JEWISH HISTORY
AN ESSAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY
OF HISTORY
By S. M. Dubnow
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
The author of the present essay, S. M. Dubnow, occupies a well-nigh
dominating position in Russian-Jewish literature as an historian and an
acute critic. His investigations into the history of the Polish-Russian
Jews, especially his achievements in the history of Chassidism, have been
of fundamental importance in these departments. What raises Mr. Dubnow far
above the status of the professional historian, and awakens the reader’s
lively interest in him, is not so much the matter of his books, as the
manner of presentation. It is rare to meet with an historian in whom
scientific objectivity and thoroughness are so harmoniously combined with
an ardent temperament and plastic ability. Mr. Dubnow’s scientific
activity, first and last, is a striking refutation of the widespread
opinion that identifies attractiveness of form in the work of a scholar
with superficiality of content. Even his strictly scientific
investigations, besides offering the scholar a wealth of new suggestions,
form instructive and entertaining reading matter for the educated layman.
In his critical essays, Mr. Dubnow shows himself to be possessed of keen
psychologic insight. By virtue of this quality of delicate perception, he
aims to assign to every historical fact its proper place in the line of
development, and so establish the bond between it and the general history
of mankind. This psychologic ability contributes vastly to the interest
aroused by Mr. Dubnow’s historical works outside of the limited circle of
scholars. There is a passage in one of his books1 in which, in his
incisive manner, he expresses his views on the limits and tasks of
historical writing. As the passage bears upon the methods employed in the
present essay, and, at the same time, is a characteristic specimen of our
author’s style, I take the liberty of quoting:
“The popularization of history is by no means to be pursued to the
detriment of its severely scientific treatment. What is to be guarded
against is the notion that tedium is inseparable from the scientific
method. I have always been of the opinion that the dulness commonly looked
upon as the prerogative of scholarly inquiries, is not an inherent
attribute. In most cases it is conditioned, not by the nature of the
subject under investigation, but by the temper of the investigator. Often,
indeed, the tediousness of a learned disquisition is intentional: it is
considered one of the polite conventions of the academic guild, and by
many is identified with scientific thoroughness and profound learning….
If, in general, deadening, hide-bound caste methods, not seldom the cover
for poverty of thought and lack of cleverness, are reprehensible, they are
doubly reprehensible in history. The history of a people is not a mere
mental discipline, like botany or mathematics, but a living science, a magistra
vitae, leading straight to national self-knowledge, and acting to a
certain degree upon the national character. History is a science by
the people, for the people, and, therefore, its place is the open
forum, not the scholar’s musty closet. We relate the events of the past to
the people, not merely to a handful of archaeologists and numismaticians.
We work for national self-knowledge, not for our own intellectual
diversion.”
These are the principles that have guided Mr. Dubnow in all his works, and
he has been true to them in the present essay, which exhibits in a
remarkably striking way the author’s art of making “all things seem fresh
and new, important and attractive.” New and important his essay
undoubtedly is. The author attempts, for the first time, a psychologic
characterization of Jewish history. He endeavors to demonstrate the inner
connection between events, and develop the ideas that underlie them, or,
to use his own expression, lay bare the soul of Jewish history, which
clothes itself with external events as with a bodily envelope. Jewish
history has never before been considered from this philosophic point of
view, certainly not in German literature. The present work, therefore,
cannot fail to prove stimulating. As for the poet’s other requirement,
attractiveness, it is fully met by the work here translated. The qualities
of Mr. Dubnow’s style, as described above, are present to a marked degree.
The enthusiasm flaming up in every line, coupled with his plastic,
figurative style, and his scintillating conceits, which lend vivacity to
his presentation, is bound to charm the reader. Yet, in spite of the racy
style, even the layman will have no difficulty in discovering that it is
not a clever journalist, an artificer of well-turned phrases, who is
speaking to him, but a scholar by profession, whose foremost concern is
with historical truth, and whose every statement rests upon accurate,
scientific knowledge; not a bookworm with pale, academic blood trickling
through his veins, but a man who, with unsoured mien, with fresh, buoyant
delight, offers the world the results laboriously reached in his study,
after all evidences of toil and moil have been carefully removed; who
derives inspiration from the noble and the sublime in whatever guise it
may appear, and who knows how to communicate his inspiration to others.
The translator lays this book of an accomplished and spirited historian
before the German public. He does so in the hope that it will shed new
light upon Jewish history even for professional scholars. He is confident
that in many to whom our unexampled past of four thousand years’ duration
is now terra incognita, it will arouse enthusiastic interest, and
even to those who, like the translator himself, differ from the author in
religious views, it will furnish edifying and suggestive reading. J. F.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The English translation of Mr. Dubnow’s Essay is based upon the authorized
German translation, which was made from the original Russian. It is
published under the joint auspices of the Jewish Publication Society of
America and the Jewish Historical Society of England. H. S.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
I. THE RANGE OF JEWISH HISTORY
II. THE CONTENT OF JEWISH HISTORY
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH HISTORY
V. THE PRIMARY OR BIBLICAL PERIOD
VI. THE SECONDARY OR SPIRITUAL-POLITICAL PERIOD
VII. THE TERTIARY TALMUDIC OR NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS
PERIOD
VIII. THE GAONIC PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE
ORIENTAL JEWS (500-980)
IX. THE RABBINIC-PHILOSOPHICAL PERIOD, OR THE
HEGEMONY OF THE SPANISH JEWS
X. THE RABBINIC-MYSTICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF
THE GERMAN-POLISH
XI. THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY)
XII. THE TEACHINGS OF JEWISH HISTORY
DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
PREFACE TO THE GERMAN TRANSLATION
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
I. THE RANGE OF JEWISH HISTORY
I. THE RANGE OF JEWISH HISTORY
Historical and Unhistorical Peoples
Three Groups of Nations
The “Most Historical” People
Extent of Jewish History
II. THE CONTENT OF JEWISH HISTORY
II. THE CONTENT OF JEWISH HISTORY
Two Periods of Jewish History
The Period of Independence
The Election of the Jewish People
Priests and Prophets
The Babylonian Exile and the Scribes
The Dispersion
Jewish History and Universal History
Jewish History Characterized
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH HISTORY
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH HISTORY
The National Aspect of
Jewish History
The Historical Consciousness
The National Idea
and National Feeling
The Universal Aspect of Jewish History
An
Historical Experiment
A Moral Discipline
Humanitarian
Significance of Jewish History
Schleiden and George Eliot
IV. THE HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS
Three Primary Periods
Four
Composite Periods
V. THE PRIMARY OR BIBLICAL PERIOD
V. THE PRIMARY OR BIBLICAL PERIOD
Cosmic Origin of the Jewish
Religion
Tribal Organization
Egyptian Influence and
Experiences
Moses
Mosaism a Religious and Moral as well as a
Social and Political
System
National Deities
The
Prophets and the two Kingdoms
Judaism a Universal Religion
VI. THE SECONDARY OR SPIRITUAL-POLITICAL PERIOD
VI. THE SECONDARY OR SPIRITUAL-POLITICAL PERIOD
Growth of National
Feeling
Ezra and Nehemiah
The Scribes
Hellenism
The Maccabees
Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes
Alexandrian
Jews
Christianity
VII. THE TERTIARY TALMUDIC OR NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS
PERIOD
VII. THE TERTIARY TALMUDIC OR NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS PERIOD
The
Isolation of Jewry and Judaism
The Mishna
The Talmud
Intellectual Activity in Palestine and Babylonia
The Agada and the
Midrash
Unification of Judaism
VIII. THE GAONIC PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE
ORIENTAL JEWS (500-980)
VIII. THE GAONIC PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE ORIENTAL JEWS (500-980)
The Academies
Islam
Karaism
Beginning of
Persecutions in Europe
Arabic Civilization in Europe
IX. THE
RABBINIC-PHILOSOPHICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE SPANISH JEWS
(980-1492)
The Spanish Jews
The Arabic-Jewish Renaissance
The Crusades and the Jews
Degradation of the Jews in Christian
Europe
The Provence
The Lateran Council
The Kabbala
Expulsion from Spain
X. THE RABBINIC-MYSTICAL PERIOD, OR THE
HEGEMONY OF THE GERMAN-POLISH JEWS (1492-1789)
The Humanists and the
Reformation
Palestine an Asylum for Jews
Messianic Belief and
Hopes
Holland a Jewish Centre
Poland and the Jews
The
Rabbinical Authorities of Poland
Isolation of the Polish Jews
Mysticism and the Practical Kabbala
Chassidism
Persecutions
and Morbid Piety
XI. THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY)
XI. THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)
The
French Revolution
The Jewish Middle Ages
Spiritual and Civil
Emancipation
The Successors of Mendelssohn
Zunz and the
Science of Judaism
The Modern Movements outside of Germany
The
Jew in Russia
His Regeneration
Anti-Semitism and Judophobia
XII. THE TEACHINGS OF JEWISH HISTORY
XII. THE TEACHINGS OF JEWISH HISTORY
Jewry a Spiritual Community
Jewry Indestructible
The Creative Principle of Jewry
The
Task of the Future
The Jew and the Nations
The Ultimate Ideal
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
What is Jewish History? In the first place, what does it offer as to
quantity and as to quality? What are its range and content, and what
distinguishes it in these two respects from the history of other nations?
Furthermore, what is the essential meaning, what the spirit, of Jewish
History? Or, to put the question in another way, to what general results
are we led by the aggregate of its facts, considered, not as a whole, but
genetically, as a succession of evolutionary stages in the consciousness
and education of the Jewish people?
If we could find precise answers to these several questions, they would
constitute a characterization of Jewish History as accurate as is
attainable. To present such a characterization succinctly is the purpose
of the following essay.
JEWISH HISTORY
AN ESSAY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
I. THE RANGE OF JEWISH HISTORY
To make clear the range of Jewish history, it is necessary to set down a
few general, elementary definitions by way of introduction.
It has long been recognized that a fundamental difference exists between
historical and unhistorical peoples, a difference growing out of the fact
of the natural inequality between the various elements composing the human
race. Unhistorical is the attribute applied to peoples that have not yet
broken away, or have not departed very far, from the state of primitive
savagery, as, for instance, the barbarous races of Asia and Africa who
were the prehistoric ancestors of the Europeans, or the obscure, untutored
tribes of the present, like the Tartars and the Kirghiz. Unhistorical
peoples, then, are ethnic groups of all sorts that are bereft of a
distinctive, spiritual individuality, and have failed to display normal,
independent capacity for culture. The term historical, on the other hand,
is applied to the nations that have had a conscious, purposeful history of
appreciable duration; that have progressed, stage by stage, in their
growth and in the improvement of their mode and their views of life; that
have demonstrated mental productivity of some sort, and have elaborated
principles of civilization and social life more or less rational; nations,
in short, representing not only zoologic, but also spiritual types.2
Chronologically considered, these latter nations, of a higher type, are
usually divided into three groups: 1, the most ancient civilized peoples
of the Orient, such as the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Egyptians, the
Chaldeans; 2, the ancient or classic peoples of the Occident, the Greeks
and the Romans; and 3, the modern peoples, the civilized nations of Europe
and America of the present day. The most ancient peoples of the Orient,
standing “at the threshold of history,” were the first heralds of a
religious consciousness and of moral principles. In hoary antiquity, when
most of the representatives of the human kind were nothing more than a
peculiar variety of the class mammalia, the peoples called the most
ancient brought forth recognized forms of social life and a variety of
theories of living of fairly far-reaching effect. All these
culture-bearers of the Orient soon disappeared from the surface of
history. Some (the Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians) were washed away
by the flood of time, and their remnants were absorbed by younger and more
vigorous peoples. Others (the Hindoos and Persians) relapsed into a
semi-barbarous state; and a third class (the Chinese) were arrested in
their growth, and remained fixed in immobility. The best that the antique
Orient had to bequeath in the way of spiritual possessions fell to the
share of the classic nations of the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They
greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, and so
produced a much more complex and diversified civilization, which has
served as the substratum for the further development of the better part of
mankind. Even the classic nations had to step aside as soon as their
historical mission was fulfilled. They left the field free for the younger
nations, with greater capability of living, which at that time had barely
worked their way up to the beginnings of a civilization. One after the
other, during the first two centuries of the Christian era, the members of
this European family of nations appeared in the arena of history. They
form the kernel of the civilized part of mankind at the present day.
Now, if we examine this accepted classification with a view to finding the
place belonging to the Jewish people in the chronological series, we meet
with embarrassing difficulties, and finally arrive at the conclusion that
its history cannot be accommodated within the compass of the
classification. Into which of the three historical groups mentioned could
the Jewish people be put? Are we to call it one of the most ancient, one
of the ancient, or one of the modern nations? It is evident that it may
lay claim to the first description, as well as to the second and the last.
In company with the most ancient nations of the Orient, the Jewish people
stood at the “threshold of history.” It was the contemporary of the
earliest civilized nations, the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. In those
remote days it created and spread a religious world-idea underlying an
exalted social and moral system surpassing everything produced in this
sphere by its Oriental contemporaries. Again, with the classical Greeks
and Romans, it forms the celebrated historical triad universally
recognized as the source of all great systems of civilization. Finally, in
fellowship with the nations of to-day, it leads an historical life,
striding onward in the path of progress without stay or interruption.
Deprived of political independence, it nevertheless continues to fill a
place in the world of thought as a distinctly marked spiritual
individuality, as one of the most active and intelligent forces. How,
then, are we to denominate this omnipresent people, which, from the first
moment of its historical existence up to our days, a period of thirty-five
hundred years, has been developing continuously. In view of this
Methuselah among the nations, whose life is co-extensive with the whole of
history, how are we to dispose of the inevitable barriers between “the
most ancient” and “the ancient,” between “the ancient” and “the modern”
nations—the fateful barriers which form the milestones on the path
of the historical peoples, and which the Jewish people has more than once
overstepped?
A definition of the Jewish people must needs correspond to the aggregate
of the concepts expressed by the three group-names, most ancient, ancient,
and modern. The only description applicable to it is “the historical
nation of all times,” a description bringing into relief the contrast
between it and all other nations of modern and ancient times, whose
historical existence either came to an end in days long past, or began at
a date comparatively recent. And granted that there are “historical” and
“unhistorical” peoples, then it is beyond dispute that the Jewish people
deserves to be called “the most historical” (historicissimus). If
the history of the world be conceived as a circle, then Jewish history
occupies the position of the diameter, the line passing through its
centre, and the history of every other nation is represented by a chord
marking off a smaller segment of the circle. The history of the Jewish
people is like an axis crossing the history of mankind from one of its
poles to the other. As an unbroken thread it runs through the ancient
civilization of Egypt and Mesopotamia, down to the present-day culture of
France and Germany. Its divisions are measured by thousands of years.
Jewish history, then, in its range, or, better, in its duration, presents
an unique phenomenon. It consists of the longest series of events ever
recorded in the annals of a single people. To sum up its peculiarity
briefly, it embraces a period of thirty-five hundred years, and in all
this vast extent it suffers no interruption. At every point it is alive,
full of sterling content. Presently we shall see that in respect to
content, too, it is distinguished by exceptional characteristics.
II. THE CONTENT OF JEWISH HISTORY
From the point of view of content, or qualitative structure, Jewish
history, it is well known, falls into two parts. The dividing point
between the two parts is the moment in which the Jewish state collapsed
irretrievably under the blows of the Roman Empire (70 C. E.). The first
half deals with the vicissitudes of a nation, which, though frequently at
the mercy of stronger nations, still maintained possession of its
territory and government, and was ruled by its own laws. In the second
half, we encounter the history of a people without a government, more than
that, without a land, a people stripped of all the tangible accompaniments
of nationality, and nevertheless successful in preserving its spiritual
unity, its originality, complete and undiminished.
At first glance, Jewish history during the period of independence seems to
be but slightly different from the history of other nations. Though not
without individual coloring, there are yet the same wars and intestine
disturbances, the same political revolutions and dynastic quarrels, the
same conflicts between the classes of the people, the same warring between
economical interests. This is only a surface view of Jewish history. If we
pierce to its depths, and scrutinize the processes that take place in its
penetralia, we perceive that even in the early period there were latent
within it great powers of intellect, universal principles, which, visibly
or invisibly, determined the course of events. We have before us not a
simple political or racial entity, but, to an eminent degree, “a spiritual
people.” The national development is based upon an all-pervasive religious
tradition, which lives in the soul of the people as the Sinaitic
Revelation, the Law of Moses. With this holy tradition, embracing a
luminous theory of life and an explicit code of morality and social
converse, was associated the idea of the election of the Jewish people, of
its peculiar spiritual mission. “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation” is the figurative expression of this ideal
calling. It conveys the thought that the Israelitish people as a whole,
without distinction of rank and regardless of the social prominence of
individuals, has been called to guide the other nations toward sublime
moral and religious principles, and to officiate for them, the laity as it
were, in the capacity of priests. This exalted ideal would never have been
reached, if the development of the Jewish people had lain along hackneyed
lines; if, like the Egyptians and the Chaldeans, it had had an inflexible
caste of priests, who consider the guardianship of the spiritual treasures
of the nation the exclusive privilege of their estate, and strive to keep
the mass of the people in crass ignorance. For a time, something
approaching this condition prevailed among the Jews. The priests descended
from Aaron, with the Temple servants (the Levites), formed a priestly
class, and played the part of authoritative bearers of the religious
tradition. But early, in the very infancy of the nation, there arose by
the side of this official, aristocratic hierarchy, a far mightier
priesthood, a democratic fraternity, seeking to enlighten the whole
nation, and inculcating convictions that make for a consciously held aim.
