In Italy the condition of the Jews has varied very little during this century, though public attention has been once or twice directed to them. In most of the large cities, though they are regarded with a species of tacit dislike, no open wrong is done them. In some, as, for example, Florence, they are treated with strict justice, indeed, it might be said with favour. Their rights are protected, and they are allowed to pursue all trades and professions, except that of the physician. At Rome, on the accession of Pio Nono, among the various liberal measures adopted by him was one in favour of the Jews. At that time they were strictly confined within the precincts of their Ghetto; they were obliged every year to send a deputation of four elders to ask permission to reside during that year at Rome, and they were required to attend periodically to listen to sermons preached for their conversion. All these obligations were annulled by the new pontiff. On the 17th April, 1847, he went in solemn procession to the Ghetto, and ordered the wall of partition between it and the rest of the city to be thrown down.[222] He rescinded the regulations whereby the Jews were compelled to sue for permission to dwell in Rome, and to attend controversial sermons. He even substituted a star for a cross, in an order of merit which he instituted, that he might not offend their feelings. After the Revolution of 1848, however, the old regulations were again enforced.
In the summer of the year 1858 public attention was again drawn to the condition of the Jews in the Papal States. On the 23rd of June in that year Signor Mortara, a cloth merchant of Bologna, received a visit from the police; who, it appeared, had been sent by Padre Felletti, Chief Inquisitor of Bologna. It was night, and Signor Mortara’s seven children were all in bed. They were awakened; an inquiry was made as to the names and ages of each; and the parents were then informed that a maid-servant, who had been in their service, had given evidence to the effect that six years before, when one of their children, Edgar by name, had been dangerously ill, she had secretly baptized him. The child was therefore a Christian, and must be given up to the Catholic Church, to be bred up in that faith. The mother screamed and fainted. The father appealed to the Archbishop of Bologna and the Governor, but without effect. The child was forcibly seized by the Carabineers, and sent to Rome.
Signor Mortara followed, and had an interview with Cardinal Antonelli. The line he took does not seem to have been the one which would naturally have suggested itself to an Englishman. He did not represent that, even assuming the girl’s statement to be correct, it would be a most monstrous perversion, alike of natural right and Christian doctrine, to suppose that her act could be any sufficient ground for removing a child from the care of its parents, to which the Providence of God had entrusted it. Probably he knew, however, that any such plea would be urged in vain, and that his only chance of success lay in disproving that any such baptism as the servant alleged had ever taken place. He therefore brought forward evidence that the child had not had the dangerous illness which she declared it to have had, and further, that the servant girl’s character was so bad that her evidence was of no value. Antonelli was not to be convinced. He did, indeed, so far relent as to allow the parents occasionally to see their son; but the priests continually interfered; and at last, finding probably that they made no progress in reconciling the child to his new life as long as the father and mother had access to him, they conveyed him away altogether.
The story excited a profound sensation throughout Europe. Several of the Great Powers remonstrated with the Vatican, urging that the boy ought to be restored to his parents. Their representations failing, Sir Moses Montefiore, the well-known champion of Jewish rights, undertook a journey to Rome, where he had an interview with Cardinal Antonelli, and asked to be allowed to plead his suit personally with the pope. His efforts were zealously seconded by Mr. Odo Russell, the British Agent, but they proved futile nevertheless. Sir Moses was informed that Pio Nono regarded the affair as one which had been finally settled, and which he declined to reopen. The boy’s mother is said to have died of grief. However that may be, it is certain that no more shameful tale of persecution ever disgraced the annals of the Papacy. It is a consolation to know that the establishment of the Italian monarchy brought freedom and civil equality at last to the Jewish people.[223]
In Germany, their history during this century is full of interest, partly on account of the remarkable variations of policy exhibited from time to time in the dealings of the German Government with them, and partly from the conflict of opinion between the ancient Rabbinical schools and what may be called the neology of modern Judaism, which, originating as we have seen with Mendelssohn and his contemporaries, derived afterwards much of its inspiration from Strauss and other kindred writers.
After the fall of Napoleon, when Germany was reconstructed professedly as nearly as possible on its ancient basis, one article of the Federal Act of the Germanic States, promulgated in June, 1815, secured to the Jews the possession of equal rights of citizenship throughout Germany, conditionally only on their compliance with the laws of the State in which they resided. But it is always easier to frame a law than to ensure its observance, and this was especially the case in Germany, which consisted of a great number of federal States, in which there was a great difference of opinion on many subjects, and especially as regarded the status of the Jews. The principle of Jewish equality, social and political, with the Christian inhabitants of every country, did make its way, but very slowly, and several generations passed before it came to be fully acknowledged.
