Part 4

Egypt enslaved thee, Babylon crushed thee, Rome led thee captive, Homeless thy head.

Where are those nations Mighty and fearsome? Thou hast survived them, They are long dead.

Nations keep coming, Nations keep going, Passing like shadows, Wiped off the earth.

Thou an eternal Witness remainest, Watching their burial, Watching their birth.

Pray, who revealed thee Heavens great secret: Death and destruction Thus to defy?

Suffering torture, Stake, inquisition―― Prithee, who taught thee Never to die?

Ay, and who gave thee Faith, deep as ocean, Strong as the rock-hills, Fierce as the sun?

Hated and hunted, Ever thou wand’rest, Bearing a message: God is but one!

Pray, has thy saga Likewise an ending, As its beginning Glorious of old?

Israel, my people, God’s greatest riddle, Will thy solution Ever be told?

P. M. RASKIN, 1914.

THE SECRET OF ISRAEL’S IMMORTALITY[14]

WHAT has prevented this constantly migrating people, this veritable Wandering Jew, from degenerating into brutalized vagabonds, into vagrant hordes of gipsies? The answer is at hand. In its journey through the desert of life, for eighteen centuries, the Jewish people carried along the Ark of the Covenant, which breathed into its heart ideal aspirations, and even illumined the badge of disgrace affixed to its garment with an apostolic glory. The proscribed, outlawed, universally persecuted Jew felt a sublime, noble pride in being singled out to perpetuate and to suffer for a religion which reflects eternity, by which the nations of the earth were gradually educated to a knowledge of God and morality, and from which is to spring the salvation and redemption of the world.

Such a people, which disdains its present but has the eye steadily fixed on its future, which lives as it were on hope, is on that very account eternal, like hope.

H. GRAETZ, 1853.

THE BOOK OF BOOKS

THE Bible, what a book! Large and wide as the world, based on the abysses of creation, and towering aloft into the blue secrets of heaven. Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfilment, birth and death――the whole drama of humanity――are contained in this one book. It is the Book of Books. The Jews may readily be consoled at the loss of Jerusalem, and the Temple, and the Ark of the Covenant, and all the crown jewels of King Solomon. Such forfeiture is as naught when weighed against the Bible, the imperishable treasure that they have saved. If I do not err, it was Mahomet who named the Jews the ‘People of the Book’, a name which in Eastern countries has remained theirs to the present day, and is deeply significant. That one book is to the Jews their country. Within the well-fenced boundaries of that book they live and have their being; they enjoy their inalienable citizenship, are strong to admiration; thence none can dislodge them. Absorbed in the perusal of their sacred book they little heeded the changes that were wrought in the real world around them. Nations rose and vanished, States flourished and decayed, revolutions raged throughout the earth――but they, the Jews, sat poring over this book, unconscious of the wild chase of time that rushed on above their heads.

H. HEINE, 1830.

THE BIBLE[15]

AS to an ancient temple Whose vast proportions tower With summit inaccessible Among the stars of heaven; While the resistless ocean Of peoples and of cities Breaks at its feet in foam, Work that a hundred ages Hallow: I bow to thee.

From out thy mighty bosom Rise hymns sublime, and melodies Like to the heavens singing Praises to their Creator; While at the sound, an ecstasy, A trance, fills all my being With terror and with awe―― I feel my proud heart thrilling With throbs of holy pride.

Oh! come, thou high beneficent Heritage of my fathers; Our country, altar, prophet, Our life, our all, art thou! In doubt, in woe, in outrage, In pangs of dissolution That wring our tortured hearts, Come, ope the rosy portals Of Hope to us once more.

Ah me! what countless miseries, What tears all unregarded. Hast thou consoled and softened With gentle voice and holy! How many hearts that struggle With doubt, remorse, anxiety, With all the woes of ages, Dost thou, on ample pinions, Lift purified to Heaven!

Listen! the world is rising, Seeking, unquiet, thrilling, Awakens the new century To new hopes and new visions. Men hear upon the mountains Strange and life-giving voices; Every soul seems to wait, And from that Book the signal For the new day shall come.

DAVID LEVI, 1846. (_Trans. Mary A. Craig._)

* * * * *

FROM century to century, even unto this day, through the fairest regions of civilization, the Bible dominates existence. Its vision of life moulds states and societies. Its Psalms are more popular in every country than the poems of the nation’s own poets. Beside this one book with its infinite editions ... all other literatures seem ‘trifles light as air’.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1895.

