The 1753 ‘Jew Bill’ Controversy: Jewish Restoration to Palestine, Biblical Prophecy, and English National Identity

Abstract

On 14 July 1753 The Craftsman ran an article purporting to be a news report from one hundred years in the future. The story was considered to be so good that it was almost immediately reprinted in the most popular journal of the day, the London Evening Post. 1 The piece imagined a dystopian vision in which England had been taken over by Jews. Now renamed 'Judea Nova', the (formerly British) government concerned itself with fighting criminals such as the pork smuggler George Briton, shooting highlanders given to the 'superstition of the Galileans', and banning The Merchant of Venice. 2 Unsurprisingly, this bizarre synthesis of political satire and anti-Semitic tropes has fascinated writers working on Anglo-Jewish history. 3 Yet beyond the attack on the Pelham administration and repetition of anti-Jewish hearsay, commentators have missed one of the most interesting aspects of the piece. The report opens with news from Jerusalem concerning the collapse of the middle arch of the temple. The great cost of the repair would be met by the citizens of Great Britain, funded through a lottery for half a million pounds. The presumption in the report, as ridiculous as it might seem, was of Jewish empire with a restored temple, based in Jerusalem. This is driven home by the earlier lead essay in the same issue of the Post. The Jews, the *My thanks to the Journal's anonymous reviewers, editor Martin Conway, and Sasha Handley for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay. Earlier versions of this work were presented at a conference on early modern prophecy at Goldsmith's College and at the Nazarene Theological College, and I thank the audiences for their helpful feedback. Early research for this article was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. 1 On the role of the London Evening Post in mid-eighteenth-century politics see B. Harris, 'The London Evening