Great travellers, great traders, the Jews had spread out all over Europe long before the Roman occupation of their territory or Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem. On the whole, they prospered and mixed well with the local people. When these people were converted to Christianity no change seemed to appear at first towards the Jews. As centuries went by, however, animosity towards them, held responsible for Christ’s Crucifixion and death, grew to the point of their being expelled successively from England, France, Spain, and various parts of Germany.

How far is it legitimate for a director to correct Shakespeare’s antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice?

SO, begging a question or two, wrote the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale in a review of a recent London production of the play in which the Christians were portrayed as rabid Nazis. Almost fifty years after the Holocaust, it appears, it is still difficult for directors and critics alike to approach The Merchant without a feeling of unease. Current wisdom—or lingering guilt—insists that the play is, in a real and unacceptable sense, racist.

Once upon a time, probably in the first half of the seventeenth century, David Curiel, a prominent member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community, was attacked by a German robber. Although seriously wounded, Curiel managed to overcome his attacker with the help of his Christian neighbours. The robber was tried and sentenced. After his execution, the States of Holland sent Curiel a letter expressing their regret at the incident and inviting him to witness the medical lesson on the corpse of the robber in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University. This legend has been handed down in at least five different manuscripts, preserved in Jewish libraries. It was probably read at the feast of Purim, which, of course, commemorates an earlier attack on the Jews and the spectacular destruction of their enemy.

In 1675 there appeared in London a rather interesting, if somewhat neglected, work entitled The Present State of the Jews: (More particularly relating to those in Barbary.) Wherein is contained an exact Account of their Customs, Secular and Religious. One of its more enigmatic features (to which we shall return) was its frontispiece, which featured an illustration not of a Barbary Jew, but of a muscular American Indian holding a spear, to which was attached a banner proclaiming the book’s short title. Its author, Lancelot Addison, was described on the title-page as ‘one of his Majesties Chaplains in Ordinary’, having received that designation in 1671, shortly after returning from eight years in the western part of what was then called Barbary, as chaplain to the British garrison in Tangier. It was largely, although, as we shall see, not exclusively, on the basis of his experiences there between 1662 and 1670 that Addison later wrote his book on The Present State of the Jews, with which we will here be primarily concerned.

No One would accuse Martin Luther of being philo-Semitic. Even his first, so-called pro-Jewish pamphlet to the Jews is tentative in the extreme and conditional on their accepting Christianity in its purer Protestant form. But even he could not disguise his admiration for the Jews in two areas. The first was sheer survival.

The synagogue in Bevis Marks in the city of London, 1700-1, is the oldest in this country. The second is in Plymouth, in Catherine Street. It was built in 1762, and is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world. It is noteworthy for its original furnishings, which are mainly austere—the deal benches, and plain turned balusters for the enclosures, with the eight brass candle-sticks, now electrified, round the bimah. The exception is the ornately carved wooden ark, towering almost to the ceiling, with large urns on the entablature, which is supported by Corinthian columns. It is mortifying to the Hebrew congregation that its existence is mostly known not for its historic and architectural importance, but in connection with the defection of one of its ministers, Michael Solomon Alexander, in 1825. A little more than sixteen years later, Alexander was consecrated for the newly constituted Jerusalem bishopric, on 7 December 1841, in Lambeth Palace Chapel. Archbishop Howley was joined in the laying on of hands by Blomfield of London, Murray of Rochester, and Selwyn of New Zealand, who had been consecrated in the same chapel three weeks before.

In 1831 William Miller, a farmer from Low Hampton, New York, began to preach that the Second Advent would occur ‘about the year 1843’. From this rather inauspicious beginning the number of people who agreed with Miller’s prediction grew, so that by 1844 they probably numbered more than 50,000 according to some estimates. This phenomenon would be of little historical interest—except, perhaps, to historians studying nineteenth-century American religious history—had it not been for the fact that one legacy of Millerism is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has over six million members world-wide and can claim, for example, one of the largest educational systems run by a Protestant denomination.

In this brief paper I discuss the relation between Christianity and Jewish religious reform in early Victorian England. More specifically, I want to suggest that there was a close relation between the Evangelical critique of Judaism as a form of popery and the direction and meaning of religious reform within Anglo-Jewry. If, indeed, this was the case, then what follows has a significant bearing upon the way we interpret Jewish integration in nineteenth-century England.

There were roughly 50,000 Jews in England in 1850, two-thirds of whom lived in the capital. Synagogues, like other communal institutions, were dominated by a wealthy elite. Synagogue attendance was thin, and in 1851, on census Sabbath, only 10 per cent of London Jews were found in a metropolitan synagogue. Although nominally Orthodox, the general temper of religious observance within Anglo-Jewry was relaxed.

Between 1830 and 1858 fourteen separate attempts were made to remove the legal disabilities which prevented Jews from sitting in Parliament. The first bill was dismissed by the unreformed House of Commons, and the next twelve, from 1833 onwards, were rejected by the Lords after being passed by the Commons. It was only the fourteenth attempt, a carefully constructed compromise between leading members of both Houses, which finally was to prove acceptable. The struggle for parliamentary representation became the longest and most bitter battle which the Anglo-Jewish community had to wage with the Christian Establishment during the nineteenth century. After the election of Lionel Nathan Rothschild as Member of Parliament for the City of London in 1847, the campaign became one of constitutional urgency, and not merely of hypothetical significance. Rothschild was re-elected with an increased majority in 1849, and returned again in 1852 and twice in 1857. In 1851 he was joined in the shadows of Westminster by David Salomons, when Salomons won a seat at Greenwich. The electorate, even in places such as Greenwich, which lacked a significant Jewish population, had apparently delivered its own verdict on the suitability of Jews being admitted to the legislature.

