THE
MENORAH
JOURNAL

Greetings: From Dr. Cyrus Adler, Louis D. Brandeis, Professor Richard Gottheil, Dr. Joseph Jacobs, Dr. Kaufman Kohler, Justice Irving Lehman, Judge Julian W. Mack, Dr. J. L. Magnes, Dr. Martin A. Meyer, Dr. David Philipson, Dr. Solomon Schechter, Jacob H. Schiff, and Dr. Stephen S. Wise A Call to the Educated Jew Louis D. Brandeis Menorah: A Poem William Ellery Leonard The Jews in the War Joseph Jacobs Jewish Students in European Universities Harry Wolfson The Twilight of Hebraic Culture Max L. Margolis Days of Disillusionment Samuel Strauss Three University Addresses—President Arthur T. Hadley of Yale University,       Chancellor Elmer E. Brown of New York University,       President Charles W. Dabney of the University of Cincinnati The Menorah Movement Henry Hurwitz From College and University: Reports from Menorah Societies

[1]

the
Menorah Journal

An Editorial Statement

For conceived as it is and nurtured as it must continue to be in the
spirit that gave birth to the Menorah idea, the Menorah Journal is
under compulsion to be absolutely non-partisan, an expression of all
that is best in Judaism and not merely of some particular sect or
school or locality or group of special interests; fearless in telling
the truth; promoting constructive thought rather than aimless
controversy; animated with the vitality and enthusiasm of youth;
harking back to the past that we may deal more wisely with the present
and the future; recording and appreciating Jewish achievement, not to
brag, but to bestir ourselves to emulation and to deepen the
consciousness of noblesse oblige; striving always to be sane and
level-headed; offering no opinions[2] of its own, but providing an
orderly platform for the discussion of mooted questions that really
matter; dedicated first and foremost to the fostering of the Jewish
“humanities” and the furthering of their influence as a spur to human
service.

It will undoubtedly prove necessary on more than one occasion in the
future to emphasize again the fact that the Journal is an
unqualifiedly non-partisan forum for the discussion of Jewish
problems; and that accordingly neither the Menorah Journal nor the
Menorah Societies are to be regarded as standing sponsor for the views
expressed in these columns by contributors. Nor will the Journal have
any editorials expressing the views of its editors or of the Menorah
organization,—particularly since the Menorah organization takes no
official stand on mooted subjects. The editorial policy will be one of
fairness in giving equal hospitality to opposing views; and space will
gladly be given to reasonable letters or articles that take exception
to statements or opinions published in these pages.

The Journal is singularly fortunate in having enlisted the
co-operation of the distinguished leaders of Jewish life and thought
who comprise its Board of Consulting Editors. The assurances already
in hand of important articles to come from our Consulting Editors and
from other notable men and women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, lend
strength to the editorial confidence that succeeding issues will more
and more repay the public interest. As an incidental but none the less
vital aim, the Journal hopes to be instrumental in encouraging our
young men and women, particularly in the Menorah membership, to devote
themselves to Jewish subjects as worthy of their best literary
effort,—with publication in the Menorah Journal as a prize to be
eagerly sought for. The Menorah hopes through the incentive of the
Journal to develop a “new school” of writers on Jewish topics that
shall be distinguished by the thoroughness and clarity of the
university-trained mind and inspired by the youthful, searching,
unfearing spirit of the Menorah movement.

With these aims and these aspirations, the Menorah Journal bids for
the favor of the public. Scholarly when scholarship will be in order,
but always endeavoring to be timely, vivacious, readable; keen in the
pursuit of truth wherever its source and whatever the consequences; a
Jewish forum open to all sides; devoted first and last to bringing out
the values of Jewish culture and ideals, of Hebraism and of Judaism,
and striving for their advancement—the Menorah Journal hopes not
merely to entertain, but to enlighten, in a time when knowledge,
thought, and vision are more than ever imperative in Jewish life.[3]

Greetings

From Dr. Cyrus Adler

The Jewish people have a long and honorable record of literary
activity. Our Holy Scriptures, our Rabbinical Literature, our
contributions to philosophy, to ethics, to law, our poetry, sacred and
secular, our share in the world’s history, all become part of the
program which you have laid out for yourselves as a means of
cultivation. In their due proportion they should (although they do
not) form a part of the outfit of every educated man. That they should
be especially cultivated by Jewish young people is self-evident, and,
for several thousand years, they have been.

You Menorah men have taken the modern form of association for the
purpose of carrying on these studies, of cherishing your Jewish ideals
along with your general culture or with your chosen profession, and it
was high time that you should do so. You already count thousands of
young people, and as time goes on you will gradually increase in
number. From among your group will come the future leaders of the
Jewish people in America, and your main body will form our
intellectual backbone. It is my hope and belief that your movement
will gradually tend toward the maintenance and promotion of Judaism in
this land.

We are now a population of nearly three million souls. That such a
vast body should be lost to Judaism or should maintain a Judaism
ignorant of its language, its literature or its traditions, is almost
unthinkable. Conditions abroad may shift the center of gravity of
Judaism and of Jewish learning to the American continent. Your
movement is one which will aid in training the group that may be
expected to measure up to our new responsibilities.

It has been a source of great personal pleasure to me to meet with
your Association in your annual convention and to have the privilege
of coming in personal contact with some of your Societies,—at
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Boston Universities. I hope
to have the pleasure of meeting more of you and to derive more of the
stimulus which your enthusiasm gives me in my work. Speaking not only
in my own name but[4] in behalf of my colleagues on the Board of
Governors and the Faculty of The Dropsie College for Hebrew and
Cognate Learning, I wish your Association and your Journal success in
all of your endeavors.

From Louis D. Brandeis

Chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist
Affairs

America offers to man his greatest opportunity—liberty amidst peace
and large natural resources. But the noble purpose to which America is
dedicated cannot be attained unless this high opportunity is fully
utilized; and to this end each of the many peoples which she has
welcomed to her hospitable shores must contribute the best of which it
is capable. To America the contribution of the Jews can be peculiarly
large. America’s fundamental law seeks to make real the brotherhood of
man. That brotherhood became the Jews’ fundamental law more than
twenty-five hundred years ago. America’s twentieth century demand is
for social justice. That has been the Jews’ striving ages-long. Their
religion and their afflictions have prepared them for effective
democracy. Persecution made the Jews’ law of brotherhood
self-enforcing. It taught them the seriousness of life; it broadened
their sympathies; it deepened the passion for righteousness; it
trained them in patient endurance, in persistence, in self-control,
and in self-sacrifice. Furthermore, the widespread study of Jewish law
developed the intellect, and made them less subject to preconceptions
and more open to reason.

America requires in her sons and daughters these qualities and
attainments, which are our natural heritage. Patriotism to America, as
well as loyalty to our past, imposes upon us the obligation of
claiming this heritage of the Jewish spirit and of carrying forward
noble ideals and traditions through lives and deeds worthy of our
ancestors. To this end each new generation should be trained in the
knowledge and appreciation of their own great past; and the
opportunity should be afforded for the further development of Jewish
character and culture.

The Menorah Societies and their Journal deserve most generous support
in their efforts to perform this noble task.

[5]

From Dr. Richard Gottheil

I should like to think that it is not entirely fortuitous that this
added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that
the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical
life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock.
At such a time—more than ever—we need to understand and to bear in
mind the great teachings which Jewish sages have given to the world,
as their and our contribution to the moral foundations of society.
Such teachings were, in most cases, not decked out in the tawdry
trappings of a recondite and far-fetched philosophy, nor garnished
with the decorations of superlogical terminology, nor even put forth
with lusty rhetoric. They were simple and to the point, because they
were founded upon deep religious convictions.

One of these teachings occurs to me as I write these lines: “The moral
condition of the world depends upon three things—truth, justice and
peace.” Have we outgrown such teaching? Have the astounding advances
made during the last one hundred years in the science of physical
living brought us any nearer to the true inwardness of moral living
than the ethical principles put forth by these early teachers? As our
hearts are rent by the sufferings of those who are caught in the
meshes of the terrible war now raging, and as our intellects are
befogged by the various excuses advanced in justification of carnage
and wholesale destruction, do not the simple words of the old Hebrew
sage appear to us as a beacon-light in the surrounding darkness?
“Truth, Justice, Peace!”

Many similar lessons are awaiting those who will show some little
willingness to learn and to know. They are a part of the patrimony
that is ours, and which for the most part we refuse to claim. A voice
is crying to us out of our own midst. We do not hear; for our ears are
sealed as with wax. The Menorah Societies, which now are to be found
in most of our institutions of higher learning, have set themselves
the task of bringing our Jewish students to a consciousness of their
own past, to a knowledge of their history as members of a great
historic people, and to a just appreciation of the teachings of their
religion. It is only the knowledge of what we have tried to be that
will make us realize fully what we are and will enable us to see what
our future may be. The Menorah Journal is intended to bring this
knowledge to our young men, to harden their Jewish resolve and to
point the way along which lies the consummation of our Jewish hopes.
It sends its greeting to every Jewish student, whether or not he be a
member of a Menorah Society. We of an older generation look to our
university and college men as the Jewish leaders of the future. Let
them gather[6] around the Menorah Journal in order to make it a true
expression of Jewish ideals, a powerful incentive to join the ranks of
those who are active in our cause. The word of the Prophet comes to me
again: “Be ye strong, therefore, and let not your hands be weak; for
your work shall be rewarded.”

From Joseph Jacobs

From Dr. Kaufman Kohler

These ideas I would offer as greeting to the editors and readers of
the Menorah Journal. The name “Menorah” was aptly chosen by the
founders of the pioneer Menorah Society with a view to the two-fold
task of the light-bearer, to enlighten a surrounding world, and to
foster self-respect in the hearts of the Jewish students by spreading
the light of Jewish knowledge among them. Now, if I understand
correctly the purpose of starting a Journal as the organ of the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association, it is to give to these endeavors
a more permanent and classical literary form, and thus successfully
defend the cause of Judaism. Wishing this enterprise all success and
Godspeed, I venture to express the hope that true to its name Menorah,
the Journal will become a real banner-bearer of light not only
dispelling clouds of doubt and of prejudice within and outside of our
camp, but also aiming to spread the truth of Judaism in all its
spiritual force and grandeur. Not nationalism, which in these days of
a cruel world-war with its barbarism puts our much-vaunted modern
civilization to everlasting shame and which has split the Jewish
people also into warring camps, but Judaism as a religion, which
notwithstanding the differences of its various wings as to form is in
its essentials and fundamentals one, should be the watchword, for it
is the light of the Torah that is both law and learning, religion and
culture, which is to unify and consolidate all the forces of American
Israel.

From Irving Lehman

The voice of this Journal may be only a weak, small voice, but if that
voice speaks in the spirit of the prophet and brings home to us the
worth of the prophetic ideals, it may well prove an important factor
in enabling Israel to fulfill its mission as a messenger of peace to
all the nations.

From Julian W. Mack

This would inevitably tend to strengthen the religious faith of the
Jewish members and to awaken in all of the members a keener and a more
intelligent appreciation of the contribution which Jews and Judaism
have made to human progress.

[9]

From Dr. J. L. Magnes

From Dr. Martin A. Meyer

Jewish journalism in America has done little, if anything, to justify
the numerous calls which it makes upon the people for support. On the
other hand, there is sad need for a journal representative of our best
thought, which will be readable and which will represent rather than
misrepresent us.

The field of Jewish culture and ideals surely has not been exhausted
by our European brethren. No matter what they may have contributed to
the exploitation of this field there surely remains ample ground for
the American Jew to express himself in the light of the old standards
of Jewish conduct and belief.

It goes without saying that your Journal will make its primary appeal
to the college man and woman. If successful, it will have saved for
Jewry its most valuable elements and enable us to build in the future
on a better and broader basis than the purely financial and commercial
leadership of the past.

From the far West we join hands with you in the far East and unite in
fervent hopes that the new Menorah Journal may grow from strength to
strength.

[10]

From Dr. David Philipson

The call of the ages sounds to the intellectual nobility of our day
and generation. Learning has been extolled among Jews from earliest
times, and the wise man has been the accredited leader, so that it was
declared that “the wise man is greater than the prophet.” I would have
the learned classes come again into their own. I would have our
university men in coming years the staunchest Jews in the community
through their intelligent interest in everything that makes for its
highest welfare.

To achieve this is the task of our university men. The possibility of
this achievement I see in such significant signs as the Menorah
movement, the institution of student congregations, and the launching
of this magazine by the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. What has
been called the “Jewish consciousness,” a term which has done yeoman’s
service during the past decade, is being aroused through these
agencies to an even greater degree. This aroused Jewish feeling will,
I am sure, be translated into active service more and more as the
years pass and the present generation of college men carve out their
careers in our communities throughout the country. This is the great
Jewish opportunity of the present generation; in this will they
reverse, such is my hope and my belief, that condition and that
attitude of the Jewish intelligenzia in the past (and still largely
in the present) which evoked the statement of Abraham Geiger. May this
new undertaking prosper so that the young generation whom this
magazine represents may be helped toward a realization of its ideals,
and become an inspiration to all Jewry throughout the length and
breadth of the land.

[11]

From Dr. Solomon Schechter

From Jacob H. Schiff

[12]

From Dr. Stephen S. Wise

A truly great Jew said about fifteen years ago that a high
self-reverence had transformed arme Judenjungen into stolze junge
Juden. I believe that the Menorah movement in this land is in part
the cause and in other part the token of a transformation among young
American Jews to-day parallel to that cited by Theodor Herzl. It marks
a sea-change from the self pitying Jewish youth, immeasurably “sorry
for himself” because of his exclusion from certain dominantly
unfraternal groups, to the Jewish youth self-regarding, in the highest
sense of the term, self-knowing, self-revering. That the
self-respecting young Jew command the respect of the world without is
of minor importance by the side of the outstanding fact that he has
ceased to measure himself by the values which he imagined the
unfriendly elements of the world without had set upon him.

The Menorah movement is welcome as a proof of a new order in the life
of the young college Jew. He has come to see at last that it is comic,
in large part, to be shut out from the Greek letter fraternities of
the Hellenes and the Barbarians, but that it is tragic, in large part,
to shut himself out from the life of his own people. For it is from
his own people that he must draw his vision and spiritual sustenance
if he is to live a life of self-mastery rather than the life of a
contemptible parasite rooted nowhere and chameleonizing everywhere.
Time was when their fellow-Jews half excused the college men, who
drifted away from the life of Israel, as if the burden of the Jewish
bond were too much for the untried and unrobust shoulders of our
Jewish college men, as if their intellectual and moral squeamishness
led to inevitable revolt against association with their much-despised
and wholly misunderstood Jewish fellows. Now we see, and our younger
brothers of the Menorah fellowship have caught the vision, that no Jew
can be truly cultured who Jewishly uproots himself, that the man who
rejects the birthright of inheritance of the traditions of the
earliest and virilest of the cultured peoples of earth is
impoverishing his very being. The Jew who is a “little Jew” is less of
a man.

The Menorah lights the path for the fellowship of young Israel, finely
self-reverencing. Long be that rekindled light undimmed!

[13]

A Call to the Educated Jew

By Louis D. Brandeis

LOUIS D. BRANDEIS (born in Louisville, Ky., in 1856),
lawyer and publicist, is a distinguished leader in the voluntary
profession of “public servant.” His extraordinary record of unselfish,
genuine achievement in behalf of the public interest—for shorter
hours of labor, savings bank insurance, protection against monopoly,
against increase in railroad rates, etc.,—gives peculiar aptness to
the appeal for community service made in this article, which Mr.
Brandeis has prepared from a recent Menorah address. From the
beginning Mr. Brandeis has taken a keen interest in the Menorah
movement as a promotive force for the ideals he has at heart.

The three men of Bialystok realized that education was not a thing of
one’s own to do with as one pleases—not a personal privilege to be
merely enjoyed by the possessor—but a precious treasure transmitted
upon a sacred trust to be held, used and enjoyed, and if possible
strengthened—then passed on to others upon the same trust. Yet the
treasure which these three men held and the boy received in trust was
much more than an education. It included that combination of qualities
which enabled and impelled these three men to give and the boy to seek
and to acquire an education. These qualities embrace: first,
intellectual capacity; second, an appreciation of the value of
education; third, indomitable will; fourth, capacity for hard
work. It was these qualities which[14] enabled the lad not only to
acquire but to so utilize an education that, coming to America,
ignorant of our language and of our institutions, he attained in
comparatively few years the important office he has so honorably
filled.

Now whence comes this combination of qualities of mind, body and
character? These are qualities with which every one is familiar,
singly and in combination; which you find in friends and relatives,
and which others doubtless discover in you. They are qualities
possessed by most Jews who have attained distinction or other success;
and in combination they may properly be called Jewish qualities. For
they have not come to us by accident; they were developed by three
thousand years of civilization, and nearly two thousand years of
persecution; developed through our religion and spiritual life;
through our traditions; and through the social and political
conditions under which our ancestors lived. They are, in short, the
product of Jewish life.

Is not the Jews’ indomitable will—the power which enables them to
resist temptation and, fully utilizing their mental capacity, to
overcome obstacles—is not that quality also the result of the
conditions under which they lived so long? To live a Jew during the
centuries of persecution was to lead a constant struggle for
existence. That struggle was so severe that only the fittest could
survive. Survival was not possible except where there was strong
will—a will both to live and to live a Jew. The weaker ones passed
either out of Judaism or out of existence.

And finally, the Jewish capacity for hard work is also the product of[15]
Jewish life—a life characterized by temperate, moral living continued
throughout the ages, and protected by those marvellous sanitary
regulations which were enforced through the religious sanctions.
Remember, too, that amidst the hardship to which our ancestors were
exposed it was only those with endurance who survived.

So let us not imagine that what we call our achievements are wholly or
even largely our own. The phrase “self-made man” is most misleading.
We have power to mar; but we alone cannot make. The relatively large
success achieved by Jews wherever the door of opportunity is opened to
them is due, in the main, to this product of Jewish life—to this
treasure which we have acquired by inheritance—and which we are in
duty bound to transmit unimpaired, if not augmented, to coming
generations.

But our inheritance comprises far more than this combination of
qualities making for effectiveness. These are but means by which man
may earn a living or achieve other success. Our Jewish trust comprises
also that which makes the living worthy and success of value. It
brings us that body of moral and intellectual perceptions, the point
of view and the ideals, which are expressed in the term Jewish spirit;
and therein lies our richest inheritance.

Among the Jews democracy was not an ideal merely. It was a practice—a
practice made possible by the existence among them of certain
conditions essential to successful democracy, namely:

First: An all-pervading sense of the duty in the citizen. Democratic
ideals cannot be attained through emphasis merely upon the rights of
man. Even a recognition that every right has a correlative duty will
not meet the needs of democracy. Duty must be accepted as the dominant
conception in life. Such were the conditions in the early days of the
colonies and states of New England, when American democracy reached
there its fullest[16] expression; for the Puritans were trained in
implicit obedience to stern duty by constant study of the Prophets.

Second: Relatively high intellectual attainments. Democratic ideals
cannot be attained by the mentally undeveloped. In a government where
everyone is part sovereign, everyone should be competent, if not to
govern, at least to understand the problems of government; and to this
end education is an essential. The early New Englanders appreciated
fully that education is an essential of potential equality. The
founding of their common school system was coincident with the
founding of the colonies; and even the establishment of institutions
for higher education did not lag far behind. Harvard College was
founded but six years after the first settlement of Boston.

Third: Submission to leadership as distinguished from authority.
Democratic ideals can be attained only where those who govern exercise
their power not by alleged divine right or inheritance, but by force
of character and intelligence. Such a condition implies the attainment
by citizens generally of relatively high moral and intellectual
standards; and such a condition actually existed among the Jews. These
men who were habitually denied rights, and whose province it has been
for centuries “to suffer and to think,” learned not only to sympathize
with their fellows (which is the essence of democracy and social
justice), but also to accept voluntarily the leadership of those
highly endowed morally and intellectually.

Fourth: A developed community sense. The sense of duty to which I
have referred was particularly effective in promoting democratic
ideals among the Jews, because of their deep-seated community feeling.
To describe the Jew as an individualist is to state a most misleading
half-truth. He has to a rare degree merged his individuality and his
interests in the community of which he forms a part. This is evidenced
among other things by his attitude toward immortality. Nearly every
other people has reconciled this world of suffering with the idea of a
beneficent providence by conceiving of immortality for the individual.
The individual sufferer bore present ills by regarding this world as
merely the preparation for another, in which those living righteously
here would find individual reward hereafter. Of all the nations,
Israel “takes precedence in suffering”; but, despite our national
tragedy, the doctrine of individual immortality found relatively
slight lodgment among us. As Ahad Ha-‘Am so beautifully said: “Judaism
did not turn heavenward and create in Heaven an eternal habitation of
souls. It found ‘eternal life’ on earth, by strengthening the social
feeling in the individual; by making him regard himself not as an
isolated being with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as
part of a larger whole, as a limb of the social body. This conception
shifts the center of gravity not from the flesh to the spirit, but
from the individual to the community; and concurrently with this
shifting, the problem of life becomes a problem not of individual, but
of social life. I live for the sake[17] of the perpetuation and happiness
of the community of which I am a member; I die to make room for new
individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to
stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus
values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness
as though it were his individual well-being, he finds satisfaction,
and no longer feels so keenly the bitterness of his individual
existence, because he sees the end for which he lives and suffers.” Is
not that the very essence of the truly triumphant twentieth-century
democracy?

But from the educated Jew far more should be exacted. In view of our
inheritance and our present opportunities, self-respect demands that
we live not only honorably but worthily; and worthily implies nobly.
The educated descendants of a people which in its infancy cast aside
the Golden Calf and put its faith in the invisible God cannot worthily
in its maturity worship worldly distinction and things material. “Two
men he honors and no third,” says Carlyle—”the toil-worn craftsman
who conquers the earth and him who is seen toiling for the spiritually
indispensable.”

