Jewish emancipation

“ An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like a mist in the real vital air of society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes as valueless this his practical essence, and labours for its abolition, he would work himself free of his previous development, and labour for human emancipation generally, turning against the supreme practical expression of human self-alienation. ”

“ One charge brought against the Jew is that he is ambitious. He, however, only strives for superiority because equality is denied him. He is reproached for his fellow-feeling with Jews the wide world over, but it is rather his misfortune that all Jewish solidarity ceased with the first sweet word of emancipation ; that in order to make room for the sole sway of love of fatherland he tore the last rays of Jewish unity from his heart. ”

“ It is important to distinguish between these two races of Jews in discussing the question of Jewish emancipation at the time of the Revolution. For whilst the Sephardim had shown themselves good citizens and were therefore subject to no persecutions, the Ashkenazim by their extortionate usury and oppressions had made themselves detested by the people, so that rigorous laws were enforced to restrain their rapacity. The discussions that raged in the National Assembly on the subject of the Jewish question related therefore mainly to the Jews of Alsace. ”

“ A state which laid claim to a high grade of civilisation must necessarily have accepted some of the reforms of the great Revolution, such as representation of the people, freedom of the press, trial by jury, division of power, and so forth. Jewish emancipation became one of the indispensable signs of a highly civilised state, something like the piano which on no account must be missing in the drawing-room, though no single member of the family can play it. Thus in Eastern Europe Jewish emancipation came to pass not from heart com- pulsion, but merely in imitation of a fashion of the period ”

“ I must give utterance to the painful truth : the nations who have emancipated the Jews have been self-deceived as to their true sentiments. In order for the emancipa- tion to have been complete it must have been perfected in goodwill ere ever it found expression in law. But this was not the case. The opposite was the case. The history of Jewish emancipation is one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of European thought. It is not come of the perception that a race has been shamefully sinned against, and that it is high time to atone for a thousand years of injustice ”

“ Persecution of the Jew throughout the world had convinced him that Jews were likely to remain strangers wherever they dwelt, that emancipation was difficult to reconcile with Jewish national feeling, and that a Jewish Nationality was the only solution of the problem. ”

“ The rush for emancipation threatened not only to disrupt the unity of the Jewish people throughout the world, which had been maintained during the ages of suffering and persecution, but it also led large and important sections of Jewry to assimilation, that is, to complete absorption. ”

“ Substantial improvements in the political situation of the Jews the empire and the easier access to the liberal professions granted them, the abolition of the old order of military service and the suppression of the Kahal—these, joined to the expectation of an early civil emancipation, stirred the Jewish humanists profoundly. Startled out of their age-long dreams, the Jews with a modern education found themselves suddenly face to face with reality, and engaged in a struggle with the exigencies of modern life. ”

“ When we are turned out of the house which we ourselves built, we beg humbly for mercy, and when we fail to reach the heart of our oppressor we move on in search of another exile.
When an idle spectator on the road calls out to us: "You poor Jewish devils are certainly to be pitied," we are most deeply touched; and when a Jew is said to be an honor to his people, we are foolish enough to be proud of it. We have sunk so low that we become almost jubilant when, as in the West, a small fraction of our people is put on equal footing with non-Jews. ”

“ Jewish emancipation in England was, in short, the work of the English democracy—almost of the same democracy which in the thirteenth century had spued the Hebrews forth, when their kingly protectors had made their residence in the land conditional on their acting as the usurious instruments of the Royal Exchequer, and which in the seventeenth had resented their readmission under the influence of deeply rooted prejudices, inherited from that dark age. ”

“ Thus, at the time when the emancipation of the Jews had begun to be in Western Europe a concomitant of social progress, Russia set to work to recreate almost typically medieval conditions for a vaster Jewish population than had ever before been assembled in any European country. ”

“ The fate of universal Jewry ought not to be bound up with one single center. We should take into account the historic fact of a multiplicity of centers of which those that have the largest numbers and can boast of the most genuine development of a national Jewish life are entitled to the hegemony of the Jewish people. In those lands in which civil emancipation has been achieved the fight must go on for national emancipation, the recognition of the Jews as a nation which is entitled to a comprehensive communal and cultural autonomy. ”

“ The English nation does not endure that important changes should be im- posed upon it from without ; it develops them from within. In England Jewish emancipation is a reality it is not merely decreed, but it is experienced. Long before it had become law it was perfected in the con- science of the nation. Without doubt a great and thoughtful nation will not be diverted from its course whether good or evil by any intellectual tendency of the time, and so it comes to pass that in England there are still individual instances of anti-Semitism. ”

“ Till now, however, beloved friend, the barren wood preponderates in Occidental Judaism. Most of the German Jews, as soon as they come in contact with European civilization, begin to feel ashamed of their religion and descent. The Germans have so frequently and thoroughly demonstrated to us that our nationality is an obstacle to our "inner" emancipation, that we have finally come to believe it ourselves and, giving up our Jewish culture and denying our race, have made every effort to be deserving of the "blond" Germanism. ”

