N> of Prin 94k DEC SO 1895 ^ w'/rt 'gfcai Seo.v$ V Division... JDlS 1 4* Section, ji L.62 No," %#♦ L ■ * ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS A STUDY OF THE JEWS AND ANTISEMITISM / BY ANATOLE* LEROY-BEAULIEU TRANSLATED BY FRANCES HELLMAN Authorised Edition for the United States and Europe NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN Copyright, 1895 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Entered at Stationer’s Hall, London ftbc TRnicberbocfcer ipress, HAew Iftocbelle, HA, CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH VERSION . . XI PREFACE ........ xvii # CHAPTER I. NUMBER AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE JEWS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES .... I Their Emancipation by the French Revolution—A Large Number are still Subject to Special Laws—The Centre of Gravity of Israel—Flow the Flistoric Currents of Jewish Migrations have been Turned back—Revival of Hatred against the Jews—Antisemitism—The Three Principal Aspects of the Jewish Question. CHAPTER II. THE OLDEST GRIEVANCE AGAINST THE JEWS, THE RELIGIOUS GRIEVANCE . . -13 I. Accusations Brought against Judaism and the Tal¬ mud—Characteristics of Judaism—Its Moral Code— The Talmud ; its Origin, its Authority—The Mishna and the Ghemara—The Halakha and the Haggada— The Hatred of the Go'im and the Two Moral Codes of the Jew—What the Talmud has been to Judaism—II. Legends and Superstitious Hostile to the Jews— Ritualistic Murder. iii IV Contents. CHAPTER III. PAGB THE JEWS, CHRISTIANITY, AND MODERN IDEAS . 43 I. In a Sense, Antisemitism is the Counterpart of Anti¬ clericalism—Antisemitism is Another Kulturkampf— II. What Share have the Jews in the Evolution of Modern Society ?—Are they the Main Factors in the De-christianising of Nations?—The Jew, Hebraism, and the Revolution—As Regards Social Tendencies the Modern Jew is Receptive, not Originative—III. The Conservative Spirit of the Great Jewish Communities— The Modern Spirit Insinuates itself into them from the Outside—The Jew is De-judaising himself at the Same Time that the Christian is De-christianising him¬ self—In what Respect our Civilisation is a Peril to Judaism—For this Reason it is Impossible that Modern Society should be Judaised. CHAPTER IV. THE JEWS AND THE NATIONAL, GRIEVANCE — ARYANS AND SEMITES.72 I. Israel Threatens to De-nationalise the Modern Na¬ tions—Why did the Antisemitic Movement Originate in the New German Empire ?—The Jew Regarded as a Stranger—Antiquity of this Grievance—II. Why did the Jews, after their Dispersion, still Continue to Form a People ?—Analogous Instances—Identification of Religion and Nationality in the East—III. Can Race and Nationality be Regarded as Identical in the West? —Are Any Modern Races of Unmixed Blood ?—Are the Semites the only Non-Aryan Element among us ?— What do we Mean by Semitic Race—IV. Of the An¬ tagonism between the Aryan and the Semitic Spirit— What the Difference between them Amounts to—Has a Christian the Right to Took upon the Semites as an Inferior Race? Contents . v CHAPTER V. PAGE ARE THE JEWS PURE SEMITES .... IOO I. Israel’s Blood does not Seem to be Free from All Admixture—Proselytes in Olden Times—Their Import¬ ance, their Diffusion—Other Converts : The Khazars —The Fear of Conversion to Judaism as One of the Causes of the Restriction of the Jews—Judaising Sects —II. The Semitic Type—It is not Equally Pronounced in All Jews ; there are at least Several Sub-Types— Karaites and Samaritans—Jews by Religion who do not Appear to be Jews by Race—Sephardim and Askenazim: How and Why they Differ—The Modern Jew is the Artificial Product of the System of Sequestration. CHAPTER VI. THE JEW IS THE PRODUCT OF HIS TRADITION AND HIS DAW.123 I. The Influence of the Jewish Law and Observances on the Race—Judaism is as much a Religion of the Body as of the Soul—Ceremonial Rules and Legal Cleanness—II. How the Talmud, as well as the Ghetto, Tended to Strengthen the Tribal Spirit—In what Man¬ ner their Rites Isolated the Jews from the Gentiles—In Order to Become a Modern Man, the Jew must “De- Rabbinise ” Himself—III. Gradual Transformation of Judaism—How it Emancipated Itself, Little by Little, from Talmudic Formalism—Conditions and Difficulties of this Religious Evolution—IV. An Analogous Trans¬ formation is Taking Place in the Jewish Life and Family. CHAPTER VII. PHYSIOLOGY OF THE JEW.148 I. External Appearance of the Race—The Kind of Selection that has Produced it—Demography of the VI Contents. Jews—Their Longevity—Their Fecundity—Birth- and Death-Rates—To what is the Superiority of the Israel¬ ites to be Ascribed—II. Alleged Immunities of the Jews—The Shekhitah and the Dietary Laws—Moses and M. Pasteur—Vitality of the Race and the Causes of its Apparent Deterioration — Poor Physique of a Large Portion of the Jewish Race—III. Maladies and Infirmities Ascribed to the Jews—Disproportionate Development of their Nervous System—Causes and Effects of their Nervosity—Frequent Lack of Balance between their Psychic and Muscular Functions—Pre¬ cocity of the Jews ; its Causes—Israel’s Civilisation the most Ancient of all. CHAPTER VIII. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JEW.I I. His Intelligence—His Ruling Faculty, the Faculty of Adaptation and Assimilation—Qualities Inherited from his Two Ancestors, the Money-Changer and the Rabbi—The Lucidity, Precision, and Pliancy of his Mind—How Study has ever been Honoured by the Jews —With them Education was Compulsory—The Gym¬ nastic of the Talmud—II. The Jew’s Character—Why his Soul is often Inferior to his Intellect—How, from a Moral Point of View, his Extreme Suppleness Be¬ comes a Defect—Age-long Debasement of the Jew— How his Conscience sometimes Became Warped—Why the Sense of Honour is more rarely Found in him—The Education Given him by the Centuries—Frequent Re- • tention of the Impress of his Ancestors’ Occupations— His Family Virtues—His Good and Bad Qualities are alike largely Contributory to his Successes—III. As Regards Character also, the Jew is Tending towards a Transformation—Parvenu Traits among the Jews—The Degradation of the Race by no Means Irretrievable. Contents . chapter IX. PAGE JEWISH GENIUS.225 I. Is there still a Jewish National Genius?—Where is it to be Found ?—The Relatively Large Number of Jews who have Distinguished themselves in Art, Science, and Literature—II. For which Arts and Sciences have they Shown the Greatest Aptitude ?—Whence do these Aptitudes Seem to Come?—III. Is the Jew, the Semite, always Lacking in Originality?—The Ancient Hebrews, the Modern Jews, and the Inventive Faculty—Jewish Poets and Artists—Jewish Music—Qualities and Facul¬ ties most frequently Encountered in the Jews—Spirit of Combination—Jewish Irony—Quickness to Compre¬ hend and Assimilate the Distinctive Aptitudes of Different Nationalities. CHAPTER X. THE JEWISH SPIRIT.263 I. Is There a Jewish Spirit Radically Different from Ours ?—What we Understand by Jewish Spirit is, in Most Cases, not Distinctively Jewish—Where are the Signs of the Jewish Spirit in French Arts and Letters ? — Gr 3 34 Israel A mong the Nations . Voltaire, the great scoffer, demonstrate before their time, “ that no people ever had such abominable cus¬ toms as the Jews ” ? Is there not, somewhere, a chap¬ ter by him, entitled : “That the Jewish Taw is the only one in the world which ordains sacrifice ’ ’ ? 1 I point this out to those Antisemites who may not be aware of it. But in thus attacking the Jews and the Bible Vol¬ taire knew very well just whom he really wished to strike. Religion may be compared to the old churches of stone or marble. Whilst prayer was kneeling on their flagstones, life, pleasure, and warfare went on about them, sometimes even beneath their very arches. More than one church has been invaded by warriors, and has had its towers transformed into dungeons and its naves into fortresses. Why should it surprise us to find still visible on their walls the traces of the assaults once made upon them ? Thus it is with religions ; they, also, have found it impossible to pass down the centuries without sustaining the taint of their contact; they also have, at times, been converted into citadels and strongholds ; let us not cry shame on them if mud- spots or blood-stains have been left upon their walls. Talmudic Judaism was for fourteen centuries the stronghold, so to say, the lair of Israel ; the Ghernara was its bulwark. There is nothing surprising in the fact that it should still, here and there, be bristling with stockades. Tong has been the siege that Israel has had to endure within this enclosure of texts and rites, erected by the rabbis after the overthrow of the walls of Zion by the rams of Titus’s army. What religion has ever been assailed by so many enemies ? And at what time, before the present, could Israel have laid 1 The Works of Voltaire, edited in 1875, vol. xxxviii. The Oldest Grievance . 35 down lier arms? In order to do so, peace must have been assured to her, and is she, even to this day, sure of peace everywhere ? Eet us then not blame her too severely for a fanaticism fanned into flames by our own intolerance. We have no right to brand the fore¬ head of a Jew, for all times, with a Talmudic maxim. As well might we try to prevent the Catholic from re¬ moving the scaffold of the ciuto-da-fk from his cathedral- close, or bind the Calvinist for ever to the stake of Servetus. II. It would be interesting to pursue the historical study of the Jew through the literature and folk-lore of the Middle Ages. His is a personality that has always im¬ pressed itself on the imagination of the masses. They have often formed a fantastic conception of him. To this day superstitious terror forms part of the aversion against the Jew. To the multitudes of one half of Europe the Jew has remained a mysterious being, in possession of formidable secrets. He is somewhat of a sorcerer. It is no mere play upon words that the assem¬ blies of witches were called “ Sabbat.” The treatises of the Talmud, burned by Saint Eouis, were part of a conjuring-book in the eyes of the populace ; the strange Hebrew letters seemed like cabalistic characters. The Jew was, by natural right, master of the occult sciences. Something of it still clings to him. He is readily sus¬ pected of diabolical connections. The most inexplica¬ ble actions are freely attributed to him, for the Jew is not like other men. In the East, and even in the West, hatred of the Jew is intensified by the ignorant credulity of the masses. 3 6 Israel Among the Nations . During epidemics lie is supposed to poison fountains. Legends are circulated at his expense, the crude and savage simplicity of which ill accords with the spirit and traditions of Judaism. How many Jews have been burnt in the Middle Ages for having crucified Christ anew, by puncturing with their penknife a con¬ secrated wafer. This, however, is one of those fables which bear on their face the evidence of their falsity. A Jew who believes neither in the divinity of Christ nor in the fact that the wafer screens his invisible pres¬ ence, is not apt from mere curiosity to pierce that wafer in order to see if blood will flow from it. Such sacrilege could originate only in a Christian brain. Almost the same may be said of another myth, still current in three fourths of Europe. It has been observed in Russia and in the East, that the popular movements against the Israelites broke out especially at the approach of the Easter holidays. To-day, as at the time of the Crusades, this coincidence is, perhaps, due less to a desire on the part of the ignorant masses to avenge the crucified God upon the descendants of his executioners, than to the bloodthirsty legends concerning the Jewish Passover current among the people. Of course, we are alluding here to that senseless charge which, for centuries, has cost the lives of so many Israelites in every country, although at no time has it been able to fasten the slightest guilt upon a single Jew. I11 Russia, Poland, Roumania, Bohemia, and Hun¬ gary, the common people believe that the Jews need Christian blood for the preparation of their unleavened bread, the Passover Mazzoth. In the villages, even in the cities of Eastern Europe, where, beneath a thin veneer of modern culture, so often are found the ideas The Oldest Grievance . >7 3 / and beliefs of the Middle Ages, the peasant and the labourer have no doubt that the Jews require the blood taken from Christian veins in order to celebrate their Passover. He does not know, this Magyar peasant or Russian moujik, that, according to the testimony of Tertullian and of Minucius Felix, the same absurd and odious charge was brought against the early Chris¬ tians by the pagans, who, in their malicious thirst for damaging information, no doubt mistook for a real sacrifice the mystical immolation of the Eamb of the Eucharist . 1 No sooner has a Christian child disap¬ peared, no sooner have the police discovered the corpse of a young boy or girl in the river or the town-moat, than the public voice accuses the knife of the schachter , the Jewish butcher, even though the body may not bear a single mark of violence. This is so well known that murderers have been seen dragging the bodies of their victims through the alleys of the Jewish quarters, confident thereby to divert the suspicion and fury of the crowd . 2 This fable of ritualistic murder—and its very nature would suffice to condemn it without other evidence-—is not very ancient. No traces of it can be discovered until the year noo. None the less did the Middle Ages, from the twelfth or thirteenth century on, believe in this abominable legend. It was commemorated in verse and in prose—witness the tales of Chaucer. There 1 Even to this day, the Chinese actually accuse our mission¬ aries of collecting children and tearing out their eyes and hearts, in order to make philters of them. 2 Heine, in his Rabbi of Bacharach y unfortunately never fin¬ ished, was thus justified in representing strangers in the act of introducing the bloody corpse of a child into the house of a rabbi, in order to incite the populace against the Jews and thus obtain a chance to despoil them. 38 Israel A niong the Nations. is nothing so tenacious as this sort of myth. Nor was the trial which in 1883 lent a transient celebrity to the small Hungarian borough of Tisza-Eszlar, the only in¬ stance of its kind. The accusation brought against the Jews of Tisza-Eszlar has been hurled time and again, within the last fifty years, against the Jews of Syria, Egypt, Roumania, and Russia. In 1880 it was at Koutais, in Trans-Caucasia ; in 1881 at Alexandria in Egypt; in 1890 at Damascus, which had already be¬ come noted for charges of a similar nature ; in 1891 at Corfu, and, strange to say, also at Xanten, in Germany. The new German Empire had, in 1892, to bear the disgrace of a trial for ritualistic murder that rever¬ berated throughout Europe, and proved to it how many ignorant superstitions are still harboured in the minds of the subjects of Emperor William II. I could cite several of these deplorable instances in Russia, espe¬ cially at Sarstof, under the Emperors Nicholas and Alexander II. At one time they were of such frequent occurrence, and the baselessness of the charges was so well established, that the imperial government forbade their prosecution. It must be added that in Russia this accusation seemed all the more natural, from the fact that one or two Russian sects have, possibly for no better reasons, been suspected of practices similar to those charged against the Jews. 1 In these trials for ritualistic murder the accusation is generally based upon some myth. “ Who, if not the Jews, could have needed the death of this young girl ? ” asked a witness in the trial at Koutais, in 1880. Such is the argument of the masses who live at the foot of the Caucasus and on the borders of the German Rhine, 1 See L*Empire des Tsars et les Russes } vol. iii. : La Religion , book iii., chap. ix. The Oldest Grievance . 39 as well as in Hungarian Puszta. In Hungary and in Germany, and in fact wherever a regular trial was held before a tribunal of Christians or Moslems, even those judges who were least favourable to Israel were obliged, in spite of themselves, to acknowledge the innocence of the Jews. The stubborn passion of the Antisemites refuses to admit such innocence ; they prefer to suspect the Christian judges of accepting bribes of Jewish gold. Tittle does it matter to them that this abominable accu¬ sation has been refuted in every country and in every tongue. 1 The strangest fact is that, amongst the learned men who have proved its emptiness, there has been a Pope, and by no means the least prominent among those versed in science and the critical spirit. 3 1 We can quote, in Russian, M. D. A. Chwolson’s, Professor at the University of Saint-Petersburg, O nekotovykh sred- nerckovykh obrineniakh protif Evrbef Saint Petersburg, 1880, 2d edition ; and M. Jer. Lioutostanski’s Vapros ab onpatreblenii Evreiami sectatorami Kristiansk , Krovi, etc., Moscow, 1876 ; in German Jos. Kopp’s Zur Judenfrage, Leip¬ zig, 1886, 3d part; in Italian, Corrada Giudetti’s Pro Judais : Riflessioni e Documenti, Turin, 1884 ; in English, The Nine¬ teenth Century , November, 1883, etc. We recommend, espe¬ cially, the learned study of Dr. Herm. Strach, Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin, Der Blutaberglaube in der Menschheit, Blutmorde und Bhitritus , Miinchen, 4th edi¬ tion, Beck, 1892. 2 Pope Clement XIV. Ganganelli was then adviser to the Holy Office in Rome. The Jews of Tampol, in Poland, had been accused, in 1756, of having assassinated a Christian to use his blood for the preparation of their unleavened bread. In their distress they had the courage to invoke the intervention of the Holy See. The Pope, Benedict XIV., entrusted Gan¬ ganelli with the examination of the question. The Franciscan scholar drew up a long report in which, after having studied, one by one, the principal cases of ritual murder charged against the Jews for centuries, he decided on the invalidity of the ac- 40 Israel Among the Nations . As far back as the heart of the Middle Ages, we find that the Popes Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., the former in 1235, the latter in 1247, publicly branded this calumny by a bull issued at Lyons. So that, in¬ deed, three centuries later, the Protestant compilers of the Centuries of Magdeburg asserted that Pope Inno¬ cent IV. had allowed himself to be bought by the Jews. Finding nothing in the Talmud to support their theory, the adversaries of the Jews claimed that ritual¬ istic murder was due to cabalistic superstitions. They bethought themselves of advancing as a proof of the religious cannibalism of the Jews, one or two metaphors from the book of Zehar , the cabalistic code of the Middle Ages, still held in high esteem by some Jews, especially the Hassidim. Others have quoted the testi¬ mony, naturally open to suspicion, of certain Jewish proselytes, who had been converted to Christianity ; but the majority of baptised Jews, as Ganganelli has already stated, brought in a verdict of acquittal for their former co-religionists. Of all the religions to which sanguinary practices have been ascribed, Judaism seems to have furnished least cause for such a suspicion. Is it not well known that the Law forbids blood as nourishment to the Jews ? That they consider all food containing blood as tarefa , cusation. This conclusion was adopted by the Romish Curia, which commanded the papal nuncio, in Warsaw, to protect the Jews against similar calumnies. The memoir of Ganganelli, a copy of which was found in the archives of the Israelitish com¬ munity in Rome, has been published, in German, by Doctor Berliner, under the name of Gutachten Ganganelli’s (Clemens XIV.) in Angelegenheit der Blutbeschuldigung der Juden , Berlin, 1888 ; and in Italian by Isidore Toeb, Revue des Etudes Juives , Paris, April-June, 1889. The Oldest Grievance . 4i that is to say, unclean ; so much so, that they are al¬ lowed to eat only meat from which the blood has been drawn. The prohibition imposed by the Bible is im¬ perative ; it is strictly confirmed by the Talmud, and rigidly upheld by custom and the Jewish shops, where only Kosher meat is sold. Jewish aversion to blood is such that a learned German thought he could not pos¬ sibly give any conception of it but by borrowing a com¬ parison from the superstitious rites of the Polynesians : he ventured, to say that, for the Jew, blood is “ta¬ booed.” And yet, the Russian and Hungarian masses are none the less convinced that the rabbis bleed our children that they may have Christian blood for the preparation of their Passover bread. Instead of a Jewish idea we recognise here again one of the old, popular superstitions in which blood played an important role. Magicians and soothsayers were in search of human blood. The imagination of the Mid¬ dle Ages believed in the miraculous power of blood ; it communicated its belief to the Jews. Were it even to be proved that at Trent or, elsewhere, the knife of the Jew had “out of hatred to the faith ” butchered Christian children, such as the blessed Simon and Andrew, of the Acta Sanctorum / I should still discern, in such cases of infanticide, nothing more than indi¬ vidual crimes, or acts of vendetta, committed in revenge 1 Two children are revered by the Church as martyrs of the Jews : one is the blessed Simon of Trent, put to death in 1475 ; the other is the blessed Andre de Rinn (Diocese of Briegen), slaughtered in 1462. It is a matter worthy of note that one was beatified in 1588, the other only in 1753. Ganganelli, while acknowledging the authenticity of these two murders, says himself, in the above-mentioned memoir, that the Romish Curia was slow in authorising the worship of these two martyrs. 42 Israel Among the Nations . for the tortures and persecutions which the sons of Jacob have had to suffer. 1 For—can we have forgot¬ ten it ?—the inhumanity of our forefathers toward the Jews was well calculated to suggest the most ruthless modes of retribution. As regards children, especially, the evidence of his¬ tory is not always to our credit. If it has never been legally proved that the fanaticism of the Jews has strangled Christian children, it is, alas, beyond ques¬ tion that, for centuries, the Christians of both great denominations have felt but little compunction in tear¬ ing from the Jew his sons and daughters, not, indeed, to open their veins, but to do what was not less painful to the hearts of the Jewish parents—to besprinkle them with baptismal water. 2 In proof of this we have abundance of testimony. It is no longer a question of imaginary crimes, perpetrated secretly and under cover of darkness, but of child-stealing, carried on in broad daylight, under the shield of the law and by order of the authorities; and, moreover, in quantities of thou¬ sands and tens of thousands, in certain states, especially in Spain and Portugal. I am loath to cite a more modern instance, from a neighbouring state ; the case was one which a Catholic would be glad to have the world forget. 1 Such is also the opinion of a learned Bavarian ecclesiastic, Dr. Fr. Frank: Die Kirche und die Juden, vii., Regensburg, 1893. 2 In Germany, in Portugal, more than one Jew has been known to prefer death to baptism for his children. CHAPTER III. THE JEWS, CHRISTIANITY, AND MODERN IDEAS. I. In a Sense, Antisemitism is the Counterpart of Anticlerical¬ ism — Antisemitism is Another Kulturkampf — II. What Share have the Jews in the Evolution of Modern Society? —Are they the Main Factors in the De-christianising of Nations?—The Jew, Hebraism, and the Revolution—As Regards Social Tendencies the Modern Jew is Recep¬ tive, not Originative—III. The Conservative Spirit of the Great Jewish Communities—The Modern Spirit Insinuates itself into them from the Outside—The Jew is De-juda- ising himself at the Same Time that the Christian is De- christianising himself—In what Respect our Civilisation is a Peril to Judaism—For this Reason it is Impossible that Modern Society should be Judaised. I. Christians who belong to the educated classes do not share the antiquated popular prejudices against the Jew. Even in Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Rou- mania, and Russia, the thin stratum of the cultured, “the intelligent,’’ as the Russians call them, are well aware that the Jew does not steal children to give them up to the knife of the schochet and that the Synagogue needs no Christian blood to celebrate the Hebrew Pass- over. The Catholics, Protestants, and members of the Greek church have another grievance against the Jews, a less crude and childish one. They accuse them of 43 44 Israel A mong the Nations . being the born enemy of what they style “ Christian civilisation.” The very vagueness of this charge makes it one of the most serious brought against Israel. If it be not true that, in his secret rites, the talmudic Jew takes delight in spilling Christian blood, the Jews, it is asserted, especially the progressive Jews, do what is still worse : they are bent upon destroying Christian faith, morals, and civilisation. Not satisfied with the toleration accorded to them, they endeavour, openly or secretly, to ‘ ‘ de-christianise ’ ’ Europe and modern so¬ ciety. Thus considered, Judaism is a disintegrating force, both from the moral and the religious, as. well as from the economic and the national, point of view ; it is a solvent of our old Christian institutions. In Evangelical Germany, in Orthodox Russia, in Catholic France and Austria, the Jew is denounced as the most zealous destroyer of what one is pleased to call the Christian state and Christian civilisation. In assailing the Jews and Judaism, Christians of every sect assert, with Pastor Stoecker, that their attack on the Jew is only an act of self-defence. There are men who strive to find hidden springs in every historical event, who believe in prolonged designs, mysteriously followed up through centuries ; such persons go so far as to look upon the “ princes of Judah ” as the eternal instigators of the secular war waged against Christ, the Church, and the Christian spirit. 1 To them the ancient, chosen people, having rebelled against the Messiah, has become the enemy of the city of God, the foundations of which it is noiselessly sapping, and on the ruins of which it hopes to establish the site of Israel’s domin- 1 Thus, for instance, Les Juifs nos Maitres , by Chabaudy, Paris, 1882. Jews , Christianity , and Modern Ideas. 45 ion. The Jews are the originators and the apostles of the great ‘ ‘ Anticrusade’ ’ waged in our times against Christian traditions and institutions. In this sense, Antisemitism is, after a fashion, the counterpart of Anticlericalism ; it is a second Kulturkampj , a Kultur- kampf that has recoiled against the .secret or avowed enemies of Christian civilisation. Here we have, indeed, one of the real causes of the Antisemitic movement. It may be recognised by the country and the period in which it first appeared. The fact that it originated in the Germany of Bis¬ marck, in the very heart of the struggle between the new Empire and the Catholic hierarchy, is not due to mere chance. Whilst the liberal German press, partly led by the Jews, was assailing the Church, the besieged party, trying to find the weak spots in the lines of attack, made a sally in the direction of the Synagogue, where the troops commanded by the Jew Tasker were en¬ camped. That was good .strategy. Such a digres¬ sion had been suggested by the composition of the opposing armies. In fact, it is in a fair way of coming to be considered as one of the classical manoeuvres of modern clerical campaigns. The Jew, who was ap¬ parently to have been the gainer, thus runs the risk of being the victim in the warfare against Christianity. This incident proves that he does not invariably play a safe game when he incites, or takes part in, religious struggles. Imprudent being! He will get nothing but blows for his pains. The shafts hurled by him, or by his people, against the Clericals, are in danger of rebounding against Israel. It is an unfortunate situa¬ tion for the Jew when the question is put whose eyes can be offended by the harmless shadow of the Cross, whose hands are interested in effacing from our old 46 Israel Among the Nations. countries the noble and precious emblems of the religion of our fathers ? “ Why,” said a Silesian German to me, “should you try to prevent us from returning to the Talmud the blows aimed at the Gospel ? When an appeal is made to the state against our clergy and our Christian associations, have we not a right to appeal in our turn to the state and the people against the rabbis and the Jewish associa¬ tions ? L,et the toleration which the Jew r s claim for them¬ selves, who are in the minority, be shown to us, who are in the maj ority. Otherwise they will again have to listen to the cries of ‘ Hep ! hep ! ’ 1 from millions of Chris¬ tians who persist in believing that the best gifts they can make to their children are the New Testament and the Crucifix.” And such language is used not only by believers ; I have heard it from the lips of sceptical or indifferent people, who, in the presence of a Jew, all of a sudden remembered that they were Christians. Anticlericalism has thus been, by the revulsion it has occasioned, one of the main abettors of Antisemit¬ ism. In more than one country its effects have been felt by the Jews even more keenly than by the Catholics. To those who denounced the Church as a foreign body, obedient to a foreign master, the Catholics were naturally led to reply with a denuncia¬ tion of the Jews as intruders of an alien race, without country, or love of country. To those who in Germany, for instance, accused the spiritual subjects of 1 Hep ! Hep ! the traditional cry against the Jews in Germany. Many esplications, almost all imaginary, have been given of it. Some have found in it the initials of the three words : Hierusa- lem est perdita . It is, perhaps, according to the hypothesis of Isidore Loeb, nothing more than a corruption of the w 7 ord: Hebe! heb ! “Stop ! hold him ! ” still used, in this sense, in Alsace and the Rhenish lands. Jews , Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 47 the pope of being thorough-going Ultramontanes, re¬ bellious to the Teutonic spirit, the Catholics were, of course, ready to retaliate with an attack on the Semites, as persons obstinately set against the German spirit and deutsche Kultur. ‘ ‘ Make front against Rome, ’ ’ was said one day, in 1879, in the thick of th ^ Kulturkampf, by one of the Berlin journals, managed or edited by Jews. This war-cry was answered by another from the Germania , the organ of the Ultra 7 nontane Centre: “ Make front against New Jerusalem.” Thus, from time immemorial, has intolerance bred intolerance : abyssus, abyssum. . . . ‘ ‘ The eyes of the German nation are opened at last, ’' continued the Germania; “it sees that the struggle for civilisation is the struggle against the ascendancy of the Jewish spirit and of Jewish wealth. In every political movement, it is the Jew who plays the most radical and revolutionary part, waging war to the death against all that has remained legitimate, histori¬ cal and Christian in national life. ’ ’ 1 And this awful charge against Israel was not ad¬ vanced only by the Catholics, who had to face Prince Bismarck and his short-sighted allies, the national Liberals; Protestant Germany echoed the words of Catholic Germany. The Russian priests, uneasy at seeing that the missiles aimed at the Roman hierarchy, flew higher than the mitres of their bishops and reached the Gospel and the Cross, were themselves perhaps the most ardent preachers of the new crusade. 2 The 1 Germania, September io, 1879. In Germany and in Austria this has become the habitual theme of a number of newspapers. Cf., in our country, La France Juive , of M. Drumont. 2 1 could cite, as an example, the speech of Pastor Stoecker in the Landtag, March 22, 1880. Cf. the writings of Professor von Treitschke. 48 Israel Among the Nations . Kreuz-Zeitung exceeded the Germania in zeal; and, outside of Germany, in states where such a movement seemed out of place, Russian writers took it up, in their turn. The Rous , edited by the Moscovite Aksakof, formed the Slav component of the cosmopoli¬ tan quartette which was composed of the Evangelical Kreuz-Zeitu 7 ig , the Ultramontane Germania , and the Roman CiviltcL Cattolica. Thus, for the Prussian Pro¬ testant, for the Austrian and French Catholic, for the Russian Orthodox, the war against Israel was merely a Kulturkampf. It meant nothing less than the preser¬ vation to modern nations of the benefits of Christian civilisation, by putting an end to what is ■called the judaising of European society. To one and all, Slav, Latin, German, and Magyar, the Jew, that odious para¬ site, was the deadly microbe, the infectious bacteria, that poisoned the blood of modern states and societies. II. How much truth is there in this accusation ? And, in order to discover its truth or its fallacy, is there need of lengthy discussion ? In the first place, is it in accord with the testimony of history, with the most stubborn sort of facts,—numbers and dates ? Besides, in assum¬ ing that the Jew inspires and, as it were, prompts the spirit of the age, do we not raise him to an eminence quite disproportionate to his real stature and ascribe to him an exaggerated supremacy ? It would certainly have surprised Voltaire and Diderot to be told that they were only the forerunners, or the unconscious agents, of the Jews. When we blame the Jewish people or the Jew¬ ish religion, for the overthrow of certain moral, religious, social or political beliefs, are we not paying scant atten- yezvSy Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 49 tion to history and to the genesis of modern ideas ? Is it not, on the part of Christian nations, equivalent to getting rid of their own sins by loading them upon Israel, the scapegoat ? Whatever may be one’s estimate of the “modern spirit,’’ it would be difficult to make out that the Jews can be either praised or blamed for it. While Israel was still penned in behind the bars of the Ghetto, the traditional foundations of Christian society were being undermined by hands that had not learned their trade in the school of the rabbis. I am perfectly well aware that those who arraign the Jews can produce Jewish witnesses to support this count in their indictment. The reproach, solemnly flung down to the Jews from the heights of the Lutheran pulpit or the Russian tribunal, has been proudly taken up by certain Semites, who deck themselves with it as though it gave them a claim to public esteem. These emancipated sons of Jacob are not afraid to point out to us their low forefathers of the Judengasse , as the far-off pioneers of the Revolution, and the secret instruments of the emancipation of the human spirit. The nation to which has been vouchsafed the matchless glory of having given the world its religion is also accredited by us with the birth of rationalism, and thus pic¬ tured as undoing with one hand what it has created with the other. The nation which during twenty-five or thirty centuries has persisted in basing everything on the Book and the Word of the living God, we would fain transform into the Master of Scepticism, the mysterious instructor of those who have broken the authority of the Bible and who deny that God has ever spoken. “The Jew,’’ says a brilliant writer, “has been the teacher of unbelief; all rebellious spirits have 50 Israel Among the Nations. come to him, either under cover of darkness or in broad daylight. He has laboured in the immense workshop of blasphemies of the great Emperor Frederick and the princes of Suabia and Aragon.” 1 This may be so ; but was it really in that workshop beyond the moun¬ tains that the weapons of modern rationalism were forged, or that the doctrines were established which have completely transformed European society ? Whatever new vistas the rabbis may have opened out, here and there, to the enfeebled sciences of the Middle Ages, it is not Israel that has given the im¬ petus to modern thought. Be the genius of the Jew never so subtle and apt, he is boasting when he as¬ cribes to himself the evolution of modern society. It is not his burrowing that slanted the spires of Gothic cathedrals and cracked the walls of Valois castles and Bourbon palaces. In order to have given the impetus to modern thought, it was not enough to have denied the endless duration of mediaeval civilisation. The Jew has the right to boast of never having bent the knee to the gods of other nations, may their names have been Christ, Jupiter, or Baal. His very existence was, for twenty centuries, a protest against the old order, and against that Christian society that would not have made room for him, any more than for the heretic, had he not seemed to be the providential guar¬ dian of the Book, and the involuntary witness of the prophets. The Jew has been the real protestant; the uncompromising, intractable opponent of dogma and tradition. Still, whether visible or concealed, timid or bold, his protest was stifled by the flames of the stake that consumed his sages and his books. The voice of 1 Mr. James Darmesteter’s Coup d'CEil sur VHistoire die Peuple jtuif, 1881, p. 16; reprinted in Les ProphUes d' Israel, 1892. Jews y Christianity, and Modern Ideas. 51 the Jew, even had it been heard, had it been still louder and clearer, could never have effected our revo¬ lutions ; for his protest was based upon tradition, and it surely was not in the name of tradition that was brought about that transformation which has rejuve¬ nated the face of the earth. In counting the men whose hands have, during the past three centuries, shattered the pillars of palace and temple, how many Jews or disciples of Jews, shall we find ? If we undertake a classification of the modern sciences that have provided our fathers with the instru¬ ments of intellectual emancipation, viz., the natural and historic sciences,—which of them shall we class, prop¬ erly speaking, among the Jewish sciences, among those that have really originated with the Jews ? Shall we say history, or philosophy, or modern physics, or chem¬ istry ? Can it be physiology, or that new-comer with the pedantic name, sociology ? I recognise, indeed, many scientific Jews, but I see nowhere a Jewish science. Is it, perchance, religious exegesis, for which the Jews, as guardians of the Bible, seemed to have a talent ? This criticism of Sacred Books to which Israel appeared to have the key, has been relegated by the modern Jew to the Protestant. Although his ances¬ tors, in the person of Raschi and his disciples, had pre¬ pared the way for it is as long ago as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, their work was assigned to the Ghetto. Even in the sixteenth century, the task of the rabbis was confined to furnishing translators to Ruther and Reuchlin. 1 1 There are indeed, in Spinoza’s works, some essays on bib¬ lical exegesis, but they have had little influence on the Syna¬ gogue. As for the modern Jewish exegetists, they came after the Christians, and have, as a rule, shown themselves less revolutionary. 52 Israel Among the Nations . And liow is it with the manifold and changeable sys¬ tems in which fluctuating modern thought has tried to find expression ? Which of these systems is Jewish ? Is it positivism, evolutionism, determinism, pessimism? Despite the flexibility of his nature, despite its sturdi- dess, its patience, its many-sidedness, its marvellous universality, the Jew can have exerted but a secondary and — taking everything into consideration — but a small influence on the formation of modern society. It matters little that this is due, in great part, to the per¬ secutions and humiliations whose victim he was, or that the blame rests more heavily on us than on him. The result is the same. Though Israel had perished utterly on the quemaderos of Castile, her disappearance would not have retarded, by so much as a century, the advent of modern society. Both the friends and the enemies of the Jew invest him with a function not his own when they insist upon looking on him as the secret leaven that has given rise, in the world, to what we call modern thought. Its germ lay in classic civilisation. To him who looks through the perspective of cen¬ turies at the transformation of European societ}% it seems to be an internal evolution, natural, organic, the spontaneous product of the generating forces of our civilisation. External influences may have hastened its internal development, but they were not its main¬ spring ; and among those influences that of the Jew was not the only, nor perhaps the most potent, one. The origin of the modern world, of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Revolution, lay neither in the Jew nor in the Jewish spirit; it lay in something more general, more subtle. It was due to the spirit of analy¬ sis, of research, to the scientific spirit, whose first teach¬ ings came to us, not from Judaea, but from Greece ; and Jews , Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 53 though, at a later day, the Jews or the Arabs brought them back to us, they have none the less emanated from the Greeks. There were other agencies than the Jewish corrosive at work in our old Christian civilisation, a composite civilisation, of mixed origin. It is a notable fact that the influence of the dispersed Jews, whether visible or concealed,—and which,during the Middle Ages was far- reaching, or, at least, positive,—has diminished in exact ratio to the acceleration of the movement that sweeps the modern world along. The lean silhouette of the Jew, still dimly discernible here and there during the Renais¬ sance and the Reformation, had, at the outbreak of the Revolution, almost vanished from the stage of history. The period of the great upheaval marks the time during which human society has, perhaps, least felt the influence of the Jew. 1 Where was the Jew in Paris during the eighteenth cen¬ tury ? Under Eouis XVI. Paris contained scarcely seven or eight hundred Jews who had come from the south of France or from Alsace, and were huddled together in the suburbs.® Yet the eighteenth century in France be¬ trays to the Antisemites of keen scent, a vague odour of what they call the Jewish spirit. Can it be possible that, unknown to us d’Alembert, Diderot, and the Encyclo¬ paedists were pupils of a Talmud- Tora f The charges made against the Jews and Jewish literature by a Stoecker or a Treitschke, might have been made, nay, they have indeed been made proof in hand, against the literature, the science, and the philosophy of the 1 We shall say nothing here of the influence imputed to the Jews in secret societies, especially in freemasonry ; this is a subject which we reserve for later treatment. 3 Leon Kahn’s Histoire de la Communaute Israelite de Paris. 54 Israel A mong the Nations. monarchical France that existed before the fall of royalty. The eighteenth century, as has lately been said by one of our young masters of criticism, was neither Chris¬ tian nor French. 1 The sudden evolution of the Christian idea, and the progressive diminution of the patriotic idea, were the two characteristic features of the age ex¬ tending from 1700 to 1790. It abhorred spiritual and material authority ; it detested every sort of hierarchy, and turned up its nose at tradition ; it was cosmopolitan, and indifferent to the greatness of its country ; it was anti-French as well as anti-Christian, and for this very reason it witnessed a signal deterioration of morals, necessarily accompanied by a certain lowering of the literary and philosophic spirit. In listening to the historian who criticises the eighteenth century, do we not seem to be listening to the Protestant, the Catholic, or the Russian Antisemite, as he denounces the Jewish spirit, the Semitic press, and the judaising of society ? Have we not here, in a few words, the chief moral, religious, and political grievance against the Jew and Judaism ? Nor, indeed, is this a mere coincidence. The Jew may perhaps be imbued with that spirit of negation, revolt, and scepticism which we delight in imputing to him ; he may even propagate it; but it has not originated with him. It came to him from us, from our fore¬ fathers of ‘ ‘ Aryan ’ ’ blood, and of Catholic or Protes¬ tant education. The torch which he is accused of carry¬ ing about in the Christian world has not been lighted by him ; he has received it from Christian hands. Neither our eighteenth century nor our Revolution was the product of Judaism. The Jew has a right to 1 Mr. Em. Faguet’s Dix-huitibne Sihle, preface, 1890. Jews , Christianity, and Modern Ideas. 55 extol the Revolution ; no one should be astonished to hear him cry “ Hosannah ” to it. For, has it not freed him and delivered him out of the bondage of Egypt ? He is entitled to see in it the hand of the old Jehovah, and to worship in it the “ Divine in action.” Ret the faithful Jew, in his transports of lyrical enthusiasm, compare ‘ ‘ the revolutionary mountain to Horeb, ’ ’ as did J. Darmesteter. Ret him look on “ Moses speak¬ ing from the summit of the mountain as an ancient pro¬ totype of the men who sat in the French Convention. ’ ’ Eet him declare that “ the Revolution has spoken the same language from the crest of Sinai as in the salons of the eighteenth century. ” 1 I am not shocked at all this, whatever the Synagogue may think of it. The Jew is at perfect liberty to believe that “ what triumphs through Voltaire, is the Bible riddled with Voltaire’s epigrams. ’ ’ 2 He is, above all, at liberty to see in the Revolution the realisation of the ancient prophecies of Israel. To this, I have no objection; but, because from the top of Moriah or Carmel an Isaiah beheld far off, through the mist of centuries, the dawn of an age of universal brotherhood, it does not follow that Israel was the principal agent in the realisation—as yet, alas, so incomplete—of the mysterious visions of her seers. It may be, as we are assured, that the language of Jerusalem is that of modern Europe ; but if the credo of the modern world be nothing more than the credo of the old Hebrew world, it is not from Jerusalem, at all events, not from the modern Jew, that Europe has learned it. When he boasts of having opened out the 1 Mr. James Darmesteter’s Joseph Salvador , p. 52 ; Cf. pp. 28, 29. 2 Mr. J. Darmesteter’s Coup d' CEil sur VHistoire du Peuple Juif. 5 6 Israel Among the Nations . paths of liberty and equality, when he claims for his rabbis the glory of having been the instructors of the philosophers and the inspirers of the Rights of Man, the Jew is the victim of a confusion of thought; he con¬ founds the modern with the ancient era, the Synagogue or the Schule with the temple on Moriah ; he further¬ more confounds the hakham and the sages of the Tal¬ mud with the prophets in Judah or in Bphraim, and the Ghetto with the hill of Zion. Certainly, Judaism, or rather Hebraism, may claim its share in the slow unfolding of ideas which, after centuries of bondage, have brought about Israel’s emancipation. Tike Greece and Rome, perhaps more than either, arid Judaea has scattered through the world some of the seeds which, retaining their vitality through ages, have finally blossomed into modern society. The Jew has a right to remind us of this whenever we seem about to forget it. There are stones from Palestine in the foundations of our new society. We have testified to this ourselves, at the centennial of the Trench Revolution. 1 In more than one respect the Revolution was but the application of the ideal which Israel has given to the world. The idea of social jus¬ tice is a Jewish idea. The coming of justice upon earth was the dream of Judah. The latest historians of the Jews have but recently reminded us of this. To discover the primal source of 1789, we must dig deeper than the Reformation and the Renaissance; we must go back, beyond the classic antiquity of the Gospel, to the Old Testament itself, to the Thora and the pro- 1 See the Banquet du Centenaire de 1789, in one volume ; La Revolution et le Libtralisme , Hachette, 1890. Cf< farther on, chap. x. Jews, Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 5 7 phets. In this sense, it is true that the new decalogue of Human Rights proceeded from the tablets brought down from Sinai, and that the night of August the 4th, was a far-off and involuntary echo from Horeb. But this share which Israel has had in the formation of modern society, does not belong to the mediaeval Jew or to the Jew of the “ ancient regime,” despised, humiliated, degraded; it belongs to the old Hebrew books that have become the patrimony of the Christian peoples. If the Revolution and modern society have had their teachers among the Jews, they were not men versed in the Talmud of the Askenazim or the Sephar¬ dim; they were rather the old nabis of Israel, the Isaiahs, the Jeremiahs, the Ezekiels, who, after their own fashion, were great revolutionists. If the Reformation itself and English or American liberty have anything in common with Judaism, it is through the Bible and not through the Jew, through the old Book, read alone after dark in the family circle, and not through the living remnants of the twelve tribes. Neither in England nor in America, at the time of their revolutions, were any Jews to be found ; so that it may be said that the coun¬ tries in which the ascendancy of the Hebrews is most pronounced are the very ones in which the Jew has had least play. 1 It is indeed in the Bible, as it would seem, that Jurien and the Protestant clergy,—in such matters the teachers of Rousseau,—have discovered the principle of popular sovereignty ; but they had no need to go to the 1 There were, indeed, several Jewish communities in the English colonies before the War of Independence, but they had no influence there. The history of the revolution of the Netherlands, which gave shelter to so many Spanish Jews, is apt to lead to similar reflections. 5 § Israel Among the Nations . yudengasse to find it. According to an American,— himself an Israelite 1 —it is from the Bible, from the Pentateuch and the Judges, that the founders of the American Union have borrowed the model for their democratic and federal Constitution ; but to do this the Adamses and the Madisons required no lessons from the Jewries of Europe and Africa. We often accredit the Protestants and the Reforma¬ tion with that which it were more equitable to attribute to the Old Testament and the Hebrews, I cannot say to the Jews. Neither on the Bast nor on the West of the Atlantic can the modern Jew, the humble Jew of the Ghetto, lay claim to a share in the genesis of those ideas that have transformed the face of the earth. Far from having given the impulse to them, Judaism has felt the effects of their reaction. In this, as in many other respects, the Jew was not so much an initiator as an imitator. To make himself receptive to the new ideas, he had to rid himself of his ancient Jewish notions. Pie was so bound and garroted by the Tal¬ mud and its ritual, that he might, perhaps, never have had the strength to break his chains had we not cut them in two, or at least lent him the file and shears wherewith to do so. I am tempted to believe that, left to himself and kept apart from the Christian, the tal- mudic Jew would have found it as difficult to discard his Jewish traditions and to liberate himself from the yoke of the Talmud, as does the Mussulman to free himself from the Koran. Moreover, in Israel the civil and the religious law 1 Mr. Oscar Straus, former Minister from the United States to Turkey : The Origins of the Republican Form of Government in the United States of America , translated into French, with preface, by F. de Laveleye. Paris, 1890; Alcan. Jews , Christianity , < 2 /^ Modern Ideas . 59 were inseparable; just as the Koran in Islam, so does the Talmud take the place of the legal code. However flexible, pliant, quick at conception and assimilation, however interested in all progress and innovation, the civilised Jew may appear to us in the West, I am not sure that he would not have remained at a standstill, had he been left pent up in the Jewries of his fore¬ fathers, in an atmosphere exclusively Jewish. He was, so to say, doomed to remain stationary by the phara- saical formalism of the Mishna and the Ghemara , by the network of endless prescriptions which encircled him, by that narrow rule of a life in which all was foreseen and reduced to a formula, in which every day, every hour, brought him into the presence of a command¬ ment, a Mitzva , that had to be fulfilled. In order to free himself from such bondage he needed help from the outside. And such was actually the course of events. Not from the Jewries was breathed the spirit that transformed the Jew into the man of our age ; and even where the walls of the Ghetto were levelled, the modern spirit did not triumph without resistance from the rabbis. Do not let us reverse the roles; despite the statements of certain Semites, or certain Antisem- ites—both tending equally to magnify the importance of Israel,—it is not the Jew who has emancipated Christian thought, but Christian thought, or, if you prefer, Aryan thought, that has emancipated the Jew. Without a Descartes I cannot imagine a Spinoza, and without a Voltaire or a Lessing I doubt whether there would have ever existed a Moses Mendelssohn. Likewise—to go farther back—without Plato and the Greeks would there have been a Philo, and with¬ out an Aristotle or the Arabs would there have been a 6o Israel Among the A T ations. Maimonides ? Does it not seem to follow that, in all ages, Jewish genius, in order to wing its flight, had need of an impetus from without ? Its wings could not spread unaided ; they needed the assistance of others. Perhaps this is due to the burden of tradition that rested on them. Be this as it may, it is not the subject of our present inquiiy. All we wish to show is that, in modern times, the Jews have been receptive and not originative. In all Jewish communities left to themselves the ultra-conservatives, the ‘ ‘ obscu¬ rantists,” have carried the day. At least, this has been so during the past two or three centuries. Par from emanating from the Synagogue, the new ideas had great difficulty in making their way into it. The Synagogue had, so to speak, stopped up all the chinks and crannies in its traditions ; in Poland, Hun¬ gary, and even in Germany, in fact, almost everywhere, it had proceeded after the fashion prevalent in cold countries, where at the beginning of winter the win¬ dows are fastened down with cement to keep the outer air from entering. Its most illustrious children were anathematised by the Synagogue ; the Herem , with its awful imprecations, was hurled at whoever attempted innovations. Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated in the eighteenth century by the most enlightened com¬ munity on earth ; Moses Mendelssohn, who served as a model for Lessing’s Nathan the Wise , had in that same century to see his German Pentateuch and his Psalms condemned by German and Polish rabbis. The synagogue of Berlin rejected books written in the ver¬ nacular ; it expelled one of its members for having read a German book. The bulk of Jews of both classes, the Askenazim and the Sephardim , abhorred the philosophers and their precepts. They held the Jews , Christianity, and Modern Ideas . 61 profane sciences in suspicion. 1 While the salons of Paris were discussing the philosophy of Descartes, or the approaching regeneration of man, the Jewish com¬ munities of Eastern and Central Europe were dreaming of cabalistic utopias, yielding themselves up to the craze of Hassidism, and growing fanatical over the rival claims of false Messiahs, such as Franck and Sabbatai. 2 III. Everywhere, in the East as well as the West, it was from the outside, and thanks only to the lamps of the goim , that the new ideas, “ the light,” penetrated into the alleys of the Ghetto and pierced the gloom of the Judengasse. Could it, indeed, have been otherwise, after centuries of sequestration and debasement! How¬ ever great may be Israel’s elasticity, her mainspring seemed to have been broken. She was weighed down by the double load of her heavy talmudic traditions, and the hatred of a hostile society. As in the time subsequent to the fall of the Temple, the Jew, thrown back on himself, withdrew behind the walls of his ritual and his traditional observances. Towards 1700 the Jews had become, perhaps, more strictly Jewish than they were on the eve of the Cru¬ sades. We can easily imagine what the European Jew 1 See, especially, the autobiography of the rabbi-philosopher, Solomon Maimon, published in 1792-93, by R. P. Moritz, under the name : Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte . Cf. Arvede Barine’s Un Juif Polonais (Revue des Deux Monies , of Octo¬ ber 15, 1889). 2 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in fact, the age of false Messiahs, and also of the diffusion of Hassidism or neo-cabalism, still prevalent in a number of communities. vSee Graetz’s Geschiclite der Juden , vol. x., chap, vi.-xi. 62 Israel A mong the Nations . was some thirty or forty years before the Revolution. We need but to turn our glance toward the Bast, where the Jews still live in compact masses, separated from the Christians by spiritual and material barriers. On such a subject nothing can be so convincing as an immedi¬ ate view of men and things. He who traverses the poverty-stricken Zions of the Bast, and beholds their inhabitants clad in their long, .shiny gaberdines, can realise the inherited aversion to change and novelty which the isolated Jew must feel. In this respect he is still an Oriental, like his forefathers the Beni-IsraeL What is most wonderful—and we shall return to it later—is the rapidity with which he is being meta¬ morphosed, under the magic wand of our Occidental civilisation. Whoever is not acquainted with the great Jewish communities of our age, where the sons of Israel live together in groups of thousands, {morejudaico ,) does not know the Jew. Only in such communities, in Bohemia, Galicia, Lithuania, Bittle Russia, and Moldavia, can we still find the Jew as Jew. Take those Jews of Central or Bastern Burope, those “ judaising” Jews of the great Jewries. Does the Polish, Russian, or Rou¬ manian Jew strike you as an innovator? Take a good look at him. Could he or his like have pushed the modern world forward into untrodden paths ? Is it he whom you could possibly suspect of imperilling Chris¬ tian civilisation ? Unhappy creature, he is much too degraded for that; too poor, too ignorant, too heedless of our religious and political strifes. Question him, he will not understand you. He is, besides, too much of a Jew, too religious, too devout, too completely hedged in by tradition,—in a word, too conservative. This is a point on which we must lay especial stress. Jews , Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 63 We shall be obliged to revert to it more than once. There is, in all the world, perhaps nothing more stub¬ bornly conservative than the talmudic Jew. In the matter of adherence to the habits of his ancestors and to custom, he might have descended from the Chinese mandarin or from the Russian moujik. This man, who is pictured to us as the natural enemy of tradition, is sedulously occupied in conforming to tradition. Wherever the Jew has remained Jew, neither the gov¬ ernment nor Christian society has had anything to fear from Israel. Note well—the countries that complain most bitterly of the judaising of contemporaneous society, are precisely those in which the Jews have least remained Jews. In order to become a religious or a political solvent, the Jew must, if I may use the ex¬ pression, become “ de-judaised.” It is easy to verify this in Germany, in Austro-Hungary, even in France, as well as in Russia and the Orient: if in those coun¬ tries there are Jews who may be accused of being zeal¬ ous promoters of the spirit of negation and destruction, they are generally such as have freed themselves from Judaism, and who in their contact with Christians, have stripped off the beliefs and traditions of Israel. This modern Israelite, depicted to us as the cor¬ rupting agency in our Christian civilisation, is him¬ self a product of our civilisation. The virus with which he charges the veins of society, was not secreted by him ; it is only because he has been infected with it that he spreads its contagion. Ret us take the countries in which modem ideas have as yet touched but the surface—for instance, Russia. Can it really be the Jews of Vilna, in their long gaber¬ dines and their high boots, who have endangered auto¬ cratic government and Orthodox civilisation ? Who 64 Israel A mong the Nations. can be made to believe this ? And yet I know men in St. Petersburgh and Moscow who are anxious to con¬ vince us of it. Such an attempt was made first by the defunct Rous of the late Aksakof and then by the Gj'ajdanme of Prince Mechtchersky. There have even been statesmen in the immediate vicinity of the Czar, who expressed on this score the apprehensions in¬ spired by their monarchical loyalty or their Christian conscience. Foremost among them was the High- Procurator of the Very Holy Synod, M. Pobedonostsef, former preceptor of the Kmperor Alexander III., and to this day the chief adviser of his imperial pupil in matters of religion. It was in 1881, at the time of the Antisemitic troubles in Southern Russia, when Jewish shops and houses had been looted, that hordes of riot¬ ers, sweeping down from the North, proclaimed to the people that an imperial ukase had decreed the pillage of those “ rascally Hebrews.” 1 A deputation of Israel¬ ites repaired to the Very Holy Synod to invoke the in¬ tervention of the High-Procurator, in behalf of the victims. While condescending to listen to their com¬ plaints, he thought it his duty to deplore, in their presence, the fact that educated Jews should use their knowledge “to undermine the foundations of .society, and to disseminate baleful doctrines among the people.” 2 Such a reproach, directed at such a time against the Russian Jew, missed its mark. If the imperial custom¬ houses, backed by a double and triple censorship, were 1 See L ’Empire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. iii., book iv., chap. iii. 2 This fact, borrowed from the Hebrew paper, Hammelits , May- 12, 1881, and reported in No. 13 of the Feuilles gaunes of the same year, was corroborated to me by one of the witnesses. Jews , Christianity , Modern Ideas . 65 not able to prevent the spirit of Western negation from being smuggled into the empire, it was assuredly not the Jewish contrabandists who imported that forbidden commodity into holy Russia. If the Jew has been a broker of ideas, he has not been so in modem Russia. Had a feeling of respect not restrained the bankers and rabbis, who interviewed the High-Procurator, M. Pobedonostsef, they might have answered his complaint by flinging back upon Orthodox Russia the charge brought against the sons of Judah. The old Jews of the Western Jewries, with their long beards and their long curls, might have asked him what the imperial schools and the intercourse with Christians had done with the souls of their sons and daughters. A Russian novelist—Ivan Turgenief, if I mistake not—brings the procurator of a province face to face with a Jew of the West, whose son is implicated in a conspiracy. 1 It is not the Russian Jews alone who would have a right to give to their accusers the same answer as that which the old Abraham gave to this magistrate. What the Russian writer, with a rare gift of divination, has placed on the lips of the Lithuanian Jew, might have been repeated by many co-religionists of Samuel Abra¬ ham, in the West as well as in the Kast. 2 The Jewish communities of Russia are not the only ones in which fathers and grandfathers are frequently at a loss to recognise their children. 1 Dans le Cabinet du Procureur (V kamere prokourora'). We have given in L ’ Empire des Tsars et les Russes (vol. iii., book iv., ch. iii.) the reasons which explain the participation of cer¬ tain Jews in nihilistic plots. 2 “ Our children have no longer our beliefs ; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your beliefs ; no more do they say your prayers ; they do not pray at all, and they believe in noth¬ ing.” ( Dans le Cabinet du Procureur .) 5 66 Israel A mong the Nations. Here we must cease to think of ourselves for a mo¬ ment. We are in the habit of considering only the in¬ fluence of the Jews on our Christian society ; we do not trouble ourselves at all about the influence of our modern civilisation on the Jews or on Judaism. Other¬ wise we should perceive that if the Jew appears, at times, to be a disintegrating force in Christian society, the Christian or the Aryan is so to a much greater de¬ gree with respect to Judaism. Israel, that has with¬ stood twenty centuries of oppression, is now im¬ perilled by the civilisation that has emancipated her. Of all the enemies which she has outlived, from Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Titus, and from Hadrian to Torquemada, none has been so formidable to her as this modern society, the first to smile on her. Our modern ideas, our critical spirit, our Aryan sciences, are about to destroy Jewish customs and tra¬ ditions. Will Judaism long survive their destruction ? Possibly ; yet, for the Synagogue this is no less serious a problem than for Christianity. At this moment, through contact with us, an internal process of disin¬ tegration is taking place in the bosom of Judaism. What will be its outcome ? We do not know. Thus, between the Jew and the non-Jew, between the goi and the son of Jacob, mutual forces are at work, apparently equally disintegrating, but, on the whole, more dangerous to the Jew than to the goi. What has preserved the Jew for so many centuries, and pre¬ vented him from disappearing among the nations ? It was his religion ; it was, as we have said, the ritual, the ceremonial, the minute practices with which the Talmud has wrapped him round. Now, these protect¬ ing rites, this shell of observances, which have been his safeguard for two thousand years and which nothing Jews , Christianity , and Modern Ideas. 67 could penetrate, have been pierced by our Western spirit, that is about to make them fall to the ground, piece by piece. Judaism—and with it the Jew—be¬ reft of its preserving envelope is, so to say, reduced to a condition of utter nakedness ; thus bared and liable to be touched to the quick, can it withstand the corroding action of our modern acids, into which it has been plunged as into a bath? And if Judaism, already weakened, were to be entirely dissolved, what would become of the Jew ? Fashioned and safeguarded by his religion, is not the Jew in danger of vanishing together with Judaism? It will thus be seen that the rabbis would be justi¬ fied in flinging back at the Christians the charge so readily brought by the Lutheran clergyman and the Russian priest against the Israelites. The latter, also, have cause for uneasiness. Some of them realise and acknowledge this. I have met, in the Jewish communi¬ ties of the Hast, men who, dreading the overthrow of the artificial barriers which still existed between their brethren and the Gentiles, preferred the mortification and annoyance of their restrictive laws, to our corrupt¬ ing liberties. They said to themselves that all is not clear gain for Israel in this civilisation which the world seems to open out to her. While others hail the victory on Zion, they ask themselves whether Israel’s triumph is not to be looked upon as the prelude to her fall, and whether the emancipation of Judah is not to end in its utter submersion, its engulfment by the nations. There is always this distinction to be made between the Jew and the non-Jew, the “Semite” and the ‘ ‘ Aryan ” : that our ideas and our Aryan, Teuto- Roman civilisation do, indeed, threaten dissolution to 68 Israel Among the Nations . Judaism, while there is nothing specifically Semitic in the doctrines that menace Christianity and eat into our Christian society. A glance at the Arabs will show this. The very disease which we accuse them of bring¬ ing or transmitting to us, has been caught by them from us. In this respect, the East and the West, Russia and our own country, are all alike. Scepticism, mate¬ rialism, nihilism, far from being Jewish products, are, in the Jews infected by them, but a sign and a conse¬ quence of the closer union of races ; they bear witness to the contact of the Jew with ourselves. In this respect, as in almost all others, and in regard to modern as well as mediaeval times, the Jew is only an agent of transmission, a broker. The intellectual commodities which he offers and retails to us are gen¬ erally not of his own making; they do not originate with him ; he took them from us, from our workshops and our laboratories. He gives them, at best, a certain shape, and polish. It is often asserted that the Jew produces nothing, that he is only a middle-man. It is perhaps with respect to the subject we are discussing that this statement contains most truth. And even in this respect it seems to me that the Jew’s influence has been exaggerated. Though he may sometimes control the money market, he nowhere monopolises the transmission of ideas. Nothing forces us to get our stock of them from him. It is hardly fair to ascribe to Jewish irony, to Hebrew scepticism, to the Semitic spirit, the diffusion of doctrines which the Jew often dishes up to us merely because they are to our taste and because it pays him to do so. Here again, by virtue of his old trader’s instinct, he follows the law of supply and demand. 1 1 Cf.y farther on, chap. x. : Jewish Genius . Jews, Christianity, and Modern Ideas . 69 The hostility between the Jewish and the Christian spirit, between the old and the new Taw, is in those cases where each still asserts its sway, far from being as formidable as people sometimes like to imagine. To judge by the manner in which some Christians speak of the Jewish spirit and of Judaism, it might be in¬ ferred that the Old and the New Testament have nothing in common. We seem to forget that both have, at bottom, the same God, the same Decalogue, the same moral Law. Were the Jew and the Christian equally faithful—the one to the Gospel, the other to the Thora, —the points of difference between them would be fewer than those of resemblance. If the only change in our modern society had been that of substituting a Jewish, or a Judo-Christian, civilisation for one purely Christian, the idea of God, the religious and moral idea, would still be the beacon-light of modern society. Is it necessary to show that the transformation which our Western world is undergoing, has not stopped there ? That the evolution of modern thought and so¬ ciety means something more than Europe’s return to Jerusalem ? He must be blind, indeed, who perceives in this evolution nothing but a tardy revenge of the Synagogue on the Church, and the overthrow of the Cross by the candelabra with seven branches. Let us, then, no longer speak of the judaising of Christian society. Had the Christians remained better Christians, the Jews would have slight hold upon them. What you call the judaising of modern society might, both by Christian and Jew, be equally well called— pardon the barbarism—the paganising of society, Aryans and Semites, de-christianised Christians, and de-judaised Jews, are practically reverting to a sort of unconscious paganism. This is the plain truth; 70 Israel A mong the Nations . Shem and Japhet, swept along by the same wind, are slipping, side by side, down the same declivity. Our clumsy Western races, which the Gospel had with such difficulty wrested from the worship of matter and force, are about to revert to their old nature-worship, now stripped of the mythical adornments that once covered it with a veil of poetry. And Israel herself, chosen to perpetuate the idea of a living God, Israel, snatched by her prophets of old with such infinite trouble from the altars of Moloch and Baal, Israel, weakened by misfortune and weary of waiting for the Messiah who is to mete out justice,—seems, like Solo¬ mon in his old age, to forget her compact with the Eternal, in order to offer incense on high places to Kamosch and Aschtoret, the idols of the stranger. If the decline of the Christian idea may be looked upon as the revenge of one faith on another, of a re¬ mote past on the past of yesterday, it is assuredly the revenge of ancient paganism—of immortal paganism, our neo-pagans would say—equally ready to triumph over the Thora and the Gospel, over Jehovah and Jesus. What the Christian spirit has to battle against, is not so much the new science or the modern spirit, with its confused aspirations, as the old pagan instincts, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life, once more unchained by the centuries. The idolatry of nature, the idolatry of man erected into a god, such is the new worship to which our Western civilisation seems to be reverting ; and this false worship of the human instead of the divine is, perhaps, more repugnant to the Old than to the New Testament, to Sinai than to Calvary. The glorifica¬ tion of the creature taken individually or collectively, amounts to a formal negation of Judaism : “I am the Jews, Christianity , and Modern Ideas . 71 Eternal thy God,” has said Jehovah, “and thou shalt have no other gods before my face.” “ Be it so,” some Antisemite will exclaim ; “ the Jew is not the sole, nor perhaps the principal, agent in the dechristianising of contemporary society. Judaism is in danger of annihilation, itself a victim of the warfare waged by its own people against Christianity and the Christian idea. But, what we have in view in speak¬ ing of the judaising of society and the disintegration of European nations by the Jew, is not so much the Jew¬ ish religion as the Jewish race ; it is less the Jew whom we fear than the Semite. Israel appears to us like an alien tribe encamped in the midst of modern nations and threatening them at once with moral subjection and material enslavement. Eet us leave Christian civilisation out of the question. The Jew acts as a solvent on something else which we have no less at heart: on our national culture, our historic genius, our French, Slav, and German souls.” CHAPTER IV. The JEWS AND THE NATIONAL GRIEVANCE—ARYANS AND SEMITES. I. Israel Threatens to De-nationalise the Modern Nations— Why did the Antisemitic Movement Originate in the New German Empire ?—The Jew Regarded as a Stranger—An¬ tiquity of this Grievance—II. Why did the Jews, after their Dispersion, still Continue to Form a People ?—Analogous Instances—Identification of Religion and Nationality in the East—III. Can Race and Nationality be Regarded as Identical in the West?—Are Any Modern Races of Un¬ mixed Blood ?—Are the Semites the only Non-Aryan Ele¬ ment among us ?—What do we Mean by Semitic Race ? —IV. Of the Antagonism between the Aryan and the Se¬ mitic Spirit—What the Difference between them Amounts to—Has a Christian the Right to Look upon the Semites as an Inferior Race ? After the religious grievance we have the na¬ tional grievance. That which the Jew appears to imperil is not only religion and the traditional founda¬ tions of our Christian society, but our nationality, to¬ gether with our native culture and our historic genius. Now, there could exist no greater crime in the eyes of modern peoples. Everything else may be forgiven ; this is the one unpardonable sin. At bottom of the Jew, was discerned the Semite—a serious disclosure for the sons of Abraham. The point 72 The "Jews and the National Grievance . 73 of attack is no longer their faith alone, but the blood that runs in their veins. The Jew, it is affirmed, is a foreign element, belonging to an exotic race ; he has nothing in common with us. Through all ages, Israel has continued to be an Oriental tribe, scattered among the peoples of the West. Even though they no longer fear religious fanaticism, the Jews have seen rise up against them something no less violent and exclusive —race-hatred. The nineteenth century will rank in history as the age of nationalities. National feeling, following ab¬ ruptly upon the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century, constituted the chief strength of the hundred years that followed the Revolution. Under our very eyes, and, largely, through our exertions, it trans¬ formed Europe, working miracles the like of which history could not recall ; bringing the dead back to life, and making the halt walk again. It is dangerous to have so formidable a power arrayed against one ; and in more than one country the Jews have realised this by experience. The experience was due to no fault of theirs ; it was one they could not avoid or avert. National feeliftg, over-excited by its triumphs or by its sufferings, was bound, in its passion, to assail the men of alien blood, and who—in some instances but a short while before—had arrived from foreign countries. Every nation resents the presence, in its body politic, of what seems to be a foreign element. Thus it came about that, in Germany,Teutonic exclusiveness arrayed itself against the “Semites.” The Jew had lulled himself into a sense of security under the shelter of modern toleration, when all of a sudden his neighbours came to bid him begone, not in the name of the Cross, this time, but in the name of 74 Israel Among the Nations. his forefathers, Isaac and Jacob. More inexorable than Torquemada and the inquisitors of old, the new Jew- haters make war against the blood of his ancestors; and although he may be able to change his faith, the Jew has no power to change his race. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the Anti- semitic movement had its origin in the new empire of the Hohenzollern. It found its ready-made cradle there. As early as 1815 the Jews of Germany were made the victims of the German triumphs. They had been emancipated by the ascendancy of France, and then saw themselves stripped of the rights which French predominance had procured for them. The Ultra-Germans, freed from Napoleon, were indignant that the Jews should set themselves up as Germans. From the Rhine to the Vistula resounded the old cry of ‘ ‘ Hep ! hep ! ’ ’ Sedan, sixty years after Waterloo, came near having the same results for the Jews. The signal for the Judenhetze was sounded anew by the trumpets that had proclaimed the fall of France ; and this was but natural. Tike the war of liberation, the restoration of the Ger¬ man Empire was destined to arouse the ultra-Germanic spirit, or what the Jewish historian calls “die christ- liche Deutschthiimelei. ’ ’ 1 At a time when, intoxicated with its regained strength, the Germanic spirit exalted all that it deemed Teutonic, from the axe of Arminius to the Bible of Uuther, German distrust turned most naturally against Israel. Was it possible, said the Prussian Junker, that Germany, the conqueror of die Welschen in France, should allow itself to be humbled by the Semites and mastered by Judaism ? The pedan- 1 Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. xi., p. 338., Cf. G. Val- bert’s Hommes et Choses du Temps Present, pp. 78, 79. The Jews and the National Grievance. 7 5 tic patriotism of the people beyond the Rhine detected a natural antagonism between these two terms: Ger¬ manism and Judaism, Germanenthum and Judenthum. Did we not hear at the same time of the eternal hostility of Germanism and Romanism, and the irrepressible conflict between the new imperial throne and the ancient Papal See ? Could the proud German, who disdained the yoke of Rome, submit to the dominion of Jerusalem ? From this point of view the Antisemitic movement in Germany may be regarded as a natural accompaniment of Anticlericalism and the Kulturkampf, and not as a reaction against the latter. Since both were the off¬ spring of Teutonic pride, it is but natural that they should have been born at the same time. They were hostile brothers, one might say twin-brothers, like Esau and Jacob, at war with each other in their mother’s womb. “Nothing henceforth in Germany but wdiat is German ’ ’ ; such .seemed the motto of the new empire, during its first years. Every foreign plant was to be uprooted from the soil of the newly recovered fatherland. Germany seemed to give itself up to a sort of national purification. Its servitude to alien masters had lasted quite long enough ; now it longed to be free from all thraldom, political, intellectual, or economic, French, Romish, or Jewish. Our age has a liking for learned formulas ; especially is Germany fond of covering its hatred with a scientific veneer. The theories which the conquerors of Alsace- Eorraine held in regard to race and nationality were made to apply to the sons of Israel. The Germans be¬ thought themselves that not only had the Jew no Teu¬ tonic blood in his veins, but he was not even of Aryan stock, or, as they say in Berlin, of Indo-Germanic stock. He was considered an Asiatic, a Semite, brother 76 Israel A mong the Nations . to the Arab, cousin to the Carthaginian ; by virtue of which fact there was no room for him beneath the Gothic wings of the Hohenzollern eagle. Rather was his presence in the midst of the Germans a constant menace to the genius of Germany, a danger to deutsche Kultur , the mother and nurse of modern civilisation. 1 And this cry of alarm, uttered by the Germany of Bis¬ marck, reverberated with that peculiar resonance which the trumpet-blasts of victory give to the popular voice. The summons that issued from Berlin found an echo along the entire frontiers of Germany. The national feeling of its neighbours was no less intense and appre¬ hensive ; it had even been still more inflamed, to the east as well as the west, by the fervour of the Germans. There, as in Germany, the Jew had to hear himself denounced as an intruder of hostile race. Such was the case in Austro-Hungary, where the Viennese Ger¬ mans only followed the example of their Berlin kins¬ men ; and in Russia, and sometimes even in France, with the only difference that in Pesth, and in Moscow the German spirit was replaced by the Slav and the Magyar spirit, both alike imperilled by the Semitic conquest. The enemies of the Jew have always been wont to attack in him the stranger. This national grievance seems to me less modern than it looks. It has been virtually at the root of every charge made against the Jews for centuries. In order to decide whether Israel really constituted a 1 This idea has been expressed in thousands of newspapers and in hundreds of pamphlets. I cite especially, W. Marr’s Sieg des Judenihums iiber das Germanenthum vomnicht confes- sionnellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet , Bern, Costenoble, 1879; E. Duhring’s Die Judenfrage als Frage der Racenschddlich- keit fiir Existenz, Sitte und Cultur der Volker, 3d edition Karlsruhe, 1885. Cf. in France, E. Drumont’s La France Juive. The Jews a 7 id the National Grievance . 77 state within the state and a nation within the nation, our forefathers did not await the development of mod¬ ern theories on the conflict of races and the struggle for existence. Had Spain, at the period of the Renais¬ sance, been but slightly versed in ethnology, the Iberi¬ ans of Castile would, as early as the time of Ximenes and Torquemada, have imposed the name of Semites on the Jews. It was really the Semite, the man of differ¬ ent faith, whom Catholic Spain, perhaps without being aware of it, persecuted in its Judios. If our countries were imperilled by the Semites, this was surely the case with the Spanish kingdoms, an¬ nexed to Africa by the conquest of the Arabs, and re¬ united to Europe by the Cross. In aiming their blows at the Jews and the Moslems, these Spaniards sought instinctively to “ de-semitise, ’ * to “ de-africanise ’ ’ themselves. This explains the rigour of their inquisi¬ tion against the Jews and the nuevos cristianos. Had only the religious interests of Spain been at stake, she would have given heed to the counsel of Rome ; she would not have exceeded the severities of the Holy Office. Ret us go still farther back : the Antisemitic spirit manifested itself already in the uprisings of the great cities of antiquity against the Jews. In Rome, Anti¬ och, and Alexandria it was the stranger whom the Roman and Greek populace attacked, and, if not the race, at any rate foreign customs and an alien civilisa¬ tion as much as the enemies of the gods. The same may be said of the classic writers. Professor von Treitschke has had illustrious predecessors among them. Juvenal and Tacitus, in assailing the Sabbath and the practice of circumcision, are already disturbed about the “juda- ising 9 9 of ancient society; what alarms them is the 78 Israel Among the Nations . substitution of Hebrew laws or Hebrew customs for Roman customs. 1 Moreover, Antisemitism, that is to say, the national complaint against Judaism as a foreign tribe, existed prior to the downfall of Jerusalem and the dispersal of Israel. It dates, at least, from the Babylonian captivity, if not from the enslavement in Egypt. Its formula may be found in the Bible ; the Jews themselves have handed it down to us ; it was pronounced by Hainan, of the Book of Esther, and by Pharaoh in Exodus. Pastor Stoecker needed but to adopt it: “ And Haman said unto King Ahasuerus : ‘ Here is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom ; and their laws are diverse from all people ; neither keep they the king’s laws.’ ” In those days people did not shrink from thorough¬ going measures. And Haman added : “ If it please the king, let it be written that they may be destroyed. ’ ’ 2 The Jews have a good memory ; they have not forgot¬ ten the minister Ahasuerus. To this day, on the annual Feast of Purim, which is the Jewish Carnival, all Israel celebrates gleefully the fall of Haman. 3 1 Romances autem soliti coniemnere leges, Judaicum ediscunt et servant ac metuunt jus Tradidit arcano quodcumque volumine Moses. {Juvenal, satire xiv., verse ioo and following.) Cf. Tacitus, Histories, verse 5. 2 Bsther, iii., 8, 9. Compare in the Bxodus (i., 8, 10) the language of Pharaoh : “ Here are the children of Israel who form a people larger and more powerful than ours,” etc. 3 In several countries the Jews celebrated this anniversary with a dramatic representation. It is said that Rachel thus de¬ lighted in playing, at the Theatre Fran^ais, during the Purim festival, the Esther of Racine, to an audience composed largely of Israelites. The Jezvs and the National Grievance. 79 II. Twenty-five centuries have elapsed since Israel was saved by the beauty of Queen Ksther, and yet the re¬ mark of Haman, son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, has not lost all truth. How can we deny that the Jews, dispersed over the Fast and West, did for a long time form a separate people in the midst of surrounding peoples? Israel had been shattered, and the debris of her tribes, scat¬ tered far and wide, were like those bronze fragments that defy the centuries. They might have been described as the particles of a people ground to powder. For fifteen hundred years the Jews have presented the al¬ most unique phenomenon of a nation without a land. In the midst of Christian or Mohammedan states, they were like the layers of flint that are to be found in the chalk formations on the Normandy coast. The Jews were the first to say of themselves : Our people, our nation. Some of them still say so. The Taw was to them a na¬ tional as well as a religious bond. They lived on the memory of Jerusalem, which was still the fatherland of their souls and the goal of their aspirations. Zion continued to be the mystic capital of dispersed Israel; they prayed for its restoration ; they looked forward to it, because Jehovah had promised it, and, relying upon the words of the prophets, they encamped as pilgrims in the midst of the nations among which exile had forced them to pitch their tents. But, can we always judge the future by the past, and is not the past of the Jew already, in some respects, contradicted by the present ? We must ask ourselves whether Judaism will, everywhere and for ever, signify a nation as well as a religion ; or, in other words, will the Jew who settles among nations mainly Christian, 8o Israel A mong the Nations. always be an alien, an intruder, dwelling in their midst without becoming a part of them ? He who insists that nationality must grow out of a common faith or a com¬ mon ancestry can have no doubt on the subject. To him the Jew will never become a Frenchman, a Ger¬ man, a Hungarian, or a Russian ; he will never be any¬ thing but a Jew. But is it true that nationality depends on race or religion ? Can there be no national unity without religious unity or a common origin ? To us, Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, such a question seems to come from another world and another age. To our mind French nationality consists of something different, something broader and subtler. But we must not always judge other nations by our own ; that would be unfair towards them. And thus, however antiquated the question seems to us, it is worth our while to stop to consider it. What is a nation ? This is, perhaps, the most diffi¬ cult of all questions to answer. There is, fortunately, Renan’s beautiful address, to which I can refer my readers. 1 For us, Frenchmen, nationality is identical with national consciousness. A nation is, in the first place, the product of history ; what creates and pre¬ serves it is a community of interests, of traditions, of feelings. Nationality is generally composed of various elements and, in more countries than one, religion has been among these elements. This was the case in Spain and in Russia; and this is one of the reasons why the Russians and the Spaniards find it difficult to look upon the Jew as their fellow-countryman. There is another point to be considered : in some countries, almost throughout the entire Orient, the idea of nationality does not exist at all, or it is confounded 1 Qu'est-ce qu'une tmtiofi ? (Calmann bevy). The Jews and the National Grievance . 81 with that of religion. This is the case especially with the Mohammedans ; the true believer knows no fatherland but Islam ; for him all national differences disappear before the common faith. Therein lies the inferiority, or, if you prefer, the superiority of Islam. The greatest transformation that could possibly take place in the Oriental world, would be the birth of national feeling quite distinct from religious belief. And even in the case of Asiatic or European Mohammedans, such as the Albanian Arnauts, and the Syrian Arabs, it would seem, at times, as though nationality were already faintly trying to free itself from religion ; but Mohammedanism has riveted them so closely together that even if they can ever become detached it will take generations to accomplish the separation. With the Eastern Christians, however, in contradistinction to the Mohammedans, religion does not generally obliterate national feeling; but it becomes in some sort, blended with it, so that, in their case also, the two feelings seem inseparable. In such a world, where Christians and Moslems regard religion and nationality as identi¬ cal, or make the latter an index to the former, the Israelite, in his turn, can have no nationality but his religion. The Jew is of necessity Jew, just as the Armenian is Armenian and the Greek is Greek. Eet me here remark that wherever different nation¬ alities exist in close proximity to each other and have for centuries been protected by the Church and by distinct modes of worship, as in the case of the people of Syria, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia, the example of the Jew is by no means an isolated one. It is not so much because he is a Jew, as because he is an Oriental or an Asiatic, that he has no nationality out¬ side of his religion. However astounding may appear 6 82 Israel Among the Nations . the longevity of Israel entrenched within her faith and ritual, she does not, as is often imagined, present herein an unique miracle or one without parallel in history ; the world of our day has witnessed like wonders. The Orient has preserved, through the course of centuries, several such dead nations, nations of mummies, as it were, enwrapped and embalmed in the old religion. The Copts of Egypt, the Maronites and Druses of the Libanus, the Parsees of India, even the Armenian and Asiatic Greeks, present, in different stages of preserva¬ tion further instances of peoples or tribes that have survived their political extinction. The great differ¬ ence between these Orientals and the Jews, lies in the fact that the latter are more generally scattered, or that the area of their dispersion is a larger one ; and this, because their uprooting from the native soil is of more ancient date and has been more completely effected. This is also the reason why it is particularly difficult for them ever to reunite into a nation. However this may be, the Jews are but conforming to Oriental traditions wherever they combine to form a separate people. In many countries, where the old con¬ fusion of nationality and religion still survives, emanci¬ pation from such a state of things does not at all depend upon the Jew. Neither the Moslem nor the Asiatic Christian would allow him to call himself Turk or Arab, Greek or Armenian. The Jews there have no choice but to remain a people set apart. They can have no country but Israel. This is so true that, similar to his Aryan or Turanian neighbours, an Asiatic Jew who has changed his faith believes that he has changed his nationality at the same time. Some twenty years ago, whilst in the vicinity of Jerusalem, I had a German Jew for dragoman. I asked him to which nation he The Jews and the National Grievance. 83 belonged. ‘ £ I am an American, ’ ’ he answered proudly. Having been baptised by American missionaries, he believed that he had become their fellow-countryman. In becoming a Christian, he had left his “nation.” Do not the various religious communities in Turkey still designate themselves after this fashion ? This identification of religion with nationality was not always peculiar to the Bast. Intolerance and politics endeavoured to introduce it into the Western mind, sometimes in the interest of Rome, sometimes in that of the reformed faith. It was the principal aim of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Trance, Eng¬ land, Holland, Austro-Hungary, Poland, and in the German and Scandinavian states. If Eouis XIV. and William III. were equally unsuccessful in this attempt, it is because such an identification was con¬ trary to the Western spirit. At a time when it seemed impossible for an Englishman to become a Papist or a Frenchman to become a Protestant, it was quite natural that a Jew could become neither an Englishman nor a Frenchman. Certain European states have not ad¬ vanced beyond this stage ; one, at least, has not, and it is the largest of them all. There, law or public opinion insists on the inseparableness of nationality from religion. From this point of view Russia is still entirely Oriental; more Asiatic than European, Mos¬ cow has had to pay the forfeit of its contact with the Byzantine and the Tartar. I11 Russian eyes there is no true Russian except the members of the Greek Church. The triple immersion of the Orthodox baptismal service is regarded by the imperial government as well as by the peasant as the most trustworthy evidence of Russian nationality. Thence came the official prosefytising of the Most 8 4 Israel A mong the Nations. Holy Synod; thence, the vexations and restrictions imposed on the ministers of the dissenting sects. They are considered foreign sects, not only by the Moscow journals, but also by the government officials ; and, be they Christian or not, they are officially designated as alien faiths. In this respect, the Catholic and the Protestant are not always more leniently regarded than the Israelite. The sole prerogative of the latter is to excite greater aversion. The forces that proceed from Moscow and impel towards national unit}^, and that weigh on all the non-orthodox peoples of the Empire, press most heavily upon the Jew, the “Semite,” doubly a foreigner, by race and by religion. We must guard against a misconception: it is not so much religious, as a sort of national intolerance that causes the persecution of the Jews in Russia. It is the same narrow and jealous patriotism which inspires the Russians with hostility to the Eutherans of the Baltic provinces, the Catholics of Lithuania and White-Russia, and the unfortunate Greek Catholics of Podolia. If Russian patriotism is tinged with religious prejudice, Russia is not entirely to blame for it. History is at fault, more than anything else. 1 The vast Slav empire has not yet been able to free itself from its Oriental past. Holy Russia has not advanced beyond its Byzantine traditions ; at the risk of estranging thirty or forty millions of its subjects, it is trying to find political unity in religious unity. For, as M. E. M. de Vogue once said: “It, also, is an Islam, and, I might add, a more absorbing Islam than the other. As formerly, in Stamboul, he who wished to become a Turk had to take the turban, now, he who wishes to 1 See L' Empire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. iii. : La Religion , book i., chap, ii., and book iv., chap. i. (Hachette, 1889). The Jews and the National Grievance . 85 be considered a Russian must be sprinkled with the waters of the Greek Church.” III. For us Westerners—of Europe or America,—this Eastern point of view is obviously antiquated ; and I believe that such will be the case, before long, with the opinion that identifies nationality, not any longer with religion, but with race. I have heard it said that, since every nation is founded on unity of race, and since the Jews are a separate race, they can never belong to any nation. Are we quite sure of this ? Frankly speaking, the German who makes nationality dependent on unity of race, seems to me not less behind his age than the Russian who makes it dependent on unity of religion. Despite its scientific aspect and its modern air, this confusion of nationality with race be¬ longs to the past, and to a remote past. It is an anti¬ quated notion—an Oriental notion—applicable, at any rate, only to the Orient, where, for centuries, communi¬ ties have lived side by side without intermingling, separated by unsurmountable religious barriers ; w'here each tribe, each national group dwells apart, enclosed in its Church and immured in its ritual. We are thus led back in a roundabout way, to the identification of nationality with religion, for between neighbouring peoples religion alone can interpose inseparable bar¬ riers. To preserve the purity of a race, nothing less than solid walls of ritual will answer. And yet, even in the Orient, we need but go back a short distance to find that the most exclusive ethnic groups—Israel, in the first instance—have by no means always escaped an intermingling with others. If religion locked the 86 Israel A mong the Nations . doors of the ancient national communities of the Levant, it kept the key with which to re-open them. That key was proselytism. The Jews, themselves, will be the means of proving this to us farther on. As to the modern nations of Europe and America, which of them can base its nationality on unity of race ? Is it England, with its blendings of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans ? Is it Trance, with its Cymris, its Gauls, its Iberians, its Teutons, its Romans? Is it Germany, where the Teutons are so largely crossed with Celts on the West and Slavs on the East, that in many German states the majority of natives have no longer the blue eyes and the blond hair of their ances¬ tors ? Is it Russia, ancient Moscow, with its mixture of Scythians, Sarmatians, Slavs, Tartars, and Finns, scarcely Russianised yet ? Can it be the United States of America, that for the past hundred years have re¬ ceived colonists from every European state; or the Spanish-American possessions, that have invented a complete gamut of shades and half-shades to designate the offspring of the crossing of Europeans with Indians and negroes? All modern nations are a mixture of peoples and races, more or less thoroughly blended : Frenchmen, Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians, Greeks, Roumanians, Bulgari¬ ans,—we are all of mixed blood, half-breeds. Whether great or small, Occidental or Oriental, German, Anglo- Saxon, Eatin, or Slav, I cannot discover any modern nation that can lay claim to pure blood. What would be left of France if we Frenchmen were forced to prove our possession of Gallic blood and to accept the principle laid down by some Breton, whose name I have for¬ gotten—“ France for the Celts ” ? “ Yes,” it may be said, “ but all these Celts, Eatins, The Jews and the National Grievance. 87 Germans, and Slavs, these ethnic elements that consti¬ tute the majority of our modem nations, are, after all, homogeneous elements ; we Frenchmen, Italians, Eng¬ lishmen, Germans, and Russians are all related to each other; we come from a common stock,—the Aryans ; we belong to the great Indo-European fam¬ ily, the noblest and most progressive of aU races. The Jew, on the contrary, is a ‘Semite.’ The sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob belong to a heterogeneous race, endowed with instincts contrary to ours. There can be no affinity between Israel and ourselves; the Jew can never be assimilated to us, he cannot become merged in our Aryan nations.” The objection is an old one, but I confess that it does not seem to me a strong one. The argument would have greater weight had none but Aryan elements ever en¬ tered into the composition of modern nations. But our anthropologists have detected in them certain ethnic materials of more humble origin. Underlying the layers of Aryan peoples—Celtic, Latin, Germanic-— they have discovered in this Europe of ours more ancient strata, which appear to have been simply cov¬ ered over by Indo-European deposits. The prehistoric races of Europe—of Cro-Magnon or of Neanderthal— have not been entirely obliterated by the Asiatic Aryans. The quaternary man has some descendants left among us. Nothing warrants the belief that we all are Aryans; the Frenchman or the German who prides himself on his pure Indo-Germanic blood, may have descended from the cave-dwellers. In fact, the existence of an “ Aryan race ’ ’ at the present time is per¬ haps as imaginary as the existence of a “ Latin race.” A truce to prehistoric ages and insoluble problems ! Do we not find in historic Europe—aye, have we not 88 Israel Among the Nations. '' found in several nations of our day—other races as little akin to us as the Jewish Semites? In the midst of our so-called Aryan peoples, I can detect at least two ethnic elements foreign to the Aryan, two races, many members of which still emerge on Euro¬ pean soil despite the flooding of our continent by Aryan immigrations. What are, actually, the Iberians or the Eigurians of Spain and those of the Provence and of Italy ? What are the Finns of Hungary, of Finland, of Russia? Are they, perchance, Aryans? And is the Semite farther removed from us than the Iberians of the Peninsula or the Finns of the Baltic ? I do not believe that such is the opinion of ethnologists. At all events, whoever has been able to compare the Jew to the Esthonians of the Gulf of Finland or to the Tcher- emshin of the Volga, cannot well help seeing that the Semite stands nearer to us than the Finn. Now, if it was possible for the Spanish Iberians, the Finns of Hungary and Finland, to adapt themselves to our Aryan civilisation, it is difficult to see why the Semitic Jew should not be able to do likewise. I do not like to waste time on these ethnographic questions. They are very complex and present great difficulties even to specialists. We commonly ap¬ proach them with a confidence born of ignorance. We speak of a “ Semitic race,” without even being certain that there has ever existed an ethnic group which ought to be so designated. It has been repeatedly re¬ marked that this word Semitic is really only a linguis¬ tic expression ; it corresponds, probably, to no racial group. The Jews are called Semitic because the ancient Hebrews spoke a language called Semitic ; and we are very well aware that a language proves nothing in regard to blood. A nation can change its The Jews and the National Grievance . 89 language without, on that account, changing its race. Because the Irish learnt English they did not become Anglo-Saxon ; and the fact that the negroes of our Antilles speak French does not make them an Aryan race. The term Semite is perhaps more apt to confuse than to clear the question. It does not enlighten us at all as to the origin and ancestry of Israel; it exposes us to the danger of deceptive comparisons and unwar¬ ranted analogies. We shall, however, retain it for want of a better word. Is the Semitic Jew black or yellow ? Is his physical or mental structure so unlike our own as to make his a different sort of humanity, another species or sub-species ? Does his union with our sons or daughters produce mulattoes or half-breeds ? Can we compare the Semites dwelling among us with the Chinese or the negroes of North and South Amer¬ ica ? Does the Jew expose us to troubles such as some states of the great transatlantic Republic have to fear from the emancipated negro ? Do they and we really constitute two races that cannot possibly be blended ? Eet us look at ourselves and then at the Semites; can they be distinguished from us by the color of their skin or the conformation of their skull ? Must w T e not look rather closely to distinguish them ? And even if, in every case, the shape of their nose were to betray them, would we still have a right to say that they have nothing in common with us ? If we accept the vague notions about race and the more or less uncertain classifications which ethnologists offer us, there can be no doubt that we are related to the Semites. Whether it suits them or not, the Aryan and the Semite are brothers ; all their characteristics bear witness to this. Both of them belong to that 9° Israel A mong the Nations . great white race, Caucasian, Mediterranean, or what¬ ever you may please to call it, which claims the dominion of the world. Kven from the ethnological point of view, admitting the reality of an Aryan and of a Semitic group, the Semite is nearer to the Aryan than is the Turanian ; the Jew is often more closely al¬ lied to us than the proud Magyar or the scornful Mus¬ covite, both strongly tinctured with Finno-Turkish blood. And, if leaving aside the obscure problems of race-kinship, we consider the genius, the mind, the talents and the intellectual habits of the Jew, how can we help confessing that the Semite is nearer to us than the Indian Brahmin who boasts of the purity of his Aryan blood ? IV. Aryans, Semites, Turanians, all these are terms that have been singularly misapplied. The history of the world means more than the conflict of races. On this point, the science of the nineteenth century has, perhaps more than once, gone astray. Though the wars of races and tribes have had their share in man’s religious and intellectual development, they have not been its sole factor. One of the causes of the popularity of the race- theory was its apparent simplicity. That should rather have been a reason for mistrust. To-day we realise this fact. After the race-theory, which professed to settle everything according to difference of origin, came the theory of environment, which attempts to account for everything by the influence of place, time, and climate. In allowing for exaggeration on both sides we should, at least, correct and complement one by the other. Take the Iranian and the Turanian, the classic types of The Jews and the National Grievance. 91 racial antagonism ; they seemed to personify two ethnic individualities, standing out boldly from all the rest. Now we see that what they represent is not so much two races as two regions ; the contrast they exhibit lies less in the existence of two hostile spirits than in that of two different countries. The case of the Aryan and that of the Semite are, in many respects, identical. The Semite, shut out from the desert plains of Asia and Africa, loses much of what seemed to constitute his originality. Many of the characteristics so long attributed to the sons of Shem belong in reality to the Arab, and indeed, less to the Arab than to Arabia, less to the man than to the desert. The age is past when all our history was made to re¬ volve about the eternal antagonism between Aryan and Semite. Whatever may be the opinion of university pedants, the raiding of Jewish shops by the peasants of Tittle Russia or the workmen of the suburbs of Vienna, is assuredly not an epilogue to the long duel between Hannibal and Scipio, between Abderaman and Charles Martel, or between Saladin and Cceur de Lion. Neither the Carthaginians nor the Saracens have any¬ thing to do with the quarrels between Pastor Stoecker and the rabbis; and the antagonism that is supposed to exist between the instincts and genius of the Aryans and those of the Semites, exists only for the use that can be made of it in the political campaigns of Prince Aloys of Lichtenstein and Dr. Kronawetter. What is more important: no trace of this legendary hostility between Ayran and Semite is to be found in the He¬ brew books or in the history of Israel. Neither the Old nor the New Testament speaks of it. The Jews never entertained a thought of it. The imprecations of the prophets were launched, by preference, against the Se- 92 Israel Among the Nations. mitic cities and tribes. The Assyrians and the Chal¬ deans, the destroyers of Israel and Jndsea, are consid¬ ered Semites; and the deliverer of the house of Israel, he whom the Jewish God called his Shepherd and his Anointed, he whom Jehovah led by the hand, 1 Cyrus, is considered an Aryan. It is true that at a later period the Jews revolted against the Greeks of Antioch and against the Roman subjects of Titus. But it is equally true that they had quietly submitted to Alex¬ ander and Pompey; and never, to my knowledge, has the Sanhedrim of Jerusalem attempted to deny the conquest of the earth by the Macedonian phalanx or the Roman legions. We must, perforce, discard this notion of a funda¬ mental antagonism between Semite and Aryan. Ever since we have gained a better knowledge of the East and have examined more closely into the peoples of Semitic tongue, we have noticed the gradual appear¬ ance among them of such different habits, beliefs, and modes of government as to make it impossible for us any longer to ascribe the same genius to them all. The notion of the unity of the Semitic spirit has been destroyed ; the simplicity which we liked to ascribe to it has vanished. The intellectual and moral features with which we had endowed the ideal figure of the Semite have faded away, one by one; and the same process has blotted out the contrast between Semite and Aryan. Semitic genius, Semitic instincts, Semitic civilisation, have become mere abstractions. We have had to class in the same group with the Hebrews and the Arabs all the neighbouring peoples who speak simi¬ lar tongues, not only the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, but also the Phoenicians, the Philistines, and the Canaan- 1 Isaiah, xlv., 2, 3. The Jews and the National Grievance. 93 ites, the traditional enemies of the Hebrews, the nations which Israel had always thought alien to herself in blood as well as in faith, the tribes which the Bible classes among the descendants of Ham, and not of Shetn. 1 Hence, from the point of view of religion at least, there can be no distinctively Semitic spirit or Semitic genius. It is a fact that the majority of the Semites were, like the Aryans, for a long time idol-worshippers and poly¬ theists. They also deified the forces of nature, and there is less discrepancy between Semitic and Aryan mythology than between the worship of Baal or of Ashtoreth, and that of the God who spoke from Sinai. Since the time when Semitic epigraphy and the dis¬ covery of Babylon and of Nineveh have made us more intimately acquainted with the Semitic gods, we have been surprised to see how little they differ, on the whole, from those of the Aryans. 2 The differences between these two polytheistic sys¬ tems are steadily becoming less discernible. The Semitic and the Aryan gods, male and female, belong to the same family. To go still farther, Aryan poly¬ theism in its highest manifestation, viz., Greek poly¬ theism, appears now to be completely imbued with the religious traditions of the Semites. Before the advent of the Panagia or the apostle of “ the unknown God,” the Hellenes burned incense to the deities of Syria. The Aphrodite of Praxiteles was born of the foam of Phoenician waters; and even in classic Olympus 1 Genesis, ix., 6, 19. 2 Mr. James Dannesteter’s Les Prophites dIsrael : Race et Tradition. According to the same scholar ( ibidem ): “ The char¬ acteristics of the two families seem to be, in the Aryan mythology the predominance of storm-myths, in the Semitic mythology the predominance of the myths of the seasons.” 94 Israel Among the Nations. Adonis preserved his Asiatic charms, and Cybele her Oriental following. It is then no longer just to say that monotheism is the special property of the “ Semite ” as opposed to the “Aryan.” The monotheistic spirit is peculiar to the Hebrews, the worshippers of Jehovah, and was im¬ parted by them to the Arabs who had been half-judaised by Mahomet. By virtue of this—and the statement is not without significance,—the Jew, the Hebrew, is dif¬ ferent from all other peoples of Semitic tongues. In his racial group he is unique, even more so than the Greek in his. He stands alone, and has not his like among “the nations.” He has not only outstripped them, he has outclassed them. To bring him back into the same class, to bring him down to the level of his Se¬ mitic neighbours, it has been necessary to presuppose in him a primitive polytheism, more or less like that of the Syrian or Phoenician. Jehovah was said to be only a Baal or a Jupiter, who devoured his rivals. But this new theory obliterates the last trace of the old difference between the Semitic and the Aryan spirit. 1 Thus, there is no fundamental religious barrier be¬ tween the Aryan and the Semite ; nothing shows that their instincts are necessarily divergent. In their con¬ ception of the divine there exist no longer irreconcilable differences. Now, it was just the contrast in their religious conceptions that gave rise to belief in the antagonism between the Semitic and the Aryan mind. Given the fallacy of this supposed antagonism, what is 1 Likewise, if in the traditions or ceremonies of Israel Semitic influence is supposed to be discernible, especially that of the Chaldeans, it has been just as easy to detect Jewish influence in the beliefs and the rites of the A^ans of Persia, the followers of Mazdeism. The Jews and the National Grievance. 95 there left, from an intellectual and moral point of view, of the chasm that formerly yawned between the races of Shem and Japhet? Barely a ditch, which modern research is filling in day by day. In speaking to us of Semites, one should at least say what Semites are meant, for, between their various kinds, there is almost as great a difference as between themselves and the Aryans. ‘ ‘ The Semitic genius, ’ ’ has said a master on this subject, 1 “is essentially simple ; it has neither shades nor intricacies. The old Semitic spirit is, in its essence, antiphilosophic and antiscien- tific. The peoples called Semitic are lacking in that versatility, that breadth and amplitude of intellect essential to perfect development. ’ ’ This may be true of the Arabs, despite the schools of Bagdad and Cordova ; it may also be true of the ancient Hebrews ; but can it be said of the Jews of to-day, who have been educated, and have grown up, side by side with us ? If we grant that there is a difference between the European and the Asiatic, the Occidental and the Oriental,—a difference, moreover, of recent date and, as it seems to me, hardly of racial character,—it lies undoubtedly in the idea of progress, that modern notion of perfectibility which we have accepted blindly as a faith, in which the learned as well as the ignorant superstitiously place their trust. But everything tends to prove that this idea of progress contains nothing distasteful to the Jew. Although it has not emanated from him, he absorbs it readily, even to the extent of becoming one of its most ardent and restless disseminators. We cannot well afford to deny a philosophic spirit to the kinsmen of 1 Renan’s Melanges d'Histoire et de Voyages: Les Peuples S£mitiques. Cf. Histoire Generate des Langues Shnitiques , pp. 9 6 Israel A mong the Nations . Spinoza. Besides, is it correct to judge modern nations, or living races, by their most remote historical ances¬ tors ? Fven if the Hebrews of Palestine had been of purest Semitic blood, should we be justified in classing our modem Jews with the Beni-Israel or with the Syrian Semites who lived two or three thousand years ago ? It would be more exact to ascribe to the French all the qualities that characterised the Gauls of Caesar’s Commentaries , or to portray the modern Germans and the Russian Slavs after the fashion of the Germania of Tacitus or the Chronicles of Nestor. Character is that which changes perhaps least in a race ; we can still find in the Frenchmen of the Third Republic certain traits of the Gauls of Vercingetorix. If, then, it is not in respect to his genius or his intel¬ lect, is it in respect to his character and his disposition that the Semite—Jew or non-Jew T —is radically different from us ? This is perhaps nearer the truth ; we shall see later in what sense and for what reason it is true —if not of all Semites, at least of the Jew. 1 This is a .subject on which second-class ethnologists generally give free vent to their imagination, contrasting the vices of the “ Semite ” with the virtues of the “ Aryan.” The one is depicted as eager for gain, covetous, hard¬ hearted, mean, crafty, cringing, vindictive, given to all sorts of cowardice and trickery ; the other as generous, frank, proud, chivalrous, unselfish, and scrupulous, the very essence of nobility and candour. I am inclined to distrust these portraits painted with a very free brush, where one side is all shadow the other all light; the portrayal of ancient races that are composed of twenty different nations, cannot be accom¬ plished by means of so simple an operation. I would 1 Cf. farther on, chap. viii. : Psychology of the Jew , II. The yews and the National Grievance . 97 have something more delicately blended, more finely shaded. The Roman, for instance, was scarcely less unfeeling, obdurate, and harsh than the Carthaginian, and the picture presented to us of the Semite would often quite as well fit the modern Greek, the Armenian, or the Parsee, all of whom are considered Aryans, as the Jew, who is classed as a Semite. “The Semitic character,” says Renan, “is generally hard, narrow, selfish.” This may be true — and not alone of the Arab—although, in the ease of the Jew, the explana¬ tion for it is to be found less in racial characteristic than in historic education. For if this aridity of heart and mind seems prevalent among the Jews, let us not forget that it is largely due to the kind of life we have forced them to lead. There is, at all events, one fact of which we too fre¬ quently lose sight, and which we dare not overlook. When we speak of Semitic harshness and narrowness, we must not forget that the Gospel, than which there is nothing sweeter, gentler, tenderer in all the world, has emanated from the Semitic tribes. Upon that rocky Syrian soil has blossomed the lily of the valley, whose fragrance, after nineteen centuries, still per¬ fumes the world. The most beautiful word in human speech, the word charity, fell from the lips of those sons of Shem. It was the Semites who proclaimed the glad tidings ; it was to a Semitic multitude and in a Semitic dialect that the Sermon on the Mount was preached; and it was by a Semitic people, braving hunger and thirst, that the Nine Beatitudes were re¬ vealed to the ancient world. Here, again, if we would assail Israel in her race, her ancestors, and her Bible, we cannot reach her without touching Christ. Did not the Saviour himself say to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s 7 98 Israel Among the Nations . well: “ Salvation comes from the Jews.” It is strange that the Christian should have forgotten this ; the Cross of Renunciation was borne to us on Jewish shoulders; that cross which scandalised all Greece, and which, for three or four centuries, the faithful dared to show to the worshippers of the gods of Paros only when it was veiled with mystic emblems. The blood that flowed on Calvary for the redemption of mankind, the blood that our old painters picture to us caught up in chalices and golden bowls by the hands of angels, was Jewish blood, Semitic blood. Neither Maty, mother of Jesus, nor John, his well-beloved dis¬ ciple, nor Simon, called Cephas, nor any of the Twelve Apostles, was of Aryan descent. Whoever would go back to the very beginning, especially he who believes that the Church, from its incipiency, has been established and governed by the Apostles, must consider Christianity itself a product of Semitism : it is no less so than Judaism. We are often told of the Semitic conquest; if the world was indeed conquered by the Semites, it was with the sword of Paul of Tarsus, the Christian Hannibal or Alexander. The battle of Cannae was not the greatest victory of the Semite. Where the son of Hamilcar was defeated, the little Jew of Cilicia triumphed. Through his agency and that of the Apostles the proud promises of Israel’s seers were realised, and the Aryan world, both Greek and Roman, was made to bow beneath the sceptre of the son of David. The empire established by the Roman legions was bequeathed to the heirs of the Galilean fishermen. The statues of the Caesars were thrown from their bases, and the impercitores who most fitly represented Roman prowess and Greek wis¬ dom, the Trajans and the Marcus-Aureliuses, were The yews and the National Grievance . 99 hurled from their marble pillars, to make room for Peter and Paul, the captains of Jesus of Nazareth. The she-wolf of Romulus, that had subjugated the Carthaginian elephants, was, in her turn, thrown to the ground by the lion of Israel. “ Vicit leo de tribu Juda ” is engraved on the base of Nero’s monument, erected by Sixtus V. in front of St. Peter’s at Rome. The Church is right: the Nazarene has conquered. This was the real Semitic conquest, and the Aryan spirit has never recovered from it. The most consist¬ ent, perhaps the only really logical, Antisemites are those who, to rid themselves of the Semitic yoke, re¬ ject the New as well as the Old Testament, the man¬ ger of Bethlehem and the tablets of Sinai . 1 The Slav or the Teuton who is unwilling to owe anything to the sons of Shem ought to go back to the Aryan gods, to Zeus, to Odin, to Perun of the golden beard—unless he prefers to substitute the emanations of the imper¬ sonal Brahma for the creative God of Genesis. It is only by freeing itself from all Christian ideas that the world can be ‘ ‘ desemitised. ’ 1 1 In this connection I must mention two books, little known, in which the chief charge against “ Semitism ” is that it gave birth to Christianity. The one, published towards the end of the Second Empire, is Le Molochisme Juif, by Tridon, who be¬ came later a member of the Commune of 1871 ; the other, dated 1890 (Dentu), is called Aryans et Semites : Le Bilan dii Judaisme et du Christianisme , by A. Reguard, vol. i., the only one published. CHAPTER V. ARE) TH^ JFWS PURF SFMITFS ? I. Israel’s Blood does not Seem to be Free from All Admixture —Proselytes in Olden Times — Their Importance, their Diffusion—Other Converts : The Khazars—The Fear of Conversion to Judaism as One of the Causes of the Re¬ striction of the Jews—Judaising Sects—II. The Semitic Type—It is not Fqually Pronounced in All Jews ; there are at least Several Sub-Types—Karaites and Samaritans— Jews by Religion who do not Appear to be Jews by Race— Sephardim and Askenazim : How and Why they Differ— The Modern Jew is the Artificial Product of the System of Sequestration. I. But enough of ancient Jews. Are the modern Jews pure Semites? Are we even sure that there is such a thing as a Jewish race, or that the European, the Asiatic, and the African Israelites are all alike the sons of Jacob and the descendants of the Beni-Israel from the land of Canaan ? There is no proof of this. For a long time we believed, on the strength of the Jewish statements themselves, that, with respect to Judaism, race and religion were correlated terms, not to be .sepa¬ rated. But this view does not always coincide with the testimony of history. It is quite permissible to question the purity of ioo Are the Jews Pure Semites f IOI Israel’s blood . 1 The Jew, in his eventful wanderings of twenty centuries among a hundred different nations, seems to have undergone cross-breeding more than once. From the oldest times down to the end of the Middle Ages, many streams of alien blood have filtered into the veins of Jacob’s descendants. The Jews did not even await their dispersal to ally themselves with the sons and daughters of other nations. These ethnic interminglings date at least as far back as the Baby¬ lonian captivity. Even if Israel had escaped all cross¬ breeding under the willows of the Euphrates, it would have been difficult for the colonists, sent from Assyria to the kingdom of the Jews, to have left no descendants but the Samaritans, who, moreover, had themselves become gradually merged in the Jews. The question of mixed marriages was one that caused much trouble in Jerusalem after the return of the Jews from captivity. It was in vain that the restorers of Zion, the Ezras and the Nehemiahs, forbade all intermarriage with strange women ; the repeated prohibitions of the reformers of the fifth century b.C. prove how frequent such unions had become. The Book of Ruth the Moabitess is an evidence of this ; certain exegetists have even believed this patriarchal idyl to be a plea against the extremists, and in favour of foreign wives. Matters were quite dif¬ ferent during the Greek and also during the Roman period. It was no longer only Canaanite, Syrian, or Chaldean blood, but Greek, Egyptian, Latin, perhaps even Gallic and Spanish blood that flowed through 1 The families whose blood has remained purest are probably those of the Cohanim, the old priests of the Temple, who still, in many cases, bear the Hebrew names of Cohen, Kahn, Cohn, etc., and who were obliged to abstain more scrupulously from unions with strangers. 102 Israel Among the Nations . various channels into the old Semitic blood. Until quite recently it was believed that the diffusion of the Jews, either just before or after the fall of the Temple, was a fact of purely ethnological significance, the re¬ sult of the emigration of the Jews from Palestine. But that was a narrow view ; the modern expansion of Judaism in Egypt, in Asia Minor, even in Europe prior to the Christian era, is largely a fact of moral significance ; it is in great part due to Jewish propa¬ ganda. In this respect again the Jews were the fore¬ runners, the pioneers as it were, of Christianity ; they hewed a path for it in the Occident as well as in the Orient. They opened to it in advance the doors of the Gentile nations by converting pagans of every race to the Mosaic Law. It was in the Synagogue, from the ranks of Jewish colonists and proselytes, that the apos¬ tles recruited their first disciples . 1 The Jews who lived during the time of the Asmoneans and of Herod did not feel the same aversion to proselytising as did the rabbis later on. Far from it; the Hellenist Jews who came into contact with the Gentiles, sought to win over Greek and barbarian alike to the worship of the true God. Not daring to appeal to them in the words of Isaiah or Daniel, the Alexandrians replaced the prophets with the old sibyls, whose duty it was to de¬ clare to the pagans the unity of God, the coming of the Messiah, and the future glory of Israel . 2 Classic antiquity was not deaf to the voice of its own oracles, thus changed into echoes from Zion. At a 1 The fact is repeatedly proved in the Acts of the Apostles, passim. 2 Gaston Boissier’s La Fin du Paganisme , vol. ii., pp. 23-24 (Hachette, 1891). The Sibylline books have generally been written by Jews. Are the yews Pure Semites ? 103 time when in Egypt, Persia, and Syria the Oriental gods, veiled behind mystic rites, assailed the frigid Pantheon of the Graeco-Roman world, Jewish mono¬ theism exerted an attraction which turned people from the old Raw and soon led them to the new . 1 On this point the old writers all agree, be they Jews, Greeks, or Romans. “ Great masses,” says the historian Josephus, “ have grown enthusiastic over our manner of worshipping God ; so much so, that there is not a single Greek or barbarian town, nor any nation, which does not observe our Sabbath, our fast- and feast-days, and our dietary laws.” 2 Judtea in Palestine was then scarcely more than the nucleus of Judaism. The prediction of the prophets seemed for a moment on the point of being realised ; it appeared as though the nations were about to set out for Jerusalem in order to worship there. The sibyls 1 See, notably, Renan’s Les Origines de Christianisme, vol. v., p. 227 and following ; cf. Kuenen’s Judaisme et Christianisme (Revue de VHistoire des Religions , vol. vii., No. 2, 1883, p. 208, No. 9) ; Graetz’s Die Judischen Proselyten im Romerreich (Breslau, 1884) ; Isr. Sack’s Die Altjudische Religion (Berlin, i88 9 )> PP- 384-87. 2 Josephus, Contre Apion , ii., 39. The statement of the Jewish writer is corroborated by the Christian author of the Acts of the Apostles (ii., 5): “And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jew T s, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.” Then follows an enumeration of all the ancient peoples, from the Medes, the Parthians, to the inhabitants of Rome, and in this crowd the sacred writer mentions expressly the “proselytes” besides the real Jews: “ And the strangers from Rome, Jews, and proselytes ” (Acts ii., 10). And also in the cities and synagogues of Asia and of Europe, wherever the Apostles preached, the Acts point out everywhere the prose¬ lytes besides the original Jews; thus, xiii., 17 ; xiv., 1 ; xvi., 14 ; xvii., 4 and 17 ; xviii., 4 and 7, etc. 104 Israel Among the Nations . had not been mistaken. Isis, Serapis, Zeus, and all the other gods had to succumb to the God of Israel. Had not the world become Christian it might, perhaps, have become Jewish. Eor it was not only the belief in the unity of God and in the morality of the Decalogue, it was not even exclusively the observance of the Sabbath and the Jew¬ ish prayers, that the pagans, converted to the faith of Israel, had accepted ; the ritual practices were also adopted, and, to begin with, that one which is the distinctive sign of the descendants of Abraham, cir¬ cumcision. Side by side with the simple proselytes who had gone but half-way, God-fearing men, like the centurion Cornelius converted by Saint Peter , 1 walked Gentiles, who had scaled the final barriers and had adopted, with the bloody seal of the sons of Jacob, every one of the Jewish customs. On this question Jewish and pagan antiquity have given us categorical statements. Josephus says, ex¬ plicitly, that the Jewish community of Alexandria 2 was largely composed of Greeks. Many of the Jews of Cyrene, Antioch, and Palmyra, the great Jewish com¬ munities of the Orient, seem also to have been of Greek, or Graeco-Egyptian blood . 3 The Jews who had become Greeks were mingled with the Greeks who had become Jews. What is most surprising is that, even in Rome itself, this was sometimes the case. Juvenal, in 1 Acts of the Apostles, x., 2. 2 Josephus, Guerre desjuifs , bookvii., ch. iii., 3 ; Renan ( Le Judaisme comine Race et comme Religion , 1883) has gathered the principal Greek and Latin texts which show the frequency of these conversions to Judaism. 3 See Mommsen’s Romische Geschichte, vol. v. (1885), pp. 492-494. Are the Jews Pure Semites? 105 the famous passage of liis 14th Satire, makes a dis¬ tinction between the simple proselytes and those who had been entirely converted to Judaism. He shows us the fathers, content merely to observe the Sabbath and abstain from pork, while the sons, transcending the paternal zeal, go to the length of circumcision : Mox et prceputium ponunt , saj^s the satirist of the first century, in his forcible Eatin. 1 At about the same time Tacitus, in speaking of all sorts of recruits that had been won over to Judaism, sa}^s the same thing in his elliptical language. 2 In the second century the Emperor Anto¬ ninus thought it necessary to forbid the Jews from cir¬ cumcising any but their own sons. Even in the third century, towards the year 225, Dio Cassius, a senator, in alluding to the Palestinian wars, says that, besides the original Jews of Judaea, “ there are other men who, although of a different race, have adopted the laws of the people. ’ ’ 3 “ And, ’ ’ continues the old consul, ‘ ‘ there are amongst the Romans many such persons ; every ef¬ fort to stop them only seems to increase their number.” Even if this last passage should partly allude to Christians, such statements compel us to believe that in the Orient as well as the Occident a great portion of the ancient Jews were the descendants of converted pagans. Such Israelites were only the adopted sons of Abraham and Jacob. Even the Roman Jews, whose catacombs can be seen on the Appian Way or on the Via Portuensis , had perhaps not much purer Semitic 1 Juvenal’s Satires , xiv., verse 95. 2 Circumcidere genitalia instituere ut diver si tate noscantur. Transgressi in morevt eorum , idem usurpant. (Tacitus, His¬ tories, book v., 5.) 3 Kcrirtsp akhosOveiS ovte$, Dio Cassius, book xxxvii., ch. xvii. 106 Israel Anion f the Nations . o blood than their Christian neighbours, now lying in the cemeteries of Calixtus and of Pontianus, where the oldest inscriptions are likewise in the Greek language. Hence we are not justified in continuing to regard Israel as an ethnic unit, free from all intermixture, espe¬ cially as in the very beginning of the race the Asmo- neans and the Herods, observing in their practice the compelle intrare , introduced into Judaism, by means of circumcision, great hordes of people from Idumaea, Iturea, the Hauran, and the neighbouring districts of Syria. The influx of alien blood did not cease even dur¬ ing the Talmudic age when vanquished Israel shut her¬ self up in her own shell. After having been on the verge of becoming a universal religion, Judaism actually reverted to the stage of a national religion. The rabbis, fearing to see Israel absorbed by the other nations, or merged in Christianity, took pains to isolate the Jew. The proselytes were treated as pests, as lepers of Israel. The Synagogue closed its doors and withdrew within itself; but, despite the antipathy of the rabbis, a num¬ ber of proselytes contrived to slip into it, especially on the outmost borders of the Jewish world. We see Jews making converts in Arabia ; tribes of Arabs are won over, in a body, to the Mosaic law. Mohammed is the disciple of the Jews, and Islamism is only a crude adaptation of Judaism. Even in Europe, Jewish missionaries contended with Christian missionaries for the Ponto- Caspian regions. Towards the eighth century, to the north of the Black Sea, in the Scythian Steppes, a people of Finno-Turk- ish stock, the Kozars or Khazars, went over in a body to the old Eaw. 1 This is perhaps not the only instance 1 According to the Chronicle called De Nestor (ch. xl., trans¬ lated by B. Beger), Khazar Jews proposed to Vladimir, Prince of Kief, then still a pagan, that he should also become con- Are the Jews Pitre Semites ? 107 of such conversions on the confines of Europe and Asia. In Tiflis I was told that there exists in the Caucasus a Jewish tribe of warlike habits, and differing from the other Israelites both in looks and manners. An attack of fever prevented my visiting them. It is probable that those Jewish mountaineers are related to the native Caucasians. 1 In the West we have nothing analogous to this conversion of Khazars in a bulk. From the time of the Merovingians there were many Jews in Gaul and Spain. Were all the Israelites, at the time of Gregory of Tours, really full-blooded Jews who had entered Gaul by the way of the Rhone and the Saone? Or were many of them simply Gauls who had been converted to Judaism ? Renan, and several scholars who wrote before him, concur in the latter opinion. 2 Unfortunately, we have no absolute evi- verted to Judaism. In the Monumenta Historica Polonies of Bielowski (vol. i., p. 50 and following) may be found a letter from the Khazar King Joseph to the rabbi of Cordova, Kazdai, in which the Khazar chieftain says formally: “Our fathers have accepted the Israelitish faith ; God has opened their eyes,” and he relates how the conversion of one of his predecessors was effected, after a strict scrutiny of the various religions, similar to that attributed by the Chronique de Nestor to the Russian Vladimir. Prom the Khazars comes the name of Khozari, given by the poet of the Middle Ages, Jehuda Halevy, to his great philosophico-religious work. 1 Perhaps they were confounded with the Jews of Daghestan, called in Turkish Dagh Tchoufout (Jews of the Mountain), former emigrants from Persia, still speaking or writing the Per¬ sian language in many cases; a large number of them have become Tartars. 2 E. Renan, ibidem . It is a notable fact that the scholar who took pains to destroy the old conception of Judaism looked upon as a separate race, is the very one who did most to spread among us the theory of races, and who even seemed to base all religious history on the antagonism between Aryan and Semite. io8 Israel Among the Nations . dence on this point, which is all the more to be regretted because the Jewish communities of England and Ger¬ many came from those of France. Even if they were originally of the blood of Israel, the Jews of Gaul and Spain certainly received, through various channels and at different periods, an infusion of native blood. The mixture of Jewish and Christian blood, which after the Crusades took place only through the conversion of the Jews and to the advantage of the Christians, inured not infrequently in the first half of the Middle Ages to the advantage of the Jews. There were in this earlier period two doors that led'from the Church into the Synagogue, and that the Church found it difficult to close—slavery and marriage. As to slavery, there can be no doubt; the traffic in slaves was lucrative, and the Jews took to it like clever traders, often circumcising their human merchandise, in order to reconcile religious piety with wordly inter¬ ests. The decrees of the councils and the actions of popes and bishops bear testimony to this. One of the principal cares of the bishop, especially in Slav coun¬ tries,—and truly a most legitimate care,—was the spir¬ itual protection of the slaves held by the Jews. Their masters were forbidden from converting them to Judaism. Finally, the Jews were prohibited from cir¬ cumcising pagan slaves and from owning Christian slaves. To this same solicitude is due the law which forbade Jews to employ Christian servants, whether male or female. This prohibition, enforced in the Greek and Catholic Churches, was until recently a part of the Russian law. 1 Not long ago an attempt was made to put it again into practice. 1 See, for instance, Orcliauski’s Rousskoe Zako?iodcitelstvo o Evreiakh , p. 59 and following. A re the Jews Pure Semites ? 109 It was the same with marriage. The command that had so often to be repeated, debarring Jews from inter¬ marriage with Christians and vice vei r sa, proves what difficulty the clergy of both creeds experienced in their attempts to prevent such unions. The Christians did not then feel the aversion to the Jew with which he has since inspired them. In the eyes of the newly baptised barbarians, Judaism was a religion like any other, a sort of heretical or Christian sect. In the West, at Tyons, the Archbishop Agobard complained, as Chrysostomus of Antioch had done four centuries earlier, that the Christians took part in Jewish festivals and listened to the sermons of the rabbis. It cost the Church a pro¬ longed effort to make all her children distinguish clear¬ ly between the old and the new Taw. The necessity of drawing a sharp line of demarcation between the two religions, was one of the causes of the premature rigours of the canon law against the Jews. It was not the desire of the Church to persecute the remnants of Israel, nor to arouse against them the fanaticism of the igno¬ rant masses ; what it wanted, above all was to separate the Mosaic Taw from the Taw of Christ, to prevent the two from being confounded and receiving the same degree of respect. 1 Perhaps this was also one of the reasons for its aversion to placing the Old Testament in the hands of laymen. The harsh rules against the Jews adopted at an early period by the canon law, originated in the desire to isolate him from the Christians in order to remove the faithful among them from the pale of his influence. Accordingly, the Middle Ages were gradually led to 1 This truth was honestly admitted by an Israelitish scholar, Isidore I v oeb; Nouveau Dictionnaire de Gtographie Univer- selle (art. Juifs , p. 998). I IO Israel Among the Nations . erect a wall between Jew and Christian. The Church did not feel reassured until it had surrounded the flock of Christ with a paling sufficiently high to protect its fold against the allurements of the Jewish ritual. It must not be forgotten that among the heresies which the Church had to combat, there are several of Jewish tendency ; that sometimes even Judaism seems to have gained converts in spite of itself. We must bear in mind that in Russia, at Novgorod and at Mos¬ cow, “ judaising Jews ” were very powerful during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; that, to this very day, there are left scattered among the people, certain com¬ munities of soubbotniki or Sabbatists, who have adopted, besides the respect for the Sabbath, several injunctions of the old Raw. 1 I have even heard of a group of sec¬ tarians in the Caucasus who are said to have engaged Jews to read to them the prayers in Hebrew. These Sabbatists were at one time believed to have been origin¬ ally of Jewish race, a sort of Russian Marranos forced into conversion. The contrary, rather, is true : they are genuine Christians, attracted by the Jewish customs. If it is certain that alien blood, pagan or Christian, flows in Jewish veins, it is still more certain that the Christian nations have an admixture of Jewish blood. 1 See L*Empire des Tsars etles Russes , vol. iii.; La Religion , book iii., ch. x. Scotch missionaries of the middle of the cen¬ tury encountered in Palestine, at Saphed, a Russian converted to Judaism, and they said that the case was not an isolated one. {Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the fews front the Church of Scotland in 1839. Anonymous, Edinburgh, 1844, p. 283.) In Poland also, conversions to Judaism have been fre¬ quently noted especially in the sixteenth century. See, for example, Hermann Sternberg’s Geschichte der Juden in Polen unter den Piasten und den Jagellonen (Leipzig, 1878), chap, xxiii., pp. 114, 115. Are the yews Pure Semites ? 111 For whole centuries, thousands of Jewish families have been gathered to the bosom of Christianity, by means of conversion, forced or voluntary. There is probably not a single European, and hence not a single Ameri¬ can nation that is quite free from all admixture with the Semitic Jew. From the Spain of the Visigoths to the Germany of the Crusades, and from the Nuevos Cris- tianos of Castile, or the Marra 7 ios of Portugal, to the Frankists of Poland, all have been subjected at differ¬ ent periods to an infiltration of Jewish blood. Who can tell how many of Israel’s children have during the past fifteen centuries been filched from her by bap¬ tism, whether optional or compulsory ? Their number must be counted by millions. In view of the rapid nu¬ merical increase of the Jews, during the few centuries since their emancipation, it is fair to suppose that, if in each generation the Church had not robbed Judaism of thousands of its members, they would to-day be four or five, perhaps even ten, times more numerous than they actually are. By just so much have the Christian countries been the gainers. Some of them, like Spain and Portugal, have absorbed so much Jewish blood, that they have become, as it were, completely impreg¬ nated w T ith it. From the time of the edicts of Theodosius and Hera- clius to the French Revolution, Israel has been like an island or an archipelago whose borders, swept by the waves, have crumbled piecemeal into the ocean, until more than once it seemed threatened with complete submersion. Of all the descendants of Jacob only a small part, perhaps even only an infinitesimal minority, has remained faithful to the religion of its fathers. The great majority of the twelve tribes have accepted the yoke of the Cross ; they have long since become merged I 12 Israel A mong the Nations . in us ; the waters of baptism have swept them out among the nations of the world. We Christians can never be sure that we do not number, among our an¬ cestors, some unrecognised Northern or Southern Jew. When we consider the amalgamation that has been in progress for centuries in the one direction or the other, it is difficult for us to ascribe the antipathy between Jew and Christian to the eternal antagonism between the Semite and the Aryan. II. That which history causes us to suspect is con¬ firmed by anthropology and the study of the living man. The Jewish race is not pure ; all the Jews can¬ not be considered Semites, any more justly than all the Christians can call themselves Aryans. To begin with, what do we mean by Semitic type ? For an unmis¬ takable instance of it we are often directed to the Chal¬ deans and the bas-reliefs of Nineveh. Indeed, I know some Jews who seem to have stepped from the very walls of the palace at Khorsabad, but these are few in number. To those who do the most talking and writ¬ ing about it, the Semitic type is commonly nothing but the Jewish type, and the Jewish type itself is not so uniform or so strictly defined as is often imagined. The best proof of this is that, in order not to be con¬ founded with the Jews, the Christians and Moslems have, for centuries, set distinctive marks upon them. To this day it is difficult to decide whether there is one Jewish type, or whether there are several. As for myself, I am inclined to believe—Renan to the contrary notwithstanding 1 —that there is a predominant 1 Le Judaisme comme Race ct comme Religion. Are the Jews Pure Semites ? 113 Jewish type, which may be called Semitic. Rembrandt has left us admirable studies of it in the Hermitage / A long and generally an oval face, a narrow forehead ; thick arched eyebrow T S, often almost running together; large and sometimes blinking eyes, with heavy lids, that give the eyes a half-closed appearance ; a long, curved nose, pinched at the base ; rather thick lips, and a somewhat receding chin ; such is, it seems to me, the classical Jewish type. But we must acknowledge that it does not fit all Jews. Kven the distinguishing feature of Israel, the Semitic feature, if there be such a one,—the hooked nose,—is not found in all Jews. Still less do they all have the black hair and eyes, or slightly prognathous face, noticeable in some of them. 2 There are certain secondary or sub-types among them which give evidence of different crosses. Thus, the Jews of different countries can often be recognised at first sight. We must, however, at the outset, omit certain Jewish groups that have, perhaps, not a drop of Hebrew blood in their veins. For in¬ stance, the black Jews of Abyssinia, the two hundred thousand Falachas , manifestly of African blood. In certain countries even, there are Jews who live side by side without intermingling, and whose difference in origin is shown by the colour of their skin. In Bombay 1 To the portraits of Rembrandt, taken after the Sephardim or Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, may be likened the Jews of the painter Munkaczy in his great painting, Christ before Pilate. See also the Jewish Stories of Sacher-Masoch, in which all the illustrations are by Israelitish artists. It will be seen that in their efforts to accentuate the distinguishing features of the race, the illustrators have frequently caricatured them. (Paris, 1888, Quantin.) 2 Ces. Pombroso et Laschi, Le Crime Politique et les Revolu¬ tions (French edition, Alcan, 1892), vol. i., pp. 148, 149. 8 114 Israel Among the Nations. three kinds of Jews are to be seen : white Jews, like those of the Levant; brownish, dark-skinned Jews, called by the old name of Beni-Israel, and believed to be indigenous to India ; and black Jews, seemingly de¬ scendants from ancient negro slaves who had been con¬ verted. In Persia also we notice two kinds of Jews of different physical types. Among European Jews there is not so marked a contrast. But even where they are not separated by custom into distinct groups, a careful observer often detects among them types, or sub-types, im¬ perfectly blended. And this is true not only of the great Jewish communities of the East; we find, every¬ where, tall and short Jews, dark and blond ones. We see them with black eyes and with blue eyes, with flat or with turned-up noses, as well as with thin and with hooked noses. The same variety exists in the shapes of the skulls and the frames. The Jews of all countries do not possess the same anthropological characteristics ; they vary sometimes in Jews of the same country. In this respect we do not, as a rule, meet with characteris¬ tics sufficiently constant to be able to differentiate the Israelites sharply from their neighbours of other reli¬ gions. 1 1 One must not attach too much importance to the “ cephalic indication ” of the Jews. The observations bear, as yet, on too small a number of individuals. According to Pruner-Bey and Lombroso, the Jews of Africa and Italy are rather dolicho¬ cephalic or sub-dolichocephalic. According to the measure¬ ments taken by Kopernilci and Majer, the Polish Jews are, generally, brachycephalic, or sub-brachycephalic. Likewise, although in the case of a number of Israelites it has been proved that the length of limb is not in proportion to that of the trunk, this is by no means a general fact. (See article Juifs in Nouveau Dictionnaire de Geographie Universelle.) Are the yews Pure Semites ? 115 Among all the groups that profess to trace their de¬ scent from Jacob, perhaps the two most interesting, cer¬ tainly the most remarkable, are the Karaites and the Samaritans. Both of these peoples reject the Talmud, and have been separated for centuries from the bulk of Israel. I visited them both, animated by the curi¬ osity of a naturalist who stands in the presence of a species about to become extinct. It was interesting to me to compare them with the Talmudic Jews of the same regions. O11 Mount Gerizim I found the remnants of the Sa¬ maritans gathered beneath three tents for the celebra¬ tion of one of their feasts; they still encamp annually, at certain times, on the sacred hill, Mt. Ephraim. On the following day I repaired to their synagogue at Nablus and had a conversation with their rabbi, while he showed me their famous manuscript of the Penta¬ teuch , the only book whose authority they recognise. “ We are a hundred and eighty Samaritans,” said to me in English the chief of their tribe, as he unrolled the old scroll before me. ‘ ‘ Our religion has doubtless fewer followers than any other, but that is no reason why it should not be the true one. ’ ’ I must confess that I found nothing peculiarly characteristic in the faces of these Samaritans, separated from the rest of the Israelites for twenty centuries. They appeared to me only taller, sturdier, of more robust health, than the neighbouring orthodox Jews. From a physical point of view these Samaritans, who will perhaps have com¬ pletely disappeared within a hundred years, are indis¬ putably superior to their hostile brothers in Israel ; perhaps for the reason that, having been spared the bitter exile of the latter, they have had to endure less suffering and degradation. The Bible tells us that the 116 Israel A mong the Nations . Samaritans come from a mixture of Hebrews and of Assyrian colonists who settled in Samaria. The fact that none of them are left is perhaps due to the en¬ trance of so large a number into the pale of orthodox Judaism. Although they had separated from the rest of Israel twelve or fifteen centuries after the Samaritans, the Karaites 1 whom I visited—at least those in the Crimea —seemed to me to differ still more from the other branches of Jacob. They profess to be the sole repre¬ sentatives of the pure Mosaic Taw ; the other Jews, the Talmudists, having substituted the authority of the rabbis for that of the Bible. This sect is supposed to have arisen in the middle of the seventh century, in Babylonia, then the intellectual centre of Israel. Al¬ though they had formerly numerous communities in Asia, Kurope, and even in Africa, these Jewish protes- tants number, to-day, scarcely five or six thousand, more than one half of whom are grouped together in the Crimea. They also have probably become merged little by little, in the orthodox Jews; swallowed up in Talmudic Judaism. In the mountains above Baktchi-Sarai, a Tartar vil¬ lage, I made a pilgrimage to Tchufut-Kale, the dead city of the Karaites, and to the old adjoining cemetery which they call their Valley of Jehoshaphat. The Jerusalem of the Jews of Tabreez is now deserted ; its inhabitants have descended into the plains, and its houses lie in ruin. The Karaites have preserved a syna¬ gogue there, to which they ascend on certain festivals. 