A JEWISH VERSION OF THE BIBLE

I

OUR great claim to the gratitude of mankind is that we gave to the world the word of God, the Bible. We have stormed heaven to snatch down this heavenly gift, as the Paitan[16] puts it. We threw ourselves into the breach, and covered it with our bodies against every attack. We allowed ourselves to be slain in hundreds and thousands rather than become unfaithful to it, and we bore witness to its truth, and watched over its purity, in the face of a hostile world. The Bible is our sole _raison d’être_; and it is just this which the Higher Anti-Semitism, both within and without our ranks, is seeking to destroy, denying all our claims for the past and leaving us without hope for the future. This intellectual persecution can only be fought with intellectual weapons, and unless we make an effort to recover our Bible we are irrevocably lost from both worlds.

S. SCHECHTER, 1903.

II

THERE is an old tradition that the day on which, for the first time, the Pentateuch was translated into a foreign language――into Greek――was considered by Jews as a day of great national calamity. It was feared that the translation, being incorrect, might become the source of error instead of being the fountain of divine truths. The fear felt and expressed about two thousand years ago has been fully justified by the history of the several versions that have since been undertaken, and by the large number of false doctrines, supposed to be founded on the authority of Holy Writ, whilst really originating in mistakes made by translators.

M. FRIEDLÄNDER, 1886.

* * * * *

NEW translations of the Bible have appeared and are appearing in various languages; but none of them has made, or intends to make, a complete and exhaustive use of Jewish contributions to the subject. Great university professors who know much, very much, but who do not know Jewish literature, unconsciously assume that they do not know it because it is not worth knowing――a judgement that no man has a right to pronounce until he has studied it――and this they have not done.

M. SULZBERGER, 1898.

* * * * *

THE book, commonly known as the Authorized, or King James’s Version, has been so long looked upon with a deep veneration almost bordering on superstitious dread, that, to most persons, the very thought of furnishing an improved translation of the Divine records will be viewed as an impious assumption and a contempt of the wisdom of former ages. Since the time of King James, however, the world has progressed in biblical knowledge no less than in all other branches of science; and giant minds have laboured to make clear what formerly was obscure.

ISAAC LEESER, 1855.

* * * * *

I FULLY admit the great merits of the Revised Version of the Bible. It corrects many faults, amends many mistranslations of the so-called King James’s Version, without impairing the antique charm of the English Bible, without putting out of tune the music so dear to our ears. Yet even that great work, compiled by the most eminent scholars and learned theologians in the land, is disfigured by errors due to dogmatic preconceptions.

HERMANN ADLER, 1896.

III

THE present translation[17] has a character of its own. It aims to combine the spirit of Jewish tradition with the results of biblical scholarship, ancient, mediaeval, and modern. It gives to the Jewish world a translation of the Scriptures done by men imbued with the Jewish consciousness, while the non-Jewish world, it is hoped, will welcome a translation that presents many passages from the Jewish traditional point of view.

The Jew cannot afford to have his own Bible translation prepared for him by others. He cannot have it as a gift, even as he cannot borrow his soul from others. If a new country and a new language metamorphose him into a new man, the duty of this new man is to prepare a new garb and a new method of expression for what is most sacred and most dear to him.

_From_ TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE, _Jewish Version of the Bible, 1916._

IV

SCRIPTURE must be interpreted according to its plain, natural sense, each word according to the context. Traditional exposition, however, may also be taken to heart, as it is said: ‘Is not My word like as fire?’――consisting of many sparks――‘and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?’――and therefore capable of various explanations.

RASHI, 1080.

V

THERE is none that hath ever made an end of learning it, and there is none that will ever find out all its mysteries. For its wisdom is richer than any sea, and its word deeper than any abyss.

ECCLESIASTICUS 24. 28, 29.

ISRAEL THE PEOPLE OF REVELATION

HAD there been no Israelites there would be no Torah. Israel’s pre-eminence is not derived from Moses, it is Moses whose pre-eminence is due to Israel. The Divine love went out towards the multitude of the children of the Patriarchs, the Congregation of Jacob. Moses was merely the divinely chosen instrument through whom God’s Blessing was to be assured unto them. We are called not the people of Moses, but the people of God.

YEHUDAH HALEVI, 1141.

* * * * *

THE Greeks were not all artists, but the Greek nation was alone capable of producing a Phidias or a Praxiteles. The same was the case with Judaism. It is certain that not all Jews were prophets; the exclamation, ‘Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets!’ was a pious wish. Nevertheless, Israel is the people of Revelation. It must have had a native endowment that could produce, that could rear, such men. Nor does Judaism claim to be the work of single individuals; it does not speak of the God of Moses, nor of the God of the Prophets, but of the God of Israel. The fact that the greatest prophet left his work unfinished contains a profound truth. _No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day._ Thereon our ancient teachers remark: ‘His grave should not serve as a place of pilgrimage whither men go to do honour to _one man_, and thus raise him above the level of man’.

