Outlines of Jewish History from B.C. 586 to C.E. 1885

by Lady Katie Magnus

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.
(1780–1880.)

1. Light and Shadows.—The influence of Mendelssohn did not die out with his death. He had stirred the conscience of the Christians, he had roused the consciousness of the Jews. Things could never again be quite as they had been. But there was a danger in the difference, as there is in all sudden and violent changes of feeling, even when the changes are good and right. Cultivated Jews quickly became quite the fashion in the literary circles of Berlin, and the reception-rooms of Mendelssohn’s daughters, and of Henrietta Herz, the charming wife of a Dr. Marcus Herz, and of several other pleasant, intelligent Jewish women were thronged by the leading men of the day. Christians seemed to find a certain delightful flavour, beyond the charm which is common to all cultivated intercourse, in this new taste of what had been for so long forbidden fruit. And almost as quickly, ambitious Jews and Jewesses grew to be a little intoxicated with their success. Many restrictions, both social and political, were still in force against the race, and these people who were so well received amongst Christians thought that they were liked and admired in spite of their Judaism, whereas they owedto it those very qualities which gained for them this flattering notice. One by one, slowly and shyly at first, they dropped Jewish observances; then, more boldly, they dropped Jewish acquaintances; and lastly, and quite in logical sequence, they dropped their Judaism altogether. It was always, and in every case, from first to last, a sacrifice to selfishness and self-interest. And perhaps the first proud step of ‘hiding themselves from their own flesh’ in their fashionable wrappings of superior cultivation, was quite as wicked as that last distinctly separate step which many took of baptism. Mendelssohn’s daughters were baptized, and his grandchildren; so was Heine the poet in 1825, and Börne the patriot in 1818, and so were a host of minor folks in the first forty years immediately succeeding Mendelssohn’s death. These ‘conversions’ were the deep shadows thrown from the light which Mendelssohn had lovingly and loyally let in upon his people. Yet, nevertheless, the light was ‘good,’ and in time it lost its blinding, dazzling quality. If a prism is put in the way of a ray of sunlight, we get a view of the most beautiful colours, but the experiment needs nice handling. If the prism be not of the right shape, and set at the right angle, instead of added colours we get our ray of light obscured. Some of the Jews of Germany managed with their pushing, self-adjusted prisms to hinder the effects of Mendelssohn’s rays of light. When he himself stood as a prism in the beams, we got Nathan der Weise as a result.

2. Leopold Zunz.—Eight years after the death of Mendelssohn, in the person of Leopold Zunz anothergood, steadfast Jew and great scholar was born to Germany. Mendelssohn had done much to free his people from fetters, both external and internal; from the outward shackles of prejudice and oppression, and from the inward rust of ignorance and superstition. Zunz carried on this work, and, perhaps, in a safer, because in a more purely historic spirit. His aim was to build up, rather than to cast down or cast aside, and to make an ideal for Israel’s future out of the actual of Israel’s past. His knowledge of the national literature was wide and profound, and his memory was as remarkable as his scholarship. He began to write from a very early age,and his celebrated monograph on Rashi[65] was published before he was thirty years old.His most valuable work was an historical review of Jewish ethics,[66] which gives the whole account of the development of the spiritual life of Israel from Biblical days to the present time. This book, which took nine years to write, shows forth the thought and the feeling of a nation of ‘witnesses,’ collecting and presenting their evidence of over a thousand years. Zunz wrote, too, standard works on Jewish literature, under the titles‘Contributions to History and Literature’[67] (1845), ‘The Synagogue Poetry of the Middle Ages’ (1855), ‘The Rites of the Synagogue Service’ (1859), and ‘History of the Literature of Synagogue Poetry’ (1865). In these works we find a history of the sorrows of the Jewish race, and a delightful account of the poets and thepoetry of the Jews of the Middle Ages. Zunz’s mind was as accurate and as full of facts as a dictionary, and yet as charming and as full of fancies as a poem. He lived till this year (1886), and up to the very last preserved his faculties, and added to his friends. Throughout his long life Zunz was faithful to his nation, to his religion, and to his national literature. His immense knowledge of Judaism made him its enthusiastic admirer, and it is as well, perhaps, for lesser scholars, who are greater critics, to recall this fact. Zunz was a cultivated man as well as a theologian and a Talmudist. He had received, and he was one of the first Jews in Germany who were permitted to receive, a university education. And his attitude towards the heroes of the past, at whose oddities it is so impertinently easy to smile, was consistently reverent. Zunz felt—

‘If these had not walked

Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?’

