewish communities, owing to their speaking European languages, are of course more readily recognisable as Jews, although, in America especially, the Judaism of these dispersed and transplanted Jews is not always in a very much better state of preservation than among the semi-savage sects of ancient civilisation. Among some American congregations Judaism seems to be occasionally rather a religion of sentiment and of complaisant remembrance, than of active and steadfast observance.

In the eastern parts of the world less change is observable among the Jewish inhabitants. Throughout the Ottoman Empire the Jews are not ill-treated, and they keep to the old paths in the somewhat sluggish fashion of Orientals. In Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan they are not very prosperous nor very enlightened, but the efforts of the Alliance Israélite and of the Anglo-Jewish Association in establishing schools for secular study, and for the teaching of handicrafts, are gradually leavening the mass. In Palestine the chief Jewish settlements are at Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, and there are small agricultural colonies at Jaffa and Safed. At Nablous there is a remnant of Samaritans who, as in the old days, are quite distinct and aloof from their Jewish half-brothers. At Jerusalem all sects and many nationalities are represented. Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Karaites, Russians and Poles, and Rabbis from all parts of the world, come to weep and to pray, and to lay their bones among the ruins of the city which was once the joy of the whole earth. In these days, the leaders among us are wisely endeavouring to direct this beautiful religious and historic enthusiasm into healthy and useful channels, and to impress on these simple pious souls that labour is one form, and not the least admirable form, of praise.