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THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 

 

 
 THE JEW 
 AND CHRISTIANI 
 
 Some Phases, Ancient and Modern, of the 
 Fewish Attitude towards 
 Christianity 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT “DANBY, D.D. 
 
 RESIDENTIARY CANON 
 OF ST, GEORGE’S CATHEDRAL, JERUSALEM 
 
 LONDON 
 TOE SHELDON: PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK AND TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN CO, 
 

 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 On the general subject, the treatment of Jesus and 
 Christianity in Jewish literature from the close of the 
 Talmud period (end of sixth century) to the present 
 day, there is still no systematic survey. The subject 
 is not an attractive one. The field is very wide, the 
 literature is not very accessible and it is in the highest 
 degree wearisome. The bulk of it is controversial; 
 and nothing is more wearisome than controversial 
 literature once we have passed beyond the atmo- 
 sphere and spirit of the time, lost touch with the 
 current idiom and changed our ideas as to the 
 relative importance of the various issues at stake, 
 and, above all, when we are totally out of sympathy 
 with the lines of argumentation and are unable to 
 accept the greater part of the premises of the 
 disputants. 
 
 It is not proposed to touch in these lectures upon 
 the mass of Jewish-Christian controversial literature ; 
 they are confined in the main to the Jewish attitude 
 to our Lord as it appears in certain Jewish expres- 
 sions of opinion which were meant only for Jewish 
 ears and were not primarily intended (like so much 
 of present-day Jewish opinion) to be overheard by 
 Christians, and to a few Jewish writings on the 
 
 Vv 
 
vi INTRODUCTORY 
 
 subject which are not, avowedly, controversial. 
 Even in this selection it is not possible to be exhaus- 
 tive: all that is here proposed is to take what may 
 fairly be regarded as representative statements at 
 various stages in the history of Christian-Jewish 
 relations and, as far as possible, sketch the general 
 conditions out of which those expressions of opinion 
 arose. 
 
 The Lectures ave printed in the form in which they were 
 jirst delivered, and a few lapses into colloquial style have 
 been allowed to pass uncorrected. 
 
I, 
 
 II, 
 
 III. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY . e ° °- . ° 
 DURING THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY. ° 
 
 THE TALMUDIC ERA AND EARLY MEDIZVAL 
 TIMES e ° ° ° ° e ° 
 
 FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY ° ° ° ° ° ° 
 
 IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ‘ e . 
 
 AT THE PRESENT TIME ° ° ° . 
 NOTES ° e e e ° e ° 
 INDEX . . . . e e e 
 
 PAGE 
 
 115 
 119 
 
CHAPMAN LECTURES 
 
 THE chapters of this book were delivered as 
 Lectures at Sion College, London, during October, 
 1926. They were arranged by the S.P.C.K., 
 on the initiative and with the help of Mr. Conrad 
 Chapman and American friends. 
 
THE JEW 
 AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 I 
 DURING THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 
 
 THERE is an outstanding fact, probably un- 
 paralleled, which is distinctive of the story of the 
 Christian Church. Side by side with the Christian 
 Church God has allowed another, the Jewish Church, 
 to persist. These two are, so to speak, two trees 
 arising from the same stock. The one owes its 
 existence to its acceptance of Jesus as Christ; the 
 other, it can certainly be said, owes its continued 
 existence to its rejection of Jesus as Christ. There 
 they are: they have from the first existed side by 
 side (for modern Judaism is just as much an immedi- 
 ate product of the first century as is Christianity) ; 
 they have stood, nineteen hundred years, spectators 
 of each other’s lives, critics of each other’s beliefs ; 
 for the most part sharing, stage by stage, the same 
 civilization, living in more or less close proximity 
 within the same countries ; and knowing (or believing 
 themselves to know) the most, including the best 
 and the worst, of each other. 
 
 Thus, throughout its history, Christianity has been 
 
2 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 provided with a gauge, a criterion, a measuring rod. 
 Judaism, through the long expanses of history, has 
 placed itself alongside of Christianity; it has applied 
 itself as a measuring rod; it, alone of the contem- 
 porary civilizations and religions, has consistently ~ 
 hovered around the flanks of Christian civilization, 
 a perpetual witness, itself changing scarcely at all, 
 while recording, stage after stage, its impressions of 
 Christianity. 
 
 In the absolute sense (or, if you prefer it, from the 
 Christian point of view) Judaism as a measuring 
 line is distorted and distorting: as St. Paul puts it, 
 “a blindness in part is come upon Israel’’; but in 
 the relative sense Judaism alone, through its peculiar 
 circumstances, offers us a systematic, consistent, 
 independent, external criterion of the various forms 
 of Christianity at various stages of its history. 
 What we propose to study now is Christianity (or, 
 rather, Christians) at various stages in history, from 
 New Testament times to the present day, as measured 
 by this largely consistent gauge. 
 
 From the time when Jesus stood before the Jewish 
 High Priest, and throughout nineteen centuries, 
 Christianity has come up for. judgment before 
 representative Judaism; it has been testified against 
 by countless successions of witnesses; it has been 
 charged with many and various crimes; it has been 
 the victim often of false testimony. 
 
 But, if one may be allowed to give the moral of 
 the story before the story itself, it is this: relatively, 
 the judgment of Judaism is just; the Jewish attitude 
 to Christianity, veering as it does from the one 
 
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 3 
 
 extreme point of utter loathing and detestation, 
 through phases of more or less cold neutrality and 
 defensive hostility, to a phase approaching appreci- 
 ation of certain Christians and of reverence for Jesus 
 their Master—this Jewish attitude has varied with 
 almost mathematical certainty according to the 
 precise degree in which Christians have shown 
 themselves real followers, in spirit and deed, of their 
 Saviour. 
 
 The more Christians have conformed to the spirit 
 of Christ, the more has Jewish respect been drawn 
 to Christianity and to Christ. The farther Christians 
 have drawn back from following after Jesus in spirit 
 and in truth, so have Christians brought into dis- 
 credit Christianity and Christ Himself. 
 
 It is the veriest truism : those outside the Christian 
 fold judge Christianity and our Lord Himself, not 
 primarily from the Gospel records, not primarily 
 from the official teaching of the Church; but, first 
 and foremost, from the living witness of Christians— 
 average professing Christians. The more worthy 
 Christians prove themselves to be, the more worthy 
 a conception will the stranger form of Christ. 
 Conversely, the more unworthy the conception which 
 the stranger forms of Christ and His teaching, the 
 more unworthy must be the so-called followers of 
 Christ. The Christian is supposed to be what, in 
 fact, he ought to be (or ought to try to be)—a mirror 
 of Christ. 
 
 So we may be able to find some salutary discipline 
 in searching out what have been in the past, and 
 especially what are to-day, the various forms of 
 
4 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Jewish attitude and opinion with regard to Christ, 
 Christians and Christianity. The Jew has ever been 
 on the watch; his vision may have been distorted, 
 but, with allowance made for its inevitable margin 
 of error, it has been consistent. 
 
 The results of this search are, on the whole, far 
 from flattering to us Christians. They are the more 
 humiliating when we think of what is most probably 
 their real basis—our own failure to show forth Christ 
 to the world in our own lives: because we, Christ’s 
 soldiers and servants, have so far forgotten our 
 professions and betrayed our trust as to put our 
 Lord and Master to an open shame. 
 
 In the New Testament period it might be supposed 
 that relations between Jews and Christians were 
 clearly defined. We might sum up the position 
 briefly as follows : 
 
 Our Lord taught certain things and He made 
 certain claims. He taught fundamental principles 
 of morality which were sometimes in direct opposition 
 to those of the ordinary accredited Jewish teachers ; 
 and He claimed that in His person all the Jewish 
 longings for a Messiah who should save the Jewish 
 race, soul and body, as a state and as individuals— 
 that all these longings were fulfilled and satisfied in 
 His person. After our Lord’s crucifixion this teach- 
 ing and these claims were promulgated, with more 
 and more success, first to a limited extent among 
 the Jews and isolated Gentiles in Palestine, and then 
 to a much more marked extent among both Jews and 
 Gentiles in certain other parts of the Roman Empire. 
 
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY © 5 
 
 As regards the Jews we must beware of making a 
 false simplification—that some Jews accepted Jesus’ 
 claims and teaching, while others rejected them; 
 and that the Jewish followers of Jesus gave up their 
 Jewish allegiance and ceased to be Jews, while the 
 others, by their refusal to accept Jesus, by this very 
 act of refusal, proclaimed their Jewishness. The 
 course of things was hardly so uncomplicated as 
 this. 
 
 For our particular purpose we shall do best to 
 draw our information not from the Gospels (which 
 give the crystallized Christian presentation of facts 
 and controversies), but from two other sources: the 
 letters of St. Paul, and the surviving scraps of Jewish 
 opinion preserved in the earliest elements of the 
 Talmud. 
 
 The Epistles of St. Paul are the earliest Christian 
 documents which we possess. What is the picture 
 we there find of Jewish and Christian relations? 
 We cannot afford time for details, but the outline 
 is this : 
 
 St. Paul preached the Gospel of Jesus to the Jews 
 outside Palestine, and especially to the non-Jews. 
 He was soon faced with the problem whether, to 
 become a member of this young body of believers, 
 it was necessary for the Gentile to become a Jew— 
 that is, whether Christianity was an essentially 
 Jewish creed, with all its roots and all its hopes 
 bound up with Judaism. As weall know, he decided 
 to the contrary : the sole condition was to be belief 
 in Jesus as Lord and Christ: “In Him is neither 
 Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision.”’ 
 
f 
 
 6 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Only after much trouble, and after grave heart- 
 searchings among the other and older Christians, 
 was St. Paul able to press this view upon his brother 
 apostles in Palestine—Jewish Christians who had 
 so far envisaged the faith in Jesus solely within a 
 Jewish framework. 
 
 The fact which we find difficult to realize, but 
 which nevertheless is a fact, is that Christianity lived 
 several decades in Jewish surroundings and as a 
 Jewish belief; and, consequently, in many or most 
 respects, did not transcend the limits of Judaism. 
 So long as the early Christians in Palestine conformed 
 with the many external requirements of the Jewish 
 religion (circumcision, attendance at the Temple 
 during the three great festivals, observed the laws 
 as to forbidden foods, and so forth)—so long as they 
 conformed with these, the external laws and practices 
 of Judaism, they seem to have been strangely free 
 to hold their beliefs in Jesus; at least none dreamed 
 of regarding them as men who had forfeited or 
 thrown off their Jewishness. 
 
 But then came the controversy: does Christi- 
 anity involve the acceptance of the Law of Moses as 
 defined and elaborated by Jewish custom, by the 
 so-called “‘ tradition of the elders”? It was a long 
 and bitter controversy. But the increasing number 
 of Gentile adherents put the matter beyond doubt : 
 the Jewish law was a burden on the Gentiles ‘‘ too 
 grievous to be borne.”’ 
 
 We may turn nowto the purely Jewish point of view. 
 
 Sects within Judaism were no new thing. In 
 themselves such sects were only expressions of 
 
 Se Seer ele 
 

 
 
 
 SHES BPIRST CHRISTIAN: CENPURY: <7 
 
 particular ideals. Thus, in the time of our Lord, 
 four main parties were very much in evidence. 
 
 There were the Sadducees, the aristocracy of the 
 time, members of the priestly families, the holders 
 of such official posts as the Roman overlords allowed 
 to be held by members of the conquered Jewish 
 people. In religious matters the Sadducees were 
 the conservatives of the time, hating change and 
 religious innovations. 
 
 Another sect, familiar to us from the Gospels, 
 was that of the Pharisees. The Gospels give us only 
 one aspect of these people. Jewish sources show us 
 that the Pharisees were, so to speak, the modernists 
 of the time, who brought the Law of Moses “ up to 
 date,’ by steadily accumulating traditions explana- 
 tory of the Law of Moses, and by adapting the Law 
 of Moses to present-day requirements. In another 
 way, important for our purpose, they were nation- 
 alists, in so far as they saw in their traditions an 
 exclusively national possession: to their mind the 
 Jewish national identity depended on the preserv- 
 ation and practice of the Mosaic law with its tra- 
 ditional interpretations and accumulations. Again, 
 as opposed to the Sadducees, who naturally as 
 office-holders sought at all costs to be on good terms 
 with the Romans, the Pharisees were a popular party, 
 the democratic party, with the interests of the people 
 at heart, and hating the foreign Roman adminis- 
 tration.” 
 
 A third sect was that of the Essenes. We hear 
 nothing of these in the Gospels, and it is difficult to 
 know exactly what part they played in the Jewish 
 
8 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life as a whole. Not much perhaps, since their ideal 
 of existence was rather monastic seclusion, a 
 separated community life, away from the workaday 
 world, in the solitude of the Dead Sea plain.® 
 
 A fourth sect, only hinted at in the Gospels, was 
 that of the Zealots. These were the enthusiastic 
 and pugnacious nationalists of the time, sworn to 
 throw off the Roman yoke. It was they who tried 
 on every possible opportunity to make trouble for the 
 Roman administration. In the religious sense they 
 were in sympathy with the Pharisees.* ; 
 
 Therefore, for a new group of Jews to come 
 together, with ideals drawn from the teaching of 
 Jesus—this was, in itself, at first, nothing out- 
 rageously strange. We remember Gamaliel’s judg- 
 ment in the Acts of the Apostles—that it was best to 
 wait and see how this new sect should turn out, 
 whether innocent or harmful, that if it were of God 
 it would endure, but if not it would soon die away. 
 This new Jewish-Christian party in the eyes of the 
 religious leaders of the time was, at the worst, simply 
 regarded as guilty of minuth, namely, a variety of 
 Jewish heresy, or, rather, Jewish sectarianism. 
 
 All the information we find in Jewish sources 
 traceable to the first century shows that, in the 
 beginning, the relations between the Jews and the 
 Jewish-Christians were amicable; and, what is far 
 greater matter for surprise, the Jewish attitude to 
 our Lord Himself is, the earlier we penetrate, marked 
 by the less degree of hostility. We are forced to 
 the conclusion that so long as Pharisaic Judaism 
 (which, we must remember, was the only form of 
 
 
 

 
 THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 9g 
 
 Judaism which survived the destruction of Jerusa- 
 lem)—so long as it records personal or almost 
 personal reminiscence of our Lord, the surviving 
 record is not viciously hostile (as later became the 
 case); but the farther the Jews were removed from 
 the time of our Lord’s earthly life, and the more 
 dependent they became for knowledge of Jesus upon 
 later generations of Christians, then so much the 
 worse became the Jewish characterization of Jesus. 
 
 The actual condemnation of our Lord turned on 
 the Roman verdict that He was a political danger. 
 His prosecution was solely in the hands of the Jewish 
 political leaders, the Sadducees, the priestly caste; 
 and, in the main, we are safe in concluding that it 
 was primarily by them that the extreme penalty was 
 connived at. The moral principles which Jesus laid 
 down may often have clashed with the principles 
 advocated by the Pharisees, or by some of them; 
 but, as Jews nowadays are never tired of insisting, 
 the ethical and religious teaching of Jesus was 
 fundamentally Jewish, and can be paralleled in 
 detail after detail by the teaching of the Pharisaic 
 religious and ethical code buried in the Talmud. 
 Therefore it was not the Pharisees who were respon- 
 sible for Jesus’ death; nor a priori was it impossible 
 that, after His death, they should retain feelings 
 towards Him more tolerant in tone than those 
 _ which later became the rule. 
 
 And such is, more or less, what we find in the early 
 references. For example, there is a curious passage 
 in the Talmud ® which contrasts Jesus with the 
 heathen prophet Balaam. It runs as follows: 
 
 B 
 
10 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The nephew of the Emperor Titus ® wished to 
 become a Jew. He first raised the ghost of Titus 
 and asked his advice. Titus advised him not to 
 become a Jew, because the religious customs of 
 Israel were too many and too difficult. He then 
 raised up Balaam, and when he was asked his opinion 
 about the Jews, he burst out in a rage, exclaiming, 
 “Seek not their peace nor their good.’’ Then at 
 last he summoned the spirit of Jesus, who answered, 
 “Seek their good and do not seek their harm, for 
 everyone that hurteth Israel is as if he hurt the apple 
 of God’s eye.” 
 
 So we find that at this time, roughly at the 
 beginning of the second century, Jesus was regarded 
 as one well-disposed to Israel. 
 
 Another somewhat obscure passage * tells how one 
 of the most respected and venerated of the Rabbis 
 in the latter half of the first century, namely, Rabbi 
 Eliezer the Great, was asked his opinion about Jesus, 
 and he refused to say that he believed that Jesus had 
 no share in the world to come. That is to say, he 
 believed that Jesus was a Jew worthy of acceptance 
 in the sight of God. 
 
 This same Rabbi Eliezer the Great is also made to 
 say that he was attracted by a certain interpretation 
 of Scripture repeated to him in the name of Jesus.® 
 He was even suspected of a leaning towards minuth, 
 in the shape of this new Christian- Jewish heresy. 
 
 We may now turn to the attitude towards the 
 first-century Christians generally. 
 In early elements of the Talmud and the Rabbinic 
 
 
 

 
 PoE ee tho CHRISTIAN: CENTURY 11 
 
 writings there is frequent reference to minim, persons 
 guilty of minuth, some form of Jewish sectarianism. 
 Many of these references are almost certainly aimed 
 at the early Christians and at the teaching of St. 
 Paul. They are partly rules to separate orthodox 
 Jews from the Christians, and partly warnings 
 against Christian and particularly Pauline teachings. 
 Thus we learn that Christian offerings of animals, 
 meal, wine, fruits, were not valid offerings in the 
 Temple (though it is not known whether the Phari- 
 sees, who stated these rules, had any power to 
 enforce them); Christian writings were to be 
 regarded as books of sorcery; intermarriage with 
 the Christians was forbidden; copies of the Scrip- 
 tures written by them were to be destroyed; also 
 animals slaughtered by them were forbidden food. 
 We have much information to show how the more 
 orthodox Jews tried to guard against the inroad of 
 Christian beliefs and practices. Perhaps the most 
 curious is this. The most solemn moment in the 
 Synagogue service is the repetition of the Shema, 
 a selection of short passages from the Pentateuch, 
 beginning, “‘ Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the 
 Lord is one.”’ We are told that in earlier times 
 the Ten Commandments were included in this 
 selection of passages; but with the rise of the 
 Christians the Ten Commandments were left out, 
 for fear of seeming to support the alleged Christian 
 view that these were the only laws given to Moses 
 from Mount Sinai.!® Here we have a curious echo 
 of our Lord’s teaching that the Ten Commandments 
 and the law of love were at the root of true religion.¥ 
 
12 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 There is quite a series of this kind of regulation, 
 which, notice, aims at excluding the possible 
 expression of Christian ideas in the actual Synagogue 
 service itself; from which we must needs infer that 
 there was an even closer contact of Christian and 
 Jew in the Synagogue than we should have supposed 
 from the Acts of the Apostles. Sometimes it would 
 seem that the very leaders of the Synagogue worship 
 were open to suspicion of Christian leanings. Thusa 
 certain blessing, acclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 was usually said ina whisper for fear that the Romans 
 should think the sentiment treasonable; but, with 
 the currency of the Christian idea of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, it was ordered that the blessing be said in 
 a loud voice,” because some Jews were suspected of 
 quietly interpolating Christian sentiments. Later, 
 as the antagonism of Jews to the Christian- Jewish 
 brethren grew more acute, there was included in the 
 Synagogue service a prayer openly denouncing the 
 munim.*® But this in itself proved to be insufficient ; 
 a fresh regulation proved necessary to the effect 
 that, though it did not greatly matter if the Syna- 
 gogue reader left out certain passages in the service, 
 yet, if he left out this “‘ Denunciation of the minim,” 
 he must go back and repeat it, under penalty of 
 being suspected of Christianity or some other 
 variety of minuth.“ 
 
 As against the teaching of St. Paul, we find stress 
 being laid on the importance of works as against 
 faith. Again, just at this time, the second half of 
 the first Christian century, we find a series of rulings 
 denouncing those who evolve new meanings from 
 
 
 
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY § 13 
 
 Scripture. This is most curious and remarkable, 
 because this kind of thing—what we should call 
 drawing new allegorical interpretations from the 
 Scriptures—was a very favourite habit indeed among 
 the Rabbis, both before and after this time. But 
 that Christians, and especially St. Paul, should do 
 this to further their own purposes, brought the habit 
 into temporary disrepute among the Rabbis. 
 
 Another habit they were accustomed to denounce 
 just at this time was that of trying to probe the 
 reasons and the underlying purpose of various of the 
 laws of Moses.2’ Such laws, the Rabbis insisted 
 (but insisted only temporarily, during the Jewish- 
 Christian period), were to be accepted humbly as 
 divine, arbitrary decrees, and on no account to be 
 questioned or theorized about. All this seems to 
 have reference to the Christian arguments (so fre- 
 quent in the Epistles of St. Paul) which sought to 
 dethrone the position of the Law of Moses. 
 
 These are somewhat vague hints at the Jewish 
 attitude, showing that relations were such that 
 common worship in the Synagogue went on for some 
 time. This could not last, and with the spread of 
 the teachings of St. Paul, which put aside as un- 
 necessary the Law of Moses and the Traditions of 
 the Elders, the Jews took means to make this 
 common worship impossible. In the end, we find 
 R. Tarphon asserting bluntly? that Christianity 
 was far more dangerous to Judaism than paganism 
 was: the Gospels and the writings of the Jewish 
 Christians must be burnt even if they contain the 
 names of God; for while paganism fails to recognize 
 
14 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the truth of Judaism for want of knowledge, minuth 
 (in which we must include Jewish-Christianity) 
 denies what it fully knows.* 
 
 Before leaving this first phase, we must touch on 
 one episode which is most illuminating as showing 
 the something more, even much more, than tolerant 
 attitude held by the leading Jews towards the 
 earliest Christians. 
 
 Not many years after the Ascension the head of the 
 Christians in Jerusalem was James, the brother of 
 the Lord. Of his manner of life and opinions we 
 learn something from early Christian tradition and 
 from the Epistle of James himself in the New Testa- 
 ment. He wasa typical Jewish Christian, observing 
 scrupulously the Jewish law, and combining this 
 with the ascetism practised by certain of the early 
 Christians. From his Epistle we see him as a 
 characteristic teacher of Jewish piety in its best 
 form. For the most trustworthy account of his 
 death we are indebted to the Jewish historian 
 Josephus.?® He tells how Annas the Second, the High 
 Priest, arrested James together with others, and 
 brought them before the Sanhedrin and accused 
 them of being dangerous offenders; they were put 
 to death by stoning. Annas was, of course, a 
 Sadducee, one of the official families who had con- 
 nived at the crucifixion of Jesus. It is not, then, a 
 
 * The substance of the preceding paragraphs sums up the 
 discussion of the subject in I. H. Weiss, Dor dor v’dor’shav (1891, 
 reprinted Berlin, 1924), pp. 232-9. It should, however, be 
 pointed out that though the Jewish Christians were certainly 
 included among the minim, there is always some uncertainty in 
 applying any reference to minim specifically to Jewish Christians. 
 
 
 
 he. See, 
 
Tobe Pi nS. CHRISTIAN: CENTURY °1r5 
 
 matter for surprise that during an interim between 
 the departure of one Roman Governor and the 
 arrival of his successor, in the year 62, the High 
 Priest seized the opportunity to get rid of the leader 
 of the Christian sect. But what 7s a matter worthy 
 of note is that this condemnation of James, the 
 brother of the Lord, so aroused the indignation of 
 the religious leaders of the Jews, that they sent a 
 protest to Albinus, the Roman Governor of Syria, 
 and to King Agrippa, with the result that Annas the 
 High Priest was deposed. 
 