And yet, though the Jew make his individual life the loftiest, that
alone will not fulfill the obligations of his trust. We are bound not
only to use[18] worthily our great inheritance, but to preserve and, if
possible, augment it; and then transmit it to coming generations. The
fruit of three thousand years of civilization and a hundred
generations of suffering may not be sacrificed by us. It will be
sacrificed if dissipated. Assimilation is national suicide. And
assimilation can be prevented only by preserving national
characteristics and life as other peoples, large and small, are
preserving and developing their national life. Shall we with our
inheritance do less than the Irish, the Servians, or the Bulgars? And
must we not, like them, have a land where the Jewish life may be
naturally led, the Jewish language spoken, and the Jewish spirit
prevail? Surely we must, and that land is our fathers’ land: it is
Palestine.

Furthermore, Zionism is not a movement to wrest from the Turk the
sovereignty of Palestine. Zionism seeks merely to establish in
Palestine for such Jews as choose to go and remain there, and for
their descendants, a legally secured home, where they may live
together and lead a Jewish life; where they may expect ultimately to
constitute a majority of the population, and may look forward to what
we should call home rule.

The establishment of the legally secured Jewish home is no longer a
dream. For more than a generation brave pioneers have been building
the foundations of our new old home. It remains for us to build the
superstructure. The Ghetto walls are now falling, Jewish life cannot
be preserved and developed, assimilation cannot be averted, unless
there be reëstablished in the fatherland a center from which the
Jewish spirit may radiate and give to the Jews scattered throughout
the world that inspiration which springs from the memories of a great
past and the hope of a great future. To accomplish this it is not
necessary that the Jewish population of Palestine be large as compared
with the whole number of Jews in the world. Throughout centuries when
the Jewish influence was great, and it was working out its own, and in
large part the world’s, destiny during the[19] Persian, the Greek, and
the Roman Empires, only a relatively small part of the Jews lived in
Palestine; and only a small part of the Jews returned from Babylon
when the Temple was rebuilt.

The glorious past can really live only if it becomes the mirror of a
glorious future; and to this end the Jewish home in Palestine is
essential. We Jews of prosperous America above all need its
inspiration. And the Menorah men should be its builders.

[20]

Menorah

By William Ellery Leonard

WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD (born in New Jersey in 1876),
Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, is the
author of several volumes of verse and literary criticism which have
won high praise,—notably “Sonnets and Poems,” “Byron and Byronism in
America,” and “The Vaunt of Man.”

[23]

The Jews in the War

By Joseph Jacobs

JOSEPH JACOBS (born in New South Wales in 1854), noted
author and editor, was one of England’s well-known scholars and men of
letters when he was called to America to become managing editor of the
Jewish Encyclopedia. He has held the chair of English literature at
the Jewish Theological Seminary, and is now editor of the American
Hebrew. He is the author of many authoritative books, including “Jews
of Angevin England,” “Studies in Jewish Statistics,” “Jewish Ideals,”
and “Literary Studies.”

Nor is this direct loss and misery compensated for by any hope of
improved conditions after the war is concluded. One may dismiss at
once the rumor that the Czar has promised his Jewish soldiers any
alleviation of their lot, on account of their loyalty and bravery.
Such rumors are always spread about when the Russian autocracy needs
Jewish blood or money. Besides, we all know the value of the plighted
word of the crowned head of the Russian Church; the emasculation of
the Duma is sufficient evidence of this. And even if the Czar carries
out his promise of giving autonomy to Poland, including any sections
of Prussian and Austrian territory which he may acquire by the present
war, the Jewish lot will not be ameliorated in the slightest. For,
unfortunately, Poles have of recent years turned round on their Jewish
fellow sufferers from Russian tyranny somewhat on the principle of the
boy at school who “passes on” the blow which he has received from a
bigger boy to one smaller yet.

In the contrary case, if Germany gets the upper hand, the influence of
the Junkers in Germany, with their anti-Semitic tendencies, would be
raised to intolerable limits, while the Reaction in Russia, even if it
loses prestige, will yet be granted more power in order to carry out
the projected revenge.

Altogether, as will have been seen from the above enumeration, I am
strongly of opinion that the Jews will suffer even more than most
peoples concerned in the present war. They have nothing to gain by it;
they are sure to lose by it.

[26]

Jewish Students in European Universities

By Harry Wolfson

HARRY WOLFSON (Harvard A. B. and A. M. 1912), a member
of the Harvard Menorah Society since 1908, was the Hebrew poet at the
annual Harvard Menorah dinners for four years, and won the Harvard
Menorah prize in 1911 for an essay on “Maimonides and Halevi: A Study
in Typical Jewish Attitudes Toward Greek Philosophy in the Middle
Ages.” On graduating from Harvard he received honors in Semitics and
Philosophy, and was appointed to a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. As
Sheldon Fellow he spent two years abroad, studying in the University
of Berlin and doing research work in the libraries of Munich, Paris,
the Vatican, Parma, the British Museum, Oxford and Cambridge. The
present article is based upon the impressions he gathered during this
period. He is now pursuing graduate studies in Semitics and Philosophy
at Harvard.

[27]

Yet within its own narrow limits, Anglo-Jewry is active enough to keep
in perfect condition. Over-exertion, however, is avoided. Cricket
Judaism is played according to the rules of the game, and the players
are quite comfortable in their flannels. The established synagogue of
Mulberry Street is as staid and sober as the Church of England, the
liberalism preached in Berkeley Street as gentle and unscandalizing as
the nonconformity of the City Temple, and the orthodoxy of the United
Synagogue as innocuously papish as the last phases of the Oxford
movement.

In England it is quite fashionable to admit Judaism into the parlor.
Parlor Judaism, to be sure, is not more vital a force nor more
creative than kitchen Judaism, but it seems to be more vital than the
Judaism restricted to the Temple. At least it is voluntary and
personal, and, what is more important, it is engaging. So engrossed in
the subject of his discussion was once my host at tea, that while
administering the sugar he asked me quite absent-mindedly: “Would you
have one or two lumps in your Judaism?” “Thank you, none at all,” was
my reply. “But I am wont to take my Judaism somewhat stronger, if you
please.”

Independent local organizations of Jewish students, however, are to be
found in almost every university in England. In Oxford and Cambridge
they are organized in congregations, having Synagogues of their own,
in which the students assemble for prayer on every Friday night and
Saturday morning. In Cambridge they hold two services, an orthodox and
a liberal, both well attended. In Oxford they have recently published
a special prayer book of their own, suitable for the needs of all
kinds of students, it being a medley of orthodoxy and liberalism,
which if rather indiscriminate in its theology is, on the whole, made
up with good common sense. English liberal Judaism, it should be
observed, is markedly different from its corresponding cults in
Germany and in the United States. In Germany, reformed Judaism has its
nascence in free thought, and it aims to appeal to the intellectual.
With us liberalism is stimulated by our pragmatic evaluation of
religion, and is held out as a bait to the[28] indifferent. In England it
arises from the growing admiration on the part of a certain class of
Jews for what they consider the inwardness and the superior morality
of Christianity, and is concocted as a cure to those who are so
affected. As a result, English liberal Judaism is more truly religious
than the German, and more sincerely pious than the American. In a
sermon delivered before the Oxford congregation, a young layman of the
Liberal Synagogue of London apostrophized liberal Judaism as the
safeguard of the modern Jews from the attractiveness of the superior
teachings of Christ.

The Jewish University men in England take an active interest in both
these branches of philanthropy. It was a fortunate coincidence that
when I came to Oxford the Jewish students there had among them a
social worker of the latter type, who had come to make arrangements
for the reception of a squad of Whitechapel boys who were under his
tutelage. When I afterwards went to Cambridge I found there a delegate
of some charitable board of the London Jewish community, seeking to
enlist the aid of the Jewish students in his work.

There is another quite as notable distinction between our Menorah and
the Jewish students’ organizations in Germany. With us the Menorah is
primarily an undergraduate society. When graduate Menorah Societies
arise, they may be confederated with the undergraduate organization,
but they will of course retain their separate character. In Germany
this distinction between undergraduate and graduate does not exist.
Matriculation in the University, not the taking of a degree in it,
introduces one into the society of the educated with its appellative
“intellectual” corresponding to our “high-brow” rather than to our
“college grad.” Joining the membership of a student organization marks
the entrance into that large class of “intellectuals.” And once you
join such an organization you are a member ever after. In Germany, in
fact, nobody graduates from a university in the same sense that we do.
There the taking of a degree is merely an episode. If you take it, you
will thenceforth be addressed as “Herr Doktor”; if you do not take it,
you will keep on printing on your visiting card “Kandidat Philosophie”
all the rest of your lifetime, and be addressed by the uninitiate as
“Herr Doktor” just the same. Thus the achievements generally ascribed
to Jewish students’ organizations in Germany are in reality the
collective work of all the Jewish men of academic training, and not
necessarily of students actually engaged in university studies. Read
over the names of contributors to publications issued by what are
known as “student organizations,” and you will notice how loosely that
term is used.

The activities of Jewish university men in Germany are chiefly
literary and intellectual, for the problem with which they are faced
is quite different from that of ours. With us the problem of
Americanism and Judaism is in its ultimate analysis the possible
conflict between two sets of social duties, in themselves not
necessarily contradictory, which can be easily reconciled by a working
program adjusting the practical demands of both without curtailing the
scope and efficiency of either. For Americanism in the abstract has no
existence. The American mind is as yet unknown in its essence; it is
only manifest by its functions, of which Jewish activities may form a
complementary part. In Germany it is quite different. If Germanism
stand for Aryanism and Occidentalism, Judaism must inevitably stand
for Semitism and Orientalism,—and can the twain ever meet? That the
Jew manifests in his works and actions good practical patriotism does
not radically solve the problem; that the Jews are capable of being
good patriots is no longer questioned, but can they be genuine ones?
Will not the Jews always remain the carriers of an alien culture,
unabsorbable and unassimilable, despite their conversion and
intermarriage? It is this problem that confronts the Jewish
intellectuals in Germany, in the over-hanging shadow of which the
“Sorrows of the Jewish Werther” was written, and the martyrdom of Otto
Weininger, self-inflicted, was made possible. Hence the great
introspective literary activity of the German Jewish youth.

There is, on the one hand, the great, ever-increasing inrush of the
Jews into the inmost sanctum of German cultural life, where their
Germanic protestations are more vociferous than those of the native
Teuton,—and they sometimes have, too, as must be admitted, a false
ring. Ludwig[32] Fulda openly proclaims that as to his relation with
Judaism there is none: Goethe is his Moses and the German war of
liberation is his Exodus; and Jewish “Gymnasium” seniors inundate the
columns of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums with introspective
analyses of their Teutonic souls. On the other hand, there are those
who, while quite as good Germans as the others, so far as practical
patriotism is concerned, do not renounce the intellectual and
spiritual heritage which is their own. Their self-imposed task is
therefore the cultivation, enrichment, and modernization of Jewish
thought and tradition. Hence the great output of highly meritorious
literary works on purely Jewish subjects which, if not as scholarly as
those of the German Jewish scientists of the past generation, are far
more stimulating and of greater educational value.

[33]

The Twilight of Hebraic Culture

The Transition from Hebraism to Judaism

By Max L. Margolis

MAX L. MARGOLIS (born in Merecz, Russia, in 1866), one
of the leading Biblical scholars of America, received his education in
Russia, Germany, and the United States (Columbia Ph.D. 1891). He has
held important professorships of Semitics and Biblical Exegesis at the
Hebrew Union College and the University of California,—and since 1909
has filled the chair of Biblical Philology in The Dropsie College for
Hebrew and Cognate learning. He has been engaged also, as
Editor-in-Chief, in the monumental task of the new English translation
of the Bible by American Jewish scholars. He is the author of numerous
learned papers and books on Biblical lore and theology.

To the Jew, however, the Scriptures are possessed of an interest
beyond the religious and literary. They are the record of his
achievements in the past when his foot rested firm and steady on
native soil, of a long history full of vicissitudes from the time when
the invaders battled against the kings of Canaan to the days when the
last visionary steeled the nation’s endurance in its struggle with the
heathen. They are the charter of Jewish nobility, linking those of the
present to the wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees.

As a finished product the Hebrew Scriptures came after the period of
national independence. When canon-making was in its last stage,
Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. The canon was the supreme effort of
Judæa—throttled by the legions of Rome—withdrawing to its inner
defences. The sword was sheathed and deliverance was looked for[34] from
the clouds. The Scriptures were to teach the Jew conduct and prayer,
and the chidings of the prophets were listened to in a penitential
mood, but also joyfully because of the consolations to which they led.
The canon-makers had an eye to the steadying of a vanquished people
against the enemy without and the foe within. For there arose teachers
who proclaimed that the mission of the Jew was fulfilled: free from
the fetters of a narrow nationalism, of a religion bound up with the
soil, he was now ready to merge his individuality with the large world
when once it accepted that measure of his teaching suited to a wider
humanity. The temple that was made with hands was destroyed, and
another made without hands was building where men might worship in
spirit and truth. The dream was fascinating, the danger of absorption
was acute, because it was dressed up with the trappings of an ideal to
which many believed the Scriptures themselves pointed.

There was a much larger range of writings in Palestine and a still
larger in Egypt. The list included historical works carrying on the
story of the people’s fortunes beyond Alexander the Great; novelistic
tales like that of the heroic Judith luring the enemy of her people to
destruction, or that exquisite tale of Jewish family life as
exemplified by the pious Israelite captive Tobit; books like the wise
sayings of Jesus, son of Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, or the Psalms
of Solomon, all modelled after patterns in the canon; midrashic
expositions of the law, like the Little Genesis; apocalyptic visions
going by the name of Enoch and the Twelve Patriarchs and Moses and
Isaiah and Esdras, whose prototype may be sought in the canonical
Daniel. Over and above the three parts which the Synagogue accepted
there were a fourth and fifth; but by an act of exclusion the canon
was concentrated upon the three and the others were cast overboard.
The canon was the creation of the Pharisaic doctors, who drew a line
at a point of their own choosing, and decreed that writings “from that
time onward” did not defile the hands.

The Pharisees had been lifted by the national catastrophe into the
leading position. They had previously been a party among many parties,
and their Judaism one of the many varieties. The Sadducees, their
chief opponents, had a literature of their own: the day upon which
their “Book of Decrees” was consigned to destruction was made a legal
holiday upon which fasting was prohibited. But even writings which
were lightly touched by the Sadduccee spirit were frowned upon: the
Siracide was barely tolerated on the outside because he made light of
individual immortality, and believed in the eternity of Israel and the
Zadokite priesthood. The Pharisees had been on the opposition during
the latter period of the Maccabeans: so with partisan ruthlessness
they excluded from the canon the writings commemorative of the
valorous deeds of those priest-warriors who freed the people from
foreign overlordship and restored the Davidic boundaries of the realm.
Because the apocalyptic visions inclined to teachings not acceptable
to the dominant opinion, they were declared not only heterodox,
heretical, but worthy of destruction. Had the stricter view prevailed,
the sceptical Preacher—now, to quote Renan, lost in the canon like a
volume of Voltaire among the folios of a theological library—would
have shared the fate of Sirach and Wisdom and the other writings which
Egypt cherished after Palestine had discarded them. And there were
mutterings heard even against the Song, that beautiful remnant of the
Anacreontic muse of Judæa. It was then that Akiba stepped into the
breach and by bold allegory saved that precious piece of what may be
called the secular literature of the ancient Hebrews.

The process concluded by the Pharisees had begun long before. The
Pharisee consummated what the scribe before him had commenced, and the
scribe in turn had carried to fruition the work inaugurated by the
prophet. Just as the Pharisee decreed what limits were to be imposed
upon the third part of the Scriptures, the scribe in his day gave
sanction to the second, and at a still earlier period the prophet to
the wide range of literature current in his days. Sobered by national
disaster, the scribe addressed himself to the task of safeguarding the
remnant of Judæa in the land of the fathers. There were schisms in the
ranks, and all kinds of heresies, chief among which stood the
Samaritan. The nation’s history was recast in a spirit showing how
through the entire past faithful adherence to Mosaism brought in its
wake national stability, and conversely a swaying from legitimacy and
law was responsible for disaster. With the Torah[36] as a guide, prophecy
was forced into the channels of orthodoxy. Heterodox prophets, the
“false prophets,” were consigned to oblivion. Their opponents alone
were given a hearing. Secular history there was to be none; there was
room only for the sacred. We may take it for granted that the
“prophets of Baal,” as their adversaries triumphantly nicknamed them,
had their disciples who collected their writings and recorded the
deeds of their spirit. But they were one and all suppressed. The
political achievements of mighty dynasts had been recorded by
annalists; the pious narrators in the so-called historical books of
the canon brush them aside, gloss over them with a scant hint or
reference; what is of absorbing interest to them is the activity of an
Elijah or an Elisha, or the particular pattern of the altar in the
Jerusalem sanctuary. In their iconoclastic warfare upon the
abomination of Samaria, the prophets gave a partisanly distorted view
of conditions in the North which for a long time had been the scene of
Hebrew tradition and Hebrew life.

Whether living in amity or in warfare, nations influence each other to
a marked degree. They exchange the products of their soils and their
industry—they also give and take spiritual possessions. Culture is a
compound product. The factors that are contributory to its make-up are
the[37] soil and the racial endowment recoiling against the domination
from without which, though not wholly overcome, is resisted with might
and main. Cultures are national amidst an international culture. They
express themselves in a variety of ways, chiefly in language and
literature. For while blood is thicker than water, the pen is mightier
than the sword. Out of a mass of myth and legend and worldly wisdom
the Hebrews constructed, in accordance with their own bent of mind,
their cosmogonies and ballads and collections of proverbs. At every
shrine the priests narrated to the throngs of worshippers the
marvelous stories of local or national interest.

The chief difference between the Hebraic culture and Judaism which
supplanted it consists in the fact that, whereas the latter was
bookish, transforming its votaries into the “people of the book,” the
former was the sum total of all that goes to make up the concern of a
nation living upon its own soil. Bookishness, literature, has a place
in the affairs of a nation, but it contributes only a side in its
manifold activities. The spoken word precedes the written. The writer
has an eye to aftertimes. He lives in the future. The speaking voice
addresses itself to the present and its varied needs. Saints are
canonized after death. The act of canonization[38] means the verdict of
the survivors who from a distance are able to gauge the merits of past
deeds. When a literature is pronounced canonical or classical, it is
no more. In its dying moments it is reduced to rule, and its range
becomes norm. But normalization is an act of choosing, of accepting
and excising. A living literature is far from being normalized. Much
that is written serves a temporary purpose, but is none the less
effective while it has vogue. However, it is only a part of the
national activities, mirroring them and commenting upon them. So is
religion another part of the national life. Government policy and
legal procedure and the arts and the crafts occupy a nation’s living
interests. The Hebraic culture meant all that. It is now a thing of
the distant past. It speaks to us from beneath the Hebrew Scriptures
by which it is overlaid, themselves the remnant of what in times gone
by stirred the nation’s spirit. A revival of that culture may come,
but when it comes it will be tempered by Judaism. And the Hebrew
Scriptures which constitute the bridge between them both will act as
the peacemaker.

[39]

Days of Disillusionment

By Samuel Strauss

SAMUEL STRAUSS (born in Des Moines, Ia., in 1870), was
publisher of the Des Moines Leader from 1895 to 1904, and became
publisher of the New York Globe in 1904. Since 1912 he has been
associated with the management of the New York Times. Mr. Strauss has
taken an active and effective interest in many worthy movements for
Jewish betterment. He is a member of the Graduate Advisory Menorah
Committee and of the Menorah College of Lecturers. His impressive and
stimulating talks have given him marked popularity with the Menorah
Societies.

What profit will be derived from it all is as yet merely a matter for
speculation. Not yet have men been able to think of the conflict in
other than negative terms, to see in it other than despair, crippled
industry, a fall from civilization, all that belongs on the debit side
of the ledger. But there is also a credit side: and to realize that
the effects of war are positive as well as negative is by no means to
condone war, but only to accept it as a fact.

History teaches us to expect that the positive result of this struggle
will be in the nature of a physic—a dissolving away of delusions, and
simultaneously a bringing into relief of some essential facts. This
clearing of the ground will not wait until the war is over; it has
already begun, though men are yet but half-conscious of it, and then
only in the guise of profitless disillusionment. This state of mind is
understandable enough. The spectacle of thousands going out by
trainload to settle differences through slaughter has been a terrible
shock. Individuals, having progressed beyond that stage, had assumed
that collectively, too, men must share the same aversion to so
illogical a method as murder for the solution of differences. This
assumption has had root in a justifiable belief in the world’s
attainment to a higher plane of civilization. The quality of to-day’s
culture may not be so fine as that of Judæa, of Greece, or Rome, or of
the Renaissance, but surely in no period of history has its extent
been so great. Never had the entire world been nearer
denationalization,[40] never had the economic interdependence of nations
been more complete. Jingoism has seemed obsolete, cosmopolitanism had
seemed the ideal, as the horizon of an increasing number of
individuals broadened out, and prejudice gave way before
enlightenment. But now this assumption is suddenly discovered to be
mere delusion, and at once much scorn is heaped upon “our alleged
civilization.” How much justification there is for disappointment over
the failure of culture to influence action is difficult to determine.
There is much confusion of thought on this point. To conclude that
because nations go to war, individuals have therefore made practically
no advance from the original state of barbarism is absurd. What should
be clear is the danger of generalizations from the individual to
groups of the individual—two psychologically different entities. It
may be that even as communities we have progressed more than we
believe, as some future reaction to this war may indicate, but what is
brought to the surface now is the old fact that the progress of groups
of men is at snail’s pace, however men may forge ahead as individuals.

