Liberalism and the Jews
By Joseph Jacobs
JOSEPH JACOBS JOSEPH JACOBS (born in New South Wales in 1854), one of our leading scholars and men of letters; managing editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia; author of many authoritative books on Jewish subjects, including "Jews of Angevin England," "Studies in Jewish Statistics," "Jewish Ideals," etc. The present article is adapted from a chapter in Dr. Jacobs' forthcoming book which will deal comprehensively with the contribution of the Jew to modern progress.
THE eighteenth century was the era of the "benevolent despots," like Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II, who adopted the ruling principle of the Welfare-State—that the object of government should be the good of the people—but considered that it could only be carried out for the people, not by them. The weakness of the principle consisted in the difficulty of securing a heritable succession of capable benevolence, and the collapse of Prussia at Jena and of Joseph II's well-meant but unreflective reforms led, in the nineteenth century, to the triumph of the principle first enunciated in America and carried out in France—of government for the people by the people. The transition to the next stage, from religious toleration to religious liberty, is marked, as regards the Jews, by the tolerance edict of Joseph II, in 1781, which for the first time threw open service in the army to the Jews and placed them to some extent on the same level with other dissenters from the State-Church of Austria.
But this was still toleration and not liberty, and it was soon cast into the background by the full religious liberty granted by the French Revolution in 1791, in imitation of the American constitution of 1787, which entirely separated State and Church. The granting of full religious liberty to the Jews had previously been advocated by Mirabeau, and though Rousseau's influence, which was all-important in the Revolution, still retained a touch of Genevan intolerance, Jews came within his religious requirements for citizenship by their belief in Providence and in future rewards and punishment. It has to be remembered that in spirit, if not in will-power or influence, Louis XVI was of the school of the benevolent despots, and it was he who signed the edict of November 13, 1791, which for the first time in European history placed Jews on the same level as the adherents of all other creeds as regards civil and political qualifications. Holland was appropriately the first country to grant the same religious equality to its Jews.[B]
The French Revolution, from our present standpoint, is the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the only great European movement on which Jews had absolutely no influence, direct or indirect, owing to their inappreciable numbers and insecure position in the chief centers, Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. The Revolution principles spread into the neighboring countries with the advance of the French arms. In Venice, the walls of the original Ghetto, from which all the rest received their name, fell at once on the entry of Napoleon's troops. No wonder they welcomed with fervor the victories of the French troops; we can catch, in Heine, echoes of the enthusiasm with which Napoleon was acclaimed the Liberator.
Napoleon's Recognition of the Jews
NAPOLEON'S own attitude was not so uniformly friendly to Jews. On his way back from Austerlitz in 1805 he learnt at Strassburg of the wide distress caused in Alsace by the exactions of certain Jewish usurers in that province, and on his return to Paris issued edicts directed against the Alsatian Jews, restricting their usurious activity. It is fair to add that these enactments were obviously directed against the usury of the Alsatian Jews, and not against the Jews in general, since they were specifically declared not to apply to the Jews of Bordeaux in the South or Northern Italy, then under Napoleon's control. It would indeed have been against the whole tendency of his career to have made the Jews an exception to that principle of the "carrière ouverte aux talents," which was the key-note of his whole policy, as it is logically to all war-lords. It was by no accident that similar indifference toward the creed of their soldiers, or civil servants, was shown by William the Silent, Wallenstein, Cromwell, William III, and Frederick the Great.
Napoleon's attention having thus been drawn to the Jewish Question, he proceeded with characteristic energy to solve it by summoning to Paris a representative assembly of the Jews of France, Germany and Italy, who should determine on what terms Jews could be admitted into a modern Country-State, which had been freed from the shackles of the medieval Church-State and only recognized a certain prerogative in the Church to which the majority of Frenchmen belonged (the Concordat of 1802). After summoning an assembly of Jewish Notables for a preliminary inquiry, in 1806, a more formal Sanhedrin was summoned in the following year, to which twelve test questions were submitted,—among them, whether the French Jews could regard France as their Fatherland and Frenchmen as their brothers, and the laws of the State as binding upon them. Further points were raised as to polygamy, divorce, and mixed marriages; other questions related to the position of Rabbis and the Jewish laws about usury.
