Anglo-Jewish Opinion During the Struggle for Emancipation (1828-1858)

<plain_text><page sequence="1">Anglo-Jewish Opinion During the Struggle for Emancipation (1828-1858)1 By Israel Finestein, M.A. INTRODUCTION IT was not hardship which led the Jews of England to demand their civil emancipation. Nor was the immediate occasion for initiating the struggle a specifically Jewish issue. The Jewish leaders, centring on the Board of Deputies, hoped that the Act of 1828, which relieved Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics from certain old restrictions, would automatically relieve the Jews as well. Their efforts in aid of that Bill formed the beginning of the struggle for Jewish emancipation. To their dismay the House of Lords introduced into the measure a deliberate demarcation between Christian dissenting bodies and Jews, so that the Jews were worse off than before. In this situation the Jewish emancipationists opened an independent Jewish campaign. The further relief of the Roman Catholics in 1829 strengthened their resolve. The Board, informal, exclusive, and limited to the major metropolitan synagogues, derived its strength from the personal standing of its leading members. The opening of the struggle transformed the Board, which henceforth met regularly and with an increasing self-consciousness as the com? munal spokesman. It continued to draw its major influence from the prominent public figures associated with it, but its representative status was progressively enhanced. The Jews were already in an advanced stage of emancipation. No special law governed their status. They had enjoyed freedom of movement at least since the Re? settlement. With very few exceptions, they enjoyed the freedom of occupation. To the extent that they were excluded from the ancient Universities or from their degrees, the restrictions applied equally to all non-Anglicans until the limitations were abolished for all in 1854-56. Admission to and advancement in University College, London, were open on uniform terms to all, including Jews, from its inception in 1828. It is true that doubts persisted as to whether Jews could legally hold freehold land, but in practice their capacity to do so was not challenged. Nevertheless, considerable restrictions remained. Until 1830 Jews were not able legally to carry on retail trade in the City of London. Not until 1833 was a professing Jew called to the Bar. Technically it was only by the Act of 1835 that professing Jews were able to exercise the Parliamentary franchise. In the same year, an Act was passed to enable David Salomons to serve as Sheriff in the City without subscribing to the statutory Christian declaration. But that was a special Act, in effect personal to Salomons. Not for a further ten years were Jews entitled to enter municipal office. No Jew could take his seat in the House of Commons until the Jewish Relief Act of 1858 permitted the House of Commons to dispense with the Christian words of the admission oath in the case of Jews. 1 Address delivered to a meeting held under the joint auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England and the Board of Deputies of British Jews on 18th December, 1958, in commemoration of the Jewish Relief Act, 1858. 113</page><page sequence="2">114 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION It is sometimes assumed that this long struggle was the unanimous wish of an eager and participating Jewish community, watching and cheering each and every development with universal joy and acclaim. The truth is less simple. It is not surprising that records in favour of emancipation are the more numerous. Jewish opposition to it was not organized, and in any case represented a minority within the Jewish community. A more widespread feature than Jewish opposition was Jewish indifference, and that state of mind leaves few muniments. Jewish emancipation was carried forward on a broad wave of change extending far beyond the Jewish community. The Industrial Revolution and the economic advance? ment of the middle classes thrust into social prominence and political power new forces who were moulding a new England. Thriving on individualism, they expanded the libertarian tradition of English history. They adopted as much of the French Revolu? tionary doctrine as was compatible with the rights of property and respect for organized Christianity. Jewish capabilities were not the only one which were progressively abolished as inconsistent with the new age.1 Civil disabilities on the grounds of religious belief ran counter to the principles on which the emerging economic and political system rested. Furthermore, Jews formed an important element in the urban, bourgeois society which was challenging for pre-eminence the rural England of the landed aristocracy. The Reform Bill of 1832 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 settled the issue in favour of the new forces. Under the compulsion of this great and favourable trans? formation, Jewish hostility or indifference to emancipation looked like, and in some respects was, a product of the ghetto. THE GOLDSMIDS The most articulate of the out-and-out emancipationists was Francis Goldsmid, whose father, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, was the prime mover in the initiation of the Jewish 1 The principle that religious difference ought not to be a ground for exclusion from civil office was often described by its advocates as "axiomatic" in the new age (e.g. Sir Robert Grant's speech in H. of C. 17.4.33) and opposition to it as "contrary to the general maxims of freedom of conscience" (see H. of C.'s reasons for disagreeing with the H. of L.'s amendments to the Oaths BUI, 1858: H. S. Q. Henriques, Jews and the English Law, 1908, 290-1). "The abstract right" doctrine was a special target of attack for it was contrary to the corporate character of society which was an ancient ideological inheritance. Its most impressive presentation in that era was by Macaulay: Essay and Speech on Jewish Disabilities, ed. I. Abrahams and S. Levy, 1909. The opponents of the doctrine regarded it as disruptive and revolutionary. The French Revolution and its "doctrinaire" slogans were a living memory and a continuing influence. "Natural rights" were met by the theory that no man has a civil right unless society bestows it upon him. "We are bit by the French fashion of liberality," wrote Spencer Percival to the elder Goldsmid in February, 1831, "and know not in what consisteth the strength of a nation": Lionel Abrahams, "Sir I. L. Goldsmid and the Admission of the Jews of England to Parliament," Trans. J.H.S.E., IV, 116-76. In a forceful letter to The Times on 6.5.31, A. L. Davids, the youthful Orientalist, caught the "axiomatic" mood of the modernists: ". . . the enlightened minds of my fellow-countrymen of the nineteenth century must shrink with disgust from the thought which only those who still retain the remnants of the Gothic fabric of superstition, now happily crumbling into dust, can support": reprinted with other material in a posthumous volume published in 1833 at the request of members of the Society for the Cultiva? tion of Hebrew Literature of which Davids was a founder. There wes indeed much truth in General Isaac Gascoyne's moan in his attack on Grant's Bill in H. of C. on 17.5.30 that "there is a spirit of innovation abroad in religious matters as well as in commercial matters and the friends of the one are the supporters of the others." Even the Judges who found against Salomons in Miller v. Salomons (1852-3) felt the anomaly of their judgments. For example, Chief Baron Sir F. Pollock presented his decision in these terms: "With these Acts of Parliament before me ... I think we are not as Judges, living though we do in a more enlightened and liberal age, to be liberal above what is written. . . ."</page><page sequence="3">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 115 campaign.1 To men of education and station who, like the Goldsmids, looked back upon several generations of comfortable life in England and of honoured prominence in the City or in service to the State, it was an affront that they should yet suffer legal discrimina tion. The long-standing social emancipation2 of Anglo-Jewry only served to aggravate the grievance, already enhanced by the accidental character and illogicality of the dis? criminatory laws and rules. "So long," wrote the younger Goldsmid in 1831, "as the law shall. . . deprive the Jews of any one privilege which other Dissenters enjoy, it will continue to mark them with a brand and make them, so far as the law can have that effect, a dishonoured and degraded caste."3 The Goldsmids discouraged from the outset the idea of piecemeal legislation, with its possible inference that Parliament approved of the remaining disabilities or that the Jews were capable of being "gratified even for a moment with any measure less extensive than our perfect equalization with other Dissenters."4 The Jews were entitled either to complete equality or to no relief at all. This doctrinaire approach was out of accord with the pragmatic habits of the English legislature.5 It also paid less than due regard to the special situation distinguishing this country from other lands where Jewish civil emancipation had been bestowed. Here there was an Established Church which once had regarded itself as co-extensive with the people of England, and which was still accorded a status bearing traces of its original assumption. At the centre of the Jewish case was the principle that the citizen's rights ought not to depend on his religion. For centuries, State and Church in England had lived by the opposite proposition. The consequences of the old assumption were attenuated by the civil emancipation of the Dissenters and Roman Catholics. But to admit non-Christians to public office or to Parliament appeared to some not so much a widening of public life as the destruction of its accepted basis. Disraeli, who was a member of the Church of England and therefore free from the disabilities, had his own curious method of disposing of this contention. His extravagant praise of the Jewish intellect and his unique conception of Judaism led 1 It was thought wise throughout the 1820's to await the successful outcome of the long struggle for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics before publicly pressing the Jewish case: F. Goldsmid: Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of the British Jews (1830). 2 The leaders of Anglo-Jewry did not take the favourable social position of the Jewish com? munity for granted. They laboured under a sense of anomaly and easily drifted into apologetics. The apologetical tone found its way even into Nathan Marcus Adler's "first pastoral letter" (13.8.45) dispatched to the Wardens of all the Synagogues in the United Kingdom and the Empire. The letter consisted partly of a statistical questionnaire and partly of a declaration of the new Chief Rabbi's aims, one of which was stated to be that "I shall most anxiously strive to effect . . . that . . . the conduct (of my flock) be worthy of the proud position which we now occupy in Society.. .." 3 The Arguments Advanced against the Enfranchisement of the Jews Considered in a Series of Letters (Letter V). 4 See Letter to Lord Bexley (30.7.33) from I. L. Goldsmid as Chairman of the Jewish Association for Obtaining Civil Rights and Privileges: A. Lowy and D. W. Marks, Sir F. H. Goldsmid (2nd ed., 1882), 153. "That which now appears to be merely the effect of chance" would become "a barrier of distinction." The Goldsmids were particularly energetic in the earlier years of the campaign in their opposition to compromise. When, for example, it was mooted in the H. of C. in June, 1830, that legislation might be introduced to remove doubts as to the legality of Jewish ownership of freehold land, Sir Robert Grant, under their influence, successfully opposed Colonel Wilson's motion for leave to bring in such a Bill. Wilson had said he favoured the admission of Jews to full civic rights except entry into Parliament or the judicial bench. 5 The careful presentation of the Act of 1845, which admitted Jews to municipal office, was significant. The Government's spokesmen, who were in charge of the Bill, pointed out the "narrow grounds" on which it rested, namely that Jews had in fact served in such office and had acquitted themselves well. "We have not rested this measure," said the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, in the H. of L. on the Second Reading, "on any great views of general policy, which might admit of doubt. . . ." On 1.8.45, the Voice of Jacob, perhaps making the best of the accomplished fact, welcomed this approach and praised the "practical" nature of the Act.</page><page sequence="4">116 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION him to declare in the House of Commons on 16th December, 1847: "If you admit the Jews, you will re-Christianize the country." The Jewish Chronicle then and later took care to dissociate itself and its Jewish readers from what on 9th August, 1850, the editor called the "eccentric fiction" in Disraeli's argument, and preferred to base the Jewish ease on equality rather than on assertions of Jewish superiority. However far the Goldsmids stood from Disraeli's colourful approach, they shared with Disraeli a desire to establish the Jewish case in principle and to bring about a victory which would at once open both Parliament and the humblest office. This approach contrasted with that of David Salomons, who by creating in his own career individual practical grievances and appealing on the grounds of their respective injustices was able in the end to procure complete emancipation step by step. As a result of the failure of four Bills between 1830 and 1836, aiming at complete and immediate emancipation, the Goldsmids were obliged in practice to accept Salomons' system as the best available method. At the root of the Goldsmids' preference for the tactics of quick and comprehensive legislation was the optimistic assumption that the course of liberalism was smooth. They, and indeed the emancipationists in general, were shocked by the obstacles. Referring to the abortive Bill of 1830, Francis Goldsmid wrote in the following year that there was "so little in its nature that seemed likely to alarm the . . . staunchest opposer of change in the laws of England, . . . both Houses of Parliament had so solemnly sanctioned the principles of religious liberty by the measures of the two preceding sessions, . . . the organs both public and private from which (the Government's) intentions may usually be ascertained had so generally assumed either a friendly or an indifferent tone respecting the claims of the Jews, . . . that any very serious opposition to our wishes was a thing regarded as an impossibility by the most experienced among our advocates."1 This optimism, born of the advancing belief in the inevitable improvement in social behaviour, was reinforced by the Whig triumph in 1832. In 1833, the House of Commons, by 189 to 52 votes, for the first time passed a Bill for the civil emancipation of the Jews. Even in the House of Lords, which rejected the measure, the principal opponents of the Bill, including William Howley, Archibishop of Canterbury, were at pains to point out their respect and even admiration for the Jews as individuals and as a people. There was a genuine expectation in the Jewish Association for Obtaining Civil Rights and Privileges, which stimulated many Petitions up and down the country from Christians, that the next attempt would succeed. At the other end of the ideological spectrum in the Jewish community one might cite the Hungarian-born Joseph Crooll.2 For several years this one-time preacher at the Manchester Synagogue was engaged at the University of Cambridge as a teacher in Hebrew. In 1829 he published a strange work entitled The Last Generation, in which he postulated Jewish "separateness" as a divinely ordained state pending the messianic 1 The Arguments Advanced, etc. His confidence in early abolition was not an affectation. "It is impossible/' he commented, "to suppose that a community whose principles inculcate and whose conduct has always displayed loyalty and patriotism, will continue to be punished for that conduct ... by degrading exclusions." In 1833, he reprinted with an addendum his Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of the British Jews, first published in 1831. "Whenever," he there wrote, "the question of removing the disabilities . . . has been mooted, the friendly disposition evinced towards the measure has seemed so general among persons of all religious denominations, that it was intended to leave its accomplishment to the spontaneous bounty of the Christian part of the community. . . ." The silence, he added, was "misconstrued" and "ascribed to apathy. . . ." 2 See I. Finestein, "Some Conversionists (in Hull) in the 19th Century," Gates ofZion (London), July, 1957, p. 9. Also J.C. 30.6.48.