the
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF ENGLAND.

––––––♦–––––– 

Transactions.

SESSION 1893-94. 

––––––♦–––––– 

LONDON: 

WERTHEIMER, LEA AND CO., 

CIRCUS PLACE. LONDON WALL. 

NOTE. 

The Society as a body is not responsible for either the
statements made or the opinions expressed by the authors
of Papers.

CONTENTS. 

––––♦––––

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT 

PLATES. 

Domus conversorum documents. 

JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

––––––––♦–––––––

A PLEA FOR ANGLO-JEWISH HISTORY, 

Inaugural Address delivered at the first meeting of the society,
november 11th, 1893,

By LUCIEN WOLF.

In welcoming you to the first business meeting of our Society, it seems
to me that my duty is to say something to you with regard to the scope
of the work you have undertaken. This is the more necessary, since
our proposal to take upon ourselves a corporate existence was at the
outset met with certain criticisms which have not been sufficiently
answered. We were told that Anglo-Jewish history was a very small
affair, that it was not likely to add much to the general history of our
race, and that it would throw no light on the annals of our country.
I must say that I marvelled when I heard these positive statements,
made without any appeal to actual research or any pretence to detailed
knowledge; but when I discovered the test which had been used in
arriving at them, my wonder disappeared. “Where are your great
men?” we were asked; “Where is your Maimonides, your Jehuda
Halevi, your Isaac Abarbanel?” The answer to these questions is, of
course, simple. We have not produced any such men, and even if we
had, it would be no proof that our history was more important than
the histories of the French and German communities which, in this
respect, are almost in the same case with ourselves. The truth is
that this criticism belongs to a primitive order of historical science.
Biography does not cover the whole domain of history. The true
function of the historian is to reconstruct the lives, not of personalities
but of communities and nations out of the largest possible accumula-
tion of social facts and individual experiences. If you will only think

for a moment you must see that the antiquated great-man-theory of
history can only, afford a very inadequate, if not a very misleading,
clue to the general development of the social organism. It was by
this method that the historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries succeeded in throwing a halo of romance over the Middle
Ages, obscuring all the ignorance, ferocity and licentiousness which
were the main characteristics of that period. What is really important
to ascertain is the social state from which the great men sprung and
the complex influences which produced both. And if there have been
no great men, it does not follow that there is no history worth en-
quiring into. In Spain and in England, for example, we have had
two contingents of one and the same race working out the destiny of
Judaism under diverse conditions. Consequently, when you ask what
have the English Jews done in philosophy to equal Maimonides or in
statecraft to compare with Abarbanel, you do not so much discourage
research as recognise its necessity. It is, indeed, of importance to us
to ascertain why, in the one case, the conditions of life have proved
favourable to the development of personal character and the free play
of intellectual genius, and why, in the other, working with the same
materials, they appear to have been sterile in these respects. Indeed,
I am not sure that the latter investigation may not prove the more
interesting of the two.

In dealing with Jewish post-Biblical history the biographic test
is the less valuable because of the absence of a governing centre of
national life. The Dispersion has subjected the Hebrew people, in
detached sections, to a variety of influences which render the socio-
logical method absolutely indispensable. It is, indeed, in its diversity of
social environment, and not in any array of commanding personalities,
that the peculiar interest of Jewish history consists. Alone among the
races of the world the Jews appear at every epoch and in almost every
land. There has been scarcely a civilisation in which they have not
played a part, or a great intellectual or spiritual movement to which
they have not contributed some impulse. At the same time their own
character has been more or less modified by the varying historic and
social influences with which they have come in contact. In every
country they have assimilated something of the national spirit, and
each epoch has submitted them to the modifying influence of some

great experience. Nor have these influences been permitted to remain
altogether local. By a migratory movement, which has so far been
one of the most constant phenomena in Jewish history, local pecu-
liarities have been periodically gathered up and redistributed until the
whole racial character has been more or less affected by them. Hero,
I think, you have the formula of the Jewish historical process, and
it is a formula which, besides rendering us independent of the great-
man-theory, vindicates the necessity of Societies such as this. Our
history is essentially a congeries of local sociological histories, the
totality of which can only be adequately comprehended by a very
refined specialisation. There is not a part of this history which can
be spared by the whole, not a part which can be sufficiently explained
apart from the whole, or which can be understood apart from its
environment. In these very onerous conditions lies the necessity of
the local study of Jewish history, and of the utilisation in such study
of a highly organised machinery.

