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On the evening of the opening of the Great Exhibition, the 1st of May 1851, a vote was held in the House of Commons on whether to allow Jews to take a seat in Parliament without reciting the required oath, which included the words ‘on the faith of a Christian’.  It was the third such vote held – earlier motions had been carried, only to be quashed by the Lords. On this occasion too, the motion in favour of emancipation was won (it would again be lost in the Lords), but by a much smaller majority than in previous years. The reduced majority could partly be explained by the absence of supporters who were at the opening of the Crystal Palace, the unique, glass-and-steel fantasy-like edifice in Hyde Park containing the Great Exhibition (and arguably its most amazing attraction) that had universally acquired this awestruck soubriquet. Opponents of the bill, on the other hand, were present to vote against it. Why? Because they were boycotting the Great Exhibition.   

In an entertaining lecture at this joint meeting of the Jewish Historical Society and UCL’s Institute of Jewish Studies, held in honour of the pre-eminent Jewish historian Stephen Massil’s 70th birthday, Geoffrey Cantor, whose book Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 recently appeared, examined the views of these opposing camps and showed how support for, or opposition to, the Great Exhibition and Jewish emancipation tended to overlap and fitted into contemporary political discourse.

Opponents of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, to give its full title, generally viewed the whole affair as a hideous celebration of the vulgar forces of capitalism that were ripping out the soul of Christian England; worse: the moment an alien prince – for the Great Exhibition was very much Albert’s project – opened the gates to a flood of dangerous, revolutionary foreigners, in a move calculated to overturn the time-honoured English way of life.

Traditionalists, often Tory High Church Anglicans, they saw the same dangers in Jewish emancipation. Lionel de Rothschild, the Jew elected as MP for the City of London whose refusal to take the oath had brought matters to a head, was, after all, scion of the foreign banking dynasty that was a driving force of despised nineteenth century capitalism. John Ball, a periodical that railed against Jews, Turks, infidels, heretics and Catholics, argued that Rothschild’s admission would unchristianise the legislature and attract the wrath of God. A Jewish campaign in the 1840s and 50s to allow Sunday trading to make up for the fact religious Jews could not trade on their Sabbath, Saturday, only amplified its writers’ anger. They likewise fulminated against Albert and his Great Exhibition, which would lead to ungodly foreigners and revolutionaries swarming the streets.

To its supporters, on the other hand, the Great Exhibition heralded a brave new world of progress, internationalism, equality and peace. Numbered among its most enthusiastic proponents were non-conformists, for whom Albert’s vision of peace, love, brotherhood of mankind and internationalism struck a chord. As the British Banner, a non-conformist periodical put it: “The Crystal Palace knows no difference between Jew and Greek, Frank and Saxon. For the first time in the annals of Mankind, the Negro and the Malay, the slave and the American, will stand together on equal terms.” The same non-conformist voices, stimulated by their own struggles against political disabilities (eventually won in 1828), spoke out strongly for the extension of political equality to those of other religions, including Jews.

Prominent Jews themselves were very involved in the organisation of the Great Exhibition. Rothschild was appointed its treasurer by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (leading the Jewish Chronicle (JC), after the Book of Esther, to ask: “Will the Lords again reject the man whom the Queen thus delighteth to honour?”) David Salomons, Sir Isaac Goldsmid and Moses Montefiore sat on its art committees, to the chagrin of some, including the Architects’ Journal, which opined that, since Jews can’t have a pure sensibility to art, it was like appointing teetotallers to a wine and spirits committee! Many Jews enthusiastically attended the Great Exhibition, and Jewish philanthropists funded trips there for groups of poor Jewish schoolchildren, where they rubbed shoulders with people of more races – Indian princes, Chinese mandarins, Japanese potentates, African chiefs – and classes – from dukes of the realm to solicitors’ clerks – than had ever been seen together. The JC had a field day identifying foreign Jewish visitors and to the delight of the newspaper, which regularly castigated the community for providing anti-semites with ammunition by failing to contribute sufficiently to the arts or sciences, there were even Jewish exhibitors, who had brought honour on their race by presenting such treasures as painted spectacles, a magnificent state bed, a splendid set of false teeth made from hippopotamus and a calculating machine declared the best of its kind by the Great Exhibition’s jury. 

At the behest of Moses Montefiore, arrangements were even made so that Jews holding season tickets could attend on Saturdays without having to sign in and thereby infringe the Sabbath, a move that garnered the disapproval of the JC’s more orthodox Jewish correspondents, who pointed out that the carrying of tickets was also an infringement of the Sabbath and attendance was anyway hardly in keeping with the spirit of the day of rest.

In truth, the public likes a grandiose spectacle – one has only to look at the mass enthusiasm for the ludicrously wasteful Olympics – and by the time it opened opposition to the Great Exhibition was probably very much a minority opinion, its adherents like the Ultra-Tory Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp MP, satirisied in Punch cartoons as Just William-style delinquents throwing stones at the panes of the Crystal Palace. (It is worth noting, inter alia, that this much more technologically and culturally unprecedented event than the Olympics was organised from scratch in about a year and a half, without a penny of taxpayers’ money being spent on it and no widespread disruption.)

Though the cause may have been less of a crowd-pleaser, a coalition of non-conformists, progressive Whigs and liberals of all stripes carried the day on Jewish emancipation too. After further battles Rothschild was allowed to take his seat in 1858 without reciting the oath, and in 1860 a law was passed definitively sweeping away Jewish political disabilities. Victorian England was, for all its faults, an era of progress and increasing religious, racial and social equality.

Looking back in 1853, Charlotte Montefiore, talented young member of one of Anglo-Jewry’s ‘aristocratic’ families, reiterated a widely-held view in an anonymously-published book A Few Words to the Jews (by One of Themselves): “The Crystal Palace, that rose into life and beauty, as by a magician’s wand, and disappeared like a phantom, was a symbol of the age.” That last sentiment is something, at least, on which its enthusiasts and detractors could surely agree.