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. 2007a, 414). One was Jacob de Castro Sarmento, a Marrano physician who had graduated from the Jesuit University of Evora and in 1721escaped from the Inquisition’s persecution by emigrating to England (Roth & Assis 2007). Another was Emanuel Mendes da Costa (1717-1791), from 1747 a Fellow of the Royal Society and from 1767 the Society’s librarian (Foote 2004), who published besides communication in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions A Natural History of Fossils (1757), Elements of Conchology, or An Introduction to the Knowledge of Shells (1776), British Conchology (1778). Besides physicians and scientists, there was also one instance of a Jewish writer, Moses Mendes (1690?-1758), a stockjobber who, after making a fortune retired from business and dedicated himself to literary pursuits, writing poems, stage pieces and the novel (McGeary 2004). In the Sephardi Synagogue, a succession of rabbis was appointed as the Haham – a Hebrew word meaning ‘wise’, used as a honorific title for the Sephardi synagogue’s chief rabbi – coming often from places as distant as Smirna, Oran, Leighorn. As Spanish remained apparently the community’s vernacular well into the eighteenth-century, resettlement to London did not imply a heavy effort to adapt to a new linguistic milieu and in fact those of time who published on theological or legal subjects went on writing in Hebrew and Spanish, even at a time when the latter language was falling out of use. An inconvenient deriving from such a practice was that the community’s intellectual leadership was not at its best when required to respond to Christian scholars. In 1701 the new Bevis Mark Synagogue was erected, an achievement marking the beginning of a new era for the London Sephardi community (Roth et al. 2007b, 180). The first rabbi appointed as Haham was Jacob Sasportas (1664-65) from Oran in North Africa, known for his staunch opposition to Shabbatianism – a movement started by the Ottoman Jew in the seventeenth century who proclaimed himself the Messiah and announced the observance of precepts was to be considered as superseded and the author of writings in Hebrew against this movement (Dan 2007). The second was Joshua Da Silva (1670-79), from Amsterdam (Roth 2007b), the author of Discursos Predicaveys (da Silva 1688), a collection of sermons in Spanish and of the Libro de Acuerdos (da Silva 1681), a compilation of community statutes. The third was Jacob Abendana (1681-85), from Amsterdam, probably born in Spain (Den Boer 2007), a Spanish translations of Yehuda Halevi’s Sefer ha-Kuzari – a work defending Judaism against non-Jewish philosophers. The fourth was Solomon Ayllon (1689-1701) from Salonika, a qabbalist and former follower of Shabbatanism, who soon met with opposition in London when his heretical past was detected and left in 1700 for Amsterdam (Scholem 2007). The following Haham deserves more extended discussion. David Nieto (1702-28), born in Venice in 1654, had been a physician and a preacher in Leighorn. Appointment of such a well-known scholar as Haham, together with the building of the new Synagogue, marked the Zenith in the life of the new-born community and the beginning of three decades intellectual awakening (Mimran 2012; Petuchowski 2007; Karem 2004; Ruderman 1995, 310-31; Katz 1994, 196-201; Gaster 1901, 129-130). He published De la Divina Providencia (Nieto 1704; Artigas 2013, 209-226), a book occasioned by a controversy aroused by a member of the community who petitioned against him for having allegedly taught Spinozism or Pantheism in a sermon and Nieto responded by this dialogue in Spanish, where he illustrated his views in detail. His intention is precisely refutation of the Deists who claim that ‘God does exist but does not govern the world. It is Nature that governs the words’ (9). And his argument is that Nature cannot be understood as an entity different from God, that ‘there is no universal Nature, and what people say that such Universal Nature performs is performed instead by God through his own divine providence’ (Nieto 1704, 3), that is, ‘the means by which God produces an effect is not identified with God himself’ (13-14). He admits that talk of nature is justified, but only as far as individual nature of things was meant but no talk of Nature in general is justified, since the latter is simply identified with divine 3 providence or, in other words, ‘only the individual is real and does exists’ and other kinds of entity ‘are entities of reason, which is tantamount to fantastic, imaginary, and possess no other kind of being than that which men ascribe to them in their ideas (18). The dispute was settled by arbitrate entrusted to rabbi Zvi Ashkenazi from Hamburg, who decided in Nieto’s favour. Another work was Matteh Dan ve Kuzari Helehk Shenì, that is, ‘The Rod of Dan and Second Part of Sefer ha- Kuzari’, in Hebrew and Spanish (Nieto 1714; Artigas 2013, 237-265), where he defends the Oral Law against the Karaites – a Jewish sect, whose doctrines had been revived among former Marranos, which rejected the while accepting just the Torah or the Pentateuch, on the argment that no unwritten Law had ever been proclaimed and the only Law is the once received by Moses. Nieto wants to prove ‘through natural reason and irrefutable proofs and real consequences, the truth of the Mental Law, received by our wise authors of the Mishah and the Ghemarah’ (Nieto 1714, title words). His claim is that the ‘mental law’ already existed before the Sinai and the argument is both philosophical and historical, arguing that the exact scope of several precepts from the written Law can be established only assuming that an oral law already existed providing the missing elements, for ex., what is the organ that should be circumcised, and that God had given commands to Adam and, at the time of the Flood, had punished those who had transgressed his commands, but this proves that such commands had already been given since natural law prescribes that one should not punish unless he had previously admonished (Nieto 1714). A third work is Esh Dat, o sea Fuego Legal, that is ‘Fire of the Law’, a dialogue against Sabbatianism in both Hebrew and Spanish, where the crypto- Sabbatanian rabbi Nehemiah Hayoun is under attack (Nieto 1715; Artigas 2013, 266-278). The first remarkable key-idea is the exclusion of the possibility promised by his opponent ‘to grasp the divine essence’ (Artigas 2013, 274); Nieto argues that

One should not open his mouth in order to ask what kind of thing is Deity. The reason is that who asks by the phrase ‘what is’ (quid est) wants to know the essential definition of what he is asking about, which cannot really be known in case it does not consist of gender and difference, which hare in turn different from each other (Artigas 2013, 274).

