Part 15

The devotion of Lord Beaconsfield to the Jewish people was a fearful retribution on the synagogue that drove out his father. His kiss was as fatal as it was sincere. He taught the Jewish youth that the path to power and glory, not merely for themselves but for their race, lay in the direction of Christianity. His spirit may yet survive as the Moses of a journey through the baptismal sea to the Promised Land. He confirmed them in every error--in all their race-egoism, in all their indifference to the progressive enlightenment of the world, and gave their bigotry a new lease of life by a Christian confirmation. The most eloquent passage he ever wrote is in _Tancred_, in the “Feast of Tabernacles,” which the _Jewish World_, in quoting it after his death, said might have been uttered by a _Chasid_ in a moment of inspiration: “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards. What sublime inexorability in the law! But what indomitable spirit in the people! It is easy for the happier Sephardim, the Hebrews who have never quitted the sunny regions that are laved by the Midland Ocean; it is easy for them, though they have lost their heritage, to sympathise in their beautiful Asian cities or in their Moorish and Arabian gardens, with the graceful rites that are, at least, an homage to a benignant nature. But picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine! The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower, and that he must build it of the boughs of thick trees; and the Rabbins have told him that these thick trees are the palm, the myrtle, and the weeping willow. Even Sarmatia may furnish a weeping willow. The law has told him that he must pluck the fruit of goodly trees, and the Rabbins have explained that goodly fruit on this occasion is confined to the citron. Perhaps, in his despair, he is obliged to fly to the candied delicacies of the grocer. His mercantile connections will enable him, often at considerable cost, to procure some palm-leaves from Canaan, which he may wave in his synagogue while he exclaims, as the crowd did when the divine descendant of David entered Jerusalem, ‘Hosannah in the highest!’ There is something profoundly interesting in this devoted observance of Oriental customs in the heart of our Saxon and Sclavonian cities; in these descendants of the Bedoueens, who conquered Canaan more than three thousand years ago, still celebrating that success which secured their forefathers, for the first time, grapes and wine. Conceive a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of Hamburg or Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of our Houndsditch or Minories, born to hereditary insult, without any education, apparently without a circumstance that can develop the slightest taste, or cherish the least sentiment for the beautiful, living amid fogs and filth, never treated with kindness, seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest, if not the vilest, toil--bargaining for frippery, speculating in usury, existing for ever under the concurrent influence of degrading causes which would have worn out, long ago, any race that was not of the unmixed blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the law of Moses; conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all ages among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience; filled with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most joyous, and the most exuberant; a subject which has inspired poets, and which has made gods--the harvest of the grape in the native regions of the vine. He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought, probably, from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it, even profusely, with the finest flowers and fruits he can procure, the myrtle and the citron never forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and his children in the open air, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee, beneath its sweet and starry sky.”

“What sublime inexorability in the law!” Nay, what binding, paralysing, mercilessness in the self-imposed law that holds the eyes of a race for ever at the back of its head instead of in the forehead! In the great and grievous error of those words is repeated once more the doom of the Wandering Race. In them Jesus says again to Ahasuerus, “As thou hast refused to go out in the general vineyard of humanity, to toil and gather with the true and earnest of all races and religions, be this thy sentence: Keep thy small province of mouldered faith; go on, and on, and for ever, celebrating vineyards that do not exist, pressing dead grapes that yield no wine, waving dead palm-leaves before a Messiah that can never arrive, bound in thine everlasting Houndsditch round by dreams of myrtle-bowers in a barbarian paradise long ago turned to a Valley of Jehoshaphat!”

Lord Beaconsfield also dealt his blow to Spinoza. He defended the rights of the Jews in Parliament on the ground that they were all Jews, all believers in Moses and the Prophets; and that the alternative of this was belief in Hume and Gibbon. The day of his burial was solemnised by the party he had led with an effort to drive out of Parliament an Englishman who preferred Hume and Gibbon to Moses and the Prophets.