This refreshed realization is by no means of negative value. It is
rather a positive benefit, and should be fixed in the minds of all men
who are striving collectively for various ends. For political parties,
socialists, suffragists, all and sundry reformers, this realization
should be the starting point from which to readjust programs when the
cataclysm is over.

For the Jewish people this realization is peculiarly significant.
Though the outlines of the general situation the world over are as yet
indistinct, some problems of the Jews have already been brought out
into sharp relief. Like the rest of mankind, the Jew has had his eyes
cruelly opened, and the clear boundary between truth and delusion
which this war has made should be stamped upon his memory, to remain
vivid after negative feelings of wrongs and disappointments have been
forgotten.

It takes two sides always to make up the full truth, but from both
sides, from the Jew and from his neighbor, there is circumstantial
evidence in the events of the past five months that gives abundant
support to this conclusion.

In this time of crisis the world has thrown aside its pretense, honest
and well-intentioned pretense though it may have been, and revealed
its underlying feeling toward the Jewish people. Suddenly, without any
absolute change in their status, the Jews are singled out and set
apart. Special inducements are held out for their support. The Czar,
though this was reported upon dubious authority, addresses his
“beloved Jews;” a non-commissioned Jewish officer is recommended for
the Order of St. George; Dreyfus is decorated in France, his son made
Lieutenant; Austria issues a special appeal to the Jews of Poland; an
English Jew voices England’s hope of their loyalty; in Germany
anti-Semitic newspapers suddenly announce their discontinuance.

Why this feeling of distrust? How has it been engendered, what are[42]
its roots? Again the answer is to be found both with the Jew himself
and with his neighbor.

As far as the present situation is concerned, the Gentile world has
had lying dormant in its subconscious mind the notion that the Jew was
inferior, and by its own action it has kept this subconscious notion
alive. For while the world has admitted the Jew to its political life,
while it has modified much its religious and its economic prejudices
and jealousies, it has not broken down every barrier. Without fully
realizing its attitude, it has still held the Jew to be different and
of lower quality. The Jew’s neighbors have had an honest sort of
delusion about their attitude toward the Semite; because they had
discovered the individual Jew, and taken him, as it were, into the
arms of their community life, they have fancied that all prejudice,
even toward the Jew as a class, had become obsolete. Here again there
is evidence of the fact that feeling toward Jews as individuals has
been mistaken for feeling toward the Jews as a race group.

This delusion has its base in something more fundamental, to which may
be accredited perhaps the distrust against which the Jews have been
battling for centuries. It is not the stranger who inspires continued
suspicion, for he soon ceases to be a stranger, but it is the wanderer
and the gypsy. There is imbedded in human nature a distrust of
shifting things and a respect for what is long established in any one
place, and it is in the wandering class that the Jew is placed in
spite of all talk of assimilation. He has had no point of departure
and hence no place of arrival. The French have crossed over the
Channel and become Englishmen; one would hardly know that the Romans
still live on in the Tyrol; but the Jew has always remained Jew, for
he has no established place from which to come and whither to return.

It would seem that this argument leads along a straight path towards[43]
Zionism as its conclusion. But practical Zionism, like all other
programs of reconstruction, must await a time which will admit of
reconstruction, and that is not the present. It may be that when this
war is concluded, world conditions will have so completely changed
that Zionism and its geographic program will no longer be the answer
to the problem of Jewry. All that is certain of it now is its
uncertainty. But the spirit of which Zionism is the expression, and
which has made of it more than a mere experiment in colonization,
still remains, emphasized by the self-realization to which the Jews
have been brought in the present conflict.

It is this which has undermined confidence in the Jews as a
people—their negation of that which is their valuable heritage. For
Judaism is not merely tradition, a thing to be reverenced as a relic;
it is a thing to be put to everyday use. This practical and vitalized
Judaism is the real salvation for which the Jews have been groping,
all the while under the delusion that it was anywhere but near at
hand. Such a rejuvenated faith would mean an end of that homelessness
which is accountable for much of the Jew’s displacement in the world’s
life. And though the remedy has been intimate to him these many years
he has failed to make positive use of it. It is true that the Zionists
have been striving for a geographical base for Judaism. But a
geographical base is never more than an outward expression of a
people’s unity; it is an excellent starting point, but as an end in
itself it is nothing. The Jews had a geographical base for their
start; thereby they were enabled to build up a unified result, the
Jewish spirit. It is this which, if recognized as a positive fact,
will take from the Jew[44] his feeling of homelessness, and from his
neighbor the notion that the Jew is a member of a tribe forever
unestablished and purposeless. It is around a spiritual core that the
Jews as a people must build, around that central force which has thus
far held them intact.

[45]

Three University Addresses

I

By studying the literature of the Jewish race, men at Yale and
elsewhere can do a great work for the learning and for the inspiration
of our country; especially can this Society do a noble and inspiring
work. History is in large measure made by the study of the literatures
of ancient races. What was it that waked Europe during the dark ages
from her apathy and ignorance but the discovery and the revival of the
Greek and Latin classics by enthusiastic scholars? In the various
centres of learning at the end of what we call the “dark ages,” we
find groups of earnest young men devoting themselves to this study,
and in these groups we find the influence which roused Europe from her
period of intellectual torpor.

Classics are the literatures which thus make history; which serve the
needs of all peoples, voicing truths of universal application. And
though it is to the Greek and Latin that the name classics has been
often confined, yet the Hebrew classics are being recognized more and
more as worthy of a place beside if not above them. Interest in the
Jewish classics never utterly perished. Throughout all ages the
theologian kept alive his interest in those writings; but there is
something of more than mere professional interest in these studies,
something which closely touches every man’s development and
experience.

It is not for me to attempt to say what these writings mean to
humanity. Biblical writings are far above any individual praise. But I
may with propriety say the reading of the Hebrew writings in English
has meant much to me personally. As a boy I read fewer books than do
youngsters of the present day, and among them the Bible was one of[46]
extraordinary interest. I read the Psalms and Isaiah as wonderful
poetry, and turned to the Bible as to a storehouse of historical
literature.

Hebrew history has been of great importance in the early history of
our country. The early settlement in America was due to the same
causes as the settlement of Canaan by the Hebrews. To the Pilgrim
Fathers the Old Testament was a supporting hand and a guide for them
in all matters. They took the Jewish theocracy as their model of
government and, in the measure that they patterned after a good model,
they achieved good results. So largely are the early history and
institutions of the United States a copy of Jewish institutions that
the spirit of the American people both before and after the Revolution
cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of Hebrew literature.
These early settlers were imbued with spirit and desire for the best
in life by reading the Bible. It was their one book, and “a man of one
book makes a strong man.” And perhaps it is the Old Testament rather
than the New Testament the knowledge of which is of greater
consequence for the best understanding of the peculiar conditions of
the early American people.

Therefore I welcome your Society first because it represents something
which has done much for learning in our great centres of learning, the
universities; and second, because as Americans, Jewish history means
much to us in understanding the early development of our own country.

II

If you go back in the history of this country you will find a time
when our New Englanders were especially indebted to what they as
Christians[47] called the Old Testament. There was a time in Colonial
days when the earlier portions of this literature exercised a mighty
influence over these new commonwealths. As you read the history of New
England you cannot help being profoundly impressed by the influence of
the Hebrew literature upon the life of the seventeenth century. The
names and references to the Jewish people are all interwoven with New
England history. I was thinking of a curious illustration of this fact
only a short time ago. You know the old poem of “Darius Green and His
Flying Machine” that has come into astonishingly new popularity in
modern times. It contains, you will recall, an enumeration of the
brothers of Darius, and four of the five names are taken from Hebrew
history. The appearance of these Jewish names in such large numbers is
coincident with a reappearance of Hebrew spirit in our Colonial times,
all modified of course by Christian tradition, but presenting a most
important and essential ingredient of the time. This apparently
trivial illustration simply shows that which is to be found in our
whole culture. It is profoundly significant in regard to our American
culture.

So it seems to me that the Menorah Society has work of two kinds—to
bring together our Jewish students on a higher plane of sentiment, and
at the same time to put new emphasis, in all parts of the University,
on the invaluable things which the Jewish race has contributed to the
civilization of the world. So I feel that I may look to you of this
organization to bring to New York University a new emphasis upon these
great things which are the common heritage of our scholastic society.
I trust that you will feel that there is a genuine warmth and a
genuine interest in the welcome that I extend to you,—not a welcome
to the University alone, but a welcome to this new service in this
University, in which every movement such as this has work to do for
the good of all.

III

For these reasons, if for no other, we should welcome the Menorah
Society into our midst. As I was just informed that the national
convention of the Intercollegiate Association is about to take place,
let me, on behalf of this University, say to you, Mr. Chancellor, as
the representative of the national organization, that we are glad to
extend an invitation to your convention to meet in our halls.

There are special reasons, too, why we should welcome the Menorah
Association here. We believe that the University and its members need
this Society for several reasons. In the first place, a great
democratic institution like this can grow only when all the races
bring into it their peculiar customs and ideals. I believe the
non-Jews need it as well as the Jews. It takes varied elements to make
up the democracy, and America, and Cincinnati, and its University all
need the spiritual resources of the Jew. I am impressed with the
statement of the purposes of the Menorah Society as explained by the
Chancellor in the address to which we have just listened.

He tells us first of all that its object is to promote the study of
the history of the Jewish race. Your ancient books are the sources of
all history; in fact, I cannot conceive of the study of history unless
it begins with, or takes up very early, these great historic books of
the Bible. They furnish the Ariadne’s thread for the wanderer through
all history; they are the fountain head also of the philosophy of
history. The old Jewish historians always took the teleological view
of the world and looked from the effect back to the cause,
interpreting human events in the terms of God, the designer, the
creator, and the governor of the world. In fact, their great
contribution to history was this doctrine of God’s hand in human
events.

The Jew had also, it seems to me, throughout his whole history, a
special talent for theistic truth, for those verities that are
eternal. With an insight and a power almost surpassing all other men,
he discovered truths which have ever been, and always will be,
essential factors in all religion. The first of these ideas is his
conception of Jahveh, not only as a sovereign, powerful, and terrible
Being, but as a personal, holy, righteous, and good Father, “who
pitieth his children.” Your Bible, however, nowhere tries to prove the
existence of a God; it everywhere assumes it. “It is the fool who says
in his heart there is no God,” declares the Psalmist.

For the same reason, your great books are the world’s text book of
comparative religion. I cannot conceive of any one studying religions
without going to them, for above all others the Jewish religion is
original.[49] For these and many more reasons, we hold that the history,
religion and philosophy of the Hebrews is fundamental and
indispensable for the student of these subjects—in fact, for all
students of the humanities.

It was the Jew who discovered conscience, also, and produced in due
time an order of men who made themselves the conscience of their
nation. Moses first formed a law declaring the word of God and
teaching men their relations to God and to each other. Other nations
have had priests and augurs who received the oblations of the people
and gave them advice about their affairs, but the Jewish nation was
the first to produce real prophets who dared to denounce the sins of
the people and remind them of their duty as men and nations. What the
world needs today is another line of such prophets.

To the young men assembled here tonight, I would say, therefore, it is
your duty to study the history, philosophy and theology presented in
these ancient Scriptures, and thus inform yourselves how to instruct
this great democratic people. Be prophets like the prophets of old to
guide the people into the truth!

The Jews were the first people to uphold the sacred character of
patriotism, the patriotism of principle, not of mere power, the
patriotism that teaches that it is not might that makes right, but
right which makes might. How sadly the European powers need to learn
this lesson today! Only “righteousness exalteth the nation” and gives
it the power and the right to lead in the world. If nations would seek
righteousness as a means of winning leadership, they would never need
to go to war, and the exercise of might would never be necessary.

Because this Society proposes to study the great history and
literature which teaches these things, we give it a welcome tonight,
and pray that the light held up by the Menorah may shine not only for
the people of Cincinnati, but for the people of America, and the
world, that all the nations may be guided into that righteousness
which leads to Peace.

[50]

The Menorah Movement

By Henry Hurwitz

In a period of less than two years since this first convention, the
number of Societies has grown from nineteen to thirty-five. There are
Societies now at the following colleges and universities: Boston
University, Brown, California, Chicago, Cincinnati, College of the
City of New York, Clark, Colorado, Columbia, Cornell, Denver, Harvard,
Hunter, Illinois, Johns Hopkins, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri,
New York University, North Carolina, Ohio State, Omaha, Pennsylvania,
Penn State, Pittsburgh, Radcliffe, Rutgers, Texas, Tufts, Valparaiso,
Washington, Western Reserve, Wisconsin, and Yale. New Societies are in
the process of formation at several other universities.

This development of the Menorah movement has from the very beginning
been a natural, unforced growth. The Intercollegiate Menorah
Association makes no effort to organize new Menorah Societies; its
policy is rather to encourage and assist the efforts of students who,
wishing to join in the movement, have undertaken on their own
initiative to organize Menorah Societies at their colleges and
universities. Hence every Menorah[51] Society is the result of a
spontaneous desire among students to organize for Menorah purposes.

The first Menorah Society started with sixteen members. Now the total
membership of Menorah Societies approximates 3,000. The Menorah idea
is firmly implanted in leading colleges and universities throughout
the country, from Massachusetts to California.

Thus, in endeavoring to promote knowledge, culture, idealism, the
Menorah Societies are in keeping with the university spirit which has
helped to call them into existence. The Societies are an expression of
the liberality and freedom of American universities. Membership is
open to all students and instructors. College and university
authorities have heartily welcomed the Menorah Societies, have aided
them in carrying out their objects, have enhanced their influence
among the students at large, and have been most generous in
recognizing the definite contribution which the Societies make to the
intellectual and idealistic life of their universities.

Not only the university authorities, but the graduates, too, and other
public-spirited men and women outside of the universities, have warmly
welcomed the Menorah Movement. They see in it the expression of a
spontaneous and earnest desire on the part of growing numbers of
Jewish students for Jewish knowledge and idealism, for a realization
of the Jewish noblesse oblige; they see, too, that this movement is
bound at the same time to help bring about a more just and liberal
attitude on the part of university men and women in general toward the
character and ideals of their Jewish fellow-citizens.

Through the encouragement and generous support provided by a Graduate
Advisory Menorah Committee, under the chairmanship of Justice Irving
Lehman of New York, the Intercollegiate Menorah Association is being
helped materially in carrying out its objects.[52]

To begin with, it may be stated that all of the Menorah Societies
strongly encourage their members to take the regular courses in Jewish
history and literature wherever such courses are a part of the
curriculum and are devoted not so much to technical learning as to a
liberal and humane study of Jewish culture. Where such courses are not
offered—and it is unfortunately true that many institutions are
deficient in this regard—the Menorah students are creating a demand
which, it is hoped, will be met in time by the offer of appropriate
courses. It is even hoped that a number of the leading universities
will eventually have special Chairs in Jewish history and culture.

Meanwhile, however, whether to supplement or to take the place of
regular courses, the Menorah Society enables its members—or, rather,
all the members of the university who so desire—to pursue their
interest in Jewish studies in less formal manner. Thus, the Societies
have lectures on Jewish subjects by members of the faculties, or by
men from outside their universities. In this connection, the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association has been of considerable service
to the various Societies. The Association has established the Menorah
College of Lecturers, consisting of a number of Jewish scholars,
publicists, and religious leaders, who have undertaken to lecture (for
love) before the Societies. Their lectures, which are generally
followed by informal discussions, are, as a rule, open to the whole
university, and are often held not merely under the auspices of the
Menorah Society, but also in conjunction with some department of the
university, or with some other student organization. At times, the
Menorah lecturers are invited by the university authorities to address
the whole student body at assemblies and convocations.

At other Menorah meetings, the members themselves present papers and
carry on discussions upon Jewish topics of historic and literary as
well as current interest.

Not content, however, with such lectures, papers, and discussions,
most of the Societies provide their members with opportunities for
intensive and systematic study. Study groups are formed, under the
leadership of older students or of competent men from outside the
universities, for the purpose of regular study in Jewish history,
religion and literature, or contemporary Jewish conditions and
problems, or the Hebrew language, or any other special field of
interest. The work of these groups is carried on along the lines of a
regular class or seminar, though, of course, with less rigor and
formality.[53]

Perhaps the most essential requirement for carrying on Jewish study is
an adequate supply of books. Except at the larger institutions, there
has been a notable lack of Jewish books at American colleges and
universities, mainly, no doubt, because Jewish studies as a whole have
been neglected. The Intercollegiate Menorah Association has
fortunately been able to remedy these conditions to some extent at the
institutions where Menorah Societies exist. With the assistance of the
Jewish Publication Society and a number of individuals, the
Association has sent Menorah Libraries of Jewish books to the various
Menorah Societies. These books are for the use not only of Menorah
Societies, but of all the students in their universities. That the
Menorah Libraries have helped the work of the Societies, and have
added appreciably to the library facilities at the various
institutions, is abundantly shown by the gratitude expressed both by
students and authorities.

Yet the work of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association has only
begun. Its field is almost unlimited; and with constantly growing
membership, both of undergraduates and of graduates, with the
increasing encouragement and support from men and women in all parts
of the country, the Association is gathering strength for enterprises
that must prove beneficial not to universities alone, but to the
community in general. Thus, the Menorah Journal is launched this year
in response to a desire not only on the part of the students, but of
men and women throughout the country who have been wanting such a
Review of Jewish life and literature in America. Other literary
enterprises are contemplated for the future. Besides syllabi for the
study groups, pamphlet essays, and similar facilities designed
especially for students, one large scheme in mind may[54] appropriately
be mentioned here as of interest to all the readers of the Journal,
namely, the plan for the Menorah Classics. These are to be the
selected treasures of the literature of the Jewish people, from the
Bible to Bialik, printed in attractively handy form, with translations
and notes designed for the general reader as well as for students. In
this way, it is hoped to place the gems of the great store of Jewish
literature within the reach of all.

Menorah Societies, however, do not assume the character of social
organizations. Menorah Societies are all-inclusive, not exclusive;
they promote democracy, mutual respect, and understanding between
different types of Jewish students who have often in the past retained
toward one another the prejudices of their elders. The Menorah
fellowship expresses and promotes the common sentiment of all students
who have come to appreciate Jewish knowledge and ideals, who accept
their common Jewish heritage and Jewish hopes. In other words, where
in the past snobbery and spinelessness were not lacking among Jewish
students at our universities, there has grown up now a spirit of
democracy and of manly frankness, which has not escaped the
observation of older men, both within and without the universities.

But these qualities in the Jewish students of to-day have merely been
revealed by the Menorah movement. The movement has definite moral
purposes of its own. The Menorah idea embraces not merely the study
but the enhancement of the Jewish heritage. And this requires not
moral enthusiasm alone, but vision and action. To accomplish their
full purposes, the Menorah Societies endeavor to inspire their members
with the will to throw themselves into the heart of Jewish life, to
join hands with other men in the active effort to advance its
interests and solve its problems.

While this participation in Jewish life must be the personal outcome
of Menorah enthusiasm and activity—as indeed has been proven already
among students and graduates—the Menorah organization, as such,
maintains its non-partisan character. A Menorah Society is neither
orthodox nor reform, neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist, but rather an
open forum for[55] presenting and discussing every point of view, a forum
hospitable in true academic spirit to the open-minded pursuit of
truth.

But the real source of Menorah strength lies far deeper. Consciously
or unconsciously, from the very beginning of his affiliation with a
Menorah Society, the Jewish student responds to a call within himself
of noblesse oblige. It is pride of race—not vanity or brag, but a
pride conscious of its human obligation—that animates Menorah men and
women throughout the country. Knowledge and service, which may be
regarded as the very cornerstones of Jewish idealism, constitute the
twin motives of the Menorah movement.

The Menorah movement is the answer of the Jewish academic youth to the
challenge of American democracy. American institutions give us the
opportunity to develop all our capacities in freedom. The endeavor of
Menorah men is to preserve and enhance, for America and for mankind,
the best in us that may flourish in freedom, our Jewish heritage and
endowment.

[56]

From College and University

Reports from Menorah Societies

[It is not planned to have reports from all the Menorah Societies in
any single issue of the Journal. A complete list of Menorah Societies
may be found on the inside of the front cover.]

The first meeting of the year, on Monday evening, August 31, was the
finest ever held by the Society. It had been announced before the
entire student body at the University meeting in Harmon Gymnasium, and
all interested were invited to attend. Eighty men and women of the
University were present. The theme of the meeting was the Menorah
Idea. Mr. Samuel Spring, Harvard, ’09, a former member of the Harvard
Menorah Society, spoke on “The Menorah and the Community from a
Graduate’s Standpoint;” Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin of Stockton, now a
graduate student in the University, spoke on “The Menorah and the
Rabbinate,” and the chief speech of the evening was delivered by Dean
D.B. Barrows on “The University and the Menorah.” Professor Barrows
greatly approved of the organization and characterized the California
Menorah Society as the most, useful student organization on the
campus.

The second general meeting of the Society, held on September 28, was
devoted to the topic of Immigration. Professor Ira B. Cross, of the
University Economics Department and of the State Industrial Accident
Commission, delivered an excellent address on “Streams of Immigration,
Past, Present and Future.” Mr. R. J. Rosenthal, of the California
State Commission on Immigration and Housing, spoke a few words on the
Jewish side of the question. A selection from Mary Antin’s “The
Promised Land” was read. Appropriate literary and musical selections
were rendered. About fifty-five members were present.

On Monday evening, October 12, a Study Circle meeting was held. Rabbi
Edgar F. Magnin conducted a discussion on “Dominant Notes in Jewish
Poetry.” Among the poems read were the Song of Deborah, the 23d Psalm,
the Wine Song of Gabirol, selections from Emma Lazarus, and “The
Jewish Soldier” and “The Sweatshop” of Rosenfeld.

