Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

♦1808 March 17♦

When the Sanhedrin had brought its labours to an end, the Emperor repealed the exceptional measures of 1806 and recognised the Consistorial organisation which for a century fixed the status of Israel in France. Every two thousand Jews were to form a community under a synagogue and a board of trustees, with Paris for their centre. Napoleon, it is true, while granting this liberal charter, was compelled to yield to the anti-Jewish prejudices of the people of Alsace and other parts of Eastern France, where the Jew was hated more than ever, for the disasters of the Reign of Terror and the distress caused by Napoleon’s campaigns, by impoverishing the peasants, had delivered them up to the tender mercies of the money-lender. In accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants of those districts Napoleon took some steps highly detrimental to Jewish interests. He enacted, for example, that loans to minors, women, soldiers and domestic servants, as well as loans raised on agricultural implements, should be null; that no more Jews should be allowed to enter Alsace; that every Jew should serve in the army; and that no Jew should engage in trade without permission from the Prefect. The duration of this decree was limited to ten years. But, such local disadvantages and the indignation aroused thereby notwithstanding, the well-earned gratitude of Israel was expressed in many Hebrew hymns composed in honour of the Deliverer whom the Lord had raised for His people.

A few years afterwards even these enactments were withdrawn, and the Jews were accorded complete equality, civil and political. From 1814 till 1831 French legislation, despite certain fluctuations under the brief restoration of the Bourbons, was enriched with various Acts, all tending to lift the Israelites to a position worthy of their country, and schools were established for the education of the Rabbis, who since the latter date until recently were regarded as public functionaries and were paid by the State.[138] ♦1833♦ Two years later the French Government gave a signal proof of its interest in the welfare of the Jewish portion of the French people by suspending relations with a Swiss canton which had denied justice to a French Israelite on account of his religion. For in Switzerland, when the French domination expired, the old prejudices came to life again, and it was not till 1874 that political equality was accorded to the Swiss Jews.

♦1805♦

Meanwhile Napoleon’s arms had carried on, even outside France, the work begun by the philosophers of the preceding generation. The Inquisition was crushed in every Catholic country under the Emperor’s heel, while in Germany Napoleon’s conquest brought to the Jews a relief which departed with the French legions, to return by slow degrees in the succeeding years. It was one of the bitterest examples of irony presented by history. The French autocrat had given to the German Jews freedom, and the people whom the Jews aided with their lives to throw off the French autocrat’s yoke robbed them of it. In Frankfort, where the ghetto had been abolished in 1811, immediately on the French garrison’s withdrawal a clamour arose demanding its restoration. In other “free towns” also, where rights of equality had been granted to Israel while the fear of Napoleon hung over them, the ancient hatred revived immediately on his downfall, and the old state of bondage was restored. Even in Prussia, where the law recognised the equality of the Jews in theory, slavery was their lot in reality: many trades and industries were prohibited to them, the road to academic distinction was barred to them, and Jews who had attained to the rank of officers during the War of Liberation were forced to resign their commissions. Nor were these disabilities removed even when the German Diet, which, by the Act signed in Vienna on June 8, 1815, was to manage the affairs of the German Confederacy, had established the principle of religious freedom among the Christians, and had pledged itself to consider measures for improving the lot of the Jews.

This reaction was partly due to an exaggerated sentiment of nationality and hatred of everything foreign, aroused by the presence of the French legions in the country, and strengthened by the sacrifices and the success of the struggle for independence. National consciousness found an ally in the Christian revolt against the French Religion of Reason. Enthusiasm for the faith, which the French had overthrown, added zest to the enthusiasm for the fatherland, which the French had overrun. “Christian Germanism” became, not only a patriotic motto, but a veritable cult of a novel and jealous god to whom everything that was non-Christian and non-German, including the Jew, ought to be immolated. ♦1819♦ “Hep, hep!” (Hierosolyma est perdita) became the battle-cry of the Jew-baiters in many German towns, and the persecution spread even into Denmark, where the Jews had been placed on a footing of equality since 1814. ♦1828–30♦ The Prussian Government proposed a plan for the improvement of the social and political condition of the Jews, but the measure had to be abandoned owing to the opposition which it met with on the part of the representatives of the Prussian people. ♦1840♦ This return to mediaeval intolerance once assumed in Prussia the mediaeval form of a blood-accusation; but the charge only served to establish the innocence of the Jews and the stupid credulity of their assailants. None the less, it supplied a striking illustration of the retrogression of the public mind. For the prejudice, even when its basis was proved false, continued to subsist in a more or less latent condition among the lower intellectual strata of society—as prejudices have a way of doing for long centuries after they have vanished from the surface—and during the revolution of 1848, on the Upper Rhine, it led to a general persecution of the Jews, who sought refuge in the neighbouring territory of Switzerland. But the reaction was temporary, and the revolutionary movement proved, in the main, favourable to the cause of Jewish emancipation.

