CHAPTER VI

_Salathiel and His People_

[Sidenote: The Position of the Jew]

We soon reached the hill country, and our road passed through what were once the allotments of Issachar, Zebulun, and Asher, but by the Roman division was now Upper Galilee. My health had been rapidly restored by the exercise and the balmy air. My more incurable disease was prevented by the journey from perhaps totally engrossing my mind. Of all the antagonists to mental depression, traveling is the most vigorous; not the flight from place to place, as if evil were to be outrun, nor the enclosure of the weary of life in some narrow vehicle that adds fever and pestilence to heaviness of heart, but the passing at our ease through the open air and bright landscape of a new country. To me the novelty and loveliness of the land were combined with the memory of the most striking events in human record. I had, too, the advantage of a companionship which would have enlivened travel through the wilderness—brave and cheerful men and women on whose minds and forms nature laid her finest stamp of beauty.

[Sidenote: The Semitic Type of Beauty]

The name of Jew is now but another title for humiliation. Who that sees that fallen thing, with his countenance bent to the ground and his form withered of its comeliness, tottering through the proud streets of Europe in some degrading occupation, and clothed in the robes of the beggared and the despised, could imagine the bold figures and gallant bearing of the lion-hunters, with whom, in the midst of shouts and songs of careless joy, I spurred my barb up the mountain-paths of Galilee! Yet, fallen as he is, the physiognomy of the Jew retains a share of its original beauty, sufficient to establish the claim of the people to have been the handsomest race on earth. Individuals of superior comeliness may often be found among the multitudes of mankind. But no nation, nor distinct part of any nation, can rival an equal number of the unhappy exiles of Israel in the original impress of that hand which made man only a little lower than the angels. To conceive the Jew as he was, we should picture the stern and watchful contraction of the dark eye expanded; the fierce and ridgy brow lowering no more; the lip no longer gathered in habitual fear or scorn; the cheek no longer sallow with want or pining, and the whole man elevated by the returning consciousness that he has a rank among nations. All his deformities have been the birth of his misfortunes. What beauty can we demand from the dungeon? What dignity of aspect from the hewers of wood and drawers of water for mankind? Where shall we seek the magnificent form and illumined countenance of the hero and the sage—from the heart cankered by the chain, from the plundered, the enslaved, the persecuted of two thousand years?

Of the daughters of my country I have never seen the equals in beauty. Our blood was Arab, softened down by various changes of state and climate, till it was finally brought to perfection in the most genial air and the most generous soil of the globe. The vivid features of the Arab countenance, no longer attenuated by the desert, assumed, in the plenty of Egypt, that fulness and fine proportion which still belongs to the dwellers by the Nile; but the true change was on our entrance into the promised land. Peace, the possession of property, days spent among the cheerful and healthful occupations of rural life, are in themselves productive of the finer developments of the human form—a form whose natural tendency is to beauty. But our nation had an additional and an unshared source of nobleness of aspect: it was free.

The state of man in the most unfettered republics of the ancient world was slavery compared with the magnanimous and secure establishment of the Jewish commonwealth. During the three hundred golden years, from Moses to Samuel—before we were given over to the madness of innovation for our sins, and the demand of an earthly diadem—the Jew was free in the loftiest sense of freedom; free to do all good; restricted only from evil; every man pursuing the unobstructed course pointed out by his genius or his fortune; every man protected by laws inviolable, or whose violation was instantly visited with punishment by the Eternal Sovereign alike of ruler and people.

[Sidenote: Freedom, Twin Sister of Virtue]

Freedom! twin sister of Virtue, thou brightest of all the spirits that descended in the train of Religion from the throne of God; thou that leadest up man again to the early glories of his being; angel, from the circle of whose presence happiness spreads like the sunrise over the darkness of the land; at the waving of whose scepter, knowledge and peace and fortitude and wisdom descend upon the wing; at the voice of whose trumpet the more than grave is broken and slavery gives up her dead,—when shall I see thy coming? When shall I hear thy summons upon the mountains of my country, and rejoice in the regeneration and glory of the sons of Judah? I have traversed nations, and, as I set my foot upon their boundary, I have said, “Freedom is not here!” I saw the naked hill, the morass steaming with death, the field covered with weedy fallow, the sickly thicket encumbering the land; I saw the still more infallible signs, the downcast visage, the form degraded at once by loathsome indolence and desperate poverty; the peasant, cheerless and feeble in his field, the wolfish robber, the population of the cities crowded into huts and cells, with pestilence for their fellow; I saw the contumely of man to man, the furious vindictiveness of popular rage, and I pronounced at the moment, “This people is not free!”