At the general meeting of the Society on Monday evening, October 26,
Rabbi Jacob Nieto of San Francisco spoke on “The Modern Viewpoint of
the Bible” to an audience of over sixty, including several non-Jews,
who were so favorably impressed with the meeting that they declared
their intention to be present at future Menorah meetings. Rabbi
Nieto’s talk stirred up a great deal of discussion among the members.
The first chapter of Isaiah and the Song of Moses were read, and there
were musical selections.

On Monday evening, November 9, Mr. Harry Hart, Assistant City
Attorney, led a discussion in the Study Circle on “Early Jewish
Philosophers.”

The last general meeting was held on Monday evening, November 30.
Professor William Popper gave a most interesting talk on “Jewish
Education,” in which he traced the history and methods of Jewish
pedagogy through the Biblical, post-Biblical and Talmudic periods.
Musical and literary numbers were rendered, the “Menorah Quartet”
making its debut at this meeting. The attendance was about sixty, of
whom ten were non-Jews.

The constitution of the club has been revised to meet the expanding
needs of[57] the Society. Three standing committees now exist. The
executive committee, composed of the four elected officers and three
other members elected by the general body, will be the administrative
arm of the club. The club’s policy is largely determined by this
committee. They decide what business is to be brought before the club
members, and they set in motion all innovations looking to the
betterment of the club.

The membership committee, composed of a chairman, appointed from the
three elected executive committee members by the President, and nine
other students, selected from the different colleges of the
University, has the duty of increasing the membership roll of the
Society. This committee began active operations in the summer.
California being a State university, its student body is made up
almost entirely of residents of California. Hence through the
assistance of Rabbis in different sections of the State, the committee
has been enabled to get in touch with many of the newcomers to the
University this fall. To them, as well as to the old members of this
Society, a circular letter was sent. The aims of the Menorah were
briefly outlined, and the dates of monthly meetings stated; the office
hours and location of several members of the Society during
registration were named, and all freshmen were advised to consult with
them for any information or aid desired.

In this way the committee has been able to reach newcomers at the
University and impress them with the Menorah idea before the entrant’s
viewpoint has been beclouded by any false attitude toward a Jewish
organization on the campus. After the college year has begun, the
committee scours the campus for those Jewish students who have not yet
been enlightened as to the work of the Menorah. The California Society
does not bow down before numbers, but it feels that the benefits of
the Menorah should be enjoyed by the largest possible number of Jewish
students.

Upon the third committee, however, the Social committee, which plans
the programs, rests the major responsibility for the Club’s success.
Taking the Harvard plan as a pattern, the California Menorah[58] has
created what is for the present called the Menorah Study Circle. This
meets bi-weekly. On the other hand, a general meeting of the Society
as a whole is held every month. These general meetings are more
popular in nature, for the many elements of the Jewish body must here
be conciliated, as well as those of non-Jewish faith who are
interested in the purposes of the Menorah. Due to the complex and
many-sided character of the Jewish student group, a concession to the
various interests must be made in the form of a cultural-social
program for the evening. Lecturers are secured; informal discussion is
encouraged; musical and literary programs are arranged—all, of
course, in the effort to present in attractive form such cultural
material as the diverse elements in the body of Jewish students can
absorb.

The Study Circle meetings have a different viewpoint. They are of a
more specialized nature. Through them the serious phases of the club’s
activity are furthered. The personnel of the Circle is made up of
those who are seriously interested in the distinctly intellectual work
of the Club. The demand for the Study Circle arose spontaneously from
these students. A faculty member, or Rabbi, or outside scholar, is
occasionally asked to present an address. Discussion follows. Jewish
literary, religious, economic and social problems are thus handled.

The recent arrival of the Menorah Library has greatly pleased the
members. The books will be a great aid in the work of the Society. The
attention of all the students in the University is being called to the
Library by a statement in the Daily Californian and by other means.
Efforts are now being made to introduce a Menorah prize for the best
essay on a Jewish subject.

Though we organized late in the year, we succeeded in having several
large meetings at which addresses were delivered by men who are
authorities in their respective subjects. At the initial meeting,
preliminary to organization, Dr. David Philipson, ’83, spoke, and Dean
F. W. Chandler of the College of Liberal Arts cordially welcomed the
Society. The first meeting after our organization was addressed by
Professor Julian Morgenstern of the Hebrew Union College, who spoke on
“The Judaism of the Future.” Addresses at subsequent meetings were
delivered by Mr. A. J. Kinsella of the Greek Department of the
University of Cincinnati on “The Greek and the Semite in the World’s
Civilization;” by Dr. Edward Mack, Professor of Old Testament at the
Lane Theological Seminary, on “The Influence of Hebrew Literature on
the World’s Thought and Literature”; and by Rabbi Louis L. Mann of New
Haven, Conn., on “Christian Science and Judaism.” These meetings had
an average attendance of seventy.

Among the meetings held so far this year the most important was on the
evening of November 19th. Chancellor Henry Hurwitz of the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association delivered an address on the
purposes of the Menorah movement, to which President Charles W. Dabney
of the University responded, heartily welcoming the Menorah Society to
the University and extending a cordial invitation to the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association to hold its next annual Convention
at the University. (The address of President Dabney is printed above,
page 47). Dr. David Philipson spoke on the significance of the
Menorah, and lighted a large Menorah on the platform. Music was
rendered by the Girls’ Glee Club. Dean F. W. Chandler sent the
following greeting:

“With the modern drift of attention[60] away from the classics and away
from the Bible, it behooves those of us who would count as the friends
of culture to welcome every effort to stimulate interest in either.
The Menorah Societies which are finding a place in our chief
universities have assumed a laudable task. They are striving to hold
before the minds of the youth of this land the fine ideals of the
ancient Hebrew literature. In such efforts they should be encouraged
by Jew and Gentile alike. For we are all heirs of Hebrew tradition; we
are all brothers engaged in a common undertaking. We believe it to be
our duty to learn from the past whatever is best, to the end that we
may enrich with that knowledge the present and the future. We welcome
therefore all that the Menorah Society can give us of inspiration
toward making the most of our heritage. We rejoice that through this
agency we may be kept constantly aware of what a great people has
contributed to our civilization.”

The Cincinnati Menorah Society is delighted that the Association has
accepted the invitation of President Dabney to hold the next
Convention at this University. Preparations are now being made for the
Convention and for the entertainment not only of the delegates but of
all Menorah men and women who will come. We ardently hope to welcome a
large number of our fellow-Menorah members.

It will be of interest to relate that, after reading a copy of “The
Menorah Movement,” Miss E. McVea, Dean of Women and Assistant
Professor of English, suggested the following three subjects for
twenty-page essays in one of her English classes: “The Contribution of
the Jew to Civilization,” “The Integrity of the Jewish Race,” and
“Zionism.”

Early in the year Mr. Louis D. Brandeis of Boston spoke under the
auspices of the Menorah Society at a meeting open to the whole
University upon “The New Science of Efficiency”—the subject being
chosen at the request of President Dabney. In introducing the speaker
President Dabney expressed the indebtedness of the Faculty to the
Menorah for the pleasure of having Mr. Brandeis at the University.

[61]

Our plan for the organization of the graduates as associate members is
the same as Harvard’s. But their dues are disposed of in a different
way: out of the two dollars one goes to our Library Fund, and the
other is sent to the Menorah Journal as the associate’s subscription,
for we feel that this is the best way to keep him in touch with
Menorah activities. This system has a further advantage in that it
spreads the Journal everywhere.

There were held during the past year thirty regular meetings and
lectures—one each week. At the meetings the average attendance was
36, at the lectures 155. The principal lecturers were: Professor M. M.
Kaplan, “The Menorah Idea”; Professor Richard Gottheil, “Jews in
Various Lands”; Mr. Jacob H. Schiff, “Zionism and Jewish Nationality”;
Professor[62] A. Marks, “Persecutions of the Jews in the Middle Ages”;
Rev. Dr. David de Sola Pool, “Jewish Education”; Professor Israel
Davidson, “Hebrew Literature”; Rev. Dr. M. A. Hyamson, “The Mishnah”;
Rev. Dr. Harry S. Lewis of London, “The Jews and Democracy”; Rev. Dr.
H. P. Mendes, “Traditional Judaism”; Professor Stephen P. Duggan,
“Tradition as a Static and Dynamic Force”; Rev. Dr. Stephen S. Wise,
“What’s Wrong with the Jew?”

There were four courses taught. The average attendance at a course was
16. Rabbi Nathan Blechman led the course in “An Extensive Study of the
Bible,” Professor M. M. Kaplan taught “Essentials of Judaism,” and
Rabbi Samuel Margoshes gave the course in “Jewish Philosophy and
Literature.” At the request of a number of students a course in
“Elementary Hebrew” was also given for a time.

Two social meetings were held during the year. The first was a
reception in the vestry rooms of the Temple Beth-el tendered us by the
Menorah Society of Hunter College (formerly Normal), in recognition of
our help in the organization of their Society. The second was a
“smoker” held at the College in the Faculty lunch-room. The guests of
the occasion were Professor Israel Friedlaender of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, Professor A. J. Goldfarb of the College, and
Rev. Dr. D. de Sola Pool.

For the first semester this year, four regular Wednesday evening
meetings have been scheduled, four public lectures, six study circles,
and four courses. The courses—”Modern Movements in Judaism” (one
hour), “Elementary Hebrew” (two hours), “Post-Biblical History” (one
hour), and an “Extensive Study of the Bible” (one hour)—will be
conducted by Rabbis Stephen S. Wise, J. L. Magnes, Max Reichler,
Rudolph Grossman, Maurice Harris, C. H. Levy, H. S. Goldstein, and A.
Robinson. The study circles, which will meet once a week, under the
leadership of Dr. Joseph I. Gorfinkle and Dr. A. Basel, will read the
“Essays of Ahad Ha-‘Am,” Schechter’s “Studies in Judaism,” the “Book
of Job,” the “Book of Jeremiah,” “Pirke Aboth,” and the “Five
Scrolls.”[63]

With the respect and co-operation of the student body, the faculty,
and the alumni, the prestige of our Menorah bids fair to increase
until, it is hoped, it will not be exceeded by that of any other City
College organization.

The first meeting of the year, on October 7, was very successful. It
was attended by more than eighty students and several members of the
faculty. The meeting was devoted to an exposition of the purposes and
ideals of the Menorah movement. Professor W. A. Hurwitz and Professor
Hays spoke very enthusiastically of the accomplishments and the hopes
of the Cornell Menorah Society. About thirty new members were
enrolled, bringing our membership list up to one hundred. This number
includes five members of the faculty and about a score of graduates.
Several men who had come to the meeting to scoff stayed to enroll. The
subsequent meetings have also been well attended. Our organization is
gaining greater and greater prestige on the campus.[64]

In the plans for this year, the work of study circles has been
particularly emphasized. As compared with two circles last year,
meeting more or less irregularly, we have at present six circles
meeting very regularly and doing really splendid work. More than half
of our members are now enrolled in one or several of these circles.
The subjects of study are: (1) Elementary Hebrew, (2) Advanced Hebrew,
(3) The Bible, (4) Jewish History, (5) Sociological Problems of the
Jews, and (6) Zionism. Though we have been feeling very keenly the
need of suitable syllabi and text books, each circle has chosen the
texts considered most suitable and available for its purpose. Most of
the men have bought their own text books, and have subscribed to
various Jewish periodicals. Thus, the beginners in Hebrew are using
Manheimer as a text; the members of the advanced Hebrew circle are
also using the Bible as a text and have each subscribed to the
Hatoren (a Hebrew monthly of New York). The Bible circle is also
using the Bible as its text, and the Hebrew and Bible circles
contemplate procuring jointly several Jewish Commentaries, like those
of Rashi and Kimchi, for general reference in the University Library.
The circle in Zionism is using Professor Gottheil’s book, and the
members have each subscribed to The Maccabæan. The history circle
has recently decided to use Dubnow’s Essay as a text. It may be
mentioned here that the books of the Menorah Library are receiving
very good circulation and the standard reference works, such as
Graetz, Ginsburg, Schechter, and others, have been of great value to
the members of the study circles in their work. It is hoped that a
number of Jewish periodicals may also be made available in the
University Library.

It is planned to hold meetings of the Cornell Menorah Society in
conjunction with one or two other university organizations for several
lecturers whom we expect through the courtesy of the Intercollegiate
Menorah Association. One meeting in particular that is planned for the
future may be noted. Annually, in February, occurs what is known as
Farmers’[65] Week in Ithaca. During the week thousands of farmers from
all over the country visit the College of Agriculture, where a most
elaborate program is arranged for their benefit, consisting of
lectures, demonstrations, exhibits, and addresses on the various
phases of agriculture and country life. Last year, Mr. Joseph M.
Pincus, Editor of The Jewish Farmer, addressed a large audience
under the joint auspices of the Menorah Society and the College of
Agriculture on “The Jew as a Farmer.” The lecture was illustrated with
a fine selection of lantern slides, and the meeting as a whole was
very successful. In planning for the coming year, we have tried to
emphasize even more strongly than last year our part in the program
for Farmers’ Week. Mr. Pincus has kindly consented to come again, and
probably we shall also have Mr. Leonard G. Robinson, General Manager
of the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society, who will speak
on “Jewish Agricultural Co-operative Associations.”

We are now trying to make arrangements for our Society to take care of
an exhibit which will show by charts, photographs, and other suitable
material, the activities of the various Jewish agricultural
organizations and the progress of Jewish farmers in America within
recent years. It may be of interest to add that as a direct result of
the Menorah meeting last year during Farmers’ Week, one of the
students was appointed by the Extension Department of the College of
Agriculture to go out with an “educational train” during the summer
and carry on certain extension work among the Jewish farmers of New
York State.

The plans for this year include as usual a series of fortnightly
lectures by men of learning and prominence. Among the speakers for the
first half year are Dr. Cyrus Adler of Philadelphia, Professor Richard
Gottheil of New York, Mr. Samuel Strauss of New York, Dr. A. A. Neuman
of Philadelphia, Dr. Martin A. Meyer of San Francisco, Dr. D. de Sola
Pool and Dr. S. Benderly of New York. In addition, there are planned
three study circles, each of which will meet every alternate week. One
of these circles is to be devoted to Jewish history, another to the
study of the Hebrew language, and the third to the consideration of
modern Jewish problems.

The prospects for this year are even brighter than ever before. The
enthusiasm is as great as it has ever been, and the membership will
undoubtedly exceed all past records.

It is of interest to note that more and more members of Menorah
Societies at other Universities all over the country continue their
Menorah activities in our Society when they come to study in the
graduate departments of Harvard University.

During the first year of its existence,[67] under the leadership of its
first President, Miss Selma Blechman, and the hearty support of its
members, the corner-stone for its present greater work was laid. A
program of lectures was planned to be held on the third Friday of
every month. The lectures were to cover the several periods of Jewish
history from ancient to modern times. This was done with great
success.

This year, in addition to the lectures, the Society is planning to
give courses in (1) Hebrew, (2) Jewish History, and (3) the Bible.
This project has met with the hearty approval of both the President
and the Dean, and the Menorah hopes to enter soon upon active work in
these subjects.

A word about the membership of the Hunter Menorah must be said. When
the Society started it had a membership of one hundred, of whom ninety
were active members. It now has about twice that number, with an
active membership of one hundred.

The Society has acquired such repute that students who are not members
attend the lectures and are very enthusiastic about them. Indeed, the
Hunter College Menorah sees before it a very rosy future.

At the recent Bazaar given by the College Athletic Association for the
Red Cross Relief Fund, the Society had a booth and sold appropriate
articles, like brass Menorahs, books and small Hebrew scrolls, objects
of Jewish art, and candy and almonds from Palestine, thus adding a
considerable sum to the Fund. Besides, the members have contributed
over $100 for Jewish relief in Palestine.

The rejuvenated Menorah Society enjoyed this period of prosperity only
for a few months when a new organization for Jewish spiritual
development at the University was formed. It calls itself the Jewish
Student Congregation, and its aim, as distinguished from the Menorah
goal of cultural research, is purely religious. The weekly prayer
meeting, marked by sermon and ceremony, is now offered to the Jewish
students in addition to the weekly study circle of the cultural
society.

However true or untrue may be the oft-repeated statement that the
Menorah has blazed the way for the Congregation, it still remains a
fact that the new organization was not confronted with the difficulty
of gaining a following, such as the parent Jewish society had
experienced. Though the attendance of the Congregation shaded off
quite considerably the last few months of its first year, there were
always enough to show their appreciation by their presence at the
services and to guarantee the continuation of the services in the
future. One noteworthy fact calls for special mention here—a certain
group of students seemed to be more religious than devoted to cultural
interests. Only a few of this class, however, were really inspired by
a religious zeal; for there were some who expressed this preference
because there still rankled in their thoughts the stigma which a few
thoughtless pioneers had allowed to attach itself to the Menorah in
the early days of its formation.

That the Congregation would appeal to a certain number was evident
from the first. The Jewish service was fraught with that sociable
spirit which became more lacking in the Menorah the more it devoted
itself to its primary motives of research and investigation into
Jewish history, culture and ideals. Though there unquestionably exists
a strong feeling of fellowship in the Menorah, it cannot compare with
the atmosphere of fraternalism in a religious meeting.

Moreover, the student can come to the Congregation to relax. He can
sit back passively and draw inspiration from the[69] service. But a
Menorah meeting is virtually a class-room lacking a few formalities.
There the student must actively discuss the problems placed before
him; he must earnestly dig for the Pierian waters before he can hope
to quench his thirst.

The average Jewish student comes to Michigan wofully ignorant of
matters pertaining to Judaism. Many of them have been reared in small
towns, where the efforts of parents to train their children in Jewish
ways, if tried at all, barely passes the first two or three pages of
the “Siddur”; while those who have been raised in the city are
generally the victims of the lax system of Jewish training prevalent
there. At the most they have only a superficial knowledge of Jewish
culture, of the great Jewish movements of the past and present. The
Synagogue or Temple represents to the mind of the average Jewish
student all that there is in Jewry; and so, while he will readily and
voluntarily support a movement for the establishment of the Jewish
church, he will have to be persuaded to help or join an organization
devoted to Jewish culture. For in the latter case he must first be
made to understand that there are other vital forces in Israel than
the Jewish church as it stands to-day in its conventional form.

The Menorah at Michigan faces the problem of attracting that element,
forming the big majority of the student body, which, though it proudly
upholds the high scholastic standard generally credited to the Jewish
student, still has its eyes closed and its brains dulled to many of
the vital Jewish problems which press for solution. With the
co-operation of the Intercollegiate Menorah office, the Society is
gradually molding the sentiment of the individual student toward a
more intelligent and favorable attitude. That the Menorah is already a
vital force on the campus may be seen from the work being done, the
zeal and enthusiasm displayed by the officers and members, many of
them among the University leaders. Those who formerly scorned or stood
aloof, including some who were in the position to mold student
sentiment, have begun to show a sympathetic interest, bordering in
many instances on actual participation.[70]

The Jewish Student Congregation does not conflict in any way with the
Menorah Society. There is room for both on the campus. Each has its
own purpose. Menorah members participate in the conduct and the
services of the Congregation.

The plans of the Society this year look more than ever before to an
intensive study of Jewish subjects by the students themselves.
Although various outside speakers will be asked to address the
Society, the bulk of the work will rest with the student body.

Each of these Societies has its own officers, and each is active in
its own section. The Executive Councils of both Societies meet jointly
as a Board of Governors at least once in two months. This Board
directs Menorah work pertaining to the whole University, at the same
time considering the problems arising in the work of each Society.

The University Heights chapter is the older, having been organized
December 22, 1913. Its membership is about 75 at this time, and an
increase to 100 is expected by the end of the present academic year.
Formed by the zeal of some twenty-five men, and looked upon at its
inception with indifference by the college community, it has made
itself respected at University Heights and has become, young as it is,
an institution in the college life.

Its work during the first half-year was directed chiefly to the
internal strengthening of the Society, the increasing of its
membership and the institution of smooth working machinery of
administration. At the same time, however, the Society offered a
number of valuable lectures which attracted wide interest. Among the
speakers of that half-year may be mentioned Professor Israel
Friedlaender, Dr. Madison C. Peters, and Dr. Theodore F. Jones of the
faculty.

The activities of the University Heights Menorah Society for this year
are extensive. It has arranged a program of lectures, among which may
be mentioned the following: “The Talmud,” by Dr. Clifton H. Levy; “The
Jew in English Literature,” by Dean Archibald L. Bouton; “The Jews in
Medieval Spain,” by Dr. D. de Sola Pool; “Conservative Judaism,” by
Dr. Jacob Kohn; “Historical Beginnings of Christianity,” by Dr. A. H.
Limouze; “Reform Judaism,” by Dr. Isaac Moses. Besides these lectures,
some meetings are devoted to discussions by members of such subjects
as Zangwill’s “Melting Pot,” “Zionism,” and others of current
interest.

The Society does not limit its work to these meetings. It conducts
regularly, every Thursday evening, classes in elementary Hebrew and in
Post-Biblical History, and on Tuesday afternoons a class in Advanced
Hebrew and the reading of Hebrew Literature. The Thursday evening
class in Hebrew is under the direction of Dr. Max Reichler. The course
in History is divided into several periods, and as the course proceeds
to a new period in the history a different instructor takes the class.
Among the men giving the course are Dr. M. H. Harris, Dr. Reichler,
Dr. Moses Hyamson, and Dr. Joseph Gorfinkle. The class in Advanced
Hebrew is conducted by Mr. Max Kadushin of the Jewish Theological
Seminary.