1 Karaim or Karaites, from kara (to read) or from mikra (Bible), because, contrary to the Jews called rabbinites , they admit no authority but that of the Old Testament, rejecting tradition and the rabbinical decisions. Are the Jews Pure Semites ? 117 In the midst of fragments of old manuscripts and half-effaced scrolls of the Thor a, I found an aged, white-bearded rabbi, who seemed the personification of his expiring religion. These Crimean Karaites, a part of whom are still husbandmen, possess scarcely any typical Jewish features. 1 They are more like their Tartar neighbours of Baktchi-Sarai. Their appearance is scarcely more Semitic in character than are many of the names inscribed on the grave-stones in their wild Valley of Jehoshaphat. In this ancient cemetery of Tabreez,Firkovitch has discovered Hebraic inscriptions of the eighth century, bearing Turkish names, such as Toktamich, in Hebrew characters. This Toktamich was doubtless a Tartar, a converted Nogai, or rather—since the inscription is of earlier date than the Mongolian invasion—a Khazar, at any rate a Finno-Turc, a Turanian. “Would a Jew of Palestine,” asks Renan, “have ever called himself Toktamich in preference to Abraham, Tevi, or Jacob ? ” These Crimean Karaites are more likely to be the prose¬ lytes, than the descendants, of the Babylonian Karaites. They have, perhaps, not a single drop of Jewish blood in their veins, similarly to many of the neighbouring Tartars, who have hardly any Tartar blood, being only the offshoots of ancient Goths or ancient Greeks, grad¬ ually converted to Mohammedanism under the empire of the Crimean Khans. 2 As between the Karaite Jew who believes himself descended from Jacob, and the 1 Likewise, morally, they are said to differ frequently from the other Jews, having neither their good nor their bad qualities. This is supposed to be one of the reasons why the Russian laws are much less harsh towards them. 2 See DEmpire des Tsars et les Rtisses , vol. i., book ii., chap. iii. 118 Israel Among the Nations . so-called Tartar who prides himself on his Turkish ori¬ gin, the Mussulman is, possibly, the less of a Turk or Tartar. These Crimean Karaites are probably not the only subjects of the Czar who are Jews by religion, but not by race. They are sometimes believed to have come from the old Khazars, that Scythian people converted to Judaism. Is it not probable that among the four millions of Russian Jews, thousands can be traced to the old nomads of the steppes ? The study of the Jew¬ ish types of Poland and Rittle-Russia inclines us to believe so. A Finno-Turkish blend seems to be com¬ mon among them. One day at Warsaw I visited the Jewish trade schools in the company of a learned Polish friend. He pointed out to me three or four different types in the Hebrew children assembled there : the first and the most familiar to us, my guide called the dis¬ tinctively Jewish or Semitic type; another, he traced from the Khazars or the Turanians, and its distinguish¬ ing feature was a short (often a snub) nose, and promi¬ nent cheek-bones ; a third type showed a low forehead, thick lips, and a dark complexion which seemed to him to suggest an African strain ; and finally, there was a fourth, with blond hair and blue eyes, which was more like the Aryan or Teutonic type. The fact is that the Jews of Russia display differences of feature and gen¬ eral appearance which can be accounted for only by dif¬ ference of origin. Similar observations might be made in Jerusalem, Berlin, Vienna, Rondon, and even in Paris,—in fact, wherever Israelites of different countries have come together. Must these modifications in the Jewish type be ascribed entirely to a mixture of races? No, for we ought assuredly to make allowance for the influence Are the Jews Pure Semites ? 119 of environment. The Jew retains the imprint of the countries and climates through which his ancestors have passed. Israel could not have wandered from the Ksour of Sahara to the Aouls of the Turcoman steppes, and from the orange-trees of the Guadal¬ quivir to the birches of the Duna, living for two thousand years under the most different skies, without having felt the effect of such changes. This furnishes another explanation for the differences that prevail among the Jews, even in those cases where Jewish blood has undergone the least admixture. It is known that history has divided the sons of Jacob into two large groups, of unequal numerical strength: the Sephardim and the Askenazim, the Jews of the South, called Portuguese or Spanish Jews, and the Jews of the North called German or Polish Jews. 1 We must not overlook the fact that this is a purely historical or geographical classification which has nothing to do with the old tribes of Israel. The tribal distinctions have been supplanted by new classifications differing according to language and place of birth. The Sephardim and the Askenazim do not differ alone in their traditions and rites ; both frequently dis¬ play in their features the traces of the migrations to which the intolerance of ages has condemned them. Of the two groups, the Sephardim seem freer from for¬ eign admixture. They have always deemed themselves 1 Sephardim comes from Sepharad (Abadias 20) the biblical name of an unknown land which the Jews believed to be Spain; Askenazim comes from Askenaz, son of Gomer, son of Japhet, (Genesis, x., 3), supposed ancestor of the Germans. Among the Sephardim of to-day, by far the less numerous, may be included the Italian Jews and those of Avignon and of the south of France. I 20 Israel Among the Nations . the elite of the nations ; formerly they constituted a sort of aristocracy among themselves, and did not wish to be confounded with the other Jews. Having lived for a long time in the midst of Semites or half-Semites, they have presumably a larger proportion of Semitic blood. As a rule, their features are more delicate ; it is among the Sephardim of both sexes that the most beautiful examples of the Jewish type are to be found which, in their case, sometimes assumes a nobility rarely met with in the Jews of the North. In the Askenazim the old blood of Israel has been more largely mingled with that of other nations ; it has been, as it were, greatly expanded and diluted with barbarian blood. The race feels the effects of old interminglings with the sluggish peoples of the North-East, while its countenance bears traces of the rigorous Northern cli¬ mate. Its features have, in many cases, grown heavy ; the nose has become larger, the lips thicker ; and these physical variations are often repeated in the character. “ How can you expect,’’ said a Russian to me, “ that, with our long winters, our colds and catarrhs, the Semitic nostrils should retain their Oriental delicacy ? ’ ’ Climate, however, cannot have been sufficient to trans¬ form aquiline noses into pug-noses or into flat noses, such as we see in the faces of some Polish Jews. Whatever may be the case in regard to these differ¬ ences, both Askenazim and Sephardim are none the less Jews. Certain scholars especially interested in ethnic types, are inclined to regard them as two dis¬ tinct peoples or races, recognising only the Sephardim as Jews at bottom, as Jews by blood and descent. 1 But this view attaches too much importance to the racial characteristics of Israel. ! Thus, for instance, M. G. Lagneau’s Anthropologic de la France , p. 676. Are the yezvs Pure Semites ? I 2 I Kven from a physiological point of view, race has been neither the sole nor perhaps the principal element, in the formation of the Jew. And what I say of race I can still more justly assert of soil, climate, and physical environment. In order to explain the Jew, something more is needed. Israel is much less the offspring of a race than the work of history. Two influences in especial have combined to form the Jew and have given him, in all countries, an appearance peculiar to him¬ self : age-long isolation and traditional ritual, his social confinement and his religious practices. The Jew is not the natural product of a soil or a climate ; he is an artificial product, the result of a twofold tradition and a twofold bondage. He has been matured by two opposite agencies: the confinement to which we have condemned him, and the practices with which he, him¬ self, has tied himself down. He was made partly by our law, partly by his own; it may be said that our canonists and his rabbis have had an equal share in fashioning him. If the action of environment has ever been potent, it has been so in the case of the Jew, condemned for cen¬ turies to strict isolation. The modern Jew is the result of a penning-in, of all that is comprised in the word Ghetto. In this sense it is truly the Ghetto that has produced the Jew and the Jewish race ; that is to say, it is we Christians, our civil laws, our canon law, our clergy, and our princes. On this subject it has been very justly said: “It is not race that has made the differences between the Jews and us ; it is we ourselves and our ancestors that have made them. ’ ’ 1 The Jewish type was moulded and stamped by the Ghetto. The Ghetto has called forth and developed, in Jews of every country, moral and physical likenesses due less to 1 M. Brunetiere : Revue des Deux Blondes , of June i, 1886. 122 Israel Among the Nations. blood-kinship than to an identical mode of living. Those fetid and doleful prisons were the crucibles in which, by the heat of its fatal fagots, mediaeval Europe fused, the various elements of Judaism into that astonishingly hard and ductile metal — the modern Jew. The Christians had carefully erected around the Jew a little world, the inhabitants of which, confined behind the walls of their Jewries, excluded from almost every profession, forced to constant intermarriage, naturally tended to form a new race in the midst of the peoples. Who can say what would have been the effect on any other religion of such a treatment prolonged through¬ out several hundreds of years ? If the Mohammedans could have tried the experiment on the Christians, they would probably have obtained as clearly marked a type in ten generations. Imagine animals, horses or dogs, shut up for four or five hundred years in an enclosed park, strictly isolated from all their fellow-animals, and condemned to a uni¬ form diet. It is in some such fashion that the Jews have been treated. A human species was created, in the same way as breeders create an animal species. In view of all this we are justified in asserting that the Jew is the product of a compulsory grouping and of economic and political conditions, as much as, and even more than, of racial conditions. His uniqueness is due less to the Oriental blood transmitted by his remote ancestors, the Beni-Israel, than to the sort of existence imposed on his forefathers by ours. The best evidence of this is the fact that, with the gradual removal of the barriers that surrounded the old Jewries, the typical and characteristic peculiarities of the Jew seem to be fading away. CHAPTER VI. the jew is the product of his tradition and his DAW. I. The Influence of the Jewish Law and Observances on the Race—Judaism is as much a Religion of the Body as of the Soul—Ceremonial Rules and Legal Cleanness—II. How the Talmud, as well as the Ghetto, Tended to Strengthen the Tribal Spirit—In what Manner their Rites Isolated the Jews from the Gentiles—In Order to Become a Modern Man, the Jew must “ De-Rabbinise ” Himself—III Gradual Transformation of Judaism—How it Emancipated Itself, Little by Little, from Talmudic Formalism—Conditions and Difficulties of this Religious Evolution—IV. An Ana¬ logous Transformation is Taking Place in the Jewish Life and Family. I. The Jew is, then, a creation of the European Mid¬ dle Ages; he is the artificial product of hostile legis¬ lation. But if we have made the Jew, we have not been alone in the making of him. The Ghetto of Italy, the Carriere of Provence, the Judengasse of Ger¬ many, the Mellah of Morocco, the Hara of Tripoli, were but the mould, the material, into which the Jew was cast; they gave him only his outward shape. Aside from the laws imposed on him from without, and other extraneous influences, the Jew has been evolved by an internal force, whose action has been more unin¬ terrupted, and perhaps even more potent. This force consists in his Raw, his practices,—in one word, his re- 123 124 Israel Among the Nations . ligion. As Renan has said, the Jew is not so much the product of a race as of a tradition ; or, according to M. J. Darmesteter, the Jew is not so much a product of the flesh as of the spirit. He was fashioned, we might almost say created, by his Books and his rites. As Adam came out of the hands of Jehovah, so did he come out of the hands of his rabbis. In this sense, the Jew has been made by the Syna¬ gogue. If the Ghetto is the house in which he has been reared, the Bible is his mother and the Talmud his father. He has retained his resemblance to the parents that begot him. I am not speaking of a spiritual parentage solely ; for it is not simply by means of faith, by virtue of ideas, that the Thora and the Ghemara have given the Jew his being, but also in a material and almost carnal fashion, by means of all kinds of practices and observances. We have here an influence that has operated for centuries, and has not been sufficiently taken into account. Judaism is not, like Christianity, an almost entirely spiritual religion in which, according to the word spoken at Jacob’s well, the faithful worship in spirit and in truth. Talmudic Judaism is, in more than one respect, a combination of practices pertaining to the body ; it is as much a religion of the body as of the soul. Hence comes its superiority, or its inferiority, whichever one may please to call it. The Haw is concerned with the flesh no less than with the spirit; the Haw has helped to form both, one by means of the other. Thus considered, the Jew is at once a work of the flesh and of the spirit. In this sense, especially, the chief element in the formation of the Jew and the Jew¬ ish race was Judaism. Never, perhaps, had man been so thoroughly moulded by his religion. The Thora The Product of Tradition and Law . 125 had, prior to the Mishna , laid down lygienic rules as commandments from God. Islam merely copied it, but in a very incomplete fashion. There has been nothing more foreign, not to say more contrary, to Judaism, at least since the days of the Essenes, than the contempt of the body manifested by some of our ascetics. The Jewish Eaw pays constant attention to the body ; whether or no it be on account of the body itself, matters little ; the result is the same. Thus, one can understand why there should have been many Israelites among the Saint-Simonites, who preached the rehabilitation of the flesh. The chief solicitude of the Jew for twenty-five or thirty centuries has been to be clean, and this in the sense of ceremonial and physical purity quite as much as in the sense of pure-heartedness. This thought pursued him from his birth to his death, from the cir¬ cumcision by the knife of the ntohel to the washing of the corpse on the mortuary board ; it was with him everywhere—at his meals, in his dressing-room, in his nuptial bed. To preserve the purity prescribed by his Eaw became a sort of obsession with him ; the Talmu¬ dic Jew seems as if hypnotised by it. The Eaw and its learned interpreters foresaw and regulated every¬ thing, even to the most secret acts of the individual and conjugal life. This minute code was studied even by the humble Jew from his early years onwards, in the Hcdcr or the Talmud-tor a. The rabbis have estimated the number of laws or commandments to which the Jew was subjected, at six hundred and thirteen, of which two hundred and fort3^-eight were mandatoiy and three hundred and sixty-five prohibitory . 1 A 1 This is the number decided by the Synagogue long ago. An Americau rabbi, Dr. Ignatz Grossmann published them re- 126 Israel Among the Nations . great many of these Mitzvoth relate to the purification of the body, of garments, and of food. “ A Jew ” said Solomon Maimon, the cynical rabbi- philosopher, “ can neither eat, drink, go to bed, wash, nor satisfy the demands of nature, without observing innumerable laws.” The pious Jew lives in constant dread of contamination. The mere touch of an un¬ clean person or thing suffices to make his food, drink, linen, chair, furniture, unclean to him. To prevent such defilement has been at all times the aim of Jewish piety. The sixth section, or Seder , of the Mishna , com¬ prising nine treatises, is called Toharoth , the Purities. Rabbinical casuistry enters into the most indiscreet de¬ tails of physiology and medicine ; it contains subtleties of purity which have something repugnant for us. Whoever would convince himself of this should read the Niddah treatise in the Talmud. It shows to what daily, almost hourly, supervision the ‘ ‘ prudent wo¬ men” are subjected, especially the wives of the Cohanim , who would remain clean. Judaism is not satisfied with the daily scrutiny of the conscience prescribed by other religions ; the Jew and the Jewess must further¬ more undergo, as it were, a scrutiny of the body. It would be impossible to describe in our language the strange precautions taken by Tobit, the female servant of Rabbi Gamaliel, whenever she poured wine into her master’s jug ; and Tobit is praised by the Talmud as a prudent woman. cently in the biblical version, with a translation and a com¬ mentary in German, under the Hebrew title: Mikraoth Keta~ neth (Cincinnati, 1892). Of these 613 articles of the politico- religious Mosaic code, many, it is true, relate to the civil or criminal laws of Israel and to the service of the Temple and the Levitical commandments. The Product of Tradition and Law. 127 Whatever may be their meaning and origin, it is im¬ possible that such practices, transmitted for centuries from generation to generation, should not have exerted an influence on the men as well as on the women of Israel, and consequently on the whole race. Israel has always boasted of being a clean people ; to be considered clean in the eyes of God has been its privilege, its sign of distinction among all nations. “For ye are a holy people before the Eternal your God,” says the Thora repeatedly ; and in the mind of the Jew, ancient or modern, holiness is apt to be con¬ founded with the purity prescribed by the Eaw. His persistent aversion towards the uncircumcised was due to the fact that to him they were unclean. Israel alone understood and practised the laws of moral and physical purity. She was so attached to these laws that, like the Maccabeans, she preferred death to violation of them. However extreme such minute rules may appear to us at times, this code of purity was, morally as well as physically, a power in Israel. To be sure, the debased and poverty-stricken Jew often observed it rather in the letter than in the .spirit. In the ill-smelling Rue aux Juifs bodily cleanliness came to be a mere matter of form ; the Jew there performed his ablutions and purifications as a legal formality, looking on them only as a religious rite, and concern¬ ing himself little about cleanliness and hygiene. To this day, in certain small Jewish market-towns of the Orient, the basin reserved for the monthly ablutions of the women, contains only tainted, nauseating water, less apt to cleanse than to infect. A salutary custom has thus been changed by ignorance and routine into an offensive ceremony. It was not always so. The benefit of these hy- 128 Israel Among the Nations . gienic regulations lias not been entirely lost to the race. In spite of the squalor in which they were often pur¬ posely compelled to live, the Jew and the Jewess were for a long time superior in personal cleanliness to the Christians, rich or poor. Moreover, it must not be for¬ gotten that, for whole generations, the Jew could feel safe only when he appeared sordid and wretched ; dirt, like poverty, was a means of self-defence to him, as is ugliness to certain animals. The Jew’s power of resist¬ ance to the noisome filth in which he was often com¬ pelled to wallow, is largely owing to his fastidious observances. Israel’s Law has made her a pure as well as a chaste nation ; consequently, despite all her sufferings, she has remained a healthy nation. The meagreness of her food and the poisonous atmosphere of her Ghetto may have succeeded in weakening her ; but her strength has not been sapped by the disgraceful practices of the Orient. The unnatural crimes of the Greek and Roman Aryan, of the Arabian and Syrian Semite, have not poisoned Israel’s blood at its source. If, in some countries, poverty or cupidity drives her daugh¬ ters to a life of shame, this is an evil of but recent date ; it has not contaminated the bulk of Israel. Despite the abuse of early marriages, especially in the Orient where boys of fourteen and fifteen are united to girls of twelve or thirteen, the respect for marriage, the chastity of the conj ugal relations, and the purity of the family life—in other words, the moral discipline of the Jews, has strengthened the individual and devel¬ oped the race. And what has been said in regard to the effect of purifications and ablutions prescribed by the Law, is more true in regard to the rules concerning food, especially Kosher meat. The Jew is supposed to The Product of Tradition and Law . 129 possess immunity from certain diseases ; if that is so, lie owes it—as we shall see—mainly to his practices, his haw. If Israel is, as has been said, the product of a tradi¬ tion, this tradition is not only spiritual, but fully as much, and perhaps even more, hygienic or prophylac-. tic, in its nature. These influences also, slowly work¬ ing for centuries, tended to make or re-make of Israel a race. I11 speaking of the Jew we owe it to him to take account of heredity and of the physical and moral influences accumulated through centuries. Our re¬ strictive and his religious laws would have been suffi¬ cient to make the Israelite, the Semite, with a strain of Aryan and a touch of Turanian blood, more and more different from his neighbours of other religions. Even when between him and them there existed blood- relationship, he gradually lost the feeling of such kin¬ ship. Israel was led, whether she would or no, to form a people, a tribe. II. Israel again became a tribe. This is a point of cap¬ ital importance. Israel constituted anew an ethnos , still regarding herself as the posterity of Abraham. She was the offshoot of the patriarchs ; whether by virtue of blood or adoption, Israel herself knew not, and it mattered but little : every circumcised Jew belonged to “ the House of Jacob.” Israel again became a tribe. This re-establishment of her racial unity was due to two influences. Our civil laws isolated her from the other peoples of Europe forcibly ; her own religious laws isolated her cere¬ monially. Here again, both Christian and Jewish 9 130 Israel Among the Nations . authorities, the one acting from without, the other from within, impelled her unconsciously in the same direction. Canon law and Talmudic code assisted each other; the Church and the Synagogue, kings and Cohanim , bishops and rabbis, in endeavouring to sepa¬ rate the Jews from us, combined to make of them an alien race. Israel, forced to herd by herself, formed, whether she would or no, a commonwealth in the com¬ monwealth, or, to use a modern expression, a State in the State. Our civil laws reinforced her religious laws, and our spirit of exclusiveness fostered her exclusiveness. The tribal spirit has been, in turns, both the cause and the effect of “ the sequestration, at once voluntary and compulsory, of Israel.” Tike the Jew subjugated by Rome, so the Jew persecuted by the Middle Ages, clung to his Taw. It became the absolute rule of Israel’s life. “ Israel fastened her eyes upon her Law,” says Renan, “as one who is to be hypnotised fastens his gaze upon a shining metal disc.” Now we know what this Taw is, and what the Talmud is, which, in interpreting it, took its place; we know what minute practices the Thora and the Mislma impose on the sons of Israel. The observances prescribed by his Taw were bound to isolate the Jew, as we have already said ; and, in fact, the aim of the editors of the Mishna and the compilers of the Ghemara , seems to have been the isolation of the Jew, his separation from all other nations. They may be said to have planted a hedge around Israel in order to preserve her intact. The practice of religious rites constrained the Jews to live in closest contact with each other and to avoid the uncircumcised. Their Taw tended both to cement their feeling of solidarity and to keep them aloof from the The Product of Tradition and Law . 131 Gentiles. In this way it awoke in them a spirit of clannishness. From this point of view Talmudic Juda¬ ism seems to have been a religion of social separatism ; its ultimate tendency was to make of the Jews a sepa¬ rate social group, absolutely cut off from all other social groups. The practice of the Taw rises like a wall between Israel and the go'im. The Jew who professes to follow the rabbinical prescriptions must not live with men of another faith ; to eat at their table is to violate the Taw. All this is well known ; it has already been stated that “the faithful would rather have died of hunger than have touched food not prepared accord¬ ing to Mosaic prescriptions. All Christian food, or more precisely, all food prepared in Christian kitchens, is an abomination to them.” 1 This is the rule laid down in the Scriptures : the eating of forbidden food is an abomination. This repugnance to closer contact with the Gentiles is one of the things which Christian¬ ity has found it most difficult to overcome. “ And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem they that were of the circumcision contended with him saying : Thou wentest in to men uncircumcised and didst eat with them.” 2 The Talmud, which out-Thoras the Thora, tends to make the Jews, by virtue of their anxiety for cere¬ monial cleanness, a sort of separate caste, like the castes of India. Thus the Talmudic Jew has remained Orien- 1 M. Maxime Du Camp’s Paris Bienfaisant: The Jewish Hos¬ pital. This is a source of great difficulty in the work of the committees presiding over the emigration of Russian Jews. A number of these unfortunates refuse all food which is not guaranteed Kosher. 2 Acts of the Apostles, xi., 2, 3. i 3 2 Israel A mong the Nations. tal. Despised by bis surroundings, he avoids all con¬ tact with them ; he would neither sit at their table nor eat of their dishes ; he is anxious to preserve his caste. This sudra , or sordid pariah, is afraid of contamination, he dreads contact with uncleanness. He shrinks from using the utensils of the Gentiles or from allowing them to use his. One day I journeyed, at a single stretch, from Jerusalem to the tombs of the patriarchs at He¬ bron, which is still, in the eyes of the Jews, one of the four holy cities of Palestine. I had a dragoman of Jewish birth who led me for a night’s lodging to the house of certain Jews,—the Hassidim, if I recollect aright. We could get no supper until the Hebrew schachter had arrived to kill the fowl. We had brought neither spoons nor forks ; as our hosts did not trouble themselves to furnish us with any, we had to have some brought to us from Jews who were less strict. There are still, in the East, many Jews of this sort. In the Occident, to be sure, matters are somewhat different. During my youth I spent three months in Dresden, boarding with a Jewish family. I do not know whether the meat I ate was kosher; but I should have been glad had the landlady been more particular regarding her sausages and her provisions from the pork-butcher. It must not be imagined however, that the dietary laws are disregarded by all European Jews. Wherever there is a Hebrew population it has its but¬ chers and slaughterers. There are even, in some of our French towns, hotels intended especially for Jewish travellers. I came across one, last winter, at a place in the south of France at which I happened to stop. The sign bore the three Hebrew letters of the word kosher. The guests were exclusively Jews, either from Eastern or Central Europe. Such Jewish inns or res- The Product of Tradition and Law . 133 taurants may be found in large watering-places, espe¬ cially in Vichy ; I know of some also in Paris. The most important thing for the Catholic or the Protestant when he is travelling, is to find a church, a chapel, a priest to say mass, or a clergyman to preach a sermon. I11 the eyes of the most devout Jew, the synagogue is a secondary consideration ; the vital thing is the butcher-shop and the schochet. The ritual practices and the dietary laws were not the only factors in the preservation of the tribal spirit among the Jews. It is due, perhaps, as much to their mode of worship as to their Taw. This spirit has re¬ tained, through all times, a national character; its feast- and fast-days are, for the most, nothing more than the commemoration of the joys and sorrows of Israel. After eighteen hundred years the Synagogue does not grow weary of bewailing the fall of the Temple. In¬ stead of permitting this national impress to be de¬ stroyed by the rust of centuries, the Talmud and the rabbis have carefully endeavoured to preserve, or to re¬ vive it. As in the days of the Maccabees, Jewish piety was for a long time a sort of patriotic fervour ; the memory of Zion was Israel’s only fatherland. Israel was led back to the national and religious particularism of the ancient Hebrews. Tike the primitive worship of Javeli, Talmudic Judaism became again a tribal re¬ ligion. It also is a national or, if the expression be preferred, an ancestral religion. This is another point in which it differs from the Christianity which Paul pro¬ claimed to the world as an universal religion, the prop¬ erty of no people in particular. Through Talmudic ritualism, the religion that had been purified and broad¬ ened by the Prophets became narrow and materialistic. To many Jews Jehovah seemed not so much the only and 134 Israel Among the Nations . universal God conceived by Isaiah, as the tutelary divin¬ ity of the Beni-Israel. He was the God of the whole world ; but, in the first instance, the God of the Jew, the God of his fathers Isaac and Jacob. It would be unreasonable to be shocked at this, for, despite the spirit of the new haw, even despite the fine name of Catholic, more than one Christian nation has likewise manifested a sort of national particularism in its reverence for the Redeemer of mankind. The Mus¬ covite of holy Russia, the Castilian of Catholic Spain, the Englishman of the Isle of Saints, even the French¬ man of most Christian France,—have they not all often regarded their countrymen as a new ‘ ‘ chosen peo¬ ple ’ ’ to whom special celestial favour had been shown by Christ or by the Virgin and the angels ? Moreover, in respect to this, the Protestant, the Scotch or English Puritan, has not always lagged behind the Papist and the Greek Catholic. The words spoken by Jesus to the Samaritan woman have penetrated but slowly into the hearts of those who believe themselves his disciples : ‘ ‘ The hour will come when not on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” The difference between Christianity and Judaism lies in the fact that national particularism, the tribal spirit, is distasteful to Christianity, while Judaism, by virtue of its origin, its traditions, its very rites, finds diffi¬ culty in getting rid of it. Now, in order that the Jews may become entirely nationalised in the countries where they live, Judaism must become de-nationalised. If the Jew would become a citizen like any other among us, he must, first of all, rid himself of this tribal spirit ; and as Talmudic ritualism is saturated with it, we may say that the Jew will never be wholly French, English, German, Russian, or Hungarian, that he will never The Product of Tradition and Lazo. 135 become entirely European or American, until he lias emancipated himself from the extremes of rabbinical ritualism. The thorny hedge that has been erected around Israel by the Tanaim and the Amor aim must be cut down or uprooted. In other words, in order that the Jew may become truly modernised, Judaism must become “ de-talmudised,” ‘ ‘ de-rabbinised. ’ ’ That which the Greek Jews attempted in ancient times in order to adapt Jewish Taw to Greek civilisation, must now, in their turn, be undertaken by the modern Jews, in order to adj ust the traditions of Israel to our modern civilisation. The Western Jews have recognised this ; they dis¬ covered long ago that Judaism was not riveted to the Talmud. Under the influence of our civilisation and of Western liberty, the Synagogue has spontaneously undertaken a purification of its ritual and its mode of worship. In proportion as the Jew becomes more of a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, Judaism and its adherents become less Jewish, less Semitic. Is not this what is meant by the transformation of the “Jew ” into the “Israelite”? This movement began but a hundred years ago, and in some countries it is nearly completed. What would have been the result to-day if it could have begun seven or eight centuries earlier ? Why should this have been made impossible by our exclusive laws ? III. At the same time, it must be confessed that to bring about this change is a delicate task. A religion is not like a batrachian or an insect which, at a certain stage of its development, undergoes a transformation at the appointed hour. Now, Judaism is verily undergoing 136 Israel Among the Nations. a sort of moulting or metamorphosis, which, to be quite exact, is the third or fourth in its long existence. At all events, it is the final and most difficult stage, the one which is to lead it to the perfect state, if we may use such an expression. A transformation like this pre¬ sents peculiar difficulties to Judaism, whose cere¬ monials, rites, race-traditions, are not mere external coverings to be stripped off at will, but, more or less, a part of its very being. There are, above all, two things that constitute a religion, two elements that give it life and permanence : its beliefs and its rites, its doctrines and its forms of worship. Now, in contradistinction to other religions, at all events to those of our day, Judaism gives but little place to dogma ; its creed is so simple that, were this made its only basis, it would almost be reduced to what the naive optimism of our ancestors called natu¬ ral religion. The same may be said of its moral code ; it has passed into the other religions to which Judaism has given birth, and into the civilisations that have been nourished on its Books; it is no longer Israel’s peculiar property. The one thing that is still her very own is her Taw, her ritual. The Taw is truty the bony structure, the framework of Israel’s religion : it alone gives body to it; without it, Judaism would be in dan¬ ger of evaporating into a vague Deism. Man}^ Israelites, looking upon these observances and ceremonial practices as superannuated, believe that they are doomed gradually to disappear with the old spirit of the Talmud. There are others who dream that the Thora , after an existence of three thousand years, has a new and youthful destiny in store. They think that Jehovah wall again cause water to flow from the rock in Horeb, and they hope that his people will The Product of Tradition and Law . 137 not be the only one to quench its thirst there. Believing in Israel’s mission, with the implicit confidence that lies at the bottom of every Jewish heart, they think that Israel is called upon to offer the Divine gift of religion, for the second time, to the civilised world which has again lost faith in its gods. And this time it is to be a religion without embarrassing practices or perplexing dogmas, without miracles or mysteries. What, in their opinion, would have been required to win over the ancient world to the rigid Monotheism of the Thora f That the Judaism of the time of Philo and of Josephus should sacrifice its national rites. Only at such a cost could the religion of Israel have conquered the world. Circumcision was Judah’s stumbling-block ; the knife of flint wielded by the circumciser cost Israel the kingdom of the civilised world. A Saul of Tarsus, who would have taught the Synagogue how to throw off the yoke of its ritual, might perhaps have sufficed to prevent its being ousted by the Church. The very sac¬ rifice which Israel was not wise enough to make at the time of the fall of the Temple, she must now make. Her only loss will be a loss of two thousand years. Then, at last, Jewish faith, freed from all tribal spirit and purified of all national dross, will become the Law of humanity. The world that jeered at the long-suffer¬ ing of Israel wall "witness the fulfilment of prophecies delayed for twenty centuries by the blindness of the scribes and the stubbornness of the rabbis. According to the words of the Prophets, the nations will come to learn of Israel and the peoples will hang to the skirts of her garments, crying: “Let us go up together to the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the Lord of Israel, that he may teach us to walk in his ways.” The true, spiritual religion for which the world has 138 Israel Among the Nations . been sighing since Euther and Voltaire, will be im¬ parted to it through Israel. To accomplish this, Israel needs but to discard her old practices, as, in spring, the oak shakes off the dead leaves of winter. The divine trust, the legacy of her Prophets, which has been pre¬ served intact beneath her heavy ritual, will be trans¬ mitted to the Gentiles by an Israel emancipated from all enslavement to form. That hour will mark the birth of a religion truly universal and authoritative, at once human and divine. Then only, after having in¬ fused the spirit of the Thora into the souls of all men, will Israel, her mission accomplished, be able to merge herself in the nations. This is an exalted dream,—and, often unconsciously, every Jew carries it about in his heart. More than one circumstance encourages him in this : the intellectual anarchy of our old Christian society, its religious dis¬ tress,—of all human distresses the most deep-seated,— the craving for faith and the difficulty of believing, the evolution of Protestantism and of the rational sects that, like the Unitarians, are going back, under cover of the Bible, to the jealous Monotheism of Jehovah. But is the realisation of such a dream within the reach of Israel ? Uet us leave aside Christianity, whose old trunk, though split, retains more sap than is commonly im¬ agined. Uet us consider only Judaism. Even should Israel have retained strength and faith enough to up¬ lift the world again, she would find it difficult to give the world a religion, since religion does not consist merely of a more or less well-defined doctrine, and since the belief in a living God is no longer so characteristic of Judaism as to constitute a dogma peculiar to it alone. A religion, as we have said, needs forms, ceremonials, bonds of ritual, to preserve a visible union between its The Product of Tradition and Law . 139 followers. Ritual is, perhaps, more essential to it than dogma ; the former is, at least, able to survive the lat¬ ter. Old religions often resemble old trees, whose trunks, despite their hollowness, continue to bear flowers and fruits. But no religion can, for any length of time, dispense with form. Even Israel owed her sur¬ vival during so many centuries to her religious practices. Now, the first condition of the triumph of the ancient Raw is the elimination of its ceremonials—which amounts to the setting aside of the Eaw itself. In other words, in order to become universal Judaism must, in some sort, begin by suppressing itself. It would seem as if its triumph could be assured only at the cost of its suicide. This consideration is not calculated to intimidate those Israelites, already half de-judaised, whose Messi¬ anic dreams are limited to vague humanitarian hopes. But such is not the case with the zealous adherents of the Synagogue, with those who have retained their faith in Israel and their love for her Raw. They do not care to see their Raw diluted into a system of morals of state-school text-book pattern, nor to see the essence of the Thora dissipated into an empty Theism or a humanitarianism still more deceptive. They wish that Jacob should remain among the nations a beacon- light of rigid Monotheism, and they claim that, to this end, Israel’s religion must remain a positive cult, a living faith. They consent to the pruning of its observances and the lopping of its ritual, but only on condition that no hand be laid on the trunk or on the stem of the old tree itself. They cling to the customs bequeathed by their fathers and they fear to break with tradition, for they feel that Judaism is rooted in its traditions and that it cannot sever their bonds without destroying itself. 140 Israel A mong the Nations. The fact is, that Judaism is not a religion, or a Church like any other; it is not so much a faith as a divinely revealed doctrine, a cult, a Taw, a mass of rites and practices, the heritage of Israel’s ancestors, and revered as such. With the Jews worship and ritual are not only religious forms : they are, in some sort, religion itself; in the eyes of true believers, their importance and value lie not so much in the doctrines which they symbolise, as in the ancestors who have handed them down, from generation to generation, as a family leg¬ acy. To many Jews this is still the principal reason for the continuance of Judaism. They cling to it as to an ancestral tradition. This explains also their aver¬ sion to proselytising. Their religion is, after a fashion, the domestic cult of the house of Israel; what would be the use of attempting to force its observances on those who are not of Abraham’s blood? In the eyes of the Jews, ceremonial practices are not only the seal of Israel’s covenant with Jehovah ; they are a rally ing- sign between Jew and Jew. Their rites constitute their bond of union ; they are the chain that links Israelite to Israelite. To discard, as do certain reformed Jews of Germany and England, all that is not of an exclusively religious character in Judaism, all that recalls its national origin ; to banish the name of Zion and the memory of Jeru¬ salem, to abolish circumcision and the dietary laws, to introduce Sunday as the Sabbath, to substitute the vernacular for the Hebrew in the singing of the Psalms, is not only to loosen the bonds of union, to slacken the ties that bind the Jew to his brethren as well as to his fathers, but also to destroy, little by little, all that is peculiarly characteristic of Judaism, and to reduce it, by imperceptible degrees, to a mere name, a mere shadow. The Product of Tradition and Law . 141 Dr. Graetz, the German historian of the Jews, is right . 1 Judaism cannot .survive the uprooting of all the tendrils with which it clings to Palestine, for it is from them that it draws its sap. The reformed syna¬ gogues that eliminate from their worship all that is peculiarly Hebrew, are in great danger of becoming nothing more than way-stations on the road to Chris¬ tianity, or 011 the well-trodden slope that leads to free- thinking. This became very evident at the end of the eighteenth century in the “enlightened circles ” of Berlin, among the followers of Moses Mendelssohn and the admirers of the beautiful Henriette Herz. We have pointed out the danger with which Judaism is beset by the modern spirit and by that civilisation which, in emancipating the Jew, opened out the world to him . 2 But there is another, perhaps not less vital, danger. In order to adapt itself to our Western civil¬ isation, Judaism must “ modernise ” itself; in order to conform to the requirements of modern national life, it must “ de-nationalise ’ 1 itself; and to do either it must “ de-rabbinise ” itself, simplify its ritual, abolish the greater part of its practices. But, at the same time, in “ modernising ’ 1 and “ de-nationalising ” it¬ self, in giving up its ritual practices, it runs the risk of “ de-judaising ” itself, and consequently of disinte¬ gration. It thereby strips off its protecting coverings, abandons the shelter of the Talmudic hedge, deprives itself of that which gave it life and permanence. For centuries the Synagogue has rested on the strong pillars of the Taw ; to abrogate that Taw, or to allow it to lapse into desuetude, is not this equivalent to undermining the very foundations of the Synagogue ? 1 Graetz, Geschichte der Juden , vol. xi., p. 170 and following. 2 See above, chap, iii., pp. 66, 67. 142 Israel Among the Nations . Seldom lias the history of religions been confronted with such a problem. Nevertheless, he would be very rash indeed who pronounced it an insoluble one. Re¬ ligions have a peculiar faculty of sliding over contra¬ dictions ; they possess a wonderful instinct of adaptation to time and place. Judaism, especially, has succeeded in emerging from two or three crises, each of which seemed as though it must be fatal. It has a strange vitality, and has given so many proofs of the fact as to have just grounds for indignation at any show of doubt regarding its future. We have traditions or myths telling us that Judaism will survive to the end of the world ; they may very possibly be correct. After all, whether or no Israel secures from the ages a renewal of her lease—that is her own affair. If Judaism were to die out, the Jew would disappear with it, and without Jews there would no longer be a Jew¬ ish question. We are sure only of this : even if Israel must perish in the process, she cannot escape ‘ ‘ de-na¬ tionalisation, ” “ de-rabbinisation.” Is not this change taking place under our very eyes in the West and in the East, more rapidly at one point, more slowly at another? The days of the old Talmudism are num¬ bered ; the rabbis whose souls have been fed on the Ghemara bewail in vain the spirit of the new age. The West wind is blowing upon Israel, and against the breath from the West there is in Jacob no power of resistance. IV. However difficult this transformation may seem, it is actually being effected. It is taking place not only in the Synagogue and the Talmud-Tora , but also in the household, the family, the domestic life. Not alone is The Product of Tradition and Law. 143 the religion, the ritual of the Jews becoming “ modern¬ ised,” but also their habits, their customs, their ideas, their entire life. And there the transition does not meet with the same obstacles as in the interior of the Synagogue. Though Judaism may not be allowed to forget the traditions of its life at Palestine, nor to lose its old Hebrew character, such is not the case with the Jewish household. Nothing compels the Hebrew to remain Oriental ; nothing forces him to preserve habits, tending to isolate him,—a peculiar language or garb, or civil usages different from those of his non-Jewish neighbours. In this respect his transformation is espe¬ cially significant, and from the social and national point of view it is the only one that interests us. Throughout Western Europe, and even in the large cities of the East, the old Jew with his long caftan and his long ringlets is becoming transformed into the modern man. This conversion of the “ Jew” into the “ Israel¬ ite ’ ’ is apt to be accomplished wherever our laws or our prejudices place no obstacles in its path. The Jews are becoming more and more responsive to the influ¬ ences of their environment. They are gradually lay¬ ing aside what might be called their national customs. The private practices, the domestic observances which occupied so large a place in the household of the Ghetto, are slowly disappearing of their own accord. In cer¬ tain countries, in France as well as in England, there is scarcely anything left of them but a poetical remi¬ niscence. To the sincere regret of the lovers of the picturesque, those old Jewish customs—with their Biblical character, their naive dignity, their touching legends, their pronounced flavour of the patriarchial life, —are receding into the past and fading away. In order to meet them again we must repair to some out-of-the- i 44 Israel A mong the Nations. way village in Alsace ; before long we shall have to penetrate deep into Poland. To judge by the rapid prog¬ ress of this transformation, we may expect to witness its final stage before the end of the twentieth century. The old Jewish family life, saturated with recollections of the Orient and the Bible, will exist no longer, except¬ ing in the stories of Bohemian or Galician authors, like Kompert or Sacher-Masoch. Israel is undergoing the common destiny ; her salient traits, like those of other nations, are disappearing beneath the levelling pressure of modern life. The astonishing fact is that the Talmud should have been able to keep Israel immured within her ritual for fifteen centuries. The Synagogue and the Kahal would long ago have failed in this undertaking had not rabbinical separatism been reinforced by Chris¬ tian exclusiveness. Those massive walls of Talmud¬ ism would have crumbled away beneath the weight of the ages, had they not been strengthened and, as it were, buttressed from without, by our canon and civil laws. Whenever the Jew seemed about to leave his Judengasse, we led him back into it. By excluding him from our society we condemned him to remain penned up in his own ; by forbidding him to become a member of our community, of our national life, we enjoined upon him to remain a man of his own tribe. The torture of being walled-in is well known ; we have inflicted it on whole generations of Jews. Both Chris¬ tian and Mohammedan laws seemed made on purpose to preserve Israel as a distinct societj^ or clan, with every chink between herself and the outer world made weather-tight by her hereditary customs. On this point nothing could be more instructive than a study The Product of Tradition and Law, 145 of the laws of the Middle Ages and of the ancien regime. They show how the fragments of Israel were kept separate, through all the centuries, from the Christian nations among whom they were scattered. Hence, those Jews are not wrong who say to us: “You complain of our exclusiveness, and you have done your utmost to strengthen and prolong it. Our rabbis imprisoned us in the Talmud, and you have barricaded its doors to prevent us from opening them. For fear of being confounded with us, or of seeing us mingle with you, you have relegated us to separate quarters, you have foisted on us a distinctive garb and ignominious signs. Is it, then, astonishing if, pro¬ hibited from being citizens in your states or burghers in your towns, we have been able to be nothing but Jews, knowing no fatherland but Israel, and no govern¬ ment but the Kahal f ” 1 How has the national spirit been generally created ? Its birth is commonly due, as we know, to reaction against the stranger, to the necessity of warding off an oppressor or a common foe. Now, for centuries, the attitude of the Christian nations and all the laws en¬ acted by them against the Jews have been calculated to inspire the latter with a national spirit distinctive^ Jewish. “ Supposing,” said Macaulay “ that, for a thousand years, red-haired men had everywhere been subjected to restrictions and annoyances similar to those imposed on the Jews ; it is evident that red-haired men 1 The Jewish commune or the authority governing the Israel- itish communities. A great noise has been made about the Kahal , ever since the book of the orthodox Russian Jew, Brafmann : Kniga Kagala. I regret not to have been able to treat this subject in the present work, but hope to take it up later. IO 146 Israel Among the Nations . of all countries would have regarded each other as fellow-countrymen and brothers, even though of different blood.” In this respect also the Jew can fairly fling back on us the blame we cast on him. If he persists, in so many countries, in forming a separate tribe or society, it is largely because we have forced him to do so. Even now, when we have given him the key with which to unlock his Ghetto, do we always, of our own accord, open our doors to him ? Do we Frenchmen, Germans, Slavs, Hungarians, or Roumanians willingly invite him to take a seat at our board ? And yet, that which hinders us from doing so is no longer the lack of a common medium of conversation, or the regret that we cannot offer him Kosher food. “ Why do you not play with this little girl ? ” I heard asked of some children in the Parc Monceau one day. “ Because she is a Jewess, Mamma.” On which side is, as a rule, more exclusiveness displayed ? In the greater portion of Eu¬ rope it seems to come from the Christians, rather than the Jews. The latter are, for the most part, anxious to associate with us ; they are sometimes importunately so. That for which we now blame the Jew is not that he secludes himself in the midst of his own people and holds aloof from us, but that, on the contrary, he forces himself upon us, that he obtrudes himself, whether we will or no, into our company or our social set, forcing an entrance into our clubs and drawing-rooms ; that he sends his children to our schools and our colleges, in¬ stead of leaving them in the Heder or the Mela?ned; in one word, that he overrides all social and worldly bar¬ riers which we thought to have erected between him and ourselves. The walls of the Ghetto have fallen, but the spirit which created the Ghetto often survives, The Product of Tradition and Law . 147 —even among those who believe themselves to be free from it. Whence conies this steady and involuntary antipa¬ thy ? Has it no other cause than the instinctive sur¬ vival of the prejudices of our forefathers? Honestly speaking, I would not dare to assert this. In order to account for it we must look more closely at the Jewish race, whose contact is still distasteful to so many men of less noble blood; especially as, in order to under¬ stand the race well, it is not enough that we should know of what ethnic or religious elements it is com¬ posed. Before deciding what place the modern nations should assign to the Jews, it will be well to study the essential traits of the Jewish mind and character. The investigation will, I think, bring out some interesting problems in psychology. CHAPTER VII. PHYSIOLOGY OP THE JEW. I. External Appearance of the Race—The Kind of Selection that has Produced it—Demography of the Jews—Their Longevity—Their Fecundity—Birth- and Death-Rates—To what is the Superiority of the Israelites to be Ascribed?—II. Alleged Immunities of the Jews—The Shekhitah and the Dietary Laws—Moses and M. Pasteur—Vitality of the Race and the Causes of its Apparent Deterioration—Poor Phy¬ sique of a Large Portion of the Jewish Race—III. Maladies and Infirmities Ascribed to the Jews—Disproportionate De¬ velopment of their Nervous System—Causes and Effects of their Nervosity—Frequent Lack of Balance between their Psychic and Muscular Functions—Precocity of the Jews ; its Causes—Israel’s Civilisation the most Ancient of all. I. Wp have seen the nature of the influences that re¬ constituted, in the confinement of the Ghetto, a Jewish race, the artificial product of the rabbinical code and of mediaeval laws. Ret us endeavour to outline the psychology of this race, at once new and old ; and since, in this century enamoured of scientific formulas, it is no longer the fashion to separate the soul from the bod}^, let us begin with the physiology of the race. The two are, in fact, closely connected, and each explains the other. The Jews bear, not in their bodies only, but in their souls, traces of the cruelties to which they were sub- 148 Physiology of the Jew . 149 jected for fifteen centuries. They have wiped from their shoulders the stain of the yellow wheel, but they have not all been able to wash from their foreheads the stigmata of the Ghetto. They carry its mark still. We must remember the life forced upon them and the training given to them by their Christian and Moslem masters. Tet us first picture to ourselves the house in which the Jew was reared. It has already disappeared almost everywhere. Our children would not be able to recog¬ nise the Rue aux Juifs. The last vestiges of the classi¬ cal Judengasse in Frankfort have been razed. The tortuous labyrinth of the Roman Ghetto with its Piazza Giudea and its Via Rua has crumbled away beneath the Italian pickaxe, to the great regret of the poor Ebrei. They had lived there so long ! They had become in¬ ured to its infectious streets ! Pius IX., at the time when he razed its walls, in vain forced upon them, by ordinance, the right of leaving it. Very few made use of this right. Many wept on being driven out to make room for the future wharves of the Tiber ; they could not find such cheap and sordid quarters in old or new Rome. During the last thirty years I have often wandered through that Ghetto on the left bank of the Tiber. Its alleys were narrow, dark, fetid ; its high houses w r ere old, dilapidated, tottering to decay. The acrid smell of the corner immondezzciio was mingled with the unsavoury exhalations of the old-clotlies shops. Through the doorways, where women of all ages were busy mending old rags, might be dimly seen the low, narrow chambers, almost devoid of light and air, and swarming w T ith entire families that lived there cooped up together. The pontifical Ghetto, of comparatively 150 Israel Among the Nations . recent date, was neither the most repulsive nor the most unwholesome. Papal Rome had almost invari¬ ably taken pride in showing itself hospitable towards the Hebrews. Its Ghetto would have shamed many a Jewry of Eastern or Central Europe. Even to-day, in Russia, at Berditchev or Vilna, there are worse ones to be found. Such warrens could not breed a comely race. And, in truth, the race is neither handsome nor strong, although it has, in all ages, put forth some pale and rarely beautiful blossoms, as if to show what the old trunk of Jacob might have produced had it enjoyed air and sunshine. The race is not handsome. “Why,” said to me a young girl of Rittle-Russia, “do you trouble yourself about those horrid Jews ? They are so ugly as to deserve all the evils that befall them.” Montesquieu, in a sarcastic plea in favour of slavery, said of the negroes : “ Their noses are so flat that it is almost impossible to pity them.” I have heard women of the world make the same remark about the hooked noses of the Jews. Their ugliness is one of the secret grievances that set so many women against them. The race is not strong. The Jew, particularly in the large Jewries of the East, is often small and puny ; he looks wretched, sickly, shrunken, and pale. But all this should not deceive us; under the frail exterior is concealed an intense vitality. The Jew may be likened to those lean actresses, the Rachels and Sarahs , who spit blood, and seem to have but a spark of life left, and yet who, when they have stepped upon the stage, put forth indomitable strength and energy. Life, with them, has hidden springs. There is no race that appears less strong, and none that can so well resist misfortune. The reason for this Physiology of the Jew. 151 is tliat in soul as well as in body, morally as well as physically, the Jew is the product of selection, of a selec¬ tion that has lasted two thousand years and has been the most severe and the most painful which living be¬ ings have ever had to undergo. ‘ ‘ If there are ranks in suffering,” said one of the race, “Israel takes precedence of all the nations.” 1 All that proved too weak, bodily and spiritually, was eliminated from the race, either by death or baptism. Israel was like a family in which the children, of each successive genera¬ tion, were exposed at birth. Hence, the Jew’s resist¬ ance to misfortune and his capacity for suffering, per¬ haps unparalleled in history. But the ordeal was so long and so relentless that Israel still feels its conse¬ quences. It has left many of the race bowed and almost broken. If we take into account the strange conditions of life to which the Jews were so long subjected, we cannot find it astonishing that they should present certain peculiarities to the physiologist and the statistician. The first thing to surprise us is the fact that the Jew lives longer than the Christian. In spite of his frail body and look of privation, he seems often to unite within himself two qualities apparently contradictory : precocity and longevity. Regarding his longevity— an easier fact to verify—there is not the slightest doubt. His superiority in this respect is so well estab¬ lished and so general that, in certain countries, in America for instance, the Jews are regarded by the life-insurance companies as especially desirable clients. Almost everywhere, especially in those countries where the laws are not such as to render existence intolerable to them, the average duration of life among the Jews 1 Zunz, Die Synagogal Poesie des Mittelalters . ! 5 2 Israel Among the Nations . is considerably higher than that of the Catholics, Protestants, or the adherents of the Greek Church. And this is true not only of the Israelites of France and of other countries where, as in France, the Jews belong largely to the well-to-do classes. It is true, as well, of the poor Jews of Germany, Hungary, England, and Roumania. 1 And it seems to be also the case with the American Jews. We have the last official report from the United States (1890). According to this American census, the chance of life, taken at the mo¬ ment of birth, what the census calls “expectation of life,” is said to be fifty-seven years for Hebrew families, and forty-one years for Christian families, whether American or English. A young Jew of ten years would have, on an average, fifty years more to live ; a Christian of the same age, only thirty-seven years. Furthermore, contrary to the ordinary rules of statis¬ tics, the chance of life, in the case of the Jews, is said to be greater for males than for females. 2 There is another fact of equal interest: the Jew multiplies, as a rule, more quickly than his Christian neighbours. This also is attested by general experience ; the rule has few exceptions and they are due to ex¬ ceptional circumstances. In .spite of the constant losses which Judaism sustains through sincere conversions and selfish apostasies, the number of Jews, as we have already stated, is almost everywhere on the increase, 1 See, for instance, Dr. Gust, fiagneau’s Remarques , a propos du Denombrement de la Population , sur quelques Differences Demographiqucs Presentees par les Catholiques , les Protestants , les Israelites. Paris, 1882. Cf. : Nouveau Dictionnaire Univer- selle de Geographic , article Juifs , by Isidore Loeb. 2 Census Bulletin (No. 19, December 30, 1890, Washington) : Vital Statistics of the Jews in the United States , pp. 11, 12, and diagram on p. 21. Physiology of the few. J 5 3 both actually, and in proportion to the number of Christians. At first sight one might be inclined to ascribe this to Jewish fecundity. Israel has always obeyed the command: “Increase and multiply.” It has been one of the principal elements of her strength. In the Orient, even in Eastern Europe, wherever the rabbinical laws and customs are still honoured, the Jews always consider it their duty to marry young and to have a numerous offspring. “ I am twenty-one years old and my grandfather thinks it a disgrace that I am not yet the father of a family,” said to me, some ten years ago, a Jew of Kovno. According to tradi¬ tion, peasants waited only till their children had reached a nubile age to marry them off, and Talmudic casuistry was not very exacting in regard to the signs of puberty. Solomon Maimon, the little rabbi-philosopher of the eighteenth century, married a girl of his own age before he had attained his eleventh year, and because he had no children when he was twelve years old, his mother-in- law suspected him of being in league with a sorceress. 1 There were many households in which the combined age of husband and wife did not amount to thirty years. This custom was the means of preserving the young Jews from libertinism. Such households of child-spouses, who live with their parents and are supported by them, are becoming rare. The hardships of life, military service, and the influence of modern customs retard the age of marriage more and more among the Jews as well as the Chris¬ tians. Among the Western Jews these early marriages have gone entirely out of vogue. In this respect again, Israel feels the influence of our example. As is often 1 Solomon Maimon’s Biography , published by R. P. Moritz, Berlin, 1792-93. Cf. Arvede Barine, Un Juif Polonais. i54 Israel Among the Nations. the case with her, in conforming to our habits she goes even a step farther. Contrary to every tradition and to all the old rabbinical laws, the majority of European and American Jews marry later than the Christians. There is another fact which I could hardly believe : almost everywhere, at present, the Jews have propor¬ tionately fewer children than the non-Jews. To make up for this, they lose, almost everywhere, a perceptibly smaller number by death. Consequently, despite her minority of births, Israel’s population increases more rapidly than that of the Christians. The excess of births over deaths is greater among the Jews. 1 The difference is considerable in certain countries, even where, as in Roumania, the number of resident Jewish and Christian families is almost equal. 3 In the United States of America the difference in 1 See, for instance, G. Lagneau’s work already quoted. Cf. Nouveau Dictionnaire de Geographic, article Juifs, by Isidore Ivoeb, and The Journal of the Anthi'opological Institute , xv., (1885-86), article by J. Jacobs, reprinted under this title : On the Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews. 2 Map of births and deaths in Roumania, during three years, among Israelites and Orthodox : Births. Deaths. Years. ,- 1 -s ,-*-, Jews. Orthodox. Jews. Orthodox. 1884 .9,729 185,000 4,626 114,300 1885 .9,542 197,000 5,036 114,000 1886 .9,458 196,000 5,194 124,500 According to M. Alexandrini ( Studu Statistical on the district of Jassy, 1886), the proportion of births to the number of in¬ habitants was, in the case of the Roumanian Catholics, 4.72 per hundred, and in the case of the Roumanian Jews, 4.47 per hundred, or a little less ; the proportion of deaths was, in the case of the former, 3.82 per hundred, and in that of the latter, 2.61 per hundred. The difference is obvious. Physiology of the Jew. 155 favour of the Israelites is said to be as marked as in Roumania. 1 This disparity, in favour of the Jews, is not equal in all countries; but it exists almost every¬ where to a certain extent. The Jews have thus a two¬ fold advantage over their fellow-countrymen of different religions : they multiply more rapidly and with less waste. They bring fewer children into the world, but they bring more of them to maturity. It would seem as if, with their characteristic cleverness at calculations, they had instinctively solved the difficult problem of population in the manner most advantageous to them¬ selves and most satisfactory to the economists. We are tempted to ascribe this predominance of the Israelites to the fact that so many of them are well-to- do. But this explanation is unsatisfactory, since the poor Jews of England, Germany, and Hungary have, in respect to numbers, the same advantage over their baptised neighbours. We should not be justified, how¬ ever, in regarding their superiority as a racial pheno¬ menon of a purely physiological nature ; it is doubtless due entirely to the difference in customs, to the family spirit of the Jews, to their devotion as parents, to the care of the mother for her children, and also to the chastity of the marriage relation, to the prescriptions of the Law, and to the consideration and respect shown by the husband for the health of his wife. It is curi¬ ous that the “ biostatic ” privileges of the Jews begin before birth ; the number of still-born children is much smaller among the Israelites than among the Christians. Another fact of similar nature and equally creditable to the Jews is that there are notably fewer illegitimate births among them than among the Catholics or the Protestants ; and this, despite their preference for living 1 Census Bulletin , No. 19, December, 1890, ibid. Israel Among the Nations. i5 6 in cities. Now, everyone knows that the number of natural children is incomparably larger in cities than in the country. In this respect the superiority of the Jews and of Jewish customs is indisputable. 1 L,et us dismiss this subject with a general observa¬ tion : it has been noticed that the “ biostatic ” differ¬ ences between the Jews and the Christians diminish gradually, as we go from Hast to West, from the countries where the Jew lives isolated, to those where he commingles with the other inhabitants. Thus in America, also, the editors of the Census Bulletins call attention to the fact that the longer the Jews live in the United States, the more closely does their average birth- and death-rate approach the general average of the en¬ tire population. In other words, on both sides of the Atlantic the distinctive peculiarities of the Jew are apt to diminish in proportion as he assimilates himself to the surrounding population. The more the Jews adopt the habits and customs of the Go'im , the less do they differ from the latter, pl^sically and mentally. If they were all to be baptised, the statistician would, after two or three generations, be unable to detect anything pe¬ culiar in them. The Uaw, the Thora, is at the bottom 1 A more remarkable fact, and one which some persons have wished to ascribe to physiological causes combined with the ritual laws of marital relations, is the enormous preponder¬ ance, among the Jews, of male over female births. The dis¬ crepancy is sometimes so great that we ask ourselves whether the Jewish families have not often omitted to register the births of their daughters. C. Lombroso in his Le Crime Politique et les Revolutions (Paris, Alcan, vol. i., p. 149) attributes this abnormal preponderance to the rarity of illegitimate children among the Jews. It is known, indeed, that everywhere the excess of masculine births is more marked in the case of legiti¬ mate children. The explanation is, none the less, insufficient. Physiology of the Jew. x 57 of all dissimilarities that exist between the Jews and their neighbours. II. In point of fact, the advantages which statistics show among the Jews are largely the result of their religion and its rites. If the Israelites had never swerved from the commandments of the Thora , their superiority to the Christians—the “pork eaters”—would be still more manifest. It has been remarked that in several coun¬ tries the Jews seem to possess immunity from certain infectious diseases. The truth of this fact has been at times so well proven that it can hardly be denied. The immunity alluded to seems to us mainly due to the ob¬ servances of the Law, and especially of the rules on bodily and dietary cleanliness. The Law has a prophy¬ lactic value for Israel; we should always recollect the importance which it assigns to the body. Some persons of our day would lower Jewish ethics to the level of a sort of hygiene. Such is assuredly not the meaning of the Law revealed on Sinai in thunder and lightning ; but in practice, the Law and the rabbinical code amount almost to the same. Judaism has made religion the handmaid of hygiene ; it has utilised piety for the preservation of health. The Thora wished to make of Israel a people that should be healthy and holy, sanus et sanctus; in its eyes these two concep¬ tions are closely connected. What Moses gave to the Hebrew race was a Law of life, of individual and social life, of physical and moral life. 1 1 “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life aud death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live : “ That thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou may- 158 Israel Among the Nations. No other religion has taken the same precautions against sickness and epidemics. In this respect, the prescriptions of the Thora and the Talmud singularly resemble those which our medical academies would like to see enforced by civil laws. The minute regula¬ tions prescribed by the Jewish haw for the treatment of all animal flesh destined for human food have long ap¬ peared childish. But now, after three thousand years, our physiologists have come to aid in the vindica¬ tion of the Bible. The Thora has science on its side. It would seem as if the author of the Pentateuch had had a presentiment of M. Pasteur. “ Moses discovered the trichinae,” said a Polish Jew ; “ that is why he forbade the eating of pork.” In fact, the majority of animals pronounced unclean in Teviticus, such as pork, hare, molluscs, and shellfish, are to-day forbidden in many sicknesses, especially in skin diseases. Besides, we must take into account the climate of the Hast, where affections of this kind have always been so frequent. 1 “ We might almost assert,” said a physician to me, * ‘ that the law-giver of the Hebrews was acquainted est obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him ; for he is thy life and the length of thy days. . . . ”—Deuter¬ onomy, xxx., 19, 20. 1 Likewise in regard to the law for bleeding animals destined for food ; it is likely to have a prophylactic value, especially in the Bast, if only for the reason that flesh filled with blood is much more apt to decompose and to decay than flesh from which the blood has been drawn. The Archives Israelites (April, 1892) quote the opinion of K. Vogt on this subject. Be¬ sides, it is possible that some diseases are transmitted espe¬ cially through the blood. It is well-known that, not satisfied with bleeding their animals, the Jews plunge the meat into salt water in order to extract all the blood. Physiology of the Jew . 159 with tuberculosis ; so carefully does he guard against it. He divined, thirty centuries before us, that con¬ sumption may be transmitted by animals to human beings.” It is for this reason that the schochet , the Is- raelitish butcher, must discard every animal which, on being examined after death, shows the slightest adhe¬ sion of the pleura ; to test this he inflates, with his breath, the lungs of the slaughtered animal. If our slaughter-houses were placed under the super¬ vision of the Jewish schochet, there is no doubt that dis¬ ease would be less prevalent and that the average dura¬ tion of life would be increased. Instead of asking the Jews to give up their separate slaughter-houses and to abandon the distinction between kosher and tarefa (clean and unclean) meat, we should do better to borrow from them this distinction. 1 Had not the abandonment of the ceremonies of the Eaw been essential to the spread of Christianity, there would be reason to regret that the controversies in the primitive Church concerning ritual observances did not conclude with the triumph of the L,aw and the Jewish-Christians. Certain medical men, Englishmen as well as Ameri¬ cans, have asked their government to constrain its butchers to adopt, at least partially, the Israelitish customs. 2 Sanitary progress, it seems, as far as we 1 I must, however, take some exceptions to their manner of killing animals. It is, perhaps, not more cruel to cut the throats of cattle than to kill them with a bludgeon ; but it should be done more quickly. The Synagogue should endeavour to conform, in this matter, to our modern humane sentiment, even though the merit of its principle seems incontestable. And indeed, this is just what some Jewish communities have already done—in Geneva, for instance. 2 See, notably, an essay by Dr. H. Behrend in The Nineteenth Century , September, 1889. 160 Israel Among the Nations. Christians are concerned, requires a return to the practices which the Hebrews adopted two thousand years ago. Unfortunately, their Eaw is so exacting in regard to the health and appearance of the animals, that its exact observance would be difficult in our slaughter-houses. It would greatly increase the price of meat and consequently lessen its consumption. Every wound, every fracture, every trace of sickness, old or new, is considered sufficient to make the meat tarefa. The Jewish schachter must discard every animal that shows the slightest imperfection ; he is, therefore, obliged to reject a great many, perhaps ten, twelve, even twenty at a time. Kosher meat, the meat stamped with the seal of the schochet can never be with¬ in everybody’s reach ; the masses will probably always be forced to eat tarefa. 