Part 4

Of all the ancient peoples none had more marked race consciousness and racial feeling than the Jews and Greeks. It is very characteristic of Greek race consciousness that Greek philosophers, when discussing ethical or political subjects, have only the Hellenic people in mind. Their notions of justice and peace were applied only to the Hellenic people. The ancient Jews were not so one-sided. Yet they, too, had a well developed race consciousness which showed not merely in the religious idea that they were the chosen people, but in a very general acceptance of the belief that they were a distinct unit. Even the call to righteousness uttered by the prophet is colored by racial motives: "Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness; ye that seek the Lord. Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." Another of the prophets, Ezekiel, even speculated as to the origin of the Jewish race. All the terms, _ger_, _nakhri_, _akum_ and others used by ancient Jews to describe non-believers characterized non-Jews with reference to race also. The feeling of racial consciousness among Jews to the present day and the consciousness of the isolation of that race are best expressed in the popular Hebrew term, "Umoth ha-Olam," the people of the world. The "Umoth ha-Olam" are the non-Jews, as the "barbaroi" were the non-Greeks. This throws light on the mental disposition of the Jews. While, in the eyes of the Greek, the non-Greek is an inferior, being a "barbaros," in the eyes of the Jews the non-Jew is simply different and not necessarily inferior. Even the term _goy_, which is so much abused by anti-Semites, means only non-Jew. But while the Jew never held the non-Jew in contempt merely for differences of race, he had always and still has intense feeling for his own race.

In theological periods of history the fight against Judaism was perhaps a conflict of theologies only. Today, however, a fight against Judaism is inevitably a fight against the Jewish race. In times of old the religious motives of Judaism seem to have been the prime factors in Jewish life. Today the driving powers in Jewish history are not so much religious as race and national consciousness. It is, therefore, characteristic of those Jews whose Jewish backbone is broken to deny the existence of the race and to scoff at race consciousness in general.

Race consciousness is not a myth invented by the professors, but a fact of life.

AHAD HA'AM

The sixtieth anniversary of Ahad Ha'am, the foremost Hebrew thinker of his time, is a notable event in Hebrew literature, and will no doubt be celebrated by Hebraists all over the world in a manner worthy of the man and of the thinker. Next to Bialik, the great Hebrew poet, Ahad Ha'am is today the most popular Jew among the Jewries of the East and the best known representative of Hebrew thought among Jewish intellectuals in the West. His name is identified with the formulation of the program of Hebrew nationalism and the creation of a Hebrew cultural centre in Palestine. Unlike other thinkers who consider their convictions their own private affair, Ahad Ha'am had the courage of his convictions and defended them against great odds. He had the courage to take his stand against the giant, Herzl, and the powerful dialectician and publicist, Max Nordau. He knew that the fight against Herzl, when the great leader of Zionism was at his height, would not win him friends, but he had the daring to take up the fight.

For Ahad Ha'am the question of political Zionism and that of cultural Zionism as represented by himself, were matters of principle and had to be fought out sooner or later. While Ahad Ha'am fought against Herzl and Nordau and against the other powerful representatives of political Zionism, he had no personalities in mind and fought for principles only. The whole position of things was such that Ahad Ha'am could at that time have had no hope to win the struggle because political Zionism was at its height and because Theodor Herzl was the shining star in the firmament of Jewish political life. But disregarding the disadvantageous position in which he found himself, he fought courageously until he believed the danger was passed.

We mention this fight against Herzl and Nordau because it best characterizes the man, Ahad Ha'am. Though his philosophy of life is a philosophy of abstract ideas, he is at the same time a man full of life and temperament, a hard public worker and a political Jew in the best sense of the term. A great deal of his popularity must be ascribed not only to his philosophy and his system of Jewish politics, but also to his manliness and wonderful qualities of character.

As a Hebrew thinker, Ahad Ha'am represents the last point in the line of Jewish thought which can be characterized as Hebrew intellectualism as distinguished from Hebrew irrationalism and mysticism, which found its expression in the teachings of the Hassidic sect.

Since the rise of the theoretical Kabbalah in Spain in the thirteenth century, which must be considered a reaction against the system of intellectualism as laid down by Maimonides, we can observe in Jewish history two spiritual tendencies striving for dominance: Irrationalism in all its forms and Intellectualism in all its aberrations. Ahad Ha'am represents the line of development, of Maimonides, the Gaon of Wilna, Krochmal. The parallel line to the theoretical Kabbalah is the practical Kabbalah which began in Palestine in the sixteenth century and Hassidism which originated in Poland in the eighteenth century. The intellectualists maintain that the prime essential of the soul is intellect and that Judaism is based not on metaphysical will but on intellectual cognition. For our mediaeval intellectualists and those of the eighteenth century, this premise resulted in the conception of a Judaism which lays more stress on knowledge (Torah) than on the practice of the religious ceremonies (Avodah). It is, of course, understood that the older representatives of Jewish Intellectualism were as God-fearing and observing as their mystical opponents. But basing Judaism on knowledge and cognition, they maintained that the first thing a Jew should do is to study and accept the advice of old: Thou shalt recognize the God of thy fathers.