It is not a novel idea. Even Aquinas had warned that knowledge about God may be at most knowledge of the quia (because), different from knowledge of the quid (what), but is was also Galileo’s programmatic idea with which Nieto was familiar, namely that also natural philosophy, that is, physics, is limited to discovery of correlations among phenomena since – Galileo adds – ‘il tentar l’essenza l’ho per impossibile’, that is, to grasp the essence is something I deem impossible. Again, as in De la Divina Providencia, limited skepticism is used as a defensive weapon in order to make room for faith, and attacks from either neo- Gnostic mystical trends or from the partisans of modern science are rebuked by the weapons of modern science itself. The second is the distinction between God’s absolute and God’s limited power, echoing perhaps William of Ockham’s distinction of potentia Dei absoluta and potentia Dei ordinata; Nieto declares that God created the word from noting using his onnipotence but he does not need it in order to govern the world, and that ‘the Power governing the world does govern it within self-imposed boundaries’ (Artigas 2013, 276). Nieto’s work as a whole was a remarkable attempt to respond to the challenge to the Jewish faith coming from modern science and philosophy by entering philosophical discussion while defending the cause of traditional Judaism without indulging in traditionalist attitudes. He adopted Samuel Clarke’s denial of the distinction between miracle and natural event resting on the assumption that it is always God’s will to determine the order of nature but did so by enlisting Jewish authorities such as Yehudah ha-Levi on his side. Besides, he fought non-Jewish philosophers with their own weapons, as when he listed Aristotle’s, Gassendi’s, Descartes’ and the chemical philosophers’ conception of matter and proceed to show that, since they are conflicting with each other, one ‘cannot view any of them as certain but only as probable, plausible explanations’ of reality’ (Ruderman 1995, 324). Such a strategy tempers endorsement of modern science’s empiricism with an epistemological consideration limiting the scope and validity of science, namely a kind of limited scepticism ‘that acknowledges science as a partial but never complete truth’ (324). Unfortunately, Nieto’s dream, conceived of half a century before the beginning of German Haskalah, had already been forgotten at Moses Mendelsohn’s time. In fact, the Bevis Mark Synagogue underwent a seventy-years process of inexorable decay, and when, at about 1800, an attempt was planned to resist the tide, the dissolution of English Sephardi Judaism had already advanced. In the long run, ‘even Nieto’s 4 elaborated reconstruction of Judaism, like Mendelssohn’s after him, could not withstand the mighty forces of Jewish social disintegration unlashed by the rapidly changing political and cultural ambience of Enlightenment and revolutionary Europe’ (331). Let us follow the ensuing process of decay step by step. At his death, Nieto’s son Isaac was appointed in turn as temporary Haham without full powers but gave up the post in 1741 and travelled abroad. In 1744 a new Haham was appointed at Bevis Mark, Moses Gomes de Mezquita, apparently an insignificant character with no scholarly record who kept the office until his death in 1751. Isaac Nieto returned to London in 1747 and took up the profession of notary. He left again London in 1749 travelling to Gibraltar where he was for a few years the chief Rabbi of the newly founded Synagogue. In 1751 he came back when he was asked to accept the post of member of the rabbinic court which he retained for a few years until he resigned after a a dispute on the court’s titles and powers (Roth 2007a). He published a Spanish version of the prayer-books (Nieto 1740; 1771) and a Sermon Moral (Nieto 1755). There is no record of reactions to this sermon but with some hindsight we may figure out the kind of suspicions and half-heartedly formulated allegations that it may have evoked, those that apparently marked the failed succession to his father. The sermon was pronounced on a general fast proclaimed by the King George III because of the current international situation. Isaac Nieto illustrates two main ideas, apparently the ones he cared for, crammed between platitudes about patriotism and to implore protection of Heaven from threats to the kingdom arising from the Jewish subjects’ loyalty to the King (Nieto 1755, 2) as well as the general decay of morals (Nieto 1755, 6-7). The first is that there is no religion without morality. The second is that the essence of all precepts is love for one’s neighbour. Both claims are cleverly presented as the quintessence of Jewish orthodoxy with reference to the Prophets, the Talmudic masters and particularly Rabbi Hillel. He writes:

Isn’t morality a part of religion? Who may pretend he is religious if he does not obey the precepts of morality? There is no religion without it; without it religion boils down to sanctimony; on this ole precept our excellent master and prince used to ground the whole of religion, What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow (Nieto 1755, 7).

Obviously enough, what Isaac Nieto writes here perfectly summarizes the essence of Judaism but in his time and place his claims were likely to evoke dangerous ideas in his audience – a community of former Marranos enjoying the precious but frail blessing of near-freedom in the British Kingdom and suspicious of possible threats to its own recently regained religious identity. One was the association with the new ideas of the Enlightenment. ‘Mieux une morale san religion qu’une religion sans morale’ was the epoch-making motto from D’Alembert’s ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie which had been published four years before, in 1751, and the reduction of all precepts to charity or one’s neighbour’s love had been a recurrent topic in Christian literature, recurrently directed against Judaism, depicted as formal and legalistic worship of numberless trifling precepts. Ten years after Gomes de Mezquita’s death, in 1761, Moses Cohen d’Azavedo from Amsterdam, who had married the former’s daughter, was elected to the seat that had been until then left vacant. He could hardly be said a scholar of any kind. He published a couple of sermons, one of them a eulogy of the new king George III. He served until his death in 1784 and after him there was a 22 years interregnum, lasting until 1808, when a new Haham was elected. These circumstances give the impression of a few decades of spiritual lethargy, caused by ‘a Jewish leadership unwilling to become involved in the intellectual battle that they were bound to lose, and a desire to continue their policy of theological self-effacement’ (Katz 1994, 255)

