The polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.
The first half of the seventeenth century saw a profound structural shift in the English economy and economic discourse. One of the controversial issues under dispute was the nature of usury. This paper sheds light on the enduring association of Jews with usury and seeks to demonstrate how the two concepts came to be decoupled in mid-seventeenth century England. It focuses on two case studies—the Jewish readmission polemic and Harrington’s Oceana—and examines two different channels through which this decoupling occurred. Reading these cases through the perspective of usury offers new insights not only into developing attitudes towards the Jews, but also into the different ways of coping with changing relations between traditional theological-economic paradigms and a shifting social reality in early modern England.
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