3. Progress of Events and of Legislation in Germany.—The frequent laxity of observance, and the occasional conversions among the higher class of Jews, had the natural reactionary consequence among the lower class. These became more rigidly, and even repellently, orthodox. The temptations to cultivated society, which hardly assailed them, they regarded with bitter hatred and contempt, and they clung to their own distinctive ways and customs and modes of dress and speech, with a fervour of anger as well as of religion. Thus it came to pass that the main body of the Jews in Germany continued to be almost aslittle as ever German citizens, and social prejudice against Jews remained at its old high-water mark till Napoleon’s wonderful series of conquests, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a change in the position. In Westphalia, which was then created a kingdom, with Jerome Bonaparte for its king, and in all the Rhenish provinces which were annexed to France, the liberal Code Napoléon took the place of that other written and unwritten code in which Jews were pariahs, liable to be condemned without evidence, and sentenced without appeal. Whether from dynastic reasons, or as a matter of conscience, the Corsican conqueror confirmed the doctrine of full and free emancipation which the Revolution had introduced. All subjects of the French Empire were to be legally looked upon simply as French citizens, and it was henceforward no one’s business to inquire whether such subjects professed the Jewish religion, or the Christian, or no religion at all. The humiliating Leibzoll, or body tax, which in Russia had been discontinued since 1790, was now definitely and altogether abolished, and, equally with Christians, office in the army and in all civil departments of the state was thrown open to Jews. Only positions directly under Government were still denied to them.

This happier condition of things, however, lasted but a very few years. With Napoleon’s downfall in 1814 it was at an end, and in the subsequent German reaction against French supremacy the Jews of Germany fared worse than ever. The famous Treaty of Vienna (1815) secured to Jews only such rights as they had possessed before the French occupation.These ‘rights,’ as we know, were all wrongs, and the different States were quick to reassert, and even to add to them. Frankfort led the van. She shut them up again in their Judengasse, and ingeniously imposed some extra restrictions, limiting, among other matters, the number of marriages to be annually permitted. Other States celebrated their emancipation from French rule in an equally liberal and grateful spirit, reserving to their own co-religionists not only every office in state, army, law, and university, but forbidding to Jews even the use of Christian names. And then, from legislating, German savants took to the composing of abstruse little pamphlets against the Jews; and, as befitted a nation who were developing into philosophers, they persecuted them pedantically instead of religiously. It came to much the same thing in results. In 1819 these attacks from professional pens culminated in serious riots at Heidelberg and Frankfort, and other towns, in all of which Jews were pillaged to the once again revived cry of ‘Hep, Hep.’

Things did not improve during the thirty years that Count Metternich was minister in Austria. But in 1848 the whirlwind of the Revolution brought its breath of liberty to the Jews, and most of the German states, in deference to the new strong tendency of public opinion, at last admitted their Jews to the rank of citizens. In 1850, Frederick William IV. of Prussia, brother of the present Emperor of Germany, although opposed by his ministers, removed all municipal and administrative disabilities from his Jewish subjects, and the new and united Empire of Germany,which was settled in 1866, and consolidated by the issue of the war in 1870, retains in its constitution no traces of any separate and restrictive legislation concerning Jews. Social prejudices, however, are tough, and often outlive legal disabilities. Nations, like individuals, have a predisposition to some especial ailments, and an old writer says that Germany is periodically subject to the distemper of Judea-phobia. Some colour is given to this theory by the dull persistency in persecution which that country has always shown towards the race. It broke out yet once again in 1875, in a sort of violent rash of anti-Semitic essays, a literature which exhibited the fever in a very pronounced form, and which was treated, unfortunately, homœopathically, by as thick a rash of replies. This Judenhetze, however, died out by degrees, and in the enlightened views of their Crown Prince and Princess the Jews of Germany look confidently forward to a ‘fair field and no favour’ being by-and-by accorded to them.

