Works Of Israel Zangwill

CHOSEN PEOPLES

The American Jewish Book CompanyNew York1921

Chosen PeoplesCopyright, 1919, By The MacMillan Company. 

Printed byThe Lord Baltimore PressBaltimore, Md. 

CHOSEN PEOPLES

Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture"delivered before the Jewish Historical Societyat University College on Easter-PassoverSunday, 1918/5678

 TO MRS. REDCLIFFE N. SALAMAN THIS LITTLE BOOK IN HER FATHER'S MEMORY

NOTE

The Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture was founded in 1917, under theauspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, by hiscollaborators in the translation of "The Service of the Synagogue, "with the object of fostering Hebraic thought and learning in honour ofan unworldly scholar. The Lecture is to be given annually in theanniversary week of his death, and the lectureship is to be open tomen or women of any race or creed, who are to have absolute liberty inthe treatment of their subject. 

FOREWORD

Mr. Arthur Davis, in whose memory has been founded the series ofLectures devoted to the fostering of Hebraic thought and learning, ofwhich this is the first, was born in 1846 and died on the first day ofPassover, 1906. His childhood was spent in the town of Derby, wherethere was then no Synagogue or Jewish minister or teacher of Hebrew. Spontaneously he developed a strong Jewish consciousness, and anenthusiasm for the Hebrew language, which led him to become one of itsgreatest scholars in this, or any other, country. 

He was able to put his learning to good use. He observed the wisemaxim of Leonardo da Vinci, "Avoid studies of which the result dieswith the worker. " He was not one of those learned men, of whom thereare many examples--a recent and conspicuous instance was the late LordActon--whose minds are so choked with the accumulations of theknowledge they have absorbed that they can produce little or nothing. His output, though not prolific, was substantial. In middle life hewrote a volume on "The Hebrew Accents of the Twenty-one Books of theBible, " which has become a classical authority on that somewhatrecondite subject. It was he who originated and planned the newedition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote mostof the prose translations. When he died, though only two volumes outof the six had been published, he left the whole of the text complete. To Mr. Herbert M. Adler, who had been his collaborator from thebeginning, fell the finishing of the great editorial task. 

Not least of his services lay in the fact that he had transmitted muchof his knowledge to his two daughters, who have worthily continued histradition of Hebrew scholarship and culture. 

Arthur Davis's life work, then, was that of a student and interpreterof Hebrew. It is a profoundly interesting fact that, in our age, movements have been set on foot in more than one direction for therevival of languages which were dead or dying. We see before our eyesWelsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, with thehope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose. Such movements show that our time is not so utilitarian andmaterialistic as is often supposed. A similar revivifying process isaffecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a rituallanguage, sheltered within the walls of the Synagogue; often not fullyunderstood, and never spoken, by the members of the congregations. Nowit is becoming in Palestine once more a living and spoken language. 

Hebrew is one example among many of a language outliving for purposesof ritual its use in ordinary speech. A ritual is regarded as a sacredthing, unchanging, and usually unchangeable, except as the result ofsome great religious upheaval. The language in which it is framedcontinues fixed, amid the slowly developing conditions of the workadayworld. Often, indeed, the use of an ancient language, which hasgradually fallen into disuse among the people, is deliberatelymaintained for the air of mystery and of awe which is conveyed by itsuse, and which has something of the same effect upon the intellect asthe "dim religious light" of a cathedral has upon the emotions. Further, it reserves to the priesthood a kind of esoteric knowledge, which gives them an additional authority that they would desire tomaintain. So we find that in the days of Marcus Aurelius an ancientSalian liturgy was used in the Roman temples which had become almostunintelligible to the worshippers. The ritual of the religion of Isisin Greece was, at the same period, conducted in an unknown tongue. Inthe present age Church Slavonic, the ecclesiastical language of theorthodox Slavs, is only just intelligible to the peasantry of Russiaand the neighbouring Slav countries. The Buddhists of China conducttheir services in Sanscrit, which neither the monks nor the peopleunderstand, and the services of the Buddhists in Japan are either inSanscrit or in ancient Chinese. I believe it is a fact that inAbyssinia, again, the liturgy is in a language called Geez, which isno longer in use as a living tongue and is not understood. 

But we need not go to earlier centuries or to distant countries forexamples. In any Roman Catholic church in London to-day you will findthe service conducted in a language which, if understood at all bythe general body of the congregation, has been learnt by them only forthe purposes of the liturgy. 

