However, though three centuries of humanism had not been altogether wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor Jew as Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us, “are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race softened in Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature, any more than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic admirer of the Psalms—the book that has played a larger part in men’s lives than any other—and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian Church, had an affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities.”[147] But Coleridge’s affection for ancient Hebrew literature deepened, if anything, his contempt for the modern Jew. He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew prophet,” and used this ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for the actual: “The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah—‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!’—and Levi of Holywell Street—‘Old clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe. Immane quantum discrepant!”[148] The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.
Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine conversion. He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews, and, finding them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as was his wont, to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on Kant’s text regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things weighty, though incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in undermining the faith of four different victims of his zeal and friendship, or may be of his sense of humour: a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite. “He said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had been arguing with the man in the moon.”[149]
Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating the hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although he declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one side—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,” can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he frankly confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit of the Synagogue is essentially separative.”[150]
Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of Coleridgean theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In 1830 Mr. Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness, sounded the trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be admitted to the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first reading by 18 votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial success of the proposal was evidence of the progress of public opinion; its final rejection showed that there was room for further progress. Indeed, the victory of light over darkness was not to be won without a severe conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries had to be assaulted and taken one after the other, ere triumph could be secured. How strong these fortifications were can easily be seen by a glance at the catalogue of any great public library under the proper heading. There the modern Englishman’s wondering eye finds a formidable array of pamphlets extending over many years, and covering the whole field of racial and theological intolerance. But the opposite phalanx, though as yet inferior in numbers, shows a brave front too. In January, 1831, Macaulay fulminated from the pages of the Edinburgh Review in support of the good cause:
“The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political functions.”
This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay sets himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no longer stands in need of vindication.
The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews, encouraged by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the House of Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a constant champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought in a Bill on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly. That a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who knows? even control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a proposition that shocked a great many good souls; while others ridiculed it as preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of opponents in his Eothen. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to the author his wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be denied political recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea, and quotes it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous materialism. “Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet.” Had Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing coming, as he was with the gift of describing current events, he would probably never have written the eloquent page on which the above passage occurs. But in his own day there was nothing absurd in his attitude. Till 1828 no more than twelve Jewish brokers were permitted to carry on business in the City of London, and vacancies were filled at an enormous cost. Even baptized Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City, and therefore no Jew could keep a shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.
The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one operation in a campaign wherein the whole English world was concerned, and on the result of which depended far larger issues than the fate of the small community of English Jews. It was a campaign between the powers of the past and the powers of the future. Among those engaged in this struggle was a man in whom the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of old England, and he was destined to promote the development of the new. His life witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His career is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.
In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities, and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his political supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish disabilities.”[151] His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast amount of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short years earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be, was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and Roman Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory party had surrendered their first line of defence—Anglicanism, and abandoned their second—Protestantism: was there any reason, except blind bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone could see none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only dictated by justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the Jews in 1833 had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the shrievalty had been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of alderman and of Lord Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846 an Act of Parliament had established the right of Jewish charities to hold land, and Jewish schools and synagogues were placed on the same footing as those of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the repeal of Queen Anne’s statute, which encouraged conversion; of the exception of the Jews from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783; and of the obsolete statute De Judaismo, which prescribed a special dress for Jews. After the bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal of political rights was absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why people should be loth to grant to the Jews nominal, after having admitted them to practical equality. But though prejudice had died out, its ghost still haunted the English mind. Men clung to the shadow, as men will, when the substance is gone. Those orators of the press and the pulpit whose vocation it is to voice the views of yesterday still strove to give articulate utterance and a body to a defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of reasons, were year after year dealt out for popular consumption, and the position was sufficiently irrational to find many defenders. But the result henceforth was a foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not impregnable. Prejudice, resting as it did upon unreality, could not long hold out against the batteries of commonsense.
Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned five times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another Jew, Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured to take his seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in repeating the oath he omitted the words “on the true faith of a Christian.” The experiment cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion from Parliament. Meanwhile, the Bill for the admission of the Jews continued to be annually introduced, to be regularly passed by the Commons, and as regularly rejected by the Lords. The comedy did not come to an end till 1858, when an Act was passed allowing Jews to omit from the oath the concluding words to which they conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red letter day” was added to the Jewish Calendar.