A. GEIGER, 1865.

THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND ISRAEL IS HIS PROPHET[18]

WHEN one thinks how this earliest of theistic creeds has persisted through the ages, by what wonderful constructive statecraft it has built up a race of which the lowest unit is no atom in a ‘submerged tenth’, but an equal member of a great historic brotherhood, a scion of the oldest of surviving civilizations, a student of sacred books, a lover of home and peace; when one remembers how he has agonized――the great misunderstood of history――how his ‘pestilent heresy’ has been chastised and rebuked by Popes and Crusaders, Inquisitors and Missionaries, how he has remained sublimely protestant, imperturbable amid marvellous cathedrals and all the splendid shows of Christendom, and how despite all and after all he is living to see the world turning slowly back to his vision of life; then one seems to see the ‘finger of God’, the hand of the Master-Artist, behind the comedy-tragedy of existence, to believe that Israel is veritably a nation with a mission, that there is no God but God and Israel is His prophet.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL.

MOSES[19]

HOW small Sinai appears when Moses stands upon it! This mountain is only the pedestal for the feet of the man whose head reaches up to the heavens, where he speaks with God.... Formerly I could not pardon the legislator of the Jews his hatred against the plastic arts. I did not see that, notwithstanding his hostility to art, Moses was a great artist, and possessed the true artistic spirit. But this spirit was directed by him, as by his Egyptian compatriots, to colossal and indestructible undertakings. He built human pyramids, carved human obelisks; he took a poor shepherd family and created a nation from it――a great, eternal, holy people; a people of God, destined to outlive the centuries, and to serve as a pattern to all other nations, even as a prototype to the whole of mankind. He created Israel.

As of the master-builder, so of his work――the Hebrew people――I did not speak with sufficient reverence. I see now that the Greeks were only handsome youths, whilst the Jews were always men――powerful, indomitable men――who have fought and suffered on every battlefield of human thought.

H. HEINE, 1854.

THE PROPHETS[20]

I

’TIS a little people, but it has done great things. It had but a precarious hold on a few crags and highlands between the desert and the deep sea, yet its thinkers and sages with eagle vision took into their thought the destinies of all humanity, and rang out in clarion voice a message of hope to the downtrodden of all races. Claiming for themselves and their people the duty and obligations of a true aristocracy, they held forth to the peoples ideals of a true democracy founded on right and justice. Their voices have never ceased to re-echo around the world, and the greatest things that have been done to raise men’s lot have been always in the spirit, often in the name, of the Hebrew prophets.

JOSEPH JACOBS, 1919.

* * * * *

THE mere foretelling of future events is the lowest stage of prophecy, and in the eyes of the great Prophets of Israel it was of quite secondary importance. Their aim was to fathom the secrets of holiness; and their striving, by means of admonition and moral suasion, to guide the peoples in the paths which lead mankind to spiritual and political well-being.

SHEMTOB IBN SHEMTOB, 1489.

II

IT was part of the spirit of Prophecy to be dumb-founded at human ferocity as at something against nature and reason. In the presence of the iniquities of the world, the heart of the Prophets bled as though from a wound of the Divine Spirit, and their cry of indignation re-echoed the wrath of the Deity. Greece and Rome had their rich and poor, just as Israel had in the days of Jeroboam II, and the various classes continued to slaughter one another for centuries; but no voice of justice and pity arose from the fierce tumult. Therefore the words of the Prophets have more vitality at the present time, and answer better to the needs of modern souls, than all the classic masterpieces of antiquity.

JAMES DARMESTETER, 1891.

* * * * *

IN Hebrew prophecy we have no crumbling monument of perishable stone, the silent witness of a past that is dead and gone, but the quickening breath of the spirit itself. In the ardent souls of the Prophets the thought of Deity was centred as in a burning-glass――a fire that consumed them, a shining light for men. Theirs was the abiding sense of an eternal Will and Purpose underlying human transient schemes, an eternal Presence, transfusing all of life as with a hidden flame; so that love of country, love of right, love of man, were not alone human things, but also divine, because they were embraced and focussed in a single living unity――the love of God.

JOSEPHINE LAZARUS, 1893.

THE TALMUD[21]

THE Talmud is the work which embodies the civil and canonical law of the Jewish people, forming a kind of supplement to the Pentateuch――a supplement such as took 1,000 years of a nation’s life to produce. It is not merely a dull treatise, but it appeals to the imagination and the feelings, and to all that is noblest and purest. Between the rugged boulders of the law which bestrew the path of the Talmud there grow the blue flowers of romance――parable, tale, gnome, saga; its elements are taken from heaven and earth, but chiefly and most lovingly from the human heart and from Scripture, for every verse and every word in this latter became, as it were, a golden nail upon which it hung its gorgeous tapestries.