 This episode leaves us with a fairly good idea of 
 Christian and Jewish relations in the year 62. 
 
 To sum up. So long as Christianity remained 
 within the confines of Jewish nationality and con- 
 formed to the elaboration of the laws of Moses, the 
 Traditions of the Elders, which in a measure served 
 as the Jewish national passport, then official 
 Pharisaic Judaism had little quarrel with Christianity 
 and no hard words to say of its Founder. Dis- 
 favour, however, began and increased with the 
 increasing influx of Gentiles into the Christian fold, 
 and the treatment of the Law as a thing of secondary 
 importance among Jewish Christians, and as a 
 non-necessity among Gentile Christians. 
 
 We have seen the measures adopted by the Jews 
 to isolate their Christian brethren. It only wanted 
 some decisive event to split this dual loyalty of the 
 Jewish Christians—their loyalty to Jesus their 
 Messiah and their loyalty to Judza their nation. 
 That decisive event came with the Jewish rebellion, 
 in the years 69 and 70. 
 
16 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The little Jewish race defied the mighty Roman 
 Empire. It must now fight for its life. Those who 
 saw in their Jewish nationalism their most valuable 
 possession rallied round the rebel leaders: even the 
 Essenes, those Jewish ascetics, who had left the 
 world for the sake of leading a higher, retired life in 
 monastic seclusion—even they threw in their lot 
 with the rebels. But the Jewish Christians held 
 aloof. They left Jerusalem and went to Pella, in 
 Transjordan, opposite Beisan. 
 
 One theory ”° has it that the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 in the New Testament was the final decisive appeal 
 to the Jewish Christians, urging them to separate 
 from their Jewish countrymen for good and all. 
 This Epistle tells, in the allegorical method of the 
 time, how the crucified Messiah was both the 
 sacrificial victim and the atoning High Priest, thus 
 superseding the religious system of the Temple. 
 ‘“« Jesus also,”’ the writer goes on to say, “‘ Jesus also, 
 that He might sanctify the people through His own 
 blood, suffered outside the gate. Let us, therefore, 
 go forth unto Him, without the camp (that is, outside 
 the Jewish community), bearing His reproach; for 
 we have here (in Jerusalem) no abiding city.”” The 
 same writer likewise tells the Jewish Christians that 
 they (contrary to the Jewish nationalists) have 
 received a “‘ kingdom that cannot be shaken.”’ 
 
 In any case the breach was now complete. Chris- 
 tians no longer felt bound by any allegiance to 
 Judaism. So Christianity, with all its Jewish 
 treasures—its belief in the divine unity, its Jewish 
 Messiah as Saviour, Teacher and living exemplar, 
 
 
 
 ae SO ee ne 
 
 ae gs a 
 
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY 17 
 
 its Jewish scriptures, its moral teaching derived from 
 the Jewish prophets—with these Jewish treasures, 
 Christianity turned its face wholly to the Gentile 
 world. 
 
 At the time it 1s most unlikely that this with- 
 drawal of a few “ Jewish sectaries ’’ made much 
 impression on the Jewish consciousness as a whole. 
 But it marks the beginning of the stage which still 
 continues—the Jew wandering through the world as 
 a stranger, watching the world transformed by a faith 
 which came to the world through the Jews, seeing 
 this faith only too often misapplied—deeds, shameful 
 in their savagery, done in the name of Christianity, 
 and seeing himself as a Jew held up in horror and 
 contempt by the Gentiles as the greatest hater of 
 Christianity. But, if the Jew did, in truth, become 
 the deepest hater of Christianity, it was most 
 certainly the Christian who had the largest share in 
 making him so. 
 
I] 
 
 THE TALMUDIC ERA AND EARLY MEDIZ:VAL 
 TIMES 
 
 In the first of these lectures we dealt with the 
 salient points in the relations, so far as we could 
 learn them, between official Judaism and the 
 members of the first-century Christian Church. 
 We saw that what governed these relations was the 
 attitude of the Church to its Jewish origins. The 
 original Christians were Jews. Christianity first 
 appeared as a sect within Judaism. Only after 
 some decades did it find the need to sever its relations 
 with its Jewish parent. So long as it remained, even 
 nominally, within the national confines of Judaism 
 and observed the Law, the hall-mark of the Jew, it 
 did not seriously fall foul of official Judaism. We 
 even had a glimpse of the illuminating fact that, the 
 earlier we penetrate, the less degree of hostility 
 marks the Jewish attitude to our Lord Himself. 
 Only when, through the influence of St. Paul, the 
 Law was deposed from its primacy and became a 
 secondary matter for Jewish Christians and a super- 
 fluity for the Gentile Christian—only then was the 
 issue finally joined and Christianity repelled as a 
 dangerous heresy. 
 
 18 
 
 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 19 
 
 The Jewish Christians met their opponents more 
 than halfway. When faced by the “‘ acid test” of 
 their Jewishness—the rebellion against the Romans 
 —the Jewish Christians, compelled to choose between 
 the rival loyalties to their Saviour and to their race, 
 found that they must throw off allegiance to their 
 race. Christianity thereby became a faith for the 
 Gentiles. 
 
 What effect had this on the attitude of the parent 
 Judaism to its daughter faith? The withdrawal 
 of a comparatively few “ Jewish sectaries ”’ could 
 not be a very noticeable event in the consciousness 
 of the Jews, torn as they then were by their own 
 distracting troubles, striving by any means to heal 
 the wounds of their shattered national body. 
 Since Christianity ceased to be Jewish it ceased to 
 be a subject for Jewish attention—friendly attention 
 or hostile attention. Two centuries, almost, were 
 to pass by, before Christianity was to impinge 
 upon the Jewish consciousness as an external 
 factor, to such an extent as to provoke any noticeable 
 reaction of feeling. 
 
 So up to, roughly, the year 150, while Christianity 
 was still. an insignificant sect among the Gentiles, 
 Jewish records, so far as they speak at all, give one 
 the impression of an attitude of uninterested, non- 
 curious, and rather ill-informed tolerance. It is 
 what we should have expected. Memories of 
 Christianity’s existence within Judaism cannot have 
 been very strong; perhaps what Jews heard about 
 the progress of Jewish ideals among the heathen, 
 even though those ideals had taken Christian shape 
 
20 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 —such knowledge might even have afforded them 
 some measure of gratification. 
 
 Early passages in the Talmud still contain hostile 
 references to the minim, among whom were numbered 
 the Jewish Christians; but these never refer to 
 Gentile Christians; they are aimed at those Jews 
 who, after the destruction of Jerusalem, joined the 
 Christians and were supposed, rightly or wrongly, 
 to use their old knowledge of Jews and Jewish ways 
 to betray their old co-religionists to the civil authori- 
 ties—since, after the Romans had, with such 
 difficulty, suppressed the Jewish revolt they issued 
 severe laws against the Jews, in order to break up 
 any national solidity, or any powers of national 
 growth of which the Jews might still be capable. 
 Thus it is that, at an early stage, the passage in the 
 Synagogue service, to which we called attention in 
 the last lecture, denouncing the mimim or Jewish 
 Christians—was changed. No longer was it the 
 Christians, as such, on whom curses were called 
 down, but the malshinim, the Jewish “slanderers,’’ 
 renegades, informers, open enemies of the Jewish 
 race. 
 
 I must pass as rapidly as possible over these 
 earlier stages, since I am anxious to devote these 
 lectures mainly to the more modern aspects of the 
 subject, and especially to what we may consider 
 the causative factors of Jewish opinion. This lecture 
 I shall devote to the more unpleasant points, namely, 
 the Jewish attitude in Talmudic times (roughly 
 from A.D. 200 to 600), and the general attitude in 
 the early Middle Ages. 
 
 
 
 ett el te, eed ee 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA Zi. 
 
 A great deal of attention has for centuries been 
 devoted to the real and supposed references to 
 Christianity in the Talmud. The Talmud has been 
 condemned as one gigantic piece of anti-Christian 
 scurrility. Many and many a time the Christian 
 authorities have tried to suppress it altogether; for 
 many centuries a rigorous Christian censorship was 
 maintained in an attempt to strike out every real or 
 supposed reference to Christianity or to substitute 
 something harmless in its place. These attempts at 
 suppression and censorship have always failed. 
 The Jews were compelled to submit to the censor- 
 ship of the printed editions of the Talmud, but 
 certain manuscript copies have survived unaffected 
 by the censorship. Also the Jews took pains to 
 preserve the memory of the censored passages by 
 making manuscript collections of all the deletions; 
 and these survive.? So it is not difficult to learn 
 what those references to Christianity were. 
 
 But, first of all, what is the Talmud ? 
 
 In our Lord’s time there existed a mass of what the 
 Gospels call “‘ the tradition of the elders,’ namely, 
 interpretations of the laws of Moses which had been 
 handed down through several generations by word 
 of mouth. As the Jewish civilization and society 
 developed, the primitive laws of Moses did not 
 always meet the requirements of daily life. Numer- 
 ous complications arose and disputes as to the 
 meaning of certain laws, their precise degree of 
 applicability in changed circumstances, and as to 
 how far their principles should govern innovations 
 in daily life never thought of in the old code. There- 
 
22 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fore, around the laws of Moses a mass of interpreta- 
 tion accumulated—very much as in England, 
 around the Acts of Parliament, decisions of the law 
 courts provide a mass of rulings and precedents on 
 points which, in the original Act, had been left 
 ambiguous or which had never been foreseen. 
 
 , Among the Jews these traditions were not reduced 
 “ to writing until about the year 200 of our era. 
 Then they were put together in systematic form, 
 under six main heads and sixty-three subheadings. 
 The result is a book nearly twice the length of our 
 New Testament, known as the Mishnah. 
 
 In the course of the next three centuries the 
 religious leaders of the Jews in Palestine and 
 Babylonia accumulated another thick layer of 
 tradition and interpretation around and about this 
 Mishnah. As we know, the Jews are a disputatious 
 and legalistically-minded race. During these three 
 centuries the Jews had no national territory to 
 govern, so the best minds and energies of the nation 
 were directed to the interpretation of their national 
 literature—chief and foremost, this Mishnah. 
 
 Paragraph by paragraph they discussed this 
 Mishnah, thrashed out its details, dragged in every 
 possible subject nearly or distantly related, refur- 
 bished old traditions confirming or contradicting 
 what the Mishnah said, dragged in their own con- 
 temporary ideas on nearly every subject under the 
 sun. All this they reduced to writing. They did 
 this in Palestine with one set of arguments and 
 traditions (some time in the fourth century), and 
 they did it also in Babylonia, with another and much 
 
 
 
 f 
 | 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 23 
 
 more elaborate set of arguments and traditions 
 (early in the sixth century). The result in the latter 
 case (the “ Babylonian Talmud ’’) is a huge com- 
 pilation, equal, at a rough guess, to more than two 
 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its con- 
 tents defy analysis. It is an unconscious attempt 
 to collate an entire national tradition—religious, 
 legal, medical, magical, popular folk-lore, historical, 
 imaginative, speculative and (though it is not easy 
 to grasp the fact) even humorous. It might be 
 said to contain virtually everything except an index. 
 
 And, of course, it contains some references to 
 Christianity; but most astoundingly few. In the 
 main the Jew had already begun the process which 
 has characterized a great part of Judaism even to 
 the present day—the process of slamming the door, 
 and locking, barring and bolting his mind against 
 the whole subject of Christianity. 
 
 What, then, do the Talmud references to Christi- 
 anity amount to? But, first in logical order, we 
 must try to grasp what, during the fourth, fifth and 
 sixth centuries, was the attitude of Christianity 
 to the Jews—tor, if there is one point which arises 
 clearly out of our subject of study, it is this: that 
 
 Jews have always (and can we blame them?) based “ 
 
 their notions of Christianity on the conduct of 
 Christians. 
 
 “ Antisemitism ’’ is not a modern sentiment. 
 It is true that the actual words “ antisemitism,”’ 
 “antisemite,”’ “‘ antisemitic ”’ 
 old; but the attitude of mind which they portray 
 is older than Christianity. Ancient Greek and 
 
 c 
 
 are barely fifty years ~ 
 

 
 24 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Roman pagan writers seem to have provided almost 
 the entire stock-in-trade of the modern abusers of 
 the Jews. They described them as “ hated of all 
 other men,” clannish, atheists and irreligious, said 
 that they had never helped civilization, that they 
 were a danger to the Roman Empire, that their 
 bodies emitted a peculiar odour, that they sacrificed 
 every year on their altar a specially fattened Greek, 
 that they hated every other nationality, and that 
 they were the descendants of lepers who had been 
 driven out of Egypt. Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, 
 Martial, Tacitus—all helped to add fuel to the 
 popular feelings of dislike towards the Jews, who 
 had spread over the length and breadth of the 
 Empire long before the destruction of Jerusalem 
 and the rise of Christianity. 
 
 When, therefore, Christianity arose and spread and 
 added its own special measure of hatred against those 
 who had crucified the Christian Messiah; and when 
 Christianity, in the time of the Emperor Constantine, 
 first became a tolerated and then the dominant 
 religion of the Empire, we can easily understand the 
 consequences for the Jews. 
 
 From the time of Constantine there was a continual 
 stream of anti-Jewish legislation, and stronger anti- 
 Jewish measures were frequently applied locally in 
 special emergencies. Actually, in themselves, these 
 anti-Jewish laws were not exceptionally or, some 
 might even argue, unreasonably oppressive. Thus 
 the first of the statutes of Constantine enacted that 
 if the Jews should stone or endanger the life of a 
 Jewish convert to Christianity, all concerned should 
 

 
 THE TALMUDIC ERA 25 
 
 be burnt alive; ® such a law merely met violence with 
 violence. The second part of this statute prohibited 
 Christians from becoming Jews. Another statute 
 prohibited Jews from owning Christian slaves. 
 Another civil law forced the Jews to undertake the 
 burden of certain public offices whose incidental 
 expenses had made them undesired positions of 
 honour. In other respects the Jews had the full 
 rights of Roman citizenship, and their religious 
 leaders had the same privileges as the Christian 
 clergy.* 
 
 Later, the Jews suffered severely in the way of 
 special levies and taxation, as the direct results of 
 anti-Christian outbreaks—mainly in Alexandria and 
 Syria. We only know of these anti-Christian out- 
 breaks from Christian sources. We do not know 
 what provoked them. Yet, knowing as we do the 
 reputation of Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and 
 the ferocity of the Egyptian monks, and the murder 
 of Hypatia, we can readily imagine what the treat- 
 ment of the Jews must have been in moments when 
 popular hysteria was let loose. 
 
 In Galilee the Jews had long possessed some 
 semblances of self-government under their patriarch 
 at Tiberias; but these rights were finally (in the 
 fifth century) crushed out of existence.® Christian 
 provocation constantly incited Jewish reprisals— 
 in turn followed by severe, often vicious, penalties 
 by the civil authorities.’ 
 
 But, as may well be imagined, it is not the sub- 
 stance of laws that matters, so much as the atmo- 
 
 sphere and the spirit in which they are carried out, 
 Cc 
 
26 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 We must always admire the enthusiasm of the early 
 Christian Church; but we would gladly forget much 
 of their conduct not only towards the Jews, but even, 
 at times, towards their fellow-Christians. The 
 Christian leaders were only too ready on any occasion 
 to appeal to mob ferocity. It is so much easier for 
 mankind to revert to its savage instincts than to rise 
 to the moral standard of the Sermon on the Mount; 
 and it was so very much easier for the Christian 
 leaders to acquire a reputation for religious zeal and 
 influence by playing on mob passions and the spirit 
 of vengeance against an already hated race, than to 
 instil the spirit of forgiveness and to drive home the 
 teaching of the parable of the Good Samaritan. 
 Only too well can we understand that the Jews 
 failed to see Jesus behind the ranks of His reputed 
 followers. 
 
 Something can, of course, be said on the other side. 
 “The clouds of ignorance and barbarism”’ then 
 settling over the world ‘‘ could not but spread a deeper 
 gloom over the sullen national character of the 
 Jews.’ The Church’s manner of carrying on the 
 contest was not calculated to reduce the bitterness 
 of Jewish feeling. It was unlikely that ‘‘ while the 
 world around them was sinking fast into unsocial 
 ferocity of manners, (the Jews alone) should acquire 
 the gentleness and humanity of civilization.’ ® 
 Undeserved oppression (or even deserved oppression) 
 does not make for sweet reasonableness in the 
 victim. Whenever they could, the Jews always 
 retaliated in kind; they seized every chance of 
 siding with the enemies of the Church or the Christian 
 Empire. In local quarrels during the long-pro- 
 

 
 
 
 THE TALMUDIC ERA a 
 
 tracted Arian controversy, the Jews were always in 
 league with the Arians.? And when, shortly before 
 the Mohammedan conquest, the Persian army 
 penetrated into Syria and Palestine, it was the Jews 
 who took the lead in the merciless massacres of the 
 Christians and the utter destruction of the Christian 
 Jerusalem.?° 
 
 We, however, are more concerned with the 
 Church’s complete failure to show, whenever it was 
 faced by the Jewish race, the faintest gleam of 
 Christian feeling, or the least glow of the spirit of 
 Jesus. Where Jesus Himself, and St. Stephen, 
 forgave, the Church thought it right to avenge. In 
 vain had St. Paul urged that “the wrath of man 
 worketh not the righteousness of God.” 
 
 I must leave this part of the subject. I have 
 understated things; or at least I have neglected 
 details. There are too many of them. Those who 
 wish can easily learnthem. They are quite accessible 
 in English, either from the mouth of a Christian 
 historian, Dean Milman, or from a Jewish writer, 
 Graetz. 
 
 We come back to the point from which we started. 
 What has the Talmud to say of Christianity ? 
 
 There is very little; only scattered hints. These 
 are, simply, parts of an imaginary picture drawn up 
 by the Jews—an imaginary picture of the only kind 
 of being who could, in their tortured minds, have 
 inspired the horror which Christianity had proved 
 itself to be to the Jews during the past three cen- 
 turies. Also bear in mind that the Jews who pro- 
 duced these few and fragmentary elements which go 
 to make up the imaginative Talmudic picture—these 
 
28 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Jews were Orientals, living fifteen hundred years 
 and more ago, with highly developed powers of 
 vituperation and few inducements to reticence. 
 They also paid no regard to historical verisimilitude ; 
 the imaginary figure which they describe lived, 
 apparently, both 100 B.c. and 100 A.D." 
 
 Much of what is now to be quoted from the 
 Talmud almost certainly did not refer to the Chris- 
 tian Founder at all; but later it was supposed to— 
 partly owing to the malevolent scrutiny and the 
 hyper-suspicion of the Christian censorship, and 
 partly owing to the Jews themselves, once they were 
 goaded into the frame of mind which could find no 
 vilification too base to express their thoughts of 
 all that concerned Christianity. 
 
 Here is the sum-total of all that the Talmud is 
 alleged (sometimes rightly, but more often wrongly) 
 to say of Christianity’s Founder : 
 
 A certain Yeshu, called the Notsri, or the Son of 
 Stada, or the Son of Pantera, was born out of wed- 
 lock. His mother was called Miriam. She was a 
 women’s hairdresser (the word here is M’gadd'la, 
 a pun on the name Mary Magdalen). Her husband 
 was Pappus, the son of Yehudah, and her paramour 
 a Roman soldier, Pantera. She is said to have been 
 the descendant of princes and rulers. This Yeshu 
 had been to Egypt, whence he brought back the 
 knowledge of many tricks of sorcery. He was justa 
 sorcerer, and so deceived and led astray the people 
 of Israel; he sinned and caused the multitude to sin. 
 He made a mock of the words of the learned men and 
 was excommunicated. He was tainted with heresy. 
 He called himself God and said that he would go up 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 29 
 
 to heaven. He was tried before the Court at Lud 
 on a charge of being a deceiver and teacher of 
 apostasy. Evidence was procured against him by 
 concealing witnesses to hear his statements, and a 
 lamp was so placed that his face could be seen, but 
 so that he could not see the witnesses. He was 
 executed in Lud on the Eve of Passover, which fell 
 on the eve of a Sabbath. During forty days a 
 herald proclaimed that Yeshu was to be stoned, and 
 evidence was invited in his favour, but none was 
 forthcoming. He was stoned and hanged. Under 
 the name of Balaam he was put to death by “ Pin- 
 has the Robber ’’ (supposed to refer to Pontius 
 Pilate). At the time he was thirty-three years old. 
 He was punished in Gehenna by means of boiling 
 scum. He was “near to the kingdom ” (whatever 
 that may mean). He had five disciples: Mattai, 
 Nagai, Netser, Buni and Todah. Under the name 
 of Balaam he was excluded from the world to come.¥ 
 
 That is all. Certainly to even the least devout 
 Christian mind it is revolting in the extreme. But 
 is it not really amazing that it is not worse— 
 far worse? Think of what Christianity had meant 
 to the Jews for long generations and centuries ! 
 Think again, in a different direction, of the verbosity 
 of the huge Talmud, and its habit of piling, piling up 
 everything it could think of about everything it 
 discussed! Only think of that, and then we can 
 only feel surprise that Christianity figures as a mere 
 half-millionth fragment of the Talmud’s interest ; 
 and odious though that half-millionth fragment is, 
 the real matter for surprise is that it is not infinitely 
 more disgusting! Compare it, for example, with 
 
30 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the medieval vituperation against “ Mahomet and 
 the paynims ”’ and the Talmud seems by comparison 
 almost a model of restraint. 
 
 At the time of its compilation long generations 
 of intense, bitter hatred between Jew and Christian 
 had been lived through. The Jews repaid Christian 
 hatred to the utmost that lay in their power—except 
 that the hatred which, on the Christian side, found 
 its vent in acts of merciless massacre, on the Jewish 
 side (since the Jews were few and feeble) mostly 
 evaporated in idle curses. The worst that we find in 
 the Talmud about Christianity need not surprise us. 
 
 Unfortunately this does not by any means take 
 us to the full depth of degradation into which 
 Christianity was to sink in the Jewish conception. 
 Christianity was to show itself a still more bitter 
 persecutor of the Jewish race—always priming itself 
 for such persecution, if you please, by appealing to 
 the memory of its Founder. The miserable fact 
 emerges that it was always the staunchest fighters 
 for Christendom who were the bitterest persecutors. 
 
 I must pass as rapidly as possible over the next 
 eight or nine centuries. This it is easy to do because 
 of the sheer monotony of the picture. 
 
 In the East Islam had conquered; and almost 
 without exception this meant comparative security 
 for its Jewish subjects. They might be reduced to 
 a position of social inferiority; but so were the 
 Christians under Moslem rule. 
 