4. Echoes from the Haskalah

Nieto’s attempt forerun by a few decades Moses Mendelsohn’s own attempt to modernize Judaism while bringing it back to its own sources. Other voices, less authoritative than those of David and Isaac Nietos, started invoking a response to the challenge of modernization and Enlightenment. A pamphlet from the last decades of the eighteenth century, A Peep into the Synagogue (Anonymous 1780?), suggests to have, without any change in ‘the fundamental principles of the Jewish profession […] the service performed in the tongue, or language of that country it is performed in […] The hearers will then know what the Priest is saying and will be able to join him in his devotion. It will render unnecessary the stupid method of learning 5 that mongrel jargan used among Jews, which prevents them from ever speaking well, the language of any Country’ (Katz 1994, 290). Similar criticism was repeated by converts from Judaism such as the author of Paradise Restored (Payne 1750), and again in the first decades of the nineteenth century by Hyam Isaacs in A solemn and affectionate address to the Jews (1820) and The awakening of the Jews from their slumbers (1842; cf. Katz 1994, 291). Joseph Priestley, a Presbyterian minister who became one of the founders of English Unitarianism, besides being a well-known chemist and philosopher, was the author of an attempt to start some kind of Christian- Hewish dialogue though a series of open letters where he develops a complex argument combining philosophical topics and Scripture-based eschatological predictions in order to advocate mass conversion to Christianity (Priestley 1786; Katz 1994, 296-300). David Levi (1742-1801), a self-taught English Jew, provided useful materials to both Jews and Christian scholars by translating the Sephardi and Askhenazi prayer book and A Succinct Account of the Rites and Ceremonies of the Jews (1782). Levi was the only one to accept Priestley’s challenge in his Dissertations on the Prophecies (Levi 1793-1800) where he defended Judaism against Priestley’s Christian millenarianism (Rothschild 2007; Popkin 1996; Katz 1994, 295-300). John King, the author of an Introduction to the 1817 second edition of Levi’s dissertation went a step further, attacking Anglican attempts to convert Jews and greeting the Unitarians’ discovery or the truth of Unity of god and their abandonment of ‘the absurd notion of Christ being the Messiah’ (King 1817: lxxvi); he presented Judaism as the best expression of a Universal Theism dictated by both reason and faith, undertook the task of working out a rational theology as a basis of Judaism seeking conciliation of Jewish faith and modern science (Ruderman 2000, 89-134). Transformation of Judaism into ‘ethical monotheism’ was precisely the kind of response first envisaged by Moses Mendelsohn and then actively staged by Reform Judaism in Germany and Hungary and by Eastern European Haskalah. Such a response followed in Britain a somewhat slower pace, starting to be felt after Ricardo’s death (Ruderman 1995, 310-31; 2000, 89-134 and 215-68). The first Liberal Synagogue was founded in London in the 1840s (Roth et al. 2007b, 181; Katz 1996, 64). It was probably too late also for the Sephardi community as a whole, whose slow process of disintegration having already began. Isolated voices had spoken up in favour of acceptance of the new ideas, namely, reform of Judaism transforming it into one religious confession among others, campaigning for recognition of full citizenship for Jews and some reasonable response to the challenge of intermarriage, the same phenomenon that was already almost wiping British Quakerism off. In 1789 the big storm broke, bringing a mix of promises of freedom, equality and universal brotherhood together with danger of wars and – as it happens often in hard times – also a revival of Millenarian movements among marginal figures in Anglo-Jewry, and the birth of -Judaic Millenarianism among English Dissenters. At this stage, the London Sephardi community had lost of sight that spark of intellectual liveliness which had been throwing some light on it for a few years and was slipping instead into a state of spiritual lethargy. Such lethargic state between 1750 and 1789, marked by ‘a Jewish leadership unwilling to become involved in the intellectual battle that they were bound to lose, and a desire to continue their policy of theological self-effacement’ (Katz 1994, 251-55) seems to contrast strikingly with the rather quick transformation it was willy-nilly undergoing. It was passively watching, from the mid-century, when the preaching was still in Spanish to the last decades of the century, to the ineluctable disappearance of Spanish as a vernacular (Ruderman 2000, 6-7, 215-16) and the growing integration by its members into all aspects of British social life. This was the starting point of the well-known process of assimilation, which carried the perverse effect of near-effacement of the more wealthy and successful Sephardi community while the worse off Askhenazi community survived in better health. To account for the above paradox no less than for the mentioned spiritual lethargy several factors should be invoked. Part of them are socio- economic ones. It is true that the Sephardi group was a mercantile group that was simply forerunning economic practices, later on generalized in the British society, and their climbing on the social ladder implied assimilation as an almost unavoidably destiny, the same as the Quakers. But, not unlike the Quaker community, also the Sephardi group underwent dramatic demographic collapse, due to a concomitant and more directly decisive factor, namely a growing rate of intermarriage in the absence of rules that would regulate it (Katz 1994, 254-259). And also, cohesion of the Sephardi community was undermined by a tragic religious story by which the Askhenazi one had gone almost unaffected, including firstly the experience of 6 forced conversion and Marranism with the heavy legacy of a feeling of insecurity and repulsion-attraction while facing the Christian outside world, with a serious problem carried by a constant flow of converts to Christianity, and secondly the Sabbatanian heresy which originated within the Sephardi community in the Ottoman empire and had more followers among Sephardim than Askhenazim. From the last decades of the eighteenth century, various Jewish thinkers, writing both in English and in Hebrew, were deeply impressed by the universalizing and rationalizing tendencies within English Christianity […] In the light of what they read and what they observed, they could no longer retain the naïve and unwavering faith of Levi. […] Judaism, in their eyes, suffered from the same depravities and malaise that Christianity had experienced; it too required the liberating and liberalizing reformulations articulated so forcefully by deists and Latitudinarianism (Ruderman 2000, 91).

Yet, far from paying attention to voices calling for reform, the Sephardi community reacted to the turmoil coming from revolutionary France between 1789 and the beginning of the nineteenth century by closing like a clam while waiting for the for the storm to subside and the very circumstance that the Synagogue was without a Haham precisely during this lapse of time is telling. Thus, in 1794, when Ricardo married outside the Jewish community, the tendency prevailing was more towards assimilation than reform (Endelman 1999, 248-271). Ricardo had started his interreligious romance at the height of the wave of revolutionary ideas, and the names he and his loved one choose as pseudonyms for their clandestine correspondence, Osman and Jesse, the former coming from Zaïre, a piece by the arch-spokesman for toleration Voltaire, the name of a Sultan who loved a Christian, and the latter being a name of a Biblical character, Yishai, deriving from the Hebrew word for ‘gift’, which was in turn the name of king David’s father, and thus somehow related with Ricardo.

