It is usual to regard this scene in the House of Commons as the culminating-point in the emancipation of English Jewry. In fact, this was not quite the case. The piece-meal removal of their grievances, after the failure of the first experiments, made symmetry impossible, and some disabilities still remained which affected Jews by reason of their faith. Indeed, the very nature of the compromise of 1858 was personal rather than general. The member for the City of London was admitted to take the oath in a form acceptable to him by a special resolution of the House of Commons, passed in the teeth of determined opposition on the part of the die-hard minority, which provided no precedent for any future occasion. When, however, in February 1859 Baron Lionel's brother, Mayer de Rothschild, was returned for Hythe at a by-election, not only was he empowered to take the oath in the fashion acceptable to him, but in addition it was resolved that henceforth any Jew duly elected might swear in the form then prescribed. A Resolution of the House remained in force only until the Prorogation, and would therefore have to be reintroduced at every succeeding session. The Resolution was, however, converted into a Standing Order by an Act of 1860 (23 & 24 Victoria, cap. 49). It was this which in fact set the seal on parliamentary emancipation in England, making the admission of Jews to the House of Commons a matter of right instead of privilege. The matter was finally consolidated by the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 (29 & 3o Victoria, cap. 19) which prescribed a new and simplified oath for both Houses, omitting the phrase which had held up Jewish emancipation for so many years. Up to this time the admission of a Jew to the House of Lords would have been dependent similarly on a special resolution, though refusal would have been difficult without personal affront to the sovereign. This was now no longer the case. In 1885, on the recommendation of Gladstone, who sixteen years before had been unable to overcome her objection to conferring the same honour on Baron Lionel de Rothschild, Queen Victoria raised his son Nathaniel to the peerage, and he took his seat in the Upper House in the normal fashion without difficulty. 1 Meanwhile the Promissory Oaths Act of 1871 (34 & 35 Victoria, cap. 48) repealed the section in the Relief Act of 1858 which excluded Jews from various offices of state, and did away with all the old forms of oaths and declarations laid down by former statutes. With the passage of this Bill into law Jews were placed at last on precisely the same footing as regards political rights as their Christian fellow subjects with one or two insignificant qualifications. 2 In the same year (1821) a Jewish member of Parliament, Sir George Jessel (more effective in politics than Baron Lionel de Rothschild, who after all the effort of entering the House of Commons is never recorded to have made a speech), was appointed Solicitor General, being the first Jew to become a Minister of the Crown. 3 By the time Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in Parliament the 20,000 to 30,000 Jews who had been in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century were increased in number to some 50,000. The economic basis of their existence had widened. It was no longer possible to specify any callings which were in the fullest sense characteristic of them, nor was there any basic economic differentiation between them and other sections of the urban middle classes. The improvement in communications and the change in the balance of population was indeed hastening the decline of some of the old provincial communities, founded in market towns in the reign of George III. Their place was taken by new ones in the growing industrial centres, such as Nottingham (1822), Leeds (1823), Glasgow (1826), and so on. A majority of the Anglo-Jewish community was by now native born—a fact that had not been without its bearing on the successful issue of the struggle for emancipation. There had of course been some immigration during the past generation, but owing to the progress of assimilation on the Continent it was of a very different type from that of the previous century, being largely composed of members of middle-class families (frequently commercial agents or technical experts) who needed only linguistic adjustment in order to acclimatize themselves in England. They had settled not only in the capital but also in the new manufacturing centres in the provinces, to the cultural as well as the economic life of which they brought in some cases a new impetus; and though some of them collaborated in the activities of the synagogue, a goodly proportion drifted insensibly in this tolerant climate into the religion or irreligion of the environment. In addition, there were a number of immigrants of humbler social status from the reservoir of traditional Jewish life in eastern Europe, for whom the process of acclimatization was less simple. These remained relatively few in number until the penultimate decade of the century. In 1881, however, there began in Russia (under the inspiration of German anti-Semitism of a more academic type) a savage outbreak of persecution, which was to remain unabated so long as the rule of the Czars continued. This led to a terror-stricken wave of emigration, on a scale (owing to the improvement in communications) unexampled hitherto in all Jewish history. Within a single generation something like 2,000,000 eastern European Jews sought new homes overseas. The overwhelming proportion settled in the United States. A perceptible eddy, however, reached Great Britain, as well as other portions of the Empire, superimposing on the native communities a completely different element, in masses so compact that they were able to maintain unimpaired their characteristic way of life, their institutions, even their dialect. Circumstances led them in the first instance to a great extent into the tailoring and allied industries, which for some time became almost as characteristic of them as peddling and dealing in old clothes had been of their co-religionists a century before. The tendency was not without its importance for the country as a whole: for the development of the industry and the consequent lowering of prices brought facilities within the reach of the working-man which initiated something in the nature of a revolution in social life. A majority of the new arrivals settled in London, whose Jewish population increased between 1883 and 1902 from 47,000 to 150,000; but Leeds, Manchester, and Glasgow also acquired communities which exceeded in number the entire Anglo-Jewry of a century before. Elsewhere in the country old synagogues were revitalized and new ones established, the area of settlement being increased beyond anything known in the past. The number of Jews in England, estimated in 1880 at 60,000, more than tripled by 1905. The Aliens Immigration Act of that year—a product of the agitation which had come to a head at the beginning of the century—stemmed the influx, which thereafter was on a much smaller scale. But, during the quarter-century over which it had continued, the face of Anglo-Jewry had been changed. 4 The alembic of English tolerance has operated by now on the newer arrivals as well. Their sons have taken part in English life, contributed to English achievement, striven for the England’s betterment, shed their blood in England’s wars. In this happy land they have attained a measure of freedom (and thereby collaboration) which has been the case in scarcely any other. That this has been possible is due in no slight measure to the process of Anglo-Jewish history—a gradual acceptance based on common sense rather than on doctrine, consolidating itself slowly but surely, and never outstripping public opinion. Hence it has been possible for the English Jews to exemplify how men can enter a society by methods other than by descent, and to absorb traditions which are not those of their physical ancestors. If their reaction to privilege had been to deserve it, it is because they have the good fortune to possess as their inheritance two noble histories. FootnotesEpilogue
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