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.

Lord Russell, now Foreign Secretary in Lord Aberdeen’s Conservative cabinet, passed another Jewish Disabilities Bill in 1853. This was steered through the Commons without issue, but Lord Shaftesbury had urged its rejection in the Lords, where it was voted down after a second reading. Russell tried to pass a bill modifying the Oath of Abjuration, but it also abolished the Catholic version of the oath. This provoked considerable opposition among members of the Commons and it was voted against by a majority of MPs. In 1856, during Lord Palmerston’s Whig ministry, the MP for Manchester introduced a bill proposing the abolition of the Oath of Abjuration, but this measure was rejected after a second reading in the Lords. In 1857, Palmerston and Rothschild were returned to Parliament, with a large Whig majority. Palmerston passed an oaths bill in the Commons with the aim of substituting the Oath of Abjuration for another. This time, the Catholic version of the oath was left intact. This passed the Commons, but was rejected by the High Tories. Again Baron Rothschild again vacated his seat but was subsequently re-elected to the Commons. Lord Russell introduced another oaths bill, but before the second reading could be completed, Lord Palmerston’s ministry had fallen and was replaced by Lord Derby’s Conservative ministry in 1858. The Lords read the bill, then removed the clause affecting Jews, an amendment that was promptly rejected by the Commons.

Eager to break the stalemate between Houses, a committee was established by the Commons, with Baron Rothschild, much to the disgust of the Lords, appointed as a member. The committee’s purpose was to provide reasoned objections to the Lords’ stance on Jewish civil and legal disabilities. This would be submitted to the Lords for consideration. The Lords would then appoint a committee to come up with reasons in favor of maintaining the status quo, then submit these to the Commons for examination. During the committee stage, the High Tories, after decades of intra-Parliamentary squabbling, finally cracked. Much to their abhorrence, the Tories found themselves drawing up a compromise bill out of political expediency, even though the majority were still against Jews in parliamentary office. This was then sent to the Commons.

On the third reading of the Jewish Disabilities Bill (1858), Tory MP Samuel Warren protested, describing the measure as a “wholly unprecedented course …  calculated to lower the Legislature in the estimation of the country.” Forcing the Tories to embrace a bill they opposed on Christian principles would hurt the Conservative party. If Jews were allowed in Parliament, it would lead to the national repudiation of Christianity.

“The Jew must, therefore, in the whole tone of his thoughts, and in the whole series of his principles,” said Warren, “be so at variance with the principles and tone of thought of a Christian community, that he cannot safely be trusted with the discretionary power of making laws for that Christian community.”

He objected to the elitist nature of the campaign for Jewish relief:

The admission of Jews into the Legislature is opposed to public opinion and the wishes of the people, which ought to be distinctly ascertained by means of a general election before taking a step so seriously affecting the constitution of the Legislature. … The Bill before the House is, in the above and other respects, without precedent in our legislation; opposed to the genius and spirit of the Constitution; offensive to the Jew; derogatory to the dignity of this House; provocative of disunion and collision between the two Houses; and violates equally the principles of both parties to this unhappy contest.[1]

With the passage of the Jewish Relief Act of 1858, the Tories were forced to shed an integral part of their English ethnic identity. This is doubtless why the contest between both houses was a protracted one. The bill gave each House the ability to decide which oath they would use. It did not expressly give Jews the right to sit in Parliament, but they would be able to sit in the Commons upon alteration of the oath. The Tories would see to it, in determining what oath they would use, that the seats in the Lords would be reserved for Christians, a state of affairs that continued until 1885.

One of the Benefits of the Jewish Emancipation (1849-1858). An old Jew shows his wife a sucking pig and says_ Dare mine dear, see vot I’ve pought you! tanks to de Paron Roast-child & de Pill.

Part V: The Destruction of English National Identity

In the History of the Jews in England, Jewish historian Cecil Roth wrote, with an air of triumph:

“On Monday, 26 July 1858, Baron de Rothschild at last took his seat in the House. Two hundred years after Cromwell’s death the work that he had begun reached its culmination, and an English Jew was for the first time recognized as an equal citizen of his native land.”[2]

The High Tories were the racial consciousness of the English nation, the last bulwark of the nation’s racial defenses against alien intruders. They were willing to fight tooth and nail for the preservation of England’s distinctive ethnic character. With the numbers and influence of the High Tories seriously diminished by late nineteenth century, who would stand for England?

