Part 14

It would be interesting to know at just what period of his life, or in which of his two lives, Wordsworth wrote this “Song.” Was it a memory of his dead self, the radical that fell in the French Revolution? Or did he write it when the sceptical wanderings of other minds around him had become to his peaceful soul, with no doom heavier than the liturgical round of Grasmere Church, as imaginary as the “seven whistlers on their nightly rounds,” which his peasant-friend heard, while overhead were heard those “Gabriel’s hounds” by ears that little knew they too were fabled of Jews doomed by the Crucified? All around Wordsworth in his home amid the Lakes were the real wanderers. Before nearly every fine mind living at the beginning of the last generation, this Ahasuerus had risen as a spiritual type. Seven times did Shelley evoke this form, and it was with him when he wandered unrecognised past Rydal Mount. Southey had known the meaning of it. Byron had taken the side of Cain against him who in Paradise permitted “the Serpent to creep in,” and seen in Prometheus, with “the wretched gift Eternity,” the symbol of man’s fate and force. De Quincey had made acquaintance with such doomed wanderers of rabbinical legend as “The Widow of Hebron.” From afar the sighings of “L. E. L.” were heard in fitful dreams of “The Undying One.”

There came a terrible day when the children of the Revolution recognised the inexorable Mother of whom they were born. The old beliefs and ideas in which good and honest people had lived so comfortably were shrivelled up. It was not the half-way heresy of the earlier time which believed it was attaining a purer Christianity and a more glorious immortality. These children of the Revolution found the whole fabric of faith fallen to black ruins. The youth went off light-hearted to college: he came back heavy-hearted. Beside the old fireside he sat once more, with the dear faces around him and exile in his heart. He listened to the old Bible, and knelt; but his mind was far away, and had left him amid the innocent, a guilty, kneeling, assenting phantasm. Then there began this Age of Wandering; for the new mind could not yet get a new heart, and could only wander about like the night-raven of folk-lore, that ever seeks the Holy Sepulchre for rest. Their voices may be heard in most of the literature of the last generation, pathetic as the appeal of deserted brides going about the street asking, “Saw ye my Beloved?”--the only answer being endless echoes of the question. Intellect seemed to them a curse. By it they were at one stroke deprived alike of faith in future and hope of present joys. Unfit for usual avocations, unable to enter pulpits and professions tainted with the discredited superstitions, how well could they understand the doom of every wanderer!

In the same year (1833) that Edgar Quinet--after ten years of wandering in the effort to find some point where he could catch a least ray of the old faith that made his early home so sweet, only to discover that his faith was gone out, not eclipsed--published his _Ahasuerus_, Carlyle also, after like wanderings, published his _Sartor Resartus_, with its story of the “Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh.” It was in that same year, too, that Ralph Waldo Emerson, unable to rest even in his Unitarian pulpit, escaping from the clinging arms of his devoted congregation, came across the ocean to converse with Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and find if they could show him any light on the great problems. Coleridge had taken refuge with opium and orthodoxy. Wordsworth entertained the young American Wanderer with lamentations over the excess of intellectual above moral culture in the modern world. But it was in the far solitude of Nithsdale that he hoped to find what he sought; for Carlyle had written an essay in which he spoke of standing amid night, yet seeing the faint signs of a new day-spring. “Here, straight uprose that lone wayfaring man,” wrote Carlyle afterwards; but, alas, it was only to find at Craigenputtoch (Hawk Hill) one preyed upon by the same remorseless doubts. The personal hospitality was beautiful. But when the young American, just bereaved of his wife, sought some vision beyond the grave, there was no help for him. He asked Carlyle to what religious development those sentences about a new day-spring pointed? The answer was that he could not state that even to himself. Everyone, he said, must find out his own path, and walk in it.

When Emerson parted from Carlyle and returned to the New World, he found in its new life more than his vanished faith: to emancipate slaves, and human minds, and the moral genius of woman, and give the People their opportunity to build the New World into beauty and happiness--this he found was a religion with eternal vistas opening from it, hopes fairer than his faded heaven, a providence better than the Syrian deity who had led the Old World into Red Seas, but never through them to any Promised Land. But Carlyle remained to wander to the last amid the wrecks of his lost worlds.

“Poor Teufelsdröckh! Flying with Hunger always parallel to him, and a whole Infernal Chase in his rear; so that the countenance of Hunger is comparatively a friend’s! Thus must he, in the temper of ancient Cain, or of the modern Wandering Jew, save only that he feels himself not guilty and but suffering the pains of guilt--wend to and fro with aimless speed. Thus must he, over the whole surface of the earth (by footprints) write his _Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh_; even as the great Goethe, in passionate words, must write his _Sorrows of Werther_, before the spirit freed itself and he could become a Man. Vain, truly, is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow!”