All these problems were decided to the satisfaction of Napoleon, though some of them aroused much searching of heart among the more strictly orthodox. The outcome legally recognized that there was nothing in Jewish law or faith which prevented its adherents from being legitimate and full members of a modern State which, at that time, practically recognized Catholicism as the State-Church. The significance of the decision was far-reaching not alone for the Jews but for the whole European State system; it was a practical recognition that the Country, not the Faith, was the foundation of a nation and thus gave the final blow to the conception of a Church-Empire, which had upheld the contrary principle. It was not without significance that simultaneously the Emperor of Austria agreed to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.
Liberalism Draws the Jews to Its Ranks
BUT though the Jews had had no influence on the French Revolution and no share in Napoleon's revolutionary reorganization of West Europe, the benefit they reaped from both movements was second only to that of the serfs. For the Jews and the serfs were the two most oppressed classes under the feudal system still surviving. And so the Jews imbibed with enthusiasm the libertarian principles of the Revolution and the "open career" administration of Napoleon. They threw off with avidity most of the shackles which prevented their joining in general European culture, and Jewish parents of means immediately began giving their sons and, what is more, their daughters, the secular education which would adapt them to the careers now seemingly open to them, as publicists, lawyers, and civil servants. When the reaction came, under the Holy Alliance, with its attempt to revive the Church-State and the closed career of prerogative, Jews everywhere in Western Europe joined the Liberal forces, from whose triumph alone they could hope for a dispersal of the clouds which once more obscured the sun of liberty in which they had basked for a few short years. Jews soon ranked among the intellectual leaders of continental Liberalism, and from 1815 to 1848 exercised an appreciable influence on the course of public opinion. In particular a brilliant band of Jewish litterateurs in Germany helped to mediate between French Liberalism and German public opinion, and practically led the movement known as Young Germany, which opposed the cosmopolitan tendencies of the eighteenth century to the narrow nationalism of the Reaction and advocated the Revolution principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as against the revival of the claims of Authority and Privilege by the Holy Alliance. Boerne and Heine, Hartmann and Saphir, Jacoby and Karl Marx, are recognized by friends and foes alike as among the leading influences which led ultimately to the downfall of Metternich and his school.
The Salons of Jewish Women and Their Liberalizing Influence
THEY were aided in their Liberal tendencies by a remarkable group of emancipated Jewesses, who introduced into Germany the vogue of the political Salon after the manner of Madame Roland and Madame de Staël. They were mostly from the Berlin Circle, which had arisen around Moses Mendelssohn, and carried his tendencies towards rationalism and culture to extreme limits. His two daughters Dorothea and Henriette, and their friends Henriette Herz and Rahel Lewin, created salons to which were attracted some of the more liberal spirits of the cultured world of Berlin. Dorothea Mendelssohn ultimately married Friedrich von Schlegel and became one of the Muses of the German Romantic School. Publicists of distinction like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Gentz formed, with Dorothea and others of her circle, a "Bond of Virtue" (Tugendbund) which according to all appearance was named on the principle of locus a non lucendo. Rahel, "the little woman with a great soul," as Goethe called her, was even a more striking personality. She numbered, among her friends, men of such different types as Schelling and Schleiermacher, the Prince de Ligne, and Fichte, Schlegel and Gutzkow, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick the Great's nephew, and Fouqué, Gentz, and the Humboldts, and she finally married Varnhagen van Ense. She was the first to appreciate, in its full extent, the multiform genius of Goethe, and helped the rise to fame of Boerne, Heine, and Victor Hugo. She was undoubtedly the most striking personality among the women of her age in Germany, and she is nowadays regarded as one of the chief forerunners of the Feminist movement.[C]