The triumph of the Judeo-Liberal vision was possible for two reasons:

(a) The millenarian beliefs of evangelical Christians. Millenarian beliefs among English Puritans introduced a world-denying and ascetic spirit into the English culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These destructive tendencies exacerbated the Englishman’s weaknesses, especially his relative lack of ethnocentrism, his individualism, and his tendency to promiscuous altruism.

Christianity is not an intrinsically destructive force; from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, it functioned as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic identifier. On the other hand, its universalist tendencies could be exploited by hostile elites—Jews, Whigs, liberals etc.—to dissolve and replace English national identity with a raceless cosmopolitanism. For example, historians speculate that Cromwell had both economic and millenarian reasons for re-admitting the Jews in 1656, believing this would lead to mass conversion of Jewry, ushering in the Millennium. The Jew Bill of 1753 was interpreted within a similar eschatological framework of mass Jewish conversion and universal redemption. In the nineteenth century, many Christians believed it was their duty to fight for Jewish relief because it would usher in the Second Coming. The Anglican evangelical Robert Grant, who tirelessly agitated for the removal of Jewish disabilities in the Commons during the 1830s, was an advocate of pro-Jewish millenarianism.

Perhaps our solution to this paradox is found in Oswald Spengler, who wrote: “It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction.”

If the birth of Western civilization occurred in the late Middle Ages, as Spengler contended, then Faustian man inherited the Christianity of late antiquity and “made it a new religion,” one that reflected Faustian man’s affirmation of life and striving towards the infinite. Faustian man transformed an ascetic and syncretistic Middle Eastern cult into a militant faith that would alter the course of world history. The music, architecture and literature of the late medieval period, like the Scientific Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all sought to expand Faustian man’s consciousness.  Christianity, by accommodating itself to the Germanic warrior ethos, served as an ethnic marker that preserved English identity when faced with ethnic conquest and subversion by hostile invaders. In this Faustian regime, Europeans did not hesitate to drive out Jews and Saracens who threatened their survival as a race or the territorial integrity of their homeland. This warrior ethos permeated the medieval doctrines of the Christian church, i.e., the military orders, the code of chivalry, the rejection of infidels as sworn enemies of Christ, the glorification of the book of Revelation’s warrior Christ, the importance of jus ad bellum etc.

Faustian Christianity concealed a double-edged sword. The world-denying and universalistic dogmas of the old Magian religion, never completely submerged by ethnocultural Germanization, could be recovered and used to de-emphasize the religion’s significance as a Germanic ethnic marker. These dogmas, i.e. pacifism, universal love, the brotherhood of man, would be employed by hostile elites—Whigs, Jews, and liberals—to exploit European vulnerabilities. As a result, Europeans would no longer be willing to fight for what their ancestors had handed down to them. Courage, bravery, honor, glory, wealth—these were the values of Faustian Christianity, of Columbus, the conquistadors, the English settlers in America. The Magian-like Christianity that now dominates the Western World is a complete reversal of these values, the last gasp of a dying civilization.

(b) Whiggism, which evolved into modern liberalism. This political philosophy, in its earliest form, stressed the economic benefits of Jewish immigration. It assumed a Benthamite utilitarian cast as time wore on. Liberals who fought alongside the Jews to sabotage English identity argued that maximizing Jewish happiness would increase the happiness of the greatest number. Although Bentham himself was not an egalitarian, many of the Jews’ liberal champions were just as much concerned with liberty as they were with equality.

The diseases of liberalism and cosmopolitanism were already in existence by the mid-seventeenth century, albeit in an inchoate, nascent form. In the Whig-liberal narrative, the Jewish attack on English national identity was portrayed as the underdog’s struggle for legal and civil equality in an oppressive society. The liberalism of the nineteenth century allowed Jews to establish a permanent foothold within the host society, with the aid of those Englishmen who had a diminished sense of racial consciousness. The Jews and their liberal regressive allies had succeeded against their “oppressors,” but only at great cost to the survival of Western civilization, which had been infiltrated and weakened from within. The roots of modern Western degeneracy are found in the emergence of the more inclusive liberal world-views of the nineteenth century.