The fundamental law of all human and social economy in the Talmud was the absolute equality of men. It was pointed out that man was created alone――lest one should say to another, ‘I am of the better or earlier stock’. In a discussion that arose among the Masters as to which was the most important passage in the whole Bible, one pointed to the verse ‘And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. The other contradicted him and pointed to the words ‘This is the book of the generations of man’ (Gen. 5. 1)――not black, not white, not great, not small, but _man_.

‘The law given on Mount Sinai’, the Masters said, ‘though emphatically addressed to one people, belongs to all humanity. It was not given in any king’s land, not in any city or inhabited spot――it was given on God’s own highway, in the desert――not in the darkness and stillness of night, but in plain day, amid thunder and lightning. And why was it given on Sinai? Because it is the lowliest of mountains――to show that God’s spirit rests only upon them that are meek and lowly in their hearts.’

The Talmud taught that religion was not a thing of creed or dogma or faith merely, but of active goodness. Scripture said, ‘Ye shall walk in the ways of the Lord’. ‘But the Lord is a consuming fire; how can men walk in His ways?’ ‘By being’, the rabbis answered, ‘as He is――merciful, loving, long-suffering. Mark how on the first page of the Pentateuch God clothed the naked――Adam; and on the last he buried the dead――Moses. He heals the sick, frees the captives, does good to His enemies, and is merciful both to the living and to the dead.’

The most transcendental love of the rabbis was lavished on children. All the verses of Scripture that spoke of flowers and gardens were applied to children and schools. The highest and most exalted title which they bestowed in their poetical flights upon God Himself was that of ‘Pedagogue of Man’. Indeed, the relationship of man to God they could not express more pregnantly than by the most familiar words which occur from one end of the Talmud to the other, ‘Our Father in Heaven’.

I have been able to bring before you what proves, as it were, but a drop in the vast ocean of Talmud――that strange, wild, weird ocean, with its leviathans, and its wrecks of golden argosies, and with its forlorn bells that send up their dreamy sounds ever and anon, while the fisherman bends upon his oar, and starts and listens, and perchance the tears may come into his eyes.

EMANUEL DEUTSCH, 1868.

JEWISH LITERATURE

RABBINISM was a sequel to the Bible, and if, like all sequels, it was unequal to its original, it nevertheless shared its greatness. The works of all Jews up to the modern period were the sequel to this sequel. Through them all may be detected the unifying principle that literature in its truest sense includes life itself; that intellect is the handmaid to conscience; and that the best books are those which best teach men how to live. This underlying unity gave more harmony to Jewish literature than is possessed by many literatures more distinctively national. The maxim ‘Righteousness delivers from death’ applies to books as well as to men. A literature whose consistent theme is Righteousness, is immortal.

I. ABRAHAMS, 1899.

THE WORK OF THE RABBIS[22]

JUDAISM and the Bible are by no means identical; the Bible is only one constituent part of Judaism, though the most fundamental one. Who taught the average Jew to understand his Judaism, to love his religion and his God? Without the zeal of the Rabbis, the Bible would never have become the guide of every Jew. They translated it into the vernacular for the people, and expounded it to the masses. They taught them not to despair under the tortures of the present, but to look forward to the future. At the same time they developed the spirit of the Bible and never lost sight of the lofty teachings of the Prophets. It is the immortal merit of the unknown Rabbis of the centuries immediately before and after the common era that they found and applied the proper ‘fences’ for the preservation of Judaism, and that they succeeded in rescuing real morality and pure monotheism for the ages that were to follow.

A. BÜCHLER, 1908.

ISRAEL’S HISTORY NEVER-ENDING

ISRAEL’S ‘Heroic History’, as Manasseh ben Israel called it, is in truth never-ending. Line upon line is still being added, and _finis_ will never be written on the page of Jewish history till the Light which shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day shall fall upon it, and illumine the whole beautiful world. Each Jew and each Jewess is making his or her mark, or his or her stain, upon the wonderful unfinished history of the Jews, the history which Herder called the greatest poem of all time. _‘Ye are my witnesses’, saith the Lord._ Loyal and steadfast witnesses is it, or self-seeking and suborned ones? A witness of some sort every Jew born is bound to be. He must fulfil his mission, and through good report and through evil report, and though it be only writ in water, he must add his item of evidence to the record that all who run may read.

LADY MAGNUS, 1886.

* * * * *

THE story of this little sect――the most remarkable survival of the fittest known to humanity――in no way corresponds with its numbers; it is not a tale of majorities. It is a story that begins very near the beginning of history, and shows little sign of drawing to a conclusion. It is a story that has chapters in every country on earth, that has borne the impress of every period. All men and all ages pass through it in unending procession.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1895.

THE MEANING OF JEWISH HISTORY

MAN is made man by history. It is history that causes the men of historic nations to be more civilized than the savage. The Jew recognizes that he is made what he is by the history of his fathers, and feels he is losing his better self so far as he loses his hold on his past history.

JOSEPH JACOBS, 1889.