5. Ricardo’s primary education

David Ricardo complained, in a letter to James Mill of 12 Sept 1817, that his education had been ‘neglected’ (Ricardo 1951-1973, 7: 190) and a few years later in conversation with Maria Edgeworth that his father had given him ‘but little education’, since he ‘thought reading writing and arithmetic sufficient because he doomed [him] to be nothing but a man of business’ (Edgeworth 1970, 226). What did he mean, among other things, by such utterances? In the former case, that he admired James Mill's greater ability as a writer and he envied him for having enjoyed the asset of education under such a star as Dugald Stewart at that kind of ‘Athens of the North’ as Edinburgh University was believed to be, or was he just uttering an expression of respect to James Mill? And in the latter case, that he was adopting the typical low-profile, the self-effacement tactic, described by the already cited Endelman, vis-à-vis a gentle and sympathetic Anglican partner that he knew too well was soaked up to the marrow with that kind of garden-party anti-Semitism he had been sensing around in his adult life? The speaker’s meaning, or what somebody means to say, is something that should be established before taking any utterance literally. And, after some reasonable guess about what he may have meant, we may ask a different question, namely, what were the facts. What the ‘Memoir’ (Ricardo 1824) says about Ricardo's education is remarkable for its reticence, due to self-censorship owing to the abovementioned deeply-rooted prejudice and other sources are either as reticent or simply ill-informed. The average message is that he received such education as was customary for a boy destined to a commercial career. This may mean – once reticence is taken into account, and the word ‘Jewish’ substituted for the word ‘commercial’ – that, being the son of a Sephardi stock-jobber destined to follow his father’s career, he did not attend a grammar school where he would have been taught Latin and Greek, but that the school he attended was probably the school for boys associated with the Bevis Mark Synagogue, named Shaare-Tikvah or Gates of Hope, whose administrative board Ricardo the father was a member. The school was the Talmud Torah established in 1664 and re-organized in 1736 and again in 1758 so that, ‘in addition to religious studies, the pupils were taught arithmetic and to read and write in English’ (Black 1998, 14; cf. Gaster 1901, 35-36, 150; Hyamson 1951, 94-95). Preparation for 7 bar Mitzvah at 13 was part of school education (Ricardo 1951-1973, 7: 195; Heertje 2015, 219-21). A reasonable guess is that the Jewish education imparted included some knowledge of the Hebrew language, some reading from the Bible and from Talmudic literature such as the Pirké Avot or Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnà, a summary in Hebrew of Jewish morals. Thus, the cultural equipment Ricardo acquired was not that of a Talmudic scholar but also not the same as the standard education for English boys was meant to provide. On this plausible enough hypothesis, Ricardo lacked the benefits of a classical education – as he used to complain later on – but enjoyed the combined benefits of a no less demanding education, including the study of one ancient language, Hebrew instead of Latin and Greek, and of an education outside the mainstream. The only exceptional feature in his education was a two-years stay at his uncle’s house in Amsterdam. We know that he was sent at the age of eleven to Amsterdam. According to Sraffa he may have attended for two years the renowned Amsterdam Talmud Torah (Sraffa 1955, 31) but his opinion rests on literal reading of a cryptic sentence from the ‘Memoir’, namely ‘with a view […] that he might be placed at a school of which he entertained a high opinion’ (Ricardo 1924, 3). The education offered at Amsterdam's Talmud Torah at the end of the eighteenth century was an almost traditional program of Jewish studies with no secular subjects; according to the 1750 regulations, the standard age of compulsory education was from 5 to 14. The school enjoyed a high reputation for its excellence in teaching and for peculiarities in its syllabus, covering, besides Talmudic subjects, also Hebrew grammar and poetry. There was a senior branch called Midrash Ets Hayim or ‘Commentary of the Tree of Life’, a name adopted also by the London parallel institution, providing three more years education for the most gifted students, with Hebrew as vehicular language and from whose alumni rabbis were appointed for numerous Sephardi communities in Western Europe and the Mediterranean countries (Michman et al. 2007, 109). Note yet, that primary school’s syllabus was different from the London ‘Gates of Hope’, since the latter had a combined Jewish-secular syllabus while the Amsterdam Talmud Torah – with all the breadth of its syllabus – apparently still made no room for secular subjects. According to Heertje, there is no evidence in Amsterdam's archives of Ricardo's attendance of the Talmud Torah (Heertje 1970, 591-592; 1975, 78-79; 2015, 219-221). In a former paper Heertje was moderately favourable to Sraffa's hypothesis concerning David Ricardo's attendance of Amsterdam Talmud Torah, suggesting that he may have been sent there with a view to his preparation for Bar Mitzvah, which takes place traditionally at thirteen, the age at which David Ricardo came back to London (Heertje 1970, 591). In a later paper he shifts to a different hypothesis, that of an education similar to Isaac d'Israeli's, who, being - like Ricardo - the son of a stockbroker, was sent to Amsterdam and studied there under a private tutor (Heertje 1975, 78). The obvious objection is that the two cases are different, since d’Israeli’s visit took place several decades after Ricardo’s, and family backgrounds were far from identical. Henderson objected that probably it would prove impossible to find any evidence of Ricardo’s attending the Talmud Torah since there was apparently no kind of official registration, but only a private agreement with an individual teacher who would accept to become the tutor of a boy (Henderson, 147- 153). I mentioned that the ‘Memoir’– in the typically reticent style whose reasons have been discussed – declares that

[h]is father, who had designed him to follow the same business in which he was engaged, and whose transactions lay chiefly in that country, sent him thither not only with a view to his becoming acquainted with it, but also that he might be placed at a school of which he entertained a very high opinion (Ricardo 1824, 3; my emphasis).