These salons had an air of cultured Bohemianism, which attracted many men of rank in Mid-Europe who were beginning to be repelled by the exactions of social gathering in which all associations were determined by armorial bearings. A similar salon was held in Vienna by Baroness von Arnstein, in whose mansion all the diplomats of the Congress of Vienna met as on neutral ground. Such gatherings, while helping to liberalize good society in Mid-Europe, also brought the position of Jews to the notice of the ruling classes and, in many cases, aroused a determination to repair their wrongs. You cannot accept a man socially yet refuse him the most elementary rights politically.[D]
The Liberal Leadership of Heine and Boerne
THE Revolution of 1830 brought into European prominence the two most brilliant members of Rahel's coterie, Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine. Both had made their mark as litterateurs in the preceding decade, but Boerne's "Letters from Paris" and Heine's "French Conditions" (contributed to the Augsburger Zeitung) drew the attention of all liberal Germany to the new hopes aroused by the downfall of the absolutist monarchy in France. Henceforth they were the dominating voices in arousing among the German Liberals the hope of similar liberty, while in France itself they helped to make known to French culture the deeper currents of German thought and literature. In particular their brilliant wit and incisive sarcasm set the tone for the feuilleton literature of all Mid-Europe. By their very isolation they were enabled to regard men and affairs with a certain detachment, and both wrote with an iridescent insolence which can only be described by the Jewish technical word Chutzpah. Treitschke complained of their frequent irreverences and flippancies but in both respects Heine, "the wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire," was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessor, and Boerne, like Diderot, knew that the most effective weapon against authority is sarcasm.
Under the leadership of Heine and Boerne a whole school of liberal journalists arose in Germany and Austria, many of them Jews like Saphir and Hartmann, and they gave a tone to Mid-European journalism which has lasted to the present day. They thus helped to internationalize Liberalism of the French form, with its rather vague and indefinite strivings after liberty, equality, and fraternity, as contrasted with the Liberalism of the English type dominated by Jeremy Bentham, which aimed at constitutional, economic, and social reforms of a definite character. Young Germany, as represented by Heine and Boerne, left the latter type of Liberalism severely alone.
Yet in the struggle for constitutional liberty, which led to the revolutions of 1848, Jews took a considerable part on the more practical side. Everywhere during that critical year Jews had a hand in the upheaval against absolutism.[E]
Among the Conservatives: Stahl and Disraeli
BUT Jews were not altogether unrepresented among the Conservative forces, counting indeed two of the chief leaders, F. J. Stahl in Prussia and Benjamin Disraeli in England. Disraeli's is the better known name, but it is probable Stahl was equally influential. Stahl is described by Sir A. W. Ward in the Cambridge Modern History, xi. 395, as "the intellectual leader of the conservative aristocratic party and the most remarkable brain in the Upper Chamber. . . . He largely supplied the ruling party with the learning and wealth of ideas on which to found their claims. Their organ was the Kreuzzeitung, and the party was called by its name." Bluntschli calls him, "after Hegel the most important representative of the philosophical theory of the State. He, in many ways, advanced political science by his dialectical and critical ability in founding new points of view." (The Theory of the State, p. 73). But Stahl's historic influence will probably rest on his connection with Bismarck at the formative period of his career, when the future chancellor was also a member of the Kreuzzeitung party.
Disraeli's career and influence is far better known and need not be further adverted to in this place. The fact that both were converts has little significance from our present point of view, since many of the Jewish leaders on the Liberal side had also adopted Christianity. It is more pertinent to remark that one cannot trace their conservatism to their Judaism since there was everything in the Jewish position of their time to range Jews on the Liberal side. Stahl and Disraeli are, therefore, to be regarded merely as examples of Jewish ability. There is nothing specifically Jewish in their influence unless we regard the socialistic strain in Disraeli's conception of "Young England" as a part of the Jewish sympathy with the "under dog," which can be attributed to their own experiences and to the traditions of the Prophets.