The Prophets were the real and appointed executors of the holy command
enjoining the “conversion” of all Jews into “a kingdom of priests and a
holy nation.” Their activity cannot be paralleled in the whole range of
the world’s history. They were not priests, but popular educators and
popular teachers. They were animated by the desire to instil into every
soul a deeply religious consciousness, to ennoble every heart by moral
aspirations, to indoctrinate every individual with an unequivocal theory
of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals. Their
work did not fail to leave its traces. Slowly but deeply idealism entered
into the very pith and marrow of the national consciousness. This
consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing
itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after the
crisis known as “the Babylonian Exile.” Thanks to the exertions of the Soferim
(Scribes), directed toward the broadest popularization of the Holy
Writings, and constituting the formal complement to the work of the
Prophets, spiritual activity became an integral part of Jewish national
life. In the closing centuries of its political existence, the Jewish
people received its permanent form. There was imposed upon it the
unmistakable hallmark of spirituality that has always identified it in the
throng of the nations. Out of the bosom of Judaism went forth the religion
that in a short time ran its triumphant course through the whole ancient
world, transforming races of barbarians into civilized beings. It was the
fulfilment of the Prophetical promise—that the nations would walk in
the light of Israel.
At the very moment when the strength and fertility of the Jewish mind
reached the culminating point, occurred a political revolution—the
period of homeless wandering began. It seemed as though, before scattering
the Jewish people to all ends of the earth, the providence of history
desired to teach it a final lesson, to take with it on its way. It seemed
to say: “Now you may go forth. Your character has been sufficiently
tempered; you can bear the bitterest of hardships. You are equipped with
an inexhaustible store of energy, and you can live for centuries, yea, for
thousands of years, under conditions that would prove the bane of other
nations in less than a single century. State, territory, army, the
external attributes of national power, are for you superfluous luxury. Go
out into the world to prove that a people can continue to live without
these attributes, solely and alone through strength of spirit welding its
widely scattered particles into one firm organism!”—And the Jewish
people went forth and proved it.
This “proof” adduced by Jewry at the cost of eighteen centuries of
privation and suffering, forms the characteristic feature of the second
half of Jewish history, the period of homelessness and dispersion.
Uprooted from its political soil, national life displayed itself on
intellectual fields exclusively. “To think and to suffer” became the
watchword of the Jewish people, not merely because forced upon it by
external circumstances beyond its control, but chiefly because it was
conditioned by the very disposition of the people, by its national
inclinations. The extraordinary mental energy that had matured the Bible
and the old writings in the first period, manifested itself in the second
period in the encyclopedic productions of the Talmudists, in the religious
philosophy of the middle ages, in Rabbinism, in the Kabbala, in mysticism,
and in science. The spiritual discipline of the school came to mean for
the Jew what military discipline is for other nations. His remarkable
longevity is due, I am tempted to say, to the acrid spiritual brine in
which he was cured. In its second half, the originality of Jewish history
consists indeed, in the circumstance that it is the only history stripped
of every active political element. There are no diplomatic artifices, no
wars, no campaigns, no unwarranted encroachments backed by armed force
upon the rights of other nations, nothing of all that constitutes the
chief content—the monotonous and for the most part idea-less content—of
many other chapters in the history of the world. Jewish history presents
the chronicle of an ample spiritual life, a gallery of pictures
representing national scenes. Before our eyes passes a long procession of
facts from the fields of intellectual effort, of morality, religion, and
social converse. Finally, the thrilling drama of Jewish martyrdom is
unrolled to our astonished gaze. If the inner life and the social and
intellectual development of a people form the kernel of history, and
politics and occasional wars are but its husk,3 then certainly the
history of the Jewish diaspora is all kernel. In contrast with the history
of other nations it describes, not the accidental deeds of princes and
generals, not external pomp and physical prowess, but the life and
development of a whole people. It gives heartrending expression to the
spiritual strivings of a nation whose brow is resplendent with the thorny
crown of martyrdom. It breathes heroism of mind that conquers bodily pain.
In a word, Jewish history is history sublimated.4
In spite of the noteworthy features that raise Jewish history above the
level of the ordinary, and assign it a peculiar place, it is nevertheless
not isolated, not severed from the history of mankind. Rather is it most
intimately interwoven with world-affairs at every point throughout its
whole extent. As the diameter, Jewish history is again and again
intersected by the chords of the historical circle. The fortunes of the
pilgrim people scattered in all the countries of the civilized world are
organically connected with the fortunes of the most representative nations
and states, and with manifold tendencies of human thought. The bond
uniting them is twofold: in the times when the powers of darkness and
fanaticism held sway, the Jews were amenable to the “physical” influence
exerted by their neighbors in the form of persecutions, infringements of
the liberty of conscience, inquisitions, violence of every sort; and
during the prevalence of enlightment and humanity, the Jews were acted
upon by the intellectual and cultural stimulus proceeding from the peoples
with whom they entered into close relations. Momentary aberrations and
reactionary incidents are not taken into account here. On its side, Jewry
made its personality felt among the nations by its independent,
intellectual activity, its theory of life, its literature, by the very
fact, indeed, of its ideal staunchness and tenacity, its peculiar
historical physiognomy. From this reciprocal relation issued a great cycle
of historical events and spiritual currents, making the past of the Jewish
people an organic constituent of the past of all that portion of mankind
which has contributed to the treasury of human thought.
We see, then, that in reference to content Jewish history is unique in
both its halves. In the first “national” period, it is the history of a
people to which the epithet “peculiar” has been conceded, a people which
has developed under the influence of exceptional circumstances, and
finally attained to so high a degree of spiritual perfection and fertility
that the creation of a new religious theory of life, which eventually
gained universal supremacy, neither exhausted its resources nor ended its
activity. Not only did it continue to live upon its vast store of
spiritual energy, but day by day it increased the store. In the second
“lackland” half, it is the instructive history of a scattered people,
organically one, in spite of dispersion, by reason of its unshaken ideal
traditions; a people accepting misery and hardship with stoic calm,
combining the characteristics of the thinker with those of the sufferer,
and eking out existence under conditions which no other nation has found
adequate, or, indeed, can ever find adequate. The account of the people as
teacher of religion—this is the content of the first half of Jewish
history; the account of the people as thinker, stoic, and sufferer—this
is the content of the second half of Jewish history.
A summing up of all that has been said in this and the previous chapter
proves true the statement with which we began, that Jewish history, in
respect to its quantitative dimensions as well as its qualitative
structure, is to the last degree distinctive and presents a phenomenon of
undeniable uniqueness.
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWISH HISTORY
We turn now to the question of the significance to be attached to Jewish
history. In view of its peculiar qualities, what has it to offer to the
present generation and to future generations as a subject of study and
research?
The significance of Jewish history is twofold. It is at once national and
universal. At present the fulcrum of Jewish national being lies in the
historical consciousness. In the days of antiquity, the Jews were welded
into a single united nation by the triple agencies of state, race, and
religion, the complete array of material and spiritual forces directed to
one point. Later, in the period of homelessness and dispersion, it was
chiefly religious consciousness that cemented Jewry into a whole, and
replaced the severed political bond as well as the dulled racial instinct,
which is bound to go on losing in keenness in proportion to the degree of
removal from primitive conditions and native soil. In our days, when the
liberal movements leavening the whole of mankind, if they have not
completely shattered the religious consciousness, have at least, in an
important section of Jewry, effected a change in its form; when abrupt
differences of opinion with regard to questions of faith and cult are
asserting their presence; and traditional Judaism developed in historical
sequence is proving powerless to hold together the diverse factors of the
national organism,—in these days the keystone of national unity
seems to be the historical consciousness. Composed alike of physical,
intellectual, and moral elements, of habits and views, of emotions and
impressions nursed into being and perfection by the hereditary instinct
active for thousands of years, this historical consciousness is a
remarkably puzzling and complex psychic phenomenon. By our common memory
of a great, stirring past and heroic deeds on the battle-fields of the
spirit, by the exalted historical mission allotted to us, by our
thorn-strewn pilgrim’s path, our martyrdom assumed for the sake of our
principles, by such moral ties, we Jews, whether consciously or
unconsciously, are bound fast to one another. As Renan well says: “Common
sorrow unites men more closely than common joy.” A long chain of
historical traditions is cast about us all like a strong ring. Our
wonderful, unparalleled past attracts us with magnetic power. In the
course of centuries, as generation followed generation, similarity of
historical fortunes produced a mass of similar impressions which have
crystallized, and have thrown off the deposit that may be called “the
Jewish national soul.” This is the soil in which, deep down, lies
imbedded, as an unconscious element, the Jewish national feeling,
and as a conscious element, the Jewish national idea.
It follows that the Jewish national idea and the national feeling
connected with it have their origin primarily in the historical
consciousness, in a certain complex of ideas and psychic predispositions.
These ideas and predispositions, the deposit left by the aggregate of
historical impressions, are of necessity the common property of the whole
nation, and they can be developed and quickened to a considerable degree
by a renewal of the impressions through the study of history. Upon the
knowledge of history, then, depends the strength of the national
consciousness.5
But over and above its national significance, Jewish history, we repeat,
possesses universal significance. Let us, in the first place, examine its
value for science and philosophy. Inasmuch as it is pre-eminently a
chronicle of ideas and spiritual movements, Jewish history affords the
philosopher or psychologist material for observation of the most important
and useful kind. The study of other, mostly dull chapters of universal
history has led to the fixing of psychologic or sociologic theses, to the
working out of comprehensive philosophic systems, to the determination of
general laws. Surely it follows without far-fetched proof, that in some
respects the chapter dealing with Jewish history must supply material of
the most original character for such theses and philosophies. If it is
true, as the last chapter set out to demonstrate, that Jewish history is
distinguished by sharply marked and peculiar features, and refuses to
accommodate itself to conventional forms, then its content must have an
original contribution to make to philosophy. It does not admit of a doubt
that the study of Jewish history would yield new propositions appertaining
to the philosophy of history and the psychology of nations, hitherto
overlooked by inquirers occupied with the other divisions of universal
history. Inductive logic lays down a rule for ascertaining the law of a
phenomenon produced by two or more contributory causes. By means of what
might be called a laboratory experiment, the several causes must be
disengaged from one another, and the effect of each observed by itself.
Thus it becomes possible to arrive with mathematical precision at the
share of each cause in the result achieved by several co-operating causes.
This method of difference, as it is called, is available, however, only
for a limited number of phenomena, only for phenomena in the department of
the natural sciences. It is in the nature of the case that mental and
spiritual phenomena, though they may be observed, cannot be artificially
reproduced. Now, in one respect, Jewish history affords the advantages of
an arranged experiment. The historical life of ordinary nations, such
nations as are endowed with territory and are organized into a state, is a
complete intermingling of the political with the spiritual element.
Totally ignorant as we are of the development either would have assumed,
had it been dissevered from the other, the laws governing each of the
elements singly can be discovered only approximately. Jewish history, in
which the two elements have for many centuries been completely
disentangled from each other, presents a natural experiment, with the
advantage of artificial exclusions, rendering possible the determination
of the laws of spiritual phenomena with far greater scientific exactitude
than the laws of phenomena that result from several similar causes.
Besides this high value for the purposes of science, this fruitful
suggestiveness for philosophic thought, Jewish history, as compared with
the history of other nations, enjoys another distinction in its capacity
to exercise an ennobling influence upon the heart. Nothing so exalts and
refines human nature as the contemplation of moral steadfastness, the
history of the trials of a martyr who has fought and suffered for his
convictions. At bottom, the second half of Jewish history is nothing but
this. The effective educational worth of the Biblical part of Jewish
history is disputed by none. It is called “sacred” history, and he who
acquires a knowledge of it is thought to advance the salvation of his
soul. Only a very few, however, recognize the profound, moral content of
the second half of Jewish history, the history of the diaspora. Yet, by
reason of its exceptional qualities and intensely tragic circumstances, it
is beyond all others calculated to yield edification to a notable degree.
The Jewish people is deserving of attention not only in the time when it
displayed its power and enjoyed its independence, but as well in the
period of its weakness and oppression, during which it was compelled to
purchase spiritual development by constant sacrifice of self. A thinker
crowned with thorns demands no less veneration than a thinker with the
laurel wreath upon his brow. The flame issuing from the funeral pile on
which martyrs die an heroic death for their ideas is, in its way, as
awe-inspiring as the flame from Sinai’s height. With equal force, though
by different methods, both touch the heart, and arouse the moral
sentiment. Biblical Israel the celebrated—medieval Judah the
despised—it is one and the same people, judged variously in the
various phases of its historical life. If Israel bestowed upon mankind a
religious theory of life, Judah gave it a thrilling example of tenacious
vitality and power of resistance for the sake of conviction. This
uninterrupted life of the spirit, this untiring aspiration for the higher
and the better in the domain of religious thought, philosophy, and
science, this moral intrepidity in night and storm and in despite of all
the blows of fortune—is it not an imposing, soul-stirring spectacle?
The inexpressible tragedy of the Jewish historical life is unfailing in
its effect upon a susceptible heart.6 The wonderful exhibition of spirit
triumphant, subduing the pangs of the flesh, must move every heart, and
exercise uplifting influence upon the non-Jew no less than upon the Jew.
For non-Jews a knowledge of Jewish history may, under certain conditions,
come to have another, an humanitarian significance. It is inconceivable
that the Jewish people should be held in execration by those acquainted
with the course of its history, with its tragic and heroic past.7
Indeed, so far as Jew-haters by profession are concerned, it is running a
risk to recommend the study of Jewish history to them, without adding a
word of caution. Its effect upon them might be disastrous. They might find
themselves cured of their modern disease, and in the possession of ideas
that would render worthless their whole stock in trade. Verily, he must
have fallen to the zero-point of anti-Semitic callousness who is not
thrilled through and through by the lofty fortitude, the saint-like
humility, the trustful resignation to the will of God, the stoic firmness,
laid bare by the study of Jewish history. The tribute of respect cannot be
readily withheld from him to whom the words of the poet8 are applicable:
When, in days to come, the curtain rises upon the touching tragedy of
Jewish history, revealing it to the astonished eye of a modern generation,
then, perhaps, hearts will be attuned to tenderness, and on the ruins of
national hostility will be enthroned mutual love, growing out of mutual
understanding and mutual esteem. And who can tell—perhaps Jewish
history will have a not inconsiderable share in the spiritual change that
is to annihilate national intolerance, the modern substitute for the
religious bigotry of the middle ages. In this case, the future task of
Jewish history will prove as sublime as was the mission of the Jewish
people in the past. The latter consisted in the spread of the dogma of the
unity of creation; the former will contribute indirectly to the
realization of the not yet accepted dogma of the unity of the human race.
IV. THE HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS
To define the scope of Jewish history, its content and its significance,
or its place among scientific pursuits, disposes only of the formal part
of the task we have set ourselves. The central problem is to unfold the
meaning of Jewish history, to discover the principle toward which its
diversified phenomena converge, to state the universal laws and
philosophic inferences deducible from the peculiar course of its events.
If we liken history to an organic being, then the skeleton of facts is its
body, and the soul is the spiritual bond that unites the facts into a
whole, that conveys the meaning, the psychologic essence, of the facts. It
becomes our duty, then, to unbare the soul of Jewish history, or, in
scientific parlance, to construct, on the basis of the facts, the
synthesis of the whole of Jewish national life. To this end, we must pass
in review, by periods and epochs, one after another, the most important
groups of historical events, the most noteworthy currents in life and
thought that tell of the stages in the development of Jewry and of
Judaism. Exhaustive treatment of the philosophical synthesis of a history
extending over three thousand years is possible only in a voluminous work.
In an essay like the present it can merely be sketched in large outline,
or painted in miniature. We cannot expect to do more than state a series
of general principles substantiated by the most fundamental arguments.
Complete demonstration of each of the principles must be sought in the
annals that recount the events of Jewish history in detail.
The historical synthesis reduces itself, then, to uncovering the
psychologic processes of national development. The object before us to be
studied is the national spirit undergoing continuous evolution during
thousands of years. Our task is to arrive at the laws underlying this
growth. We shall reach our goal by imitating the procedure of the
geologist, who divides the mass of the earth into its several strata or
formations. In Jewish history there may be distinguished three chief
stratifications answering to its first three periods, the Biblical period,
the period of the Second Temple, and the Talmudic period. The later
periods are nothing more than these same formations combined in various
ways, with now and then the addition of new strata. Of the composite
periods there are four, which arrange themselves either according to
hegemonies, the countries in which at given times lay the centre of
gravity of the scattered Jewish people, or according to the intellectual
currents there predominant.
This, then, is our scheme:
V. THE PRIMARY OR BIBLICAL PERIOD
In the daybreak of history, the hoary days when seeming and reality merge
into each other, and the outlines of persons and things fade into the
surrounding mist, the picture of a nomad people, moving from the deserts
of Arabia in the direction of Mesopotamia and Western Asia, detaches
itself clear and distinct from the dim background. The tiny tribe, a
branch of the Semitic race, bears a peculiar stamp of its own. A shepherd
people, always living in close touch with nature, it yet resists the
potent influence of the natural phenomena, which, as a rule, entrap
primitive man, and make him the bond-slave of the visible and material.
