Part 4

‘Don’t tell my wife,’ he exclaims one day, when a paroxysm that should have been fatal was not, and the doctor expressed what he meant for a reassuring belief, that it would not hasten the end. ‘Don’t tell my wife’--we seem to hear that sad little jest, so infinitely sadder than a moan, and our own eyes moisten. Perfectly upright geniuses, when suffering from dyspepsia, have not always shown as much consideration for their perfectly proper wives as does this ‘blackguard’ Heine, under torture, for his. It is conceivable that under exceptional circumstances a man may contrive to be a hero to his valet, but, unless he be truly heroic, he will not be able to keep up the character to his wife. Heine managed both. Madame Heine is still living,[16] and one may not say much of a love that was truly strong as death, and that the many waters of affliction could not quench. But the valet test, we may hint, was fulfilled; for the old servant who helped to tend him in that terrible illness lives still with Madame Heine, and cries ‘for company’ when the widow’s talk falls, as it falls often, on the days of her youth and her ‘_pauvre Henri_.’ There are traditional records in plenty of his cheerful courage, his patient unselfishness, his unfailing endurance of well-nigh unendurable pain. ‘_Dieu me pardonnera_, _c’est son métier_,’ the dying lips part to say, still with that sweet, inseparable smile playing about them. Shall man be more just than God? Shall we leave to Him for ever the monopoly of His _métier_?

DANIEL DERONDA AND HIS JEWISH CRITICS

_George Eliot and Judaism._ An attempt to appreciate _Daniel Deronda_. By Professor David KAUFMANN, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth. Translated from the German by J. W. FERRIER, 1877. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.

The latest echo from the critical chorus which has greeted _Daniel Deronda_ comes to us from Germany, in the form of a small book by Dr. Kaufmann, professor in the recently instituted Jewish Theological Seminary at Buda-Pesth. A certain prominence, which its very excellent translation into English confers upon this work, seems to be due less to any special or novel feature in its criticism than to the larger purpose shadowed forth in the title, ‘George Eliot and Judaism.’ It is advowedly ‘an attempt to appreciate _Daniel Deronda_,’ and is valuable and interesting to English society not as a critique on the plot or the characters of the book--on which points it strikes us, in more than one instance, as somewhat weak and one-sided--but as indicating from a Jewish standpoint in how far and how truly modern Judaism is therein represented. Unappreciative as the great mass of the reading public have shown themselves to the latest of George Eliot’s novels, the work has excited a considerable amount of curiosity and admiration on the ground of the intimate knowledge its author has evinced of the inner lives and of the little-read literature of the ‘Great Unknown of humanity.’ We think Dr. Kaufmann goes too far when he says, ‘The majority of readers view the world to which they are introduced in _Daniel Deronda_ as one foreign, strange, and repulsive.... It is not only the Jew of flesh and blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but the Jew under whatever shape he may appear, and even the airy productions of the poet’s fancy are denounced when they venture to take that people as their subject’ (p. 92). We think this view concedes very much too much to prejudice; but it is undoubtedly a fact that the first serious attempt by a great writer to make Jews and Judaism the central interest of a great work, has produced a certain sense of discord on the public ear, and that criticism has for the most part run in the minor key. Mr. Swinburne, perhaps, strikes the most distinctly jarring chord, when, in his lately published ‘Note on Charlotte Brontë,’ he owns to possessing ‘no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s harp,’ and, disclaiming ‘a taste for the dissection of dolls,’ ‘leaves Daniel Deronda to his natural place over the rag-shop door’ (pp. 21, 22). Even an ear so politely and elegantly owned defective might be able, it could be imagined, to catch an echo from the ‘choir invisible’; and poetic insight, one might almost venture to think, should be able to discern in poetic aspirations, however unfamiliar and even alien to itself, something different from bran. This arrow is too heavily tipped to fly straight to the goal. There are numbers, however, of the like school who, with more excuse than Mr. Algernon Swinburne, fail to ‘see anything’ in _Daniel Deronda_, and a criticism we once overheard in the Louvre occurs to us as pertinent to this point. The picture was Correggio’s ‘Marriage of St. Katharine,’ and to an Englishman standing near us it evidently did not fulfil preconceived conceptions of a marriage ceremony. He looked at it long, and at last turned disappointed away, audibly muttering, ‘Well, I can’t see anything in it.’ That was evident, but the failure was not in the picture. Preconceived conceptions count for much, whether the artist be a Correggio or a George Eliot, and ignorance and prejudice are ill-fitting spectacles wherewith to assist vision.