The Contribution of the Jews to Socialism
CERTAINLY we find a strong Jewish participation throughout the socialistic movement which, from its inception up to the present day, has been largely dominated by Jewish influences. Although modern socialism can be traced back to St. Simon, the whole movement would have collapsed at the death of the master but for the organizing ability of Olinde Rodrigues and the religious enthusiasm of his brother Eugene. A practical turn was also given by their cousins, Isaac and Jacob Pereire, who, as bankers, had thought out the best means of carrying out the principles of the school into practical life. An extension of the facilities for banking would lower the rate of interest and therefore leave more to be distributed to the workers, while the development of railways would reduce the cost of transportation and thus lower the cost of living and raise real wages. Accordingly the Pereires devoted themselves, with religious enthusiasm, to creating the Credit Foncier, and later the Credit Mobilier, and were the chief agents in developing the railway system of Northern France, incidentally making themselves multi-millionaires in the process, though they never lost their enthusiasm for the socialistic ideals.[F]
Most of these left the St. Simonian Church when it diverged into the sexual vagaries of Enfantin, though one of his creeds was, "I believe that God has raised up Saint Simon to teach the Father (Enfantin) through Rodrigues." Felicien David the musician, however, accompanied Enfantin on his epoch-making journey to Egypt, during which he implanted the idea of the Suez Canal in the minds of Mehemet Ali and Ferdinand de Lesseps, and Gustave d'Eichthal devoted his enthusiasm and energies to creating, out of the ideas of St. Simon and Enfantin, a new religion which should revert to the socialism of the Prophets, while denying or ignoring, like them, any other life than this. It is said that he consulted Heine as to the best means of founding such a religion. "Get crucified and rise again on the third day," was Heine's caustic reply. The socialistic tone of J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, which differentiates it from its Ricardian predecessors, is undoubtedly due in large measure to his intercourse with d'Eichthal. Enfantin's vagaries, while they destroyed any direct practical outcome for St. Simonism, drew wide attention to its views, and Jews helped to spread them throughout Europe, Moritz Veit performing that function in Germany, and M. Parma in Italy. The cosmopolitan position of Jews is seen at its best in such propagandism, and it is not surprising that they should have been attracted by views of which the kernel is in the Prophets of Israel, whom indeed Renan, in his Histoire d'Israel, brilliantly characterized as socialistic preachers.
The later stages of socialism in Europe were, as is well known, dominated by Karl Marx, who based upon Ricardo's "iron law" of wages the imposing edifice of Das Kapital, for long the gospel of advanced socialism. The brilliant Ferdinand Lassalle introduced its principles into German politics, and the most recent stages of German socialism have been controlled by the opportunism of E. Bernstein, while among its most prominent leaders have been V. Adler and Paul Singer.
The Struggle for Political Emancipation
THIS participation of Jewish intellect and sympathies with the Liberal current in European politics made Jewish emancipation a part of the Liberal creed throughout Europe. Jews were fighting for themselves in fighting for the general liberties, and their position in the forefront of the struggle was thus justified by the representative principle at the root of modern Liberalism. Jewish disabilities were the last stronghold of the old Church-State conception, and the struggle on the side of the Reaction to retain this fundamental principle was the more intense. If Jews were granted full civil and political rights it could no longer be contended that Christianity was a fundamental principle of the State (or, as the English obiter dictum put it, "Christianity is a parcel of the common law"). Hence the extreme violence of the defense which seems, at first sight, out of all proportion to the interests or numbers involved. Thus the struggle was as embittered in Switzerland as anywhere, though the Jews there only constituted a handful, and the traditions of the country were in favor of toleration.
From this aspect the fight in England is typical. As soon as the Catholics had obtained emancipation in 1828 (the Jews had stood aside in order not to complicate the question), Jewish emancipation became part of the Liberal creed, and the struggle was waged in Parliament, or rather in the House of Lords, for the ensuing thirty years. England was the home of toleration, and her Toleration Act, passed as early as 1689, formed the third stage in the European progress towards religious liberty. Yet the more conservative elements in English life fought against the removal of Jewish disabilities because it meant the visible proof of the secularization of English politics. It is perhaps characteristic that the Tory resistance was mainly broken down by Disraeli, of Jewish, and by Lord George Bentinck, of Dutch, descent.