Of course all the communities in their geographical classification
are not equally interesting, and it is possible that in the perspective
of the œcumenical historian some of them may disappear. This, how-
ever, cannot be the fate of the Anglo-Jewish community, no matter
how restricted the scale of the general survey, if only this Society
does its duty. To illustrate how closely associated our history is with
the larger history of our people on the one hand, and with the national
history of our country on the other, I will take one event, the anniver-
sary of which falls on this very day. It is just two hundred and
thirty-eight years ago to-day that, at the instance of Cromwell, a
special sub-Committee of the Council was charged to report on
Menasseh ben Israel’s petition for the legal readmission of the Jews
to this country. The result of that reference you know. It is
usually spoken of as the starting-point in the history of our community
as it at present exists. This, however, is not its sole significance.
This Anglo-Jewish event was largely a continental Jewish scheme, the
outcome of a long series of continental events, the projected solution of
a crisis in the continental Jewries and the attempted fulfilment of a
Jewish national dream. The two great branches of persecuted Jewry,
the Marranos in Spain and the hunted Polakim in Lithuania, looked
forward to the success of Menasseh’s mission as a cure for all their

woes, and Menasseh himself regarded it as a further step in that
dispersion of Israel, on the completion of which—according to the
mystics—the Millennium depended. On the one hand, its causes
reached back to the massacres of Chmielnicki in Poland, and the
Spanish persecutions of Ferdinand and Isabella, and on the other, it
was inspired by an apocalypse which, in one form, had nearly trans-
formed English life, and in another was destined to bring about the
last unfurling of the banner of Israel by Sabbathai Zevi on the coast
of Syria. Nor was this all. If the movement of the Jews towards
England had behind it a long chain of important historic causes, the
reciprocal movement of the English people to welcome them to their
shores was also the outcome of a series of events which neither the
English nor the Anglo-Jewish historian can afford to ignore. From
this point of view, in fact, a very large part of English history may be
said to belong to Jewish history. Matthew Arnold recognised this in
one of the most suggestive chapters of his “Culture and Anarchy”
when he sketched the struggle of Hellenism and Hebraism in England.
That struggle, which I prefer to call a struggle between the Old and
the New Testaments, is not only the key to English social and
political progress, but it also affords the explanation of the reversal by
the English people in 1655 of the banishment which they had decreed
against the Jews three and a half centuries before. Compare the
state of the public mind at the two epochs. In 1290 the Jews were
regarded as the born enemies of a rigidly Christian society, the
traditionally accursed anti-Christ, and nothing more. Ecclesiastics
troubled themselves little about their identity with the people of the
Bible, while the common people were absolutely ignorant of it. In
1655, however, the nation knew them essentially as the People of the
Bible, walking in error perhaps, but still deserving of respect and
kindly treatment. They were depositaries of divine truth—not of all
of it, but of a great deal—and they were survivors of a polity which
the leading spirits in England at the time were desirous of reviving.
How had this change been operated? By means of the popularisation
of the Old Testament. The Reformation had made the Old Testament
a popular book and a political force. The history of Israel had not
only profoundly modified the religious thought of the country, but it had
inspired a great struggle for political freedom and a great scheme of

constitutional revision. Under the new conception of popular freedom
which the Puritans had derived from the Hebrew Commonwealth, the
Jews became eligible to resettle in the land. “The State,” said
Cromwell to Major-General Crawford, “in choosing men to serve it,
takes no notice of their opinions; if they are willing faithfully to
serve it, that satisfies.” It was this liberal doctrine, accentuated by
the Hebraic inspiration on which it rested, that made the readmission
of the Jews practicable just two hundred and thirty-eight years ago.

I may be told, perhaps, that if these remote causes are to be
taken into account by the Jewish historian the result may be that
Jewish history will deal with everything except Jews. Of course
these aspects must be subjected to proper limitations and to an artistic
perspective, but they cannot be wholly ignored in any centre of Jewish
life. Moreover, in this country the role played by the Old Testament
has been peculiarly important, both in itself and in its influence on
Jewish emancipation and Jewish religious thought. Hence it appeals
more directly to the Anglo-Jewish historian than do similar movements
abroad to their several local Jewish historians. While popular
liberties in this country and in America have been developed very
largely on Hebraic lines, on the Continent they owe almost everything
to Rationalist inspirations. This, I believe, to be largely due to the
fact that in one case translations of the Old Testament in the
vernacular were available at an early period, and in the other this
venerable book remained unknown until it was too late to be of any
use. It was this want of a second line of religious defence and one of
a practical and constructive character which hurried the French people
into the arms of the philosophers in 1789. We have a curious
illustration of this in the enthusiastic reception accorded to Salvador’s
“Institutions de Moïse” by the French Republican press in 1823.
They hailed it as though it were a new revelation.