“ If there can be no question of the dependence of the emancipation movement on the Jews, the dependence of the Jews on the emancipatory movement is very real. What must be the Jew's attitude toward this movement? There can be only one answer to the question. The Jewish masses have realised the importance for them of the emancipatory movement not only because they are more enlightened, because they are more educated, because they are not addicted to alcoholism, and, hence, are superior to their neighbours in their understanding of their own needs ”

“ Such is the way of Jewish autoemancipation, in contradistinction from the civic emancipation, which had been bestowed by the dominant nationalities upon the Jews as an act of grace and which does not safeguard them against anti-Semitism and the humiliating position of second-rate citizens. The Jewish people can be restored, if, instead of many places of refuge scattered all over the globe, it will be concentrated in one politically guaranteed place of refuge. ”

“ The emancipation of the Jewish inhabitants of these provinces was a condition of the treaty, a condition which the conduct of the refugees since their settlement has fully justified. The Jewish immigrants rapidly multiplied, and their intelligence, industry, sobriety, and loyalty bore down prejudice, and won them friends. ”

“ Emancipation has totally changed the nature of the Jew, and made him another being. The Jew without any rights did not love the prescribed yellow Jewish badge on his coat, because it was an official invitation to the mob to commit brutalities, and justified them in anticipation. ”

“ Oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us. No nation on earth has survived such struggles and sufferings as we have gone through. Jew-baiting has merely stripped off our weaklings; the strong among us were invariably [77] true to their race when persecution broke out against them. This attitude was most clearly apparent in the period immediately following the emancipation of the Jews. Those Jews who were advanced intellectually and materially entirely lost the feeling of belonging to their race. ”

“ The marvellous increase of the Jewish people since their so-called 'emancipation' in the xixth century, is indeed a striking sign of the times. The statement of a recent writer in the Jewish Chronicle that at the commencement of the xvith century there could scarcely have been more than a million Jews left in the entire world after the untold sufferings, dispersions and massacres which they had to endure in the dark and middle ages—is probably true. ”

“ Another literary salon was at the same time opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice; for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue, drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must always be some that is rotten. ”

“ Thus was established the possibility of a gradual emancipation of the Jews, foreshadowed in the communal law of 1864, which granted the right of naturalization to certain classes of native Roumanian Jews. Those who had passed through college or had a recognized foreign degree, or who had founded a factory in the land employing at least fifty workmen were among the favored classes. ”

“ But the emancipation of the Jews in western European countries, releasing them from isolation, bringing them into intimate contact with their non-Jewish neighbors, has completely transformed them. Racial traits are not to be obliterated by a change of milieu during a comparatively short period of fifty or one hundred years, nor do they show such wide limits of variation as is displayed by the Jews in different countries. ”

“ In human psychology, then, we find the roots of the prejudice against the Jewish nation; but there are other factors not less important which render impossible the fusion or equalization of the Jews with the other peoples to be considered.
No people, generally speaking, likes foreigners. Ethnologically, this cannot be brought as a charge against any people. ”

“ Let us understand that the prosperity and power of Russia are inseparable from the well-being and the liberty of all the nationalities which constitute its vast Empire. Let us understand this truth, act according to our intelligence and our conscience, and we may be certain that the ultimate disappearance of persecutions against the Jews and their complete emancipation will form one of the conditions of a truly constructive imperial régime. ”

“ The Jews wish to have a State, and they shall have one.
We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own home.
The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. ”

“ The equal rights of the Jew before the law cannot be withdrawn where they have once been conceded; for the first attempt at withdrawal would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of revolutionary parties. ”

“ Our enlightened Jews, however, possess this strong belief and vigorous hope no more. What good is emancipation to them? Of what avail is it that here and there a Jew rises to high office, when to the name "Jew" there is attached a stigma which every obscure journalist, every stupid fellow, can safely turn to account? ”

“ To the autocracy and the bureaucracy there was the added fear from their intellectual superiority and their zeal for education of their playing a powerful part among the liberal forces seeking political freedom. Indeed, the Jews, whose economic and cultural activities and interests bound them closely to Western Europe and were in themselves modernizing and liberalizing influences, growing all the stronger through the greater freedom offered them during the liberal epoch, excited the deep repugnance of the feudal forces now directing the destinies of the state. ”

“ In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. ”

“ As long as the Jews were self-respecting and self-governing, they and their government and their religion had been respected and left alone. As soon as their leaders began to riot and quarrel among themselves the fate of the bundle of sticks fell upon the people. ”

“ Twenty centuries of a terrible oppression has made of the Jews in Europe an element of no small importance in all the struggles for popular liberties, but throughout it all they have always remained a relatively conservative force. ”