The High Tide of Liberalism
WITH Jewish emancipation in England Liberalism reached its acme about 1860. Complete civil and religious liberty was gained for Jews throughout Western Europe during the next decade,—in the German confederation and in Switzerland, 1866, in Austria and Hungary, 1867, and in the German Empire, 1871, while even in Spain the expulsion order was practically repealed and toleration, if not liberty, was given to Jews there in 1869. By that time Liberalism, both in the French sense of liberty and equality before the law and in the English sense of constitutional government and free-trade, had gained its fullest triumph and had spent its force. Its negative work had been most valuable; it had freed the human spirit from intolerable shackles and thrown into the lumber-room the clogging survivals of medieval feudalism. But to the human spirit thus freed it had little instruction to give of a constructive kind; its slogan seemed to be, "Go as you please," or, to use its own formula, "laissez faire, laissez aller." It was rather superficial in its treatment of national and social forces and made no appeal to the more generous imaginative emotions. It was inevitable that a reaction should set in if only to fill the void. Nationalism which had given vitality to France under Napoleon, and in Spain, Russia and Prussia had brought down his downfall, was opposed to Liberal cosmopolitanism. Protection to native industry, which had, only for a moment and in England, lost its hold, replaced free trade, and the strong individualism of "Manchestertum" was drowned in the rising flood of Collectivism, whether in the more formal guise of socialism or in the vaguer tendencies of philanthropy. In none of these currents of opinion had Jews a prominent voice except, as we have seen, in the latter, though there they were mainly effective in opposition and criticism.
Bismarck and the Forces of Reaction
ALL these tendencies, which may roughly be summed up as the Counter-Revolution, found a home in victorious Prussia and a voice in Otto von Bismarck, its representative statesman. As we have seen, his views on the nature of the State had been influenced in his formative period by F. J. Stahl, and his socialistic sympathies may possibly have been aroused by Ferdinand Lassalle, but he was of too independent a character to submit much to external influences, and the tendencies he represented, Junkertum and Militarism, were entirely opposed to Jewish Liberalism. For some fifteen years he found it convenient to work with the National Liberal party, to which all German Jews belonged, and among whose leaders the most prominent were two Jews, Eduard Lasker and Ludwig Bamberger. But in 1878 he broke with the party and let loose the forces of "Anti-Semitism" as a means of discrediting them. The movement, thus encouraged by Bismarck, soon spread to Austria and was transformed in Russia into the pogroms of 1881. In France the Royalists and Jesuits conceived hopes of reviving the Church-State and adopted anti-Semitism as a means of discrediting not alone Jews but also Protestants and other opponents of Catholicism. Their adherents, the French nobility, were especially embittered against the Jews by the bankruptcy of the Union Générale, a banking establishment in which all their money had been placed in the hope of wresting the control of French finance from the hands of the Rothschilds. Their chief hope lay in getting control of the General Staff, by filling its posts with young men of noble birth, trained by Jesuits. In order to attain this they schemed to remove all Jews and Protestants from the Staff and thought they had found a rare chance in their perverse persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Their scheme recoiled on their own heads, and the final result of the Dreyfus Affaire was to break the alliance of clericalism and militarism, at least in France.
The Dreyfus Affaire was specially significant as bringing into play, at one time, all the forces that have given vitality to anti-Semitism. The New Nationalism, based not on Country but on Race and fostered by chauvinistic anthropologists as well as historians; the revived Church spirit, which sees in the National Church not so much the guardian of Christian truth as a spiritual bond of national unity; the New Collectivism which sees in capitalism the chief anti-social force, and the revived militaristic spirit which glorifies war as the regenerator of the nation; all these movements combine to regard the Jew—considered as alien, infidel, capitalist, and pacificist—as the representative enemy. All the reactionary forces regard a revival of the medieval Church-State as both the means and the end of their strivings, and naturally find the position of the Jew, both theoretically and practically, one of the chief stumbling-blocks in their way.