Besides this the direct Jewish element is not wanting in the
review of English national psychology which must be the framework
of any Anglo-Jewish history. We know now that Jews frequently
visited this country throughout the whole period of their legal exclusion
between 1290 and 1655, and while some of them were actually
concerned in public affairs all were affected by the gradual transforma-
tion of public opinion. One of the earliest tasks of this Society will

be to ascertain the exact rôle enacted by Jews both in England and
abroad in the passage of this country from Roman Catholicism to
Protestantism. Enough is already known to show that this rôle was
by no means inconsiderable. Jews figured in the epoch-making
controversies which raged round the divorce of Henry VIII., and
Jews gave substantial assistance to Elizabeth when as the head of
European Protestantism she waged a life and death struggle with
Spain. Here, too, it will be found that Anglo-Jewish history and
English political records throw fresh light on general Jewish history,
and the great change which took place in the European equilibrium
after the defeat of the great Armada. At this moment, I am only at
liberty to say that our materials will enable us to trace the decadence
of Spain in a very direct way to the expulsion of 1492. But it is not
only in the middle period that Jews have played a part in English
history. Before the Expulsion they were an economic factor of the
first importance in the strangely constituted society of the time, and
since the Readmission, they have made substantial contributions to
the political, commercial, literary and scientific progress of the
Empire. Nor is their internal communal history devoid of special
interest. We need only take a cursory survey of our community to
recognise characteristics in it which differentiate it strikingly from the
Jewish communities of both the Eastern and Western Continents. It
may be true that we have had no great Rabbis, but, at any rate, we
have travelled further in solving the great problems of Jewish religious
life than any other body of our brethren. We have constructed an
enlightened and progressive orthodoxy, and have maintained the most
strenuous attachment to the racial bond, without restricting our
intellectual freedom or our activity as British citizens. I can conceive
of no more interesting task than the investigation of this branch of our
history. And here, again, I think you will find that the inquiry Will
touch upon other communities besides our own, and will not even be
limited to the synagogue. We are the product of many converging
migrations—of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Marranos, Moriscos and
Levantines; we have experienced successively the influences of
Spinoza and Orobio de Castro, of Sabbathai Zevi and Chacham Zevi,
of Mendelssohn and Israel Baalshem, of Holdheim and Samson Hirsch,
and the whole has been harmonised and organised by that spirit of

progressive Conservatism, or perhaps I should call it cautious Liberalism,
which so eminently characterises the intellectual atmosphere of this
island. The importance of this complex movement will be apparent
to you if you reflect that two generations hence the centre of gravity
of Jewry will probably be transferred from Poland to the English-
speaking communities.

I hope I have said enough now to show you that Anglo-Jewish
history is not the small and négligeable quantity it has been pictured
to you, but that it is worthy of the energies of this Society and of the
dignity and ambition of our community. I do not, however, base the
claim of our Society to public support exclusively on these considera-
tions. I cherish the hope that our new organisation will be a fruitful
source of intellectual life and of virile Judaism to the great body of
our English co-religionists. Our work will not be limited to dry-as-
dust research, but will comprehend every means that our resources
will afford of promoting a knowledge of and interest in the general past
of our people. In this we shall be performing both a religious and a
moral task. It will be a religious task, because Judaism can have no
distinctive existence apart from its great historic sanctions. It will
be a specifically moral task, because, besides cultivating historic know-
ledge, we shall cultivate historic spirit. There is nothing more
essential to the moral well-being of a people than the historic spirit,
for it stands in the same relation to a community that personal repute
does to an individual. It is the sense of national honour, the conscious-
ness of a high level of conduct to be maintained, a standing
proscription of mean actions. Already it is exercising a marked
conservative influence on the centripetal movement of our race, assuring
our persistence through the new epoch of our long history opened by
our emancipation. In the future, I believe, it is destined to make
clear to the meanest of us the sacred mission of Judaism, and to fit us
for its accomplishment.