If it be an axiom that a man should be judged by his peers, we should think that George Eliot would herself prefer that her work should be weighed in the balance by those qualified to hold the scales, and should by them, if at all, be pronounced ‘wanting.’ A book of which Judaism is the acknowledged theme should appeal to Jews for judgment, and thus the question becomes an interesting one to the outer world,--What do the Jews themselves think of _Daniel Deronda_? Are the aspirations of Mordecai regarded by them as the expression of a poet’s dream, or a nation’s hope? What, in short, is the aspect of modern Judaism to the book?

‘Modern’ Judaism is itself, perhaps, a convenient rather than a correct figure of speech. There are modern manners to which modern Jews necessarily conform, and which have a tendency to tone down the outward and special characteristics of Judaism, as of everything else, to a general socially-undistinguishable level. But men are not necessarily dumb because they do not speak much or loudly of such very personal matters as their religious hopes and beliefs, more especially if in these days they are so little in the fashion as to hold strong convictions on such subjects. Our author distinctly formulates the opinion that ‘men may give all due allegiance to a foreign State without ceasing to belong to their own people’ (p. 21); and in the same sense as we may conceive a man honestly fulfilling all dues as good husband and good father to his living and lawful wife and children, and yet holding tenderly in the unguessed-at depths of memory some long-ago-lost love, so is it conceivable of many an unromantic-looking nineteenth century Jew, who soberly performs all good citizen duties, that the unspoken name of Jerusalem is still enshrined in like unguessed-at depths, as the ‘perfection of beauty,’ ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ Conventionalities conduce to silence on such topics, and therefore it is to published rather than to spoken Jewish criticisms we must turn in our inquiry, and the little book under review certainly helps us to a definite answer.

And we may notice, as a significant fact, that while on the part of general critics there has been some differing even in their adverse judgments, and a more than partial failure to grasp the idea of the book, there seems both here and abroad a grateful consensus of Jewish opinion that not only has George Eliot truly depicted the externals of Jewish _life_, which was a comparatively easy task, but has also correctly represented Jewish thought and the ideas underlying Judaism. Our author emphatically says, ‘_Daniel Deronda_ is a Jewish book, not only in the sense that it treats of Jews, but also in the sense that it is pre-eminently fitted for being understood and appreciated by Jews’ (p. 90); and again, ‘it will always be gratefully declared,’ he concludes, ‘_that George Eliot has deserved right well of Judaism_’ (p. 95). Does this, then, mean that the ‘national’ idea is a rooted, practical hope? Do English Jews, undistinguishable in the mass from other Englishmen, really and truly hold the desire, like Mordecai, of ‘founding a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old’? (_Daniel Deronda_, Book IV.) Do they indeed design to devote their ‘wealth to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors,’ to cleanse their fair land from ‘the hideous obloquy of Christian strife, which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of wild beasts to which he has lent an arena’ (_ibidem_)? Was Daniel’s honeymoon-mission to the East to have this practical result? The general Jewish verdict, as we read it, scarcely concedes so much; it sees rather in the closing scene of _Daniel Deronda_ the only weak spot in the book. Vague and visionary as are all honeymoon anticipations, those of Daniel, their beauty and unselfishness notwithstanding, strike Jewish readers as even more unsubstantial, even less likely of realisation, than such imaginings in general. Possibly, as in the old days of the Babylonian exile, ‘there be some that dream’ of an actual restoration, of a Palestine which should be the Switzerland of Asia Minor, which, crowned with ancient laurels, might sit enthroned in peace and plenty,--

‘Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-Be.’

But save with such few and faithful dreamers, memory scarcely blossoms into hope, and hope most certainly has not yet ripened into strong desire. It may come; but at present we apprehend the majority of Jews see the ‘future of Judaism’ not in the form of a centralised and localised nationality, but rather in the destiny foreshadowed by our author, in which ‘Israel will be greatest when she labours under every zone,’ when ‘her children shall have spread themselves abroad, bearing the ineradicable seeds of eternal truth’ (pp. 86, 87). This conception of ‘nationality’ would point rather to a spiritual than to a temporal sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter, and appears to be in accord with the tone pervading both ancient and modern Jewish literature, which exhibits Judaism as a perpetual living force, maintained from within rather than from without, and destined continually to influence religious thought, and to survive all dispensations.