Tent life has attuned these Semitic nomads to contemplativeness. In the
endless variety of the phenomena of nature, they seek to discover a single
guiding power. They entertain an obscure presentiment of the existence of
an invisible, universal soul animating the visible, material universe. The
intuition is personified in the Patriarch Abraham, who, according to
Biblical tradition, held communion with God, when, on the open field, “he
looked up toward heaven, and counted the stars,” or when, “at the setting
of the sun, he fell into benumbing sleep, and terror seized upon him by
reason of the impenetrable darkness.” Here we have a clear expression of
the original, purely cosmical character of the Jewish religion.
There was no lack of human influence acting from without. Chaldea, which
the peculiar Semitic shepherds crossed in their pilgrimage, presented them
with notions from its rich mythology and cosmogony. The natives of Syria
and Canaan, among whom in the course of time the Abrahamites settled,
imparted to them many of their religious views and customs. Nevertheless,
the kernel of their pure original theory remained intact. The patriarchal
mode of life, admirable in its simplicity, continued to hold its own
within the circle of the firmly-knitted tribe. It was in Canaan, however,
that the shepherd people hailing from Arabia showed the first signs of
approaching disintegration. Various tribal groups, like Moab and Ammon,
consolidated themselves. They took permanent foothold in the land, and
submitted with more or less readiness to the influences exerted by the
indigenous peoples. The guardianship of the sublime traditions of the
tribe remained with one group alone, the “sons of Jacob” or the “sons of
Israel,” so named from the third Patriarch Jacob. To this group of the
Israelites composed of smaller, closely united divisions, a special
mission was allotted; its development was destined to lie along peculiar
lines. The fortunes awaiting it were distinctive, and for thousands of
years have filled thinking and believing mankind with wondering
admiration.
Great characters are formed under the influence of powerful impressions,
of violent convulsions, and especially under the influence of suffering.
The Israelites early passed through their school of suffering in Egypt.
The removal of the sons of Jacob from the banks of the Jordan to those of
the Nile was of decisive importance for the progress of their history.
When the patriarchal Israelitish shepherds encountered the old, highly
complex culture of the Egyptians, crystallized into fixed forms even at
that early date, it was like the clash between two opposing electric
currents. The pure conception of God, of Elohim, as of the spirit
informing and supporting the universe, collided with the blurred system of
heathen deities and crass idolatry. The simple cult of the shepherds,
consisting of a few severely plain ceremonies, transmitted from generation
to generation, was confronted with the insidious, coarsely sensual animal
worship of the Egyptians. The patriarchal customs of the Israelites were
brought into marked contrast with the vices of a corrupt civilization.
Sound in body and soul, the son of nature suddenly found himself in
unsavory surroundings fashioned by culture, in which he was as much
despised as the inoffensive nomad is by “civilized” man of settled habit.
The scorn had a practical result in the enslavement of the Israelites by
the Pharaohs. Association with the Egyptians acted as a force at once of
attraction and of repulsion. The manners and customs of the natives could
not fail to leave an impression upon the simple aliens, and invite
imitation on their part. On the other hand, the whole life of the
Egyptians, their crude notions of religion, and their immoral ways, were
calculated to inspire the more enlightened among the Israelites with
disgust. The hostility of the Egyptians toward the “intruders,” and the
horrible persecutions in which it expressed itself, could not but bring
out more aggressively the old spiritual opposition between the two races.
The antagonism between them was the first influence to foster the germ of
Israel’s national consciousness, the consciousness of his peculiar
character, his individuality. This early intimation of a national
consciousness was weak. It manifested itself only in the chosen few. But
it existed, and the time was appointed when, under more favorable
conditions, it would develop, and display the extent of its power.
This consciousness it was that inspired the activity of Moses, Israel’s
teacher and liberator. He was penetrated alike by national and religious
feeling, and his desire was to impart both national and religious feeling
to his brethren. The fact of national redemption he connected with the
fact of religious revelation. “I am the Lord thy God who have brought thee
forth out of the land of Egypt” was proclaimed from Sinai. The God-idea
was nationalized. Thenceforth “Eternal” became the name peculiar to the
God of Israel. He was, indeed, the same Elohim, the Creator of the
world and its Guide, who had been dimly discerned by the spiritual vision
of the Patriarchs. At the same time He was the special God of the
Israelitish nation, the only nation that avouched Him with a full and
undivided heart, the nation chosen by God Himself to carry out, alone, His
sublime plans.9
In his wanderings, Israel became acquainted with the chaotic religious
systems of other nations. Seeing to what they paid the tribute of divine
adoration, he could not but be dominated by the consciousness that he
alone from of old had been the exponent of the religious idea in its
purity. The resolution must have ripened within him to continue for all
time to advocate and cherish this idea. From that moment Israel was
possessed of a clear theory of life in religion and morality, and of a
definite aim pursued with conscious intent.
Its originators designed that this Israelitish conception of life should
serve not merely theoretically, as the basis of religious doctrine, but
also practically, as the starting point of legislation. It was to be
realized in the daily walks of the people, which at this very time
attained to political independence. Sublime religious conceptions were not
to be made the content of a visionary creed, the subject of dreamy
contemplation, but, in the form of perspicuous guiding principles, were to
control all spheres of individual and social life. Men must beware of
looking upon religion as an ideal to be yearned for, it should be an ideal
to be applied directly, day by day, to practical contingencies. In
“Mosaism,” so-called, the religious and the ethical are intimately
interwoven with the social and the political. The chief dogmas of creed
are stated as principles shaping practical life. For instance, the exalted
idea of One God applied to social life produces the principle of the
equality of all men before the One Supreme Power, a principle on which the
whole of Biblical legislation is built. The commands concerning love of
neighbor, the condemnation of slavery, the obligation to aid the poor,
humane treatment of the stranger, sympathy and compassion with every
living being—all these lofty injunctions ensue as inevitable
consequences from the principle of equality. Biblical legislation is
perhaps the only example of a political and social code based, not upon
abstract reasoning alone, but also upon the requirements of the feelings,
upon the finest impulses of the human soul. By the side of formal right
and legality, it emphasizes, and, in a series of precepts, makes tangible,
the principle of justice and humanity. The Mosaic law is a “propaganda by
deed.” Everywhere it demands active, more than passive, morality. Herein,
in this elevated characteristic, this vital attribute, consists the chief
source of the power of Mosaism. The same characteristic, to be sure,
prevented it from at once gaining ground in the national life. It
established itself only gradually, after many fluctuations and errors. In
the course of the centuries, and keeping pace with the growth of the
national consciousness, it was cultivated and perfected in detail.
The conquest of Canaan wrought a radical transformation in the life of the
Israelitish people. The acquiring of national territory supplied firm
ground for the development and manifold application of the principles of
Mosaism. At first, however, advance was out of the question. The mass of
the people had not reached the degree of spiritual maturity requisite for
the espousal of principles constituting an exalted theory of life. It
could be understood and represented only by a thoughtful minority, which
consisted chiefly of Aaronites and Levites, together forming a priestly
estate, though not a hierarchy animated by the isolating spirit of caste
that flourished among all the other peoples of the Orient. The populace
discovered only the ceremonial side of the religion; its kernel was hidden
from their sight. Defective spiritual culture made the people susceptible
to alien influences, to notions more closely akin to its understanding.
Residence in Canaan, among related Semitic tribes that had long before
separated from the Israelites, and adopted altogether different views and
customs, produced a far greater metamorphosis in the character of the
Israelites than the sojourn in Egypt. After the first flush of victory,
when the unity of the Israelitish people had been weakened by the
particularistic efforts of several of the tribes, the spiritual bonds
confining the nation began to relax. Political decay always brings
religious defection in its train. Whenever Israel came under the dominion
of the neighboring tribes, he also fell a victim to their cult. This
phenomenon is throughout characteristic of the so-called era of the
Judges. It is a natural phenomenon readily explained on psychologic
grounds. The Mosaic national conception of the “Eternal” entered more and
more deeply into the national consciousness, and, accommodating itself to
the limited mental capacity of the majority, became narrower and narrower
in compass—the lot of all great ideas! The “Eternal” was no longer
thought of as the only One God of the whole universe, but as the tutelar
deity of the Israelitish tribe. The idea of national tutelar deities was
at that time deeply rooted in the consciousness of all the peoples of
Western Asia. Each nation, as it had a king of its own, had a tribal god
of its own. The Phoenicians had their Baal, the Moabites their Kemosh, the
Ammonites their Milkom. Belief in the god peculiar to a nation by no means
excluded belief in the existence of other national gods. A people
worshiped its own god, because it regarded him as its master and
protecting lord. In fact, according to the views then prevalent, a
conflict between two nations was the conflict between two national
deities. In the measure in which respect for the god of the defeated party
waned, waxed the number of worshipers of the god of the victorious nation,
and not merely among the conquerors, but also among the adherents of other
religions.10
These crude, coarsely materialistic conceptions of God gained entrance
with the masses of the Israelitish people. If Moab had his Kemosh, and
Ammon his Milkom, then Israel had his “Eternal,” who, after the model of
all other national gods, protected and abandoned his “clients” at
pleasure, in the one case winning, in the other losing, the devotion of
his partisans. In times of distress, in which the Israelites groaned under
the yoke of the alien, the enslaved “forgot” their “conquered” “Eternal.”
As they paid the tribute due the strange king, and yielded themselves to
his power, so they submitted to the strange god, and paid him his due
tribute of devotion. It followed that liberation from the yoke of the
stranger coincided with return to the God of Israel, the “Eternal.” At
such times the national spirit leaped into flaming life. This sums up the
achievements of the hero-Judges. But the traces of repeated backsliding
were deep and long visible, for, together with the religious ideas of the
strange peoples, the Israelites accepted their customs, as a rule corrupt
and noxious customs, in sharp contrast with the lofty principles of the
Mosaic Law, designed to control social life and the life of the
individual.
The Prophet Samuel, coming after the unsettled period of the Judges, had
only partial success in purifying the views of the people and elevating it
out of degradation to a higher spiritual level. His work was continued
with more marked results in the brilliant reigns of Saul, David, and
Solomon. An end was put to the baleful disunion among the tribes, and the
bond of national tradition was strengthened. The consolidated Israelitish
kingdom triumphed over its former oppressors. The gods of the strange
peoples cringed in the dust before the all-powerful “Eternal.” But, with
the division of the kingdom and the political rupture between Judah and
Israel, the period of efflorescence soon came to an end. Again confusion
reigned supreme, and customs and convictions deteriorated under foreign
influence. Prophets like Elijah and Elisha, feverish though their activity
was, stood powerless before the rank immorality in the two states. The
northern kingdom of Israel, composed of the Ten Tribes, passed swiftly
downward on the road to destruction, sharing the fate of the numberless
Oriental states whose end was inevitable by reason of inner decay. The
inspired words of the early Israelitish Prophets, Amos, Hosea, and Micah,
their trumpet-toned reproofs, their thrilling admonitions, died unheeded
upon the air—society was too depraved to understand their import. It
was reserved for later generations to give ear to their immortal
utterances, eloquent witnesses to the lofty heights to which the Jewish
spirit was permitted to mount in times of general decline. The northern
kingdom sank into irretrievable ruin. Then came the turn of Judah. He,
too, had disregarded the law of “sanctification” from Sinai, and had
nearly arrived at the point of stifling his better impulses in the morass
of materialistic living.
At this critical moment, on the line between to be and not to be, a
miracle came to pass. The spirit of the people, become flesh in its
noblest sons, rose aloft. From out of the midst of the political
disturbances, the frightful infamy, and the moral corruption, resounded
the impressive call of the great Prophets of Judah. Like a flaming torch
carried through dense darkness, they cast a glaring light upon the vices
of society, at the same time illuminating the path that leads upward to
the goal of the ethical ideal. At first the negative, denouncing element
predominated in the exhortations of the Prophets: unsparingly they
scourged the demoralization and the iniquity, the social injustice and the
political errors prevalent in their time; they threatened divine
punishment, that is, the natural consequences of evil-doing, and appealed
to the reason rather than the feelings of the people. But gradually they
elaborated positive ideals, more soul-stirring than the ideals identified
with the old religious tradition. The Prophets were the first to touch the
root of the evil. It is clear that they realized that alien influences and
the low grade of intelligence possessed by the masses were not the sole
causes of the frequent backsliding of the people. The Jewish doctrine
itself bore within it the germ of error. The two chief pillars of the old
faith—the nationalizing of the God-idea, and the stress laid upon
the cult, the ceremonial side of religion, as compared with moral
requirements—were first and foremost to be held responsible for the
flagrant departures from the spirit of Judaism. This was the direction in
which reform was needed. Thereafter the sermons of the Prophets betray
everywhere the intense desire, on the one hand, to restore to the God-idea
its original universal character, and, on the other hand, while strongly
emphasizing the importance of morality in the religious and the social
sphere, to derogate from the value of the ceremonial system. The “Eternal”
is no longer the national God of Israel, belonging to him exclusively; He
becomes the God of the whole of mankind, the same Elohim, Creator
and Preserver of the world, whom the Patriarchs had worshiped, and to
whom, being His creatures, all men owe worship. His precepts and His laws
of morality are binding upon all nations; they will bring salvation and
blessing to all without distinction.11 The ideal of piety consists in the
profession of God and a life of rectitude. The time will come when all
nations will be penetrated by true knowledge of God and actuated by the
noblest motives; then will follow the universal brotherhood of man. Until
this consummation is reached, and so long as Israel is the only nation
formally professing the one true God, and accepting His blessed law,
Israel’s sole task is to embody in himself the highest ideals, to be an
“ensign to the nations,” to bear before them the banner of God’s law,
destined in time to effect the transformation of the whole of mankind.
Israel is a missionary to the nations. As such he must stand before them
as a model of holiness and purity. Here is the origin of the great idea of
the spiritual “Messianism” of the Jewish people, or, better, its
“missionism,” an eternal idea, far more comprehensive than the old idea of
national election, which it supplanted.
These sublime teachings were inculcated at the moment in which Judah was
hastening to meet his fate. It had become impossible to check the natural
results of the earlier transgressions. The inevitable happened; Babylon
the mighty laid her ponderous hand upon tiny Judah. But Judah could not be
crushed. From the heavy chastisement the Jewish nation emerged purified,
re-born for a new life.
VI. THE SECONDARY OR SPIRITUAL-POLITICAL PERIOD
The rank and file of a people are instructed by revolutions and
catastrophes better than by sermons. More quickly than Isaiah and
Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar brought the Jews to a recognition of their tasks.
The short span of the Babylonian Exile (586-538 B. C. E.) was a period of
introspection and searching self-examination for the people. Spiritual
forces hitherto latent came into play; a degree of self-consciousness
asserted itself. The people grasped its mission. At last it comprehended
that to imitate inferior races, instead of teaching them and making itself
a model for them to follow, was treason to its vocation in life. When the
hour of release from the Babylonian yoke struck, the people suddenly saw
under its feet “a new earth,” and to “a new heaven” above it raised eyes
dim with tears of repentance and emotion. It renewed its covenant with
God. Like the Exodus from Egypt, so the second national deliverance was
connected with a revelation. But the messages delivered by the last
Prophets—especially by “the great unknown,” the author of the latter
part of the Book of Isaiah—were too exalted, too universal in
conception, for a people but lately emerged from a severe crisis to set
about their realization at once. They could only illumine its path as a
guiding-star, inspire it as the ultimate goal, the far-off Messianic
ideal. Meanwhile the necessity appeared for uniform religious laws,
dogmas, and customs, to bind the Jews together externally as a nation. The
moralizing religion of the Prophets was calculated to bring about the
regeneration of the individual, regardless of national ties; but at that
moment the chief point involved was the nation. It had to be established
and its organization perfected. The universalism of the Prophets was
inadequate for the consolidating of a nation. To this end outward
religious discipline was requisite, an official cult and public
ceremonies. Led by such considerations, the Jewish captives, on their
return to Jerusalem, first of all devoted themselves to the erection of a
Temple, to the creating of a visible religious centre, which was to be the
rallying point for the whole nation.
The days of the Prophets were over. Their religious universalism could
apply only to a distant future. In the present, the nation, before it
might pose as a teacher, had to learn and grow spiritually strong. Aims of
such compass require centuries for their realization. Therefore, the
spiritual-national unification of the people was pushed into the
foreground. The place of the Prophet was filled by the Priest and the
Scribe. Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah were permeated by the purpose to
make religion and the cult subservient to the cause of national union and
isolation. The erection of the Temple, the solemn service with the singing
of Psalms and the public reading from the “Book of the Law” (the
Pentateuch, which underwent its final redaction at that time), the removal
of whatever might arouse the remembrance of strange and heathen
institutions—these were the levers of their unifying activity. At
first sight this activity might appear almost too one-sided. But if we
summon to mind a picture of the conditions prevailing in those days, we
are forced to the conclusion that, in the interest of national
restoration, a consistent course was imperative. In point of fact,
however, some of Ezra’s innovations testify to the broad-minded,
reformatory character of this activity; as, for instance, the public
reading of the Pentateuch, introduced with a view to making the people see
the necessity of obtaining detailed knowledge of the principles of its
religion, and obeying the precepts of the Law, not blindly, but with
conscious assent. The object steadily aimed at was the elevation of the
whole body of the people to the plane of spirituality, its transformation,
in accordance with the Biblical injunction, into a “kingdom of priests.”
