THE JEWS AND JUDAISM
The opening years of the nineteenth century found the Jew blinded by the light of a new sun, the rays of which were beating upon the Ghetto and were forcing him to take off, one by one, the many garments with which he had clothed himself during the hostile Middle Ages. For the Jew these Middle Ages did not end with the Reformation and the Renaissance; but only disappeared in the transformation brought about gradually by the French Revolution. The beginning of the twentieth century sees him putting on some of these garments again, and trying to save his own warmth from being lost in the coldness of the outside world. During this period the Jew has passed through more upheavals than many nations have during three or four times the number of years. What outward struggles has he not been called upon to experience; through what alternating seasons of joy and sorrow has he not passed! What changes even within his own body has he not sustained! The modern European and American world has had a hard fight to find its way into its present changed condition; but much harder by far was the task laid upon the Jew; and, whether he has succeeded or not, he has made an honest fight. Evidences of the struggle abound on every hand, and the road is strewn with many a dead hope and many a lost opportunity. The Jew was bound more firmly to ancient traditions; and so interwoven were these ancient traditions with his whole being that the new life into which he came had of necessity to be blended with the old. The tale of the Jew of the nineteenth century is a record of his endeavor to do justice to the two demands which were made upon him: the one from the outside world—to fit himself to take his place worthily and do his work side by side with the other citizens of the state in which he lived; the other from within his own ranks—to harmonize his religious belief with his new point of view and to adapt his religious exercises to modern social conditions.
EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS
The struggle of the Jews in the various European countries for civil rights and for equality before the law was long drawn out, and was marked by varying fortunes dependent upon the political conditions of these countries. More than seventy years of the century had passed before this struggle had been fought out. Though it is true that a beginning was made in Germany and Austria (1750 and 1781), to France belongs the honor of having been the first to really do away with the mass of anti-Jewish legislation which the centuries preceding had piled up. On the 27th of September, 1791, the National Assembly at one stroke removed all the disabilities under which the Jews had been living—distinctive dress, special Jew’s oath, Jew’s tax, forced residence in certain localities, etc. From France, and under the influence which that country then exercised, the emancipation of the Jews spread to Belgium and Holland, and to some of the states of Germany; but the rest of Europe was not yet ready for this emancipation. The reaction which marks the period between 1814 and 1848 made itself felt upon the Jews, restoring, in many places, the disabilities under which they had formerly lived. The “Judengassen” became once more inhabited, and the principles of freedom and liberty for all members of the state seemed to have been wellnigh forgotten. The Revolution of 1830 stayed the downward course in some of the German states; but it was not until 1848 that the second great period in Jewish emancipation came about. In the breaking down of old institutions it was natural that the exceptional laws against the Jews should go also. The German Parliament of 1848, at Frankfort, forcefully proclaimed the doctrine of religious liberty; and of this parliament a Jew, Gabriel Riesser, was vice-president. But it was not until the formation of the German Empire, in 1871, that the emancipation of the Jews, which had gradually made its way in the various states, was carried through for the whole of that empire. In 1867, a decree was issued in Austria by virtue of which all citizens were declared equal before the law, and in 1870 the walls of the Ghetto fell in Rome. In 1874, Jews were admitted to the rank of citizens in Switzerland. In 1878, the Congress of Berlin, the leading spirit of which (Disraeli) was of the Jewish race, demanded equal rights for the Jews living in the Balkan Peninsula. These rights were accorded by the various states there, with the exception of Roumania; which, in spite of the treaty and in spite of the promises made at the time, still continues to refuse to allow the Jews living within its borders to become citizens or to treat them as an integral part of the population. In Turkey the laws which put certain restrictions upon non-Mohammedan citizens were sensibly changed in 1839; so that the Jews living in the dominions of the Sultan suffer from no exceptional legislation.
