Their dispersion is explained as follows:
“They were always in Rebellions and Tumults while they had the Temple and Holy City in View, for which reason they have often been driven out of their old Habitations in the Land of Promise. They have as often been banished out of most other Places where they have settled.... Besides, the whole People is now a Race of such Merchants as are Wanderers by Profession, and, at the same time, are in most if not all Places incapable of either Lands or Offices, that might engage them to make any part of the World their Home. This Dispersion would probably have lost their Religion had it not been secured by the Strength of its Constitution: For they are to live all in a Body, and generally within the same Enclosure; to marry among themselves, and to eat no Meats that are not killed or prepared their own way. This shuts them out from all Table Conversation, and the most agreeable Intercourses of Life; and, by consequence, excludes them from the most probable Means of Conversion.
“If, in the last place, we consider what Providential Reason may be assigned for these three Particulars, we shall find that their Numbers, Dispersion, and Adherence to their Religion, have furnished every Age, and every Nation of the World, with the strongest Arguments for the Christian Faith, not only as these very Particulars are foretold of them, but as they themselves are the Depositories of these and all the other Prophecies, which tend to their own Confusion. Their Number furnishes us with a sufficient Cloud of Witnesses that attest the Truth of the Old Bible. Their Dispersion spreads these Witnesses thro’ all parts of the World. The Adherence to their Religion makes their Testimony unquestionable. Had the whole Body of the Jews been converted to Christianity, we should certainly have thought all the Prophecies of the Old Testament, that relate to the Coming and History of our Blessed Saviour, forged by Christians, and have looked upon them, with the Prophecies of the Sybils, as made many Years after the Events they pretended to foretell.”
This cold-blooded habit of drawing from the sufferings of fellow-men an assurance of our own salvation is still cultivated by many good Christians. It is a comfortable doctrine, though not particularly complimentary to Providence.
♦1723♦
But if the progress of reason is slow, it is sure. A few years after the publication of Addison’s essay, the Jews already established in England were recognised as British subjects. ♦1725♦ Two years later a Jewish mathematician was made Fellow of the Royal Society, and not long after a Jew became secretary and librarian of the Society. Judges also refrained from summoning Jewish witnesses on the Sabbath. ♦1753♦ The concession of 1723 was followed, thirty years later, by the right of naturalisation. But, even then, though the Commons passed the Bill, the Lords and the Bishops endorsed it, and King George II. ratified it, so loud an outcry from traders and theologians arose thereat that the gift had to be revoked. “No more Jews, no wooden shoes,” was the elegant refrain in which the British public sang its sentiments on the subject, and the effigy of an enlightened Deacon, who had defended the Act, was burnt publicly at Bristol. England, which in the Middle Ages had been induced to persecute and expel the Jews by the example of the Continent, was once more to be influenced by the Continental attitude towards the race. Fortunately, this influence was now of a different kind.
CHAPTER XIX
THE EVE OF EMANCIPATION
About the middle of the eighteenth century a new spirit had arisen on the Continent of Europe; or rather the spirit of the Renaissance, suppressed in Italy, had re-asserted itself in Central Europe under a more highly developed form. Seventeen hundred years had passed since the heavenly choir sang on the plain of Bethlehem the glorious anthem, “Peace on earth, good-will toward men.” And the message which had been blotted out in blood, while the myth and the words were worshipped, was once more heard in a totally different version. Those who delivered it were not angels, but men of the world; the audience not a group of rude Asiatic shepherds, but the most polished of European publics; and the tongue in which it was delivered not the simple Aramaic of Palestine, but the complex vehicle of modern science. Once more man, by an entirely new route, had arrived at the one great truth, the only true commandment: “Love one another, O ye creatures of a day. Bear with one another’s faults and follies. Life is too brief for hatred; human blood too precious to be wasted in mutual destruction.”
It was the age of Voltaire, Diderot and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; of Lessing and Mendelssohn in Germany. The doctrine of universal charity and happiness which, like its ancient prototype, was later to be inculcated at the point of the sword and illustrated by rape, murder, fire and famine, as yet found its chief expression in poetical visions of freedom and in philosophical theories of equality promulgated by sanguine Encyclopaedists. It was a period of lofty aspirations not yet degraded by mediocre performance; and the Jews, who had hitherto passively or actively shared in every stage of Europe’s progress, were to participate in this development also. Unlike the earlier awakenings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this call for tolerance did not die away on the confines of Christendom. The time had come for the question to be put: “Sind Christ and Jude eher Christ und Jude als Mensch?” Israel was destined to receive at the hands of Reason what Conscience had proved unable to grant. And in this broader awakening both Teuton and Latin were united. The French philosophers served the cause of toleration by teaching that all religions are false; the German by teaching that they are all true.
But, ere this triumph could be achieved, the Jews had to overcome many and powerful enemies. Among these were the two most famous men of the century.