Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

♦1740–86♦

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and ardent friend of philosophy, appears anything but great or philosophical in his policy towards the children of Israel. Under his reign the prohibitive laws of the Middle Age were revived in a manner which exceeded mediaeval legislation in thoroughness, though it could not plead mediaeval barbarism as an excuse. Only a limited number of Jews were permitted to reside in Frederick’s dominions. By the “General Privilege” of 1750 they were divided into two categories. In the first were included traders and officials of the Synagogue. These had a hereditary right of residence restricted to one child in each family. The right for a second child was purchased by them for 70,000 thalers. The second division embraced persons of independent means tolerated individually; but their right of abode expired with them. The marriage regulations were so severe that they condemned poor Jews to celibacy; while all Jews, rich and poor alike, were debarred from liberal professions, and they all were fleeced by taxes ruinous at once and ludicrous.

Voltaire, the arch-enemy of Feudalism, yet defended the feudal attitude towards the Jews. His enmity for the race did not spring entirely from capricious ill-humour. He had a grudge against the Jews owing to some pecuniary losses sustained, as he complained, through the bankruptcy of a Jewish capitalist of the name of Medina. The story, as told by the inimitable story-teller himself, is worth repeating: “Medina told me that he was not to blame for his bankruptcy: that he was unfortunate, that he had never been a son of Belial. He moved me, I embraced him, we praised God together, and I lost my money. I have never hated the Jewish nation; I hate nobody.”[136]

♦1750–51♦

But this was not all. Whilst in Berlin, Voltaire waged a protracted warfare against a Hebrew jeweller. It was a contest between two great misers, each devoutly bent on over-reaching the other. According to a good, if too emphatic, judge, “nowhere, in the Annals of Jurisprudence, is there a more despicable thing, or a deeper involved in lies and deliriums,” than this Voltaire-Hirsch lawsuit.[137] It arose out of a transaction of illegal stock-jobbing. Voltaire had commissioned the Jew Hirsch to go to Dresden and purchase a number of Saxon Exchequer bills—which were payable in gold to genuine Prussian holders only—giving him for payment a draft on Paris, due after some weeks, and receiving from him a quantity of jewels in pledge, till the bills were delivered. Hirsch went to Dresden, but sent no bills. Voltaire, suspecting foul play, stopped payment of the Paris draft, and ordered Hirsch to come back at once. On the Jew’s arrival an attempt at settlement was made. Voltaire asked for his draft and offered to return the diamonds, accompanied with a sum of money covering part of the Jew’s travelling expenses. Hirsch on examining the diamonds declared that some of them had been changed, and declined to accept them. It was altogether a mauvaise affaire, and to this day it remains a mystery which of the two litigants was more disingenuous.

The case ended in a sentence which forced Hirsch to restore the Paris draft and Voltaire to buy the jewels at a price fixed by sworn experts. Hirsch was at liberty to appeal, if he could prove that the diamonds had been tampered with. In the meantime he was fined ten thalers for falsely denying his signature. Voltaire shrieked hysterically, trying to convince the world and himself that he had triumphed. But the world, at all events, refused to be convinced. The scandal formed the topic of conversation and comment throughout the civilised world. Frederick’s own view of the case was that his friend Voltaire had tried “to pick Jew pockets,” but, instead, had his own pocket picked of some £150, and, moreover, he was made the laughing-stock of Europe in pamphlets and lampoons innumerable—one of these being a French comedy, Tantale en Procès, attributed by some to Frederick himself; a poor production wherein the author ridicules—to the best of his ability—the unfortunate philosopher. The incident was not calculated to sweeten Voltaire’s temper, or to enhance his affection for the Jewish people. Vain and vindictive, the sage, with all his genius and his many amiable qualities, never forgot an injury or forgave a defeat.