Church-State versus Welfare-State
IT remains to be seen whether the ideals of religious and political liberty, which have been gained through so much blood and tears, will be preserved intact against the rising forces of the Reaction and Counter-Revolution which are, at bottom, an attempt at a revival of the Church-Empire. The slogan "One God, one king, one people," has again been raised, and armies that are nations in arms are in movement to the cry. Anti-Semitism is largely the result of this reaction, and while it is dominant in the councils of certain nations Jews must once more take up their rôle of martyrs to the wider truth. Nowadays however they do not fight alone, and it is scarcely possible that in Western Europe and in lands dominated by Western European ideals they can be reinterned into their ghetti. But the Colossus of the North still retains the medieval ideal of the Church-Empire, and while that controls Russian State policy Jews will have to suffer, in All the Russias, indignities and disabilities from which they have been freed in the lands of true civilization and religious liberty.
The ideal of the unified Church-State has been shattered by the assaults of modern criticism and the growth of true religious liberty. But the conception of all the citizens of a compact territory animated by the same ideals still retains its attraction; only the unification nowadays is with regard to the goal rather than to the roads that lead to it. In other words, the Welfare-State (interpreting Welfare as spiritual as well as material) is taking the place of the Church-State of the Middle Ages and of Reformation times. What then is to become of the separate churches or religious bodies which are found in profusion in modern States? That is the sole ecclesiastical problem which the modern statesman has to face. Except among the extreme parties, such as the Ultramontagnes, the obvious solution would seem to be that given by the modern Federal constitution in which each State (in this case Church) has a corporate life of its own over which it has autonomous control, except in any case where this conflicts with the general Federal ideals. The Jewish Synagogue may rightly claim its place among these churches within the State as having its part in promoting the general welfare.
The Rôle of the Jews in European Progress
OWING to their medieval disabilities Jews, though sharing as we have seen in the higher life and in the commerce of Europe, were yet kept in a kind of enclave in each of the European nations, and thus acted, both intellectually and economically, as a separate body with distinctive tendencies caused by their isolation and disabilities. Accordingly we are able to estimate roughly the part taken by the Jews as a body in the various movements which have made European civilization what it is to-day. In all these movements (except possibly one, the French Revolution) the Jews have contributed towards European culture while sharing in it themselves. Their monotheistic views and liturgic practices were the foundation of the medieval Church, both in creed and deed. By their connection with their brethren in the East and their tolerated existence, both in Islam and in Christendom, they helped towards that transmission of Oriental thought, science and commerce, which had so large an influence on the Middle Ages and led on to the Renaissance and the Reform, in both of which movements Jews had their direct part to play. So, too, in the struggle for religious liberty and in the different stages of toleration which lay at the root of political liberty, Jews had their part to play, and when freed from their shackles by the French Revolution took a leading rôle both in Nineteenth Century Liberalism and in the Collectivism which has now replaced it.
But when fully emancipated, Jews no longer acted in the European world of ideas collectively but as individuals, often choosing opposite ideals and in most cases applying the talents thus let free to objects apart from the general political or religious movements of the time. Great as has been the influence of Jews in their collective capacity on the development of European thought and culture up to the present day, it is possible that their influence as individuals, during the past fifty years, has been even more extensive though less discernible, owing to the absence of any general direction to Jewish intellectuality.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] It is perhaps worth while remarking that one of the most prominent leaders on the Jewish side in Holland, Herz Bromet, had lived as a free Burgher in Surinam for a long time, and that the example of America, especially New York State, was adduced in favor of the movement. (Graetz xi, 230-1).
[C] See Ellen Key, "Rahel Lewin."
[D] Similar salons were held later by distinguished Jewesses like Countess Waldegrave, in London, and Madame Raffalovitch in Paris; and the Rothschilds have, throughout, made their houses centers of the most cultured influence.
[E] No adequate or connected account has yet been given of the part taken by the Jews in the revolution of 1848. Incidentally a good deal of information is contained in the last volume of Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vi, "Young Germany."
[F] They got their altruistic tendencies from their family connections. Their uncle Jacob Rodrigues Pereire (1750-80) was the first teacher of deaf mutes.
[The second in a series of articles on The Meaning of Judaism]