Part 6

The spirit of American Judaism first asserted itself when Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Amsterdam, would not permit the few Jews who had emigrated from Portugal to unite with the other burghers in standing guard for the protection of their homes. When the tax-collector came to Asser Levy to demand a tax on this account, he asked whether that tax was imposed on all the residents of New Amsterdam. “No,” was the reply, “it is only imposed upon the Jews, because they do not stand guard!” “I have not asked to be exempted,” replied Asser Levy. “I am not only willing, but I demand the right to stand guard.” That right the Jews have asserted and exercised as officers in the ranks of the Continental Army and in every crisis of our national history from that time until the present day.

The American spirit and the spirit of American Judaism were nurtured in the same cradle of Liberty, and were united in origin, in ideals, and in historical development. The closing chapter of the chronicles of the Jews on the Iberian peninsula forms the opening chapter of their history on this Continent. It was Luis Santangel, “the Beaconsfield of his time,” assisted by his kinsman Gabriel Sanches, the Royal Treasurer of Aragon, who advanced out of his own purse seventeen thousand florins which made the voyages of Columbus possible. Luis de Torres, the interpreter as well as the surgeon and the physician of the little fleet, and several of the sailors who were with Columbus on his first voyage, as shown by the record, were Jews.

Looking back through this vista of more than four centuries, we have reason to remember with justified gratitude the foresight and signal services of those Spanish Jews who had the wisdom to divine the far-reaching possibilities of the plans of the great navigator, whom the King and the Queen, the Dukes and the Grandees united in regarding as merely “a visionary babbler” or, worse than this, as “a scheming adventurer.” The royal patrons were finally won over by the hope that Columbus might discover new treasures of gold and precious stones to enrich the Spanish crown. But not so with the Jewish patrons, who caused Columbus, or, as he was then called, Christopher Colon, to be recalled, and who, without security and without interest, advanced the money to fit out his caravels, since they saw, as by divine inspiration, the promise and possibility of the discovery of another world, which, in the words of the late Emilio Castelar--the historian, statesman, and one time President of Spain--“would afford to the quickening principles of human liberty a temple reared to the God of enfranchised and redeemed conscience, a land that would offer an unstained abode to the ideals of progress.” Fortunately, the records of these transactions are still preserved in the archives of Simancas in Seville.

It is idle to speculate upon hypothetical theories in the face of the facts of history. Of course, America would have been discovered and colonized had Columbus never lived; but had the streams of the beginnings of American history flown from other sources in other directions, it would be futile even to make an imaginative forecast of the effect they would have produced upon the history and development of this Continent. The merciless intolerance of an ecclesiastical system and the horror of its persecutions stimulated the earliest immigration, and subsequently brought about the Reformation in Saxon and Anglo-Saxon lands, and the same spirit drove to our shores the Pilgrim and the Puritan fathers; which chain of circumstances destined this country from the very beginning to be the land of the immigrant and a home for the fugitive and the persecuted.

The difference between government by kings and nobles and government under a Democracy is, that the former rests upon the power to compel obedience, while the latter rests essentially upon the sacrifice by the individual for the community, based upon the ideals of right and justice. If the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Huguenots brought with them, as they certainly did, the remembrance of sufferings for ideals and the spirit of sacrifice, how much longer was that remembrance, and with how much greater intensity did that spirit glow in the souls of the Jews, whose whole history is a record of martyrdom, of suffering, and of sacrifice for the ideals of civil and religious liberty; concerning whom it has been said: “Of all the races and nations of mankind which quarter the arms of Liberty on the shields of their honor, none has a better title to that decoration than the Jews.”

The spirit of Judaism became the mother spirit of Puritanism in Old England; and the history of Israel and its democratic model under the Judges inspired and guided the Pilgrims and the Puritans in their wandering hither and in laying the foundation of their commonwealths in New England. The piety and learning of the Jews bridged the chasm of the Middle Ages; and the torch they bore amidst trials and sufferings lighted the pathway from the ancient to the modern world.