This is the doom of Judaism. This is Ahasuerus bound. There is a nobility in the Ahasuerus that Shelley evokes in _Queen Mab_, a Semitic Prometheus bound for ever on Time and its desolations, as a rock, with bigotry and intolerance feeding vulture-like upon his heart because he will not bend to tyrannical Jove, either in the form of Jahve or of Jesus; suffering as the friend of a Humanity also groaning beneath a celestial despotism, but cringing as he will not. But there is nothing Promethean in the mere preference for the chains of one tyrant over those of another. There is nothing noble in a sect accepting its rock and vulture through servility to a deity of whose indifference or impotence or non-existence the history of his worshippers is a sufficient proof. There is no majesty in martyrdom unless it is endured for the deliverance and welfare of all mankind. There was a time when the Jews suffered nobly; they stood almost alone in preserving the protest of the human mind against priestly impostures, which could not be maintained by the thinking Greeks and Romans--who no doubt knew the facts as well as Lucian and Celsus--against imperial decrees. But that time passed when thought became free. The emancipation of the Jews politically brought to their side Herakles--a human-hearted deliverer--who cut their outward cords. Judaism, remaining on its Caucasus, apart from the evolution of humanity, is bound only by inward chains. Its doom, in free countries, comes only from within.

It is forbidden that any man or race shall find strength and happiness in isolation, and this race is withheld by its traditional system and its dogmas from co-operation with mankind in its nobler aims and tendencies. Their fundamental error is to regard the God of Israel as different from the Gods of other people. Upon that rests the wild superstition that the Jews, in some sense or other, are “a chosen people” or “a peculiar people.” It is the doctrine alike of Christianity and Judaism; but as in the dreary past it has been the dogma most fatal to the Jews--their accepted supernatural eminence logically leading to their supernatural doom--it must be equally fatal in their future of freedom, in an intellectual sense. So long as they are marked off in the human world in this way they will not find rest; for that can be found only when their genius--earning such wreaths as adorn the brow of Spinoza and Heine, or those which came from every capital to lie on the grave of Offenbach--is identified with the general work and play of the world, and their religious aims such as are common to all who acknowledge allegiance to reason and pursue the equal welfare of mankind.

XIX.

AHASUERUS DELIVERED.

There are certain races of mankind whose history or whose character has made them the tests of civilisation. In one direction the negro has been such. In the development of English self-government, on both sides of the Atlantic, there came a time when its fine theories of liberty were put to the test. In America the poor ignorant negro knelt chained before the genius of the Republic. His slavery represented many millions of money, his freedom must cost many thousands of lives; but Justice said, “There is that lowly man--helpless, of alien race from you, too poor to pay you anything: if you can do justice to him, can make him a citizen, the world will know that you are really a republic.”

In another direction the Jewish race has been the test and register of civilisation. It was the one visible embodiment of Antichrist in Christendom. While missionaries were going through the world to convert the world, the Jew also went through the world--moral, religious, learned--a compulsory wanderer and missionary, in whose scars might always be read the spirit of the Church he opposed, and the meaning of a vicarious atonement, whose corollary was the unending crucifixion of a race for the offence of three or four of their ancestors. This Wandering Jew knocked at the doors of law-courts. “Who art thou?” said the judges. “I am Antichrist.” “Come in and be burnt,” said they. He came in and was burnt. But ever rising from his ashes, the Wanderer marched on. Again, after some centuries, he knocked at the door marked Justice. “Who art thou?” asked the judges. “I am Antichrist,” he said. “Stay out and be mobbed,” said they. And so he wandered until he reached the century when England opened the door and said, “Enter and receive thy right.” Even Judge Jeffreys, in the time of James II., would not accept the old law which disabled a Jew from prosecuting a Christian. “Pay him his money,” he cried to the defendant. “His action is not against a Christian: you are more a Jew than he is!” At many doors this unconquerable Antichrist had to knock in this land: slowly, against frantic attempts to bar them, they swung open, one after the other; and it was proved that English justice, confronting what Christendom called a devil, was ultimately equal to giving that devil his due--in society, in the law-court, in the Parliament.

The English have managed to hold superstition more in order in their smaller territory than it is held in Eastern Europe, yet they must not take for their own race all the credit for the equality that has been accorded the Jew in England. The credit is mainly due to himself. Some forty years ago, when wild stories reached Great Britain from Damascus and Rhodes of how Jews were suffering horrible outrages on account of absurd accusations--such as sacrificing Christian priests and children--the entire English community joined to support Sir Moses Montefiore in his mission to repress that fanaticism. But when England had sent Sir Moses on his noble mission, it turned to consider its own relation to the Jews, and found on its statute-book laws which still bore witness of the ages when Jewish blood had mingled with Christian sacrifices. The laws were even then--forty years ago--not all obsolete. But some of them were, and others have since become so, largely through the fact that the Jews had made themselves useful to the country.

Just now England is again called to look abroad though nearer home, and consider the outbreak of fanaticism in Germany.