Among all the Wanderers only one seemed to have found a new heart atwin with his new intellect--he alone loved and welcomed the new, and preferred the vulture-beak that tears Prometheus, the loneliness of Ahasuerus, to the favour of Jove, Jahve or Jesus. Shelley alone was heard singing his matin of the lark above ruins sadder than all the rest.

XVIII.

AHASUERUS VINCTUS.

Here before me is a formidable array of large--one might almost say fat--volumes, which I have hardly known whether to assign to England or Germany, but conclude that they belong to both, and also to America, and to the night-side of Protestantism everywhere. They are entitled: _Chronicles, selected from the originals, of Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, embracing a period of nearly XIX. centuries. Now first revealed to and edited by David Hoffman, Hon. J. U. D. of Göttingen. In two series, each of three volumes. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853._ This book contains a dedication, dated March 10, 1851, Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, to the author’s brother, Samuel Hoffman, Esq., of Baltimore, U. S. A. It contains also a dedication, dated September, 1852, Austin Friars, London, from Cartaphilus himself: “To the Children of the Dispersion--Jehovah’s favoured people during so many ages, Christ’s scattered flock during so many more--these chronicles are affectionately inscribed,” etc.

There is nothing in these volumes which bear upon the legendary Wandering Jew, except a tradition, incidentally mentioned, that in 1539 he visited Cornelius Agrippa, and was shown the face of Rebecca, whom he had loved fifteen centuries before, in a magic mirror. But the existence of such a book, embodying the vulgar Protestant superstitions about the “dispersion” and the gathering of the “chosen people;” the fact that so much labour can be expended on these notions by a man otherwise educated, the author apparently of several legal works, are phenomena to excite reflections. There is a good deal of suggestiveness, too, in the link between Austin Friars and Grosvenor Square. Cartaphilus, going his eternal round with cry of “O’ clo’!” has finally, it would appear, discovered that he need only have his Judaism baptized to be one of “Christ’s flock,” pastured as richly in the fashionable Square.

But even more significant just now is the fact that Germany is ready to supply the hand that can write of the Jews as for ages “Jehovah’s favoured people,” and in the next moment be clenched to smite them as an accursed race. So much this union of Cartaphilus and Austin Friars with the Hon. Mr. Hoffman and Grosvenor Square may mean for us, as we bid them farewell, finding nothing further in their voluminous sermons pertinent to our present inquiry or purpose.

Here are two pregnant facts. In various parts of the East Jews manifest a superstitious dread of a Christian’s curse. On the other hand, for a long time there prevailed among Christians a belief that an oath taken in a Jewish synagogue was more binding and efficient than one taken elsewhere.[40] Add these two facts together, and their sum is in the following third fact: on Wednesday, April 13, 1881, a petition against the Jews was presented to the German Chancellor, in twenty-six volumes, 14,000 sheets, and with 255,000 signatures.

Every signature to that most shameful document which the nineteenth century has witnessed was set there by--Judaism itself. It was Israel that taught Christendom its black art of cursing. The Christian idea of a Chosen People of Christ, commissioned to make war upon other peoples as heathen, infidels, hosts of Antichrist, is a precise transcript of the Judaic idea of a Chosen People of Jahve, with commission to put Gentiles to the edge of the sword. In the darkest ages, when holocausts of Jews were offered in sacrifice to a deified member of their race, the Christian might have addressed his victim with a paraphrase of Shylock’s words, “If a Baalite disagreed with a Jew, what was his humility? Slaughter. If a Jew disagree with a Christian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, slaughter. The intolerance your Testament teaches me I will execute, and it shall go hard but, with the aid of my Testament, I will better the instruction!”

When Moses Mendelssohn was asked, “When will the Jews become Christians?” he answered, “When the Christians cease to be Jews.”

After Shakspeare had startled the world with a suspicion that the Jew is a man, it still required a hundred and fifty years, or thereabout, to awaken the further suspicion that a Jew might be a good, even a religious man. This revelation came through Lessing. When he was coming of age, Lessing recognised the injustice done to the Jews of Germany. Every Jew entering Berlin was compelled to pay toll at Brandenburg Gate. The meanest Christian might gain credit by insulting or assaulting a Jew. Frederick the Great could write, “Jesus was a Jew, yet we persecute the Jews,” but his wide toleration left that people unprotected. Lessing wrote an early drama, _Die Juden_, which touched gently on the matter. In it a wealthy Jew of high character saves the life of a Christian baron and his daughter. The baron desires the youth to marry his daughter, but finding to what race and religion he belongs, that, of course, is impossible. So the drama ends. Why impossible? The answer to that question had to be postponed. There are some evils in this world which are like the birth-mark in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story: the chemist succeeded in extracting the birth-mark from his wife’s face, but the wife lay dead. When the mark of the cross disappears from the Wanderer’s brow, so that the Christian who has branded him shall no longer say as he passes, “He is a Jew,” nor for that part from his daughter’s lover, Christianity will be dead. The flower of Lessing’s great heart and mind was _Nathan the Wise_. The apologue of “The Three Rings,” in which the Jew, the Moslem, the Christian Templar, raised above their bigotry by mutual human service are seen in a tableau of charity, shone like the star of a new religion over Germany. It is the “Ideal of Religious Liberty,” said Schwartz, Historian of Modern Theology at Halle; “Truly can Deity be said to pervade every line of Nathan,” said Kuno Fischer, of Jena University; while in it Strauss sees one advancing the “Kingdom of God on earth.”[41] Yet even Lessing was still not equal to the idea of having the Jewess marry the Christian. Just as we are listening to hear the marriage-bells ring out for the lovers, lo, they turn out to be brother and sister! So, the religious equality having been proclaimed a hundred and fifty years after Shakspeare had proclaimed the human equality, Lessing leaves it to a like time to establish the social equality of Jew and Christian.