</page><page sequence="5">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 117 restoration to the Holy Land. He opposed emancipation, which he feared would wean the Jews from Judaism.1 He warned that the Jews would say: "London is our Jerusalem; we have no need of any other Jerusalem." Crooll was quoted from time to time in Parliament by Bishops and laymen2 to prove that the Jews were not unanimous and that a truly pious Jew could not conscientiously want emancipation. In 1833 he wrote to Sir Robert Inglis, the most persistent enemy of Jewish emancipation, that "whether the Jews spend two days or two months or twenty years in a country, they are equally strangers and sojourners, they must look to another home and another country." They are a distinct nation. "Birth" commented Inglis in the House of Commons in 1833 in connection with this letter, "does not make a Jew an Englishman," and "those Jews who yet preserve their scriptural character do not desire the boon of emancipation." Speaking in the House of Lords on 3rd June, 1841 on the current Bill to open municipal office to Jews, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared his belief that "notwithstanding what has been said and the Petitions presented ... the greater portion of the Jews are perfectly indifferent about the Bill. I know that some of them are decidedly hostile to the measure and sincerely deprecate it on conscientious grounds."3 THE JEWS AS A NATION Embarrassing statements were made not only by critics of emancipation but also by friends of the movement. John Mills, for example, the Welsh Calvinist preacher and missionary, in his useful survey of the British Jews in 1853 described "the Jewish idea of religion" as "national." "In the Jew's estimation," he wrote, "his faith and his nation are synonymous. To profess one is to belong to the other, and to change the former is to deny the latter." In February, 1829, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was perhaps a little embarrassed by receipt of a letter from Lord Holland, his closest Christian associate in the movement. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, who had already courted unpopularity in his own Party by giving way on Catholic relief, was reluctant, at least for the present, to advance the Jewish claims. Holland suggested that the Duke might be impressed into action by certain probable national advantages from the relief of the Jews. What Holland had in mind was that the emancipation of the Jews here might incline the 1 No doubt Francis Goldsmid had Crooll in mind in the following passage in his Two Letters published in 1830 in reply to objections raised against Grant's first Bill: "Now it must be admitted that there is a certain small number of Jews who regard our application for relief not only with indifference but even with doubt and distrust because they imagine that its success is likely to promote among those who now adhere to Judaism a falling off from the faith of their ancestors. These persons maintain that the religious feeling of men arms them sufficiently against fear of the privations which restrictive laws impose, but that there is no such defence against the slow under? mining progress of kindness and affection." 2 Notably by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, in H. of L., 25.5.48, and Inglis in H. of C., 22.5.33 and 10.3.41. 8 Howley was one of those opponents of emancipation who did not attach importance to the "national" identity of the Jews. In his influential attack on E. Divett's unsuccessful Bill of 1841, mentioned in the text, the Archbishop expressly told the H. of L. that it was not against the character of the Jews "as a nation" that he wished to speak, but that his objection was "only to their religion." Gladstone, who until 1845 opposed Jewish emancipation, likewise did not base his opposition on considerations of the Jews as a nation but upon his conviction that on religious grounds Parliament should be limited to Christians. Gladstone supported the Act of 1845 and believed that once municipal office was opened to Jews, no argument remained which could keep them out of Parlia? ment. However, the attempted distinction between nation and religion was regarded by most spokesmen, on both sides, as unreal. After 1845 the opponents of emancipation tended to use the argument as to religion more frequently than the argument as to nation, which in the early years of the emancipation struggle was the predominant argument.</page><page sequence="6">118 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Levant towards friendship with Great Britain. Jews, he wrote, are sensitive to the treatment "of their nation" by the Governments of the world.1 If Holland entertained such double-edged opinions, it is not to be wondered at that others went further. "The Jews of London," commented Inglis in the House of Commons in 1830, "have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside." He was only expressing a general belief. As late as July, 1857, so intelligent a politician as Lord Derby, the Tory leader in the House of Lords, was able to tell the House that "what the Jews were in Egypt, they are in England . . . though among us they are not with us. . . ." In contending with the allegation that the Jews were a distinct nation with their own national interests and aspirations, the emancipationists were at all times conscious of a basic contradiction in their own case.2 They did not deny the Jewish aspiration to be restored to Palestine. They admitted that the Jews possessed certain national features as a group. But they put messianism outside practical politics and deprived it of any day-to-day influence. They avoided the language of redemptionism and discountenanced public declarations of Jewish separateness or exclusiveness.3 "I have never heard of a single English Jew" stated J. S. Buckingham in the House of Commons on 22nd July, 1833, "having visited Palestine even as a matter of curiosity or recreation." If this eminent journalist, who had himself visited Palestine and was a well-known advocate of Jewish emancipation, was too sweeping in his assertion, his next comment has the ring 1 Letter in Trans. J.H.S.E., IV: Holland added that Russia's "preponderance in Turkey and Persia" was due in large part to the fact that the Christians in those countries looked upon Russia as "a natural protector and ally." 2 See I. Finestein, "Emancipationist Apologetics," J.C., 14th February, 1958. The emphasis by Jews on their loyalty to the State also pervaded publications intended primarily for Jewish reading. For example, S. J. Cohen's Elements of Faith for the Use of Jewish Youth of Both Sexes, published as a textbook in 1815 with the sanction of Solomon Hirschell and Moses Meldola, charac? teristically states: "As long as Messiah is not come, the King under whose protection we live must be esteemed as a King of Israel." The Question to which that statement is the Answer is indicative of the age: "As we are the children of Israel who live in the hope and expectation of the coming of the Messiah and return to our country, Judea, is it equally incumbent upon us to love the King and country ... in which we at present reside and to obey its laws?" In 1833 I. L. Goldsmid published extracts from the Elements with letters addressed to himself by Hirschell and Hyman Hurwitz in reply to certain crude charges made against Judaism, Jewish ritual, and the Jews by William Cobbett in the H. of C. in March, 1833. Extracts were also appended from resolutions passed by the Sanhedrin in Paris in 1807 to the effect that the law of Moses lays upon the Jews the duty of regarding as brethren members of all nations who acknowledge God and among whom they live. Scriptural passages which were sometimes quoted as showing Jewish exclusiveness and superiority were interpreted as referring to ages when the peoples among whom the Jews lived were heathens. Such apologetics could not have influenced those critics, such as Cobbett, in whom opposition to emancipation sprang from a fervent hostility to Jews. Cobbett, who regarded the Jews as unproductive social parasites, referred to them as "once a week (blaspheme) Christ in the Synagogue and once a year (crucify) him in effigy" (H. of C, 1.3.33). In his Political Register (Vol. 81, No. 3), he described the movement for Jewish emancipation as "an attempt to counteract the dispensations of Providence to put these fellows upon a level with Christianity in any respect, except that of merely being allowed to live" (p. 145). 3 Perhaps in reprimanding A. A. Lindo for publishing his A Word in Season from an Israelite to his Brethren (1839), the Mahamad, in addition to being affronted by his having failed to secure their prior consent to publish the work, were also adversely impressed by his somewhat grandiloquent treatment of Jewish exclusiveness. "Though without a country," he wrote, "or temporal prince... we are as completely a nation as when first established as such, for we acknowledge ourselves now as then as being under the immediate government of the Sovereign of the Universe. . . ." Lindo described the Jewish religious observances as having been multiplied the more effectively to render loss of identity difficult, and "the more effectively to prevent us intermingling with and becoming corrupted by neighbouring nations. . . ." He regarded the Jews as an "instrument" for the "redemption of mankind."</page><page sequence="7">ANGLO-JE WISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 119 of truth. "We assume," he added, "that the Jews feel what their sacred book represents them as feeling and act as their scriptures prescribe. In this sense it is no doubt their duty to remember Jerusalem and they recite prayers and hymns in praise of the Holy Land. But it does not follow that they feel what they say or act up to what they profess, any more than many Christians." It is noteworthy that in the prayer-book edited in 1841 for the new Reform Congregation, D. W. Marks retained the Restoration while deleting the sacrifices. Addressing that Congregation in November, 1845, on "Israel's Restoration," he stated that the scriptural promise appears too frequently to be merely allegorical. But he made his position clear. "We look to our restoration," he said, ". . . but only at a time when the whole tone of society will be changed, when all the nations will be subjected to a system of government wholly different from that which obtains today."1 The emancipationists were the more readly minded to turn aside from current restoration schemes because in that era the Restoration was often associated with con versionist slogans and personalities. But underlying their antipathy was the consuming desire to rid Judaism in their day of its exilic character. In their presentation of Judaism, they contended with eighteenth-century habits and with the ideals of nineteenth-century Zionists. Their desire did not reduce their active concern for oppressed Jewries abroad. They were aware of their special responsibilities as the Jewry of the most powerful country in the world.2 But there was great resistance to the suggestion, of which the Prague-born and Zionist-minded Abraham Benisch was a life-long sponsor, of an inter? national, Jewish representative or executive body to ameliorate the Jewish position. Indeed the very erninence in the Jewish world of the prosperous Jews of London inclined them to assume that any such international Jewish combination was not likely to be as effective as their own personal approaches to the Foreign Office or direct to foreign Governments. The Anglo-Jewish press was a regular critic of this aloofness. "We regret," wrote Jacob Franklin editorially in the Voice of Jacob on 7th October, 1842, "the isolated position which the English Board of Deputies appears to occupy." Improved communications, the heightened sense of Jewish solidarity occasioned by the recent Damascus Affair, and the growing general international interest in the Jewish 1 J.C, 28.11.45. Marks retained for the Jews a special role. Their Restoration was to be an instrument for bringing all men to recognize God: see his Sermon to the Reform Congregation on the theme of Tisha B'Av and Zion, Voice of Jacob, 4.10.44. A corollary of Reform was a greater readiness to present the messianic idea as a variable incident of Jewish history. "Since the Jews have been permitted to live as citizens or quasi-citizens, in the civilized States of Europe, they have, without changing the doctrines on the Messiah fundamentally, manifested a stronger interest in the contemplation of the Messiah as a universal benefactor; whereas in the ages justly called dark the Jews found their only solace amid existing tribulations in pondering over the glories which days of the Messiah had in store for their people in particular.... There is nothing political in the messianic belief... (nothing) which differs in essence from what may be subscribed to and has frequently been supported by Christians . . .": per Tobias Theodores, J.C., 3.1.45. In 1845 the Anglo-Jewish press devoted considerable space to controverting the proposition that emancipationist desire was incom? patible with prayers for the coming of the Messiah. The proposition was attributed to "a narrow minded, though a very small minority" (J.C, 21.2.45), but the minority was large enough to induce the J.C. to urge the calling of public meetings to discuss this and related questions in order to enlighten the critics. 2 Perhaps the most striking presentation of the special duty which lay upon Anglo-Jewry, rendered all the greater by the extent of their freedom, was contained in Benisch's long leader in Hebrew Observer, 29.9.54. Among the arguments often presented on behalf of Jewish emancipation in England was that an advance here would probably be an encouragement to foreign Governments to curb legislative discrimination on the Jews. Jews in the Russian and Austrian Empires looked to see "when the fetters shall be struck off from the British Jews so that Potentates may no longer continue to justify their intolerant conduct by the example of Great Britain": J.C, 7.3.45. i</page><page sequence="8">120 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION question, made the time appear propitious for the creation of some international Jewish machinery for consultation and concerted action. In December, 1855, Solomon Sequerra moved an amendment to the Constitution of the Board of Deputies to give the Board express authority to watch over the interests not only of the Jews of the British Empire but of "the Jews in general." Sequerra advocated a "common effort" among Jewish communities in different lands and he thought the Board was the natural leader in bringing about the necessary machinery. His proposed amendment was rejected, its principal critic being Benjamin S. Phillips, later Lord Mayor of London. Phillips thought such an express claim on the part of the Board would be "presumptuous" and "dangerous," and, in view of the Board's readiness to make representations as and where necessary, superfluous. The "common effort," which was the true object of the mover and which Benisch detected as the heart of the proposal, did not figure prominently in the debate, which became involved with the proposed constitutional amendment. Sequerra, com? mented the Jewish Chronicle on 28th December, 1855, expressed the thoughts of "perhaps the majority of reflecting persons out of doors" as well as of a "considerable number of Deputies." The Mortara Case in 1858 considerably advanced the idea of joint Jewish international policy and action.1 In 1871, the Anglo-Jewish Association, of which Benisch was the principal founder, was instituted ostensibly as a branch of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which seemed to Benisch and others a kind of realization of the international body for which he had long pleaded. But the new Association quickly emancipated itself both from the Alliance and from the implications of an international Jewish policy and interest as expounded by him.2 As far as Restorationism was con? cerned, the pithy comment of the Hebrew National in April, 1867, is apposite. That short? lived weekly journal, edited by the Russian-born Hebraist and mathematician, Hirsch Filipowski, was devoted to the history and literature "of the Israelitish Nation" and advocated the Jewish purchase of Palestine. He bemoaned that while "the orthodox" await the messianic age, the "modern Israelites" regard themselves as "citizens of their 1 An unpublished paper on Anglo-Jewry and the Mortar a Case by Moses Aber bach (Baltimore), composed in 1950, describes the journalistic pressure in 1858-60 by Benisch as editor of the J.C. to project the theme of an international Jewish policy and concerted action, in the wake of the Mortara Affair. See also B. W. Korn's study of American reactions to the Mortara case in The American Jewish Archives (Cincinatti, 1957). "Never before," wrote Benisch in J.C. on 4.3.59, upon Montefiore's departure for Rome to intercede with the Pope, "has the sentiment of oneness been so quickened within (the dispersed of Israel) as in our age." Montefiore occupied a contradictory position. He resisted the idea of a concerted international Jewish political policy, but favoured ad hoc co-operation between the various Jewish organizations here and abroad as occasion required. He resisted the ideology which would express Jewish oneness in an international executive organization, but by his personality and by the geographical extent of his intercessions in the capitals of many countries (whatever the success or otherwise of his interventions), he contributed to the mood of unity of which Benisch spoke. The Testimonial presented to Montefiore in 1842 by Ludwig Philippson, the famous scholar and editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, on behalf of 1,500 signatories of various demoninations, reflects the temper of the age: "For long centuries Israel has been passive; you are the first that has been active. . . . For thousands of years Israel lived merely in separate congregations, every one considering itself only. . . . You . . . have shown that a congregation beyond the summits of the Lebanon is quite as much Israel as one in the blessed countries of liberal Europe-Israel as a nation is as much one as ... is the doctrine it professes": V.ofJ., 16.9.42. 