“After dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue: where the men and boys in their vayles, and the women behind a lettice out of sight; and some things stand up, which I believe is their law, in a press to which all coming in do bow; and at the putting on their vayles do say something, to which others that hear the Priest do cry Amen, and the party do kiss his vayle. Their service all in a singing way and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. And in the end they had a prayer for the King, in which they pronounced his name in Portugall; but the prayer, like the rest, in Hebrew.
“But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more; and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.”
Such was the impression which the Jewish congregation produced on that keen observer of the surface of things.
The inference to be drawn from these sprightly comments is that the Jew was far from having outlived his unpopularity. Though the doctrine of toleration, for which Cromwell had fought and Milton suffered, was still preached by divines like Taylor and expounded by philosophers like Locke, the English public was far from recognising every man’s right to think, act and worship as seemed good to him. So hard it is even for the faintest ray of light to pierce the mists of prejudice.
To Mr. Pepys we also owe a curious glimpse of the vigour with which the Messianic Utopia was cherished at this time amongst us. The fame of Sabbataï Zebi had reached England, and the Prophet of Smyrna found adherents even in the city of London. We are in 1666, on the eve of the mystic era fixed by enthusiasts as the year that was to see the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land. Under date February 19th, Mr. Pepys makes the following entry in his Diary;—“I am told for certain, what I have heard once or twice already, of a Jew in town, that in the name of the rest do offer to give any man £10 to be paid £100, if a certain person now at Smyrna be within these two years owned by all the Princes of the East, and particularly the Grand Segnor, as the King of the world, in the same manner we do the King of England here, and that this man is the true Messiah. One named a friend of his that had received ten pieces in gold upon this score, and says that the Jew hath disposed of £1,100 in this manner, which is very strange; and certainly this year of 1666 will be a year of great action; but what the consequences of it will be, God knows!”
♦1689♦
But the Messiah did not come; and twenty-four years later, under William and Mary, an attempt was made to fleece the unpopular race in London. It was proposed in the Commons that £100,000 should be exacted from the Jews; and the proposition impressed the House as tempting. But the Jews presented a petition pleading their inability to comply and declaring that they would rather leave the kingdom than submit to such treatment. Their protest was seconded by statesmen who, be their personal feelings towards the Jews what they might, objected to the measure as contrary to the spirit of the British Constitution; and after some discussion the project was abandoned, though not the prejudice which had made such a proposal possible.
Sober Protestantism did not in the least share the Puritan preference for Hebrew ideals. If the Spectator may be taken as a mirror of public opinion on the subject, in the reign of Queen Anne, English Protestants objected to “the Multiplicity of Ceremonies in the Jewish Religion, as Washings, Dresses, Meats, Purgations, and the like.” Addison states that the reason for these minute observances, adduced by the Jews, was their anxiety to create as many occasions as possible of showing their love to God, by doing in all circumstances of life something to please Him. However, this explanation does not seem convincing to the critic, who goes on to remark that Roman Catholic apologists use similar arguments in defence of their own rites, and concludes, “But, notwithstanding the plausible Reason with which both the Jew and the Roman Catholick would excuse their respective Superstitions, it is certain there is something in them very pernicious to Mankind, and destructive to Religion.”[134] Accordingly, a statute of Queen Anne encouraged conversion to Christianity by compelling Jewish parents to support their apostate children.
Addison, elsewhere, recognises the advantages, commercial and other, which the world owes to the Jews’ dispersion through the nations of the earth; but he quaintly observes: “They are like the Pegs and Nails in a great Building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole Frame together.”[135] He is impressed by the multitude of the Jews, despite the decimations and persecutions to which they had been exposed for so many centuries, no less than by their world-wide dissemination and firm adherence to their religion; and he endeavours to explain these remarkable phenomena by several reflections which deserve to be quoted, not only on account of the intrinsic sound sense of some of them, but also for the sake of the picture which they present of the Jewish nation in the early days of the eighteenth century, as it appeared to a highly cultured Gentile, and of the highly cultured Gentile’s attitude towards the nation:
“I can,” says the Spectator, “in the first place attribute their numbers to nothing but their constant Employment, their Abstinence, their Exemption from Wars, and, above all, their frequent Marriages; for they look on Celibacy as an accursed State, and generally are married before Twenty, as hoping the Messiah may descend from them.”