The Jew Bill of 1753

Here’s another thought provoking excerpt from Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789This excerpt is about the failure of a Jewish naturalization bill in Britain in 1753:

“Public measures at the middle of the century afford a variety of examples of the bias against change. In 1751, Parliament had received a bill for naturalizing foreign Protestants; it reached a committee before protests from the City of London and elsewhere persuaded Henry Pelham, first Lord of the Treasury, to abandon it. Two years later a similar effort was made on behalf of Jews. This “Jew Bill” earned an incredible notoriety despite its limited objectives. Its central provisions provided that Jews might be naturalized by private acts from which the words “on the true faith of a Christian” had been omitted from the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, which were still required. A similar statute had been accepted in the American colonies without opposition. The English bill slipped through an apathetic Parliament only to be repealed the next year after an immense public outcry. A careful Pelham tried to explain that only wealthy Jews would be able to afford a private bill and that the capital investments by this minority would add to public revenue. These restrained and reasonable arguments made no headway against ingrained prejudice and religious conservatism.”

So, Jewish naturalization failed in England in 1753 due to mob action in London, where the Radical Whigs were still confined to the dissenting fringe, but had been accepted in the American colonies “without opposition.” Jewish naturalization in England had been a Radical Whig project. Interesting.

Note: The Jews were expelled from England by King Edward I (Longshanks) in 1290. They were let back into England by Oliver Cromwell in 1656 during the English Civil War when England briefly flirted with republicanism.

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21 Comments

  1. Mob action: culture in action. These are free men protecting their society in spite of government. Get government out of the way and let nature take care of herself.

  2. Cromwell didn’t let the Jews in because of Republicanism. First, he accepted a massive bribe from the Jews. He accepted Dutch Amsterdam Jews for an excellent reason.
    17th century history is the history of Dutch and English naval warfare over colonies.
    The Jews who came to England were Dutch Jews and promised that they would use their connections in the Netherlands to spy on the Dutch. OF course they also spied on the English and sent information back to the Netherlands. Dutch Jews did the same thing, they sent Dutch information to the English.

    The Dutch finally won when William of Orange and his English conspirators invaded with 80,000 soldiers and sailors and sent James Stuart into exile. A year later the Amsterdam Jews established the usurious Bank of England.

    Cromwell benefited personally from the bribe money and I suppose the English navy benefitted from the Jewish spies in Amsterdam who sent information to the newly arrived English Jews.

  3. No doubt, Survivor, that they play both sides of the fence and the ends against the middle. Loyal to none but themselves..

  4. Please, Cromwell granted the Jews no political rights or political standing in England. Your article the “The Jew Bill of 1753” makes that perfectly clear. Cromwell had been dead for almost 100 years when the “Jew Bill” was proposed.

    Don’t forget had Cromwell had pledge no Roman Catholic restoration in England, and he was the most serious enemy of the infallible Pope of Rome.

  5. The interesting aspect here is that the Brits did not want naturalization. Apart from some apathetic MP’s and the Lords. The Colonists on the other hand accepted the naturalization of Jews. This is quite a fascinating cultural divide. Small in appearance but clearly a sign of divergence to come. It’s well publicized that Washington had a huge loan to pay the continentals from some Solomon type lender when he moved on Yorktown. Without that loan the continentals would not have fought.

    It’s also well known that Royal Navy Admirals like Rodney were anti-Semites. I understand that Rodney was sued in London for attacking and expelling Jewish gun runners in the Carribean.

    I didn’t hear about Jewish emancipation in that bill in any domestic history courses back in the day’s of my schooling. Emancipation was discussed in the Victorian period though. The Gordon Riots were included. So there you go: America. What is it?

  6. Jews were expelled by Longshanks in 1290 because the House of Commons, meeting for the first time that year, demanded this action as a quid-pro-quo for the taxes Longshanks requested to wage war against France.

    Jews re-entered the Anglo-Saxon world in 1640, in both Barbados and London, with the tacit consent of Charles I. Jewish experience in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the management of Brazilian sugar plantations appealed to the greed of the elites.

    Cromwell merely gave legal standing to an already existing situation.

    Charles II confirmed Cromwell’s action and gave a privileged charter to the disproportionately Jewish Royal Africa Company.

    The only mainland colonial towns which, like Jamaica and Barbados, had a significant Jewish population in 1750 were Charleston, Savannah, Newport and New York – all because of their involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The delegates from the first 3 of these towns were the ones who successfully insisted that Jefferson remove his denunciation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the Declaration of Independence.

    (Ah, those Charleston Jews! Fresh off the boat from Morocco they found the Charleston Mercury to set American against American. The loudest fire-eaters before the war, the biggest cowards during the war, and the most shameless scawllywags after the war!)

    The London mob, which prevented the Jewish naturalization act, was a well known Whig stronghold, England’s most enthusiastic burners of Guy Fawke’s effigy.

    The Tories gave Meyer Rosthchild his first big step towards vast wealth with their treaty to hire Hessian mercenaries for use against the Americans.

