The Mosaic Republic in Augustan Politics: John Toland's "Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews" (original) (raw)
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In this essay, I merge three histories which have not yet met. First is the Marxist interpretation of the English Civil War, in which the war and the Commonwealth are the genesis story of English capitalism: the Protestant bourgeoisie's first successful conquest of state power, made possible only by the mobilization of the uprooted rural poor-landless soldiers and millenarians, the forebears of the English working class. I take and modify a second historiographical thread from the political historian and Hebraist Eric Nelson. Nelson argues that radical Protestants' encounter with Jewish midrash and Jewish texts during the English Civil War allowed factions of the English rebels to imagine a republic in Israel's ancient past. This "Hebrew republic," ruled by God, became the English rebels' ideal form of human government-their template for a post-revolutionary state. A Commonwealth would rise: a republic of merchants, the pious, and (for the most radical of the English rebels) the poor. The third and final historiographical thread is the story of Manasseh ben Israel and the Jews' readmission to England-a negotiated process that began in the revolutionary spring of 1642 to 1648, but which was only effected in 1656, under Oliver Cromwell's post-revolutionary dictatorship. By this time, both the Jewish and English Protestant worlds were in the throes of the greatest millenarian fervor either had experienced in centuries. 1
The Evangelical Movement and the Jewish Emancipation
This article aims at defining the role played by the Evangelicals in England at the time of the struggle for Jewish political rights from 1827 to 1830. Can we consider the eschatology as a provider of emancipation? Introduction. The emancipation of the Jews in England has a particular aspect. By this we mean political emancipation only. The restrictions imposed on them were those that any non-Anglican citizen had to face. England, as a non-secular country, saw the Anglican religion as the constitutional foundation that bound Parliament to the Crown. This correlation between political law and religion was the result of the particular history of the British Isles. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 under Henry VIII marked a break with the Papacy to make the monarch the Head of the Church of England. Thus, Anglicanism became the de facto established religion. And, if we exclude the interlude of the reign of Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII, Protestantism would eventually take hold. The first legislation to reaffirm Anglicanism as the state church was the Corporation Act of 1661. This prohibited anyone who did not follow the Church of England rite from taking up employment in the civil service. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, in order to prevent the return of a Catholic monarch, led Parliament to define Anglicanism as a sine qua non for political rights. This restriction affected Catholics and other non-Anglicans as well as the Sephardic Jewish community. In fact, British citizens of Hebrew origin were not, unlike their continental co-religionists, discriminated against for what they were but for what they were not. This is an important fact. Emancipation in England was therefore not the same as on the continent. The idea of economic equality and rights was not in question, the question was whether Jews could enter Parliament as elected representatives. The debate was brought to England by the debate in France, then the bridgehead of the emancipatory movement. The laws passed by the revolutionaries and Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrin were taken as an example by MPs in favour of political rights for English Jews. Emancipation, in the light of the work of British historians, seems at first sight to be a well-treated fact. The first reference to be given regarding the historicity of Jewish emancipation is Henriques. In his 1907 1 article he argues that the obstacle of Jews to political emancipation lay in the legal status of the right to nationality. Also, he pointed out that the oaths taken by any pretender to an official position prevented Jews from accessing these offices. Indeed, the last words "On the True Christian Faith" were real obstacles. Therefore : [...] after the year 1701, no conscientious Jew could hold any of the offices for which taking the oath of abjuration was a necessary qualification 2 .
Britain and the world, 2009
The treatment of Jews in any modern society has often been likened to a litmus test or lighting rod for the general health of that society, and, in any society with a claim to being democratic, to the general health of that democracy. While in many ways the treatment of Jews in modern British society has plainly been of minor and peripheral importance, it arguably assumes greater significance for the light it sheds on other aspects of British society. As academic sub-disciplines within the traditional mainstream of modern British history have developed in recent decades and become legitimate fields of study, Anglo-Jewish history has emerged as an independent unit, with its own debates and points of dispute. Long the domain of well-informed amateur historians who were mainly associated with the Jewish Historical Society of England (JHSE)-a body founded as long ago as 1893, with an unbroken record of publication for over a century-recent decades have seen many academic historians give the field a professional mantle. The most important historian of Anglo-Jewry before the present generation was Cecil Roth (1899-1970), who was both a doyen of the JHSE and University Reader in Post-Biblical Jewish Studies at Oxford. An amazingly prolific and erudite writer, his History of the Jews in England carried the story of Anglo-Jewry from Medieval times until 1858, the date of the so-called "Jewish Emancipation," when professing Jews elected to Parliament were finally allowed to swear the oath "so help me God," rather than "upon the true faith of a Christian," and thus take their seats. This date, during the Age of Reform, is widely seen as marking the full acceptance of the Jewish community into British civil society (although it should be noted that 1858 was also a year when a non-professing Jew became Chancellor of the Exchequer for the second time). Roth's highly Whiggish and optimistic work appeared in 1941, at the darkest moment of modern Jewish history, and was obviously meant to contrast the benign evolution of Anglo-Jewry with the catastrophe unfolding on the Continent. In general, Roth's Whiggish view held sway until the 1970s, when it was challenged by a range of younger historians, including Geoffrey Alderman, Davis Cesarani, Bill Fishman, Tony Kushner, and others, who have seen much more antisemitism in British society than Roth, and also widened the study of Anglo-Jewry to include groups beyond the traditional "Cousinhood" elites. This school has itself been challenged by a counter-group, including this reviewer, who point to the minimal levels of anti-semitism in Britain compared with Europe, and to the fact British Scholar 171
The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom
Seventeenth-century political and juridical thinkers mined the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature for ideas, examples and full-fledged political systems, aiming to apply them to modern Europe. This essay examines several political Hebraists of the seventeenth century, notably Petrus Cuneaus, John Selden, James Harrington and his fellow English republicans, and John Locke. The "Hebrew republic," the polity idealized by early modern Hebraists, is significant above all as a political and juridical model. The essay discerns three clusters of ideas reaped exclusively, or mainly, from Hebraic sources, and interwoven into modern political thought: (1)The importance of the rule of law within fixed borders: a concept of international borders underpinning a novel, natural-law-based theory of the state, law, and rights; (2) the idea of a federal republic, transformed from the tribal Israelite society to Dutch political thinking; and (3) the moral economy of republican social justice. Finally, the essay explains why jurists and political thinkers ceased to read the Bible as a historical and political text in the eighteenth century, and why the earlier legacy of political Hebraism could become valuable again today, both historically and politically.