This injunction of civilizing import became the starting point of the
activity of all of Ezra’s successors, of the so-called school of the Soferim,
the Scribes, those versed in the art of writing. The political calm that
prevailed during the two centuries of the Persian supremacy (538-332 B. C.
E.), was calculated to an eminent degree to promote spiritual development
and the organization of the inner life of the people. During this period,
a large part of the writings after the Pentateuch that have been received
into the Bible were collected, compiled, and reduced to writing. The
immortal thoughts of the Prophets clothed themselves in the visible garb
of letters. On parchment rolls and in books they were made accessible to
distant ages. The impressive traditions transmitted from earliest times,
the chronicles of the past of the people, the Psalms brought forth by the
religious enthusiasm of a long series of poets, all were gathered and put
into literary shape with the extreme of care. The spiritual treasures of
the nation were capitalized, and to this process of capitalization solely
and alone generations of men have owed the possibility of resorting to
them as a source of faith and knowledge. Without the work of compilation
achieved by the Soferim, of which the uninstructed are apt to speak
slightingly, mankind to-day had no Bible, that central sun in
world-literature.
These two centuries may fitly be called the school-days of the Jewish
nation; the Scribes were the teachers of Jewry. In the way of original
work but little was produced. The people fed upon the store of spiritual
food, of which sufficient had been laid up for several generations. It was
then that the Jews first earned their title to the name, “the People of
the Book.” They made subservient to themselves the two mightiest
instruments of thought, the art of writing and of reading. Their progress
was brilliant, and when their schooling had come to an end, and they
stepped out into the broader life, they were at once able to apply their
knowledge successfully to practical contingencies. They were prepared for
all the vicissitudes of life. Their spiritual equipment was complete.
Nothing could have been more opportune than this readiness to assume the
responsibilities of existence, for a time of peril and menace was again
approaching. From out of the West, a new agent of civilization, Hellenism,
advanced upon the East. Alexander the Great had put an end to the huge
Persian monarchy, and brought the whole of Western Asia under his dominion
(332 B. C. E.). His generals divided the conquered lands among themselves.
With all their might, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucidae in Syria
hellenized the countries subject to their rule. In the old domain of the
Pharaohs, as in Babylonia, in Phoenicia, and in Syria, the Greek language
was currently spoken, Greek ceremonies were observed, the Greek mode of
life was adopted. Athens ceded her rights of primogeniture to New Athens,
Alexandria, capital of Egypt, and cosmopolitan centre of the civilized
world. For a whole century Judea played the sad part of the apple of
discord between the Egyptian and the Syrian dynasty (320-203 B. C. E.). By
turns she owned the sway of the Ptolemies and the Seleucidae, until
finally, in 203, she was declared a Syro-Macedonian province. Here, as in
the other parts of their realm, the rulers devoted themselves
energetically to the dissemination of Greek culture. Meeting with
resistance, they had resort to main force. At first, indeed, a large part
of the people permitted itself to be blinded by the “beauty of Japheth,”
and promoted assimilation with the Greeks. But when the spread of
Hellenism began to threaten the spiritual individuality of Judaism, the
rest of the nation, endowed with greater capacity of resistance, arose and
sturdily repulsed the enemy.
Hellenism was the first gravely dangerous opponent Judaism had to
encounter. It was not the ordinary meeting of two peoples, or of two kinds
of civilization. It was a clash between two theories of life that stood
abruptly opposed to each other, were, indeed, mutually exclusive. It was a
duel between “the Eternal” on the one side, and Zeus on the other—between
the Creator of the universe, the invisible spiritual Being who had, in a
miraculous way, revealed religious and ethical ideals to mankind, and the
deity who resided upon Olympus, who personified the highest force of
nature, consumed vast quantities of nectar and ambrosia, and led a pretty
wild life upon Olympus and elsewhere. In the sphere of religion and
morality, Hellene and Judean could not come close to each other. The
former deified nature herself, the material universe; the latter deified
the Creator of nature, the spirit informing the material universe. The
Hellene paid homage first and foremost to external beauty and physical
strength; the Judean to inner beauty and spiritual heroism. The Hellenic
theory identified the moral with the beautiful and the agreeable, and made
life consist of an uninterrupted series of physical and mental pleasures.
The Judean theory is permeated by the strictly ethical notions of duty, of
purity, of “holiness”; it denounces licentiousness, and sets up as its
ideal the controlling of the passions and the infinite improvement of the
soul, not of the intellect alone, but of the feelings as well. These
differences between the two theories of life showed themselves in the
brusque opposition in character and customs that made the Greeks and the
Jews absolute antipodes in many spheres of life. It cannot be denied that
in matters of the intellect, especially in the field of philosophy and
science, not to mention art, it might have been greatly to the advantage
of the Jews to become disciples of the Greeks. Nor is there any doubt that
the brighter aspects of Hellenism would make an admirable complement to
Judaism. An harmonious blending of the Prophets with Socrates and Plato
would have produced a many-sided, ideal Weltanschauung. The course
of historical events from the first made such blending, which would
doubtless have required great sacrifices on both sides, an impossible
consummation. In point of fact, the events were such as to widen the abyss
between the two systems. The meeting of Judaism and Hellenism
unfortunately occurred at the very moment when the classical Hellenes had
been supplanted by the hellenized Macedonians and Syrians, who had
accepted what were probably the worst elements of the antique system,
while appropriating but few of the intellectual excellencies of Greek
culture. There was another thwarting circumstance. In this epoch, the
Greeks were the political oppressors of the Jews, outraging Jewish
national feeling through their tyranny to the same degree as by their
immoral life they shocked Jewish ethical feeling and Jewish chastity.
Outraged national and religious feeling found expression in the
insurrection of the Maccabees (168 B. C. E.). The hoary priest Mattathias
and his sons fought for the dearest and noblest treasures of Judaism.
Enthusiasm begets heroism. The Syrian-Greek yoke was thrown off, and,
after groaning under alien rule, the Persian, the Egyptian, and the
Syro-Macedonian, for four hundred years, Judea became an independent
state. In its foreign relations, the new state was secured by the
self-sacrificing courage of the first Maccabean brothers, and from within
it was supported by the deep-sunk pillars of the spiritual life. The rise
of the three famous parties, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the
Essenes, by no means testifies, as many would have us believe, to national
disintegration, but rather to the intense spiritual activity of the
people. The three tendencies afforded opportunity for the
self-consciousness of the nation to express itself in all its variety and
force. The unbending religious dogmatism of the Sadducees, the
comprehensive practical sense of the Pharisees in religious and Rational
concerns, the contemplative mysticism of the Essenes, they are the most
important offshoots from the Jewish system as held at that time. In
consequence of the external conditions that brought about the destruction
of the Maccabean state12
after a century’s existence (165-63 B. C. E.), the Pharisee tendency,
which had proved itself the best in practice, won the upper hand. When
Judea was held fast in the clutches of the Roman eagle, all hope of escape
being cut off, the far-seeing leaders of the people gained the firm
conviction that the only trustworthy support of the Jewish nation lay in
its religion. They realized that the preservation of national unity could
be effected only by a consistent organization of the religious law, which
was to envelop and shape the whole external life of the people. This
explains the feverish activity of the early creators of the Mishna, of
Hillel, Shammai, and others, and it interprets also the watchword of still
older fame, “Make a fence about the Law.” If up to that moment religious
usage in its development had kept abreast of the requirements of social
and individual life, the requirements out of which it had grown forth, it
now became a national function, and its further evolution advanced with
tremendous strides. For the protection of the old “Mosaic Laws,” a twofold
and a threefold fence of new legal ordinances was erected about them, and
the cult became more and more complicated. But the externals of religion
did not monopolize all the forces. The moral element in the nation was
promoted with equal vigor. Hillel, the head of the Pharisee party, was not
a legislator alone, he was also a model of humane principles and rare
moral attainments.
While Judaism, in its native country was striving to isolate itself, and
was seizing upon all sorts of expedients to insure this end, it readily
entered into relations, outside of Judea, with other systems of thought,
and accepted elements of the classical culture. Instead of the violent
opposition which the Palestinian Judaism of the pre-Maccabean period, that
is, the period of strife, had offered to Hellenism, the tendency to make
mutual concessions, and pave the way for an understanding between the two
theories of life, asserted itself in Alexandria. In the capital city of
the hellenized world the Jews constituted one of the most important
elements of culture. According to Mommsen, the Jewish colony in Alexandria
was not inferior, in point of numbers, to the Jewish population of
Jerusalem, the metropolis. Influenced by Greek civilization, the Jews in
turn exercised decisive influence upon their heathen surroundings, and
introduced a new principle of development into the activity of the
cultivated classes. The Greek translation of the Biblical writings formed
the connecting link between Judaism and Hellenism. The “Septuaginta,” the
translation of the Pentateuch, in use since the third century before the
Christian era, had acquainted the classical world with Jewish views and
principles. The productions of the Prophets and, in later centuries, of
the other Biblical authors, translated and spread broadcast, acted
irresistibly upon the spirit of the cultivated heathen, and granted him a
glimpse into a world of hitherto unknown notions. On this soil sprang up
the voluminous Judeo-Hellenic literature, of which but a few, though
characteristic, specimens have descended to us. The intermingling of Greek
philosophy with Jewish religious conceptions resulted in a new
religio-philosophic doctrine, with a mystic tinge, of which Philo is the
chief exponent. In Jerusalem, Judaism appeared as a system of practical
ceremonies and moral principles; in Alexandria, it presented itself as a
complex of abstract symbols and poetical allegories. The Alexandrian form
of Judaism might satisfy the intellect, but it could not appeal to the
feelings. It may have made Judaism accessible to the cultivated minority,
to the upper ten thousand with philosophic training; for the masses of the
heathen people Judaism continued unintelligible. Yet it was pre-eminently
the masses that were strongly possessed by religious craving. Disappointed
in their old beliefs, they panted after a new belief, after spiritual
enlightenment. In the decaying classical world, which had so long filled
out life with materialistic and intellectual interests, the moral and
religious feelings, the desire for a living faith, for an active
inspiration, had awakened, and was growing with irresistible force.
Then, from deep out of the bosom of Judaism, there sprang a moral,
religious doctrine destined to allay the burning thirst for religion, and
bring about a reorganization of the heathen world. The originators of
Christianity stood wholly upon the ground of Judaism. In their teachings
were reflected as well the lofty moral principles of the Pharisee leader
as the contemplative aims of the Essenes. But the same external
circumstances that had put Judaism under the necessity of choosing a
sharply-defined practical, national policy, made it impossible for Judaism
to fraternize with the preachers of the new doctrine. Judaism, in fact,
was compelled to put aside entirely the thought of universal missionary
activity. Instead, it had to devote its powers to the more pressing task
of guarding the spiritual unity of a nation whose political bonds were
visibly dropping away.
For just then the Jewish nation, gory with its own blood, was struggling
in the talons of the Roman eagle. Its sons fought heroically, without
thought of self. When, finally, physical strength gave out, their
spiritual energy rose to an intenser degree. The state was annihilated,
the nation remained alive. At the very moment when the Temple was
enwrapped in flames, and the Roman legions flooded Jerusalem, the
spiritual leaders of Jewry sat musing, busily casting about for a means
whereby, without a state, without a capital, without a Temple, Jewish
unity might be maintained. And they solved the difficult problem.
VII. THE TERTIARY TALMUDIC OR NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS PERIOD
The solution of the problem consisted chiefly in more strictly following
out the process of isolation. In a time in which the worship of God
preached by Judaism was rapidly spreading to all parts of the classical
world, and the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion were steadily
gaining appreciation and active adherence, this intense desire for
seclusion may at first glance seem curious. But the phenomenon is
perfectly simple. A foremost factor was national feeling, enhanced to a
tremendous degree at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Lacking a
political basis, it was transferred to religious soil. Every tradition,
every custom, however insignificant, was cherished as a jewel. Though
without a state and without territory, the Jews desired to form a nation,
if only a spiritual nation, complete in itself. They considered themselves
then as before the sole guardians of the law of God. They did not believe
in a speedy fulfilment of the prophetical promise concerning “the end of
time” when all nations would be converted to God. A scrupulous keeper of
the Law, Judaism would not hear of the compromises that heathendom, lately
entered into the bosom of the faith, claimed as its due consideration. It
refused to sacrifice a single feature of its simple dogmatism, of its
essential ceremonies, such as circumcision and Sabbath rest. Moreover, in
the period following close upon the fall of the Temple, a part of the
people still nursed the hope of political restoration, a hope repudiating
in its totality the proclamation of quite another Messianic doctrine. The
delusion ended tragically in Bar Kochba’s hapless rebellion (135 C. E.),
whose disastrous issue cut off the last remnant of hope for the
restoration of an “earthly kingdom.” Thereafter the ideal of a spiritual
state was replaced by the ideal of a spiritual nation, rallying about a
peculiar religious banner. Jewry grew more and more absorbed in itself.
Its seclusion from the rest of the world became progressively more
complete. Instinct dictated this course as an escape from the danger of
extinction, or, at least, of stagnation. It was conscious of possessing
enough vitality and energy to live for itself and work out its own
salvation. It had its spiritual interests, its peculiar ideals, and a firm
belief in the future. It constituted an ancient order, whose patent of
nobility had been conferred upon it in the days of the hoary past by the
Lord God Himself. Such as it was, it could not consent to ally itself with
parvenus, ennobled but to-day, and yesterday still bowing down
before “gods of silver and gods of gold.” This white-haired old man, with
a stormy past full of experiences and thought, would not mingle with the
scatter-brained crowd, would not descend to the level of neophytes
dominated by fleeting, youthful enthusiasm. Loyally this weather-bronzed,
inflexible guardian of the Law stuck to his post—the post entrusted
to him by God Himself—and, faithful to his duty, held fast to the
principle j’y suis, j’y reste.
As a political nation threatened by its neighbors seeks support in its
army, and provides sufficient implements of war, so a spiritual nation
must have spiritual weapons of defense at its command. Such weapons were
forged in great numbers, and deposited in the vast arsenal called the
Talmud. The Talmud represents a complicated spiritual discipline,
enjoining unconditional obedience to a higher invisible power. Where
discipline is concerned, questions as to the necessity for one or another
regulation are out of place. Every regulation is necessary, if only
because it contributes to the desired end, namely, discipline. Let no one
ask, then, to what purpose the innumerable religious and ritual
regulations, sometimes reaching the extreme of pettiness, to what purpose
the comprehensive code in which every step in the life of the faithful is
foreseen. The Talmudic religious provisions, all taken together, aim to
put the regimen of the nation on a strictly uniform basis, so that
everywhere the Jew may be able to distinguish a brother in faith by his
peculiar mode of life. It is a uniform with insignia, by which soldiers of
the same regiment recognize one another. Despite the vast extent of the
Jewish diaspora, the Jews formed a well-articulated spiritual army, an
invisible “state of God” (civitas dei). Hence these “knights of the
spirit,” the citizens of this invisible state, had to wear a distinct
uniform, and be governed by a suitable code of army regulations.
As a protection for Jewish national unity, which was exposed to the
greatest danger after the downfall of the state, there arose and
developed, without any external influence whatsoever, an extraordinary
dictatorship, unofficial and spiritual. The legislative activity of all
the dictators—such as, Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi Akiba, the
Hillelites, and the Shammaites—was formulated in the Mishna, the
“oral law,” which was the substructure of the Talmud. Their activity had a
characteristic feature, which deserves somewhat particularized
description. The laws were not laid down arbitrarily and without ceremony.
In order to possess binding force, they required the authoritative
confirmation to be found in the Mosaic Books. From these, whether by
logical or by forced interpretation of the holy text, its words, or,
perchance, its letters, they had to be derived. Each law, barring only the
original “traditions,” the Halacha le-Moshe mi-Sinai, was
promulgated over the supreme signature, as it were, that is, with the
authentication of a word from the Holy Scriptures. Or it was inferred from
another law so authenticated. The elaboration of every law was thus
connected with a very complicated process of thought, requiring both
inductive and deductive reasoning, and uniting juridical interpretation
with the refinements of casuistry. This legislation was the beginning of
Talmudic science, which from that time on, for many centuries, growing
with the ages, claimed in chief part the intellectual activity of Jewry.
The schools and the academies worked out a system of laws at once
religious and practical in character, which constituted, in turn, the
object of further theoretic study in the same schools and academies. In
the course of time, however, the means became the end. Theoretic
investigation of the law, extending and developing to the furthest limits,
in itself, without reference to its practical value, afforded satisfaction
to the spiritual need. The results of theorizing often attained the
binding force of law in practical life, not because circumstances ordered
it, but simply because one or another academy, by dint of logic or
casuistry, had established it as law. The number of such deductions from
original and secondary laws increased in geometric progression, and
practical life all but failed to keep up with the theory. The “close of
the Mishna,” that is, its reduction to writing, had no daunting effect
upon the zeal for research. If anything, a new and strong impetus was
imparted to it. As up to that time the text of the Holy Scriptures had
been made the basis of interpretation, giving rise to the most diverse
inferences, so the rabbis now began to use the law book recently canonized
as a new basis of interpretation, and to carry its principles to their
utmost consequences. In this way originated first the “Palestinian
Gemara.” Later, when the Patriarchate in Palestine was stripped of its
glory by persecutions, and, in consequence, the centre of activity had to
be transferred from the Talmud academies of Palestine to those of
Babylonia, supreme place and exclusive dominion were obtained by the
“Babylonian Gemara,” put into permanent form about the year 500 C. E., a
gigantic work, the result of two hundred years of mental labor.