2 In referring to the initiation of the A.J.A. in his address to the Hampstead and St. John's Wood Jewish Literary Society on 3rd February, 1903, Claude Montefiore said that among the reasons for its establishment was the thought that it was "undesirable that it should be supposed that there was an international Jewish society with international political aims on the one hand and on the other that any association of that sort should be closely identified with one particular nation (France). . . ."</page><page sequence="9">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 121 native countries and therefore have no interest in the reacquisition of the land of their ancestors ... especially those who are prosperous in their respective adopted countries."1 Even Sir Moses Montefiore, the nearest to Zionism among Anglo-Jewish leaders, was at heart no more than a philanthropist who, once the slender opportunities of 1838-41 had vanished, fell back for ever on his non-political temperament. Where he feared to tread, others were hardly likely to rush. THE JEWS AS A DENOMINATION The classic emancipationist outiook was that the English Jew differed from his fellow-subject only in the matter of creed. Judaism was a denomination and the Jews were among the dissenters from the Established Church. They had no political interests outside those of England. On 26th June, 1828, Montefiore recorded in his diary his attendance with the elder Goldsmid at a meeting at the home of the Duke of Norfolk. A number of prominent Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics had there assembled to consider means for removing the disab?ities of all the religious rninorities. This was not the only such comprehensive meeting in that year.2 In 1847, William Thornborrow in his Advocacy of Jewish Freedom prided himself on having sponsored Salomons' election as Sheriff in 1835 after having in previous years similarly sponsored the election of a Dissenter and of a Roman Catholic. The doctrine that the Jews simply formed one of the nonconforming sects was clearly expressed by Salomons on the last day of his Lord Mayoralty in 1856 in reply to a Memorial presented to him by a large concourse of City interests. Salomons hoped "that (he) might be regarded as one who had done something for the Nonconformists." "I do not mean," he added, "for any particular section of Nonconformists but for that large body . .. some of whom are Christians and others not."3 1 Filipowski presented Zionism as a form of emancipation. As Jews became free, their freedom to arise as a nation was as much their right as the right to hold public office if they wished. "As long as our nation was oppressed all over the world, as long as our rights as men were denied to us ... we could not expect to obtain mercy and much less support from our oppressors. But those times ... are passed by.... We can therefore lift up our heads, like the rest of mankind": Hebrew National, 19.4.67, in an editorial headed "The Land of Israel" and urging Jews "to regain our inheritance." "It was inherent in the liberal programme of Frankfurt . . . , though not yet fully formulated then, that equality of rights must not be predicted upon national self-abnegation. . . . (Emancipation and Zionism) rather than being antagonistic principles as then generally believed, . . . really complemented one another": Salo W. Baron, "The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation," Vol. 11, Jewish Social Studies (New York. 1949). 2 The Jewish leaders saw in the final emancipation of the Nonconformists and Catholics a decisive breach in what Barnard Van Oven termed "the monopoly." "Its principle (has been) destroyed ... it only remains to consummate the great work of toleration by extending to Jews the rights and privileges now enjoyed by all other classes of the nation": An Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews (1829). 3 In following the principle that "the cause of civil and religious liberty is one and the same," the J.C. was sometimes sharply critical of foreign rulers in their treatment of their minorities, of whatever denomination. "We will not separate the lot of the Jews from that of other religious denominations": J.C, 14.12.55. The occasion was the recent discussion at the Board of Deputies on the proposal to send a memorial of thanks to the King of Sardinia, then in London, on his grant of equality to his Jewish subjects. Some Deputies, including B. S. Phillips, had doubted the wisdom of this proposal (which was ultimately passed) on the grounds that it would involve invidious dis? tinctions (no memorial had been presented to the King of Prussia on his recent visit) and the proposal, if acted upon, might appear provocative, for example, to the Czar, by virtue of the Board's laudation of civil liberties abroad. The J.C. deprecated this caution and castigated the King of Prussia for legal discrimination against Roman Catholics and Baptists (as well as Jews) in Prussia, and the Austrian and French Emperors for legal discrimination against their Protestant subjects.</page><page sequence="10">122 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION The doctrine that Judaism was nothing more than a nonconformist denomination had its difficulties. The civil interests of the denominations were not necessarily always in accord. In 1828 and 1837, clauses to relieve the Jews of municipal disabilities were not pressed for fear that to do so would endanger the principal objects of the Bills. Dissenting groups, always favourable to Jewish emancipation, fought shy of urging the Jewish cause in the same measures which gave their own denominations relief. Some Anglican supporters of Jewish relief felt it necessary to add as a ground for their advocacy of that cause their own misgivings over the relief of the Roman Catholics if that relief stood alone. To admit Roman Catholics to Parliament might, they argued, smack of indifference as between Anglicanism and Romanism; whereas to admit the Jews as well would indicate that the whole question was considered on the general principle of religious toleration and not on the respective merits of various phases of Christianity.1 In 1854, a Bill which, had it been carried, would have opened Parliament to Jews, did not even pass through the House of Commons, since one of its clauses seemed even to some Liberals to go too far in favour of the Roman Catholics.2 But these episodes were incidental and not typical. The Jewish emancipationists expressly aimed at assimilating their civil status to that of the other dissenting communities. Each stage in Jewish emancipation was assisted by the public support of Protestant Dissenters such as Apsley Pellatt,3 the glass manufacturer, who was primarily responsible for the opening of the 1 The admission of Jews to Parliament was thus posited as proof that Anglicans had not approved of the entry of non-Anglican Christians out of sympathy for their religious doctrines. On 25.5.48, the Bishop of St. David's told the H. of L. that on any question affecting the Church of England, "I should greatly prefer that it should be submitted to the decision of a Jew rather than that of a Dissenter." In presenting to the H. of C. on 4.5.30 a Petition in favour of Jewish emancipation signed by more than 2,000 citizens of Liverpool, Huskisson said that those who voted against Catholic emancipation might "consistently" with their principles support the Jewish claims. Never? theless, some detected in the admission of Jews to Parliament a possible lever towards Disestablish? ment. Gladstone was one of those Liberals to whom was strangely imputed a desire to disestablish the Church of England coupled with a wish to bring Jews into Parliament in order to stimulate a like desire for Disestablishment on the part of the Anglican clergy. This charge was expressly refuted by Gladstone in the H. of C. on 16.12.47. He admitted that "it will require great caution and delicacy on our part so as to manage the question (of Jewish admission) as to avoid producing what I cannot regard as otherwise than an evil, namely a desire in the minds of the clergy or of others for an organic change in the relation between Church and State." 2 I.e. the Parliamentary Oaths Bill, introduced by Lord John Russell, which was rejected by the H. of C. on Second Reading (25.4.54) by 251 to 247, despite a Liberal majority in the House. Russell's plan was to unify the Oaths of Supremacy, Allegiance and Abjuration, and inter alia to abolish the special oaths required of Roman Catholics by the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. The new and simplified oath would have suited the Jews since it contained no specifically Christian terminology. Russell proposed to retain the express denial by Roman Catholics of the Pope's temporal and civil jurisdiction within this realm but proposed to delete the words (contained in the Oath of Supremacy and subscribed to hitherto by Protestants) rejecting the ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction of any foreign prince, person, prelate, etc. It was this proposed deletion which in the end defeated the whole Bill. It was in this prolonged debate that Disraeli, attacking the proposed deletion, stated that he advocated Jewish emancipation not on grounds of religious liberty but because of the Christian obligation to the Jews ("by their history, their poetry, their laws, our lives are instructed, solaced and regulated") and because "divine favour has been withdrawn" from those countries in which Jews have been persecuted. 3 His Brief Memoir of the Jews in Relation to their Civil and Religious Disabilities (1826) had much influence. Prominent figures in the City (not limited to non-Anglicans but almost invariably Liberals) were frequently seen at Jewish banquets in aid of Jewish charities and often were Patrons or speakers. A typical occasion was the annual dinner in aid of the Jews' Hospital (Neveh Zedek) on 8.6.43, at which the principal speakers included the Duke of Cambridge (who presided and who had succeeded his brother, the Duke of Sussex, not only as Patron of the institution but as the senior Christian patron of Jewish causes), William Cotton (Governor of the Bank of England) and J. B. Heath (Deputy Governor of the Bank): V. of J., 23.6.43. The effusive compliments of the eminent visitors were always extensively reported in the Jewish press and often, more briefly, in the</page><page sequence="11">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 123 Freedom of the City to Jews in 1830, and Roman Catholics such as Daniel O'Connell, the father of Catholic emancipation who pressed upon Isaac Lyon Goldsmid the wisdom of firm and unremitting action on public opinion and the Government.1 The sometimes artificial attempt to render the term Jew solely denominational was given added force by the Jewish attribution of a special status to England. In the emancipationist literature, phrases such as "the cradle of liberty, civil and religious"2 or "a land which owes its greatness chiefly to the free expression of public opinion"3 abound. These words were not intended as platitudes or as mere literary nourishes. Jews were not alone in using them, but to the Jews they were valuable instruments in their emanci? pationist struggle. They were also meant in the greatest seriousness. "Almost without exception," wrote Mills, "foreign Jews designate Great Britain by the appellation of City of Refuge." "I call upon this Court," pleaded Salomons in October, 1844, to the Aldermen who refused to admit him without the statutory Christian declaration, "to bear in mind how by her example England has stopped the effusion of blood and how success? fully she has been able to mitigate even recently the rigours of oppression in lands less favoured than her own...." In the first of the Jewish emancipation pamphlets, namely Barnard Van Oven's Appeal to the British Nation on Behalf of the Jews (1829), the author declared that "the nearer a nation approaches to civilization the more clearly are the duties, rights and privileges of its members defined." "Britain," he went on, "approaches perhaps nearer than any other country to the Utopia I have been speaking of (but)... the Jews are yet degraded." This prestige attaching to the name of England was not only the result of her power and prosperity. There was also a qualitative difference. English? men were presumed "to hold the first rank among civilized nations."4 Her institutions were models abroad. Her inventiveness was proverbial. It was assumed that fair play was an English trait. The contrast between English constitutional government and foreign autocracy and revolution intensified the respect with which Jews looked upon this country. An English gentleman was a designation worthy of aspiration. It was intolerable that it should be thought that a Jew somehow could not achieve that category. 1 The Jewish spokesmen were usually careful not to present the Jews as a corporate body or a political bloc. On 29.6.33, apparently in reply to I. L. Goldsmid's request, Holland wrote to Goldsmid promising to urge upon Lord Grey (who was unfriendly to the proposed admission of Jews to Parliament) and others the "impropriety of any expectation that the Jews should act in political matters as a body with a view of purchasing their just rights." During his candidature for an Aldermancy in 1844, Salomons studiously avoided advertising in the Jewish press, which pointed out that his candidature as such was not a Jewish issue but that the Jewish question related to his right to serve if elected. The deputation inviting him to stand was almost entirely non-Jewish. His opponent, Moon, canvassed Jews: V. of J., 4.10.44. Franklin commented editorially that those Jews who voted for Salomons did so on his merits. This attempt to deny the existence of a "Jewish vote" was artificial, since Salomons' campaign was throughout closely associated in the public mind with the issue of Jewish emancipation. Franklin's use of the term "nation" was also somewhat anomalous: "Salomons is not selected by his nation to represent or to contend for them." Salomons announced before the election that he would avoid any act in his public career which might offend Jewish religious feelings. There was at that time an inescapable oneness about the Jewish vote. On 9.7.47, the J.C. denied the rumour that the Jews intended to vote solely for Lionel de Rothschild but added that they intended "as a body" to vote for all the Liberal candidates in the City list. 2 Salomons' open letter to Lord Derby, Alteration of Oaths Considered (1853). 3 J.C, 18.10.44. 4 J.C, 6.10.45. general London press. A frequent and typical observation was that of Matthias Attwood at the annual dinner in aid of the Jews' Free School at the London Tavern on 23.3.43 in referring to the "Christian indebtedness to the Jews for the principles on which Christian institutions were founded ... principles whose origin was to be traced to the divine revelation entrusted to the Jews": V. of J., 313 A3.</page><page sequence="12">124 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION JEWISH ENGLISHMEN It was natural that Jewish Englishmen should take the colour of their environment. In the degrees and forms of their domesticity and religiosity, the Jewish Victorians were not only in the line of Jewish tradition but were at the same time fashionable. Synagogal architecture had long borne the impress of prevailing forms. When the Great Synagogue was redecorated in 1852, The Times described it "as on the whole resembling a handsome English Protestant Church."1 The current centralizing tendencies in England were partly reflected both in the growing union between the metropolitan synagogues and in the advancing idea within the Jewish community of co-ordination. As in the State, so in Anglo-Jewry, Erastianism, or the ultimate control of the religious by the lay leaders, was taken for granted.2 There was a "growing desire to regulate Jewish institutions according to English methods."3 The preference for uniformity of worship and the habit of tliinking in terms of an official or established norm were likewise partly a reflection of English, or rather Anglican, thought and practice.4 In that sense, the Chief Rabbinate 1 . . but for the absence of communion table, pews and pulpit and for the presence of the orchestral platform in the centre. . . . The first thing that struck a Christian (next to hats), he would be surprised to see the respectability of their appearance, all dressed in black, many in evening dress, with much-begemmed fingers and shirt fronts, radiant with every kind of precious stone. ... It did not need much scrutiny of the varied yet homogeneous physiognomy in the place to convince you that you were among a distinct race. . . . Look where you would, the faces were not European, or at least not English": The Times, 3.9.52. 2 In March, 1843, the Conference of representatives of London and Provincial Synagogues, which approved certain provisions for the election and powers of the Chief Rabbi, resolved that the Honorary Officers of the Great Synagogue and three members of its Committee, together with the Honorary Officers of the other "uniting Synagogues" in London should constitute "a permanent committee with which the Chief Rabbi may communicate when necessary on any subject relative to the exercise of the duties of his office, through the medium of the President of the Great Syna? gogue." This Committee of Reference was regarded with some scepticism by the Jewish press. On 3.3.43, the V. of J. described it as a "useful council" but expressed the hope and belief that it would not "be permitted to weaken (the 'spiritual or civil adrrlinistrators,) by a right of incompatible interference with functions properly distinct." See also J.C., 18.10.44. A forthright article by E. D. in The Anglo-Jewish Magazine (1.10.48) described the Committee as "a drag" on the Chief Rabbi and alleged that it had prevented him "from doing anything." This stricture of the Com? mittee and Adler was unjust, but in spite of Adler's strong character the predominance of the lay element became progressively more marked during his regime, and reached its nineteenth-century zenith in the opening years of his successor's incumbency. 