    The Whigs consistently promoted friendship with kindred peoples such as the Dutch, Americans, Russians and Afrikaners. The Tories joined with the French to wage war against the Dutch (partly at the instigation of the Royal Africa company, and to the delight of anti-Orangist Jews in the Netherlands such as Spinola), armed the savages to wage merciless war against the American frontiersmen, shamelessly allied with the Ottomans against Russia at the behest of D’Israeli’s ethnic preferences, and attacked the Afrikaners at the behest of gold speculators and diamond interests.

    Indeed, the Tories refused to pay the veterans of Navarino! Only after the Whigs gained control of Parliament after the Reform Bill were these heroes given what they’d more than earned driving the Turks out of Greece.

    The Whigs expanded the Anglo-Saxon volkstat by promoting the colonization of North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and by defending the colonists against their enemies, the French, Spanish, Indians, Maoris and Xhosa. The Tories turned the Anglo-Saxon volkstat into a multicultural empire by conquering India and proclaiming the Queen of England the Empress thereof. The seeds of Londonistan were sown the day Victoria succumbed to the sly flattery of the Levantine adventurer, and placed the accursed crown of the Mughals on her brow.

    I am, always have been, and always will be proud of my American identity, and every aspect thereof: our Nordic race, our fine dialect of the English language, our Protestant religion, our Whig political tradition, and our frontier legacy of the relative egalitarianism (something very different from the utopian absolute egalitarianism of leftist rhetoric).

    As to monarchy versus republicanism:
    The Athenian republic drove the Persians out of Europe; King Alexander forced the Macedonians to adopt wretched, groveling Persian customs.
    The Roman republic drove the Carthaginians out of Europe; Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to the entire population of North Africa and the Levant.
    The Pisan republic drove the Saracens out of Corsica and Sardinia, and helped drive them out of Sicily, the Balearics and various coastal enclaves; the noblemen of the 4th crusade destroyed the Byzantine Empire, opening the way for the Turkish invasion of the Balkans.
    The peasant dominated cantons of Switzerland never allowed Jews to settle in their midst; the noble dominated Kingdom of Poland gave Jews and Lipka Tatars a privileged status vis-a-vis Polish commoners.
    Alabama, the most conservative political unit in North America, was carved out of the wilderness by uber-republican Andrew Jackson; Ontario, the most liberal political unit in North America, was founded by uber-Royalist Sir John Johnson.

    We Americans are, in my opinion, the greatest nation that ever was. We are not being dragged down by egalitarianism, or Protestantism, or Whiggism or republicanism. These are strengths.

    We are being dragged down by Jewish ethnic malice. Everything else is details.

  7. That is an answer I guess. America by your definition is the Volkstat of blood.

    That’s good, but what did ugh at have to do with DC or the Supremes or the Presidency or the legislature? Add the American finance system to that. As an Anglo I take great pride in the Anglosphere. But some of the component bits are making me scratch my head.

  8. Locke was a founder of Republican thought, American constitutionality and a serious investor in the Royal African Company. He has to be considered a founder of the Anerican Volkstat you talk about. Yet… Yet there’s obviously something much more millennial and Messianic about America than you are willing to admit. Investors like Solomon tend to show it.

  9. Savannah. An eminently illuminating 1784 pamphlet giving a history of the legal status of the Jews in England and an opinion on their status in the newly sovereign State of Georgia:

    “Cursory Remarks on Men & Measures in Georgia” signed A Citizen 1784 published here with a reply signed A Real Citizen from The Georgia Gazette January 15, 1785. (The date 1874 in this publication is a misprint, as is likely Manners in the title though most references use it instead.)

    https://books.google.com/books?id=2nYTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=cursory+remarks+on+men+%26+manners+in+georgia&source=bl&ots=qELy8hL-t_&sig=EdtPFuP9LHCPC6M9E1EEsBhvua8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LRSZVNGoDourgwSy04O4Cg&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=cursory%20remarks%20on%20men%20%26%20manners%20in%20georgia&f=false

    The Jew in question, styling himself A Real Citizen, is Mordechai Sheftall, who served as a commissary during the war under the rank of Colonel. A Citizen, some sources I’ve seen suggest, is the printer and publisher of The Georgia Gazette himself, James Johnson, who had been sympathetic to the loyalist cause in the run-up to the war.

    …Proving that “the Jewish problem” is as old as the Jews.

  10. Locke also wrote (or was a key influence behind) the latitudinarian charter for the Carolina colony which allowed Jews. That charter was also the legal framework upon which the Jews who landed in Savannah (without the approval of the Trustees and on funds fraudulently raised with a revoked commission) threatened to press their appeal when it appeared that Oglethorpe was going to apprise the Trustees and turn they away. Perhaps the story of Samuel Nunes’s “vital medical assistance” was a bit a face-saving for caving to Jewish pressure.

