1. Newman goes on to describe the further spectacular increase in the Jewish population to about 15,000-20,000 in London and a further 5,000-6,000 in the provinces by 1800. This growth of over 200% overshadows that (about 33%) of the general population of England and Wales (from about 5.5 million in 1715 to about 6 million around 1760 and nearly 9 million in 1790) and indicates continued, substantial immigration. [Return to main text.]
2. By its charter, issued in 1660, the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly of English trade along the West coast of Africa, with the principal objective being the search for gold. In 1663 a new charter was obtained, which mentioned also the trade in slaves. On Jews as suppliers of loans to the government and food and weapons to the army during the wars of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic period, see also Pollins, Economic History of the Jews in England, 54-55. [Return to main text.]
3. “Ship owning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not, as it was later to become, a specialised calling, occupying the owner’s time and capital to the exclusion of all else. It was in fact the part-time occupation of merchants [ . . . ] and it formed merely one of a diversity of interests.” (Woolf, .“Eighteenth-century Jewish London Shipowners,” 198.) An appendix to Woolf’s article (201-204) lists among major late eighteenth-century Jewish shipowners Isaac Aguilar, Samuel da Costa, Aaron Franks, Benjamin and Abraham Goldsmid, Jacob Mendes & Co, , Nathan Modigliani, and Francis, Joseph and Moses Salvador. Thus well-to-do, native-born Ashkenazim were among the shipowners of the time. Woolf’s appendix also shows Jewish shipowners heavily engaged in the Indian trade and frequently collaborating with the East India Company. [Return to main text.]
4. The value of attracting Jewish investors and merchants was recognized, among others, by the King and Senate of Sweden, when they invited Portuguese Jews to take up their abode in Sweden. It fell to the wealthy Jewish merchant Joseph Salvador, as parnas or president in 1746 of London’s Bevis Marks Synagogue, to write to Stockholm expressing thanks for the invitation while at the same time affirming that “the continued kindness of the English King and Parliament [to the Jews] did not allow them to leave the United Kingdom.” (Woolf, “Joseph Salvador” 105). [Return to main text.]
5. Charles II and James II both recognized that this was unfair and ceased to demand alien duties from endenized Jews. But in face of protests by native English merchants, William III reinstated the obligation to pay the full fees (Katz, Jews in the History of England, 242). [Return to main text.]
6. By the time the Tories repealed it in the following year, that 1709 act had apparently led to an influx of around 10,000 mostly very poor German immigrants (Katz, Jews in the History of England, 243; Perry, 18). [Return to main text.]
7. As David Katz puts it (Jews in the History of England, 245), “The Jew Bill itself was fairly innocuous, and made more so in its final form after certain changes and amendments had been introduced in the House of Lords.” It allowed for Jews who had been resident in Great Britain or Ireland for at least three years, without having been abroad for more than three months at any one time during this period, to be naturalised by Parliament “without receiving the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.” Two witnesses were required to testify to the candidate’s Judaism and converts to Judaism who could show that they had been converted for at least three years were also eligible to apply. A clause was inserted that for the first time specifically prohibited all Jews, including native-born Jews, from acquiring an advowson -- i.e. the right of certain individuals and institutions to present a candidate for induction into a vacant ecclesiastical benefice and thus exercising ecclesiastical patronage. [Return to main text.]
8. Jackson’s Oxford Journal, no. 20: 1, quoted Wolper, “Circumcision,” 33; Wolper, Pieces, iv., introducing the text of The Christian’s New Warning Piece: or, A Full and True Account of the Circumcision of Sir E.T. Bart. (London: W. Owen, 1753). [Return to main text.]
9. The chief proponent of this view was Thomas W. Perry (Public Opinion, 73-76). Perry’s view appears to be endorsed by the Brandeis University historian David Katz (The Jews in the History of England, 246: “Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to know what to make of this great public outcry. Unquestionably, it was primarily a Tory stick with which to beat the Whigs in a period notable for the lack of such distinctions of principle. Certainly the entire issue of the Jew Bill has provided those who look for a continuity of anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe with a battery of quotations with which to justify their case. But the storm passed over mid-eighteenth century England like a dark cloud and left little trace behind nor any lasting effect on Anglo-Jewish relations.” In similar vein Aubrey Newman, “Anglo-Jewry,” 1-10: “It must be pointed out that the agitation was not anti-Semitic in any usual sense of that term. Some references could perhaps be described as such, but the vast bulk is xenophobic rather than anything else” (7).[Return to main text.] .
10. In the view of the Israeli historian Jacob Katz, “the easy access of the propaganda and the nature of the arguments used during the campaign are telling testimonies to the image of the Jew prevailing in the public mind. It was the image of the popular Christian tradition, combining the theological tenets of the Jews; guilt in rejecting the Christian message and an aversion to the foreign tradesman whose greed and cunning remain unchecked” (“The Term ‘Jewish Emancipation’,” 29-30). Felsenstein Anti-Semitic Stereotpes and Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England also distanced themselves from Perry’s position. For an unusual account of opposing positions with respect to the 1753 bill as determined by whether facilitating Jewish settlement in England was seen as supporting or as undercutting Biblical prophecy, specifically that of the return of the Jews to Palestine, see N.I. Matar, “The Idea of the Restoration of the Jews” and Andrew Crome, “The 1753 ‘Jew Bill’ Controversy.” [Return to main text.] .
11. See Singer, “Great Britain or Judea Nova?”; P.G.M Dickson, Financial Revolution, pp. 32-34; the chapter on Samson Gideon in Sutherland, Politics and Finance, 387-413; and most recently the fine essay of Yuval-Naeh Avinoam, “The 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill.” [Return to main text.] .
12. See especially P.J. Marshall, “A Nation defined by Empire”; Dana Y. Rabin, “Internal Others: Jews, Gypsies, and Jacobites.” in her Britain and its Internal Others, 1750-1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 45-71. It is worth noting that in the second of the Federalist papers, John Jay emphasized the advantage to the new United States of Providence’s having “been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. . .” (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed02.asp) Accessed 24.6.2020. [Return to main text.] .
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Last modified 25 June 2020