The Whiggish view of history—the belief in endless social progress—does not promote mutual co-operation in an ethnically heterogeneous living space, but inter-ethnic warfare. When two distinct ethnic groups with diametrically opposed interests are confined to a single geographical area, the racially healthy group will always take advantage of the racially unhealthy; if lack of good racial health is defined as widespread promiscuous altruism, i.e., Lockean individual rights, religious tolerance, universal suffrage, feminism etc., the group with the strongest ethnic identity will use these as weapons against the group being infiltrated and subverted. By exploiting its weaknesses, such as the European’s promiscuously altruistic attitude toward outgroups, the invading Jewish ethny maximizes its own survival at the expense of the host.

The attempt to do away with English ethnicity in the early modern period was led by a Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite, in collusion with Anglican evangelicals. By the late twentieth century, it would become so powerful that race-conscious whites would find their civilization being taken away from them and given to racial aliens. The attempt to encourage ethno-racial amalgamation between Jews and Englishmen was an attempt to redefine English national identity to accommodate Jewish ethnic interests. The result was inter-ethnic warfare, followed by subversion of English national identity from within. Once the Jewish influence had spread throughout the English body politic, English national identity would be further expanded to accommodate the peoples of the Third World, a development that will ultimately lead to the ethnic extinction of the English. The year 1948, the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush on English shores (see Andrew Joyce’s “The SS Empire Windrush: The Jewish Origins of Multicultural Britain”), was really the culmination of a series of events set in motion by Oliver Cromwell.

The parallel between Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite betrayal of the English public from 1753–1858 and Judeo-Liberal elite betrayal of the European public from 1948 to the present is striking. Cromwell invited Jewish foreigners to settle on English soil for economic reasons, just like the globalist elites, who invite Third-World immigrants to colonize Western countries so they can be economically exploited as a source of cheap labor. Jews were also re-admitted for millenarian reasons, with the Puritans believing that Jewish colonization of England was part of the divine plan, one that would usher in humanity’s universal redemption; in the same vein, Third World immigrants are imported by neoliberal globalists to recreate heaven on earth, similar to the New Jerusalem of the English Puritans.

There are other similarities. The Jew Bill was the result of Jewish meddling in English affairs at the highest levels of government, with the collusion of the Whig elite. Similar events occurred in the United States during the 1960s, where Jewish involvement in the demographic transformation of the country, in collusion with liberal elites, has been among the most decisive factors.[3] That Jews have always been a weapon of Western elites eager to advance their narrow economic and ideological goals is an inescapable conclusion. The difference, of course, is that national populist resistance to Judeo-Whig-Liberal elite power in 1753 was able to exploit the patriotic sentiments of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry to devastating effect, temporarily thwarting Jewish infiltration of English society.

Self-identified Jews pushing for dissolution of English national identity while maintaining their ethnic identity as Jews, would be a recurring leitmotiv in the history of Jews in Europe and the New World. This aspect of Jewish behavior would figure prominently in the twentieth century and would be a major factor in the undoing of Western civilization in the Anglosphere.

Whether the integrity of one’s racial identity can be preserved or not typically depends on the resolve of the elites, since a nation’s world-view or “ruling ideology” is ultimately a reflection of elite power. If the elites value the survival of the people they rule, they will preserve their distinct ethno-racial character; if they do not, they will undermine it by importing racial aliens. This was the case in early Victorian England; public opinion was molded by the millenarian evangelicalism and utilitarian liberalism of the Judeo-Liberal elite, placing the Lords at a strategic disadvantage because of the increased public pressure to resolve the intra-Parliamentary disputes in favor of the Jews and their allies. At some point in the late 1850s, resistance to Jewish interests became futile and High Toryism ceased to exist as a major force in English politics.