 In the West the Church was all powerful. It 
 dominated religious and, to a great extent, civil life 
 as well. Where the Church was strongest, there 
 Jewish life was most perilous. By the seventh 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 31 
 
 century Spain had already taken the lead in Jewish 
 persecution, and it was to retain this odious dis- 
 tinction (such time as it had the power) to the end 
 of the fifteenth century. These are the sort of laws 
 we find passed in the Synods of the Church and 
 ratified by the State. The titles are enough : 
 
 “Laws concerning the promulgation and ratifica- 
 tion of statutes against Jewish wickedness and for 
 the general extirpation of Jewish errors. That the 
 Jews may not celebrate the Passover according to 
 their usage; that the Jews may not contract mar- 
 riage according to their own customs; that the Jews 
 may not practise circumcision; that the Jews shall 
 make no distinction of meats; that the Jews bring 
 no action against Christians ; of the time when their 
 converted descendants are admissible as witnesses; 
 of the penalties attached to the transgressions of 
 these statutes by the Jews; ”’ and so forth.!° 
 
 The penalty for these offences was even more 
 extraordinary than the offences themselves: the 
 criminal was to be stoned to death, or burnt, by the 
 hands of his own people. 
 
 Moslem conquest soon threatened Spain. The 
 nearer it came the worse became the troubles of the 
 Jews. It was now, it is interesting to learn, that 
 there started the famous fable of the Jewish con- 
 spiracy against the civilized world, known to our 
 generation as “‘ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ” 
 (now duly translated into Arabic for the edification 
 of the Palestinians). It was at the Council of 
 Toledo, in 695, that the Gothic king, Egica, announced 
 the discovery: “Already,” he states, “ already 
 this people, defiled by the blood of Christ and 
 
32 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 infamous for the profanation of their oaths, have 
 meditated ruin against the king and kingdom; 
 proclaiming that their time is come, they have begun 
 the work of slaughter against the Christians.” # 
 
 It really was believed that there was a vast Jewish 
 confederacy throughout the entire Mediterranean 
 world to exterminate the Christian faith. Laws 
 were promptly passed to confiscate all the property 
 of the Jews, to disperse them as slaves throughout 
 the country, to seize all their children under seven, 
 to bring them up as Christians, marry them to 
 Christians, and so wipe out for ever the practice of 
 the Jewish faith. Yet still the Jews survived. 
 
 After the Mosiem conquest of Spain the centre of 
 gravity of Christian effort passed to France. France 
 followed Spain’s lead, but not with such consummate 
 efficiency, for the simple reason that the Church 
 was not so powerful. But what the leading bishops 
 could do they did. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, 
 is the leading figure. It is worth noticing that he 
 introduced the practice of Christian scrutiny of the 
 Talmud as a stick with which to beat the Jews. 
 This was early in the ninth century. Archbishop 
 Agobard was, it must be confessed, one of the most 
 enlightened Christians of his age; but listen to his 
 opinion of the Jews: ’ 
 
 He calls upon his fellow-bishops to co-operate with 
 him in separating the Christians from a people who, 
 he says, “‘ are clothed with cursing as with a garment. 
 The curse penetrates into their bones, their marrow, 
 and their entrails, as water and oil flow through the 
 human body. They are accursed in the city and 
 in the country, in their births and in their deaths; 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 33 
 
 their flocks, their meat, their granaries, their cellars, 
 their magazines are accursed!’ ® 
 
 And so we might go on and on with the miserable 
 panorama. It is only varied by becoming at times 
 considerably worse. Among the Moslems the Jews 
 had peace and prospered. But Christianity meant 
 to them the extremity of savagery and barbarism. 
 The high-water mark was reached when Christian 
 chivalry set out on the Crusades. 
 
 It is quite impossible to go into details. Wherever 
 the Crusaders passed through France and the Rhine 
 Valley on their way to the Holy Land they found an 
 easy and profitable way of tasting the first-fruits of 
 Christian conquest over the infidel. ‘‘ How can 
 we,’’ they said, “ how can we go to the Holy Land to 
 free it from the infidels while we leave worse infidels 
 behind us, those who crucified our Saviour!’ I 
 am glad that time does not allow me to describe 
 what happened. The acts were those of a fanatic 
 mob in the extreme stages of religious intoxication. 
 We can imagine the terrible cry of Hep (supposed to 
 stand for the initial letters of Hzerosolyma est 
 perdita, Jerusalem is fallen)—this cry of Hep, the 
 signal for the massacre of the Jews, running through 
 the cities of the Rhine with frightful results. It 
 happened in the first, the second, and to a less degree 
 in the third Crusade: the blood of the Jew was as 
 conspicuous a mark of the Crusader as the cross on 
 his breast. 
 
 Fortunately, it is not my purpose to give a history 
 of these times: my sole purpose is to show what 
 Jews have thought of Christianity, and, especially, 
 Why ! 
 
34 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 I have gone into the story of the times at such 
 length simply to prepare you for the medieval 
 popular Jewish idea of Christianity. We need not 
 be surprised (and we have no right to complain) 
 however bad that idea should turn out to be. 
 
 Once more the Jewish popular mind drew up its 
 own imaginary picture of the Founder of Christianity 
 and His life. It based this on the imaginary details 
 already contained (and obviously gloated over) in 
 the Talmud. These details it amplified and adorned 
 with everything which Jewish contempt and loathing 
 could think of, to the discredit of Christianity. The 
 result is known under various titles: ‘‘ The History 
 of Yeshu,”’ “ The Story of him who was hanged,” 
 “The Story of that one and his son,” and the like.!” 
 It is an unseemly relic of ancient times, a pitiful 
 device by which the tortured imaginations of the 
 Jews revenged themselves on the Christians. But, 
 with all this, we must remember that whatever 
 discredit it brings upon those who concocted it, 
 it brings in every one of its disgusting details an even 
 greater, a much greater, discredit upon those whose 
 cruelty provoked it. 
 
 You will recognize in the course of the summary 
 which I am about to give, that it is mainly a perver- 
 sion and caricature of a few half-heard details from 
 the Gospels. Here are the outlines of the story: 
 details it is quite impossible to give. 
 
 Johanan, a pious youth of Jerusalem, is betrothed 
 to Miriam, the daughter of a Bethlehem widow. 
 Joseph Pantera, of the tribe of Judah, forms a plan 
 to seduce Miriam and effects his purpose one Sabbath 
 eve. Three months afterwards the pious Johanan 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 35 
 
 realizes what has happened and suspects Joseph 
 Pantera; but having no proof he deserts Miriam 
 and flees to Babylonia. In course of time Miriam 
 bears a son who is called Yeshu. The boy is placed 
 under the tuition of a learned Rabbi, yet by his very 
 conduct, which is disrespectful to the sacredness of 
 Jewish tradition, he makes the Rabbis suspect his 
 birth. Yeshu is expelled from the community. 
 He first went to Upper Galilee, and thence to 
 Jerusalem, where he contrived to learn in the 
 Temple the secret of the sacred Name of God, and 
 with the help of this he was able to work miracles. 
 The leaders of the Jews, becoming alarmed at his 
 unprincipled behaviour, set up one of themselves as 
 a rival magician. This rival was called Judas. 
 The priests allowed Judas to learn the sacred name 
 so that he too could work miracles; they arranged 
 a trial of strength between him and Yeshu, in which 
 the latter was defeated. Yeshu was condemned to 
 death but managed to escape. Judas followed him, 
 disguised as one of his disciples, and contrived to 
 steal from him the parchment on which Yeshu had 
 written the sacred name and which he kept hidden 
 in a cut in his flesh. Yeshu, in order to learn the 
 name once more, went again to Jerusalem. There 
 Judas betrayed him to the rulers. He was captured, 
 scourged, stoned, and hanged—upon the stalk of 
 a cabbage, because no tree would consent to bear 
 him. After he was dead, Judas stole the corpse 
 and threw it into the ditch of his garden. The dis- 
 ciples not finding the body said that Yeshu had 
 risen from the dead. Helena, who was then queen, 
 believed them, and threatened the Jews with death. 
 
36 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The body, however, was discovered and dragged 
 before the queen at the tail of a horse. The Chris- 
 tians were furious against the Jews; so one of the 
 latter, by name Simon Kephas, undertook to make 
 peace by completely separating the Christians from 
 the Jews. He learned the sacred name, worked 
 miracles, and having thus gained the confidence of 
 Yeshu’s followers, he gave them, in Yeshu’s name, 
 new laws of religion. They accepted his teaching. 
 He then withdrew himself to a tower, specially 
 built for him, where he remained till his death. 
 After his death a new teacher arose in Rome and 
 set aside the laws given by Simon Kephas, and gave 
 new ones, instituting baptism instead of circum- 
 cision, and Sunday instead of the Sabbath. The 
 new teacher, however, in trying to perform a miracle, 
 was killed by a stone falling upon his head. “So,” 
 the document ends, “ so let all thine enemies perish, 
 O Lord.”’ 
 
 Naturally it was long before such a story as this 
 found its way into print. But there is plenty of 
 evidence showing how widespread it was throughout 
 the Middle Ages, from the sixth century onwards. 
 There are several versions of it, all delighting in the 
 most odious details, all mixed up with wonder- 
 stories and low comedy and word-play, which 
 Jewish wit then, as now, takes great delight in. 
 
 An apology must be offered for suffering such 
 things to reach Christian ears. But they have to be 
 reckoned with as an essential element in Jewish 
 medieval thought, and even belief, about Christian 
 origins. Furthermore, what is most important in 
 our present study, they are a formative element in 
 
THE TALMUDIC ERA 37 
 
 d 
 
 the general “‘ make-up ”’ of the present-day Jewish 
 mind—at least of those Jews who are still only a 
 generation removed from the atmosphere of purely 
 Jewish thought. It is quite true that many, or 
 most, Westernized Jews are quite ignorant of this 
 document in question. A short time ago a professor 
 of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem alleged that 
 it was only recently that he came to know that there 
 was such a book in existence; but he confessed that 
 he had known its contents from his very earliest years. 
 
 And there we have the main point. All through 
 the centuries the Jews have cherished these scurrilous 
 details. Whether they were true or not did not 
 matter: they were a highly treasured, private 
 form of vengeance in return for the attitude of the 
 Christians towards the Jews. They could not retort 
 by physical means, but they did retort in this even 
 more effective way, by reducing, within their own 
 Jewish circles, Christianity and its Founder to 
 contempt and ridicule. We learn that the Jews of 
 Eastern Europe till quite recently used to celebrate 
 Christmas by reading aloud this horrid caricature in 
 their family circles. 
 
 In all this, how can we dare to insist that blame 
 rests solely or even mainly upon the Jews? In 
 utter shame I have been compelled to slur over 
 quickly the glaring, appalling, abhorrent details of 
 official Christendom’s treatment of those, our 
 Lord’s brethren according to the flesh. Our Lord’s 
 charter to His Church was, “‘ Let your light so shine 
 before men that they may see your good works and 
 glorify your Father which is in heaven.’’ Whatever 
 success has followed the progress of the Church 
 
38 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 throughout the world in spreading the Gospel, 
 however great its service in spreading the spiritual 
 light of Christianity throughout the dark places of 
 the world, we have to set on the other side of the 
 scale the dead weight of the criminal conduct of the 
 Church in its failure to follow even the least of its 
 Lord’s commands, whenever it was brought face to 
 face with the scattered Jewish race. It might even 
 seem that God has permitted the Jewish race to 
 persist as a permanent reproach to Christianity: a 
 glaring reproach of Christianity’s failure. 
 
 We may not free ourselves of blame and think that 
 it was only a failure of the Church in the past. The 
 Christian Church, the body of Christ, is one: in 
 time and in space. The sins of the past must either 
 be borne by us or be repented of by us. The effects 
 of those past sins still continue. How we can best 
 repent of those past sins of the Church and how we 
 can receive God’s pardon for them, that, in our 
 perplexity, must be the substance of our most 
 penitent prayers. 
 
 One thing, however, we can know of a surety, that 
 if we would remove the reproach of the past, then 
 we must realize our failure as a Church to show forth 
 the spirit of our blessed Lord and Saviour in just 
 those times and places where it might have worked 
 the greatest power. 
 
 So far as the Jews are concerned, let us not deceive 
 ourselves for one moment: the Church, by its 
 deliberate choice and conduct, has made itself one 
 gigantic and seemingly impenetrable obstacle 
 between them and the figure of our blessed Lord. 
 
Il 
 
 PROM THE CRUSADES, TO. THE 
 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In the preceding lectures we have seen what was 
 the Jewish attitude to Christianity from the first 
 century to the time of the Crusades. Christianity 
 was first a sect within Judaism; in the earliest stages 
 neither Christianity nor its Founder met with 
 extreme hostility. But the teaching of St. Paul as 
 to the non-necessity of the Jewish Law, or, rather, 
 its abrogation in the Christian scheme of things— 
 this caused Christianity to be ostracized by official 
 Judaism, while the Jewish revolt against Rome 
 finally severed the Jewish members of the Christian 
 Church from their Jewish origins and their allegi- 
 ance to the Jewish nation. In the course of the 
 next five centuries, with Christianity dominant in the 
 Roman Empire, Christian enthusiasm found an 
 outlet in persistent Jewish persecution, ranging from 
 harassing legal inconveniences to acts of passionate 
 mob violence. Even in the pre-Christian Roman 
 Empire the Jews had been a hated race: Christianity 
 intensified this hatred and, as its peculiar contribu- 
 tion, added the element of religious vengeance under 
 the guise of Christian piety. 
 
 39 
 
4o THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The direct or indirect effects of this treatment we 
 find reflected in the real and supposed references to 
 Christianity inthe Talmud. These references amount 
 to no more than perversions of half-understood details 
 in the Gospels. They are far from being a cause of 
 horror at the depravity of the Jewish mind: their 
 altogether astonishing scarcity ought rather to 
 be a reason for surprise at Jewish restraint. Still, 
 it would be wrong to crown the Jews prematurely 
 with a halo of—suppose we call it Christian charity 
 and forbearance! The final form of the Talmud took 
 shape in Babylonia, where its compilers were under 
 Persian rule. Christianity was not prominent in 
 their lives: it was just an inconspicuous contempo- 
 rary, sharing equally with the Jews in whatever 
 measures of State persecution were launched from 
 time to time by the Persian rulers. Also, the Jews 
 had already adopted the plan which they later found 
 to serve their interests best—closing their minds 
 entirely to the whole subject of Christianity. 
 
 After the rise of Islam the Jews had comparative 
 peace in the East; but this was more than counter- 
 balanced by their sufferings in the West, where the 
 Church for some cefituries was all-powerful over 
 souls and bodies. First Spain, then France, became 
 centres of highly concentrated anti-Jewish policy. 
 To the Jews, the Christian leaders must have ap- 
 peared the symbol of intolerance and cruelty, and 
 the Christian rank and file as the embodiment of 
 savagery and barbarity. This barbarity, always in 
 the guise of pious Christian enthusiasm, reached its 
 height in the Crusades. 
 
THE CRUSADES AI 
 
 The Jews, utterly incapable of retorting physically 
 in kind, retorted in the only way that remained open 
 to them—the rendering of Christianity ridiculous 
 and contemptible within their own circles. Thus 
 arose that medieval Jewish legend, giving a gro- 
 tesque, unseemly and, from the Christian point of 
 view, blasphemous account of the Christian Saviour 
 and the early days of Christianity. This legend— 
 a puerile, imaginative bogey-story, perverting the 
 Gospel narratives, making what was good in them 
 odious, and transforming the traitor Judas into a 
 national Jewish hero—this legend played its part in 
 medieval thought; and although most modern Jews 
 are ignorant of it as an anti-Christian document, its 
 poison has, to an indeterminate extent, become a 
 formative element in the conscious or unconscious 
 attitude of Judaism towards Christianity. 
 
 Going back a little, there is a somewhat brighter 
 picture to be painted of the days in Spain which saw 
 the close of the Moslem occupation and the gradual 
 revival of Christian power. The Jews look back to 
 these centuries of their existence in Spain as the 
 golden age of Judaism. They were tolerated, 
 allowed to acquire landed property, and to conduct 
 their own affairs; they became wealthy, respected ; 
 they were the chief representatives of the learning 
 and science of the day. As a little side-picture it is 
 worth recording how a certain Jewish philosopher 
 and poet, Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. 1070), gained a 
 great reputation amongst the Christian philosophers 
 
 of the succeeding generations—among those who 
 D 
 
42 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 created the medieval scholastic system of philosophy. 
 Thus Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas and 
 Duns Scotus, all busied themselves with the writings 
 of this Solomon Ibn Gabirol. But they did not know 
 that he was a Jew: they refer to him as “a certain 
 Arab Avicebron”’ or “‘ Avicebrol’’; and they seem 
 doubtful whether he were not, in fact, a Christian.! 
 The few Jewish references to Christianity which 
 we meet at this period reflect the atmosphere of 
 peace and toleration in which the Jews were living. 
 These opinions are, uniformly, gravely argued, 
 restrained and appreciative of the good in Christian- 
 ity. As might be expected, they dispute on philoso- 
 phical grounds such Christian doctrines as the 
 divinity of Christ, and the Holy Trinity; yet they are 
 without rancour and bitterness. Such, for example, 
 is the case with the great Jewish teacher Sa’adiah, 
 the translator of and commentator on the Arabic 
 Bible. Again, the famous Jewish poet, Judah ha- 
 Levi (d. 1140), hails Christianity as sharing the same 
 root with Judaism, and considers that it is one of the 
 preparatory steps towards the time of Messianic bliss, 
 in which it, Christianity, will have a share.? Another 
 Jewish figure, greater than either of these two, 
 namely, Maimonides, the Jewish physician of Saladin, 
 recognizes Christianity as fulfilling the divine pur- 
 pose of preparing the way for the coming of the 
 Messiah ; for, he says, it has spread the words of the 
 Scriptures and the law of truth over the wide world.4 
 Following Maimonides, the rabbinical authorities all 
 sharply differentiate Christianity from what were, 
 in Jewish eyes, idolatrous faiths : Christians were to 
 
THE CRUSADES 43 
 
 ¢ 
 
 be regarded as “‘ proselytes of the gate,’ that is, 
 near akin in beliefs, although merely Gentiles. 
 
 Unfortunately, as Christianity more and more 
 recovered from the shock of the Moslem conquests 
 in Europe, the Jews once again came into their old 
 heritage of hatred and contempt. Spain again was 
 to take the lead. 
 
 It is also about this stage that the wealth of many 
 of the Jews began to be such an exasperation to their 
 Christian neighbours. Under the feudal system the 
 Jews were regarded as so many cattle, attached to 
 the soil, and the personal property of this or that 
 baron—who found their money-producing qualities 
 extremely helpful. The Jews, as the only purveyors 
 of ready money, were, in turn, patronized and pro- 
 tected by kings and princes, who constantly had need 
 of them; and, in turn, robbed and denounced as 
 blood-sucking parasites and hateful usurers when- 
 ever Gentile indebtedness to them threatened to be 
 embarrassing. And so it is that, for continuous 
 centuries, we find decree after decree issued by rulers 
 throughout Europe annulling interest on debts owed 
 to Jews—or, as often as not, confiscating the debts 
 for the benefit of the royal treasuries and driving the 
 Jews out of the country. At need it was always 
 possible in this way for a Christian king, actuated by 
 religious motives, to wreak vengeance on the enemies 
 of Christ. Thus we find the French king, St. Louis, 
 in 1234, issuing a statute stating that “‘ for the welfare 
 of his soul and the souls of his father and all his 
 ancestors, he annulled one third of all debts due to 
 jews, --* 
 
44 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 To read the history of the Jews in Europe during 
 these centuries is one of the most monotonously 
 depressing things imaginable. There is scarcely a 
 ray of relief. The great religious orders, the Fran- 
 ciscans and Dominicans, had arisen; but never a 
 leader do we find who, in the spirit of St. Francis, 
 should preach the love of God over all His works— 
 even over the Jews. The widespread pestilence, 
 known as the “ Black Death,” appeared and re- 
 appeared during the fourteenth century. Throughout 
 France, Spain and Germany came the same outcry : 
 it was the Jews who had been poisoning the wells. 
 How otherwise should the Christians die by the 
 scores of thousands while the Jews seemed to remain 
 immune? Widespread massacres of Jews followed. 
 But then we should remember that, in Italy, at an 
 earlier date, some poor Jews were even executed 
 because of an earthquake.® 
 
 The venerable charge against the Jews, of killing a 
 Christian child in order to use its blood for the 
 Passover ritual—this was asserted and repeated in 
 every Christian country where Jews were to be found. 
 This horrid charge, even more absurd than horrid, 
 has been brought against Jews—and men have 
 always been found to believe its truth—since pre- 
 Christian times even to the present day (it was 
 revived in Lithuania last year; it was heard in Port 
 Said five years ago, and it was even hinted at in 
 Jerusalem shortly afterwards). It is one of the 
 curiosities of history; but it has had fatal conse- 
 quences for the Jews; for nothing has so served 
 to perpetuate and exasperate anti-Jewish feelings 
 
THE CRUSADES 48 
 
 among simpler-minded Christians as this charge. 
 Our own English saints, St. Hugh of Lincoln and 
 St. William of Norwich, serve to remind us that the 
 Jews have suffered the same calumny even in 
 England’s “ green and pleasant land.’”’ Some of you 
 will remember how Chaucer, in the Prioress’s Tale, 
 has embalmed the legend in an only too exquisitely 
 pathetic setting. 
 
 The revival of the Church’s power in Spain spelled 
 all manner of miscellaneous oppressive methods 
 against the now wealthy Jews. Thousands found it 
 easier to accept the form of baptism and so retain 
 their wealth and security while remaining Jews at 
 heart. This leads us to the final terrible closing 
 scenes of Christian and Jewish relations in Spain. 
 These nominal Jewish-Christians, or Crypto-Jews, 
 or New Christians, or Marranos, as they were vari- 
 ously called, were suspected of secretly judaizing. 
 The clergy of Spain called in the help of the Inquisi- 
 tion. This was in 1480. 
 
 Those of us who belong to the Reformed Churches 
 think of the Inquisition solely as a weapon in the 
 hands of the unreformed Church against Protestants. 
 But to the Jewish mind the Inquisition was primarily 
 aimed against the Jews—against those scores of 
 thousands of them who had accepted the form of 
 baptism under compulsion while remaining Jews at 
 heart. And bitterly did those Jews suffer. Details 
 need not be given. The fact remains that with the 
 Jew of to-day, far more than with the most per- 
 fervidly imaginative Protestant, the Inquisition has 
 burnt itself into his inmost being as the worst of 
 
46 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 horrors conceivable, the most hideous nightmare in 
 his national past. Till one has grasped this fact, it is 
 strange to notice how promptly and persistently 
 this idea comes up to-day from Jewish lips and 
 Jewish pens: “ Inkvisitzia’”’ and Torquemada are 
 to them the commonest terms of comparison 
 whenever they would describe oppression; they are 
 commoner even than “ Czarist Russia.”’ 
 
 Twelve years later, 1492, saw the whole body of 
 Jews hounded out of Spain, 300,000 in number. 
 The horrors and sufferings were unspeakable. And 
 it was all done in the name of Holy Mother Church. 
 
 Covering this period, up to the end of the fifteenth 
 century, there is little we can lay hold of for the 
 subject of these lectures : namely, the expression of 
 Jewish thought about Christianity outside ordinary 
 controversy. We can without the least difficulty 
 suppose that the Jews found no reason to change the 
 libellous, blasphemous notions about the origins of 
 Christianity which had done duty for centuries past. 
 Weare, in fact, able to trace a new and more bitterly- 
 worded recension of the medieval ‘ History of 
 Yeshu ”’ stories, specially adapted to the mentality 
 of the Jews of the later Middle Ages. In Spain and 
 France there were many public disputations between 
 Christians and Jews; but these were nothing more 
 than verbal tournaments, turning on artificial inter- 
 pretations of Scripture for the most part. 
 
