Part 41

There can be no doubt that next to the Reform movement the profoundest modification of the forces within Judaism has come about during the last years of the century through the rise and progress of the Zionist movement. It has been said by some that Zionism is the expression of Jewish pessimism, by others that it is the highest form of Jewish optimism. I venture to say that it is both. The emancipation of the Jews has not been able to do away with anti-Semitism; history has repeated itself time and time again. When the Jews of a country were few in number and of little influence, they led a tolerably secure existence; but as soon as their number increased and their influence commenced to be felt, anti-Semitism was the effective weapon in the hands of their opponents. In so far, then, as Zionism takes account of this fact, it is pessimistic; for conditions in the future will hardly differ from those in the past. It sees the Wandering Jew of history continuing still his dreary march through the ages, never at rest and never able to effect a quiet and even development of his own forces. It explains this phenomenon from the fact that Israel has in all the changed circumstances striven to maintain its racial identity, and as this racial identity has a religious side as well, that the two combined may well be called a separate national existence; that a people holding tenaciously to this separate existence, but having no home of its own, must become, when occasion demands, the scape-goat and the play-ball of other forces. It recognizes anti-Semitism as continually existent, and in so far the opponents of Zionism may be right in saying that its rise is the result of the anti-Jewish movement. It is the Jewish answer from the Jewish point of view. On the other hand, Zionism is optimistic in believing that real help for the Jews can only come from within their own body; and that the Jewish question will only be solved when the Jews return to that point in their history whence they set out on their wanderings, and again found a permanent home to which all the persecuted can flee and from which a light will go forth to every nook and corner of Jewry. It does not hope that all Jews will return to Palestine, but it believes that only in a national centre can the centrifugal force be found which will hold the Jews together in the various countries of their sojourn.

When Theodore Herzl, a _littérateur_ in Vienna, published in 1897 his pamphlet on the Jewish state, he little imagined that it would call forth an echo in every country in which the Jews were scattered. He was not the first to attempt this solution of the problem. Far-seeing Russian Jews before him had, many years previous to that, propounded this method of dealing with the question, and it had been practically the assumption upon which the Judaism of the past had been built up. Reform Judaism, in relinquishing the hope of a return, and in cutting out from the prayer-book all mention of Palestine and the restoration, broke one of the strongest links which bound the Judaism of to-day with that of the past, and cast aside a great ideal, the realization of which had been a light to the feet of the Jews since the destruction of the Temple. The idea of a “Mission” has taken its place, the preaching of a pure Monotheism.

The Zionist congresses (which have now been held during four successive years) have found the platform, so often sought for in vain during the nineteenth century, upon which all Jews, regardless of theological opinions and of economic theories, can stand. They represent the old unity of Israel; for Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even the purely racial Jew are to be found there as well as in the Zionist societies which have grown up in every Jewish community, whether in Europe or in Africa, in North or in South America, even in the distant Philippines. The Orthodox Jew must be, by his very profession, a Zionist; but he often doubts whether the plan as formulated by Dr. Herzl is feasible, and holds himself aloof, waiting for the realization of his hopes at the hands of others, or for some supernatural sign of divine assistance. The very fact that the Jewish opponents of Zionism (and they are the only opponents it has) come from various parts of the Jewish camp is in itself a proof of the above statement. The Orthodox complain that some of the leaders of the movement are not sufficiently Jewish; the Reform, that some are too Jewish. That this opposition is exceedingly strong cannot be denied. The demand made that the Jew should assert himself first and foremost as a Jew has been distasteful to many who were soaring in the mystic hazes of Universalism, or who had hoped to get out of Judaism as it were by the back door, without being seen by the world at large.

But even in those circles which do not formally affiliate with Zionism, or who at times even oppose it, there has of late years been a very strong revival of Jewish feeling and a movement towards a stronger expression of that feeling. Germany is honeycombed with societies for the study of Jewish literature; the Hebrew language has been revived, notably in Russia, not only as a form of literary expression, but also as a vehicle of social intercourse; France has its Society of Jewish Studies; America and England have their Jewish Historical Societies, and their Jewish Chautauqua movements; Jewish national societies have sprung up among the students of German and Austrian universities—all influences—tending in this one direction.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As we look ahead into the century which is now opening and cast our eye over the forces which the Jews will bring into its life, we can easily see that these forces tend in various directions.

