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Part IV The Collapse of the Anti-Jewish Party, 1847–1858

THE AGITATION FOR JEWISH “EMANCIPATION” WOULD NOT BEGIN AGAIN IN EARNEST UNTIL THE WHIG MINISTRY OF LORD RUSSELL. There was no law against Jews taking up seats in Parliament; rather, they were effectively barred from taking office because of a technicality. In 1847, Lionel de Rothschild, Nathan’s son, was elected to the Commons. Unable to swear the Oath of Abjuration because of the words “upon the true faith of a Christian,” he could not take his seat. A Jewish Disabilities Removal Bill was again sent through the Commons in 1848.

This provoked significant opposition among High Tories because it placed Jews on an equal footing with Roman Catholics. It was passed in the Commons, but rejected in the Lords. Following the Whig failure to get the bill passed through the Lords, Rothschild vacated his seat. He was re-elected in 1850. In consequence, the Whigs introduced into the House of Commons an Oath of Abjuration Bill, which would allow Rothschild to swear a modified oath and take his seat. Although it was passed in the Commons, it was ultimately rejected by the Lords in 1851.

The Jewish Campaign Against Parliamentary Anti-Judaism, 1829–1836

The movement for Jewish “emancipation” in nineteenth-century England was spearheaded by Jews and their Whig or Liberal allies, while the opposition was led by the High Tories:

The High Tory majority in the House of Lords had acted as a barrier to the advancement of Jewish ‘emancipation’ —-and some of the arguments

put forward against the Jews, both in and out of Parliament, reflected the traditional Tory view that Church and State were part of an inseparable entity, in the promotion of which Jews ought to play no part. (Alderman, 2015)

In practice, Anglo-Jewry had more freedoms than their compatriots in central Europe, but in late-Georgian England, the laws on the books indicated that they were less free. Cecil Roth writes:

The entire body of medieval legislation which reduced the Jew to the position of a yellow-badged pariah, without rights and without security other than by the goodwill of the sovereign, remained on the statute book, though remembered only by antiquarians. As late as 1818 it was possible to maintain in the courts Lord Coke’s doctrine that the Jews were in law perpetual enemies, ‘for between them, as with the devils, whose subjects they are, and the Christian there can be no peace.’

Despite his freedoms vis-à-vis Ashkenazim of Central Europe, in the English society of the nineteenth century, politically and professionally, the Jew was still excluded from the mainstream:

Public life was, in law, entirely barred. Jews were excluded from any office under the Crown, any part in civic government, or any employment however modest in connexion with the administration of justice or even education, by the Test and Corporation Acts. —These made it obligatory on all persons seeking such appointment to take the Sacrament in accordance with the rites of the Church of England. —Naturally these disqualifications included the right to membership of Parliament, for which the statutory oaths in the statutory form were a necessary preliminary. For the same reason the universities were closed, and, as a consequence of this, various professions.

Henry Pelham (1694–1754), Whig Prime Minister who introduced the Jew Bill in Parliament in 1753

Part I: The English Common Law Basis of Tory Anti-Judaism

A legal case involving Robert Calvin, although seemingly unrelated, would play a key role in shaping attitudes and beliefs about Jews and Jewishness until the mid-nineteenth century. The plaintiff was born in Edinburgh, two years after the Union of the Crowns in 1603.  Some land was purchased on his behalf, to test whether his Scottish parentage was an impediment to ownership of English real property. However, it was promptly confiscated because, it was claimed, his birth had occurred outside the “ligeance” or dominion of the English Crown. This meant that Calvin, from an international perspective, was an alien. In 1608, the Lord Chancellor and justices of the Exchequer Chamber ruled in favour of the plaintiff, reasoning that since Scotland and England were ruled by the same monarchy, Calvin’s birth had actually occurred within the ligeance of King James I, making him a full subject with the same rights as an Englishman. The court concluded that he had been wrongfully dispossessed of the land.

The Elizabethan jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) used Calvin’s case to define the proper legal relationship between infidels and Christians:

All infidels are in law perpetui inimici, perpetual enemies (for the law presumes not that they will be converted, that being remota potentia, a remote possibility) for between them, as with the devils, whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is perpetual hostility, and can be no peace.

Since Jews were infidels, they were “perpetual enemies” subject to a plethora of civil and legal disabilities. In the First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628), Coke wrote: “If the witness be an infidel, or infamous, or of non-sane memory, or not of discretion, or a party interested, or the like, he can be no good witness.” This meant that Jews, because they were infidels, were not allowed to bear witness or testify in a court of law, even in cases of assault, robbery and murder. As far as English jurisprudence was concerned, the Jew was a legal non-entity.

Because Jews were perpetual enemies, certain interactions between Christians and Jews were punishable by death.  In the Institutes, Coke “found that by the ancient laws of England, that if any Christian man did marry with a woman that was a Jew, or a Christian woman that married with a Jew, it was a felony, and the party so offending should be burnt alive.”