One answer to the question of Ricardo’s education in Amsterdam could be that the phrasing adopted in the ‘Memoir’ suggests that the possibility of enrolment at the Talmud Torah had just been considered and never put into practice. An alternative answer could be that the question of the Amsterdam Talmud Torah is irrelevant. The reticent phrasing suggests that David did not attend this school even though his father had toyed with the idea to send him to the school where he had been a pupil. One does not have to look long to find reasons why the project was utterly unrealistic. One is that the level of education David had received in London in Jewish subjects may have been much lower than the one expected for his age at the Amsterdam school which was still imparting an exclusively Jewish education. Another more obvious reason is that the vehicular language used for teaching in Amsterdam at Abraham Ricardo’s time as a pupil was probably still 8

Spanish but, as late as 1774, it may have already been Dutch, and it was probably no more Spanish but English at the school attended in London by his son. The result may have been that his uncle had to opt for a plan less ambitious than envisaged by his father, namely, preparation for bar Mitzvah with a private tutor and tuition in Dutch, French and Spanish. Ricardo’s later recollections as presented to Maria Edgeworth present his Amsterdam stay as an educational disaster, mentioning that his father had sent him ‘at eleven to Amsterdam to learn Dutch, French Spanish’ but – he added – ‘I was so unhappy at being separated from my brothers and sisters and family that I learned nothing in two years but Dutch which I could not help learning’ (Edgeworth 1971, 266). Yet, the very fact that his father had thought of this possibility of having him attending the Amsterdam Talmud Torah is a proof to the fact that Ricardo attended a Talmud Torah in London before and after his stay in Amsterdam. This implies that he received a mixed, Hebrew/religious and English/secular education, and Heertje’s opinion that ‘there is no evidence that he received any particular Jewish education’ (Heertje 2015, 220), besides contrasting with Heertje’s own opinion that ‘the study of Talmud’ (Heertje 2015, 224) did contribute in a decisive way in moulding Ricardo’s cast of mind, lacks support from extant documents and is incompatible with what we know of the context where the son of a Parnas, that is an administrator of the Synagogue, could not be sent anywhere else than to the school in whose administrative body his father was serving. George Porter, Ricardo’s brother-in-law, contributed his own dose of reticence to the creation of the myth of a non-existing commercial school Ricardo would have attended while in Amsterdam by writing that his father, being a member of the Stock Exchange, and designing his third son, David, for the same occupation, gave him a good but plain commercial education. For this purpose he was sent, when eleven years of age, to a school in Holland, where he remained for about two years (Porter 1841).

This was repeated by McCulloch who wrote that Ricardo received ‘such an education as is usually given to young men intended for the mercantile profession’ (McCulloch 1846, 469) and amplified with the addition of some imaginary information by the French editor of Ricardo’s writings according to whom Ricardo was sent to ‘une école de Hollande, où les plus saines théories du change et l'art du parfait negociant lui furent enseignés’ with a frankly racist consideration on top on the ‘instinct financier qui distingua sa race [...] depuis les fameux jours du veau d'or’ (Fontayraud 1847, xvii). On balance, the most probable conclusion is that at the Haarei Tikvah or ‘Gates of Hope’ school for boys associated with the Bevis Mark Synagogue, besides reading and writing in English and arithmetic, young David was taught some Hebrew and received some instruction on the Bible and the Mishnah, which is the collection of rabbinic traditions concerning interpretation of the 613 precepts enounced in the Pentateuch redacted by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi at the beginning of the third century, mostly in Hebrew (Wald 2007). It is not obvious what was the vehicular language used at school at the time. In the seventeenth century, when the school began existing, it was a matter of course that classes were taught in Spanish while the children were taught to read in Hebrew. As the school began imparting very soon instruction in English and arithmetic, part of the classes was taught in English. It is possible that at the time Ricardo was sent to school, the vehicular language for all classes had already become English. It is unclear too what kind of written materials may have been adopted for teaching Jewish subjects besides passages from the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah. Jewish literature in English was until this time almost non-existing but there was a literature in Spanish and Portuguese printed mostly by the renowned Amsterdam printers Menasseh ben Israel, Joseph Attias and David de Castro Tartas, who also printed books in Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, and occasionally also in Dutch and English (Michman et al. 2007, 109). A consequence is, yet, that even though young Ricardo did not enjoy the advantages of a ‘classical education’, this would just imply that his mind missed the opportunity to be shaped by Latin and Greek grammar but was offered instead an opportunity, besides being taught Dutch, French, and Spanish, to exert itself with the Hebrew grammar. As Henderson notes, Hebrew may be, thanks to the simple and logical structure of Semitic languages, no less formative than Latin and Greek (1995, 142-3) and, I would add, trying to learn also three modern languages might have been much more than the children of the gentry had an occasion to do. Note also that, when Ricardo was born, Spanish was still the vernacular used by London Sephardim and it was substituted by English no sooner than 1800 in sermons at the Synagogue but 9 he seems to be careful in avoiding mention of this language. Obviously enough, Spanish, in its quality of the vernacular of a migrant community, was far from a mark of distinction.

6. Ricardo’s continuing education

There is a blank in the evidence available concerning the kind of private tuition he still received after the age of 14, when ‘his father began to employ him in the Stock Exchange’ (Ricardo, Moses 1824, 4). The Memoir says that, at ‘his intervals of leisure he was allowed any masters for private instruction whom he chose to have’ (3) and besides, that ‘in early life’, besides his remarkable ‘solidity and steadiness of character’ (4), he acquired ‘those habits of deep thinking, which in the end enabled him to develop the most abstruse and intricate subjects […] instead of receiving passively the ideas of others (4) showing ‘a taste for abstract and general reasoning’ (4), and later on, ‘at the age of nineteen and twenty, works of that description [i.e., scientific and philosophical, or also theological?] which occasionally occupied his attention afforded him amusement and cause for reflection (4-5). Let us try some tentative decoding of the above statements. We know that basic education at the ‘Gate of Hopes’ school lasted until the age of fourteen. Three years further education was provided at the Heshaim or ‘Tree of Life’ senior school for more gifted students to direct them on the way of Talmudic scholarship and we know that Ricardo’s great grandfather had been one of these. It was a widespread custom, and a rule in some communities – for example in Metz community’s 1690 regulations – that ‘those aged 14-18 who did not continue attendance in a yeshivah were required to study at least one hour daily’ (Demsky et al. 2007, 177). In his father’s expectations, one may easily imagine that private instruction would have meant attending individual classes at the Heshaim school; according to the Memoir, the choice of ‘masters for private instruction’ was David’s own choice, not his father’s, and accordingly they may have been masters of secular subjects. A further suggestion is that the latter were not the humanities – note some sarcasm vis-à-vis ‘classical education’, which possibly distracting him from ‘habits of deep thinking’ (4), might after all not ‘have been a benefit to him’ (4) – since such tuition contributed in developing habits of abstract thinking. We know that Ricardo was fourteen in 1787 and accordingly his further education took place in the years of the French Revolution when the wind of change was also sweeping the streets of London and not by chance Ricardo adopted a character from Voltaire as his own avatar in correspondence with Priscilla. The Memoir goes one declaring that he never yielded his assent on any important subject, until after he had thoroughly investigated it. It was perhaps in opposing these [i.e., his father’s] strong prejudices, that he was first led to that freedom and independence of thought for which he was so remarkable, and which has indeed extended itself to the other branches of his family (5).

