444 A History of Judaism
attaché in the German embassy in Paris. In the ensuing furore in France
among liberal Dreyfusards, who campaigned for his exoneration in part
as a way to attack the hold of the Catholic Church on the right wing
and the military establishment still smarting from the defeat by Prussia
in 1870, it became clear that even the most integrated and assimilated
Jew in the most liberal of countries could still become the target of viru-
lent antisemitism, as a pawn in wider social tensions.^6
The opponents of Dreyfus called themselves the Ligue de la Patrie
Française, and nationalist movements in many European countries
similarly excluded Jews from the narrative of the nation’s history and
therefore from a role in its future. Thus Jews in Romania took part in
the unsuccessful nationalist revolt against Russia in 1848, but in the
following decades they were rarely granted citizenship. Despite the
demand by the great powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 which
finalized Romanian independence, Jews were excluded from the profes-
sions (including law and medicine) and from serving as officers in the
army, and (from 1893) from attendance at public schools. Many of
those who had campaigned for emancipation were driven into exile.^7
One such exile was Moses Gaster from Bucharest, who had studied
at both the University of Breslau and the Jüdisch-Theologische Seminar
of Breslau, where he was ordained a rabbi in 1881 at the age of twenty-
five, when he was also appointed to a post in the University of Bucharest
to teach Romanian language and literature. Expelled from his univer-
sity post and his native country for his protests against the treatment of
Jews, he moved to England, where he was appointed to teach Slavonic
literature in the University of Oxford in 1886. A year later he was
elected haham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of England, a role he
was to retain to his death fifty- three years later. The choice of England
as refuge was no accident. Britain was at the height of its imperial
power, and Jews had achieved full political emancipation with Lionel de
Rothschild, who had been elected to parliament on successive occasions
by the City of London since 1847. Unable to take his seat because of the
requirement to take a Christian form of oath, Rothschild was finally
admitted to the House of Commons in 1858 with permission to take a
Jewish form of the oath; in 1885, the year Gaster left Romania, Lionel’s
son Nathaniel was the first professing Jew to be raised to the peerage.
The rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London, who had been informally
recognized as chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi Jews of England since the
mid- eighteenth century, was in 1845 officially designated by the state as
chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire;