Essay and speech on Jewish disabilitiesMacaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
Religion
Essay and speech on Jewish disabilities
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
Jews -- Great Britain
section of the state were the whole, and to censure the other sections
of the state for their want of patriotic spirit. If the Jews have not
felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them
like a stepmother. There is no feeling which more certainly develops
itself in the minds of men living under tolerably good government than
the feeling of patriotism. Since the beginning of the world, there
never was any nation, or any large portion of any nation, not cruelly
oppressed, which was wholly destitute of that feeling. To make it,
therefore, ground of accusation against a class of men, that they are
not patriotic, is the most vulgar legerdemain of sophistry. It is the
logic which the wolf employs against the lamb. It is to accuse the
mouth of the stream of poisoning the source.[10]
If the English Jews really felt a deadly hatred to England, if the
weekly prayer of their synagogues were that all the curses denounced
by Ezekiel on Tyre and Egypt might fall on London, if, in their
solemn feasts, they called down blessings on those who should dash
their children to pieces on the stones, still, we say, their hatred
to their countrymen would not be more intense than that which sects
of Christians have often borne to each other. But in fact the feeling
of the Jews is not such. It is precisely what, in the situation in
which they are placed, we should expect it to be. They are treated
far better than the French Protestants were treated in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, or than our Puritans were treated in the
time of Laud. They, therefore, have no rancour against the government
or against their countrymen. It will not be denied that they are far
better affected to the state than the followers of Coligni or Vane.[11]
But they are not so well treated as the dissenting sects of Christians
are now treated in England; and on this account, and, we firmly
believe, on this account alone, they have a more exclusive spirit. Till
we have carried the experiment farther, we are not entitled to conclude
that they cannot be made Englishmen altogether. The statesman who
treats them as aliens, and then abuses them for not entertaining all
the feelings of natives, is as unreasonable as the tyrant who punished
their fathers for not making bricks without straw.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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