1 These dietary laws and the vigilance of the schochet explain why the Jews are less susceptible to certain epidemics than their neighbours of other religions,— especially to the parasitical diseases. The law-observ¬ ing Jew is obviously less exposed to all the sicknesses that can be transmitted by animal food. To this must be added the well-known sobriety of the Jews, their Oriental self-restraint, which distinguishes them so conspicuously from the Northern peoples, Slav or Se¬ mitic, into the midst of which the eddies of history have whirled them. The Jew is not a drinker; the Thora had no need to forbid wine to him, as does the Koran 1 I have heard Jews reproached with selling to Christians this unclean meat which they, themselves, would not eat, as though they did not fear to poison us in offering us rejected animals. It must not be forgotten that the meat refused by the Israelitish schachter is, in every respect, like that which our butchers sell without the slightest compunction. Physiology of the Jew. 161 to tlie Arab. Under whatever sky he may live, to whatever class he ma}^ belong, the Jew is hardly ever addicted to alcoholism; and this abstemiousness is of incalculable benefit to his mind as well as to his body, for he thereby escapes the most destructive of the ulcers that are eating into modern races. If we would take into account all the advantages of the Jews from a sanitary point of view, we must not omit the rabbinical laws regarding the bodily purity of man and woman, and possibly also circumcision. Despite the risk which the new-born infant may incur under the knife of the peritomist, circumcision seems to have a twofold value : it may—although this has not been conclusively proven—decrease the chances of contagion from the most repulsive diseases ; it may also—and this would be no lesser benefit—blunt the desires and weaken the stimulus to carnal passion. At any rate, I know 7 Jews who are convinced that such results are secured, and who, while caring little for the Thor a, persist in having their sons circumcised, and in eating kosher meat, as a matter of hygiene. The biostatic immunities ascribed to the Jews do not, however, seem to be as invariable or as universal as some persons have imagined. Thus, it was believed for a long time that the Jews of the Middle Ages had escaped the black plague. This was one of the popu¬ lar grievances against them ; they were accused of giving the plague to others, because it appeared to attack them less frequently than the Christians. In all epidemics they were supposed to poison wells and fountains. To-day we know that the plague did not always stop at the threshold of the Jewries. Nor is it accurate to say, in regard to cholera-epidemics of more recent years, that the Jews always emerged unscathed. 162 Israel Among the Nations. Some discount must be made from these alleged privi¬ leges against sickness and death. All Jews do not enjoy such privileges, and the fact is due less to the diversity of their origin than to the difference in their social conditions. Let us take tuberculosis, the disease that creates most havoc in Kurope. Although in London, even in the most squalid dens of Whitechapel, consumption is, according to medical testimony, less frequent among the Jews than the Christians, 1 it has been proved that in Poland and Russia the Jews are often subject to consumption as well as to scrofulous diseases. Indeed they seem predisposed to these evils. The Jews of Lithuania, Poland, and Little-Russia are frequently characterised by narrow chests. This alone would suffice to render them liable to consumption. The Russian councils of revision are well aware of this. They are obliged yearly to reject as invalids, or to put off for future examination, a number of Jewish con¬ scripts whose chests are not sufficiently developed. 2 And, although I can scarcely credit it, I am informed by a Russian correspondent that the military regula¬ tions have reduced, as far as Jews are concerned, the chest measure required for admission to the army. It seems absurd to say that, simply because he is circum¬ cised, a man of poor physique should be strong enough to carry a rifle. This narrowness of chest must not be ascribed to the origin of the race or to its Semitic blood; for the 1 See, for instance, Dr. Behrend in The Nineteenth Century , September, 1889. The Census Bulletin of America (December, 1890) makes the same remarks in regard to the United States. 2 See L' Empire des Tsars et les Russes, vol. iii., La Religion , book iv., chap. iii. Physiology of the Jew . 163 Polish Jews are perhaps less Semitic than any others. It is mainly due to their social conditions, to their city life, to the sedentary habits of the majority among them, and, above all, to their centuries of privation. All this accounts for the constitutional weakness so often found in the Eastern and also in the Western Jews. Their wretched physique is the result of their wretched living. Their physical strength, their mus¬ cular power, has diminished in each generation ; their blood has become poorer, their stature smaller, their shoulders and chests narrower. Many Jews of the large Jewries have an emaciated, pallid look. Many of them show signs of racial decline and degeneracy. I have often been struck with this in Galicia, Rou- mania, Russia, and the Orient; in Palestine perhaps more than elsewhere. Those anaemic German Jews who, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, have returned to the home of their robust ancestors, reminded me of the enfeebled sons of old houses, who come back to die in the dilapidated castles of their fathers. There are, in every country, many Jews of poor build, stunted growth, and weak constitution. There is a singular contrast between the Jew’s persistent vitality and his bodily infirmity. His feebleness often gives him a somewhat unmanly appearance. He is of frail bodily structure; the skeleton and the muscular sys¬ tem lack strength. He is wanting in breadth and squareness ; in many countries he is manifestly unfit for heavy work. The contrary is true of the English¬ man, the Auvergnat, the Piedmontese, the Spanish Gallego , all of whom seem constructed for hard work. The Jew is, moreover, often misshapen ; few races have so many men who are deformed, disabled, or hunch¬ backed, so many who are blind, deaf-mutes, or congeu- 164 Israel Among the Nations. ital idiots. The reason for this lies not only in their early marriages and their marriages between near re¬ lations, but also, and above all, in their age-long confinement, their lack of exercise, of pure air and wholesome nourishment. For the historian as well as for the geologist, the present often helps to explain the past; the action of slowly working forces manifests itself especially in his¬ tory ; and to see these processes in operation, we need but to turn our gaze from one country to another. The influences that have moulded the mediaeval Jew, at once hardening and weakening him,—his persecu¬ tions, his confinement, his wretchedness,—still operate in Eastern Europe. Even in our day the Eastern Jew¬ ries are so poor that the nourishment of their inhabi¬ tants is reduced to a minimum. This is especially the case with the three millions of Russian Jews. They manage to live under a northern sky upon an amount of food that would barely suffice in a milder climate. How is it possible that this should not react upon their health ? Long ago it was noticed that the Jew of Little- Russia consumes less food than the Greek Christian or the Polish Catholic. 1 And his nourishment becomes less and less substantial, in proportion as the imperial laws and regulations seem bent on making his wretched existence still more unendurable. If the Russian police persists in driving the Jews back into the Western cities, where there is neither room nor work left for them, we must not be surprised to find the death-rate exceed the birth-rate amongst the Jews of Russia. This seems, in fact, to be the scheme of the authorities at St. Petersburg and at Moscow, who 1 See P. Tclioubinsky’s Troudy Etnogr. Statist. Eksped. o Zapadnorousskii Krai , south-west section, vol. vii., 2d part. Physiology of the Jew . 165 are responsible for this whole series of regulations as extraordinary as they are inhuman. It is to a slow and lingering death that those three or four millions of the Tsar’s subjects are doomed, penned in their Ghetto, systematically deprived of air and food, and far from a sovereign justly beloved for his goodness. Nothing less than the Jew’s power of endurance could have enabled him to resist so long, and to escape the death that is waiting to put an end to the sad spectacle of awful misery enacted on the banks of the Niemen and the Dniester. When I consider the diet to which, at the end of this century, so many European Jews are still subjected, I am not at all astonished at the apparent degeneration of the race. Men who for centuries have been thus treated, cannot help becoming small, puny, weak, and frail; it would be ridiculous to expect in them the splendid torso of the Greek or the fine bearing of the Englishman. The Jew’s past is responsible for his good and his evil qualities, for his strength and his weakness, for all the peculiarities of his physical and moral being. This is the refrain to which we cannot but recur. And here there is a distinction to be made —whatever is good in the Jew physically, and perhaps morally, is due to himself, whatever is bad in him is due to us ; the former is of his own making, the latter is our work. His longevity, his resistance to disease, his immunity from certain disorders, are a legacy from his ancestors, and are due to his laws, his customs, and his sobriety. O11 the other hand, his feebleness and the defects of his physical constitution are due to our laws, our Ghettos, and our system of confinement. So we may assert that, in this respect also, the Jew is an artificial 166 Israel Among the Nations . product of flesh and blood, fashioned—we might almost say created—half by his laws and his rabbis, half by our laws and our lawyers. The very differences which we notice to-day between Jew and Jew, between the Eastern and the Western Israelites, attest this fact. The race is growing better, physically and morally ; the Jew is growing stronger and becoming a new man as the shackles that weighed him down fall from his limbs. III. Popular imagination has, for many years past, im¬ puted to the Jew certain strange diseases, as though there were a secret taint in his blood, apt to manifest itself in repulsive disorders. This is pure fiction, but it is still believed in more than one country. The people, looking upon the Jew as an accursed being, supposed him smitten with diseases that were to avenge upon him the Cross of Calvary. From the folk-lore of our forefathers, especially from those ancient authors who have given us the Bestiaires of the Middle Ages, we might extract an entertaining chapter on physiology, in the ancient and legendary sense of the word physi- ologos. The legend went so far as to impute to each of the twelve tribes a particular disease, in order that each should expiate its special share in the drama of the Passion. For instance, the tribe of Simeon nailed Christ to the cross ; and so the descendants of Simeon are afflicted, four times yearly, with sores on hands and feet. The tribe of Zabulon disposed by lot of the garments of Jesus (in the New Testament it is the Roman soldiers that did so) ; and therefore the descend¬ ants of Zabulon have sores on their mouth and spit Physiology of the few. 16 7 blood. 1 And so on with the rest of the twelve tribes ; the men of Asser have right arms shorter than the left; the women of the tribe of Joseph, from their thirty-third year onward, have mouths full of live worms. And, according to popular superstition, the sole cure for these diseases is Christian blood. This was supposed to be one of the reasons why Jews strangled Christian children. To the same source may be traced the fcetor Judaicus of the Middle Ages, the belief that the Jews had an especial odour betraying Israelitish blood. 2 I have indeed met some ill-smelling Jews, but, as in the case of Christians, this was due simply to their uncleanli¬ ness. It was formerly supposed, however, that the Jews could be distinguished by their offensive odour, and, since baptism left this peculiarity unchanged, it w 7 as sometimes discovered that this or that high digni¬ tary of the Church was of Jewish extraction. A Ger¬ man relates that one day a certain pilgrim, after kissing the slipper of Pope Pius IX., exclaimed on rising: “ He is a Jew.” He had recognised the Jew in him by the odour. “ And,” adds the narrator, “ there are other persons who have asserted that the Masted were actually of Jewish stock ; Pius IX. himself is said to have confided as much to some baptised Israelites.” 3 1 See Isidore Loeb, Le Juif et VHistoire de la Ltgende , Paris, L. Cerf, 1890. 2 This foetor Judaicus , with the Judceorum fcetentium of Mar¬ cus Aurelius (Ammien Marcellin, xxii. 5), seems to date back to an error or a malicious trick of a copyist of the Middle Ages, who, instead of Judceorum petentium wrote Judes or um fetentuim. —See Is. Loeb, ibidem, according to Joel’s Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte zum Anfange des zweiten Christ- lichen Jahrhunderts , 2d, part, Breslau, 1883, p. 131. 3 Mr. Gustave Iaeger’s Entdeckung der Seele, vol. i., pp. 246- 168 Israel Among the Nations . There is one thing, on the other hand, that seems not to be mythical—the Jew is particularly liable to the disease of our age, neurosis. This fact has been verified throughout the greater part of Europe as well as in the United States of America. The Jew is distin¬ guished by the predominance of his nervous, over his muscular, system. This may be pronounced the char¬ acteristic feature of his constitution. He is far less muscular than nervous ; he is all nerve, if we may be permitted this expression. “ In my practice in Paris,” said a French physician to me, “ I have often had oc¬ casion to notice that, with the Jew, the emotions seem to be more vivid, the sensibility more intense, the nervous reactions more rapid and profound.” The Jew is the most nervous of men, perhaps because he is the most “ cerebral,” because he has lived most by his brain. All his vital sap seems to rise from his limbs, or his trunk, to his head. On the other hand, his overstrained nervous system is often apt, in the end, to become disordered or to collapse entirely. Again, the Jew is particularly subject to affections of the nerve-centres, especially to spinal and cerebral diseases. 1 The balance between his psychic and his digestive functions is frequently overthrown. Insanity seems more prevalent among Israelites than among Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant. The ratio against the Jews is in some countries two to one ; in others three to one. 2 This fact is all the more strik- 248 (1884). Cf. Revue des Etudes Juives, October and De¬ cember, 1890, p. 314. 1 See, for instance, the American Census Bulletin , No. 19, December, 1890, p. 15. 2 In Russia and Denmark the number of Jewish lunatics is said to be twice as large as that of the Christians : in Bavaria, Physiology of the Jew . 169 ing because, as we have already said, the Jew’s sobriety generally preserves him from alcoholism, one of the vices which contribute most to mental derangement. 1 It is well known that the increase of cerebral dis¬ eases and the exacerbation of nervous disorders is one of the distinctive marks of our age and our civilisation. It is due to the feverish intensity of modern life, which, by multiplying our sensations and efforts, overstrains the nerves and rends the delicate network of the cerebral fibres. The Jew is the most nervous and, in so far, the most modern of men. He is, by the very nature of his diseases, the forerunner, as it were, of his contemporaries, preceding them on that perilous path upon which society is urged by the excesses of its intellectual and emotional life, and by the increas¬ ing spur of competition. The noisy army of psycho¬ pathies and neuropathies is gaining so many recruits among us that it will not take the Christians long to catch up with the Jews in this respect. Here, again, there are probably no ethnic forces in operation. three times as large (Bulletin of the Anthropological Society, November 6, 1884, pp. 698-700.) Cf. for epileptic lunatics Enrico Morsilli’s Intorno al Numero e alia Distribuzione Geografica delle Frenopatie in Italia , p. 77 (Milan, 1886). But the opinion of the Italian alienist on the prevalence of epilepsy among the Jews is contradicted by the observations of French specialists. This decision was the result of a discussion in our Academy of Medicine (September 8, 1891). 1 C. Lombroso’s L' Homme de Genie has an explanation for this in comformity with his theory on the relationship between genius and lunacy, considered as, in some sort, complementary to each other. There are, according to him, more lunatics or more persons afflicted with neurasthenia among the Jews, because there are more men of talent among them. Cf. J. Jacobs’s The Comparative Distribution of fewish Ability (London, Harrison, 1886). 170 Israel A mong the Nations . Neither to his Oriental origin nor to his bodily con¬ formation would it be right to ascribe this predomi¬ nance, this exaggeration, of the Jew’s nervous system ; it is but another result of his mode of life for centuries past, of the conditions that have governed his exist¬ ence, of his urban and sedentaty life, of his lack of physical exercise, of the enfeebling of his muscular system, and the excitement and worries connected with the occupations followed by his ancestors. For centu¬ ries he has owed his existence less to his hands than to his brains. No other human being has had so severely to tax his ingenuity in order to subsist. Even- to this day, in certain districts of Russia, for example, it is only by a miracle of will-power and industry that he can manage to eke out his wretched existence. Side by side with the nervous diseases that affect Israel may be placed diabetes, the prevalence of which among the Jews has already been noted by Bouchardat. 1 This pre¬ disposition of the Jews to all these diseases, is ascribed by medical authorities to their way of living, to their residence in towns, and to the nature of their occupa¬ tions and anxieties. 2 1 See amongst others, Demange’s article, Diabetes ( Diction - naive Encyclopediqne des Sciences Mtdicales). It must, how¬ ever, be said that even this has been disputed in the Academy of Medicine (September 8, 1891), by Dr. Germain See. 2 Arthritism, with its ever-varying manifestations, is another disease very common with the Jews. It has often been said that they are more liable than other men to skin diseases ; Dr. Hardy inclined to this opinion, especially in regard to eczema (Medical Bulletin , Sept. 16, 1891). To be quite exact I shall mention the following facts, pointed out by Dr. G. Lagneau. Jewish women are said to be hardly ever afflicted with goitre; thus, the Medical Society of Metz gave out this question in one of its competitive examinations of 1880 : “ Why are Jew- Physiology of the few. i 71 One of the qualities that appear to characterise the Jews and Jewesses of many lands, is their precocity. Although we may question the rapidity of their physi¬ cal development—in too many cases arrested by un¬ wholesome diet and insufficient nourishment,—it would be difficult to deny the rapidity of their mental growth. Every one of us has had occasion to notice this pre¬ cocity of the Jewish mind ; as for myself, I have often been struck with it. It probably has its share in the success that attends Jewish boys and girls in all the schools and colleges that we open to them. We all know how many laurels these puny athletes carry off in the modest arena of scholastic competition. Al¬ though they may rarely win a prize in our intercol¬ legiate athletic contests, they are, on every field in Europe, amongst the swiftest runners in the races for classic honours. I have heard Germans urge this intellectual precocity of the Jews as a reason for de¬ barring their children from the schools and colleges attended by other children. “The struggle,” they said, “between the sons of the North, the pale Ger¬ mans with their blond hair and sluggish intellects, and ish women exempt from goitre?” Messrs. Javal and Wecker have indicated, among the Jews, an astigmatism contrary to the rules, the horizontal meridian of the cornea presenting the maximum of curvature. (Wecker, Sur VAstigmatisme dans ses Rapports avec la Conformation des Os du Crane : Bulletin de la Socitti d' Anthropologies June 15, 1869, pp. 545-547. Cf. Hovelacque and Herve, Precis d'Anthropologies p. 309, 1887.) According to M. Herve there is a frequency of lachrymal tu¬ mours among the Jews, due to the narrowness of their nasal canal (. Bulletin of the Anthropological Society , Dec. 20, 1883, p. 915). This astigmatism, sui generis , and this prediposition to lachrymal tumour—supposing them to be thoroughly proved —might even be ascribed to their anatomical conformation. 172 Israel Among the Nations. these sons of the Orient with their black eyes and alert minds, is an unequal one.” To what shall we ascribe this premature develop¬ ment, this rapid unfolding, of the Jewish intellect? Solely to the race, to its Oriental blood ? Is it not due as much, and even more, to its past training, to the process of selection through many centuries, to the prolongation and bitterness of the struggle for exist¬ ence through which a hundred successive generations have been forced to pass ? Scorned, insulted, scoffed at, beaten from his earliest infancy, the little Jew learned at a tender age to reflect, to observe, and to be on his guard. The premature development of his in¬ tellect is due, in many cases, simply to his premature acquaintance with suffering. He acquired more quickly, and paid more dearfy for his experience of life’s hard¬ ships. His childhood was stunted, his youth was short. The hour of cares and struggles was sounded earlier, and the age of lingering dreams and vague yearnings was sooner over for him than for others. I have often noticed the pensiveness of the Jewish face ; it is one of the characteristics of the race . 1 The Jew’s soul, like his body, has but a brief j^outli. As we go eastward this fact strikes us more and more forcibly. “The Jew is early withered by life,” says even their historian Graetz. This is true. His youth has, in many cases, lost its bloom ; his drawn features, old before their age, have a wasted look ; his brow is 1 This, I am assured, is discernible in the photographs of the Jewish type, taken in an Israelitish school in London, by Dr. Galton, according to his method of individual pictures united in a “composite” picture. Cf. Jos. Jacobs, On the Racial Characteristics of the Modern Jews , London, Harrison, 1885, p. 51. Physiology of the few. 173 furrowed with premature wrinkles ; one might almost say that the Jew is born old; his glance, so piercing and intense, has frequently an oldish expression. There seems to be an air of decay about his person, as about the houses of the Judengasse. In speaking of the Jews one is always tempted to say: “Those old Jews ” ; youth does not appear to sit well on them. In certain eastern countries, well on towards Asia, there seems to be a disposition to deny them the right of be¬ ing young ; if, by chance, they dare to indulge in the noisy games of boyhood, people are shocked and com¬ plaint is made of their turbulence, or, if need be, of their insolence. The pranks and pleasures of youth seem so ill-suited to them that an impulse is felt to prohibit such outbreaks. The truth is that the Jew belongs to an old race; his tastes, passions, character, disposition—everything about him is subtly touched with this antiquity. Whether or no he has descended from the patriarchs buried in the cave of Mamre, the Jew is part of a very old family ; he has a long line of ancestors behind him. He, alone, can, without exceeding the limits of proba¬ bility, trace his genealogy back through the ages, to prehistoric times. As compared with the Jew, the oldest peoples of ancient Europe are still in their ado¬ lescence. Which of our dynasties or our feudal families would dare to compare itself in age to the house of Israel ? And this age is not a matter of years only, for Israel is an old race mainly by virtue of the antiquity of her civilisation. The training of the mind, the care¬ ful cultivation of the intellect, was begun ages ago for the sons of Jacob, in Jerusalem, Babylon, and Alexan¬ dria. If we would regard the Jews as a race, the chief fact concerning them is, probably, that this race has the 174 Israel A mong the Nations. oldest civilisation of our Mediterranean world. Its civilisation dates farthest back, and has, at the same time, experienced the least interruption. For a human family, twenty centuries is a long stretch of time. What is the lineage of the heirs of our old bourgeois families or of the descendants of the Crusaders, as compared with that of the Kevys, descendants of the Kevites, or of the many Cahens, Cohens, Kohns, Kahns, and Cohns whose authentic ancestors, the Cohanim of the Temple, made their burnt-offering of spices to the Eter¬ nal, on the altar of incense, before they went to discuss the origin of the world, in the shadow of the Tower of Babel, with the Chaldean soothsayers and the Iranian magi. Next to the selection that has been in operation for centuries, it is, in my opinion, the antiquity and the continuity of their civilisation that throws some light upon the Jews themselves and the place they occupy in our midst. They were here before us ; they are our elders. Their children were taught to read from the scrolls of the Thora before our Katin alphabet had reached its final form, long before Cyrillus and Meth- odus had given writing to the Slavs, and before the runic characters were known to the Germans of the North. As compared with the Jews, we are young, we are new-comers; in the matter of civilisation they are far ahead of us. It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto ; no sooner were their prison-gates un¬ barred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we had opened up without their aid. It is said that families, nations, races, are bound to exhaust themselves. The Jew is a proof to the con¬ trary, at least in regard to intellect. Though his Physiology of the few. 175 blood may, at times, seem impoverished, his appearance old, and his body wasted, even stunted and vitiated, yet his mind is always alert; old it may be, by antiquity of culture, but never in the least decrepit or senile. And even when the Jew’s body appears to us broken and degraded, this is less the result of years than of suffer¬ ing. I11 looking at the pale Jews of certain eastern and Oriental towns, those Jews, for example, who live on the shores of the lake whence the fishermen set out who have taken the world in their nets, we might say that Israel was an exhausted race. Its degeneration seems to include the soul as well as the body. But even in these bloodless and degraded Jews there abides a secret vitality, a marvellous power of recuperation and rejuvenation. There is sap in them still, and, to convince ourselves of this, it is often sufficient to trans¬ plant them from the poor soil of the eastern Jewries to the rich land of the West. CHAPTER VIII. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE} JEW. I. His Intelligence—His Ruling Faculty, the Faculty of Adaptation and Assimilation—Qualities Inherited from his Two Ancestors, the Money-Changer and the Rabbi—The Lucidity, Precision, and Pliancy of his Mind—How Study has ever been Honoured by the Jews—With them Fducation was Compulsory—The Gymnastic of the Talmud—II. The Jew’s Character—Why his Soul is often Inferior to his Intellect—How, from a Moral Point of View, his Extreme Suppleness Becomes a Defect—Age-long Debasement of the Jew—How his Conscience sometimes Became Warped— Why the Sense of Honour is more rarely Found in him— The Education Given him by the Centuries—Frequent Re¬ tention of the Impress of his Ancestors’ Occupations— His Family Virtues—His Good and Bad Qualities are alike largely Contributory to his Successes—III. As Regards Character also, the Jew is Tending towards a Transforma¬ tion—Parvenu Traits among the Jews—The Degradation of the Race by no Means Irretrievable. I. In the ca.se of the Jew the development of the mind has outstripped that of the body. I do not know a more intellectual race. The Jew lives mainly by his head. His strength lies less in his arms than in his brain. We reproach him for not always supporting himself by the labour of his hands ; but he would often be at a loss to do so, since he has rarely muscle 176 Psychology of the few. 1 77 enough. On the other hand, he has force enough in his brain to make up for the weakness of his body. In his feeble frame there reside frequently a lucid mind and a .strong will. Contrary to the ancient Greek and the modern Englishman, the Jew’s superiority does not con¬ sist of a nice balance between body and soul. No other race has so often proved the fallacy of the mens sana in corpoi'e sano. likewise, and for the same reasons, the animal life of the Jew seems reduced to a minimum. By virtue of his physical constitution and also of the antiquity of his culture, the animal instincts, the grosser appetites, are in his case less powerful and less imperious. His bodily wants are fewer ; their tyranny weaker. His flesh and blood are less disposed to rebel against his spirit; his senses are more easily ruled by his reason. No race is so little carnal. The Jew’s mind is more vigorous than his body. That which has enfeebled the one, has often strength¬ ened the other. The long and terrible ordeal which im¬ paired his physical powers and weakened his muscles, gave tone to his intellect and edge to his mind. His mental mechanism gained in strength and flexibility. His intellect, especially, was made at once firm and supple. Tempered by the persecutions of fifteen cen¬ turies, it became a hard and ductile metal, yielding and yet resisting ; it is, as it were, unbreakable. It has been said that the Jew is everywhere easily acclimated. This is even more true of his mind than of his body, for although we find him living in the most different latitudes, we cannot always exactly say at the cost of what bodily sufferings. There can, however, be no doubt with regard to his moral acclimatisation ; that is accomplished with wonderful rapidity. He is 178 Israel Among the Nations. able to adapt himself to any environment. This is all the more surprising from the fact that his origin, his traditions, his confined habits, would seem to make him the least malleable and changeable of human beings. But he is so only on the surface, or, to put it more accurately, in the mysterious depths of his innermost nature. Observe him in his Ghetto or in the Jewries of the Kast; he is of all men the most completely governed by habit; he seems petrified in his rites and mummified in his practices,—a sort of living fossil. Strip him of his traditional covering, place him in a different country or in different environment, and he will become more capable of assimilation, more open to change and progress than any other man. There is in every Jew a secret power of metamorphosis which has often amazed me. He is able to undergo any transformation while scarcely ever losing the im¬ press of his race, just as he preserves on his body the mark of his religion. He has the remarkable faculty of taking on a new skin, without at bottom ceasing to be a Jew. He is thus the man who modifies himself most, and yet changes least. In this respect he is, perhaps, unique. There is something Protean in him. The ease with which he transforms himself borders on the miraculous. He is like a metal in constant state of fusion ; he may be cast into any mould and is able to assume any shape, without changing his substance. This is especially noticeable in the West, where his fac¬ ulties have free play ; hardly more than one or two gen¬ erations are necessary to transform the most greasy, the most bigoted Oriental Jew into an Occidental, a Parisian. Beneath an exterior that often seems dull, he has the nimblest mind that I know. He adapts and assimilates himself to everything. This is his ruling faculty, as Psychology of the few. 179 M. Taine would say. Were lie to be removed to another planet, he would soon feel himself at home there. This power of adaptation is of great consequence in all things ; these insignificant Jews, to whom freedom is a recent gift, largely owe to it the place which they already occupy in the world. The Jew adapts himself to every¬ thing ; he is fit for everything ; he feels at ease every¬ where, consequently he succeeds in everything. The centuries have trained him to this nimbleness of mind, this intellectual agility. Everything has con¬ tributed to it; his historic education, the persecutions and the humiliations to which he has been subjected, the occupations forced, upon him, the various civilisa¬ tions and countries through which he has passed. No other race has been trained in such mental gymnastics. The Jews are like those poor children whose limbs have been broken and whose bones have been dislocated in all possible feats of agility ; they can take with ease the most marvellous flights, the most perilous leaps, always landing upon their feet. There is another characteristic of the Jewish mind : its lucidity, distinctness, clearness, accuracy. The Jewish intellect is a faultlessly exact piece of mechan¬ ism ; it is as nicely adjusted as a pair of scales. Here again, the explanation is simple ; it is furnished by the life of his ancestors, by the habits and aptitudes im¬ planted in him by the occupations in which they were engaged for eighteen hundred years. Every man’s ancestors live again in him ; our souls and our minds, no less than our bodies, are subject to the laws of heredity. We must remember the ancestors of the modern Jew. We need but consider them to understand him fully. Never was son better interpreted by his fathers. i8o Israel Among the Nations . Both the good and the evil qualities of the modem Jews are rooted in the bosom of the old mediaeval Jews. Bet us cast a glance at those far-off ancestors. The Jew’s genealogy is indeed easily traced ; he has no need to examine the archives of his Ghettos. We know who were his forefathers; with one of them we are but too well acquainted ; it is the pawnbroker, the money-lender, the dealer in second-hand goods, the huckster, the old-clothes man, the usurer, the stock¬ jobber, always the same, under diverse names and garbs, for fifty generations. Such is, for most of us, the great ancestor from whom all modern Jews, be they beggars or millionaires, uneducated or refined, have descended. We shall see before long that he is not the only one ; but he is the best known, the principal ancestor, if you will. The Jew of to-day resembles him strongly, in intellect as well as in character. From this long line of forefathers engrossed in barter, traffic, calculation and figuring, the Jew has received his mental precision, his clearness of vision, his habit of taking nothing at its face value. The Jewish merchant is not easily taken in by words or good appearances. His eyes are used to measuring, his hands to weighing. He distrusts and dislikes approxi¬ mations. Observe the money-changer as he handles the gold pieces. He examines the metal and the stamp, he listens to their ring, verifies their weight, satisfies himself that the edges are not worn or chipped. Ob¬ serve the dealer in precious stones, who pursues a voca¬ tion likewise long followed by the Jews; see how he turns the diamonds and rubies over and over, looking at them from all sides, bringing them close to his eyes and then holding them far off, letting both daylight and lamplight shine through them, while he tries to Psychology of the Jew, 1 81 estimate their size, transparency, brilliancy, and purity. In this manner does the Jew handle things and ideas ; he appraises everything at its correct worth ; he is careful not to be carried away. This spirit of exact¬ ness is always displayed by the Jew, in his private as well as in his business life, in his scientific work as well as in his commercial undertakings. It is one of the secrets of his strength. Above all other men, he likes and comprehends realities. As he has learnt to value things, so has he learnt to understand men. He has seen so many of them, of all ages and conditions, in the market-place, or in the counting-house of his forefather, the money-changer, or gliding furtively at nightfall through the low door¬ way of his grandsire, the pawnbroker. He has known them all, small and great, rich and poor, the gambler, the ambitious man, the prodigal, the miser, the profli¬ gate, the man of frank and open character; he has observed them, at his ease, in their moments of trans¬ port, trouble, anguish, when all disguise is thrown off. Young and old, nobleman and commoner, burgher and peasant, all came to borrow from him ; for centuries he was able to gauge them at leisure; were they not all clients of Israel? Indeed, the Jew has an instinctive knowledge of men ; he knows how to take them and how to cajole them. From his ancestors, the stock¬ jobber and the middleman, he has inherited an in¬ sinuating and flattering tongue, a merchant’s clever¬ ness, as well as his art of displaying his wares to advantage and of attracting customers. In the art of getting on, the Jew has no equal. He knows that time has, in reality, no forelock, and no one is so nimble in the pursuit of fortune or so clever in holding fast to it. He is—need we say it—the keenest hunts- 182 Israel Among the Nations. man in the chase after florins and ducats. We, our¬ selves, have trained him to this. He has been reared to it as is an English hound to fox-hunting. There is no need of dwelling longer on this aptitude peculiar to the race. We are familiar with it, we are even in danger of exaggerating its importance. We are apt to picture the Jew to ourselves most frequently under this aspect of trader, of money-getter, because it is this side which he generally turns toward us. But we must be careful not to imagine that the Jew is, or ever has been, a money-maker and nothing more. The money-changer, the broker, the second-hand dealer, the usurer, are by no means the only ancestors of the modern Jew. He has another, less familiar to us, but to whom he bears as great a resemblance. It would be unjust to overlook this ancestor, for he em¬ bodies Israel’s traditions and her true spirit, while the other, the money-dealer, represents only the trades which we ourselves have forced upon the Jew. This forefather, the oldest and most beloved by Israel, is the rabbi, the sage, the Talmudist. It is not true that for twenty centuries Israel’s soul was absorbed in banking and speculation. The traffic in gold, was for a long time but a means of subsistence for the Jews, the only one permitted to them. It was not the publi¬ can nor the financier whom the sons of Israel honoured and aspired to emulate ; it was the rabbi, the interpre¬ ter of the law, the scribe, the scholar, the Hakham . Israel was a nation of students before she became a nation of money-makers. She has always remembered this. The Jew has had a twofold education, two entirely different teachers whose lessons he learned simul¬ taneously. While, in the hands of the money-changer and the broker, he was being trained to precise calcu- Psychology of the Jew. i8 3 lations, to a practical sense, to the knowledge of men and things, under the guidance of the rabbi, the Hak- ham , he acquired the habit of theoretical speculation, of intellectual study, of scientific abstraction. These two warring tendencies in human life thus met and became, as it were, blended in Israel. Of the two directions in which man’s activity is tempted to spend itself, the one most prized by the select of Israel, most sought after by this race apparently given over to material cares, was invariably the spiritual one. In the old Jewries the banker has ever been less esteemed than the scholar, the money-changer less than the student. If such is not now the rule, it is because, through our influence, Israel has fallen away from her traditions. Even as late as the eighteenth century, the highest ambition of the Polish Jews was to add a learned Hakhani to their family. The competition to secure promising young rabbis for their daughters was so keen that money was offered. There was something like a traffic in these budding scholars. Their parents put them up at auction, as it were, and shrewd fathers, such as Solomon Maimon’s, sold only to the highest bidder. 1 At the age of eleven Solomon Maimon, the grandson of the Lithuanian inn-keeper, had already had several offers. The j^oung doctor continued his studies in his wife’s family. Even in Berlin, the daughter of a rich banker fell in love with Moses Mendelssohn, the son of the copyist of the Thorn , merely because of his reputation as a scholar. The Jew has an admiration for science. From the time of the edict of Cyrus to the Sanhedrim of Napoleon, this 1 Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte , edited by R. P. Moritz, Berlin 1792-93. Cf. Graetz, Geschichte der jfuden, vol. xi., pp. 142-149. 184 Israel Among the Nations . has been one of the most marked and most constant traits of Judaism. Whether among the Sopherim of Palestine or the Amoraim of Babylon, the teacher of the Taw was the national type of Israel, the man in whom Israel gloried. This idea runs not only through the Talmud, but pervades the Old and New Testa¬ ments. Teaming was, for two thousand years, the sole claim to distinction recognised by Israel. To the scholar were accorded all the honours. “The scholar,” says the Talmud, ‘ ‘ takes precedence over the king ; the learned bastard over the ignorant high-priest.” 1 What a con¬ trast to this is afforded by our Western barbarians, the Franks, the Goths, and the Bombards. Israel remained faithful to this precept throughout all her humiliations. Whenever, in Christian or Moslem lands, a hostile hand closed her schools, the rabbis crossed the seas to reopen their academies in a distant country. Tike the legen¬ dary wandering Jew, the flickering torch of Jewish science thus passed from Hast to West, from North to South, changing every two or three hundred years from one country to another. Whenever a royal edict com¬ manded them to vacate, within three months,- the coun¬ try in which their fathers had been buried or their sons had been born, the treasure which the Jews were most anxious to carry away with them was their books. Among all the anto-dci-fes which the daughter of Zion has had to witness, none has cost her such bitter tears as those flames which, during the Middle Ages, greed¬ ily consumed the scrolls of the Talmud. And even at the present time—the saddest time the Jews have known since Torquemada wrested the decision against them from the conquerors of Granada,—among all the 1 Treatise Horaioth , iii. Psychology of the Jew. 185 laws that sweep clown upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow, those which they find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance to the Russian universities . 1 But, to return to the Jew’s ancestors. L,et us con¬ sider who were these scholars and what was their science. The rabbi and the Hakham were no closet- students, shut up in their academies or schools, sepa¬ rated from the bulk of their co-religionists, and honoured by their people in proportion to the inability of the people to understand them. Not at all; they were at all times in close and intimate relation with the great body of Israel; it is really they who formed her spirit and moulded her mind. They were truly her guides and counsellors, her masters and chiefs. Israel’s whole soul became imbued with their teachings, taking an eager interest in the disputes between the rival schools. It might be said that almost every Jew was more or less of a scholar, more or less learned. The entirely illiterate Jew, Vinalfabeto , as the Italians say, has al¬ ways been rare. Education was always compulsory in Israel. The Jewish laymen, unlike those among the Christians, never left all learning to the clergy. Such a division would have been contrary to the spirit of Judaism. Every Israelite is, in a certain sense, a priest; every Jew is obliged to study the Thom. All that has been said, in this respect, as to the Refor¬ mation and the reading of the Bible by the Protes¬ tants, is still more pertinent to the Jews and Judaism. It is for this reason that the Synagogue called itself the school. This w r as the case with our Avignon Jews. The Polish Jews still say Schule , and the Italian Jews la 1 See Z ,’Empire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. iii., book iv. chap. iii. 186 Israel A mong the Nations . scuola. For generations the children—at least the boys —who attended the heder were taught, from the age of four or five, to read in the Talmud. Even to this day, wherever Jewish tradition survives in the life of the people, many Hebrew artisans or merchants keep, in their back-shop, some Talmudic treatise, which they study behind closed doors, at night, after having set¬ tled their accounts. In many cities of eastern Europe, at Vilna, BerditchefF, Warsaw, Brod, and Jassy, the Jewish working-men assemble in their klause?t, or cells, to study and meditate upon the Eaw. Instead of meeting in grog-shops or joining some band or singing society, as men of their class do elsewhere, these Jewish artisans establish the hebroth for the study of the Thor a. Each hebra has its maggid , or reader, whom it maintains at its own expense. Throughout the East we find many ofthese doctors of various degrees, maggid , talmid , hakham ;, many of whom, like the rabbis of old, live by the labour of their hands . 1 To be sure, this Talmudic learning seems useless. It seems a barren knowledge of words and formulas, a system of idle and hollow dialectics, childish in some respects, and in others senile. They appear almost pathetically ludicrous to us, those little Polish rabbis of eleven or twelve, who, in the presence of their admir¬ ing co-religionists, maintained all manner of theses on the most bizarre points of Talmudic casuistry. Useless and trifling though it may have been in its teachings, this science was by no means always so in its effects on the mind, to which it gave form and fineness. This pedantic instruction of the Talmud-Tora or the Mel¬ amed may be compared to the Eatin orations and other 1 See VEmpire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. iii. : La Reli- gion , book iv., chap. iii. Psychology of the Jew . 187 useless exercises in our colleges. That which is apt to be worthless for practical life is often of greatest benefit to the intellect. For centuries the Ghemara trained the mind of Israel to acrobatic feats which greatly increased its agility. The Talmud, too, which seemed to put the Jewish mind in a strait-jacket, helped to make it limber. It has often been said that theology is a mental train¬ ing-school. From Talleyrand to Renan—diplomats or scholars—all who have gone through theological semi¬ naries have emerged from them with quicker and subtler minds. The scientific pre-eminence of Ger¬ many, as has been frequently remarked, is largely due to the German faculties of theology. The science of divinity is perhaps that which puts the finest point on the mind. This is as true of the Jews as of the Chris¬ tians. The discussions of the halakhot , the distinc¬ tions and comparisons drawn between the various opinions of the tanaim , the over-subtleties, even, of the rabbinical dialectics, tended to whet the Jewish mind. As late as the last century, during the age of decadence and formalism, when the system of Pilpoul , or “ pepper¬ corns,” obtained in the Polish communities, the teach¬ ings of the rabbis continued their work of giving edge to the intellect of Israel. The Jew’s mind, as well as his body, was thus moulded by the Talmud. For the Mishna is not only a theological treatise, but also, and to a still greater extent, a Corpus Juris , and the Ghemara is a com¬ mentary of the Raw. Now, the study of the Taw is another mental grindstone; and indeed, the Jew’s mind is as keen as a newly sharpened blade. Instead of wandering off into empty abstractions, the shrewd expounders of the Ghemara dwelt rather on concrete, 188 Israel Among the Nations . practical questions, on the rules of living and the observances of the Eaw. At the same time the Hag- gada, the legendary portion of the Talmud, stimulated Israel’s imagination. But this was not all; the rab¬ binical studies covered a remarkably large field. I know of no branch of knowledge or rudiment of science which was not touched upon in the Jewish schools. We must not look with scorn on those old, mediaeval rabbis with their foreign names. Few of our scholars have possessed so broad a culture, perhaps to none of our Sorbonne doctors was there disclosed so wide a mental horizon from so many different points of vantage. The rabbi was no priest; properly speaking, Israel has had no priests since the fall of the Temple. The rabbi was a scholar, at once a theologian and jurist. He was even more ; he was also a physician, by virtue of his study of the Talmud, in which medicine and physiology occupy a large place . 1 We know how greatly in demand were the Jewish physicians of the Middle Ages; they were almost all rabbis, and almost all the rabbis w T ere physicians. The rabbi was also a mathematician and an astrologer, like Abraham ben Ezra ; and this was likewise due to the Talmud and the religious laws, which had to understand the course of the stars in order to determine the feast days and the calendar. In addition to this, the rabbis were almost invariably polyglots and travellers, familiar with many tongues and with many peoples. Compelled to study dead languages and to decipher ancient texts, they were necessarily grammarians and, to a certain degree, philologists. Many of them were mighty trans¬ lators before the Ford. So it was that the Jew became 1 See, for instance, Dr. Rabbinowicz’s La Mkdecine du Tal¬ mud. Psychology of the few . 189 the common carrier of ideas between Asia and Europe, between the Mussulman and the Christian, between the philosophy and science of the ancient world and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The learned Jew, the rabbi-physician, was, espe¬ cially among the Spanish judios , commonly also a poet-philosopher. This was the case with most of the great rabbis of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the golden age of Jewish science and literature. For in¬ stance, with Rabbi Salomon Ibn Gabirol, the author of Fons Vita, known to our scholiasts as Avicebron , the Arabian, the reviewer of Hebrew poetry and the re¬ storer of philosophy in Europe. Also with Rabbi Jehuda Halevy, the physician of Toledo and the pilgrim from Palestine, the philosopher of the Khosari and the author of the Songs of Zion , whose Hebrew verses on Jerusalem still move Israel to tears ; Jehuda Halevy, a great poet, extolled by Heine as: “A poet by the grace of God.” 1 And with Maimonides, the greatest of all, Moses ben Maimon, the second Moses, born in Cordova, reared in Moscow, buried in Tiberias, a mer¬ chant for a short time during his youth, physician to the Sultan at Cairo, prince or nagid of the Egyptian Jews ; Maimonides, Israel’s great metaphysician, the legislator and codifier of Judaism. Seldom has the human plant, if I may borrow Alfieri’s expression, had richer sap or thrust its branches more vigorously forth in every direction ; but its period of bloom was brief. The Jewish intellect was placed in the confined air of the Ghetto, or rather, like the trees which the Chinese amuse themselves by 1 la, er ward ein grosser Dichter, Stern und Fackel seiner Zeit . . . —Heinrich Heine : Jehuda ben Halevy ; Romanzero. 190 Israel A mong the Nations . growing in tiny pots, it was forced into a narrow re- ceptable where its roots lacked earth. No wonder it was dwarfed ! But to see it spread and branch freely, it is only necessary to set it out in open soil. We marvel often at the varied talents of the Jews, at their singular power of assimilation, at the quick¬ ness with which they appropriate our knowledge and our ways. But this should not astonish us, since they have been trained to it by their past, by two thousand years of mental exercise. In approaching our sciences they are not venturing upon strange ground, but are re-entering a land already explored by their ancestors. The past centuries have not only equipped Israel for the battles on the Stock Exchange and the race for wealth, they have also armed her for the warfare of science and the conquest of thought. The cumber¬ some treatises of the Talmud and the old rabbinical schools have prepared and, as it were, preordained the Jew for our two most modern studies; they have fitted him for modern criticism, through the discussion of learned texts, and for physics and the natural sciences, through the study of life and organic nature. The Israelite who to-day devotes himself to philology or archaeology is the descendant of a long line of rabbis who, for generations, have laboured over obscure texts. The two Darmesteters for instance, the sons of the modest bookbinder, number thirty rabbis among their forefathers. 1 The Jewish mind is not waste land waiting for the plough ; it has never lain fallow long. It has been a fertile soil for centuries, needing but the application of new scientific methods to bring forth new harvests. Viewed as a nation, Israel is, we 1 Arsene Darmesteter’s Reliques Scie?itiftques y 1890. Preface by Mr. James Darmesteter. Psychology of the few . 191 repeat, the most ancient and perhaps the most gifted of all those which the Germans call “ Cultur- volker.” The breadth and antiquity of her culture have won for her a sort of aristocracy of birth among the nations. II. The Jew’s mind is stronger than his body. On the other hand, his character is weaker than his intellect. The one may be said to have developed at the expense of the other, or rather, that which strengthened and sharpened the latter often tended to weaken the former. This phenomenon is not without precedent. Pessi¬ mists will probably pronounce it a natural occurrence, asserting that in races and civilisations, if not in in¬ dividuals, intelligence and morality are like the two bowls of a scale, one of which rises as the other falls. Some persons will say that this is one of the laws of history. We should be so sorry to believe this, that we cannot readily agree with such a statement. The instance of the Jew is no proof of its truth. Israel’s case can be easily explained ; history itself furnishes the explanation for it. With the ancient Hebrews the contrary was more apt to be the case ; their character was superior to their intellect. In this respect again, modern Israel would seem to be morally as well as physically, a dying race. Moral deterioration united to mental quickness is, in fact, one of the most distinctive features of a race in its decline; witness the ancient Greeks, and the Italians of the last two centuries. The persistency of Jewish character throughout history has been the subject of frequent comment; the observation is correct in some respects, but false or superficial in others. 192 Israel A mong the Nations . Stubbornness was the dominant trait, the distinguishing quality, of the ancient Hebrew. He possessed a strength of will, a doggedness, rarely found in the Occi¬ dentals. It was Mordecai, the haughty zealot, who refused to bend the knee before Haman. ‘ 1 A stiff¬ necked race ’ ’ they are called by Moses himself, in Exodus. The Jew was always refractory ; even when he yielded to force—and his impotence often compelled him to do so—he submitted outwardly only. The Jews have retained this stubborn spirit; it is a part of their very being ; it has even been intensified by their age¬ long ordeal. Their will has been tempered by fire and water during twenty centuries of suffering. They have become accustomed to resist. Their motto was, * 1 In spite of everything. ’ ’ If there ever was an obstinate race, it is Israel. Only the stronger, the more energetic, the more self- willed of her members could persist in remaining Jews ; the weaker ones, the cowardly, vacillating natures, all those whose spirits were tame and whose souls or bodies offered little resistance, were eliminated by the centu¬ ries. They succumbed to persecution or the attraction of other religions. In their case the law of selection had fullest sway. There were many countries in which a man had to be nothing less than a hero in order to remain a Jew. The race has, to-day, as strong a will as ever. In this sense there is none that has more character. Energy or intensity of will is one of the most constant traits of the Jew, and one of the reasons of his superior¬ ity. But his inflexibility has disappeared ; the prophet would not now say to Israel: ‘ ‘ Thy neck is as an iron sinew.” 1 Israel’s head has been taught to bow and 1 Isaiah, xlviii., 4. Psychology of the Jew. 193 her spine to bend. The lesson had to be learned, or her back would have been broken. After having been the oak that resists the storm, Israel was compelled to become the reed that bends before the breeze. Only at this cost has the race been able to survive. The Jew has kept his energy, but has kept it within him, out of sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and masked beneath humility. He combines within himself two qualities rarely co-existent, and the union of which should suffice to give him the key to fortune : he is, at once, the most self-willed and the most yielding of men, the most stubborn and the most tract¬ able. In this respect, his soul corresponds to his intel¬ lect ; he is a homogeneous being ; his mind harmonises with his character. The pliancy of the one exists in the other ; they are equally elastic. But what is gener¬ ally an advantage to the mind, is often detrimental to the character ; and there is danger that the virtue will transform itself into a vice. The extreme pliancy, the great ductility which constitutes the mental superiority of the Jew, is, on the other hand, the cause of his moral inferiority. For this flexibility of his whole being the Jew has had to pay dear; constant bending has given him a stoop. Not infrequently his figure has be¬ come deformed—we might almost say warped—by it; it has left him with something like a curvature of the spine. His soul has lost stature and his heart has shrunk, like his body. In many cases moral abasement has kept pace with physical degeneration. Constrained to accommodate himself to all sorts of situations, he has, of necessity, grown used to objec¬ tionable compromises. The inner man has felt the effect of the outer man’s obeisances. It has been so *3 i 9 4 Israel Among the Nations . bowed by the centuries that it cannot always rise erect again. Look at the Eastern Jew ; he has so long been used to bending that he has, in manj^ cases, lost the habit of walking upright. There seems to be something of the reptile in him, something sinuous and crawling, something slimy and clammy, of which not even the educated Israelite has always been able to rid himself. In this respect he often finds it difficult to “ de-judaise ’ ’ himself. This is a quality which transforms him again, as it were, into an Oriental; it is a racial feature, an inherent vice, not always to be washed away by the water and salt of baptism, nor exorcised by the prayers of priests. According to one of our great writers, there are two things which characterise the modern man, “ two things which he never repudiates : conscience and honour, the former of Christian, the latter of feudal origin.” 1 Now, of these two new concepts on which the entire morality of modern society is based, the latter w r as, until quite recently, unknown to the Jew, the former has be¬ come starved or warped in him for ages. Herein lies the great contrast between the Jew and ourselves ; in this respect he is often inferior to us, despite his mental advantages and intellectual vigour. As for conscience, we have no right to say that it is lacking in Israel. Taine asserts it to be of Christian origin ; it would be more correct to attribute it to Jew¬ ish origin. It is like charity, a Semitic importation. Israel introduced it into the world, at least in the sense 1 Taine’s Les Origines de la France Contemporaine.—La Revo¬ lution , vol. iii., pp. 124-126. These are, remarks Taine, two new words, without equivalent in Greek or Latin : neither consci- entia , nor honos , nor dig?iilas has the same meaning. Psychology of the few. 195 in which Christianity interpreted it. The Jew was the first to set up an inner tribunal, into which no master had the power to penetrate, not even the kings of the earth nor the wielders of the sword. His conquerors, whether Assyrian, Greek, or Roman, have had experi¬ ence of this. Israel has had her proto-martyrs of the conscience, led by the seven Maccabaeans, who preferred to suffer torture rather than to partake of for¬ bidden food. Conscience has been the soul of Judaism ; it is rooted in the Thora . Israel’s very existence is the best proof of this ; the Jew has been faithful to his Taw, and has remained Jew, only because he exalted conscience above everything. But this Jewish conscience, the mother and nurse of our own, has gradually become contracted and ob¬ scured. It, also, has lost a part of its inflexibility ; it has become pliant, yielding to the demands of the times, adapting itself to compromises, leaguing itself with force, donning disguises and masks. Even in religion, in what lay nearest to its heart, it has learned to dissimulate, to lie, to bend the knee before strange gods and prophets. Thousands and tens of thousands of African, Asiatic, and European Jews have, in order to save their lives, outwardly renounced their faith, declaring themselves followers of Jesus or Mohammed. Christians, also, have weakened under persecution ; there were a number of backsliders among them; martyrdom has ever been a neglected profession. But the difference between them and the Jews lies in the fact that the rabbis palliated, approved of, sometimes even advised, such seeming apostasy. Their most renowned scholar, the author of the thirteen articles of faith, the great Maimonides, practising what he preached, is said himself to have turned Mohammedan 196 Israel A mong the Nations . during his earlier years . 1 Five centuries later, Sab- batai, the Oriental pseudo-messiah, acknowledged his belief in Mohammed in the presence of the Sultan, and trampled upon his Jew’s cap, without weakening his authority over his followers by such an act of disloy¬ alty. I am not sure that some Jews do not still look forward to his resurrection. Many other Jews—Span¬ ish, Portuguese, Italian, and French—have likewise accepted conversion whenever they have had to choose between death and the Cross. There may be certain families among the Sephardim who have alternately kissed the Gospel and the Koran. The nuevos cris- tianos of Castile and the marra?ios of Iyusitania attended church, were married by priests, knelt in the confes¬ sional and at the communion table, without ceasing to be Jews. Even in our own country, in Bordeaux, our Portuguese Jews, descendants of the “ New Christians ” of the Peninsula, protested for a long time that they were good Catholics, and not Jewish unbelievers . 2 “We are Israelites,” the fathers told their children in private, teaching them to deny before men the faith which was secretly transmitted to them. Whole gen- 1 The fact, it is true, has been disputed, although admitted by Munck aud Graetz. Maimonides wrote a treatise in defence of the Mohammedan Jews. According to him, the Talmud and the Taw forbid under penalty of death only idolatry, adultery, and manslaughter. See Graetz, Geschichte der Juden , vol. vi., chap, x., pp. 316-322. 2 The Jews of Bordeaux did not renounce Catholic practices to take up the practices of their ancestral creed, until the eighteenth century. They had concealed their faith and feigned to be Christians during more than five hundred years. See Malvezin’s Histoire des Juifs d, Bordeaux, pp. 178-180. It has been asserted that Montaigne’s mother issued from one of those Portuguese Jews. Psychology of the few. 197 erations of the sons of Jacob were thus trained to lie and dissimulate with regard to what they held most sacred. Such false Catholics were to be found until very recently in Spain, despite the familiars of the In¬ quisition ; and in certain Eastern towns, in Salonica, if I am not mistaken, there are many false Moham¬ medans left. Even to-day, although the Russian sab- bafists, may not be Jews in disguise 1 as has sometimes been supposed, Russia appears to do all in her power to convert her Jewish subjects to such false orthodoxy, giving them—one and all—the choice only between baptism and expulsion. How many of the thousands of Jews whom his Excellency, the chief Procurator of the most Holy Synod boasts, in his official reports, of having won over to the Greek Church during the past twelve years, can really be called Christians ? How many profess themselves still Jews, in the seclusion of their families, and teach their sons to despise the reli¬ gion which they are obliged to acknowledge in public ? Can we be surprised, in view of this, that the Jew is less pained by duplicity than we are ? Need we ask ourselves what sort of influence upon young and old must be exerted by the mere verbal adherence to a religion despised at heart? It is true, without this duplicity Israel might have been exterminated. The surest means by which a Jew could save his faith was to abjure it. Does not the heaviest blame fall upon the Christians who forced the Jews to profane the mysteries of their faith ? However, all Jews are not compelled, or not willing, to submit to this supreme humiliation, to this outward renunciation of the faith of their fathers. They are 1 See VEmpire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. iii. : La Reli¬ gion , book iii., chap, ix., pp. 515-518. 198 Israel A mong the Nations . justified in reminding us that no religion can vie with that of Israel in the number of its martyrs . 1 But this religious disguise, which many of them are forced to adopt, was not the only one to which the sons of Jacob had to submit. Not only while at prayers, in the tab¬ ernacle of the Christians or the mosque of the Turks, had the Jew to play the hypocrite ; but also in his every-day life, in his shop, in his different professions, and in his intercourse with the Go'im. The Jewish conscience has not emerged unscathed from the Ghetto. It became narrowed under the influence of the tribal spirit, confused by casuistry, weakened by persecution, and finally almost extinguished by suffering. Scorned by all his surroundings, excluded from the common law, cheated of his human rights by other human be¬ ings, the Jew thought himself justified in taking many liberties with those who took every liberty with him. Deprived of the weapons of the strong, he resorted to the devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery, and deceit. And so the ages have succeeded in warping the conscience of that people in whom the word con¬ science has had its origin. It matters little that this moral deterioration was due less to their own teachers and casuists than to our laws and our persecutions ; 1 “ Within the space of two months,” wrote to me, on this sub¬ ject, the chief-rabbi, Mr. Lehmann, in a letter published by & Vnivers Israelite (Now., 1891), “twelve thousand Jews whose names have been preserved,—twelve thousand, in the Rhenish towns alone—were massacred for having refused baptism.” The vindicators of Israel remind us that even in Spain, where the nuevos cristianos were most numerous, hundreds of thousands of Jews accepted in 1492—for the most part without contest—the decree of misery and exile in preference to abnegation of their faith. And even to-day, the greater portion of Russian Jews are willing to make the same sacrifice. Psychology of the Jew. 199 the fact remains the same; and this conscience, thus warped and twisted, cannot straighten itself all at once. As to honour, where could the Jew possibly have learnt its meaning? What connection was there be¬ tween such a sentiment,—born in mediaeval strongholds, beneath the knight’s helmet and coat-of-arms,—and the Jew, beaten, reviled, scorned, abused, by everybody. How could his pride have ‘ ‘ mounted guard over his rights,” when no one would grant him any rights? The feudal knight in his castle-keep was obliged to display pride, under penalty of death. The Jew, on the contrary, was obliged, under the same penalty, to show himself meek and retiring. Only at this cost has he continued to exist. In him honour would have seemed ridiculous. The grossest insult was no disgrace to the Jew ; the disgrace was in being a Jew. He became saturated with the contempt in which he was steeped. Con¬ trary to the feudal baron, he was made to swallow abuse like water; he was not allowed to take offence at anything. It was he, and not the Christian, who offered the left cheek to those who had smitten him on the right . 1 This made his skin callous; blows and insults no longer bit through it ; the only wounds he felt were those which affected his in¬ terests. On certain days (notably on Good-Friday) and in certain cities (in Toulouse, for example) the heads of the Jewish community marched solemnly to 1 Israel’s sages have, themselves, applied to her these words of Isaiah ( 1 ., 6, 7) which the Christians ascribe to Christ: “ I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair. I hid not my face from shame and spitting. I have set my face like a flint and I know that I shall not be ashamed.” 200 Israel Among the Nations. the town-hall, there to receive in public, in the presence of my lord the count and his Christian vassals, a box on the ear. Jurists have pedantically styled this act “ colaphisation.” Never was ceremony more symbol¬ ical. The whole of Israel has for a thousand years been thus boxed on the ear by Christians and Mo¬ hammedans. The conservator of the Roman Capitol was in the habit of setting his foot on the neck of the rabbi who lay prostrate before him. The Jew has been forced to submit to many other outrages. In almost all countries he has had, during the carnival, to play the fool or buffoon for the entertainment of the popu¬ lace. Even in Rome, where the popes had given them protection, half-naked Jews were obliged to run about, like the barberi, followed by the shouts and jests of the Roman people who often goaded them with sticks and stones. The Jew was a clown for the masses ; he was the people’s jester. The best that could happen to him was to excite their laughter. Michelet speaks of “the Jew, the dirty man, the man who is abused, whom everybody spits upon.” And this is no mere figure of speech ; I have had ocu¬ lar proof of it in Europe as well as in Africa. Tike the Russian Slav who, even to-day, is also often made to feel the disgrace of his birth, he has had “ to beat the earth with his forehead. ” For fifteen hundred years he has been forced to repeat to himself, even more con¬ stantly than the Chinaman, “ Siao sing “ contract thy heart.” 1 Driven into exile or into the flames of the stake, not even free to feign a different faith, he never thought, as did his ancestors, the Maccabaeans, of rising up and perishing sword in hand . 2 He was too weak 1 Le P. Hue. 2 Several instances of Jewish resistance are quoted : for in- Psychology of the few. 201 for that, too broken by suffering, too much accustomed to bow his neck to the yoke. There was no more re¬ sistance left in his soul than on his lips or in his arms. He submitted in silence. He scarcely dared to tell his woe in Hebrew verse or, as in the case of the French Jews burnt at Troyes in 1288, to clothe his lamenta¬ tions in vernacular stanzas. No race has served so long an apprenticeship in patience and meekness. “The Jew,” it was said in the Middle Ages, “ may be recognised by his stooping gait.” But where should he have learned to walk erect ? No matter how repulsive or malodorous the labour to which he was debased, neither his spirit nor his senses revolted. The starving dog has no loathing of the bone which he digs out of the dirt-heap. The Jew was inured to degradation ; it was his lot. He was made to become like those animals that subsist on carrion and decayed scraps. He lived by what was vile, resigned himself to obscure trades, which had to be practised secretly, under cover of darkness, in dis¬ reputable quarters. The knight, the Christian clerk or townsman, could look upon himself as a superior being to whom base actions were forbidden ; such base actions, all the ignoble tasks to which the Christian would not stoop, were frequently the only ones per¬ mitted to “the Jewish dogs.” Where should the money-lender or the dealer in second-hand goods, the old-clothes man or the merchant of the Ghetto, have stance, at York, under Richard Cceur de Lion ; but such cases are very rare and belong to the time when the Jews had not be¬ come entirely debased. But lately, during the antisemitic riots in Russia, very few Israelites, even in those places where they lived in large numbers, attempted resistance. True, they would never have been forgiven for it. 202 Israel Among the Nations . acquired that self-esteem which, whether justified or not, enabled a gentleman to stand erect in the presence of a Philip II. or a Louis XIV. ? 