Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.”Footnote ¹ Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?”Footnote ² That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.

The role of L'Univers in promoting such accusations was not without a certain irony. In Britain, Catholics—not Jews—were regarded as members of a “fifth column,” whose deference to the pope came before their loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty. In Germany, the expulsion of Jesuits during the Kulturkampf served as a reminder that suspicions of Catholic dual loyalties remained widespread. The persistence of such accusations is reflected in the work of a new generation of historians, who have drawn attention to the international dimension of religious conflict. While the Siccardi Laws, the Kulturkampf, and the conflict between Catholics and anti-clericals in France used to be seen primarily in terms of national politics, a landmark collection of essays has highlighted the Europe-wide confrontation between secularism and the Catholic Church.Footnote ³ Viewed comparatively, the internationalism of which L'Univers complained no longer appears a uniquely Jewish phenomenon.

Indeed, the nineteenth century was an age not just of nationalism but also of religious internationalism. The revolution in individual consciousness wrought by modern communications, the explosion of the public sphere, new forms of public ritual, and mass education did not merely create national “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson has argued; it also transformed existing religious communities beyond recognition.Footnote ⁴ These communities had always been in some sense international, but in the nineteenth century, religious internationalism began to express itself in new ways.

Liberalism, secularization, nation-state formation, and the modernization of social and political structures undoubtedly acted as catalysts for the politicization of religious identities, but this process had an international dimension. Once, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews had demonstrated their faith by attending church, chapel, or synagogue. Now they read religious newspapers and journals devoting considerable space to overseas developments, signed petitions and held public meetings in support of foreign religious causes, and gave generously to strengthen the international profile of their own faith and to support outreach activities in other parts of the world. True, Catholics supported the Catholic Church and its missionary orders, while Protestants gave to voluntary missionary societies organized on a sectarian basis, and Jews to ostensibly secular Jewish relief organizations. The structural similarities are still sufficiently striking to point to the existence of a distinctively modern form of religious internationalism, characterized by the emergence of new forms of sectarian politics, philanthropy, and the press.

This modern religious internationalism was rooted in civil society but dependent on European economic and political expansion, the communications revolution engendered by railways, steamships and the telegraph, new patterns of migration, and the development of a global public sphere. In short, the interaction of traditional religious structures and identities with wider processes of political, social, cultural, technological, and economic change promoted the transformation of communities of believers into communities of opinion. Thus religious aspects of identity assumed renewed importance, leading ultimately to the mobilization and politicization of religious identity on the world stage. The construction of “world religions” was a global phenomenon affecting Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, and Buddhists as much as Jews and Christians.Footnote ⁵ We will concentrate here on the religious traditions of Europe and the New World, for whom imperialism and the rise of global capitalism created a particular set of opportunities and challenges.

The tendency for the historiographies of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to remain separate fields has obscured the importance of this phenomenon.Footnote ⁶ Yet the Jewish case that I focus on here provides a telling example of the ways in which a comparative approach can transform our understanding of the experience of a particular religious group. It both demonstrates the common ground Jews shared with other religions, and illuminates the dynamic interaction between Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant internationalisms. Such an approach helps to establish the place of religious internationalism within the modernization paradigm. It also provides a new framework for understanding the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism, and more cosmopolitan expressions of collective Jewish identity.

Of course, the ethnic component of Jewish identity did distinguish Jews from their Catholic and Protestant counterparts, enabling opponents of emancipation like Inglis and L'Univers to justify their stance in terms of the inherently subversive nature of the “Hebrew nationality.” This discourse reflected the Christian identification of Jews with the biblical Israelites. As the original ‘Chosen People,’ the Jews acted as an important inspiration for the elaboration of modern national identities.Footnote ⁷ Thus, both the British and the Germans appropriated the Jewish trope of ‘chosenness’ and sought to portray themselves as the true heirs of God's covenant.Footnote ⁸

More generally, the historical longevity of the Jewish people and their (re)emergence as a modern nation has provided theorists of nationalism with food for thought. In his seminal study The Ethnic Origins of Nations, the “primordialist” Anthony D. Smith uses classical and modern Jewry to explore the role of ethnicity in ancient and modern societies and the connection between the two.Footnote ⁹ “Modernists,” by contrast, have emphasized the similarities between Jewish and other nationalisms, highlighting the disjuncture between Zionism as a secular ideology and traditional Judaism.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the persistence of this discourse of Jewish nationhood should not blind us to similarities between manifestations of Jewish solidarity and other forms of religious internationalism.