Of all these ritual languages which have outlived their current useand have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, sofar as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs ofrenewing its old vitality--like the roses of Jericho which appear tobe dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover theirvitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again inPalestine Hebrew may recover something of its old supremacy in thefield of morals and of intellect. 

To render this possible the work of scholars such as Arthur Davis hascontributed. To him this was a labour of love, and for love. He wouldreceive no payment for any of his religious work or writings. Part ofthe profits that accrued from the publication of his edition of "TheServices of the Synagogue" has been devoted to the formation of a fundfrom which will be defrayed the expenses--after the first--of a seriesof annual lectures on subjects of Jewish interest, to be delivered bymen of various schools of thought. We are fortunate that the initiallecture is to be delivered to-day by the most distinguished of livingJewish men of letters. 

Arthur Davis was a man of much elevation and charm of character. Hetook an active part in the work of communal, and particularlyeducational, organizations. He was one of those men--not rare amongJews, though the rest of the world does not always recognize it--whoare philanthropic in spirit, practical in action, modest, self-sacrificing, devoted to a fine family life, having in them muchof the student and something even of the saint. It is fitting that hismemory should be kept alive. 

 HERBERT SAMUEL. 

CHOSEN PEOPLES

I

The claim that the Jews are a "Chosen People" has always irritated theGentiles. "From olden times, " wrote Philostratus in the third century, "the Jews have been opposed not only to Rome but to the rest ofhumanity. " Even Julian the Apostate, who designed to rebuild theirTemple, raged at the doctrine of their election. Sinai, said theRabbis with a characteristic pun, has evoked _Sinah_ (hatred). 

In our own day, the distinguished ethical teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit, complains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked andblighted all other national inspiration: in his book "The Soul ofAmerica, " he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally "the claimto spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world. "

The recent revelation of racial arrogance in Germany has provided ourenemies with a new weapon. "Germanism is Judaism, " says a writer inthe American _Bookman_. The proposition contains just that dash oftruth which is more dangerous than falsehood undiluted; and the sayingascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his timepraying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. "As he talksto-day at Potsdam and Berlin, " says Verhaeren, in his book "Belgium'sAgony, " "the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousandyears ago at Jerusalem. " The chronology is characteristic ofanti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrewreckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings ofJerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, likeJudaism, has evolved a doctrine of special election. Spiritual in theteaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross andnarrow in the _Deutsche Religion_ of Friedrich Lange. "The Germanpeople is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of theLord. " And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a"Man of War" who demands "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, " and crieswith savage sublimity:--

 I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries, And will recompense them that hate Me, I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, And my sword shall devour flesh. 

Judaism has even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel byMiriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes isa byword. "We utterly destroyed every city, " Deuteronomy declares;"the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining;only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil ofthe cities. " David, who is promised of God that his seed shall beenthroned for ever, slew surrendered Moabites in cold blood, and JudasMaccabæus, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral cityof Ephron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male init, and passed across its burning ruins and bleeding bodies. Theprophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations--the phrase is his, notAdam Smith's--streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. "For thatnation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish. . . . Aliensshall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee. Thou shalt suck the milk of nations. " "The Lord said unto me, " saysthe second Psalm, "Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Askof Me and I will give the nations for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shaltbreak them with a rod of iron. "

Nor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. EverySaturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for materialprosperity and the promise of ultimate glory: "Thou shalt lend untomany nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over manynations but they shall not rule over thee. " "Our Father, our King, " heprays at the New Year, "avenge before our eyes the blood of Thyservants that has been spilt. " And at the Passover Seder Service hestill repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath onthe heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling. "Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of theLord!"

II

Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity oregotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia, which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball, "should be found really resembling Judæa, whose national greeting was"Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame andthunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity;whose mediæval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what mightbe almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that plannedin secret, performed in daring. " And, as a matter of fact, some ofthese passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianicprosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework:the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that isto be avenged is the blood of martyrs "who went through fire and waterfor the sanctification of Thy name. "

But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore--ascompletely as Jesus did--that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" hadbeen commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of earlyPharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policyof Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of theLord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinckover Belgium and not of a mediæval Jew over the desolated home ofJacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only theother Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me shewould like to kill every German--man or woman--with her own hand!

