Part 9

THE moral feelings of men have been deepened and strengthened, and also softened, and almost created, by the Jewish prophets. In modern times we hardly like to acknowledge the full force of their words, lest they should prove subversive to society. And so we explain them away or spiritualize them, and convert what is figurative into what is literal, and what is literal into what is figurative. And still, after all our interpretation or misinterpretation, whether due to a false theology or an imperfect knowledge of the original language, the force of the words remains, and a light of heavenly truth and love streams from them even now more than 2,500 years after they were first uttered.

BENJAMIN JOWETT.

* * * * *

ONE lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with distinctness, that the world is built somehow on moral foundations; that in the long run it is well with the good; in the long run it is ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets.

J. A. FROUDE, 1889.

THE BOOK OF JONAH.

AN involuntary smile passes over one’s features at the mention of the name of Jonah. For the popular conception sees nothing in this book but a silly tale exciting us to derision. I have read the Book of Jonah at least a hundred times, and I will publicly avow that I cannot even now take up this marvellous book, nay, nor even speak of it, without the tears rising to my eyes and my heart beating higher. This apparently trivial book is one of the deepest and grandest that was ever written, and I should like to say to every one who approaches it, ‘Take off thy shoes, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’.

Jonah receives from God the command to go to Nineveh to proclaim the judgement, but he rose to flee from the presence of the Lord by ship unto Tarshish in the far west. From the very beginning of the narrative, the genuine and loyal devotion of the heathen seamen is placed in intentional and exceedingly powerful contrast to the behaviour of the prophet――they are the sincere believers: he is the only heathen on board. After Jonah has been saved from storm and sea by the fish, he again receives the command to go to Nineveh. He obeys; and, wonderful to relate, scarcely has the strange preacher traversed the third part of the city crying out his warning, than the whole of Nineveh proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth. The people of Nineveh believed the words of the preacher and humiliated themselves before God; therefore, the ground and motive of the Divine judgement ceased to exist: ‘God repented of the evil that He thought to do them, and He did it not’. Now comes the fourth chapter, on account of which the whole book was written, and which cannot be replaced by paraphrase.

‘But it’ [i.e. God’s determining not to destroy Nineveh because of its sincere repentance] ‘displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I hasted to flee unto Tarshish: for I knew that Thou art a gracious God, and full of compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, and repentest Thee of the evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, Doest thou well to be angry? Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. And the Lord God prepared a gourd and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his evil case. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun arose, that God prepared a sultry east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and requested for himself that he might die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry even unto death. And the Lord said, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night; and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city; wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle’?

With this question the book closes. More simply, as something quite self-evident, and therefore more sublimely and touchingly, the truth was never spoken in the Hebrew Scriptures that God, as Creator of the whole earth, must also be the God and Father of the entire world, in whose loving, kind, and fatherly heart all men are equal, before whom there is no difference of nation and creed, but only men, whom He has created in His own image.[45]

C. H. CORNILL, 1894.

I AM convinced that the Bible becomes ever more beautiful the more it is understood.

J. W. GOETHE.

JOB

I CALL the Book of Job one of the grandest things ever written with pen ... a noble book, all men’s book! There is nothing, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit.

T. CARLYLE.

* * * * *

THIS extraordinary book――a book of which it is to say little to call it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world.

J. A. FROUDE, 1885.

ECCLESIASTES

THE old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can never cling too close to the past. _The thing that has been is the thing that will be again_; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the disillusions, miseries, insanities that for ever accompany the throes of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel; you may spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the Book of Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

THE BOOK OF ESTHER[46]

WITHIN it burn a lofty independence and a genuine patriotism.

The story of Esther, glorified by the genius of Handel and sanctified by the piety of Racine, not only affords material for the noblest and gentlest of meditations, but is a token that in the daily events――the unforeseen chances――of life, in little unremembered acts, God is surely present.

When Esther nerved herself to enter, at the risk of her life, the presence of Ahasuerus――‘I will go in unto the king, and if I perish I perish’――when her patriotic feeling vented itself in that noble cry, ‘How can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred’?――she expressed, although she never named the name of God, a religious devotion as acceptable to Him as that of Moses and David.