1 Not that the Jewish pariah had not a pride of his own. No man, perhaps, has been so proud, with a concen¬ trated pride, steeled b}^ humility, and which nothing could assail. Unable to command respect for his frail personality, the Jew took refuge in a collective pride ; he was proud of his people, his religion, and his God. Never has he lost faith in the superiority of Israel. In the presence of his Christian or Mohammedan op¬ pressors, he seemed to himself like a prince, sold into slavery and condemned to degrading labours by cruel taskmasters. Though yielding to force, he found in his Law an inner refuge where no harm could reach him. 2 The knights, the grandees, the lords of the 1 Some Israelites have found that here I was unfair towards Israel. A high-rabbi, M. Lehmann, has taken the trouble to reply to me in minivers Israelite (Nov. i, 1891). “What would you have thought of us ” he wrote, “ if we had accepted, without revolt, some of your strictures? Then, indeed, you would have been but too right! Deprived of honour and con¬ science, what would the Jews have left?” This high-rabbi was not wrong. I do not bear him a grudge for having revolted against some of my decisions, thus proving that they do not apply to all of his co-religionists. Several of them, officers in our army, have protested after their own fashion, sword in hand; and the duel in which Captain Meyer fell, no longer permits the assertion that a sense of honour is foreign to the Jews. Nevertheless, I believe my opinions well founded, at least in certain cases, where I account for these moral short¬ comings by the treatment inflicted on the Jews in the past. 2 “ Outrage cannot touch him, injustice does not incense him,” wrote to me, himself, the high-rabbi M. Lehmann, di¬ rector of the Israelitish seminary in Paris. “ Despite all his humiliations, the Jew has never been degraded in his own eyes.” (II Univers Israelite, ibid.) Psychology of the few. 203 earth, and all the Go'im were, in his eyes, nothing but barbarians, of less noble blood, of inferior culture, almost of a lower race. What contempt must have filled his heart for those Christians by whose vices he lived, for those great bodies of armour-clad barons who, according to the advice of the good King Touis at Joinville, were willing to argue with a Jew, “ only by hard sword-blows on the belly.” The Gentiles had only brute force on their side. While submitting to the most repulsive labours, the Jew continued to scorn those who forced him to perform them,. In the midst of the filth and degradation of the Judengasse, the Jew with his yellow cap felt himself immeasurably superior to his uncircumcised masters. Israel alone was noble ; Israel alone was pure; nothing could sully the house of Jacob or impair its grandeur. From this conviction of his innate superiority the Jew borrowed the strength to withstand all humiliations, so that, according to Tamennais, ‘ ‘ neither suffering nor disgrace succeeded in diminishing his pride or his meanness. ’ ’ Moreover, was he not sure of revenge some day ? “ Tittle fool,” said the rabbi Joshua in his dirty tavern at Sukoviborg, to his son Solomon Maimon, who stood speechless with admiration before the princess Radzi- will, “ in the next world this beautiful princess will have to light the fire in our stove.” Indeed, many Jews believed that they would not need to wait for the next world; they hoped in this life to hear the trumpet-call of the archangel proclaim the hour of their triumph. It had been promised them by the prophets and Jehovah owed them the fulfilment of this promise. Was not the Messiah to come, some day, in order to set everything right; to place Israel on high and the Goim below, beneath the feet of Judah ? From 204 Israel Among the Nations . generation to generation the Jews looked forward to this avenging Messiah, searching through astrology and the cabala for the year of his advent, accepting artlessly all the false Messiahs up to the time of Descartes and Voltaire, without ever losing their faith in Israel’s victory. This explains why for centuries they were able to bear such a burden of contempt without break¬ ing down beneath its weight. The mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not broken ; it remained intact, ready to be set in motion again on the day of deliver¬ ance. Bowed as he was, the Jew was always ready for the time of upraising. He prayed for it; he discounted it in anticipation, asking Jehovah when his wrath would cease to be poured out upon his people, never doubting that liberation would come in the end,— patient, also himself, because himself eternal. Thence comes the Jew’s marvellous faculty of re¬ bounding as soon as the crushing weight has been lifted from his shoulders, a faculty which, despite all degradation, always raises him again to the surface. Thence, also, his occasional outbursts of long-sup¬ pressed and seemingly stifled pride, and his sensitive¬ ness, which jars on us all the more because it is so unexpected. In his desire to be proud he becomes insolent. But here especially, if we make a point of being just, we must look into our own hearts. This meanness, this moral abasement, for which, even to this day, we believe ourselves justified in blaming the Jew, is as much our fault as his. It is our work. We ourselves, from generation to generation, have engendered this quality in him. We have taxed our wits to debase him ; we have knowingly and skilfully laboured at Psychology of the Jew. 205 his degradation. To this end we have invented dis¬ graceful garbs, ignominious badges, humiliating cere¬ monies. The Jew could never be made sufficiently vile in the eyes of the Christian. Our ancestors trained him to baseness as they trained setters to crouch, and dachshunds to crawl into holes. Here again, it is neither Semitic blood nor Hebrew Taw that is respon¬ sible ; it is but a question of heredity and adaptation to environment. Wherever he was relatively free, wherever he was permitted to raise his head, the Jew became more and more like the Christian, in this re¬ spect as in many others. Such was the case formerly with the Spanish Jews, also with the Sephardim who emigrated to the West. If they have suffered more than the Askenazim they have, at any rate, been less humiliated. Honour did not always present itself to them in the guise of a pinnacled castle with a draw¬ bridge, over which no Jews were allowed to pass. They were sometimes permitted to bear arms within the castle-walls and they often associated with Arab knights and Christian hidalgos. Despite their four centuries of exile we can, at times, detect in them what seems like a reflex of Castilian pride or Oriental dignity. As for the Asiatic, African, Roumanian, Hungarian, and Russian Jews, treated with a degree of contempt perhaps more fatal to their souls than were the quema- deros of the Inquisition, what chance have they had to wash off the mire in which Christian and Moslem masters have forced them to crawl ? Those wretched Jews were like the timid animals, which, for fear of at¬ tracting the attention of their pursuers, crouch down and lie flat upon the ground. There is, moreover, another fact which must not be forgotten : they have keenly felt the debasing effects of inherited poverty and 206 Israel Among the Nations . sordid want, apt, in severe climates, to degrade tlie body as well as the soul. The laws of Christian Europe were well calculated to keep them in such a con¬ dition or to throw them back into it. To this day, in Russia and Roumania, such hostile laws recently re-en¬ acted and, in some cases, made more stringent than ever, weigh heavily upon more than one half of the Jew r s of Europe. They manage to live only by tricks and devices, by smuggling themselves, so to speak, between the meshes of the law in which they are netted. They are not evenly matched in their game with the Christians; the law forces them to cheat. This has created a sort of vicious circle from which the various governments have not been skilful or brave enough to extricate themselves. The legislators, professing to protect the Christians from the wiles of the Jews, issue edicts against them that serve only to incite them to trickery and to train them in duplicity. Even in the countries where they are emancipated, in Germany, Austria, and Italy, it is only since one or two generations that they have enjoyed liberty and security ; nowhere, except in France and Holland, has this been the case for more than a century. The Jews are like the enfranchised sons of former slaves ; they have but recently exchanged the Jew’s cap for the cap of Eiberty. They are all liberti or libertini; their newly acquired freedom is held by a revocable tenure ; and in our modern democracies, as in ancient Rome, the freedman, whatever be his race, needs more than one generation to acquire the habits, ideas, and feelings of the man born free. Eet us remember the education which the Jews have received during the past twenty centuries and the education which more than three fourths of them are Psychology of the few. 207 still receiving. What was taught to the child by his father ? Above all—since such influences are still more important than family advice or example—what lessons were taught by the world and every-day life ? Were they lessons of loyalty, truth, rectitude, and delicacy ? What were the games and pastimes of the young Jews? Almost everywhere children are taught games that are apt to cultivate pride, courage, a sense of honour ; but we must not imagine that such were the games of the Jewish children. Kven to-day, in some localities, they scarcely dare to engage in the boisterous sports suited to their years. They are chidden when they are noisy, heedless, frolicsome, like Christian children. The Jew in those places has no right to be a child; his least misdemeanours are punished as if they were crimes. As recently as July, 1890, at Bialystok in Russia, a Jewish boy of twelve was caught picking cherries in a garden ; the proprietor, a Christian physician, tattooed, with nitrate of silver, upon the culprit’s forehead the word thief, in Russian, German, and Hebrew. 1 And the Jews who dared to find fault with this ingenious mode of correction were relegated to a distant part of the empire. Kven after having been admitted to our Western colleges, the Jewish youths were fora long time objects of derision. They were like aliens among the Christian youths, like bastards among legitimate children. The blood of Jacob seemed, even in the baptised Jews, to be a blemish, a physical defect, for which their inhuman companions made them suffer bitterly. Benjamin Disraeli, for instance, never forgot nor forgave the 1 I hold in my hands the photograph of the child thus dis¬ figured. 208 Israel Among the Nations . cruelties of which he was a victim at Eton and Har- lowe, during his childhood. 1 What was the state of things before the French Revo¬ lution set the example of emancipating these pariahs ? Everywhere the young Jew received, at an early age, lessons which sank deep into his youthful mind,—les¬ sons of deceit, of mock humility, of servile submission, of trickery and of cunning. If he was beaten or in¬ sulted by Christian or Mussulman, of what use was it to complain, since law and justice were not for him ? Prudent parents were careful to instil this elementary truth into the minds of their offspring. Rabbi Joshua the father of Solomon Maimon, urged his sons to oppose their adversaries with ruse alone. “ No force,” said this sensible man, ‘ ‘ only strategy. ’ ’ Solomon’s younger brothers one day deftly took from him some trousers- buttons which the future rabbi had treacherously purloined from them. Solomon complained of this. ‘ ‘ Why did you allow yourself to be found out ? ’ ’ answered his father : ‘ ‘ try to be slyer next time. ’ ’ 2 It was after this fashion that the wise Israelites of the eighteenth century taught their children the science of life. We should not be astonished, in view of this, at the meanness of that very Maimon, a type of the most cultured Jew to be found prior to the French Revolution : a low soul united to a high intellect. This self-taught rabbi succeeded in becoming one of the most subtle metaphysicians of Germany, while remaining a beg- ’ These sufferings and heart-burnings of his youth have been described by Disraeli in two of his earliest novels : Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey. Cf G. Brandes, Lord Beaconsfeld, Berlin, 1879, pp. 20-24. 2 Salomon Maimon''s Lebensgeschichte. Cf. Arvede Barine’s “ Un Juif Polonais,” Revue des Deux Monctes, Oct. 15, 1889. Psychology of the Jew . 209 garly rogue. He was able to refute Kant, to soar, without effort, into the ethereal regions of pure thought, and at the same time to remain engrossed in the vulgar interests of a very material life. The thinker in him preserved the feelings, the instincts, the motives, of a low-born parasite. Despite his learning and phi¬ losophy, he sank deeper than the most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating his ancestral faith he had lost the staff which, through all their humili¬ ations, served as a prop even to the most debased of ancient Jews. The case of Maimon is not without a parallel. Many modern Israelites, though far removed in out¬ ward elegance from the vulgar grandson of the Eusi- tanian inn-keeper, are morally in the same predicament. Deprived of their own faith and without having adopted ours, possessing, like so many of us, but a dim notion of duty, without having, like most of us, inherited from their ancestors a strict sense of honour, the de-judaised Jews are, in too many cases, lacking in moral feeling. Much could be said of the peculiarities of Jewish morals, peculiarities that exist even among the Jews who, happily for themselves and for us, have not lost all reverence for the Thora. Every race develops a code of morals that accords with the conditions of its existence. How could those of Israel withstand the influence of the life which we have compelled her to live ? The ethics of a race or of a religion are almost entirely contained in its laws and sacred books; they rise and fall, become corrupted or purified, according to the demands of life. It is but natural that the Jew should have developed a code of ethics that accorded with the persecutions and degradations which he had to suffer. It is perhaps the most marked result of the 14 210 Israel Among the Nations. education which the centuries have given him. From his earliest youth, life presented itself to the son of Judah as a war to be waged with all his surroundings, a war of cunning, of traps and ambuscades, in which the Jew had no means of defence but his shrewdness and dexterity. His forefathers, whose deeds of valour were recorded in the Bible, had fought with the sword and the javelin ; but his own weapons, the only ones within his reach, were intrigue, fraud, cunning, and hypocrisy. Israel fared like every other race that has been trampled on and abased for years ; we know into what the noblest nation of antiquity was for a long time transformed by Roman conquest, Byzantine des¬ potism, and Turkish domination. Bondage is invari¬ ably a terrible corrupter of morals ; the finest races are perhaps most degraded by it: optimi corruptio pessima. There is, moreover, another means of forming char¬ acter : that which works through the agency of he¬ reditary occupations, of the trades followed by our ancestors. Fvery calling may be said to engender its own system of morals, as each produces its character¬ istic traits of mind and tricks of body. The ordinary trades of the Jew are well known to us ; we have noted their influence on his intellect, but they have made per¬ haps even a deeper impress on his character. His long confinement at the counter or in the shop has imbued him with its spirit and given him, as it were, a mercan¬ tile instinct that is still apparent in many cases. Would that such an instinct were to be met with only in the sons of Abraham, in whose case it can be so easily explained ! With them it is a sort of atavistic trait. In the banker of Berlin or Frankfurt, in the journalist or the scholar of Vienna or Paris, there crops out all of a sudden the broker of the Judengasse, or the huck- Psychology of the Jew . 21 I ster of the Ghetto. The impress is too deep to be wholly worn away inside of a century. One’s ances¬ tors cannot be gotten rid of so quickly. The many repulsive labours forced upon the Jew for centuries have often soiled his soul as well as his fingers. Take even the most decent occupations followed by his ancestors: that of peddler, jobber, inn-keeper, old-clothes dealer, treasurer of king or sultan, banker, or farmer,—these are not occupations apt to uplift the soul or ennoble the character. What they teach is not moral refinement, sincerity, unselfishness, or generosity. It is not right to disparage commerce, yet among all occupations, it is traffic, especially petty trade, that tends most to blunt the moral sense and to cramp the highest faculties of the soul. The ancients were so well aware of this that their lawgivers excluded mer¬ chants from the agora and from the administration of public affairs. There was some basis for the rule which obtained in France before the Revolution : “Trade forfeits nobility.” Now, although the Jew was never only the money-maker, almost every Jew was forced to make money. Shut out from all hon¬ ourable occupations, scarcely any Jew was able “to live nobly,” as our fathers used to say. And wdiat shall be said of the conditions under which the Jewish traders were obliged to carry on their busi¬ ness ? As a rule, trade is protected by laws. Was there any law on which the Jew could rely, in spite of the licenses which Christian policy or cupidity had granted or sold to him ? He had. to pursue his secret or avowed business without legal protection, often clandestinely, always uncertain of the morrow, ex¬ posed to all sorts of vexations and robbery, liable to diminution or entire loss of credit, anxious to conceal 212 Israel Among the Nations. his gains, in order more easily to save a few ducats for the day when it should please the people or the prince, by pillage or edict, to make him disgorge. Nor was this all. Compelled to yield his ill-gotten gains to the mighty ones of the earth, he was obliged to exploit the weak, to drain the blood of the poor, to take from the unfortunate by sheer cunning that which the powerful had wrested from him by force. This was, for himself as well as for the Christians, one of the most demoralising sides of Jewish activity. The Jew was like those birds that are trained to fish and hunt for the benefit of their owners. He was the in¬ variable agent for every sort of oppression and extor¬ tion. Treated pitilessly by those above him, he had to be pitiless to those beneath him and to extort all he could from them for the benefit of those who regarded him only as a sponge to be squeezed dry. In Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Bohemia the Jew was the detested middle-man between people and princes, serfs and noblemen. In such a calling he natural^ visited on the lowly the blows and contumely which he had received from the mighty, making the peasants pay dearly for the cruelty of their masters. As an example of this let me cite the agent of the Bast, the Polish Jew for a long time employed by the State, the pans , the Church itself, for the collection of duties, taxes, fines, debts, and rents of all kinds. Snch an agent has two sides ; by his very calling he is a man with two faces : the one turned to the master is servile, for ever smiling ; the other turned towards the farmer or tenant is hard, haughty, disdainful. Thus, the very same Jew is, in turn, meek and arrogant, low- spoken and loud-voiced, according to the man whom he addresses. His calling succeeded in blunting his Psychology of the few. 213 sensibilities, in hardening and shrivelling his heart. He suffered so much himself that he became callous to the sufferings of others. His eyes were dry ; for gen¬ erations—as Heine puts it—his silent tears trickled eastward to feed the waters of the Jordan : he had none left to weep. Besides, he was too much hated by the people to sympathise with the wrongs of which he was made the medium. When he trampled upon the Christians, when he sold the horse or cow of the peas¬ ant who was in arrears with his rent, he was only visiting upon the Go'im the cruelties which they had inflicted on him ; he could say, with the Bible : “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” certain, whatever he might do, of not being quits even then with the enemies of his race. The Christians did not regard the Jews as their equals. The feeling was mutual. Does this imply, as we are apt to believe, that the Jew was inhuman, heartless, cruel, brutal, that he had a stone in place of a heart ? By no means. Because he was hard towards his enemies it does not at all follow that he was incapable of kindness, tenderness, affection, and devotion. To a close observer the Jew is, perhaps, the most affectionate of men ; but all his affection was reserved for his family and his race. His nature, so hard and callous on the outside, remained tender in its innermost depths. The Jew, too, was a man; Shakspeare realised it instinctively in his Sliy- lock ; but he was a man toward his brethren only, toward those who treated him like a man. Against all others he clothed himself in an armour of spines, or rolled himself up in a ball; or else he shut himself up in cold impassiveness. His tenderness, like his pride, had struck inward. In a general way it may be said that the Jew was a 214 Israel Among the Nations. man of an inward life. His entire existence, his con¬ finement, and his humiliations tended, in all things, to throw him back upon himself. All his emotions, joy¬ ful or sad, were locked in his own breast. Hated and despised by everybody, he could never let himself go, nor open his heart, nor indulge in confidences; or, at least, only in his own family, with his “Jewess” and his “little Jews,” hunted and chased like himself. With them he was tender, as the wild boar is tender with its female and its young. To his wife, his chil¬ dren, and his brothers in ignominy, he revealed all that was good and tender in his nature. His spurned affec¬ tions found free outlet, at evening, in the midst of his family. The family-life has always been the refuge of the Jew. He has the domestic virtues ; even his ene¬ mies have never denied him these. In all ages he has deserved the praise of the village epitaphs, generally so apt to lie ; he was a good father, .son, and husband. Probably no other race has possessed in a like degree the love of family and the attributes which foster that love and which, though they may not be the highest nor the most brilliant, are none the less sound and precious—temperance, continence, patience, gentleness, moderation, and regularity of habits. The Jew had long been trained to all these virtues by the daily prac¬ tice of his Taw and the constant conformity to its rules. He had few vices; none of those which cause women and children to suffer most—the love of drink and of gambling, a violent temper, brutal manners, and coarse speech. In this respect he remained, even in his pesti¬ lential Ghetto, a man of good family, of good birth and breeding. As a rule, the Jew shrinks from deeds of violence and from the display of unbridled passion ; it is so very 215 Psychology of the few. long since he has been allowed to indulge in them. Moreover, his laws, the discipline of the Thora and the Talmud, have helped to teach him self-mastery. Not that he is never passionate, but he is so only in a suppressed way, and often with an icy exterior. His passion flares out only in the fire of his glance. Con¬ trary to the Slavonic and Germanic barbarian, he is seldom the slave or plaything of his passions; he knows how to guide and curb them. The Jew is exactly the opposite of the so-called child of nature, the primi¬ tive man, passionate and unbridled, carrying his heart on his sleeve—a creature of impulse. In this respect nothing could be more unlike the real Jew than the Jew of Malta, the furious and ferocious Barrabas, de¬ picted by Marlowe. The savage and lustful brute that lurks at the bottom of every man’s nature, shows itself less frequently in the Jew ; it has been cowed into sub¬ mission. 1 The Jew is, as a rule, not impulsive ; he has neither the Southern fire nor the buoyant spirits of the North¬ ern races. Although, being a nervous man, he may feel keenly, he is not subject to sudden nervous shocks. His passions are not like restive horses that neigh and paw the ground ; he has broken them in and taught them not to prance ; at least, he curbs them with a firm hand and does not give them their heads. It is true 1 Perhaps one of the most marked characteristics of the Jew is his horror of blood. It has been instilled into him, little by little, by his dietary laws. Not only must the orthodox Jew abstain from blood, but all animals, small or large, destined for his food, must be killed by the schochet appointed to that task. “Never,” says an Israelite (M. Weill’s Levitique , p. 6o), “ would a Jewess kill a chicken or a goose. The Jews have a man sworn to this difficult office.” The large communities have a schochet for poultry as well as for cattle. 2l6 Israel Among the Nations . that in some cases—and this is a modern phenomenon —nature seems to take its revenge, and there is, as it were, an explosion of long-stifled passion ; but such cases are exceptional. Contrary to the Slav and the Celt, the Jew is rarely impulsive ; he knows how to bide his time and to control himself. The ages have trained him to this ; he has so long been forced to exer¬ cise a constant watch over himself. Even to-day he feels the hostile glances that are spying on him. “ You cannot imagine how tiresome it is to have to watch one’s self so constantly,” said an Israelite to me. But most of them have acquired the habit. The Jew is master of himself, and to this self-mastery is due the ease with which he masters others. He is less obedi¬ ent to instinct than to reason. If it be the distinctive characteristic of man that he is a reasonable being, then the Jew is the most human of men. True, for him the voice of reason is commonly the voice of self-interest; but is not this what most men call being reasonable ? He has, at all events, the ad¬ vantage of better understanding his own interests and then, of holding fast to them and not permitting him¬ self to be turned aside. He is not given to hasty action ; all that he does is done with deliberate forethought and consecutive purpose. He has the patience and perseverance that makes all enterprises, great and small, succeed. Nothing discourages, fatigues or dis¬ concerts him. Think of his energy, part tenacity, part pliancy. His will is like a bow in constant tension ; his eye never swerves from the target. What a great advantage this is in the so-called struggle for life ! This struggle, which we are proud of having recently discovered, was known to the Jews a thousand years before Darwin ; they were schooled to it by the ages. Psychology of the Jew. 2 1 7 and laboriously trained to it by our ancestors. They have acquired, in bondage and suffering, those quali¬ ties which overcome force and lead to fortune. Their character as well as their intellect was equipped for the battle, and in the conflicts of modern life, which are not mere knight^ tournaments, their vices are almost as useful to them as their virtues. The Jew is indeed successful in life. In the terms of fin de siecle jargon, he is the great “ struggle-for-lifer * ’ of our continent. To be sincere, we must confess that to this fact he owes most of his enemies. III. Such is the Jew handed down to us by the ages ; both physically and morally he is but a product of the past, gradually becoming transformed under the influ¬ ence of the present. In proportion as the atmosphere in which he lives grows purer and freer, his characteris¬ tics, good and bad, grow less pronounced and vanish little by little. No other race responds so quickly to the influences of environment. Israel is undergoing, as it were, a physical as well as a moral rejuvenation. Let us bear in mind that the supreme faculty of the Jew is his suppleness, his gift of adaptation. As we have already said, he adjusts himself with incredible facility to the conditions of modern life, and while adopting our customs he appropriates our thoughts and feelings to a greater extent than we imagine. Look at the humble Russian Jew who comes to us with his threadbare caftan and his velvet skull-cap ; though he may preserve his accent and his awkwardness as long as he lives, the children whom he brings over with him will, in the course of fifteen years, have become 2 18 Israel Among the Nations . Frenchmen, Englishmen, aye, and Americans. This metamorphosis begins with the head, with that Jewish head that empties itself so quickly of all its Oriental notions in order to fill itself with ours. The heart, the feelings, change more slowly, their conversion requiring, as a rule, several generations. Indeed, some Jews re¬ mind us of those fabulous beings whose heads and bodies belong to two different species ; in some cases we should say that the Jew has a French or a German head, set on Oriental shoulders. The metamorphosis was often too sudden to be com¬ plete. There seems, at times, something incongruous in these French and English Israelites whose fathers have emigrated from Poland and Germany. A glance, a word, a gesture, all of a sudden lays bare the old Jew at bottom. “ Scratch an Israelite,” said a friend to me, “ and you will find the Jew of the Ghetto.” This is not always true. What we take for the Jew is often only the stranger, the man of a foreign country and a different education. The qualities which we see crop¬ ping out in the civilised Israelite are not so much those of the Jew as of the parvenu ; we are apt to confound one with the other. Surely most of the Jews with whom we are acquainted have traits of the parvenu ; they have the weaknesses, eccentricities, arrogance, presumption, and self-suffi¬ ciency of that class. Hence, as a rule, their lack of dis¬ tinction and elegance, their bad taste or bad tone, their want of tact, their outre manners, tending to extremes in one way or another, now familiar and unconstrained, now studied and ceremonious ; in one word, the diffi¬ culty which they experience in preserving the modera¬ tion of the man of the world. To the same cause is also partly due the vanity so naively displayed by men Psychology of the J ew. 219 not habitually frank or outspoken ; a vanity all the greater and the more sensitive because the Jew has been humiliated in his self-love for so long a time. Hence, also, that craving for titles, crowns, decorations, ribbons, distinctions of all kinds, which the Jew hank¬ ers after all the more because he has been denied them so long, and because, having had to forego them, he is apt to find them all the more precious. Hence, again, his desire to make himself heard and seen, to be in people’s mouths, to dazzle the eyes of his own race as well as of others ; hence, in a measure, his luxury, often so ostentatious, his love for jewels, equipages, enter¬ tainments of a kind to excite comment, and for all that glitters and attracts notice ; we recognise in all this the man who is delighted to parade the wealth that he has been obliged to conceal for ages. Hence, finally, the occasional eccentricities of men otherwise very prudent; such as the youthful Disraeli clad in velvet and satin, with fingers loaded with rings, and the pretensions of a dandy ; and Eassalle the Social-Democrat, posing as the knight-errant of the Countess Hatzfeld, and foolishly throwing away his life, out of sheer self-love, in his at¬ tempt to capture the hand of a young Bavarian noble¬ woman whose family would have none of him. An Englishman has said that four generations are needed to make a gentleman. “But, there are very few Jews who have these four generations back of them,’’ remarked to me a wealthy Israelite of Warsaw. He was right. With the exception of a few dozens, or at the most a few hundreds, of families, the Jew is al¬ most invariably a new-made, a self-made, man. He has risen suddenly from the ranks. He is a sol¬ dier of fortune. He has not had time to learn the tastes, manners, bearing,—and what is perhaps most 220 Israel Among the Nations . difficult of acquisition—the feelings, of a gentleman. But it does not follow that he cannot become one ; be¬ fore deciding this question we must grant him two or three more generations. Is even so much always nec¬ essary ? Rare though we may deem such cases, I, myself, have known French, English, and Italian, aye, and German, Polish, and Russian Jews who, for loftiness of feeling, are as deserving as any Christian of the name of gentleman. To those who believe the Jew to be irretrievably de¬ graded, we need but to recall the names of numerous Israelites, circumcised or baptised, who have brought honour upon the old house of Jacob. They are to be found in every age, in mediaeval as well as in present times, even in the last two or three centuries, the period of the Jew’s deepest degradation. Every race, every religion, may personify itself in certain men who are, as it were, its highest manifesta¬ tion. This was the case with Israel, even when she issued from the Ghetto, still staggering under the heavy laws and prejudices which have crushed her so long. To show what the old Jewish stock is capable of becoming under the influence of our civilisation, I will cite a man who seems to me particularly represen¬ tative of his people and his faith. It is Moses Men¬ delssohn, the friend of Eessing, and the grandfather of the composer. This little Northern Jew, whose life and especially whose writings have done so much to uplift his race, might be regarded as its living symbol. Small, ugly, awkward, misshapen, the son of Mendel the copyist of the Thor a, he had nothing to please the eye or to captivate the imagination. When his future wife—the banker’s daughter, who without knowing him had fallen in love with his precocious reputation, Psychology of the few. 221 first beheld him, she found him so ill-favoured that she had not the courage to accept him as her husband. The poor philosopher was about to withdraw when the Jewess, calling him back, asked him this question in¬ spired by the Talmud : “ Is it true that marriages are made in heaven ? ” Mendelssohn’s answer in the af¬ firmative decided her own. And the rich young girl, enough of an idealist to give her hand to the little hump-back, never had cause to repent her belief that heaven had actually preordained this strange union. Though Mendelssohn’s stature was low, his mind was lofty ; and his heart was straight, if his body was not so. We have said that with the Jew character was in¬ ferior to mind, and now the first representative of Judaism gives the lie to our assertion. It was pre¬ cisely the superiority of his soul over his genius that distinguished the author of Phedon , the ‘ ‘ Socrates of Berlin.” If we compare him with the most celebrated of his contemporaries, especially with the great men of France, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and with Mira- beau who knew him, we shall see that the moral ad¬ vantage is not on our side. In the matter of nobility of character, dignity of life, and generosity of feeling, the Jew puts the Christians to shame. And this dis¬ tinct superiority of the son of Israel over the Christians who were faithless to the spirit of Christ, was due to Mendelssohn’s faith and to his Taw. It was the re¬ spect for that Taw, the habit of moral discipline, the happy union of reason and faith, the profound appre¬ hension of all that is sound, well-balanced, moderate, in the Thora and in Jewish tradition, that made a sage of Mendelssohn before Tessing took him as a pattern for his Nathan der Weise. And this suggests a reflection. 222 Israel Among the Nations . Just as the ideal type of the Christian, the sum of evangelical virtue, is the saint—that loftiest pinnacle to which our poor human race can ever attain,—so it might be said that the ideal type of Israel, he who has climbed to the topmost rounds of Jacob’s ladder, is the sage. In all countries Israel has furnished such lofty types of character. As another instance—not taken from the Askenazivi , the Northern Jews, but from the Seph¬ ardim , the Southern Jews,—not from those still within the Synagogue, but from those who under our influ¬ ence have become separated from the traditions of their people—we can cite perhaps the greatest of all modern Jews, one whose genius took a new direction and a bolder flight, but who, also, was a sage, some have even dared to say a saint. It is obvious that we allude to Baruch Spinoza, the recluse of Pavilioengracht, the Spanish Jew interred in a Dutch Church. In this Jew we behold a combination peculiarly rare in the case of great men—philosophers not excepted,—a soul as lofty as his genius. We may possibly not like Spinoza’s philosophy ; as for myself, I confess that it is not much to my taste ; but it would be difficult not to admire the philosopher himself, and not to love him. This Jew, without fortune or protection, sacrifices everything to what he believes to be the truth; he is almost the only thinker of his time, who is not afraid to pursue his thought to its utmost limits, daring to be honest with others as with himself, caring neither for glory nor for calumny. Princes offer him professor¬ ships and pensions ; among all the scholars of his age this Jew is almost the only one who refuses appoint¬ ments and pensions, as little desirous of money as of fame. This pious infidel who beholds God in all things Psychology of the Jew . 223 will let nothing draw him away from his contempla¬ tion of the Infinite Substance. In order to earn the pittance necessary for his brief existence (he has, like so many of his race, a frail constitution), he adopts a manual trade in an age when manual labour is universally despised. He ponders his theory of Ethics and the deductions of his Theologico-Politicus while busy polishing lenses for spectacles. His biographer, Colerus, represents him to us as a kindly man, simple with the simple-minded, glad to converse with them, edifying his good hosts, the van der Spyks, through his life and his teachings, admonishing them to piety, urging their children to attend divine service and ex¬ plaining to them the words of their pastor. This Jew, excommunicated by the Synagogue, will ever remain one of the most perfect types of humanity, one of the men who do honour to mankind. Other writers have compared him with the loftiest products of Christian piety united to ancient wisdom ; to me, he seems half-way between the two, between the humility of the one and the pride of the other ; there is less of effort, of heroic tension in his virtue, it is entirely human and natural. Here again, in this Jew anathematised by the Herem , we discern a certain moderation and balance, apparently due to his Hebrew extraction and education. Even though there may be nothing Jewish in his philosophy, though it may ow^e no more to the cabala than to the Thor a , yet his life and his wisdom are Jewish. At any rate, that is not a hopelessly degraded race which, in its worst days, gave birth to a Spinoza. “In the book of Arabian tales,” saj^s the Jewish poet, ‘ ‘ we see princes changed into animals who, when the right hour has struck, reassume their former 224 Israel Among the Nations. shapes. Such has been the fate of the prince of whom I sing. His name is Israel. Witchcraft has changed him into a dog, a plaything for the children of the street, a cur with the thoughts of a cur : Hund mit hiindischen Gedanken .The poet’s words are true. Israel, prince of the Orient, driven out of the house of his royal father, was transformed for centuries into a vile beast. He was made to crouch before strange masters, whining with hunger and thirst, an object of disgust to all who crossed his path. And lo ! To the great annoyance of those who thought him doomed for ever to kicks and blows, we have seen him reassume his human shape. The witches who deprived him of it are old indeed; but they are not yet all of them dead. Intolerance and special laws, which so long re¬ fused to look upon the Jew as a human being—these still survive in some countries, over yonder, towards Asia, and persist in treating him like a dog. But the fairy w T ho has broken the evil spell—need we name her ? She has wrought many such wonders and Israel is not the only people which has to thank her for the recovery of its human shape. Until quite recently she was held in high esteem by us Frenchmen, and other nations, fol¬ lowing our example, welcomed her to their doors. To¬ day men seem to have wearied of her ; many bear her a grudge for the service she has rendered to Israel. Her name is Liberty. In order to regain his complete manhood, the Jew requires no help but hers. 1 Heinrich Heine’s Prinzessin Sabbath : Romanzero. CHAPTER IX. I JEWISH GENIUS. I. Is there still a Jewish National Genius?—Where is it to be Found ?—The Relatively Large Number of Jews who have Distinguished themselves in Art, Science, and Literature. —II. For which Arts and Sciences have they Shown the Greatest Aptitude ?—Whence do these Aptitudes Seem to Come?—III. Is the Jew, the Semite, always Lacking in Originality ?—The Ancient Hebrews, the Modern Jews, and the Inventive Faculty—Jewish Poets and Artists— Jewish Music—Qualities and Faculties most frequently Encountered in the Jews—Spirit of Combination—Jewish Irony—Quickness to Comprehend and Assimilate the Dis¬ tinctive Aptitudes of Different Nationalties. I. I have endeavoured to describe the physiology and the psychology of the Jew. The task is not an easy one. The picture which I have drawn has not satisfied all Israelities. Some have thought it their duty to answer me . 1 Several Christians, on the other hand, have told me that I had gone but half-way. “ It is all very well to describe the psychology of the Jews,”— so runs an unsigned letter from one of my more or less kindly chance-correspondents—“but, to make us understand the Jew, it is not sufficient to depict ^specially, in L'Ujiivers Israelite (Sept.-Nov., 1891), the chief-rabbi, M. Lehmann. See above, p. 202. 225 226 Israel Among the Nations. the good qualities of his mind and the faults of his character. Something else is needed. It would be well to inquire whether there is a Jewish genius or spirit, that is to say, whether in letters, science and politics the Jew is characterised by a national genius or a national spirit fundamentally different from that of the nations among whom he lives. If you wish to define Israel’s role in modern society, this question can¬ not be avoided.” My correspondent was right; for if the Jew has really a distinctive genius and a peculiar national spirit, if he differs radically from us in his intellectual qualities and moral tendencies, then, indeed, does the ascendancy of Israel threaten to de-nationalise the modern nations. If, on the contrary, the Jew has neither a distinctive national genius nor spirit, what signifies the “judais- ing ’ ’ of contemporary society ? I,et me admit frankly that I have often asked myself this question during the past fifteen years. It is a most delicate and complex one. If we are not content to settle it according to our own fancy or prejudice, I see but one other way ; that is, to take up the writers, art¬ ists, scholars, philosophers, and politicians of Jewish origin, and to examine whether they have any common attributes which distinguish them from the other writ¬ ers, scholars, and artists of their country and age. This problem—or, if you will, this puzzle—has furnished me, in my character of cosmopolitan dilettante, inter¬ ested in all the arts and accustomed to ramble across five or six national literatures, with frequent, though desultory, occupation. I have always had a taste for what might be called comparative national psychology ; it constitutes for me the great charm of the study of foreign politics and of the history of art. As for my Jewish Genius. 22 7 conclusions with regard to the Jew, I shall endeavour to state them without pedantry or scientific pretension, confining myself to artists and writers, and leaving all that concerns politics and social economics and the all- absorbing topic of our demoralised age—the money- question—for a later study. To begin with, has the Jew a distinctive national genius, and, if so, in what does it consist ? Which are, apparently, its principal features, and who are its chief representatives ? If we go back to Israel’s beginning, we shall find that she has a genius as strongly pro¬ nounced as that of Rome or Greece. Without wishing to offend the superficial detractors of the Semite, let me say that Israel has occupied an unique place among the nations ; she has been, not an artistic, but a prophetic people. Her lips, like those of the son of Amos, have been touched by the live coal from the altar, and they had no words for things profane. The Bible bears witness to the national Hebrew genius ; the poetry of Genesis is equal to that of Homer, and Isaiah is as original as Pindar. If the inflexible Hebrew genius is inferior to that of the Greeks, this is not due to the fact that it rises to less lofty heights, but that it branches out in fewer directions, and has infinitely less variety and shading. The Hebrew genius was all of a piece, like the bare rocks that loom up far off in the desert. In this respect, there could be no greater contrast than that which exists between the modern Jew, so supple and agile, and his remote ancestors, the Beni-Israel. Now, what we have in view is the modern Jew, the Judaism of to-day, that has issued from the Ghetto and the Talmud- Tora, and not ancient Hebraism, the fierce lion of Judah, which neither the smiles of the Greek gods nor the swords of the Romans could succeed in taming. 228 Israel Among the Nations . Is there, to-day, after two thousand years of disper¬ sion and the prolonged contact with different races and civilisations, still a Jewish genius ? If so, it would manifest itself in the writers and artists of Jewish descent and in the distinguished men of all kinds whom the house of Jacob has furnished to the modern world. Let us examine these, for a moment, with the eye of a naturalist who classifies and labels animate objects. Is there anything in these Jews that could constitute a family, a species, an intellectual variety, distinct from all other modern types ? Let us see what apparent characteristics justify this separate classifica¬ tion. The investigation fortunately presents few diffi¬ culties : at least, there is no lack of specimens. But very few generations have passed since, at the signal given by France, the black gates of the Ghetto and the bolted portals of the Judengasse have sprung open, and already a large number of French, German, Austrian, English, Italian, and even Russian Jews, not content merely to inhabit our cities, are invading the chairs of our universities, the stages of our theatres, and even the platforms of our political assemblies. This unexpected rise of a race so long repressed, was so rapid that many beholders believed it to be a sort of national revival, such as Europe has welcomed in the case of more than one people in this nineteenth century. A number of these newly-emancipated have boldly tested their powers in our arts and sciences. They were like birds just liberated from their cages, so swift was their flight; they were seen to dart from twig to twig of the thickly branched tree of our modern civili¬ sation, as though none of its parts were beyond the reach of their wings. This fact is, in itself, of great importance. How can we, in the face of it, be made to Jewish Genius. 229 believe that the Jew is not adapted to our civilisation, or that a law of race has made an Oriental of the Semite, and doomed him to remain simply a spectator of our Occidental civilisation ? In this civilisation the barely emancipated Jew has taken his place with the greatest ease ; indeed, too large a place to suit many of us. And, strange to say, this supposed Oriental is, as a rule, much more success¬ ful in the West than in the East, so readily does he assimilate the Western spirit. Outside of France and Holland, the circumcised pariah was nowhere emancipated, even a century ago ; and in every country which has granted him legal equality, this obscure Jew, but yesterday still penned in his Ghetto, is not content to rule only on the Stock Ex¬ change ; he competes with us on our own ground, in those very studies from which he was farthest removed —the latest arts and sciences. And the fact that he did not need even two or three generations to accom¬ plish this change, is a phenomenon perhaps unparal¬ leled in history. What are we to conclude from this, if not that between the Semite and ourselves, despite all differences of origin and of past education, there exists a secret likeness of disposition, an indisputable intel¬ lectual kinship ? In almost every domain of know¬ ledge this Israelitish novice has proved himself able to cope with the Christian, the Aryan. What modern country has not experienced this ? I11 spite of the very small number of Jews, relatively speaking—one or two in a hundred, and in some countries, as in France and in Italy, but one or two in a thousand,—almost all the professions, especially those which demand only intelli¬ gence and application, have furnished, within the past hundred years, a certain number of Jews who have 230 Israel A mong the Nations. risen to the very first rank. This success of the Jew in so many different fields may even possibly be regarded as the chief cause of the antisemitic spirit. Con¬ sidering how few they are, the Jews everywhere take up too much room. As I said at the outset, they com¬ mit the offence of showing that numbers are not every¬ thing—an offence which numbers never forgive. Compare, indeed, this infinitesimal Jewish minority with the Christian majority ; count the number of celebrated men who have issued from the ranks of Israel. There can be no doubt that the Jews, the so- called Semites, have given proportionately more men of talent to our Aryan civilisation than the so-called Aryans themselves . 1 This is all the more astonishing, because in the struggle for fame and honour, in which so many different races compete for the prize, the Jews, as Jews, have until very recently laboured under a great disadvantage ; in many countries they were not even allowed to enter the lists, being disqualified by birth. Even when admitted, they were handicapped by their religion and their Jewish names to such an extent that many of the most illustrious Jews were obliged to cast off this irksome burden. They could win the prize only by submitting to baptism, and thus disguising themselves as Christians. An English Israelite has conceived the strange notion of reducing to figures and tables what he calls the com¬ parative ability of the Jews as distinguished from that 1 This is an interesting computation—for instance, with re¬ gard to the French Institute ; and I do not think it can be said of those men of Jewish faith or origin, who have become mem¬ bers of our academies since more than a century, that they owe their admission to patronage. yewish Genius. 231 of the Englishmen and Scotchmen . 1 In order to ascer¬ tain the percentage of more or less celebrated Jews, he has had recourse to biographical dictionaries and to the annual reports of academies, discovering there that the proportion of the Jews who, within the last hun¬ dred years, have become famous in all departments of human activity, exceeds that of the Christians. I do not think that anybody really doubted this. The six or seven millions of European Jews have furnished relatively more men of talent than the three hundred millions of Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Christians. If this is a fair method of measuring the intelligence of different races and determining the value of different religions, the Jews and Judaism have no competitors for the first place. And the proportion in favour of the Jews increases considerably if we except the Orient and Russia, where the sons of Israel have still to bear the heavy yoke of special laws. The chance of discovering a distinguished man, a scholar or artist, among a thou¬ sand Western Jews is three or four times as good as among a thousand Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Ger¬ mans. Does this mean that the Israelites have three or four times, often indeed—as it would really appear —ten times, as much aptitude for science, literature, and art as the ordinary Gentile? I, myself, am not disposed to go so far, seeing that the number of Jews who devote themselves to intellectual labour is relatively much larger than the number of non-Jews. But, after making this allowance, the superior fitness of the Jews 1 Joseph Jacobs’s The Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability (London, Harrison, 1886). Cf. : Servi’s Gli Israeliti d’Europa, 1873. An Austrian, Mr. Alf. Schonwald, if I mis¬ take not, has undertaken a biographical dictionary of celebrated Jews, under the title : Das Goldene Buch des Judentums. 232 Israel Among the Nations . for such labour is indisputable. It is so marked that an Englishman—doubtless an Israelite—infers that the sons of Jacob, as compared with the rest of the human race, represent a higher stage of evolution. I should not wonder if this opinion were secretly held by many Jews . 1 If this be true, it is one of those truths which Israel should take care not to proclaim too loudly, for fear of exposing herself to many annoyances. Of all superiori¬ ties, the racial one is probably that which men are least willing to concede. We do not like to admit that we belong to a poorly-endowed race. Happily for our¬ selves as well as for the Jews, we have not yet come to such a pass. We shall presently see that some persons believe themselves justified in lowering the pride of the “Semites,” and persist, despite all, in looking upon them as an inferior race. One of my Israelitish friends, more modest and pos¬ sibly nearer to the truth, contents himself with the assertion that the average ability of the Jews is greater than the average ability of the Gentiles. How shall we account for this Jewish superiority so frequently met with? I, for one, am not at a loss to do so. It is explained by what I have already said, by the Jew’s historic education, by the antiquity of his culture, by the protracted training to which he has been subjected for centuries, in one word, by hereditary selection,— that cruel selection of two thousand years of suffering and struggle. I can perceive here neither mystery nor race-fatality. Still stranger is the fact that the proportion of emi¬ nent men is even greater—it is truly extraordinary—in 1 Luc. Wolf, “What is Judaism?” (Fortnightly Review , Aug., 1884.) Jewish Genius. tlie case of men of half-Jewish blood . 1 We shall meet with some instances of this later on. The fact is all the more astonishing because, for many years past, intermarriage between Jews and Christians has been growing rarer, the old and the new Law being equally opposed to it. Experience, however, seems to endorse the advice given (with a totally different intent) by that great humorist, Bismarck : “ Cross a Christian stallion with a Jewish foal.” But what an instance of the irony of things ! In contracting such unions, the impoverished noble, anxious to fertilise his lands, and the Jewish banker, eager to gain admission to the salons of society, may be viewed as working unconsciously for the improvement of the species. Aryan greed and Semitic vanity may be regarded as the dupes of kind Dame Nature, who is herself concerned only with bringing forth a select offspring. Unfortunately, she is not always successful; the many cases in which she does succeed are but special instances of a general law, new illustrations of the benefits to be derived from the crossing of neighbouring races. II. The sons of Israel, as can readily be imagined, are not equally gifted in all directions. The arts and sciences in which they have attained the greatest distinction are, according to the estimate of our English author, music, drama, poetry, medicine, mathematics, and philology. We suspected as much, and needed no statistics in proof of it. The fields in which the Jews have indisputably displayed the highest 1 See J. Jacobs, Ibidem. According to him the fact had already been noticed by Mr. Grant Allen, Mind , vol. viii., p. 504. 234 Israel Among the Nations. ability, are music and philology, the art of sound and the science of language, two studies probably at bottom related to each other. It is unnecessary to name the musicians of Jewish origin ; most of them are well known. The philologists, the archaeologists, the men of general learning, are perhaps still more numerous. As far as these branches are concerned, it may be said that contemporary science in Germany, and especially in Trance, is to a great extent Jewish. I quote at ran¬ dom the names of Munck, Oppert, Breal, Weil, Derem- bourg, Halevy, Toeb, the two Darmesteters, and the two Reinachs. I have already alluded to this Jewish bent for philology and the erudite sciences; it is ex¬ plained by the past education of the Jews, by their hereditary study of ancient texts, and also by their migrations, their series of exoduses, their frequent journeyings, voluntary or compulsory, among peoples of different tongues. Compelled to be a polyglot, the Jew easily became a philologist, albeit these two attri¬ butes are not always co-existent. One of my Christian friends gave a different, and a humorous, explanation of this fact. He professed to consider philology, espe¬ cially phonetics and the permutation of vowels and consonants, as a sort of change of sounds, the rules of which were easily mastered by the Jew, quick at every sort of change. Because the Jew was most successful in music and philology, it does not follow that he had no ability for the other arts and sciences. No supposition could be more erroneous. There is probably not a single art or science in which the Jews have not proved themselves capable. This is not astonishing, inasmuch as we have seen that the power of adaptation is their master faculty. Some persons regard the intellect as an Jewish Genius. 235 instrument equally well adapted to all purposes. If this seems sometimes true, it is possibly so in the case of the Jew. There are certain arts, such as painting and sculpture, plastic art in general, in which he seemed lacking for a long time. But to-day, in Hol¬ land, Germany, France, and even in Russia, he is beginning to take to them. About fifty Jewish artists are annually represented in our exhibitions. Many of them have received prizes. Some have made a name for themselves; such as Emile Levy, Henry Levy, Lehman, Heilbuth, Worms, the German Liebermann, and the American Mosler. But only one or two have acquired an European reputation : Joseph Israels, the Dutch painter, and Antokolsky, the greatest sculptor that Russia has yet produced. Whence comes this numerical inferiority of the Jews in these especial arts? Doubtless from their Law, which for three thousand 3 r ears prohibited, as idolatrous, the making of painted or carven images. This is, if you will, a racial trait, a Semitic trait, and yet it seems due to religion rather than to race. Can the same be said of the Jew’s taste for music, at once the most modern and the most ancient of all arts? I doubt our right to see in this trait of his any¬ thing Semitic or Oriental, for it does not appear to me that the Orientals have manifested a pre-eminent talent for music; and while Oriental music has its quarter- tones, its own scales and methods so different from ours, our ear can discern in the works of Jewish com¬ posers nothing distinctively Oriental or Semitic . 1 1 At no time, I believe, has the music of the Jews been clearly distinguished from the music of the period. If the Synagogue has preserved ancient melodies, it is like the Church, which in its liturgy has preserved the plain chant and also 2 3 6 Israel Among the Nations. I am inclined to believe that this predilection of so many Jews for that one of our modern arts which ap¬ peals most searchingly to our inmost being, is due, above all, to historic causes : to their intimate domestic relations, to their compulsory confinement behind the gates of the Ghetto, to the liturgy of their Synagogue, which always joined chant to prayer, perhaps also to their sufferings, which caused them to retreat into themselves, and to find greater solace than ever in their national melodies. Moreover, music, at least musical composition, re¬ quires the .spirit of combination, and this is one of the faculties which the past centuries have most developed in the sons of Judah. The nervousness which we have already noticed in them predisposes them to the most vibrating of all arts, that one which has most sway over the nerves, the only one, at any rate, by means of which they were enabled to give vent to their feelings. Although the exiles of Babylon, in the freshness of their grief, had not the heart to sing in the presence of their Chaldean masters, the harp of Israel, so often hung on the willows of the stranger, could not long remain silent. The harp and the psaltery accompanied the sons of Judah throughout all their wanderings, and the echo of the sacred songs of Zion resounded along the streams of the Gentiles. With the Jews, as with all musical races, the talent for poetry, the taste for versifying, the sense of rhythm, certain hymns of the Middle Ages. The musical compositions of every Jewish sect are, moreover, very numerous. See Rev. Dr. Sparger’s “ Literature on the Music of the Jews, an Attempt at a Bibliography.” (The American Hebrew , 1892.) Cf. ibidem , Rev. Francis L. Cohen’s “The Historical Origins of Synagogue Music,” February, 1893. jfewish Genius. 237 went hand in hand with the love for music. David, the great poet-king, has remained one of the favourite types of Israel. During their dispersal, the Jews sub¬ jected their Hebrew to the laws of modern verse, and made it sing in metres until then unknown to the Psalmist and the priests of the temple . 1 The Spanish Jews had their national poetry during the Middle Ages; and ever since his intermingling with the modern nations, Ahasuerus, finally at rest, has voiced his plaints in almost every contemporaneous language. From The Songs of Zion, by Jehuda Halevy, to Heine’s Romanzero, from the unknown native of Champagne, who bewailed in old French the martyrdom of his brethren in Troyes , 2 to the Castilian versifiers among the Sephardim of Holland, and the sonorous Russian poems of Minsky and Natson—from these various vernacular tongues of Europe there might be culled a curious anthology of Jewish poems, resembling—to my fancy—the sprays of sweet-briars in many-coloured stones that we give to the victors in our floral games. In the writers of Jewish origin—prose-writers or poets —I, for my part, often find a poetic feeling and a touch of lyric warmth, scarcely to be expected in this commercial race. How comes it that every poetic spark has not been stifled in Israel beneath the prosaic influence of the degrading occupations to which we have subjected her, and the pedantic formalism of her own rabbinical schools? Because in the depths of his Ghetto the Jew 1 It is known that in Hebrew there was, strictly speaking, neither verse nor metre. The usual form of Hebrew poetry, of the Psalms, for instance, is what is called “parallelism.” 2 Elegy discovered by Arsene Darmesteter, Reliques Scien- tifiques. 238 Israel Among the Nations. preserved his Bible and his Haggada , two wells of poetry at which he could ever refresh himself: the one deep, with limpid, gushing waters, like the shady springs on the slope of Lebanon ; the other less pure and fresh, similar to the fountains in Oriental bazaars, with their dome-like roofs and fantastic arabesques. The sons of Jacob had, as it were, a latent, subterranean, poetic fire, ready to burst forth wherever Israel’s soul had not become too parched by ritual and form, or too degraded by oppression and dishonouring trades. This poetic vein, often disfigured by vulgarity, has been revealed to us on the stage by Jewesses of low birth. Dramatic art is, according to the statement of actors, that in which Jews, and especially Jewesses, have achieved the most ringing success. Those tribes, so long without a dramatic stage, that Semitic race, said to be incapable of being other than self-cen¬ tred, have furnished us with great actors and actresses ; for them, dramatic art took the place of plastic art; it was their statuary. The human face, the emotions and passions, which the Jew has rarely been able to reproduce with the brush or chisel, have been modelled by his sons and daughters with the muscles of their faces, and painted with the accents of their voices. There is, however, nothing surprising in this; it confirms our previous knowledge of the Jew’s flexi¬ bility, his talent for imitation and his faculty of assimi¬ lation. His enemies will say that in his case the talent of the actor is innate ; that, for ages, he has been master of the art of simulation ; that this is one of the characteristics of the Semite, alwa3'S quick to change expression, to assume any kind of mask, to lie with his wdiole person as well as with his tongue. Granted ; but if he has learned to play different roles, if he can Jewish Genius . 239 alter his entire looks at will, it is we who have taught him this by means of the trades which we have forced on him, and the low esteem in which we have held him. He was of too little account, too uncertain of respect or toleration, to dare to show himself as he was. Tet me remark, however, that it was by no means in the portrayal of low and mean passions that Israel ex¬ celled. Her daughters, at all events,—as if, through a mysterious selection, they had most bitterly felt the age-long insults shown to their race,—distinguished themselves less in the light work of comedy than in awe-inspiring tragedy and in the drama. It was a strange revenge, won by art or genius, w 7 hen a daugh¬ ter of this downtrodden race, an uneducated Jewess, picked up one morning in the street, gave to the royal creations of our classical poets their noblest embodiment. As regards mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences, no one can deny that the descendants of Jacob have a decided talent for these studies. Here, again, is shown the fitness of the Jews for our civilisa¬ tion. In the domain of science, the mathematical faculty is probably that one which is most highly de¬ veloped among them. “These Jews have, in many cases, the bump of mathematics, as well as that of music,” said a professor to me. It is, moreover, a well-known fact, that these two “bumps” are fre¬ quently found on the same head. This race, apparently so absorbed in the search after the concrete and the material, has, from the time of its dispersal, invariably evinced a taste for the abstract sciences, for geometry and astronomy, as well as for philosophy. This is due to their past, to the antiquity of their culture, to the pursuits of their ancestors, per¬ haps also to the exactions of their religion. 240 Israel Among the Nations. However, Israel is not the only race with a bent for metaphysics and mathematics. The Arabs attached no small importance to these studies, and astronomy was founded by the Chaldeans. It was in Babylon, on the steps of the terraced pyramids, that the Jews learned the rudiments of astronomy. The rabbis made use of this knowledge to settle the feasts of the calen¬ dar ; the study of the heavens has its own place in the Talmud. Is this the reason why the domes of our ob¬ servatories have sheltered so many Jews, from Herschel to W. Beer, the Berlin astronomer and Meyerbeer’s brother ? In France, that contains only two or three Israelites in a thousand, we need but to look into the annals of the Academy of Science to find several Jews side by side. Halphen, for instance, was considered one of the foremost mathematicians of our day. Abroad, there are Goldschmidt and Jacobi. Another fact worthy of mention is that many of the most celebrated chess players of both hemispheres have been Jews. Does not all this strengthen the conviction that the talent for combination and calculation has, for ages, been inherent in this race ? Perhaps it is even more apt than any other race to exaggerate the value of mathematics and to abuse the inductive method, as has been the case with Spinoza in his philosophy, Ricardo in his political economy, and Marx in the paradoxes of his socialism . 1 1 Not to appear too incomplete, we must point out the large number of Jews who have distinguished themselves in medicine and physiology, especially in Germany. M. C. Bombroso, himself a Jew, has made a list of them in his L' Homme de Genie, if I mistake not. Other Israelites have become renowned as legal instructors, which is the more easily accounted for by the fact that the rabbi was a sort of jurist, since the Talmud was a corpus juris. Jewish Genius . 241 If there is a science or an art for which their past would seem to have unfitted them, it is certainly the art of politics, the government of men. They have been debarred from it for centuries, although during the Middle Ages, in Spain and elsewhere, they still frequently took part in it. Yet, no sooner was he emancipated, than the Jew threw himself into the whirl of party conflicts. The temptation was strong ; he needed but to set foot on the ladder of power in order to win both fortune and honours. His agility and his elasticity, a combination of stubbornness and supple¬ ness, were bound to help him into office in every coun¬ try where a public career was open to all. Indeed, those states which have the system of appointment by election, like France, England, Austria, Germany, and Italy, have already furnished many politicians of Jewish blood. It is notorious that modern politics are not very clean. This is no reason why the descendants of Jacob should keep out of political life ; they have long been forced to put up with more distasteful occupations. The modern politician, be he baptised or circumcised, is not a very edifying object ; and if the Jews are no worse than the rest, neither are they any better. Their inter¬ vention in the public business is not always a thing that we can be glad of—least of all when they see nothing in it but “ business.” I have already remarked that they seem at times imbued with a sectarian spirit, a sort of grudge against the faith in the name of which their an¬ cestors were persecuted. But, at present I propose to dwell on their intellectual faculties only. Moreover, the political activity of the Jews has not always been en¬ listed on the same side. The ministers and the orators whom Israel has furnished to the modern parliaments 16 242 Israel Among the Nations . —such men as Cremieux, Goudchaux, Fould, Raynal, Easker, Bamberger, Disraeli, Goschen, and Euzzatti— have not all sat on the benches of the Deft. Disregarding stars of the second magnitude, let us dwell rather on three of the most remarkable figures of the nineteenth century, three very dissimilar men, who rose in three different countries to almost equally as¬ tounding heights. I mean Benjamin Disraeli, Ferdi¬ nand Eassalle, and Eeon Gambetta. The last is a Jew with a strain of Gascon blood . 1 Are these not singular Jewish types? I shall leave it to the reader to discover their common, and therefore their Semitic, traits : great tact and address, talent for effect, a little charla¬ tanism perhaps, and perhaps also, at bottom, a latent aristocratic contempt for the people whom they flattered in public. At all events, these three are enrolled as saints of three different political calendars ; they are patrons of three distinct political churches. And, what is rare in politics, all three have left disciples ; their influence on their parties has outlived their eloquence. Having at¬ tained popularity by different paths, having made their ambition subservient to almost opposite causes, all three, the English Tory, the German Socialist, and the French Republican have become fetiches in their accidental fatherlands. These sons of a proscribed race to whom idols were forbidden, have themselves 1 Gambetta was really Jewish on his father’s side; not that the latter was a Jew by faith, but by race. Although the fact has been disputed, it was confirmed to me by a man to whom it had been told by Gambetta himself. To Gambetta may be added another lawyer, also a dictator, Daniel Manin, who con¬ ducted the heroic defence of Venice against Austria in 1848-49. Manin’s father came from the Ghetto. Jewish Genius. 243 been raised to the rank of idols by the servile enthusi¬ asm of Aryan masses. In the three most cultured nations of Europe, aristocrats, middle-classes, and workingmen submitted, at nearly the same time, to the almost regal authority of a Semite. Nay, even more : the British aristocracy, the French bourgeoisie, and the German proletariat may be said to have been embodied, each in its turn, in a descendant of Abraham. In spite of the rapidity with which every¬ thing is forgotten in this century, these dead sons of Israel still have devotees who piously celebrate their birthdays. It is hard to say to which of these three scions of Judah the incurable antliropolatry of our pagan races has accorded the most clamorous apothe¬ osis. Do we not all remember the triumphal obsequies of the grocer’s son with the foreign name, whose glory it was to have embodied the soul of France in the hour of her distress ? It is said that the house in which, prematurely spent, he closed his life, has become for some a place of pilgrimage. And yet, as far as posthumous veneration is con¬ cerned, Gambetta yields place to Eassalle, the young god of the Teutonic populace, hailed during his life¬ time as the Messiah of Socialism and glorified, after his death in a senseless duel, as the suffering Christ and adored redeemer of the toiling masses. But the most fortunate of the three, the one whose eminence aroused most pride in Israel and most envy among the Israelites, was Disraeli. To force their way into the select circle of society is the dream of thousands of his co-religionists. And this dream, Dis¬ raeli the Sephardi of Venice, with the contemptuous lip, realised in the most exclusive of societies. What are the acclamations of Belleville or Diisseldorf, the 244 Israel Among the Nations. gross homage of ignorant crowds, the cheers of thou¬ sands of hoarse voices, compared with the plaudits of Piccadilly’s drawing-rooms, and the wreaths laid upon the old Beaconsfield’s grave by the elite of the most aristocratic nation in the world? England, solicitous of his fame, has invented a new holiday in his honour ; and every spring on Primrose-day, the old dandy with the black ringlets, masquerading as an English peer, looks dowm from his pedestal upon ladies of the highest rank, who come to strew at his feet basketfuls of his favourite flower. There is one novel side of the Jewish genius, how¬ ever, which Disraeli, the self-made leader of British aristocracy, who gave half a century of new youth to decrepit Toryism, exhibited to a less marked degree than Eassalle, the apostle of Socialism, or Gambetta, the representative leader of the newly aroused social classes. These have shown us the Jew as master of the spoken word, swaying assemblies and fascinating the masses, as the prophet of these latter days, pro¬ claiming to the people the gospel of democracy, an actor again, if you will, tragedian and comedian by turns, but with a swing and a fire, a force of animal vitality and a glow of inspiration such as was hardly to be looked for in the old blood of Israel. What is there left, in these rich natures, of the stunted Jew of the Ghetto? In looking at Gambetta’s profile with its characteristic Jewish curve, we see the lean face of the Jew, filled out and grown leonine. And in what traits of character do we recognise the Semite in these men ? In their self-possession, perhaps, and their im¬ perturbable self-confidence ? In their appreciation of realities and possibilities ? In their clearness of vi¬ sion, even in moments of passion and violence ; in the Jewish Genius. 245 cool calculation that underlies even their audacities and apparent follies ? All these characteristics are exhib¬ ited by men without a drop of Jewish blood. Of all the incarnations of that modern Proteus—the Jew of to-day—this is certainly the most astounding. If we regard them as a separate race, a sort of na¬ tionality scattered among other nationalities, what a number of different aptitudes are united in the sons of Jacob. This seems to be a long-established character¬ istic of theirs ; witness the great rabbis of the Middle Ages, at once or in turn physicians, mathematicians, grammarians, poets, philosophers, sometimes even financiers and administrators. If you wish to sum up under a single head, or in a single imaginary person, the salient characteristics of the race—the modern Jew, the social cultivated Jew, who has wound his way into our life, may be likened to a youth of precocious intelli¬ gence that can be turned to almost anything ; calcu¬ lating by instinct, practical by nature, concealing at times beneath material tendencies a germ of poetic feeling that soon dries up—one of those young men who flock to us yearly from the provinces, especially from the South, deeming themselves more or less fit for any¬ thing, and really sufficiently dexterous to make their way everywhere. But this variety of aptitudes does not imply origi¬ nality. It by no means proves the existence in Israel of a national genius. On the contrary, it suggests the belief that the Jew differs less from others in his posi¬ tive personal characteristics than in his power of adapta¬ tion. It might be said that he assimilates everything and invents nothing. In fact, this has been said. What are we to think of it ? 246 Israel Among the Nations . III. There are two opinions current with regard to the Jew. One ascribes to him a spirit, if not a genius, foreign and antagonistic to our race, and calls it the “ Semitic ” spirit. The other—often held by the very same persons—asserts that the Jew is utterly lacking in individual genius, in originality. According to this opinion he has never invented anything, and is in art and science, as everywhere else, capable only of ad¬ justing and adapting. “Took at them,” said one of my friends to me, “ see how quickly and with what monkey- or squirrel-like agility they climb the first rungs of any ladder ; sometimes they even succeed in scaling its top, but they never add to it a single round.” Granted ; but how many of us really add a single round to that mysterious ladder which we have set up in vacant space, and which reaches toward the Infinite ? Men who consider the remnants of Israel as an eth¬ nic element distinct from all others, insist that they have never displayed any originality, either in art, poetry, or philosophy. The Jew, in their opinion, is utterly lacking in creative power. It is this that is said to distinguish the Semitic, from the Aryan, spirit. The Semite is sterile ; neither his brain nor his hands can produce anything new. He is content to appro¬ priate the labour of others, in order to put it to use ; he makes the most of ideas and inventions, as of dollars ; he combines them and puts them into circulation ; in short, he always subsists on others ; one might almost say that he is the parasite of arts and sciences. This is, approximately, the theory of Wagner 1 with regard to music, the art most cultivated by the Jews ; 1 Wagner’s Das Judenthun in der Musik. Jewish Genius. 