And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside itshistoric conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said JamesHinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it. "And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a ChosenPeople, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that cangive us the clue to the Bible. This is the only "Guide to thePerplexed, " and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded whenby allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist helaboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was theeffort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The_Baraitha_ of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a thirdtext must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to thatdistorted dialectic known as _Pilpul_. The only true "Conciliador" ishistory, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizingrationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere--or rather everywhere. Thesame method that softened the Oriental amorousness of "The Song ofSolomon" into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in thehands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church. But if Reason cannot always--as Bachya imagined--_confirm_ tradition, it can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strandsfrom the higher in that motley collection of national literaturewhich, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked withstrayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to theapocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes ofeven a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism whenput forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward asuniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the peoplethat produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected andcanonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed becauseoccasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworthsthere is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery. 

III

As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his "Biblical Archæology" and as SirJames Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritualis permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonideshimself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to apurer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices andgradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as withpractices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuriesof spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterlybeyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it hasreplaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea waswiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukesthe angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when Mycreatures are perishing?" The very miracles of the Old Testament wereside-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely specialcreations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which wentits course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages, is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort ofthe soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interferedwith the voting on a legal point, _en mashgîchin be-bathkol_--"Wecannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, notheaven"--was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reasonand the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that theera of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of theTalmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking. Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers andsaints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, fromMendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it hasbeen at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism neverto have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great areverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for themasses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the newback again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piouslyforward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, "averitable museum of relics, " or as whales have vestiges of hind legswith now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism hadbegun to evolve "the service of the Synagogue, " but it did not shedthe animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by thedestruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needssubstitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through theages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were theJehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popularimagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosingIsrael was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow thatJudaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago. The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament thatis reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only byJudaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturatedwith the conception of a people chosen not for its own but foruniversal salvation, that the more material prophecies--evokedmoreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved toforetell restoration and glory--are practically swamped. At the worst, we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there arein the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and theother setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us tounderstand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life isconsecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, arerarely able to separate the success of their mission from their ownindividual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesuslooked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at theright hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has thebalance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side ofidealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilateserves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. Whenhe brought the Roman ensigns with Cæsar's effigies to Jerusalem, theJews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defilingdeification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiersand menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester andwent home. "But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid theirnecks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly ratherthan the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed. " And Pilate, touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how theJews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him. 

"God's witnesses, " "a light of the nations, " "a suffering servant, " "akingdom of priests"--the old Testament metaphors for Israel's missionare as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occurare unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passionwith poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter ofIsaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version ofthe Bible we owe to America. )

 Behold My servant whom I uphold; Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth; I have put My spirit upon him, He shall make the right to go forth to the nations: He shall not fail or be crushed Till he have set the right on the earth, And the isles shall wait for his teaching. Thus saith God the LORD, He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth, He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it, He that giveth bread unto the people upon it, And spirit to them that walk therein: I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, And have taken hold of thy hand, And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, For a light of the nations; To open the blind eyes, To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house. 

Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of allcivilization. "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as amighty stream. " "Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neithershall there be war any more. "

Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of externaltriumph. "Despised and forsaken of men, " Isaiah paints Israel. "Yet hebore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors . . . With his stripes we were healed. "

Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen orMatthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But thatthis ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is lessunderstood of the world. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hastchosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law. " Here is nochoice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that"from Zion shall the Law go forth" it is obvious what that servant'stask is to be. "What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house ofIsrael, " says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist?Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. "A Law, andcommandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us. " Beforethese were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records, Israel was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them couldhe enjoy peculiar favour. "Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto Myvoice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasurefrom among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall beunto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. " A chosen people isreally a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert thatthe Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israelaccepted the yoke. 

How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen Peoplepostulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr. Lucien Wolf once urged that "the yoke of the Torah" had fashioned aracial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages overaverage humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperanceand family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality andbrain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough toinvite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen. But whether this general superiority--a superiority not inconsistentwith grave failings and drawbacks--is due to the rigorous selection ofa tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieumaintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of yearsthan that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of thepeople, or the people--precisely because of its greatness--made theTorah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificialelection to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority oraim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolicaltruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed--when one considers theimpress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, andimagination of the world--might well be credited with the intuition ofgenius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And theJews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would havethe ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless thatelection is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solelyfor world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel whenfashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of theconsummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be butthe symbol. It is with _Alenu_ that every service ends--the prayerfor the coming of the Kingdom of God, "when Thou wilt remove theabominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty andall the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turnunto Thyself all the wicked of the earth. . . . In that day the Lordshall be One and His name One. " Israel disappears altogether in thisdiurnal aspiration. 

IV

Israel disappears, too, in whole books of the Old Testament. What hasthe problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism ofEcclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter wouldscarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentiallyrooted in a race. 