A. P. STANLEY, 1876.

* * * * *

WE search the world for truth; we cull The good, the pure, the beautiful From graven stone and written scroll, From all old flower-fields of the soul; And, weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said Is in the Book our mothers read.

J. G. WHITTIER.

THE TALMUD[47]

THE Talmud, which was as a second life to the men of the Ghetto, was not only a book of philosophy or devotion, it was a reservoir of national life; it was the faithful mirror of the civilization of Babylon and Judea, and, at the same time, a magical phantasmagoria of all the wild dreams, the fables, the legends, the scraps of science more or less exact, the reveries, the audacious theories discovered by the Wandering Jew in his endless travels. Every generation of Judaism had accumulated its facts and fancies there. Even the Bible itself did not come so close to the daily life of the Ghetto as the Talmud and the Mishna. The Bible was a thing eternal, apart, unchanging. The Talmud was a daily companion, living, breathing, contemporary, with a hundred remedies for a hundred needs. A nation persecuted, lives through its time of stress rather by its commentaries than by its Scriptures. In the Ghetto the Talmud was a door into the ideal always open. When the Christians burned the Jews they did no enduring harm to Judaism, for martyrdom purifies and strengthens every cause. But when they sequestrated every copy of the Talmud that fraud or force could discover, and burned the spiritual bread of a devoted people upon the public square, they committed an irreparable injury; for, by withdrawing its ideal, they debased the population of the Ghetto.

A. MARY F. ROBINSON, 1892.

THE HUMANITY OF JEWISH WISDOM

IN my early youth I read――I have forgotten where――the words of the ancient Jewish sage――Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou’?[48]

The inner meaning of these words impressed me with its profound wisdom, and I interpreted them for myself in this manner: I must actively take care of myself, that my life should be better, and I must not impose the care of myself on other people’s shoulders; but if I am going to take care of myself alone, of nothing but my own personal life, it will be useless, ugly, meaningless. This thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy.

I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age, not only because it is the firstborn, but also because of the powerful humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man.

MAXIM GORKY, 1916.

THE PHARISEES[49]

OF all the strange ironies of history, perhaps the strangest is that ‘Pharisee’ is current as a term of reproach among the theological descendants of that sect of Nazarenes who, without the martyr spirit of those primitive Puritans, would never have come into existence.

T. H. HUXLEY.

* * * * *

THE Pharisees built up religious individualism and a purely spiritual worship; they deepened the belief in a future life; they championed the cause of the laity against an exclusive priesthood; they made the Scriptures the possession of the people, and in the weekly assemblages of the Synagogue they preached to them the truths and hopes of religion out of the Sacred Books.... The Pharisees consistently strove to bring life more and more under the dominion of religious observance. By carefully formed habits, by the ceremonial of religious observances, religious ideas and sanctions could be impressed upon the people’s mind and heart. But the outward was subordinated to the inward.

CANON G. H. BOX, 1911.

* * * * *

PHARISAISM in history has had a hard fate. For there has seldom been for Christians the opportunity to know what Pharisaism really meant, and perhaps still more seldom the desire to use that opportunity. Is then the Christian religion so weak that it must be advocated by blackening the character of its oldest rival?

R. TRAVERS HERFORD, 1912.

THE JEWISH PRAYER BOOK

WHEN we come to view the half-dozen or so great Liturgies of the world purely as religious documents, and to weigh their value as devotional classics, the incomparable superiority of the Jewish convincingly appears. The Jewish Liturgy occupies its pages with the One Eternal Lord; holds ever true, confident, and direct speech with Him; exhausts the resources of language in songs of praise, in utterances of loving gratitude, in rejoicing at His nearness, in natural outpourings of grief for sin; never so much as a dream of intercessors or of hidings from His blessed punishments; and, withal, such a sweet sense of the divine accessibility every moment to each sinful, suffering child of earth. Where shall one find a hymn of universal faith like the Adon Olam, of mystical beauty like the Hymn of Glory[50]; or services so solemn, touching, and tender as those appointed for Yom Kippur? Compare the misery, gloom, and introspection surrounding other requiem and funeral services, with the chastened, dignified sobriety of the Hebrew prayer for the dying,[51] and the healthy, cheerful manliness of the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Again, there is most refreshing silence in regard to life-conditions after death. Neither is there any spiteful condemnation of the followers of other faiths; the Jew is singularly free from narrow intolerance.