In the various republics of heathen antiquity, the helot living under the yoke of oppression, and the born bondsman lingering out life in thankless toil, at once put to flight all conceptions of freedom. In the midst of altars fuming to liberty, of harangues glowing with the most pompous protestations of scorn for servitude, of crowds inflated with the presumption that they disdained a master, the eye was insulted with the perpetual chain. The temple of Liberty was built upon the dungeon. Rome came, and unconsciously avenged the insulted name of freedom; the master and the slave were bowed down together, and the dungeon was made the common dwelling of all.

[Sidenote: Where Freedom Reigned in Name Alone]

In the Italian republics of after ages, I saw the vigor that, living in the native soil of empire, has always sprung up on the first call. The time has changed since Italy poured its legions over the world. The volcano was now sleeping; yet the fire still burned within its womb, and threw out in its invisible strength the luxuriant qualities of the land of power. The innate Roman passion for sovereignty was no longer to find its triumphs in the field; it rushed up the paths of a loftier and more solid glory, with a speed and a strength that left mankind wondering below. The arts, adventure, legislation, literature in all its shapes, of the subtle, the rich, and the sublime, were the peaceful triumphs whose laurels will entwine the Italian brow when the wreath of the Cæsars is remembered but as a badge of national folly and individual crime.

But those republics knew freedom only by name. All, within a few years from their birth, had abandoned its living principles—justice, temperance, and truth. I saw the soldiery of neighbor cities marching to mutual devastation, and I said, “Freedom is not here!” I saw abject privation mingled with boundless luxury; in the midst of the noblest works of architecture, the hovel; in the pomps of citizens covered with cloth of gold, gazing groups of faces haggard with beggary and sin; I saw the sold tribunal, the inexorable state prison, the established spy, the protected assassin, the secret torture; and I said, “Freedom is not here!” The pageant filled the streets with more than kingly blazonry, the trumpets flourished, the multitude shouted, the painter covered the walls with immortal emblems, in honor of Freedom; I pointed to the dungeon, the rack, and the dagger! Bitterer and deeper sign than all, I pointed to the exile of exiles, the broken man, whom even the broken trample, of all the undone the most undone—my outcast brother in the blood of Abraham!

I am not about to be his defender; I am not regardless of his tremendous crime; I can not stand up alone against the voice of universal man, which has cried out that thus it shall be; but I say it from the depths of my soul, and as I hope for rest to my miseries, that I never saw freedom survive in that land which loved to smite the Jew!

[Sidenote: The Women of Judea]

I saw one republic more, the mightiest and the last; for the justice of Heaven on the land, the most terrible; for the mercy of Heaven to mankind, the briefest in its devastation. But there all was hypocrisy that was not horror; the only equal rights were those of the equal robber; the sacred figure of Liberty veiled its face; and the offering on its violated shrine was the spoil of honor, bravery, and virtue.

The daughters of our nation, sharing in the rights of its sons, bore the lofty impression that virtuous freedom always stamps on the human features. But they had the softer graces of their sex in a degree unequaled in the ancient world. While the woman of the East was immured behind bolts and bars, from time immemorial a prisoner, and the woman of the West was a toy, a savage, or a slave, our wives and maidens enjoyed the intercourses of society, which their talents were well calculated to cheer and adorn. They were skilled on the harp; their sweet voices were tuned to the richest strains of earth; they were graceful in the dance; the writings of our bards were in their hands; and what nation ever possessed such illustrious founts of thought and virtue! But there was another and a still higher ground for that peculiar expression which makes their countenance still lighten before me, as something of more than mortal beauty. The earliest consciousness of every Jewish woman was, that she might, in the hand of Providence, be the sacred source of a blessing and a glory that throws all imagination into the shade; that of her might be born a Being, to whom earth and all its kings should bow—the more than man! the more than angel! veiling for a little time His splendors in the form of man, to raise Israel to the scepter of the world, to raise that world into a renewed paradise, and then to resume His original glory, and be Sovereign, Creator, God—all in all!

[Sidenote: The Passing Glory of Judah’s Daughters]

This consciousness, however dimmed, was never forgotten; the misfortunes of Judah never breaking the strong link by which we held to the future. The reliance on predictions perpetually renewed, and never more vividly renewed than in the midst of our misfortunes—a reliance commemorated in all the great ceremonies of our nation, in our worship, in our festivals, in every baptism, in every marriage—must have filled a large space in the susceptible mind of woman. And what but the mind forms the countenance? And what must have been the molding of that most magnificent and elevating of all hopes, for centuries, on the most plastic and expressive features in the world?

Sacredly reserved from intermixture with the blood of the stranger, the hope was spread throughout Israel. The line of David was pure, but its connection had shot widely through the land. It was like the Indian tree taking root through a thousand trees. Every Jewish woman might hope to be the living altar on which the Light to lighten the Gentiles was to descend! The humblest might be the blessed among women—the mother of the Messiah! But all is gone! Ages of wandering, wo, poverty, contumely, and mixture of blood have done their work of evil. The loveliness may partially remain, but the glory of Judah’s daughters is no more.