247 according to him, Jews like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Halevy, although indeed able to compose a Ger¬ man symphony or a French opera, have not been able to invent a new form in art. But, is it necessary to in¬ vent new forms in order to be an original artist ? And does this lack necessarily imply that Jewish genius consists entirely in a faculty for combination ? Ab¬ sence of creative power, of spontaneity and of origi¬ nality, is said to be the mark of the Jew everywhere. Israel, it is asserted, displays in this respect something of a woman’s nature. The Semites are said to be a feminine race, possessing to a high degree the gift of receptivity, always lacking in virility and procreative power. From which it would seem to follow that they are, after all, an inferior race. If this be indeed so, it suggests a reflection : If the Jew is merely an imitator, a copyist, a borrower, how can his race possibly denationalise our strong Aryan races? But, are we justified in regarding this lack of originality as a racial feature, the stamp impressed on Israel and the Semite by the hand of ages ? As for myself, I must confess that if any of the ancient races seemed to possess originality, it was this race. Even those who have denied it a creative imagination 1 have agreed that it gave the world religion—an invention that holds its own with any other. How can we deny all spontaneity to this Lilliputian kingdom of the Jor¬ dan, to which we owe Hebraic monotheism and Chris¬ tianity, the Old and the New Testaments ? Are we to 1 Renan’s Histoire Generate des Langues Semitiques: “ The eminently subjective character of Arabian and Hebrew poetry is due to another trait of the Semitic spirit, to its complete lack of creative imagination and to the consequent absence of fiction. ” 248 Israel Among the Nations. judge only by the narrow literary standard ? What is the meaning of spontaneity of feeling and poetic power, if they are not contained in the Psalms, nor in Job, nor in the Prophets ? We may question the historic value of the Jewish books, but not their poetry ; a poetry impersonal and spontaneous, welling up from the depths of the popular soul. If there is anything in the world really inspired, high above the empty writings of rhetoricians and polishers of phrases, is it not these very books, artless and unstudied, eternally alive, in which so many men of all nations have felt the breath of the Spirit of God? That which is really true, really characteristic of the race, is the fact that the Hebrews have not invented a new kind of litera¬ ture ; in this sense they have had no art or literature, no drama, epic poem, painting or sculpture. That which is furthermore true is, that the Hebrew (and, if you wish, the Semitic) genius was confined to a narrow bed between two rocky walls, whence only the sky could be seen ; but it channelled there a well so deep that the ages have not dried it up, and the nations of the four corners of the earth have come to slake their thirst at its waters. Let us leave the ancient Hebrews out of the ques¬ tion ; it is not they who were always borrowers, eager to make use of the inventions of others. As regards the Jews of the dispersal, and especially the modern Jews, we have already said that, with respect to social tendencies, they were receptive and not originative. Surely, there were many reasons for this—their small number, the twofold servitude to which they were sub¬ jected, the moral bondage from within and from with¬ out, the spirit of routine acquired in the Ghetto, the scattering and insecurity of their schools, the super- yewish Genius. 249 stitious attachment to tlieir national past, kept alive by the oppressions of their Christian and Mohamme¬ dan masters. Was the rod of persecution likely to stimulate the spirit of originality ? If the Jew has con¬ tributed to the growth of modern civilisation, it was especially as an intermediary, as the carrier of ideas, the transmitter of sciences and discoveries, of stories and legends. Israel has been a connecting link be¬ tween the Orient and the Occident, between antiquity and the Middle Ages, between the Mohammedan and the Christian worlds. This was her principal role ; and this function, which she still discharges to some extent in our time, was not so much assumed by Israel in virtue of her racial in¬ stincts, as imposed by her history, by her dispersal to the borders of different races and the meeting-points of different civilisations. Does the fact that the an¬ cient people of God has contributed to our civilisation only what it received from others, that in the midst of modern nations it has manifested no genius distinc¬ tively Jewish, not seem to prove that it has no longer a national genius peculiar to itself, and that whatever endowment of the sort it once had, at home in Pales¬ tine, it has lost long ago in mingling with us ? Thus, to repeat, if it really has no distinctive genius and is only capable of imitating, of borrowing, of transmitting to some what it has received from others, how can this slim remnant of Judah, thinned by intermixture with a hundred peoples, endanger our national genius? Here we must beware of confounding the Jew with the Jewish race, the originality of a nation with the faculties of an individual. Because Israel as a people, as a race, seems no longer to give evidence of a national genius, it does not follow that the Jew, as an indi- 250 Israel Among the Nations. vidual, as a modern Frenchman, Englishman, or Ger¬ man, is always completely lacking in originality and spontaneity. Is it really certain that the gift of invention has been bestowed exclusively on the Aryans and remains the mark of that race ? If this were so, how many of us could prove our Aryan blood ? I know of nations that, for centuries, have not produced a single creative gen¬ ius. Are these nations to be classed among the Sem¬ ites ? Eet us not be misled by the vague idea of race. The relatively small number of Jews, the heavy clouds that until recently obscured the horizon of Judah, are sufficient to explain why no star of first magnitude has shone in their firmament. Can it be said, therefore, that, as poets, artists, and philosophers, the Jews shine only by our reflected light, or are heard only as echoes of our voices ? Because without Descartes there might possibly have been no Spinoza, shall we dare to assert that Spinoza was a philosopher without ideas, devoid of original views and of genius ? And what we would not venture to affirm of Spinoza, the greatest of Israel’s sons, shall we assert it of a poet like Heine ? Is it not true that the sceptical heir of the Psalmist has added a new string of wondrous deli¬ cacy to the German lyre ? Or is our ear no longer at¬ tuned to its subtle variations and soft dissonances ? However much out of vogue the Jewish poet may be in Germany, shall we pronounce his Lieder nothing more than the inspired rhymes of a plagiarist, devoid of spontaneity and imagination, of humour and deli¬ cious surprises,—in one word, of inspiration ? To me, at least, there is in the whole rich treasure-house of German poetry no freer fancy than his. Eet us dwell for a moment on Heine. If the mod- yewish Genius. 25 1 ern Jews still possess a national genius, we shall be most likely to find it in the author of the Reisebilder. For all that he had himself baptised, he retains the mark of his birth. You cannot understand him unless you recollect that he was born a Jew. There is in him, in his very love-songs and simplest melodies, a strain foreign to the Germany of our dajr, something at once sad and spiteful, an after-taste of tears, an acrid flavour, a sting of maliciousness, due to his origin, his educa¬ tion, and the position then occupied by the Jews in Germany. He is like the bird escaped from its cage, the Ghetto, but which, still remembering its prison, flies about noisily in every direction, as though to test its new-found liberty ; there is a note of defiance and ran¬ cour in its trills and in the beat of its wings. I am aware that the Germans criticise Heine se¬ verely, as though, in attacking the poet, they took pleasure in lowering the Jew. To be a German poet, but not of Teutonic descent, is—in the eyes of Ger¬ many imbued with race-pride—an inherent sin, hard to expiate. The new empire wishes to be indebted only to the blood of Herrmann. The ungrateful Teuton at¬ tempts to banish everyone who is not a descendant of Thor from the classic Walhalla that has been erected on the banks of the Danube to commemorate the triumphs of Germany. Heine was treated by his critics beyond the Rhine as were his musical co-religionists by Wagner; to him, as to them, w r as denied all originality and in¬ ventive faculty. William Scherer, the historian of German literature, accords to him only a rare imitative talent. It is true that the form in which the Lieder were cast is not original with Heine ; it belongs to the romanticism of Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis. Ac¬ cording to W. Scherer, the author of the Heimkehr 252 Israel Among" the Nations. is only the last and most brilliant of the romanticists. His critics will not even concede his exclusive claim to that quality most distinctively his own, that irony, which none of them are willing to call Jewish, but which they ascribe likewise to German romanticism. Heine is only its last flower, and a diseased flower at that, with an unwholesome odour ; for in this German rose there lurks a worm—Judaism . 1 If it is found so easy to make the author of Atta Troll fit into the historic evolution of German poetry, how can one admit that there is such a thing as a Jew¬ ish genius or a Jewish poetry ? In spite of its bias and prejudice, German criticism shows us how largely the most individual of all Jewish writers is a product of his age and his country. Heine is indeed a German and a romanticist from beyond the Rhine. He is much more of a German than many Frenchmen imagine ; this does not imply that he has nothing peculiarly his own. He has, on the contrary, a brilliancy, a light¬ ness of touch, a quickness of thought, so rare in the Germans (compare him but to Jean Paul), that we are led to ascribe these qualities to his Jewish descent and to his residence in France. We are, possibly, not quite wrong. However German he may be, there is some¬ thing of the Jew and of the Frenchman in him. Like his contemporary and congener Borne, Heine was in- 1 The historian Treitschke and the philosopher Hartmann, two of the educators of contemporaneous Germany, do not deal any more tenderly with Heine. Moreover, both of them show plainly that, in the poet, they are attacking the Jew, and, as Hartmann says, the entrance of Judaism into German civilisa¬ tion. The French reader can peruse, with profit, the book of Mr. L. Ducros : Heine et son Temps , his youth (1886), and the article of M. J. Bourdeau, Revue Bleue , 8th January, 1887. Cf. Ad. Strodtmann’s Herne's Leben und Werke. Jewish Genius. 253 fluenced by the French spirit; not only by French ideas, but by the very genius of France. He is saturated with it; no German of Teutonic blood could have ab¬ sorbed it to such an extent. It constitutes a part of his originality and is, no doubt, due to his Jewish extraction. If we insist upon discovering a special genius of the Jews, this is its leading trait; it reduces itself to this faculty, always a rare one even among the sons of Judah—the faculty of assimilating, at the same time, the special aptitudes of two peoples. But this cannot be re¬ garded as amounting to a distinctively national genius. This advantage—if indeed it always be one—the Jew owes to the fact that, however strongly his education and intellectual environments may have tinged his mind with the national genius, French, Fnglish, or German, this stamp, marked as it often is, is less deep, because usually more recent. It has not been imprinted in his marrow for centuries upon centuries. It follows that the pores of the Jew are not closed, as ours are for the most part, against foreign influences. He steeps him¬ self, body and mind, in the genius of surrounding na¬ tions. He drinks it in like a sponge, absorbs it, and, so to say, assumes its very tincture. Thus, w 7 e see Russian and German Jews transform themselves so quickly into Frenchmen and Parisians. Contrary to his ancestors encased in the Talmud as in a coat of mail, the modern Jew responds more rapidly than our¬ selves to the influences of his environment and his time. If we pass from the poets to the artists and musi¬ cians, similar reflections will suggest themselves. The domain of art in which they have achieved the most marked success, is probably that in which they have 254 Israel Among the Nations. displayed the least creative faculty. Eet me note, at the outset, that there is no more a Jewish music than there is a Jewish poetry . 1 There are merely Jewish musicians, all of whom belong musically to the coun¬ try in wdiich they were born or happened to live. In these offshoots of Jacob we can easily recognise a French, German, Russian, or English graft . 2 Nothing in these Jewish musicians resembles a distinc¬ tively national Jewish genius. Otherwise, who would have dared to dispute their originality ? Halevy is a Frenchman and one of the most French of our compos¬ ers ; he has the best qualities of our race: espidt , vivacity, playful grace, a sense of form, a knowledge of composi¬ tion. Mendelssohn, Goethe’s Wunderkind, is German in his inspiration, as well as in the forms of his art. He has the seriousness of the Germans, their scientific know T - ledge, their poetry, their depth, and their feeling for nature. If the Jew comes out in him at all, it is in the effort that marks the beginning and in the purpose that pervades the whole of his composition ; in his critical sense and a certain characteristic eclecticism. Meyer¬ beer, too, is at bottom German ; if there is anything Jewish in him it is his talent for appropriating, in turn, German, Italian, and French taste and style, and the skill with which he combines all these without, however, alw T ays being able to blend them entirely. He is a Jew inasmuch as he seems to be a cosmopolitan, knowing how to borrow contrasting elements from different na¬ tions. With him, especially, the spirit of combination 1 See below, Chapter IX., Part II. 2 Among the musicians who have endeavoured to endow England with a national music, there are many of Jewish origin : J. Nathan, Sir Julius Benedict, Sir M. Costa, F. Co wen, Sir A. Sullivan. Jewish Genius . 255 predominates. From this point of view he is decid¬ edly typical of his race. It was he whom Wagner had in mind when he denied all creative talent to the Jews. If it be true that Jewish music is an amalgamation of various styles, something composite, like the name in which the author of U Africaine saw fit to muffle him¬ self, then Giacomo Meyerbeer is its most characteristic representative. But this is not a sufficient basis for the assumption of a national Jewish music. It is rather the negation of any such assumption. If we ever encounter in Meyerbeer (or, for that matter, in Mendelssohn) an inspiration that may truly be called Hebrew, it is of a religious character—the stern voice of the Old Testa¬ ment which re-echoes here and there in Le PropliZte. And now, shall we ask ourselves what rank will be assigned to Jewish musicians, especially to Meyerbeer, in the history of art ? This is not the place for such a question . 1 But it is undeniable that in the realm of opera—a kingdom which has its revolutions also— Meyerbeer held complete sway for fifty years. This is a fairly long reign for a Jew possessed of little origi¬ nality. It has been said of him that by sheer force of will he developed his talent to the point of genius. “ Much talent served up with much patience , 1 ’ was the expression used, I believe, by Thomas Graindorge. This fact might again be taken as a racial characteris¬ tic ; for we have seen that the Jew’s great strength lies in his supple tenacity. If we are willing to concede to the composer of Les 1 I must say, in passing, that one of the first detractors of Meyerbeer was his congener Mendelssohn, displeased no doubt at the success on the stage, of an artist whom he felt his infe¬ rior. (See the letters of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Briefe aus den Jahren, 1830-1847, passim, Leipzig, H. Mendelssohn.) 256 Israel Among the Nations. Huguenots nothing more than skill, science of compo¬ sition, the trick of his craft, the knowledge of effect, the understanding of scene-painting and stage-setting, the art of making use of a dramatic situation or a musical idea, as his congeners on the Exchange made the best use of the situations there, we shall have to forget the duet between Valentine and Raoul, and the cathedral scene in Le Prophete. Meyerbeer’s French operas may go out of fashion, like his Ci'ociato and his Italian operas ; and yet, the fact will remain that a Berlin Jew gave to two generations of Christians the sentiment of the sublime. His music has indeed be¬ come antiquated ; we have grown conscious of its faults and tricks. We are shocked with its Italianisms, its commonplace motifs , and the want of refinement in its instrumentation. For all that, Meyerbeer was un¬ doubtedly the most dramatic composer of his age. We may jeer with Wagner at the historical form of opera, regarding it as a false and illegitimate style, and we are at perfect liberty to prefer the lyric drama and the sym¬ bolic legends ; nevertheless, this same historic opera has held sway over two hemispheres, and it was Meyerbeer who marked the zenith of its power. This is sufficient glory for any artist, be he Jew or Christian. Thus, whether we deny or concede to them sponta¬ neity in art, or imagination and creative power, it is obvious that the children of Israel no longer possess a national genius. There are merely certain faculties which we encounter more frequently in them than in others ; the gift of combination, the power of adapta¬ tion, the art of blending different elements, and a spe¬ cial quickness in grasping the varying genius of different nations . 1 All this can be reduced to what we have al- 1 Hence, probably, the success of the Jews as performers and interpreters of the music of others. In this respect, perhaps Jewish Genius . 25 7 ready pointed out as the Jew’s master faculty—his power of assimilation. I am not certain that outside of this flexibility, this mental elasticity, there is anything specifically Jewish in the artists and authors of Israel. Two or three dis¬ tinctive features may be noticed in them, but they are far from being common to all Jews. Thus, we some¬ times imagine that we can discern an Oriental strain in their nature. I, for my part, should be grateful to them if they were to brighten our foggy skies with a gleam from the Oriental heavens. But this Oriental radiance, which we seem to see in the dark eyes of Israel’s daughters, does it glow in the souls of many of Israel’s sons? Even in those cases in which the im¬ agination seems to be tinged with an Oriental colour¬ ing, is this really an atavistic feature, a dim reflection from Zion and Carmel, transmitted through the ages ? “ What seems to you like a racial peculiarity with us,” said an Israelite to me, in this connection, “is gener¬ ally only the result of our education ; it is due more to our books than to our blood. We have turned our faces so long toward the hills of Jerusalem, that the vision of the Orient is still mirrored in our eyes and its voice still rings in our ears. When we have reached the age of twenty and have leisure to dream, our dreams are filled with palm-trees—probably with more than ever grew in Palestine. The truth is, that we are only as Oriental as we imagine ourselves to be. Our Orien¬ talism, like that of Disraeli in his Tcincred, is an Orien- no pianist has equalled Anton Rubinstein. Even in Bayreuth, the conducting of Parsifal is entrusted to an artist of Jewish origin, Mr. Hermann Levy. The celebrated German violinist J. Joachim, is also an Israelite, as was the great singer Paul¬ ine Lucca. To these musicians must be added the Jewish actors. *7 2 5 8 Israel Among the Nations. talism of the intellect, and greatly resembles that of an English pastor fed on Old Testament metaphors.” Irony is a quality often found in Jewish authors; almost all of them have a touch of it. We might say that it dates far back in Israel, as far as that terrible irony of the prophets, at times almost fierce in its in¬ tensity. But have the Jews inherited this bent from Ju¬ dah and Ephraim, or from their forefathers of the Rue aux Juifs ? From the latter, we believe,—through their humiliations and sufferings. It is but another product of persecution, an acrid fruit that has ripened on the brackish waters of age-long hatred. If their irony has at times a touch of the Satanic, this comes from the hell of the Ghetto and the long damnation of the Ju- dengasse ; or, as in the case of Heine, the baptised Jew takes vengeance upon the God of the Christians and upon their social system, for the disgrace of compulsory baptism . 1 Irony, sarcasm, have ever been the weap¬ ons of the weak when persecuted or degraded. We know how caustic is the wit of deformed persons ; Judaism was regarded, for centuries, as a sort of de¬ formity. Moreover, the irony of the Jews spared no one; they ridiculed themselves as well as others. Christians have not spoken worse of the Jews than the latter have spoken of themselves. In this respect, they are like us, Frenchmen; nor is it, perhaps, our only point of resemblance. Is there not, in certain respects—lightness and sup- 1 But Jewish irony has by no means invariably this malignant sting. Far from it; witness Disraeli, Leon Gozlan, Ludovic Halevy, and more than one French writer. As representative, in Germany, of this playful irony, we can cite David Kalisch (1820-1872), the popular author of the Berlinese Posse and founder of the Kladderadatsch of that city. Jewish Genius. 2 59 pleness and careless ease of movement—a secret kin¬ ship between the Jewish and the French intellects? Foreigners have said so. I admit that I, myself, used to believe it. It seemed to account for the Jew’s rapid acclimatisation on our boulevards, and for the fact that among the oracles of our loungers there could be so many Parisians imported from beyond the Rhine. But no, it simply proves Israel’s marvellous faculty of adaptation. “Take care,” said an Alsatian Jew to me ; “ what you now say about the Jews with regard to Frenchmen, has already been said of them with regard to Germans and Anglo-Saxons. In order to see differ¬ ent resemblances, it is necessary only to shift your posi¬ tion or change the light.” In fact, I recalled a certain page of Heine, in which the versatile author of Lutecia.\ extols the kinship be¬ tween the French and the German spirits, both unique with regard to morality, depth of thought, and serious¬ ness of feeling . 1 Would an English Israelite not be still more justified in saying that the Jew resembles the Anglo-Saxon by virtue of his practical sense, his enterprising spirit, his suppressed fervour, his energy and tenacity ? An Italian Jew might easily discover an affinity between the Italian spirit and that of Israel. And so on, in every country, even in Russia, where the participation of certain “Hebrews” in the nihilistic propaganda might serve as a proof of the kinship be¬ tween Jew and Slav. We have here an amusing occu¬ pation and an easy one . 2 Must we not conclude that 1 Heine’s Shakespeare's Madchen und Frauen. 1 Several scholars have allowed themselves to be deceived by this fact and have thought to detect here an argument in favour of the Hebrew origin of certain Christian nations. There is hardly a nation in which some persons have not flattered 26 o Israel Among the Nations . there is always something artificial in such compari¬ sons, and that the Jews have acquired, by virtue of their migrations through all countries and their contact with all civilisations, a strange plasticity which renders them everywhere capable of assimilation with their fellow- countrymen of Aryan stock ? In view of this, we surely do not need to lay stress upon the rapidity with which the Jew, especially the cultured Jew, becomes nationalised in every country. Still, while becoming a Frenchman, a German, an Englishman, or an American, he often retains uncon¬ sciously a certain flavour of the countries in which his forefathers have lived. I will not say that he remains more or less cosmopolitan (only the minority of Jews are cosmopolitan), but he is less exclusive in his na¬ tionality and more responsive to outside influences than we are. He experiences less difficulty in extricating himself from the traditional swaddling-clothes of na¬ tional prejudice in which every race is swathed. Herein lies often his originality and his strength. The cultured Israelite is able to view his own country at once from * within and without; he apprehends the national spirit like a native, and yet judges it like a stranger. For this reason Israel will always be fit to serve as an inter¬ mediary between the other nations, to bring them into closer union and make them intelligible to each other. Thus the genius of Heine and Borne spanned the Rhine with a bridge which once served to connect the French themselves to have discovered the ten tribes of Israel! Of the numerous essays of this kind I shall quote one, whose name speaks for itself: Anglo-Israel and the Jewish Problem. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel Found and Identified in the Anglo- Saxon Race , by Th. Rosling Howlett, B. A. (Philadelphia, Spangler, 1892.) Jewish Genius . 261 and the German intellect, but which to-day lies in ruins. And a poor Jewish community of Denmark has furnished us with a critic like George Brandes,who has penetrated perhaps more deeply than any other Euro¬ pean into the spirit of the various literatures. Despite the most patient investigation, then, we fail to discover a national Jewish genius. This does not imply that the sons of Jacob, like the statue of Condil¬ lac, have no impressions or ideas other than those sug¬ gested by contact with us. I do not know whether the soul of the Semite differs sensibly from that of the Aryan ; but I perceive that the soul of the Jew has, at times, a different ring from that of the Christian. This is due to the fact that, unlike ours, it was not cradled in the manger of Bethlehem, and that religion leaves upon human souls a more lasting impress than is com¬ monly imagined. It is due also, and in no less degree, to Israel’s long humiliation. I freely admit, then, that we may differ from the Jews in certain characteristics and shades of feeling; but in this I can see no disad¬ vantage to us or to our civilisation. I have little taste, I confess, for uniformity ; I leave that to the Jacobins. My ideal of a nation is not a monolith, nor a bronze formed at a single casting. It is better that a people should be composed of diverse elements and of many races. If the Jew differs from us, so much the better ; he is the more likely to bring a little variety into the flat monotony of our modern civilisation. I am rather inclined to find fault with these sons of Shem-—as I find fault with the Orientals who adopt our customs— for resembling and copying us too closely. But why should I ? Even if we admit that they have no par¬ ticular originality, even if we see in them, as the Ger¬ mans see in the Slavs, mere ethnic raw material—is it 262 Israel A mong the Nations . not something to furnish material for such philosophers as Spinoza, such composers as Mendelssohn, such ar¬ tists as Rubenstein, such poets as Heine, such orators as Gambetta, such actresses as Rachel ? Whenever I meet one of those melancholy proces¬ sions of Russo-Jewish refugees who, retracing after a lapse of centuries the road along which their sires and grandsires marched into exile, are pressing in search of liberty towards the land of the setting sun, I ask my¬ self whether one of those pitiable Jewesses, emaciated by the fatigues of the journey, is not perchance carry¬ ing beneath her heart some future Messiah of art or science ? Spinoza’s mother may well have disembarked as such a fugitive, on the low shores of the Netherlands. For the sake of one such metaphysician as Baruch de Spinoza, or of a single poet like Heine, or merely for another Rachel, I, for my part, would submit to hav¬ ing the number of Jews in France doubled. CHAPTER X. THE JEWISH SPIRIT. I. Is There a Jewish Spirit Radically Different from Ours?— What we Understand by Jewish Spirit is, in Most Cases, not Distinctively Jewish—Where are the Signs of the Jewish Spirit in French Arts and Fetters ?— Grceculi et Judaiculi. —The Jews and the French Operette—The Jews and Por¬ nography—II. Jewish Writers in Germany—The Jewish Woman—In Germany and Throughout Europe there have been Disintegrating Forces Other than that of the Jewish Spirit—III. The Lowering of our Ideals—Are the Jews Really to Blame for it?—Is the Semite Incapable of Ideals? —The Jew and the Jewess in Art, Fiction, and Life—IV. In what Respect the Jewish Ideal Differs from Ours—It is Neither Chivalrous nor Mystical—A Humanitarian, Earthly Ideal—The Messianic Conception—How it is Interpreted by Modern Jews—The Jewish and the Christian Spirit, the Semitic and the Aryan Ideal. I. “ Granted,” it will be said, “ the Jew has no national genius and is therefore not able to denation¬ alise the French, German, or Slavonic genius. But this is not sufficient to reassure us ; apart from the in¬ tellectual, there is the moral danger. You have told us that the Jew, our equal, sometimes our superior in intellect, is frequently inferior to us in soul, in char¬ acter. Though there may be no national Jewish genius, 263 264 Israel Amo7ig the Nations . is there not a Jewish spirit which threatens to corrupt the French spirit and that of Germany, Russia, and America?” For, whether we be neo-Latins, Teutons, Slavs, or Anglo-Saxons, we all have inherited the belief that our blood is pure and our race healthy. Every nation is but too ready to believe that its corrup¬ tion comes from without. This denotes a degree of guilelessness or hypocrisy ill-befitting any great people. Is there a Jewish spirit, that is to say, have the Jews moral and social tendencies radically different from ours ? This is another point that seems doubtful to me. If there be a Jewish spirit, it is in the same sense in which there is a Catholic or Protestant spirit, in the religious sense. Such a spirit may be found al¬ most intact in the Jewish communities of the Fast where the sons of Israel live in compact groups ; it is reverential of its past and attached to its traditions ; it is formalistic and suspicious of innovations . 1 Such is the Jewish spirit as it has been fashioned by the Tal¬ mud and the Ghetto. But this is not what, in the Occident, is generally meant by the Jewish spirit ; it is rather the opposite, for as I have already observed, what we, in our ignorance, usually understand by that term is the spirit of the Jew who has become de- judaised by contact with us, the spirit of negation with which the Jew has become imbued by breathing our atmosphere and the miasmas with which it is filled. That spirit which is but too prevalent among them, a spirit of revolt against all tradition and authority, is about as Jewish as Voltaire or Diderot is Catholic. The Jews have been inoculated with it by the Christians. The truth of this has again been proved, under our very eyes, in Russia. I have shown elsewhere how the 1 See above, chap, iii., part iii. The Jewish Spirit. 265 minds of the Jewish youths who frequented the Russian schools became tinctured with nihilism . 1 The same took place in Germany with regard to Hegelianism, pessimism and materialism. The fact which here dis¬ tinguishes the Jew is that, similar to the Catholic, but contrary to the Protestant, he often passes without intermediate stages and by a single bound, as it were, from the faith of his ancestors to complete negation ; and that, unlike the Catholic, he seldom returns to the dogma and the ritual which he has abandoned. Leaving aside, for the present, social and political questions, let us ask ourselves how w r e can recognise the Jewish spirit and in what form it manifests itself? Is it in commercialism that has insinuated itself every¬ where ; or in the striving after material welfare and what is called by a name so long unknown to Israel, the comforts of life ? Or is it in the love of gain and of luxury, in the thirst for pleasure, in the practical materialism which we inhale and exhale everywhere ? Is it in the venality which is corrupting all our public men, and which, like a shameful canker, threatens to eat its way, little by little, into the flesh of a nation but recently ruddy with health ? The broker from be¬ yond the Rhine is too often the vehicle of the corruption that has presided in our legislatures for a decade and a half; but why is it in republican France that this destructive bacillus seems to find the conditions most favourable to its development ? This is due, alas, to many causes : to our political dissensions, to our social discord, to the artificially nourished prejudices of the people against the better classes and against those families in which honour was 1 See l'Empire des Tsars et les Russes , vol. ii., book vii., ch. ii. ; cf. : vol. iii., book iv., eb. iii. 266 Israel A mong the Nations . ever held as a sacred heirloom ; it is due to the appe¬ tites of the rising masses who greedily assail the board of power in their eagerness for a morsel to munch ; to the voracity of starveling politicians, the brazen trick¬ sters of universal suffrage ; it is due, in a word, to the gradual lowering of the social and moral standard of our elective assemblies. Do we not know a great country beyond the Atlantic to which the Semite emi¬ grated without any notion of ruling there, and which is nevertheless afflicted with a similar evil, due to simi¬ lar causes? It all comes from the ascendancy of material interests and from the democratic character which our societies are assuming ; and if our patriotism would like to give it a foreign name, we can quite as justly call it Americanism. Where, then, is the mark of the Jewish spirit, and how does it manifest itself in art and letters? It is very low, very filthy, our modern literature, our French literature especially; it has, moreover, too often a gamey flavour, a musty, sickening odour of decay. Is the Jew, perchance, to be blamed for this? Is it really Israel that has given the tone to French literature these past fifty years ? And why should the most de¬ praved literature be that of France, the country that has relatively the smallest number of Jews? What is there essentially Semitic in our plays and novels? Their realism, that takes delight in degrading human nature, their enervating pessimism, their insipid dilet¬ tantism, their mountebank silliness,—are these the products of the Synagogue? Was it the Talmud-Tora that gave birth to the word-jugglers, the inventors of artistic writing, who transform art into a senseless kaleidoscope of sounds and colours ? I recognise, indeed, some sons of Jacob among the The Jewish Spirit, 267 playwrights, the novelists, especially the journalists, of to-day ; but who would pretend to call them the leaders of our literature ? Is it from Israel that have come decadentism, symbolism, the depravity of Beau- delairism, and the humbuggety of occultism? Is it the Jewish exiles from Samaritan lands who have brought to us, concealed beneath their greasy gaber¬ dines, the latest literary epidemics: egotism, self-wor¬ ship, that silly and unwholesome wish-wash of which so many guileless novices have become the victims ? Among the noisy herd of the “young” school—be they mature men or youths—who strive so strenuously to attract notice by the strange motley of their ener¬ vated prose or the disjointed rhythm of their inarticu¬ late verse, I perceive, indeed, some scions of Abraham, probably not the least clever among them. Some one has said : “There are almost as many Semites to be found at our small literary suppers as on the Ex¬ change ’ ’ ; but I do not see how one can claim for them the initiative in this matter. Neither M. Ephraim Mikhael nor M. Gust. Kahn would have advanced such a claim. Those sons of Jacob simply follow the fashion of to-day, while attempting to guess that of to-morrow. In this, as in everything else, they evince great clever¬ ness, agility^, subtlety ; but if one is ever justified in denying them a creative imagination, it is certainly in this respect. Those Jews from beyond the Rhine and the Vistula are, indeed, not the only foreigners who meddle with the remaking of our French prose and poetry. Greeks, Romans, Flemish, Slavs, Creoles, they all have a hand in it; it is as though our old language were being invaded with a horde of refined barbarians. May they render it pliable, without too greatly disfiguring it. 268 Israel Among the Nations. There is, with regard to the stage, a secondary style, already half out of fashion, in which the sons of Jacob retained the lead for a long time. They might, per¬ haps, even claim the credit of its invention, were it not for Herve, the composer of Le Petit Faust. I allude to the French Operette, the Opera Bouffe of the Second Empire. Here we have, to all appearances, a style distinctively French. But the creators of the Operette, both poets and musicians, belong, for the most part, to the tribes of Israel. Must we conclude from this that it is a Jewish style? But why was this Operette born in France, and why did it flourish only in Paris? Shall we say that Orphee aux Enfers , La Belle Helene , La Grande Duchesse , embody the Jewish spirit, whose sacrilegious vein makes game of kings and gods ? Are these irreverential parodies on the heroic and the di¬ vine to be regarded as a play of Jewish irony ? I have no objection to such a view, since this is a case in which Jewish irony is not very cruel ; but how can we help recognising in it that French mirth and that Parisian bluster, neither of which has ever shown much notion of respect ? Hector Cremieux and Offenbach have had many precursors, since the time of L ’ Enlide Travestie, La Pucelle , and Les Galanteries de la Bible , not to go back as far as Gargantua , and the Dialogues of Eucian. What has ever been held sacred by believer or patriot that the Gallic spirit has not turned into ridicule ? How many Frenchmen of ancient France (and that France certainly was not Jewish) have not hesitated to deal with the patriarchs of the Old Testament, the saints of the Gospel, and the heroes of our past, precisely as the librettists of the Varietts and the Bouffes have dealt with the heroes of Homer and the half-gods of Greece. Eet us not play the hypocrite ; let us be honest with our- The Jewish Spirit. 269 selves ; we have here, assuredly, a product of our own soil, which could have sprung from no other. It matters not that Offenbach came from Germany and that he took some of his motifs from scores com¬ posed on the other side of the Rhine ; it was Paris that inspired him, Paris that furnished his subjects, his style, his lively and pungent music. Were every author, composer, and actor who have had a share in La Belle Helhie and La Grande Duchesse , of Jewish ex¬ traction, the style would remain none the less French, Parisian. In this, as in most cases, the Jews have not been originators ; they have merely followed the fashion. A further example is found in the squibs of the boulevard newspapers, another worthless style, devoid of intelligence, but a spontaneous product of France. In this calling, also, some Jews have made a name or, what they like better, a fortune. It is always the old story of Israel’s flexibility and power of adaptation. Whether journalists or playwrights, they become the most Parisian of Parisians ; and yet all these ultra- Parisians are not of French birth. There can be no¬ thing more entertaining, on this point, than the career of Albert Wolf, the German Jew, admired because of his effrontery, as the type of a Parisian journalist, by so many guileless persons. We have all heard of the remark made by a young Berlin lady to one of our fellow-countrymen : “ Which writer do you French¬ men regard as the best stylist of the day ? Is it not Albert Wolf? ” I have come across the same expres¬ sion of opinion in serious English and American papers. The queerest fact is that this view is held by a number of Frenchmen—provincials, to be suro. Israel has often provided the press—ours especially— 2 JO Israel Among the Nations. with literary acrobats, newspaper buffoons, clowns of the fenilleton. The Jew, when necessary, apes the Frenchman, who, as we know, is a born dancer; the Jew goes even a step farther than his master ; he is more of a Parisian, of a boulevardier, than the native himself. What a pitiful achievement, what a despica¬ ble triumph, for the heirs of the prophets and the descendants of the Maccabees ! They remind me— these clever little Jews, ready for all merry work—of the Greeks of the Empire, the Grczculi of Rome, who, after having also given heroes and gods to the world, exhausted the remnant of their genius in furnishing distraction to the Romans of the decadence. But no ; it was their own degraded frivolity, the corruption of a worn-out people, that those Achaian and Ionian Greeks brought to Rome, while it is our frivolity, our rotten¬ ness and our vices, inculcated by us and copied from us, that these Hebraiculi , these degenerate Jewlings, are practising for the sake of our pleasure or their own profit. They fill our cups, alas, with water from our own springs and wine of our own vintage. Neither from the rocks of Carmel nor from the snows of Rebanon have flowed that mocking Parisian levity, that profane French scepticism. If you ask a stranger, a Frenchman, a German, even one of our Russian friends, he will tell you that it is due to the soil, to the race and its history, to Celtic blood, to Latin tradition, to the Roman Church, to the Jesuits; for, abroad as well as at home, there are persons who blame the Jesuit for everything, as others do the Jew. Jesuit or Jew—for an explanation of the point in question one will serve as well as the other ; they are our two scape¬ goats ; everything may be loaded upon them, for their backs are strong. The Jewish Spirit . 271 There remains one pre-eminence which no one will deny to the Frenchmen of the Third Republic; it is that of pornography. On this field we have no rival. I11 some of our newspapers, literature has become synonymous with pornography ; everyone knows what their “literary supplement” means. To whom do we owe this abject royalty? To the Jew? Is it the Se¬ mite, with his ancient Kedeshoth , who has brought us down from the worship of the gentlewoman to that of the jade? But, England has as many Jews as France, and even more ; Germany contains seven or eight times as many, and yet the literature of our English or Ger¬ man neighbours is not as corrupt as ours. The Galician story-teller, Sacher-Masoch, relates that an Israelitish bookbinder, of a small town in Hungary, having received from one of his co-religionists a novel of Zola, said to his customer when she called for the book: “I threw it into the stove; it is no book for a Jewish woman.” Of how many books and newspapers, written or published by Jews, should we be obliged to say that they, also, are not fit for a Christian woman ? But have the Jews a monopoly of this lucrative industry ? Are they the only writ¬ ers whose feuilletons display such elegant turpitudes? To be sure, it is too profitable a business not to be undertaken by some one. Among our ancestors there were painters who used to paint with wax and the yolks of eggs ; we have a school that paints with filth and dips its brushes in impurity. Certain managers of popular newspapers, who profess to enlighten the lower classes, arrogate to themselves the right of polluting the youth of our country, and make a busi¬ ness of publicly displaying their obscenities, as else¬ where, in less civilised countries and in some out-of- 2J2 Israel Among the Nations . the-way alleys, they might open dens of ill-fame. But all the tenants of these literary brothels are not descend¬ ants of Jacob ; we could name some who have been wedded to the Church and decorated by the State. Likewise, with regard to the writers whose muse, decked in the graces of a courtesan and striving to assume lascivious poses, is skilled in all the wiles that are apt to tickle the senses of lewd old men. Are all those who become priests of the Syrian Astarte, or who dance and sing their devil’s litanies before the Beast clothed in purple and scarlet, revealed of late by M. Alexandre Dumas 1 —are all these the sons of the house of Israel, fallen again into the whoredoms of Aholah and Aholibah? Are all our leading exponents of shame¬ less theories, our masters of lascivious verse, skilled in juggling with ambiguities and in heightening the effect of voluptuous images by the gauzy drapery of transparent words—are these all Hebrews with Chal¬ dean profiles ? Among such poets of indecency, who seek new themes in uncleanness and find ideals in obscenity , 2 I am sorry to recognise many a Christian whom the water of baptism has washed in vain. If this sort of poetry were the only kind left to us, we should, like Plato, have no alternative but to banish the poets—without crowning them with flowers, how¬ ever ; and if this were really the Jewish spirit, I should demand that the Ghetto be re-established. If we really have a poetry of a Jewish nature, it is not that of M. Catulle Mendes ; it is rather that of the au¬ thor of Les Ouvriers , of M. Manuel, the grandson of the Levite ; modest and discreet poetry, intimate, domestic, 1 Letter to M. Cuvillier-Fleury (preface to La Femme de Claude ). 2 The expression is that of Mr. James Darmesteter. The Jewish Spirit . 273 somewhat restricted perhaps, but chaste and healthy. The lyre with the Lydian strings, and the Phrygian cymbals have nothing in common with the psaltery of the daughters of Judah and the harp of the prophet- king. Those Jews who praise voluptuousness in Ionian measures, are the pupils of Gentiles. Go down into the eastern Jewries, where the Law and the rabbis have preserved their authority, and study the verses that are still made there in Hebrew or in jargon ; I assure you, a mother would allow them to be sung in the presence of her daughter. From the time of the prophets to that of Jehuda Halevy, and from the Mid¬ dle Ages to our day, there has been an immense Hebraic and Jewish literature ; there is, I think, no literature which contains less of the erotic element. Shir Hashirim , the canticle of canticles, that burning eclogue of Oriental love, chaste in its very crudity, (compare it but with Daphnis and Chloe ) stands un¬ approached in Hebrew poetry ; and the Synagogue, which, like the Church, saw in it nothing but an alle¬ gory, would not permit it to be read by men under thirty. The peoples who obey the Bible and are most deeply imbued with the spirit of Judah, are the least indulgent towards the baneful amusements of por¬ nography. I know of nothing that could be more opposed to the spirit of Israel, a spirit of purity, of domestic sanctity, which has always regarded the rela¬ tion between the sexes with seriousness, and sometimes even with medical pedantry. Those Jews who would turn it into an object of intellectual diversion or of refined sensualism, are untrue to the traditions of their race; they are, to quote their Oriental congeners, Apicoresim, epicureans, miscreants, who neglect to light the Chanuka torches. Adultery was not to be 2 74 Israel A mong the Nations . trifled with in the schools of Judaea. We know what sort of punishment the Law held in store for it; and an aged Parisian Jew has recently had the bad taste to demand the re-establishment of this penalty, insisting that it be applied to “ feuilleton ” pornographists as well as to guilty wives . 1 To the former also, he in¬ sisted, the law of restriction applies. Again, I say, a fig for Pharisaism ! That, at least, is not a French vice, and we have enough of our own without borrowing those of our neighbours. Here again, whatever derivation or inheritance there is, is Aryan and our own. We are the children of Rome and Greece, and the waters of baptism have not. washed us clean. This vein of corruption, this moral dry-rot which is spreading over the surface of our societies, may be traced far back into our past; from the secret literature of the eighteenth century it goes back to the Renaissance, to the Middle Ages, to antiquity. If the England of the Restoration had not had her dramatic stage, and the Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries her story tellers and her divine Aretin, we might be tempted to believe that we have here again a product of the Gallic, some might say the Latin, spirit. Whence does it really come, this abject literature, at once coarse and refined, these obscene glorifications of the voluptuous, condemned by Church and Synagogue ? They come from neo-paganism, from the restored wor¬ ship of the flesh and the senses, to which the de-juda- ised Jew and the de-christianised Christian alike succumb. To be cleansed and cured, both Jew and Christian have but to bathe once more at the foot of Mt. Hermon, in the cold streams that feed the Jordan. Let us not flatter ourselves ; all is not clear gain for 1 Al. Weill’s Le Levitique (pp. 109-113, Paris, 1891). The Jewish Spirit. 275 the Jew in his contact with us. As with the Orientals —be they Christians or Moslems—sudden contact with our civilisation is often fatal to him. He is subject both to the contagion of our ideas and to the infection of our vices. From these diseases he has no immu¬ nity. His moral code is not to blame for it; the Jewish code is the same as the Christian. There is merely a difference of shades ; both codes are based on the same faith in God and on the same Decalogue. What is true of the Jew, perhaps even more than of the Chris¬ tian, is that in abandoning the rites and the faith of his ancestors he rarely succeeds in preserving intact the morality incorporated in that faith and hidden in those rites, like the kernel in the nut. This is especially true with regard to sexual morality, chastity, that frail virtue which, in order to withstand the tempest of the passions, appears to require a religious prop, and, as it were, a divine teacher. II. There is one country which is perhaps more justified than ours in accusing the Jew of having had a share in its corruption. It is Germany. Israel has held a larger place in the literature and the intellectual life of our neighbours than in that of France. The writers of Jewish origin are legion in the country of Heine, Marx, and Tassalle. Many of them have long in¬ habited France and imbibed the French spirit. When the Teutomaniacs blame the Jews for having inocu¬ lated virtuous Germany with the virus of the French .spirit, with its love for ridicule, its superficial scepti¬ cism, its immorality, its lack of respect, its rebellious instincts, I do not take offence at this charge, provided 276 Israel A moiig the Nations . that they are willing to admit that the Jew has also infused into it a little of our love for justice, our intel¬ lectual freedom, our disdain for superannuated castes and hierarchies, our hatred of hypocrisy and conven¬ tional lies. Such was the case especially with Borne and Heine, two hostile brothers, the two Israelitish leaders of “young Germany,” which, according to Menzel, was only a young Palestine. To Graetz, the historian of Judaism , 1 Borne and Heine seem like two angels armed with rods with which to scourge German iniquity. True enough, but those scourges were soaked and made supple in French wit. Those two archangels are not the only German Jews who have borrowed some¬ thing from us. We could cite many others of lesser magnitude : Paul Tindau, for instance, and Max Nor- dau, among our contemporaries. In all these German Jews, even in Heine and Borne, as well as in Fassalle and Karl Marx—the two demi¬ gods of German socialism—we still feel the German education, the German groundwork, the Germanic substratum. If a hidden virus courses through their veins, it is neither wholly Jewish nor wholly French. Its analysis reveals a subtler poison that comes straight from learned Germanjq from its schools, its universi¬ ties, and its philosophy. Whether they figure as the inspirers of “ young Germany ” and its political revo¬ lutions, or the founders of socialism and the war of classes, there is in all these Teutonic Jews something of Hegel and the Hegelian spirit. By virtue of this, they are indeed very German and very modern ; Ger¬ many has no right to disown them. Have the Jews monopolised intellectual radicalism 1 Graetz, Geschichte der guden, vol. xi., p. 367. The Jewish Spirit . 2 77 and philosophical or political unbelief in Germany? But Stirner, for instance, the prototype of the nihilist, and Nietsche, who calls the cross the most poisonous of trees—these men are not, to my knowledge, scions of the house of Jacob. Moreover, among the contem¬ poraries of Heine, who incurred with him the censure of the German Diet, did not Gutzkow of Berlin, a Christian by descent and baptism, openly exhibit his dislike of Christianity and the Nazarene spirit ? Fur¬ thermore, was it the Jews and Jewesses who taught the Germans to look upon the old moral law as so much rubbish ? If a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn really once dared to put into practice the theory of free love, she merely applied the principles of a Christian, a mystic, one of the inspirers of German romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel . 1 The Jewish woman, that Oriental woman pictured to us as enslaved and degraded by the Talmud, has truly, more than once shocked the deutsche Frau by her emancipated ways and her in¬ tellectual culture, deemed indelicate and alarming in a woman. Everywhere, and perhaps above all in Germany, the Jewish woman has had a large share in the uplifting of her race. Hers has been a curious history since the end of the eighteenth century. Her metamorphosis has been even more rapid and more complete than that of the Jew. These daughters of Judah, until recently shut in, like nuns, behind the dark lattices of grated galleries, by the Shames of the synagogue, have almost universally displayed, even to a greater degree than their husbands, the supreme faculty of Is¬ rael, the gift of assimilation, bringing it to bear upon 1 Friedrich Schlegel, in his novel Lucinde. Besides, Schlegel married Mendelssohn’s daughter, who became baptised. 278 Israel A mong the Nations . our customs, our ideas, our arts, our fashions, our social life. In their case the flexibility of the Jewess was re¬ inforced by the suppleness of the woman. Contrary to what obtains in other races and other faiths, in which woman appears like the jealous guardian of traditions and beliefs, the Jewess has, especially in Germany, been ready to welcome innovations from without. It might be said that Judaism, a virile religion, and, above all, solicitous of the male, has less hold upon the female heart than upon the masculine brain. As a rule, the Jewess was not admitted to the study of the haw ; hence her hands were not tied down by the ropes of Talmud¬ ism ; she took advantage of this to assist her husband and her brothers to throw off their fetters. Not content with her share in the emancipation of her race, the German Jewess has been bold enough to labour at the emancipation of her sex. She has com¬ mitted the blunder of displaying tastes and talents in which the German Hausfrau would not permit herself to indulge. It was through the Jewess also—Henriette de Lemos (Henriette Herz), for instance, the friend of the theologian Sclileiermacher, and Rahel Varn- hagen von Ense,—that Berlin learnt the meaning of a salon, that French importation that had not yet found a foothold on the banks of the Spree. However, I do not think that the example set by these Jewesses has corrupted respectable Germany. It may have been startled by the fantastic romances of Fanny Eewald; but the audacities of that free-thinking Jewess were surpassed by Marlitt, the fashionable authoress of Ger¬ many. Eet us return to men, selecting the Jewish writers who have become famous. Has Germany forgotten that the first Jew who wrote in German, a Jew still The Jewish Spirit . 279 imbued with the spirit of the Synagogue, Moses Men¬ delssohn, dared to re-write the Phedon in the midst of the eighteenth century ? How many Christians would, at that time, have been so courageous ? If the spirit of scepticism prevails among so many of his congeners, it is because they have broken loose from the traditions of Israel; because, despite the old rabbis, they have read profane books and tasted of the fruit of the tree of German knowledge. As in the case of the Russian Jews, it is in the University, in the Christian Alma Mater, established by the Church or the State, that the Jews of Germany and Austria have acquired their radi¬ cal tendencies. Thus Auerbach, the son of the Suabian rabbi, would doubtless never have translated Spinoza had it not been for Tubingen and Strauss. This has not prevented him from becoming the most faithful delineator of country-life in Germany. Why have our French peasants not had their Auerbach ? I do not think that Germany has ever had a more German or a more wholesome writer. Perhaps this would be say¬ ing too much of Paul Heyse (a half-blooded Jew) ; although one must admire the cleverness of his stories and the sparkle of his poetry, it is possible not to enjoy his romances written to develop his theories, or his sensual paganism. But ever since the return from Italy of Goethe — that Goethe wdio compre¬ hended everything except, perhaps, the Christian reli¬ gion,—paganism has, more than once, been imported into the countries north of the Alps. As to purpose-literature, if in Germany, in Austria, and even in France, so many sons of Israel have a predilection for political novelties and revolutionary doctrines, it is because, like the Prussian Jews who are swept along by the nihilistic torrent, they are 28 o Israel A mong the Nations . driven towards extreme democracy and revolutionary ideas by the recollection of their long oppression, by the intolerance of law and custom, in one word, by the necessity of bringing about, or of strengthening, their emancipation, even to-day so often called into question. East and west of the Rhine alike, the majority of Jews who have used their pens as weapons have en¬ listed in the parties of their native country, and been led by the spirit of their times . 1 Moreover, all the German and Austrian Jews were by no means apostles of the Revolution. In proof of this, we quote men of differ¬ ent kinds and degrees of talent: the poet Beer, brother of Meyerbeer; the delineators of the Ghetto, Bernstein and Kompert; the learned Ebers, Egyptologist and novelist; the story-teller Franzos. I do not think that these men have greatly disturbed the peace of German thought. If the literature of our German neighbours has no longer the azure clearness of the waters of the Rhine as they emerge from the lake, the Jew is not to blame for it. And, if Christian faith and Christian culture are still dear to the heart of the Germans, they should remember that the nineteenth century produced two solvents much more active than the Jewish spirit: German exegesis was one, German metaphysics the other. III. “ My friend,” said to me one of those men who have made the moral uplifting of France their object, “ there is one thing to be said against the Jews : the3^ lower 1 Karl Beck and Moritz Hartmann, two Austrian poets, of Jewish birth and democratic tendencies, thus became associated with the liberal movement in Germany, from 1840 to 1848, The yeivish Spirit. 281 our national ideal.” Well and good ! Here is a griev¬ ance worthy of us. I cannot deny that it seems justi¬ fied at times. There is in the world a decrease of idealism, or—in order not to be too severe towards our age—there is a change, a transformation for the worse in our ideals. Although we may still have them, we do not place them so high ; sometimes we place them so low that they can hardly be called by their old name. Many influences besides that of the Jew have con¬ tributed to this; democracy, enamoured above all of material progress, the weakening of religious faith and of all other faith, the utilitarian spirit of our industrial civilisation, the desire for material prosperity, the wor¬ ship of money, the respect for success and the indiffer¬ ence to the means by which it is attained. Here again, instead of believing that our society is becoming Juda- ised, I should say that it is becoming Americanised. Idealism is declining ; this is undoubted. If the Jew contributes to this decline, it is through his age-long debasement, and we know whence this debasement has come. What pains we have taken to degrade him, to make him crouch in the dust and bend the knee be¬ fore Mammon. Honestly speaking, many of us pre¬ fer him so ; the lower he is, the more he seems to be in his proper place ; when he dares to raise his head and to reach out after nobler things, we are apt to accuse him of insolence. But is this a reason for saying that it is the Jew’s fault that our ideals are becoming lower ? Let us take an example from another country—we see more clearly in the case of others, for we are always partial to ourselves;—let us take Germany, that has boasted of being the home of the ideal. “The Jew,” exclaims the ultra-Teuton, “is about to strangle the native idealism of old Germany ; the Jew threatens to 282 Israel A mong the Nations. corrupt German character, German fidelity, German purity, German probity.” 1 This seems somewhat ridiculous to us, outsiders ; all these Germanic virtues must be very insecurely grounded in the German heart if a handful of Semites are able to uproot them. And yet, are there not some Frenchmen who say the same of France and the French soul ? Or, does that which causes us to smile when beheld in our neighbours, appear more serious when detected in ourselves ? The old idealism of the Swa¬ bian and the Saxon has, in unified Germany, been trans¬ planted by the cynical realism of the Prussian of the Mark. That is the true situation. Whom do you hold responsible ? Is it really due to the Jew, as the Teu¬ tons would have it ? Or to Prussian brutality, Berlinese bureaucracy, the military spirit of the Hohenzollern, the violence and deceit taught by that Pomeranian, Bis¬ marck, and the erection of force into law? Whether it be German or Roman, we have here, at all events, an idea that does not come from Israel. Her entire past is a protest against it. The Chaldean, the Phoenician, the Carthaginian, the Arabian, are adduced as proofs of the Semite’s inca¬ pacity for idealism ! What boots all this ethnography, in view of the fact that for two thousand years our souls have been kept alive by the ideal bequeathed to us by the sons of Judah? We have been fed on the manna transmitted by the Beni-Israel, no matter which was the divine hand that caused it to rain upon their tents. The prophets of Ephraim and the apostles of Galilee have been the world’s proclaimers of idealism. 1 These are the words spoken at the Assembly of Antisemites in Berlin, July 15, 1887 ; and such is, in Germany, the habitual language of a certain portion of the press. The Jewish Spirit. 283 The thirst for the ideal that consumes the Christian soul has come to us from these men. Open their Book, their Bible ; it has been for entire nations a well of perennial freshness, whence they have drawn strength and nobility of soul. By virtue of it, the Aryan peoples have become gradually imbued with the Semitic spirit; their souls have been uplifted and their hearts have been strengthened by it. If the modern Jew seems to us bare of ideals, this is due neither to his race nor to his tradition, but to his sufferings. He has been artifi¬ cially perverted by the centuries. The people that preached to the world the Kingdom of God, has been turned by intolerance into the most matter-of-fact and earthly-minded of races. History shows more than one of these sad metamorphoses. It is not true that suffering always purifies, and that persecution always ennobles. The Jew is a proof of this. He has sacrificed everything to his faith and his nation. He was an idealist after his fashion, for had he sought only repose and riches he would long ago have ceased to be a Jew. He would have said, with Heine, that Judaism is not so much a religion as a misfortune. In this sense his existence disproves the saying that he has put all his heart into his gold. Where can we find a race more faithful to its traditions, to its Law, to its God, in short, to its ideal ? What a history it has had ! Its poets have called it ‘ ‘ the passion of a people.” 1 How enduring and mighty has been that passion, from Nebuchadnezzar to Antiochus, from Hadrian to Torquemada ! The Jew has been the prosaic hero of a drama that has lasted two thousand years ; a hero with little of 1 For instance, David Devi, in his II Prof eta o la Passione di un Popolo. (Turin, 1884.) 284 Israel A mong the Nations . the heroic in his aspect, and caring little to seem heroic, humbling himself, effacing himself, shamming death, when necessary, in order to escape his enemies and avoid the faggots at the foot of the scaffold. To re¬ main a Jew was, for ages, the only ideal, the only point of honour to which he clung ; everything else he renounced as superfluous luxury. All the nobility of his soul, all his enthusiasm, was spent in this effort, and so freely, that he had none left for other things. So constantly did he draw himself in, that he became shrivelled, as it were, and hardened. Outside of his Taw, life seemed to him only a piece of business. But is not this mode of conceiving life that of nine-tenths of the Christians? I, for my part, can see nothing Semitic in it. It is very English, and very American. It has even become French and German, and it was not the Jew who taught it to us. If we, Germans and Frenchmen, were nobler at heart, if our young men were less eager for pleasure, and our old men less anx¬ ious for worldly goods, if our souls had retained some of the spirit that breathed upon them from the moun¬ tains of Palestine, we should have no occasion to fear the Jew’s example. We should have but to leave him behind his counter, or to send him back to his rabbis. But where is our ideal ? It is written : ‘ ‘ The heart of man is where his treasure is. ’ ’ Where is our treasure ? Is it not in the coffers of the Jewish bankers ? And there, also, is our heart, like the heart of the Semite. The trouble is, that we have neither faith nor enthusi¬ asm left; we scarcely know what to believe, nor at what ideals to kindle our souls. Tike an old man of fifty who has become weaned of everything, our modern world has lost faith in all but wealth ; and neither Europe nor America needed the apostles of Judsea in order to be converted to this worship of Mammon. The Jewish Spirit. 285 But, can we honestly say that the Jew conceives life only as a transaction on the Stock Exchange ? Eet us leave aside the broker, the banker, the money-maker ; whether Jew or Christian, his calling is not to teach idealism. Ret us take life’s highest expression, art poetry, science. Is it true that the sardonic Jew is constantly blighting with his irony that pale flower of idealism so prone to wither in the heavy air of com¬ merce ? This carnal race, “ this race, sensual like all Oriental races,” has it really lowered art and degraded literature ? Has Rachel, for instance, lowered the French stage or degraded the Roman women of Corneille, and the Greek women of Racine? Have the inspirations of Beethoven lost any of their grandeur under the fingers of Rubinstein or the bow of Joachim ? If there be an unhealthy, a voluptuous, an enervating music, can we say it is that of either Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn ? Are we to look upon Le Prophete and the Reformations-Sym¬ phonic as degrading compositions, void of all idealism ? Antokolsky, the Russian sculptor, the creator of Spinoza, Nestor, and the Christian martyr, is an idealist, “a sculptor of ideas,” as says M. de Vogue ; if he has a fault it is that he is too anxious to spiritualise flesh and muscle ; he would put too much soul into his marble forms. It has been said that the Talmud has given to the Jews a coarse idea of women and of love. It seems to me, that, notwithstanding all his sarcasm, few poets have so poetised love or so idealised woman as that great scoffer, Heine. In his case, as in the case of so many ardent spirits whose glowing youth has been chilled by the icy breath of reality, there seems to be a sort of idealism turned back on itself. Is it, perhaps, in philosophy that the Jew has shown himself incapable of idealism? But then, what be- 286 Israel Among the Nations. comes of Spinoza? However scant may be one’s liking for the theorems of his Ethics , is it possible to class this contemplator of the Absolute with the vile herd of materialists whose gaze is inclined earthward ? His gaze is lifted on high. His pantheism, instead of beginning with matter, begins with thought, and ends in the absorption, by God, of nature and the whole universe. Was it not Spinoza who taught the intel¬ lectual love of God, amor Dei intelledualis f And is not his whole teaching comprised in the identification of virtue with beatitude? Here is a recipe for happi¬ ness which it would be well for Semites and Aryans to retain ; if it fails to appeal to them, it is not because it leans towards epicureanism. L,et us leave aside the productions of the Jews, to see how the Jew has been depicted by others in art and poetry. To study him in fiction as w 7 ell as in history has been a pleasant task for me. Is it true that, since Ahasuerus, of mythical memory, poets and wuiters of romance have known but one classical type of Jew, the grovelling, swindling, rapacious, dishonoured, pre-Shy - lockian Jew of the popular stage ? ‘ ‘ On the stage, a Jew must be odious,” said a dramatic writer of Israelitish extraction . 1 M. Alexandre Dumas had already said : “ It is admitted that on the stage the Jew must always be a buffoon.” 2 And, verily, he has become a sort of fantastic automaton, similar to the Italian masks, and always, like Harlequin and Pulcinella, confined to the same role. On the other hand, if the stage-Jew must be repulsive, the stage-Jewess is usually endowed with every grace and charm. The poor Aryans have 1 M. Abraham Dreyfus, Le Juif au Theatre , lecture before the Societe des Etudes Juives , 1888. 2 Alexandre Dumas, fils : Letter to M. Cuvillier-Fleury. The yewish Spirit . 287 always been captivated by her, from the Esther of Ahasuerus to the Polish Esterka of Casimir the Great. Such is the decree of tradition, or of legend. Happy Israel ! From time immemorial woman has been her salvation. In the novel, the Jewess—be she an angel of purity or a courtesan—still retains her fascinating beauty, and the Jew ceases to be a mere conventional type. In the Nucingen of Balzac, and the Samuel Brohl of Cherbuliez, he becomes again a living being ; and, strange to relate, he is often transformed into an ideal character. This is to be expected in authors of Jewish extrac¬ tion such as Heine, Disraeli, Heyse, Eindau, Fanny Eewald, Auerbach, Kompert. But a similar transforma¬ tion has been depicted in the writings of not a few Christian authors, and even on the stage, where it was hardest to obtain acceptance for the new type. Cessing is not the only one who has dared to show us a Jew erected into a model of virtue. To his Nathan der IVeise, a verbose reasoner surrounded by a cold halo of wisdom, I prefer the Daniel of La Femme de Claude , an idealistic Jew, more true to nature than the Parisian idlers imagined ; I myself have met his like, but far off, 3^onder, in the East. The Daniel of M. Alexandre Dumas has given rise to a school from which seems to have emanated Mordecai , the neo-prophet of Da 7 iiel Deronda . 1 2 According to the information of Valbert , 3 George Eliot has depicted three or four Jewish types in an exceedingly sympathetic spirit. It is true that George Eliot wrote under the influence of Eewes, and 1 The remark occurs, I believe, in M. E. Montegut’s Ecrivains Moderates de l y Angleterre, first series, George Eliot. 2 G. Valbert’s Homines et Choses d'Allemagne. 288 Israel A mong the Nations . that he passes for an Israelite. This has been disputed ; but granted that Eewes was a Jew, how came it that a Jew was able to inspire so noble a woman as Miss Evans with so profound a sentiment ? Towards the same time, Robert Browning, one of the most representative poets of the idealist school in England, places on the lips of a rabbi, in RabbiBezi Ezra , his high conception of old age, which he likens to a new dawn. However unromantic the Jew may appear, George Eliot is not the only author who has made him the hero of a novel. His own life .sometimes furnished the necessary material. Ferdinand Eassalle, for instance, has been a subject of inspiration to three or four English and German novelists. Even the naturalists have realised that the entire Israelite was not contained in the money-maker. M. Zola, who occasionally deals in symbolism, contrasts, in his E Argent, a magnate of the Bourse with a little con¬ sumptive Jew w r ho, in the very agony of death, dreams of social regeneration. This Sigismond is not a figment of Zola’s brain ; him, also, have I known. Even in Poland, the country in which the Jews are most down¬ trodden, poets and novelists have often pictured to us Jews of noble character, enamoured of lofty ideals ; for instance, the Jankiel of Mickiewdcz, the Jacob of Kras- zewski and the Meyer Ezofowicz of Elise Orzeszc. As for the Jewesses, with their velvety eyes and long lashes, our Aryan gallantry, or frailty, has always been indulgent to them. As far as they are concerned, I do not know that there exist any Antisemites. Why have so many writers of different races seen fit, like M. Alexandre Dumas, to incarnate the grace and purity of woman in “ the daughter of the eternally-persecuted ”— from the Rebecca in Ivanhoe to the Rebecca in La Femme de Claude , and from the Sarah in Don Juan of Austria The Jewish Spirit . 289 to Grillparzer’s Jewess of Toledo , and Fanny Hafner in Cosmopolis f Yet, this purity is a lily that will not grow upon a dung-hill ! But what matters fiction or the empty shadows born of a poet’s brain ? Is it only in novels that the Jews show themselves disinterested ? Are there, beneath Jehovah’s firmament, no Israelites—be they circum¬ cised or baptised—who have proved to us that, in despite of its prolonged debasement, the race of Jacob has not yet become impervious to idealism? I, for my part, should be able to quote many such instances, even in France, among the living as well as the dead. What shall we call a writer like James Darmesteter, for instance, if not an idealist ? And among the Israelites who have become Christians without dis¬ owning the blood of their fathers, was there not Gus¬ tave d’Eichthal, one of those rare old men who remain faithful to the lofty ideals of their youth ? We have in the Academy of Moral Sciences, an octogenarian, who, whenever the existence of God or the soul is questioned, defends them with the accents of a prophet ; he is an Israelite, who was taught to read in the Talmud. They must surely have had a spark of idealism—that Levan¬ tine Jew, Franchetti, who in the hour of our distress gave up his life to France on the hills overlooking the Seine, and that Jewess from Lorraine, Madame Coralie Cohen, who after having nursed our wounded in com¬ pany with the Sisters of Charity, traversed Germany three times to solace our prisoners in the fortresses of old Prussia . 1 1 See M. Maximedu Camp’s Paris Bienfaisant , pp. 365-369. It was while thinking of this noble woman that M. Maxime du Camp wrote these lines : “ It has been said, and I, myself, have said, that the Israelites have but an imperfect sense of patriot- 19 2go Israel Among the Nations . If we confine ourselves to history, we shall not look in vain for Jews, both ancient and modern, who have realised in their lives the type of wisdom and justice that has remained Israel’s ideal throughout the ages. This ideal, perverted in their tzadiks^ through the super¬ stition of the Hassidim, has found its immortal proto¬ types in Jehuda Halevy and the great rabbis of the Middle Ages, as well as in Spinoza and Moses Mendels¬ sohn and Montefiore. It does not seem impossible that the Jew may, by the grace of Christ, rise even to saint- ship. Scandalous as it may appear, I know at least one who is in a fair way of being publicly acknowledged a saint, and to whom has already been granted the honour of officiating at our altars,—the venerable Tiebermann, the founder of the congregation of Missionaries of the Holy Spirit . 1 Kven the reformed churches that dare ism : Oh, Jewess, forgive me ! ” Cf., in VInvasion of M. L,udovic Halevy the stories called Venddme and Graudenz: the person whose name is suppressed there is Madame Coralie Cohen. 1 It is perhaps the first instance of a descendant of Israel becoming the object of canonisation. Although the baptised Jews do not always belong to the “ dlite ” of Judaism, more than one of them has distinguished himself in the Protestant or Catholic clergy by his noble qualities and deeds. Thus, in France, the two fathers Ratisbonne ; the one, founder of the congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion, the other, converted to Romanism by an apparition of the Virgin in the Church Saint Andrea delle Fratte. Also, the two brothers bemann, both noted for their apostolic fervour. In Austria, the Archbishop of Olmutz, Dr. Kohn, is of Jewish blood. The Antisemites, who deem themselves wiser than Rome, do not, however, hesi¬ tate to ask the Church to re-establish the custom of the Spanish Inquisition, by admitting to the priesthood no men of Jewish extraction whose ancestors have not been baptised several generations before. The Jewish Spirit . 