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Rh communities often founded by Spanish refugees. Such incidents as the rise of (q.v.) to high position under the Turkish government as duke of Naxos mark the coming change. The reformation as such had no favourable influence on Jewish fortunes in Christian Europe, though the championship of the cause of toleration by Reuchlin had considerable value. But the age of the (q.v.) had set in too firmly for immediate amelioration to be possible. It is to Holland and to the 17th century that we must turn for the first real steps towards Jewish emancipation.

47. Period of Emancipation.—The ghetto, which had prevailed more or less rigorously for a long period, was not formally prescribed by the papacy until the beginning of the 16th century. The same century was not ended before the prospect of liberty dawned on the Jews. Holland from the moment that it joined the union of Utrecht (1579) deliberately set its face against religious persecution (Jewish Encyclopedia, i. 537). Maranos, fleeing to the Netherlands, were welcomed; the immigrants were wealthy, enterprising and cultured. Many Jews, who had been compelled to conceal their faith, now came into the open. By the middle of the 17th century the Jews of Holland had become of such importance that Charles II. of England (then in exile) entered into negotiations with the Amsterdam Jews (1656). In that same year the Amsterdam community was faced by a serious problem in connexion with Spinoza. They brought themselves into notoriety by excommunicating the philosopher—an act of weak self-defence on the part of men who had themselves but recently been admitted to the country, and were timorous of the suspicion that they shared Spinoza’s then execrated views. It is more than a mere coincidence that this step was taken during the absence in England of one of the ablest and most notable of the Amsterdam rabbis. At the time, (q.v.) was in London, on a mission to Cromwell. The Jews had been expelled from England by Edward I., after a sojourn in the country of rather more than two centuries, during which they had been the licensed and oppressed money-lenders of the realm, and had—through the special exchequer of the Jews—been used by the sovereign as a means of extorting a revenue from his subjects. In the 17th century a considerable number of Jews had made a home in the English colonies, where from the first they enjoyed practically equal rights with the Christian settlers. Cromwell, upon the inconclusive termination of the conference summoned in 1655 at Whitehall to consider the Jewish question, tacitly assented to the return of the Jews to this country, and at the restoration his action was confirmed. The English Jews “gradually substituted for the personal protection of the crown, the sympathy and confidence of the nation” (L. Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Cromwell, p. lxxv.). The city of London was the first to be converted to the new attitude. “The wealth they brought into the country, and their fruitful commercial activity, especially in the colonial trade, soon revealed them as an indispensable element of the prosperity of the city. As early as 1668, Sir Josiah Child, the millionaire governor of the East India company, pleaded for their naturalization on the score of their commercial utility. For the same reason the city found itself compelled at first to connive at their illegal representation on ’Change, and then to violate its own rules by permitting them to act as brokers without previously taking up the freedom. At this period they controlled more of the foreign and colonial trade than all the other alien merchants in London put together. The momentum of their commercial enterprise and stalwart patriotism proved irresistible. From the exchange to the city council chamber, thence to the aldermanic court, and eventually to the mayoralty itself, were inevitable stages of an emancipation to which their large interests in the city and their high character entitled them. Finally the city of London—not only as the converted champion of religious liberty but as the convinced apologist of the Jews—sent Baron Lionel de Rothschild to knock at the door of the unconverted House of Commons as parliamentary representative of the first city in the world” (Wolf, loc. cit.).

The pioneers of this emancipation in Holland and England were Sephardic (or Spanish) Jews—descendants of the Spanish exiles. In the meantime the Ashkenazic (or German) Jews had been working out their own salvation. The chief effects of the change were not felt till the 18th century. In England emancipation was of democratic origin and concerned itself with practical questions. On the Continent, the movement was more aristocratic and theoretical; it was part of the intellectual renaissance which found its most striking expression in the principles of the French Revolution. Throughout Europe the 18th century was less an era of stagnation than of transition. The condition of the European Jews seems, on a superficial examination, abject enough. But, excluded though they were from most trades and occupations, confined to special quarters of the city, disabled from sharing most of the amenities of life, the Jews nevertheless were gradually making their escape from the ghetto and from the moral degeneration which it had caused. Some ghettos (as in Moravia) were actually not founded till the 18th century, but the careful observer can perceive clearly that at that period the ghetto was a doomed institution. In the “dark ages” Jews enjoyed neither rights nor privileges; in the 18th century they were still without rights but they had privileges. A grotesque feature of the time in Germany and Austria was the class of court Jews, such as the Oppenheims, the personal favourites of rulers and mostly their victims when their usefulness had ended. These men often rendered great services to their fellow-Jews, and one of the results was the growth in Jewish society of an aristocracy of wealth, where previously there had been an aristocracy of learning. Even more important was another privileged class—that of the Schutz-Jude (protected Jew). Where there were no rights, privileges had to be bought. While the court Jews were the favourites of kings, the protected Jews were the protégés of town councils. Corruption is the frequent concomitant of privilege, and thus the town councils often connived for a price at the presence in their midst of Jews whose admission was illegal. Many Jews found it possible to evade laws of domicile by residing in one place and trading in another. Nor could they be effectually excluded from the fairs, the great markets of the 18th century. The Sephardic Jews in all these respects occupied a superior position, and they merited the partiality shown to them. Their personal dignity and the vast range of their colonial enterprises were in striking contrast to the retail traffic of the Ashkenazim and their degenerate bearing and speech. Peddling had been forced on the latter by the action of the gilds which were still powerful in the 18th century on the Continent. Another cause may be sought in the Cossack assaults on the Jews at an earlier period. Crowds of wanderers were to be met on every road; Germany, Holland and Italy were full of Jews who, pack on shoulder, were seeking a precarious livelihood at a time when peddling was neither lucrative nor safe.

But underneath all this were signs of a great change. The 18th century has a goodly tale of Jewish artists in metal-work, makers of pottery, and (wherever the gilds permitted it) artisans and wholesale manufacturers of many important commodities. The last attempts at exclusion were irritating enough; but they differed from the earlier persecution. Such strange enactments as the Familianten-Gesetz, which prohibited more than one member of a family from marrying, broke up families by forcing the men to emigrate. In 1781 Dohm pointed to the fact that a Jewish father could seldom hope to enjoy the happiness of living with his children. In that very year, however, Joseph II. initiated in Austria a new era for the Jews. This Austrian reformation was so typical of other changes elsewhere, and so expressive of the previous disabilities of the Jews, that, even in this rapid summary, space must be spared for some of the details supplied by Graetz. “By this new departure (19th of October 1781) the Jews were permitted to learn handicrafts, arts and sciences, and with certain restrictions to devote themselves to agriculture. The doors of the universities and academies, hitherto closed to them, were thrown open. . . . An ordinance of November 2 enjoined that the Jews were everywhere considered fellow-men, and all excesses against them were