On the other hand, the Jews could boast not a few allies. Among the champions of humanity, in the noblest sense of the term, none was more earnest than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the prince of modern critics. His pure and lofty nature had met with her kindred in Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, born within the same twelvemonth. ♦1728–9♦ The friendship which bound these two children of diverse races and creeds together was a practical proof of Lessing’s own doctrine that virtue is international, and that intellectual affinity recognises no theological boundaries. ♦1779♦ This doctrine, already preached in most eloquent prose, found an artistic embodiment, and a universal audience, in Nathan der Weise—the first appearance of the Jew on the European stage as a human being, and a human being of the very highest order. The Wise Nathan was no other than Moses Mendelssohn, scarcely less remarkable a person than Lessing himself. Years before Mendelssohn had left his native town of Dessau and trudged on to Berlin in search of a future. A friendless and penniless lad, timid, deformed, and repulsively ugly, he was with the utmost difficulty admitted into the Prussian capital, of which he was to become an ornament. For long years after his arrival in Berlin, the gifted and destitute youth laboured and waited with the patient optimism of one conscious of his own powers, until an unwilling world was forced to recognise the beauty and heroism of the soul which lurked under that most unpromising exterior; and the Jewish beggar lad, grown into an awkward, stuttering and insignificant-looking man, gradually rose to be the idol of a salon—the eighteenth century equivalent for a shrine—at which every foreign visitor of distinction and culture, irrespective of religion or nationality, deemed it an honour to be allowed to worship. Though faithful to the cult of his Hebrew fathers, Mendelssohn was deeply imbued with Hellenic thought and sense of beauty. His famous dialogue, Phaedo, or the Immortality of the Soul, might have been written by Plato, had Plato lived in the eighteenth century; so much so that an enthusiastic pastor and physiognomist of Zurich, enchanted by Mendelssohn’s masterpiece, declared that he saw the spirit of Socrates not only in every line of the book, but in every line of the author’s face. Like a present-day phrenologist, Lavater was anxious to obtain a model of Mendelssohn’s head as an advertisement for his science; but, being in addition a pious evangelical minister, he also nourished hopes of winning Mendelssohn over to the Christian faith. In both these objects of his ambition the well-meaning physiognomist was sadly disappointed.

The great work of Mendelssohn’s life is the partial reconciliation which by his writings he assisted in effecting between the two worlds that had so long misjudged and mistrusted each other. His translation of the Pentateuch into pure German inaugurated for the Jews of Germany a new era of literary activity. By substituting modern German for the barbarous Yiddish in their education the book established an intellectual bond between them and their Christian fellow-countrymen. Lessing made the Jew known to the Gentile; Mendelssohn made the Gentile known to the Jew. And even the hostility of Frederick, the master of legions, the sneers of Voltaire, the master of laughter, and the bigotry of the Protestant public and of the Synagogue prevailed not against the united endeavours of the two apostles. In 1763 Mendelssohn carried off the prize offered by the Academy of Berlin for an essay on a philosophical subject, beating no less a competitor than Kant. In the same year Frederick, who three years before, enraged at some thinly-veiled disparagement of his verses by the Jewish critic, had been prevented from punishing him only by the fear of French ridicule, was induced to honour Mendelssohn by granting him the status of a Protected Jew.

Among Mendelssohn’s young contemporaries three are pre-eminent as representatives of the new Hebrew culture: Herz, Ben David, and Maimon. Herz was Kant’s favourite pupil and distinguished himself as a popular exponent of his master’s philosophy. Ben David was a mathematician and a student of Kant’s philosophy. On the latter subject he lectured at the University of Vienna and afterwards in Berlin. Maimon was a Polish Jew who had inherited restlessness of body from his fathers and restlessness of mind from the writings of his great namesake Maimonides. He wandered over the limitless and cheerless desert of Negation, sought to slake his thirst at the mirage of the Cabbala, or to forget it in the mysticism of the “Pious,” and finally, at the age of five-and-twenty, quitting home and family with the readiness characteristic of the born vagrant, he arrived in Berlin, unwashed, unkempt, and untaught in any tongue but his native jargon of Germano-Polish Hebrew. Some time afterwards, however, he became famous by the publication of an Autobiography—a work worthy to stand beside Rousseau’s Confessions in one respect at least: its unsparing and almost savage unreserve. Its sincerity was doubted by George Eliot and by other critics also. But Schiller and Goethe were both impressed by this work, and Maimon was honoured with the latter poet’s acquaintance.

Gradually there was formed in the capital of Prussia a wide circle of intellectual Jews and Jewesses, which stood in strong contrast to the proud and stupid nobility on the one hand and to the homely and stupid bourgeoisie on the other. Between these two frigid zones spread the Jewish class of men and women rich in money and brains, cultivating French literature, wit, and infidelity. Mendelssohn’s house was at first the centre of this circle, and after his death it was succeeded by that of Herz, whose own brilliancy was eclipsed by that of his wife. In her salon were to be met more celebrities than at Court. Mirabeau was captivated by the gifted Jewess’s charm, and little by little even the wives of distinguished men began to acknowledge the beautiful Henrietta’s attraction. Another literary salon was at the same time opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice; for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue, drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must always be some that is rotten.