In the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ--half Whitman, half St. Francis--not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under thebenediction of the Hebrew poet's mood. "The high hills are for thewild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies. . . . The young lionsroar after their prey, and seek their food from God . . . Man goethforth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening. " Even in amore primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism revealsitself. To the bard of Genesis the rainbow betokens not merely acovenant between God and man but a "covenant between God and everyliving creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. "

That the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist inface of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He sharesin the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in hisfinely felt but intellectually incoherent book, "God the InvisibleKing, " dismisses Him as a malignant and partisan Deity, jealous andpettily stringent. At most one is entitled to say with Mr. IsraelAbrahams in his profound little book on "Judaism" that "God, in theearly literature a tribal, non-moral Deity, was in the laterliterature a righteous ruler, who, with Amos and Hosea, loved anddemanded righteousness in man, " and that there was an expansion from anational to a universal Ruler. But if "by early literature" anybodyunderstand simply Genesis, if he imagines that the evolutionarymovement in Judaism proceeds regularly from Abraham to Isaiah, he isgrossly in error. No doubt all early gods are tribal, all earlyreligions connected with the hearth and ancestor worship, but the Godof Isaiah is already in Genesis, and the tribal God has to be exhumedfrom practically all parts of the Bible. But even in the crudities ofGenesis or Judges that have escaped editorship I cannot find Mr. Wells's "malignant" Deity--_He_ is really "the invisible King. " Thevery first time Jehovah appears in His tribal aspect (Genesis xii. )His promise to bless Abraham ends with the assurance--and it almostinvariably accompanies all the repetitions of the promise--"And inthee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. " Nay, as Ipointed out in my essay on "The Gods of Germany, " the very first wordsof the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, "strike a magnificent note of universalism, which is sustained in thederivation of all humanity from Adam, and again from Noah, with oneoriginal language. Nor is this a modern gloss, for the Talmud alreadydeduces the interpretation. Racine's "Esther" in the noble lineslauded by Voltaire might be almost rebuking Mr. Wells:--

 Ce Dieu, maître absolu de la terre et des cieux, N'est point tel que l'erreur le figure à vos yeux: L'Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouvrage; Il entend les soupirs de l'humble qu'on outrage, Juge tous les mortels avec d'égales lois, Et du haut de son trône interroge les rois. 

--there is the true Hebrew note, the note denounced of Nietzsche. 

Is this notorious "tribal God" the God of the Mesopotamian sheikhwhose seed was so invidiously chosen? Well, but of this God Abrahamasks--in what I must continue to call the epochal sentence in theBible--"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham, infact, bids God down as in some divine Dutch auction--Sodom is not tobe destroyed if it holds fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, nayten righteous men. Compare this ethical development of the ancestor ofJudaism with that of Pope Gregory XIII, in the sixteenth century, somethirty-one centuries later: _Civitas ista potest esse destrui quandoin ea plures sunt hæretici_ ("A city may be destroyed when it harboursa number of heretics"). And this claim of man to criticize God Jehovahfreely concedes. Thus the God of Abraham is no God of a tribe, but, like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the Godof Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-centuryMartineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to thehuman conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of theSodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater andmore wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of freethought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah andthe people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptiansspeak, saying, For evil did He bring them forth to slay them in themountains. . . ? Turn from Thy fierce wrath and repent of this evilagainst Thy people. " Moses goes on to remind Him of the covenant, "Andthe Lord repented of the evil which He said He would do unto Hispeople. " In the same chapter, the people having made a golden calf, Moses offers his life for their sin; the Old Testament here, as in somany places, anticipating the so-called New, but rejecting the notionof vicarious atonement so drastically that the attempt of dogmaticChristianity to base itself on the Old Testament can only be describedas text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses'squestioning--"I AM THAT I AM"--yields already the profoundmetaphysical Deity of Maimonides, that "invisible King" whom theanonymous New Year liturgist celebrates as:

 Highest divinity, Dynast of endlessness, Timeless resplendency, Worshipped eternally, Lord of Infinity!