Through the kindness of the Jewish Publication Society of America and
the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, and by its own additions, the
Society has placed a collection of books in the University library,
which, according to the Librarian’s statement, is used more frequently
than is any other collection of books placed in the library by a
society.

All these activities have caused favorable interest on the part of the
student body, faculty, and college authorities. Aside from these
academic efforts, the Society has made its members feel something of a
social friendliness toward each other and has brought together men who
might otherwise not have come in contact at all.

The Society at Washington Square promises an exceedingly good future.
At the present writing it is only several weeks old, but it already
has a membership of over one hundred and fifty. Judging from the
strong beginning it has made, it is bound to become a factor in its
section of the University.

The new University library opened its doors this year, and we are
greatly indebted to our beloved friend, Mr. Joseph Schonthal, of
Columbus, for placing upon the shelves a set of the Jewish
Encyclopedia; and to the University, the Intercollegiate Menorah
Association, and the Jewish Publication Society for books and
periodicals. The trustees of the University considered our proposition
for the establishment of a chair in Jewish History and Culture, but it
was agreed that conditions were not yet ripe for this move. These
several undertakings, in connection with the entertainments, held the
members steadily interested throughout the year. The bi-monthly
meetings, the programs of which were made up by the members
themselves, were inspiring and beneficial.

A successful close was marked by a “Farewell Banquet” to the seniors,
among whom were several of our best workers—pioneers of our Society.
Of the guests present, only our old friend Dean Orton made an address.
He was greatly impressed with the work of our Society, and assured us
that the faculty is in full sympathy with our aims.

With the passing of a good year we are looking forward to a still
better one, and are predicting a big year for Menorah work. Such men
as Dr. J. Leonard Levy, Dr. Washington Gladden, Dr. Moses J. Gries,
Prof. I. Leo Sharfman, Dr. David Philipson, and Dr. Louis Wolsey are
among the speakers this year.

Our program committee has been working up attractive plans, and expect
to carry out discussions and studies in Jewish history, literature and
problems. The social part of our program is taken care of as the year
progresses, and forms only so much of our work as is justifiable to
keep the members together.

The Ohio State Menorah takes this opportunity of extending its best
wishes to the other Menorah Societies and of expressing its perfect
readiness to co-operate with them. The members will eagerly welcome
the first number of the Menorah Journal, both for its own sake and as
a means of strengthening the bonds with the other Menorahs.

Among those who addressed us last year were Dr. Cyrus Adler, ’83,
President of the Dropsie College; Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, Chancellor of
the Jewish Chautauqua Society, on the “New Teaching of Religion”; Dr.
Henry M. Speaker, Principal of Gratz College, on “Jewish Literature”;
Rabbi Haas of the Baron de Hirsch School, on “Woodbine, a Jewish
Town”; Dr. Isaac Husik of the Semitic Faculty, on “Philosophic
Movements of Medieval Jewry”; and Dr. Henry Malter of the Dropsie
College, on “The Written and the Oral Law.”

In addition to the regular meetings we have been for the past three
years conducting a Jewish Discussion Group, led by Rabbi Marvin Nathan
of this city, which has proved very popular. The group meets at the
noon hour and attracts also non-Menorah men, women students, and
liberal-minded non-Jews. This year in order to accommodate the
students whose schedules prevent their attending this group, we expect
to institute another to be conducted either like the present or in
such a way as to utilize the services of the Rabbis and other
prominent Jews of Philadelphia.

Our policy this year concerning new members differs decidedly from
that of the past. While we are by no means more restrictive or
exclusive than heretofore, we feel that the method of “rushing” men
into membership is psychologically wrong. It cheapens the organization
in the eyes of non-members and thereby defeats its own end. Instead of
attempting to cajole freshmen into joining, we shall endeavor to
attract the serious-minded men on the campus by the quality of our
programs and the variety of our activities. With the strong men in,
the others will follow, and in this way our membership will be one of
both quality and quantity.

Another innovation this year will be the acceptance of women students
as members. The attitude of the University toward mixed membership in
organizations that meet on the campus has been unfavorable and as a
result women students have been admitted only to the Discussion Group
and to public meetings. Their wholesale application for admission into
the Society, however, prompted us to intervene in their behalf, and in
view of the seriousness of our purpose the authorities consented to
make the exception. Hereafter, therefore, we shall be able to offer
membership, on an equal footing, to all students.

Although our attention this year will be directed mainly to intensive
work, the Menorah will continue to act unofficially as the medium
between the Jewish students here and local communal activities. In a
quiet way, also, we intend to exert our influence upon local Jewish
organizations so as to induce them to take a more active interest in
Jewish affairs. They will be invited to attend our public meetings and
assistance will be offered them in arranging programs along Jewish
lines. We shall further offer to furnish them with speakers from among
our members.

A real need of our Menorah, and probably of other Menorahs, is some
extra incentive to induce the writing of Jewish papers. The
establishment here of a Menorah Prize would, we feel confident, work
wonders in stimulating interest in Jewish problems. We look forward to
the early filling of this need.

Of our work this year we are very optimistic. Several papers have
already been prepared by members and others are promised. A number of
notable men, including Provost Edgar F. Smith, of our University, and
Professor David W. Amram, ’87, of the Law Faculty, will give us
addresses. We are in addition organizing a Menorah Orchestra with the
idea primarily of presenting to the public the best Jewish music, and
we hope in this way to combine business with pleasure.

As is quite natural, our organization did not at first strike all the
Jewish students as something worth while, but in a comparatively short
time we found that ninety per cent. of the Jewish students of the
College were members, and that our attendance for the past year
averaged thirty-five out of a possible forty.

Our meetings are held every Sunday morning from ten to twelve o’clock.
Our constitution states that any member who absents himself for three
consecutive meetings without a legitimate excuse is automatically
expelled. Thus far no man has been expelled. Members of the Menorah
Society are excused from the chapel by the Dean, provided they attend
all the Menorah meetings.

Our Society has also striven to get desirable lecturers. Owing to our
limited treasury, we must depend upon the Intercollegiate Association
for support, else we can make but very little headway.

The Menorah Library has proved a big boon, for practically every man
is making use of the books for his own reading and in the preparation
of papers for our meetings.

We were very fortunate in having been offered the services of
Professor O. F. Boucke as a lecturer for the Society and as teacher of
a special course of study on the Old Testament. Professor Boucke’s
assistance is bound to add materially to the prestige of the Menorah
on the campus. At an early meeting this year we had a most interesting
and inspiring talk by President Sparks, who is taking a deep interest
in the Menorah movement.

It is our belief that the Menorahs in colleges and universities that
are isolated from the large cities (a good example of which is Penn
State) are bound to have by far the greater success, because the
students enjoy more opportunity of being together and doing more
things in common. In our Menorah Society the Jewish students find
their chance not only to study things Jewish in common, but to come
together and exchange their thoughts on all subjects in which they are
interested.

Rabbi Henry Cohen, speaking eloquently on “Judaism as a Factor in
Modern Life,” took up each one of the Ten Commandments and summarized
their influence on society to-day. A poem written especially for the
occasion was read by Mr. Israel Chasmin, and piano selections were
rendered by Miss Beatrice Burg and Miss Minna Rypinski. The program
closed with the installation of officers for the year 1914-15.

We lost ten members by graduation last June, but our membership has
none the less increased on account of the greater number of Jewish
students at the University this year.

The opening meeting of the year was attended by fifty out of the
fifty-eight Jewish students. In enthusiasm it resembled a football
rally, and the new students caught the spirit of the occasion. Since
then a number of other meetings have been held, with an average
attendance of forty. At the first meeting, Professor L. M. Keasby of
the Department of Institutional History gave an eminently just
interpretation of Jewish history from the point of view of the
economic development of mankind. At the next meeting, Israel Chasmin
reviewed Dubnow’s Essay on Jewish History. At the last meeting, Rabbi
J. Bornstein of Houston, Texas, spoke on Jewish Music. We are looking
forward to an illustrated lecture by Professor Gideon of the
Department of Architecture on “The Architecture of the Synagogue, Past
and Present.”

Through the fund for local speakers which we are raising and through
the aid of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, we hope to have a
speaker at least every month for the rest of the year.

The Menorah Library which we have received through the Intercollegiate
Menorah Association is greatly appreciated by the University and will
be of much help in the work of the Society.

And so members of the Menorah Society joined the Jewish lodges in
Seattle, Jewish synagogues, and the “Modern Hebrew School,” so that
they might effect their objects both from within as individual members
and from without as the Menorah Society. Our members volunteered to
teach at the Modern Hebrew School, an orthodox institution, one day in
the week. The offer was accepted gladly and greatly appreciated. At
the same school, a class was conducted by one of our members for the
instruction of Jewish men in the fundamentals of citizenship, and over
twelve of this class passed the examinations and secured their
citizenship papers. Another member organized an athletic club among
Jewish boys, and still another member did much valuable work at the
Settlement House.

At the meetings of the Society, which were held in the quarters of
Jewish organizations downtown and at members’ homes, papers bearing on
Jewish questions were read.

During the past summer it was felt that by affiliating with the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association greater impetus would be given to
our Society, and steps have already been taken for admittance into
that body. President Henry Landes of the University has expressed, I
believe, the favorable attitude of the whole University toward the
Society, as shown in the letter quoted below.

This year we shall devote more time to the study of Jewish culture and
ideals. A course of lectures is being arranged which will bring noted
Jewish men of the Pacific Coast to our University. It is hoped also
that we may have the benefit of speakers from the Intercollegiate
Menorah Association. Of course, the work we began last year down town
will be kept up, but it will now be done unofficially.

In the past, the programs have been of a diverse nature, many phases
of Hebrew life and letters having been touched upon. The program
committee has put forth special efforts to assign to members those
subjects in which they have special interest.

The work of the past year came to a close with a large banquet, at
which Professor I. Leo Sharfman, Judge Max Pam of Chicago, and
Professor Joseph Jastrow and Dr. H. M. Kallen of the Faculty of the
University of Wisconsin gave short talks.

Although the Wisconsin Menorah may be said to be still in its infancy,
there is no doubt that, with its membership, which includes both men
and women, steadily increasing, it will soon be ranked high among the
Menorah Societies of the Middle West.

Professor Kent said:—”It is a great pleasure for me to face the work
of the new year with you, and it is a source of congratulation that
the Menorah is no longer an innovation but an established institution
at Yale. It seems a pity that Jews do not inherit Hebrew as a
birthright, but fortunately the study of Hebrew history and ideals
can proceed without this knowledge.

“Men must appropriate old ideas and interpret them into the terms of
modern life and thought, for in the old we find the germ of the new.
It is in Jewish history that we must look for the first true
commonwealth or democracy, where the king was chosen by the people and
where his authority was derived solely from and rested in the people.
This has no ancient parallel, not even in Greece. International peace
was also one of the great fundamental teachings of the prophets of
Israel.

“Religious education is to be traced directly to the Jews,—and this
is one of the great needs of America to-day. Not to the Greeks but to
the prophets do we turn for religious education. Hebrew sages were the
forerunners of the modern religious education movement, for they
devoted their time to developing the moral and spiritual ideals and
character of the individual. And then the great teacher of Nazareth
was a Rabbi, a Jew. The social motif is exceedingly strong throughout
Jewish history and literature. Social justice, social service, and the
universal brotherhood of man are the dominant ideas in the Old
Testament, and they constitute a heritage of priceless value to the
world and to our country to-day.

“All success and joy to you in your work, for the Menorah fills a
large gap in the life of the University.”

We hold lecture meetings fortnightly. Among the speakers thus far have
been Professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia University and Mr. Samuel
Strauss of New York. In addition to these regular meetings study
groups have been planned under the direction of Rabbi Louis L. Mann of
the Temple Mishkan Israel of New Haven.

Mr. Norman Winestine who was last spring elected President for this
year has been awarded a fellowship at the Dropsie College of
Philadelphia and has therefore left the University. Mr. Charles Cohen
has been chosen President to take Mr. Winestine’s place.

Notes

Of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association

The Third Annual Convention of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association
took place at the University of Cincinnati on Wednesday and Thursday,
December 23 and 24, 1914. A report will be published in the next
number of the Journal.

The Harvard Menorah Society Prize of $100, established by Mr. Jacob H.
Schiff of New York, was awarded last May to Henry Epstein, ’16, for an
essay on “The Jews of Russia.” The judges were Professor David Gordon
Lyon of Harvard, chairman; Professor William R. Arnold of Harvard, and
President Solomon Schechter of the Jewish Theological Seminary. This
is the seventh award of the Harvard Menorah Society prize since its
foundation in 1907-8. (For the list of previous awards, see The
Menorah Movement, 1914, page 102.)

The Wisconsin Menorah Society Prize of $100, established in 1911-12 by
Mr. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago, was awarded for the first time, in
1912, to Marvin M. Lowenthal (adult special student in Letters and
Science) for an essay on “The Jew in the American Revolution.” There
was no competition in 1912-13, but last year the prize was divided
into two equal parts and awarded to Hemendra Kisor Rakshir (senior in
Letters and Science) for an essay on “The Jews and the Interest Rate
in Angevin England,” and Percy B. Shostac (senior in Letters and
Science) for an essay on “A Short Survey of the Modern Yiddish Stage.”
The prize for 1913-14 was awarded again to Marvin M. Lowenthal for an
essay on “Zionism.” The Committee of Award consists of Professor R. E.
N. Dodge, chairman, Professor E. B. McGilvary, and Professor M. S.
Slaughter, of the University of Wisconsin. The chairman has stated
that the Menorah prize is the best prize offered by the University of
Wisconsin.

The Michigan Menorah Society Prize of $100 was established in 1912 by
Mr. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago, but was not awarded the first year.
Last year three prizes of $50 each were awarded, one to Paul
Blanshard, ’14, for an essay on “The Approach of Reformed Judaism to
the Unitarian Movement in the United States,” one to Miss Judith
Ginsburg, ’15, for an essay on “Disintegrating Forces in Contemporary
Jewish Life,” and one to Miss Sadie Robinson, ’15, for a general
discussion of Jewish problems upon the text of Proverbs 30, 13. The
judges were Professor Robert E. Wenly, chairman, and Professor I. Leo
Sharfman of the University of Michigan, and Rabbi Leo M. Franklin of
Detroit, Mich.

The Cornell Menorah Society offers this year the following prizes to
the undergraduates of the University: a prize of $25 for the best
essay on any subject relating to the status and the problems of the
Jews in any country; a prize of $25 for the best essay on any subject
relating to Jewish literature in English; and a prize of $25 for the
best essay or poem in Hebrew. The judges will be Professor Nathaniel
Schmidt of Cornell University, chairman; Professor M. M. Kaplan of the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Professor I. Leo Sharfman
of the University of Michigan.

The Harvard Menorah Society has made a gift of $50 to the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association. The sum is taken from the
Associate Membership Fund of the Society. This Fund consists of the
dues of associate members (graduates), “which shall be used
exclusively for the substantive work of the Society” (Harvard Menorah
Constitution, Article IV, section 4). The control of this Fund is in
the hands of an advisory committee, consisting of the President of the
Society and two associate members designated by the Executive Council
of the Society.

[71]

the
Menorah Journal

For Small Mercies

By Israel Zangwill

[72]

From Across the Seas

From Dr. Max Nordau

From Dr. Moses Gaster

There is no limit to which the light cannot reach and there will be no
limit, I hope, to the light which you will now spread. It will reach
the remotest corner of the universities and schools of learning, nay,
even more, it will bring everywhere a measure of knowledge and of
truth, and above all it will illumine and warm. It will reach the eyes
of those who have hitherto refused to see the beauty of their own past
and the greatness of their own future. They may then learn to live in
the present by the teaching of the past and by the hope of the future.
Make both known.

In conclusion, I can only express the wish that you keep steadily and
exclusively to Jewish questions, Jewish problems, Jewish learning.
Make your readers know what they can find in Jewish literature and
make the students of the various universities realize that in the
libraries of Europe and America there are vast treasures accumulated
which await the hand and the heart of the Jewish scholars. There are
great and grave problems which await solution and the field is
unlimited. Let them begin to till the ground of our own field, and
turn the furrows and sow the seed, and the golden harvest is sure to
repay them for their labor in the service of love and truth, and above
all of devotion to Judaism.

From Norman Bentwich

The Jewish people stand on the brink of a new era in which they are to
resume their true function of the spiritual teacher of mankind. And[74]
American Jewry, it is a truism to say, has a vital and a leading part
to play in moulding the destiny of the Jewish people. So we may adapt
the old Rabbinic saying: “He who saves the soul of a single Jewish
student is as though he saved the world.” The Menorah Journal in
holding up the light of the Jewish spirit to the young men and women
of America is doing the work of humanity.

May I express the hope that the Menorah Societies will direct the gaze
of their members to the land of promise and the land of the prophets,
where the inspiration of Judaism has always come and whither the hopes
of Jewry have always turned. Living as I do, in the reflection of
Palestine as well as in the shadow of the Pyramids, I am very
conscious of the need for a continued Passover from the ideas of the
various Egypts that beset the Jewish people to the message that calls
us, in spirit if not in body, to the land of our fathers. To-day in
Palestine the light has begun to shine brightly again. Judaism has
relit there its prophetic lamp, which in centuries of stress and
darkness has never been permitted to fade away altogether. In our own
time the Menorah has been re-established in the Temple of the land by
a new band of Maccabees. But a single branch, so to say, of the seven
branches as yet shows its clear light. But if the Jewish youth wills
it, the whole Menorah may be lighted and shine full and clear to the
world with fresh lustre. In our day there may be a new Hanukka, a
rededication of the Hebraic light—if only we will it.

[75]

The Jewish Problem Today

By Jacob H. Schiff

JACOB HENRY SCHIFF (born in Frankfort-on-the-Main,
Germany, in 1847, came to America in 1865), one of the world’s leading
bankers (senior member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York), and a prince of
philanthropists, noted for his personal devotion and munificent gifts
to many causes for human betterment. He was among the first to
encourage and befriend the Menorah movement, founding in 1907 the
annual Menorah Society Prize at Harvard. The present article forms the
approved substance of an interview granted by Mr. Schiff to the
Editors of The Menorah Journal on March 4, 1915. Mr. Schiff’s
statement regarding the need for a separate Jewish Relief Fund is
given special significance by the fact that he is Treasurer of the
American Red Cross.

According to the latest reports, the conditions are not being improved
in any way. And the relief so far has been entirely inadequate. It has
never been adequate. We need millions for the immediate relief of our
brethren, and so far only about half a million has been forthcoming
from American Jews. This in spite of the fact that all parties and
factions in Jewry are acting together in the work of relief, except
only one organization, the B’nai B’rith, and for this there is some
reason, because the B’nai B’rith have their own lodges abroad and they
want evidently to apply their relief to their own members first.

Beyond the immediate measures for relief we can for the present do
nothing. We must act from day to day. As the war goes on we must
simply keep on trying to relieve the distress. As to what is in store
after the war, I am unable to form a picture, at least so far as
Russia is concerned. The hope is expressed that when peace is restored
Russia will do better than heretofore for her large Jewish population.
But we have been disappointed so often by Russia’s promises that we
should believe this only when actually done and not before. I have
little confidence at all in the assertion that Russia will mend her
way in the future.

The situation is different in Poland and Roumania, where the people
themselves are anti-Semitic. It may appear strange at first that there
should be such a difference between the Polish people and the Russian
people in their attitude towards the Jews in their midst. But it may
be easily explained. People who are oppressed generally become narrow
by the oppression. The Poles and the Roumanians have had long to
suffer from oppression to a great extent, the Poles from Russia and
the Roumanians for many years from Turkey, from whose yoke they were
freed only a few decades ago. It is generally a fact that when the
servant becomes a master he makes the most intolerant master. Even if
a Polish autonomous kingdom should be created, it could not be much
worse for the Jewish population than it is now. But the Russian people
have been happy. They have gotten used to their despotic government
and do not feel it in particular, and they have little prejudice
against their still greater oppressed Jewish neighbors.[77]

The great numbers of Jews who have gone into the war and are fighting
heroically will, I have no doubt, make a convincing demonstration of
Jewish patriotism in every country, and that should make for an
improvement of Jewish conditions all over, except possibly in Russia.

In Germany the Jews do not suffer. They have a high standing and
occupy many high positions. There has, it is true, always been a
certain anti-Semitic tendency in Germany. But I think this war will
crush out most of that, in fact all class differences. I am quite
convinced that anti-Semitism in Germany is a thing of the past.

I do not think there is anything to do now for the Jews and for Jewish
bodies in America except to work harmoniously together in the raising
of relief funds. Of course, we must always be on the alert and ready
to take a definite position whenever the proper time arrives. But not
now. When peace negotiations begin to be talked about, I think it will
be well for such bodies as the American Jewish Committee, possibly the
B’nai B’rith and other organizations, to take united action. What
action they should take it is hard to say. It is a very difficult
question to decide at[78] this moment whether or not it would be
advisable to have special Jewish representatives present at the peace
negotiations to look after the specific Jewish interests. Whatever
influence should be brought to bear at the proper time should
originate with the American Jewish Committee, which is the most
suitable unifying Jewish agent in America to-day.

[79]

Nationality and the Hyphenated American

By Horace M. Kallen

HORACE MEYER KALLEN (born in Silesia, Germany, in
1882, came to America in 1887), studied at Harvard (A. B., Ph.D.),
Princeton, Oxford, and Paris. He has been assistant and lecturer in
philosophy at Harvard, instructor in logic at Clark University, and
since 1911 of the faculty of philosophy at the University of
Wisconsin. At the request of the late William James, he edited his
unfinished book on “Some Problems of Modern Philosophy.” Besides
contributing to philosophical and general periodicals, Dr. Kallen is
the author of a recently published book on “William James and Henri
Bergson.” Dr. Kallen was one of the founders of the Harvard Menorah
Society, and has rendered signal service, both by tongue and pen, to
the Menorah movement.