In opposition to these teachings is the conception of Judaism as represented by Kabbalists and Hassidim. These lay more stress on the practice of Judaism, claiming that Judaism is primarily a matter of will and not of knowledge. It is not a coincidence that while among Jewish intellectualists in the East (Mithnagdim) the knowledge of the Talmud and of Rabbinic Judaism is widely spread because they consider this the first duty of the Jew, there prevails among the Hassidim ignorance of the Talmud and of Rabbinic Judaism.

Ahad Ha'am is today the representative of Intellectual Judaism as conceived by his time, as the Gaon of Wilna was in his day the representative of intellectual Judaism. It is very characteristic of this Jewish school of thought that a man like the Gaon of Wilna has written a system of geometry and was interested in mathematics and logic. With his logical mind he created a new method of studying the Talmud which is marked by simplicity and clearness. Ahad Ha'am achieved in the domain of Hebrew thought and literature what the Gaon of Wilna had achieved in Talmudic methodology. As the Gaon of Wilna did away with "Pilpul" sophistry, so Ahad Ha'am did away with the confusing and unproductive "Hakira," unsystematic discussion of abstract thought, and introduced economy of thought and of expression--a clear terminology and a systematic formulation of principles and ideas. That is what has given him the leading position in modern Hebrew literature.

Ahad Ha'am's greatness does not consist of these formal innovations only. He has enriched Hebrew literature with a philosophic ideology of his own which has greatly influenced modern Hebrew thought. Ahad Ha'amism, as this system is called, was not less productive at the beginning of the twentieth century than the Yeshibah of Volozhin, the work of the Wilna Gaon, at the start of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact Ahad Ha'amism is the modern development of the ideas which came from Volozhin. Without Volozhin there would be no modern Hebrew literature, no modern Hebrew thought and no Ahad Ha'am.

While the Jewish teachings of Ahad Ha'am can easily be explained as the continuation of a certain historical tendency in Judaism, the philosophy of Ahad Ha'am consists of many different systems and cannot be so readily surveyed. His own disciples claim that he is following in the footsteps of Krochmal and that he is thus a disciple of Hegel. This, however, is only partly true. One finds, moreover, in the philosophy of Ahad Ha'am elements of Kant, Spencer, of modern French sociology and even of Nietzsche. The unifying and productive mind of Ahad Ha'am has absorbed these various philosophic elements and turned them into an organic unit. For this reason Ahad Ha'am cannot be called an eclectic. Even Kant had his predecessors, was influenced by various philosophers and took up their suggestions.

Ahad Ha'am is one of the few modern Hebrew leaders who is as much European as Jew, and who is not on less intimate terms with European thought than with Jewish. Owing to these facts he succeeded in Europeanizing Hebrew literature and in raising it to the high level it now holds.

In the last few years Ahad Ha'am has made peace with Zionism because he thinks that Zionism has accepted his views on Palestine. His appearance at the 11th Zionist Congress at Vienna was thought by friend and opponent alike to mean that he had made peace with the Zionist organization. He has in any case supported the Zionist organization in its efforts in Palestine and has approved the plan to establish a system of Hebrew educational institutions in the Holy Land. But whether Ahad Ha'am became more political or whether the Zionist organization has come nearer to Ahad Ha'amism remains a question. The many pupils of Ahad Ha'am, however, and the Zionists in all lands, are happy that the uncontested leader of modern Hebrew thought and literature is to be found today with the rank and file of Zionism.

THE TRANSVALUATION OF VALUES

Even a language is subject to the force of fate. Its value in life and its meaning for the life of a people change constantly with the great changes of life. Only one hundred and twenty years ago there were those who believed in the possibility of the realization of the medieval idea that a day would come when all the peoples of the earth would speak one language and all linguistic barriers would soon disappear. Today language stands next to the state as the most important factor in the life of a nation; in many cases it is as strong a factor as the economical and political forces. This is especially true of the so-called nationality states where the various peoples can show their line of national demarcation chiefly by the language they use. Today language is not only one of the strongest factors in the national life of a people, but is also of great weight in universal politics. The future historians, in describing the ups and downs of the present war, will not fail to observe that one of the causes that threatened, for a time, the existence of the Hapsburg Empire was the apparently unimportant fact that the people in Germany and Bohemia could not come to terms about the linguistic barrier. The language quarrels in Bohemia were the cause of so many political upheavals that they shook the very foundations of Austria; they have influenced, to a large extent, the international crisis during the last three years.