And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman andthat "a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt showsthat the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettablerejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity;while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth, "with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabitewoman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have, in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces, and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph ofthe latter is that the race being one with the religion could notresist that religion's universal implications. If there were only asingle God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He beconfined to Israel? The Mission could not but come. The true God, urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him throughidols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blindseekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always beenthe governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the originof the term Jew, " says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. "Thename is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs ofthis people, even though they be of different race. " Where indeed laythe privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined anon-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah asgreater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquilaand Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; whilethe orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unlessaccompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyteOnkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinicliterature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesqueconception of their status towards their former families, cannotcounterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work, "The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans, " that there was a carefullyplanned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell thePharisees: "Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte"? Do notJuvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeansproselytised almost by force? "The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts, "says Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, "became familiar facts inall the great cities. " And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion, which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatestdocuments, declares in noble language: "There ought to be but oneTemple for one God . . . And this Temple common to all men, because Heis the common God of all men. "

It would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers ofthis temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there wereseventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediævaland rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcelyexists--even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whosesuccess will be the test of his genuineness. And Spinoza--though he, of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper--refusedto see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system forensuring his eternity. The comparatively modern Chassidism, anticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has aspecial channel through which it receives God's gifts. Of contemporaryReform Judaism, the motto "Have we not one father, hath not one Godcreated us?" was formally adopted as the motto of the Congress ofReligions at Washington. "The forces of democracy _are_ Israel, " criesthe American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra-modern adaptation of theTalmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblicalliterature almost a note of apology for the assumption of the Divinemission: perhaps it is as much the offspring of worldly prudence as ofspiritual progress. The Talmud observed that the Law was only given toIsrael because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. AbrahamIbn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had toreveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himselfaloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the veryargument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his"Foundations of Belief. " Crescas, in the fourteenth century, declared--like an earlier Buckle--that the excellence of the Jewsprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in hisrecent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when RabbiAkiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all othernations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said--whatindeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards. In the words of Hosea:

 When Israel was a child, then I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son. 

No evidence of the universalism of Israel's mission can away with thefact that it was still _his_ mission, the mission of a Chosen People. And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literatureand broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendaryfantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimestouching in its tender mysticism, sometimes almost grotesque in itscrude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation arebound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in Hischastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehensionproduced the concept of the _Chillul Hashem_, "the profanation of theName. " Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower thereputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the contrary, hewas to promote the _Kiddush Hashem_ "the sanctification of the Name. "Thus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a senseof _Noblesse oblige_. As the "Hymn of Glory" recited at New Year saysin a more poetic sense: "His glory is on me and mine on Him. " "Heloves His people, " says the hymn, "and inhabits their praises. "Indeed, according to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceivedGod as existing only through Israel's continuous testimony and ceasingwere Israel--_per impossibile_--to disappear. It is a mysticism notwithout affinity to Mr. Wells's. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr. Wassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, likeFather and Son, are each incomplete without the other. In anotherpassage of Hosea--a passage recited at the everyday winding ofphylacteries--the imagery is of wedded lovers. "I will betroth theeunto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness andin judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy. "

But it is in the glowing, poetic soul of Jehuda Ha-Levi that thiselection of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supremeand uncompromising expression. "Israel, " declares the author of the"Cuzari" in a famous dictum, "is among the nations like the heartamong the limbs. " Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump, feeding the veins of the nations--Harvey was still five centuries inthe future--he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbolof the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thuschosen, he declares plumply that it is as little worthy ofconsideration as why the animals had not been created men. This is, ofcourse, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration blowethwhere it listeth. As Tennyson said in a similar connection:

 And if it is so, so it is, you know, And if it be so, so be it!

V

But although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Sciencecannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it canshow us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in consideringyourself a Chosen People--as indeed the accusation with which we beganreminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a missionto itself is not a sudden growth. "Unlike any other nation, " says thelearned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in hisarticle on "Chosen People" in the _Jewish Encyclopædia_, "the Jewishpeople began their career conscious of their life-purpose andworld-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religioustruth. " This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theorythat its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not hisown, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress andevolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the SinaiticCovenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Missionwith it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peopleswill, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant wasother than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, asublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to othernations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feelingof a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees, " says Mr. Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said, history is the sole clue to the Bible--history, which according toBacon, is "philosophy teaching by example. " And the more modern thehistory is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it. We have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest ofnations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblestmission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another greatprophet--sprung like Amos from the people--through Abraham Lincoln, America had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when shebegan to call herself "God's own country, " but her National Anthem, "My Country, 'tis of thee, " dating from 1832, fixes the date whenAmerica, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickensfelt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eaglerhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their ownfreedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The MeltingPot, " with its high universal mission, first at home and now over theworld at large. 

The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the missionof defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breachundaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotismwhich finds such moving expression in the pæan of Shakespeare:

 This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . . . . . . This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, . . . . . . . This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land. 