This busy intellectual activity was as comprehensive as it was
thoroughgoing. Talmudic legislation, the Halacha, by no means confines
itself to religious practices, extensive as this field is. It embraces the
whole range of civil and social life. Apart from the dietary laws, the
regulations for the festivals and the divine service, and a mass of
enactments for the shaping of daily life, the Talmud elaborated a
comprehensive and fairly well-ordered system of civil and criminal law,
which not infrequently bears favorable comparison with the famous rationi
scriptae of the Romans. While proceeding with extreme rigor and
scrupulousness in ritual matters, the Talmud is governed in its social
legislation by the noblest humanitarian principles. Doubtless this
difference of attitude can be explained by the fact that religious norms
are of very much greater importance for a nation than judicial
regulations, which concern themselves only with the interests of the
individual, and exercise but little influence upon the development of the
national spirit.
The most sympathetic aspects of the Jewish spirit in that epoch are
revealed in the moral and poetic elements of the Talmud, in the Agada.
They are the receptacles into which the people poured all its sentiments,
its whole soul. They are a clear reflex of its inner world, its feelings,
hopes, ideals. The collective work of the nation and the trend of history
have left much plainer traces in the Agada than in the dry, methodical
Halacha. In the Agada the learned jurist and formalist appears transformed
into a sage or poet, conversing with the people in a warm, cordial tone,
about the phenomena of nature, history, and life. The reader is often
thrown into amazement by the depth of thought and the loftiness of feeling
manifested in the Agada. Involuntarily one pays the tribute of reverence
to its practical wisdom, to its touching legends pervaded by the magic
breath of poesy, to the patriarchal purity of its views. But these pearls
are not strung upon one string, they are not arranged in a complete
system. They are imbedded here and there, in gay variety, in a vast mass
of heterogeneous opinions and sentiments naive at times and at times
eccentric. The reader becomes aware of the thoughts before they are
consolidated. They are still in a fluid, mobile state, still in process of
making. The same vivacious, versatile spirit is revealed in the Midrashim
literature, directly continuing the Agada up to the end of the middle
ages. These two species of Jewish literature, the Agada and the Midrashim,
have a far greater absolute value than the Halacha. The latter is an
official work, the former a national product. Like every other special
legislation, the Halacha is bound to definite conditions and times, while
the Agada concerns itself with the eternal verities. The creations of the
philosophers, poets, and moralists are more permanent than the work of
legislators.
Beautiful as the Agada is, and with all its profundity, it lacks breadth.
It rests wholly on the national, not on a universal basis. It would be
vain to seek in it for the comprehensive universalism of the Prophets.
Every lofty ideal is claimed as exclusively Jewish. So far from bridging
over the chasm between Israel and the other nations, knowledge and
morality served to widen it. It could not be otherwise, there was no
influx of air from without. The national horizon grew more and more
contracted. The activities of the people gathered intensity, but in the
same measure they lost in breadth. It was the only result to be expected
from the course of history in those ages. Let us try to conceive what the
first five centuries of the Christian era, the centuries during which the
Talmud was built up, meant in the life of mankind. Barbarism, darkness,
and elemental outbreaks of man’s migratory instincts, illustrated by the
“great migration of races,” are characteristic features of those
centuries. It was a wretched transition period between the fall of the
world of antique culture and the first germinating of a new Christian
civilization. The Orient, the centre and hearth of Judaism, was shrouded
in impenetrable darkness. In Palestine and in Babylonia, their two chief
seats, the Jews were surrounded by nations that still occupied the lowest
rung of the ladder of civilization, that had not yet risen above naive
mysticism in religion, or continued to be immersed in superstitions of the
grossest sort.
In this abysmal night of the middle ages, the lamp of thought was fed and
guarded solely and alone by the Jews. It is not astonishing, then, that
oblivious of the other nations they should have dispensed light only for
themselves. Furthermore, the circumstance must be considered that, in the
period under discussion, the impulse to separate from Judaism gained
ground in the Christian world. After the Council of Nicaea, after
Constantine the Great had established Christianity as the state-church,
the official breach between the Old Testament and the New Testament
partisans became unavoidable.
Thus the Jews, robbed of their political home, created a spiritual home
for themselves. Through the instrumentality of the numberless religious
rules which the Talmud had laid down, and which shaped the life of the
individual as well as that of the community, they were welded into a
firmly united whole. The Jewish spirit—national feeling and
individual mental effort alike—was absorbed in this pursuit of
unification. Head, heart, hands, all human functions of the Jew, were
brought under complete control and cast into fixed forms, by these five
centuries of labor. With painful exactitude, the Talmud prescribed
ordinances for all the vicissitudes of life, yet, at the same time,
offered sufficient food for brain and heart. It was at once a religion and
a science. The Jew was equipped with all the necessaries. He could satisfy
his wants from his own store. There was no need for him to knock at
strange doors, even though he had thereby profited. The consequences of
this attitude, positive as well as negative consequences, asserted
themselves in the further course of Jewish history.
VIII. THE GAONIC PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE ORIENTAL JEWS (500-980)
With the close of the Talmud, at the beginning of the sixth century, the
feverish intellectual activity abated. The Jewish centre of gravity
continued in Babylonia. In this country, in which the Jewish race had
heard its cradle song at the dawn of existence, and later on Judaea
capta had sat and wept remembering Zion, Judaism, after the
destruction of the second Temple and hundreds of years of trials, was
favored with a secure asylum. In the rest of the diaspora, persecution
gave the Jews no respite, but in Babylonia, under Persian rule, they lived
for some centuries comparatively free from molestation. Indeed, they
enjoyed a measure of autonomy in internal affairs, under a chief who was
entitled Exilarch (Resh-Galutha). The Law and the word of God went
forth from Babylonia for the Jews of all lands. The Babylonian Talmud
became the anthoritative code for the Jewish people, a holy book second
only to the Bible. The intellectual calm that supervened at the beginning
of the sixth century and lasted until the end of the eighth century,
betrayed itself in the slackening of independent creation, though not in
the flagging of intellectual activity in general. In the schools and
academies of Pumbeditha, Nahardea, and Sura, scientific work was carried
on with the same zest as before, only this work had for its primary object
the sifting and exposition of the material heaped up by the preceding
generations. This was the province of the Sabureans and the Geonim, whose
relation to the Talmud was the same as that of the Scribes (the Soferim)
of the Second Temple to the Bible (see above, ch. vi). In the later
period, as in the earlier, the aim was the capitalization of the
accumulated spiritual treasures, an undertaking that gives little occasion
for movement and life, but all the more for endurance and industry.
This intellectual balance was destroyed by two events: the appearance of
Islam and the rise of Karaism. Islam, the second legitimate offspring of
Judaism, was appointed to give to religious thought in the slumbering
Orient the slight impulse it needed to start it on its rapid career of
sovereign power. Barely emancipated from swaddling clothes, young Hotspur
at once began to rage. He sought an outlet for his unconquerable thirst
for action, his lust for world-dominion. The victorious religious wars of
the followers of Allah ensued. This foreign movement was not without
significance for the fate of the Jews. They were surrounded no longer by
heathens but by Mohammedans, who believed in the God of the Bible, and
through the mouth of their prophet conferred upon the Jews the honorable
appellation of “the People of the Book.” In the eighth century the wars
ceased, and the impetuous energy of the rejuvenated Orient was diverted
into quieter channels. The Bagdad Khalifate arose, the peaceful era of the
growth of industry, the sciences, and the arts was inaugurated. Endowed
with quick discernment for every enlightening movement, the Jews yielded
to the vivifying magic of young Arabic culture.
Partly under the influence of the Arabic tendency to split into
religio-philosophic sects, partly from inner causes, Karaism sprang up in
the second half of the eighth century. Its active career began with a
vehement protest against the Talmud as the regulator of life and thought.
It proclaimed the creators of this vast encyclopedia to be usurpers of
spiritual power, and urged a return to the Biblical laws in their
unadulterated simplicity. The weakness of its positive principles hindered
the spread of Karaism, keeping it forever within the narrow limits of a
sect and consigning it to stagnation. What gave it vogue during the first
century of its existence was its negative strength, its violent opposition
to the Talmud, which aroused strenuous intellectual activity. For a long
time it turned Judaism away from its one-sided Talmudic tendency, and
opened up new avenues of work for it. True to their motto: “Search
diligently in the Holy Scriptures,” the adherents of Karaism applied
themselves to the rational study of the Bible, which had come to be, among
the Talmudists, the object of casuistic interpretation and legendary
adornment. By the cultivation of grammar and lexicography as applied to
the Biblical thesaurus of words, they resuscitated the Hebrew language,
which, ousted by the Aramaic dialect, had already sunk into oblivion. By
the same means they laid the foundation of a school of rejuvenated poetry.
In general, thought on religious and philosophic subjects was promoted to
a higher degree by the lively discussions between them and the Talmudists.
By imperceptible steps Talmudic Judaism, influenced at once by the
enlightened Arabs and the protesting Karaites, departed from the “four
ells of the Halacha,” and widened its horizon. Among the spiritual leaders
of the people arose men who occupied themselves not only with the study of
the Talmud but also with a rational exegesis of the Bible, with philology,
poetry, philosophy. The great Gaon Saadiah (892-942) united within himself
all strands of thought. Over and above a large number of philological and
other writings of scientific purport, he created a momentous
religio-philosophic system, with the aim to clarify Judaism and refine
religious conceptions. He was an encyclopedic thinker, a representative of
the highest Jewish culture and of Arabic culture as well—he wrote
his works in Arabic by preference. In this way Jewish thought gained
ground more and more in the Orient. It was in the West, however, that it
attained soon after to the climax of its development.
Gradually the centre of gravity of Jewry shifted from Asia Minor to
Western Europe. Beginning with the sixth century, the sparsely sown Jewish
population of Occidental Europe increased rapidly in numbers. In Italy,
Byzantium, France, and Visigothic Spain, important Jewish communities were
formed. The medieval intolerance of the Church, though neither so
widespread nor so violent as it later became, suffered its first outbreak
in that early century. The persecutions of the Jews by the Visigothic
kings of Spain and the Bishops Avitus of Clermont and Agobard in France
(sixth to the ninth century) were the prelude to the more systematic and
the more bloody cruelties of subsequent days. The insignificant numbers of
the European Jews and the insecurity of their condition stood in the way
of forming an intellectual centre of their own. They were compelled to
acknowledge the spiritual supremacy of their Oriental brethren in faith.
With the beginning of the tenth century the situation underwent a change.
Arabic civilization, which had penetrated to Spain in previous centuries,
brought about a radical transformation in the character of the country.
The realm of the fanatic Visigoths, half barbarous and wholly averse to
the light of progress, changed into the prosperous and civilized Khalifate
of the Ommeyyades. Thither the best forces of Oriental Jewry transferred
themselves. With the growth of the Jewish population in Arabic Spain and
the strengthening of its communal organization, the spiritual centre of
the Jewish people gradually established itself in Spain. The academies of
Sura and Pumbeditha yielded first place to the high schools of Cordova and
Toledo.
The Jewry of the East resigned the national hegemony to the Jewry of the
West. The Geonim withdrew in favor of the Rabbis. After centuries of
seclusion, the Jewish spirit once more asserted itself, and enjoyed a
period of efflorescence. The process of national growth became more
complex, more varied.
IX. THE RABBINIC-PHILOSOPHICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE SPANISH JEWS
(980-1492)
The five centuries marked at their beginning by the rise of Arabic-Jewish
civilization in Spain and at their end by the banishment of the Jews from
Spain (980-1492), offer the Jewish historian an abundance of culture
manifestations and intellectual movements so luxuriant that it is
well-nigh impossible to gather them up in one formula. The monotony
formerly prevailing in Jewish national life, both in its external and in
its internal relations, was succeeded by almost gaily checkered variety.
Swept along by the movement towards enlightenment that dominated their
surroundings, the Jews of Arabic Spain threw themselves into energetic
work in all the spheres of life and thought. While they had political
ground more or less firm under their feet, and for the most part enjoyed
peace and liberty, the Jews in the Christian lands of Europe stood upon
volcanic soil, every moment threatening to swallow them up. Exposed
constantly to persecutions, they lived more or less isolated, and devoted
themselves to one-sided though intense intellectual activity. Sombre
shadows and streaks of bright light alternate with each other in this
period. In its second half, the clouds massed themselves heavily upon the
darkening horizon. Even the “privileged” Spanish Jews suffered an untoward
change in their affairs at the beginning of the thirteenth century:
gradually they were withdrawn from under the sovereignty of the Arabs, and
made subject to the power of the Catholic monarchs. They became
thenceforward the equal partners of their brethren in faith in the rest of
Europe. All without distinction had a share in the spiritual martyrdom
which is the greenest bayleaf in the crown of Jewish history. To think and
to suffer became the watchword of the whole nation.
At first, as we have said, a considerable portion of the Jewish people
enjoyed the happy possibility of thinking. This was during the classical
epoch of the Arabic-Jewish Renaissance, which preceded the Italian
Renaissance by four centuries. There is a fundamental difference between
the two Renaissance periods: the earlier one was signalized by a re-birth
of the sciences and of philosophy, the later one pre-eminently of the arts
and of literature. The eleventh and twelfth centuries marked the meridian
of the intellectual development of medieval Judaism. As once, in
Alexandria, the union of Judaic with Hellenic culture brought in its train
a superabundance of new ideas of a universal character, so again the
amalgamation, on Spanish soil, of Jewish culture with Arabic gave rise to
rich intellectual results, more lasting and fruitful than the Alexandrian,
inasmuch as, in spite of their universal character, they did not
contravene the national spirit. The Jewish people dropped its misanthropy
and its leaning toward isolation. The Jews entered all sorts of careers:
by the side of influential and cultivated statesmen, such as Chasdai ibn
Shaprut and Samuel Hanagid, at the courts of the Khalifs, stood a
brilliant group of grammarians, poets, and philosophers, like Jonah ibn
Ganach, Solomon Gabirol, and Moses ibn Ezra. The philosophic-critical
scepticism of Abraham ibn Ezra co-existed in peace and harmony with the
philosophic-poetic enthusiasm of Jehuda Halevi. The study of medicine,
mathematics, physics, and astronomy went hand in hand with the study of
the Talmud, which, though it may not have occupied the first place with
the Spanish Jews of this time, by no means disappeared, as witness the
compendium by Alphassi. Unusual breadth and fulness of the spiritual life
is the distinction of the epoch. This variety of mental traits combined in
a marvelous union to form the great personality of Maimonides, the crown
of a glorious period. With one “Strong Hand,” this intellectual giant
brought order out of the Talmudic chaos, which at his word was transformed
into a symmetrical, legal system; with the other, he “guided the
Perplexed” through the realm of faith and knowledge. For rationalistic
clarity and breadth of view no counterpart to the religio-philosophic
doctrine which he formulated can be found in the whole extent of medieval
literature. The main feature of the philosophy of Maimonides and of the
systems based upon it is rationalism, not a dry, scholastic, abstract
rationalism, but a living rationalism, embracing the whole field of the
most exalted psychic phenomena. It is not philosophy pure and simple, but
religious philosophy, an harmonization, more or less felicitous, of the
postulates of reason with the dogmas of faith. It is reason mitigated by
faith, and faith regulated by reason. In the darkness of the middle ages,
when the Romish Church impregnated religion with the crudest
superstitions, going so far as to forbid its adherents to read the Bible,
and when the greatest philosopher representatives of the Church, like
Albertus Magnus, would have rejected offhand, as a childish fancy or,
indeed, as an heretical chimera, any attempt to rescue the lower classes
of the people from their wretched state of spiritual servitude—in a
time like this, the truly majestic spectacle is presented of a philosophy
declaring war on superstition, and setting out to purify the religious
notions of the people.
Not a breath of this ample spiritual development of the Jews of Arabic
Spain reached the Jews living in the Christian countries of Europe. Their
circumstances were too grievous, and in sombreness their inner life
matched their outer estate. Their horizon was as contracted as the streets
of the Jewries in which they were penned. The crusades (beginning in 1096)
clearly showed the Jews of France and Germany what sentiments their
neighbors cherished towards them. They were the first returns which
Christianity paid the Jewish people for its old-time teaching of religion.
The descendants of the “chosen people,” the originators of the Bible, were
condemned to torture of a sort to exhaust their spiritual heritage.
Judaism suffered the tragic fate of King Lear. Was it conceivable that the
horrors—the rivers of blood, the groans of massacred communities,
the serried ranks of martyrs, the ever-haunting fear of the morrow—should
fail to leave traces in the character of Judaism? The Jewish people
realized its imminent danger. It convulsively held fast to its precious
relics, clung to the pillars of its religion, which it regarded as the
only asylum. The Jewish spirit again withdrew from the outer world. It
gave itself up wholly to the study of the Talmud. In northern France and
in Germany, Talmudic learning degenerated into the extreme of scholastic
pedantry, the lot of every branch of science that is lopped off from the
main trunk of knowledge, and vegetates in a heavy, dank atmosphere,
lacking light and air. Rashi (1064-1105), whose genial activity began
before the first crusade, opened up Jewish religious literature to the
popular mind, by his systematic commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud.