Since language has developed into such a tremendous force, all the meditations and calculations of the philosophers of the eighteenth century about the possibility of one language for the entire human race have proven to be empty visions--soap bubbles of philosophic and humanitarian dreamers. If the living provincial languages of small peoples, the Bohemians, Lithuanians, Armenians, and so forth, have become important political factors in the lives of the nations, and, in consequence thereof, an important momentum in international life, the so-called dead languages, such as Hebrew, Gaelic, Welsh and many others, have become driving forces in the lives of their peoples and may even decide their fate and future. The development of these dead languages during the nineteenth century is as interesting and fascinating as the growth in political importance of such living, provincial languages as Bohemian, Lithuanian, and so forth. Most remarkable of all is the development of the importance of Hebrew during the nineteenth century.

One hundred years ago, Hebrew was a purely philological and theological proposition. The knowledge of Hebrew had quite a different value from what it has today. To the Eastern Jew, Hebrew had the meaning of a holy tongue only; to the Western Jew, Hebrew was a sort of a cultural luxury which was very much appreciated as such, but had no national value. The love for Hebrew in the West, which, by the way, was stronger than we today imagine, smelled faintly of a museum. These conditions prevailed in the West for several centuries. In the East, however, conditions changed with kaleidoscopic rapidity. With the spread of the Haskalah eastward, Hebrew achieved another value altogether; it had a different function to perform. The adherents of the Haskalah used Hebrew not as a holy tongue, as did the orthodox, nor as a theological proposition, as did many of the Western Jews, but as a medium to spread culture among the Jews and to introduce European ideas in the ghetto. The Hebrew writer of the middle of the nineteenth century considered himself a sort of cultural missionary. The best means to enlighten the people and to counteract superstition was, at that time, Hebrew literature. By the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, Hebrew experienced another transvaluation, chiefly because of the failure of the Haskalah and the awakening of the national spirit among the Jews. The writers of that time considered Hebrew no longer a means to an end--that is to say, an agency to spread culture among the Jews--but an object in itself. People began to realize that Hebrew is not only a linguistic theological proposition, as was thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but that it is the woof and warp of national culture. The Hebrew writers of the last third of the nineteenth century, consequently, began to speak of the Hebrew tongue as a certain culture and Hebrew ideas as the ideas of the Jewish people. In short, Hebrew became the national cultural force in contradistinction to the humanitarian cultural force that it was thought to be in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Hebrew writers of the Eighties and Nineties no longer considered themselves cultural missionaries of the Jews, as did the writers of the preceding generation, but rather as the representatives of Hebrew thought and Hebrew culture. The most conspicuous representative of this school of thought is Ahad Ha'am, the father and systematizer of Hebrew cultural nationalism. Ahad Ha'am himself witnessed the transition from cultural Hebrew to political Hebrew. Although about twenty years ago he was the embodiment of Hebrew thought, his school had to make room for another conception of Hebrew, a conception to which, we think, the future belongs. It is the national political conception of Hebrew in opposition to its purely cultural conception.

To the modern Hebraist, Hebrew is neither a holy tongue nor a medium to spread culture among the Jews, nor yet a national cultural idea, as it is to the disciples of Ahad Ha'am, but a national political force; accordingly, he strives to secularize Hebrew and to introduce into it all the elements of secular civilization and to make it the expression of the movement of life of his people. The modern Hebrew writer would think in Hebrew not only on subjects Jewish, would not only philosophize in Hebrew on Jewish cultural and theological problems, but would write in Hebrew on all secular subjects and try to find the Hebrew expression for all the movements of life, especially the life of our people. This striving to secularize Hebrew has enriched our national tongue enormously. We now know more Hebrew than did our forefathers one hundred years ago. Because of our striving to secularize Hebrew we were compelled to go to all the Hebrew sources of antiquity and to find Hebrew terms for things which, for the last two thousand years, have not been described in Hebrew, because the writing of Hebrew was concentrated on theological and philosophical subjects. A few years ago a Russian Jew wrote an agricultural text book in Hebrew, which created a sensation among Hebrew circles because the author re-created Hebrew agricultural terminology. Since the ancient Jews were agriculturists, they had of course an agricultural terminology of their own which had, however, been forgotten during our Diaspora life. The author of the above mentioned book re-established that Hebrew agricultural terminology. Other Hebrew writers have produced similar results in other literary and scientific endeavors. A small booklet by the late Dr. Schereschevsky, for instance, surprised the Hebrew public by the abundance of Hebrew scientific terms and by his re-establishment of a Hebrew scientific terminology. The modern Hebrew writer is conscious of the fact that Hebrew is bound some day to become a concrete political force and that, to gain that end, it must admit all the elements of life and establish the life of our people as the only agency of our general and Jewish education. This necessitates the secularization and, one might say, the humanization of Hebrew. The real modern Hebrew writers are, therefore, not those who can write a treatise in Hebrew on medieval Jewish philosophy but those who can write a Hebrew essay or Hebrew book on scientific or sociological topics.

