On Burke, Price, and antisemitism

Maybe it’s because I am more vulnerable since I had long covid, but Burke’s blatant and repeated deployment of complex array of anti-Semitic tropes in Reflections on the Revolution in France to tar not just the cause of the French revolution but to animate loathing of Richard Price in particular irritated me and made me pause my reading of the Reflections. Yes, I know the term ‘anti-Semitism’ was coined near the end of the nineteenth century; I am applying the concept to Burke’s rhetoric, which clearly seems to imply that the French revolution, and Price’s celebration of it, is a re-enactment of the Jews cheering on the crucifixion.

In his great, courageous essay on antisemitism, Orwell admits defeat in his investigation on the topic and writes one of his least persuasive sentences, “The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilization, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.”

I didn’t know what to think. So I turned to Price’s (1789) “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” which so triggered Burke. I had never read it before. It starts with a partial quote from Psalm 122 usually attributed to King David. But it skips the mysterious sentence (“יְרֽוּשָׁלִַ֥ם הַבְּנוּיָ֑ה כְּ֜עִ֗יר שֶׁחֻבְּרָה־לָּ֥הּ יַחְדָּֽו:“), translated as, “The built-up Jerusalem is like a city that was joined together within itself.” I would say “the built-up Jerusalem, an ordered city” but I am conscious I may be imposing a Platonic philosophy on the psalmist.

There is much to reflect on in Price’s sermon; I was struck especially by this comment:

The complaint I am making, is the complaint of many of the wisest and best men in the established church itself, who have been long urging the necessity of a revisal of its Liturgy and Articles. These were framed above two centuries ago, when Christendom was just emerging from the ignorance and barbarity of the dark ages. They remain now much the same they were then; and, therefore, cannot be properly adapted to the good sense and liberality of the present times.

Let’s call the idea that the liturgy and articles of the church need to reflect, or even be adapted to, the spirit of the times ‘the progressive view of religion.’ I do so because Price himself clearly presupposes the fact of progress here. Enlighten/enlightened and their cognates are repeated like a mantra through the sermon. (There is an irony here in that Price is following Hume’s time-line as developed in the History (see here for details)).

The progressive view of religion is a near relation of a kind of proto-Spinozism of the sort we also find in Part I of More’s Utopia where the content of religion is historicized and explained in virtue of the context that gives rise to them. But, of course, despite Burke’s protestations, one can be either a progressive or a proto-Spinozist about religion without sliding from one to the other. After all, a proto-Spinozist may hold that Price’s commitment to progress is itself a species of religion.

As I was circling around these ideas, I noticed that one of the tempered criticisms Price makes of the 1688 establishment/revolution is that it is by no means as tolerant as it understands itself to be: “the toleration then obtained was imperfect.” Price goes on to deplore that while toleration has been extended since, in fact, “there still exist penal laws on account of religious opinions.”

In fact, while Burke would be loath to grant Price anything in 1790, just a few years before he would have agreed. In a (1775) letter to Burgh he wrote, "I would give a full civil protection, in which I include an immunity, from all disturbance of their publick religious worship, and a power of teaching in schools, as well as Temples, to Jews Mahometans and even Pagans.”* Burke the politician, however imperfect any must be, was a far more generous soul than Burke of Reflections fame. And this seems significant.

Price proceeds to give some examples of signs of progress in toleration, one of which is this: “that in the Emperor’s dominions Jews have been lately admitted to the enjoyment of equal privileges with other citizens.” This is almost certainly a reference to Emperor Joseph II's Edict of Toleration of 1782.

Be that as it may, that Price praises the Edict of Toleration does not make him a philosemite to be contrasted with Burke. After all, this edict was a double-edged sword because while it granted some equal privileges it also involved what we would now call at least partial forced assimilation (see here for the text.) As the edict puts it, the “purpose” of toleration is “to make the Jews more useful and serviceable to the State.”

As readers know, I dislike thinking of the history of thought as a morality tale. So let me close with a digressive impression: one wonders to what degree Price was familiar with Von Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, and the debate it generated in German lands. For, one of the key questions that Enlightenment (!) critics of Von Dohm raised was precisely this question that comes naturally on the progressive view of religion: to what degree post rabbinic Judaism could adapt itself to modern circumstances.+ And lurking in the progressive view is an inability — one that is fatal to its political compass — to understand what is now known as ‘fundamentalism’ as itself an adaptation to modern circumstances.

*Quoted from De Bruyn, Frans. "Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke's" Reflections on the Revolution in France"." Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.4 (2001): 577-600.

+On this issue, see Liberles, Robert. "From toleration to Verbesserung: German and English debates on the Jews in the eighteenth century." Central European History 22.1 (1989): 3-32.