The cause of Jewish emancipation in England suffered no such sudden changes as it did on the continent. It proceeded by regular stages through the abrogation of the Act of Test in 1828, the admission of Jews as citizens of London in 1830, as sheriffs in 1835, as magistrates in 1845, and in 1858 as members of Parliament by the removal of the words “upon the faith of a Christian” in the oath taken by the members. There can be no doubt that the emancipation in England, though long drawn out and fiercely contested, was more effective than anywhere else, owing to the fact that it was progressive in character and based upon the idea of rights demanded and not upon that of favors granted. Nothing was asked of the Jews in England other than that they be good citizens of the state; while the whole continental legislation regarding them, from the time of Napoleon on, had on the part of the legislators only one object in view—to break up the cohesion of the Jews as a body and to pave the way for their disappearance as a distinctive group. The idea that emancipation was a favor and not a right brought it about that the Jews themselves aided in their own disintegration. They believed that it was their duty to show themselves more patriotic than were the other citizens of the state in which they lived, as they were receiving greater favors. And so, even though Jews have sat in the parliaments of various continental states, they have with few exceptions steadfastly refused to acknowledge themselves to be in any way representatives of their brethren, and in some cases (notably in France) during the last few years have either remained supinely indifferent when Jewish questions were before their several parliaments, or have even aided those whose agitation was directed against their fellow-Jews. In England, on the contrary, the Jewish members of Parliament have never forgotten that, in addition to their interests as citizens of England, they have a duty to perform to the Jews, whom they also represent, and they have therefore been able, while giving their best services to the state, to be also useful to their co-religionists. It may be due to this cause that the emancipation of Jews on the continent has in no way been able to stem the recrudescence of anti-Semitism; while it has undoubtedly done this in England. The opposite effect is most clearly seen in Algiers, where the wholesale emancipation of the Jews in 1870, through the efforts of Crémieux, that bold champion of his people, has in a large measure contributed to make the riots possible which have in late years been witnessed in that French colony. Neither the population of Algeria nor the Jews there were at that time ready for such a measure; it did not therefore come as the result of a development among the people, but as something imposed upon them by the government.
In addition to Roumania, Russia is practically the only country which has refused to enter the European concert, and which by means of laws and ordinances represents still the dark period of the Middle Ages. It has turned the provinces on its western borders into a tremendous Ghetto, and driven the Jews to exile by making life within that pale practically impossible. Even Portugal in 1821, and Spain in 1868 (the two countries from which the Jews had been banished for a great number of years), opened their doors to them once more; though few Jews have ventured to return to the Peninsula, despite the fact that in 1886 a committee was formed in Madrid for the promotion of Jewish immigration into Spain.
THE WANDERING JEW
The Wandering Jew is not the Jew of legend, but the Jewish people of history. The dislocation of large Jewish bodies, which was characteristic of the Middle Ages, has been kept up during the nineteenth century; and this dislocation has, as in former times, profoundly modified Judaism in the various countries. From the fifteenth century on to the nineteenth, hostile legislation on the part of Western Europe had been continually driving the Jews to the East. The expulsion from Spain and Portugal, at the end of the fifteenth century, forced several hundred thousand into Turkey; while the hardships which they had to suffer in the smaller German states and in Austria caused large numbers to seek a refuge in Poland and Russia. The tide commenced to turn westward about the middle of the eighteenth century, though bands of Jews from Poland had been driven into Germany, Italy, and Holland in the terrible years of the Chmelnicki persecutions (1648–1651). The readmission of Jews into England, the relative kindness of Frederick William of Prussia and of Frederick the Great, aided a certain slow but continuous infiltration from Poland, so that at the end of the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century these Polish Jews were to be found in all parts of Germany, Holland, and England. This slow migration back again to Western Europe took on, however, much larger proportions in the latter part of the nineteenth century; but before this could happen a strong movement still farther westward had already taken place. Jews were among the earliest settlers on the American continent. They were in nearly every case of Spanish or Portuguese descent, having come from Holland and England to the possessions which these powers held on the new continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the tide of immigration from Germany was at its height, a large number of Jews from the southern states and the Rhine region found their way to these shores. The Russian atrocities of 1882 and the following years caused a greater shifting of the Jewish population westward than can be paralleled at any previous time. It has been estimated that between the years 1882 and 1900 fully one million Russian Jews left their homes in the pale of settlement, finding new dwelling-places in England, Germany, and France. The largest number (probably half a million) came to the United States and Canada. Untoward economic conditions existing in Galicia, and the frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism there, forced out during the 90’s a large number of Galician Jews; and in 1899 and 1900 the hostility of the Roumanian government has made it impossible for thousands of Jews to remain in a country in which most of them had been born; and, under circumstances the like of which has hardly ever before been seen, bands of the Roumanian Jews have been wandering over Europe, seeking the means by which to come to the American continent in order there to establish themselves anew. There are between ten and eleven million Jews to-day in the world: of these, about nine million live in Europe; one million in the United States and Canada; three hundred and fifty thousand in Africa; three hundred and fifty thousand in Asia; and sixteen thousand in Australasia.