 Yet it is from a Spanish Jew at the end of the 
 fifteenth century that we have a judgment on Chris- 
 tianity which, you will agree, is well worth recording. 
 It is the opinion of a strictly orthodox Jew, Joseph 
 Yaabetz by name, one of the victims of the expul- 
 
THE CRUSADES 47 
 
 sion of 1492. He records with gratitude the work 
 of Christianity as teaching a belief in the one Divine 
 Creator, in divine revelation, retribution for sin, and 
 the resurrection. He goes so far as to say (and he 
 says it without the cynicism which one would suspect, 
 not unreasonably, to be behind it), that ‘“ but for 
 the example of these Christian nations we might 
 ourselves have become infirm in our faith during 
 our long dispersion.” 7 
 
 This is, indeed, heaping “ coals of fire.’’ In the 
 circumstances I think it would be difficult to find 
 a more exact fulfilment of St. Paul’s prescription 
 of Christian charity: ‘“‘ Charity suffereth long and 
 is kind . . . is not provoked, taketh no account of 
 evil, rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth 
 with the truth.” 
 
 ¢ 
 
 The beginning of the sixteenth century marks a 
 great change. It is the dawn of the Reformation ; 
 it is immediately after the invention of printing; the 
 centre of gravity of Jewish life in Europe is now in 
 Germany; the feudal system is either forgotten or a 
 powerless form; the Church’s power is still immense, 
 but it has to cope with difficult matters of purely 
 mundane state-craft, in which religion as often as 
 not served only as a pawn in a diplomatic game. 
 
 With the Reformation we instinctively associate 
 a new interest in the Scriptures. With this new 
 interest came the first widely expressed desire to 
 know the originals—the Old Testament in Hebrew 
 and the New Testament in Greek. In this con- 
 nection we at once think of Erasmus. But there 
 was a greater man than Erasmus, one whose name is 
 
48 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 known to comparatively few—one who took the lead 
 in introducing the study of Greek and Hebrew to the 
 students of Europe. This was John Reuchlin.® 
 
 In searching out the many and various causes and 
 streams of thought which culminated in the Refor- 
 mation, it is strange to find that by no means one 
 of the least prominent was the Talmud—this much- 
 abhorred Jewish Talmud. 
 
 At the beginning of the sixteenth century a strong 
 anti-Jewish campaign was launched by the Domini- 
 cans of Cologne, headed by their Prior, Jacob van 
 Hoogstraten. Hoogstraten seems to have aimed at 
 securing for the Dominicans in Germany the same 
 powerful position which they held in Spain owing 
 to the Inquisition. The Dominicans secured the 
 services of a converted Jew, Joseph Pfefferkorn.® 
 Pfefferkorn, at the instance of his Dominican 
 patrons, wrote a series of pamphlets exhorting the 
 Jews to embrace Christianity; but the principal aim 
 in the pamphlets was to persuade the Christian world 
 that all Jewish writings were written in a tone bitterly 
 hostile to Christianity, and that these writings, the 
 Talmud first and foremost, should be destroyed whole- 
 sale and utterly, as pernicious blasphemies. 
 
 The Dominicans brought influence to bear on the 
 Emperor, Maximilian. He ordered that all Jewish 
 writings (except the Old Testament) should be 
 destroyed throughout the whole of Germany. To 
 the converted Jew, Pfefferkorn, he gave authority to 
 carry out the necessary searches in the synagogues 
 and private houses of the Jews. This was in the 
 year 1509. The Jews were forced to hand over to 
 him every book they possessed. 
 
THE CRUSADES 49 
 
 But the Jews were now no longer the helpless 
 sheep of earlier centuries. They protested, and 
 through the intervention of the Archbishop of 
 Cologne, the actual destruction of the confiscated 
 books was delayed, and the Emperor was persuaded 
 that it would be more just to have the books first of 
 all scrutinized by experts, who should examine into 
 the truth of the wholesale and very serious charges 
 brought by Pfefferkorn. 
 
 John Reuchlin was the expert chosen. He was 
 the only Christian in Germany, possibly even in all 
 Europe, who knew Hebrew well enough to report on 
 the nature of the vast post-biblical Hebrew literature. 
 
 Meanwhile the intense anti-Jewish propaganda of 
 the Dominicans, the stream of pamphlets, in both 
 German and Latin, turned out from the printing 
 press—served to rouse popular feelings to an unusual 
 pitch. Those feelings became more exasperated 
 and embittered by a charge, brought against the 
 Jews in the Brandenburg district, of stealing and 
 desecrating the consecrated Eucharistic wafers, and 
 of killing a Christian child for the purposes of the 
 Passover ritual. Thesecharges were taken as proved, 
 and thirty Jews were burnt in Berlin. It was at 
 this stage that John Reuchlin drew up his report : 
 “Whether it was godly, laudable and advantageous 
 to Christianity to burn the Jewish writings, especially 
 the Talmud.” 
 
 He decided (as, of course, any unprejudiced person 
 was bound to decide) that to condemn all Jewish 
 writings indiscriminately would be foolish. He 
 divided them into six categories; of these he con- 
 sidered that there should be destroyed only those 
 
50 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 deliberate perversions of the Gospels and the puerile 
 fables known as the “ History of Yeshu.” As for 
 the rest, they ought to be preserved in the interests 
 of science and true learning and for the promotion 
 of a sound knowledge of the Scriptures. 
 
 It was a very brave act. Reuchlin dared to put 
 forward this view in the teeth of the most powerful 
 element in the Church, and in the teeth of popular 
 prejudice at a moment when anti-Jewish feeling was 
 at its maximum. 
 
 Reuchlin went even further: he argued that the 
 Jews were citizens of the Holy Roman Empire, and 
 as such were entitled to its full privileges and pro- 
 tection; also, since the Jews stood outside the 
 Roman Church and were not bound to hold the 
 Christian faith, the Roman Church could therefore 
 have no jurisdiction over them, whether over their 
 bodies or their minds. 
 
 Reuchlin sent his report to the Archbishop of 
 Cologne. It was intercepted and opened by the 
 Dominicans. Pfefferkorn promptly drafted an 
 answer and a rebuttal. This the Dominicans pub- 
 lished in German and circulated widely. In it they 
 openly denounced Reuchlin as a heretic. What 
 made Reuchlin most indignant was that they alleged 
 that he was in the pay of the Jews and that he did 
 not really know Hebrew, and that he was the 
 instrument of Satan. 
 
 It is not easy to picture to ourselves the sensation 
 stirred up by this pamphlet, the ‘‘ Handspiegel,”’ 
 Pfefferkorn’s attack on Reuchlin. It was circulated 
 in thousands of copies. Since the invention of 
 printing this was the first attack on a highly placed 
 
THE CRUSADES BT 
 
 dignitary of the State, such as was Reuchlin. It 
 was the first printed libel. Being written in German 
 everyone could understand it. Reuchlin was forced 
 to answer publicly in a counter-pamphlet and to 
 make the Talmud a personal question, and—a verit- 
 able landmark in history—he was compelled openly 
 to defend the Jews. As for his opponent, Pfeffer- 
 korn, the accuser of the Jews, Reuchlin publicly 
 branded fim as a scandalmongering liar. 
 
 Well might the Jews of the day rub their eyes and 
 ask whether they were dreaming. A prominent 
 Christian had publicly protected them and their 
 writings and actually claimed that the Gospels taught 
 that a Christian should treat even a Jew as his neigh- 
 bour and love him as himself ! 
 
 The controversy waged for another ten years. 
 Around Reuchlin were ranked all the humanists of 
 the day, Erasmus, Melancthon, Martin Luther—all 
 those spirits who ushered in the continental Refor- 
 mation. On the other side, behind Pfefferkorn, 
 was the entire Dominican order (the Franciscans, it is 
 curious to note, took Reuchlin’s part) and the organ- 
 ized Church, struggling to maintain its authority 
 against the new rush of modern learning and the 
 plague of unsettling convictions which the new 
 learning was stirring up. 
 
 In the end the Pope condemned Reuchlin on 
 principle. But, none the less, the ten-year-old 
 decree, ordering the destruction of the Talmud and 
 other Hebrew writings, was not revived. 
 
 Reuchlin had aroused the interest of the Christian 
 world in the Talmud and Jewish writings; it was a 
 friendly interest and not the hostile interest which 
 
52 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 alone had existed in the past. During his lifetime 
 there were printed for the first time the Rabbinical 
 Bible (that is, the Old Testament in Hebrew with 
 Aramaic translation and garlands of Hebrew com- 
 mentaries), and the Talmud in fifteen folio volumes. 
 By the year 1543 the same printer had published 
 altogether some eighty Jewish works, great and 
 small. This printer, Daniel Bomberg of Antwerp, 
 was a Christian. 
 
 Martin Luther, during the earlier part of his life, 
 was a faithful and worthy pupil of Reuchlin. He 
 too lifted his voice, in his blunt, outspoken, and 
 sometimes crude way, to point out things which are 
 so obviously true, but things which in those days 
 had barely struck the consciences of mankind, and 
 things which even in our own day are more often 
 forgotten than remembered. 
 
 Luther’s remarks are worth quoting at some 
 length. They are as startling as they are sometimes 
 crude. 
 
 “Those fools, the Papists, Bishops, sophists, 
 monks, have formerly so dealt with Jews that every 
 good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And 
 if I had been a Jew and seen such stupidity and such 
 blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would 
 rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated 
 the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if 
 they were fit for nothing but to be reviled; whereas 
 they are blood-relations of our Lord; therefore if 
 we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ 
 more than do we. I beg therefore, my dear Papists, 
 if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that 
 you begin to revile me as a Jew. 
 
THE CRUSADES 53 
 
 “Therefore,” he goes on to say, “it is my advice 
 that we should treat them humanely; but now we 
 drive them by force, treating them deceitfully and 
 ignominiously, saying they must have Christian 
 blood to wash away the Jewish stain, and I know 
 not what more nonsense. Also we prohibit them 
 from working amongst us, from living and having 
 social intercourse with us, forcing them, if they would 
 remain with us, to become usurers. If we would 
 help them, then must we exercise, not the law of the 
 Pope, but that of Christian love. We must receive 
 them kindly and allow them to compete with us in 
 earning a livelihood, so that they may have an 
 opportunity to witness Christian life and doctrine; 
 and if some remain obstinate, what of it? Not 
 every one of us is a good Christian.’’ 1° 
 
 Elsewhere Luther speaks of the Jews as the instru- 
 ments of God’s revelation to man: “‘ The Jews are 
 of the best blood on earth;”’ ‘‘ through them alone 
 the Holy Spirit wished to give all the books of Holy 
 Scripture to the world. They are the children, and 
 we are the guests and strangers. Indeed, like the 
 Canaanitish woman, we should be satisfied to be the 
 dogs that eat the crumbs which fall from their 
 master’s table.’’ 14 
 
 And yet in his later years Luther became the 
 bitterest enemy of the Jews. His terrific vocabulary 
 and force of language were turned against instead 
 of for the Jews. This is what we now find him 
 saying : 
 
 “Doubt not, beloved in Christ, that after the devil 
 you have no more bitter, venomous, violent enemy 
 than the real Jew.’ As to what should be done 
 
 e 
 
54 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 with the Jews, Luther recommends: “ Burn their 
 synagogues and schools; what will not burn, bury 
 with earth, that neither stone nor rubbish remain. 
 In like manner, break into and destroy their houses. 
 Take away all their prayer-books and Talmuds, in 
 which is nothing but godlessness, lies, cursing and 
 swearing. Forbid their Rabbis to teach on pain of 
 life and limb.” ¥ 
 
 After admonishing his hearers not to have the 
 slightest intercourse with the Jews, he says: “Ii 
 that which you already suffer from the Jew is not 
 sufficient, strike him in the jaw . . . if I had power 
 over them I would assemble their most prominent 
 men and demand that they frove that we Christians 
 do not worship the one God, under the penalty of 
 having their tongues torn out through the backs of 
 their neoks.’% +* 
 
 This radical change of heart in so great a man, 
 this lapse from Christian charity to the grossest 
 intemperance, should make us pause and take very 
 careful thought. Luther may have been disap- 
 pointed by the Jews; he is supposed to have 
 suspected a Jewish attempt to poison him; all 
 manner of explanations have been offered to account 
 for so radical a change. But primarily the change 
 goes to show this: that, even in the case of so great 
 a Christian as Luther, it needed only the removal of 
 certain inhibitions, it needed only the slackening of 
 certain controls exercised over mankind by the due 
 practice of the Christian virtues of humble-minded- 
 ness, love and obedience to our Lord and Master, 
 and the open-eyed facing of truth—it needed only 
 
THE CRUSADES 55 
 
 the slackening of these, the hardly acquired Christian 
 virtues, and once these controls falter or slacken, for 
 whatever reason, then at once, the age-long, inbred, 
 instinctive Jew-hatred breaks loose. Centuries of 
 Christianity of a kind have made it a Christian 
 instinct to loathe the Jew; to overcome that im- 
 planted instinct has now become one of the severest 
 disciplines in the practice of the Christian life. 
 
 In pursuing the subject of these addresses it is 
 possible to pick out only a few illustrative episodes. 
 The field of Jewish history is so huge—being virtually 
 a complete survey of world-history wherever the 
 Jew enters into the picture; and there are few 
 countries and times in which Jews have not figured. 
 I have tried to limit the choice to episodes which in 
 themselves each marked the beginning of a new 
 phase in Christian-Jewish relations. Once such a 
 new phase is begun, usually it becomes continuous, 
 lasting in many cases even to modern times—just as 
 the blood-accusation libel, which first took precise 
 form in Norwich, in the thirteenth century, continues 
 to be charged against the Jews to the present day, 
 and is even becoming more frequent. This sense of 
 continuity in the quality of Christian- Jewish relations 
 is constantly being aroused in most curious fashion. 
 
 For the later seventeenth and early eighteenth 
 centuries I would draw your attention to three 
 Christians who have influenced these relations: the 
 influence of one was bad, though he meant well; 
 a second had an influence which was thoroughly 
 pernicious; while the influence of the third was 
 thoroughly good. 
 
56 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 John Christopher Wagenseil was an industrious 
 Christian Hebraist who exerted all his energies in 
 collecting Jewish works controverting Christian 
 doctrines or attacking Christianity in cruder style. 
 This collection he published in 1681, under the highly 
 intriguing title Tela ignea Satane—the fiery darts 
 of the devil. His intention was quite without 
 malice. He hoped to persuade the leaders of the 
 Church that it was their duty to take an oath from 
 all Jews that they would utter no word of mockery 
 against Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Cross and the 
 Christian Sacraments. Incidentally he emphasized 
 his belief that it was wrong to “ scorch and burn the 
 Jews, to rob them of all their property, or to drive 
 them with their wives and families out of the 
 country.”’ 
 
 Wagenseil wrote also a pamphlet exposing the 
 falsehood of the popular belief that the Jews used 
 the blood of Christians. ‘It might,” he says, “ in- 
 deed pass if the matter stopped with idle gossip; 
 but that on account of this execrable falsehood the 
 Jews have been tormented, punished and executed 
 by thousands, should move even stones to com- 
 passion and make them cry out.”’ #4 
 
 Wagenseil was, however, followed by John Andrew 
 Eisenmenger.” He compiled (in the year 1700) a 
 malicious book whose title well describes its con- 
 tents. This is it: 
 
 “Judaism exposed: or an original and true 
 account of the way in which the stubborn Jews 
 frightfully blaspheme and dishonour the Holy 
 Trinity, revile the Holy Mother of Christ, mockingly 
 
THE CRUSADES 57 
 
 criticize the New Testament, the Evangelists, the 
 Apostles and the Christian religion, and despise and 
 curse to the uttermost extreme the whole of Chris- 
 tianity. At the same time much else besides, either 
 not at all or very little known, and gross errors of 
 the Jewish religion and theology, as well as ridiculous 
 and amusing stories, herein appear. All proved 
 from their own books. Written for the honest in- 
 formation of all Christians.’ 
 
 Eisenmenger’s purpose was to hurl back Wagen- 
 Seil’s “ Fiery darts of the devil”’ with deadly aim 
 against the Jews themselves. Furthermore, all that 
 other material about alleged Jewish abominations, 
 which Wagenseil had collected and exposed as false- 
 hoods—all these Eisenmenger refurbished and 
 presented as indisputable facts. Ffor example, he 
 gave lengthy proofs that Jews were forbidden to save 
 a Christian from death; he repeated all the stories 
 of murders of Christians by Jews, of the poisoning of 
 wells by Jews in the time of the Black Death, the 
 ritual murders—in fact, everything which had ever 
 been alleged against the Jews, whether through simple 
 ignorance, deliberate fraud or excited fanaticism. 
 
 By heavy bribery the Jews succeeded in delaying 
 the publication of this work. But it was ultimately 
 published after Eisenmenger’s death. It has ever 
 since proved an inexhaustible armoury for malicious 
 opponents of the Jews. The name of Eisenmenger 
 is burnt deep into the suffering soul of the Jew. 
 
 Altogether admirable, however, is the figure of 
 William Surenhuysius,!® a Christian scholar of 
 Amsterdam. After years of labour he produced 
 
 E 
 
58 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 between 1698 and 1703 a Latin translation with 
 commentaries of the entire Mishnah. He desired 
 that Christian youths training for theology and the 
 ministry of the Church should not devote themselves 
 to the seductions of classical literature, but by 
 engaging in the study of the Mishnah serve, as it 
 were, a sacred noviciate : 
 
 ‘““ He who desires to be a good and worthy disciple 
 of Christ must either first become a Jew, or first learn 
 thoroughly the language and culture of the Jews, and 
 become Moses’ disciple before he joins the Apostles, 
 in order that he may be able through Moses and the 
 Prophets to convince men that Jesus is the Messiah.”’ 
 
 He was outspoken in his contempt for those who, 
 like Eisenmenger, picked over Jewish writings with 
 ulterior motives, like, he says, ‘“‘ highwaymen, who, 
 after they have robbed an honest man of all his 
 clothes, beat him to death with cudgels or send him 
 away with scorn.” 
 
 In all this I have almost entirely neglected to give 
 the Jewish reaction—to show whether, or how, 
 Jewish opinion of Christianity was affected by the 
 post-Reformation attitude to the Jews. We are at 
 once met by the remarkable fact that there is no such 
 thing as a recognizable Jewish anti-Christian litera- 
 ture—that is to say, a literature in the least corre- 
 sponding to the type represented by the gigantic 
 bulk of Christian anti-Jewish (or, as it later came 
 to be called, anti-Semitic) literature. All Wagen- 
 seil’s efforts produced little more than that early 
 Jewish parody of the Gospels, and Isaac of Troki’s 
 Hizzuk Emunah—the Protection of the Faith—and 
 

 
 THE CRUSADES 59 
 
 the reports of one or two Christian Jewish public 
 disputations. The Gospel parody may be put on 
 
 one side as a thing standing by itself. The others 
 
 are nothing more than philosophical arguments 
 according to the fashion of the time and rival inter- 
 pretations (and mostly very artificial interpretations) 
 of Old Testament texts—the one side striving to 
 show that the Messiah was come in the person of 
 Jesus, the other side using just the same means 
 and methods and materials to show that the Messiah 
 had not come. But never a trace do we find of a 
 Jewish work written in the spirit of Eisenmenger— 
 with the specific object of rendering odious a religion 
 and all who believe in it. You will agree that this 
 is remarkable. It may be that Jews have wished to 
 write such works, but feared for the consequences ; but 
 we have no right to take such a thing for granted.1*4 
 The Jews preferred, on the whole, to remain dumb. 
 If they did break their rule of protective dumbness 
 it was to point to something good in Christianity and 
 Christians. S 
 
 A very famous Talmudist and controversialist of 
 the middle of the eighteenth century was Jacob 
 Emden. This is what he finds himself able to say 
 of Christianity : 
 
 “Christianity has been given as part of the 
 Jewish religion by the Apostles to the Gentile world ; 
 and its Founder has even made the moral laws 
 stricter than are those contained in the Mosaic 
 law. There are, accordingly, many Christians of 
 high qualities and excellent morals who keep from 
 hatred and do harm to none, even to their enemies. 
 
60 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Would that Christians would all live in conformity 
 with their precepts! They are not enjoined, like the 
 Israelites, to observe the laws of Moses; nor do they 
 sin if they associate other beings with God in wor- 
 shipping a trinitarian Godhead. They will receive 
 reward from God for having propagated a belief in 
 Him among nations that never heard His name; for 
 ‘He looks into the heart.’ Yea, many Christians 
 have even gone forth to the rescue of Jews and their 
 literature.”’ 1” 
 
 This is, indeed, a valuable testimony. It is a 
 tribute to the growth of a truer, Christ-like Chris- 
 tianity within the Church, a great tribute to the 
 fearless work done by the few Christian leaders and 
 rank and file who dared to fight down the age-long 
 instinct which led Christians of all ages to loathe, 
 despise and, wherever possible, harass and persecute 
 the Jew; but it is, still more, a tribute to the 
 great-mindedness of this Jew who was able to some 
 extent to penetrate through the thick wall of intoler- 
 ance and cruelty, savagery and barbarity which had 
 interposed between the Church and Judaism. 
 
 We referred earlier to the “‘ Golden Age’”’ of the 
 Jews in Spain. It was towards the close of that 
 period that there took place some of the famous 
 public disputations, staged by the rulers of the 
 country between Christians and Jews, to argue the 
 rival merits of the two religions. In one of these 
 disputations we first hear of the story of the rings, 
 found later in Boccaccio and used again with great 
 effect by Lessing in his Nathan the Wise.® This is 
 the story as it was first told by a Jew: 
 
THE CRUSADES 61 
 
 “In ancient days there lived a man who 
 possessed a ring of gold beyond all price. It 
 had within it a hidden virtue. It made him 
 who wore it beloved of God and man. This 
 man had two sons. He promised them that 
 when he died he would give the ring to that 
 one of his sons whom he loved best, and that 
 son, by virtue of possessing the ring, should 
 inherit all his father’s goods. But he loved 
 both his sons equally dearly. What then did 
 he do? He called a skilful goldsmith who made 
 a second ring so like the first that none could 
 see a difference. On his death-bed the father 
 gave a ring to each of his sons. What hap- 
 pened? Each claimed the father’s estate. 
 Each, knowing his father’s love for himself, 
 believed the other’s ring to be false. They 
 brought their case before the judge, ‘I,’ said 
 the judge, “cannot solve this riddle. Your father 
 alone knew which of you he loved best; and he 
 is not here to testify before me. This do. 
 Each of you go your way, wear your ring; 
 strive in all things to make yourselves beloved 
 of God and man—the virtue which the true 
 ring gives. Pass on the ring with the virtues 
 which it claims to your children’s children. 
 Then, after a thousand thousand years, appear 
 again before this judgment seat. A greater 
 one than I shall then sit upon it. He shall 
 decide between you.’ ”’ 
 
IV 
 IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 In the three earlier lectures we have had glimpses 
 of Christian-Jewish relations at characteristic times, 
 in various centuries and in various parts of the world, 
 and we have learnt the consequent Jewish senti- 
 ments about Christianity. Tothe Jews, Christianity, 
 whenever it rose to activity, was too often an evil 
 dream experienced in fact. To murder Jews even 
 became a laudable Christian practice; to hate the 
 Jew became a Christian virtue. Nothing, no matter 
 how bad it is, that may be found in Jewish ideas 
 about Christianity need surprise us: Jews had no 
 reason to think otherwise than that Christian 
 leadership spelled intolerance and cruelty, while the 
 outstanding Christian virtue cultivated by the multi- 
 tude seemed to be savage barbarity towards the 
 Jew. That many thoughtful Jews did, in fact, 
 penetrate through this thorn-hedge raised by the | 
 Christians, and found something of good in Chris- 
 tianity—that is a tribute rather to Jewish intelli- 
 gence than to Christian practice. 
 