This may be more easily decrypted: Ricardo came to adopt the new ideas, that is the ideas of the Enlightenment – which in turn might have sounded as Nieto’s lesson made more radical – that is, that the essence of religion is one neighbour’s love, the essence of cult is veneration for the Deity and external forms are accessory and variable, and humankind as a whole is tied by ties of universal brotherhood. This implied that when one’s religion’s rites and regulations clashed with so natural and virtuous passion as love between one woman and one man, love should come first, and religious particularities should give way. On such considerations – we may not too implausibly venture in conjecturing – third born David opened the way to most of his siblings toward mixed marriage and post-confessional piety. On mixed marriage I come back in section 5. On intellectual education, we lack evidence to fill the blanks left, but at least the conclusion appears at this stage plausible that Ricardo’s education was neglected, but slightly less than his own retrospective reports suggest. Some additional light may come from evidence concerning intellectual interests and skills in the extended family-network. The family’s Dutch branch network was made not just of merchants. A well-known figure is Dr. Immanuel Capadose, a medical doctor and man of letters (Ricardo 1981, 210) who left a doctoral dissertation in Latin (Capadose 1767). Abraham Capadose was Immanuel’s nephew and adoptive son. He became too a physician and later on converted to Christianity and adhered to a movement, the Réveil, the 10

Dutch Revival movement that resisted the revolutionary and liberal ideas and became a religious writer defending traditionalist views (Capadose 1843a; 1843b; 1851); as if that were not enough, he also fought cowpox vaccination (Kagchelland and 2009, 487-513). Isaac Da Costa, the son of Ricardo’s cousin Rebecca Ricardo, a doctor in Law and in Philosophy and a poet (da Costa 1821-22; 1823; 1848-49) was described by Ricardo as ‘one of the best poets in Holland’ and ‘a metaphysician’ (Ricardo 1891, 207). He converted to Christianity with his wife Hannah Belmonte and adhered to the same movement as his cousin (Gäbler 1986). Coming to the English side of the network, the Delvalle family had been a family of merchants in tobacco. Ricardo’s great grandfather Isaac Delvalle, yet, was also a community leader, from 1751 to 1757 a member of the rabbinic tribunal, a position which implied being recognized as a Talmudic scholar. In fact, he was among the pupils of the Midrash while David Nieto was teaching in 1725 when an accident occurred which is reported by Sraffa. The latter offhandedly defines it a ‘curious theological dispute’ as Sraffa (1955, 27) but it was rather an episode typical of the ongoing latent rebellion by Crypto- and neo-Karaites whom Nieto was actively fighting in his writings. The facts are that a Certain Isaac Barrientes entered a class of the Heshaim school, that was, as mentioned, the equivalent of a yeshiva, where Nieto was commenting on Genesis and asking the pupils for interpretation of the burning-bush story. Barrientes opposed his own interpretation, according to which Moses had learned philosophy from the Egyptian, including the doctrine of a created world, Moses just dreamt the episode of the burning bush and God doesn’t speak because he has no mouth and other human organs, and, put under pressure from outraged pupils, he proclaimed his belief that salvation does not depend on orthodoxy but on compliance with divine law (Gaster 1901, 128- 129). It is noteworthy that the rebellious figure’s words sound as much as neo-Karaitism (probably not Sabbateanism because of the role he assigns to divine law) as of proto-Enlightenment, with a curious mixture of Masonic rubbish on the hand – such as the hidden tradition of Egyptian wisdom one could find profusely in Voltaire’s writings – and the claim of a moral character of religion, the one that can be met in Kant, Adam Smith and in Moses Mendelsohn and in Nieto’s son’s already mentioned Sermon. Rebecca Delvalle, one of Ricardo’s aunts, married a non-Jew, an engraver specializing in scientific publications and a scientist on his own (Sraffa 1955, 29). Taking a closer look at the Ricardo-Delvalle nuclear family, it was not a family of scholars. And yet, the fact that none of the Ricardo siblings received a higher education depended on obvious reasons, since non- Anglicans were not de facto admitted to Oxford and Cambridge until at least 1836 and official abolition of confessional requirements came no sooner than 1871 (Roth 1964, 293; Rubinstein 1996, 78). A notable exception is brother Moses, who became a surgeon. Unlike Scotland, where there was a school of medicine at Edinburgh University and indeed a few Jewish students had been already admitted (Rubinstein 1996, 78) – law and medicine were careers accessible through apprenticeship, normally undertaken after University graduation, but for the medical profession also without a degree. After retirement, Moses, published a few papers in the Annals of Philosophy on different gases for lighting (Ricardo, Moses 1821a; 1821b; 1821 c; 1823a; 1823c; cf. Sraffa 1955, 56; Henderson, 138-139). Another, even more remarkable exception is the youngest sister Sarah, who became a popular author of literature for boys, arithmetic textbooks, and essays on educational subjects (Sraffa 1955, 60; Drain 2004; Rubinstein, Jolles, and Rubinstein 2011, 766; Cremaschi 2014). Less notable, but also relevant, is the case for brother Samson, who was too a member of the Stock Exchange, head of the British Iron Company and, in the Fifties, was elected as Liberal MP, and, like his older brother, published on currency defending the latter’s project of a national bank (Ricardo 1837; 1838; cf. Sraffa 1955, 60-61; Rubinstein, Jolles, and Rubinstein 2011, 799). Let me try to draw some conclusions from the contextual evidence collected and the decoding of documents carried out. James Mill wrote in the Morning Chronicle after Ricardo’s death that the history of Mr. Ricardo holds out a bright and inspiring example. Mr. Ricardo had everything to do for himself and he did everything […] he had his mind to form, even his education to commence and to conduct (Mill 1823, 212).