Historians of Jewish nationalism have taken transnational Jewish solidarity for granted. Instead of examining the international context in which Zionism emerged, Jewish historiography has focused on the ‘national’ contexts in which it did so—most importantly Russia, but also the states of western Europe, where emancipation raised a new set of questions about the relationship between Jews, citizenship, and national identity. The tendency is so pronounced that even the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) has been studied largely in terms of Franco-Jewish cultural, political, and imperial history, without reference to the international environment in which it developed.Footnote ¹¹ The assumptions underlying this approach are brought out in the title of Shmuel Almog's Nationalism & Anti-Semitism in Modern Europe. Almog's perspective is comparative and he always maintains an awareness of the international dimension, but the core of his argument is that nationalism and anti-Semitism were inherently linked because the process of Jewish integration in Europe took place in parallel with the consolidation of national consciousness within a new international order based on the nation-state.Footnote ¹² Conversely, dissemination of the anti-Semitic claim that Jews were foreigners created an atmosphere conducive to the propagation of the Zionist national idea.Footnote ¹³

This interpretative model has led historians to examine the pre-history of Jewish nationalism in two key ways. First, histories of Zionism often devote a chapter to emancipation and the resulting divide between east and west European Jewry.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, a long-running preoccupation with the ideological roots of Jewish nationalism has prompted numerous attempts to identify the ‘forerunners of Zionism’ and to clarify their relationships with Zionism proper.Footnote ¹⁵

There are two exceptions to this pattern. In The Zionist Ideology, Gideon Shimoni distinguishes between an awareness of shared ethnicity and common origin, which he terms “cultural nationalism,” and the more overtly political aims of modern nationalist movements, which seek to create congruence between the ethnic and the territorial unit.Footnote ¹⁶ While cultural nationalism may have been widespread among Jews before 1880, Shimoni argues that a Jewish nationalist movement in the modern sense only emerged after that date when the aims of Jewish nationalists become territorial. His findings are similar to those of David Vital, who strictly delineates political Zionism from its earlier historical foregrounding.Footnote ¹⁷ They have more far-reaching implications because Shimoni engages explicitly with the theoretical literature on nationalism rather than simply the antecedents of the Zionist movement. Still, Shimoni's analysis does not help us understand the pre-1880 phenomenon more clearly. That is because earlier “cultural nationalism” manifested itself partly through the emergence of an international lobby for Jewish rights which, although not territorialist, was undoubtedly political in its approach to the Jewish question.

This differentiates the Jewish case from other transitions from cultural to political nationalism. In eastern Europe, cultural nationalism—essentially the creation of a literate national culture coupled with calls for its official recognition by the state—typically predated ‘political’ demands for autonomy among the subject peoples of the Russian and Habsburg Empires. The same model does not hold true for Jews. On the face of it, the revival of Hebrew as the language of Haskalah in eastern Europe shares some characteristics with other eastern European “cultural nationalisms.” In reality, the Haskalah originated as a German-language movement advocating the integration of Jews into their host cultures: its link with Zionism came only after the fact. More generally, modern Jewish politics based on a sense of international ethno-religious solidarity emerged in a phase of so-called “cultural nationalism,” rather than with the Zionist movement. We might do better to put the “cultural nationalism” model to one side and explore this phase of Jewish history in terms of international religious politics.

The work of Jonathan Frankel provides a productive way forward. He situates the birth of Zionism within an evolving dynamic of international solidarity and crisis in the Jewish world, attaching particular importance to the Damascus Affair of 1840 and the Mortara Affair of 1858.Footnote ¹⁸ Frankel argues these two crises, together with the pogroms of 1881–1882, saw the crystallization of political, institutional, and perceptual processes long at work among the Jews. Essentially, he presents a three-step process of nationalization: from the emergence of a modern form of international Jewish solidarity with the Damascus Affair, through the institutionalization of that solidarity with the foundation of the AIU in the aftermath of the Mortara Affair, to the birth of Zionism in the maelstrom of 1881–1882.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet the historiography of Jewish nationalism with its focus on the nation-state is ill suited to interpreting such inherently international causes célèbres, as Frankel's exemplary study of the Damascus Affair clearly demonstrates.Footnote ²⁰

For those unfamiliar with these two seminal episodes, a short introduction is in order. The Damascus Affair occurred in response to news that the Egyptian government had convicted the leading Jews of Damascus of the ritual murder of a Catholic priest and his servant, on evidence produced by the French consul. The Mortara Affair was a case of forced conversion, in which the authorities of the Papal States kidnapped a young Jewish boy to bring him up a good Catholic after receiving reports of his secret baptism.Footnote ²¹ Both events intersected with moments of acute international tension, and each provoked a major public outcry and global controversy.

Emancipation, social integration, and the preoccupations of rival European nationalisms all influenced the trajectory of these two affairs, but neither had much to do with ‘modern’ secular anti-Semitism. Instead, the issues at stake were religious. Both ritual murder and forced conversion were perennial flash points in Judeo-Christian relations. The shock-value of these controversies stemmed precisely from the fact that they seemed to reveal the persistence of superstitious and archaic beliefs and practices in the modern world.

This may seem to be stating the obvious. Surprisingly, however, viewing the Damascus and Mortara Affairs primarily as international religious controversies adds a new dimension to our understanding of the origins of Jewish nationalism. If we accept that Jewish identity in this period was ethno-religious in nature, then exploring the national aspect at the expense of the religious is to miss a trick. This does not invalidate the traditional preoccupation with the politicization of Jewish identity in a variety of national contexts. My contention is rather that the relationship between international Jewish solidarity and the pre-history of Jewish nationalism cannot be studied without reference to this global religious context as well.