 Coming to the nineteenth century, there is a radical 
 change to be noticed. This change is a complicated 
 one. To understand it rightly we must realize the 
 external factors which brought it about. 
 
 62 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 63 
 
 I. The first factor is this. The end of the eighteenth 
 century saw the Jews at a low ebb politically and at 
 an even lower ebb culturally. In the Middle Ages, 
 and for long after, compared with the Christians the 
 Jews were an educated people: with them, at least 
 among their men-folk, literacy was the rule, and not 
 as with Christians, the exception. In their con- 
 troversies with Christians, and especially in their 
 private dealings with Christians, the Jews must 
 always have cherished a conviction of their own 
 superiority; that they had not the tact to hide this 
 feeling may, to some extent, explain Christian 
 exasperation against them. 
 
 With the dawn of the nineteenth century the con- 
 ditions were reversed. It was the Jews now who 
 were examples of ignorance and superstition, and it 
 was the Christians who had the monopoly of learn- 
 ing—who were hurrying forward and taking advan- 
 tage of all the new developments in science and 
 learning. Before, while suffering under political 
 oppression, the Jew could always comfort himself by 
 a feeling of his own moral and intellectual super- 
 iority. By the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 he had quite lost this superiority. More and more 
 the Jews had been cut off from the world: they 
 _ were either confined to the ghettoes in the big towns 
 of Western Europe, or segregated in towns and 
 villages in Eastern Europe, where they became 
 stagnant both intellectually and economically. 
 Whenever any of them had the courage to look out 
 from the narrow confines of their petty community 
 life, it was to see a Christian world which, in material 
 
64 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and intellectual progress, left the Jew by comparison 
 in the discomfort and obscurity of the Middle Ages. 
 The Jews could only cultivate their old feeling of 
 superiority by keeping their eyes rigidly turned 
 inwards. Out of this lethargy the Jews, or some of 
 them, were vigorously shaken by Moses Mendelssohn 
 (the grandfather of Mendelssohn the musician).+ By 
 introducing his fellow-Jews to the German language 
 and literature, Mendelssohn first showed them their 
 defects and gave them the key to the totally new and 
 strange territory of Western learning and thought. 
 
 II. The second factor in the changing situation 
 was the gradual acquiring by the Jews in Western 
 Europe of political rights. It was the era of ‘‘ eman- 
 cipation,” freedom in the political, educational, 
 social and religious sense. The ideals which had 
 found an outlet in the American and French revolu- 
 tions continued to work, and one effect of them was 
 the removal of the political disabilities of Jews in 
 France, Germany, England, Italy and some other 
 parts of Europe. 
 
 This all led to a gradual change in Jewish life and 
 mental habits. Formerly the Jew had the alterna- 
 tive either of leading a harassed, embittered, though 
 sometimes profitable life in Christian surroundings, 
 or of persuading himself that his own ghetto Jewish 
 life, bound and hemmed in by the Talmud rules, 
 was a higher, an all-sufficient life. Some there were, 
 some there are still, convinced that this second is the 
 true and altogether satisfying ideal for the Jew. But 
 with the early decades of the nineteenth century the 
 Jew was no longer compelled to lead the stunted life 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 65 
 
 of a social outcast in Christian circles, or reduced to 
 persuading himself that life within the four walls of 
 the Talmud was the ideal Jewish life. All life, learn- 
 ing and work now lay before him. 
 
 But now he was not, as in the Middle Ages, the 
 teacher, the leader in civilization: he was a mere 
 learner, a beginner. 
 
 III. The third factor to bring about a change in 
 Jewish-Christian relations was a movement within 
 Judaism—the so-called “‘ Reform Judaism.” 
 
 In its beginnings reform in Judaism, though 
 obviously influenced by a reformed-Christianity 
 environment, was not primarily moved by the 
 principle called up by the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion in Christian history—the clearing away of 
 centuries of practice and tradition in order to 
 return to a simpler and supposedly purer form of the 
 faith. The primary object in Jewish reform, the 
 main object of its fivst promoters, was to fit Jews to 
 take a part in the wider world that had opened around 
 them in consequence of the removal of most political 
 disabilities. Thus, first and foremost, the tradi- 
 tional laws must be relaxed which forbade Jews to 
 have anything to do with the culture of the age or 
 hindered them from taking the fullest share in the 
 social and national activities, responsibilities and 
 opportunities of the live world around them. A 
 new interest was taken in the idea of Judaism as 
 a religion (as opposed to a complex, hemmed-in 
 life) ; stress came to be laid upon the orderliness 
 and seemliness of divine worship—following the 
 model of Christian Protestant Churches, synagogue 
 
66 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 services were shortened, sermons and hymns 
 were introduced in the vernacular, and much of 
 the service itself was conducted in the everyday 
 speech, instead of the rarely understood Hebrew. 
 Subsequently far-reaching changes were introduced 
 into the actual contents of Judaism. The Talmud 
 and the Shulchan Arukh (the compendium of rules 
 governing daily life, derived from the Talmud), 
 though honoured as Jewish tradition, were no longer 
 regarded as absolutely binding. 
 
 It is impossible to discuss all the stages of Reform 
 Judaism. The gist of the matter is simply this: 
 whereas the traditional orthodox Judaism claims to 
 control the whole of a Jew—his nationality, his every 
 habit, his secular thoughts and outlook, his family 
 life, in fact his whole attitude to life—Reform 
 Judaism, on the other hand, pleads that the “ Juda- 
 ism’ of a Jew should affect only his religious life. 
 There are degrees of Reform Judaism, from the 
 comparatively conservative to the extreme left wing 
 of liberalism; but they all agree in this, that “‘ Juda- 
 ism ’’ is not to be bound up with Jewish nationality 
 or culture: it is a religion only. 
 
 Such are the three factors dominating the change 
 in Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth 
 century: the Jew’s realization of his cultural in- 
 feriority, his acquisition of political and social rights, 
 and the stirrings of the Reform Judaism idea. 
 
 What were the results? They may be reduced in 
 number to two: one intangible, the other most 
 tangible. 
 
 The first is this. The more a person is conscious 
 of his own imperfections the less likely is he to brood 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 67 
 
 overmuch upon the real, or supposed, imperfections 
 in others; also, consciousness of one’s own defects 
 leads automatically to the recognition of others’ 
 merits. For eighteen centuries Christianity had 
 used its physical superiority to crush Judaism : 
 scarcely ever do we find it striving first and foremost 
 to impress the moral beauty of Christianity upon the 
 Jews. Therefore no blame attaches to the Jews if 
 they failed to see any moral beauty in Christianity. 
 But the Christian’s appetite for persecution (at least 
 throughout much of the world) ended with the dawn 
 of the nineteenth century. The Jew, in most of 
 Europe and in America, found himself accepted as a 
 human brother and a fellow-citizen. He was free 
 and highly willing to take what he wanted of the 
 Christian civilization around him; and he was ex- 
 tremely quick to adapt himself toit. Hewas able to 
 shed his protective crust of Jewish customs and anti- 
 Christian prejudices. There even arose generations 
 of Jews ignorant of the anti-Christian weapon forged 
 by their fathers of old—the cherished idea that 
 Christianity was a fiction based on shameless lies. 
 They were willing to admit that Christianity was a 
 movement of service to the world. 
 
 The second result is this. In itself it is a develop- 
 ment grievously humiliating to Christians. But it is 
 one for which Christians must feel a measure of 
 gratitude. No longer did the Jews rest content to 
 base their conclusions about Christianity on Chris- 
 tians. They had the good taste to forget, so far as 
 they possibly could, the terrible scourge that Chris- 
 tianity had been to them in the past—to forget the 
 acts of Christendom and to think rather of its ideals. 
 
68 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 In short they turned their faces away from Christians 
 and gave their attention to the person of the Founder 
 of Christianity. This is humiliating to Christians, 
 but we cannot say that the humiliation is un- 
 deserved. 
 
 I speak now, of course, only of those Jews who 
 troubled their heads about the subject at all: the 
 mass of the Jews never did. Orthodox Jewry has 
 tried its utmost to close its mind against the whole 
 subject of Christianity; though if the Jews lived (as 
 most of them still did) under the more harassed con- 
 ditions and in the unfriendly surroundings of Eastern 
 Europe—in that case they could at need always find 
 combined comfort and vengeance by cherishing in 
 their heart of hearts the puerile medizval Jewish 
 fables about Christianity’s origins. But their past 
 memories and their present ideas of Christianity, 
 and their ever-present dangers, convinced them that, 
 in the face of the outer world, silence and the closed 
 mind were their wisest policy. 
 
 But certain Jews there were who faced the subject 
 of Christianity as an essential part of the world of 
 thought in which they were at last permitted to 
 roam at large. In a sense they were compelled to 
 study the subject. They were influenced by the 
 Reform Movement: in other words, Judaism had 
 come with them to fulfil the duty of a veligion only: 
 it must meet their spiritual requirements. But 
 though Judaism was to them no more than a religion, 
 it was the religion which they openly professed. 
 Therefore they must justify this preference, at least 
 to themselves. Judaism and Christianity sprang 
 from the same origins: they must closely resemble 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 69 
 
 each other. What prevented the Jews from going a 
 step further in their course of reform and accepting 
 that modification of Judaism contained in Chris- 
 tianity? They had to meet the challenge of such 
 men as the learned Christian Hebraist, Franz 
 Delitzsch, and prominent converts like Benjamin 
 Disraeli, who insisted that Christianity was Judaism 
 in a stage of higher and more cultivated development. 
 
 This period saw the conversion of large numbers 
 of Jews in Germany. We need not follow Jewish 
 writers who attribute these conversions one and all 
 to worldly motives and personal ambition. There 
 may have been such; but it is more reasonable to 
 see the great movement of conversion in the nine- 
 teenth century as an outcome of the factors we have 
 seen at work. Many of the Jews were at last able to 
 see Christianity through glasses no longer smeared 
 by the mud and fog of former Christian treatment of 
 them; and they no longer felt the straining of a 
 purely Jewish conscience or a purely racial bond 
 binding them tightly to their forefathers. All the 
 more then were the leaders of Jewish life compelled 
 to face the problem of Judaism’s claim, as a religion, 
 to persist face to face with its daughter faith, 
 Christianity. 
 
 It is proposed to discuss briefly the work of six 
 prominent Jews who have dealt with the subject, 
 namely, Joseph Salvador, a French Jew of in- 
 dependent mind; Abraham Geiger, a leading figure 
 in the Reform Movement in Germany; Heinrich 
 Graetz, a strong opponent of the Reform Movement ; 
 Joseph Jacobs, an English Jew of the Westernized 
 orthodox type; Mr. Claude Montefiore, an English 
 
Pee 
 
 70 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Jew of the extreme Liberal camp; and “ Ahad ha- 
 Am,” the philosopher of the Zionist Movement, and 
 one who is held in great veneration by thoughtful 
 Jews of to-day. These six represent almost every 
 variety of nineteenth and early twentieth-century 
 articulate Jewish opinion about Christianity. Their 
 ideas also underlie all present-day Jewish opinion as 
 well. 
 
 The first on our list, Joseph Salvador,? published 
 in Paris, in 1838, two volumes entitled Jesus Christ 
 and His Teaching: a History of the Birth of the 
 Church, its Organization and its Progress during the 
 First Century. He puts forward the idea which later 
 Jews have seized upon with such avidity and empha- 
 sized so strongly—that Jesus never laid down any 
 ethical precepts which did not already exist in the 
 Old Testament or in the Judaism of the time. Thus 
 he claims to find the entire Sermon on the Mount 
 in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, in the Apocrypha. If 
 there was any difference between Jesus and the 
 Pharisees, the established teachers of the time, it 
 lay mainly in this: that whereas the Pharisees had 
 an eye for society as a whole, for reality, the possi- 
 bilities of human nature, the needs of the Jewish 
 nation as a nation, the claim of man’s happiness in 
 this life, and what made for practical social reforms 
 —Jesus, on the other hand, was concerned only 
 with the religious and ethical life of the zudividual. 
 The Pharisees looked to the preservation of the 
 Jewish national integrity, to save it from fading into 
 the surrounding nations, and being absorbed by 
 them; the great aim of the Pharisees was to preserve 
 the distinctive national characteristics, social and 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. FE 
 
 secular, as well as religious and ethical—all of which 
 were combined in the Tovah, the divine Law given 
 to Israel. The social and ceremonial elements 
 served to protect and preserve the purely ethical 
 and religious elements till the time should at last 
 come when, through Israel’s enlightened example and 
 teaching, redemption should come to the whole 
 world. Jesus, on the other hand, thought only of 
 the religious and moral life of the individual; He 
 thought nothing of the national Jewish needs, nor 
 was it a matter of importance to Him whether the 
 Jewish nation survived at all. 
 
 Salvador tried to show that Christianity was a 
 compromise between Judaism and paganism, a com- 
 promise which had proved necessary in order to 
 persuade the pagan world to accept Jewish ethical 
 and religious teaching. Judaism, however, remained 
 free from any such taint or admixture. 
 
 Although Salvador wrote nearly a hundred years 
 ago, his arguments are still the mainstay of Jewish 
 apologetics to-day. He anticipated most of the ideas 
 which we shall find in his successors. At the time 
 the book made a sensation in French Christian 
 circles, but it was soon forgotten and exerted no 
 direct influence on Jewish thought of the time. 
 
 Abraham Geiger was a learned Rabbi, one of the 
 greatest figures among the Jews of Germany in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. In 1864 he pub- 
 lished three lectures dealing with Jesus and His 
 early disciples. Geiger reduced the origin of 
 Christianity to very mean proportions. He main- 
 tained that Jesus put forward no new idea of any 
 kind, nor did His thoughts ever wander beyond the 
 
, 
 te 
 
 92 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 range of His own people. Jesus did not teach any- 
 thing contrary to the general principles already main- 
 tained by the Pharisees; like the rest of the Jews 
 of those days he believed in the coming of a Messiah, 
 with whom were bound up the hopes of deliverance 
 from the tyranny of Rome. Jesus kept the cere- 
 monial laws like every loyal Jew, but occasionally 
 He belittled this or that observance if He thought it 
 a hindrance rather than a help. But He never 
 dreamed of putting an end to such laws on principle 
 —as did St. Paul. Jesus praised the life of poverty 
 and He taught a contempt of this world, and He 
 disliked sharing this world’s pleasures. But this was 
 no opposition to Jewish teaching of the time; it was 
 simply a frame of mind due to the depressed econo- 
 mical conditions of the Jews under Roman oppression. 
 
 Faced by the obvious problem : How could Chris- 
 tianity have arisen if Jesus taught no new idea ?— 
 Geiger thought it could be solved by supposing that 
 Jesus’ disciples believed that He was the Messiah, 
 that they still believed this after He was killed, and 
 from day to day looked forward to His return in 
 glory, and felt the spiritual conviction that Jesus had 
 risen again and would appear a second time. 
 
 That, Geiger thought, was all that there could 
 possibly be known about the real historical origins 
 of Christianity ; and he thought that these things in 
 themselves accounted for Christianity. 
 
 His conclusion as to the rival merits of Christianity 
 and Judaism was that Christianity was a weakened, 
 enervated form of Judaism, arising out of Judaism 
 at a time when Judaism was passing through a 
 sickly, enervated period. Christianity, this en- 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 73 
 
 feebled Judaism, only survived through its super- 
 structure of belief about the second coming of Jesus. 
 Judaism, on the other hand, had survived through 
 the centuries of persecution, thereby proving its 
 strength. Geiger saw it as a still developing plant 
 destined to bring the ideals of universal justice before 
 the world. He did not believe, with older orthodox 
 Judaism, that the Talmud was the last word in the 
 story of Judaism. He was not an extreme reformer 
 (from the standpoint of modern Reform Judaism), 
 but he hoped that a gradual process of evolution 
 would enable the Jews to shed a great deal that was 
 petrified and worthless in their lives and traditions. 
 
 It is, however, Heinrich Graetz4 (d. 1894) who 
 has done more than any other Jewish writer to instil 
 into the ordinary average, Western Jew a working 
 hypothesis of Christianity, not too difficult to under- 
 stand, and one that preserved the self-respect of 
 Jews. He was a violent opponent of the Reform 
 Judaism movement. He admired his nation’s tradi- 
 tions and gloried in his Jewishness. He was an 
 industrious and widely read student. He had an 
 independent mind. But chiefly he was possessed of 
 powers of highly impassioned rhetoric. With these 
 qualifications he wrote a History of the Jews from 
 the earliest times till 1848. It is a great work. It 
 is immensely popular in spite of its bulk. Most 
 Jews consider it as authoritative and the last word 
 on the subject. Its ideas have penetrated deeply 
 into the consciousness of all Western Jews with any 
 pretence to a modern education, be they orthodox 
 or reformed, liberal or conservative. 
 
 Unfortunately it is long odds that if a so-called 
 F « 
 
74 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 d 
 
 “History ’’ wins immense popularity, it cannot be 
 very good history. So it is with Graetz. It is 
 written with a passionate love and enthusiasm for 
 his people; hence its popularity. It is a lyrical 
 account of the wanderings and sufferings of the Jews 
 down through the centuries; but good history it 
 certainly is not. It knows only two principles—if 
 you dislike anything, condemn it wholly; if you 
 admire anything, then it is altogether praiseworthy. 
 This makes popular reading but bad history. 
 Graetz gives careful attention to the rise of Chris- 
 tianity ; and, of course, in the later portions of Jewish 
 history the Christian world is constantly on the 
 scene. Throughout (and we cannot be surprised 
 and we have little right to protest) Christian treat- 
 ment of Jews comes in for the bitterest comment. 
 The persecutions in country after country, in century 
 after century, are told in most lurid detail, with 
 passionate sympathy for the suffering race. (The 
 Christian should bear in mind that these accounts, as 
 retold by Graetz, have entered into the flesh and 
 blood of the Jew of to-day and become in a sense 
 a part of his national and religious consciousness.) 
 The astonishing part of Graetz’s ‘‘ History ”’ is his 
 treatment of the life of our Lord. Normally Graetz 
 was the servant and the victim of most violent pre- 
 judices. The Kabbalah, the eighteenth-century Hasi- 
 dic Movement, the Reform Movement, Christianity 
 throughout the ages, Jewish converts to Christianity 
 —all these are treated with trenchant, scornful, 
 scurrilous, venomous and, at times, libellous ani- 
 mosity. We turn to the account of Jesus. The 
 Christian has to confess to surprise, and—humilia- 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 75 
 
 tion. There is no bitterness in Graetz’s portrayal of 
 Jesus. These following words of Graetz might easily 
 have been written about our Lord by a devoted 
 Christian: ‘“‘ High-minded earnestness and spotless 
 moral purity were his undeniable attributes: they 
 stand out in all the authentic accounts of his life. 
 . . . Jesus looked upon the promotion of peace and 
 the forgiveness of injuries as the highest form of 
 virtue. His whole being was permeated by that 
 deeper religion which consecrates to God not only 
 the hour of prayer, a day of penitence . . . but every 
 step in the journey of life, which turns every aspira- 
 tion of the soul towards God, subjects everything to 
 His will, and with childlike trust commits every- 
 thing to His keeping.”’ # 
 
 For the rest, Graetz follows much the same lines 
 as Salvador and Geiger in confining Jesus to the 
 narrow limits of a purely Jewish framework. Graetz 
 attempted to account for any peculiarities in Jesus, 
 as well as in John the Baptist, by supposing that 
 they were both connected with the Essene com- 
 munity—those Jewish ascetics living a monastic 
 life away from civilization down in the Dead Sea 
 plain. It is characteristic of Graetz, Geiger, Sal- 
 vador, and most Jewish writers who have followed 
 in their train, that they feel it their first and most 
 bounden duty to deprive the Gospels of any semblance 
 of originality. 
 
 Graetz gave his fellow-Jews the blackest possible 
 picture of Christianity from the time of St. Paul 
 onwards, a picture which is the reflection of Chris- 
 tianity’s treatment of the Jews; but of Jesus, our 
 Lord Himself, the picture is that of one who fulfilled 
 
76 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 an ideal of Jewish piety. Graetz, it may be pointed 
 out, utterly refused to accept the medieval blas- 
 phemous stories of Jesus as representing Jewish 
 opinion of any worth; also he pays no attention to 
 the real or supposed Talmud references. 
 
 We come now to the English Jew, Joseph Jacobs. 
 He is chosen here not because he is important as the 
 originator of a new phase, but because he is repre- 
 sentative of educated, more or less sophisticated 
 orthodox Judaism, tending towards conservative 
 Reform, at the end of last century. In 1895 he 
 published anonymously a little book entitled As 
 Others saw Him. It belongs to the familiar type of 
 fictitious lives of our Lord, attempting to retell the 
 Gospel story as seen through the eyes of an indepen- 
 dent contemporary—in this case an Alexandrian 
 Jew imagined as having been present in Jerusalem 
 during our Lord’s ministry there. The author makes 
 quite a charming story of it. He depicts Jesus as a 
 compelling, attractive, winning character; he retells 
 the episodes of the Rich Young Man, the Woman 
 taken in Adultery, and Jesus’ teaching as to what 
 is the greatest commandment. Material is drawn 
 from other sources, but not out of keeping with the 
 rest of the picture. Indirectly the author intro- 
 duces the aim of his book: to explain why the Jews 
 refused to accept Jesus. He hails Jesus as 
 thoroughly Jewish, one who observed all the cere- 
 monial laws; as a true Jew He looked on God as 
 His heavenly Father, He had compassion on the 
 poor, helped the fallen, rated the repentant higher 
 than the scrupulously pious. He even had the 
 national defects of the Jew: He never noticed 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 77 
 
 what was beautiful in nature, never smiled; He 
 taught by tears, threats and scoldings. In all this 
 Jesus was most Jewish of Jews. But in two respects 
 He was wholly strange to them. He did not teach 
 as a messenger sent from God, but taught His own 
 views on His own authority; secondly, He lacked 
 Jewish patriotic feelings. It was this last which 
 finally turned the Jews from Him. Thus a character 
 in the story is made to say: ‘‘ He evaded our ques- 
 tionings and eluded our testings. He seemed aloof 
 from us and our desires. All Israel was pining to 
 be freed from the Roman yoke, and he would have 
 BSA ya DULG J0L weven. er [ess dled: er ator 
 that he cared naught for our national hopes. We 
 were all panting for national freedom; he would 
 have naught of it. Whether it was that he felt in 
 some sort to be not of our nation, I know not; but | 
 in all his teaching he dealt with us as men, not as ~ 
 Jews.” “‘ He had spent his life in trying to impress 
 a new ideal upon his people, and they had welcomed 
 him only as the fulfilment of the old ideal which he 
 would have replaced.”’ 
 
 We shall hear more of this “ unpatriotism ”’ of 
 Jesus in the course of the next lecture. 
 
 In passing, reference may be made to the great 
 twelve-volume Jewish Encyclopedia published in 
 Amierica during the early years of this century. It 
 can be taken as giving the standard ideas of modern, 
 conservative Reform as well as Westernized Orthodox 
 Judaism. So far as it touches on the subjects of 
 Christianity and our Lord it does not add any ideas 
 beyond those we have already heard. The attitude 
 on the whole is one of friendly but critical neutrality. 
 