We have first the Orthodox wing of the Jewish Church, which stands upon the broad basis of what the past has evolved. It holds firmly to the inspiration of the biblical word and the divine character of its interpretation as handed down in the oral law; it tries to regulate its life by Talmudic ordinances as evolved in the latest law books, and is unwilling to make any but æsthetic concessions to changed circumstances, believing that we must adhere strictly to all the time-honored ceremonies of the synagogue. At its side stand the Conservatives, who are willing to make some concession to present demands, but believe that these concessions should be most sparingly and grudgingly made, and who theologically, at least in theory, occupy the same position as do the Orthodox. It is safe to say that the greater number of Jews in the Western European states belong to this wing of the synagogue. Between the Conservatives and the Ethical Culturists stands the Reform party, more numerous in the United States than anywhere else, whose position it is hard to define and in whose midst there are various shades of opinion and of practice. All the Reformers have openly or tacitly broken with Talmudic Judaism—the more conservative among them seem to believe that a new Judaism can be built up upon the Bible, only without its traditional interpretation; while the advanced body do not even look upon the Bible as binding, but merely as a starting-point for a further development. They do not consider the Bible as inspired in the old accepted sense of the term; they welcome biblical criticism as an aid to the understanding of the early history of their people; they do not believe in the special election of Israel, and have a well-defined abhorrence of anything like a creed. They are practically Theists with a Jewish racial coloring. Nor do they believe in the coming of a personal Messiah; rather, in the advent of a Messianic time in which righteousness and good-will shall prevail and all the earth acknowledge the one God. To bring about this time is, according to them, the Mission of the Jew—a phrase very current in these latter days, the fulfilling of which has been made the pretext for dejudaizing Judaism, so as to make it acceptable to non-Jews. Mr. Oswald John Simon, of London, has even gone further. He believes that if the Reform party is earnest in its pretensions, it ought—as it did once before in its history—to become an active missionary power. A few years ago he attempted to found a Jewish Theistic Church, which should in no way be colored by Jewish ceremonial. The movement was, of course, a failure. The original attempt, some nineteen hundred years ago, led to the founding of the Christian Church, and Jews themselves have suffered too much from missionaries of other faiths to take to this work with pleasure. But, in addition to these, there is also a large body of Jews whose connection with the synagogue is purely nominal, and who know of it only when they need the services of its sanction or the respectability of its connections. The hold which the Jewish Church has upon them is small indeed, and many of them hope, in the twentieth century, to doff their Jewish gaberdine. The open or concealed pressure of anti-Semitism (particularly on the continent of Europe) which makes it impossible for the Jew as such to attain to social distinction or political position will drive most of these into the arms of the dominant Church of the country in which they live. In a remarkable article published in the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ of October, 1900, a writer who uses the _nom de plume_ of Benedictus Levita openly urges those of his fellow-Jews who have become estranged from the synagogue to have their children baptized, in order that they may not suffer as their parents have, but may become really believing Christians, since their affiliation with the Christian Church has become necessary in the modern Christian state. Another German Jew at about the same time advises his brethren to declare themselves “Confessionslos,” so as to become lost, not in Christianity, but in “Deutschtum.” A similar request was made to the Jews of Roumania, in 1900, by the historian Xenopol of Bucharest. There is little fear that this advice of wholesale apostasy will find many adherents, notwithstanding the fact that an unusually large number of conversions have taken place in Germany and Austria, due wholly to pressure from without rather than to conviction from within. The defection even of comparatively large numbers can, however, hardly affect the Jewish cause as a whole; for these numbers living on the periphery, or even beyond it, have been of little service to the Jewish cause; and all through the ages Jews have made just such contributions as these to the general society in which they lived.