The tendency to secularize Hebrew is spreading all over the world; it is to be hoped that the day is near when a considerable section of our people will use Hebrew with the same ease as any other people uses its national tongue. The secularization of Hebrew is a clear sign of our approaching national liberation.

A TURNING POINT IN JEWISH HISTORY

In ancient times, nationality and state were identical. The destruction of the state always involved the destruction of the nationality. This was, in fact, the case with many peoples whose states were destroyed by conquerors. Only the Jews are an exception to the rule. The Jewish state was destroyed, the Jewish nationality was not. Even the dispersion of the Jews all over the globe could not destroy and did not destroy the Jewish nationality. On the contrary, the diaspora life of the Jews, with all its evils and troubles, woes and tribulations, sorrows and pains, only served to intensify the national consciousness of the Jews and to strengthen their hopes of national redemption. But the chancellors of the governments, always in the habit of dealing with concrete facts, did not take the sentiments of Jewish individuals into consideration. Seeing that the Jews have no homeland, no national sovereignty and not even an intellectual and spiritual centre, they pronounced the Jewish nationality dead forever. From the point of view of this now antiquated conception of nationality, the European governments could not be blamed for their attitude toward the Jews as a people, for the orthodox notion of nationality always implies an ethnic unit that enjoys national sovereignty, or, at least, is living on its own land, even though it may be dominated by others. The governments, in their attitude toward the Jews as a people, followed a certain principle that had to be maintained as long as no substitute could be found for it. Today it seems that the old principle of nationality has been replaced by another and that the present notion of nationality does not necessarily imply that an ethnic group must either enjoy national sovereignty or live on its own soil. The Jews, who have now been recognized as a nationality not only by Great Britain but, as we have been informed, by several other great powers, are still living in dispersion and have none of the characteristics of the concrete makeup of other nationalities.

This change was brought about both by the Jews themselves, who for the past thirty or forty years have begun to assert their nationality and to claim the right to which every nationality is entitled, namely, a national homeland, and by the peculiar discrepancy between principle and life. The European governments, following a certain principle, refused to consider the Jews a nationality, but in practical life the Jews were always considered a nationality of their own. While the modern state emancipated the Jew on the condition that he emancipate himself from Judaism, modern society, on the other hand, refused to admit him just because he was a Jew, and thus counteracted and opposed the emancipation policy of the government. Modern society is intensely nationalistic and will only recognize those as its true members who belong to it, not only socially and economically, but also nationally and racially. Since the Jews are not Slavs or Teutons or Anglo-Saxons but Jews, they simply were not admitted as full-fledged members in the society of these races and nations, and whenever they made an attempt to penetrate into society by force and _en masse_, they were only too quickly ejected by a wave of anti-Semitism. So that while the states emancipated the Jews, on the condition that they become full-fledged Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Austrians, etc., because it considered the Jewish nationality dead and done for, the nations themselves, being nearer to life and its movements than the bureaucrats of the government chancelleries, felt that the Jews do form a national society of their own and are by no means nationally dead. The official recognition of the Jews as a nationality on the part of a modern state will, we are convinced, put an end to this difference in attitude and policy towards the Jews on the part of the government and of the nation.

Besides the national self-assertion of the Jews during the past thirty years, we find that their rôle as intellectual and spiritual factors in history led to the present change of mind of the European governments in regard to Jewish nationality. It is by no means pure accident that two mighty Anglo-Saxon nations and governments, Great Britain and the United States of America, should be the first among the great powers to recognize the right of the Jews to a national homeland of their own and thus to recognize publicly the nationality of the Jews. If the ancient Jewish mind, as it expressed itself in the Bible, ever influenced a great race and helped to shape its destinies and policies, it was the Anglo-Saxon race that it influenced. For the past four hundred years the greatest production of Jewish genius, the Bible, has been a powerful factor in the life of the Anglo-Saxon race, and as soon as the Anglo-Saxons freed themselves from medievalism, they began to treat the Jews living among them with consideration and fairness, even before they were officially emancipated.