The campaign for the removal of Jewish disabilities, begun by the two friends, was continued by others. In 1781 Christian William Dohm, a distinguished German author and disciple of Mendelssohn’s, advocated the cause in an eloquent treatise in which he not only reviewed the pathetic history of the Jews in Europe, and defended them against the venerable slanders of seventeen hundred years, but also discussed practical measures for the amelioration of their lot. The plea was read by thousands, and, though refuted by many, it was approved by more. Its earliest tangible effect, however, was produced, not in Berlin, but in Vienna. The new spirit had penetrated into the remotest corners of the German world. Austria, long a by-word among the Jews as a house of bondage, established an era of toleration under the philosophical monarch Joseph II., who, soon after the appearance of Dohm’s work, abolished many of the imposts paid by the children of Israel, granted them permission to pursue all arts and sciences, trades and handicrafts, admitted them to the universities and academies, founded and endowed Jewish schools, and, in pursuance of his futile plan to secure internal harmony by the Germanisation of the various races of his Empire, he made the study of German compulsory on all Jewish adults. ♦1782♦ The reign of toleration, it is true, ended with the good monarch’s life; but nevertheless it forms a landmark on the road to civilisation.
Meanwhile, in Germany also, the new gospel was fighting its way laboriously to the front. The death of Frederick the Great removed a great obstacle from the path of the advocates of the Jewish cause. Under his successor, Frederick William II., a commission was appointed to investigate the complaints of the Prussian Jews and to suggest remedies; and the Jews were asked to choose “honest men” from amongst themselves, with whom the matter might be discussed. ♦1787♦ The Jewish deputies laid before the commission all their grievances; and the poll-tax, levied upon every Jew who crossed or re-crossed the frontiers of a city or province, was abolished in Prussia. But the Jews justly pronounced this concession as falling far below their hopes and their needs. German public opinion was still averse to Jewish emancipation, and its prejudices were shared even by such men as Goethe and Fichte, both of whom, though representing opposite political ideals and though despising Christianity, yet agreed in the orthodox estimate of the Jew—and that in spite of the admiration which the former entertained for “the divine lessons” of Nathan der Weise. Thus, though the good seed had been sown in German soil, it was not in Germany that the flower saw the light of the sun.
Notwithstanding Voltaire’s unfriendly utterances regarding the Jews, the general tenour of his teaching was, of course, in favour of toleration, and it was on the French side of the Rhine that Lessing’s intellectual dream was to find its first realisation in practical politics. ♦1748♦ Montesquieu, moved to righteous indignation by the sight of the suffering Marranos in Portugal, had already protested against the barbarous treatment of the Jews in his Esprit des Lois, stigmatising its injustice, and demonstrating the injury which it had caused to various countries. Nor did he argue in vain. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there had been Jewish communities in France, consisting of refugees from Spain and Portugal. But they were only tolerated as pseudo-Christians. Dissimulation was absolutely necessary for self-preservation, and these hypocrites in spite of themselves were obliged to have their marriages solemnised at church, and otherwise to conform to rites which they detested. To these immigrants were gradually added new-comers from Germany and Poland, whom the Portuguese Jews despised and persecuted in a most revolting manner. An internecine feud between these two classes of refugees at Bordeaux gave King Louis XV. an opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the community. ♦1760♦ The Portuguese section passed a resolution calumniating their poor co-religionists, and trying to procure their exclusion as sturdy beggars and vagabonds. The communal resolution was submitted to the king, and every stone was turned to obtain his ratification of the iniquitous statute. Truly, there is no tyrant like a slave. Soon after Louis XV. issued an order expelling all the stigmatised Jews from Bordeaux within a fortnight; but in the chaos which pervaded French administration at that time there was a gulf between the issue and the execution of royal edicts, which, happily for the wretched outcasts, was never bridged over. ♦1776♦ Meanwhile the protest against the servile position to which Israel had been doomed for ages gained in strength, and, as its first result, the Jews of Paris obtained a legal confirmation of the right of abode in the capital of France.
Far worse was the condition of the Jew in Alsace—a district German in everything save political allegiance. In that province oppression was of that dull, chronic kind which begets degradation without driving its victims to violent despair. The Jews in Alsace were simply regarded and treated as inferior animals. They lived in jealously guarded ghettos, egress from which had to be purchased from the local officials. The right of abode was vested in the hands of the feudal nobility; the same limitations as to the number of residents and marriages prevailed, and the same extortions were practised there as in Germany. The Jews had to pay tribute to king, bishop, and lord paramount for protection, besides the taxes levied by the barons on whose domains they dwelt, and the irregular gifts wrung out of them by the barons’ satellites. And, while money was demanded at every turn, most of the avenues through which money comes were closed to the Jews, cattle-dealing and jewellery being the only trades which they were permitted to pursue openly. The profits derived from these pursuits were, of course, supplemented by surreptitious and, consequently, excessive usury. This last occupation exposed the Jew to the hatred of the simple country folk, and to blackmail on the part of crafty informers. The discontent, fomented by the clergy and the local magistrates, culminated in a petition to Louis XVI., imploring his Majesty to expel the accursed race from Alsace. But it was too late in the day. The movement in favour of toleration had made too much headway. An enquiry was instituted, and the ringleader of the anti-Jewish agitation—a legal rogue rejoicing in the name of Hell—was convicted of blackmail and banished from the province, instead of the Jews. ♦1780♦ At the same time the latter presented to the King a memorial, drawn up by Dohm, and obtained a considerable alleviation of the burdens under which they groaned, of the restrictions which hampered their commercial activity, and of the missionary zeal of the Catholic priests, which threatened the religion of their children. Finally, they were relieved of the odious capitation tax in 1784, the year which witnessed the triumph of Beaumarchais’ Mariage de Figaro at the Theatre Français—a rapier thrust at the dotard giant of feudalism, none the less deadly because inflicted amid peals of laughter; to be followed by the fall of the Bastille and of other things. In the same year a Royal Commission was appointed to revise the laws concerning the Jews and to remove their disabilities.
