David S. Katz

The Abendana Brothers and the Christian Hebraists of Seventeenth-Century England

One of the most striking features of the first decades of open Jewish resettlement in England is the speed with which Jews managed to integrate themselves into so many different spheres of English life. From the first appointment of a Jew as a broker on the Exchange in 1657 to the first Jewish knighthood in 1700, the story is one of a dramatic rise in the acquisition of rights, privileges and special consideration. So, too, had Jews long been a part of English intellectual and academic life, but before Cromwells tacit permission of Jewish residence in 1656 only Jewish converts to Christianity dared to make their appearance at English universities. This pattern was broken with the Abendana brothers, Jacob (d. 1685) and Isaac (d. 1699), Hebrew scholars and bibliophiles who came to London from Holland after the Restoration. Jacob Abendana, in the last four years of his life, was rabbi of the Sephardic community in London; Isaac, from at least 1663, taught Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge. Both men were very much in demand by English scholars, who turned to them to solve Hebraic problems of various kinds and to procure Hebrew books for themselves and for university libraries. Both brothers worked on the first translations of the Mishnah into European languages and thus helped make available to Christian scholars this central core of the Talmud, the Jewish ‘oral’ law. Finally, it was Isaac Abendana who invented the Oxford diary and thereby made a permanent mark on the social habits of the university in which he laboured.

“Moses’s Principia”: Hutchinsonianism and Newton’s Critics

Once upon a time we saw the rejection of religion as the most central feature of the Enlightenment. As Ernst Cassirer wrote, “If we were to look for a general characteristic of the age of the Enlightenment, the traditional answer would be that its fundamental feature is obviously a critical and skeptical attitude towards religion.”1 So too did Isaiah Berlin characterize the French Enlightenment as being grounded on The proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge.2

The marginalization of early modern Anglo‐Jewish history

The history of early modern Anglo‐Jewry has suffered from a dual disability: English historians often pass over Jewish themes, while at the same time Anglo‐Jewish historiography has been excessively patriotic, conservative, and ‘Whig’, that is, ends‐oriented, the ‘End of Anglo‐Jewish History’ being Emancipation. These tendencies can be illustrated by examining three specific examples: (1) a ‘Christian’ subject whose ‘Jewish’ component has been left out (Newtons theology); (2) a ‘Jewish’ subject whose ‘Christian’ aspect has been excised (Spinoza and the Quakers); and (3) a ‘neutral’ subject which has been misunderstood through lack of co‐operation between gentile and Jewish historians (Anglo‐Jewry and the Glorious Revolution).

Introduction: ‘Bag and Baggage’

When the Allies in 1917 called for ‘the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire’ they were simultaneously affirming that Turkey was at that time considered to be a part of Europe. This is a book about some of the principal writings that have shaped the perception of Turkey for informed readers in Britain, from Edward Gibbon’s positing of imperial ‘decline and fall’ to the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923), illustrating how Turkey has always been a part of the modern British and European experience. Many people have written about Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, but the five celebrated authors discussed here were especially influential in moulding the image of the country. Despite the philhellenic prejudice that was the natural result of the typical English educational programme based on the study of classical literature, these authors’ close study of the Ottoman Empire or personal encounter with it shaped in each a much more positive appreciation of the Turks.

Edward Gibbon’s Eastern Question (1776–1788)

The first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was published in 1776. It took Gibbon twelve more years to produce his next five volumes, which carried the story through the conflict between the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, past the fall of Constantinople in 1453. When Gibbon thus inserted the Turks into the history of the Roman Empire, which was then the pinnacle of Western civilization in the set classical curriculum, he also introduced the Turks into Europe and European history. Everyone read Gibbon. By not shrinking from Ottoman history but going forward where the narrative took him, Gibbon set Turkey in Britain for educated readers who formed the political nation.

Greenmantle at the Ministry of Information: John Buchan, the First World War and the Turks

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) was the first of five novels starring the daring Richard Hannay, who featured the following year (1916) in Greenmantle, a tale about Germans fomenting a Muslim rebellion in the East. This time, however, Buchan’s book was more than a shilling shocker, for he was already a key player in Britain’s propaganda war. Greenmantle was hugely successful and ultimately painted a rather favourable view of Turkey and its people. It was based in part on Buchan’s visit to Istanbul only five years earlier and, along with his popular historical writing, helped detach Turkey in British public opinion from its alliance with the German enemy in the First World War.

Lord Byron, Turkophile and His Grand Tour to the East (1809–1811)

Nearly all Greeks would be surprised to learn that Lord Byron (1788–1824) much preferred the company of Turks, and Muslims in general, over Greeks. When Byron went on his Eastern Grand Tour in 1809, Greek independence was a hopeless cause, a utopian quest. The Greeks he fell in love with were in fact Muslim Albanians, and the entire country was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron’s poetry sparked an Eastern craze, and included a sympathetic portrait of Turks and the Ottoman Empire which had an enduring effect.

Conclusion: Turkey-in-Europe, Turkey-in-Asia, Turkey-in-Britain

Educated English men and women inhabited a mental landscape created by their reading. For anyone who was even mildly ‘at home’ with books, the five writers discussed here lived cumulatively and simultaneously for their readers as the century moved on. Toynbee read Gibbon, and Disraeli knew his Byron. The attitude towards Turkey that is the almost inevitable result of reading their books is curious, respectful and generally positive. An English observer, reading in a newspaper about the transition of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic in 1923, might have marshalled what he or she knew about Turkey, remembered from things by Gibbon, Byron and Disraeli, from Buchan’s novels and Toynbee’s newspaper articles. These authors furnished the minds of English readers with images that compelled fascination and bolstered an attitude which kept Turkey in Europe, unmistakably the most Eastern country in the West.

Disraeli’s Eastern Career, 1830–1880

Disraeli’s obsession with all things Eastern, and his belief that he and his family were members of a superior Semitic-Jewish-Arabian-Oriental race in a world where breeding was all that mattered, had an enormous influence on foreign affairs. For Disraeli, the Ottoman Empire was more than a convenient behemoth that lay astride the border between Russian and British possessions in India. He was pro-Turkish in a very deep sense, drawn to everything Turkish and a keen supporter of the Ottoman Empire throughout his long career. Disraeli’s youthful Turkish adventures and Jewish racial philosophy were at the base of his foreign policy and support of Istanbul, but it was not irrational, and fitted very well with traditional British fears of Russian imperialism in the Balkans and further east towards India.

Arnold Toynbee on the Quay at Smyrna, 1921–1922

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) was sent out by the Manchester Guardian to cover the Turkish War of Independence, arriving in Smyrna in January 1921, reporting from Anatolia until he left for home from Istanbul eight months later. Toynbee’s articles and his relief work saved many lives and helped push public opinion in favour of Turkey. His time there was also fateful for his own work: it was on his way home, travelling on the Orient Express, that he had the idea of how to organize the books that would become his famous A Study of History. These dozen volumes published between 1934 and 1961 made him a household name throughout the English-speaking world and put him on the cover of Time magazine, crowned by the popular press as the greatest historian of his day.