His brother’s Memoir apparently reacted to Mill’s exaggerations:

It is not true […] as has been insinuated, that Mr. Ricardo was of a very low origin, and that he had been wholly denied the advantages of education (Ricardo 1824, 4). 11

As a fact, there is almost no reference in Ricardo's correspondence to his Jewish education and, while he mentions his own knowledge of Dutch and some French, he mentions Spanish just as a language his father had planned he should study during his stay in Amsterdam (Edgeworth 1970, 226). Even such information, no less than other, is contained in speech acts by Ricardo addressing specific hearers and allowance should be made not just for his mild and modest character and for the gentleman’s taste for understatement, but also for his communicative intentions and the socio-cultural context. When talking to Maria Edgeworth, the offspring of Anglo-Irish gentry, he may have had the intention not to satisfy too much her curiosity vis-à-vis the exotic Spanish-Jewish world, about which she shared as much sincere curiosity as sub-conscious prejudice. Note the following comment in her letters to her mother: ‘I have hitherto escaped saying anything about jews – not even as rich as a jew has ever passed my lips but I live in fear that I shall not get out of the house without stumbling upon some thing belonging to jews’ (Edgeworth 1970, 226). Ricardo may also have avoided boosting his own cultural diversity and to avoid entering an already lost contest for intellectual primacy for the same reasons as any other Anglo-Jew of the time. He may have felt it better to avoid mentioning that the gentry’s offspring usually benefited from the study of two classical and one modern language, Latin, Greek, and French, while a Sephardi boy may have been offered, before he reached the age of thirteen, the delights of studying one dead language and three living ones, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, and French. In fact, he neither ever mentions Hebrew – whose knowledge, at least at a minimal level, has always been a compulsory prerequisite for Bar-Mitzvah – nor does ever give any proof of acquaintance with biblical and Talmudic subjects (Weatherall 1976, 12-13). Such a circumstance doe not amount to evidence to the fact that Ricardo received a ‘secular’ education Heertje (2015, 220); it should rather be read in terms of communicative strategies vis-à-vis widely shared prejudice, keeping in mind also that Ricardo had adopted the option of assimilation, one that will become almost dominant in British Sephardi Judaism in the nineteenth century (Rubinstein 1996, 60-66; Endelman1999, 86-117; Ruderman 2000, 215-268;). At any rate, the little we know about Ricardo's education highlights more interesting aspects than mere ‘neglect’. The circumstances described above imply that the education Ricardo received was not enough to make a scholar, but also neither was the same as the ‘practical’ education current among English middle nor was a ‘commercial’ education of sort. Even James Mill, in letter of Oct 19 1817, admitted that Ricardo enjoyed the asset of freedom from ‘prejudice’ which, he believed, was ‘the principal part of what is given to people for education’ (Ricardo 1951-1973, 7: 195). Everything considered, one could say that Ricardo, his complaint notwithstanding, not unlike other religious outsiders such as Isaac Watts and Joseph Priestley who were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, received a kind of education which made no less remarkable achievements possible. At any rate, even Mill – in one of his lucid moments – realized that this might have been an asset, in so far as it left him free from ‘prejudices’ created by current education (Ricardo 1951-1973, 7: 196). And even though the study of Hebrew is good food for thought, it is probable that as an adult he did not remember more Hebrew grammar than most students coming from a classical gymnasium in those European countries where such a school still exist remember Greek grammar, yet his main intellectual asset was the fact of having grown up as a citizen of two worlds.

7. Ricardo’s mixed marriage

As a result of the state of affairs described, young Ricardo could not see anywhere to go within English Judaism when he found himself cast off from both his family and the Bevis Mark Synagogue because of his love story with a Quaker young woman. There is no evidence, yet, of any official act of expulsion, and even less supporting Henderson’s speculations about his ceasing to attend the Synagogue well before his marriage (Henderson 1997, 163). The facts are that Ricardo started a romance with Priscilla Wilkinson, one of the daughters of neighbour Josiah Wilkinson, a Quaker physician. The love story met with disapproval by both families. The marriage was sanctioned by the Quaker meeting with disownment, which did not cut all ties, in so far as non-members could still join prayer meetings, as Priscilla did up to 2008; besides, the birth of children of non-members could be registered at the meeting, which happened for all of Ricardo’s 12 children, with the mystery-clause ‘Parents not Members of our Society’ added to the three first certificates (those of Henrietta, born in 1796, Priscilla, born in 1997, and Fanny, born in 1800) but not the later ones (Ricardo Papers; cf. Sraffa 1955, 41-42). A possible way to solve the mystery are that Priscilla may have made formal apology for having married outside the Society of Friends and had been re-admitted, but no evidence is available; another is that rules may have somewhat relaxed in the meantime making the, obviously rather unpleasant note, unnecessary. In the Mark Bevis Synagogue, as in any Synagogue well into the twentieth century, the obvious consequence was loss of membership, but the real thing was ipso-facto non-recognition of the marriage as valid, which applies to the act as such without affecting the legal status as a Jew of the contracting party (Rosenthal et al. 2007, 376). This is what may be read, through the smokescreen of reticent language, in a letter by Maria Edgeworth, on a visit at Gatcomb, to her mother, dated 14 Nov. 1821. She writes:

When Mr. Ricardo Senr. was paying his court to Mrs. Ricardo some of their friends not approving of their attachment they corresponded for some time under ye feigned names of Osman and Jesse and they afterwards agreed that they would call their eldest son Osman (Edgeworth 1971, 264; my emphasis).