“The historical power of the prophets of Israel,” says James Darmesteter, “is exhausted neither by Judaism nor by Christianity, and they hold a reserve force for the benefit of the coming century. The twentieth century is better prepared than the nineteen preceding it to understand them.” While Zionism is a pious hope and a vision out of despair in countries where the victims of oppression are still counted by millions, the republicanism of the United States is the nearest approach to the ideals of the prophets of Israel that ever has been incorporated in the form of a state. The founders of our government converted the dreams of philosophers into a political system,--a government by the people, for the people, whereunder the rights of man became the rights of men, secured and guaranteed by a written constitution. Ours is peculiarly a promised land wherein the spirit of the teachings of the ancient prophets inspired the work of the fathers of our country.

American liberty demands of no man the abandonment of his conscientious convictions; on the contrary, it had its birth, not in the narrowness of uniformity, but in the breadth of diversity, which patriotism fuses together into a conscious harmony for the highest welfare of all. The Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew, each and all need the support and the sustaining power of their religion to develop their moral natures and to keep alive the spirit of self-sacrifice which American patriotism demands of every man, whatever may be his creed or race, who is worthy to enjoy the blessings of American citizenship.

I do not wish to be misunderstood as claiming any special merit for the Jews as American citizens which is not equally possessed by the Americans of other creeds. They have the good as well as the bad among them, the noble and the ignoble, the worthy and the unworthy. They have the qualities as well as the defects of their fellow-citizens. In a word, they are not any less patriotic Americans because they are Jews, nor any less loyal Jews because they are primarily patriotic Americans.

The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.

FELIX ADLER

Felix Adler, lecturer and writer on moral and ethical subjects, was born in Alzey, Germany, in 1851. He received the degree A.B. from Columbia University, and continued his studies at Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg. From 1874 to 1876 he was professor of Hebrew at Cornell University. Since 1902 he has been professor of political and social ethics at Columbia. He has produced numerous works on moral and ethical topics. In 1915 there was published his book, “The World Crisis and its Meaning,” the third chapter of which is here quoted in part.

Adler’s keen interest in international ethics has been expressed in several addresses delivered before the New York Society of Ethical Culture, which was founded by him in 1876. Among other things he pleads for altruism among the nations, and truthfulness, and believes in a purified nationalism instead of anti- or inter-nationalism.

THE AMERICAN IDEAL

The American ideal is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man. Necessarily it is an ethical ideal, a spiritual ideal; otherwise it would be nonsense. For, taking men as they are, they are assuredly not equal. The differences between them, on the contrary, are glaring. The common man is not uncommonly fine spiritually, but rather, seen from the outside, “uncommonly” common. It is therefore an ethical instinct that has turned the people toward this ethical conception.

It is true that in Germany and in England, side by side with the efficiency and the mastery ideals, there has always existed this same spiritual or religious ideal; side by side with the stratification and entitulation of men, the labelling of them as lower and higher, as empirically better or worse, there has always been the recognition that men are equal,--equal, that is to say, in church, but not outside, equal in the hereafter, but not in this life. If we would fathom the real depth and inner significance of the democratic ideal as it slumbers or dreams in the heart of America, rather than as yet explicit, we must say that it is an ideal which seeks to overcome this very dualism, seeks to take the spiritual conception of human equality out of the church and put it into the market place, to take it from far off celestial realms for realization upon this earth. For men are not equal in the empirical sense; they are equal only in the spiritual sense, equal only in the sense that the margin of achievement of which any person is capable, be it wide or narrow, is infinitesimal compared with his infinite spiritual possibilities.

