Macaulay informs the House that a Jew may finance the sovereigns of Europe but not sit among the members for boroughs he could buy outright — and that a Christianity needing intolerance for support is being insulted by its defenders.

April 1833, in the first session of the reformed Parliament. Catholic emancipation had come in 1829 and the great Reform Act the year before; the Jews — perhaps thirty thousand in Britain — remained the last community formally barred from the Commons by the words 'on the true faith of a Christian' in the oath. Macaulay, thirty-two and already famous for the 1831 Reform speeches, had made Jewish relief peculiarly his own: his 1829 Edinburgh Review essay on the civil disabilities of the Jews is among the founding documents of British religious liberty, and this speech is that essay brought to the floor and sharpened for combat. The method is pure Macaulay — the reductio piled on reductio, the opponent's arbitrary line pushed until it touches the stake and the rack, the sudden lift into the cadenced peroration on Isaiah and the Maccabees. The argument won the House repeatedly and the country slowly: the Commons passed relief bills again and again through the 1830s and 1840s only for the Lords to reject them, Baron Lionel de Rothschild was elected for the City in 1847 and could not take his seat, and not until 1858 — a quarter century after this speech — did Parliament finally admit the first professing Jew. Macaulay did not live much past it; the speech stands as one of the half-dozen finest ever delivered in the House on religious liberty, and its central maxim about persecution as Christianity's false ally has never needed revision.

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