262 Existing Disabilities (ft lie Jews in the British Empire. [MARCH, 



enemies of all creeds but their own idolatrous and sanguinary superstition. 

 In all Protestant countries all actual cruelties to the Jew may be said to 

 have ceased with the commencement of the Reformation ; and the example 

 of Protestantism has, for a century past, sheltered him from the old 

 violences of Popery. Yet, in the Popish countries he is still an object 

 of especial insult. His confinement in the Ghetto, at Rome, and his 

 compulsory attendance at the periodical sermons of the monks, whose 

 zeal is measured by the force of their animadversions on their unwilling 

 hearers, is a relique of their slavery, and an evidence of the spirit that 

 \vould lay waste its victims on the first burst of popular rage or priestly 

 fanaticism. On the part of Christianity, we wholly disclaim all right or 

 desire of forcing human consent by human evil. Christianity is common 

 sense elevated by divine obedience. It knows the folly of persecution, 

 and would, on that ground, disdain to use it. But it knows the crime, 

 and what it would refuse, as an abuse of reason, it abjures and abhors 

 as a direct breach of the first law of religion. 



It will be fully admitted, that the habits of the Jew have seldom 

 lessened the prejudices of society. His determined separation, his 

 peculiar ceremonial, his exclusive tenets, and his unequivocal assumption 

 of a religious superiority, which some consider as ignorance and some as 

 insult, have sternly prohibited him from entering within the social pale. 

 His occupations, generally connected with the lowest livelihood; his 

 avidity of trade, down to the most repulsive sources of gain ; that love 

 of money which has characterised him in every age of Europe, and has 

 seemed to supersede every love of the honours of literature, the arts, 

 and all those manly and graceful pursuits in which a high heart or 

 a vigorous mind naturally solicits distinction ; have nearly flung him 

 out of the reach of public feeling. But much of this character" must be 

 accounted for by the difficulties of his position. 



The legal disabilities which still beset the Jew, in the principal 

 countries of Europe, shut him out from the career of a more honourable 

 ambition. Trade, in some shape or other, has been left to him as his 

 only resource. In the early ages of England and the Continent, the 

 tyranny of the government would have instantly extinguished all his 

 property, had he ventured to place it in a less transferable shape than 

 commerce. The doors of the law and the legislature were closed against 

 him. Almost the whole range of professional life v/as closed against 

 him. Trade was his only resource, and unless he were content to perish 

 in the streets, he must be the thing that we have made him. It has 

 been idly asserted that usury is a part of his nature. Yet, in his own 

 land, the Jew was the least guilty of this vice, among mankind. While 

 usury was the common practice of all other nations, and the chief source 

 of misery, ending in tumults and revolutions, it was unknown in 

 Judea. Even to take interest of any kind of one of the community of 

 Israel, was a solemn prohibition of their law. Among all the nations bor- 

 dering on the Mediterranean, they were also the least commercial. They 

 saw the wealth of the East borne by their doors, yet they seem to have 

 felt no wish to share a traffic which has enriched in succession the chief 

 nations of Europe and Asia. They were in all their institutes and habits 

 an agricultural people. And, with the change of circumstances, they 

 would probably return to a change of habits so strongly urged by their 

 law, by their natural desire to throw off' the past imputation, and by the 

 original fondness of all mankind for that life of health, cheerfulness, and 