On the other hand, the Tossafists, the school of commentators succeeding
him, by their petty quibbling and hairsplitting casuistry made the
Talmudic books more intricate and less intelligible. Such being the
intellectual bias of the age, a sober, rationalistic philosophy could not
assert itself. In lieu of an Ibn Ezra or a Maimonides, we have Jehuda
Hachassid and Eliezer of Worms, with their mystical books of devotion, Sefer
Chassidim, Rokeach, etc., filled with pietistic reflections on the
other world, in which the earth figures as a “vale of tears.” Poetry
likewise took on the dismal hue of its environment. Instead of the varied
lyrical notes of Gabirol and Halevi, who sang the weal and woe, not only
of the nation, but also of the individual, and lost themselves in
psychologic analysis, there now fall upon our ear the melancholy,
heartrending strains of synagogue poetry, the harrowing outcries that
forced themselves from the oppressed bosoms of the hunted people, the
prayerful lamentations that so often shook the crumbling walls of the
medieval synagogues at the very moment when, full of worshipers, they were
fired by the inhuman crusaders. A mighty chord reverberates in this
poetry: Morituri te salutant.
One small spot there was, in the whole of Europe, in which Jews could
still hope to endure existence and enjoy a measure of security. This was
Southern France, or the Provence. The population of Provence had
assimilated the culture of the neighboring country, Arabic Spain, and
become the mediator between it and the rest of Europe. This work of
mediation was undertaken primarily by the Jews. In the twelfth century
several universities existed in Provence, which were frequented in great
numbers by students from all countries. At these universities the teachers
of philosophy, medicine, and other branches of science were for the most
part Jews. The rationalistic philosophy of the Spanish Jews was there
proclaimed ex cathedra. The Tibbonides translated all the more
important works of the Jewish thinkers of Spain from Arabic into Hebrew.
The Kimchis devoted themselves to grammatical studies and the
investigation of the Bible. In Montpellier, Narbonne, and Lunel,
intellectual work was in full swing. Rational ideas gradually leavened the
masses of the Provençal population. Conscience freed from intellectual
trammels began to revolt against the oppression exercised by the Roman
clergy. Through the Albigensian heresy, Innocent III, founder of the papal
power, had his attention directed to the Jews, whom he considered the
dangerous protagonists of rationalism. The “heresy” was stifled, Provence
in all her magnificence fell a prey to the Roman mania for destruction,
and, on the ruins of a noble civilization, the Dominican Inquisition raged
with all its horrors (1213).
Thenceforward the Catholic Church devoted herself to a hostile watch upon
the Jews. Either she persecuted them directly through her Inquisition, or
indirectly through her omnipotent influence on kings and peoples. In the
hearts of the citizens of medieval Europe, the flame of religious hatred
was enkindled, and religious hatred served as a cloak for the basest
passions. Jewish history from that time on became a history of
uninterrupted suffering. The Lateran Council declared the Jews to be
outcasts, and designed a peculiar, dishonorable badge for them, a round
patch of yellow cloth, to be worn on their upper garment (1215). In France
the Jews became by turns the victims of royal rapacity and the scapegoats
of popular fanaticism. Massacres, confiscations, banishments followed by
dearly purchased permission to return, by renewed restrictions,
persecutions, and oppressions—these were the measures that
characterized the treatment of the Jews in France until their final
expulsion (1394). In Germany the Jews were not so much hated as despised.
They were servi camerae, serfs of the state, and as such had to pay
oppressive taxes. Besides, they were limited to the meanest trades and to
usury and peddling. They were shut up in their narrow Jewries, huddled in
wretched cabins, which clustered about the dilapidated synagogue in a
shamefaced way. What strange homes! What gigantic misery, what boundless
suffering dumbly borne, was concealed in those crumbling, curse-laden
dwellings! And yet, how resplendent they were with spiritual light, what
exalted virtues, what lofty heroism they harbored! In those gloomy,
tumbledown Jew houses, intellectual endeavor was at white heat. The torch
of faith blazed clear in them, and on the pure domestic hearth played a
gentle flame. In the abject, dishonored son of the Ghetto was hidden an
intellectual giant. In his nerveless body, bent double by suffering, and
enveloped in the shabby old cloak still further disfigured by the yellow
wheel, dwelt the soul of a thinker. The son of the Ghetto might have worn
his badge with pride, for in truth it was a medal of distinction awarded
by the papal Church to the Jews, for dauntlessness and courage. The
awkward, puny Jew in his way was stronger and braver than a German knight
armed cap-a-pie, for he was penetrated by the faith that “moves
mountains.” And when the worst came to the worst, he demonstrated his
courage. When his peaceful home was stormed by the bestialized hordes of
Armleder, or the drunken bands of the Flagellants, or the furious avengers
of the “Black Death,” he did not yield, did not purchase life by
disgraceful treason. With invincible courage he put his head under the
executioner’s axe, and breathed forth his heroic spirit with the
enthusiastic cry: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.”
At length the turn of the Spanish Jews arrived. For the unbroken peace
they had enjoyed, they had to atone by centuries of unexampled suffering.
By degrees, the Arabs were forced out of the Pyrenean Peninsula, and the
power they had to abdicate was assumed by the Catholic kings of Castile
and Aragon. In 1236 occurred the fall of Cordova, the most important
centre of Arabic Jewish culture. Thereafter Arab power held sway only in
the province of Granada. The fortunes of the Spanish Jews underwent a
calamitous change. The kings and the upper ten thousand were, indeed,
favorably disposed toward them. At the courts of Castile and Aragon, the
Jews were active as ministers, physicians, astronomers. But the people,
incited by the propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against
the Jews, not only as “infidels,” but also as intellectual aristocrats.
The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific
explosions that occurred periodically, in the bloody saturnalia of the
Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the massacre of
Seville (1391).
Dire blows of fortune were unable to weigh down the Spanish Jew,
accustomed to independence, as they did the German Jew. He carried his
head proudly on high, for he was conscious that in all respects he stood
above the rabble pursuing him, above its very leaders, the clerics. In
spite of untoward fate his mental development proceeded, but inevitably it
was modified by the trend of the times. By the side of the philosophic
tendency of the previous age, a mystical tendency appeared in literature.
The Kabbala, with its mist-shrouded symbolism, so grateful to the feelings
and the imagination, chimed in better than rationalistic philosophy with
the depressed humor under which the greater part of the Jews were then
laboring. Another force antagonistic to rationalistic philosophy was the
Rabbinism transplanted from France and Germany. The controversy between
Rabbinism and philosophy, which dragged itself through three-quarters of a
century (1232-1305), ended in the formal triumph of Rabbinism. However,
philosophic activity merely languished, it did not cease entirely; in
fact, the three currents for some time ran along parallel with one
another. Next to the pillars of Rabbinism, Asheri, Rashba, Isaac ben
Sheshet, loomed up the philosophers, Gersonides (Ralbag), Kreskas, and
Albo, and a long line of Kabbalists, beginning with Nachmanides and Moses
de Leon, the compiler of the Zohar, and ending with the anonymous authors
of the mysterious “Kana and Pelia.”
The times grew less and less propitious. Catholicism steadily gained
ground in Spain. The scowling Dominican put forward his claim upon the
Jewish soul with vehement emphasis, and made every effort to drag it into
the bosom of the alone-saving Church. The conversion of the Jews would
have been a great triumph, indeed, for Catholicism militant. The
conversion methods of the Dominican monk were of a most insinuating kind—he
usually began with a public religious disputation. Unfortunately, the Jews
were experts in the art of debate, and too often by their bold replies
covered the self-sufficient dignitaries of Rome with confusion. The Jews
should have known, from bitter experience, that such boldness would not be
passed over silently. From sumptuous debating hall to Dominican prison and
scaffold was but a short step. In 1391, one of these worthy soul-catchers,
Bishop Ferdinando Martinez, set the fanatical mob of Seville on the Jews,
and not without success. Terrorized by the threat of death, many accepted
Catholicism under duress. But they became Christians only in appearance;
in reality they remained true to the faith of their fathers, and, in
secret, running the risk of loss of life, they fulfilled all the Jewish
ordinances. This is the prologue to the thrilling Marrano tragedy.
Finally, the moment approached when gloomy Catholicism attained to
unchallenged supremacy in the Pyrenean Peninsula. On the ruins of the
enlightened culture of the Arabs, Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella of
Castile reared the reactionary government of medieval Rome. The
Inquisition was introduced (1480). Torquemada presided as high priest over
the rites attending the human sacrifices. Ad gloriam ecclesiae, the
whole of Spain was illuminated. Everywhere the funeral pyres of the
Inquisition flared to the skies, the air was rent by the despairing
shrieks of martyrs enveloped in flames or racked by tortures, the prisons
overflowed with Marranos,—all instruments of torture were vigorously
plied.
At last the hour of redemption struck: in 1492 all Jews were driven from
Spain, and a few years later from Portugal. Jewish-Arabic culture after
five centuries of ascendency suffered a sudden collapse. The unhappy
people again grasped its staff, and wandered forth into the world without
knowing whither.
X. THE RABBINIC-MYSTICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE GERMAN-POLISH
JEWS (1492-1789)
The expulsion from Spain was a stunning blow. The hoary martyr people
which had defied so many storms in its long life was for a moment dazed.
The soil of Europe was quaking under its feet. At the time when the
medieval period had formally come to a close for Occidental Christendom,
and the modern period had opened, the middle ages continued in unmitigated
brutality for the Jews. If anything, the life of the Jews had become more
unendurable than before. What, indeed, had the much-vaunted modern age to
offer them? In the ranks of the humanistic movement Reuchlin alone stood
forth prominently as the advocate of the Jews, and he was powerless before
the prejudices of the populace. The Reformation in Germany and elsewhere
had illuminated the minds of the people, but had not softened their
hearts. Luther himself, the creator of the Reformation, was not innocent
of hating the followers of an alien faith. The Jews especially did not
enjoy too great a measure of his sympathies. The wars growing out of the
Reformation, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries devastated
Europe in the name of religion, were not calculated to favor the spread of
tolerance and milder manners. The conflict raging in the bosom of the
Church and setting her own children by the ears, was yet insufficient to
divert her maternal care from her “unbelieving” stepchildren. In Spain and
Portugal, stakes continued to burn two centuries longer for the benefit of
the Marranos, the false Christians. In Germany and Austria, the Jews were
kept in the same condition of servitude as before. Their economic
circumstances were appalling. They were forced to emigrate en masse
to Poland, which offered the adherents of their faith a comparatively
quiet life, and by and by was invested with the Jewish hegemony. Some of
the smaller states and independent towns of Italy also afforded the Jews
an asylum, though one not always to be depended upon. A group of
hard-driven Spanish exiles, for instance, under the leadership of
Abarbanel had found peace in Italy. The rest had turned to Turkey and her
province Palestine,
For a time, indeed, the Jewish spiritual centre was located in Turkey.
What Europe, old, Christian, and hardhearted, refused the Jews, was
granted them by Turkey, young, Mussulman, and liberal. On hearing of the
banishment of the Jews from Spain, Sultan Bajazet exclaimed: “How can you
call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who has made his
land poor and enriched ours?” His amazement characterizes the relation of
Turkey to the Jews of the day. The one-time Marrano, Joseph Nassi, rose to
be a considerable dignitary at the court of Sultan Selim (1566-1580).
Occasionally he succeeded, by diplomatic means, in wreaking vengeance upon
European courts in retaliation for the brutal tortures inflicted upon his
people. With the generosity of a Maecenas, he assembled Jewish scholars
and poets, and surrounded himself with a sunlit atmosphere of
intellectuality and talent. All other Jewish communities looked up to that
of Constantinople. Now and again its rabbis played the part of Patriarchs
of the synagogue. To this commanding position the rabbis of Palestine
especially were inclined to lay claim. They even attempted to restore the
Patriarchate, and the famous controversy between Jacob Berab and Levi ben
Chabib regarding the Semicha is another evidence of the same
assertive tendency. Among the Spanish exiles settled in the Holy Land a
peculiar spiritual current set in. The storm-tossed wanderers, but now
returned to their native Jordan from the shores of the blood-stained Tagus
and Guadalquivir, were mightily moved at the sight of their ancestral
home. Ahasuerus, who on his thorn-strewn pilgrim’s path had drained the
cup of woe to the dregs, suddenly caught sight of the home of his
childhood razed level with the ground. The precious, never-to-be-forgotten
ruins exhaled the home feeling, which took possession of him with
irresistible charm. Into his soul there flowed sweet memories of a golden
youth, past beyond recall. The impact of these emotions enkindled
passionate “longing for Zion” in the heart of the forlorn, homeless
martyr. He was seized by torturing thirst for political resurrection. Such
melancholy feelings and vehement outbursts found expression in the
practical Kabbala, originating with Ari (Isaac Luria) and his famous Safed
school. A mystical belief in the coming of Messiah thenceforward became
one of the essential elements of the Jewish spirit. It vanquished the
heart of the learned Joseph Karo, who had brought Rabbinism to its climax
by the compilation of his celebrated ritual code, the Shulchan Aruch. With
equal force it dominated the being of Solomon Molcho, the enthusiastic
youth who, at one time a Marrano, on his public return to Judaism
proclaimed the speedy regeneration of Israel. He sealed his faith in his
prophecy with death at the stake (1532). The Marranos beyond the Pyrenees
and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of the
sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on the
increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant
excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of hope.
A mournful national feeling pervades the Jewish literature of the time.
Recollections of torments endured enflamed all hearts. A series of
chronicles were thus produced that record the centuries of Jewish
martyrdom—Jocha-sin, Shebet Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha, etc. The
art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of
perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of spiritual
union. The papal index librorum prohibitorum was impotent in the
face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and feeling carried on by
the printing press.
After Palestine and Turkey, Holland for a time became the spiritual centre
of the scattered Jews (in the seventeenth century). Holland was warmly
attached to the cause of liberty. When it succeeded in freeing itself from
the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king, Philip II, it
inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of peaceful
development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to the
persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the harassed
Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal, migrated to
Holland. Amsterdam became a second Cordova. The intellectual life was
quickened. Freedom from restraint tended to break down the national
exclusivism of the Jew, and intercourse with his liberal surroundings
varied his mental pursuits. Rabbinism, the Kabbala, philosophy, national
poetry—they all had their prominent representatives in Holland.
These manifold tendencies were united in the literary activity of Manasseh
ben Israel, a scholar of extensive, though not intensive, encyclopedic
attainments. Free thought and religious rationalism were embodied in Uriel
Acosta. To a still higher degree they were illustrated in the theory of
life expounded by the immortal author of the “Theologico-Political
Tractate” (1640-1677). This advanced state of culture in Holland did not
fail to react upon the neighboring countries. Under the impulse of
enthusiasm for the Bible Puritan England under Cromwell opened its portals
to the Jews. In Italy, in the dank atmosphere of rabbinical dialectics and
morbid mysticism, great figures loom up—Leon de Modena, the
antagonist of Rabbinism and of the Kabbala, and Joseph del Medigo,
mathematician, philosopher, and mystic, the disciple of Galileo.
These purple patches were nothing more than the accidents of a transition
period. The people as a whole was on the decline. The Jewish mind darted
hither and thither, like a startled bird seeking its nest. Holland or
Turkey was an inadequate substitute for Spain, if only for the reason that
but a tiny fraction of the Jews had found shelter in either. The Jewish
national centre must perforce coincide with the numerical centre of the
dispersed people, in which, moreover, conditions must grant Jews the
possibility of living undisturbed in closely compacted masses, and of
perfecting a well-knit organization of social and individual life. Outside
of Spain these conditions were fulfilled only by Poland, which gradually,
beginning with the sixteenth century, assumed the hegemony over the Jewry
of the world. This marks the displacement of the Sephardic (Spanish, in a
broader sense, Romanic) element, and the supremacy of the Ashkenazic
(German-Polish) element.
Poland had been a resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the
outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to the
position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude. As the merchant middle
class, the Jews were protected and advanced by the kings and the Szlachta.
The consequent security of their position induced so rapid a growth of the
Jewish element that in a little while the Jews of Poland outnumbered those
of the old Jewish settlements in Occidental Europe. The numerous
privileges granted the Jews, by Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the
Great (1347-1370), Witowt (1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their
successors, fortified their position in the extended territory covered by
Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circumstances in Poland
left an impress upon their inner life. An intense mental activity was
called forth. This activity can be traced back to German beginnings,
though at the same time it is made up of many original elements. For a
space Rabbinism monopolized the intellectual endeavors of the Polish Jews.
The rabbi of Cracow, Moses Isserles, and the rabbi of Ostrog, Solomon
Luria (d. 1572), disputed first place with the foremost rabbinical
authorities of other countries. Their decisions and circular letters
regarding religious and legal questions were accorded binding force.