There can be no doubt that Zionism is a strong protest against these weaklings, and that the coming century will witness the Jews divided into two camps not necessarily hostile to each other, the Zionists and the Non-Zionists—those who plead for a conservation of the old energy and the old ideals, and those who look forward to the disintegration of Judaism and its gradual passing away into other forces. That Judaism can only conserve its force if that force is attached to a racial and national basis is seen clearly in the fact that just those Jews in Germany who have been most loudly clamorous against the Zionists propose to have now what they call a German “Judentag,” which can certainly mean nothing unless it become Zionist in its tendency.

Confident in this hope, we of the House of Israel look calmly into the future. The message of the prophet of old is full of meaning for us: “Thus saith the Lord God: behold I, even I, will both search my sheep and seek them out, as a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his flock which is scattered, and I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.” We can echo the sentiments expressed by a Christian Zionist, George Eliot, many years ago: “Revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.”

RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL.

FREE-THOUGHT

The history of religion during the past century may be described as the sequel of that dissolution of the mediæval faith which commenced at the Reformation. The vast process of disintegration proceeds by degrees, is varied by reactionary effort, and gives birth to new theories in its course. In our day the completion of the process and a new departure seem to be at hand. A sharp line cannot be drawn at the beginning of the last century, the leaders of religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries having been to a great extent the leaders, and their works the text-books, of the nineteenth.

At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of Pope and priest, priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the mediæval system. Ostensibly, Protestantism was founded on freedom of conscience and the right of private judgment. In reality, it retained Church authority over conscience in the shape of dogmatic creeds and ordination tests. It besides enforced belief in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, by which the exercise of private judgment was narrowly confined. Not for some time did it even renounce persecution. In grimly Calvinistic Scotland a boy was hanged for impugning the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican Church, suspended by the will of the Tudor sovereigns between Catholicism and Protestantism, oscillated from side to side, producing by one of its oscillations the great civil war. It burned heretics in the reign of James I. All the Protestant Churches except the Baptists, who at first were objects of persecution, fell under the dominion of the state, which repaid them for their submission and support by endowments, temporal privileges, and persecution of dissent.

Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events, were in some sense dogmatic and were anchored to the inspiration of the Bible. Nor is it easy to convict Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox as he was, of scepticism or even of heterodoxy. The expression of heterodox opinions, indeed, would have been a violation of his own principle, which makes religion absolutely an affair of the state, to be regulated by a despotic government, and confines liberty to the recesses of thought. It is true that in making religion a political institution, variable at a despot’s will, he covertly denied that it was divine.

Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William III.

The Church of Rome, to meet the storm, reorganized herself at the Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. A comparison of Suarez with Thomas Aquinas shows the change which took place in spirit as plainly as a comparison of the Jesuit’s meretricious fane with the Gothic churches shows the change in religious taste. Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate, and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery of extraordinary power in the Order of Loyola. That the plenary inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of its authority upon her. She now allied herself more closely than before with the Catholic kings, with Philip II., and afterwards with Louis XIV., who paid her for her support of political absolutism by sanguinary persecution of heretics. She hereby parted with her Hildebrandic supremacy over the powers of the world, though she did not, like the Anglican Church, recognize the divine right of kings. The liberal and peace-making movements which had been set on foot, or were afterwards set on foot, within her pale, such as the Oratory of Divine Love, which held justification by faith and wished to compromise with the Protestants, were effectually put down. Jansenism, when it appeared, with its half-Calvinistic theory of Grace, shared the same fate. Gallicanism afterwards, having nationality to back it, was more successful. But it brought no freedom of conscience; it was merely a repartition of the despotic power over conscience between the King and the Pope.