Between 1830 and 1858 fourteen attempts were made to remove the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ from the oath required of new Members and thereby to allow Jews to gain admission to Parliament. After 1833, when a bill was passed in the Commons, all proposals for reform foundered on opposition in the Lords. Speaking against Jewish emancipation in the Upper House on 1 August 1833, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Howley, made it clear that the issue was not one on which the Church of England could remain indifferent. In contrast to other religions, he argued, Judaism stood ‘in a peculiar relation to Christianity’, for its very existence was ‘not simply a negative but a positive contradiction of Christianity’.

Nineteenth-Century Britain was a Christian country, in that its laws and institutions were based upon the Christian religion. Not to be a Christian was to be excluded from full citizenship, for Christianity was, in the eyes of the Common Law, ‘parcel of the laws of England’. Until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 Christianity was still for some purposes equated with Protestantism and, after this date, Jews and other ‘infidels’ continued unable to sit in Parliament or swear an oath as witnesses in courts of law. Conversely, those British Radicals of the nineteenth century who rejected the aristocratic politics of what they termed ‘Old Corruption’ frequently chose also to attack its religious base—Anglicanism or, in extreme cases, the entire Christian system under which they were required to live.

The rise and decline of organs in British synagogues from about 1850 to the present day is intrinsically linked to social, political, and religious developments. It therefore provides a fascinating focus for studying some of the complexities of change in Anglo-Jewry, the extent to which Victorian British Jews were affected by developments in Judaism elsewhere, and the adoption of, and reaction against, certain cultural phenomena perceived by Jews as Christian.

In 1982 Menachem Begin, then Israel’s Prime Minister, presented Jerry Falwell, an evangelist and leader of the fundamentalist group ‘the Moral Majority’, with a medal of the Jabotinsky Order, an organization associated with Begin’s Likud Party. Observers both of American religion and Middle East politics could not help but notice the friendship that had developed between the Israeli government and conservative evangelical elements within American Protestantism. The special interest this segment of American Protestantism had in the fate of the Jewish people, and their support for a national Jewish home in the Land of Israel was evident from the early beginnings of the fundamentalist movement and was derived from their interpretation of biblical prophecy regarding the end of history—in which they see a prominent role for the Jewish people.

British historians and others have been slow to recognize the tradition of immigration and ethnic, religious, and racial diversity that has marked the British experience in the modern era. The multi-cultural nature of British society today is harder to ignore, with black groups alone representing over 5 per cent of the total population. Yet the implications of such diversity both in the past and in the present have not been properly acknowledged by academics, politicians, or society as a whole. Coloured immigration, following that of the Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, has tended to be viewed only in problematic terms—such newcomers are seen to bring with them the potential for racial strife. Immigration control—from the turn of the century to the present day—has been consistently justified by politicians, commentators, and agitators on the grounds that it will improve race relations in this country. Of equal significance have been the limitations of those opposed to racism and the control of entry. Support of immigrants and minorities has been generally limited to attacks on racism. In the process, issues concerning pluralism and the need to accept diversity have been relatively ignored. Such tendencies within anti-racism reflect the domination of assimilationist assumptions with regard to minorities. This has been particularly the case with the left-liberal world which has been dominant in the campaign against racism in the twentieth century. It is thus not surprising that the Rushdie affair caused enormous shock in Britain amongst those who assumed that religion no longer mattered in this country. It was, in the words of Fay Weldon, ‘like a tidal wave’ removing what was left of liberal illusions concerning race relations.

Just before I sat down to write this paper, I heard the editor of the Serbian newspaper in Knin giving an interview to the BBC. ‘Remember’, he said over the crackling telephone line, ‘we Serbs had our Auschwitz too; it was called Jasenovac’ Jasenovac can legitimately be compared with Auschwitz in the annals of human horror. Nobody knows how many Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were hacked to pieces with butcher knives, beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts, worked to death on detachments, or died of fright, illness, and starvation in the Croatian death camp. A Serb friend of mine recalls being pulled by his mother from the rails of a ferry on the river Sava, near Jasenovac, in 1941 as he stared at the bits of human anatomy bobbing in the current. In the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome there is a file of photographs of the butcher knives and mallets used in the camp and elsewhere by the Ustase in their pogroms, as well as pictures of the mutilated victims. Those pictures have been indelibly burned on to the retina of my memory. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasants Party, was arrested and sent to Jasenovac on 15 October 1941, six months after the foundation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia. He described it in his memoirs:

One of the major factors which distinguish Judaism and Christianity from virtually all non-monotheistic religions is the concept of time. The Jews were alone among ancient peoples in worshipping the God of Time. In most ancient religions the pagan gods of space, embodied in sacred places and things, were worshipped. Nature was perceived pantheistically, as sacred, inhabited by spirits and devas. Gods of space were visualized in images: ‘Where there is no image, there is no god’, their worship necessarily involving idolatry. Generally anthropomorphic and often personifying man’s own instincts, such gods could inspire no clear moral code. Separation from them could be bridged only by physical means—by Dionysiac frenzy, by re-enactment of myths about them. Thus Cretans tore apart a living bull to re-enact Hera’s murder of Dionysos Zagreus; worshippers of Attis in Phrygia engaged in self-castration. Shamanisric trances, eating sacrifices, and temple prostitution were among other means of temporarily embodying the spatial gods.