In deed if not in name, international Jewish ‘solidarity’ was far from being an invention of the modern era.Footnote ²² For centuries, Jews had demonstrated their sense of brotherhood and mutual responsibility through charitable activity. Tellingly, two of the three oldest charities at London's Spanish and Portuguese Jews Congregation were devoted to such causes: the Cautivos fund for the redemption of Jewish slaves and prisoners, and the Terra Santa fund for the support of Jews in the Land of Israel.Footnote ²³

Charity (tzedakah) is a fundamental religious duty in Judaism. One of the basic principles of tzedakah is that while “the poor of your own town come before the poor of any other town,” the poor of the Land of Israel take precedence over all.Footnote ²⁴ By 1800, charitable giving to Jews in the Land of Israel had acquired a name (halukah) and an institutional framework in the shape of two central fundraising committees in Istanbul and Amsterdam. This promoted a sense of connection between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, which other forms of tzedakah reinforced. Perhaps most important was the practice of keeping synagogal collection boxes dedicated to the upkeep of Jewish holy places, like the tomb of Rabbi Meir Ba'al Ha'ness in Tiberias. But this sense of inter-communal responsibility was not restricted to Palestine. Instead, it was common for Jewish communities to appeal to their brethren abroad in hard times.Footnote ²⁵

These structures persisted well into the nineteenth century, yet this period also saw the emergence of a new kind of Jewish solidarity. Pre-modern Jewish ‘solidarity’ was primarily religious in motivation and expression, relying heavily on personal contacts and communal institutions. ‘Modern’ Jewish solidarity was very visible and heavily reliant on the public sphere. It had moved beyond the religious dimension symbolized by the synagogal collection box, congregational charities, and the traditional preoccupation with tzedakah.

While the disparate forms of pre-modern Jewish ‘solidarity’ are best characterized as transnational avant la lettre, their more modern incarnation was genuinely international because the emergence of a Jewish public sphere around 1840 provided a coherence and focus that earlier forms of Jewish internationality lacked. Up to a point, the new Jewish press was divided on national lines.Footnote ²⁶ Yet this national orientation did not prevent the internationalization of the Jewish public sphere.Footnote ²⁷ Editors of early Jewish newspapers republished and critiqued each other's articles, demonstrating a consistent set of international preoccupations at any given time. The eyes of the Jewish world were directed toward Russia in the 1840s, the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, Italy and the Papal States in 1858–1859, Morocco during the early 1860s, Romania in the late 1860s, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Publications catering to a Jewish reading public also made it easy to disseminate specifically Jewish disaster news and coordinate an organized international response. The emergence of a coherent Jewish lobby transcending national boundaries was rooted in the existence of a public sphere stretching from America and Australia through western and eastern Europe to the Jews of the Middle East.

In practice, international Jewish solidarity took two key forms: the political and the philanthropic. The Jewish lobby was consistently engaged with emancipation and intermittently occupied in responding to the outbreak of political crises in the Jewish world. These included the projected expulsion of Jews from Russian border zones in the 1840s, the Mortara Affair, the false imprisonment and execution of several Moroccan Jews in 1863–1864, the outrages perpetrated against the Jews of Romania in 1866–1872, and the rise of anti-Jewish parties in Germany and Austria.Footnote ²⁸ All these episodes reflected not just socio-economic tensions and religious prejudice, but also the attitudes of governments toward their Jewish subjects. Consequently, the response of the Jewish lobby was primarily political. While notables like Gerson Bleichröder and the Rothschilds used their private contacts to lobby informally, secular bodies like the Board of Deputies, the AIU, the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, and the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA) held public meetings, drew up resolutions, and dispatched delegations to negotiate with governments at home and abroad.Footnote ²⁹

A concurrent series of humanitarian crises captured the imagination of the Jewish world and galvanized the machinery of international Jewish solidarity in much the same way. The fire in Izmir in 1841, the sack of Essaouira in 1844, the famine in the Holy Land during the Crimean War, the Moroccan refugee crisis of 1859, the Russian famine of 1868–1870, and the Persian Famine of 1871–1872 each prompted international subscription-based fundraising campaigns promoted by Jewish communal organizations and publicized through the Jewish press. The earliest of these initiatives were small in scale, but later appeals such as the Holy Land Relief Fund of 1854–1855 and the Persian Famine Relief Fund of 1871–1872 raised about £20,000 each.Footnote ³⁰

That these causes also appealed to non-Jews does not diminish their importance as engines of solidarity in the Jewish world.Footnote ³¹ With time, the AIU would become known primarily for its educational activities among the Jews of the Muslim world.Footnote ³² Yet the very first of these initiatives stemmed from the Moroccan refugee appeal of 1859, which generated enough surpluses to fund a Jewish school in Tetuan on the North African coast.Footnote ³³ Equally significant, the response to the pogroms of 1881–1882 was as much about raising money for Jews left injured, homeless, and bereft of their livelihoods as it was about political lobbying. Inevitably, it built on the philanthropic fund-raising structures within the Jewish community developed through earlier humanitarian appeals. More than this, bringing Jewish humanitarian activity into the equation broadens our understanding of Jewish internationalism significantly.