3 J.C., 11.6.97, in a review of the Victorian Era. 4 Under the heading "The Danger of Unauthorized Tampering with Established Forms of Prayer," the V. of J. on 25.11.42 cited with approval an article in The Times (16.11.42) which deprecated meddling with the English Book of Common Prayer established by law. Reform apart, there was even witMn the bulk of the Jewish community a growing diversity of liturgical practice. In a lengthy report on the recent High Holydays, Franklin commented that "a revision of the Machsor is becoming so generally called for that there is really some risk of the needful uniformity of our national ritual being destroyed by the independent changes of minhagim already in progress in various continental communities": V. of J., 30.9.42. High among the reasons for the growing impatience of the Jewish press with the long interregnum after Hirschell's death was the fear of widening diversity. Fear lest Reform be thereby advanced was partly responsible for the impatience. But, predominantly, uniformity was deemed a good in itself and diversity in liturgy and ritual, even within orthodoxy, was deemed an evil. A curious illustration of Franklin's assumption of an "established" Synagogue is to be found in his editorial reference in the V. of J. on 28.2.45 to the inclusion by the Goldsmids of recent synagogal changes as grounds for comprehensive Jewish emancipation, in their approach to Peel in 1845. Franklin did not think such grounds were relevant or effective. He did "not imagine the possibility of a Tory Government's disposition to inter? meddle with the synagogues, seeing that such a principle might be sought to be applied to the present condition of the State Church." There were many other examples of the conscious and natural use of outside models for development in Jewish institutional life. The Jews' Infants School, founded in September, 1841, was (in addition to being a protection against the conversionists) part of the nation-wide movement for Infants' Schools, following the nursery school opened by Robert Owen</page><page sequence="13">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 125 and later the United Synagogue were essentially English institutions. It is historically of interest that the founder of the United Synagogue, Lionel Louis Cohen, was a prominent member of the Tory Party which was so closely identified with the conception of an Established Church. The principal Jewish critic of the Chief Rabbinate clauses, originally intended to be incorporated in the United Synagogue Act, was Salomons, a member of the Liberal Party in which Nonconformity was the most powerful single influence and which in 1868 disestablished the Church of Ireland. Salomons consistently opposed the idea of a corporate Jewish community comprehended or defined by one ecclesiastical authority. His typically Nonconformist approach was clearly evident in his life-long condemnation of the operation of the Jewish clauses of the Marriage Registra? tion Act of 1836 (sharply exemplified in his evidence to the Royal Cornrnission on the Laws of Marriage in 1865-66), his attitude towards the Model Deed drafted by the Board of Deputies for State-aided Jewish voluntary schools,1 and in his conflict with Montefiore in 1853 over the admission to the Board of members of the Reform Congregation. If England was a highly class-conscious society, so was Anglo-Jewry. There was a conflict between Anglo-Jewry's ingrained snobbery at that period and the emanci? pationists' desire to raise the social and cultural level of the Jewish middle and lower classes. Allied to the acutely self-conscious patriotism and social aspirations of the emancipationists there was a sharp sense of Jewish inferiority. They were highly sensitive to Christian opinion. It was not in respect of themselves that they were sensitive but in respect of the foreign and poor elements within the Jewish community. There was a widening of Jewish interests in the middle and upper reaches of Anglo-Jewry at this time. This was betokened for example by the pages devoted in the Anglo-Jewish Magazine, the momentary successor to the Voice of Jacob, to music and drama on the London stage and to general news at home and abroad. In its first issue in 1853, the Hebrew Observer, referred to "questions which may well engage human sympathies without reference to religious distinctions," including the preservation of peace, the spread of temperance and the abolition of slavery. The editor, Benisch, proposed to include these matters within the scope of his new journal. Mills perceived the significance of this editorial passage as "a sign of the corning forth of the Jews." But these broader interests were limited to a minority of the Jews. To raise the social and cultural level of the poorer ranks of the Jewish tradesmen and manual workers became something of an obsession with the 1 Salomons fought to exclude from the Model Deed, drafted by the Board in 1852, the exclusive jurisdiction of the Chief Rabbi and the Haham over the religious instruction in the Jewish schools receiving State grants. On 19.1.53, at the height of the dispute, his brother-in-law, Aaron Asher Goldsmid, went to the length of writing direct to the Privy Council, whose Committee on Education administered the public grants to schools, to point out the injustice of this clause. Although the clause was also opposed by the Jews' Free School and the Manchester Jews' School, which were under orthodox control, the essence of the controversy was the principle that under the clause the Chief Rabbi had the power to withhold his approval (and thereby probably inhibit the State grant) from a School of whose religious instruction, or of the religious affiliation of whose Managers, he might disapprove. The clause was eventually abandoned, and religious superintendence was placed in the hands of either the Chief Rabbi and Haham or of persons appointed by the School Committees. See in general Board of Deputies Minute Book No. 7, especially for meetings on 14.7.51 and 23.1.53 and attached correspondence; and volume of Board's Committee Minutes (1844-56), pp. 81-90 and 93-125. at New Lanark, which was inspected by I. L. Goldsmid. Henry Faudel expressly based his pro? posals for the organization of Anglo-Jewry (1844) on the system adopted by the Quakers. The Anglo-Jewish communal vocabulary bore the inevitable impress of current English forms?vestry, Guardians, wardens, catechism, Deputy, etc.</page><page sequence="14">126 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION emancipationists. "While the (Jewish) poor are left to obloquy," wrote Henry Faudel, a considerable London merchant, in his well-known booklet of 1844,1 "no matter who the rich may be all will be designated by one common term of reproach." So acute an observer as Jacob Franklin thought it desirable to issue the following warning in the Voice of Jacob on 1st August, 1845, in his comments on the legislation ofthat year which opened municipal office to Jews. "The unusual direction of the popular attention upon the Jews," he wrote, "may throw a disproportionate number of them on the surface and that very probable fact requires extra devotion to the improvement of the mass." There is no evidence that the Jews were inferior to others in thrift, sobriety or respectability. There is some indication that there was much gambling among them. But the incidence of crime among foreign Jews in London which had attracted attention in the eighteenth century had abated. It was not only their deeds but above all their repute which the emancipationists were anxious to raise. In a pamphlet in 1835,2 Salomons pointed out that the Jews "were desirous to overcome every obstacle to the improvement of their condition"?by which he meant in relation to civil rights?and that "they have anxiously endeavoured to diffuse education among their poorer classes by the establishment of schools supported by voluntary subscription." He referred specifically to the Jews' Free School and the Jews' Hospital, to Jewish apprenticeship schemes and to the instruction in mechanical arts as well as in the three R's. It was thought that such education would play a part in reducing the number of Jews who entered the street trades and other allegedly low occupations, such as peddling. There was a general and optimistic belief, which Jews shared, that education raises the moral tone of society. In his inaugural address as Goldsmid Professor in Hebrew at University College on 11th November, 1828, Hyman Hurwitz gave eloquent expression to it in relation to Jewish civil advancement. "Everywhere," he said, "our condition has been and must be ameliorated in proportion to the general diffusion of knowledge and and to our own susceptibility to its precious effects." The same apologetical inspiration lay behind the foundation of the Jews' and General Literary and Scientific Institution, or Sussex Hall, in 1845. The "primary object" of that body was defined by the Voice of Jacob upon its inauguration as "the immediate good ... of the trading and working classes." The institution, added the editor, was "so eminently calculated to elevate their tastes, their habits, their repute. . . ." In spite of the hopes of some of its founders, it never became an agency for Hebrew or Jewish education. It was merely the counterpart within the Jewish community of the Mechanics' Institutes which from about 1824 were founded in cities up and down the kingdom, sponsored largely by Utilitarian and Radical reformers and aiming at increasing popular general knowledge in the technological age. Even Morris Raphall, the distinguished preacher of Birmingham, who delivered the inaugural address in January, 1845, and who urged the use of the new Institution for the promotion of adult Hebrew education, felt obliged to declare: "What better proof of your ardent attachment to this country can you give than by founding institutions which shall connect you with the general progress of improvement." He added: "It is not by individual exertions only that you can expect to obtain the removal (of civil disabilities) 1 Suggestions to the Jews for Improvement in reference to Their Charities, Education and Central Government. Faudel prefaced his proposals by an interesting, if over-simplified, summary of current aspirations: "The anxiety of the poor Jews for instruction, of the Jewish trading classes for moral improvement, of the wealthy for a removal of civil disabilities, of the religious for some alteration in the mode of worship. ..." 2 A Short Statement of Behalf of His Majesty's Subjects Professing the Jewish Religion.</page><page sequence="15">Repulsed but not Discouraged Caricature dated 1830 of proposal to admit Jews to Parliament. O'Connell, the Irish leader, tells the Jew, who is trying to enter the House, "Agitate friend Moses, agitate! that's the way I got in" Caricature on the Election of David Salomons as Sheriff of the City of London in 1835 Plate 23</page><page sequence="16">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 127 ... it is only by coming before the public as a body, by proving that as a body you are not inferior to any sect or commurnty."1 JEWISH IMMIGRATION The anxiety to demonstrate that the Jewish community was not unworthy of the favour of emancipation was associated with the fear lest it be believed that emancipation was not the wish of the mass of the community. Throughout his period, about one-half of Anglo-Jewry was of foreign birth. In the 1850's, the proportion probably increased. A considerable proportion of the community was considered by anglicized Jews and by Christians as essentially foreign. The non-anglicized elements were described by Mills as "retaining the peculiarities of the countries whence they came?peculiarities of ideas and habits entirely disconsonant in most respects to their English brethren." He then added this remarkable passage: "These, however, we shall endeavour to avoid and confine ourselves, when touching upon traits of character, as much as possible to English Jews." This approach by a sympathetic observer as late as 1853 gives added point to the care taken in the early years of the struggle for emancipation to emphasize that what was being sought was only for native-born Jews. After 1832, in the more favourable Parliamentary climate, this limitation in the emancipationist case was abandoned. With the increase in Jewish immigration after the continental events of 1848, Jewish destitution in England?not only in London?grew alarmingly. Poverty had been wide? spread, even in the native-born sections of the community, long before that date. From 1850, dire poverty was the fate of the bulk of the Jewish community. In 1829, Montefiore recorded in his diary2 that of the 2,500 Sephardim, 1,200 were in receipt of relief from the Sephardi Synagogue. The proportion of Ashkenazim receiving relief for subsistence from their synagogues was approximately the same.3 Twenty-five years later there were in London alone, judging by contemporary reports in the Jewish press, more than fifty Jewish Charities in addition to the eleemosynary funds of the synagogues. On 5th September, 1856, the Jewish Chronicle reported that ?39,000 was spent annually on the metropolitan Jewish poor, inclusive of private charity. The total Jewish population in London then was little more than 20,000. Subsistence and employment were of greater concern to the bulk of the community than the opening of municipal office to Jews or their admission to Parliament. The degree of truth in the following comment by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords on 3rd June, 1841, could not be gainsaid. Divett's Bill, he said, "might satisfy the ambitious view of a few individuals but it cannot increase the comfort or happiness of the great proportion of the Jewish people." Eight days later, the Bishop of London, Dr. C. J. Blomfield, told the House that he had made "many enquiries on the subject" and had "found . . . very few of the great body of the Jewish people who cared anything at all about the success of the measure. The lower 1 The main object of RaphalPs address was to rebut the charge that the Institution was need? lessly exclusive. "Enlightened members of our Community," he said, "maintain that in all matters other than religious it is wrong and unwise of us Jews to isolate ourselves from the great body of our fellow-subjects, as by so doing we ourselves contribute to strengthen the barrier of exclusiveness." He added: "In the general principle, they are right." He went on to deny the charge of exclusive? ness, since the Institution was not limited to Jews, and he pointed out that since the general Institu? tions were closed on Sundays Jews could not much avail themselves of them. There was also the danger of conversionism in the general Institutions: J.C., 24.1.45. 2 (1890), ed. L. Loewe. Vol. 1, p. 75. 3 See also V. of J.3 1.1.42.</page><page sequence="17">128 ANGLO-JE WISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION classes of their society it does not in the least degree affect, and many of the higher and more religious Jews entertain most serious doubts whether they could receive the privileges thus to be conferred on them." COMMUNAL STRUCTURE Writing in the Jewish Chronicle on 13th November, 1891, Sir John Simon, the prominent lawyer and M.P., who had played a part in the emancipationist struggle, stated as his recollection that in 1840, "there was no such thing as a Jewish public opinion." What Simon presumably had in mind was the system of communal government whereby a small group of prominent financiers and large merchants took the lead and were expected to decide policy. "There were a few men," added Simon, "such as Isaac Lyon Goldsmid or Salomons who took an interest in the affairs of the community, but as to the general body, they were indifferent." These men of wealth were certainly beginning to adopt the marks and demeanour of an aristocracy of birth. The proprietary system of synagogal administration strengthened their grip on communal policy. There were, however, the elements of democratic change within the Jewish com? munity. Simon's description is somewhat exaggerated. Between the apex of the communal pyramid, consisting of a compact and inter-related group of great financiers and larger merchants, and its ever widening base of petty tradesmen and manual workers, there were a variegated middle class, including dealers of all kinds, large and small, shop? keepers of varying levels of prosperity and a fluctuating body of small retailers. The hope was often expressed that these amorphous groups might become more integrated, or at least that the higher and the lower in the social hierarchy might confront one another occasionally with less of the customary patronage and obsequiousness. But the conse? quences of the extremes of wealth and poverty were aggravated through the abandonment by the upper classes of the old areas of residence in and adjoining the City of London.1 Provincial communities were more closely knit. Their compactness, both in numbers and residentially, was a cohesive force. Their leaders were not financiers but comfortable shopkeepers. There was less social distance between the rich and poor in the provincial communities. But distance there was, sustained by differences of language, dress, education and outlook. The large and multi-natured Anglo-Jewish middle class was itself riven socially by the forces of attraction of the respective ends of the community. One of the merits of Sussex Hall was adverted to in a long leading article in the Hebrew Observer on 20th October, 1854?a year of much industrial distress and inclement weather. "There cannot be a more efficient antidote," wrote the editor, "to the poisonous doctrines of socialism, communism, chartism and other Utopian solutions lauded by designing demagogues or short-sighted philanthropists than this frequent intercourse between the higher and 1 The financial aristocracy gravitated from the City to the West End. N. M. Rothschild moved to Mayfair in 1825. The suburbs attracted the comfortable middle class. Light is thrown on current trends by a letter signed "Kashrut" in V. of J. on 17.3.43 advocating the opening of a kosher eating-house near the Bank. The writer often frequented an earlier kosher establishment which existed near the Exchange in 1830. He lived in a suburb and was occupied in the City from 9-10 a.m. until 5 p.m. and sometimes until 7 p.m. He rated the prospects of success of such an eating-house greater than in 1830 as "a greater number of Jewish families now live out of the City ... a much larger number of commercial men now visit London by railway." On 31.3.43, Saul Myers, of 9, Mansell Street, announced in V. of. J. that having been requested "by several influential gentlemen" to open a kosher eating-house near the Bank, he had, taken "spacious premises in Crown Court, Old Broad Street," for that purpose. See also V. of J. 23.6.43.