Although the Prussians, fired by patriotism, had rallied round their king and unanimously supported him in the effort to deliver the country from French domination, they had not been left untouched by the lessons of the French Revolution. To the Prussian patriots individual freedom was as precious as national independence. So strong was this feeling that Frederick William III. had been obliged to promise that at the end of the struggle he would reward his subjects’ sacrifices by granting to them a representative form of government. But few monarchs have ever parted with power except under compulsion. When the War of Liberation was over, and the country’s independence assured, the king forgot his promises. Hence there arose between the prince and his people a bitter conflict, which continued under his successor. Frederick William IV. as Crown Prince had evinced a lively sympathy with the popular demand for a Constitution; but with the sceptre he inherited the absolutist principles of his ancestors, and strove to prop up the authority of the throne by the help of religion. The German Liberals, however, had outgrown the mediaeval notion that kings rule by the grace of God. They claimed that the will of the people should be the supreme law of the State, and laughed at the Sovereign’s antiquated pretensions. The fate of the German Jews was naturally bound up in that of German Liberalism.

The year 1846 was chiefly distinguished by the agitation which prevailed in Prussia and all Northern Germany in favour of religious toleration and liberty of conscience; and the emancipation of the Jews was one of the demands submitted to the King of Prussia by the Prussian Estates, especially those of Cologne, Posen and Berlin, for various measures of domestic and social improvement, as, for example, the reform of criminal justice, the publication of the procedure of trials and of the debates of the Estates, and the extension of the representation of towns and rural communities. ♦1847♦ In the following year the question of Jewish emancipation was again introduced into the Prussian Chambers and found only two opponents, one of them being Bismarck, who then declared that he was “no enemy of the Jews, and if they are my enemies,” he said, “I forgive them. Under some circumstances I even like them. I willingly accord them every right, only not that of an important official power in a Christian State. For me the words, ‘By the grace of God,’ are no mere empty sounds, and I call that a Christian State which makes the end and aim of its teaching the truths of Christianity. If I should see a Jew a representative of the King’s most sacred Majesty, I should feel deeply humiliated.”

However, the National Parliament which met at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1848, under Liberal auspices, among other steps which it took in order to secure popular freedom, removed all religious disabilities. The Prussian Constitution of 1850 imitated the example; and the establishment of the new régime, in 1871, threw the doors open to the Jews throughout the German Empire. The Reichstag now contains many distinguished members of the Jewish faith.

In Austria the edifice of toleration reared by Joseph II. was overthrown by his successors, Leopold II. and Francis I., who revived most of the antiquated restrictions and regulations against the Jews, and again confined them within special quarters. This barbarous policy lasted far into the nineteenth century. In many parts of the country the Jews were forbidden to own, or even to rent land, except that on which their houses stood, or to migrate from one province to another without special permission. In Austrian Poland, or Galicia, the Jews were especially hated. There, as elsewhere in Poland, they formed a vast multitude, settled in the chief towns and villages. The greater part of their emoluments was derived from the sale of intoxicating liquors, to which the Poles, like all northern nations, were immoderately addicted. From the time of Joseph II. the Jews had been by repeated laws prohibited from trading in alcohol. But these laws were disregarded. The landowners possessed the exclusive rights of distilling, and they had from the first coming of the Jews to Poland farmed out these rights to the latter. Deplorably enough, a number of the Jews, in despair of finding other means of livelihood, allowed themselves to become the go-betweens in this demoralising traffic, and thus the most temperate race of Europe laid itself open to the hostility and scorn of those who would feign have seen a check put to the intemperate propensities of the people and its consequent impoverishment.