Why, in an officially neutral country, has this come to pass? When we
look closely to the ground and principle of the division of sentiment
in our population, we discover this significant fact: the division is
not truly determined by the merits of the European issue; it is
determined by the lines of our population’s European origin and
ancestral allegiance. The Americans of German and Austrian and Magyar
ancestry are pro-German; those of French or British or Russian
ancestry favor the Allies. Only the Jews seem to be an exception to
this rule. Being mainly from Russia, their favor should go to the
Russians, but their newspapers, almost without exception, favor the
Germans. The case of the Jews, however, is an exception that proves
the rule. Although the majority of them came from Russia, they have
had no part in the Russian polity; they have been oppressed,
persecuted, terrorized, as their brethren still are in Russian
territory. As[80] Americans, what portion and what hope have they in
Russia that they should desire Russian victory? None. But they are not
for this reason in favor of Germany. The headlines of their newspapers
do not celebrate German victories, but Russian defeats. The Ghetto’s
partiality to Germany is a consequence of its loyalty to Jewry.
Kinship of blood and race, ancestral allegiance, determine with the
Jewish masses in America also, what side they take in this war.
Although they have no political background in Europe, and their civil
allegiance is absolutely American, they too are hyphenated in
sentiment—Jewish-Americans.

Such is the fact. Its significance lies in what it reveals, and what
it reveals is a force much deeper and more radical, distinctly more
primitive and original, than anything else in the structure of
society. It hyphenates English and Germans and Austrians and Russians
and Turks no less than it hyphenates Americans, and, in the failure of
the external socio-political organization of Europe to give it free
play, it is the chief, almost the only, cause of the present
unendurable European tragedy. Its name is nationality.

The Swiss Republic, for example, is a nation composed of three
nationalities, two of which belong to powers at war with each other.
These are the French and the German; the third is the Italian. Yet the
nationhood of Switzerland is the most integral and unified in Europe
to-day, because Switzerland is as complete and thorough a democracy as
exists in the civilized world, and the efficacious safeguard of
nationhood is democracy not only of individuals but of nationalities.
The German, French and Italian citizens of the Swiss Republic are
to-day under arms to defend the neutrality of their nation from
possible violation by German, French or Italian belligerents, and in
defending their nation, they are defending also the autonomy of each
other’s nationality. In Switzerland, nationhood, being democratic, is
the safeguard and insurance of nationality.

Contrast Swiss nationhood with Austro-Hungarian nationhood.
Austria-Hungary is the immediate and direct occasion of the great war
by reason of the fact that, although she is a mosaic of nationalities
like[81] Switzerland, her government, instead of being a democracy, has
in the long run been directed toward the control and exploitation of
many nationalities by one or two. Hungary contains a population of
seven million Magyars among twelve million Slavs; yet the Hungarians,
having the economic and political upper hand, have sought to Magyarize
by force and trickery this almost doubly greater and culturally equal
population. They have tried to compel Magyar forms and standards in
language, in literature, in history, the arts, the sciences, religion,
law, in every intimate or remote concern of the daily life and
national genius of their Slavic subjects. The result has been the
steady disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian mosaic, the increasing
use of force to hold it together, the corresponding increase of
restlessness among the subject-peoples, plot and counterplot, the
assassination of the Archduke, and the attack on Serbia, which
precipitated the war. In this war Austria has come off worst of all
the combatants, and for the same reason: the attempt to maintain the
unity of a nation of nationalities by the force of one of them instead
of by the democratic coöperation of all. In Austria-Hungary,
nationality, having been exploited and suppressed, has been the enemy
and destroyer of nationhood.

For the democracy of America had its first articulate voicing in the
Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans of New England. These men and women,
devoted to the literature of the Old Testament, and upheld by the
ancestral memories of the Jews, were moved to undertake their great
American adventure by the ideal of nationality. It was not because of
an overwhelming oppression of body and soul that the Pilgrims
adventured to America. It was not “freedom to worship God” that they
sought. They had that in Holland. They sought freedom to be
themselves, to realize their national genius in their own individual
way. Their English manners, English speech, English history, and
English loyalty were, in fact, more important to them than their
Hebrew Bible. They used that as the spiritual pabulum which nourished
their English corporate life. Their Calvinism was a reinterpretation
of its prophetic nationalism expressed in the doctrine of the “chosen
people”; their political institutions were a modification of the ideal
political order it was supposed to reveal. As Cotton Mather narrates,[82]
his grandfather, John Cotton, found, on his arrival in New England,
that the population was much exercised over the framing of a “civil
constitution.” They turned to him for help, begging “that he would,
from the laws wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an
abstract of such as were of a moral and lasting equity.” So “he
propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might
be to that which was the glory of Israel.” Out of this beginning the
democratic mood of America surges; in such conceptions the ideals
which express the mood have their origins. These ideals are the
conservation of nationality, and the equality of men before the
inconceivable supremacy of their God. Hebraism and English
nationality—these are the spiritual background of the American
commonwealth.

Political freedom in America has tended to generate self-expression of
each national group, and our country is to-day, broadly speaking, a
great coöperative commonwealth of nationalities, British, French,
German, Slavic, Jewish, each freely developing, in so far as it is
self-conscious, its national genius, its language, literature and art
in its own characteristic way as its best contribution to the
civilization of America as a whole,[C] realizing in this way the ideal
of the democracy of nationalities, of international comity and
coöperation which our prophets were the first to formulate.

American nationhood, thus, is in the way of becoming what Swiss
nationhood fully is, the liberator and protector of nationality; its
democracy is its strength, and its democracy is “hyphenation.”
“Hyphenation” may, it is true, become perverse. As an expression of
the coöperation of nationality with nationality in the life of the
State, it is inevitable and good; as an attempt to subordinate all
nationalities to one, to use all for the advantage of one, it is
partial, undemocratic, disloyal. Our nation is a democracy of
nationalities having for its aim the equal growth and free development
of all. It can take no sides. To require it to take sides, German or
Anglo-Saxon, Slavic or Jewish, is to be untrue to its spirit and to
pervert its ideal.

The movement in modern history which we call progressive has been a
movement toward democracy in both the internal affairs and external
relationships of nations. Men did not realize its entire significance
until the nineteenth[83] century; only then did it come to full
consciousness in fact and idea, urged equally in Greece, in Germany,
in Ireland, in Italy. Its great voice is the Italian thinker and
patriot, Mazzini. In a marvelous essay entitled “Europe, Its Condition
and Its Prospects,” he wrote, at a time when the hope of social and
international democracy seemed extinguished: “They struggled, they
still struggle, for country and liberty; for a word inscribed upon a
banner, proclaiming to the world that they also live, think, love and
labor for the benefit of all. They speak the same language, they bear
about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same
tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate
freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to
elaborate and express their idea, to contribute their stone also to
the great pyramid of history. It is something moral which they are
seeking; and this moral something is in fact, politically speaking,
the most important question in the present state of things. It is the
organization of the European task. In principle, nationality ought to
be to humanity that which division of labor is in a workshop—the
recognized symbol of association; the assertion of the individuality
of a human group called by its geographical position, its traditions
and its language, to fulfill a special function in the European work
of civilization.”

Modern Europe saw the overthrow of the Holy Roman Empire, of the
imperial aspirations of Louis XIV, and of Napoleon before it realized
the natural fact and moral principle which underlay these overthrows,
and which finally so successfully asserted themselves as to unify
Italy and cast off the Austrian dominion, to liberate Greece,
Bulgaria, Roumania and the other Balkan States from the Turk, to unify
and create contemporary Germany. The last quarter of the nineteenth
century saw the renaissance, often in the face of overwhelming
suppression, of the language and cultures of Czechs, Bohemians, Poles,
Irish and Jews. It saw the rise of nationalism in the Oriental
dependencies of Great Britain. It saw the beginning of an
acknowledgment of the full rights of nationalities by both Austria and
Great Britain, the grant of local autonomy to the various
nationalities in the Austrian Empire, of progressive home rule to
India and South Africa and Ireland. The twentieth century seemed to be
moving peacefully toward the fulness of democracy—when came the war.

This is the issue between the warring powers and each claims that it
is defending itself against the aggression of its opponents. Each
claims to be fighting for democracy. In the face of these claims,
history has the deciding voice. Now, historically, England, more than
any other power, has stood for the democratic and coöperative idea.
Her colonies have autonomy, her more backward dependencies are
encouraged toward autonomy. Since the Boer war, when imperialism
passed away, she has moved toward the position of Switzerland. Even
Ireland has obtained home rule. “We are a great world-wide,
peace-loving partnership,” said Mr. Asquith,[D] has reiterated again
and again the principle for which all the Allies are fighting:
believing that “the preservation of local and national ties, of the
genius of a people which has a history of its own, is not only not
hostile to or inconsistent with, but on the contrary, fosters and
strengthens and stimulates the spirit of a common purpose, of a
corporate brotherhood,” the Allies seek to defend public right, to
find and to keep “room for the independent existence and free
development of the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate
consciousness of its own . . . and, perhaps, by a slow and gradual
process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing
ambitions, for groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise, of
a real European partnership, based on equal right and enforced by a
common will.”[E]

It is hard to believe that Russia can be fighting for such an end.
Fear of Russian barbarism is what brought Germany into the lists, the
Germans declare, to defend western ideals and western democracy. Yet
Russian government is Prussian in its organization, and it is on the
side of the ideal of western democracy that she is explicitly aligned.
The contradiction is striking, and it is still more striking when we
recall that in her armies are over a quarter of a million of Jews, and
that in the other armies there are half as many more. For the Jews the
war is more than civil; it is[85] fratricide. On the face of it they have
no inevitable personal or political stake in the war’s fortune.
England has acknowledged their “corporate consciousness” and given
them maximal opportunity for “free self-development”; so has France.
Russia has oppressed and horribly exploited them; Germany, though
infinitely better than Russia, has set them conditions in which “free
development” is synonymous with complete Germanization. Austria and
Turkey have dealt with them somewhat after the manner of England and
France. The contradiction of the Jewish position outdistances that of
the Russian. But both contradictions are resolved in the fact that the
ideal in question concerns not Russia alone, nor England alone, nor
the Jews alone, but the whole of Europe, the whole world. What is at
stake is not something local, personal, political, but a universal
principle, the goal toward which mankind has been so slowly and
deviously crawling from the beginnings of modern history—the
principle of democracy in nationality and nationality in democracy.

It is for this that our brethren in the armies are fighting; it is for
this that they are undergoing crucifixion in the Pale, for this that
our people have suffered and died from the beginnings of our history.
Our whole recorded biography is the narrative of a struggle for social
justice against the exploitation of class by class within our polity,
for nationality against imperialism without. Our statesmen and leaders
were the first to formulate the ideal of the coöperative harmony of
nationality, and the ideal of international peace.[F] Mr. Asquith is
echoing our prophets, and our embattled brethren are engaged in the
defence of a principle which is the constituent of the genius of their
own nationality.

The indispensable condition for such a realization is autonomous
nationality; not nationhood, necessarily, but autonomy. This, more
than civil rights among other nationalities, is our stake in this
great war. In the last analysis, the Hebraic culture and ideals which
our Menorah Societies study, can be advanced, can be a living
force in civilization, only as a national force. Our duty to America,
inspired by the Hebraic tradition,—our service to the world, in
whatever occupation,—both these are conditioned, in so far as we are
Jews, upon the conservation of Jewish nationality. That is the potent
reality in each of us, our selfhood, and service is the giving of the
living self. Let us so serve mankind; as Jews, aware of our great
heritage, through it and in it strong to live and labor for mankind’s
good.

Yankee and Jew

[87]

An After-Dinner Address

By G. Stanley Hall

G. STANLEY HALL (born in Ashfield, Mass., in 1846),
President of Clark University, is a leading authority on education and
psychology, and author of a number of important books, notably
“Adolescence” (2 vols. 1904). The present address, delivered at a
recent dinner of the Clark Menorah Society, has been revised by Dr.
Hall for publication in The Menorah Journal.

Again, I am always embarrassed in talking to members of your race
because I feel a little as Napoleon did when he told his soldiers in
Egypt that forty generations looked down on them from the top of the
Pyramids. You know your ancestry in general back for thousands of
years, and I am rarely fortunate in being able to go back as much as
nine or ten generations to the Puritans of the “Mayflower,” but there
I stop and everything before that is a blank. David Starr Jordan tells
us in his book that there is perhaps no man alive who has not kings or
queens in his ancestry, but adds that we all have had murderers among
our predecessors, too.

The old New England Puritan taught sternly. He was a patriarchal head
of his family. In my boyhood, Saturday evening or perhaps better
Thanksgiving Day, when their descendants all gathered together as long
as either of the grandparents lived, we had an illustration of
something very like Heine’s touching picture of an old Jewish peddler
who worked hard through the week, but on Friday night put on his long
black coat and his three-cornered hat, lit the seven candles at the
table, and told his children and grandchildren how Jehovah had led His
people through the wilderness, and how the Egyptians and all the other
naughty people who persecuted them were long since dead, while the
chosen race survived. And so happy in his race was this poor peddler
and so proud of his pedigree that, as Heine says, had the great
Rothschild entered at that moment and asked him what favor he could
do, he would reply simply: “Stand out of my light, that I may finish
telling the law to my children.”

As I read the Old Testament, the substance of the covenant with
Abraham was that if he kept Jehovah’s law, his seed would be
multiplied like the stars of Heaven. This placed society and life in
that early day squarely on a eugenic basis, for it makes the number
and success of good children the supreme test of every human
institution, activity, and every[89] kind of culture. This I take it is
one of the chief characteristics of your race, and I hope it may long
be so.

I am going to avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words
about a topic that has for centuries been a point of the very greatest
difference and tension between your people and mine, namely, the
character and work of Jesus. Please do not be shocked till you hear
what I have to say. Such of us psychologists as have recently been
interested in the psychological aspect of Jesus’ life and work
understand, as had never been understood before, how purely Jewish he
was. Scholars have lately given to his figure a radically new
interpretation.

The Jews are never beaten; if checked in their aspirations they, like
the prophets in the days of captivity, strike out in higher and nobler
ways. Thus you ought to be proud of Jesus for, as he is now being
understood, he was an extremely representative man of your race. The
real enemies of the Jews are now claiming that no such man ever lived,
which is the view of Drews and his school, some holding that he was a
deliberate invention of the early decades of the first century, and
others, like Jensen, that he was a revived Babylonian myth. But these
new views show that Jesus was not an Aryan, as a few of the
pan-Germanists have claimed, but a typical Semite. It does look now,
in view of the teachings of such men as Gobineau and various of his
successors, that the Aryans are the highest and best people in the
world and that the Germans are the very best of all the Aryans, that
it is Germany that has come to consider itself the chosen people, the
elite, superior race. But certainly Germany is not very[90] Christian. It
was only converted in the thirteenth century, and Luther soon threw
off the fully developed Christianity of Rome. Since then we have had
the Tübingen School, that resolved everything into myth, and the very
many other negative points of view expressed in Nietzsche’s supremest
condemnation of Jesus as a wretched degenerate, while Wagner’s
deliberate slogan was, “Das Deutschtum muss das Christentum siegen.”

I cannot but wonder, therefore, whether, in view of these new
conceptions, Jew and Gentile are not going to meet in this country and
even agree about Jesus. It is difficult at least to see which of us
would change most if there were this rapprochement. We must neither
of us abandon our birthright. We must be the very best Puritan
Anglo-Saxons we possibly can, and you must be the best Jews possible,
for out of these component elements American citizenship is made up.
This country stands for the dropping of old prejudices, such as those
that are inflaming Europe now with war. If we can satisfy each other’s
ideals and meet half way the thing is done, and the melting pot which
America stands for has got in its work. I want the Menorah Society to
feel that it is in the van of this movement.

[91]

“Golden Rule” Hillel

By Moses Hyamson

MOSES HYAMSON (born in Suwalki, Russia, in 1863, came
to England in childhood). Rabbi and jurist; educated at Jews’ College
and University College of London; for thirteen years Senior Dayan of
the London Beth-Din (Jewish Court of Arbitration), in which capacity,
because of his erudition in both the Jewish and the common law, he
rendered notable service to the British community. In 1913 he accepted
a call from the Congregation Orach Chayim of New York. Besides being a
contributor to the Jewish Quarterly Review and other learned
publications, Dr. Hyamson has published “The Oral Law and Other
Sermons” (1901), and an annotated edition of the medieval “Collatio
Romanorum et Mosaicarum Legum” (1912).

So runs the Talmudic tale. The incident happened in Palestine in the
century before the common era. The boy Hillel had come from his
obscure home in Babylon, bent upon study at the most famous school in
Palestine, whose teachers, Shemaya and Abtalion, were heads of the
Synhedrion, the Supreme Court of Jurisdiction. Poor and proud, Hillel
supported himself by manual labor while he was securing his education.
Like Abraham Lincoln, he was a woodchopper. One half of the small
amount he earned daily served for his meals, and the other half he
paid to the porter at the college for his admission in the evening. On
this short Friday in mid-winter he had been able to earn nothing, and
in his keen anxiety not to miss the lecture and discussion, he
clambered to the roof of the college hall, braving snow and cold for
the words of the living God as expounded by his teachers.

Within a few short years Hillel himself had succeeded his teachers as
the head of this famous school, and also as President of the
Synhedrion. Hillel’s career is a shining example of the democratic
principle which has always prevailed in Jewish life, of the
opportunity open to all men of talents, however humble their origin,
to achieve position in the republic[92] of Jewish learning. And learning
combined with noble character, as in the case of the great Hillel,
carried authority in Jewish life. It is true that Hillel was not
without letters patent of nobility; though he came from poverty and
obscurity and from an alien land, he was, according to tradition, of
the blood of David. It is not, however, to this accident of birth,
known only later, that Hillel owed his quick rise and supreme eminence
in Jewish life, but to his distinguished attainments, to his profound
learning not only in the Jewish Law but in many secular fields of
knowledge, to his bold and original mind combined with a pious
devotion to tradition, to his indomitable energy and industry, his
nobility of character, his sympathy with the people and his
understanding of their needs.

And in the interpretation of that “commentary” which, together with
the Torah itself, enshrined the spirit of Judaism and made it a
throbbing reality in the life of the nation, Hillel brought out the
humanity of every regulation, the true intent behind it, whenever
literal enforcement would have worked hardship or might have defeated
its true intent because of the changed circumstances since its
enactment. While keeping faithfully within the spirit of Jewish
tradition, Hillel struck out into innovations, new precedents and
legal institutions, which testified at once to the remarkable insight
and boldness of his mind as a jurist and to his tact and sympathy as a
leader of the people. Some of his innovations anticipate in a striking
way the developments under similar circumstances of the common law of
England and the United States many centuries later.

Other decisions of Hillel equally significant could be cited. To
lawyers especially, the study of them is fascinating; they are full of
startling relevancy in the present time of unrest and agitation for
legal reform in this country. And not without reason. What we are keen
for now is a greater measure of social justice in a democratic
community. A study of Hillel’s jurisprudence—both the theory and the
decisions affecting the workaday life of the people—will give one an
appreciation not only of the beautiful spirituality of the master, his
erudition and his imagination, but the characteristic coalition of
letter and spirit, the emphatic sense of social justice, which has
prevailed in the whole system of Jewish law.

Hillel’s character is illustrated by a number of pregnant sayings of
his that have been recorded in the Talmud. “Do not separate yourself
from the community,” was one of his characteristic sayings which
genuinely expressed his public spirit. His sense of individual and
social responsibility is summed up in his three famous questions: “If
I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself alone,
what am I? And if not now, when?” His peace-loving nature and humanity
found voice in his counsel: “Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving
peace, pursuing peace, loving God’s creatures and bringing them near
to the knowledge of the Law.” His disinterestedness, his liberal
pursuit of the Law, that is, of knowledge, made him confidently say:
“He who aggrandizes his name, his name shall perish. He who does not
add to his store of learning and good deeds will suffer diminution. He
who does not teach deserves death. He who uses the crown of the Law
for selfish needs and personal advancement will be destroyed.” Who had
a better right than Hillel, graduate of poverty, to warn his
contemporaries: “Do not say I shall learn when I will have leisure;
perhaps you never will have leisure.” And in every case, even when the
conduct of a man seems most reprehensible, as when one of his
colleagues Menahem left the Synhedrion to take service under the
tyrant Herod, Hillel holds to this advice: “Judge not thy neighbor
until thou art in his place.”

Many a tale is narrated of Hillel’s patience, unfailing courtesy and
tact, tolerance and humility, even under the greatest provocation. The
man who bet 400 Zuz that he would break Hillel’s patience by silly and
far-fetched questions lost his own temper at the consideration with
which he was treated. And so the proverb became current, “Patience is
worth 400 Zuz.” And other tales are told of Hillel’s considerate
dealing with heathens who wished to embrace Judaism, in contrast to
the harsh treatment meted out to them by his contemporary Shammai.

His wife, we learn, was a fit helpmeet to the sage and saint. Their
domestic life was a perfect harmony. Once on returning from a journey[95]
Hillel heard a sound of quarreling in the neighborhood of his house.
“I am certain,” said he, “that this noise does not proceed from my
home.” On another occasion Hillel sent his wife a message to prepare a
sumptuous meal for an honored guest. At the appointed hour Hillel and
his guest arrived. But the meal was not ready. “Why so late?” asked
Hillel. “I prepared a banquet,” the wife replied, “according to your
desire. But I learned that a couple were to be wedded to-day and they
were too poor to provide a marriage feast, so I gave them our meal for
their wedding banquet.” “Ah, my dear wife, I guessed as much.”