</page><page sequence="18">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 129 humbler classes on the common ground afforded by the platform of the ... Institution." The so-called strike of the cigar-makers in the winter of 1857-58 and the bitterness of that contest was a reminder that the Jewish proletariat was not immune from collective action or class consciousness.1 Many attempts were made to harness the enthusiasm of the Jewish working-man to the campaign for emancipation. There were occasional public meetings for the poorer Jews to demonstrate their interest. At one such meeting in the Portsoken Ward of the City of London, described in the Jewish press as a "full meeting" and attended almost entirely by Jewish working-men, ?5 was raised towards a testimonial to Salomons on his election as Alderman.2 In 1833, of the 983 London Jews who signed petitions to Parliament on behalf of the current emancipation Bill, 523 were described as "Jewish artisans" and were shown as such on a separate list of signatures. But all such efforts to ally the humbler classes to the aspirations of the wealthy were spasmodic and artificial. For all the anxiety to draw tighter the bonds of the community, the gulfs remained. F. H. Lewis, then a young law student, unwittingly revealed with unhappy candour an outlook not confined to himself. "Although an intense advocate of the education of the Jews," he wrote in the Jewish Chronicle on 26th October, 1855, "I should be sorry to see them all receiving an equally excellent one, for the distinction of class, which must to a certain extent be kept up, would immediately vanish.... A man intended as a butcher should not be educated as a chancellor."3 DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE It would, however, be a mistake to think that the gilded leaders of Anglo-Jewry were alone. If their eighteenth-century lineage bestowed on them a glamour and a special kind of self-assurance, new men were arising who belonged to a category destined to rival the old families for communal leadership at the end of the nineteenth century. They were professional men or substantial business men of the second rank. In the mid century, they constituted an important element in communal leadership, evincing great enterprise and vigour. They were indispensable to the pretensions of the grade above them. A scholarly merchant such as Moses Haim Picciotto, a solicitor like Henry Harris, an erudite s?versrnith such as Moses Samuel of Liverpool, or an impressive English preacher like D. M. Isaacs of Liverpool, provided or contributed to that ferment of informed Jewish public opinion which saved the uppermost layer of emancipationist spokesmen from speaking for themselves alone. 1 It was alleged on behalf of the Jewish cigar workers that the Jewish cigar manufacturers had brought over employees from abroad, especially Holland, in order to depress wages and that the "strike" was in reality a lock-out since the Jewish masters were insisting on employing only such workers as agreed to accept 50 per cent, of the current low rate of pay. These charges do not appear to have been expressly denied but the employers' point of view was that wages had been artificially raised during the preceding period of brisk trade and that they were obliged, during the current depression, to try to return to the wage level of 1856. See J.C., January, 1858, especially the letter from S. G. Solomon, Hon. Secretary to Cigar Manufacturers' Association (22.1.58). The cigar trade was almost wholly in Jewish hands. The strike petered out. The over-supply of labour, aggravated by the tobacco duties, was much relieved by emigration to New York: Jewish Board of Guardians' Annual Report, 1863. 2 J.C., 8.11.44. 3 In a lengthy and well-reasoned open letter to the Board of Deputies signed "Ayin Ben Aleph," in V. of J. on 28.2.45, the writer deprecated "the social disparity and the want of all but patron-and dependant sympathy which every year is increasing. . . ." "I should rejoice," wrote one E. P., in reply to Lewis (J.C., 2.11.55), "were the canker which rankles in the heart of our community, the everywhere-to-be-found class distinction, eradicated."</page><page sequence="19">130 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION It was also an age of frequent challenges to the supremacy of inherited leadership within Anglo-Jewry. The challenges were in line with the development of a somewhat more broadly based democracy in the country at large. The general expansion of the influence of public opinion and the rise of what might be termed the better-off shop? keeper class were paralleled in the Jewish community. In this movement, the growing self-consciousness of provincial Jewish communities and the rise of the Jewish press were indicative and influential. There ran through the Voice of Jacob and the Jewish Chronicle, both founded in 1841, a levelling spirit of considerable importance. Of course these journals also aimed at such immediate targets as countering the conversionists, advancing the cause of emancipation, and reporting the many stirring events at home and abroad. But one of the most important and pervasive effects of these journals within Anglo-Jewry was the piercing of the secrecy which had long marked the counsels of the community. They persistently condemned the high-handedness, the arbitrary exercise of power and the closed and proprietary system of government which had for generations prevailed in Anglo-Jewish affairs. In 1844, the Voice of Jacob conducted a campaign for the extension of the synagogal franchise to all seatholders. On 11th October, the editor attacked what he termed "the presumption that it is less the individual than his property that is repre? sented in the Synagogue."1 On 1st November, the Jewish Chronicle, not to be outdone, published a long letter from the Orientalist, S. M. Drach, which denounced the "vicious and rotten-borough constitution of the Great Synagogue." There were at that time approximately 450 members, of whom fewer than 200 had the right to vote. "Whilst its leading members," declared Drach, "are publicly striving for the extension of the British franchise, of civil and religious liberty, etc., they themselves keep up the old restrictive and select vestry system." In the following year, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle made frequent and hard-hitting references to the oligarchic habits of the Elders at Bevis Marks, despite the recently instituted practice of convening regular general meetings of members. "Modern progress of the mind," he wrote on 3rd January, "has brought with it a desire for improvement in our social condition; and the example held out to us by the country at large in sought to be emulated in the guidance ... of our affairs." The example from without was a regular theme in the Jewish press. On 18th October, 1847, by which time Lionel de Rothschild had been elected to Parliament but had been refused admission without the Christian oath, the Jewish Chronicle commented pithily as follows: "All emancipation from without is incomplete unless we emancipate ourselves from within." The same "hberality" which Rothschild was claiming in Parliament should be applied within the Jewish community. Jews had "a right" to "constitutional government" in their synagogal affairs. Running through such leading articles and the numerous letters in support, there was the idea, mostly unspoken, that "hberality" in Jewish communal life would not only be the fairest and most rational form of communal administration but would also be the most modern and the most English. 1 Yet the editor was cautious and far from radical. He added: "To us it appears clear that those who are taxed directly, no matter however little, for the support of an institution, may fairly claim although not the eligibility to become assessors and legislators themselves, at least the right to elect from those legally qualified the parties who are to assess and legislate." Franklin welcomed the "legal obligation to admit registered seatholders to vote in the election of representatives to the Board of Deputies" and advocated a like franchise in the voting in each Synagogue to the Electoral College for the Chief Rabbi. In some Synagogues (Hambro, Western, Maiden Lane, and in some provincial congregations) the vote in the elections to the Electoral College was extended beyond "privileged members" to all seatholders above a certain amount of annual contribution. At the Great and New Synagogues, the franchise in the election was Umited to "privileged members."</page><page sequence="20">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 131 In 1858 a proposal was made for reducing the size of the now more widely based Board of Deputies, in the alleged interests of speed and efficiency. The opposition of Abraham Benisch as editor of the Jewish Chronicle and the most influential of what I have called the new men, was an important factor in the abandonment of that retrogressive measure. "When the whole country," stormed Benisch on 5th November, "calls for the enlargement of the franchise, when the tendency of the whole nation is to transfer the powers from the aristocracy to the people, the Jewish community is advised to pursue an opposite direction."1 But the process of democratization in Anglo-Jewish affairs was slow. Its slowness 1 There were unmistakable signs of democratisation. Benisch, in a somewhat colourful passage, contrasted the present structure of the Board with its composition in an earlier generation, probably in the 1820's. ". . . the community," he commented, "was (then) represented by a small knot of gentlemen, pretty much in the same position of life and of the same class of society. They met in friendly converse at the President's hospitable table ... the voice of a plebeian had no chance of dis? turbing the harmony of the family compact." In December, 1836, the Board considered (and rejected) a motion, unthinkable even a few years earlier, that the Deputies should resign and re submit themselves for re-election on a popular basis. It was in that year decided to publish half yearly reports and furnish them to the constituent congregations. In January, 1838, the Board decided by a majority of one vote that Deputies should resign to allow their congregations to consider the best method of election to give effect to the wishes of the community. This decision does not appear to have been acted upon, and the five-year term, laid down in 1836, ran its course. An important inroad into the traditions of oligarchy was the insertion of a provision into the Board's Constitution in 1850 requiring the Board (save in an emergency) to submit to its constituent con? gregations fourteen days before action any proposals for action by the Board in respect of any legislative or other important matter. The V. of J.'s comment (14.2.45) that "there is a desire for a more popular system of government" in the Sephardi congregation was amply justified by the periodic contests between the Elders and the Yehidim which marked that decade, related principally to proposals to amend the Laws in order to temper oligarchy with the principles of election and responsible government. The general meetings of subscribing members of Sussex Hall in 1845 were likewise punctuated by revolt against the leadership. "Prolonged and warm discussion" (V. of J.y 28.3.45) followed the Committee's plan to register the printed code of laws of the Institu? tion without first submitting them to the general body, which through the casting vote of the President, Hananel de Castro, eventually won its point. See J.C., 15.8.45 and 5.9.45. A further sign of the times was the composition of the meeting (at which Joseph Mitchell, the volatile owner and editor of J. C. was the leading figure) of the Association for Preserving Inviolate the Ancient Rites and Ceremonies of Israel in July, 1843. There were almost one hundred persons present. The V. of J.} no doubt with a view to writing the meeting off as irresponsible and as misguidedly hostile to non-Reformist changes, commented that "there were scarcely any of those who usually take a lead in Jewish affairs": 2.8.43. That journal's attitude was somewhat intriguing since Franklin tended to adopt a sterner attitude to reforms than Mitchell! The meeting, composed of non-vestry men and including many non-privileged members, proposed to issue a counter-memorial to the memorial recently submitted at the Great Synagogue in favour of certain amendments to synagogal practice. On 20.8.43 the meeting was resumed?the V. of J. not failing to point out that its venue was a coffee-house in St. James's Place, Aldgate. The acrimonious debates on the memorial and the counter-memorial betokened the growing need for an early appointment to the Chief Rabbinate. In addition, the issue also indicated the increasing restiveness of the "general body of ratepayers at the Great Synagogue who have little if any control over their closely constituted governing body": V. of J., 15.9.43. The new procedure for the election of the Chief Rabbi signified the acceptance by the ruling proprietary group of the more democratic forms which were becoming fashionable, although the ultimate control of the outcome continued to rest in fact with a tiny knot of families. Although those families did not go as far as Franklin would have wished, they snared with him an awareness of the need to adopt a system which would "harmonize with the institutions of this free country": V. of J., 11.10.44. From 1847 additional vestry-men were elected by the general body of "ratepayers," whereas hitherto the vestry was elected solely by the "privileged members." How? ever, the list from which the additional men could be chosen was presented by the Committee. A striking tribute to the influence of Jewish public opinion (though not necessarily to democratic procedures) was contained in the first published report of the Jewish Board of Guardians (1859): "Let but the voice of the community be heard as emphatically and as loudly as during the past six months, and the Synagogues will soon be enabled by such encouraging utterances to define what the career of the Board should be. . . ."