The Revolution did not stem the current of toleration. In 1789 the National Assembly met in Paris: a council of twelve hundred spiritual and secular fathers patriotically sworn to formulate a new creed—an object which, despite pandemonic wrangling and jangling and chaotic disorder of thought and action, they contrived to achieve in that memorable document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The National or, as it now calls itself, Constituent Assembly is the “station for all augury,” whither repair all mortals in distress and doubt. Petitions pour in from every side, and among these is one from the Jews, especially the down-trodden Jews of Alsace. They also come forward to claim a share in the new Elysium, to assert their rights as men. Mirabeau, who already towers high above his brother-councillors, and is looked upon as the one seer among many speakers—the one living force among fleeting shades—espouses the Jewish claim. Three years earlier he had published a work On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of the Jews. He now sets himself to demolish the remnants of the ancient prejudice still cherished by some of the clerical friends of mankind.
The task was not an easy one. Besides Mirabeau, the Abbé Grégoire, and Clermont-Tonnerre, there were scarcely any politicians of note in France who cared for the Jews. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, while abolishing the religious disabilities of Protestants, made no provision for the Jews. Even the French public of 1789 was not yet quite ripe for so revolutionary a measure as the admission of the Jew to that equality of citizenship which it declared to be the birthright of every human being. A statute of January 28th, 1790, enfranchised the Jews of the south of France who had always held a privileged position; but this exception on behalf of a few only emphasised the disabilities of the many. The bulk of the race, especially in Alsace, continued to be treated as outcasts, until the more advanced section of the Parisian public, under the leadership of the advocate Godard, appealed to the people of the capital for its opinion on the matter. ♦1790 Feb. 25♦ Fifty-three out of the sixty districts voted in favour of the Jews, and the Commune gave a practical expression to the feelings of the majority in the form of an address laid before the Assembly. But it was not till nineteen months after that a definite decision was arrived at, partly by the eloquent advocacy of Talleyrand, who pointed out to the Assembly that the only difference between ordinary Frenchmen and French Jews was their religion. In every other respect they were fellow-countrymen and brothers. If, therefore, religion were allowed to interfere with their enfranchisement, that would be a denial of the principles of the Revolution—a flagrant breach of all those laws of humanity and civil equality for which the French people were fighting. ♦1791 Sept. 27♦ These arguments prevailed in the end, and the French Jews were formally enfranchised. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple the children of Israel, who had hitherto sojourned as strangers in foreign realms, hated, baited, and hunted from place to place, without a country, without a home, without civil or political rights, are citizens. Henceforth the name Juif, made hateful by the horrors of centuries, is to be forgotten in the new appellation of Israelite.
The storm that raged during the next three years left the French Jews comparatively unscathed. Israel had long taken to heart the lesson embodied in the oriental proverb, “The head that is bent is spared by the sword.” In some districts, it is true, the enemies of all religion also tried to suppress the Jewish “superstition”; but on the whole the Jews came through the ordeal better than might have been expected. The Constitution of 1795 confirmed the decrees of the National Assembly.
Holland, as we have seen, had long been a home for the persecuted sons of Israel. But the full rights of citizenship were not conceded to them until 1796, when closer relations with France enabled the gospel of liberty, equality, and fraternity to complete the work of toleration begun by enlightened commercial policy. The gift, however, was not welcomed by the heads of the community. The jealous Synagogue, which had persecuted poor Uriel Acosta to death, and excommunicated Spinoza in the preceding century, was still determined to guard its masterful hold upon its members. The new duties and rights which accompanied the gift, it was feared, would render the Jews less dependent upon their religious pastors. The Rabbis, supported by the Portuguese element which formed the aristocracy of the community and, like all aristocracies, abhorred innovation, offered a strenuous resistance to emancipation. They indited a circular epistle declaring that the Jews renounced their rights of citizenship as contrary to the commands of Holy Writ. They endorsed all the objections raised by the enemies of Jewish emancipation—namely, that the Jews, owing to their traditions of the past and their expectation of the Messiah, are and shall ever be strangers in the land—and they prevented their flock from accepting the invitation to vote in the elections to the National Assembly. On the other hand, the Liberal party, led by Jews of German descent, endeavoured to weaken the power of the Rabbis. The two sections banned each other heartily, and the distance between them grew wider as the Liberals went further and further along the path of reform. This difference of views led to a schism between the lovers of the new and the slaves of the old.
In England prejudice was still so strong that as late as 1783 we find the Jews excluded from the benefit of the Irish Naturalisation Act, passed that year. Yet there appears a faint reflection of Lessing’s teaching in some of the writings which bring the century to a close. Richard Cumberland, the friend of Burke and Reynolds, Garrick and Goldsmith, banteringly eulogized by the last-named author as “the Terence of England, the mender of hearts,” wrote, in collaboration with Burgess, the Exodiad, a long epic, consisting of eight dull books, wherein the two bards sing the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and their journey through the desert. The work begins, after the fashion of epics, with the orthodox invocation of the Muse in a single breathless period:
“Of Israel, by Jehovah’s mighty power