291 not canonise, have worshipped apostles and sages of Jewish origin ; in Germany, for instance, the great Neander, the torch of Orthodox theology, one of the men who, in the Evangelical Church, succeeded in thawing for a short while the Christian piety that had grown benumbed beneath the ice of rationalism . 1 IV. It seems to me beyond doubt that the fount of lofty sen¬ timents has not run dry in the sons of Abraham ; but I do not know whether their ideals are always the same as ours. Perhaps there is something in Israel’s past that robs her highest aspirations of warmth and colour, and gives a prosaic tinge to her ideals. The Jew is old, he has long beheld the world through the gates of the Ghetto. It is possible that even in his dreams he may be more positive than the younger races, to whom a kindlier nurture has given a more expansive youth. To us, ungrateful sons of new Rome, joyously reared in the maternal lap of the Church, come, at times, dim recollections of our Christian childhood and its reach- ings-out towards heaven. We are the sons of Cru¬ saders, and the life of monk and cavalier has bequeathed to us a turn of imagination, an elevation of sentiment, 1 England has likewise had her clergymen and missionaries of Jewish blood. An Anglican ecclesiastical review, The Newbery House Magazine , Jan., 1892, p. 320, states that the Established Church has had four bishops and twenty clergymen of Jewish extraction, several of whom have been noted for the fervour and disinterestedness of their apostolate. L,ord Herschell, for instance, the Chancellor of Gladstone’s cabinet, is the son of a Polish Jew, Ridley Herschell, who became an Anglican clergy¬ man after his baptism. 292 Israel Among the Nations . a delicacy of soul, difficult to find in the sons of the Semites, kept like dogs beyond the thresholds of the houses. The ideal born within the mediaeval castle-keep and beneath the arcades of the cloister, is not that of the Jew, any more than it is that of the Yankee. The Jew is usually neither chivalrous nor mystical ; we have shown why. How can we be astonished at the fact that he is not chivalrous, that he has nothing but con¬ tempt for the spirit of Don Quixote, and scant liking for noisy military fame or the stirring adventures of the noble classes, when we remember that the right to wear a shield or to carry a sword has been denied him for centuries? Nor is he inclined to mysticism; in fact, he seems never to have been so; Judaism has always been a Taw, a religion of the mind, an intellectual creed not favourable to mystical transports or divine langours. The mysticism of the Cabala, and that of the Hassidim, the neo-Cabalists, seems to have been a foreign importation ; according to the best judges, the Cabala itself is not rooted in Judaism. If it be neither chivalrous nor mystical, what is the nature of the Jewish ideal ? One might call it a bour¬ geois ideal, and, if it is permissible to combine the two words, a material ideal. It does not lose itself in the clouds or the azure heavens; its object is this earth and its realities ; its aim is the establishment of peace, and the diffusion of happiness, among men . 1 It is what has been called the carnal ideal of the Jew, an ideal “of the earth, earthy,’’ or, if you will, of the needy broker or the enriched banker, but not so very despic- 1 It would be in place to notice here, did I not intend to recur to it later, the part taken by the Jews in Saint-Simonism, of which Olinde Rodrigues seems to have been the founder. The Jewish Spirit. 2 93 able after all, since it can be traced to the ideal of the prophets,—the reign of justice on earth. “And the time will come when every man will be able to sit peacefully in the shade of his vine and his olive-tree. ’ ’ Material or not, such has remained the Jewish ideal throughout the ages ; and it matters little that the Jew has brought this terrestrial ideal of ancient Israel down to his own level; no one can deny that it corre¬ sponds to the ideal of the new age, to the humanitarian dream bequeathed to modern peoples by the eighteenth century, which, despite all its utopias and follies, was, after its own fashion, an idealistic century. Israel may pride herself on having gained a long start over the Gentiles. What name does Jewish tradition give to that far-off hope of a regeneration of human soci¬ ety ? It calls it by an old name : the reign of the Mes¬ siah. This constitutes the chief dogma and the great originality of Judaism. Among the thirteen articles of the profession of faith of Maimonides, this one has retained the most adherents. But what is the reign of the Messiah, and how does Israel interpret it ? Tor two thousand years Israel has invoked the son of David who was to bring about the reign of justice and peace. There are Jews who still wait for him, but the majority have grown weary of praying for his ad¬ vent. Their hopes have been too often betrayed by false Messiahs ; they have believed too ardently to believe any longer. The rabbis themselves smile at the credulity of the Jews of Tiberias, who keep their lamps lighted in expectation of the birth of the Lord’s anointed, and at the Jews of Safed, who assemble at the foot of the mountain on which the scion of Jesse is to establish his throne. But very few Jews still believe in a Messiah of flesh and blood, the restorer of Israel’s 294 Israel Among the Nations. dominion, who is to make Jacob ruler of the earth. It is a good while since the rabbis themselves have begun to doubt it. Nevertheless, these Jews, so tenacious in their faith, have not relinquished their hope in a Re¬ deemer who is to bring about the triumph of right and justice on earth. The prophetic emblems of this vision may be seen depicted on the walls of certain Galician synagogues, in naive paintings of the wolf and the lamb pasturing side by side. The Jew, like the Christian, interprets allegorically the promises of his seers. How often have our scholars accused him of being a slave to the letter, of materialis¬ ing the prophecies. And now he, also, interprets them spiritually, without at the same time losing sight of their temporal significance. The Prince of Peace, the Son of Righteousness, proclaimed on Carmel and Moriah, is—in the eyes of the Jews—neither a king, nor a conqueror, nor a man, but an epoch, a new era, promised to Israel and to all humanity. For some of the rabbis the Messiah, if he be indeed a living being —the triumphant Messiah, as well as the suffering Messiah, the Christus patiens of Isaiah—is none other than Israel, the light of the world, in turn persecuted and liberated, humiliated and glorified. For the greater part of our Western Jews this is but an alle¬ gorical figure of the future of humanity, a veiled vision of the glorious destiny in store for the descendants of Adam. The triumphant Messiah, like Bar-Cocheba , seems to them nothing more than a corruption of the Messianic conception of the prophets. What the nabis of Judah perceived in the remote distance of the ages, was indeed the coming of justice, the reign of Jehovah on earth ; but the reign of Jehovah among men will not be established sword in hand, by The Jewish Spirit . 295 a monarch issued from the trunk of Jesse; it will be the pacific triumph of science, the natural march of civilisation, advancing slowly towards the Good and the Just. Isaiah saw true, and the promises of Amos and Zachariah are not deceptive ; but the Jerusalem of the future, towards which the soul of the prophets be¬ held the peoples ascending, will not be a city of stone on the hill of Zion, but an ideal city, wdierein all the children of man will dwell together in brotherly love. Such is the Messiah in the eyes of a large number of modern Jews; and w T e, too, know this Messiah. We have a name for him ; we, too, look forward to him, and invoke his coming with all our heart. He is what Aryan nations call Progress ; a modern Messiah, in whom the incredulous multitudes of our great cities trust as blindly as the Jews of old trusted in the advent of the Redeemer, the son of David. This faith, it is true, does not come to us directly from Israel; it is rather we who have awakened it in the Jew. It slumbered within his Books; it rested there in a latent condition, until Diderot and Condorcet re- wealed it to the nations and spread it throughout the w r orld. But no sooner was it proclaimed by the Revo¬ lution, no sooner was it applied to the Jews, than they recognised it and claimed it as a legacy from their an¬ cestors. They read their Bible in the light of the Ency¬ clopaedia, and they discovered the utterances of the prophets to be the same as those of the profane Gentile seers. They blended the old religious doctrine of a Messiah with the new philosophical doctrine of human perfectibility. Thus, from the day on which he was admitted to our civilisation, the Jew found himself pre¬ pared to share its boldest hopes ; and thus, ancient 296 Israel Among the Nations. Judaism seemed confirmed by science and rejuvenated by modern speculation. The Synagogue, apparently petrified for ever in its archaic ritual, was enabled to present itself to its followers as the religion of progress, and could boast of having forestalled, by two or three thousand years, the sages of all nations. Progress—such is for modern Israel the true Messiah, whose near advent she acclaims with all her hosannahs. Such is the creed of neo-Judaism and the ideal of the Jews. Many of them are, in their eagerness, no longer content to say : “ the Messiah is coming,” but exclaim : “ the Messiah is close at hand, the Messiah is here ! ” I11 their eyes we are already standing on the threshold of the Messianic era. The Revolution was its intro¬ duction, our Doctrine of Human Rights its manifesto, and its signal was given to the world, not by the trum¬ pet of the arch-angel of the Apocalypse, but by the drums of our soldiers when, at the approach of our tri¬ color, the barriers of caste and the walls of the Ghetto fell to the ground. The Messianic era has been in¬ augurated ; but not a few weeks nor a few years will see the regeneration of the earth, or the consummation of the prophetic visions. What obstacles must yet be over¬ come ! What darknesses dispersed ! The emancipated Jew takes pride in working to this end, assailing super¬ annuated hierarchies, battling with prejudices, warding off the revival of past evils, struggling—sometimes with foolhardy haste—to pave the way for future revo¬ lutions ; too often confounding movement with progress, and the overthrow of the present with the upbuilding of the future ; too apt to regard as hostile all that re¬ minds him of the past, and too eager to destroy, under the pretext of reconstructing ; too defiant of tradition, too confident of novelty ; cherishing, perhaps, too strong The Jewish Spirit . 297 a faith in Reason, Science, and Wealth; too forgetful of moral conditions, which are the eternal conditions of all human progress. Such is the Jew, and such is the new Jewish spirit. We have here something far removed from the Chris¬ tian spirit,—apparently its very opposite. And yet, it is, perhaps, not so far removed from it as we imagine. The idea of the millennium, which is but the Christian form of the old hope in the Messiah, has, since a long time, had few adherents left among the Christians. Yet, Christianity has not, on this account, renounced its faith in a Kingdom of God on earth. For, Christianity also has promised the Kingdom of God to the descendants of Adam ; and the Christian who knows that the Mes¬ siah has come, knows very well that his reign is not yet established on earth, and continues to invoke its advent. Christian lips still repeat the prayer offered up ages ago, on the mountain of Galilee : “ Adveniat rcg- ?ium tuum And how much there is in this petition taught us by the living Messiah, above all, when we add to the ‘ ‘ Fiat voluntas tua ’ ’ the ‘ ‘ Sicut in codo et hi terra F On earth as in heaven ! I remember hearing at Rome a discourse by an American prelate in which the meaning of this passage w r as well brought out; he showed that it contained the most daring aspirations and the noblest ambitions of the children of men. “ Sicut in coelo ! ” The most dazzling promises of the seers of Israel live again in this sentence from the Lord’s Prayer. If the Christians have ever appeared to forget it; if the Church, solicitous above all of the everlasting life and the final triumph of Righteousness, has, at any time, seemed indifferent to her reign on earth, such is certainly not the case in our age. The Church, as we 298 Israel Among the Nations . have recently shown , 1 deems it also her duty not to neglect this terrestrial life, but to heal its wounds, to as¬ suage its sufferings, to render purer and more salubrious its transitory abodes. In truth, she has never neglected such teachings; but the wind that to-day sweeps in upon her from without, impels her more than ever in this direction. She will not relinquish any part of her heaven-imposed task ; she urges her sons to engage in the work of social regeneration, and not to leave it to the children of darkness. The banner of the Cross is unfurled again as a banner of Progress, and the word Justice is given to the soldiers of Christ, the Mes¬ siah of the nations, as the motto of coming victo¬ ries. Thus, the old dream of Israel, the grand .Semitic vision embodied in the Christian idea, reappears in the Church as well as in the Synagogue ; and to bring about its consummation the chair of the Galilean apostle offers its help to our century. When will it be built, that new Jerusalem, that city of universal justice and love ? And will our children ever be privileged to unlock its gates ? True, Christ has said : 11 My Kingdom is not of this earth.” In this respect Christianity differs from Judaism, and the spiritual hopes of the new faith from the temporal ambitions of Israel. “ My Kingdom is not of this earth ’ ’ ; the Gospel is right; it puts us on our guard against utopian dreams ; it warns us not to presume too much on this life. The Kingdom of God cannot be completely realised on earth unless, indeed, the Son of the Most-High should come down from heaven to establish it among men. The Kingdom of God is an ideal towards which the ages must forever 1 See La Papaute , le Socialisme et la Democratic (Calmann L£vy, 1892). The Jewish Spirit. 299 aspire in vain. None the less does the Church urge Christians to do their share towards the establishment, among men, of the reign of peace and justice. This is the import of the social teachings of Reo XIII. The Church does not approve of those who, wearied by the length of the journey, turn their backs on strug¬ gling mankind, or remain seated at the gates of the cemeteries, to wait until the trumpet of the Archangel shall sound the awakening of the dead, and proclaim the reign of Righteousness on earth. “For the sons of Israel,” preached a rabbi, “ it is an imperative duty to promote the realisation of the Messianic hope.” 1 This is a sermon which the priests of Christ do not wish to have preached by the rabbis only ; it is not exclusively the duty of the chil¬ dren of Abraham, and we shall not leave its entire ful¬ filment to them. We, Christians, are also in duty bound to promote the reign of justice ; it is not right that we should rely solely on the dispersed rem¬ nants of Judah, the visionary adepts in Messianic hu- manitarianism, or on the false prophets who delude the masses with a chimerical transfiguration of earth into paradise. Adveniat regnum tuuvi is uttered daily by the lips of three or four hundred millions of Christians; but this petition of the Ford’s Prayer—how do they in¬ terpret it ? How many of them are in the same case as those carnal-minded Jews, whom we accuse of material¬ ising the promises of Scripture ! If we were told to evoke before our mind the ideal of the Christian multitudes, and the earthly Jerusalem that is the dream of the Jewish people, I do not be¬ lieve we should discover a great difference between the 1 M. A. Astruc’s Entretiens sur le Judaisme, son Dogme etsa Morale ; Lemerre, 1879. 3 °° Israel Among the Nations . Aryan and the Semitic ideal, between the ideal of the Christian and that of the Jew. Although our Occi¬ dental races may have returned to a vague hope in a millennium ; although we may, however unconsciously, have acquired from the hills of Zion our thirst for jus¬ tice and our inflexible faith in the victory of right, this ideal, handed down to us by the prophets, has been sadly perverted on its way. The seers of Moriah would find it difficult to recognise their visions or their Jerusalem in our material dreams and our prosaic utopias. The faith in a Messiah, wafted down from the mountains of Judah, and in a Kingdom of God, proclaimed by the waters of Galilee, has been touched by the breath of neo-paganism ; both Jews and Christians, confounding, almost equally, pro¬ gress with riches and blessedness with happiness, have chosen Mammon for their Messiah. Forgetful alike of the eternal Nisi Dominus of the Psalmist and of the cornerstone on which the true Jerusalem was to be built, they dream of a Kingdom of God without God. Jehovah is forsaken and his Christ is forgotten. Truly, while we flatter ourselves that we are drawing nearer to it, that New Jerusalem, that City of Justice and Peace towards which we stretch out our arms in vain, seems to be receding further and further from our grasp. CHAPTER XI. the; duration and the signs of Jewish PARTICULARISM. I. Reasons for the Persistence of Israel’s Particularism—The Spirit of Clanship and Religious Minorities—II. The Jew¬ ish Garb ; Is There a National Jewish Garb ?—Polish Jews, Oriental Jews—Was it Always the Jew who Wished to Distinguish Himself from the Gentiles by his Dress ?—The Yellow Wheel of the Middle Ages—III. Language and Dialects of the Jews—Why Does the Jew Frequently Speak a Different Language from that of his Christian Neigh¬ bours?—The “Jargon” or Jewish-German and Jewish- Spanish—IV. Jewish Names—Family Names and First Names—Askenazim and Sephardim—How, in this Respect also, They are Endeavouring to Nationalise Themselves. I. Whether he be a pure Semite or of mixed origin, there is nothing in the blood of the Jew, nothing in the genius of his race, to prevent him from adopting our civilisation. Why does he in so many countries con¬ tinue to form, as it were, a people in the midst of peo¬ ples, an international brotherhood scattered among the nations? Whence comes this persistent particularism, joined to a sort of egotistical cosmopolitanism, which enables him to pass from one country to another with¬ out ever completely blending with its inhabitants ? Why do so many scions of Abraham form a part of that scum of nations, which, in our capitals, floats upon the surface of decaying society ? 301 302 Israel Among the Nations . We know the reasons for this ; they are neither physiological nor ethnological, but purely historical. For a long time the Jew was not allowed to take root anywhere. What did the scions of Jacob resemble for centuries on European soil ? They were like weeds uprooted every season by the hands of a hostile gar¬ dener, or, in those cases where we were willing to suffer their presence, they were like potted plants, con¬ stantly replanted ; meagre shrubs, set out in boxes, and not permitted to take root in the soil. Almost every¬ where, it was taken for granted that the Jew was merely a temporary guest, admitted by tolerance ; in many countries he was obliged to purchase yearly, with ready cash, his right of habitation. In Rome, which might then be called the hot-bed of old customs, the Jews were obliged to repair annually, before Eent, to the Capitol, in order to implore solemnly the privilege of spending another year in their ancient Ghetto. And this request had to be repeated several times in deep humility. Repulsed at the foot of the Capitol, the sup¬ plications of the Ebrei were granted only on the summit of the sacred Clivus . 1 Carefully isolated as they were from their Christian neighbours, the Jews were forced to live among them¬ selves, and two or three generations of liberty have not sufficed to wean them entirely from this habit. Besides, in more than one country the law—or custom, which is more exclusive than law—still forces them to dwell apart. Each time that he attempted to leave his Ghetto and to shake off his natural particularism, the 1 This symbolical ceremony survived even after 1830 ; it was not abolished, I believe until the time of Pius IX. (see, for instance, Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Reisebriefe aus den Jahren , 1830-32 ; Leipzig, Mendelssohn, 1865, p. 122). Jewish Particularism . 303 Jew was led back into it, as to-day he is often forced back into it whether he will or no. It is ridiculous of us to be surprised that the stream of Jacob has not yet everywhere mixed its waters with the rush¬ ing torrents of modern life, in view of the fact that we have constructed so many dykes and dams to keep it within its own channel. Because no race and no religion has been treated like Israel, none has displayed so clannish a temper. The circumstance is, however, not as singular as people like to insist. Other religious groups have, for analo¬ gous reasons, presented a similar phenomenon. This has been the case not only in the Orient with the Copts, the Armenians, the Parsees, and the Druses, but with all the creeds and churches that constitute a sort of nationality. The same tendency reveals itself, in a lesser degree, among nearly all religious minorities, and especially among those that have suffered cruel persecutions. So it has been in France, with the Protestants, and elsewhere with the Catholics, although no difference of race existed between the Protestants and the Catholics. It has been said that there is a psychology of religious minorities. This is true, and the particularism of which we are speaking is one of its most salient traits, which only generations of liberty can eradicate. History bears ample testimony to this. Religious differences and mutual intolerance are forces strong enough to separate men of the same blood into hostile and almost foreign tribes. And the old lines of di¬ vision are often visible in social customs, long after the hatreds which produced them have passed away. Consider, by way of example, the position of the French Protestants. Even at the present time, when 304 Israel Among the Nations . the dividing walls of governmental ordinances, and the barriers of prejudice between them and us have been levelled, and in every school their children sit side by side with ours, it seems at times to us, Catholics, as if the French Protestants still retained a certain indefina¬ ble Puritan stiffness foreign to the French nature. There appears to be in their manners, their speech, and their turn of mind something strange, something Swiss, something Genevese, I might say, for want of a better word. I have known Parisian free-thinkers who, having accidentally fallen in with Protestant fellow-countrymen, felt themselves entirely out of place, having no ear for what has been humorously called the “patois of Canaan.” And yet, although many of them have come to us, or come back to us, from beyond the Rhine or the Jura, our Protestants are often as thoroughly French in blood as our old Catholic families, and woe to him who would dare to question their patriotism. Similar illustrations might be drawn from the Irish Presbyterians and the Catho¬ lics of the Netherlands, the Hungarian Calvinists, the Piedmontese natives of Vaud, and certain raskolniks of Russia. When we consider that sectarian differences have been able to create, among Christians of the same race and country, outward differences in tone, manners, and bearing, how can it be expected that the Jew, the Semite of alien origin, rigidly kept aloof from the Christians, should not retain the mark of an isolation which has continued for centuries? What surprises me is not that the Israelites form, as it were, blotches of foreign population on the surface of so many Chris¬ tian nations, but that, on the contrary, in so many coun¬ tries the Jew has assimilated himself to us so quickly. Jewish Particularism. 305 Even in those regions where they have least mixed with Christians, the Jews have, in their customs, felt the influence of their Gentile neighbours more deeply than is commonly believed. Here we must beware of superficial observation. If the Jew and the Christian, the Semite and the Aryan, be compared to two chemi¬ cal substances brought into contact, the one which eats into the other more rapidly and more thoroughly is not the Semite, but the Aryan. Nowhere, even in those countries where they have lived longest and in largest numbers, have the Jews denationalised any Christian people ; witness Poland, Eittle Russia, and Hungary. On the contrary, in almost every land they have been strongly influenced by the Gentiles, and have so thoroughly adopted the language, usages, and dress of their Christian neigh¬ bours, that, after centuries of exile, they often still retain the impress of the countries inhabited by their forefathers. This is as true of the Israelites of the North as of those of the South, of the German Jews as of the Spanish. What is, in fact, the origin of the dis¬ tinction between the Askenazim and the Sephardim, of that historic schism which has divided Israel into two dissimilar portions ? Has it anything to do with the tribes of Jacob? By no means. It is purely a national and geographical distinction, Aryan rather than Semitic; and it is due solely to the impress which European national life has placed on the descendants of Abraham. To such a degree had German Jews and Spanish Jews, Askenazim and Sephardim, become children of the countries into which the dispersal of their race had thrown them ; so thoroughly, despite all obstacles, had they naturalised themselves among the sons of Japhet, 20 T Israel Among ike Nations, 306 that when, after the lapse of a thousand years, brought , face to face with each other in the halting-places of their new exodus, these long-separated brethren found it difficult to recognise each other. In Jerusalem, on the banks of the Danube, in France, in Holland, in England, in America, they formed for many years dis¬ tinct and almost hostile communities, each having its own language, synagogues, ritual, and usages. Aske- nazim and Sephardim had become strangers and looked upon each other as different nations. Directly after the Revolution, the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux entered a petition that they should not be confounded with the German Jews of Alsace, or even with the French Jews of Avignon. Eess than a hundred years ago, intermarriages between the Askenazim and the Sephardim were still of rare occurrence. It was only the assaults of their common foes that recalled to these fragments of Israel the consciousness of their solidarity. After this, how can we assert that the Jew remains impervious to his national environment ? His whole history" proves the contrary". There is, perhaps, no Israelitish community", however isolated it may" seem, that has not borrowed a great deal from its Christian or Moslem neighbours. We shall prove this by" the very- things that are ordinarily- adduced as the signs, I might say- the labels, of Israel’s particularism,—the gar¬ ments that she wears, the languages that she speaks. Take the Jewish communities in the East of Europe, apparently the most exclusive ; what is called the Jew¬ ish garb, or the Jewish speech, was not, as a rule, origi¬ nally" Jewish at all. Nearly" all the outward signs that distinguish the Israelite were purposely foisted on him by us. Jewish Particularism. 307 Whether we consider him in modern times, or during the Middle Ages, we shall find that the very Jew who, in a hostile country, shuts himself up in his exclusive¬ ness and withdraws behind his traditions, tends gradu¬ ally to assimilate himself to the Christians wherever he is accorded the right to do so. It is the story of the man with the cloak ; the icy North wind of persecu¬ tion compels him to remain enveloped in his particu¬ larism ; the genial rays of liberty persuade him to throw it off. II. The national particularism of the Jews has survived mainly in the Orient and in eastern Europe. Needless to give the reasons for this ; they are obvious. In the Orient the tribal spirit is not peculiar to the Jew ; it is found more or less in all those religious communities of which each forms a nation, with separate laws and modes of dress. In this respect the Jews of eastern Europe have remained half Oriental. To this very day, their habit of forming a separate body reveals itself in various ways ; often it shows itself in their mode of dress. In many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa ; in Poland, Eittle-Russia, Roumania, Asia-Minor, Palestine, and Tunis, the Jews wear a special garb, as if to distinguish themselves from the other inhabitants, whether Christian or Moslem. Here we have again, what might almost be called an Oriental custom. In the Orient, one’s mode of dress is a profession of one’s faith, or is like a national flag which every one hoists in broad daylight; to lay aside the garb of one’s fathers amounts almost to apostasy. 3°8 Israel Among the Nations. A history of the costumes of the Jews would make an interesting book, and the task of compiling it ought to be tempting to lovers of the picturesque ; some rich Israelite could assuredly be found willing to incur the cost of its publication. Their mode of dress has varied strangely according to country and time. They can hardly be said to have a national costume. They have only local costumes ; and, in the Orient, I have seen Jews and Jewesses from different places wearing, in the same city, garments of dissimilar style. Almost every¬ where the fashion of their dress has been repeatedly changed; sometimes it has been determined by governmental decree. In most cases, the costume worn by the Jews of to-day is nothing but the ancient costume of the country in which they are living or of that from which they have come. The Jew preserved his mode of dress while all those around him were giv¬ ing up theirs ; faithfnl to habit, he did not follow the change of fashion. Here again was displayed the con¬ servative spirit of the great Jewish communities. It is beyond question that the Jews did not always have a peculiar costume. This is proved by the decrees of councils and the edicts of princes, which commanded them to wear distinctive signs. It was made a crimi¬ nal offence on their part to dress like the Christians. The severity with which the offence was punished shows how apt the Jews were to commit it. We find the same state of things among the Moslems. In Da¬ mascus, for instance, the Jews formerly wore turbans. They still wear them in many parts of Islam ; and if theirs are different in colour from those of the faithful, it is because the latter insisted upon the distinction. Every one knows the long coat, the talar of the Polish Jew ; we regard it as the classical costume of the Jew. We are inclined to believe that he always wore Jewish Particularism, 309 it in the past; but in this we are mistaken. In old Poland the well-to-do Jews dressed in the Polish cos¬ tume ; on their heads they wore the spodek , a cap lined with the skin of the fox or the marten, such as we still see on the Sabbath in Galicia ; about their bodies they wore the caftan or rather the Polish joupan with open sleeves, held in at the waist by a wide sash, such as the Jews of that country have ever delighted in tying about their loins. Their dislike to innovation caused the Jews to pre¬ serve this rich costume after it had been abandoned by the lords, the Polish pa?is ; and thereafter it was looked upon as a Jewish costume. It was prohibited by the Russian government. The Israelites of Poland and Eittle-Russia were obliged to substitute for the fur cap the silk or velvet skull-cap, which had formed the head- gear of the poorer city population ; in many localities this cap became, in its turn, the Jewish head-dress. In other cases the Israelites have adopted the high hat; and the stove-pipe (or cylmder , as the Germans call it) has become in some countries their national covering. Thus, in Tiberias I have seen poor German Jews airing their stove-pipes on the lonely shores of the sea of Galilee. The Polish joupan was replaced by a long coat, more or less like the caftan of the Russian merchants. The Emperor Nicholas soon bethought himself that the tails of this coat were too long; im¬ perial authority took a stand against the talar , so greatly fancied by the Jews ; ordinances were issued to regulate its dimensions. Those who disregarded the rule were arrested in the streets, and the scissors of the police summarily docked the coat-tails that exceeded the authorised length . 1 1 See, among others, Orchanski’s Rousskoe Zakonodatelstvo o Evreiakh, p. 29. Sio Israel Among the Nations . Unhappy sons of Judah ! Not only was their talar exposed to such annoyances from the administration, but also their long beard and hair, especially the ringlets or pajes, which they were in the habit of wear¬ ing down their cheeks. It is written in Eeviticus, (xix., 27) : “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither slialt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” Against those corkscrew curls the Emperor Nicholas declared war, permitting only the rabbis to wear them, and making them all the dearer to the masses by this tacit acknowledgment of their religious character. A conflict broke out over the cheeks of the Jewish populace, similar to that which raged a hundred years earlier over the chins of the raskolniks under Peter the Great. 1 As in the case of the old believers in the time of the reformatory czar, all the Jews apprehended by the police were shaved or shorn by act of government. ‘ ‘ Which of the two powers, Austria or Russia, do j^our co-religionists prefer?” I asked, about fifteen years ago, a Jew of Cracow who was escorting me to the mines of Wieliczka. A stranger in Poland can¬ not get along without a Jew, if only to protect himself from the importunities of other Jews. My guide, like the prudent man he was, had to be coaxed for an answer ; then, as I insisted, he replied with a malicious smile : “ The majority prefer Austria.”—“ But why ? ” “ Because Austria permits them to wear their curls.” Whether or no this was intended for a joke, it was not so bad an answer. The right to wear curls has its worth, and it is not only in regard to their head-dress that the Jews are freer under the Austrian rule than under that of Russia. 1 See V Empire des Tsars et les Russes, vol. iii. ; La Religion , book iii., ch. ii. Jewish Particularism. 311 In the Jewish communities of the East, the costume of the women, like that of the men, varies according to the country in which they live. Perhaps the most pleasing one is that of the Jewesses of Smyrna, with its baggy trousers and open-necked vests. The most elaborately grotesque is that of the fat Jewesses of Tunis, with its clinging drawers interwoven with gold or silver. In Poland the Jewesses have, for the most part, ceased to wear the ancient coronet of their grand¬ mothers. Those Eastern Jewesses are to be pitied ; their husbands have still, in some cases, the bad taste to make them shave their foreheads. Once married, a woman should no longer desire to please. The poor victims endeavour to conceal their bare fronts by a fall of ding}^ lace or sleek wigs, or glossy, satin head-bands. Many of them, when they marry, make it a condition that they shall not be shaved. In rich families this custom has gone out of use. The Jewesses have no scruples in following our fashions ; they are not afraid to wear their own hair, nor to curl it. The only way in which they try to distinguish themselves from the Christian women is in appearing more elegant. But was it really the Jew who wished to separate himself from us by means of his garb ? We know that, in most cases, it was just the contrary. In many countries, the Jew who dared to dress like the Christian or the Moslem, laid himself open to rough treatment. For whole centuries both Christians and Moslems pro¬ hibited it. In order better to keep him aloof, we marked him with distinctive signs, which made it impossible to confound him with us. It would seem as though the curve of his nose and his Semitic profile were not sufficient to betray his origin ; human ingenuity and the wit of jurists came to nature’s aid. Although we 3 12 Israel Among the Nations . may have forgotten it, the Jew still remembers the yellow wheel, the infamous stigma so long inflicted on his fathers. The wheel (rota) imposed on the sons of Jacob by the Council of Eaton in 1215, was a piece of cloth, sometimes square, but generally round, yellow or red, or half yellow and half red, which every Jew was obliged to wear in a conspicuous manner on the shoulder, breast, or head. The Jews who failed to dis¬ play it were subject to fines and even more severe penalties. In certain cases, especially when travelling, they could be temporality excused from wearing this wheel. 1 In some countries, for instance in Ger¬ many, the wheel was often replaced by the red or green cap, or by a bonnet or hood of a special pattern. Not even the women were spared this humiliation. In certain towns of Italy they were compelled to wear a square of yellow cloth on top of their head-dress. Elsewhere they were permitted to replace the wheel by another less disgraceful sign; in Frankfort, by blue bands on their veils. Whether religious or civil, all these laws, all these 1 According to M. Ulysse Robert’s Etude Historique et Archeo- logique sur la Roue des Juifs , the custom of the wheel seems to have existed in the diocese of Paris as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Fourth Council of Latran (1215), extended the right to all Christian nations. Saint Louis imposed this custom on the Jews of France, by a decree pro¬ mulgated in 1269. Philip the Bold, finding this sign insuffi¬ cient, compelled the Jews, in 1271, to add to the wheel a horn worn upon the cap. We have several pictures of the time representing the Jew with the wheel. A bull issued by Pope Paul IV. made this custom again obligatory on the Jews of Rome as late as the middle of the fourteenth century. (Rodo- canachi, Le Ghetto de Rome , pp. 163, 164.) yewish Particularism 3 J 3 decrees of councils or princes with respect to the dress of the Jews and Jewesses, had but a single aim: to iso¬ late them from the Christians. In inventing the wheel and all the other distinctive signs, the Christian au¬ thorities only imitated the Moslems. So striking is, in this matter, the resemblance between our canon law and the Moslem laws, that people have asked whether the Church had not appropriated the prescriptions of Islam. 1 This seems doubtful to us ; the same measures may have suggested themselves simultaneously to Christians and Moslems, inspired by the same spirit of distrust against the Jews and Judaism. In Damascus and Bagdad, as well as in Rome and Paris, this stigma with which Christians and Moslems branded the fore¬ head or the shoulder of the Jew, was the logical result of the system of sequestration which led to the Ghetto and the Mellah. 2 III. As with the garb of the Jews, so with their language. A large number still speak, among themselves, a tongue that differs from that of the country which they inhabit. This fact is generally due to the same causes : to their forced migrations and their long sequestration. Strictly speaking, there is no more a Jewish language than there is a Jewish garb : there are only archaic dialects, far-off reminiscences of older abodes, which the Jews have carried with them in their sorrowful exoduses. 1 As, for instance, Isidore Loeb in the Nouveau Dictionnaire de Geographie Universelle , article Juifs , p. 999, 3d column: “ Even the wheel of the Council of Latran appears to be bor¬ rowed from the Moslems.” * Name of the Ghetto in Morocco. 3H Israel A mong the Nations . This is the case especially with the German jargon, the Judendeutsch or Jiidisch , of the Askenazim, the Jews of Poland. Having come from Germany to¬ wards the end of the Middle Ages, they continued to speak German in the midst of Slavs, Hungarians, and Roumanians. This jargon has been carried into America by the Jewish emigrants from Russia ; there are several newspapers published at present in New York in this German dialect. It is safe to predict that it will not endure there for centuries; it is the result of confinement, and could have been perpetuated only under the shelter of special legislation. 1 So, too, with the Spanish of the Sephardim, or southern Jews. Banished from the Peninsula, manj^ of them have preserved in the land of their exile the sonorous language of their beautiful country, so long regarded by them as a second Palestine. Thanks to 1 The Jewish “ patois ” or jargon, brought from Poland by the Jews who were expelled from Germany in the fourteenth century, seems to have been, originally, the dialect of Northern Saxony. Despite its corruption, it has retained an ancient character and has acquired, on the lips of the exiled Jews, a new accent. Since the young Jews were set to studying Hebrew at an early age, the dead language crept little by little into the living tongue, the sacred idiom into the vernacular. Thus it happens that, in the jargon, abstract, religious, and philosophical ideas are expressed in Hebrew or Aramaic terms. One of the reasons why the jargon has continued to be spoken, and even written, is that the old rabbis of the eighteenth century and the ultra-orthodox Jews had a dislike to the literature of the Gen¬ tiles ; they feared that in reading German books the young Jews might lose their Jewish faith. Besides a considerable number of newspapers and a great many translations, we could cite stories, novels, even poems, written in this hybrid language. (See, for instance, Max Griinbaum’s Judischdeutsche Chresto- mathie , Leipzig, 1883.) Jewish Particularism . 3 ! 5 them, the Castilian tongue of the fifteenth century re¬ sounds, to this day, throughout almost the entire basin of the Mediterranean, from Tangiers to Smyrna and Salonica, and even on the shores of the North Sea, from Amsterdam to Hamburg. Far from proving that the Jew has remained a stranger everywhere, these dia¬ lects of foreign origin show that, in the Middle Ages, the Jews became so thoroughly naturalised among the Christian nations on the banks of the Tagus as well as the Rhine, that after centuries of exile the)" still speak the language of those nations. This lan¬ guage of the old country, transmitted carefully to their children, was for them like a living relic of their lost fatherland. The Jew had grown attached to it and had made it his own. This is especially true of the Sephardim, who were more refined and cultured than their brothers from the North. Spain was to them a sort of promised land. They cherished its lan¬ guage, they preserved religiously in their exile the virile tongue of their “ cruel fatherland,” as it was termed by a son of the marranos , Don Miguel de Barrios. In Holland, where they had found shelter, the co¬ religionists of Spinoza took pleasure, as late as the end of the seventeenth century, in cultivating their old Castilian tongue, delighting to use it in verse or prose¬ writing. 1 This did not prevent the Sephardim from becoming, in time, Dutchmen, Germans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen. Do we not find, among refugees of different blood and faith, equally touching examples 1 See (Revue des Etudes Juives , April-Jiine, 1880) La Re¬ lation de los poetas y Escritores de la Nation Judayca ; Am¬ sterdam, par Daniel Levi de Barrios. ( Cf. M. Kayserling’s Sephardim ; Romanische Poesie?i der Juden in Spanien.) 3 l6 Israel Among the Nations. of devotion to the mother-tongue ? Have not our French Huguenots, expelled by Louis XIV., preserved for generations the love of their mother-tongue ? This, alas, has not prevented them from becoming Prussians, Swiss, Englishmen, Dutchmen,—nay, even Boers. These facts suggest a sad reflection—that in the Middle Ages the Jews had become more thoroughly assimilated with us and were far less a foreign element among us, than was the case two or three centuries later, after they had been imprisoned in the Italian Ghetto or the Carriere of Provence. In that earlier period Jews and Christians led almost the same kind of life, followed the same occupations, 1 spoke the same language, wore the same style of dress, ob¬ served even, except in religion, the same customs. Had the process not been violently interrupted by vexatious ordinances or by decrees of expulsion, the assimilation of the Jews, instead of beginning with the French Revolution, might have been completed as early as the Renaissance. This is true not only of the Spanish and German Jews, but also of the Jews of France and of Italy. They were Frenchmen and Italians ; they spoke French and Italian. 3 France also — northern and southern France alike,—had become a fatherland to the Jews. The French Jews of that period seem even to have ac¬ quired some of the peculiar qualities of the French mind. The commentaries of the famous Raschi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) and those of the glossators or tos - safists of the school of Champagne, are thought to have exhibited the French characteristics of exactness, 1 This can be verified in the travels of Benjamin de Tudele. 2 To this day the majority of the Jews of Corfu speak Italian, for it was from Italy that they wandered into ancient Corcyra. Jewish Particularism . 3 1 7 clearness, common sense, and logic. At all events, it is certain that the Jew of the flourishing communities of Champagne, Eanguedoc, and Provence was thor¬ oughly French ; his speech was not a Hebrew dialect, it was the French of France, the langue d’oc or the langue d' oil. The most ancient French elegy, and in its sim¬ plicity perhaps the most beautiful, was composed in a Ghetto, by the flare of a stake. It is the lamenta¬ tion of Rabbi Jacob over the thirteen martyrs who were burned in Troyes, in 1288. I know of none more touching. 1 The Jews who emigrated or were expelled from France, carried our language with them beyond the Channel and the Vosges. At a certain period, French seems to have been the language of the English Jews and of the Jews on the banks of the Rhine. The glosses on the Talmud, written by the German Jews of the Middle Ages, swarm with French words in Hebrew characters. In fact, many German Jews have come from old French Jewries ; thus, in crossing back from Germany into France, the Jews from beyond the Rhine can imagine, as did the descendants of the Huguenots, that they are returning to the land of their forefathers. An Israelite has not hesitated to say that, as regards the Jews: “ France is not a fatherland improvised in the glow of a generous hour; it is a fatherland regained.” 2 1 Written in Hebrew characters, this French elegy has been discovered, translated, and published by the lamented Arsene Darmesteter. (See his Reliques Scientifiques, Elegie du Vati¬ can sur l’Autodafe de Troyes, 1288): “ . . . . Deux freres y furent brules, un petit et un grand ; Le petit fut ebahi du feu qui ainsi prend, Et il dit : ‘ Haro ! je brule tout! Et le grand lui apprend Et lui dit: ‘ A paradis seras, j’en suis garant! . . . . ’ ” 2 M. James Darmesteter’s Coup d' CEil sur VHistoire du Peuple Juif. Some persons profess to have found the traces of this 318 Israel A mong the Nations. In addition to their vernacular—whether French, Spanish, German, or Italian,—the Jews, especially the rabbis, have always maintained the study of the language of the Thora. The ancient idiom of Palestine was to them what Hatin was to the Christians; as in the case of Fa tin, all educated people spoke and wrote it. Of these two dead languages, the one which has preserved most vitality is the Hebrew, although as a local language in common use it was dead before Hatin was fully developed,—for in Palestine the Hebrew had been replaced by the Aramaic or Chaldaic, and after the return from captivity it existed only as an artificial language employed by men of learning. For the Israelites, both ancient and modern, Hebrew was not only the idiom of their religion, their learned language, but also the sign and, so to say, the bond of their unity. 1 In this sense it was for them at once a national and an international language. The Jewish philosophers and poets of the Middle Ages—such as Jehuda Halevy, to whom Heine owed a moment of inspiration,—gave new life to it. The more isolated the Jews became, the greater became the ascendancy of French origin in one of the names most frequent amongst the Jews, Dreyfuss. This name is said to be simply a corruption of Trevoud, the ancient capital of the country of Dombes, which, during the Middle Ages, had a large Jewish settlement. 1 It were, however, a mistake to believe that all the learned Jews of the Middle Ages wrote in Hebrew, as our Christian scholars write in Latin. The Jews have, at times, used other languages, especially Arabian. The majority of the works of Mairnonides, the eagle of the Synagogue,—for instance, the More Nebouchim (Guides to the Brring)—are in Arabian. Nor must it be forgotten that in ancient times Greek was the cus¬ tomary language of the Alexandrine Jews, such as Philo and Josephus. Jewish Particularism. 3 l 9 the Hebrew language among them. It was, until the nineteenth century, the only literary language of the German and Polish Israelites, the Askenazim, whose clumsy jargon was ill-adapted to writing. Kven to this day, they have newspapers in modern Hebrew, such as the Magid and the Melitz. The language of Isaiah lives again in prose and verse. There are renowned writers in Hebrew ; such as the Russian, Juda Gordon, and also P. Smolensky, the editor of Hammelitz ; and Menahem Mendel Dalitzky, who went to America that he might be free to wield his pen. Among the eastern Jews, not all that is written in Hebrew letters is Hebrew. One day in Warsaw, in front of a Jewish shop, I endeavoured to make out some words in rectangular characters on a long signboard ; I discovered that, instead of being Hebrew, they were only German jargon, written in Hebrew letters. The Sephardim of Smyrna do the same with their Judo- Spanish. This is an old Jewish custom. The Jews appear to have applied their old Oriental alphabet to all the languages spoken by them. F. frenormant discovered in the catacombs of Venosa, in Apulia, Greek epitaphs disguised in Hebrew letters. 1 What the Russo-Polish Jews are doing to-day with their jargon, the Jews of the Middle Ages have often done with French, Spanish, and Italian. This is the case, for example, with the elegy on the auto-da-fe of Troyes. This style of writing (many Jews knew no other) was one of their resources in times of persecution. It was like a secret alphabet, a pre-arranged cipher, to which Israel alone held the key; how could her Christian masters possibly have recognised their own language 1 Revue des Deux Mondes , March 15, 1883 ; Apulia and Lucania. 320 Israel A mong the Nations, under this foreign disguise ? Even in our day, a num¬ ber of eastern Jews make use of Hebrew letters in their correspondence and their ledgers. I am not certain that the Russian government, has not, on some occa¬ sions, prohibited this practice. Nevertheless, the ancient language is steadily losing ground ; it is in as great danger of dying out as is Latin, and for similar reasons. In proportion as our schools are opened to them, the Jews are obliged to give less place to Hebrew in their education. Some are even desirous of banishing it from the Synagogue, despite the risk of lessening the solemnity of their wor¬ ship. Even now many Jews need prayer-books in the vernacular in order to follow the divine service ; many of them can no longer read the venerable Hebrew characters, even those with the vowel-points. Contrary to their fathers, they have prayer-books in which the liturgical chants are transcribed in Gothic or Latin let¬ ters. In the majority of western synagogues the local language—French, English, German, Italian—claims its place beside the language of the Thor a, even in the most solemn portions of the service. The time has long since gone by when the rabbis were shocked to know that Moses Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German. To-day, almost everywhere, the Jewish liturgy contains translations from the Psalms or the Prophets ; and in certain countries, in England for instance, they have endeavoured in their version of the Holy Book to approach the version used in the Christian churches. A few years ago I became acquainted with a young Israelite from Berditchef, who, aspiring to become a rabbi, had come to Paris with the intention of preach¬ ing in Hebrew in the synagogues of that city ; he was Jewish Particularism. 3 2 1 obliged to abandon his plan ; he would not have been understood. He had to keep his Hebrew lectures for his Schule in little Russia ; there, people understood him ; but the police, suspicious of his eloquence in a dead language, forbade his speaking. 1 As for books and newspapers, the imperial censorship has specialists in Hebrew, as well as in other languages of the empire. Modern Hebrew writers and poets have had the honour of seeing their works interdicted. I, myself, possess a collection of quite recent Hebrew poetry that had been seized in Lithuania. Nor is the precaution useless. For it is a fact that in Russia, Poland, and Rouma- nia, wherever the Jews live in compact groups isolated by law and custom, wherever their education has remained entirely Talmudic, and the little Jews have been confronted with sacred texts as soon as they have attained the age of six or seven, the Hebrew language has continued to be the principal, if not the only, vehicle of thought. The eastern Jew, reared under the system of separat¬ ism, seems to be of a different race from his western brethren; he might be compared to a fossile species, artificially kept alive in a special atmosphere. In those eastern Jewries, disrupted to-day by emigration, persistent confinement tends to consolidate the Jews into a distinct nation. Under such a system, where everything seems to prevent their assimilation, neo- 1 “Towards evening I went to the Synagogue,” he wrote to me in 1889 ; “it was the feast of Ckanuka. I had been engaged to deliver a speech in honour of the Maccabees, whose memory we celebrated on that day. The Israelites thronged to the ceremony, when suddenly, it was forbidden by the prefect of police. It was in vain that we went to him—he could not be induced to yield.” 21 3 22 Israel Among the Nations . Hebrew may long remain, for those Jews who are dis¬ gusted with the jargon, the national as well as the sacred tongue. And their sons will grow all the more attached to it, the more they are treated like strangers in their native country. Here again, the particularism of Israel will have been prolonged by the exclusiveness of the nations. IV. Even in those eastern Jewries there are occasional signs of a desire on the part of the Jews to assimilate themselves to modern peoples. In all other countries this desire seems general. This is easily proved by their family names and first names. To the majority of Israelites it is a matter of great regret that they are distinguished by their names from other inhabitants of the same country. These names, often of strange sound, are like placards advertising the Jew from afar, almost as clearly as did the ancient wheel or the yellow cap. Some are of Hebrew origin, like Halphen, Hayem, Cohen or Kahen (priest), an old title still borne by so many descendants of Aaron. Many are taken from the Old Testament: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, first names which have become family names. But these represent, after all, only the minority. Taken as a whole, the Sephardim have preserved the Spanish names, and the majority of the Askenazim, the German, or Polish names which they brought with them into the lands where they settled. Thus, the Jews exiled from the Peninsula can have themselves announced in our drawing-rooms under the great names of Castile or Portugal : Mendoza, de Castro, Nunez, Alvarez, d’Almeida, de L,emos, de Silva, de Jewish Particularism. 323 Souza, old names given to the Nuevos Cristianos , at the time of their conversion, by the noble lords who acted as their godfathers . 1 No sooner had they emigrated to Holland or Hamburg, than the Portuguese or Spanish marranos flung aside the Christian mask which the Holy Office had forced them to wear ; but they retained the names of Catholic Spain. On some of the old palaces erected in Amsterdam by their descendants, may still be seen the Christian coat-of-arms of those aristocratic Sephardim who, though exiled, boasted an alliance with the proudest families of Hispania. The Askenazim, by far more numerous, have, as a rule, been less fortunate. The majority of them have had to bear German names that are not very flattering. When Poland was divided, both Prussia and Austria, to whose share fell Poland proper, forced their new subjects to adopt German family names . 2 Vienna and Berlin wished to make use of the Jews to Germanise Poland. Families with Slav or Hebrew patronymics, some of whom I have met, were obliged to exchange them for names of German form, which they retained, even after Warsaw had been wrested from Prussia, and 1 Saint-Simon, a learned man in such matters, points out as improper this “ ancient custom of giving to the Moors and the Jews who become converted, and who have great lords as god¬ fathers, not only the Christian names of the latter, but also their family names and arms, which thus pass for ever into those low families, confounding them after a while with the real ones, and even substituting them for the latter when these have become extinct.” ( Mtmoires , published by M. de Boislille, vol. ix., p. 168.) 2 Likewise, in France, under Napoleon, in 1808, all Jews were obliged to have family names. More recently, the mistake has been made of not taking care that the Algerian Jews, prema¬ turely naturalised in 1871, should have adopted French names. 324 Israel Among the Nations . after the Poland of the Vistula had passed into the hands of the Czar. Prussian and Austrian function¬ aries offered to the Jews three or four classes of names, appraised according to their degree of elegance; the names of animals were given gratuitously ; the names of trees or flowers had to be paid for . 1 At all events, the majority of these Jewish names, for all that they are German, are no less typical than if they were Hebrew, since in Germany they are borne only by families of Israelitish extraction. They cling to these families like an indelible stamp w’hich the waters of baptism cannot wash aw r ay. The names of cities and townships are also very commonly borne by Jews, of whatever country or origin . 2 It is but natural that the Israelites should try to get rid of these Hebrew or German names ; for they are like Jewish labels pasted on their persons. In fact, many have discarded them, especially in Germany, re¬ placing them with less characteristic appellations. But for this, more than one celebrated Jew would perhaps have found it difficult to become famous. Thus, Boerne was not originally called Boerne; I/udwig Boerne’s name was Toeb Baruch ; and if Karl Marx had retained the name of his fathers he would have called himself Mordechai . 8 I regret this Aryan dis- 1 The names of animals may also have come from Biblical tradition, and may allude to the tribes of Israel and to the benediction given by Jacob to his sons. (Genesis, xlix.) Lion, Lyon, in German Loewe , Loeb , recalls the tribe of Judah ; Cerf, Hirsch , diminutive, Herschell , that of Naphtali; Loup, Wolf, that of Benjamin. 2 It should be observed, in passing, that certain families have taken their names from the signs on their shops or their busi¬ ness houses ; thus Rothschild, the red scutcheon. 3 The name of Marx had already been taken by Karl’s father. Jewish Particularism . 325 guise on the part of the founder of the International; I should have liked to see whether Mordechai could so easily have become the prophet of collectivism. Formerly the Jews changed their names only with their faith. Whence comes this new tendency ? And what is it but an attempt — pardon the word — to desemitise themselves ? This desire of theirs to merge themselves in the mass of the inhabitants, natural as it is, does not please everybody. Their enemies wish to be able to identify the Semites by a glance at their visiting cards, for the purpose of exposing them to public contempt. A year or two ago, a certain number of Prussian Jews proffered, in Berlin, a request to be authorised to change their names. This petition was not granted. On the other hand, there are countries where the authorities seem delighted to nationalise them so cheaply. This is the case in Hungary. Unlike the other nationalities of the kingdom of St. Stephen—the Slavs, Germans, and Roumanians,—the Hungarian Jews are quite ready to magyarise themselves, proving by this very fact that they no longer claim to be a distinct nation. Although, in many cases, they speak the Jewish-German jargon, they have taken sides with the Hungarians against the Germans, and as a public profession of their patriotism as Magyars, they have, for the most part, magyarised their family names. This is easy for them ; they have only, as a rule, to affix the letters yi. Herr Simon becomes M. Simonyi . 1 If to become a Russian it were necessary only to do what so many Armenians 1 Hence, naturally, frequent ridicule on the part of the Anti- semites, as when a Hungarian Jew, looking at the statue of the Magyar patriot Szechenyi, asks himself. “What was his former name ? n 326 Israel Among the Nations . and even Tartars have done, viz. : to affix to one’s name the syllable of , how many Salomonofs and Avraamofs would appear in the Russian city directories ! But the old custom which imposed a new name on the converted Jew, as though, in becoming a Christian he became a new man, has been discarded, and baptised Jews are not always permitted to russianise their names . 1 Ret us take Roumania, where, despite the treaty of Berlin, the Jews find it so difficult to acquire the rights of citizenship. There also, those who succeed in getting themselves naturalised are frequently careful to give a Roumanian turn to their names. In such cases Herr Simon becomes Domnu Simionescu. Some of them, to rid themselves of their foreign appearance, go so far as to latinise their German names, and we are astonished to recognise M. Wolf in M. Lupascu. In France even, Loewe has more than once been changed into Lion or Lyon, and Hirsch into Cerf; and I wish that this were done more often. We must not imagine that all this is mere child’s play ; to estimate it cor¬ rectly, we should ask ourselves whether the Slavs or the Roumanians of Austro-Hungarjr show any disposition to germanise or magyarise their names in order to appear German or Hungarian. A glance at the first names of Israelites in the vari¬ ous European countries, will be apt to suggest similar reflections. There, also, is manifested a tendency on the 1 In 1887, for instance ( Novoe Vremia , 2d August), the Ortho¬ dox consistory of Astrakhan, forbade the converted Israelites to Russianise their family names. In Russia, however, the baptised Jew is regarded as having become so completely an¬ other man that he is free to abandon his wife and children and to rear another family, with a new wife. Jewish Particularism . 327 part of the Jews to emerge from their old isolation. Tjie biographical dictionaries alone would suffice to reveal certain traits which, for all their seeming dissimilarity, are none the less characteristic. Formerly all the Jews chose their first names from the Old Testament; to¬ day, in the West, most of them prefer the names in vogue with us. In some countries they had, until recently, two first-names : a good old Bible name for the Synagogue and the family, and a modern, and so to say, profane name for wordly and business purposes. In those cases in which they still take names of Hebrew origin, they adopt, for the most part, the popular Christian form, calling themselves Jacques or James, instead of Jacob. If the Hebrew name does not happen to have a derivative, some Jews translate it into a mod¬ ern Christian name, with the same meaning, if not the same root. There is good authority for this practice : long ago Baruch Spinoza changed his Baruch into Benedict or Benoit, which has the same meaning. Thus, a German Israelite can translate Solomon into Friedrich. But, in most cases, the modern Jews use a different expedient ; they replace their Hebrew first names by names of Eatin, Greek, or Germanic derivation having the same initial or the same sound. Isaiah is trans¬ formed into Isidor, Rachel has Rose for its equivalent, and Adele or Adelaide is substituted for Abigail. Do you know why Maurice is a favourite name with the Jews? Because it stands for Moses. A similar im¬ pulse was felt by the Hellenic Jews of Asia and Egypt, who changed Joshua into Jason. A harmless disguise, at which it would be unreasonable to take offence; the Jew has recourse to it simply in order that he may draw nearer to us. 328 Israel Among the Nations. What is all this but an indication and a symbol of the spirit that prevails in modern Israel? The Jew, at least the western Jew, is tired of keeping apart from us ; he has given up the half compulsory and half vol¬ untary particularism so long displayed by his fore¬ fathers. Whether we examine dress, or language, or names, or anything that distinguishes men out¬ wardly, we always reach the same conclusion : that the modern Jews have set their heart on becoming like us. To accomplish this, they take as much pains as their most fanatical ancestors could possibly ever have taken to isolate themselves from us. On their side all barriers have been levelled. Shall we blame them for preserving the Jewish calendar for their religious ceremonies, and for celebrating in their synagogues the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, at about the time of the autumnal equinox ? But even with us, Catholic Christians, the Church calendar does not coincide with the civil calendar, and yet no one thinks that our social relations are any the worse for it. The rabbis have, indeed, preserved the ancient Talmudic era ; but what matters it to us that the Books of the Synagogue continue to compute time from the creation of the world ? This does not prevent the Jews from dating their letters and their bills as we do, ac¬ cording to the ordinary, that is to say, the Christian, reckoning. I know a good many among them who would be at a loss to tell us in which year of the crea¬ tion we now are; whether the month Sivan precedes or follows Tammouz , and whether the year 5656 begins or ends in 1895. Facts speak clearly. Wherever no hindrance is interposed b}^ law or custom, the Jews endeavour to nationalise themselves; the majority are careful to Jewish Particularism . 3 2 9 throw off all that can make them appear as a separate people. Even when they are thrown into contact with two or more nationalities, they incline to blend with one of them, most frequently with that one which is more firmly rooted in the country. Not only do they try to show themselves Frenchmen in France, Germans in Germany, Englishmen in England, Americans in the United States, but, what is much more meritorious, they strive to appear Poles in Poland, Danes in Den¬ mark, Hungarians in Hungary, Czechs in Bohemia, Bulgarians in Bulgaria. The Germans of Prague have, accordingly, reproached them for taking sides in Bohemia with the Slavs, who desire the re-establish¬ ment of the crown of St. Wenceslas. The Jews preserve the character of a separate people, and look upon themselves as a nationality, only in those countries where they live in compact masses in the midst of diverse nationalities; or where, as in Russia and Roumania, the laws of the State prohibit them from blending with the natives, from considering them¬ selves Russians or Roumanians. In eastern Europe to-day, as was the case in western Europe during the Middle Ages, Jewish particularism is sustained by the legislation against the Jews. To quote an expression of L,eo Tolstoi, the Jew, threatened from without, curls back upon himself and retreats into the shell of his exclusiveness. CHAPTER XII. THE NATIONALISATION OF THE JEW. I. The almost Universal Tendency of the Jews to Nationalise themselves—In which States is their Assimilation most Complete ?—The Necessity of Distinguishing, in the Same Country, between the Indigenous Jews and the Emigrants —The Patriotism of the Jews—Only the Emancipated Jews can be Patriotic—The Naturalisation of Strangers—How, in France, it has Become an Advantage not to be of Native Stock—II. Can the Jews still Form a People and a State ? —The Persistence of National Aspiration in Israel—The Connection between the Religion of the Jews and their Faith in the Re-establishment of Judaea—The Ritual and the Reunion of the Dispersed—“ Next Year in Jerusalem ”— III. What it is that, in Certain Countries, Leads the Jews back to their Exclusiveness—Is it possible to Re-establish a Jewish State in Palestine?—How, even if it were Possi¬ ble, such a State could Include only a Small Minority of the Jews—The Great Current of Jewish Migration Flows towards the West, and not towards the East—Instead of Drawing Closer together, the Jews are, more than ever, Becoming Dispersed over the face of the Globe—How this Facilitates their Nationalisation. I. This work of assimilation by means of dress, lan¬ guage, customs, is progressing everywhere simulta¬ neously, without, however, being equally advanced in all countries, or even among all Jews of the same country. Of all the states in either hemisphere, that 330 The Nationalisation of the few . 331 in which the nationalisation of the Jew is most complete is, perhaps, Italy, the classical land of the Ghetto. The reason for this is simple. Many of the Italian Jews came from the Bast in ancient times, others came from Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages, so that they have been established in the Peninsula for centuries. During the Middle Ages Italy gave shelter to many Sephardim, but she has remained almost entirely un¬ touched by the modern immigrations of the Askenazim. Not so with the other states of Europe and those of America. In almost all of these there is a marked dif¬ ference between the Israelites from the north or from the south of Europe who have long been settled in the country, and the Jews of the northeast who have come recently, urged on by the emigration from Russia, and forming a part of the great Jewish ebb-tide that is sweeping from East to West. In Germany, for instance, the Jews of the Rhine, the Elbe and the Oder are genuine Germans ; if in Berlin or elsewhere there is an Israelitish society, distinct from the society of the middle classes and from the aristo¬ crats, the fault lies with German customs, still imbued with the spirit of caste. In England, the Jews who were welcomed by Cromwell, or who landed under the Four Georges, are to-day pure Englishmen in manners, habits, feelings ; while the mass of Russian Jews who have poured during the last fifteen years into the quar¬ ters of the East-End, constitute, in London, a wretched colony transplanted from the Jewries of the Dnieper. We find the same contrast in the United States, where there were Jewish communities before the war of Inde¬ pendence ; besides the Jews long since americanised, there are the new-comers just landed from Russia, and still speaking their national jargon. Their advent 332 Israel A mong the Nations . amounts almost to the importation of a new national ele¬ ment into the great Republic. But, unlike the German immigrants, these Russian Jews, who are received with suspicion, ask only to be allowed to become Ameri¬ cans. To the Union and the star-spangled banner they say, as Ruth said to Naomi : “ Thy people shall be my people.” As for France, how can one dispute the French nationality of the Jews of Provence or Venaissin, who, having formerly gathered together under the shelter of the pontifical power, have lived uninterruptedly on French soil for fourteen or fifteen centuries previous to the Normans, and, perhaps, also to the Franks and Burgundians, so that, with regard to age, they may boast of being among the most French of Frenchmen, the most native of natives. And if we take the Jews of the Southwest, who set¬ tled on the banks of the Gironde or the Adour in the time of the Valois, and the Jews of Bordeaux, who since the time of Henry II. have had no country but France, shall we dare to say that a sojourn of 350 years has not been able to make Frenchmen of them ? As for the eastern Jews, the van-guard of the great army of the Askenazim, the Jews of Alsace and of Ror- raine, who have also, for two or three hundred years, been alternately subjects and citizens of France, old compatriots whose fathers and grandfathers have served under the tricolor ,—shall we accuse them of being strangers because some of them have a German accent ? If we welcome as brothers the people of Alsace-Ror- raine, whether Protestant or Catholic, who, when the option was offered them, chose to be citizens of van¬ quished France, shall we repulse, as intruders, the Jews of Metz and of Strasburg, who have given to their former fatherland the same proof of devotion ? The Nationalisation of the few, 333 The truth is, that in France, England, Germany, and America—everywhere, in fact—there are Jews and Jews, and we must distinguish between the indigenous Israelites born of parents long settled in the country, and the foreign Israelites who have but recently made it their home. This distinction should be applied not only to the Jews, but to every race or religion that sup¬ plies us with immigrants ; in France, for instance, to the Protestants, Reformed or Lutheran, whose num¬ bers among us (in Paris at least) have increased re¬ markably in the last half century. In their case, also, we have no right to confuse the old French families that have grown up on our soil or have been acclimatised there, with the new-comers from Switzerland, Holland, or Germany. Of these latter, as well as of the Catho¬ lics who come to us from Belgium, Spain, and Italy, and the Levantines of every confession who are begin¬ ning to land on our shores, the same may be said as of the Jews who have recently arrived from beyond the Rhine or the Vistula. To make of these new-comers true Frenchmen, to make them French in body and soul, if I may use the expression, it is not enough that they should live a dozen years in the neighbourhood of the Parc Monceau, or have received naturalisation papers. And what we say of France, may be said with equal truth of England, Germany, and America. Quite different is the situation of the Jews long estab¬ lished in the country. These have had time to take root there ; the sap of their native soil has had time to make its way up to their hearts and heads. From a national point of view they are no longer Jews, but Jewish Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, and Ameri¬ cans, or, as was said at Warsaw in 1863, citizens of the Mosaic faith. They have so thoroughly appropriated 334 Israel A mong the Nations . the habits, tastes, ideas, sometimes even the defects and prejudices, of the countries which gave them birth, that they can often be looked upon as representatives of the national spirit. What is there in France, for example, more French than the author of La Famille Cardinale and of Id Abbe Constantin f Not only in mind, but in feeling and in every fibre of their being, do these descendants of Jacob feel them¬ selves Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Italians, or Americans. Nor are many generations always needed to produce this sense of being identified with the na¬ tional life. In the midst of a patriotic people that treats one as a citizen, patriotism is easily learnt; it is imbibed from childhood, at school, at college. The fact that Gambetta had in his veins the blood of Geno¬ vese Jews, did not make his heart a jot less French; he could hardly have imagined himself other than French ; all his pride was centred in France. Nor was Disraeli any the less an Englishman because his grand¬ father was a Venetian Jew; we all know how jealous he was of Great Britain’s fame. Though Mordechai Marx, like so many socialists of every race, became the apostle of cosmopolitanism, Ferdinand Eassalle, on the other hand, was a German patriot, the zealous sup¬ porter of German unity, quite ready, for its sake, to join hands with Prussia and Bismarck. Then there is Italy, where we find no end of in¬ stances. The ancestors of Daniel Manin came from the narrow alleys of the ghetto nuovo and the ghetto vecchio , but liberated Venice did no more than she was in honour bound to do, when she interred Manin be¬ neath the byzantine vaults of the narthex of San Marco. I often go to Italy ; I have never met an Italian more jealous of the glory of the Peninsula than The Nationalisation of the few. 335 M. Tuzzatti, the former Minister of the Treasury. As a Frenchman I might find fault with him for not being free from Italian bias in foreign politics. What is the use of being a Jew if it does not preserve one from national prejudices? Well, it does not; I have no¬ ticed more than once in Italy, in Germany, even in France, that Judaism gives no immunity against Chauvinism. I may cite on this point a much earlier experience ot my own. I have already stated, I think, that in 1867 I spent a few months at Dresden in an Israelitish family. There I met a young man, eighteen years of age, of pure Jewish race, who could read the Genesis at sight in Hebrew. Tike Tassalle, he was an ardent champion of German unity, but he was also a loyal subject of Saxony. He longed for the restoration of the German empire, but he would have had the King of Saxony made Kmperor. “ If France dares to oppose our unification,” he said to me, “ it will cost you dear. We shall go to Paris ; we shall take back Alsace and Lorraine.” He did not know how truly he was speaking. Three years later he had to march into France with thousands of his co-religionists, all singing in unison with their Christian comrades, Die Wacht am Rhein . 