But was this line drawn altogether by the Christian? Lessing’s friendship with Moses Mendelssohn had taught him otherwise. When Michaelis, the theologian, read his early play, “The Jews,” he wrote a criticism in which he expressed a doubt whether an oppressed and despised race could produce such a man as the hero. Mendelssohn replied, and Lessing, enclosing this reply to Michaelis, wrote concerning its author: “He really is a Jew, a man of five-and-twenty, who, without any instruction, has acquired great attainments in languages, in mathematics, in philosophy, in poetry. I foresee in him an honour to our nation, if he is allowed to come to maturity by his co-religionists, who have always displayed an unfortunate spirit of persecution towards men like him.” The confirmation of this apprehension on the part of the Jews’ earliest champion in Germany may be found in the enthusiasm which the next eminent Mendelssohn put into his oratorio of “St. Paul.”

Goethe tells us that he had intended to bring his Wandering Jew to a meeting with Spinoza. The great German had met with two illustrations of the legend he did deal with, of Faust carried off by demons. One was in the case of Lessing, who, for his defence of Jews and his attack on historic Christianity, had been piously impaled by a rumour that Satan had appeared at his death-bed. The other was in a tract he picked up in which Spinoza was denounced as an infidel, and upon which was a picture of the noble man, giving him diabolical features. But, alas! Spinoza had been more a martyr among his own people than among Christians. Ahasuerus with the red cross on his brow would have found Spinoza also a lonely wanderer, outcast from his people, but not under any Christian doom.

Were Goethe alive, he would find Spinoza still in Europe, and still a lonely wanderer amid the scowling hatred of both Jew and Christian. He would find in England, certainly, a steady tendency of synagogue-Judaism to find its ally and support in the Christianity which alone represents its ancient superstition and bigotry. It is the orthodox Jew who on Saturday sets the model of a Sabbath for the Christian to copy on Sunday. When the parliamentary oath--half Romish, half Jewish--is questioned, Jew and Christian stand side by side in its defence, and together seek to impose upon Englishmen of the nineteenth century the theological test of belief in an oath-bound and oath-guaranteeing deity in which no educated man can possibly believe. The orthodox male Jew thanks Jahve in his liturgy that he was not made a woman; and the male Christian responds by excluding women from political rights. While in Germany the Christian persecutes the Jew as Antichrist, in England the Jew persecutes the Antichristian as Armillus. The Jew recognises a believer in the Trinity as a true theist, and the Christian accepts the Jewish worshipper of Jahve as a theist; and they make common cause against the disbeliever in both as a “miscreant,” an “atheist.” Some influential Jews recently made an effort to “Boycott” the _Jewish World_ newspaper for its criticisms on Christianity. From another “Jewish” quarter there came a sharp cry of distress and anger because a scholar attempted to prove that Jesus was not of the Jewish race!

It is a significant fact that the man of whom the Jews of recent times have been proudest, the statesman whom every Israelite in Europe was glad to aid with his information and his wealth, was a Jew whose circumcision had been subordinated to Christian baptism. This combination of auspices--the heart of an ancient Jew with the political advantages of a Christian--made Lord Beaconsfield a symbolical figure. It is only in its Christianised form that Judaism can ever behold even a partial fulfilment of its ancient dreams of worldly power. The theocracy of Jahve is henceforth dependent for every shred of its authority upon the golden sceptre of Christ.