First, focusing on humanitarian philanthropy helps us move away from a bipolar model of international Jewish solidarity, in which eastern European Jews primarily figure as the victims of anti-Jewish violence and the recipients of western Jewish aid. Political crises were usually European, but humanitarian disasters were more common elsewhere and integrated the Jews of Muslim lands with European and North American Jewry in new ways. Eastern European Jews were not always the objects of international Jewish philanthropy; they could also be active participants. Thus, the lists of donors to the Persian Famine Relief Fund given in Ha'Magid during 1871–1872 include the names of some forty thousand Jews from the Pale of Settlement.Footnote ³⁴

This episode highlights a second important factor, namely the ability of international philanthropy to mobilize very large numbers of individuals. Such levels of active participation were probably less widespread in political campaigns that, by their very nature, depended on Jewish elites. Large public meetings tended to be held in important cities, while newspaper articles and political lobbying were the responsibility of journalists, community leaders, and secular Jewish organizations. Only philanthropy was open to all. Moreover, as Jean Quataert has argued with respect to the German states, participating in philanthropic campaigns could be an important factor in the formation and consolidation of imagined political communities.Footnote ³⁵

Finally, the humanitarian and philanthropic dimension acquired central importance in Palestine—a key consideration given the subsequent role of Israel in Jewish nationalism. Between 1840 and 1880, Jews in Palestine ceased to be the primary focus of international Jewish solidarity. Instead, the developments outlined above combined to bring the difficulties faced by a far wider range of Jewish communities to the attention of the Jewish world. The Land of Israel continued to attract halukah from the Diaspora, but these years also saw a transformation of Jewish philanthropic activity in Palestine. For one thing, emigration to the New World prompted Jews in Palestine to look beyond their traditional fund-raising constituencies, most strikingly when Rabbi Haim Zvi Schneersohn of Jerusalem traveled to raise money in Australia (1863) and the United States (1869).Footnote ³⁶ More importantly, the activities of Ludwig Philippson and Sir Moses Montefiore led to a fundamental reassessment of the means—and increasingly the aims—of collecting money for Jews in the Holy Land.Footnote ³⁷

Montefiore's plans for rendering the Jews less dependent on halukah by encouraging agricultural settlement were a first step in this direction.Footnote ³⁸ Philippson went significantly further in the early 1840s when he launched the first subscription-based fund-raising appeal on behalf of the Jews of Palestine through the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.Footnote ³⁹ The campaign was a failure, but it left its mark. Ten years later, Montefiore's Holy Land Relief Fund raised £18,584 on a similar basis within less than a year.Footnote ⁴⁰ Other, less successful appeals followed in its wake. Montefiore's personal interest in renewing the social institutions and economy of the Old Yishuv grew to be shared by notables like the Rothschilds, who established a hospital in Jerusalem in 1854, and by international organizations like the AIU, which founded the agricultural school Mikveh Yisrael in the early 1870s.Footnote ⁴¹

The ‘Jewish International’ as outlined above undoubtedly had some proto-national characteristics. The speeches, newspaper articles, and tracts produced during the Damascus Affair demonstrate that many Jews deployed the language of nationhood in moments of crisis. Only very rarely did this take the form of an explicitly nationalist agenda, as with Moses Hess who wrote part of Rome and Jerusalem in the wake of 1840.Footnote ⁴² More often, the idea of nationhood was hidden behind a less-assertive rhetoric of Jewish unity. An address presented by 1490 German Jews to Montefiore on his return from the East provides a telling example of this phenomenon. The word “nation” is missing from the original German, which declared: “Israel is one, as the God she adores, as the religion, to which she adheres. Her history is one, her elders one, her ever-renewing youth one. Above all, however, her heart is one, and her memory one!”Footnote ⁴³ The allusion to the idea of nationhood was sufficiently obvious for a rather free translation that appeared in The Voice of Jacob to render the text as follows: “Israel as a nation is as much ONE as the God it adores….”Footnote ⁴⁴ The discrepancy between the two versions seems to indicate a caution attached to the idea of Jewish nationality that appears unsurprising in the highly charged political context of mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Yet we should beware of leaping to conclusions. Such an interpretation suggests clarity of thought and expression with regard to the language of nationhood and the specific idea of Jewish nationality that was in fact absent at this time.

Both the Jewish press and Jewish leaders frequently spoke in terms of “our nation's history,” “our entire insulted nation,” “the immense importance to our nation,” and so on.Footnote ⁴⁵ This casual use of the term should not be taken as an indication of modern nationalist feeling. The first of these examples comes from the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the second from a private letter written by Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Lehren to Adolphe Crémieux, and the third from a speech given by Montefiore to the Board of Deputies. The intentions of the correspondent of the Allgemeine Zeitung are unknown, but Lehren (who was responsible for administering halukah payments through Amsterdam) was a pillar of traditional Jewish society and certainly not an exponent of modern Jewish nationalism. His readiness to use the term reflects its longstanding currency when applied to the Jews, and the existence of equivalents such as “Am Yisra'el” (people of Israel) within the traditional Jewish lexicon.

As for Montefiore, his 1839 plans for Jewish settlement in Palestine have led some to see him as a proto-Zionist.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, his private use of the word “nation” was ambiguous, echoing the more culturally limited Sephardi concept of “Men of the Nation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Crucially, even when Montefiore spoke of the need to disseminate information among Jewish communities as a way of promoting Jewish unity—in terms reminiscent of Anderson—he continued to define this unity in religious terms. Thus in 1840 Montefiore reminded the Board of Deputies to keep the “County Congregations” abreast of developments in Damascus since they too had contributed to the costs of the mission. He explained: “I do not look upon their contributions so much as to the amount, as I hold it to be an expression of their feeling towards their suffering brethren, and as tending to keep up that oneness and identity of interest and faith, which should pervade all of us throughout the world.”Footnote ⁴⁸ That Jewish activists like Montefiore and his French counterpart Adolphe Crémieux habitually described foreign Jews as their “brethren” or “co-religionists” only underlines the primarily religious framework within which they operated.