1 This de¬ scendant of Jacob, with his brown hair and black eyes, might have been taken as a type of the German youth. He was completely imbued with the spirit of Germany ; he despised the Slav and der Welsche ; he professed the naive philosophy of history entertained by certain doctors across the Rhine. According to him, nothing 1 In Berlin alone, it was computed in 1885, that there were two thousand old Jewish soldiers who had been through the war against France. 336 Israel Among the Nations . great had ever been accomplished in the world except by the Germans ; the worth of modern nations was in proportion to the dose of Teutonic blood injected into their veins. He appeared to forget that he, himself, very possibly, had not in his body a single drop of the blood of Arminius. He seemed quite taken aback when I took the liberty of telling him this. All the other Israelites whom I met in this Saxon family were equally German ; I could not, as a rule, distinguish them from the Christians. One day there came to dinner a Berlin Jew, who had carried the needle-gun at Sadowa. He was a thorough Prussian, blond and rosy, with a loud voice and a Berlin accent. ‘ ‘ Since Koenigsgraetz,” he said, “one is proud of being a Prussian.” And in all of them, Prussian or Saxon, a foreigner recognises the German national pride. I was surprised, at the time, to find such sentiments in those Jews. Since then I have met others—and the discovery was to me far more touching—whose whole heart was set on being Polish patriots, and who con¬ tinued to cherish an unconquerable affection for that dead nation. I have known others again, who honestly believed themselves Russians, and thought and spoke like Russians. “ If there are not more of us,” a Jew of Odessa confided to me, “ there are good reasons for it. In this respect, also, every country has the Jews that it deserves.” Rove of country can be felt only by those who have been conscious, from their infancy, that they have a country. How can we expect to find patriotism among immigrants who have not had time to take root in the land, or among a proscribed people, like the Russian Jews, who are whirled from country to country, like the pey'ikatetipole of the steppes,—that ball of dry weeds The Nationalisation of the few. 337 that the autumn wind drives aimlessly over the bare prairie ? These men have no longer a country ; they have been uprooted from their native soil. However niggardly that country may have been to them, how¬ ever restricted were the rights accorded them, nearly all of them were attached to that monotonous land— the land in which their fathers had struggled and prayed for centuries on centuries. Nothing but unbearable misery, or the despair of ever finding peace within its limits, could induce them to leave it. Even then, how few can tear themselves from it without a wrenching of the heart-strings. On the eve of their departure for the land of the setting sun, they go with their children for a last visit to their cemetery, and there, with tears and lamentations, the women bid a long farewell to the dead who cannot accompany them into exile. More unhappy than their brethren of Segovia expelled from the Castile of Isabella, they have not the consolation of taking with them the tomb¬ stones of their ancestors. 1 Whether they linger in Europe or embark directly upon the great Atlantic, or slowly skirt the shores of the Mediterranean at the risk of finding no landing-place,—to whatever country they come, be it Germany, England, France, or Amer¬ ica, they feel themselves strangers; they must adapt themselves to a new climate, a new soil, a new r lan¬ guage, a new life. And yet, they will do so more rapidly, perhaps, than they dare to hope. Wherever liberty smiles on them, wherever equal justice is ad¬ ministered to them, they will soon become nationalised. They will feel towards the country which offers them a new fatherland, as outlaws feel who have found a home. For the very reason that he has less cause to be at- 1 Mocatta’s The Jews and the Inquisition. 22 33 § Israel Among the Nations . tached to the empire which has thrust him out, the Jew experiences less difficulty in becoming French, English, or American, than do the Christian immigrants who really have a fatherland, and are entitled to regard themselves as its sons. It seems to me, however, that some distinction may rightfully be made between the natives of a country and the new-comers, whether they be Jews or Chris¬ tians. I do not think that we should place upon the same footing those whose families have long been French, and the neo-Frenchmen, the candidates for French nationality, who have but recently arrived from the other side of the Alps or the Rhine. The latter— need we point it out after the past sad winter ?—have not always given us reason to feel satisfied. 1 Not that I would object to the naturalisation of foreigners ! God forbid! I am too well aware that to our modern states, especially to a state like France whose popula¬ tion increases so slowly, it is of the greatest advantage to naturalise strangers and the sons of strangers. But the government ought not to shower upon these natur¬ alised citizens of j^esterday or of to-morrow, all its favours, all its distinctions, all its good-will and offices. It would be well to give the preference to the natives, to the French Frenchmen. It must be admitted, how¬ ever, that precisely the opposite practice has prevailed in France under the third Republic. The important part that strangers play in our affairs, has been one of the features and one of the faults of the system that has obtained during the past fifteen years. In this respect, the complaints of La France Juive and of the Antisemites have not been altogether ground¬ less ; and this fact, in itself, fosters the Antisemitic agi- 1 Allusion to the Panama Canal scandal.— Transl. Note . The Nationalisation of the fezv. 339 tation. It should not be considered an advantage in France to have been born in Hungary or in Frankfurt, nor should it be a recommendation in the eyes of the government to have brothers or cousins in Berlin or Vienna, or even in London or New York. 1 It is not right that adopted sons should be preferred to the chil¬ dren of the house, nor, that at the public board the immi¬ grants or their sons should have the choicest morsels and the promptest attendance. Let us have no inverted privileges. In our assemblies and in our newspapers we have too often seen new-comers from beyond the Rhine or elsewhere, many of whom had never drawn lots with us for military service, laying down the law to our native-born citizens, giving lessons in patriotism and in French at the same time, revealing to our children the meaning of our Revolution and the mission of the French spirit. To some of these we are strongly tempted, at times, to fling the words of the Roman patrician: “ Tacete quibus Roma noverca est.” But these newly-made Frenchmen are not all of Jewish extraction. And outside of France, there are, happily for our neighbours, but few countries where political passions and sectarian fanaticism have made it an advantage not to be native-born. Before entrusting immigrants and naturalised citizens—be they Jews or Christians—with elective commissions or public offices, 1 Likewise, if public offices are to be accessible to all, it is not right that the fact of one’s being a Jew or a Protestant should be a title to preferment or to the confidence of the government. Now, this is sometimes the result of the anti-clerical policy, as directed against the oldest daughter of the Church ; the religion professed by the majority of Frenchmen has become an object of suspicion. This is a point, however, to which I expect to have an occasion to refer later on. 340 Israel Among the Nations . it would be only fair to let them serve an apprentice¬ ship in the performance of civic duties. 1 Of all the foreigners who do us the honour to .settle among us (France, as we know, has become one of the goals of immigration), those who most quickly become French are, perhaps, the Israelites. Many of them have left no fatherland behind them, and if there be a country where the Jew can find a fatherland, it is France. France was the first to emancipate him—the first to grant him the title of citizen. That was more than a hundred years ago, and since then, except for a short time under Napoleon the First, the rights of the Jews have never been seriously disputed in France. And un¬ like many countries which have followed our example in according legal equality to the Jews, France has long ago made her customs agree with her laws. The Israelites have entered French society ; they do not constitute, as in Berlin or Vienna, a separate social class ; they are le tout Paris. Mention is sometimes made of Jewish society ; but the phrase is employed in the same sense as when one speaks of Protestant society ; it applies to certain groups, to certain salons ; as a rule, it carries with it no ideas of exclusion or limitation. We have lost the art of shutting our doors. If we have a fault, it is rather that of welcoming everybody. We are too apt to forget that our easy-going ways and our demo¬ cratic institutions have made Paris a magnet for all 1 1 have heard it said that from 1876 to 1890 the Republic has had, in less than fifteen years, three men of foreign extrac¬ tion as ministers of foreign affairs. That is a great many, although they were men whose patriotism for France was above all suspicion. Of these three ministers of foreign blood, one only—Gambetta—was of Jewish origin. On this matter, see above, chap, ix., p. 242. The Nationalisation of the few. 34i sorts of business projectors and fortune hunters. Paris¬ ian society, doubtless the largest and the most varied on earth, has remained the most open ; that is one of the reasons why it is so pleasant to live in Paris, and also one of the reasons why so many foreigners and adventurers come to Paris. To the 11011-native Jew, Prance soon becomes an adopted fatherland. Recently an Israelite wrote: “ Man is free to choose his fatherland. He is not bound to the soil like a serf, or rooted in the ground like a tree.” 1 This is the argument to-day of many men, not all of whom are descendants of Jacob. But such is not the opinion of us Frenchmen of old France. For us, fatherland means something else and something deeper. We have no more chosen it than we have chosen our mothers, and it seems almost as impossible to change it as it would be to change our mothers. That Israelite is mistaken ; we do feel ourselves rooted in French soil, as firmly as a tree that clings to the earth with all its roots and living fibres. Our fatherland was here be¬ fore us ; it has borne and nourished us ; we belong to it; we are bound to it with indissoluble ties. We are a part of it; it is the flesh of our flesh ; the soul of our soul, or rather, we are its body and its members. We cannot conceive of being other than French ; nor could it occur to us to barter our old French fatherland for any other country. And this is not with us the effect of race-pride or national vainglory. Vanquished in war, France is but the dearer to us. Were she to be destroyed, were she even to be parcelled up like Poland, this beautiful and noble France which we can never confound with the politicians who exploit her, were she—impossible thought !—to perish as a State, we 1 M. Weill’s Le L&vitique , Introduction, p. 51. (Paris, 1891.) 342 Israel Among the Nations. should none the less feel ourselves Frenchmen, we should, in the face of the stranger, remain faithful to the memory of our dead, feeling her still alive in our hearts, cherishing for ever the hope of her resurrection. We should say to her as the Psalmist said to Jeru¬ salem : ‘ ‘ Eet my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget thee, O France ! ” Nor is this feeling peculiar to us Frenchmen, the sons of so tender a mother, of so glorious a country. The same sentiments have prevailed, even in the midst of degradation and bondage, in many Christian nations great and small; witness Italy, Poland, Ireland, Hun¬ gary, Roumania, Greece. But why cite these illustra¬ tions? Was not the first example set us by the Jews themselves, who have remained so long and so obstin¬ ately faithful to the hill of Zion, who have kept their sorrowful gaze fastened, for centuries, on the ruined walls of the city of David ? To choose a fatherland, however impious such a liberty may appear to us, is nevertheless, it must be admitted, a right which the Jews are not alone in claim¬ ing. With the increasing movement between the human ant-hills that swarm on our little globe, we see, every year, hundreds of thousands of Christians chang¬ ing their fatherland. Every summer the ocean is crossed by whole tribes of Germans, Englishmen, Ital¬ ians, and Scandinavians, who abandon the old and glorious lands of their birth to seek a new Country abroad. To these millions of emigrants the word coun¬ try means no longer the adored mother, whose children are loath to leave her ; it means a betrothed, the girl or woman whom one marries from love or calculation, and for the sake of whose beauty or dowry one bids good-bye to the old mother, without a pang—reserving The Nationalisation of the Jew . 343 the right, in case of disenchantment, to secure a divorce and marry again. Why should that which has been done under our very eyes, during the past fifty years, by millions of Christians (seven or eight millions within ten years), in order to call a bit of land their own or to escape from the drudgery of the barracks, not be per¬ mitted also to the Jews, in order that they may be able to worship freely the God of Abraham, that they may gain the right of attaining to the full stature of their manhood ? For the Jews, emigration is not the same thing as for our countrymen. Most of the Jews who are streaming towards the northern or the southern seas, are not chang¬ ing their country ; they are in search of a country. And they are grateful to those who will grant them one. “No one can form an idea ” was written to me from the United States a few years ago, ‘ ‘ of the delight of the Russian Jews in seeing themselves treated like free men, at liberty to come and go as they please. They are so happy at this that, as soon as they have landed on our wharfs, and while still unable to speak any language but their clumsy jargon, they already feel themselves Americans, full of affection for our land and of enthusiasm for our institutions.” I well believe this ; they have come out of the bondage of Egypt ; the country which welcomes them is, for them, the land of liberty, their new promised land. Why should they need much time to become attached to it ? It would not surprise me, if, on disembarking, they were to feel like pressing their lips to its ground, as did their fore¬ fathers during the Middle Ages, on reaching the Holy Land. 344 Israel Among the Nations. II. For a long time the Jews may be said to have been without a country. Although this was true of the ma¬ jority of them at the end of the eighteenth century, it is no longer so at the end of the nineteenth century. From the Vistula to the Mississippi, they display, in every civilised country, the same eagerness to nationalise themselves. In view of this, is it worth while to ask whether the remnants of the tribes still form a people, and whether the small particles of Israel that float on the surface of the nations, will ever mass themselves into a national body, a State ? Neither of these questions can be raised as regards the western Jews. They are daily growing more into Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Americans. The notion of forming again a Jewish people, in Palestine or elsewhere, causes them to smile. They are no longer in search of a country. They have found one, by the rivers of the West, and are not at all desirous of ex¬ changing it for the deserted banks of the Jordan. It would be almost as reasonable to ask the Normans of France whether they wish to set sail again for the Nor¬ wegian fiords, or the Bretons whether they are not anxious to recross the Channel and return to the val¬ leys of Cambria. May the same be said of the eastern Jews, massed in compact colonies in Poland, Rittle-Russia, and Rou- mania? There, in many cases, rabbinical particularism still survives ; those Israelitish communities seem still to constitute a Jewish nation in the midst of Christian peoples. Nevertheless, I believe that, in Europe at least, the same thing will happen to those eastern Jews that has happened to our own. They, also, will eventually become nationalised. Even in those Jewries that seem 345 The Nationalisation of the few. closed to tlie outer world, the old particularism is yield¬ ing, little by little, to western influences. As with us formerly, the chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Jew is the liostilty of the governments and the enmity of the peoples. Opposition comes less from the Syna¬ gogue than from without, less from the Jew than from the Christian. But this very hostility of custom and law tends, by means of public and private annoyances and enforced or voluntary emigration, to lessen the density of the great Jewish communities ; and this, of itself, should facilitate at the same time the nationalisa¬ tion of the Jews who leave the country, and of those who remain in it. Of the growing ascendency of western ideas over the Jews of the Bast, I have pointed out more than one sign. Nevertheless, all Jews do not willingly subject them¬ selves to this influence. Not only the Hassidim, or neo-cabalists, the most superstitious and most fanat¬ ical of the Israelitish populace, but many others, set themselves rigidly against it. Certain rabbis are anxious concerning the faith, and even the permanency, of Israel; next to contact with our ideas and customs, they dread the contagion of our scepticism. We must not forget that the rabbis of Alsace and of Germany gave evi¬ dence of similar apprehensions towards the end of the eighteenth century. They looked askance upon the emancipation promised to them by innovators ; they did not always forgive the zeal of such advocates as Moses Mendelssohn, Dohm, and Cerf-Beer, who aimed at bringing Israel nearer to the Gentiles. ‘ ‘ They feared that in leaving their narrow society, buttressed by their religion,” the Jews would become unfaithful 1 1 See the very interesting study by l’Abb£ J. bemann, Z’ En¬ tree des Juifs dans la Societe Frangaise , p. 408 (Paris, 1889). 346 Israel Among the Nations. to the creed as well as to the customs of their fathers. They were, perhaps, not altogether wrong, those old rabbis of Alsace and Silesia; subsequent events have more than once justified their fears. And yet, they were forced to yield to the spirit of the century, for the current of history was against them. The Jews of France and Germany have relinquished their traditional particularism ; and where are the rabbis who dream of lamenting this fact ? Their race has disappeared. The same result would soon be attained in Poland, Russia, and Roumania, were not the exclusiveness of the old Jews strengthened by that of the Christians. 1 “ You are mistaken,” some persons may say ; “ the Jews are not at liberty to renounce their national par¬ ticularism, for in their creed national hopes are inti¬ mately associated with religious faith. That is the essential feature of Judaism.” We have already seen that this is true ; with the Jews nationality and religion have been united for ages. They have been interlaced and, as it were, knitted together by the centuries ; but what the centuries have done, the centuries are about to undo. Of the two interwoven strands that make up Judaism, one is dropping into shreds, worn away by 1 In the year 1892, in a French province, at Bone, in Algeria, a new manifestation of the old Jewish particularism is supposed to have been detected. A rabbi named De Stora is said to have warned his co-religionists, in a public speech, against French education. I do not know whether this incident has been faith¬ fully reported to us. The criticism of the rabbi of Bone ap¬ pears to me to have been directed less against French education than against instruction without reference to religion, “ neutral instruction,” such as is frequently given in our country. In this respect, the complaint of the rabbi coincided with that of our Catholic clergy ; and he was punished, like a simple curate ; the government stopped his salary—a proceeding which seems not more just in the case of a rabbi than in that of a parson. The Nationalisation of the few. 34 7 the friction of ages; the other, having greater powers of resistance, still holds together. In this respect, Israel is still in a period of transition. She is passing out of the stage of an ethnic group into that of a confes¬ sional group. After having been so long a people, she will soon be only a religion . 1 This transformation, which is nearly completed in the West, has only just begun in the East. Encased for a long time in its nationality as in a protective tegument, Judaism has only half extricated itself; while its head and upper body have emerged completely, its feet and lower limbs are still imprisoned in the national sheath. The Jewish ritual is essentially national in its char¬ acter. We have shown why ; the Talmud wished to protect Israel against absorption by the Gentiles. The walls of Jerusalem had fallen, and Judah proceeded to protect itself with a triple hedge of rites and observ¬ ances. The Synagogue was not content to keep alive in Israel the memory of her triumphs and defeats ; by means of fast-days and feasts, the ritual strove also to stimulate her hopes. ‘ ‘ Our entire worship, ’ ’ an Oriental rabbi assured me, ‘ ‘ is based on faith in the re-estab¬ lishment of Israel. In all our prayers, mindful of the promises of the prophets, we implore the deliverance of Zion, the reunion of the tribes in their ancient father¬ land.” These divine promises are, no doubt, accepted lit¬ erally by thousands of Oriental Jews in Russia and Roumania. Did not Ezekiel, in the valley of death, see the dry bones come together, and the slain stand up, beneath the breath of the Eord ? Many believe firmly that Jehovah will gather his people together from the ends of the earth, to restore it to the inherit¬ ance of David. Until that time Israel appears to them 1 See above, chapters iv. and vi. 348 Israel Among the Nations. to be condemned to the golus , the sorrows of exile. I once met a young hakham of Tittle-Russia, an enthu¬ siast, with black eyes aglow with inspiration, who took pleasure in quoting to me the texts on which his faith was based, citing, in turn, the Thora , the Prophets, the Talmud, Maimonides, and the liturgical prayers, and learnedly demonstrating that a true Jew can have no other country than Palestine. He enumerated his authorities, and for my fuller conviction he sent me the following day a written list of the decisive passages. “ Read the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy,” he said to me, “ The Tord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations. If any of thine be driven out unto the utmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Tord thy God gather thee, and from thence w T ill he fetch thee; and the Tord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it.” What could be clearer? And in accordance with this promise of the Thora , the orthodox Jew repeats every morning,—before reciting the Shemah —the following words : ‘ ‘ Bring unto us peace from the four corners of the earth and break the yoke of the heathen from our neck and lead us upright into our land.” And the following petition is renewed every day in the Shemona esreh, the prayer which every Jew must repeat three times daily, as my young rabbi affirmed to me : “ Sound the great horn for our freedom ; lift up the ensign to gather our exiles, and gather us from the four corners of the earth into our land. Blessed be Thou, oh Tord, who gatherest the banished ones of this people Israel.” “ And these prayers, to which I could add many others,” my ardent interlocutor continued, “have been The Nationalisation of the few . 349 repeated close upon two thousand years, all over the world, in the morning, during the day and in the evening, by Jews who invoke, without ever growing weary, the re-establishment of Israel.” There can be no doubt concerning the original mean¬ ing of these invocations ; it was indeed the restoration of the house of Israel and of the kingdom of David that the remnants of the tribes so ardently invoked. But it is, perhaps, because they have expected it in vain, century after century, that so many Jews have finalfy ceased to interpret literally this restoration of Israel, or have concluded to relegate it to the darkness that veils the end of time, as the Christians have done with the second coming of Christ. “ Next year in Jerusalem,” the Jews continue to say to one another on each Rosh Hashanah , when they celebrate the Jewish New Year. “ Next year in Jerusalem.” This aspira¬ tion, transmitted by the stubborn faith of their fathers, —by how many among us is it interpreted literally ? How many, in Paris, Berlin, or New York, would like to see it fulfilled ? Where, among us, are those Israel¬ ites to be found who whisper to themselves, with Jehuda Halevy : “In the West is my body, but my heart is in the East. What, to me, is Spain with her blue sky and brilliant fame, as compared to a handful of the dust of the Temple, trodden underfoot by the Gentiles.” 1 Jehuda Halevy was a contemporary of the Crusaders, and Jerusalem inspired many a churchman and knight of that age with sentiments almost analagous to those of the poet of Israel. It was the century in which 1 I borrow the translation of these verses from an English baptised Jew who has given them in Hebrew : A pilgrimage in the Land of my Fathers , by Rev. Moses Margoliouth, vol. ii., appendix. 35 ° Israel Among the Nations . so many Franks, from all the lands of the West, pressed on towards Palestine, crying: “God wills it” ;—for we Christians also feel that Jerusalem is, in a way, our own country. But times have changed ; the pious craze for the recovery of the Holy Eand is over ; neither Jews nor Christians are any longer hypnotised by the image of the hill of Zion. Do the Jews whom we meet at the races or at the doors of the Stock Exchange, seem homesick for Jerusalem ? The number of Jews who contemplate the restoration of the Kingdom of David is hardly greater than the number of Christians who still dream of wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel. “ Next year in Jerusalem.” But do the Jews of France, Germany, England, and America who celebrate Ros/i Hashanah, really seem like people pre¬ pared to leave everything behind, and ready to pitch their tents in the valley of the Cedron ? Do they show, by their conduct, that they regard themselves as way¬ farers whose stay in our cities is to be a brief one ? Do they not enter upon long business engagements ? Do they not buy land ? Do they not build for themselves and their descendants houses, synagogues, hospitals, schools, as though they expected to remain for ever with the sons of Japhet ? What their enemies complain of is, not that they are anxious to leave us, but that they are too content to stay with us. And the old Jews of the East, who still invoke the res¬ toration of Israel and the early advent of the Redeemer —are they not turning their possessions into money, that they may be free to transport themselves to their future country ? Do they, on this account, neglect their business? Do they differ from their Christian neighbours in their worldly interests ? In many cases they do, indeed, exhibit a difference—but it is generally The A r ationalisation of the few . 351 in being more earnestly concerned with the morrow. I11 fact, the Jews who await the reunion of the tribes, are singularly like the Protestant sect of Second Ad¬ ventists, still to be found in Great Britain and the United States, who compute mathematically the date of the establishment of the fifth monarchy foretold by Daniel. I have known some of these English vision¬ aries, and their confidence in the impending fulfilment of the prophecies did not interfere with their daily life as good business-men and good Englishmen. It is not true, moreover, that all the Jews of eastern Europe cherish such dreams. Though he were an angel from heaven, the messenger who should come to tell them that the Kingdom of David had been restored, and that they were bound to return to the lean pastures of Canaan, would be received by most of them with a salutation of unpleasant surprise. ‘ ‘ If Israel ever be¬ comes again a people,” said to me a Jew of the Vistula, ‘ ‘ I shall ask for the Consulship of Palestine at Warsaw. ’ ’ How many thousands of those degenerate sons of Jacob would entertain the same wish, some asking for Paris, some for Berlin, some for Rome, and some for Washington ? How many would submit to all manner of annoyances, rather than return to the rocky hills of the land of their forefathers ? For the greater part of the Jews, even in the East, the real restoration of Israel, the reign of the Messiah who is to redeem them, is the end of their bondage, their deliverance from special laws. The new Jerusalem, the earthly Zion to which they implore admittance in the old rabbinical formulas, is civil liberty and equality. Go into the most miser¬ able Lithuanian or Bielo-Russian Jewries; question the poorest Roumanian or Polish Jews, and they will tell you that they aspire only to remain on the banks 35 2 Israel Among the Nations . of the Niemen or the Pruth, provided they are per¬ mitted to lead there an endurable existence. In their eyes, their fatherland is the land in which their fathers have died and have been buried ; and when they are forced to leave it, their exodus seems to them indeed an exile. III. If to the nationalisation of the Jews among us there were no obstacle but their Messianic hopes, it would be accomplished in less than two or three generations. But there are modern countries, as we know, in which the Jew cannot aspire to the rights of citizenship. To-day, as in the Middle Ages, we see governments taxing their ingenuity to retard his assimilation, as though they washed to maintain for ever his distinctive nationality. The result is that, more than a hundred years after the time of Mendelssohn and the decree of the Constituent Assembly, Israelites who had believed in the assimilation of their race, are beginning to doubt its possibility. ‘ ‘ When we are told daily that we cannot become Russians, Poles, or Roumanians, that we are Jews and can never be anything but Jews,” said to me, in con¬ fidence, one of those students who come to Paris for the diplomas denied them in Russia, “ how can we refrain from asking ourselves whether we have not taken a wrong road? Since they persist in looking upon us as a distinct people, incapable of assimilation with others, why should w^e not try to discover if we cannot again become a separate nation ? They give us no choice. If we try to escape from our isolation, we are thrust back into it; we are expelled from Christian cities and villages and sent back to our The A T ationalisation of the Jew. 353 Jewries; we are debarred from entering tlieir colleges and universities—in other words, we are denied access to civilisation. Even in the West, where special laws were abolished long ago, voices are heard clamouring for their re-establishment. Why should we not repulse those who reject us, and set our pride on remaining, or again becoming, ourselves ? What is it, after all, that prevents Israel from being born anew ? Religion dis¬ appears in our youth ; nationality survives. Ret us leave the western Jews, who are gradually blending with the modern peoples, to their own fate. Could we not here, where we are so numerous, on Russian, Polish, and Roumanian ground, form a living nation¬ ality in the midst of the nations that are contending for the supremacy of the East? Why could we not even colonise Palestine and Syria, re-establish a Jewish State, and, like the Greeks, at least regain an indepen¬ dent national centre, where it would be possible for us to live according to our own laws and customs, in accordance with our historic genius ? After all, it may be true that the fatherland of other men can never be a Jew’s real country, but only what an Englishman might call a ‘ step-fatherland.’ ” The aspiration which George Eliot, a number of years ago, put into the mouth of Mordechai, I have heard more than once formulated in just such words. It caused people to smile when Daniel Deronda first appeared. To-day, it deserves to be treated less lightly, because the eastern Jews have suffered a great deal since then, and because their suffer¬ ings and fears have re-awakened in many of them the desire to be independent of the Christians, to possess a country, a territory of their own . 1 Will this Many pamphlets have been published on this subject in 23 1 354 Israel Among the Nations . dream of a Jewish state ever become a reality ? I dare not say no ; however difficult of accomplishment it may seem, it is not impossible. The question is worth looking into, and perhaps I .shall do so some da}". But even if the Jews were again to form the majority of the population in Canaan, as they do already in Jerusalem ; even if they were to establish on either bank of the Jordan a tiny republic or a little Jewish principality, this would not induce the western Israel¬ ite to return to the old country. I cannot imagine the Jews of France, England, Germany, or Italy generally taking ship to Jaffa or Acre. We cannot say of them, as of the Turks, that they are only encamped in Europe. Moreover, Palestine would not be able to support them. The whole of Syria could shelter only a small minority of the seven or eight millions of Jews now in the world. Must we, to make room for them, expel the Christians and the Moslems? Shall we confide the care of the Holy Sepulchre to the Synagogue? What Christian would propose or tolerate such a thing ? Supposing we were to relinquish to Israel all the unoccupied tracts of Syria, including the desert as far as the Euphrates, not a third, nor even a quarter, of the European Jews could find subsistence there. The ancient country of Canaan and the neighbouring regions are certainly not able to accommodate more than a few hundred thousand. And these new colonists would come exclusively from the great Jewries of the East, for we must not confound Paris with Berditchef, nor Vienna or Berlin with Jassy. The Jew who dreams of returning to the land of his ancestors, is by no means addition to the writings of the late hawrence Oliphant. I quote, among others, Die Judische LJnabhangigkeit , von Isch- Berlin. (Berne, 1892.) The Nationalisation of the few. 355 the unwelcome guest of whom our capitals would gladly rid themselves ; he is neither the slippery broker nor the shameless speculator, nor the cosmopolitan adven¬ turer in search of suspicious bargains, nor the dealer in publicity, always on the lookout for venal pens and purchasable votes. This sort of Jew would remain with us ; it were useless to restore to Israel the terri¬ tory of the twelve tribes ; in order to attract such Jews to Jerusalem we should have to set up on the hill of Zion a stock exchange, banks, and legislative cham¬ bers—the entire plant, in fact, that is required for the sort of business which they seek to monopolise. The Jews that have emigrated to Palestine are the least enterprising, the least ambitious, or the least cul¬ tivated, and, if we may use the expression, the least youthful portion of the race. I have visited them in Jerusalem ; I have seen them on Fridays, lamenting by the walls of the Temple, and invoking in those lamenta¬ tions the re-establishment of Zion. It was one of the most touching sights that I have ever witnessed ; Bida and Verestchagin have reproduced its thrilling mourn¬ fulness. Neither in the old men, who go to Jerusalem to die, that they may be buried in the valley of Jehosha- phat, nor in the feeble adults who are enabled to live there by the halukka , the charity of their rich co¬ religionists of the West, can we find the elements of a national resurrection. The Jews whom I saw in the Holy Band were less suggestive of the renascence of a people, than of the decay of a race. They might have been compared to human ruins scattered over ruins of stone, as though the remnants of the tribes had come to exhale their last breath on the old site of the house of David . 1 1 1 am aware that in the last few years the Jews have founded 3 5 6 Israel Among the Nations . Not towards the Orient and the barren hills of Judaea is the gaze of our western Israelites turned. Even in the poverty-stricken Russo-Roumanian Jewries, the masses look less towards Syria than towards the coun¬ tries of the setting sun. The Jew prefers the rich plains of America to the exhausted soil and the impoverished peoples of Asia. The great stream of the modern exodus is not flowing towards the Biblical lands but in an opposite direction. Though mistrustful Turkey should permit the Israelitish refugees to set sail for Rebanon and Carmel, the majority would still prefer to crowd into the transatlantic steamers. ‘ ‘A new father- land, a new country,” such is the cry of the Jew, who, goaded by the spur of misery, breaks loose from the great Ghetto of Russia. For him, the promised land lies no longer between the ocean and the river Jordan ; but over yonder, veiled by the mists of the West, on the shores of the Atlantic. But lately, the rabbis of the Hudson and the Mississippi, in celebrating the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, compared Columbus to a second Moses, raised up by Jehovah to prepare for Israel, driven out from the old continent, a refuge in a better world . 1 The dreams of those who summon Judah to become in Palestine some rather prosperous colonies ; but this does not invalidate the opinions expressed above, with regard to the im¬ possibility of reassembling there the dispersed tribes. 1 I find eloquent speeches on this subject in the American Hebrew, September and October, 1892. According to them, there were Jews among the companions of Columbus, the funds needed to fit out his caravels were furnished by a Castilian Israelite, and the maps which he used were drawn up by a Portuguese Jew. Even more : according to the old chronicles, it was a Jew, Rodrigo de Triana, who first saw land, and another Jew, Luis de Torres, who first set foot on American soil. The Nationalisation of the Jew. 357 again a people, are proved idle by the actual character of Israel’s recent migrations. Instead of returning to their cradle in Asia, the majority of Jews are contempt¬ uously turning their backs upon Asia. Israel is more and more becoming Occidental, European, American. In order to make of her again a separate people, it would be necessary to collect the remnants of the twelve tribes, and concentrate them in a single territory ; but, far from coming together from the ends of the earth, the sons of Jacob are becoming more widely dispersed than ever among the Gentiles ; the wind of persecution is driving them to the four corners of the world. And the more they are scattered, the thinner becomes the Israelitish layer which is stretched over the surface of the nations, and the less resistance does it offer to local influences. The old particularism which has resisted the diaspora of the ancient world, will not resist this new dispersion. In proportion as they become scattered over the earth, the Jews will become emancipated from their religious and national exclusiveness. Such is the case already in almost all free countries, from the Car¬ pathians to the Rockies. CHAPTER XIII. THE COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE FRATERNISATION OF THE ISRAELITES. I. Reasons for the Persistent Solidarity of the Jews—The Psy¬ chology of Religious Minorities Reverted to again—The Spirit of Solidarity often Survives the Jewish Faith—All great Religions are, in a Certain Sense, Cosmopolitan—An¬ ticlericalism and Antisemitism again Compared—The In¬ ternational Organisation which Modern Peoples have Cause to Fear.—II. Is it True that the Jews Try to Separate the Nations?—Judaism and Human Brotherhood—The Spirit of Judah is a Spirit of Peace—The Messianic Dogma Re¬ verted to again—The New Jerusalem—On this Point, the Spirit of Israel is in Accord alike with the Modern and with the Christian Spirit. I. If Palestine cannot again become the home of the majority of Jews, nor give them the territorial basis of a separate national existence, is it not possible that Judaism may continue to take the place with them of a country ? Even though Jtidaism should cease to be any¬ thing but a religion, it will always be a Church of a peculiar kind—a Church whose members believe them¬ selves descended from the same father and look upon each other as brothers, bound by ties of blood. This is the reason why the Jews exhibit a solidarity unparalleled in any other religion. This is the reason why the most 358 Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 359 sceptical Jews are inclined to place the religious above the national bond—since for them the religious and the racial bond are identical—and to consider themselves Jews, before considering themselves Frenchmen, Eng¬ lishmen, or Germans. This is the cause, finally, of that cosmopolitan spirit which enables so many of them to wander without a pang of regret from one country to another, and of that light-heartedness with which they make themselves at home wherever they are able to set up their shops. For, in the case of many Jews, national particularism is being replaced by a sort of international cosmopoli¬ tanism, which is sometimes allied to the old partic¬ ularism and which is due, at bottom, to the same cause. While the old-fashioned orthodox Jew, wrapped up in his rites and his memories, knows no fatherland but Jerusalem, the civilised Western Jew is inclined to look upon the world as a domain to be exploited, troubling himself little about the fate of the provinces and empires that he crosses, concentrating all his selfish thoughts on his own personal interests, and all the generous instincts left within him, on the interests of Judaism—that ancient and vast fraternity, of which the Jew, despite all his transformations, still considers him¬ self a member. Israel continues to resemble quick-sil¬ ver, that strange, liquid metal, whose restless globules run in all directions without mingling with anything they touch, but reunite in larger masses as soon as they meet again. But, to all this sort of reasoning how easy it is to find the answer. It is the old story : the Jew has been formed by the past which we have made for him. His persistent solidarity, his apparent cosmopolitanism, are largely our work. Had it not been for the humiliations 360 Israel Among the Nations. and vexations which kept them huddled together, the racial bond of the Semites would have been broken or loosened. How little, in the long run, kinship, based on descent, amounts to, is shown by our family quarrels, by the wars of dynasties connected by repeated mar¬ riages, by the internal conflicts which so many of the nations of both hemispheres have had to fight out, by the tribal jealousies which have so often pitted against each other peoples who had every reason to look upon one another as brothers. In all the groups, religious or national, formed by that quarrelsome animal, man, internal cohesion has been directly proportioned to the violence of the external shocks and the intensity of external friction. If no other human group has shown a consistency equal to that of Israel, it is because none other has been subjected to any such degree of outside pressure. Here, as everywhere, the past explains the present. The Jewish sentiment, strengthened by centuries of common suffering and anxiety, is perpetuated by a sort of atavism, even when it is not fomented by the annoyances and apprehensions of the present. It sur¬ vives even in those Jews who have broken loose from the traditions of Israel, and have become thoroughly incorporated in the modern nations. How many have remained Jews, without retaining any of the practices of the Mosaic laws ! Arsene Darmesteter, in relating how he had lost the faith of his fathers, said to a friend : “I have not, for all that, cut loose from Judaism ; it is to me a second fatherland.” 1 I like this saying and the sentiment which inspired it. I cannot understand how a man who has shared the faith of a Church, who has owed to 1 Journal des Debats , April 24, 1890, article by M. I,. Havet. Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation. 361 it the loftiest aspirations and the sweetest emotions of his youth, can fail to cherish for it a tender feeling. The absence of such a feeling would seem to show a narrow mind or an unresponsive soul. Few Christians whose faith has gone to pieces on the rocks which lined their path and the flinty stones which strewed their way, have, for that reason, conceived any aversion toward the gentle teacher of their childhood. I know many who, despite the scepticism of their heads, still cherish her memory in their hearts. This sentiment is not peculiar to the sons of Israel. It is especially marked in the case of the French Protestants, and constitutes another point of resemblance between them and the Jews. Who, among us, has not known some of these Protestants who have abandoned the dogmas of the Reformed Church, and yet, as far as their interest in that Church and its adherents is concerned, are as thoroughly Protestants as ever ? For them, also, religion is like a second country; with them, also, the spirit of fraternity has survived the downfall of their faith. Why is this sentiment more frequent, in France, among the Protestants than among the Catholics ? It is because our Protestants have for a long time formed a separate society ; it is because they, too, have long suffered in common ; it is because, like the Jews, they are in the minority in our country, and because, in all countries, the spirit of solidarity is one of the most dis¬ tinctive psychological characteristics of religious mi¬ norities ; so that, what we say of the Protestants in France, might equally well be said of the Catholics in Prussia or England. Shall we allow our children to be taught that, in order to be patriotic, their affections must be limited to 362 Israel Among the Nations. the frontiers of their country? If this were true, I should pity all patriots, however spacious the bound¬ aries may seem within which their souls are imprisoned. To be good Frenchmen, are we really bound to love nothing outside of France, and must we clip the wings of our sympathies to prevent them from flying across the ocean or soaring beyond the mountains ? Must we at once abridge and parody the motto on the ring of St. Louis; and, forgetting the place which the royal crusader kept open for his God, shall we say : “ No love, save for France? ” I do not know how the pro¬ fessors of secular patriotism feel on this subject; but of one thing I am certain, and that is that such patriotism is altogether unchristian. It behoves us to remember that the reproach which we fling at the Jew can well be turned against others. There is not a single great Church which is not proud to deserve it! Where is the believer—Catholic, Protes¬ tant, or Orthodox—who does not keep a warm spot in his heart for his brothers abroad ? The Knglish church¬ man and all the numberless sects of nonconformists would be ashamed to confine their zeal within the silver ribbon that encloses Great Britain, or even within the immense territories that constitute the Greater Britain. Vast as is the empire which, extending from the Pacific to the Baltic, comprises one half of our continent, its frontiers are yet too narrow for the sympathies of the Russian merchant and moujik, which go out across the mountains to their Orthodox brethren. And we Frenchmen, who in former times led the chivalry of Christendom into the lands of the Hast, has the range of our sympathies become so narrow, or have our hearts grown so cold that nothing in this wide world can make them throb again ? Cosjnopolitanism and Fraternisation . 363 Let us not accuse ourselves unjustly ; in spite of all the lessons in egotism taught us by other countries, and of the selfish resolutions which we sometimes openly avow, the old generosity of the French soul is not dead. It survives, if nowhere else, in the men imbued with the faith of the old Church. Their hearts have remained as big as our little planet itself. They, also, in their way, are cosmopolitan, although they are the most French of Frenchmen. Do not speak to them of shutting up their affections, their impulses of self- sacrifice, between the Straits of Dover and the Gulf of Lyons. If they did, what meaning would there be left in the name of Catholic ? Poor Catholics, poor Cleri¬ cals ! How often have their enemies flung in their teeth the old accusations made against the Jews ! How often in France, in Germany, in England, in both North and South America, have they been convicted of letting their hearts stray from their country, and of subordinating national interests to foreign interests ! Under the old regime this was the chief grievance of our Gallicans, and what but this is the meaning of that name of Ultramontane with which their adversaries see fit to brand the foreheads of the Catholics ? If any¬ thing is needed to make the analogy more complete, consider how the Roman hierarchy, with its bishops, its priests, and its monks, is accused of possessing an international organisation incompatible with the unity of the State, and how Israel also is accused of being an international organisation with secret leaders, which, likewise, aims at nothing less than the conquest of the world and the subjection of the nations. I have already called attention to the resemblance which the Antisemitic movement bears to the Anticleri¬ cal movement. Of this resemblance we have a further 3 6 4 Israel Among the Nations. suggestion in these hostile brethren. There is a striking similarity between the attacks of the Antisemites upon the Jews, and the diatribes of the Anticlericals against the Papacy. The language employed, the formulas fol¬ lowed, and the conclusions reached are so nearly iden¬ tical, that the enemies of Israel and the enemies of the Vatican might use each other’s indictments against the Church or the Synagogue by simply changing the names. As the Antisemite tells the Jews that their country is Jerusalem, the Anticlerical tells the Cath¬ olics, the priests, the monks, that their country is Rome. Of both the Jews and the Ultramontanes it is asserted that they form a State within the State, imperium in imperio. Against both, appeal is made to national pas¬ sions, against both, protective measures, that is to say restrictive laws, are demanded. The difference is that, as a rule, those who denounce the dangerous nature of the Jews are not the same persons who point out the danger threatened by the Roman Catholic question. And yet, in Protestant and Orthodox countries,—in Russia, for instance, where Rome is little better liked than Zion—the same lips testify to the same mistrust of Judaea and Rome, of the Kahal and the Society of Jesus . 1 We are not of those who believe that either the Jew or the Jesuit imperils the nationality of peoples or the independence of States. We see no need for special laws, against either Judah or Royola. I have sufficient 1 Likewise in England, at the time of the emancipation of the Catholics as well as of that of the Jews, the principal argument of their opponents was this : “ You are about to introduce into the British Parliament men who represent a foreign spirit, for¬ eign interests. The Vatican will have a voice in Westminster, etc.” Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 365 faith in liberty to feel convinced that, as regards both Israel and Rome, the common law will answer. There are too many contending forces in the modern world to allow it to be conquered either by the Kahal or the Society of Jesus. I go even further ; I am not averse to anything that tends to override the barriers of national frontiers. It seems to me, that, in this age of national exclusiveness, when each people seems eager to make its own home not only weather-proof but air-tight, it were not unwise to cut a few openings in the party- walls between them. This is one of the functions of religion. Whatever the partisans of State-omnipotence may think, it is fortunate for humanity that its two great spiritual bonds, country and religion, are not always of equal compass, and that the one embraces what the other excludes. If the limits of religion were to coincide with the boundaries of States, there would be danger of our frontiers becoming hermetically sealed against the passage of ideas and affections. Our dual system has its advantages. Unlike the ancient City- State every nation in our day includes a number of re¬ ligions, just as every religion embraces a number of nations. This is a point in which the modern world is superior to the ancient. Those who accuse us, whether we be Jews, Protes¬ tants, or Catholics, of extending our sympathies beyond the pale of our country, forget that all great religions are cosmopolitan. One’s country is necessarily local ; religion should be international or supranational. Its mission is to be a bond between peoples, no less than between individuals. This is the reason why the most beautiful name a Church can have is “ Catholic.” The weakest point in Judaism is that its right to be regarded as an universal religion may be disputed, that it has 3 66 Israel Among the Nations . been, for a long time, a national, a tribal creed. But its primitive and ethnic character is gradually disap¬ pearing with the dispersion of the race. L,ike Chris¬ tianity,—and perhaps with better right than Moham¬ medanism, which tends to merge nationality in religion, —Judaism, also, is becoming an international creed. If we cared only for the terrestrial evolution of humanity, I am not certain that we ought to congratu¬ late ourselves on the weakening of religious solidarity— for, what is to take its place ? The feeling of human solidarity ? That is too broad and indefinite. Religious fanaticism is now nothing more than a dim recollection ; we must rather beware of national fanaticism. I have scant liking for that narrow nationalism which certain pedagogues, in France as well as in Germany, would introduce into the schools. It is a retrograde idea, a step backward from the modern spirit, and even from the Middle Ages. It endangers the national idea by exaggerating it. To suppress all religion, to leave to the people nothing but the worship of country, is simply to return to paganism, to revive an ancient form of idolatry. The one God, the common Father of all peo¬ ples, is replaced by a kind of national polytheism, in which each nation is to have its own gods. It is a re¬ turn to the ancient City-State, to the worship of Rome and of Augustus, to the deification of Caesar, against which Jews and Christians protested with the blood of so many martyrs. I know that our age is all confusion and contradic¬ tion. While some of our professors appointed by the government are preaching to our children the worship of country, which is set up as the only true divinity, voices from below, growing louder and louder, are preaching to the masses the denial of county. The Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 367 century wliicli noisily proclaimed the principle of na¬ tionality, witnesses, before its close, an attack upon all that is most legitimate in the national idea. There is rising up against it, from the lowest depths of our society, an adversary more to be dreaded than the vague philosophical cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century. While blind and deaf sentinels are calling us to arms against the Ultramontane or the Semite, another, and a far more dangerous, enemy has glided past our frontiers, and threatens to unfurl, over our capitals, the red flag of industrial cosmopolitanism. The foe of modern nationalities, that already forms everywhere a State within the State, and, more ambi¬ tious than Charles the Fifth or Napoleon, aspires to the empire of the whole earth,—we know its name, we see it at work ; it is revolutionary socialism. For national patriotism and religious solidarity, it professes to substi¬ tute community of jealousies and solidarity of greed. This is the only international movement that we have to fear at present, and for this movement neither Jewish nor Christian fraternity will pave the way. On the contrary, every religion, apart from its doctrinal and moral teachings, and by virtue of the simple fact that it binds men together with ties that are independent of class-interests, forms an obstacle to the triumph of rev¬ olutionary internationalism. To win its battle, the latter must destroy religion as well as country. It is well aware of this, and for this reason, among others, the religious idea is as repugnant to it as is the national idea. Uet us be men of our own day ; let us not take for living beings the phantoms of belated imaginations. If modern nations are menaced with any danger, it is not from the religious side that the menace comes; Israel Among the Nations . 368 neither from the Catholic monk, nor from the Re¬ formed minister, nor from the Israelitish rabbi. The time is long past when Huguenots and Leaguers called into France the German Reiter and the Spanish tercieros. As for the Jew, the dumb drudge of the past, what stranger has ever hastened to his defence ? Only the rancorous memory of the Castilians could blame him for having delivered to the Arabs of Tarik the cities of King Roderigo. If, by reason of his education or his history, the Jew seems inclined to cosmopolitanism, this makes him all the more fit to act as a connecting bond between the peoples, as his forefathers did in ancient Alexandria and in mediaeval Arabia. “At an epoch,” says a western Jew, “when so many elements conspire to divide the nations, is it to be regretted that there should exist one calculated to unite them ? ” 1 “ There¬ in,” said Graetz, the historian, “lies the national mis¬ sion ”—he did not dare to say the providential mission —“of the Jews.” 2 Why do they not devote them¬ selves to it in larger numbers ? To dissipate the clouds of prejudice piled up between contemporary nations were indeed a noble work, for if they could understand each other better the nations would find it less difficult to agree with each other. II. r The Jews are sometimes represented to us as sowing hatred and strife among the nations, that Israel may grow rich on the spoils, and establish her empire over the Gentiles. The charge rests on a total misconcep- 1 Theodore ReiuaelTs Histoire des Israelites , p. 387. 2 Geschichte der Juden, vol. xi., p. 406, and following. Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 369 tion of the spirit of Judah. The three men who, while dining together in Berlin in July 1870, dropped their forks in dismay at the thought that the war might, after all, slip out of their hands—were not Israelites. The Jew is peaceful. This is true, not only of the Jewish disposition, which is not commonly regarded as warlike, but also, and in no less degree, of Judaism itself. If there is anything constant in its tradition, it is the love for peace, the glorification of peace. Here, again, Judaism harmonises with Christianity, because both religions rest on the same basis. How can we forget that the great doctrine of human brotherhood, given to the world by the apostles of Galilee—the doctrine in which it is so often claimed to¬ day that all religion and all morality are summed up— is a Jewish-Christian doctrine that has its roots in the Hebrew religion. These Jews, who are accused of an incurable tribal spirit, were the first to proclaim that all men are brothers, descendants of the same Adam and the same Kve. “ Why,” asks the Talmud, “ was there but one Adam in the beginning ? In order that all men should have the same father, and that one nation should not be able to say to another: * our ances¬ tors were richer or greater than thine.’ ” All men are brothers, all nations are sisters. “In thee,” said the Tord to Abraham, “shall all families of the earth be blessed.” 1 And this human brotherhood, which the sacred books placed in the cradle of the race, the seers of Judah have embodied in their visions of the future. At a time when the mitred Assyrian crushed the people beneath the wheels of his chariot of war, the captive Jew yet dared to proclaim that the day was coming when peace and harmony would reign for ever 1 Genesis, xii., 3. 24 3 7 ° Israel A mong the Nations. among the nations. The primitive brotherhood was to be re-established at the end of time. Its prophetic emblems are well known ; they are those of Eden : the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the wolf and the lamb shall pasture together. Beautiful symbols of a noble hope ! What do they mean, if not that the weakness of the little nations will be respected by those that are great and strong ? Maimonides, the eagle of the Synagogue, takes pains to tell us that this will be accomplished without a miracle. In his eyes, the lamb and the kid stand for Israel, the wolf and the panther for the nations converted to justice and peace. What matters the interpretation of the rabbis ? Brotherhood among men, peace among nations, this is an ideal in which there is nothing exclusive ; and if this is cosmo¬ politanism, where is the patriot who could take offence at it ? We know what name Israel has given to these hopes. The reign of the Messiah. We find ourselves again confronted by the great doctrine of Judah, and again we must confess that this old Oriental doctrine har¬ monises with all that is loftiest in our modern aspira¬ tions. The golden age to be, which the Jews of Alexandria prophesied to the Graeco-Roman world through the voice of the sibyls, teste David cum Sibylld, has now become the dream of our fast-aging Occident. Israel, son of Amos, says : “ And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into prun- ing-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Have such visions become criminal in the Europe of the Hohenzollerns ? Or do we Frenchmen not realise that these far-off promises accord with our national spirit and our faith in justice? The reign of peace Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 371 brought about by a reign of equal law, human frater¬ nity realised through the liberty of the nations, is not this the prophesy which our seers, also, dared, in 1789, proclaim to the world from the height of their pre¬ sumptuous Sinai ? Does Christianity forbid us to hope for such an age of peace ? By no means. Christianity authorises such hopes, it has made them its own ; it has striven to real¬ ise them, nor has it waited for our philosophers. If the Christian nations would heed the voice of the Church, which, day b}' day, prays that peace may reign among them, the world might soon say : “ Oh, war, where is thy sting ? ” After the truce of God, we should have the peace of God. The new dispensation has entered upon the inheritance of the old dispensation, and what the prophets of Carmel dimly foresaw, the Gospel has pledged itself to verify ; if it has not yet succeeded, the fault lies in the pride of life and the lust of the eyes. This aspiration towards peace, between the sons of an universal Father, between all nations and all classes, is so thoroughly a part of the new dispensation as well as of the old, that, in order to attain it, certain sons of Israel have not hesitated to appeal to the papacy. Thus, Isaac Pereire (in more than one respect a repre¬ sentative Jew of the modern type) addressed, shortly before his death, a petition to L,eo XIII. And this dream of the old Sephardim banker was taken up re¬ cently by M. J. Darmesteter, in whom a young savant and a young poet were blended. Here are Jews who surely cannot be charged with national exclusiveness. 1 1 J. Darmesteter’s Les ProphHes d * Israel , preface. Cf. Gust. d’Fichtal’s Les Evangiles, introduction. Isaac Pereire, a practical mind despite his Utopian dreams, asked that the function of arbiter between the nations be entrusted to the 37 ^ Israel Among the Nations . For some, it is true, these great dreams of the future are associated with Israel’s past. They cling to the promises made to the house of Judah, and in the humanity of the future, unified under the reign of jus¬ tice, they reserve a place for the daughter of Zion. They behold in their hopes, according to the visions of Micah and Isaiah, the platform of Moriah, the moun¬ tain of the house of the Ford, towering above the hills, and all nations flowing into it to celebrate a New Feast of Redemption. To Joseph Salvador , 1 son of ancient Israel and of modern France, in whom the traditions of Judah were blended with our French aspirations, Jerusalem appeared veiled in the mists of the future, as the ideal centre of humanity, the holy city of the novum foodus, or com¬ pact of alliance between the peoples. This French Jew hoped that the city of David might become the Washington of the United States of the world, the federal capital of the East and the West and the North and the South, reconciled, each with the rest, by the supremacy of justice. But Salvador is already an old man, and the Israelites who share his hopes are grow¬ ing rare. With most of them the universal spirit has gained ascendancy over the tribal spirit, humanity casts Israel into the shade. If their utopian dreams have still a national tinge, it is not a Jewish, but rather a French, German, or Anglo-Saxon tinge. Thus J. Darmesteter, in reformulating the ideas of Salvador, Holy See. This Jew would have had the Pope “establish a line of demarcation between the ambitions of the different powers, between France and Germany, between Austria and Italy,” etc.—I. Pereire’s La Question Religieuse y 1878. 1 Paris , Rome , and Jerusalem. Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 373 claims for Paris, the secular Jerusalem of the Revo¬ lution, the title of the holy city of the future . 1 2 And if the Jews should persist in claiming this glory for the little state of Judaea, they would not lack Gentile support. Many Christians also, of every sect, in their dreams of the rejuvenation of this old earth, allot a place to the holy city, the eternal symbol of our high¬ est hopes. Until recently many Catholics regarded the city of the seven hills as destined to become the ideal centre, the moral umbilicus of humanity; but since it has sunk to the position of a national capital, secular¬ ised and disloyal Rome can no longer aspire to such a dignity, and many eyes, accustomed to look towards the banks of the Tiber, are now slowly turning from the new to the old Jerusalem . 3 But, be they utopian fancies or prophetic visions, a 1 What the French Jews say of France and the French Revo¬ lution, the American Jews say of the United States and the American Revolution. Thus, I read in the A merican Hebrew , on the subject of the commemoration of Christopher Columbus (October 14th, 1892): “ This is the Zion from which goeth forth the law. Here is Liberty enlightening the world. . . . We look no longer to Palestine or Jerusalem as our Mecca. . . . This land has become our Canaan. . . . America is the Messiah of mankind, the refuge of the oppressed of all na¬ tions,” etc. 2 We could give many indications of the interest which Christians of every denomination are once more beginning to take in Jerusalem. I shall point out but one—the campaign led by a religious scholar, P. Tondiui di Quarenghi, in favour of the adoption of the meridian of Jerusalem as an international meridian. I shall not speak of those who wish to transport the Holy See to Jerusalem ; in the actual state of the world, this would be equivalent to banishing it beyond the pale of civilisa¬ tion. 374 Israel A mong the Nations. truce to these great dreams, the most beautiful, per¬ haps, that have ever soothed the slumbers of the children of men! It is almost three thousand years old, this dream of Israel; but a short while ago it seemed to us that its time of fulfilment had come, that its realisation was near at hand. The soothsayers of the Gentiles had promised it to us, and the century that no longer be¬ lieved in prophesies, still had faith in their horoscope. And yet, can the soothsayers of the Gentiles and the prophets of Zion have both been mistaken, after all ? The nations of to-day are like armies drawn up in battle array, and awaiting the onset of the morrow. When will our eyes be gladdened by the dawn of that happy day on which the lamb will pasture beside the lion, and the kid lie down with the leopard ? .Instead of drawing nearer to it, never has Europe seemed further removed from its realisation. No matter, it is a good thing for the world that our hearts still cling to this great dream. Both the Old and the New Testament forbid us to despair. It is the duty of us Christians, especially, free as we are from all tribal spirit and racial exclusiveness, not to betray this noble hope of attaining peace through justice, but to bring about its triumph among nations and races, as well as among classes and individuals. We cannot leave it to the exclusive care of the sons of Jacob; here, again, it is our duty to labour for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the reign of Peace and Righteous¬ ness, by sweeping away all that divides the peoples and sunders the tribes of men. Beati pacifici, said the Preacher on the Mount. And I, also, in writing these pages and in banishing from my lips all words of hatred, in refusing to believe that differences of blood can breed an eternal enmity between the posterity of Cosmopolitanism and Fraternisation . 375 Japhet and the sons of Shern—I have the consciousness of having contributed my own feeble share to this work of peace ; and in doing so, I believe that I have been true to that spirit of charity and gentleness that breathes upon us from the hills of Galilee. GLOSSARY OF HEBREW WORDS. Amoraim = the authorities given in the Ghemara. Apicoresim = epicureans ; also infidels and sceptics. Askenazim = German Jews as contrasted with Spanish Jews. Bar-Cocheba = “Son of a Star,” a pseudo-Messiah; led the last great but unsuccessful war of the Jews against Rome under Hadrian, A.D. 132-135. Beni- or Bnai-Israel = Sons of Israel; also a Jewish tribe in India, remnant of an ancient Israelitish colony, and having retained or adopted many pagan rites. Chanuka = Feast of the Maccabees. Cohanim = Priests of the Synagogue. Gher = a proselyte. G01 = a Christian. Goim = plural of Got. Golouss or Golus = exile. Hakham = “ The Wise ” ; also name for rabbi or teacher in Eastern communities. Halakha = single decisions of the codified, but originally oral, por¬ tion of the Rabbinical Law. Halakhot = plural of Halakha. Halukka = distribution of relief money among poor Jews, especially in the Holy Land. Hassidim = “ The Pious Ones ” ; also a mystic sect among Russian and Galician Jews, believing in miracles performed by their rabbis. Hazzan = reader or cantor. Hebra = charitable society or association. Hebroth = plural of Hebra. Heder = school; narrow school-room of the Ghetto. 377 378 Glossary of Hebrew Words. Herem = excommunication, anathema. Kahal = congregation, especially the Jewish community of Russia. Kedeshoth — harlots, or women who worship at the shrine of Astarte. Kosher = food prepared according to Jewish dietary law. Maggid = Polish Jewish preacher and interpreter of the Bible. Mazzoth = unleavened cakes, the only bread eaten at Passover. Melamed = teacher. Mitzva = divine commandment ; also, religious practice. Mitzvoth = plural of Mitzva. Mohel = the one who performs the rite of circumcision. Nabi = prophet. Rosh-Hashanah = Jewish New-Year. Sanhedrim = highest court of justice in Judsea. Schachter = butcher, the same as Schochet . Schochet = slaughterer of animals according to traditional custom. Sephardim = Spanish Jews, as contrasted with German Jews. Shames = sexton, or care-taker in the Synagogue. Shir-Hashirim = The Song of Songs. Sivan = third Jewish month. Sopherim = scribes ; the ancient interpreters of the written or Mosaic Law. Talar = gaberdine. Tales, or Talet = white shawl with fringes worn in the Synagogue at morning service. Talmid = pupil, student. Tammouz = fourth Jewish month. Tarefa = opposite of Kosher. Food forbidden to the Jews. Tossafists = glossators of the Talmuds in eleventh to thirteenth cen¬ tury. Tzadig, or Tzadik = a righteous one. Zehar, or Zohar = the great Book of Mystic Lore, or Cabala, ascribed to Simon ben Jochai of the second century, but com¬ piled thirteenth century B.c. INDEX. A Acta Sanctorum, 41 Agobard, Archbishop, 109 Ahasuerus, King, 78, 287 ; (Wan¬ dering Jew), 4, 237, 286 Alexandria, 38 Alsace, forged receipts of, 27 Amor aim, 135, 184 Andrew (martyr), 41 Anticlericalism, 45, 46, 75, 363, 364 Antisemitic movement, 74, 75 Antisemitism, causes, 10, 45, 230; aspects, 11—14 ; growth, 12 ; pretended grievances, 15, 43 - 45 , 47 , 48 , 72-76; an¬ tiquity of, 77, 78 ; consistent, 99; compared with anticleri¬ calism, 45, 363, 364 Antokolsky, 235, 285 Apicoresim , 273 Apostles, 18, 98, 102 Armenians, 81, 82, 303 Aryan, 11, 67, 87, 88, 89-94, 305 Askenazim , 57, 60, 119, 120, 205, 305 , 306, 314, 319 , 322, 323, 331 , 332 Asmoneans, 102, 106 Atavism, 11, 14, 179, 210, 257, 360 Auerbach, 279, 287 Auto-da-fe , 27, 35, 184 B Babylon, rabbis of, 23 Bamberger, 242 Bar-Cocheba , 294 Barrabas (Jew of Malta), 215 Beck, Karl, 280 (note) Beer, 280 ; Beer-Isaac, 2 ; W., 240 Benedict, Sir Julius, 254 (note) Ben Ezra, Abraham, 188, 288 Beni- Israel, 62, 114, 122, 134, 227 Bernstein, 280 Bible, 33, 57, 58, 227, 238, 248 283 _ Blandia, 26 Borne, Ludwig, 252, 260, 276, 324 Brandes, George, 261 Bre'al, 234 Brotherhood, human, 20, 369-371 Browning, R., 288 C Cabala, 223, 292 Calvinist, 35 Carriere, 123, 316 Cerf-Beer, 2, 345 Chanuka , 273, 321 (note) Chaucer, 37 Christ, 18, 97, 98 Christianity and Judaism, differ¬ ences, 26, 133, 134 ; resem¬ blances, 16, 69, 94, 297-300, 366 , 369 Chrysostomus of Antioch, 109 Circumcision, 105, 106, 108, 137, 161 Civilta Cattolica, 48 Cohanim , 17, 101 (note), 126, 174 379 380 Index. Cohen, Mme. Coralie, 289, 290 “ Colaphisation,” 200 Condorcet, 295 Constituent Assembly, 2 Copts, 82, 303 Corfu, 38 Costa, Sir Michael, 254 (note) Cowen, F., 254 (note) Cremieux, 242, 268 Crusades, 9, 36 D D’Alembert, 53 Dalitzky, Menahen Mendel, 319 Damascus, 38 Darmesteter, Arsene, 190, 234, 237 (note), 317 (note), 360 : James, 55, 190, 234, 289, 371, 372 Darwin, 216 David, King, 237 De Barrios, Miguel, 315 Decalogue, 18, 19, 57 D’Eichthal, Gustave, 289 Derembourg, 234 Descartes, 59, 250 Diderot, 48, 53, 295 Disraeli, Benjamin, 207, 219, 242, 243, 244, 257, 258 (note), 287, 334 Dohm, 345 Druses, 82, 303 E Easter outbreaks against Jews, 36 Ebers, Georg, 280 Education, compulsory, 185 Eighteenth century, 53, 54 Eliot, George, 287, 288, 353 Encyclopaedists, 53 Environment, influence of, 119, 143, 217, 253 Essenes, 125 Esther, Book of, 78 F Falachas (black Jews of Abys¬ sinia), 113 Fould, 242 Franchetti, 289 Frank, 61 Franks, laws of, 23 Franzos, 280 Frederick, Emperor, 50 French, literature, 266, 267, 270- 272; operette, 268 ; Protest¬ ants, 303, 304, 316, 333, 361 ; Revolution, 1, 2, 3, 12, 53-56 G Gabirol, Salomon Ibn, Rabbi, 189 Gambetta, Leon, 242-244, 262, 334, 340 (note) Ganganelli, 39 (note), 40, 41 (note) Germania , 47, 48 Ghemara , 21-23, 3