Associates and successors of theirs founded Talmud academies throughout
the country, and large numbers of students attended them. Commentators
upon the Talmud and expounders of classical works in Jewish theological
literature appeared in shoals. Jewish printing establishments in Cracow
and Lublin were assiduous in turning out a mass of writings, which spread
the fame of the Polish rabbis to the remotest communities. The large
autonomy enjoyed by the Polish and Lithuanian Jews conferred executive
power upon rabbinical legislation. The Kahal, or Jewish communal
government, to a certain degree invested with judicial and administrative
competence, could not do without the guiding hand of the rabbis as
interpreters of the law. The guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a
“college of judges,” with fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their
own members. The organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the
“Synods of the Four Countries,” formed the keystone of this intricate
social-spiritual hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the
system of Talmud academies (Yeshiboth) that covered the whole of
Poland remind one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the
Babylonia of the Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile,
commanding thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were
under the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of
intellectual energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the
“golden age,” did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the
Orient at Saadia’s time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides.
Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of the
Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised between
the classes of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness that gave
peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew as an
individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the same
exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a sharply
defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting violent shocks
and beyond the danger point of extinction through foreign invasion.
The fateful year 1648 formed a turning point in the history of the Polish
Jews, as in the history of the countries belonging to the Polish crown.
The Cossack butcheries and wars of extermination of 1648-1658 were the
same for the Polish Jews that the Crusades, the Black Death, and all the
other occasions for carnage had been for the Jews of Western Europe. It
seemed as though history desired to avoid the reproach of partiality, and
hastened to mete out even-handed justice by apportioning the same measure
of woe to the Jews of Poland as to the Jews of Western Europe. But the
Polish Jews were prepared to accept the questionable gift from the hands
of history. They had mounted that eminence of spiritual stability on which
suffering loses the power to weaken its victim, but, on the contrary,
endues him with strength. More than ever they shrank into their shell.
They shut themselves up more completely in their inner world, and became
morally dulled against the persecutions, the bitter humiliations, the deep
scorn, which their surroundings visited upon them. The Polish Jew
gradually accustomed himself to his pitiable condition. He hardly knew
that life might be other than it was. That the Polish lord to whom he was
a means of entertainment might treat him with a trace of respect, or that
his neighbors, the middle class merchant, the German guild member, and the
Little Russian peasant, might cherish kindly feelings toward him, he could
not conceive as a possibility. Seeing himself surrounded by enemies, he
took precautions to fortify his camp, not so much to protect himself
against hostile assaults from without—they were inevitable—as
to paralyze the disastrous consequences of such assaults in his inner
world. To compass this end he brought into play all the means suggested by
his exceptional position before the law and by his own peculiar social
constitution. The Kahal, the autonomous rabbinical administration
of communal affairs, more and more assumed the character of an inner
dictatorship. Jewish society was persistently kept under the discipline of
rigid principles. In many affairs the synagogue attained the position of a
court of final appeal. The people were united, or rather packed, into a
solid mass by purely mechanical processes—by pressure from without,
and by drawing tight a noose from within. Besides this social factor
tending to consolidate the Jewish people into a separate union, an
intellectual lever was applied to produce the same result. Rabbinism
employed the mystical as its adjutant. The one exercised control over all
minds, the other over all hearts. The growth of mysticism was fostered
both by the unfortunate conditions under which the Polish Jews endured
existence and by the Messianic movements which made their appearance among
the Jews of other countries.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its
zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the
“practical Kabbala.” The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school
established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances
intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the false
Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi. As by magic he attracted to himself a tremendous
company of adherents in the East and in the West. For a quarter of a
century (1650-1676), he kept the Jewish communities everywhere in a state
of quivering suspense.
The harassed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved
about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated its
agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly. Not even the apostasy
and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his followers. Under the
guise of a symbolic faith in a Messiah, many of them, publicly or
secretly, continued the propaganda for his doctrines.
This propaganda prepared the fertile soil from which, in the eighteenth
century, shot up Messianic systems, tending to split Judaism into sects.
Nowhere did the mystical teachings evoke so ready a response as in Poland,
the very centre of Judaism. At first an ally of the rabbinical school,
mysticism grown passionate and uncontrollable now and again acted as the
violent opponent of Rabbinism. Secret devotion to the Sabbatian doctrines,
which had made their home in Poland, sometimes led to such extremes in
dogma and ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves. Chayyim
Malach, Judah Chassid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of
the eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of
excommunication. The mystical tendency was the precursor of the heretical
half-Christian sect of Frankists, who ventured so far as to lift a hand
against the fundamentals of Judaism: they rejected the Talmud in favor of
the Zohar (1756-1773). At the same time a much more profound movement,
instinct with greater vitality, made its appearance among the
Polish-Jewish masses, a movement rooted in their social and spiritual
organization. The wretched, debased condition of the average Jew,
conjoined with the traditions of the Kabbala and the excrescences of
Rabbinism, created a foothold for Chassidic teaching. Chassidism replaced
Talmudic ratiocination by exalted religious sentiment. By the force of
enthusiasm for faith, it drew its adherents together into a firmly welded
unit in contrast with Rabbinism, which sought the same goal by the aid of
the formal law. Scenting danger, the rabbinical hierarchy declared war
upon the Kabbala. Emden opposed Eibeschütz, the Polish Sabbatians and
Frankists were fought to the death, the Wilna Gaon organized a campaign
against the Chassidim. Too late! Rabbinism was too old, too arid, to tone
down the impulsive outbreaks of passion among the people. In their
religious exaltation the masses were looking for an elixir. They were
languishing, not for light to illumine the reason, but for warmth to set
the heart aglow. They desired to lose themselves in ecstatic
self-renunciation. Chassidism and its necessary dependence upon the Zaddik
offered the masses the means of this forgetfulness of self through faith.
They were the medium through which the people saw the world in a rosy
light, and the consequences following upon their prevalence were seen in a
marked intensification of Jewish exclusiveness.
The same aloofness characterizes the Jews of the rest of the eighteenth
century diaspora. Wherever, as in Germany, Austria, and Italy, Jews were
settled in considerable numbers, they were separated from their
surroundings by forbidding Ghetto walls. On the whole, no difference is
noticeable between conditions affecting Jews in one country and those in
another. Everywhere they were merely tolerated, everywhere oppressed and
humiliated. The bloody persecutions of the middle ages were replaced by
the burden of the exceptional laws, which in practice degraded the Jews
socially to an inferior race, to citizens of a subordinate degree. The
consequences were uniformly the same in all countries: spiritual isolation
and a morbid religious mood. During the first half of the “century of
reason,” Jewry presented the appearance of an exhausted wanderer, heavily
dragging himself on his way, his consciousness clouded, his trend of
thought obviously anti-rationalistic. At the very moment in which Europe
was beginning to realize its medieval errors and repent of them, and the
era of universal ideals of humanity was dawning, Judaism raised barricades
between itself and the world at large. Elijah Gaon and Israel Besht were
the contemporaries of Voltaire and Rousseau. Apparently there was no
possibility of establishing communication between these two diametrically
opposed worlds. But history is a magician. Not far from the Poland
enveloped in medieval darkness, the morning light of a new life was
breaking upon slumbering Jewry in German lands. New voices made themselves
heard, reverberating like an echo to the appeal issued by the “great
century” in behalf of a spiritual and social regeneration of mankind.
XI. THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)
Two phenomena signalized the beginning of the latest period in Jewish
history: the lofty activity of Mendelssohn and the occurrence of the great
French Revolution. The man stands for the spiritual emancipation of the
Jews, the movement for their political emancipation. At bottom, these two
phenomena were by no means the ultimate causes of the social and spiritual
regeneration of the Jewish people. They were only the products of the more
general causes that had effected a similar regeneration in all the peoples
of Western Europe. The new currents, the abandonment of effete
intellectual and social forms, the substitution of juster and more
energetic principles, the protest against superstition and despotism—all
these traits had a common origin, the resuscitation of reason and free
thought, which dominated all minds without asking whether they belonged to
Jew or to Christian. It might seem that the rejuvenation of the Jews had
been consummated more rapidly than the rejuvenation of the other peoples.
The latter had had two centuries, the period elapsing since the middle
ages, that is, the period between the Reformation and the great
Revolution, in which to prepare for a more rational and a more humane
conduct of life. As for the Jews, their middle ages began much later, and
ended later, almost on the eve of 1789, so that the revolution in their
minds and their mode of life had to accomplish itself hastily, under the
urgence of swiftly crowding events, by the omission of intermediate
stages. But it must be taken into consideration that long before, in the
Judeo-Hellenic and in the Arabic-Spanish period, the Jews had passed
through their “century of reason.” In spite of the intervening ages of
suffering and gloom, the faculty of assimilating new principles had
survived. For the descendants of Philo and Maimonides the rationalistic
movement of the eighteenth century was in part a repetition of a
well-known historical process. They had had the benefit of a similar
course of studies before, and, therefore, had no need to cram on the eve
of the final examination.
In point of fact, the transformation in the life of the Jews did take
place with extraordinary swiftness. It was hastened in France by the
principles of the Revolution and the proclamation of the civil equality of
Jews with the other citizens. In Germany, however, it advanced upon purely
spiritual lines. Mendelssohn and Lessing, the heralds of spiritual reform,
who exposed old prejudices, carried on their labors at a time in which the
Jews still stood beyond the pale of the law, a condition which it did not
occur to Frederick II, “the philosopher upon the throne,” to improve. A
whole generation was destined to pass before the civil emancipation of the
German Jews was accomplished. Meantime their spiritual emancipation
proceeded apace, without help from the ruling powers. A time so early as
the end of the eighteenth century found the German Jews in a position to
keep step with their Christian fellow-citizens in cultural progress.
Enlightened Jews formed close connections with enlightened Christians, and
joined them in the universal concerns of mankind as confederates espousing
the same fundamental principles. If they renounced some of their religious
and national traditions, it was by no means out of complaisance for their
neighbors. They were guided solely and alone by those universal principles
that forced non-Jews as well as Jews to reject many traditions as
incompatible with reason and conscience. Non-Jews and Jews alike yielded
themselves up to the fresh inspiration of the time, and permitted
themselves to be carried along by the universal transforming movement.
Mendelssohn himself, circumspect and wise, did not move off from religious
national ground. But the generation after him abandoned his position for
that of universal humanity, or, better, German nationality. His successors
intoxicated themselves with deep draughts of the marvelous poetry created
by the magic of Goethe and Schiller. They permitted themselves to be
rushed along by the liberty doctrines of 1789, they plunged head over
heels into the vortex of romanticism, and took an active part in the
conspicuous movements of Europe, political, social, and literary, as
witness Bôrne, Heine, and their fellow-combatants.
The excitement soon evaporated. When the noise of the liberty love-feasts
had subsided, when the cruel reaction (after 1814) had settled heavily
upon the Europe of the nineteenth century, and God’s earth had again
become the arena of those agents of darkness whom dreamers had thought
buried forever beneath the ruins of the old order, then the German Jews,
or such of them as thought, came to their senses. The more intelligent
Jewish circles realized that, in devotion to the German national movement,
they had completely neglected their own people. Yet their people, too, had
needs, practical or spiritual, had its peculiar national sphere of
activity, circumscribed, indeed, by the larger sphere of mankind’s
activities as by a concentric circle, but by no means merged into it. To
atone for their sin, thinking Jews retraced their steps. They took in hand
the transforming of Jewish inner life, the simplification of the extremely
complicated Jewish ritual, the remodeling of pedagogic methods, and, above
all, the cultivation of the extended fields of Jewish science, whose head
and front is Jewish historical research in all its vastness and detail.
Heine’s friend, Zunz, laid the cornerstone of Jewish science in the second
decade of the nineteenth century. His work was taken up by a goodly
company of zealous and able builders occupied for half a century with the
task of rearing the proud edifice of a scientific historical literature,
in which national self-consciousness was sheltered and fostered. At the
very height of this reforming and literary activity, German Jewry was
overwhelmed by the civil emancipation of 1848. Again a stirring movement
drew them into sympathy with a great general cause, but this time without
drawing them away from Jewish national interests. Cultural and civil
assimilation was accomplished as an inner compelling necessity, as a
natural outcome of living. But spiritual assimilation, in the sense of a
merging of Judaism in foreign elements, was earnestly repudiated by the
noblest representatives of Judaism. It was their ideal that universal
activity and national activity should be pursued to the prejudice of
neither, certainly not to the exclusion of one or the other, but in
perfect harmony with each other. In point of fact, it may be asserted
that, in spite of a frequent tendency to go to the one or the other
extreme, the two currents, the universal and the national, co-exist within
German Jewry, and there is no fear of their uniting, they run parallel
with each other. The Jewish genius is versatile. Without hurt to itself it
can be active in all sorts of careers: in politics and in civil life, in
parliament and on the lecture platform, in all branches of science and
departments of literature, in every one of the chambers of mankind’s
intellectual laboratory. At the same time it has its domestic hearth, its
national sanctuary; it has its sphere of original work and its
self-consciousness, its national interests and spiritual ideals rooted in
the past of the Jew. By the side of a Lassalle, a Lasker, and a Marx
towers a Riesser, a Geiger, a Graetz. The leveling process unavoidably
connected with widespread culture, so far from causing spiritual
desolation in German Judaism, has, on the contrary, furnished redundant
proof that even under present conditions, so unfavorable to what is
individual and original, the Jewish people has preserved its vitality to
the full.
An analogous movement stirred the other countries of Western Europe—France,
Italy, and England. The political emancipation of the Jews was
accomplished earlier in them than in Germany. The reconstruction of the
inner life, too, proceeded more quietly and regularly, without leaps and
bounds, and religious reform established itself by degrees. Yet even here,
where the Jewish contingent was insignificant, the spiritual physiognomy
of the Jews maintained its typical character. In these countries, as in
Germany, the Jew assimilated European culture with all its advantages and
its drawbacks. He was active on diplomatic fields, he devoted himself to
economic investigations, he produced intellectual creations of all kinds—first
and last he felt himself to be a citizen of his country. None the less he
was a loyal son of the Jewish people considered as a spiritual people with
an appointed task. Crémieux, Beaconsfield, Luzzatti are counterbalanced by
Salvador, Frank, Munk, Reggio, and Montefiore. All the good qualities and
the shortcomings distinctive of the civilization of modern times adhere to
the Jew. But at its worst modern civilization has not succeeded in
extinguishing the national spirit in Jewry. The national spirit continues
to live in the people, and it is this spirit that quickens the people. The
genius of Jewish history, as in centuries gone by, holds watch over the
sons of the “eternal people” scattered to all ends of the earth.
West-European Jewry may say of itself, without presumption: Cogito ergo
sum.
Russian Jewry, the Jewry that had been Polish, and that is counted by the
millions, might, if necessary, prove its existence by even more tangible
marks than Occidental Jewry. To begin with, the centre of gravity of the
Jewish nation lies in Russia, whose Jews not only outnumber those of the
rest of Europe, but continue to live in a compact mass. Besides, they have
preserved the original Jewish culture and their traditional physiognomy to
a higher degree than the Jews of other countries. The development of the
Russian Jews took a course very different from that of the Jews of the
West. This difference was conditioned by the tremendous contrast between
Russian culture and West-European culture, and by the change which the
external circumstances of Jews outside of Russia underwent during the
modern period. The admission of the Polish provinces into the Russian
Empire at the end of the eighteenth century found the numerous Jewish
population in an almost medieval condition, the same condition in which
the non-Jewish population of Russian Poland was at that time. The Polish
regime, as we saw above, had isolated the Jews alike in civil and
spiritual relations. The new order did not break down the barriers. The
masses of Jews cooped up in the “Pale of Settlement” were strong only by
reason of their inner unity, their firmly established patriarchal
organization. The bulwark of Rabbinism and the citadel of Chassidism
protected them against alien influences. They guarded their isolation
jealously. True to the law of inertia, they would not allow the privilege
of isolation to be wrested from them. They did not care to step beyond the
ramparts. Why, indeed, should the Jews have quitted their fortress, if
outside of their walls they could expect nothing but scorn and blows? The
unfortunates encaged in the sinister Pale of Settlement could have been
lured out of their exclusive position only by complete civil emancipation
combined with a higher degree of culture than had been attained by Russian
society, an impossible set of circumstances in the first half of the
nineteenth century. The legislative measures of the time, in so far as
they relate to the Jews, breathe the spirit of police surveillance rather
than of enlightenment and humanity. To civilizing and intellectual
influences from without the way was equally barred. Yet all this
watchfulness was of no avail. Nothing could prevent the liberty principles
espoused by the Jews of Western Europe from being smuggled into the Pale,
to leaven the sad, serried masses. A sluggish process of fermentation set
in, and culminated in the literary activity of Isaac Beer Levinsohn and of
the Wilna reformers of the second and fourth decades of the nineteenth
century. They were the harbingers of approaching spring.
When spring finally came (after 1855), and the sun sent down his genial
rays upon the wretched Jewry of Russia, life and activity began to appear
at once, especially in the upper strata. As in Germany, so in Russia
spiritual emancipation preceded political emancipation. Still shorn almost
entirely of the elementary rights of citizens, the Russian Jews
nevertheless followed their ideal promptings, and participated
enthusiastically in the movement for enlightenment which at that time held
the noblest of the Russians enthralled. In a considerable portion of the
Russian Jewish community a process of culture regeneration began, an eager
throwing off of outworn forms of life and thought, a swift adoption of
humane principles. Jewish young men crowded into the secular schools, in
which they came in close contact with their Christian contemporaries.