Indeed, Jews in 1840 usually deployed national language in contexts that limited Judaism to the status of a confessional loyalty, or at least coupled Jewish nationhood with the idea of religious faith. Addressing a public meeting of Jews in Philadelphia in August 1840, Rabbi Isaac Leeser paid lip service to both when he asserted: “We have no country of our own; we have no longer a united government under the shadow of which we can live securely; but we have a tie yet holier than a fatherland, a patriotism stronger than the community of one government, our … patriotism is the affection which unites the Israelite of one land to that of another. As citizens we belong to the country we live in, but as believers in one God … we hail the Israelite as brother, no matter if his home be the torrid zone or where the poles encircle the earth….”Footnote ⁴⁹ The confusion between religious and national loyalties and identities here is almost impossible to disentangle. Yet despite Leeser's talk of Jewish “patriotism,” ultimately he seems to distinguish between their political loyalties as citizens of one country, and their confessional loyalties as believers in one God.

Obviously, this emphasis on the confessional nature of Jewish loyalties reflected the wider political context. Jewish leaders felt the need to prove that their Jewishness was limited to the private sphere of religious belief and did not detract from their ability to identify politically with the countries in which they lived. Thus, in 1859, at the height of the Mortara Affair, the editor of the Archives Israélites and co-founder of the AIU, Isidore Cahen, declared, “[t]he link which can unite the Israelites is religious and social. As a nation, as a race, it tends constantly to weaken: we embrace more and more the interests of the countries which have adopted us, and which often run counter to one another.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This tendency to privilege religious over ethnic identity seems sufficiently pronounced for us to consider the ‘Jewish International’ in religious as well as national terms.

There are obvious parallels between the transformation of modern Jewish internationalism in this period and forces at work in the Catholic world. The international pretensions of ultramontane Catholicism were well-established by the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹ Italian unification, which deprived the pope of his temporal power, intensified this dimension by forcing the Papacy to reshape itself as a different kind of international institution on the world stage.Footnote ⁵² Particularly striking features of this phenomenon are the growth of the Catholic press, the politicization of Catholic identity through petitions, associations, and political parties, and the role of Peter's Pence as a tangible financial expression of Catholic solidarity. More generally, imperialism and the forces of early globalization facilitated both the spread of Catholicism through missionary activity and the emergence of a militant ‘Catholic International.’Footnote ⁵³ What differentiated Catholic internationalism from both its Jewish and Protestant counterparts was its congenital and symbiotic relationship with a sovereign actor in international politics, the Holy See. Yet Catholic internationalism was neither limited to nor directed by the institutions of the Catholic Church. Instead, Catholic opinion was generated as much in the nominally secular public sphere as within the Church itself. Its relationship with the Holy See was an interaction, with the influence going as much from the former to the latter as the other way round.Footnote ⁵⁴

Both the Damascus Affair and Mortara Affairs were part of this wider phenomenon. While the former was provoked by the disappearance of a Catholic missionary in Syria, the latter was predicated on the fusion of temporal and spiritual power exercised by the Church in the Papal States. In each case, the ‘Catholic International’ and the ultramontane press emerged as the key adversary for the Jews. This opposition between Catholics and Jews was less clear-cut during the Damascus Affair, partly because the French Consul was the leading force behind the blood libel accusations, partly because the Catholic Church was more liberal and diverse at this stage, and partly because the forces of Catholic internationalism were only beginning to make themselves felt. Nevertheless, Jonathan Frankel emphasizes the role of the Catholic press in fomenting the blood libel accusations—unlike the pointed silence of newspapers in pluralistic, mercantile, and Protestant states.Footnote ⁵⁵

Almost from the first the Catholic Univers acted as chief prosecutor, publishing a series of damning documents emanating from the French consulate and Catholic missionary organizations in the East. The Univers of 1840 was different in tone from the militantly ultramontane Univers of 1858–1859, but it still exploited the Damascus incident to oppose Jewish emancipation, highlight Jewish economic power, and expose the workings of an international Jewish conspiracy. Thus, on 8 May, L'Univers attributed the amount of publicity the case was receiving to “a sense of unity [that] binds the Jews together, making them act as one man in all parts of the world,” adding, “by means of their money they can, when it suits them, control almost the entire press in Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Admittedly, the Papacy never endorsed the line taken by L'Univers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even so, the impression of the Damascus Affair as driven primarily by Catholic anti-Semitism was so strong that Hirsch Lehren, Louis Cohen, and Moses Montefiore were all willing to see the blood libel allegations as part of a wider Catholic conspiracy against the Jews.Footnote ⁵⁸

