History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

while on the one hand he presented Judaism to the outside world in its best possible light, he sought on the other to encourage changes to rid it of its unacceptable face.

He called for the end of all persecution and discrimination against Jews, and said he believed this would come as reason triumphed. But equally he thought that Jews must abandon those habits and practices which limited reasonable human freedom and particularly freedom of thought.

As an apologist for Jewish religion, then, Mendelssohn was not very successful. The truth is, there was much of it in which he simply did not believe: the idea of the chosen people, the mission to humanity, the Promised Land. He seems to have thought that Judaism was an appropriate creed for a particular people, which should be privately practised in as rational a manner as possible. The idea that the whole of a culture could be contained in the Torah was to him absurd. The Jew should worship at home and then, when he went out into the world, participate in the general European culture. But the logic of this was that each Jew would belong to the culture of the people among whom he happened to live. So Jewry, which had kept its global unity for 1,500 years despite appalling ill-treatment, would gradually dissolve, except as a private, confessional faith.

The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States,

In Europe, the enlightenment brought them hopes which proved illusions, and opportunities which turned into a new set of problems.

French Revolution.

‘The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.’ That was all very well, but it was the voice of the enlightened elite. The voice of the people could be rather different.

It was only after tremendous resistance that the National Assembly voted a decree of complete emancipation for Jews

Moreover, emancipation in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the revolutionary spirit with their arms.

For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew.

The events of 1789 were a product of the French enlightenment, which was strongly anti-clerical and, at bottom, hostile to religion as such.

The French philosophes

turned on its head the old Augustinian argument that Judaism was a witness to the truth of Christianity. It was, rather, a witness to its inventions, superstitions and sheer lies. They saw Judaism as Christianity taken to the point of caricature, and it was on this ugly travesty that they concentrated.

The works of Voltaire and his colleagues were the title-deeds, the foundation documents, of the modern European intelligentsia, and it was a tragedy for the Jews that they contained a virulently anti-Semitic clause.

Thus yet another layer was added to the historical accumulation of anti-Jewish polemic. On top of the pagan plinth and the Christian main storey there was now placed a secular superstructure. In a sense this was the most serious of all, for it ensured that hatred of the Jews, so long kept alive by Christian fanaticism, would now survive the decline of the religious spirit.

two distinct themes, mutually exclusive in theory but in practice forming a d...

On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portray the Jews as the allies and insti...

The second myth was unwittingly aided by Napoleon’s well-intentioned attempts to solve th...

Napoleon

convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah.

dubbed the Sanhedrin.

Memories stirred of the secret international Jewish assemblies which had supposedly met to pick the town selected each year for the ritual murder. Thus a new conspiracy theory appeared,

The Sanhedrin also attracted the attention of the new secret police organizations which the autocracies of central and eastern Europe were creating to counter the radical threat,

Hence when the ghetto walls fell,

They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism.

Conversion to Christianity was one way in which Jews reacted to the age of emancipation.

With the decline of the part all religion played in society, conversion might be less of a religious act than a secular one; it might be quite cynical.

Heine

‘an entrance-ticket to European society’.

For a Jew, everywhere except in the United States, remaining a Jew was a material sacrifice.

On the Continent, Judaism remained an obstacle not just to a political career but to many forms of economic activity.

other solutions

Rothschilds.

Jewish flair for news-gathering and transmission.

Reuter

the new kind of international firm the Rothschilds created was impervious to local attack.

1819,

‘Hep Hep’ riots

included an assault on the Rothschild house in Frankfurt.

The money was no longer there.

It was paper, circulating throug...

their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.

Moreover, from an early date, Britain had been prepared not just to welcome and accept Jews, but to help them abroad.

Between 1827 and 1839, largely through British efforts, the population of Jerusalem rose from 550 to 5,500 and in all Palestine it topped 10,000–the real beginning of the Jewish return to the Promised Land.

Palmerston was also instrumental in helping wealthy western Jews to come to the rescue of their beleaguered co-religionists.

February 1840

Dam...

blood ...

Sir Moses Montefiore

Montefiore and his colleagues not only secured the release of the Jewish captives, in August 1840, but persuaded the Sultan of Turkey to issue a firman forbidding the circulation of blood libels or the arrest of Jews on such a basis. The success of this mission led to many others in which Montefiore, who lived to be over a hundred, worked with the Foreign Office to help Jewish victims of injustice.