The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell
to Churchill
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
(Encounter Books, 183 pages, $23.95)
At a time when physical attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, and
individual Jews have been increasing exponentially year-on-year
across the United Kingdom, it is heartening to hear from one of
America’s foremost intellectuals that it was not always thus. When
Jewish history is almost constantly—and understandably—written in
the context of anti-Semitism, that foul bacillus that finds its
origins in all that is most repulsive in the fetid recesses of
human nature, it is rather wonderful occasionally to read an
extended essay on its antithesis: philosemitism. I fear that the
reason that this book is only 155 pages long, however, is that
Professor Himmelfarb had simply too few significant Britons to
praise for their philosemitism, despite casting her historical net
as wide as the three centuries that separated Oliver Cromwell from
Winston Churchill. A Briton’s sole consolation might be that the
histories of philosemitism in France, Germany, Russia, and
elsewhere would be even shorter.
Certainly, no one could be better qualified to write this book
that Gertrude Himmelfarb, the most distinguished living historian
of Victorian English culture and society, which allows her to write
with utter authority of the philosemitism of such key literary
figures as George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, and Benjamin Disraeli.
In her seminal works The Victorian Mind (1968) and The
Idea of Poverty (1984), she demonstrated her mastery of
mid-19th century British intellectual life, and her recent The
Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009) allowed her fascinating
insights into philosemitic novels such as Daniel Deronda
that this book explores further. Professor Himmelfarb is one of the
few public intellectuals to be elected both a Fellow of the British
Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in
2004 she received the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal.
We are therefore in the best possible hands when it comes to
understanding how the best of Britons’ minds worked when they
embraced the Jews at a time when so many of their countrymen were
rejecting them. (An admiring word is also due to Encounter Books, a
young and small imprint that is nonetheless publishing very many of
our culture’s most thought-provoking tracts for troubled
times.)
When one looks for the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes in
literature, it is of course not to Joseph Goebbels’ foul
representations that one goes, because none were memorable and the
political bias was so obvious. Instead it is to Geoffrey Chaucer’s
“Prioress’s Tale,” William Shakespeare’s Shylock in The
Merchant of Venice, and Charles Dickens’ Fagin in Oliver
Twist. Even the 20th century saw another great English poet,
T.S. Eliot, employing anti-Semitic imagery. How can it be that
generally liberal, humanist writers of acknowledged talent—even
genius—could create Jewish figures of such repulsiveness? When Al
Pacino played Shylock in Central Park two summers ago, American
theater-goers were reminded of how flimsy the stock answers—that
Shakespeare was only trying to make us confront our own prejudices,
that Shylock wasn’t meant to be representative of his race,
etc.—truly are in the face of the merchant’s constant, vicious, but
eloquent demands for a pound of Christian flesh. How can it be that
Englishmen created worse and longer-lasting stereotypes of
grasping, amoral Jews even than the Nazis?
Himmelfarb explains that in Chaucer and Shakespeare’s time there
were no practicing Jews living in England, and that Dickens tried
to atone in later years both by softening Fagin’s image in Oliver
Twist’s later editions by making him less conspicuously, or at
least specifically, Jewish, and by introducing the “old Jewish man”
Riah into Our Mutual Friend, who was “a gentle Jew” and
contrasted totally with “his Christian master” Fledgeby, who was
“the meanest cur existing.”
Twenty-six years separate Oliver Twist (1838) from
Our Mutual Friend (1864), and in the meantime Parliament
had repealed the requirement by which MPs had to take an oath of
allegiance to the sovereign “on the true faith of a Christian.” By
the 1830s, Jews were the only religion still discriminated against,
as the Nonconformists and Roman Catholics had been allowed to enter
Parliament in 1828 and 1829 respectively. When the great Whig
historian Thomas Babington (later Lord) Macaulay was elected in
1830, it was on the repeal of Jewish civil disabilities that he
decided to dedicate his maiden speech, traditionally a signal of
what freshmen MPs consider most important to them. At that time
there were only between 30,000 and 40,000 Jews in Britain, as
opposed to about a quarter of a million today.