Certainly the Jew has cause to thank God, and the fathers before him, for the noblest Liturgy the annals of faith can show.

G. E. BIDDLE, 1907.

IN A SYNAGOGUE[52]

DERONDA gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a ‘Gloria in excelsis’ that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both for long generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric proclamation, dry statement, and blessing; but this evening all were one for Deronda; the chant of the Chazan’s or Reader’s grand wide-ranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys’ voices from the little choir, the devotional swaying of men’s bodies backwards and forwards, the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a national faith, which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, had moulded the splendid forms of that world’s religion, was finding a remote, obscure echo――all were blent for him as one expression of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious.

GEORGE ELIOT, 1876.

THE TORCH OF JEWISH LEARNING[53]

LEARNING was for two thousand years the sole claim to distinction recognized by Israel. ‘The scholar’, says the Talmud, ‘takes precedence over the king.’ Israel remained faithful to this precept throughout all her humiliations. Whenever, in Christian or Moslem lands, a hostile hand closed her schools, the rabbis crossed the seas to reopen their academies in a distant country. Like the legendary Wandering Jew, the flickering torch of Jewish scholarship thus passed from East to West, from North to South, changing every two or three hundred years from one country to another. Whenever a royal edict commanded them to leave, within three months, the country in which their fathers had been buried and their sons had been born, the treasure which the Jews were most anxious to carry away with them was their books. Among all the _autos-da-fé_ which the daughter of Zion has had to witness, none has cost her such bitter tears as those flames which, during the Middle Ages, greedily consumed the scrolls of the Talmud.

A. LEROY BEAULIEU, 1893.

DURING THE CRUSADES[54]

IN the little town Tiberias, on the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret, sat the old Jew Eleazar, with his family, prepared to celebrate the Passover. It was the fourteenth day of the month Nisan of the year 1089.

After the head of the family had washed his hands, he blessed the gifts of God, drank some wine, took some of the bitter herbs, and ate and gave to the others. After that, the second cup of wine was served, and the youngest son of the house asked, according to the sacred custom, ‘What is the meaning of this feast?’

The father answered: ‘The Lord brought us with a strong hand out of the Egyptian bondage’. Thereafter a blessing was pronounced on the unleavened bread, and they sat down to eat. The old Eleazar spoke of past times, and contrasted them with the present: ‘Man born of woman lives but a short time, and is full of trouble; he cometh up like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth hence like a shadow, and continueth not. A stranger and a sojourner is he upon earth, and therefore he should be always ready for his journey as we are, this holy evening.’

The eldest son, Jacob, who had come home in the evening after a journey, seemed to wish to say something, but did not venture to do so till the fourth and last cup was drunk.

‘Now, Jacob’, said Eleazar, ‘you want to talk. You come from a journey, though somewhat late, and have something new to tell us. Hush! I hear steps in the garden!’

All hurried to the window, for they lived in troublous times; but, as no one was to be seen outside, they sat down again at the table.

‘Speak, Jacob’, Eleazar said again.

‘I come from Antioch, where the Crusaders are besieged by Kerboga, the Emir Mosul. Famine has raged among them, and of three hundred thousand Goyim, only twenty thousand remain.’

‘What had they to do here?’

‘Now, on the roads, they are talking of a new battle which the Goyim have won, and they believe that the Crusaders will march straight on Jerusalem.’

‘Well, they won’t come here.’

‘They won’t find the way, unless there are traitors.’

‘The Christians are misguided, and their doctrine is folly. They believe the Messiah has come, although the world is like a hell, and men resemble devils! And it ever gets worse....’

Then the door was flung open, and on the threshold appeared a little man, emaciated as a skeleton, with burning eyes――Peter the Hermit. He was clothed in rags, carried a cross in his hands, and bore a red cross-shaped sign on his shoulder.

‘Are you Christians?’ he asked.

‘No’, answered Eleazar, ‘we are of Israel.’

‘Out with you!――down to the lake and be baptized, or you will die the death!’

Then Eleazar turned to the Hermit, and cried, ‘No! I and my house will serve the Lord, as we have done this holy evening according to the law of our fathers. We suffer for our sins, that is true, but you, godless, cursed man, pride not yourself on your power, for you have not yet escaped the judgement of Almighty God.’

