David Ricardo's Sefarad

David Ricardo’s Sefarad Sergio Cremaschi Former Professor of Moral Philosophy Amedeo Avogadro University (Alessandria, Novara, Vercelli) ESHET XXII Conference Madrid 7-9 June 2018 1. A blind spot in Ricardo’s biography This paper is meant to be a contribution to a reconstruction of an aspect of Ricardo’s biography, namely the history of his shifting religious affiliations with their biographical, intellectual and political implications. Here I examine the first 21 years of his life, when he was a child in a London Sephardi household and, from the age of 13, a member of the Bevis Mark congregation. My aim is – given the scarcity of primary sources – to add something to the accounts available (Sraffa 1955, 16-43 and 54-61; Heertje 1970; 1975; 2015; Weatherall 1976, 1-21; Henderson 1997, 51-154) by taking advantage of two tools by which to squeeze a bit more out of scant documents. The first is a contextual approach, made possible now by excellent work that has been done by historians on eighteenth-century Anglo-Judaism. The second is pragmatic interpretation of utterances recorded in documents, a technique that may be learned from the no less valuable work done by philosophers of language, one of Sraffa’s close friends no less than the whole Oxford philosophy which the latter did not appreciate too much, John Austin, John Searle and Paul Grice. I contend, first, that something more may be learnt on Ricardo’s formative years, on religion, moral education, intellectual interests awakened and competences acquired, than Sraffa and other biographers felt in a position to do on the basis of the scant documents available; secondly, that Ricardo’s Sephardi background is important both in order to account for his moral commitments, particularly his ideas on toleration; thirdly that this background is important in order to understand the kind of intellectual training he had received and the kind of intellectual motivations he had acquired, and accordingly also the kind of scientific interests he cultivated later on, and in turn the moulding of his cast of mind, or his scientific style. Starting with the context, I try to carry out a thick reading of reticent declarations by Ricardo himself and other sources while trying to interpret what they mean, whom they are addressing, and what they want not to disclose to their audience. I carry out my thick reading by summarizing first the problems with interpretation of sources on Ricardo’s biography (sect. 2), then by illustrating the history of the London Sephardi community until Ricardo’s time (sect. 3-4) and reconstructing the context, first, of his education (sects. 5 and 6), and then of the circumstances of his marriage with a Quaker and the ensuing break with his religious community (sect. 7). 2. Twenty-one years in Ricardo’s life The Memoir written by Ricardo’s brother Moses is the fullest of the early part of his life based on personal knowledge. Apparently, Moses intended to write a fuller biography but abandoned the project probably for the reasons reported by John Lewis Mallet. The latter writes that Mr. Moses Ricardo, a brother of David Ricardo, and a man of information and intelligence who intended writing a Memoir of his brother, ands was collecting materials for the purpose, has been prevailed upon by Ricardo’s family to abandon the undertaking; and I understand from him that their real objection to it is, that as they are now people of fortune and of some consequence, and landed gentry, they do not like that the public should be reminded of their Jewish and mercantile origin (Mallet Diary, June 24 1830; cf. Sraffa 1955, 16). 1 Ricardo did not like to talk about his own Jewish origins. Reasons for doing so were obvious. In Georgian England, even though Jews enjoyed a higher level of integration than in other European countries, anti- Jewish gossip was so deeply rooted a social practice as to be an irresistible temptation even for the most liberal minds – among them the author of the Sunday Times obituary, who was a friend and admirer, a fellow-Unitarian, and a fellow-liberal who did not refrain in the obituary itself the due amount of derision addressed to Jewish greed and sectarian spirit as well as to the ‘peculiarities of the Mosaic ritual’ (Whittle Harvey 1823). The response to such social pressure, a unique combination in the European scenario of comparatively liberal treatment at the legal administrative level on the one hand and ‘genteel intolerance’ (Edelman 2002, 247) through a perennial flood of ‘casual garden-party anti-Semitism’ (262) was, among Sephardi Jews, assimilation, first cultural, then also religious, through step-by-step processes, ranging from mixed marriage, having one’s children christened, adopting the Christian mother’s family name (Edelman 1999, 257-258). And the