In Spain, and for the most part in Italy, Rome, by the aid of the Jesuit and the Inquisition, completely succeeded in killing free-thought. In France, where there was no Inquisition, her triumph was not so complete. She succeeded only in driving scepticism into disguise and subterfuge. The Commonwealth of Holland did France and the world in general the immense service of affording a printing house for free-thought which was on the confines of France, but beyond the reach of the French government. Descartes, without directly assailing the faith of the Church, planted in her face the standard of thorough-going reason and entitled himself to a place in the Index. Growing sensuality and love of pleasure brought with them laxity of belief and impatience of priestly control. The authority of the clergy was impaired by their scandalous wealth and vice, which at the same time enhanced the odium of their persecuting tyranny. At last came Voltaire, Diderot, the _Encyclopædia_, and Rousseau. With literary cleverness unmatched and an incomparable genius for subtle attack, combined with a winning philanthropy, Voltaire converted and drew into the work of demolition, to them suicidal, the thrones of Louis XV., or rather of the Pompadour, of Catherine, and Frederick. The influence extended even to Spain, where Aranda, and to Portugal, where Pombal reigned. The Pope was constrained to dissolve the Order of Jesus. As Voltaire demolished in the name of Reason, Rousseau demolished in the name of Nature, taking an artificial society by storm. Helvétius went to the length of extreme materialism; but Voltaire, the master-spirit of the movement, remained a theist, and Rousseau was even for compulsory theism as the foundation of the state. The Revolution also, when it came, though violently and profanely anti-Christian, was in the main theist, and in the midst of the Terror held its Feast of the Supreme Being, with Robespierre for high priest. Atheism, in the persons of Chaumette and Anacharsis Clootz, went to the guillotine.

One hardly knows what to say about the _Last Will and Testament_ of Jean Meslier, the priest who after thirty years’ service as a country curé bequeathed to his parishioners a profession of atheism. The work appears to have passed through the hands of Voltaire. It urges the arguments against natural theology in a very forcible as well as thorough-going way. But it seems, when it appeared, to have made little impression and can be mentioned historically only as an indication of the masked ferment of the time.

England had a series of deists, Toland, Tindal, Collins, Chubb, and the rest, not men of much mark, though seekers of truth after their measure and in their day. The ecclesiastical polity of England was comparatively mild, and there was nothing to provoke indignant resistance to clerical tyranny like that which was provoked by the cases of Calas and LaBarre. Shaftesbury, a deist of a higher stamp, was, with his “moral taste,” a philosopher for men of taste, and could little stir the common world. In defence of orthodoxy came forth Bishop Butler, with a work which will be memorable forever as a model of earnest and solemn inquiry into the deepest questions, though its fundamental assumption is unwarrantable, since we should expect the difficulties of natural theology not to be reproduced but to be dispelled by revelation. Butler’s tone in discussion was an effective rebuke to those who had treated Christianity with levity as an obsolete interference with the pleasures of the world. His profound analysis of the moral nature of man in like manner rebuked the shallow and cynical theories which resolved everything into self-love; though here again his assumption of the authority of conscience as a divinely implanted monitor has by modern investigation been disallowed. Butler, however, with all his piety and his orthodox conclusions, must essentially be reckoned among rationalists. He frankly admits that the use of our reason is the only means we have of arriving at truth, never appealing from it to Church authority. He who recognizes reason as supreme must be deemed rationalist, let his own reason lead him or mislead him as it may. This is the vital line of cleavage which runs through the whole religious history and divides the religious world at the present day.

Butler had a popular shield-bearer in Paley, an extremely acute and effective though not profound writer. Paley’s supposed proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator from the design visible in creation told greatly at the time and long continued to tell; though we now see that the universe, unlike the watch, presents terrible proofs of undesign as well as apparent proofs of design; not to mention that in the case of the universe, though adaptation is visible, the aim is not revealed. Paley’s _Horae Paulinae_, however, is about the only piece of historical apologetics which has in any degree survived the destructive influence of modern criticism.

Warburton hardly calls for mention. In his _Divine Legation_ he is right enough in saying that Moses did not teach the immortality of the soul; but the notion that the Mosaic dispensation must have had divine support because it could afford to dispense with that doctrine would now only provoke a smile.

Among literary apologists we can scarcely reckon Johnson. Yet he was a living defence, intellectual as well as moral, of his religion. That he speculated, we cannot doubt, and we know that he was not satisfied with the proofs of the immortality of the soul; but he suppressed doubt in himself and frowned it down in others. He was well justified in treating with contempt the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, which have not the slightest force or value beyond their literary form. Bolingbroke’s scepticism, however, had a certain effect if it inspired Pope’s _Universal Prayer_.