This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, andat first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soondeveloped an assurance of special protection--"the favour of the loveof Heaven, " wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica, " "we have greatargument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propendingtowards us"--was tempered by that humility still to be seen in theliturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the mightof the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred andtwenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethantranslators of the Bible called "Our Sion, " and whose mission, according to Milton, had been to sound forth "the first tidings andtrumpet of reformation to all Europe, " had sunk to the swaggeringmilitarism that found expression in "Rule, Britannia. "

 When Britain first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain: Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves. 

 The nations not so blest as thee Must in their turn to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish, great and free, The dread and envy of them all. 

 To thee belongs the rural reign, Thy cities shall with commerce shine: All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles, thine. 

It is the true expression of its period--a period which Sir JohnSeeley in his "Expansion of England" characterizes as the period ofthe struggle with France for the possession of India and the NewWorld: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France hadreplaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritimeStates of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeleysums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Well may Mr. Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an OldTestament sense of being "answered in stormy oracles of air and sea"lowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the seaserving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be thehigh-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 theEast India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 isfounded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. Ithelps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated inthe atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of theBible. 

In Cromwell, that typical Englishman, these two strands of impulseare seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seizedJamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was notCatholic Spain the enemy of God? _Delenda est Carthago_ is his feelingtowards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. "The Lord byhis Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us theopportunity to draw off those horse. " Yet this elect of God ruthlesslymassacres surrendered Irish garrisons. "Sir, " he writes with almostchildish naïveté, "God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannonshot. " We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite. Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously likeBismarck's that his deceased hero

 The soldier taught that inward mail to wear And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?

The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves withthe universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangeroustendency. 

At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of"Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals ofthe joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mobcelebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British tradein the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of theEmpire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This isnot wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule, Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense ofthe lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historicexcogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls thegrosser Hebrew prophecies:

 I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world: All nations serve thee; every foreign flood, Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames, he points to the virgin shores "beyond the vast Atlantic surge" andcries:

 This new world, Shook to its centre, trembles at her name: And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms. 

 Britons, proceed, the subject deep command, Awe with your navies every hostile land. Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain: They rule the balanced world who rule the main. 

But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was writtenexpressly to persuade the England of 1883 _not_ to give up India andthe Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truersoul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodistmovement began and which manifested itself, among other things, insweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula forthe still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophetarose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualizethe doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson ispurely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as thevisions of the Hebrew bards. 

 The Lord our God Most High, He hath made the deep as dry, He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth. 

But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose ischaracteristically practical. 

 Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience; Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford, Make ye sure to each his own, That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord. 

And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has Englandon the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economicmotives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in Britishimperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, howthe prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, howthe mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backwardrays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light fromthe stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shiningroad. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Notunlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shootthe arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselvespurposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes thetingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour ofretrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that thatgreat struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundlesscourage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of onenation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. Therecould not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallenfriend, the poet Vernède, yet even he writes:--

 God grant to us the old Armada weather. 

Thomson was not poet enough--nor the eighteenth century naïveenough--to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that hethrows "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfredthe Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's futureis prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospectivehabit of national missions. 

The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her sevencenturies has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shapingitself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not alwaystroubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthopecomplained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to

 Magic casements opening on the foam Of faëry lands in perilous seas forlorn. 

But Israel had abundant time to perfect her conception of herself. From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of therace are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a processanalogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved intoa People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel wasinscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existenceelsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lordwould write there, no more objective reality than the Charter whichBritain received when "first at Heaven's command" she "rose from outthe azure main, " or than that _Contrat Social_ by which Rousseauexpressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this isnot to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these vitalizingimpulses "Life-illusions, " but the criteria of objective truth do notapply to volitional verities. National missions become false only whennations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolutionrob them of their mystery. _Hamlet_ is not less inspired becauseShakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers. 

If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations underits spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblicalvocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universaltendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:--

 O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat æther. 

The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II, assured the monarch:--

 Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon! Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger, More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers. 