But the greatest and most constant hospitality was shown by Hillel to
a guest who was always with him and uppermost in his thoughts. Every
day it was his habit to withdraw for a while for private meditation.
“Whither art thou going?” asked his colleagues and disciples. “I have
a guest to whom I must show attention.” “Who is this guest?” “My
soul,” was the solemn reply; “to-day it is with me, to-morrow the
heavenly visitant may be departed and returned home.”

Is it any wonder that, after forty years of activity in the
Patriarchate, when Hillel died (in the year 10 of the common era), men
said of him: “Meek and humble-minded, a saint has departed from among
us, a disciple of Ezra the Scribe.” The title fitted his career, for
he came like Ezra from Babylon to Palestine and like Ezra he restored
the Law when it was threatened with destruction. Great as a student,
he was great also as an inspirer of other students. He left eighty
distinguished disciples, of whom the youngest was that famous Jochanan
ben Zakkai who became the savior of Judaism at the destruction of the
second Temple.

[96]

The Quality of Mercy

A Sixth Act to “The Merchant of Venice”

By William M. Blatt

William M. Blatt (born in Orange, N.J., in 1876)
was educated in the public schools of Boston, and received his degree
of LL.B. from Boston University Law School in 1897. Besides being
engaged with the law in Boston and contributing to a number of legal
periodicals, Mr. Blatt is also devoted to letters and has published a
number of plays, including “Husbands on Approval,” and many one-act
playlets, including “The Danger of Ideals,” which have been given
professional performance.

Characters: Shylock, Jessica, Antonio, Gratiano, Portia, Isaac, a
servant of Shylock.

Scene: A street in Venice.

Time: An afternoon, two years after the last act of “The Merchant of
Venice.”

As curtain rises, Portia and Gratiano discovered standing and looking
down the street, Gratiano pointing.

[106]

Jewish Students in European Universities

By Harry Wolfson

It is these young French Jews of immigrant parentage, students and
professional men, who organized themselves, about two years ago, in an
“Association des Jeunes Juifs,” known by its initials as A. J. J. The
aim of that organization, which is non-partisan in Jewish affairs, is
both cultural and practical. It publishes a monthly by the name of
“Les Pionniers,” and occasionally holds debates and lectures on
various Jewish topics. It also carries on a program of social work
among the immigrant Jews. I might perhaps give a clearer idea of the
object of the A. J. J. by reproducing their following declaration:
“Notre But.—Nous voulons nous affirmer ‘Juifs’ sans forfanterie, mais
avec fermeté; cultiver, développer parmis nous, faire connaître au
dehors, l’âme juive; nous éduquer mutuellement; demander, par les
voies légales, le respect, la justice pour tous,—fussent-ils juifs;
aider nos frères émigrés à l’aquérir la qualité de citoyen; inculquer
à nos membres les principes de solidarité et de mutualité.” In the
summer of 1913, Dr. Nahum Slouszch of the Sorbonne submitted to the
society a scheme for more extensive activities, both Jewish[107] and
patriotic in their scope, namely, the participation in educational and
social work among the indigenous Jews of the French possessions in
Africa.

In his religious life the Jew of the Roman Ghetto resembles the
Lithuanian rather than the Western European. His religious activity,
to be sure, is restricted to the prayer services of the Temple, but
his Temple is more like a Beth Midrash than a symphony hall and
lyceum. Living within a Catholic environment, his religion has been
preserved as something positive, tangible, and powerful; and if it is
no longer an inspiring influence within him, it exists at least as a
reality outside of him. The religious institutions and
instrumentalities are looked upon by him as something hallowed and
consecrate. The synagogue is spoken of as the “sacro tempio” and the
rabbi, referred to by the Hebrew words “Morenu Harav,” is looked up to
in matters religious as if he were the incumbent of the throne of
Moses. The place of worship is opened three times a day for the
traditional number of the daily public prayers, and young men as well
as old, unwashed and in their working garments, repair there directly
from their work to hear the “sacra messa,” as the services are
sometimes termed by them. Most of the younger Jews are unable to read
the Hebrew prayers, some read without understanding them; but they all
know a few selected prayers by heart which they recite aloud with many
interesting gesticulations[108] and genuflections, while in the pulpit the
Chasan reads the services from a prayer-book printed in Livorno,
chanting them in a monotonous sing-song not unlike what one often
hears in the chapels of St. Peter.

It is therefore not surprising that among the native Italian Jews
there should arise on the part of the young educated elements a desire
to convert that latent Jewish sentiment into some form of practical
and useful activity. A society of Jewish youth in Italy has already
existed for about three years during which time two conventions were
held. A number of commendable resolutions were passed about the
improvement of Jewish education among the Italian Jews and especially
the advancement of the study of the Hebrew language among them.
Zionism was warmly endorsed, though the society as a whole did not
commit itself officially to the cause. Like the A. J. J. of Paris, the
Italian organization also purports to act as intermediaries between
the Italian government and the native Jewish population of Tripoli. In
Rome there is a local organization of Jewish students, devoted to the
study of Hebrew literature, and is rather of cosmopolitan complexion,
being composed of Italian, Greek, German, and Russian Jews. The moving
spirit of that circle was a brilliant Russian Jew, who had graduated
in law from the University of Rome.

The enthusiasm for Judaism, everywhere in a process of growth,
manifests itself in its early stages in study and self-cultivation; it
assumes a more concrete form, in its later stages, of some communal or
social activity; and if that development keeps on uninterruptedly it
finally consummates in Zionism. This development, it must be admitted,
is not a spontaneous and self-directive movement. In no small measure,
it is everywhere stimulated by the growing tendency on the part of
non-Jews in almost every country to appraise the Jew according to his
racial origin, an appraisal which results in a feeling not necessarily
hostile, but in most cases neutral and sometimes even favoring the
racial and cultural peculiarity, indestructible and impermiscible, of
the Jewish element. It is this external stimulus, rather than any
internal impulse, that is responsible for the unfolding of the
national spirit among Jewish students and the assertion of their
selfhood.

None the less, their self-assertion has nowhere reached the extreme of
spiritual alienation from their environment. There is nothing more
remarkable in the character of Jewish youth of the present day, even
among those who were born and raised in East European ghettos, than
the spiritual and intellectual snugness in which they find themselves,
in what should have been expected to remain to them a foreign
environment. The residual estrangement of the Jewish soul from
everything that is non-Jewish, which our forefathers in the past had
figuratively designated with what Jewish mysticism called the
“Captivity of the Shekinah,” has totally disappeared. The individual
Jew of to-day, while sharing in the sublimated consciousness of the
race as a whole, does not in any conscious or subliminal way feel
himself to be personally identified with it; whence the hesitation on
the part of the majority of Jewish students to participate actively in
Zionism even though they would all admit it to be the logical sequel
of Jewish history.

For Zionism to them can never become a personal ideal, something
requisite for the salvation of their souls. It can at its best appeal
to them, in so far as they are consciously Jewish, as the cause of the
nation as a whole; and consequently the mere suspicion that their
affiliation with[110] the movement might be held up against them as an
impugnment of their loyalty to the land of their birth and abode is
sufficient to keep them aloof from it. It was very interesting for me
to notice how everywhere, after a long manœuvre of Zionist discussions
with good Jewish young men, they would finally halt at their
unshakable position that Zionists might arouse the suspicion of their
Gentile neighbors as to the loyalty and patriotism of the Jews. Where
people are obsessed by the fear of being misunderstood in doing what
they otherwise think to be good and impeccable, no arguments, of
course, can avail. They are in this respect characteristically Jewish.
In their Brand-like racial frame of mind, the Jews could never stop
midway between the two antipodes of roving world-citizenry and
hidebound mono-patriotism. It is probable that their attitude will
change as soon as it is generally realized that personal devotion and
loyalty to two causes are not psychologically a self-deception, and
that the serving of two masters is not a moral anomaly unless, as in
the original adage, one of the masters be Satanic.

[111]

Zionism: A Menorah Prize Essay

By Marvin M. Lowenthal

MARVIN M. LOWENTHAL (born in Bradford, Pa., in 1890)
is at present a Senior in the University of Wisconsin. He has won the
Wisconsin Menorah Society Prize twice—in 1912 for an essay on “The
Jew in the American Revolution,” and in 1914 for the essay on
“Zionism” here published for the first time. Mr. Lowenthal is now the
President of the Wisconsin Zionist Society.

This picture reveals the typical and traditional attitude of the Jew
toward the land of his forefathers. Taught as children in the Cheder
to turn their thoughts and desires toward Palestine; devoting
themselves as men to the study of the Law and the Prophets and to the
building upon this study of the vast Talmudic structure, until a
spiritual Land of the Book may be said to have been created wherein
they continually dwelt; crystallizing and adopting the Restoration as
a dogma of the faith; commemorating with solemn fasts the Ninth of Ab
as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple by Titus; and
repeating at each Passover with the pitiful hope of a child, “Next
year in Jerusalem,” the Jews have bound the memory of Palestine as a
sign upon their hands and as frontlets between their eyes. They have
indeed written it upon the door-posts of their houses and upon their
gates, to the end—that they have wept and prayed. The vision of the
prophets, which created and sustained this passionate ideal, itself
inhibited the realization by emphasizing the redemption[112] as
miraculous, as a consummation to come in its own time without man’s
effort, and indeed in spite of man’s will. And so, except for the
sporadic and meteoric fiascos of mock-Messiahs, the Jews—this most
practical of people—continued in hope and prayer to watch the
centuries creep by. Frequently the hope flowered into the songs of a
Judah Halevi or Ibn Gabirol, songs as sweet as have blossomed in the
medieval garden; and the prayer found expression in a poignancy
attributable only to the racial genius which created the Psalms; but
until the nineteenth century the dream preserved all the qualities of
a dream.

Quoting from his book, “The Jewish State”[2]—a book journalistic in
style, but trumpet-toned in the note it sounded for political
Zionism—Theodor Herzl offered the following definition of Zionism
after the first Zionist Congress (1897): “Zionism has for its object
the creation of a home, secured by public rights, for those Jews who
either cannot or will not be assimilated in the country of their
adoption.”[3] Zionism, in a word, is not the last truism in a weary
debate, nor a new verse to an old song; it is, on the contrary, a
definite answer to a perplexing and imperative question. What are
these Jews who cannot or will not be assimilated, and why cannot or
will not they be assimilated? This question constitutes what is known
as the Jewish problem, or, for those who deny or dislike the term,
the Jewish position; and this question must first be fully stated
before the Zionist or any other answer can be intelligible.

That the existence of a separate, recalcitrant, and even obnoxious
nation within a nation did not constitute a problem for the medievals
may be attributable to two reasons: (1) the medieval theory of life
accentuated a hierarchical order of existence—a theory that found
expression in feudalism, in Church organization, and in guild and
craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a
recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an
economic necessity in the times when a ban was laid on money-lending,
and they constituted an important economic facility at a little later
period when capital could indeed be worked but when rivalry and
hatreds rendered communication uncertain.[6] To the maintenance of
Jewish solidarity and the preservation of things Jewish qua Jewish,
sacrifices culminating in the surrender of life bequeathed to the race
a comprehensive martyrology.[7]

Ernest Renan defines a nation as “a great solidarity constituted by
the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made and those
they feel prepared to make once more. It implies a past, but is summed
up in the present by a tangible fact—the clearly expressed desire to
live a common life.” In sum, the Jews throughout the Middle Ages,
which was prolonged for them until a little less than two hundred
years ago, comprised a nation as virtual in point of their own claim
and its recognition by other nations as in the days when they were
established in Palestine. Renaissance, Reformation, and the
rediscovery of the world by science failed to make an impression on
the thick ghetto walls; and Jewish isolation, even as late as the
eighteenth century, may be vividly realized by thinking of Rousseau
and Voltaire in contrast with the contemporary lights of Jewry—Elijah
Gaon and Israel Besht,[8] men as medieval as a gargoyle.

The French Revolution with its early philosophy of naturalism and
humanism and its later political expression in liberty, equality, and
fraternity, razed the physical and spiritual walls of the ghetto and
set up[114] the “Jewish problem.” Following the Revolution, four currents
of thought and action, working both simultaneously and successively,
causing, reacting upon, and intermingling with one another, affecting
the Jews now favorably and now unfavorably, went into the making of
this problem. To deal with Emancipation, Enlightenment, Nationalism,
and Anti-Semitism in detail would consume a volume, but an outline of
their bearing on the present situation is essential.

The Enlightenment, or Haskalah movement, broadly speaking, comprises
the Jewish absorption of secular learning, particularly in literature
and science, the abandonment of the study of the Talmud for modern
subjects, and the adoption of farm and craft life.[10] Moses
Mendelssohn in Germany and Lilienthal in Russia were the first great
protagonists of these radical departures; and the movement, which in
part led to the demand for Emancipation and in part resulted from it,
further removed the differences between Jew and non-Jew, at least from
the standpoint of the former, and further removed him from his
religious and historical[115] past, perceptibly weakening and in many
cases practically destroying the medieval sense of solidarity. Each
Jew adopted the culture of his native country, and so one Jew became
virtually a foreigner to another. Haskalah, in a word, is a looking
outward on the part of the Jew; for all its virtues this movement had
the consequence of blunting racial consciousness and blurring racial
identity.

In its restricted sense, anti-Semitism is a scientific stick used to
beat the Jewish dog with. After impartial, impersonal scientific
investigation, French and German scholars[11] demonstrated the racial
inferiority of the Semite to the Aryan, enumerated the inherent
Semitic qualities as greed, special aptitude for money-making,
aversion to hard work, clannishness, obstrusiveness, lack of social
tact and of patriotism, the tendency to exploit and not to be overly
honest. Ernest Renan adequately sums up the anti-Semite position when
he claims for the Aryans all the great military, political, and
intellectual movements of history.[12] The Semites never had a
comprehension of civilization in the sense in which the Aryan
understands the word; they were at no time public-spirited.[13] In
fact, intolerance was the natural consequence of Semitic
monotheism.[14]

In the wider sense,[15] anti-Semitism is the modern word for the old
and apparently ineradicable hatred of the Jew, partly dependent, as G.
F.[116] Abbott well shows,[16] not only upon Christian faith, but upon the
Christian frame of mind and feeling—a hatred to which the Nationalism
of the nineteenth century furnished a reasonable fuel, which found a
social expression in ostracism and rioting[17] and a political
expression in the formation of the Christian Socialist Party in
Germany (1878), and similar parties in Austria and Hungary (1882-99),
seeking the suppression of equal rights for Jews, the Dreyfus affair
in France (1895), and the open, violent persecutions in Roumania—all
aimed at annulling the privileges granted by the Emancipation.
Clerical, economic, and social opposition to the Jews combined to
support the nationalistic contention summed up in the words of
Heinrich von Treitschke (Professor of History, University of Berlin):
“Die Juden sind unser Unglück.”[18] This essay is not concerned with
the truth of the contention; suffice that it is advanced, supported,
and acted upon.

The Jewish situation falls naturally into four geographical zones. The
first, which contains the problem in its most serious aspect, is
Eastern Europe, including Russia, Poland, and Roumania, where are
settled six of the twelve million Jews of the world.[19] In this zone,
the Jews are for the most part maintaining medieval solidarity and
separation, are suffering from medieval repression and persecution;
but on the other hand, (and this appears to be the determining factor
in the gravity of the problem), the Russian Jew is by no means a
necessity to the Russian in any way similar to that in which the
medieval Jew was a necessity to the medieval Christian. The eastern
Jew is beginning to expand with the leaven of the Haskalah, and is
simultaneously strangling for lack of the release and exercise of his
powers afforded by Emancipation. The Russian and Roumanian, in what
they believe to be the preservation of Nationalism, are determined on
crippling or destroying the inimical and[117] unassimilative factor in
their population; and although the Russian is politically medieval, he
is economically modern and considers himself restrained by no need of
Jewish money.[20] The outcome for the Jews is economic impoverishment,
social persecution, political enslavement, and spiritual
degeneration.[21]

The second zone includes Austria, Germany, and to a minor degree
France, where are settled approximately three millions of Jews. Save
in Galicia, where political and racial turmoil is constantly giving
the Jewish situation the sombre tinge of a problem, the Jews are
finding themselves, for the most part, in a precarious position.
Nationalism demands that they surrender their racial identity and
proclivities; anti-Semitism declares upon the verdict of science that
such surrender is impossible, and substitutes repression,
assimilation, or extinction. The Jews in attempting to satisfy the
conditions by entering fully into all the activities of national life
arouse through their success only greater hostility; and the situation
becomes converted into a vicious circle.

France to a large degree and England comprise the third zone, where
the Jewish position is identical with that of the fourth zone, the
United States, save in one important detail. The Jews in these two
zones, numbering only one-and-a-half million, have entered freely into
the national life about them, and, except for minor social
disabilities which can only make the judicious smile, have been
accorded equality, with the result that the Jew qua Jew is exposed
to complete assimilation. The distinction between the third and fourth
zone is that in England and France, anti-Semitism based on Nationalism
is a potentiality (though the recent Aliens Bill and Chesterton trial
would suggest that it might be more than this), whereas the open-door
theory of settlement which created the United States militates
basically against race-discrimination. The Jew of England and America
does not face persecution nor repression, but a gradual and apparently
pleasant extinction.

The medieval Jew found himself a necessary, well-paying, if not
honored, guest in the households of Europe; but the day when the Jew
resolved on adopting the life and manners of his host, the host
resolved on drawing tightly the family lines. The modern Jew has
discovered it necessary either to convince the obdurate host, who
points to a scientifically certified chart of the family-tree, that he
too is of blood germane, or take himself to lodgings in the cellarage.
And yet—a third possibility here insinuates itself—why may not the
Jew set up housekeeping for himself?

[118]

To justify Emancipation before and after it was secured, assimilative
doctrines of a peculiar type, known as Reform Judaism,[22] whereby the
essentials of Jewish life were to be separated and saved, constituted
the main attempt of the Jew to demonstrate that he was a member of the
households of Europe and not an intruder. Reform Judaism began as a
result of the Haskalah by simplifying and beautifying, according to
European standards, the Orthodox religious service (Germany 1810-20),
and ended by abandoning the Messianic Restoration, the doctrine that
Israel is in exile and that the prophecies are literally to be
fulfilled. The expediency of these measures is apparent. To refute the
anti-Semitic charge of racial inferiority, the existence of the race
as a separate entity was denied, and the necessary scientific backing
has lately been secured.[23] To meet the Nationalists, Israel’s
national hopes were declared void, and it was strongly urged that the
basis of a modern nation is citizenship and not race.

The Reformers proceeded further and maintained that the Jewish people
were themselves the Messiah, whose mission was “to spread by its
fortitude and loyalty the monotheistic truth all over the earth, and
to be an example of rectitude to all others,”[24] whose goal was “not
a national Messianic State, but the realization in society of the
principles of righteousness as enunciated by the prophets;”[25]
wherefore, it was not only just that they receive citizenship, but
religious duty compelled the Jew to demand it.

The Jewish religion was considered the essential possession of the
Jewish people—so essential that it was to be maintained at the
sacrifice of assimilation; but nowhere is it made apparent how a
religion can be maintained without a people, how a people can be
maintained without separation, and how separation can be maintained
without abandoning the no-race, no-nation propositions. If these are
abandoned, the Jews are precisely where they began—another circle
whose viciousness is becoming obvious and is resulting in the constant
discarding of Jewish rite and form, until the religion which was to be
prized and saved is fast becoming a watery[119] Unitarianism, and its
adherents are allowing themselves, where permitted, to become
completely assimilated. Reform Judaism which began as a compromise is
ending as a surrender. The final and unanswerable objection to Reform
Judaism as a solution is that the majority of Jews will not even in
theory accept it. The devotion to race, religion, and separation is
too strong. The Gentile in asking the Jew to assimilate is undoubtedly
right; the refusal of the Jew undoubtedly is not wrong; and the ring
of true tragedy becomes audible.

The Alliance began by distributing pamphlets and calling the attention
of western governments to eastern injustice; it gradually, however,
undertook practical work. Influenced by Rabbi Kalischer, religious
enthusiast, a farm school (Mikveh Israel) was established at Jaffa;
and after the Russian persecutions of 1880-82, active colonization for
the relief of refugees became the chief work, in which the Alliance
received substantial aid from Baron de Rothschild. Meanwhile Baron de
Hirsch, another philanthropist of international proportions, dedicated
millions to the foundation of colonies in Argentine and Palestine. In
the latter place the Hirsch activities were incorporated under the
title of the Jewish Colonization Association (“IKA”, 1891), working in
harmony of aim with the Alliance and with still a third movement—one
more of the people—styled Chovevei-Zion (Lovers of Zion). The only
activities of the Chovevei-Zion, a general term attached to small and
ardent semi-affiliated societies throughout Europe and America, with
which we are here concerned are the philanthropic; and their services
in this respect were haphazard and negligible.[27]

To cast up briefly the sum of practical work accomplished by 1898: 94
schools in Asia and Africa,[28] and 25 colonies in Palestine
supporting[120] 5,000 Jews.[29] Such philanthropy is to be considered an
attempt, however valiant and noble, to empty the sea with a pail—with
a leaking pail.

Thus, upon a review of the situation, three alternatives present
themselves: (1) Maintenance of the status quo with its dull round of
persecution and degradation on one hand, and the soul-destroying life
in the Fool’s Paradise of Reform Judaism on the other; (2)
Amalgamation with the surrounding peoples—a grim race-suicide; (3)
Re-establishment of a national center where, perhaps not the entire
people, but a remnant can be saved.