    (BTW, Whites Unite, Mordecai Sheftall in his “letter to the editor” at the link above, identifies himself as a Whig and as a man confident in the credit of his opinion among Whigs. The erstwhile loyalist appears far more conscious of his folk, and at the same time broad-minded and consistent in his principles. Perhaps there’s some insight in that, too.)

  11. II.
    From the Georgia Gazette, Thursday, January 13th, 1785. Mr. Printer,
    A Pamphlet having lately with much industry circulated about this town, under cover of the Night, entitled Cursory Remarks on Men and Measures in Georgia, shows that the author has been at a great deal of trouble to collect and put together the sufferings and persecutions of the Jews in those days of ignorance and superstition; this has given him an opportunity to show his hatred to those people in nine pages of this masterly piece of learning and wit. The little countenance it has met with from the public in general must long ere this have convinced him that he might have employed his time to some better purpose. He subscribes himself a Citizen, this leads me to inquire what the Jew particularly alluded to in that masterly piece has done that he should not also be entitled to the rights of citizenship. Did he get his property removed from the reach of the enemy, and then cause it to be brought back within the enemy’s lines? or did he ever implore Sir Henry Clinton, or any other of the enemy’s Generals, although near two years their prisoner, to obtain for him his Britannick Majesty’s most gracious pardon? or was he even, during the war, ordered by American officers to be put into irons, and sent to headquarters for treasonable practices against the States? or did he not, as became a faithful citizen, discharge the several trusts reposed in him? If he did, why so much spleen, and so much pains taken to put him, and the rest of his profession in this State, on the same footing of an African that deserts his Master’s services? But, should there be any such characters as above described in Georgia, I leave to the Whigs to judge what they merit from their injured country.
    A Real Citizen.

    Cheeky bastard!

  12. “shows that the author has been at a great deal of trouble to collect and put together the sufferings and persecutions of the Jews in those days of ignorance and superstition;”

    Thus a Thousand Years Together is dismissed, eh? The language of The Real Citizen could be that of Potok or Dershowitz.

  13. Yep. Skirt the issue. Hurl stock counter-accusation. Proceed with ad hominem: “Nobody cares what you say, and who the hell are you to say so in the first place.” Chutzpah.

  14. Waronman,

    See that EU wide demand for banning antisemitism. It’s gone from Royals occasionally fronting for their private banking crony to Republics ruled by an aristocracy of Jews. It’s astounding how that went from the Jew Bill to the Rule of the Jews in the context of Republicanism.

  15. It does show the rot at the heart of the American constitution to see exactly the same rhetorical strategy used by them then that they use now.

  16. It’s uncanny, isn’t it. A pattern so consistent and pervasive, seemingly so effortless and reflexive, among these “Lions of Judah” has to indicate the happy symbiosis between the misanthropic Jewish religion and a psychological profile hitting high marks for antisocial personality disorder (or psychopathy). So interwoven it’s hard to tease out which is cause and which is effect.

    Implanted vicarious trauma in the grooming of Jewish identity (this forum hosted, of all unlikely groups, by Chabad-Lubavitch):

    http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/1700465/jewish/Vicarious-Trauma.htm

  17. The idea of the King is a uniquely Germanic thing. You see a man who is stuck with his people. Sure he’s an imperfect POS but he’s goddamn well stuck with his folk. What President isn’t looking for a lecture circuit gig?

  18. A cursory search for references to “Cursory Remarks…” both as “Manners” and as “Measures” brings up some interesting secondary material.

    This gem deliberately misreads the pamphlet to claim that its author “charged…that Jews in that state were enemy aliens with no judicial rights.” (p.136) So Jewish.

    http://books.google.com/books?id=BPnLm-08czMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Despite manifesting strongly the “Lion of Judah” pathology throughout, the rest of it appears to be a fantastic compendium of primary sources for researching attitudes of the period.

    Another one I turned up which ought to interest readers here is Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World by Jonathan Schorch which appears to take a more objective, scholarly, and critical tone. There is a whole section heading titled “Inventing Jewish Whiteness”.

    http://books.google.com/books?id=COpQcnGESRwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    In fact, though only having scanned it, it appears to approach in candor Elliot Horowitz’s Reckless Rites or Israel Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb if not, however, taking the full leap into the dangerous waters of Ariel Toaff’s Blood Passover.

    The counter-accusation of antisemitism and the maddeningly well-honed tables-turning rhetoric likely derives from centuries (and millennia) of fending off prosecutions for monstrous criminal conspiracies and acts which are sanctioned under Jewish law. The motivation for some of the exposes, like the above, are likely related to a fear that the transparency of these tactics will inevitably generate blowback that could endanger all Jews. In all, whether conciliatory or defiant, Jewish identity is nearly inescapable, and for the Jewish scholar willing to challenge the collective image handlers’ line on sensitive Jewish subjects it must exert just as powerful an influence over how far he is willing to take it.

  19. Yep. If some dumb Yank starts to make a compendium of attacks on Britian a Brit will often hit back point by point. A tribal type will avoid the subject and hurl back ad hom, Alinsky-like reflexivity.

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