This fundamental opposition between the Catholic International and world Jewry was even more pronounced during the Mortara Affair. This time, Catholics, not Jews, were on the defensive since the fate of Edgardo Mortara became a bone of contention in conflicts between Catholics and anti-clericals in France, nationalists and supporters of the Papacy in Italy, and Catholics and Protestants in Britain. In 1840, attitudes towards the Jews had been deeply equivocal. In 1858, the majority of newspapers sided with them and against the Catholic Church. Privately, some Catholics were embarrassed by the whole episode. In public, the Catholic world sought to portray the Mortara Affair as a deliberate attack on the Holy See. “In the past,” wrote Louis Veuillot in L'Univers, “Christians would have accepted the Papal decision: now the same people criticize his action. A revolution in values and beliefs has shaken modern society and pagan prejudices have taken precedence over the eternal verities.”Footnote ⁵⁹

This sense of a global struggle between the godly forces of religion and the godless forces of liberal revolution reflected the traumatic experiences of 1848, which convinced Pius IX and many other Catholics of the fundamental opposition between religion and constitutional liberalism. As in 1840, the Catholic lobby made no bones about linking this wider struggle with international Jewish influence. Veuillot claimed: “Everywhere that eastern race rules supreme. They have purchased the copyright of all the important newspapers in Europe: the Times, Constitutionnel, Débats, etc.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This time, moreover, the anti-Jewish allegations made in L'Univers were echoed in a long article in the semi-official Civiltà Cattolica, the only public Papal response to the Mortara polemic.Footnote ⁶¹

Recent studies of the Damascus and Mortara Affairs have recognized the conflict between Jews and the forces of international Catholicism. Surprisingly, these two episodes—which are recognized as seminal for the crystallization and consolidation of international Jewish solidarity—have never been subjected to systematic comparison. The extent to which this solidarity emerged out of a confrontation with Catholic internationalism has therefore been ignored. Yet arguably it was the opposition between two global religious communities that differentiated the Damascus and Mortara Affairs from other political crises that transfixed the Jewish world between 1840 and 1880. Precisely because they were primarily religious controversies, they developed a genuinely international dynamic. It was this that rendered them such critical turning points in the evolution of modern Jewish politics and the collective history of the Jews.

If the relationship between Catholic and Jewish internationalism was essentially confrontational, the interaction between Protestants and Jews was more complex. This was partly because the ‘Protestant International’ lacked the central focus of the Papacy and the institutional support of the Catholic Church. Self-consciously international initiatives like the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric in Jerusalem and the Universal Evangelical Alliance never had much success. Yet the association between Protestantism and nationalism did not prevent the emergence of a powerful trans-Atlantic anti-slavery lobby, nor did it inhibit the cultivation of transnational ties in the missionary world.Footnote ⁶² Missionaries and governments had different priorities but there was an undeniable symbiosis between Protestant missionary activity and the forces of European imperialism, particularly where the British Empire was concerned.Footnote ⁶³

It might be argued that Protestant humanitarian and religious missions directed principally at those outside the fold had little in common with activities undertaken by Jews in Europe and North America on behalf of their co-religionists. In reality, these distinctions were less clear-cut. Anti-slavery grew as much out of concern with the plight of Protestant converts among the slave population of the West Indies as it did out of moral outrage.Footnote ⁶⁴ Many slaves in the United States were devout Christians and their Christianity was an argument in favor of their freedom. Conversely, it is hard to deny the ‘missionary’ quality of Jewish educational outreach conducted by the AIU, the AJA, and the Hilfsverein deutscher Juden among the “backward” Jews of the Middle East, even if the mission in question was the secularizing mission civilisatrice.Footnote ⁶⁵ In many ways, Protestant internationalism demonstrated exactly the kind of interaction between religion and civil society that characterized Catholic and Jewish experiences.Footnote ⁶⁶ Bible distribution, the worldwide missionary movement, and the great Protestant humanitarian campaigns all depended on individual charity, voluntary activism, association formation, and the emergence of a global public sphere.

Interestingly, the inveterate anti-Catholicism of many Protestants ensured considerable Protestant support for the Jews during both the Damascus and the Mortara Affairs. In 1840, the Anglican missionaries in Jerusalem dispatched a convert, George Pieritz, to Damascus to investigate the allegations with a view to clearing the Jews' name.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1858, Sir Culling Eardley's Evangelical Alliance was a key supporter of the Jewish cause. Indeed, the relationship between Protestant and Jewish internationalism in this period was sufficiently close for its structures to serve as an inspiration. At least one prominent member of the Universal Evangelical Alliance, Pastor Petavel of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, had links with several future leaders of the AIU. As early as 1855 Isidore Cahen wrote of the need for Jews to establish an equivalent body.Footnote ⁶⁸

Yet the sympathies of Protestants for the Jewish cause were intimately linked to proselytizing Restorationism, something of which Jews were well aware.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus the Jewish Chronicle criticized Eardley for the narrowly Christian basis of his stand over the Mortara Affair, complaining: “The conversion motives activating the worthy baronet in his movements on behalf of the Jews, are evident in every step.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Likewise, James Finn, the British Consul in Jerusalem, was known for his proselytism as much as his defense of Jewish rights.Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, Jewish alarm at the activity of Protestant missionaries in Jerusalem was arguably the most important catalyst for the transformation of Jewish philanthropic activity in the Holy Land that I have already described.Footnote ⁷²

In the 1840s, Ludwig Philippson's groundbreaking efforts to found a Jewish hospital in Jerusalem followed the arrival of Anglican medical missionaries in 1838, the foundation of the Anglican Bishopric in 1841, and widely publicized plans for a missionary hospital in 1842.Footnote ⁷³ The connection was explicitly acknowledged by The Voice of Jacob when it publicized details of Philippson's appeal.Footnote ⁷⁴ After outlining the medical case for a Jewish hospital, the editor of the Voice elaborated: “[t]hose who know the exertions made by the missionaries of the Conversion Society at Jerusalem, and the means they employ to apostatize our brethren, will at once recognize the importance of this institution.”

