Michael Scrivener

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination; John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner

books here reviewed, serve as an encouragement to others to write good intellectual history, they will have done their job as custodians and demonstrators: to show us, remind us of, the provenance and significance, for good or ill, of values and concepts we live by but take too much for granted; along with the loss of others, once equally constitutive, to which we have now become quite oblivious. This kind of self-forgetfulness is decadence: a genuine existential threat.

1656 and the Origins of Anglo-Jewish Writing

When Menasseh ben Israel (1604–57), arguably the first Anglo-Jewish writer, campaigned for the readmission of Jews to England in the middle of the seventeenth century, he provoked William Prynne (1600–69) to publish what is arguably the first modern antisemitic pamphlet.1 At precisely the same time, James Harrington (1611–77) published The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), which to some extent advances the philosemitic tradition of political writing that extends well into the nineteenth century. These three kinds of Jewish writing emerge in the 1650s, each one with its own rhetorical and argu-mentative orientation toward religion and politics. Menasseh wrote as an ambassador representing the interests of Jews to the English Protestant world, a role other Anglo-Jewish writers would play in the future. The militantly Protestant Prynne, whose sincerity was registered on his body scarred by legally sanctioned torture—his cheeks were branded and his ears had been removed for opposing the crown and the church in the 1630s—intervened forcefully with his pamphlet in the Whitehall debates of December 1655, turning public opinion—skeptical already about readmission—against the Jews.2 Keeping alive the medieval absurdities about Jewish villainy to justify the expulsion in 1290, Prynne assumed a role that will be played later by the “Jew Bill” pamphleteers of 1753–54 and William Cobbett (1763–1835) in the early nineteenth century. Harrington addressed the readmission question by proposing that Ireland become a Jewish colony while he treated Judaism as Mosaic republicanism, a source of political wisdom rather than nefarious anti-Christian sins and heresies.

British-Jewish Writing of the Romantic Era and the Problem of Modernity: The Example of David Levi

The British–Jewish writing current during the Romantic era illustrates how British Jews negotiated the problem of modernity, which was quite differently than the Jews in Continental Europe. As explained by historians Todd Endelman, David Katz, and David Ruderman, British Jews accepted and adapted to modernity while at the same time they retained a Jewish identity.1 Whether British Jews wrote in Hebrew, like Mordecai Schnaber Levison, Abraham Tang, and Jacob Hart, or in English, like David Levi, Isaac D’Israeli, Daniel Mendoza, Emma Lyon, Levy Alexander, and Hyman Hurwitz, or both English and Hebrew (Levison and Tang), they allowed themselves to be influenced by British and European currents of thought. Anglophone writers addressed both Jews and Gentiles, and when they defended the Jewish community, they did so forthrightly. In numerous texts by British Jews one finds a recurrent pattern: Jewish difference makes itself fit into already existing generic conventions in much the same way that British Jews became acculturated. Against Christian conversionist pressures, these texts affirm Jewish identity with varying degrees and strategies of defiance. Although Britain had no conventional Haskalah—modernizing Enlightenment movement of cultural renewal and reform led by an intellectual elite—which the German states did indeed have, Britain had a modernizing Jewry nevertheless, as well as reformist writers who tried to play the role of maskil, someone who was critical of traditional beliefs and practices and who adapted Jewish culture to modernity.

Following the Muse: Inspiration, Prophecy, and Deference in the Poetry of Emma Lyon (1788–1870), Anglo-Jewish Poet

There is no disputing that Emma Lyon’s poetry has been neglected.1 Her first and only volume of poetry was published in 1812 when she was twenty-three years old, as she enjoyed a brief moment of public attention. Her Miscellaneous Poems2 was reviewed favorably but condescendingly in the Monthly and Critical, and Isaac Nathan (1792–1864), a former pupil at her father’s boarding school, composed music for one of her songs, “The Soldier’s Farewell,” which was sung by the famous Jewish tenor, John Braham (1774–1856). (Nathan and Braham were involved with Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies of 18153). Also, in April of 1812, a poem of hers was sung at the annual meeting of a prominent charity, the Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress. Lyon’s literary career was beginning with some modest success, but her public career seems to have ended after she got married to Abraham Henry (1789–1840) in 1816 and gave birth to ten children between 1817 and 1830.4 Some of her poetry after her marriage was recited at the Jews’ Hospital and the Jews’ Free School, and we know that she continued to write poetry but “en amatrice” as an amateur.5 Her manuscript poems still might show up eventually, but as for now, they are not known to have survived.

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution

The parliamentary reform movement in Britain would seem to be an obvious antithesis to revolution, but in fact, as Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt observed in their study of Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848, this movement’s intentions were ‘invariably open to misinterpretation, unintentional or deliberate’.1 There were times when reform seemed to mean revolution, not just to overly anxious governments but to the reformers themselves. Thomis and Holt nicely capture the nature of revolution in Britain as not primarily a movement but rather as ‘an idea … [that is] elusive in its location in time and space, elusive above all in its shape and form’.2 If we have difficulty keeping discrete the conceptual boundaries between revolution and reform as we try to understand the early democratic movements in Britain, that is in part due to the ambiguity, unintentional or deliberate, which the early democrats themselves realized in their political rhetoric. John Thelwall is a good example of someone from the parliamentary reform movement who made equivocal use of the terms and ideas of revolution and reform. Indeed, Thelwall’s ambivalence towards both concepts was not idiosyncratic but typical of the democratic movement from the French Revolution to the Reform Act of 1832.

The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays

Thompsons new book is a collection of four essays, three of which appeared earlier (1973,1965, and 1960). Although the latter three are interesting, I will comment only on “The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors” (1978), Thompsons long critique of Althusser. One response to Althusser has been eclecticism: although his French Communist Party politics are not worth anything, his philosophical ideas can be detached from his politics and fit into something one could call “up-to-date Marxism,” or perhaps better, Super Marxism. This tolerance of Althusser is certainly a sign of the times because in the 1960s no one would have dared to put forward Roger Garaudy as a philosopher whose great ideas could be detached from his politics.

William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary

Thompson wrote the 1955 version of William Morris as a member of the communist Party. Shortly thereafter he left the party, was instrumental in forming the New Left Review, and began to write about British history in extremely interesting ways. The Making of the English Working Class (1963), despite its problems, is a ground-breaking study that continues to generate exciting insights. In the mid-1960s, Thompson argued with the dominant tendency of New Left Review, which, under the leadership of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson, was looking for (and, unfortunately, often finding) truly revolutionary traditions and critiques outside of Britain, which was contemptuously dismissed as lacking in any radical traditions worthy of the name.

Lessons of the Spanish Revolution

Since Noam Chomskys “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (in American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969), there has been a flood of books in English on the Spanish anarchists. Along with such scholarly works as Temma Kaplans Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903 (1977), there have been a number of long-overdue translations—for example, José Peirats and Gaston Leval, both anarchist participants in the Spanish revolution: Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (Peirats) and Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Leval). Also recently translated are biographical studies of renowned anarchist guerillas: Abel Paz, Durruti: The People Armed, and Antonio Tellez, Sabate: Guerilla Extraordinary. (The last four books are all available at anarchist bookstores; try Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201).