The victory of the Judeo-Liberal elite in 1858 spelled the death of English national identity. If the Jew could be an Englishman, anyone could be an Englishman. The effects of this decline have worsened considerably since Jewish “emancipation” and are now unstoppable, unless drastic measures are taken.

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Bibliography:

Alderman, Geoffrey. “Not Quite British: The Political Attitudes of Anglo-Jewry.” In The Politics of Race by Ivor Crewe (2015).

Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain: 1656 to 2000. Univ. of California Press, 2002.

Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Hibbert, Christopher. Wellington: A Personal History. HarperCollins Publishers, (2010).

Latimer, B. “Samuel Richardson and the ‘Jew Bill’ of 1753: A New Political Context for Sir Charles Grandison.” The Review of English Studies, 66 (275), 2015b, 520–539. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgu112

‌Panayi, Panikos. Germans in Britain since 1500. Hambledon Press, 1996.

Perry, Thomas Whipple. Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth Century England. Harvard University Press, 1962.

Rabin, Dana Y. “The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2006, pp. 157–171., doi:10.1353/ecs.2005.0067.

Roth, Cecil. A History of the Jews in England. Clarendon Press, 1964.

Shapiro, J.S. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

‌Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn and Arnold, Thomas. The life and correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. Two Volumes. London: T. Fellowes, 1858.

[1]     https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1858/jul/21/aejourned-debate

[2]     1964, pg. 266

[3] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002; orig.: (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).

The story of Jews in England begins with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Jews from Normandy, following in the footsteps of William the Conqueror, traveled to England to make their fortunes in a land that had always been, as far as they were concerned, terra borealis incognita. England was an ideal location for Jews; it was among the few places in Western Europe unaffected by the Crusading frenzy sweeping the continent, a state of affairs that lasted until the middle of the twelfth century  and often involved violence against Jews. Jewish immigration began as a trickle, but their numbers perceptibly increased with the establishment of permanent communities in metropolitan areas.  In medieval England, Jews influenced the English economy was far out of proportion to their small numbers. A growing Jewish population combined with their main occupation of money lending inevitably led to ethnic tensions with the Anglo-Saxon majority (see Andrew Joyce’s article on Jews in medieval England). The Jews practiced strange rites in an unknown tongue and deliberately segregated themselves from the general populace. This created an atmosphere of hostility, leading to occasional eruptions of sporadic anti-Jewish violence.

The Plantagenets, wishing to safeguard an important source of revenue, protected the Jews. The Jew was made a privileged foreigner, who answered to no one else but the king. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon peasant, the Jew had complete freedom of movement. As the king’s property, the royal sheriffs were obligated to ensure the Jew’s safety at all times and enforce collection of unpaid debts from gentile borrowers. Compared to the common people, Jews possessed great wealth and made enormous contributions to the Royal Exchequer. This mercenary relationship between English Crown and Jewry was not to last forever.

The Anglo-Saxon peasant saw the Jew as a predatory, money-grubbing foreigner. The Jew’s narrow- minded focus on the acquisition of wealth and power, regardless of cost, were always at the expense of the wider community. The church saw the Jews as a class of infidel moneylenders who actively resisted conversion to the Christian religion. The lesser barons also came to resent the Jews; they had to surrender land as collateral to Jewish financiers, otherwise they would not be able to cover their expenses while accompanying the king on his foreign military adventures. Many could not pay their loans back in full and became indebted to the Jews. Together, all three estates pressured Edward I into taking action. In 1275, the king enforced the ecclesiastical prohibition against usury; as a result, the Jews were banned from engaging in the practice on English soil. In 1286, Pope Honorius IV issued a bull to the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suffragans warning of the dangers of Jewish proselytism. In 1290, Edward, eager for a chance to display his Christian piety, ordered the expulsion of the Jews from England. They were not to return again until 1656, when they were invited back by Oliver Cromwell.