In the event, Philippson's hospital proved hard to establish. For the time being, the Jews of Jerusalem had to make do with the new Bikur Holim Perushim, and with the services of a Jewish doctor and dispensary funded by Montefiore.Footnote ⁷⁵ This dispensary was the first modern Jewish charitable institution established in Jerusalem, and Dr. Simon Frankel was the first western Jew to be formally employed in such an enterprise. It represented a critical turning point in the modernization of Jewish philanthropy in Palestine, and this too was a direct response to the missionary hospital. In February 1843, the Voice of Jacob had described the “great ferment” the medical missionaries created among the Jews of Jerusalem and reiterated the “painfully urgent” need for a proper Jewish equivalent. “In this critical emergency,” it continued, “we rejoice to announce, that Sir Moses Montefiore has resolved to establish a Jewish dispensary in Jerusalem at his own private cost….”Footnote ⁷⁶

A similar link between proselytism and Jewish philanthropy helps to explain Montefiore's decision to launch his Holy Land Relief Fund with Nathan Adler in 1854. Some time before Montefiore's own initiative, Consul Finn and his wife had responded to famine conditions in Jerusalem by setting up an “Industrial Plantation” to provide poor Jews with gainful employment and appealing to like-minded Christians abroad for funding.Footnote ⁷⁷ In his memoirs, Finn stresses that he barred the Jerusalem missionaries from entering the site during working hours, and that “the perfect freedom and religious liberty of the workpeople were respected.”Footnote ⁷⁸ He admitted, however: “[n]ow and then it happened that one or other who applied for admission and joined the others in the field had become Christians….” The anxiety Jewish religious leaders felt at Finn's project and their close contacts with Montefiore led the latter to instigate his hugely successful Holy Land Relief campaign.

Links between missionary Protestantism and international Jewish solidarity elsewhere remain to be explored. Intuitively, it seems probable that rival networks of missionary schools were an important context for the flowering of Jewish educational initiatives in the Middle East. In Jerusalem, the efforts of Christians to establish schools for Jewish girls preceded those of western European Jews; Jewish pioneers in the field admitted their activities were intended to stem the flow to missionary schools.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Morocco, the educational activities of Franciscan missionaries during the occupation of Tetuan from 1860 to 1862 made it easier for acculturated French and English Jews to establish the first AIU school in the Muslim world.Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, the attempts of native Ottoman Jews to modernize educational provision in Istanbul went hand in hand with the foundation of schools for local Jews by Catholics and Protestants.Footnote ⁸¹

In other contexts too, it seems likely that the link between missionary activity and philanthropy in an extra-European context prompted Jews to develop their own forms of international charity. The fate of Montefiore's first fund-raising initiative in the Middle East is instructive. On receiving news of the fire in Izmir, which had destroyed the Jewish quarter, he lost no time in launching a campaign on behalf of the Jewish victims.Footnote ⁸² Soon afterwards, he decided to play down the sectarian nature of this charitable activity by merging the Jewish subscriptions with money raised for the other inhabitants of Izmir.Footnote ⁸³ Within two months, however, reports began to reach London that “the daily bread of the starving Jews, supplied by the general fund to which their European brethren have so liberally contributed, is … doled out through the medium of apostate Jews (missionaries of the English Conversion Society) who abuse the opportunity, to influence the poor creatures to recognize Christianity.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Experiences such as this must have raised the hackles of Jewish philanthropists, leaving them reluctant to relinquish control of future charitable campaigns.

Even without such speculation, it is clear that the aggressive activities of Protestant missionaries were the catalyst for transforming traditional links with the Diaspora in the vital but very particular case of Palestine. Once this process had started, it developed a momentum of its own. In time, controversies over halukah and the productivization of the Old Yishuv took center stage in their own right among the concerns of the Jewish public sphere.

This brief analysis of the interaction between Jews, Catholics, and Protestants has demonstrated the vital contribution made by the global confrontation between these three religions to the evolution of the ‘Jewish International’ between 1840 and 1880. While the confrontation with the forces of militant Catholicism was a decisive factor in the transformative impact of the Damascus and Mortara Affairs upon traditional forms of Jewish solidarity, the Protestant preoccupation with converting Jews in Palestine provided the initial impetus for the modernization of Jewish philanthropy in the Land of Israel. More generally, proselytizing in an imperial context prompted European and North American Jewry to take greater interest in their brethren in the Middle East, who attracted disproportionate attention from evangelical missionaries. These twin developments created essential preconditions for the emergence of Zionism as an international movement capable of bridging the East-West divide in the Jewish world, rather than a more limited form of territorialist nationalism focusing on the Jews of Ashkenaz.

