From Macaulay’s Essay on “Civil Disabilities of the Jews”
THERE is another argument which we would not willingly treat with levity, and which yet we scarcely know how to treat seriously. Scripture, it is said, is full of terrible denunciations against the Jews. It is foretold that they are to be wanderers. Is it then right to give them a home? It is foretold that they are to be oppressed. Can we with propriety suffer them to be rulers? To admit them to the rights of citizens is manifestly to insult the divine oracles.
We allow that to falsify a prophecy inspired by divine wisdom would be a most atrocious crime. It is therefore a happy circumstance for our frail species, that it is a crime which no man can possibly commit.
Oliver Cromwell, who said, “Liberty of conscience is a natural right, and he that would have it ought to give it.”
If we admit the Jews to seats in Parliament, we shall, by so doing, prove that the prophecies in question, whatever they may mean, do not mean that the Jews shall be excluded from Parliament.
In fact it is already clear that the prophecies do not bear the meaning put upon them by the respectable persons whom we are now answering. In France and in the United States the Jews are already admitted to all the rights of citizens. A prophecy, therefore, which should mean that the Jews would never, during the course of their wanderings, be admitted to all the rights of citizens in the places of their sojourn, would be a false prophecy. This, therefore, is not the meaning of the prophecies of Scripture.
But we protest altogether against the practise of confounding prophecy with precept, of setting up predictions which are often obscure against a morality which is always clear. If actions are to be considered as just and good merely because they have been predicted, what action was ever more laudable than that crime which made the earth shake and blotted out the sun from heaven? The same reasoning which is now employed to vindicate the disabilities imposed on our Hebrew countrymen, will equally vindicate the kiss of Judas and the judgment of Pilate. “The Son of Man goeth, as it is written of Him; but wo to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.” And wo to those who, in any age or any country, disobey His benevolent commands under pretense of accomplishing His predictions. If this argument justifies the laws now existing against the Jews, it justifies equally all the cruelties which have ever been committed against them, the sweeping edicts of banishment and confiscation, the dungeon, the rack, and the slow fire. How can we excuse ourselves for leaving property to people who are to “serve their enemies in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things;” for giving protection to the persons of those who are to “fear day and night, and to have none assurance of their life;” for not seizing on the children of a race whose “sons and daughters are to be given unto another people”? We have not so learned the doctrines of Him who commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and who, when He was called upon to explain what He meant by a neighbor, selected as an example a heretic and an alien.