It is because of this subconscious ethical motive that there is this generous air of expectation in America, that we are always wondering what will happen next, or who will happen next. Will another Emerson come along? Will another Lincoln come along? We do not know. But this we know, that the greatest lusters of our past already tend to fade in our memory, not because we are irreverent, but because nothing that the past has accomplished can content us; because we are looking for greatness beyond greatness, truth beyond truth ever yet spoken. The Germans have a legend that in their hour of need an ancient emperor will arise out of the tomb where he slumbers to stretch his protecting hand over the Fatherland. We Americans, too, have the belief that, if ever such an hour comes for us, there will arise spirits clothed in human flesh amongst us sufficient for our need, but spirits that will come, as it were, out of the future to meet our advancing host and lead it, not ghosts out of the storied past. For America differs from all other nations in that it derives its inspiration from the future. Every other people has some culture, some civilization, handed down from the past, of which it is the custodian, and which it seeks to develop. The American people have no such single tradition. They are dedicated, not to the preservation of what has been, but to the creation of what never has been. They are the prophets of the future, not the priests of the past.

I have spoken above of ideals, of what is fine in a nation, of fine tendencies. The idea which a people has of itself, like the idea which an individual has of himself, often does not tally with the reality. If we look at the realities of American life,--and, on the principle of _corruptio optimi pessima_, we should be prepared for what we see,--we are dismayed to observe in actual practice what seems like a monstrous caricature,--not democracy, but plutocracy; kings expelled and the petty political bosses in their stead; merciless exploitation of the economically weak,--a precipitate reduction of wages, for instance, at the first signs of approaching depression, in advance of what is required,--instead of respect for the sacred personality of human beings, the utmost disrespect. Certainly the nation needs strong and persistent ethical teaching in order to make it aware of its better self and of what is implied in the political institutions which it has founded.

But ethical teaching alone will not suffice. It must be admitted that a danger lurks in the idea of equality itself. The danger is that differences in refinement, in culture, in intellectual ability and attainments are apt to be insufficiently emphasized; that the untutored, the uncultivated, the intellectually undeveloped, are apt presumptuously to put themselves on a par with those of superior development; and hence that superiority, failing to meet with recognition, will be discouraged and democracy tend to level men downward instead of upward. This will not be true so much of such moral excellence as appears in an Emerson or a Lincoln,--for there is that in the lowliest which responds to the manifestations of transcendent moral beauty,--but it will hold good of those minor superiorities that fall short of the highest in art and science and conduct, yet upon the fostering of which depends the eventual appearance of culture’s richest fruits.

In order to ward off this danger we must have a new and larger educational policy in our schools than has yet been put in practice. Vocational training in its broadest and deepest sense will be our greatest aid.

Democracy, the American democracy, is the St. Christopher. St. Christopher bore the Christ child on his shoulders as he stepped into the river, and the child was as light as a feather. But it became heavier and heavier as he entered the stream, until he was well nigh borne down by it. So we, in the heyday of 1776, stepped into the stream with the infant Democracy on our shoulders, and it was light as a feather’s weight; but it is becoming heavier and heavier the deeper we are getting into the stream--heavier and heavier. When we began, there were four or five millions. Now there are ninety millions. Heavier and heavier! And there are other millions coming. When we began we were a homogeneous people; now there are those twenty-three languages spoken in a single school. And with this vast multitude, and this heterogeneous population, we are trying the most difficult experiment that has ever been attempted in the world,--trying to invest with sovereignty the common man. There has been the sovereignty of kings, and now and then a king has done well. There has been the sovereignty of aristocracies, and now and then an English aristocracy or a Venetian aristocracy has done well--though never wholly well. And now we are imposing this most difficult task of government, which depends on the recognition of excellence in others, so that the best may rule in our behalf, on the shoulders of the multitude. These are our difficulties. But our difficulties are also our opportunities. This land is the Promised Land. It is that not only in the sense in which the word is commonly taken--that is to say, a haven for the disadvantaged of other countries, a land whither the oppressed may come to repair their fortunes and breathe freely and achieve material independence. That is but one side of the promise. In that sense the Anglo-American native population is the host, extending hospitality, the benefactor of the immigrants. But this is also the land of promise for the native population themselves, in order that they may be penetrated by the influence of what is best in the newcomers, in order that their too narrow horizon may be widened, in order that their stiffened mental bent may become more flexible; that festivity, pageant and song may be added to their life by the newcomers; that echoes of ancient prophecy may inspire the matter-of-fact, progressive movements, so-called, of our day.