Influenced by their new companions, they gave themselves up to Russian
national movements, often at the cost of renunciation of self. Some of
them, indeed, in one-sided aspiration strove to become, not Russians, but
men. The influence exercised by literature was more moderate than that of
the schools. Rabbinic and Chassidistic literature, on the point of dying
out as it was, abandoned the field to the literature of enlightenment in
the Hebrew language, a literature of somewhat primitive character. It
consisted chiefly of naive novels and of didactic writings of publicists,
and lacked the solid scientific and historical element that forms the
crown of Western Jewish literature. It is indisputable, however, that it
exerted an educational influence. Besides, it possesses the merit of
having resuscitated one of the most valuable of Jewish national
possessions, the Hebrew language in its purity, which in Russia alone has
become a pliant instrument of literary expression. A still greater field
was reserved for the Jewish-Russian literature that arose in the
“sixties.” It was called into being in order to present a vivid and true
picture of the social and spiritual interests of the Jews. Proceeding from
discussions of current political topics, this literature gradually widened
its limits so as to include Jewish history, Jewish science, and the
portrayal of Jewish life, and more and more approached the character of a
normal European literature. All this was in the making, and the most
important work had not yet begun. The lower strata of the people had not
been touched by the fresh air. In time, if all had gone well, they, too,
would have had their day. And if the minority of the Jewish people in the
West in a short span of time brought forth so many notable workers in so
many departments of life and thought, how much superior would be the
culture achievements of the Eastern majority! How vigorously the mighty
mental forces latent in Russian Jewry would develop when their advance was
no longer obstructed by all sorts of obstacles, and they could be applied
to every sphere of political, social, and intellectual life!
Nothing of all this came to pass; exactly the opposite happened. Not only
were the barriers in the way of a prosperous, free development of Jewry
not removed, but fresh hindrances without number were multiplied. Some
spectre of the middle ages, some power of darkness, put brakes upon the
wheel of history. It first appeared in the West, under the name
anti-Semitism, among the dregs of European society. But in its earliest
abode it was and is still met with an abrupt rebuff on the part of the
most intelligent circles, those whom even the present age of decadence has
not succeeded in robbing of belief in lofty moral ideals. Anti-Semitism in
the West is in anima vili. Its cult is confined to a certain party,
which enjoys a rather scandalous reputation. But there are countries in
which this power of darkness, in the coarser form of Judophobia13,
has cast its baleful spell upon the most influential members of society
and upon the press. There it has ripened noxious fruit. Mocking at the
exalted ideals and the ethical traditions of religious and thinking
mankind, Judophobia shamelessly professes the dogma of misanthropy. Its
propaganda is bringing about the moral ruin of an immature society, not
yet confirmed in ethical or truly religious principles. Upon its victims,
the Jews, it has the same effect as the misfortunes of the middle ages,
which were meted out to our hoary people with overflowing measure, and
against which it learnt to assume an armor of steel. The recent severe
trials are having the same result as the persecutions of former days: they
do not weaken, on the contrary, they invigorate the Jewish spirit, they
spur on to thought, they stimulate the pulse of the people.
The historical process Jewry has undergone repeatedly, it must undergo
once again. But now, too, in this blasting time of confusion and
dispersion, of daily torture and the horrors of international conflict,
“the keeper of Israel slumbereth not and sleepeth not.” The Jewish spirit
is on the alert. It is ever purging and tempering itself in the furnace of
suffering. The people which justly bears the name of the veteran of
history withdraws and falls into a revery. It is not a narrow-minded
fanatic’s flight from the world, but the concentrated thought of a
mourner. Jewry is absorbed in contemplation of its great, unparalleled
past. More than ever it is now in need of the teachings of its past, of
the moral support and the prudent counsels of its history, its four
thousand years of life crowded with checkered experiences.
XII. THE TEACHINGS OF JEWISH HISTORY
Let us return now to the starting point of our discussion, and endeavor to
establish the thoughts and lessons to be deduced from the course of Jewish
history.
Above all, Jewish history possesses the student with the conviction that
Jewry at all times, even in the period of political independence, was
pre-eminently a spiritual nation, and a spiritual nation it continues to
be in our own days, too. Furthermore, it inspires him with the belief that
Jewry, being a spiritual entity, cannot suffer annihilation: the body, the
mold, may be destroyed, the spirit is immortal. Bereft of country and
dispersed as it is, the Jewish nation lives, and will go on living,
because a creative principle permeates it, a principle that is the root of
its being and an indigenous product of its history. This principle
consists first in a sum of definite religious, moral, or philosophic
ideals, whose exponent at all times was the Jewish people, either in its
totality, or in the person of its most prominent representatives. Next,
this principle consists in a sum of historical memories, recollections of
what in the course of many centuries the Jewish people experienced,
thought, and felt, in the depths of its being. Finally, it consists in the
consciousness that true Judaism, which has accomplished great things for
humanity in the past, has not yet played out its part, and, therefore, may
not perish. In short, the Jewish people lives because it contains a living
soul which refuses to separate from its integument, and cannot be forced
out of it by heavy trials and misfortunes, such as would unfailingly
inflict mortal injury upon less sturdy organisms.
This self-consciousness is the source from which the suffering Jewish soul
draws comfort. History speaks to it constantly through the mouth of the
great apostle who went forth from the midst of Israel eighteen hundred
years ago: “Call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were
enlightened, ye endured a great conflict of sufferings; partly, being made
a gazing-stock both by reproaches and afflictions; and partly, becoming
partakers with them that were so used…. Cast not away therefore your
boldness, which hath great recompense of reward” (Epistle to the Hebrews,
x, 32-34, 35).
Jewish history, moreover, arouses in the Jew the desire to work
unceasingly at the task of perfecting himself. To direct his attention to
his glorious past, to the resplendent intellectual feats of his ancestors,
to their masterly skill in thinking and suffering, does not lull him to
sleep, does not awaken a dullard’s complacency or hollow self-conceit. On
the contrary, it makes exacting demands upon him. Jewish history
admonishes the Jews: “Noblesse oblige. The privilege of belonging
to a people to whom the honorable title of the ‘veteran of history’ has
been conceded, puts serious responsibilities on your shoulders. You must
demonstrate that you are worthy of your heroic past. The descendants of
teachers of religion and martyrs of the faith dare not be insignificant,
not to say wicked. If the long centuries of wandering and misery have
inoculated you with faults, extirpate them in the name of the exalted
moral ideals whose bearers you were commissioned to be. If, in the course
of time, elements out of harmony with your essential being have fastened
upon your mind, cast them out, purify yourselves. In all places and at all
times, in joy and and in sorrow, you must aim to live for the higher, the
spiritual interests. But never may you deem yourselves perfect. If you
become faithless to these sacred principles, you sever the bonds that
unite you with the most vital elements of your past, with the first cause
of your national existence.”
The final lesson to be learned is that in the sunny days of mankind’s
history, in which reason, justice, and philanthropic instinct had the
upper hand, the Jews steadfastly made common cause with the other nations.
Hand in hand with them, they trod the path leading to perfection. But in
the dark days, during the reign of rude force, prejudice, and passion, of
which they were the first victims, the Jews retired from the world,
withdrew into their shell, to await better days. Union with mankind at
large, on the basis of the spiritual and the intellectual, the goal set up
by the Jewish Prophets in their sublime vision of the future (Isaiah, ch.
ii, and Micah, ch. iv), is the ultimate ideal of Judaism’s noblest
votaries. Will their radiant hope ever attain to realization? If ever it
should be realized,—and it is incumbent upon us to believe that it
will,—not a slight part of the merits involved will be due to Jewish
history. We have adverted to the lofty moral and humanitarian significance
of Jewish history in its role as conciliator. With regard to one-half of
Jewish history, this conciliatory power is even now a well-established
fact. The first part of Jewish history, the Biblical part, is a source
from which, for many centuries, millions of human beings belonging to the
most diverse denominations have derived instruction, solace, and
inspiration. It is read with devotion by Christians in both hemispheres,
in their houses and their temples. Its heroes have long ago become types,
incarnations of great ideas. The events it relates serve as living ethical
formulas. But a time will come—perhaps it is not very far off—when
the second half of Jewish history, the record of the two thousand years of
the Jewish people’s life after the Biblical period, will be accorded the
same treatment. This latter part of Jewish history is not yet known, and
many, in the thrall of prejudice, do not wish to know it. But ere long it
will be known and appreciated. For the thinking portion of mankind it will
be a source of uplifting moral and philosophical teaching. The thousand
years’ martyrdom of the Jewish people, its unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic
fate, its teachers of religion, its martyrs, philosophers, champions, this
whole epic will in days to come sink deep into the memory of men. It will
speak to the heart and the conscience of men, not merely to their curious
mind. It will secure respect for the silvery hair of the Jewish people, a
people of thinkers and sufferers. It will dispense consolation to the
afflicted, and by its examples of spiritual steadfastness and self-denial
encourage martyrs in their devotion. It is our firm conviction that the
time is approaching in which the second half of Jewish history will be to
the noblest part of thinking humanity what its first half has long
been to believing humanity, a source of sublime moral truths. In
this sense, Jewish history in its entirety is the pledge of the spiritual
union between the Jews and the rest of the nations.
FOOTNOTES:
1 (return)
[ In the introduction to his Historische
Mitteilungen, Vorarbeiten zu einer Geschichte der pol-nischrussischen
Juden.]
2 (return)
[ “The primitive peoples that
change with their environment, constantly adapting themselves to their
habitat and to external nature, have no history…. Only those nations and
states belong to history which display self-conscious action; which evince
an inner spiritual life by diversified manifestations; and combine into an
organic whole what they receive from without, and what they themselves
originate.” (Introduction to Weber’s Allgemeine Weltgeschichte, i,
pp. 16-18.)]
3 (return)
[ “History, without these (inner,
spiritual elements), is a shell without a kernel; and such is almost all
the history which is extant in the world.” (Macaulay, on Mitford’s History
of Greece, Collected Works, i, 198, ed. A. and C. Armstrong and Son.)]
4 (return)
[ A Jewish historian makes the
pregnant remark: “If ever the time comes when the prophecies of the Jewish
seers are fulfilled, and nation no longer raises the sword against nation;
when the olive leaf instead of the laurel adorns the brow of the great,
and the achievements of noble minds are familiar to the dwellers in
cottages and palaces alike, then the history of the world will have the
same character as Jewish history. On its pages will be inscribed, not the
warrior’s prowess and his victories, nor diplomatic schemes and triumphs,
but the progress of culture and its practical application in real life.”]
5 (return)
[ A different aspect of the same
thought is presented with logical clearness in another publication by our
author. “The national idea, and the national feeling,” says
Mr. Dubnow, “must be kept strictly apart. Unfortunately the difference
between them is usually obliterated. National feeling is spontaneous. To a
greater or less degree it is inborn in all the members of the nation as a
feeling of kinship. It has its flood-tide and its ebbtide in
correspondence to external conditions, either forcing the nation to defend
its nationality, or relieving it of the necessity for self-defense. As
this feeling is not merely a blind impulse, but a complicated psychic
phenomenon, it can be subjected to a psychologic analysis. From the given
historical facts or the ideas that have become the common treasure of a
nation, thinking men, living life consciously, can, in one way or another,
derive the origin, development, and vital force of its national feeling.
The results of such an analysis, arranged in some sort of system, form the
content of the national idea. The task of the national idea it is to
clarify the national feeling, and give it logical sanction for the benefit
of those who cannot rest satisfied with an unconscious feeling.
“In what, to be specific, does the essence of our Jewish national idea
consist? Or, putting the question in another form, what is the cement that
unites us into a single compact organism? Territory and government, the
external ties usually binding a nation together, we have long ago lost.
Their place is filled by abstract principles, by religion and race.
Undeniably these are factors of first importance, and yet we ask the
question, do they alone and exclusively maintain the national cohesion of
Jewry? No, we reply, for if we admitted this proposition, we should by
consequence have to accept the inference, that the laxity of religious
principle prevailing among free-thinking Jews, and the obliteration of
race peculiarities in the ‘civilized’ strata of our people, bring in their
train a corresponding weakening, or, indeed, a complete breaking up, of
our national foundations—which in point of fact is not the case. On
the contrary, it is noticeable that the latitudinarians, the libres
penseurs, and the indifferent on the subject of religion, stand in the
forefront of all our national movements. Seeing that to belong to it is in
most cases heroism, and in many martyrdom, what is it that attracts these
Jews so forcibly to their people? There must be something common to us
all, so comprehensive that in the face of multifarious views and degrees
of culture it acts as a consolidating force. This ‘something,’ I am
convinced, is the community of historical fortunes of all the scattered
parts of the Jewish nation. We are welded together by our glorious past.
We are encircled by a mighty chain of similar historical impressions
suffered by our ancestors, century after century pressing in upon the
Jewish soul, and leaving behind a substantial deposit. In short, the
Jewish national idea is based chiefly upon the historical consciousness.”
(Footnote Note of the German trl.)]
6 (return)
[ “If there are ranks in
suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the
duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble,
the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is
called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we
say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the
poets and the actors were also the heroes?” (Zunz, Die synagogale
Poesie. Translation by George Eliot in “Daniel Deronda.”)]
7 (return)
[ As examples and a proof of the
strong humanitarian influence Jewish history exercises upon Christians, I
would point to the relation established between the Jews and two
celebrities of the nineteenth century, Schleiden and George Eliot. In his
old age, the great scientist and thinker accidentally, in the course of
his study of sources for the history of botany, became acquainted with
medieval Jewish history. It filled him with ardent enthusiasm for the
Jews, for their intellectual strength, their patience under martyrdom.
Dominated by this feeling, he wrote the two admirable sketches: Die
Bedeutung der Juden für Erhaltung und Wiederbelebung der Wissenschaften im
Mittelalter (1876) and Die Romantik des Martyriums bei den Juden im
Mittelalter (1878). According to his own confession, the impulse to
write them was “the wish to take at least the first step toward making
partial amends for the unspeakable wrong inflicted by Christians upon
Jews.” As for George Eliot, it may not be generally known that it was her
reading of histories of the Jews that inspired her with the profound
veneration for the Jewish people to which she gave glowing utterance in
“Daniel Deronda.” (She cites Zunz, was personally acquainted with Emanuel
Deutsch, and carried on a correspondence with Professor Dr. David
Kaufmann. See George Eliot’s Life as related in her Letters and
Journals. Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross, Vol. iii,
ed. Harper and Brothers.) Her enthusiasm prompted her, in 1879, to indite
her passionate apology for the Jews, under the title, “The Modern Hep!
Hep! Hep!”]
8 (return)
[ Pushkin.]
9 (return)
[ This is the true recondite
meaning of the verses Exod. vi, 2-3: “And God spake unto Moses, and said
unto him, I am the Eternal: and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and
unto Jacob, as El-Shaddai (God Almighty), but by my name Eternal I
was not known unto them.”]
10 (return)
[ “Ye have forsaken me,” says
God unto Israel, “and served other gods; wherefore I will deliver you no
more. Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen: let them deliver you
in the time of your tribulations” (Judges X, 13-14). The same idea is
brought out still more forcibly in the arguments adduced by Jephthah in
his message to the king of Ammon (more correctly, Moab), who had laid
claim to Israelitish lands: “Thou,” says Jephthah, “mayest possess that
which Kemosh thy god giveth thee to possess, but what the Lord our God
giveth us to possess, that will we possess” (Judges xi, 24). Usually these
words are taken ironically; to me they seem to convey literal truth rather
than irony.]
11 (return)
[ Two Biblical passages, the
one from Deuteronomy, the other from Deutero-Isaiah, afford a signal
illustration of the contrast between the religious nationalism of the
Mosaic law and the universalism of the Prophets. Moses says to Israel:
“Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath
chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are
upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor
choose you, because ye were more in number than any people: for ye were
the fewest of all people. But because the Lord loved you….” (Deut. vii,
6-8). And these are the words of the prophecy: “Listen, O isles, unto me,
and hearken, ye people, from far! The Lord hath called me… and said unto
me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified! But I had
thought, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and
in vain; yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God.
For now said the Lord unto me… It is too light a thing that thou
shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore
the preserved of Israel: no, I will also give thee for a light to the
Gentiles, that my salvation may reach unto the end of the earth” (Is.
xlix, 1-6).]
12 (return)
[ The external causes of the
downfall of the Maccabean state, dynastic quarrels, are well known. Much
less light has been thrown upon the inner, deeper-lying causes of the
catastrophe. These are possibly to be sought in the priestly-political
dualism of the Judean form of government. The ideal of a nation educated
by means of the Bible was a theocratic state, and the first princes of the
Maccabean house, acting at once as regents and as high priests, in a
measure reached this ideal. But the attempts of other nations had
demonstrated conclusively enough that a dualistic form of government
cannot maintain itself permanently. Sooner or later one of the two
elements, the priestly or the secular, is bound to prevail over the other
and crush it. In the Judean realm, with its profoundly religious trend,
the priestly element obtained the ascendency, and political ruin ensued.
The priestly- political retreated before the priestly-national form of
government. Though the religious element was powerless to preserve the state
from destruction, we shall see that it has brilliantly vindicated its
ability to keep the nation intact.]
13 (return)
[ As anti-Semitism is called in
Russia.]
14 (return)
[ Pushkin.]