The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be "inpursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and theEarth. "

VI

Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that"Germanism is Judaism, " we are able to see its full grotesqueness. IfGermanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Whereit does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of itscitizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which movesto great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman hasunfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the commonBritish breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are ratherwith Japan than with Judæa. For in Japan, too, beneath all theromance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of theindividual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection ofthose ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcelyexisted, which could expose infants or kill off old men because theState was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greaterscale of the mediæval city commune, which sucked its vigorous lifefrom the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding itssubservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, hasgiven a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for theyshall inherit the earth. "

Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, sawclearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that"in which the slow suicide of all is called Life, " and "a welcomeservice unto all preachers of death"--a cold, ill-smelling, monstrousidol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "Weare, " boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and theTangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible. "

But Germany was not always thus. "High deeds, O Germans, are to comefrom you, " wrote Wordsworth in his "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty. " Andit throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when shelay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for herby Fichte was one of peace and righteousness--to penetrate the life ofhumanity by her religion--and he denounced the dreams of universalmonarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on hispeople as "the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan, ""To you, " he says, "out of all other modern nations the germs of humanperfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire ofmind and reason--to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as theruler of the world. " And throwing this mission backwards, he sees inwhat the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by theGoths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tideof tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kantand Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalistas Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesiedthat if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they, "by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity oftheir inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers": and incuriously prophetic language he called for a hero "to realize by bloodand iron the political regeneration of Germany. "

If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal forhis nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is tohold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of theworld. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified asthe stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; asPol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: "If the devil knew he hadhorns the cherubim would offer him their place. " And though it was onlyin the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of theWill-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the "blood and iron" ofJunkerdom that perverted Prussia--Junkerdom still lives simply--as thegross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. Amodern German author describes his countrymen--it is true he has turnedMohammedan, probably out of disgust--as tragically degenerated andturned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. Thisindustrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is byVerhaeren--attacking Judaism from another angle--ascribed to its Jews, so it is comforting to remember that when England started the EastIndia Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany isclearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in PrussiaEngland meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely moreconscious and consequent than her "Rule, Britannia" period, with aruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. WhileEngland's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany'sright hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinisteractivities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel--"The Sense ofthe Past"--a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot getback to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization. Nor is the civilization that followed the struggle for America by thescramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late forthe first mêlée and smarting under centuries of humiliation--did notLouis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?--is avenging on our century thesins of the seventeenth. 

So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies areto be sought within the five maritime countries which precededGermany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is thesame alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and thearmies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turningback the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences wasapproaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors ofwar. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell, but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicatesthe Puritan with the Cavalier. "From childhood, " he is quoted assaying, "I have been under the influence of five men--Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. " Nogreat man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatricalgreatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thuswere "the Kings of Jerusalem" even "six thousand years ago. " Our kingshad the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and theRabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eightqualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of agood name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem"Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King inthe seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the differencebetween Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer hisenemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression andviolence, "and precious will their blood be in his sight. "

VII

If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference betweenJudaism and Germanism, it would be the word "Recessional. " While theprophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. "You only have Iknown among all the families of the earth, " says the message throughAmos. "_Therefore_ I will visit upon you all your iniquities. " TheBible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. "Israel is thevillain, not the hero, of his own story. " Alone among epics, it is outfor truth, not high heroics. To flout the Pharisees was not reservedfor Jesus. "Behold, ye fast for strife and contention, " said Isaiah, "and to smite with the fist of wickedness. " While some German writers, not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced, vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to MichaelAngelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposesthe flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracityunknown among other peoples--is even Washington's story told withoutgloss?--that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancientsavagery. "The title of a nation to its territory, " says Seeley, "isgenerally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if wecould recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre. " Thedispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by NewZealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends thisuniversal process is sophisticated. 

 Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course thecontemporary ideal backwards--as all missons are put--and into theprophetic mouth of Jove:--

 Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos. 

It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupyPalestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him:"Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dostthou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nationsthe Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. "

In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded longbefore Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was toreveal himself "first to His Englishmen, " added that they "mark notthe methods of His counsel and are unworthy. "

"Is India free, " wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure fromactual warfare, " sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell thewar-whoop. " For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of thenations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a "History of England" inthe very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes "who loved fieldsand seized them. " But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks thechorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like MaximilianHarden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost theonly real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine theliterature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from findingany swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in itsmost popular work--Lazarus's "Soziale Ethik im Judentum"--published aslate as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews--a graveindictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justlyexplaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of theindividual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically thatwhat unites individuals separates nations. "The work of justice shallbe peace, " he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the oldGermany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent--indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversarythat the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, andthat another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie desKrieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels mento act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblestand most practical treatise on "Perpetual Peace" came from that otherGerman professor, Kant, the hope is not altogether _ausgechlossen_ thatin the internal convulsion that must follow the war, there may be anupheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proudto say that it _is_ Judaism. 

VIII

But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord morethan watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for themorning. " Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies indarkness, listening to the silence of God--a silence that can be felt. 