78 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 The same Joseph Jacobs, just discussed, was one of 
 the Board of- Editors, and the same ideas found in 
 his book, As Others saw Him, recur from time to time 
 throughout the Encyclopedia. The actual article on 
 “ Jesus’ is by the late Kaufmann Kohler. He finds 
 himself able to speak thus of his subject : 
 
 “A great historic movement of the character and 
 importance of Christianity cannot have arisen with- 
 out a great personality to call it into existence and 
 to give it shape and direction. Jesus of Nazareth 
 had a mission from God; and he must have had the 
 spiritual powers and fitness to be chosen for it.”’ 
 
 This veneration of the figure of Jesus must not, 
 however, be taken as typical of Westernized Jewry. 
 Hostility to Christianity and its Founder, stifled or 
 only masked by the age-long habit of the closed mind, 
 still persists to a very great extent among ordinary 
 Western Jews. To these people, in the first decade 
 of this century, it came as a great relief to hear that 
 Jesus had “ never really existed at all.’ This con- 
 soling fact they learned on the authority of a German 
 called Drews, an Englishman called Robertson and 
 an American called Smith.” 
 
 This theory has become extremely popular 
 among Jews. They now argue that since “ they ’— 
 that is, non-Jews, therefore Christians—have them- 
 selves declared Jesus to be a myth, then those 
 troublesome problems of Christianity, Jesus and 
 Judaism, can be regarded by all sensible people as 
 permanently shelved. 
 
 But to return to the six representatives on our 
 list. 
 
 Mr. Claude Montefiore is a leader of the liberal 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 79 
 
 camp in Judaism, the extreme left wing of Reform 
 Judaism. The characteristic of this party is its 
 claim to choose, out of the historic content of Juda- 
 ism, only those elements which appeal to their judg- 
 ment as worth preserving in the light of modern 
 thought and knowledge. They correspond very 
 closely to the ‘‘ Modernists” in the Church of 
 England, and they are just as hotly attacked by the 
 older orthodoxy. Therefore, however interesting a 
 their views may be as coming from a Jewish source, “ 
 they must on no account be supposed to be in any 
 sense typically Jewrsh. 
 
 This is what Mr. Montefiore, as long ago as 1894, 
 wrote of Jesus : 
 
 “ The most important Jew who ever lived, one who 
 exercised a greater influence upon mankind and 
 civilization than any other person, whether within 
 the Jewish race or without it. ...A Jew whose 
 life and character have been regarded by almost all 
 the best and wisest people who have heard or read 
 of his actions and his words, as the greatest religious 
 exemplar of every age.”’® 
 
 In rg10 Mr. Montefiore writes : 
 
 ‘““God’s nearness was felt by Jesus directly with a 
 vivid intensity unsurpassed by any man.’’® “ Jesus 
 differs from, or, as some would say, goes beyond the 
 prophets: ‘ More than a prophet is here.’ ”’ 7 
 
 We have seen how, since the time of Joseph 
 Salvador, Jews have proclaimed loudly that the - 
 Gospels, in their religious and ethical teaching, give 
 nothing more than what Judaism already possessed. 
 This is what Mr. Montefiore has to say on this point : 
 
 “To each individual striking utterance of Jesus 
 
80 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it is likely enough that a good parallel can be found 
 in the Rabbinic literature; but when Jewish 
 scholars adopt this method of disproving the origin- 
 ality of the Gospels, they forget (quite apart from 
 questions of date) the size of the Talmud and the 
 Midrashim ”’ (these, it should be explained, amount 
 in quantity to something like half the bulk of the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, and were written at 
 various dates between the third and the thirteenth 
 centuries of our era). ‘‘ The teaching of Jesus is 
 contained in three little books which do not fill 
 more than sixty-eight small pages of tolerably small 
 print. The teaching belongs or is attributed to one 
 man, and constitutes, in large measure, a consistent 
 and harmonious whole. It is not a combination 
 of a thousand different occasional and disconnected ~ 
 sayings of a hundred different Rabbis. Again, as a 
 great scholar rather bitingly said, the greatness of 
 the Gospels as compared with the greatness of the 
 Talmud must be measured by what is not there as 
 well as by what is. (In the Gospels) we have not to 
 neglect a vast quantity of third- and fourth-rate 
 material, and seek for occasional pearls amid a mass 
 of negligible trivialities.’’ § 
 
 Elsewhere the same Jewish writer says: 
 
 “There is a certain spirit and glow about the 
 teaching of Jesus . . . you cannot recognize or do 
 justice to it by saying, ‘ The teaching of Jesus com- 
 prises the following maxims and injunctions; of 
 these some are borrowed from the Old Testament, 
 some are paralleled by the Talmud, and a few are 
 impracticable.’ The teaching of Jesus, which has 
 had such gigantic effects upon the world,.is more 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 81 
 
 and other than a dissected list of injunctions. It is 
 not merely the sum of its parts: it is a whole, a 
 Stirite 
 
 The last of the six representatives to be considered 
 is ‘‘ Ahad ha-Am.”’’ 
 
 Ahad ha-Am, “ One of the people ”’ (the pen-name 
 of Mr. Asher Ginzberg), is a modern Jew who has 
 done much hard thinking in order to find for his 
 people a reasonable and fitting place in the scheme of 
 the universe. All along, in season and out of season, 
 he has endeavoured to persuade his fellow- Jews that 
 they have something, as Jews, in their history, their 
 traditions, their culture, their religion, their men- 
 tality, worthy of preservation. With Theodor 
 Herzl, the idea of Zionism began as an attempt to 
 command justice and consideration for Jews by 
 making a nation of them in the political sense. 
 With Ahad-ha-Am, the root-principle of Zionism is 
 rather an attempt to create in Palestine a spiritual 
 centre in which any and every form of specifically 
 Jewish art, life, thought or activity could work out 
 its own salvation, free from all things un-Jewish; 
 from this spiritual centre it is hoped that Jewish 
 inspiration may go forth to the Jews the world 
 over; and that even the Gentiles may once again 
 feel themselves impelled to listen to glad tidings 
 from Jerusalem. 
 
 The attitude towards Christianity of liberal and 
 Reform Jews like Mr. Montefiore aroused fierce indig- 
 nation and antagonism in Ahad ha-Am; and quite 
 naturally. Hzs great ideal was to find the essence of 
 Judaism and grasp it tightly and at all costs avoid 
 the entanglements of rival attractions. His diagnosis 
 
82 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of Mr. Montefiore, and those who thought like him, 
 was not that they merely showed an innocent Jewish 
 appreciation of Christianity, but that they were 
 ceasing to be Jewish and were already half assimil- 
 ated to Christianity. Ahad ha-Am insisted that 
 while Christianity was all very well for Christians, 
 Jews could have nothing to do with it short of deny- 
 
 "ing the three most fundamental characteristics of 
 Fé 
 
 / ‘Judaism. According to Ahad ha-Am these are; 
 
 (x1) Judaism puts the good of society first : Chris- 
 tianity cares only for the individual ; (2) Judaism 
 cannot suffer any kind of religious veneration 
 directed towards any human tangible personality; 
 and (3) the ethical basis of Judaism is absolute 
 justice, whereas in Christianity the ethical principle is 
 confused by compromise with asceticism. 
 
 I should like to give long extracts from the essay 
 in which Ahad ha-Am works out his ideas about 
 Judaism and Christianity; but it would take too 
 long. Those who are interested can easily secure it. 
 It has been translated by Mr. Leon Simon.” To the 
 Christian mind, the three points made by Ahad ha-Am 
 are curious and important. They will make most 
 Christians rejoice in the fact that they are Christians. 
 
 As for the first point, normal humanity needs a 
 religion which takes first thought for the frailty and 
 needs of the individual: society can be trusted to 
 work out its own salvation, once the needs of the 
 individual are granted. A League of Nations will 
 never make good men: it needs good men to make 
 a League of Nations. Again, with regard to Ahad 
 ha-Am’s second point, the Christian, equally with the 
 Jew, will always resist the crime of making God in 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 83 
 
 the image of man; but divine revelation to man 
 there must be: for the Jews it has been the revela- 
 tion from Sinai—taking the form of a code of law; 
 for the Christian the revelation has taken the form 
 of a Person—a Person who lived and who died (so 
 the Christian believes) in perfect accord with the will 
 of God. 
 
 But it is the third point which will give the Chris- 
 tian the greatest shock. Ahad ha-Am tries to show 
 that, ethically, Judaism represents absolute justice; 
 while Christianity stands for asceticism and com- 
 promise. This, translated into simple Christian 
 language, means: Jewish morality is based on right- 
 eousness, Christian morality is based on love. This, 
 of course, we always knew—that the God of the 
 Hebrew prophets was a God of righteousness, whereas 
 the Christian revelation emphasized the fact (not 
 altogether ignored in the Hebrew Prophets) that 
 God is a God of love, mercy and compassion as well. 
 
 But Ahad ha-Am would have us understand the 
 consequences: he shows us the deep line of cleavage 
 which the difference makes between the ethical 
 principles of Judaism and those of Christianity. 
 
 The Christian “ golden rule ’’ is, ‘‘ Do unto others 
 what you would that men should do unto you.” 
 Judaism has the same, or what seems to be the same 
 rule in the negative form: ‘ What is hateful to thy- 
 self, do not unto thy neighbour.”” And Ahad ha-Am 
 believes that in these two forms lies the ethical 
 difference in the two religions* : egotism is the mark 
 
 * Yet no less an authority than Maimonides holds both forms 
 
 as truly representative of Jewish ethics. See his Sefer ha- 
 Mitzvoth : Mitzvoth ‘A séh, § 206. 
 
 1, 
 
tg ge 
 
 84 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of Jewish ethics; but Christian altruism, he insists, 
 is merely inverted egotism, the substitution of other 
 for self. 
 
 Ahad ha-Am is not content to leave the matter at 
 that. To make an apparently abstruse point clear 
 as daylight he quotes the following case from the 
 Talmud : 
 
 Imagine two men travelling in the desert; only 
 one of them has a bottle of water; if both drink they 
 will both die before their journey’s end; if only one 
 drinks he will reach safety, but his companion will 
 certainly die. What should the man with the bottle 
 of waterdo? Rabbi Akiba decided (and Ahad ha-Am 
 fully agrees that the decision counts as a funda- 
 mental principle of Jewish morality)—R. Akiba 
 decided that the man with the water should keep it 
 and drink it all himself; because if both of them could 
 not survive, it is more just, more in accord with 
 God’s righteousness, that a man should save himself 
 rather than that he should save his neighbour and 
 so lose his own life. Other things being equal, says 
 Jewish morality, you have no right to assume that 
 your neighbour’s affairs are of more worth in God’s 
 eyes than your own affairs. Certainly Judaism 
 approves of the laying down of life to fulfil a religious 
 ideal (sanctification of the name of God, martyrdom) ; 
 but it condemns the man who will suppress himself 
 for the sake of his fellow. Christianity, on the con- 
 trary, teaches: “Greater love hath no man than 
 this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 
 
 Ahad ha-Am maintains that this, the basic differ- 
 ence between Jewish and Christian ethics, shows the 
 superiority of Jewish ethics, in that it replaces the 
 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 85 
 
 illogical Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice, self- 
 renunciation, by the absolute rule of justice. There 
 we must be content to leave it. 
 
 Tosumup. The nineteenth century sees the Jews 
 examining for themselves the Person and teaching of 
 our Lord. They refuse to learn about Christ from 
 Christians. Of this we dare not complain. The 
 Christians have themselves alone to blame if the 
 Jews failed to see Christ reflected in the lives of 
 Christians. The Jews have studied the Person and 
 teaching of our Lord. They have reached certain 
 conclusions. As Christians we know their conclu- 
 sions to be imperfect, their picture of Jesus to be 
 colourless and fragmentary. It is only Christians 
 who can experience Christ to the full. But Chris- 
 tians, in the eyes of Jews, have forfeited the right 
 to be interpreters of Jesus. There we have the 
 terrible tragedy of Christian Jewish relations. One 
 way only lies open: that is, for the Christian to 
 convince the Jew that he, the Christian, does indeed, 
 know Jesus, has indeed learnt to follow Jesus, does 
 indeed model his life on the pattern of Jesus, his 
 Saviour and Redeemer, and does indeed rank 
 humility, love of his fellow-men, and forgiveness and 
 forbearance as the indelible marks of the Christian 
 life and character. Then, and not till then, have 
 we the right to expect that Jews will be prepared to 
 listen to a Christian interpretation of Jesus as Christ 
 and Redeemer. 
 
 eg 
 
V 
 AT THE PRESENT TIME 
 
 In the last lecture we saw the change which the 
 nineteenth century brought about in the Jewish 
 attitude towards Christianity. It would be wrong 
 to describe it as, in general, a change for the better : 
 such change as there was, was nothing more than a 
 modification in the frame of mind of articulate, 
 vocal, educated, Westernized or half-Westernized 
 Jewry only: the majority of the Jews, far removed 
 or removing themselves from any chance of social 
 or intellectual intercourse with Christians, were 
 either ignorant of Christianity, or despised it, or 
 deliberately ignored it, closing their minds to it as 
 to a thing which had meant for them only grievous 
 harm, sorrow and loss in the past, and even still was 
 an ever-present threat to them in their daily sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 I have said nothing of the persecutions which 
 befell the Jews of Russia and East Europe during the 
 nineteenth century. They are well enough known: 
 they have made the Russian words “‘ pogrom ”’ and 
 “hooligan’’ familiar in the English language. 
 These persecutions were not essentially religious 
 persecutions carried out in the name of Christianity : 
 
 86 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 87 
 
 they often had quite other motives—racial or econo- 
 mic; but always the same old, inbred, instinctive 
 dislike of the Jew, instilled into Christians by 
 centuries of a Christianity which cultivated this 
 hatred as a substitute for a Christian virtue, or even 
 as a Christian virtue in itself—this same dislike was 
 always invoked and utilized by every pogrom- 
 monger; and it was natural that the Jew should see 
 in all such social eruptions nothing more than 
 repetitions of the same old crimes, Christian anti- 
 Jewish crimes, with which his past history was so 
 thickly bespread. 
 
 But even this lamentable condition of things 
 brought about some good. Jews of Eastern Europe 
 emigrated in ever greater numbers—first over the 
 Russian frontiers to Western Europe, and then 
 overseas to America. There, their Jewishness 
 proved, if a drawback at all, only a comparative 
 drawback: they experienced a Christian civilization 
 in which such Christianity as was cultivated aimed 
 in the main not at expressing itself by Jew-hatred; 
 but by an ideal of life which neither Jew nor un- 
 believer could deny was a noble ideal. The nature 
 of this Christian ideal naturally became a source of 
 interest to thoughtful Jews. With much of it they 
 could sympathize; by much of it they were repelled. 
 The “ Christ of dogma’’ or, as Christians would 
 insist, the Jesus of Christian experience—Him the 
 Jewish mind could not appreciate. But the Jesus 
 of the Gospels, Jesus reduced by the rationalizing 
 processes fashionable at the moment, Jesus reduced 
 to the size and figure of a Jewish teacher of the first 
 century—such a Jesus the Jews could approach with 
 
 La 
 
“ 
 
 , 
 
 “88 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 interest and, they would claim, with understanding 
 also. 
 
 Such was the Jewish attitude towards Christianity 
 which developed in certain sections of Jewry in the 
 nineteenth century; and it is such an attitude which 
 is typical of to-day. In Christian eyes this Jewish 
 attitude is vitiated in that it ignores the entire body 
 of Christian interpretation and experience. But 
 then, for reasons which are more plain to Jews than 
 pardonable in Christians, the Jews refuse to accept 
 the credentials of Christians as the only true ambas- 
 sadors of the Jesus of the Gospels. . 
 
 In the preceding lecture we reviewed the most 
 representative expressions of articulate Jewish opinion 
 to which this new attitude had given rise. They 
 varied between a lowest degree of appreciation, which 
 looks upon Jesus as the teacher and exemplar of an 
 enfeebled Judaism, offered to the world by His 
 followers with a more or less pronounced veneer of 
 paganism; they vary between this lowest degree 
 and a /ighest degree of appreciation (that of the 
 Liberal camp in Judaism) which deems Jesus to have 
 taught what was best in Judaism; by choosing with 
 inspired wisdom what was finest and by rejecting 
 the dross and the non-essentials, Jesus showed’ 
 Himself one of the greatest, if not the greatest 
 Jewish religious genius of all time, one whose 
 beneficial influence throughout the world none can 
 dispute. 
 
 In other words, there is a minimum Jewish 
 appreciation of our Lord which holds that by 
 ‘““ watering down ”’ Judaism, Jesus and His followers 
 made it a religion more easy of acceptance by the 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 89 
 
 pagan world; and there is a maximum Jewish 
 appreciation which holds that by freeing Judaism 
 of what was merely national and sectarian, Jesus 
 enabled the best that was in Judaism to become a 
 world-possession. 
 
 I propose to bring this series of lectures to an end 
 by describing the most recent Jewish attempt to 
 appraise the Person and teaching of our Lord, 
 namely, Dr. Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth : 
 his Times, his Life and his Teaching; and by 
 indicating the kind of reception which this book has 
 met with in various Jewish circles. 
 
 By some Jews the book has been looked upon as a 
 startling and dangerous monstrosity; by others as 
 a welcome novelty. Actually we shall see that in 
 only a few points does it at all overstep the well- 
 defined channels of Jewish opinion in the recent or 
 remote past. It is best described as a book which 
 gathers together the many loose and floating ends 
 of Jewish thought, and anchors them, stabilizes them, 
 or even stereotypes them for a generation or more— 
 very much, for example, as Graetz in his History 
 of the Jews, by his treatment of Jesus and Christianity, 
 acted as a fixative of Jewish thought on the subject 
 for more than half a century. 
 
 It is important to give a few details of the author 
 himself ; for the book, above all things, is an honest 
 and sincere book. Therefore it never, so to speak, 
 oversteps the limits of the personality and experience 
 of its author. 
 
 Dr. Joseph Klausner has a great and well-earned 
 reputation as writer, historian, thinker and leader of 
 thought in those Jewish circles mainly concerned 
 
 G 
 
go THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 with the present Hebrew cultural revival, commonly 
 called Zionism. His whole life and energies have 
 been devoted to this revival ; and it is characteristic 
 of him, and the many like him, that though an 
 accomplished writer in German and Russian, he has 
 refused for many years to publish anything except 
 in Hebrew, or even to speak publicly except in 
 Hebrew, although this condemns him to a very 
 limited body of readers and a very local fame. 
 
 He was born in a small town in Lithuanian Russia 
 in 1874. All his life (except for an interval at a 
 German University) he has lived in an exclusively 
 Jewish environment and Jewish atmosphere of 
 thought. This fact should not be forgotten. Till 
 his fourteenth year he was educated along lines that 
 were becoming usual among broader-minded Jews— 
 combining the best results of the old-fashioned 
 concentration on Talmud and Rabbinic studies with 
 a modicum of subjects contained in an ordinary 
 secular education. Subsequent years, lived in 
 Odessa, provided him with the more conventional 
 Western education, except that, Jew-like, he 
 absorbed a multiplicity of languages, ancient and 
 modern. 
 
 When he was sixteen years of age he became an 
 enthusiastic follower of the movement for reviving 
 Hebrew as a spoken language. Soon afterwards he 
 became a sworn friend and follower of Ahad ha-Am, 
 Mr. Asher Ginzberg, the philosopher of the Zionist 
 Movement, and mouthpiece of that variety of Zion- 
 ism which would concentrate on making Palestine 
 the spiritual centre of world-Jewry rather than 
 merely a material or political Jewish centre. He 
 
THE PRESENT TIME gl 
 
 began to publish articles in the Hebrew Press on the 
 subject of the Hebrew language revival, and in his 
 early twenties acquired the hall-mark of the Hebrew 
 writer—the honour of writing in Ha-Shiloach, a 
 monthly Hebrew journal then edited by Ahad 
 ha-Am. In 1897 he entered the University of 
 Heidelberg, where he studied philosophy and 
 Semitic languages. He took his degree of Doctor 
 of Philosophy in 1902, with the thesis Jewish 
 Messianic Ideas in the First and Second Centuries. 
 This was published in 1904 and has become the 
 standard work on the subject. Shortly afterwards 
 Dr. Klausner became the editor of Ha-Shiloach, 
 and he has edited it ever since. 
 
 In 1907 he was appointed lecturer of History 
 in the Hebrew Seminary at Odessa. He came to 
 Palestine in 1920 and at once took a dominating 
 position in the new Hebrew life of the “ Jewish 
 National Home,” both as writer and public worker. 
 
 He has a long list of books to his credit on several 
 subjects. But the bulk of his labours has been 
 devoted to the history of the Jews, particularly to 
 that period, the years preceding and following the 
 birth of our Lord, from the rise of the Maccabees to 
 the fall of Jerusalem. He has, further, written 
 several volumes on the Messianic idea as it was 
 developed among the Jews. Of kindred, but wider 
 scope are his two books Judaism and Humanity and 
 Early Ethical Ideas among the Jews. 
 
 It is, therefore, obvious that Dr. Klausner’s 
 intellectual life has focussed itself very directly on 
 to the period when our Lord lived on earth, and on 
 the Jewish ideas of the Messiah which our Lord came 
 
Q2 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to fulfil. So there is no gainsaying Dr. Klausner’s 
 claims to publish a competent study of the figure of 
 Jesus from the point of view of Jewish history, 
 Jewish ideas of the Messiah, and Jewish ethics. 
 Such a work he published in 1922, in Hebrew of 
 course; and he tells us that it is the result of work 
 carried on through the best part of his life. 
 
 The author explains that it is his object to give in 
 Hebrew for Hebrews an account of the Founder of 
 Christianity which shall be free of both Christian 
 and Jewish preconceptions, and so fill an obvious 
 gap in Jewish history, hitherto filled in only by 
 Christian historians.+ 
 
 First, to describe the book generally. 
 
 The early chapters are devoted to the sources on 
 which we are dependent for our knowledge of Jesus. 
 The author takes first the non-Christian sources, 
 Jewish and pagan. He deals with the references 
 in the Talmud and then with the stories contained 
 in the medizval Jewish fables about Jesus. These 
 he shows to be worthless as history, since they are, 
 essentially, deliberate depreciations or satirical 
 perversions of an already existing tradition; all that 
 they can serve to prove is what the medieval Jews 
 thought about Christianity, and (in the case of the 
 early Talmud references) that the Gospel tradition 
 is traceable to an early date in the first century. 
 This is the first time in the Hebrew literature that a 
 Jew has seriously investigated these early and late 
 Jewish traditions on which the Jewish mind has 
 nourished itself for at least fifteen hundred years 
 and based its private, intimate conceptions of 
 Christianity’s origins—it is the first time in Hebrew 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 93 
 
 that a Jewish writer has investigated these traditions 
 and declared them to be worthless. 
 
 The book follows the beaten track in discussing 
 non-Jewish sources. A long section is devoted to a 
 history of the study of the Gospels themselves— 
 that is to say, a history of this study as carried out 
 from the purely literary, documentary and historical 
 point of view—the so-called “‘ Higher Criticism ”’ of 
 the Gospels, which works independently of the 
 traditional Christian and ecclesiastical ideas about 
 them, and tries to estimate them quite apart from 
 theological preconceptions. This is all familiar 
 ground to the Christian student, except for the 
 sections devoted by Dr. Klausner to the work of 
 Jewish students of the Gospels, work which has been 
 quite ignored by Christian scholars. As a result 
 of this study, Dr. Klausner arrives at much the same 
 conclusions as those accepted by the criticism 
 fashionable in Germany a generation ago. 
 