</page><page sequence="21">132 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION only accentuated the sense of isolation in which the new Jewish aristocracy, with the aid of the admiring and comfortably-off upper middle class, conducted their emancipation campaign. Certainly the growing success of that campaign, and especially Rothschild's elections to Parliament and Salomons' striking Lord Mayoralty, subdued the Jewish critics and gave the movement a popular and dramatic appeal. Nevertheless, insistent doubters continued to urge that the gleam of emancipation was tending to entice Jewish leaders away from urgent Jewish communal tasks. The emancipationists strenuously denied that they neglected their communal responsibilities. Indeed many examples could be cited of their Jewish organizational enterprise, such as Francis Goldsmid's energetic Presidency of the Jews' Infants School from its inception in 1841, or Salomons' active Presidency of the Westtriinster Jews' Free School from 1853 until his death and his close association with the New Synagogue in which he succeeded his brother as Warden in 1853. But the true balance of effort on the part of the principal Jewish emanci? pationists and indeed of communal leadership in general is indicated in a memorable editorial in the Jewish Chronicle by Benisch on 6th August, 1858, within a month of the Jewish Relief Act. He urged Jews who enter Parliament to "demean themselves, feel and act as Jews.... Let us show by the efficient management of our communal affairs how unfounded the apprehensions of those co-religionists are who did not look without sad misgivings at the efforts made for Jewish relief and who prognosticated communal retrogression from civil progress." He went on to present a programme of communal effort for the immediate future, which in most particulars was to be fulfilled in the coming generation.1 This programme constituted an implied admission of neglect 1 His programme included the reform and co-ordination of charities, the provision of more Jewish schools, especially in the newer areas of residence, the establishment of Synagogues to meet the ceaseless demographic changes, the formation of a Jewish workhouse, the enlargement of plans for Jewish emigration, and the creation of an international Jewish body for the protection of Jewish interests. The revealing communal debate on a Jewish workhouse is not entirely removed from the context of this paper. A Jewish workhouse was opened at 123-4, Wentworth Street, E.l, on 4.4.71, on the initiative of Solomon A. Green, a shopkeeper of Goulston Street, E.l, who became its President. He was assisted in its foundation by "a few worthy men of the working class who subscribed their pence": see his letter in J.C., 21.4.71. At its initiation it had 1,400 subscribers, which total within a few weeks rose to 1900: J.C., 26.5.71. It accommodated fourteen "aged and destitute Jews," who were transferred from parochial workhouses in Whitechapel (6), Homerton (4), Bow (2), Windsor (1) and Sheerness (1), and had a total accommodation for twenty: J.C., 14.4.71. Dis? couraged by lack of funds and by influential opposition in the Jewish community, the Jewish work? house was closed in 1877. The Jewish Board of Guardians set its face against a specifically Jewish workhouse and regarded Green's experiment with disfavour. The Board preferred to use, whenever possible, the existing machinery of State or Local Authority. Ever since the Parliamentary debates on the Poor Law Amendment Bill of 1834, the Board of Deputies had sought to procure special provisions for Jewish inmates of the workhouses, especially in respect of kosher food and facilities for religious observances. In 1861, the Board of Deputies and the Board of Guardians made joint representations to the Poor Law Commissioners on this score. In 1869, Salomons played a decisive r?le in incorporating into the Metropolitan Poor Law Amendment Act of that year a clause which in effect permitted Jewish inmates to be congregated in particular workhouses to facilitate the provision of Jewish amenities: Section 17. In its Annual Report for 1870, the Board of Guardians, reflecting in particular the views of Jacob Franklin, the Chairman of its Committee for Legislative and Parochial Affairs, commented that "the general course of legislation in this country has been for some time to eliminate from the regulation of social questions anything giving a predominance to any one religious class." The Board hoped that "impediments even indirectly antagonistic to Jewish requirements will disappear." The Report adds: "The duty of the community under these circumstances seems to be clear; it can no longer be necessary to repudiate concerted action within the general system provided every security be taken that Jewish rites and observances are regarded. ... To found separate workhouses or separate hospitals at a time when the State seems about to make those that exist available to Jews seems an unnecessary and unjustified step and one which the good sense of the community will surely disown and repudiate." The Board's optimism was mis? placed. One of the difficulties in the policy of concentrating Jewish paupers was the reluctance of</page><page sequence="22">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 133 on account of the struggle for emancipation, which Benisch described as the "all-absorbing activity" during the past thirty years. Now that emancipation was achieved, wrote Benisch, "we shall be able to bestow our undivided attention on our internal and external development." INDIFFERENCE At the beginning of the Victorian Age, "the Synagogue offered its members what to most was their only opportunity for satisfying ambition."1 Forty years later, Lionel Louis Cohen, the ablest communal adniinistrator in Anglo-Jewish history, wrote pri? vately to a friend expressing his anxiety for the future. He wondered "who will take up our hard, dry and monotonous work which makes no show and evokes little enthusiasm,"2 Other avenues to public distinction, and wider forums for the exercise of talents, were being opened to the rising Jewish generation. Those avenues and forums were of personal interest to very few. Again and again the narrowness of the area of the Jewish community which was likely to feel the benefit of emancipation was pointed out. This was sometimes done inadvertently by friends. Lord John Russell, for example, in supporting the Bill of 1841, drew the attention of the House of Commons to the families of Rothschild, Salomons and Montefiore "and others" in the following terms. "Those families," he said, "have long been established in this country and are well known to be deeply interested in the prosperity of the country (and) have a great stake in it, (and their) respectab?ity and character are equally well known to be above reproach."3 This kind of advocacy offered many targets to the opponents of emancipation. As late as 31st May, 1858, Lord Derby, in all seriousness, told the Upper House that "apart from some (Christian) clergymen who think the opening of the Parliament to Jews would be ruinous and some six Jews anxious not to be debarred from the House of Commons . . . the country is perfectly indifferent about the Bill." On 10th January, 1850, the London correspondent of the reputable Jewish newspaper in New York, the Asmonean, wrote "that the Jews as a body are quite indifferent in England to Jewish emancipation. It appears to me that it is but the ambition of a few individuals in the Jewish community in England who care at all about it, whether Jews may sit in Parliament or not."4 1 J.C., 11.6.97. 2 J.C., 1.7.87. 8 Russell praised Jews like Montefiore and Salomons for their generosity regardless of creed. This benevolence, when extended to Churches, perplexed some Christians. Inglis, for example, sharply criticized as inconsistent Salomons' donations towards the building of churches in Kent where Salomons was High Sheriff: H. of C, 10.3.41. The discussions on this theme demonstrated again the narrow group of Jews pressing for emancipation. 4 Cited by Salo W. Baron, "The Dynamics of Emancipation," Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People (ed. L. W. Schwarz, New York, 1956), p. 322. local Poor Law Unions to allow transfers from other parishes to fall on the local rates. By 1880, the Board had abandoned its long effort to bring about the desired concentration. The comparative industrial improvement in 1879-80 relaxed the pressure of pauperism and so took the urgency out of the question. See the Board's Annual Report for 1871 for an account of an interview of the Board's deputation with James Stansfeld, President of the Poor Law Board on 8.6.71 on this and related issues. On 2.5.71, Stansfeld received a deputation from the Jewish workhouse, introduced by Joel Emmanuel, seeking his sanction for the use in aid of the Jewish workhouse of local rates from parishes whence Jewish paupers are removed into the Jewish workhouse: J.C., 5.5.71. This proposal proved easier of acceptance than the proposals of the Board. In framing its policy, the Board was actuated not only by a desire to limit sectarianism to a minimum but also by its conscious aim of acting within the spirit of the famous Minute and Circular issued in November, 1869, by George Goschen, President of the Poor Law Board, urging closer co-operation between private benevolence and public relief: for the Minute and Circular, see 23rd Annual Report of Poor Law Board (1870), and see Franklin's letter to Goschen of 12.1.71 in the Board's Annual Report.</page><page sequence="23">134 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION In his long Address on the Position of the Jews of Britain (1844), Moses Samuel castigated the community for their "apparent apathy in the great cause of our emancipa? tion."1 This plea seems to be directed to the middle classes. "Ayin Ben Aleph," writing in the Voice of Jacob on 28th February, 1845, put the issue in stark terms. "It is notorious," he declared in his striking letter, "that very many sincere Jews in this country entertain opinions adverse to the movement and a still larger number are wholly indifferent thereto." "Ayin Bel Aleph" described the barriers to civil advancement as an annoyance "to a self-seeking few whose intellectual energies can and ought to be profitably and honourably employed in the ranks of their own community."2 The emancipationist campaigners naturally played down this opposition or indiffer? ence. But their frequent reference to it belied their insistence. Within a few days of the First Reading of the Bill of 1830, Francis Goldsmid published two letters in answer to the objections urged against the measure. The second letter was largely devoted to this question and to the related question as to how far the Jewish community wanted Parlia? ment to go in relieving the Jews.3 He deprecated the views of certain "individual Jews" that "if the Bar and office in the City were opened to Jews and if the supposed doubt regarding the legal right of the Jews to hold real property be resolved by statute, they would forego the rest, including the opening of Parliament." There then follows a passage of unusual sharpness in which the true approach of those in charge of the campaign may be detected. "The man of nervous temperament," wrote Goldsmid, "and of small fortune who is inclined to reside on his estate will think nothing more important than an indisputable tide to his property. The man whose hope of subsistence depends on his being enabled to open a retail shop within the City, will desire with more ardour a resolution of the Common Council permitting him to become a freeman than any legisla? tive enactment whatever." So seriously did the Jewish leaders regard the allegation that only a handful of Jews cared about emancipation that on 11th April, 1833, a letter was 1 This address was mainly concerned to encourage Jewish learning. Samuel pleads with "your merchants, loan-contractors, stockbrokers, men of independent means, as well as tradesmen . . . (to) exert themselves to bring about a national literary change" by furthering Jewish literary effort." 2 He added: "Look to France and Holland where the higher classes pursue their ambition and neglect their religious duties, and the lower classes are become low indeed. Is not the like imminent here also? Experience has shown that it is at least possible for a Jew to discharge municipal office, without violation of his religious duties; if no more were sought for now, I scarcely think that, although many Jews would be indifferent, any would be hostile. . . . But it is otherwise when the claim is liability for all departments of the public service." In particular, the writer considered that service in Parliament would involve breaches of Sabbath observance. A perceptive correspondent in V. of J. on 11.10.44, admitting a religious decline in certain continental Jewish communities, wrote that "it was not emancipation that caused the evil but the state of mind of the Jews at the time when it was granted and the state of that nation that granted it." The emancipationists hoped that the gradualness of emancipation in England in contrast to the revolutionary transformation abroad, would soften the impact for Anglo-Jewry and so greatly curb the corrosive effect. Nor did the emancipationists overlook the heightened interest in Jewish studies which accompanied Jewish emancipation in Europe. "The results of the emancipation on the Continent," wrote the J.C. on 10.11.48, "are not, as is yet suspected by some fanatics, tending to diminish the religious fervour of the Jewish people but to increase and strengthen it." See S. Posener, "The Immediate Economic and Social Effects of the Emancipation of the Jews in France," Vol. 1, Jewish Social Studies (1939), p. 271, and Salo W. Baron, "Aspects of the Jewish Communal Crisis in 1848," Vol. 14, ibid., p. 99. 3 This letter admitted that the number of persons who would "derive direct and immediate advantage" from the passage of the Bill would be a very small proportion of those "whom such a concession benefits less directly and less speedily but not with less certainty." The emancipationists made much of the fact that the expenses of the application to Parliament which the Board of Deputies had organized were met out of congregational funds and that the Vestry of the Great Synagogue had voted the considerable sum of ?300 towards the cost.</page><page sequence="24">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 135 dispatched to Sir Robert Grant, who was in charge of the current Bill in the House of Commons, impressing upon him the falsity of the allegation. This document bore sixty eight signatures. But since the list consisted of three Rothschilds, six Goldsmids, five Mocattas, four Montefiores, as well as David Salomons, Barnard Van Oven and other prominent Jewish emancipationists, the impressive array did not of itself carry the matter much further.1 As was often the case, Christian supporters of Jewish emancipation tended to give a different emphasis, albeit with good intentions, from that habitually offered by the Jewish protagonists of the cause. In rebutting the charges uttered by some of his episcopal brethren in the Parliamentary debates of 1841, the Bishop of St. David's, Dr. N. C. Thirlwall, in a maiden speech, expressly based his own opinion on what he described in the House of Lords on 11th June as "the general principles of human nature." Those principles led him to believe that it was "highly probable or rather ... absolutely certain that every member of the Jewish community would feel gratified and raised in self-esteem by the honours and privileges which may be thrown open to it, though in the nature of things they are such as can only be enjoyed by a few of its most distinguished members." He concluded his speech with the following even more delicate statement: "The object of the Bill is to conciliate the affection of a very large and powerful body of men to the land of their birth to which they are attached by many ties, though to a certain extent they must always remain foreigners and aliens." In 1848 Francis Goldsmid referred to the contention that the Jews were indifferent to emancipation as "the strange assertion" and he added that he believed it was "aban? doned."2 Yet in that year, Thirlwall still thought it necessary to address the House of Lords on this aspect of the question. If it be correct, he said on 25th May, that "as a body" the Jews are indifferent to the Bill then before Parliament, it was the result of their mistaken notions of its likely effects. There was unconscious irony in these observa? tions, since Thirlwell was the frankest conversionist among the supporters of the Bill in the House. He often indicated his belief that emancipation would assist conversionism.3 1 Letter in full with all signatures in Trans. J.H.S.E., IV, pp. 164-5. The communication referred to recent "attempts" to spread the report that "the community in general and even the most influential of the persons who compose it regard the subject with indifference. . . ." 2 Reply to the Arguments Advanced against the Removal of the Remaining Disabilities of the Jews. Yet only three years earlier, the V. of J. thought it necessary to emphasize that the current Bill was a Government measure. "Those Jews who object to authorize any active measures for incurring on their behalf official obligations possibly incompatible with certain religious scruples ... would of necessity occupy the invidious position of not merely opposing the executive Government . . . but of seeking to frustrate the enjoyment by others of certain honourable privileges to which they happen to have no mind themselves": 14.3.45. 