"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancientJews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning fromempty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created aninner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since. Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invadedRome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes, began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of thediscarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St. Augustine to create an inner "City of God. " How shall humanity meetthis blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build onthe tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel nocontribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? Butthat quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common perilfrom the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus. And it was always an exaggerated quarrel--half misunderstanding, likemost quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God wasother than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively--aslogicians say--those conceptions of divine sonship and sufferingservice which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theologyof atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of themmight have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism whichits essential genius demands, and which even without them it only justmissed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expresslyrecalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in thework of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work doneby Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if theuniversalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reasonwhy the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaismless future than Buddhism--that religion of negation andmonkery--whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in andcontemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than thatapocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles thedisciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in itsancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to theApocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions ofthe Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenenmaintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievablynarrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificenttribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the lastword is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the futureChristian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonementas injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as astumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plainman, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, andwith the simplicity of greatness he confessed: "I have never unitedmyself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving myassent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicatedstatements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articlesof Belief and Confessions of Faith. " "When any church, " he added, "will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification formembership, . . . 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour asthyself, ' that church will I join with all my heart and with all mysoul. "

Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about thatLincoln did not even know there _was_ such a church? But call thecoming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matterwhen all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to saveit from meaningless frictions and massacres? "Would that My peopleforgot Me and kept My commandments, " says the Jerusalem Talmud. Toolong has Israel been silent. "Who is blind, " says the prophet, "butMy servant, or deaf as My messenger?" He is not deaf to-day, he isonly dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the newworld-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not tobe. "The religion of the Jews is indeed a light, " said Coleridge inhis "Table Talk, " "but it is as the light of the glow-worm which givesno heat and illumines nothing but itself. " Why let a sun sink into aglow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not evenpay--that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud, _Dina dimalchuthadina_ ("In Rome do as the Romans"). Despite every effort of Jews asindividual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe sawthem a century ago in his "Borough":--

 Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight, They will not study and they dare not fight. 

It is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the timehas come when they must fight as Jews--fight that "mental fight" fromwhich that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not ceasetill he had "built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. " Tobuild Jerusalem in every land--even in Palestine--that is the Jewishmission. As Nina Salaman sings--and I am glad to end with the words ofa daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture isgiven--

 Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless, Every land our home for ill or good? Ours it was long since to join the hands of nations Through the link of our own brotherhood. 

AFTERWORD

DR. ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, Reader in Talmudic and RabbinicLiterature in the University of Cambridge, in seconding the vote ofthanks to the speakers, moved by the President of the JewishHistorical Society (Sir Lionel Abrahams, K. C. B. ), said that theChairman had already paid a tribute to the memory of Arthur Davis. Buta twice-told tale was not stale in repetition when the tale was toldof such a man. He was a real scholar; not only in the general sense ofone who loved great books, but also in the special sense that hepossessed the technical knowledge of an expert. His "Hebrew Accents"reveals Arthur Davis in these two aspects. It shows mastery of anintricate subject, a subject not likely to attract the meredilettante. But it also reveals his interest in the Bible asliterature. He appreciated both the music of words and the melody ofideas. When the work appeared, a foreign scholar asked: "Who was histeacher?" The answer was: himself. There is a rather silly proverbthat the self-taught man has a fool for his master. Certainly ArthurDavis had no fool for his pupil. And though he had no teacher, he hadwhat is better, a fine capacity for comradeship in studies. "Acquirefor thyself a companion, " said the ancient Rabbi. There is nofriendship equal to that which is made over the common study of books. At the Talmud meetings held at the house of Arthur Davis were foundedlifelong intimacies. Unpretentious in their aim, there was in thesegatherings a harmony of charm and earnestness; pervading them was thetrue "joy of service. " Above all he loved the liturgy. Here theself-taught man must excel. Homer said:--

 Dear to gods and men is sacred song. Self-taught I sing: by Heaven and Heaven alone The genuine seeds of poesy are sown. 

And, as the expression of his inmost self, he gave us the best editionof the Festival Prayers in any language: better than Sachs'--thanwhich praise can go no higher. This Prayer Book is his true memorial, unless there be a truer still. Perhaps his feeling that he mightafter all have lost something because he had no teacher made him sowonderful a teacher of his own daughters. In their continuance of hiswork his personality endures. At the end of his book on Accents hequoted, in Hebrew, a sentence from Jeremiah, with a clever play on thedouble meaning of the word which signifies at once "accent" and"taste. " Thinking of his record, and how his beautiful spirit animatesthose near and dear to him, we may indeed apply to him this same text:"His taste remaineth in him and his fragrance is not changed. "

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