In that debate, the Tory MP for Oxford, Robert Inglis, used the
ancient argument—which often resurfaces in anti-Semitic literature
today—that Jews were mere aliens who felt no true allegiance to the
country of their residence, but only to their race. “The Jews of
London had more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna
than with the Christians among whom they resided,” Inglis claimed,
“to this day they called themselves a people, and they might avail
themselves of their political influence for objects connected with
their own aggrandizement.” (Compare Inglis’ remark to that of the
Labour MP Paul Flynn, who on December 1, 2011, said of Britain’s
first Jewish ambassador to Israel, the fourth-generation Briton
Matthew Gould, “What Britain needs in Israel is someone with roots
in the U.K,” who “can’t be accused of having Jewish loyalty.”)
Of course the same despicable argument that Inglis and Flynn
made had been used unsuccessfully to try to prevent Catholics being
permitted to sit in Parliament—that “the papists” owed their
ultimate allegiance to the Pope rather than the Crown—and it gave
the 30-year-old Macaulay his opportunity to draw comparisons
between the Catholic Emancipation bill and the measure known as
“the Jew Bill.” Despite Macaulay’s eloquence—and Himmelfarb quotes
some of his scintillating speech—the Bill failed by 228 to 165, and
it was not until 1858 that Lionel de Rothschild finally took the
seat in the House of Commons for which he had been twice elected
but from which he had hitherto been barred. Gladstone, Disraeli,
William Hazlitt, and some others come out well from the story, but
several others one might have expected to be enlightened, such as
Lord Shaftesbury and John Stuart Mill, either vacillated or were
hardly to be seen in the struggle. Himmelfarb argues that
“Philosemitism has a rich history in English society, politics,
diplomacy and literature,” yet it was not rich enough to allow Jews
into Parliament before 1858, although of course that was five years
earlier than the United States abolished slavery.
Himmelfarb also reminds us that England was the first country to
instigate a blood libel legal case—that Christian children’s blood
was used in Jewish religious rituals—in 1144, and the first to
expel the Jews, in 1290, two centuries before even the Spanish
Inquisition. (As Winston Churchill pointed out, “Exception was made
for certain physicians without whose skill persons of consequence
might have lacked due attention.”) Thenceforth it was not until
Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the mid-17th century that Jews were
allowed to return. (Or as Churchill put it equally succinctly: “It
was left to a Calvinist dictator to remove the ban which a Catholic
king had imposed.”)
It is worth notice that the title of Himmelfarb’s book is
specific to England, rather than the whole of the British Isles.
Despite there only being 4,000 Jews, the spring of 1904 saw a
pogrom in the Irish town of Limerick against the few who had
managed to emigrate there from eastern Europe. Whipped up by the
vilely anti-Semitic preachings of the Catholic priest Fr. John
Creagh, Limerick Catholics started a boycott of Jewish businesses
and soon Jews were being hissed at by crowds in the street, and mud
thrown at them. They were then physically attacked, with cries of
“Down with the Jews!” “Death to the Jews!” and “We must hunt them
out!” When Rabbi Levin of Limerick begged the local Catholic bishop
to denounce what was happening, no public statement was made. Soon
Jews in Limerick were being refused service in shops and by April
twenty of the city’s 35 Jewish families had been put out of
business. Assaults on them continued, and the boycott went on into
the autumn. By 1905, not surprisingly, virtually the entire Jewish
community of the city had left. Small wonder that Ireland has won
only one Nobel Prize for Physics, and none at all for Chemistry,
Economics, or Medicine.
“We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation,” wrote the
noted philosemite Winston Churchill in an article entitled “Zionism
versus Bolshevism,” “a system of ethics which, even if it were
entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the
most precious possession of Mankind, worth in fact the fruits of
all other wisdom and learning put together.” A Victorian duke’s
grandson born in a palace might easily have adopted the thoughtless
“social” or “club” anti-Semitism of so many of his class, age, and
background, but the fact that Winston Churchill—whom many see as
the greatest Englishman since Cromwell—did not is just yet another
testament to his greatness. If only there had been more like
him.