This medieval episode in English history is crucial to understanding Edmund Burke’s scathing denunciation of Richard Price’s 1789 speech on the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Jew as the quintessential moneylender, without national allegiance of any kind, was a popular stereotype that had arisen during the Middle Ages. This conception of Jewish character served as the historical template for Burke’s negative characterization of Jews as greed personified. Like most ethno-racial and sex stereotypes, it was highly accurate. According to Gavin I. Langmuir, who cannot be accused of being biased against Jews:

“Jews had not been known as moneylenders in antiquity, but starting in the twelfth century, they became stereotyped as usurers. Like the Christ-killer stereotype, the usurer stereotype, although obviously an exaggeration, had a solid basis in reality. While medieval Jews were not all moneylenders and also engaged in other kinds of conduct, from the twelfth century onward they were in fact disproportionately concentrated in lending money at interest.”1

Of significance for Burke was Price’s delivery of his pro-Jacobin speech in a Protestant Dissenter’s meeting-house, colloquially known as the Old Jewry, in a part of London historically known by the same name. This was the main road in London’s medieval ghetto, which had been home to the Jews since the time of William the Conqueror, up until their expulsion in 1290. The Great Synagogue of London was located in the Old Jewry, an indication of the ghetto’s importance in medieval Jewish ritual and commercial life. Read more

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was an incredibly prolific French novelist of the first half of the nineteenth century. A pioneer of realism, he wrote 85 novels in twenty years, many comprising parts of his multifaceted examination of French society, which, invoking Dante, he dubbed La Comédie Humaine—The Human Comedy. Through carefully observing every social actor, profession, institution, and condition of French life, Balzac aimed to analyze the forces underlying the economic and social changes wrought by an emerging capitalist society—a society he believed was excessively motivated by money at the expense of traditional values.

His most famous works include Eugenie Grandet (1833), Pere Goriot (1934), Lost Illusions (1837), and Cousin Bette (1846). In developing the novels that would comprise La Comédie Humaine, Balzac hit upon the (then revolutionary) idea of using recurring characters. He wrote with great attention to detail to depict and explain their lives, and strived to present them as real people with real triumphs and frequent failures. Never fully good nor fully evil — his characters are entirely human in their desires and their behaviors. Balzac’s attention to detail and unfiltered depiction of people in society had never been seen before in literary writing. In addition to his remarkable powers of observation and prodigious memory, he had an intuitive understanding of people and their motivations which, borrowing the term from Sir Walter Scott, he called “second sight.” The French poet Baudelaire, an ardent admirer of Balzac, noted how “All his characters are endowed with the same vital flame which was burning within himself.”[1]

After working for three years as a lawyer’s apprentice, the young Balzac turned his back on the profession, finding it inhumane and tedious in its working schedule. His experiences in the law did, however, provide the basis for many plotlines in his novels which often center on legal disputes, wills and contested legacies. Turning his attention to writing, his early attempts to forge a literary career proved unsuccessful, as did later attempts to achieve success as a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician. Despite experiencing dire poverty and constant rejection, Balzac continued to write, and his breakthrough came with The Chouans (1829), a novel set in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Its success encouraged him to devote himself wholeheartedly to a literary career. From this point, his life’s purpose was to achieve glory as the historian of his time, as the “secretary” of French society. In this endeavor he developed what many would regard as insane work habits.

Balzac’s energy was unbounded and his productivity astounding. His phenomenal work ethic was necessitated by a penchant for luxurious living—a tendency that constantly plunged him into debt, and led to his being hounded by creditors for most of his adult life. To evade them, he registered under pseudonyms and frequently changed his lodgings. While Balzac eventually earned decent money from his literature, his reckless spending always ensnared him in further debts: bills exist for his order of fifty-eight pairs of gloves at one time, and for similarly extravagant purchases from his fashionable tailor and jeweler in Paris. Balzac was famous for his bejeweled walking sticks, red leather upholstered library, busts of Napoleon (whom he loved), and other things of a luxurious and superfluous nature. In a letter from 1828, his publisher and friend Latouche wrote:

You haven’t changed at all. You pick out the [expensive] rue Cassini to live in and you are never there. Your heart clings to carpets, mahogany chests, sumptuously bound books, superfluous clothes and copper engravings. You chase through the whole of Paris in search of candelabra that will never shed their light on you, and yet you haven’t even got a few sous in your pockets that would enable you to visit a sick friend. Selling yourself to a carpet-maker for two years! You deserve to be put in Charenton lunatic asylum.[2] 

Read more