3 It was impossible for Christian advocates of Jewish emancipation who were at the same time conversionists to ignore the possibility that the one would assist in the other. In moving Grant's Bill in the H. of L. in August, 1833, Bexley, a prominent conversionist, rejected the notion that he sponsored the Bill as "measure of proselytism." "Much as I desire the conversion of our Jewish brethren," he stated, "that is not my object but I would not have supported it if I had thought it could have a contrary tendency." Every advance on the part of the Jews, whether in the acquisition of secular knowledge or in social or civil status, was deemed by many conversionists as an easing of their task. "The more enlightened the Jew becomes," wrote Dean Milman in his History of the Jews (first published in 1830), "the less credible will it appear that the Universal Father intended an exclusive religion, confined to one family among the race of man, to be permanent; the more evident that the faith which embraces the whole human race within the sphere of its benevolence, is alone adapted to a more advanced and civilized age." K</page><page sequence="25">136 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION ADLER AND MONTEFIORE Another pointer to the state of Jewish opinion was the public denial which the Chief Rabbi felt obliged to issue as late as March, 1858, of the allegation made in the House of Commons that he had averred his belief in a recent sermon that the admission of Jews to Parliament would subvert the laws of Judaism. Adler pointed out that he was in favour of Jewish emancipation.1 Nevertheless Adler's attitude was not the same as that of the principal Jewish lay spokesmen. Indeed between the position of the Goldsmids and Crooll there were many standpoints. On 31st January, 1845, a few weeks after Adler's appointment, Jacob Franklin, always a perceptive observer, wrote in the Voice of Jacob of three schools of thought within the Jewish community. Some, he wrote, "would pledge the body of English Jews to repudiate any legislative concession short of complete equality in every respect" and "desire a complete fusion with their fellow-subjects of every other demonina tion." This desire was regarded by them as perfectly compatible with the maintenance of Judaism in the lives of English Jews. It is noteworthy that Francis Goldsmid, a founder Warden of the Reform Synagogue, was an observant Jew.2 "Another body of opinion," added Franklin, consisted of "those who dread a diversion of the Jewish mind from the religious interests of the Jews as a people. . . ." The third and middle school which was also the largest, contained "those who are content to deal with every disqualifica? tion as the opportunity serves . . . (and) to accept every such concession as it can best be secured . . . and as the propriety of each additional privilege can be reconciled to the objections" of the second section described above. The leading figures of the middle school of thought were Adler and Montefiore, and its institutional spokesman was usually the Board of Deputies. The reservations and caution within the large centre group tended to give the outright Jewish critics of emancipation a somewhat greater influence than their numbers or the substance of their apprehensions warranted. Montefiore had a vague presentiment that emancipation, although desirable, carried with it certain dangers?dangers obscurely associated in his mind with excessive assimila? tion and the modern, restless, questing spirit which appeared to challenge the Orthodox tradition and its ancient sanctions and assumptions. From the first rounds of the emancipationist campaign, it was evident that the leadership of Anglo-Jewry was divided and that the differences went beyond tactics. In March, 1829, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid felt it necessary to assure the Board that he would take no "public or decided step" without consulting them. He was at that time co-operating closely with the Board in approaches to leading political figures. It was clear that these approaches acquired importance by virtue of and in proportion to the general public standing of those making them and the personal relationship already existing between them and the personalities to be approached. In this field no Jews stood in greater fame or could exert greater influence than Goldsmid and Nathan Meyer Rothschild. The latter was inhibited by a caution resulting from his foreign birth. Goldsmid was the key figure on the Jewish side. From 1830 onwards Montefiore's diary contains a series of episodes pointing to the growing divergence 1 J. C.j 26.3.58. On 21.2.45, the J. C, in mentioning apprehensions as to the duty of attending Parliament on the Sabbath and Festivals, suggested the device of pairing off as the remedy. 2 On 9.2.53, according to a report in J.C., the Lord Chancellor advanced the hearing of an action in the Court of Chancery to a Friday "to suit the religious convenience of Mr. Francis Goldsmid." On 28.2.45, V. of J. referred to a report that one member of the Reform congregation had refused to subscribe to I. L. Goldsmid's memorial to Peel for complete emancipation on grounds analogous to those set forth by "Ayin Ben Aleph."</page><page sequence="26">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 137 between the Board and Goldsmid and to Goldsmid's more robust policy and his increasing discontent with the pace and outlook of the Board. The defeat of the Jewish Relief Bill of 1830, which sought to place native-born Jews on a par with the Roman Catholics, dampened the Board's enthusiasm, especially as its promotion was costly. Montefiore's deep-rooted opinion was that the Board would and should be prepared to accept whatever relief the Government might concede, however far short it fell of the full Jewish request. In 1831, the Board refused Goldsmid's request to petition Parliament during the current session for complete abolition. In recording Goldsmid's intense dissatisfaction with the Board over this question, Montefiore added in his journal1 that Goldsmid threatened to establish a new synagogue with the aid of the younger men and to alter the form of prayer to that in use in the reformed synagogue in Hamburg. The rift was broadening. THE BOARD OF DEPUTIES In 1833 and 1834 Goldsmid was reduced to instituting Bills without the Board's support and even in face of warnings by Christian supporters of the danger of making the Jewish claims an annual issue in Parliament. Between 1831 and 1836 the Board's records are silent on the question of Jewish emancipation. I must add that Montefiore was not idle during the debates on the Bills instigated by Goldsmid. He used his personal influence to win votes for them. Goldsmid's independent conduct was the background to the Board's first Constitution2 which was adopted on 7th March, 1836. Its basic principle was that the Board was the sole official medium of communication with the Government in respect of all matters affecting the political interests of British Jews. Fortified by this act of self-assertion and encouraged by the Act of 1835 which permitted Salomons to serve as Sheriff without the statutory Christian Declaration, the Board adopted a forward policy in respect of the emancipatory Bill introduced in 1836 by no less a person than Thomas Spring-Rice, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This Bill had been instigated largely by Salomons' personal efforts. The Board informed Spring-Rice in May of the terms of its new Constitution and asked him to send the Board a copy of his proposed Bill. This revealing and somewhat self-hum?iating request was complied with and the Board was able to persuade Salomons and Goldsmid to collaborate with it in organizing support for the measure. The rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords was forestalled by the dissolution of Parliament. In the following year, Salomons again took the initiative in an attempt to extend to the Jews a current Bill which granted complete emancipation to the Quakers, Separatists and Moravians. Again, the Board, which had left the initiative to individuals, followed in the wake of his efforts and joined forces with him, but the attempt to widen the Bill failed. On 26th September, 1838, Goldsmid informed the Great Synagogue that he "cannot possibly consent to entrust my political interests to the charge of the Deputies." He set out his charges against the Board, which included not only the charge that it was a slow moving and cumbersome deliberative assembly but also the allegation that the Board in effect was luke-warm in its efforts for emancipation.3 Indeed it was not until 1845 that 1 Vol. 1, p. 82. 2 Printed in C. H. L. Emanuel, A Century and a Half of Jewish History (1910), pp. 23-5. At this date, there were twenty-two Deputies, comprising seven each from Duke's Place and Bevis Marks and four each from the Hambro and New Synagogues. 3 "For all purposes connected with the civil rights of the Jews that Board has always proved itself to be utterly inefficient... I found in some (Deputies) a disposition to co-operate warmly</page><page sequence="27">138 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION the Board may be said to have returned in earnest to the active pursuit of the cause of Jewish emancipation. By that time there had been a marked weakening of the numerical strength of the ParHamentary opposition to the Jewish claims. Salomons had more than once been elected Alderman and had been refused admission. Several members of Peel's Tory Government were now known to be in favour, if not of opening Parliament, at least of admitting Jews to municipal office. Nevertheless even now the old divisions remained. In February and March, 1845, two Jewish deputations1 waited upon Peel. One was headed by Montefiore and repre? sented the Board. The other was led by the Goldsmids and in fact, although not in theory, represented the West London Synagogue of British Jews. The title of the new congregation was not lost on Peel. Among the grounds on which the latter group was reported to have based their case for complete Jewish emancipation was the recent improvement in synagogal worship, including greater decorum and the use of some English. Montefiore's deputation declared itself ready to accept merely the abolition of the municipal disabilities. This difference between the two sets of claims had no effect on Peel, for he had already decided upon a Bill to open the municipalities. He told the House of Commons during the successful passage of the measure, that while he believed that the Bill would "satisfy the majority of our Jewish fellow-subjects,"2 he did not wish to preclude the Jews from urging further claims later. The Goldsmids left nothing to chance. During the unopposed passage of the measure in the Lords, Spring-Rice, now Lord Monteagle, on 16th March, 1845, presented to the House a Petition signed by them and their associates indicating in terms that the Bill was not a waiver of Jewish rights and 1 One consisted of Montefiore, Salomons, Lionel de Rothschild, Hananel de Castro and Israel Barned of Liverpool; the other, I. L. Goldsmid, Francis Goldsmid, J. G. Henriques, David Mocatta, and Moses Mocatta, who was Montefiore's uncle and immediate predecessor as President of the Board. There was a preliminary meeting at I. L. Goldsmid's home at which about thirty were present, where it was agreed that, although nearly all present were members of the Reform Con? gregation, the deputation should not be regarded as representing that particular congregation: V. of J., 14.3.45. For the latter deputation's Memorial to Peel, see J.C., 3.3.45. 2 Peel chose his words carefully. Perhaps another instance of his care is to be found in his letter of 28.6.46 offering Montefiore a baronetcy on the latter's return from Russia and as part of Dissolution Honours. It was offered because of "your high character and eminent position in the ranks of a loyal and estimable class of Her Majesty's subjects agreeing with you in religious per? suasion, and in the hope that it may aid your truly benevolent efforts to improve the social condition of the Jews in other countries by temperate appeals to the justice and humanity of their rulers." This may be contrasted with the words used five years earlier, when Melbourne was still in office, to convey to Montefiore the Queen's grant of supporters to his coat of arms on his return from the East. The Queen was "desirous of giving a special mark of our royal favour ... in commemoration of these his unceasing exertions in behalf of his injured and persecuted brethren in the East and the Jewish nation at large." with me, but experienced from others and among them influential members, a great unwillingness to contribute their personal exertions and a total refusal of pecuniary assistance . . .": see letter in Trans. J.H.S.E., IV, pp. 173-4. It is somewhat curious to find in Goldsmid's attack the observation that he could not find any necessary connection between being a ba'al habayit and fitness for office as a Deputy. Another charge against the Board concerned its failure to procure (or to take steps early enough to procure) an amendment to the Act of 1835 which voided marriages within degrees prohibited by English law. A Bill to exempt Jewish marriages if within the Mosaic degrees was inspired by the Board and introduced into the H. of C. in June, 1837, but failed. As a result of these severe strictures by Goldsmid the Board adopted a resolution on 4.12.38 to the effect that "no individuals ... are precluded from exerting their influence with the Government... for the promo? tion of their civil rights and privileges." But Goldsmid, when re-elected to the Board by the Great Synagogue, refused to serve.</page><page sequence="28">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 139 laying claim to complete equality, especially in view of recent Jewish academic distinctions. Following the Act of 1845, the Board once again withdrew from the initiative in organizing public pressure for emancipatory legislation. It left the decisive action to the individual energy and enterprise of the Goldsmids, Salomons and Lionel de Rothschild. The Board continued to assist by stimulating petitions to Parliament in support of the successive Bills which unavailingly sought to open Parliament to Jews. In October, 1848, the Board was severely criticised by a writer in the Anglo-Jewish Magazine for its apparent indifference over Rothschild's candidature in the City.1 Ten years later, in July, 1858, when the House of Commons was at last opened, the Board inevitably turned in retrospect to its conduct in the long struggle. Some Deputies did not hesitate to castigate the Board for its lack of consistent activity and for periods of apparent apathy.2 There is no doubt that the Board and Montefiore, who was President from 1835, wanted complete emancipation. What was the reason for their comparative reserve? Part of the answer is that the Board, as a responsible institution with a representative status, felt it necessary to take care not to outstrip public opinion.3 This caution was accentuated by the old Sephardi regard for good public relations. The Sephardi Elders, who exercised a considerable sway over the Board, tended to look back upon the eighteenth century as having established proper forms in the sphere of what were thought of as "external" affairs, that is the realm of Jewish contacts with the wider community. A high-pressure political campaign smacked of ingratitude and a denial of the implied or presumed terms of the protection afforded to the Jews by good King Charles and his successors. The new age was less inhibited, more democratic, and less convinced of the merits or morals of Jewish quietism. After all, the age was full of political agitations. It was not without significance that the five Jews nominated for Parliament in 1847 were Ashkenazim.4 To stand as a Parliamentary candidate when the law precluded a Jew from taking his seat even if elected was a kind of direct action from which the Sephardi grandees were averse. Furthermore, the more adventurous or ambitious of the Sephardim had already withdrawn from the Jewish community. Political ambition was a feature of the Ashkenazim rather than of the remaining Sephardim. Another factor was the role of Reform in the emancipationist campaign. "I am most firmly resolved," wrote Montefiore in a well-known insertion in his diary on 9th July, 1837, "not to give up the smallest part of our religious forms and privileges to obtain civil 1 "Even the spread of English feelings, and the diffusion of community of interests between Jew and Christian, that prompted the liberal constituency of the City of London to put Baron Rothschild in nomination, failed to arouse the Deputies into active and useful exertion, and Jews generally, after the excitement had passed, looked with something very like indifference at the probable result": per E. D. 2 In defending the Board, Joseph Sebag (later Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore) adopted the partly self-defeating argument that "as the struggle was between the two Houses, the attitude of the Board was the right one": J.C., 30.7.58. 3 In his biography of Montefiore (1884), Lucien Wolf exaggerated Montefiore's role in the initiation and execution of the campaign for emancipation but his comment that "his views on Jewish emancipation were not of an heroic kind, but were intelligent and practical" (p. 47), is not wide of the mark. See Wolf's quotation from Montefiore's conversation on the wisdom of gradual ness: pp. 47-8. The Board's resolution of 23.12.45 is in conformity with this cautious approach: "This Board having noticed the advancement of liberal feelings in all classes of the community, more particularly when religious questions are concerned, deems the present period fitting to take measures for the removal of the civil disabilities of the Jews. . . ." 4 Lionel de Rothschild (City), Francis Goldsmid (Yarmouth), I. L. Goldsmid (Beverley), Salomons (Greenwich), Meyer de Rothschild (Hythe). For I. L. Goldsmid's candidature, see I. Finestein, "Forcing the Pace of the Law," J.C., 8th November, 1957.