4. Progress of Events and Legislation in France (1780–1880).—At the time when Moses Mendelssohn’s efforts were producing a reform in feeling and in conduct among and towards the Jews of Germany, the Jews in France thought that his influence might be brought to bear upon their rulers. The Jews in Alsace accordingly, who, numbering by this date some 20,000, were the most numerous of the various French communities, forwarded an appeal to Mendelssohn, setting forth their wrongs and their hopes. In deference to this appeal a very famous memoir in favour of Jewish claims to fair treatmentcame to be written by a learned and enlightened Christian scholar named Dohm. Dohm was one of Mendelssohn’s influential friends, and thought well of all Jews for Mendelssohn’s sake. When the Jews of Alsace begged Mendelssohn to speak up for them, he wisely thought that a Christian advocate might gain more hearers than a Jewish one; and so, at his friend’s request, Dohm wrote and published in 1781 a book on the Political Reform of the Jews, which work had a great, though indirect, share in the bringing about of better times. Another friend for the French Jews was found in Count Mirabeau, who, before he came to be a power in the stirring events on which the eighteenth century closed in France, was, with Dohm and other noteworthy people, a frequent visitor in the salons of Henrietta Herz and of Mendelssohn’s daughters at Berlin. The Abbé Grégoire was another personage who, having had the opportunity of intimate intercourse with Jews, used such knowledge to their benefit. Both Mirabeau and Grégoire wrote and spoke frequently and earnestly on the subject of Jewish emancipation, which was rapidly becoming one of the questions of the day. Whether French Jews should be admitted to the rights of French citizens, was over and over again debated in the French Assembly. Many ignorant arguments were brought against it. One speaker urged that Jews could not serve the state; that they could not be soldiers, since their laws forbade them to fight on their Sabbath; nor artisans, added another orator, nor agriculturists, for their holidays were too numerous for continuous labour. Such speakers must haveforgotten all about the Land and the Book—all about the oliveyards and the vineyards of Palestine, the ‘borders set with precious stones,’ and the battlefields drenched with more precious blood. The discussion went on. Their own friend Abbé Grégoire hurt their cause by remembering something of all this past, and pleading for them as a ‘people.’ This roused the stupid folks. Could a ‘people,’ dispersed among other ‘peoples,’ be patriots? they asked. And when that was answered out of history, and Jewish loyalty and law-abidingness taken as proved to demonstration, then a new doubt was raised on the score of the alleged money-lending proclivities of the race. Robespierre answered this. ‘The vices of the Jews,’ said he, ‘are born of the abasement in which you have plunged them. Raise their condition, and they will speedily rise to it.’

After an immense amount of eloquence had been expended on the question, the Assembly, on September 27, 1791, passed the vote for the emancipation of the Jews, and mainly on the grounds that those who fought against the measure were actually fighting the Constitution, which proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, without reservation or exception, to all subjects of the French republic. By this vote, France gained for herself the distinction of being first among modern nations to give not only tolerance, but liberty, in its full social, legal, and political meaning, to her Jewish subjects. It remained for Napoleon Bonaparte to complete the work. When that extraordinary man came to be Emperor of France, he showed an extreme interest in the history and the position of his Jewish subjects. He summoned anassembly of representative Jews, composed of Rabbis, merchants, and literary men, and calling it a Sanhedrin, he desired this assembly to report on the present religious and political status of their nation, and to define their duties towards God and their country. This so-called Sanhedrin did its difficult work very well.Starting with a quotation from one of the Amoraim,[68] that the law of the State is a binding law on the Jews of that State, the Assembly showed, by proof and by principle, that Judaism constrains Jews to be in every sense true and worthy sons of the soil. Passing from declaration to suggestion, the Assembly advised with great sagacity on many subjects, on that especially of mixed marriages, on the practice of ‘usury,’ and on the choice of trades and professions. Napoleon gave the sanction of authority to much of this counsel, and altogether the deliberations of this latter-day Sanhedrin greatly helped forward the progressive movement which had set in. The wave of liberty, which swept over France in such terribly tumultuous fashion at the end of the eighteenth century, has known no ebb tide. The many and various forms of government, which have changed much and effaced much since 1793 in the fair and fickle land of France, have, to their honour, left religious freedom at high-water mark.It has been well said that, from that date to this, one cannot accurately speak of the ‘Jews of France,’ but only of French citizens professing the Jewish religion.[69] Rabbis of the Jewish Synagogue,since 1830, have been considered to hold the same relation towards the state as curés of the Catholic church, receiving, like them, their salaries from the Government. Not only in the army and in the learned professions, but also in every class of society, the Jews of France march, nowadays, shoulder to shoulder with their fellow-countrymen. The war of 1870, which made Alsace and Lorraine German, was a great blow to the loyal French-Jewish inhabitants of these provinces, but the loss to France of her Alsatian Jews was balanced by the gain of some 30,000 Algerian ones; for in 1870 the Jews of Algiers became, in a body, naturalised Frenchmen, and are proving themselves excellent and enlightened subjects of France.