No less reticent is the Memoir when declaring that

His father was a man of good intellect, but uncultivated. His prejudices were exceedingly strong; and they induced him to take the opinions of his forefathers in points of religion, politics, education &c., upon faith, and without investigation. Not only did he adopt this rule for himself, but he insisted on its being followed by his children; his son, however, never yielded his assent on any important subject, until after he had thoroughly investigated it. It was perhaps in opposing these strong prejudices, that he was first led to that freedom and independence of thought for which he was so remarkable, and which has indeed extended itself to the other branches of his family. Soon after he had attained the age of twenty-one, Mr. Ricardo married; and this threw him upon his own resources, as he quitted his father at the same time (Ricardo 1824, 5; my emphasis).

Whittle Harvey, the already mentioned Sunday Times editor, had been more outspoken. He had written that

Ricardo's father and family were of the Jewish persuasion; blameless according to the Decalogue, and uncommonly strict in all the peculiarities of the Mosaic ritual. In the same faith he was himself initiated [...] The father's residence was at Bow, not far from that of an eminent surgeon of the name of Wilkison [sic]. Ricardo formed an honourable attachment to one of the daughters of this gentleman; she was beautiful, accomplished, and amiable; but she was not of the seed of Jacob, and perhaps had not the inheritance of Rachel. The old man forbade his son's union with a Christian; and upon his persevering, deprived him of his share of the business. Ricardo was, however, firm in his attachment, which the event proves to have been made with that judgment which was the leading feature of his character; and so he married the lady, and became a Christian, attaching himself to the Unitarian Chapel, in Essex- street, where he and his family have regularly attended the instructions of Mr. Belsham (Whittle Harvey 1823).

Note that reticence in the two former accounts strikingly contrasts with the already mentioned concessions to anti-Judaic prejudice in the last one, notably the work of a liberal and a Unitarian, and among Ricardo’s estimators. In other words, such concessions make reticence in the former (but chronologically later) accounts rather comprehensible. What happened is that David and Priscilla married in 1794 and this led to a cut of relations with Ricardo’s parents lasting for a few years. There is no evidence of any break of relations with Priscilla’s family, and ensuing disownment by the Society of Friends was a formal act, something that had to be done, but Priscilla kept attending the Meeting House with her children (and perhaps, with her husband). Note that, later one, also brother Moses married another of Wilkinson’s daughters and, in Moses’s already quoted words, David’s ‘freedom and independence of thought […] extended itself to the other branches of his family?’ (Ricardo 1924, 5), that is, once reticence phrasing is translated into plain English, the majority of Ricardo’s siblings became Christians by marriage (Sraffa 1955, 54-61) and this was just one symptom of a massive phenomenon of assimilation that would have taken place in the course of the nineteenth century, to a wide extent resulting from mixed marriage (Endelman 1999, 248-271). As mentioned, Ricardo’s father at last

13 surrendered to the force of things and sought reconciliation with David. What is left out of Whittle Harvey’s picture – apparently because the latter was not informed enough about the period before Ricardo’s adhesion to Unitarianism – is the kind of religious practices were followed by Ricardo and family between 1794 and 1812, namely between the year of his marriage and the year he moved to Central London and started attending Essex Street Chapel.

8. Partial conclusions: the importance of being outsider

(i) Ricardo was born a member of the London Sephardi Community, a culturally distinct group with its own religious, legal, educational and charitable institutions, with strong connexions with Amsterdam and Hamburg and, at least until the time of Ricardo’s boyhood, a linguistic minority whose everyday languages were Spanish and Portuguese, and the classical language was, instead of Latin and Greek, Hebrew. (ii) He received decent school education with some part-time further education, limited but not as bad as he and contemporary sources tended to represent it, indeed for reasons that should be by now clear enough; its syllabus was worlds apart from the one customary for the offspring of the Anglican elite, but also from that of the ‘practical’ education the commercial middle class used to have imparted to their sons. (iii) No break with his religious community took place before the age of 21; he was simply forced to leave his community at the time of his marriage, clearly enough with a rupture of family relations, but with no official act implying his loss of personal status as a Jew; he seems rather to have been tiptoeing out of his community; the reason for the break was just one, interreligious marriage, a case for which no provision was made at Ricardo’s time, and which left Ricardo in a religious no man’s land. (iv) In the years before marriage, yet, he had become sympathetic with the new ideas brought by the Enlightenment, namely that religion is primarily moral, consisting in one’s neighbour love, that particular cultic institutions are transient and not essential, and that love between a man and a woman comes before religious identity; it is as well to clarify that this bunch of ideas is not tantamount to Atheism but is the shared message of the most known spokesmen for European Enlightenment who were either Theists or professedly believers in the Christian God (v). He became a religious outcast not out of disbelief, but rather of love, and he and his wife for all the rest of their lives attended some form of religious service and remained in search of the most appropriate context for their religious practice. (vi) Marshall’s witticism about Ricardo’s ‘Semitic’ mind (Marshall, Alfred (1885, 12) is more a symptom of Marshall’s own English chauvinism – combined with the due amount of racist pseudo-scientific theories with which at his time even the best minds were imbibed – than of anything pertaining to Ricardo’s biography; Semitic is an adjective denoting a linguistic group, not a population; Sephardi Jews had been a group with some degree of in-marriage for centuries, but they had nothing to share with other ‘Semitic’ populations, being more of Berberian than Middle-Eastern origin; they had little to share, qua population, with the Ashkenazi, who have been too a comparatively closed group for centuries but have probably more to share with Tartars, Mongols, Slavs and Germans than with Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians (the latter being probably the closest descendant of the ancient Jews); and the astonishing intellectual performances of German and then American Ashkenazi in the two following centuries particularly in the most abstract branches of knowledge are still waiting for explanation but hardly encourage to think that Ricardo’s chromosomes had anything to do with Ricardian economics. (vii) But Ricardo’s biography, that of a Sephardi Jew, a Dutch immigrant’s son growing up in a religious, cultural, and even linguistic minority group, having had a non-standard education which exposed him to the Hebrew language, the Bible, the Mishnah, thus giving him a hint of the Talmudic method of disputation, and a socialization process where intellectual pursuits were highly valued, may have been enough to make him an intellectual outsider with some advantages outsiders enjoy and contributed in moulding his peculiar ‘cast of mind’.

14

References

Unpublished material Ricardo Papers. David Ricardo: Correspondence and Papers. Miscellaneous Private. Cambridge: Cambridge University Library. MS Add 7510

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