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The Jews had, since the first and second centuries, territorially and politically ceased to be a nation, yet no people held more grimly to the sense of nationhood than they. Expelled from the Holy Land after the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, under Titus, and again with more rigour about sixty years later under Hadrian, they were dispersed among nearly all the nations of the earth and they suffered from every form of humiliation and misery for will-nigh sixteen centuries. But now in the eighteenth century for the first time a national life began to assert itself among them. It was the time for the Jewish Renaissance.. nation after nation began to restore to them by slow degrees rights which for long centuries had been denied them. In 1723 Louis Xv gave the Jews permission to hold real estate in France. In the same year England acknowledged them as English subjects. In 1738 Charles Vi of Denmark opened all trades to the Jews. In 1750 Frederick Ii granted toleration to the Jews in his dominion. Joseph Ii of Austria in 1780 opened the schools and Universities of the Empire to the Jews, allowing them to follow any trade or establish manufacturing. In the year 1788 Louis Xvi of France appointed a royal commission "to remodel on principles of justice all laws concerning the Jews.".. (57:3) The United States.. was the first nation to embody in its laws the principle that Gentiles and Jews were equal in rights and privileges before the law (A.D. 1776). (58:1) The same process of gradual concession was continued through the nineteenth century, the year 1844 being a time of special importance, since in it the Turkish Government pledged to the Jews protection from persecution throughout the Ottoman Dominion, including.. the Holy Land, though it was not until 1867 that the Sublime Porte gave them the right to own real estate in the land of their fathers.
(58:2)
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