Nor was it only the vis inertiæ, so to speak, of public opinion that had to be overcome. In some countries, at all events, there was a positive reaction against the favour which had been shown by Diets and Governments to the Jews. Even as early as 1815, Frankfort, Lubeck, and Bremen made several enactments, revoking the civil privileges which had been granted to the Jews. Commercial jealousy does not seem to have been the main, or at all events the sole, occasion of this change of policy. The Jews were attacked by men of learning and ability, whom we might have expected to be superior to the prejudices they displayed. The faults of their national character were alleged against them—their exclusiveness, their inveterate obstinacy, their greed of gain, and especially the bigotry of their religious belief. This was no doubt offensive to the rationalizing school, which was rising into eminence. Some of the German professors insisted on their being regarded as always and everywhere aliens, who could not be made to amalgamate with any other nation—who might exist in great numbers in any land, but would never be of it. The effect of this agitation was, for the time, at all events, to throw back the question of Jewish emancipation. They were excluded from holding magisterial offices, professorships in the Universities, commissions in the army. In some States the question of their expatriation was mooted; it was even carried out at Lubeck, so far as the city itself was concerned. In other places something of the old mediæval outrages were renewed. At Hamburg and other towns the houses of the Jews were pillaged and demolished. It is even said that in some places the old cry of the monk Rodolph, ‘Hep, Hep,’ was again heard.
The revolutionary outbreak of 1830 in France spread into Germany; but the extreme Liberal party did not now advocate, as before, the entire social and political equality of the Jews with their fellow-citizens. Hatred of dogmatic teaching seems to have overpowered every other consideration; and as the dogmatism of the Jews has always been one of their most marked characteristics, the Rationalist leaders, among whom Bruno Bauer was conspicuous, clamoured for their suppression as a religious community, and the withdrawal of civil rights and privileges from them. The orthodox Jews did not lack able and zealous champions; but, as has been already intimated, it was not from Christians only that they encountered opposition. As some nominal Christians in Germany, and certain others who could hardly claim the title of Christian at all, had dealt with the historical records and theological dogmas of the Gospel, so did nominal Jews deal with those of Judaism. ‘In the Synagogue, as in the Church,’ says Da Costa,[224] ‘everything that was national and Israelitish, all that was supernatural and beyond the reach of unassisted human reason, was furiously attacked and rejected.’ It was not merely that novelties were introduced into the ancient Hebrew liturgy and synagogue service, that organs and music were imported, and sermons preached in the German language, and new prayers interpolated, and old prayers excluded, but the fundamental doctrines of their faith were questioned and discredited. One party proposed to abolish the Jewish Sabbath, substituting the Christian Sunday for it. Another openly declared that they looked for and desired no Messiah to come. Another more insidiously averred that they did indeed believe in the future advent of the Hope of Israel, but He was not a Person, but simply the representative of ever-advancing enlightenment and benediction—one who always had been and ever would be coming, but who would never come until the perfection of humanity had been reached. But a theory like this would be more embarrassing to the Jew than its counterpart was to the Christian. Rationalists might declare the Incarnate God to have been a personified myth, an ideal Being, in whose reputed words and acts Christian ideology found embodiment. But there were His words, which no man could have spoken; and there were His acts, which no man could have performed; there were His predictions, which the history of the world since His day had made good, and which nothing but Divine Wisdom could have uttered. The Jews had nothing of this to sustain them, and it cannot surprise us that many among them found no shelter in such a sea of doubt, except in embracing the Christian creed. Hence, in all likelihood, the number of conversions which are reported to have taken place in Germany at this period. Da Costa reports them as having amounted to five thousand in twenty years.
But orthodox Judaism made a resolute stand against the evil. Schools and colleges were established in the great German cities, presided over by learned and zealous teachers: nor is there any lack of distinguished writers and able preachers among them. Among scholars, Raport and Leopold Zunz were pre-eminent;[225] among historians, Geiger and Graetz, the last-named the author of the most copious and learned History of the Jews which has yet appeared. The German Jews have also distinguished themselves in every department of science and literature—in politics, in music, in metaphysics, in medicine, in the belles lettres. Their free admission to all public offices, and the full rights of citizenship, dates only from the reconstruction of the German empire; but it is now fully, and we may hope finally, secured.