Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the preceding century brought forth its fruit. England could not long remain a stranger to the march of events. But, slow as usual and averse from hasty experiments, she pondered while others performed. Besides, she had been spared the volcanic eruption of the Continent which, while destroying much that was venerable and valuable, had cleared the ground for the reception of new things.

There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s view of the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century differed in no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary American of the same period, as described by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[139] The ordinary Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin, grew up inheriting the traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel. The great historical Church of Christendom was presented to him as Bunyan depicted it. In the nurseries of old-fashioned English Orthodoxy there was one religion in the world—one religion and a multitude of detestable, literally damnable impositions, believed in by countless millions, who were doomed to perdition for so believing. The Jews were the believers in one of these false religions. It had been true once, but now was a pernicious and abominable lie. The principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money and to fulfil the predictions of the old prophets of their race. No doubt, the individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary Englishman found in the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt to be unpleasing specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing view of it.

The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards the Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Scott in that work gives utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been growing up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season of the novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany, “still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a novel.[140] The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye seized on the artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was the group of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in introducing the characters seems to have been innocent of any deliberate aim at propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient proof of his own sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of kindling sympathy in many thousands of readers.

Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of preconceived ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and Nathan the Wise is the same as the difference between Scott and Lessing and their respective countries. The British writer does not try to persuade us that the person whom we abhorred a few generations before as an incarnation of all that is diabolical, and whom we still regard with considerable suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be that there was no need for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition, or Scott was not equal to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not depart too abruptly from the convention sanctioned by his great predecessors. His Isaac is not a Barabas or Shylock transformed, but only reformed. Though in many respects an improvement on both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical attributes of his progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity, cunning, affection for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But, whereas in both Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking precedence of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed. It is with exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order to save his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his merchandise into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-Bœuf, has given his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Isaac throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him to take all he possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the Norman, surprised, exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags.”

“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be, the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young—the despised and persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”

On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac changes his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew, and for his child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from which he had just promised to part even with one thousand silver pounds:

“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens.”

While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author takes care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned as much as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important difference in Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes Isaac as a victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion rather than of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,” “unbelieving dog” are the usual modes of address employed by the mediaeval Christian towards the Jew; just as they are the usual modes of address employed by the modern Turk towards the Christian rayah. The Jews are “a nation of stiff-necked unbelievers,” the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse with a Jew,” his propinquity, nay his mere presence, is considered as bringing pollution—sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those entertained by the Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances Isaac makes his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,” wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired, “he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at the lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make room for him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves, with looks of pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son of a rejected people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place.”

Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with brutal frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the bowels of our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with gauds and toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one road to the favour of a Christian”—money. Hence his avarice. Furthermore, the impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might perhaps be derived from the above presentation, is softened by the author, who hastens to declare that any mean and unamiable traits that there may be in the Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of the credulous vulgar and the persecutions by the greedy and rapacious nobility.”

Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew by dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation: “except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unremitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period.” “The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited.” “On these terms they lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” Thus we are led to the conclusion that the Jew’s vices have grown, thanks to his treatment, his virtues in spite of it. For Isaac is not altogether impervious to gratitude and pity. He handsomely rewards the Christian who saves his life, and he himself saves a Christian’s life by receiving him into his house and allowing his daughter to doctor him.