Christ is for the present a monarch--in England the last surviving sovereign whose rule is at all theocratic. The Jews, as we have seen, were really saved from extermination by powerful rulers who only hungered for their money while the mob thirsted for their blood. Fear of the populace was part of the heritage of the Jew, transmitted by heredity. However bravely the modern Jew--at least up to this generation--might begin with the radicalism of his prophets, he was pretty sure to develop into a supporter of strong government; and there has hitherto, in most countries, been always sufficient Christian intolerance to enable that evolution to pass its embryonic phases without arrest. Heine begins with revolutionism and atheism; ends with worshipping Napoleon I. (whom he sees protecting Jews along the Rhine), and God (of whose existence he was convinced by the sense of smell while mingling with the atheistical _ouvriers_ in their Paris clubs). Benjamin Disraeli begins with poetical eulogy of regicide, and ends with turning a queen into an empress. So far as this ancient reactionism can survive into the immediate future, it must necessarily be the ally of Christianity. The English Jews who paid so large a sum to bring back Charles II. to his throne, were represented by those who gathered to the support of the Christian Lord Beaconsfield.

Lord Beaconsfield was for the Jews a triumph for their race, but a humiliation for their religion. They must needs find their leader in a family of apostates! But the orthodox Jews knew well that this humiliation was more than compensated to them in the new resource which their christened leader opened for them against their party of progress. Disraeli the Elder had fled from the dry bones of Judaism to find intellectual freedom. Disraeli the Younger, sent by his father into the Christian Church, found there the dry bones all turned into armed men.

Isaac Disraeli made an earnest effort to be at once a man of letters and a member of the synagogue. When his effort had proved vain, and he must follow Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the path of exile, he wrote to the wardens of Bevis Marks synagogue: “Many of your members are already lost; many you are losing! Even those whose tempers and feelings would still cling to you are gradually seceding. But against all this you are perpetually pleading your existing laws, which you would enforce on all the brethren alike. It is of these obsolete laws so many complain. They were adapted by fugitives to their peculiar situation, quite distinct from their own, and as foreign to us as the language in which they were written. For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without laws.”

Soon after his separation from the synagogue he wrote his work _The Genius of Judaism_. In it is the following passage: “The religious Judaism of the Theocracy degenerated into Rabbinical Judaism by fabulous traditions and enslaving customs. Dictators of the human intellect, the Rabbins, like their successors, the papal Christians, attempted to raise a spurious Theocracy of their own. A race of dreaming schoolmen contrived to place an avowed collection of mere human decisions among the hallowed verities and the duties of devotion, to graft opinions of men on the scion of divine institutions; nay, even to prefer the gloss in direct opposition to the divine precept, whenever, as they express it, ‘the tradition is not favoured;’ that is, when the oral tradition absolutely contradicts the written law. The Jews live according to their laws, and according to their traditions and customs; for their traditions have become an integral part of their written law, and their customs have been converted into rites. The Judaic superstitions have been substituted for the code of Revelation. We may ask, by what enthralling witchcraft, by what perverse ingenuity, has such a revolution been brought about?”

In reading this I am reminded of the Russian folk-tale of “The Devouring Sister.” The Vampire born into a family devours each member of it successively, to the last--a brother who slays her. After she is dead, he hears her voice gently entreating him to think with compassion on her hard doom, and to preserve some bit of her remains. Moved by this appeal, the brother folds one drop of her blood in a leaf and carries it in his bosom. When he reaches home he falls dead; the one drop of Vampire blood had devoured his heart. The fatal drop which Isaac Disraeli carried away from his dead Judaism was folded in the fine passage just quoted, as in a green leaf: it is in the phrase, “scion of divine institutions.”

There is enough in that brief creed to sustain every persecution of reason and conscience the world ever saw. The Sanhedrim is in it; the Inquisition is in it. The belief that the God of the universe established the institutions of ancient Judea is enough to eat the human heart out of every generation that presses it, with whatever sentiment, to its breast.

It was perfectly logical for Isaac Disraeli to have his son baptized a Christian. Seeing in the so-called “religion” of his race a “scion of divine institutions,” he rightly saw in Christianity the natural expansion and historic development of that “scion.” He had said to the synagogue, “For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without laws.” Christianity supplied those laws. The same voice spake again when, thirty-seven years ago, his son reminded Christendom that it was obeying the laws and saturated in the literature of the Jewish race; when he claimed that Moses was summoned by Jahve “to be the organ of an eternal revelation of the divine will.”

The freethinker owes a certain debt to Lord Beaconsfield for his logical treatment of Christianity. That unanswerable argument of his in “A Political Biography,” that the Jews deserved gratitude for prevailing on the Romans to crucify Jesus, so securing the Atonement; that it was a sublime act and sacrifice, Jews being the ordained immolators, securing the salvation of the world; that no one has ever been permitted to write under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost but a Jew; that all Christians acknowledge that the only medium of communication between themselves and God is the Jewish race; that the Mother of God was a Jewess; that, indeed, is a _reductio ad absurdum_, which cannot be unwelcome to the age of common sense. But every nail he thus drove into the coffin of Christianity was one which had pierced the hands and feet of humanity from Canaan to Calvary, and from Calvary to Smithfield.