Dr. Carl Vogt, the naturalist, recently expressed his belief that the present persecution of Jews in Germany is a recurrence of ancient Teutonic barbarism. He explains Judenhetze scientifically, on the principles of Atavism. Every now and then there must be a recrudescence of suppressed barbarism. Those who have read, in _A Tramp Abroad_, those accounts of the duels witnessed by imperturbable Mark Twain in that country--duels in which students cut and slash each other in a friendly way, in the intervals of drinking beer together, and flaunt their facial gashes upon the street with pride, will suspect that the barbarism in coming back had not far to travel. Nevertheless, we must remember that Germany has not yet completed that revolution which shall bring the people under the influence of their best heads; its great science, art, and literature are still carried on as it were in cloisters. The throne of Germany’s noble Reason is usurped by heartless pretenders in politics and hypocrites in religion. Barbarossa will awake presently, and when he comes forth from his cave it will not be in the guise of Emperor William or Prince Bismarck, nor yet as the priest-ridden Jew-hater, but as a cultured and courageous People, with their feet alike on titled despotism and parochial barbarism.

As, however, in the outrages on Jews at Damascus and Rhodes, in the last generation, England caught a glimpse, as in a mirror, of certain features from her own hideous past still surviving in her laws, so one can hardly turn from the Judenhetze of Germany without a consciousness that there are still certain scandals in the attitude of English Christianity towards the Jews. The chief scandal is that there should be an organised society for converting them--as if they were savages.

The existence of such a society in London will one day be quoted to show how much pious preadamitism survived amid our telegraphs and telephones. It is not civilised for men to suppose that a good Jew is inferior to a good Christian. It is scandal that the learned clergy should permit the people to suppose that Christian churches and sects have any moral or spiritual advantage over those who attend the synagogue. How many mothers who teach their children the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, or rehearse to them the parables of the New Testament, pity the children of Jewish mothers as knowing nothing of those beautiful and tender sayings? How many of them even realise that the Golden Rule is in the Pentateuch; and that every Jewish child learns those sweet sayings and parables where Jesus learned them--at his Jewish mother’s knee?

It is a great misfortune that religious liberalism, in its revolt from the primitive Judaism which Protestantism and Puritanism restored, and which survives now chiefly among Sabbatarian and dogmatic Christians, has kept before the world only that ancient Jahvism under which Canaanites were exterminated. It has thus indirectly fostered the fallacy which regards as Judaism much that even strict Jews have long ago outgrown. The Jews themselves, however, as we have seen, are largely to blame for the persistence of this vulgar delusion; indeed, even many of their liberal thinkers have obstinately preserved their new wine in ceremonial bottles, with the ancient labels, and helped to convey the popular impression that their religion is unchanged. But it _is_ changed. Even the strictest Jews are to-day less Sabbatarian, and more emancipated from the barbarism of sacrificial superstitions, than Christians. When Moses Mendelssohn said that the Jews would become Christians “when the Christians cease to be Jews,” he no doubt recognised that Christians are preserving as dogma the Judaism which Jews keep as a shell, but inwardly have outgrown; and that a conversion of the Jews to Christianity would really carry them back to Levitical beliefs long replaced by the modern ideas prevailing inside the hereditary and patriotic walls from which they fear to venture.

Spinoza was as representative a Jew as ever lived, and never more than when the synagogue disowned him. The history of his race for a thousand years had been to him an instruction in fidelity and independence. That there is a vigorous Left among the Jews is apparent in every direction; not only in Jewish scholarship, which is assisting in the work of detaching from their Bible and other sacred books a Hebrew Mythology, but also in the political and social influence of Jews. The outbreak of Judenhetze in Germany is a bad enough symptom for the Teutons, but a hopeful sign for the Jews. Socially they have excited jealousy by the extent to which, having become men and women of the world, they are able to support that character by their wealth. Politically, they would appear to have so completely entered into those liberal and popular movements which they so long eschewed, that the Imperial Power is under the necessity of reminding them that, as in the past they suffered from the mob, and were protected by princes, so it may be again. The retention of the Rev. Mr. Stoecker as Court Chaplain, while he is leading this agitation so unscrupulously, is a confession that the anti-Semitic movement has the encouragement of the Emperor and his Chancellor. To awaken Teutonic jealousy of Jewish wealth, just beginning to be displayed in the enjoyment of Gentile luxuries; to arouse Christian fanaticism against the growing freethought of a race ceasing to expect any Messiah: such are the obvious methods by which the German Government hope to separate Jewish means and radicalism from the masses, and drive Jews to their ancient refuge--the strong central power always purchasable by money and servility. What success will crown this imperial effort remains to be seen. But that there should be a necessity for it is a confirmation of what the late Lord Beaconsfield asserted, and such good judges as Herr Eydmann and Karl Blind attest, that the Jews are very extensively concerned in popular movements on the Continent.