In his undefined mission to the East Deronda is, therefore, to that extent perhaps, out of harmony with the general tone of modern Jewish thought. We at least are constrained to think that more Jews of the present day would be ready to follow Mordecai in imagination than Deronda in person to Judæa. It is, nevertheless, in strict artistic unity that, shut out for five-and-twenty years from actual practical knowledge of his people, Deronda should represent the _ideal_ rather than the _idea_ of Judaism. Mordecai, sketched as he is supposed to be from the life, with his deep poetic yearnings, which are stayed on the threshold of action, strikes us as a truer and more typical figure than Deronda hastening to their fulfilment. And on the subject of these same vague yearnings another point suggests itself. We have heard it said that the religious belief of Mordecai centres rather in the destiny of his race than in the Being who has appointed that destiny, and we have heard it questioned whether the theism of Mordecai is sufficiently defined to be fairly representative of Jewish thought, or if Judaism indeed is also passing under that wave of Pantheism which, like the waters of old, is threatening to submerge all ancient landmarks, and to leave visible only ‘the tops of the mountains’ of revealed religion. This seems a criticism based rather on negative than on positive evidence, and derived possibly from the obvious leanings of George Eliot’s other writings, and it is, perhaps, somewhat unfair to assume that, even if, on this point, she does not sympathise with the Jews, she has any intention of colouring her picture of modern Judaism with intellectual prepossessions of her own. In the silence of Mordecai with respect to his beliefs, he represents the great body of Jews, whose religion finds expression rather in action than in formula, and who are slow to indulge in theological speculations. Mordecai was true to Jewish characteristics in the fact that his belief was concealed beneath his hopes and aspirations, but had he in any degree shared the views of the new school of sceptics, he could not have been the typical Jew, who sees in the unity of his people a symbol of the unity of his God.

The pure theism of Judaism may be said to have its poles in the anthropomorphic utterances of some of the Rabbinical writers, and in the present pantheism of the extreme German school; but we should say that the ordinary, the representative Jewish thought of the day lies between these two extremes, and, in so far as it gives expression to any belief on the subject, distinctly recognises a personal God presiding over human destiny and natural laws. There may be here and there an inquiring spirit that wanders so far afield that his attraction towards his people is lost, and with it the influence his genius should exert; but Jewish thought, if owning a somewhat nebulous conception of the Deity, slowly progressing towards one fuller and grander, cannot be said to be drifting towards Pantheism. Judaism, unlike many other faiths, has not a history and a religious belief apart,--the one not only includes and supplements, but is actually non-existent, ‘unthinkable,’ without the other. Thus to have made an earnest Jew, with the strong racial instinct of Mordecai, a weak theist, would have been an inartistic conception, and Jewish criticism has not discovered this flaw in George Eliot’s exceptional but faithful Jewish portraiture. Judging, then, from such sources as are open to us, we are led to infer that the feeling of nationality is still deeply rooted in the Jewish race, and that the religious feeling from which it is inseparable perhaps gives it the strength and depth to exist and to continue to exist without the external props of ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Dr. Kaufmann, therefore, very well expresses what appears to be the general conviction of his co-religionists, when he suggests that ‘in the very circumstance of dispersion may lie fulfilment’ (p. 87).

MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL

PRINTER AND PATRIOT

When the prophet of the Hebrews, some six-and-twenty hundred years ago, thundered forth his stirring ‘Go through! go through the gates! prepare a way, lift up a standard for the people!’ it may, without irreverence, be doubted if he foresaw how literally his charge would be fulfilled by one of his own race in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. The story of how it was done may perhaps be worth retelling, since many subjects of lesser moment have found more chroniclers.

It was in 1290 that gates, which in England had long been ominously creaking on their hinges, were deliberately swung-to, and bolted and barred by Church and State on the unhappy Jews, who on that bleak November day stood shivering along the coast. ‘Thy waves and thy billows have passed over me’ must have lost in tender allegory and gained some added force of literalness that wintry afternoon. Scarce any of the descendants of that exodus can have had share in the return. Of such of the refugees as reached the opposite ports few found foothold, and fewer still asylum. The most, and perhaps they were the most fortunate of the fifteen thousand, were quick in gaining foreign graves. Those who made for the nearest neighbouring shores of France, forgetful, or perhaps ignorant, of the recent experiences of their French brethren under Philip Augustus, lived on to earn a like knowledge for themselves, and to undergo, a few years later, another expulsion under Philip the Fair. Those who went farther fared worse, for over the German States the Imperial eagle of Rome no longer brooded, now to protect and now to prey on its victims; the struggle between the free cities and the multitudinous petty princelings was working to its climax, and whether at bitter strife, or whether pausing for a brief while to recruit their powers, landgrave and burgher, on one subject, were always of one mind. To plunder at need or to persecute at leisure, Jews were held to be handy and fair game for either side.

Far northward or far southward that ragged English mob were hardly fit to travel. Some remnant, perhaps, made effort to reach the semi-barbarous settlements in Russia and Poland, but few can have been sanguine enough to set out for distant Spain in hope of a welcome but rarely accorded to such very poor relations. And even in the Peninsula the security which Jews had hitherto experienced had by this date received several severe shocks. Two centuries later and the tide of civilisation had rolled definitely and drearily back on the soil which Jews had largely helped to cultivate, and left it bare, and yet a little longer, Portugal, become a province of Spain, had followed the cruel fashions of its suzerain.