 A long section follows, virtually a third of the 
 entire book, on the period in which our Lord lived. 
 This is by far the best and most convincing account 
 that has yet been written of the historical, political, 
 cultural, religious and economic conditions into 
 which our Lord was born, and in which He lived and 
 worked and in which He died. Here, for the first 
 time, to the present writer’s knowledge, we have 
 placed at our disposal, in correct perspective, all the 
 details of information that can be derived from 
 Jewish sources—sources which hitherto have been 
 used for the purpose by Jewish writers uncritically 
 and without any historical sense of values, or by 
 Christian writers only superficially at second or 
 
94 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 third hand, or ignored by Christian writers altogether. 
 These sources and the contemporary conditions are 
 here all reviewed with the one purpose of illuminating 
 the person and labour of Jesus. 
 
 Next comes a treatment, point by point, of the 
 events in our Lord’s life. Here, again, what is said 
 and concluded covers matters familiar to Christian 
 students; but, throughout, the author is constantly 
 drawing on his specialized knowledge of Jewish 
 sources of information, and, again and again, he 
 enables us to understand better many details in the 
 Gospels and to place them in their true proportion 
 and against their true Jewish background. It is 
 these details, and the full, expert treatment of the 
 period, which form a real contribution to know- 
 ledge and the permanent worth of the book. For 
 these, Christian students of the Gospels can feel 
 genuine gratitude to Dr. Klausner. For here it is 
 not a case of giving what is merely Jewish opinion 
 about Jesus and the Gospels, but of giving expert 
 Jewish help in a sphere where the Christian scholar 
 is generally inexpert and superficial. 
 
 What, however, has aroused the chief interest in 
 the book and provoked most opposition, is the final, 
 quite short section, dealing with the teaching of 
 Jesus. This teaching is dealt with under the 
 headings: ‘“‘ The Jewishness of Jesus,’ “ Points 
 of opposition between Judaism and the teaching of 
 Jesus,” “ Jesus’ idea of God,”’. “‘ The ethical teaching 
 of Jesus,” “ The Day of Judgment and the Kingdom 
 of Heaven,” “‘ The character of Jesus and the secret 
 of his influence,” and, in conclusion, ‘‘ What is Jesus 
 for the Jews? ”’ 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 95 
 
 Throughout, the author is groping around to 
 try and find a convincing reason why it was that, 
 although Jesus was so completely Jewish, so com- 
 pletely a product of that time, and so clearly a great 
 influence which has transformed the world—why was 
 it that the Jews as a whole, and the greatest minds 
 of the Judaism of that time—why did they reject 
 Him ? 
 
 Dr. Klausner satisfies himself (but will certainly 
 not satisfy Christian readers) that the reason, or 
 reasons, were these: 
 
 Our Lord’s ethical system, His religious outlook, 
 were fundamentally Jewish. Yet He was so 
 immersed in the needs of the individual soul and so 
 overcome by despair of any good arising out of the 
 work-a-day world as He knew it, that He lost touch 
 with reality. Hence His insistence on self-abnega- 
 tion, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, the cultivation of a 
 degree of humility and self-suppression, such as, if 
 it were carried out in practice, would bring civiliz- 
 ation to an end. All these qualities, Dr. Klausner 
 urges, were taught by Judaism, but confined 
 within the limits of reason and practicability ; 
 whereas Jesus, in His ethical code, pushed these 
 Jewish principles to such an extreme as to 
 render them un-Jewish and beyond the capacities 
 of man, if he would continue in this ordinary 
 work-a-day world. Dr. Klausner believes that the 
 teachings of Jesus, if carried into practice, would 
 imply the wreckage of civilization, science, legisla- 
 tion and art, and everything that makes life 
 possible and worth while. This is what Dr. Klausner 
 says : 
 
96 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ‘Beyond this ethical teaching Jesus gave 
 nothing to his nation. He cared not for 
 reforming the world or civilization; therefore 
 to adopt the teaching of Jesus is to remove 
 oneself from the whole sphere of ordered national 
 and human existence—from law, learning and 
 civics... from life within the State, and 
 from wealth in virtually all its forms. How 
 could Judaism accede to such an ethical ideal ? 
 —that Judaism to which the monastic ideal 
 had ever been foreign! . . . Therefore he left 
 the course of ordinary life untouched—wicked, 
 cruel, pagan; and his exalted ethical ideal was 
 relegated to a book or, at most, became a 
 possession of monastics and recluses who lived 
 far apart from the paths of ordinary life.’ ? 
 
 The second and (according to Dr. Klausner) much 
 the most decisive point in the teaching of Jesus 
 which led the people of Israel to reject Him, was His 
 failure to show Himself a true nationalist. In the 
 previous lecture we saw that this nationalist motif 
 figured in Jewish comment on Jesus nearly a 
 hundred years ago in the work of Joseph Salvador ; 
 we saw it more prominently in Joseph Jacob’s 
 romance, As Others saw Him. But with Dr. 
 Klausner the nationalist motif has assumed such 
 enormous proportions as to dominate the writer’s 
 entire outlook on our Lord, on His every act and 
 word. 
 
 We are accustomed to think of “‘ nationalism ”’ as 
 a phase in international politics of comparatively 
 recent growth. But Dr. Klausner throughout 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 97 
 
 thinks and writes, and measures and weighs, and 
 praises and condemns, as though the rank and file of 
 Jewry in the time of our Lord had precisely the same 
 nationalist ideals and fears which move the most 
 enthusiastic and fanatical nationalists of to-day. 
 To Dr. Klausner (and he reads the same ideas into 
 the minds of the Jews of the first century) the 
 paramount criterion of our Lord’s acceptableness by 
 the Jews was His attitude towards Jewish nationalist 
 ambitions, towards what counted in Jewish national- 
 ism, what constituted its essential characteristics, 
 and what made for its survival. Thus Dr. Klausner 
 writes : 
 
 “ The Judaism of that time, however, had no 
 other aim than to save the tiny nation, the 
 guardian of great ideals, from sinking into the 
 broad sea of heathen culture, and enable it, 
 slowly and gradually, to realize the moral 
 teaching of the Prophets in civil lxfe and in the 
 present world of the Jewish state and nation. 
 . . . Judaism is not only religion and it is not 
 only ethics: it is the sum-total of all the needs 
 of the nation placed on a religious basis. Itisa 
 national world-outlook with an ethico-religious 
 basis. . . . Judaism is a national life, a life 
 which the national religion and human ethical 
 principles (the ultimate object of every religion) 
 embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and 
 thrust aside all the requirements of the national 
 life; and it was not that he set them apart and 
 relegated them to their separate sphere in the 
 life of the nation: he ignored them completely ; 
 
98 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in their stead he set up nothing but an ethical- 
 religious system, bound up with his conception 
 of the Godhead. In the selfsame moment he 
 both annulled Judaism as the life-force of the 
 Jewish nation and also the nation itself as a 
 nation. For a religion which possesses only a 
 certain conception of God and a morality 
 acceptable to all mankind does not belong to 
 any special nation, and consciously or uncon- 
 sciously breaks down the barriers of nationality. 
 This inevitably brought it to pass that his 
 people, Israel, rejected him.”’ 8 
 
 In his final chapter Dr. Klausner attempts to 
 explain what, to his mind, Jesus stands for to the 
 Jews of the present time. The Jews, he says, 
 
 * cannot regard Jesus as God, nor Son of God in the 
 
 \* Trinitarian sense; nor can they regard Him as the 
 Messiah, nor yet as a prophet. “ But,” to quote 
 the writer, “‘ for the Jewish nation Jesus is a great 
 teacher of morality and an artist in parable. He is 
 the moralist for whom, in the religious life, morality 
 counts as—everything. Indeed, as a consequence 
 of this extremist standpoint his ethical code has 
 become simply an ideal for the isolated few, a 
 Zukunfts-Musik, an ideal for the ‘ Days of the 
 Messiah,’ when an ‘end’ shall have been made of 
 this ‘ old world,’ this present social order. It is no 
 ethical code for the nations and the social order of 
 to-day.” 4 
 
 “ But,” he goes on to say, “in his ethical code 
 there is a sublimity, a distinctiveness and originality 
 in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 99 
 
 code; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable 
 art of his parables. The shrewdness and sharpness 
 of his proverbs and his forceful epigrams serve, in an 
 exceptional degree, to make ethical ideas a popular 
 possession. If ever the day should come and this 
 ethical code be stripped of its wrappings of miracles 
 and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics of Jesus will 
 be one of the choicest treasures in the literature of 
 Israel for all time.” ® 
 
 Before touching on the nature of the reception 
 which the book called forth from the Jewish world, 
 I should like to touch on the rather difficult question : 
 “What, if anything, does the book add to the Jewish 
 attitude towards our Lord ? ”’ 
 
 If you put this question to the ordinary educated 
 Palestinian Jew, in nineteen cases out of every 
 twenty you will get the answer: En bo shum mddush 
 —‘‘ There’s nothing whatever new in it.”’ And such 
 a remark is largely true in the sense they have in 
 mind, namely, that all the many streams of thought 
 and the possible explanations of this difficulty and 
 that, and the various standpoints adopted towards 
 this or that phase of the life, Person, character and 
 teaching of our Lord—all of these which are con- 
 tained in Dr. Klausner’s book may be found com- 
 plete in detail, or sketched in outline, or vaguely 
 hinted at in a multitude of writers who have pre- 
 ceded him. In that sense the author has done no 
 more than refurbish the conclusions of modern 
 Gentile critical study of the Gospels and supplement 
 this with the results so far secured by Jewish studies 
 in and around the subject. Again, Dr. Klausner’s 
 estimate of the character and teaching of Jesus does 
 
too THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not (except, of course, in closeness and intimacy 
 and minuteness of treatment) advance much, if at all, 
 beyond the conclusions of such writers as Salvador, 
 Geiger or Graetz; it falls far, very far short of 
 the appreciativeness expressed by certain Jewish 
 Liberals, like Mr. Montefiore. It is not in the 
 novelty of its ideas that the significance of the book 
 lies : even the nationalistic motif which strikes most 
 Christian readers as so odd—even this follows a 
 beaten track in the Jewish attitude towards Jesus. 
 The significance really lies in this—and Jews have 
 been the most prompt in pointing out the fact—that 
 it has been deemed suitable by one of whose ardent, 
 passionate, enthusiastic, even fanatical Judaism, 
 of whose thorough and complete Jewishness there 
 can be no two opinions—such a one has thought fit 
 to devote intense labour and care to the writing of a 
 book devoted solely to the times, life and teaching 
 of Jesus the Jew. <A writer with a most responsible 
 position in the world of Jewish thought, even a 
 leading figure in the concentrated, intensified atmo- 
 sphere of the very centre of that world of Jewish 
 thought, in Palestine—such a man has thought it 
 worth the trouble, and even his duty, as a Hebrew 
 of the Hebrews, to write in Hebrew for the benefit 
 of his fellow-Hebrews, a weighty, learned treatise, 
 calling forth his best powers; and all for what ?—to 
 present to fellow-Hebrews the figure of Jesus, a Jew 
 who taught Jewish religious ideas and moral princi- 
 ples to the Jews of Palestine early in the first century. 
 In the spring of 1926 extraordinary excitement 
 and interest were shown by the Jews in Palestine in 
 the performance of a Hebrew play called Ha-Dibbuk. 
 
THE PRESENT TIME IOI 
 
 That play treats of a condition of Jewish life in 
 Eastern Europe known as Hasidism. This Hasidism 
 the enlightened, educated Jews of the West have, 
 for a hundred years, tried to forget, to ignore, and 
 condemn as humbug, silly superstition, debased 
 mysticism, crude charlatanism. But this same 
 Hasidism has now become a subject of immense 
 fascination to the nationalist Jews of to-day. They 
 regard it as one of the spiritual creations of Jewry, 
 a possession of their race to be treasured and studied. 
 
 In much the same way, this book by Dr. Klausner 
 is symptomatic of a desire in certain sections of 
 Jewry to collect, treasure and study this nineteen- 
 hundred-year-old phenomenon which arose from 
 among the Jews of old—the Person and teaching of 
 Jesus, and to claim Him as a figure in the gallery of 
 Jewish worthies. It is not—and Christians should 
 not deceive themselves on the subject—it is not at 
 all of the nature of a Jewish approach to Christianity : 
 the Christ of Christian dogma and the institutional- 
 ism of the Christian Church with its hierarchy and 
 ecclesiastical machinery—the Jew is as much repelled 
 by these as ever he was; to him they are symbols 
 of bitterest cruelty, savage, senseless and fanatical 
 persecution and wholesale murder. No, it is not a 
 sign of Jewish approach to Christianity; but it is an 
 attempt to rescue from the hands of Christendom 
 a figure whom the Jews can claim to be, historically 
 and humanly, their own. 
 
 It is a most unexpected by-product of the rise_of 
 the Jewish nationalist instinct and the revival of 
 Jewish culture. 
 
 This book, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared, in Hebrew, 
 
 es 
 a 
 dr 
 
1o2 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 from an apostle of Hebrew culture, thought and 
 learning, and from the centre of the newly revived 
 Hebrew life in Palestine. One American Jewish 
 paper hailed it as the first scientific work published 
 in Hebrew literature; and an English Jewish paper 
 (but with a distinct touch of bitterness) made the 
 comment: “‘ Dr. Klausner and his book are of the 
 first-fruits of the new Yzshub”’ (the Hebrew settle- 
 ment in Palestine).6 So long as the book remained 
 in its original Hebrew dress, its effect was only felt 
 in those Jewish circles for whom Hebrew counted as 
 something real—namely, among educated, more or 
 less orthodox Jews in Eastern Europe, among 
 professional Jewish scholars, and, first and foremost, 
 among those, in Palestine and outside of it, who were 
 affected by the modern revival of Hebrew life. The 
 reactions were, on the whole, what might have been 
 expected. 
 
 From certain orthodox circles there came nothing 
 but a significant silence. From another direction 
 came a substantial volume, couched in a tone of most 
 lurid vituperation of the new book and scurrilous 
 abuse of its author, reminding one somewhat of the 
 seventeenth-century political pamphlets. What 
 most disturbed this critic was that a leading Jew 
 should bolster up the superstition that there ever 
 was such a person as Jesus. Iam, however, warned 
 that it is unfair to Jews generally to refer to this 
 criticism as emanating from a representative or even 
 a responsible Jewish source. 
 
 A more weighty criticism came at an early stage 
 from Dr. Aaron Kaminka, a scholar and orthodox 
 Jew. He writes as follows : 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 103 
 
 “Primarily we must protest in the name of 
 our faith and our clear conscience against this 
 presentation of the legendary figure of the 
 founder of the Christian faith as the central 
 figure in the events of the time of the spreading 
 of the New Testament, and against exalting 
 ‘that man’ on high, and the respect paid to 
 him as a lofty ethical personality truly fitted 
 for the propounding of a new Torah, and to be 
 a ‘light to the Gentiles ’—implying explicitly 
 or implicitly that our fathers were smitten with 
 blindness in that they failed to perceive this 
 holy phenomenon and the Messiahship of ‘ that 
 man. This idea underlies the very title of 
 the book and penetrates, like a scarlet thread, 
 the entire order of events and legends and 
 hypotheses and investigations. The whole order 
 of the book, and the prevailing spirit in it, are 
 a truckling and kow-towing to the Christian 
 religion and an assertion of great affection for 
 the foggy figure of its founder, a denial of the 
 healthy sense of our saintly forefathers, those 
 enthusiastic Hebrews devoted heart and soul 
 to the service of the One God, Creator of heaven 
 and earth, who rejected with loathing those 
 fables and inventions, knowing the hero of 
 those stories to have been no more than a 
 ‘mocker at the words of the Wise,’ ‘ a seducer 
 and beguiler,’ a hater of the people of Israel, 
 and one who sought the nation’s destruction.” ? 
 
 Here, we readily perceive, speaks that Jewish 
 mind which can only look at the figure of our Lord 
 
1o4 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 through the acrid, red fog of Jewish sufferings at the 
 hands of Christianity. 
 
 But by Jewish scholars on the whole, and by most 
 elements in Jewry interested in the Hebrew revival, 
 the book was accepted as a great and important 
 addition to Hebrew literature and to Jewish history. 
 But mixed with this reception was a sense of awed 
 surprise at the dangerous temerity of the author— 
 to dare to treat such a forbidden subject and to 
 handle it with such utter disregard of the dominant 
 Jewish prejudice. These fears, as it turned out, were 
 not unjustified. Startled prejudices were aroused, 
 and pressure applied in certain high places, with 
 results which I need not specify, since they have not 
 altogether been permanent. 
 
 More curious, however, was a charge (in an 
 American Zionist organ) against the author of showing 
 a lack of tact, as regards the Christian world—a charge 
 illustrating the ever-present dread in some Jewish 
 minds of ‘‘ What will the Gentiles say? ’’ While 
 describing the book as profound and scholarly, this 
 same critic regards it as a premature venture. The 
 criticism winds up with the words: “ The time is 
 not yet ripe: as long as the adherents of Christ 
 
 » do not accept the teachings of Jesus, the Jews must 
 
 be silent.” 
 
 When the book was published in an English 
 translation it was made accessible to an infinitely 
 wider circle of readers, Jewishand Gentile. Naturally 
 its novelty to most English-speaking Jews was not 
 always apparent at first sight. Books by Jews on 
 Jesus had been published before, occasionally in 
 England and very often in America, by authors who 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 105 
 
 belonged either to a more advanced Reform Judaism 
 in America, or to the Jewish Liberals on both sides 
 of the Atlantic. Many things said by Dr. Klausner 
 had also been said by them. The great difference, 
 
 of course, is that while theiy sentiments had arisen 
 
 from the midst of a civilized Christian environment, 
 and were always redolent of tact, in view of their 
 mostly Christian circle of readers, Dr. Klausner, on 
 the other hand, speaks from an environment exclu- 
 sively and intensively Jewish. 
 
 From the side of Liberal Judaism the most 
 distinctive comment has come from Mr. Montefiore. 
 He devotes to the book a long, seven-column review 
 in the Jewish Guardian.’ I propose to quote from 
 it at considerable length, mainly because of the 
 passages which Mr. Montefiore himself picks out 
 from Dr. Klausner as being most characteristic. 
 It is, as we should expect, the nationalism in the book 
 which most intrigues the reviewer. 
 
 He quotes the following : 
 
 “A religion which possesses only a certain 
 conception of God and a morality acceptable 
 to all mankind does not belong to any special 
 nation, and, consciously or unconsciously, breaks 
 down the barriers of nationality.”’ 
 
 Mr. Montefiore’s comment is: 
 
 “Some of us have no longer any place for a 
 national religion, whether it be Judaism or any 
 other. For us a national religion belongs to the 
 museum of antiquities or to the lumber-room. 
 But to our author, religion must be the 
 H 
 
106 
 
 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 handmaid of the nation, or, at any rate (since 
 what other nations choose to have or do is their 
 affair)—for the Jews, at any rate, their religion 
 must be strictly national! The nation and the 
 national life, as always, first and last ! 
 
 “One can understand ”’ ( proceeds Mr. Monte- 
 fiore) ‘‘ how all this sort of thing has arisen in 
 Dr. Klausner’s mind. One can well imagine, 
 too, how in a Russian Jew’s soul, born in 1874, 
 there should be bitterness and _ occasional 
 unfairness to Christianity. It is thus that we 
 can account for an occasional strange outburst, 
 such as: ‘ Jesus left the course of ordinary life 
 untouched—wicked, cruel, pagan; his exalted 
 ethical idea was relegated to a book, or, at 
 most, became a possession of monastics and 
 recluses who lived far apart from the paths of 
 ordinary life.’ Or ”’ (continues Mr. Montefiore) 
 “such an amazing paradox and exaggeration 
 as: ‘Such has been the case with Christianity 
 from the time of Constantine till the present 
 day: the religion has stood for what is highest 
 ethically and ideally, while the political and 
 social life has remained at the other extreme of 
 barbarism and paganism.’ And” (Mr. Monte- 
 fiore goes on to say) “ the iron in our author’s 
 soul, his passionate nationalism, his admiration 
 for the Zealots, and his old Jewish prejudices, 
 are all embodied in the following amazing 
 sentence: ‘ Christian morality was embodied 
 in daily life by ... Judaism; it is Judaism 
 and Judaism only which has never produced 
 murderers and pogrom-mongers, whereas indul- 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 107 
 
 gence and forgiveness have become the prime 
 feature in its being, with the result that the 
 Jews have been made moral (not in theory but 
 in living fact) to the verge of abject flaccidity.’ 
 
 “IT will not” (proceeds Mr. Montefiore) 
 “comment upon this sentence; it speaks for 
 itself; what is deeply interesting is that, in 
 spite of this iron in the soul, in spite of his 
 prejudices (which, for example, as regards 
 monasticism and asceticism, so completely 
 prevent him appreciating their services and 
 value in the history of European civilization)— 
 in spite of this, Dr. Klausner is yet so open-eyed 
 and so fair. We have seen how, from his 
 nationalist point of view, he dislikes and con- 
 demns the negative and polemical attitude of 
 Jesus towards the ceremonial law (which to 
 Dr. Klausner is synonymous with a specifically 
 Jewish national culture) and yet such is his 
 fairness and open-eyedness, that he constantly 
 points out how this attitude (of Jesus) was—up 
 to a measure—justified by the facts. He (Dr. 
 Klausner) virtually allows that a prophet who 
 should do as jesus did was justified and 
 desirable. 
 
 “Nevertheless ’’ (Mr. Montefiore goes on to 
 say) “his (Dr. Klausner’s) passionate national- 
 ism warps his judgment and causes him to make 
 such very odd statements as the following, in 
 which we clearly see how religion, in our 
 author’s mind, occupies a subordinate place. 
 He has sought to show that, in Rabbinic 
 Judaism, religion had become more democratic 
 
108 
 
 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and more nationalistic, and how there were 
 mixed up with religion elements of science, 
 jurisprudence, medicine and general culture, 
 which caused religion, in Dr. Klausner’s words, 
 “to escape the danger of exclusiveness and one- 
 sidedness.’ And then he (Dr. Klausner) goes 
 on to say: ‘What did Jesus do? Had he 
 come and said, Instead of religion alone, I give 
 you here science and art as national possessions 
 independent of religion; instead of Scripture 
 commentaries, I give you learning and poetry, 
 also independent of religion; instead of cere- 
 monial laws, grown so oppressive as to crush 
 the warmer religious feelings, instead of those I 
 give you a practical and theoretical secular 
 culture, national and humanistic ;—had Jesus 
 come with such a Gospel, his name would have 
 endured as a blessing among his nation. But 
 he did not come and enlarge his nation’s know- , 
 ledge and art and culture, but to abolish even 
 such culture as it possessed, bound up with 
 religion, a culture which the Scribes and 
 Pharisees . . . seized upon and held tightly, as 
 though it were the single anchor of safety left 
 to the nation—a nation not minded to be only 
 a religious community, but a real nation, 
 possessed of a land, a state and authority in 
 every sense.’ 
 