strategy of communication with non-Jewish partners was dictated by the mentioned genteel intolerance which ‘encouraged them to mute their Jewishness, rather than accept it naturally or even revel it’ (Edelman 2000, 247). Thus, the obvious strategy was minimalistic, ranging from suppression of information about one’s story to adoption of ‘English’ linguistic and cultural patterns, to modesty about one’s skills verging on self-depreciation, and finally to a constant attempt not to be too clever – in England ‘cleverness was bad form’ (Endelman 2002, 265) – and, in case one could not help his own cleverness, at least he was expected not to show it around. The above historical considerations may be a reminder of the need to interpret both Ricardo’s and his contemporaries’ utterances in their context and co-text, to keep in mind that when Ricardo was declaring that his education had been neglected or that he learned almost nothing during his stay in Amsterdam, he was not addressing Sraffa but rather James Mill and Maria Edgeworth. And I would add that we may better interpret such utterances than Sraffa was in a position to do thanks to the high-level historical literature on Anglo-Jewry which has accumulated in the meanwhile, to what Oxford philosophy has worked out in the meanwhile concerning interpretation of utterances and its application in historical methodology, first of all by Quentin Skinner, and perhaps also thanks to our freedom from Sraffa’s own prejudices. The facts we know are that David was born in 1772 to Abigail Delvalle and Abraham Israel Ricardo, a wealthy Sephardi stock-jobber who was born in Amsterdam in 1734 and moved to London in 1760. There he married the daughter of a Sephardic family who had been living in England for three generations and a few years later obtained British citizenship. Besides an established businessman he became an important figure in the Bevis Mark Synagogue, where he was appointed to serve as an administrator for several years (Hyamson 1951, 437-9; Sraffa 1955, 17-29. It may be worth noting that Ricardo’s father was not an English native speaker but apparently a Dutch-Spanish bilingual speaker, and his mother was apparently – since the vernacular of the Sephardi population was still Spanish – apparently a Spanish-English bilingual native speaker. One may wonder which language was adopted as a medium among spouses and the answer would be that in analogous cases it would have the shared native language, that is, Spanish. Nonetheless, the language spoken with the children was apparently English, which was probably also the vehicular language of teaching in the schools affiliated with the Bevis Mark synagogue, even though Spanish was still alive until about 1800, and was the language in which young David heard sermons in the Synagogue. David was the third in a family of fifteen. Almost all the children married. Almost all brothers went into professions with a commercial character, five of them as brokers at the Stock exchange, with the exception of Moses who became a surgeon. Among the sisters the exception was provided by last-born Sarah, who became an author of educational writings (Sraffa 1955, 54-64). Moses’s and Sarah’s stories are discussed in more detail in what follows. David was cast off by his parents as he married a Quaker but, after several siblings had already followed his example, his father resolved to surrender to the course of history and sought reconciliation with his son David (Sraffa 1955, 36-43). 3. Anglo-Judaism from 1600 to 1793 After the 1290 expulsion and attempts to establish tiny clandestine communities of Marrano immigrants, a flow of Marranos to London started again between 1632 and 1655 when Cromwell tried to secure a legal status for Jews in England. The attempt failed but led to a situation of de facto toleration which allowed for 2 establishment in 1657 of a burial ground and a synagogue in Creechurch Lane. Besides the older Sephardi community, also an Ashkenazi congregation came into being in 1690, and kept steadily growing due to immigration from Poland via Germany and Holland. Even though they had too their own magnates and managed to erect a new main synagogue in 1722, then rebuilt and enlarged in 1766 and in 1790, as a whole they remained for a rather long time a lower-class group (Roth et al. 2007b, 180-181). Through the eighteenth century a steadily growing Sephardi community, headed by an elite of brokers and merchants, became a part of the London landscape and in 1697 twelve ‘Jew Brokers’ were admitted to the Royal Exchange. Apart from magnates from the financial world, the Community’s elite included in a first phase, roughly from mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, a number of physicians and scientists (Roth et al.

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