</page><page sequence="29">140 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION rights." It was difficult for him to work in the cause of emancipation with men who appeared to make synagogal changes part and parcel of their case. Yet another considera? tion was that Montefiore's main public energy was concerned with the fate of Jewries abroad. The Damascus Affair interrupted the emancipationist campaign. To Montefiore, for all his protestations of enthusiasm for civil emancipation at home, the struggle was a subsidiary issue. His visits to Palestine and his journeys as an ambassador of the Jewish people occupied his first attention. In respect of these travels, his relations with British Ministers of both Parties were often close. He was not always minded to mix this urgent business with the comparative luxury of pressing harrassed Ministers at home for political concessions. Again, in the 1850's, even the strong and stubborn Montefiore was perhaps beginning to feel his years. In 1857 he offered to retire from the Presidency of the Board "by reason of advanced age," but the Deputies prevailed upon him to continue in office. In order to relieve him of some of the burden of office, the Deputies appointed for the first time a Vice-President and a Treasurer. TWO AGES But there was possibly a deeper cause of friction than all this. Perhaps there was a confrontation of two merging ages, the one reacting in terms of a Jewish nation whose members were entitled to enjoy certain civic rights as a privilege, the other thinking in terms of Jewish Englishmen who were entitled as of right to all the privileges of English? men. This distinction was not always clearly discerned. It was certainly less clearly perceived in England than in the more disputatious and ideologically-minded continental communities where emancipation was of a comparatively sudden growth. The distinction was a question of emphasis, habit and outlook rather than of principle or conscious policy. Nevertheless, the Englishman of the Jewish persuasion was coming into being, with Salomons as his progenitor. Loyalty was not in issue. Ranging from the arguments for and against a Jewish Hospital1 to those for and against religious reform, there was hardly 1 An unsigned article on "the necessity of erecting an hospital for Jews of the German and Polish communities in London" appeared in Vol. Ill Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature (11.9.35), a journal founded and edited by Raphall (1834-6). The writer welcomed the recent distribution of circulars advocating this course and reported certain preliminary measures to raise the necessary funds. One of the circulars was in Hebrew and English and "appears to have been issued by a foreign Israelite at present in London." The Sephardim had long had their own hospital for their "poor sick." The effort of a group of Ashkenazim to rally support for their new venture did not succeed. In 1842 the London Hospital agreed to allot certain beds for Jewish patients and arrangements were made for the provision of kosher food. The Metropolitan Free Hospital, then in Devonshire Square, E., followed suit, but the idea of a specifically Jewish hospital was revived as the Jewish community grew. See letters in J.C., 13.9.67 and 20.9.67, from Lazarus Lewis and I. J. Symmonds respectively. The demand received influential support from D. H. Dyte, Medical Officer to the Board of Guardians, who pointed out the inadequacy of the sixteen beds at the London Hospital and the eight at the Metropolitan (J.C., 3.7.68). Among opponents of the suggestion was Albert Kisch who in addition to financial difficulties raised the objection that the proposal was "directly opposed to the spirit of true unsectarian philanthropy." His plan was to extend the arrangements for Jewish beds to other hospitals: J.C&gt; 10.6.68. By the end of the century, the provision of kosher food had been extended to the Charing Cross Hospital, the Chelsea Hospital for Women and the Ventnor Consumption Hospital. Dyte's dream did not come true until this century. In 1879, the Board of Guardians closed its dispensary and left Jews to apply for medical relief to the District Medical Officers of the Poor Law Unions. "There being nothing of a specifically Jewish character in the mere dispensing of drugs and the giving of medical advice," commented the Annual Report, "the Board resolved to avail itself of the facilities given by the State."</page><page sequence="30">ANGLO-JE WISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 141 a question in Anglo-Jewish affairs in the Victorian Era which was not related to and sharpened by this ineluctable jostling of epochs. In these controversies, some of which we have already mentioned, Salomons became in the eyes of the Jewish community the main protagonist of the more advanced or less restricted point of view. He remained a member of the orthodox community and was therefore less suspect of innovation than Francis Goldsmid. Since he bore the brunt of the practical emancipationist struggle between 1835 and 1855, he was intensely alert to any adverse interpretation that might be placed upon this or that Jewish undertaking. There developed a particular tension between him and Adler, who for all his western education, was still old-fashioned enough to believe, for example, that Jewish schools were desirable even for the wealthy. Salomons had no quarrel with Jewish schools for the poor, but he thought it was natural, proper and wise for the upper and upper middle classes to send their children to such schools as the City of London School and University College School.1 Nor did Salomons attach the same weight as Adler to the advantages of Jewish learning in that part of Anglo-Jewry which was in every-day contact with the social and public life of England. In March, 1844, he chanced to be in Paris. Louis Cohen, in anxious consultation over the appointment of a new Chief Rabbi, asked Salomons to make some private enquiries regarding a certain candidate. Salomons sent Cohen the result of his enquiries and added: "I hope (the new Chief Rabbi) will be a person who shall command the respect of all persons as much by his appearance as by his teaching. ... Of the two, I would prefer the cornmanding person to great talent."2 The lay leadership of Anglo-Jewry?as indeed was common over a wide area of English political life generally?was little interested in ideas. They tended during this period to leave the sponsorship of Jewish publications to Jews of foreign birth and scholars of limited means. On 1st October, 1848, a contributor ("Ben Abram") to the Anglo Jewish Magazine on "Studies in Jewish Literature" contrasted the "ardent" desire among English Jews "for literary acquirements in general" with the "indifference" 1 Salomons dissociated himself from the fee-paying Jewish day school which Adler set up in 1855 as a mean between the "charity" schools on the one hand and the more costly Jewish private schools and the great Public Schools on the other. The sharpness of controversy on this issue may be sensed from Benisch's harsh editorial in J.C., 15.1.58, in which he supported Adler's school, "which, while developing . . . the faculties of the pupil, shall not remove him from Jewish ground, shall not impress him with un-Jewish views, shall not dissociate him from Jewish feelings, shall not make him a good scholar but a bad Jew." He wrote of "the generation which has grown up under such non-Jewish school influences.... We might enquire how far the community has been benefitted by the talents ... of those nursed in the alien atmosphere. ... In name most of them are still Jews, in spirit few, in practice still less." This was an excessively severe appraisal. Salomons was far from unconcerned over the inadequacies of the Jewish education of the children of the better-off homes, but he regarded the principle of mingling with Christians on equal terms as a decisive test in judging the merits of Adler's venture. It is significant that the two most important signs of the awakening of Anglo-Jewish lay leadership to the Jewish cultural and literary needs of the Jewish community (apart from the special and ambiguous case of Sussex Hall) came after the virtual com? pletion of the struggle for emancipation in 1858, namely the Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge (1860) and the Society for Hebrew Literature (1870), of which latter body Salomons was the first President. With a few exceptions, the many and urgent pleas for patronage which were a regular feature of earlier decades were little heeded. See for e.g. the striking and lengthy review of Grace Aguilar's The Women of Israel (J.C., 19.9.45), Benisch's Introduction to his Two Letters on The Life and Writings of Maimonides (1847) and the long letter by "Hertz ben Pinchas" (J.C.3 27.3.50) with its cry: "Let those who are true philanthropists show it by encouraging among their race that love of letters which will raise their morals and exalt their ideas ... it is more important to the community at large that a dozen adults know their alphabet than that so many esquires race in their chariots." 2 Hannah F. Cohen, Changing Faces (1937), p. 40.</page><page sequence="31">142 ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION towards Jewish knowledge. He described the situation on the Continent and came to the conclusion that as regards this indifference in England "we are at a loss to find a parallel."1 The impact of these preferences and stresses may be detected in the early history and pre-history of Jews' College more clearly perhaps than in any other department of communal life. The institution originally envisaged by Adler and even as eventually inaugurated by him in 1855 underwent a series of changes against his will, of which the most indicative was possibly the final abandonment within twenty years of one of his cherished principles, namely that the College was to be open to all, including laymen, who cared to and could avail themselves of Jewish higher studies. Henceforth the College was limited to the training of Ministers. That, of course, was always its principal purpose. Adler certainly appreciated the significance to the emancipationist movement of making possible an English-trained Ministry.2 But to him this was an incidental virtue of such a Ministry. To the emancipationists, it was the prime attraction of the 1 An interesting illustration of the times was afforded by a correspondent's reference in V. of J. on 4.10.44 to the sale in August of the major portion of the Duke of Sussex's valuable library of books and manuscripts, which included valuable Hebraica and Judaica. He wrote of "the almost total absence of our wealthy Jewish brethren (from the sale, which took 33 days) into whose libraries many of the volumes ought to have found their way; the only buyers being Sir I. L. Goldsmid, H. Guedaila and Barnett the bookseller." The era of the struggle for emancipation coincided with a decline in the level of and the extent of interest in Jewish studies in England. The contrast was often drawn, not always in accurate terms, with Jewish communities abroad and even with Anglo Jewry in the eighteenth century. The first issue of the Jewish Chronicle and Working Man's Friend (18.10.44), under the control of Joseph Mitchell, draw a sombre picture of the old lay leadership. "Our leaders of the last century, wise in their generation, only looked to the saving of money, which they effected." Nevertheless, added the editor, "While we had four Chief Rabbins and four ecclesiastical tribunals, Hebrew and Talmudic learning was cherished among us. Each Chief Rabbi . . . had a knot of disciples around him. . . . Many a British-born Jew ranked high for learning. . . . The rapid advance of commerce, the spread of wealth and the refinement of luxury, diverted men's attention from Hebrew learning to lucrative avocations." Germany and France, commented the J.C. (16.10.46), are "teeming with all kinds of Jewish theological, philosophical and philological . . . works," while in England, there "is ... so little . . . beyond a grammar and an almanack." In the 1840's there was noticeable in England an increasing interest in Biblical studies and in Hebrew scholarship, associated with the intensification of theological disputation, the more systematic exploration of the Libraries of the ancient Universities, and the deepening concern over the history and future of Palestine. Inevitably, Jews shared in this increasing interest. This was acknowledged by Benisch in a revealing letter in Anglo-Jewish Magazine, in November, 1848, in which he expounded the principles on which he based his translation of the Bible. During this period, a series of literary societies were instituted in a number of provincial Jewish communities: Manchester Hebrew Association (1838), Liverpool Literary Hebraic Association (J.C, 6.12A4, and V. of J., 29.11.44), Portsmouth Jewish Literary Society and Exeter Jewish Literary Society (J. C, 16.8.50). In 1845, Raphall toured a group of cities, including Edinburgh and Belfast, where he addressed public meetings, under Jewish auspices, on Hebrew Literature. 2 On his taking office he was reported as expressing surprise that "hardly one post" was occupied by an English-born Jew: J.C, 5.9.45. This no doubt appeared to him all the more remarkable since the practice of advertising English as a prerequisite for ministerial candidates was already becoming common, e.g. the advertisements in the Jewish press from the Synagogues in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Portsmouth, etc. There was also a distressing scarcity of native-born teachers, which Adler hoped to remedy, in particular through Jews' College. At the date of his appointment, the Jewish schools were being subjected to criticism on account of the paucity of teachers emerging from their ranks of pupils. "Our Free Schools," bemoaned the J.C. (11.12.46), "have produced no more than one or two teachers in the course of twelve years." A notable exception was the London-born Henry A. Henry, who was educated at the Jews' Free School, of which he became Principal. In 1844-9, he was Reader at the Western Synagogue. In April, 1846, in a by no means uncritical review of his Series of Six Discourses on the Principles of the Religious Belief of Israel as Productive of Human Happiness and Moral improvement, the Cup of Salvation (Liverpool, eds. Moses Samuel and D. M. Isaacs) described Henry as "a striking exception to the generality of Readers of the Synagogue" on account of his pedagogic talent. Henry migrated to America in 1849.</page><page sequence="32">ANGLO-JEWISH OPINION DURING THE STRUGGLE FOR EMANCIPATION 143 College. From the first, the College was hailed as "beginning the emancipation of English Judaism from continental Judaism." Future Ministers, commented the Jewish Chronicle on the same occasion, "will be . . . men of thorough English feelings and views."1 In 1857, to take another aspect of Jewish life, a keen dispute arose over the status of rabbinic divorce in English law. Following representations made by Adler and the Board of Deputies, the Lord Chancellor laid before the House of Lords an amendment to the Matrimonial Causes Bill of that year which would have exempted Jewish marriages from the scope of the new Divorce Court. This clause, which was not opposed in Parlia? ment, was suddenly dropped by the Government upon the personal and private inter? vention of Salomons and Lionel de Rothschild. This over-reaching of the established institutions of the Jewish community evoked the sternest rebuke which the editorial pen of Benisch could compose.2 There is no doubt that Salomons was guided largely by the desire at the crisis of the emancipationist campaign to divest the Jewish community of its appearance as an alien group. In the words of an early nineteenth-century legal historian, the exemption granted by the law to the forms of Jewish marriage, "has probably arisen from the peculiarities attending the state of the Jewish nation in England, having always been looked upon as a distinct people and having for a long time been treated rather as aliens than as native subjects."3 Salomons and his school of thought considered it desirable that once a Jewish marriage was celebrated, it should be capable of dissolution only by the processes of the law of the land. Adler's view was that just as the law recog? nized Jewish marriage, so should the law recognize Jewish divorce. Adler persuaded the Lord Chancellor but not Salomons.4 In July, 1857, Lord Derby addressed the House of Lords as follows: "No doubt they submit to the laws and discharge their duties of citizens_(But) they retain their laws, they retain their peculiar customs . . . they do not generally associate freely with their fellow-subjects, they have interests wholly apart. . . ." Was he so far from the truth? And was there not a risk that emancipation would corrode these particulars? Was not emancipation in fact followed by a weakening of Judaism in the lives of the emancipated community? These are questions which only self-deception will ignore. But they were not the whole issue. It was not civil emancipation alone which had this effect. It was freedom and science which posed the great issue. Judaism had lost some of its hold even before civil emancipation. Civil emancipation was but an incident in the issue, which is not yet resolved, namely the survival and content of Judaism without the pressure of the ghetto or the compulsion of oppression. 1 J.C., 23.11.55. The self-conscious patriotism was no doubt enhanced by the Crimean War, then at its height. 2 See I. Finestein, "Anglo-Jewry and the Law of Divorce," J.C., 19th April, 1957. In defending his action, Salomons went so far as to express his "belief that the power of divorce by the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities ought to be entirely abrogated. . . .": J.C., 10.7.57. 3 R. S. D. Roper, Treatise of the Law of Property arising from the Relations between Husband and Wife (ed. Edward Jacob, 1826), Vol. 2, pp. 475-6. 4 A further illustration of the tension between the two ages is found in the author's paper, shortly to be published, dealing with opinions in Anglo-Jewry as to what action, if any, should be taken by the community following the Marriage Act of 1835, having regard to differences between the prohibited degrees of marriage in Jewish law and the law of the land.</page><page sequence="33">Plate 22 Sir Francis H. Goldsmid, Bart., Q.C., M.P. 1808-1878 (see page 114)</page></plain_text>