But of course Zionism was not the only outcome. While historians like Michael Graetz have seen the internationalism of the AIU primarily in terms of the emergence of Jewish nationalism, recent work has highlighted the institutionalization of the Jewish International in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁸⁵ These years saw a proliferation of international Jewish groups and agencies like the AIU, which were cosmopolitan and sometimes anti-nationalist in orientation, but nonetheless remained preoccupied with their “brethren” overseas.Footnote ⁸⁶ Jewish nationalism may have emerged partly from the religious solidarity of the mid-nineteenth century, but religious internationalism had its own dynamic and international religious politics continued to function independently of nationhood as an expression of collective Jewish identity. The boundaries between religion and nation have remained fluid, but nationalism has never fully displaced religious internationalism in the Jewish world.Footnote ⁸⁷

In this context, I want to highlight three crucial issues. First, despite the presence of proto-nationalist elements, the ‘Jewish International’ in this period is best characterized as a religious rather than an ethnic grouping. Only if we understand it in these terms can we explain the anomalous development of modern Jewish politics in what was—as Shimoni argues—a phase of “cultural nationalism.” Shimoni's approach remains relevant to understanding the emergence of Zionism in eastern Europe, particularly perhaps to “forerunners of Zionism” like David Gordon, Peretz Smolenskin, and Akiva Yossef Schlesinger. Just as Zionist historians have demonstrated the interplay between Jewish and non-Jewish nationalisms in a national context, however, so the time has come to acknowledge the interplay between Jewish and non-Jewish religious internationalisms in creating preconditions for modern Jewish nationalism in an international context.

The contribution of various aspects of Jewish religious tradition to Jewish nationalism is quite different to the link made here between Jewish nationalism and modern religious internationalism. Paradoxically, the emergence of a highly confessional international public sphere in the nineteenth century encouraged the ‘secularization’ of confessional identities by transforming religious communities from bodies of believers into bodies of opinion. The exclusively religious nature of Catholicism and Protestantism meant that the secularizing effect of this transformation on both denominations was less immediate and more indirect. In the Jewish case, however, bringing Judaism out of the synagogue and into the public sphere made it possible for a man like Crémieux to emerge as a leading Jewish activist, whose identification with his ‘co-religionists’ was not apparently undermined by the pragmatic decision to baptize his children. This paved the way for the subsequent transition from a community defined primarily in terms of religion to one increasingly (but not exclusively) ready to embrace the secular ideals of nationhood.

This conclusion sits uneasily with the approach taken by nationalist theorists, who have preferred to see the Jews primarily as an ethnic group rather than a religious group. Despite paying lip-service to the role of religion in Jewish (and other) national identities, most nationalist theorists continue to see religion in functionalist terms: as a powerful cultural resource on which nationalism can draw, and as a model for the cult of nationhood, which has appropriated religious symbols, liturgies, and rituals to create a secular “political religion.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Indeed, Eric Hobsbawm is reluctant to distinguish between ethnic exclusivism, conflict, xenophobia and the religious “fundamentalism” of (Christian) Armenians, (Muslim) Azeri Turks, and “Old Testament” Likud Zionists, and regards them all as part of the same general phenomenon.Footnote ⁸⁹ Common to these interpretations is a failure to engage with Judaism and the different streams of Christianity as international religious belief systems, whose structure and evolution were conditioned as much by a dynamic global environment as by the multiplicity of ‘national’ contexts. The truism that religion has been an important factor in many different national identities fails to do justice to the role of religion in forging modern Jewish identity, whether ‘national’ or otherwise.

Second, the contribution of religious confrontation to this process is reminiscent of the role of conflict and contestation in the elaboration of national identities. War is widely acknowledged as a critical crucible for nationalism, and the conflict between dominant and subordinate ethnic groups is well known as a key factor in the emergence of counter-state nationalisms. Even within relatively successful nation-states, the process whereby different constituent units and traditions contest the meaning of nationhood was an important factor in popularizing the nation.Footnote ⁹⁰ By analogy, it is only to be expected that the confrontation between different global religions contributed decisively to the crystallization of militant religious politics and more coherent confessional identities in the modern era. Just as the confrontation between traditional religions and the liberal ideology of the secularizing state politicized religious belief through a series of ‘culture wars’ in Europe, so too the conflict between different world religions helped to strengthen confessional loyalties on the global stage.

Needless to say, individual episodes did not have the same transformative impact for different religious communities. While the Damascus Affair was a seminal moment in modern Jewish history, it was relatively unimportant to Catholics who endorsed the ritual murder allegations. The vulnerability of the Papacy in 1858–1859, however, meant the Mortara Affair packed a similar punch for both Jews and Catholics, if not for Protestants who seized upon it as an opportunity to confirm their anti-Catholic prejudices. Inevitably, different national contexts created different political pressures: not every Catholic believed in ritual murder or supported the abduction of Edgardo Mortara, nor was every Protestant an enthusiastic proselytizer. But recognizing that religious opinion was not monolithic does not detract from the importance of religious internationalism as a characteristic feature of the confrontation between religion and modernity for Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike.

Finally, the failure of Jewish historians to consider systematically the interaction of Jews with Catholics and Protestants in a global context reflects the segmentation that continues to predominate in the historiography of religion. The conclusions of this article have helped to demonstrate how fruitful a comparative perspective can be. Just as the ‘transnational turn’ has led historians to question the place of the nation-state as the primary unit of historical study, so historians of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants could benefit greatly from a little more trans-denominational analysis.