 “It would take too long” (concludes Mr. 
 Montefiore) “‘to discuss this curious passage 
 in which our author’s nationalist and secular 
 attitude towards both Judaism and Jesus are 
 very apparent. It would needa long pamphlet 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 109 
 
 to disentangle the odd mixture of truth and 
 falsehood, of just appreciations and inaccurate 
 and irrelevant estimates, in his picture of the 
 character and teaching of Jesus. .. . Mean- 
 while, the interest of the book remains the 
 same, however much one may differ from its 
 point of view. The author’s learning is great. 
 His measure of objectivity, in spite of all 
 deductions, is, in the circumstances, most 
 commendable and remarkable. ... No such 
 Jewish life of Jesus has ever been published 
 before. It is written from a point of view 
 which, to most of us Westerners, is totally novel 
 and unexpected. So, for every reason, his 
 book is one which all of us, orthodox or liberal, 
 Jew or Christian, would do well to read.” 
 
 Another English Jewish paper, of by no means 
 Liberal tendencies, The Jewish World,? gave an 
 article in unstinted praise of Dr. Klausner’s work. 
 The writer points out, and welcomes, the great 
 change which, he alleges, has come about within the 
 last twenty years in the attitude towards Jesus of 
 the younger generation of Jews in Eastern Europe. 
 Very curiously he dates the change from what he 
 calls ‘‘ the pogrom year of 1906.”’ As a result of 
 these pogroms, he writes, “a religious revival swept 
 the Eastern ghetto. Their hopes for freedom 
 shattered, their expectation for redemption gone, 
 they turned towards God. In those years the 
 younger generation of Jewish writers and poets in 
 Eastern Europe discovered the figure of Jesus, and 
 since those days Jesus has been with them a topic 
 
110 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of discussion.” This, I should remind you, is written 
 
 by a Jew. 
 The same writer hails Dr. Klausner’s work as “a 
 book of the first magnitude . . . for the first time 
 
 in nineteen hundred years a rabbinical Jew discusses 
 the life of Jesus without prejudice, and instead of 
 continuing the old Jewish tradition, makes an end 
 of it, and goes a step further by representing the 
 Founder of Christianity as the embodiment of 
 religious and ethical idealism. He does not propose 
 that the Jews should accept Jesus as Christ, but he 
 does propose that they should accept him as a great 
 ethical personality. The revolutionary character 
 of this proposal can only be understood and appre- 
 ciated when one realizes that it was made im Jeru- 
 salem by the foremost orthodox Jewish scholar of our 
 time—after that innumerable Jewish generations 
 had come and gone without pronouncing the name 
 of Jesus.”’ 
 
 In America, immediately before Christmas, 
 1925, attention was directed to the book in more 
 sensational fashion. Dr. Stephen Wise is an 
 American Liberal Jew of somewhat similar outlook 
 to Mr. Montefiore. Before a large Jewish audience, 
 three thousand in number, he referred to Dr. 
 Klausner’s book with approval. ‘‘ He thanked 
 God such a book could be written, published and 
 read. . . . It marks ’”’ (Dr. Wise is reported to have 
 said)—“ it marks the first chapter in a new literature. 
 Such a book could never have been written a few 
 yearsago. Youall know what would have happened 
 to the Jew who would have dared to express his 
 opinion, based on facts, of Jesus a score of years ago. 
 
THE PRESENT TIME peu 
 
 Thank God the time has come when men are allowed 
 to be frank, sincere and truthful in their beliefs. 
 This book, overlooked by the Press and handled 
 wretchedly by reviewers, who have missed the point 
 completely, is the greatest book of its kind ever 
 published... . 
 
 “The very foundations of morality,’ said Dr. 
 Wise in this same speech, “‘ are contained in the 
 unparalleled code of ethics which comprises the 
 teachings of Jesus. . . . Because Christendom has 
 renounced Jesus in fact, shall we continue to deny 
 him now that we, his brother Jews, are free to face 
 his life and teaching anew? Shall we not say that 
 this Jew is soul of our soul, and that the soul of his /@ 
 teaching is Jewish and nothing but Jewish? The 
 teaching of Jesus the Jew is a phase of the spirit 
 which led the Jew Godward.” 
 
 The result of this statement by Dr. Wise was that 
 the American Press seized the opportunity for a 
 sensation, indulged in a characteristic orgy of head- 
 lines, and Dr. Stephen Wise and Dr. Klausner 
 found themselves the centre of a newspaper storm. 
 Dr. Wise was bitterly attacked by orthodox Jewry. 
 Though there was much of inter-Jewish party 
 politics underlying the attacks, there was still 
 playing its part a very great deal of the old leaven of 
 orthodox Jewish abhorrence towards any Jew who 
 dared to turn his thoughts towards Christianity and 
 its Founder. Dr. Wise’s quite ordinary reference 
 to the ideals of Christianity were sufficient to make 
 certain types of Jew accuse him of trying to pervert 
 Jews from the faith of their fathers. 
 
 Dr. Wise’s reply is very much to the point for the 
 
112 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 subject of these lectures. ‘“‘ Who,” he says, ‘‘ who 
 save in folly or with malice, will charge me with 
 urging my people to forswear their faith and life 
 by embracing Christianity? or accepting Jesus? 
 But a question remains to be answered. Because of 
 Christian dogma or unchristian injustice to the Jew, 
 shall the Jew never feel free objectively to face and 
 revaluate, as Klausner does, the teaching of a 
 Galilean Jew of the first century? What a mournful 
 commentary upon the infinite hurt which the Jew 
 has suffered at the hands of Christendom !—that a 
 Jewish teacher cannot even at this time speak of 
 Jesus, his completely Jewish background and his 
 ethical contribution to his time and for all time, 
 without being hailed as a convert to Christianity, or 
 misunderstood by some of his fellow-Jews, to whom 
 the centuries have, alas, made the Christian name 
 synonymous with injustice and wrong? .. . Shall 
 \ Jews for ever refuse to claim Jesus either because of 
 the centuries of misunderstanding and Christlessness 
 which have grown out of the stories touching the 
 manner of his death, or because Christendom is not 
 yet become Christian? . . . I do not need to bea 
 Christian in order to recognize the place of Jesus in 
 the great Jewish tradition. Israel gave Jesus the 
 man and the Jewto humankind. For the most part, 
 Christendom has denied him in deed, though 
 affirming him in name. Is not the hour come for 
 us, his fellow-Jews, to place Jesus exactly where he 
 belongs—this radiant Jewish teacher of Palestine 
 of the first century ? ’’ 1° 
 
 I will give only two more quotations in this 
 connection. The first extract, quoted from an 
 
THE PRESENT TIME 113 
 
 American Yiddish paper,!! gives the general tone 
 assumed in American orthodox circles: “‘ Does not 
 Dr. Wise know how much of our blood has been shed 
 for the God whom he now wants to adopt? Does 
 not Dr. Wise know that the ‘soul of our soul’ 
 has kept us in burning tongs since the time when 
 this ‘soul’ was invented? Instead of reading 
 the English clergyman’s translation of Dr. Klausner’s 
 book, would it not be advisable that Dr. Wise should 
 look through the Jewish History again? ”’ 
 
 The second quotation is from an English Jewish 
 newspaper : /# “‘ For a Jew to preach—in any form— 
 to Jews on Jesus is an abomination, it is ‘death’ 
 or betrayal of the soul... the very name of the 
 world-historic phenomenon, such as is the figure of 
 Jesus, ought to fill the heart of every true Jew with 
 trepidation. Isit not for nigh upon twenty centuries 
 that the blood of innocent thousands of Jewish men, 
 women and children has been, and still is, spilt for 
 Christ’s sake? ”’ 
 
 So, then, we find that even the Christian civiliz- 
 ation of America and England is still not enough to 
 cover up the Jew’s memory of pain and injustice in 
 his nation’s past ! 38 
 
 It is painfully simple to sum up this course of 
 lectures. 
 
 Nineteen hundred years of Christian dealings with 
 Jews have brought it to pass that Christians, the 
 sworn soldiers and servants of Jesus, despite cen- 
 turies of real Christian endeavour, in spite of the 
 saintly lives lived by countless hosts of holy and 
 humble men of heart, apostles, saints and martyrs— 
 
1144 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 despite all these, Christians as such have not been, 
 and still are not, in Jewish eyes, the true torch- 
 bearers of Jesus of Nazareth. “‘ Ye are the light of 
 the world’’; that is our Lord’s commission to us, 
 His disciples. Have we failed? Notentirely. The 
 light of Christianity has shone in the darkest places 
 of the earth, and still is shining throughout the 
 greater part of the civilized world. It is the Jews 
 alone who, all through our history, have stood aloof, 
 watched that light and rejected that light—or, it 
 would perhaps be more true to say, have rejected 
 those who were the bearers of that light. 
 
 The reason is plain: the Christian, wherever he 
 was confronted by the Jew, has straightway cast 
 away his Christian torch, rejected his Lord’s com- 
 mission, arrogated to himself the right of vengeance 
 where our Lord Himself forgave. The Christian 
 Church, wherever and whenever the power lay in its 
 hands, has shown to the Jewish race only the 
 darkened, blackened wall of vengeance, of hatred, 
 malice and all uncharitableness, acts unblessed by 
 our Lord; it has not shown them the bright light of 
 Christian charity. 
 
 Are we to blame the Jews if they have failed to see 
 Christ in His Church, and now, at last, go groping 
 to find Him in their own way, using for their guide 
 any will-o’-the-wisp of a passing fashion of thought ? 
 Are we to blame the Jews if they turn with horror 
 from the one possible guide, when all that they know 
 of that guide, which is the Christian Church—when 
 all they know of 7 is that for them it has spelled 
 oppression, persecution and murder throughout the 
 weary passage of centuries ? 
 
NOTES 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 1 On the Sadducees, see G. H. Box, ‘“‘ Who were the Sadducees ? ”’ 
 Expository, January, 1918; J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (London, 
 1925), pp. 216—22, and the references there given. 
 
 * See R. T. Herford, Pharisaism (London, 1912); The Pharisees 
 (London, 1924). 
 
 3 See Klausner, op. cit., pp. 206-12. 
 
 4 See K. Kohler, Jewish Encyclopedia, “‘ Zealots,” XII. 639 ff. ; 
 in ‘Memorial Volume to A. A. Harkavy,’ German section, 
 pp. 6-18 (Petersburg, 1909), ‘“‘ Wer waren die Zeloten oder 
 Kannaim?’’; Klausner, op. cit., pp. 203-6. 
 
 5 Gittin 56b-574. 
 
 6 This nephew, called “‘ Kalonymos ”’ or “‘ Kalonikos ”’ in the 
 Talmud, is probably Flavius Clemens, nephew of Domitian, put 
 to death as an atheist in A.D. 96. 
 
 7 ¢t. Yebamoth, III. 3; Yoma 660. 
 8 Aboda Zara 16b-17a; t. Hullin, IT. 24. 
 ® Berachoth, 12a. 
 
 11 Matt. xix. 18. 
 
 12 j. Berachoth, V. 3. 
 
 13 Berachoth, 28d. 
 
 14 3. Berachoth, V. 3. 
 
 15 R. Shimeon ben Gamaliel, Aboth I. 
 
 16 j. Pea, I.; Sanhedrin, I.; t. Sanhedrin, XII. 
 
 1? Megillah (j. and b.) end. 
 
 18 Shabbath, 1164. 
 
 19 Antiquities, XX. ix. 1. On the ‘“ Jewishness”’ of the 
 Epistle of James, see Joseph Halévy Révue Sémitique, XXII. 
 (1914), pp. 197-201. ; 
 
 20 So H. Graetz, History of the Jews (English translation), II. 
 
 374. 
 
 ~~ 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 1 For the variants in this ‘“‘ Twelfth Blessing ”’ in the Amzdah, 
 see J.Q.R. (New Series) XVI. 156f.; J.E. XI. 280 f. 
 2 Hesyonoth ha-Sha’s (Cracow, 1895). 
 3 Cod. Theodos. Tit. XVI. viii. 
 115 
 
116 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Cod. Theodos. Tit. XII. viii. 3-4. 
 
 Socrates, H.E. II. 33, VII. 13; Sozomen, H.E. III. 17. 
 Cod. Theodos., XVI. 22. 
 
 Cf. Socrates, H.E. VII. 16. 
 
 H. Milman, History of the Jews (edition 1909), II. 199. 
 cf. Milman, II. 191, 200. 
 
 10 Milman, II. 239. 
 
 11 For a full discussion of this material see R. T. Herford, 
 Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (London, 1905); for a more 
 critical treatment see Klausner, op. cit., pp. 18-47. 
 
 12 This summary is taken, with slight modifications, from R. T. 
 Herford’s article, “‘ Christianity in Jewish Literature’”’ in 
 Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, II. 877, where all the 
 references can be found. 
 
 13 Leges Wisi-Gothorum, Lib. XII. 
 
 14 Quoted in Milman, op. cit., II. 260. 
 
 16 OD. cit., 11. 282. 
 
 16 The Jew-hunt cry, “Hep! hep!’ has probably a more 
 prosaic origin—the cry of goat-herds urging on their flocks. 
 
 17 On the Tol’doth Yeshu, and for the relevant literature, see 
 Klausner, op. cit., 47-53. The short abstract here given is taken 
 from R. T. Herford’s article in D.C.G., cited above. Klausner, 
 op. cit., gives a more detailed summary. Both these summaries 
 are based on that form of the legend given in Wagenseil’s Tela 
 Ignea Sataneé (Altdorf, 1681). Another version, obviously later 
 in date, is to be found in J. J. Huldreich, Historia Jeschuae 
 Nazaveni (Leyden, 1705). Samuel Krauss, in Das Leben Jesu 
 nach jidischen Quellen (Berlin, 1902), prints three different 
 complete recensions of the fable together with fragments of 
 others. 
 
 Seon on 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 1 See Davidson, Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn 
 Gabivol, Philadelphia, 1923, p. xxxil. 
 
 2 See his Emunot we De‘ot, ii. 5. 
 
 3 Cuzari, iv. 23. 
 
 Yad: Melakim, xi, 4. 
 Milman, op. cit., II. 319. 
 In the eleventh century. See Ademar, Hist. iii. 52. 
 
 * Ma@ amar ha-Ahdut, iii. 
 
 8 See Ludwig Geiger, Johann fReuchlin, Leipzig, 1871; 
 Horowitz, Zur Biographie und Korrespondenz J. Reuchlins, 
 Vienna, 1877. 
 ® See Geiger, op. cit. supra. 
 
 ° Sadmmtliche Werke (Frankfort a.M., 1826-57), xxix. 46-7, 74. 
 11 xxv. 409, 260. 
 
 12 Von den Juden und Ihren Luegen, xxxii. 99 ff. 
 
 48 ROR 57, 
 
 ao Oo fe 
 
 » 
 
NOTES T07 
 
 14 For further details see Graetz, History of the Jews (English 
 translation), V. 197 ff.; Jewish Encyclopedia, XII. 455 with 
 Bibliography. 
 
 EP ASTAGTZ, UP. CHL Vi. LOO fee fi io0V, G0 f. 
 
 16 Graetz, op. cit. V. 205 ff, 
 
 16a Qn the contrary, it is a matter for note, that although the 
 Christian censorship was never applied in Rotterdam nor, of 
 course, in Turkey, there is no example of the Jews taking 
 advantage of such freedom to print anti-Christian writings. 
 
 17 Resen Mat‘eh, 15b; Lehem ha-Shamayim to Aboth V. 17. 
 
 id Ay eyeans in Lessing-Mendelssohn’s ‘‘ Gedenkbuch,”’ pp. 
 329 ff. 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 1 See Kayserling, Moses Mendelssohn, sein Leben und seine 
 Werke, Leipzig, 18062. 
 
 * See Gabriel Salvador, Joseph Salvador, sa vie, ses cuvres et 
 ses critiques (Paris, 1881). . 
 
 3 Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte (2nd ed., 1865), pp. 
 108-48. 
 
 4 See especially Sinai et Golgotha, ou les origines du judaisme 
 et du Christianisme (Paris, 1867). The substance of this volume 
 was later embodied in his fuller History of the Jews. 
 
 4@ History of the Jews (English translation), II. 149-50. 
 
 46 Drews popularized in Germany the conclusions of Albert 
 Kalthoff, Die Entstehung des Chrisitentums, 1903. But the 
 same ideas, arguments and conclusions were put forward more 
 than a century earlier. See Ch. F. Dupuis, Mémoires sur l’ovigine 
 des constellations et suv explication de la fable par l’astronomie, 
 1791; the same author’s Origine des tous les cultes, ou réligion 
 universelle, 1790. 
 
 5 Jewish Quarterly Review, 1894, p. 381. 
 
 6 Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus (London, 
 1910), p. 88. 
 
 4 Ibtd., p. 115. 
 
 ST 10td. Dita. 
 
 9 Synoptic Gospels (London, 1909), I. civ—cv. 
 
 10 The original essay was published in Ha-Shiloach (XXIII. 
 97-111) in Hebrew, entitled Al Sh’te ha-Sippim. Itis translated 
 by Mr. Leon Simon in the volume of essays by Ahad ha-Am, 
 Essays on Zionism and Judaism (London, 1922), pp. 223-53. 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 1 English translation, p. 11. 
 2 OD. cit., p. 397. 
 3 Op. cit., Pp. 390. 
 £ OD. éit., Pp. 414; 
 
118 THE JEW AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 5 Op. cit., p. 414. 
 
 6 Jewish Chronicle, January I, 1926. 
 7 Ha-Toven (New York), May 1922. 
 8 November 13, 1925. 
 
 ® December 30, 1925. 
 
 10 For reports of Dr. Stephen Wise’s remarks and their results, 
 see Jewish Daily Bulletin, New York, for December 23, 1925, and 
 following days. 
 
 11 Der Tag, New York, December 25, 1925. 4 
 
 12 Jewish Chronicle, February 26, 1926. 
 
 13 The following appeared in Ha-Doar (an American Jewish 
 weekly paper, published in Hebrew), November 19th, 1926, 
 from the pen of a Hebrew writer of considerable repute : 
 
 “It is a proof of feebleness in many of our younger writers 
 —the obvious pleasure they take in using words like ‘ cruci- 
 fixion,’ ‘ Golgotha,’ and all that class of word, apparently 
 finding in them some sort of spiritual uplift. And the name 
 ‘ Jesus’ itself actually incites their pens to creative effort 
 
 . . they Jove thename. . . . [ should wonder whether even 
 among Christians the picture arouses such enthusiasm. 
 
 **T have always admired Ahad ha-Am for his dislike of 
 Christianity for both its content and its form. What a fine 
 aesthetic sense such dislike shows! It is utterly incon- 
 ceivable that Ahad ha-Am should write such a book as that 
 written by his disciple [Dr. Klausner]: to him the mere 
 subject matter would be nauseous. Any present-day 
 Gentile, if he has any spirit left, is bound to loathe the whole 
 gloomy business; while as for ourselves, it is the starkest 
 horror ! 
 
 ‘‘We have to shut our eyes tight even against the source of 
 the matter (innocuous though it may have been originally) 
 because of the mass of terrible foulness which it has since 
 accumulated owing to a fatal confusion. . . . If any poet 
 of our day, even a Christian, approaches some creative idea 
 and takes Jesus as subject in the old-fashioned way, it only 
 proves his limited outlook and stuffy mentality. Jesus 
 must never again even cross our minds.”’ 
 
 (Italics according to the original.) 
 
INDEX 
 
 AHAD-HA-Am (A. Ginzberg), 
 81-85, 90 
 
 Annas IT, 14 
 
 Anti-semiticism, 23, 31, 40, 48 
 
 Arian controversy, 27 
 
 As Others saw Him, 76, 96 
 
 Black Death, 44 
 Breach with Christianity, 15 
 
 Christ, attitude to, 3, 8, 15, 18, 
 34, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 
 79, 87, 94-99, 109-10 
 
 Christianity, attitude to, 2-4, 
 6, 8, 10, 19, 20, 27, 59, 67, 
 Thee oa, TOL SELL: TEa 
 
 Christian writings, attitude to, 
 tits 
 
 Constantine, 24 
 
 Crusades, 33 
 
 Delitzsch, 69 
 Disraeli, 69 
 Dominicans, 48, 50 
 
 Eisenmenger, J. A., 56 
 Eliezer the Great, R. 10 
 Emancipation, 64 
 Emden, Jacob, 58 
 Essenes, 7, 16, 75 
 
 Fall of Jerusalem, 16, 20 
 Feudal system, 43 
 
 Geiger, A., 71 
 Gentiles, 5, 15, 19 
 Gospels, 5, 75, 80, 93 
 Graetz, H., 73, 89 
 
 II9 
 
 Ha-Shiloach, 91 
 Hasidim, ror 
 Hebrews, Ep. to, 16 
 Herzl, 81 
 
 History of the Jews, 73 
 Hizzuk Emunah, 58 
 
 Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), 41 
 Inquisition, 45 
 
 Isaac of Troki, 58 
 
 Islam, 30, 41 
 
 Jacobs, J., 76, 78 
 James, St., 14 
 Jesus Christ and His Teaching, 
 
 70 
 Jesus of Nazareth, 89, 92-111 
 Jewish Encyclopedia, 77 
 Jews in: 
 America, 67,).$7), 104; 110, 
 113 
 France, 32 
 Germany, 48, 69 
 Roman Empire, 24 
 Russia and Eastern Europe, 
 63, 86, 109 
 Spain, 31-32, 41, 6c 
 Syria and Palestine, 22, 25, 
 110 
 Judah ha-Levi, 42 
 Judas, 35 
 
 Kaminka, Dr. A., 102 
 Klausner, Dr. J., 89 
 Kohler, K., 78 
 
 Law of Moses, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 
 65, 71 
 
I20 
 
 Louis, St., 43 
 Luther, 51-55 
 
 Maimonides, 42 
 
 Marranos, 45 
 
 Mendelssohn, Moses, 64 
 
 Minim and Minuth, 8, 11, 12, 
 20 
 
 Mishnah, 22, 58 
 
 Montefiore, C., 78, 82, 105 
 
 Nathan the Wise, 60 
 Nationalism, 7, 16, 71, 96, 105 
 
 Orthodox Jews, 68, 111 
 
 Pantera, 28, 34 
 
 Panlpot. 3, ths kescge 
 Pauline Epistles, 5 
 
 Persia, 27 
 
 Pfefferkorn, 48 
 
 Pharisees, 7 
 
 Protocols of Eldevs of Zion, 31 
 
 Reform and Liberal Judaism, 
 65-66, 79, 81, 105 
 
 Reformation, 47 
 
 Reuchlin, 48-52 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ritual murder, 44, 49, 55 
 
 Sa’adiah, 42 
 
 Sadducees, 7, 9 
 
 Salvador, J., 70, 96 
 
 Scripture, 13 
 
 Sects, Jewish, 7 
 
 Shulchan Arukh, 66 
 
 Simon Kephas, 36 
 
 Surenhuysius, W., 57 
 
 Synagogue services, II-I3, 20, 
 6 
 
 Talmud, 9, 10, 20, 21-23, 27, 
 32, 48-52, 66, 80, 92 
 
 Tarphon, R., 13 
 
 Tela ignea Satane, 56 
 
 Toledo, Council of, 31 
 
 Tradition of the Elders, 15, 21 
 
 Wagenseil, J. C., 56 
 Wise, Dr. S., 110 
 
 Yaabetz, Joseph, 46 
 Yeshu, History of, 34-37, 46 
 
 Zealots, 8 
 Zionism, 81, 90 
 
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