By the close of the sixteenth century a settlement of the dispossessed Spanish and Portuguese Jews had been formed in Holland, and Amsterdam was growing into a strange Dutch likeness of a new Jerusalem, for Holland alone among the nations at this period gave a welcome to all citizens in the spirit of Virgil’s famous line, ‘_Tros Rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo_.’ And the refugees, who at this date claimed the hospitality of the States, were of a sort to make the Dutch in love with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. Under Moorish sway, for centuries, commerce had been but one of the pursuits open to the Jews and followed by the Jews of the Peninsula, and thus it was a crowd, not of financiers and traders only or chiefly, but of cultivated scholars, physicians, statesmen, and land-owners, whom Catholic bigotry had exiled. The thin disguise of new Christians was soon thrown off by these Jews, and they became to real Christians, to such men as Vossius and Caspar Barlæus, who welcomed them and made friends of them, a revelation of Judaism.

It was after the great _auto-da-fé_ of January 1605, that Joseph ben Israel, with a host of other Jews, broken in health and broken in fortune, left the land which bigotry and persecution had made hideous to them, and joined the peaceful and prosperous settlement in Amsterdam. The youngest of Ben Israel’s transplanted family was the year-old Manasseh, who had been born in Lisbon a few months before their flight. He seems to have been from the first a promising and intelligent lad, and his tutor, one Isaac Uziel, who was a minister of the congregation, and a somewhat famous mathematician and physician to boot, formed a high opinion of the boy’s abilities. He did not, however, live to see them verified; when Manasseh was but eighteen the Rabbi died, and his clever pupil was thought worthy to be appointed to the vacated office. It was an honoured and an honourable, but scarcely a lucrative, post to which Manasseh thus succeeded, and the problem of living soon became further complicated by an early marriage and a young family. Manasseh had to cast about him for supplementary means of support, and he presently found it in the establishment of a printing press. Whether the type gave impetus to the pen, or whether the pen had inspired the idea of the press, is hard to decide; but it is, at least, certain that before he was twenty-five, Manasseh had found congenial work and plenty of it. He taught and he preached, and both in the school-room and in the pulpit he was useful and effective, but it was in his library that he felt really happy and at home. Manasseh was a born scholar and an omnivorous reader, bound to develop into a prolific, if not a profound, writer. The work which first established his fame bears traces of this, and is, in point of fact, less of a composition than a compilation. The first part of this book, _The Conciliator_, was published in 1632, after five years’ labour had been expended on it, and it is computed to contain quotations from, or references to, over 200 Hebrew, and 50 Latin and Greek authors. Its object was to harmonise (_conciliador_) conflicting passages in the Pentateuch, and it was written in Spanish, although it could have been composed with equal facility in any one of half-a-dozen other languages, for Manasseh was a most accomplished linguist.

Although not the first book which was issued from his press, for a completely edited prayer-book and a Hebrew grammar had been published in 1627, _The Conciliator_ was the first work that attracted the attention of the learned world to the Amsterdam Rabbi. Manasseh had the advantage of literary connections of his own, through his wife, who was a great-granddaughter of Abarbanel--that same Isaac Abarbanel, the scholar and patriot, who in 1490 headed the deputation to Ferdinand and Isabella, which was so dramatically cut short by Torquemada.

Like _The Conciliator_, all Manasseh’s subsequent literary ventures met with ready appreciation, but with more appreciation, it would seem, than solid result, for his means appear to have been always insufficient for his modest wants, and in 1640 we find him seriously contemplating emigration to Brazil on a trading venture. Two members of his congregation, which, as a body, does not seem to have acted liberally towards him, came forward, however, at this crisis in his affairs, and conferred a benefit all round by establishing a college and appointing Manasseh the principal, with an adequate salary. This ready use of some portion of their wealth has made the brothers Pereira more distinguished than for its possession. Still, it must not be inferred that Manasseh had been, up to this date, a friendless, if a somewhat impecunious, student, only that, as is rather perhaps the wont of poor prophets in their own country, his admirers had had to come from the outer before they reached the inner circle. He had certainly achieved a European celebrity in the Republic of letters before his friends at Amsterdam had discovered much more than the fact that he printed very superior prayer-books. He had won over, amongst others, the prejudiced author of the _Law of Nations_, to own him, a Jew, for a familiar friend, before some of the wealthier heads of his own congregation had claimed a like privilege; and Grotius, then Swedish ambassador at Paris, was actually writing to him, and proffering friendly services, at the very time that the Amsterdam congregation were calmly receiving his enforced farewells. There was something, perhaps, of irony in the situation, but Manasseh, like Maimonides, had no littleness of disposition, no inflammable self-love quick to take fire; he loved his people truly enough to understand them and to make allowances, had even, perhaps, some humorous perception of the national obtuseness to native talent when unarrayed in purple and fine linen, or until duly recognised by the wearers of such.