America is the Wonderland, hid for ages in the secret of the sea, then revealed. At first, how abused! Spanish conquerors trampled it; it was the nesting place of buccaneers, adventurers, if also the home of the Puritans--bad men and good men side by side. Then for dreary centuries the home of slavery. Then the scene of prolonged strife. And now, on the surface, the stamping ground of vulgar plutocrats! And yet, in the hearts of the elect,--yes, and in the hearts of the masses, too,--inarticulate and dim, there has ever been present a fairer and nobler ideal, the ideal of a Republic built on the uncommon fineness in the common man! To live for that ideal is the true Americanism, the larger patriotism. To that ideal, not on the field of battle, as in Europe, but in the arduous toil of peace, let us be willing to give the “last full measure of devotion.”

MARY ANTIN

With the publication in 1912 of Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land,” a new interest was awakened in the experiences of the foreign-born, and since then several important autobiographies of immigrants have appeared.

Miss Antin, who was born in Polotzk, Russia, in 1881, and came to America in 1894, was educated in the public schools of Boston, later attending Teachers’ College and Barnard College, Columbia University. Many an American boy and girl is familiar with her fine tribute to the part of the public school in her Americanization.

In 1914 she published “They Who Knock at Our Gates,” “a complete gospel of immigration,” in which she aims to refute the material and selfish arguments of the restrictionists, basing her plea for a nobler and more liberal treatment of the immigration question upon the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is from this volume and “The Promised Land” that the following selections are taken.

AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND TO GEORGE WASHINGTON

The public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad it is mine to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it, you born Americans; for it is the story of the growth of your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from the far ends of the earth to the flag you love; of the recruiting of your armies of workers, thinkers, and leaders. And you will be glad to hear of it, my comrades in adoption; for it is a rehearsal of your own experience, the thrill and wonder of which your own hearts have felt.

How long would you say, wise reader, it takes to make an American? By the middle of my second year in school I had reached the sixth grade. When, after the Christmas holidays, we began to study the life of Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution, and the early days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study had been idle until then. The reader, the arithmetic, the song book, that had so fascinated me until now, became suddenly sober exercise books, tools wherewith to hew a way to the source of inspiration. When the teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I sat rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped on the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent sighs of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts between bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington, till I could see them with my eyes shut. And whereas formerly my self-consciousness had bordered on conceit, and I thought myself an uncommon person, parading my schoolbooks through the streets, and swelling with pride when a teacher detained me in conversation, now I grew humble all at once, seeing how insignificant I was beside the Great.

As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save himself from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant of my sins. Formerly I had fasted and prayed and made sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, but it was more than half play, in mimicry of my elders. I had no real horror of sin, and I knew so many ways of escaping punishment. I am sure my family, my neighbors, my teachers in Polotzk--all my world, in fact--strove together, by example and precept, to teach me goodness. Saintliness had a new incarnation in about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it, was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really admired, like my Uncle Solomon and Cousin Rachel, were those who preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be downright good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one had books and teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes if one traveled about and picked up such things, like one’s uncles and cousins. But a human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and unfailingly valiant, all at the same time, I had never heard or dreamed of. This wonderful George Washington was as inimitable as he was irreproachable. Even if I had never, never told a lie, I could not compare myself to George Washington; for I was not brave,--I was afraid to go out when snowballs whizzed,--and I could never be the First President of the United States.

So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends who were notable people by the old standards,--and I had never been ashamed of my family,---but this George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were Fellow-Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow-Citizens in the patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father how he was a Citizen through the process of naturalization, and how I also was a Citizen by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was a Fellow-Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me, and at the same time sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct myself as befitted a Fellow-Citizen.

Before books came into my life, I was given to stargazing and daydreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived with my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alterations of the sun and stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the American Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the Common after school instead of hurrying home to read. I hung on fence rails, my pet book forgotten under my arm, and gazed off to the yellow-streaked February sunset, and beyond, and beyond. I was no longer the central figure of my dreams; the dry weeds in the lane crackled beneath the tread of Heroes.