The Hermit had gone out to his followers. Those within the house closed the window-shutters and the door.

There was a cry without: ‘Fire the house!’

‘Let us bless God, and die!’ said Eleazar, and none of them hesitated. Eleazar spoke: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He will stand at the latter day upon the earth. And when I am free from my flesh, I shall see God. Him shall I see and not another, and for that my soul and my heart cry out.’

The mother had taken the youngest son in her arms, as though she wished to protect him against the fire which now seized on the wall.

Then Eleazar began the Song of the Three Children[55] in the fire, and when they came to the words,

‘O thank the Lord, for He is good, And His mercy endureth for ever’,

their voices were choked, and they ended their days like the Maccabees.

AUGUST STRINDBERG, 1907.

THE EXPULSION FROM SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 1492‒1497[56]

THE persecution of the Jewish race dates from the very earliest period in which Christianity obtained the direction of the civil powers; and the hatred of the Jews was for many centuries a faithful index of the piety of the Christians.

Insulted, plundered, hated, and despised by all Christian nations, banished from England by Edward I, and from France by Charles VI, they found in the Spanish Moors rulers who were probably not without a special sympathy for a race whose pure monotheism formed a marked contrast to the scarcely disguised polytheism of the Spanish Catholics; and Jewish learning and Jewish genius contributed very largely to that bright but transient civilization which radiated from Toledo and Cordova, and exercised so salutary an influence upon the belief of Europe. But when, in an ill-omened hour, the Cross supplanted the Crescent on the heights of the Alhambra, this solitary refuge was destroyed, the last gleam of tolerance vanished from Spain, and the expulsion of the Jews was determined.

This edict was immediately due to the exertions of Torquemada; but its ultimate cause is to be found in that steadily increasing popular fanaticism which made it impossible for the two races to exist together. In 1390, about a hundred years before the conquest of Granada, the Catholics of Seville being excited by the eloquence of a great preacher, named Hernando Martinez, had attacked the Jews’ quarter, and murdered 4,000 Jews, Martinez himself presiding over the massacre. About a year later, and partly through the influence of the same eminent divine, similar scenes took place at Valentia, Cordova, Burgos, Toledo, and Barcelona ... and more than once during the fifteenth century. At last the Moorish war, which had always been regarded as a crusade, was drawing to a close, the religious fervour of the Spanish rose to the highest point, and the Inquisition was established as its expression. Numbers of converted Jews were massacred; others, who had been baptized during past explosions of popular fury, fled to the Moors, in order to practise their rites, and at last, after a desperate resistance, were captured and burnt alive. The clergy exerted all their energies to produce the expulsion of the entire race, and to effect this object all the old calumnies were revived, and two or three miracles invented.

It must be acknowledged that history relates very few measures that produced so vast an amount of calamity. In three short months, all unconverted Jews were obliged, under pain of death, to abandon the Spanish soil. Multitudes, falling into the hands of the pirates, who swarmed around the coast, were plundered of all they possessed and reduced to slavery; multitudes died of famine or of plague, or were murdered or tortured with horrible cruelty by the African savages. About 80,000 took refuge in Portugal, relying on the promise of the king. Spanish priests lashed the Portuguese into fury, and the king was persuaded to issue an edict which threw even that of Isabella into the shade. All the adult Jews were banished from Portugal; but first of all their children below the age of fourteen were taken from them to be educated as Christians. Then, indeed, the cup of bitterness was filled to the brim. The serene fortitude with which the exiled people had borne so many and such grievous calamities gave way, and was replaced by the wildest paroxysms of despair. When at last, childless and broken-hearted, they sought to leave the land, they found that the ships had been purposely detained, and the allotted time, having expired, they were reduced to slavery and baptized by force. A great peal of rejoicing filled the Peninsula, and proclaimed that the triumph of the Spanish priests was complete.

Certainly the heroism of the defenders of every other creed fades into insignificance before this martyr people, who for thirteen centuries confronted all the evils that the fiercest fanaticism could devise, enduring obloquy and spoliation and the violation of the dearest ties, and the infliction of the most hideous sufferings, rather than abandon their faith.