That these liberal tendencies might be expected among the Jews generally when and where they feel assured of freedom and security, is suggested by the history of their race in America. It is certain that the leading Rabbins of that country would be regarded as perilously latitudinarian by their strict co-religionists of Europe. It is a significant unique fact that the high family of Adlers has produced a President of the Free Religious Association, which is made up of theists and agnostics developed out of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. But, furthermore, the leading Rabbins, Lilienthal, Wise, and Sonnenschein, are instances of the advanced Rationalism which pervades the Jewish body in America. These scholarly and eloquent Rabbins freely fraternise with the anti-supernaturalistic teachers of other antecedents than their own. It is pretty certain that they do not look for the advent of any personal Messiah, and never dream of any restoration of their race to power in Palestine. They are not theocratic in politics, but republican, and regard America as the real Jerusalem of their race. Such is my conviction, based not only upon the works of the gentlemen I have mentioned, but upon personal acquaintance with them; and I cannot doubt that, whatever may be their dissent from much that is written in these pages, they would confirm my opinion as to the tendency of the people of Jewish origin in America. Jews of the Old World are somewhat in the condition of the rich man who, when reproached for a stinted charity, said that he began life poor, and had never got the chill of poverty out of his bones; these Jews have vivid traditions of persecution, and have not yet got the chill of fear out of their bones. Recent events in Germany and Russia may even prolong this timidity; the ferocious reply to their attempt to mingle in the society and politics of the world may set back for a little their liberation. But the free heart and mind of Europe is with them, and will be felt not only in England but on the Continent. The unbinding of Ahasuerus is part of the civilised revolution which can never really go backward.

Shakspeare was the first to show the Jew to be a man. Lessing was the first to show that a Jew might be as good a man as a Christian, the indispensability of Christ to excellence being quite ignored. Thus the seventeenth century had its gospel for the Jew, and the eighteenth century had its gospel. But in essence the gospel according to Lessing was not so high as that of the master at whose feet he learned it. Shakspeare had raised up the standard of Manhood, and in its light Judaism and Christianism are seen to be comparatively small things, and their contentious tempers proof that they are no longer religious in any pure sense. Lessing, even in his famous apologue of the Three Rings which a father gave to his equally beloved sons--similitudes of the Jewish, Moslem and Christian religions--makes the wise judge end the dispute as to which is the true ring by consecrating all three. The true ring, which the fond father had caused to be copied in two others, so that neither son might be disappointed, had the power to draw the love of all on its owner. But it also carried the right to sovereignty; and this advantage so overbore the former virtue that each son, with his ring, was found to love himself alone. The Judge advises them to be each content with his ring:

“Let each of you comport him in such wise As love unbribed commands; let each resolve To show the world that in the ring he wears He holds the prize, its virtues being shown To Man in acts of justice, meekness, mercy, To God in thoughts of love and heartfelt trust.”

But the nineteenth century should transmit to the twentieth a nobler gospel for Jew, Moslem, and Christian than that. Let each of them see that his ring is a survival from the ancient chain that fettered him to his several rock of superstition; that so long as he holds faith in it, no transmutation of it into gold, no decoration with opal, can make it other than a talisman to bind him, and isolate him from the real work of creating a Man able to be the providence of this world. Let the rings, not only of Israel, but of Christianity, and of all sects, be thrown into the flames of human love, that there may be formed a coronet for the Mother whose patient all-loving face poetry and science are revealing. “In this principle,” said Clifford, of the evolution of organic from inorganic things, “we must recognise the mother of life, and especially of human life, powerful enough to subdue the elements, and yet always working gently against them; biding her time in the whole expanse of heaven, to make the highest cosmos out of inorganic chaos; the actor, not of all the actions of living things, but only of the good actions; for a bad action is one by which the organism tends to be less organic, and acts for a time as if inorganic. To this mother of life, personifying herself in the good works of humanity, it seems to me we may fitly address a splendid hymn of Mr. Swinburne’s:

“Mother of man’s time-travelling generations, Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart, God above all Gods worshipped of all nations, Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.

“Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things; The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.

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