[121]

The Third Annual Convention of the Menorah Societies

I. The Public Meeting

Two principal elements have entered into the spiritual life of the
modern world. The past and the present are one and inseparable, and
you cannot destroy the former without doing positive damage to the
latter. The roots of our civilization lie in the soil of antiquity,
and you cannot destroy and disentangle the fibers of the growing tree
of civilization from the far-off centuries that are gone, without
injuring the whole organism. “If we were to wipe out all the records
of the past, what a series of inexplicable riddles would our own
history present, and if we were to blot out entirely every reference
to ancient writers, or were to blow away all the perfume that has been
shaken down from the vestments of those writers, how blurred and how
scentless would the fairest and most fragrant pages of our own great
poets and historians appear!”

What we need to-day, what our country needs more than anything else,
is thorough, really liberally educated men, and not merely men who are
supposed by the general public to be educated, simply because they
have passed through a college, because in some quarters the business
of education has, alas, fallen into the hands of men who are not
themselves liberally educated; and so as an ardent advocate of the
humanities, with hope that the Intercollegiate Menorah Association
will contribute to the laying of greater stress upon the value of the
study of the humanities in our college curriculum,[122] I bid you
God-speed, and again extend to you the cordial greetings of the
University of Cincinnati.

This fact, however, of a continual intellectual and spiritual progress
of Judaism, is altogether too rarely recognized by the surrounding
Christian world, even by its men of light and leading or by its seats
of learning, because the New Testament is looked upon by altogether
too many as the death warrant of the Old Testament, as if the sun of
civilization had stood still over Israel ever since its seers and
singers and sages of yore voiced the Divine message. Nor does the
Jewish man of culture and college training as a rule appreciate the
wondrous achievements of the Jewish genius since the very dawn of
history until our day, in the whole domain of learning and science, or
of ethical and religious culture.

It is therefore a highly laudable endeavor undertaken by the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association to arouse the dormant spirit of
self-respect in the academic Jewish youth, to stir in him the ambition
to study and know this matchless history and literature, and to kindle
in his soul anew that idealism which made the Jew throughout all the
ages endure and brave the onslaughts of the empires and churches and
the persecuting mobs, so that even to-day he is as young and as
vigorous as any of the youngest races and nations in the world.

“In estimating the position of Israel in the human values, one must
remember that the quest for righteousness is Oriental, the quest for
knowledge, Occidental. With the great prophets of the East—Moses,
Isaiah, Mahomet [he might have included Jesus of Nazareth], the word
was ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ With the seers of the West, from Aristotle
to Darwin, it was ‘What says nature?’ Modern civilization is the
outcome of the two great movements of the mind of man, who is to-day
ruled in heart and head by Israel and by Greece. From the one he has
learned responsibility to a Supreme Being and love for his neighbor,
in which are embraced the law and the prophets. From the other he has
gathered the promise of Eden, to have dominion over the earth in which
he lives.”

Now let me add to this that whatever the Jew claims or possesses of
culture he has borrowed from the nations and civilizations around him,
whether it be architecture, the art or the mode of writing, philosophy
and science, the modes of social and industrial life, all of which he
has taken and assimilated into his own life.

Not so with his religious truth. This is all his own, his peculiar and
genuine contribution to humanity. Thereby he has given human life its
eternal value, its purpose, its goal and hope for all time.

Now it seems to me that you may as well expect of the blind to depict
for you his impressions of the prismatic glories of the rainbow, or of
the deaf to orate on the beauties of a Beethoven symphony, as to
expect of one who lacks the sense of religion, the spirit of faith, to
expound, or even to understand, the ideals of the Jew, whose history
throughout the past was but one continuous glorification of the only
one God, by the master works of its hundreds and thousands of men of
learning and the unparalleled martyrdom of the whole people, and whose
future is humanity made one by the belief in the only one God and
Father. Therefore, let me give you, delegates and members of the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association, the advice to continue as you
started, as an academic, cosmopolitan association, yet at the same
time let it be linked to the synagogue of each city as the center of
the faith. Let your watch-word be true to the symbol of קומי אורי
“arise and shine,” and give light to all the nations. Let your
inspiration and your power of enlightening the world ever come fresh
from the sanctuary of faith, as of yore, and you will not only be all
the more honored for this loyalty to the spirit of the past and the
spirit of the American people which is religious, but the sweetest
delight that comes from the classic world of beauty will reflect only
the brighter light of the holiness, the beauty of holiness, that comes
from Israel’s one God.

I happen at the present time to be teaching at the University of
Michigan, at Ann Arbor. We have there a Menorah Society, devoted to
the general object to which all our Menorah Societies are devoted. We
listen to speakers and engage in discussions on Jewish history, Jewish
literature, Jewish religion, and current Jewish social, economic and
political problems. Side by side with the Menorah Society there exists
a Jewish Student Congregation, a body of men and women of which I feel
it a privilege to have been one of the organizers and to be a member
at the present time, which devotes itself entirely to religious
activity, to regular weekly worship. The two organizations do not
conflict in any way. It is significant that about ninety-five per
cent, if not more, of the members of the Michigan Menorah Society
attend regularly the services of the Jewish Student Congregation.
Unfortunately, not so large a percentage of the members of the
congregation attend the meetings or are members of the Michigan
Menorah Society. In the course of time, the relationship between the
two organizations will doubtless be adjusted more satisfactorily. But
in the experience at Michigan we have a concrete illustration of the
spur to religion which Menorah men derive from their participation in
Menorah work.

The ideal of the Menorah Societies is a non-partisan ideal. We do not
stand for Zionism or anti-Zionism; we do not urge the acceptance of
reform Judaism or conservative Judaism or orthodox Judaism; we do not
favor the German Jew as against the Russian Jew, or vice versa, nor do
we appeal to one social class as against another. We want the Menorah
ideal to be broad enough to include every Jew. We do not exclude
religion as such from the scope of our interests; we but exclude any
insistence upon a particular sect or branch or kind of Judaism. We
avoid all partisan activity which may tend to disorganize our Jewish
students, which may tend to divide them. That is all.

[125]

II. The Luncheon

I am glad that our Chancellor here to my right said that the speeches
were to be brief. I think that an after-dinner speaker who makes a
long speech ought to have about the same punishment that the member of
parliament mentioned when he introduced a bill, “The only way to stop
suicide is to make it a capital offense, punishable by death.”

But I have always tried to avoid redundancy of expression. I would
never say a “wealthy plumber,” nor a “poor poet,” nor for that matter
a “poor professor.”

Nor would I say an “interesting Menorah Association meeting.” That
they[126] are interesting goes without saying, if we can judge from the
one we had last night.

I am exceedingly interested in real culture, and being an American,
and knowing, as I do, what the Jews in America can do for the
advancement of learning, of knowledge and of the humanities, I am
interested in the Menorah movement, which will tend to bring this
about; and it is when we reflect upon the war in Europe today, with
all its sickening horrors and what that means to culture (we can
hardly comprehend it yet), what an obstacle to learning, that we may
exclaim with that old bibliophile, Richard de Bury:

“O pacis auctor et amator altissime! dissipa gentes bella volentes quæ
super omnes pestilentias libris nocent.”

And by “libris” he meant culture.

Let me make a confession as to that evening. I not only felt a thrill
but made also some observations. These young men had their ideals, but
they had also their difficulties. And they spoke of them. We had an
exchange of thought and of candor such as comes to a man in the
ministry and to a teacher of students but rarely. They told me of
their doubts. Young men, serious young minds, always will have their
doubts. They want to earn their convictions. I hope the day will never
come when young men will not insist on seeing things. These young men
were quick-witted and ready with repartee and counter-argument, and I
saw in each eye a glint of an ideal. The debate was strong, but the
ideals were stronger.

I notice the Menorah Association has for its aim the cultivation of
ideals. It is natural that young men, with red blood in them, should
hold dear the precious dreams of what might and should be. As I look
upon ideals now, through the perspective of years, I see they have
both strength as well as limitations. But I know that, however much
life and experience challenges them, they are the best force in us. I
respect and value them so much that I deplore the waste of the[127] least
of them. An ideal is a moral ambition, a great wish of a true, even if
a bit naive, soul. And it should have the right of way.

Every work in life implies stern necessity and a fine wish. I am
reminded of a bridge in Berlin which the Germans have built with
inimitable art and truth. There are four groups, each at a corner. On
one an elderly man stands erect and writing. It is History, stern and
real. At his side stands a boy, lithe and graceful. There are ideals
just as much as Law in the affairs of men. On the other side of the
bridge stands another symbol of the two forces in Life: a man carrying
a bundle, a bent man, who has borne the brunt of the pioneer days, and
next to him also a youth. Commerce, however sordid, still implies
morality and the generous side of man. On the third side stands the
solemn figure of Religion, sober and haggard, the symbol of Faith and
martyrdom. And the young man, next to it, seems sprightly and strong.
Why must Religion be interpreted as dispensing comfort alone? Should
it not also give strength and joy? In the last corner stands
Pestalozzi, the teacher, and a boy looks up into his kind face. We
crave for action and capability more than for knowledge and facts. And
we crave for love more than for truth, and the real truth brings
affections and enthusiasm.

In the meetings of your Association you speak often of ideals, you
speak of them fervently. But ideals are not merely academic. They are
personal. An ideal becomes yourself, if it is yours at all. It is a
dynamic force within you. It pervades your whole being. It is an
unseen but a very telling strength. It directs you, and it sends you
on your errand of life. You cannot rest satisfied merely to know your
ideal and to speculate about it. It is the engine of warfare in your
career. Study ideals, not to contemplate and analyze, but to emulate
them and to fill yourself with them. You have work to do. And work is
more insistent than philosophy. You have work to do which no one else
can do for you, or may do for you. An ideal is your Self at the
highest power.

You with fresh energies, you with the clear eye of healthy youth, you
with unoppressed hearts, you at the beginning of life, you should go
at your work splendidly, directly, forcefully. The real idealist is a
man of action, of untiring activity. Do things and you verify what you
plan. You have the privilege of youth. Have also the pride of youth.
Keep it sweet, but keep it also strong.

It seems to me that, having in this city a Hebrew Union College with a
gifted faculty, we should establish at our University a Department of
Semitics. Since the University is a public school, an institution
supported by public taxation, it certainly could not affiliate
directly with a sectarian institution, but I see no reason why the
professors in the Hebrew College, if they are not already overworked
like the students, should not be able to conduct courses at the
University itself, and I believe such courses would promote the
Menorah movement more than anything else you could do. I think you
would attract students from far and wide to the University of
Cincinnati, and you would thereby achieve one of the ends for which
you are working.

The position of the Menorah movement and what it stands for calls to
mind a story that was told in Montreal a couple of years ago by Lord
Haldane, who came to America to attend a meeting of the American Bar
Association. A part of the story was recited in verse (which I do not
recall exactly) and had to do with an Englishman who was taken
prisoner in one of the countries of the Far East, and was offered his
choice between conversion to the religion of his captors or death. He
was a man who had no particular religious feelings; he was not
religious when at home. However, he felt that first and foremost he
was an Englishman and that if he were to do anything base it would
reflect upon all those ideals which were so dear to him, and therefore
he cast in his lot and chose against the change of religion. So, too,
with some of us who perhaps are not religious in a formal way; the
realization of the great things that have been accomplished in the
past by Jews, the Jewish historical background, is in itself a shield
to us, and the realization of what Judaism is and stands for must act
to prevent us from doing something that would be unworthy of
ourselves and of the religion of which we are a part.

I am not one of those who insist on views once maintained though later
found faulty. I am rather ready to change my views, especially after
what I heard today from my honored neighbor (Prof. I. L. Sharfman) and
from what he said last night that the religious idea of Judaism is not
ignored but is held in view.

All Jews who are Jews must believe that Judaism stands for an
uncompromising[129] monotheistic truth, while the world around us has
compromised the same. Therefore we, as Jews, must always insist upon
the maintenance of the pure monotheistic idea for which we suffered
and struggled, and for which our fathers died. We must maintain this
as the mainstay and vital principle of Judaism. For this very reason,
and for no other, we insist, especially from the point of view of a
Jewish theological college, that this idea of a pure Jewish religion,
the pure monotheistic idea, must be held unshakenly and without any
change or any concession. And for that very reason we could not and
will not say that race is everything. We cannot admit that a pure race
is the best, and that a pure Jew is he who has maintained solely
everything Jewish and not allowed the Greek culture to be assimilated
in order to sublimate and spiritualize and idealize the truth
inherited. For Ruppin and the Nationalists who follow him, the poor
Jews, the ghetto Jews, of Russia who speak Yiddish and live only an
exclusive narrow life, are five-fifths Jews, while the Jews in free
and civilized lands are only half Jews. Now against this, we of the
Hebrew Union College, we who represent progressive or reformed
Judaism, must protest. We must insist that the Jewish race, the Jewish
people or nation, if you want to call it so, can form only the body;
Judaism, the Jewish religion, is the soul. And we will always stand
not merely for the body, not merely for the material side, not merely
for race, which is the lowest kind of life, but for the spirit, the
soul of Judaism, and that is its religious truth.

For right appreciation, which shall be neither over-appreciation nor
under-appreciation, but true appreciation, based upon a correct
estimation of all essentials, the first requisite is knowledge,
thorough knowledge of all conditions, forces and influences. And the
second requisite is pride, pride in this knowledge and in the object
of this knowledge. And this, translated into the Menorah language,
means, as I understand it, correct knowledge of Judaism, of our Jewish
history, our Jewish past, our Jewish heritage, our Jewish religion,
and pride in all this Judaism—a knowledge and pride that alone can
enable us to know what Judaism truly is, and what its work and its
mission for the present and the future must be, that alone can enable
us to live positively and constructively as Jews and perpetuate our
Judaism for the blessing of ourselves, our children, and all mankind.
So I interpret the Menorah movement. And I heartily welcome such a
movement, whose aim is the awakening of our Jewish college young men
and women to a wholesome and genuine appreciation[130] of themselves, of
the Jewish side of their lives, of their Jewish consciousness and
Jewish obligations, of the full meaning and responsibility imposed
upon them by their subscribing to the name Jew, and their adherence to
the religion of our fathers. We must look to our college-bred Jewish
men and women to become the guiding spirits in our Judaism of
to-morrow and of all the future. And I say, “Thank God for any
movement that must surely lead to this goal.”

To begin with, the word Judaism, in the English language, stands
exclusively for a religion. It is co-ordinate with the word
Christianity, the word Buddhism, the word Zoroastrianism, with any
word that stands exclusively for a religion. Now in the history of the
Jewish people, there was a time when Judaism did not exist, and if I
understand the gentlemen who represent the Reform sect correctly—I
speak under correction—the intention of the Reform movement is a
reversion in fact to the religious attitude of the pre-Judaistic
period in the history of the religion of the Jewish people. It is
“prophetic” or “progressive Judaism” for which they stand, I gather,
in contrast with the “Talmudical Judaism,” of the larger orthodox
sect. But the period of the great prophets is not the period of
Judaism, and strictly speaking, the term Judaism excludes the
prophetic element as an active force in Jewish life. This is
significant, and to me the significance seems tremendous, for so far
as my personal sympathies are concerned they go entirely with the
prophetic aspects of Judaism, or better, of Hebraism.

For this reason the gentlemen who stated the object of the Society in
the constitution of the Harvard Menorah Society were compelled to take
into consideration the following historic fact: There was a time in
the history of mankind when religion and life were coincident. You
know that the prophets were reformers. The orthodox religion which
they fought was the religion of the land. They were progressive
religionists, just as the gentlemen who are in the Reform sect to-day
claim to be progressive religionists. When they established their
religion, it became the religion of the whole nationality, for all
ancient religion is national religion. Religion for the Greeks, and
religion for the Jews, and religion for the Syrians, and for the
Babylonians, and the Romans, was essentially[131] national and political,
and the political nationalism of religion in the time of the Roman
Empire was the immediate basis for the persecution of the Jews by the
Romans. The latter persecuted the Jews not primarily because they
disliked the Jews, but because the Jews were a political danger in
their refusal to worship the representative of the State in the shape
of the Emperor. But in the development of civilization, religion
became detached from the totality of civilized living. In the
progressive division of labor religion became specialized. The
priestly group learned to confine itself more and more to the “things
of the spirit”—cult, ritual, dogma, while the other elements in
civilization loomed larger and larger. Religion remained social, but
society was no longer religious. Life was secularized. I think that
the representatives of the Reform sect, in one of their conferences,
declared that America is not a Christian country. In so doing they
acknowledged this fact.

This may be seen generally in the case of Yiddish alone. Yiddish, as
you know, is a German dialect; it is middle high German in its base,
and German is an inflected language; its rhythms are essentially long,
periodic, indeterminate, radically different from the rhythms of
Hebrew, involving a different kind of co-ordination and mode. But
compare Yiddish with German, and you find quite an antagonistic
literary quality. Yiddish reads like the Psalms, and the Bible, and
the Talmud; it doesn’t read like German until it is Germanized. The
whole genius of the tongue has been altered by Jewish use so that its
spiritual quality has taken on the quality of the race that uses the
tongue, and its literary kinship has become Hebraic.

Again, there is this whole mass of neo-English, neo-Russian,
neo-German literatures which, written by Jews, deal with the life of
the Jews, with their interests and character. This is not religious.
What is its relation to Jewry? Yet again, there is any number of
Jewish individuals, among whom I must count myself, who find it
impossible to adjust their consciences with any official type of
theological doctrine, who are interested in discovering the truth, and
are compelled to acknowledge that no truth has been discovered
finally, once and for all; there are hundreds and thousands such. What
is to be their relation to their people if Jews are to be considered
members merely of Judaistic sects? Yet Jews they are, and if they do
not contribute directly to Judaism, they do contribute to Hebraism.

Hebraism stands not for that particular expression of the Jewish mind,
religion, but for all that has appeared in Jewish history, both
religious and secular. The term Judaism stands for that partial
expression of the Jewish genius which is religious.

Now the Harvard Menorah Society, taking this fact into consideration,
made use, because of the tradition of English usage, of the term
“Hebraic.” It recognized that since Hebraism is more comprehensive
than Judaism, many people might be Hebraists who are not and need not
be Judaists. It refused to exclude them from a share in Jewish life
and an opportunity for Jewish service. The organization goes on the
principle—both the Intercollegiate and the constituent
Societies—that nothing Jewish is alien to it. For this reason the
Menorah takes no sides; for this reason it is Hebraic and not
Judaistic. For this reason it welcomes everything Jewish without
exception—theological and secular, Russian, German, French, English.
It requires only that a thing shall be Jewish, that it shall be a
possible part of the organic total we call Hebraism.

Hebraism is the flower and fruit of the whole of Jewish life. Its
root is the ethnic nationality of the Jewish people, and with this
also the secularizing reformers agree when they prohibit and
discourage the marriage of Jew with Gentile.

Many of us, however, are not content with merely the status quo.
Throughout the nineteenth century it has thrown us into a series of
dishonorable compromises. We want a condition—I speak now for myself
and not for the Menorah—we want a condition in which the genius of
the Jew, the Hebraic spirit, may express itself without any need of
compromise. The orthodox Jew, at least, retains his integrity with his
darkness. But we are in danger of losing our integrity. We concede to
our environment point after point. But we are not liberated in spirit
by these concessions; we are merely turned into amateur Gentiles. The
orthodox sectary makes no concession to environment, and tends to
petrify and die. The reformed sectary makes too many, and tends to
dissolve and die. This is the penalty for the status quo.

Life, to be sure, consists of compromise and concession. But for
integral living we must make them as masters, not serfs. There must be
one place where the ancestral spirit of the Jew will not need to adapt
itself to the world, but will, like the English or French spirit,
adapt the world to itself. That place is determined nationally, just
as the places of all European culture are determined nationally and
racially.

This Hebraism, academically realized through study, must be realized
in the lives of individuals through work, as Dr. Grossmann has well
said, and in the life of the great Jewish mass in a free Jewish state.
Every ideal we acquire from the past must be turned into a fact of the
present. Noblesse oblige![133]

There are some things in Dr. Kallen’s eloquent address that I do
believe, but there are many more things with which I do not agree. But
let that be as it may, I was very much interested in his remark, that
the “Reform sect,” as he is pleased to call us, harks back to the
prophets. This has been claimed frequently by the reformers
themselves, but he puts a new interpretation upon it; he says the
prophets were pre-Judaistic. This is the Christian point of view. They
claim that Judaism was the growth of the post-exilic period, but we
reformers interpret the term Judaism altogether differently.

The Reform movement, as the movement for religious emancipation, was
the accompaniment of similar emancipatory movements affecting the Jews
at the close of the eighteenth century. First there was the linguistic
emancipation when under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn the Jews
of Germany discarded the use of the German-Jewish jargon or Yiddish,
the language of the Jew’s degradation, (for there would have been no
such thing as Yiddish had the Jew not been degraded and excluded as he
was in the countries of Europe) and began the employment of pure
German. Secondly, there was the educational emancipation. The Jews had
been educated in chedarim where they received instruction only in
Hebrew branches and no so-called secular education whatsoever. This
separated the Jew from the culture of the world. At the close of the
eighteenth century German Jews began to attend schools and
universities. Gradually this took place also in other countries.
Thirdly, there was the civil or political emancipation, when after the
French Revolution the countries of western Europe, one after the
other, accorded the Jews the rights of men. The Reform movement or, in
other words, the religious emancipation, is simply the result of great
world forces, as embodied in these various aspects of emancipation,
and for this reason the Reform movement, far from being simply a
matter of creed or theological belief, made the Jew a citizen of the
world and fitted him for the modern environment.

Freedom is the Messiah that is still to come to the Jews in the lands
where they are oppressed, so that everywhere they may be at one in the
rights of citizenship with their fellow countrymen, differing from
them in their religion alone. This is the great distinction I desired
to draw between the Jew nationally and the Jew as a member of a
religious people; this “religious people” is the body of which Judaism
is the soul.

[135]

III. The Business Sessions