{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_20631/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_20631","id":"gutenberg_20631","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20631","summary":null,"tags":["Category: History - Religious","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Religion/Spirituality","Jews -- Election, Doctrine of","Judaism","National characteristics, German"],"text":"E-text prepared by Steven desJardins, Jeannie Howse, and the Project\nGutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)\n\n\n\nWorks Of Israel Zangwill\n\nCHOSEN PEOPLES\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe American Jewish Book Company\nNew York\n1921\n\nChosen Peoples\nCopyright, 1919,\nBy The MacMillan Company.\n\nPrinted by\nThe Lord Baltimore Press\nBaltimore, Md.\n\n\n\n\nCHOSEN PEOPLES\n\nBeing the First \"Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture\"\ndelivered before the Jewish Historical Society\nat University College on Easter-Passover\nSunday, 1918/5678\n\n\n\n\n                              TO\n                  MRS. REDCLIFFE N. SALAMAN\n                   THIS LITTLE BOOK IN HER\n                       FATHER'S MEMORY\n\n\n\n\nNOTE\n\n\nThe Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture was founded in 1917, under the\nauspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, by his\ncollaborators in the translation of \"The Service of the Synagogue,\"\nwith the object of fostering Hebraic thought and learning in honour of\nan unworldly scholar. The Lecture is to be given annually in the\nanniversary week of his death, and the lectureship is to be open to\nmen or women of any race or creed, who are to have absolute liberty in\nthe treatment of their subject.\n\n\n\n\nFOREWORD\n\n\nMr. Arthur Davis, in whose memory has been founded the series of\nLectures devoted to the fostering of Hebraic thought and learning, of\nwhich this is the first, was born in 1846 and died on the first day of\nPassover, 1906. His childhood was spent in the town of Derby, where\nthere was then no Synagogue or Jewish minister or teacher of Hebrew.\nSpontaneously he developed a strong Jewish consciousness, and an\nenthusiasm for the Hebrew language, which led him to become one of its\ngreatest scholars in this, or any other, country.\n\nHe was able to put his learning to good use. He observed the wise\nmaxim of Leonardo da Vinci, \"Avoid studies of which the result dies\nwith the worker.\" He was not one of those learned men, of whom there\nare many examples--a recent and conspicuous instance was the late Lord\nActon--whose minds are so choked with the accumulations of the\nknowledge they have absorbed that they can produce little or nothing.\nHis output, though not prolific, was substantial. In middle life he\nwrote a volume on \"The Hebrew Accents of the Twenty-one Books of the\nBible,\" which has become a classical authority on that somewhat\nrecondite subject. It was he who originated and planned the new\nedition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote most\nof the prose translations. When he died, though only two volumes out\nof the six had been published, he left the whole of the text complete.\nTo Mr. Herbert M. Adler, who had been his collaborator from the\nbeginning, fell the finishing of the great editorial task.\n\nNot least of his services lay in the fact that he had transmitted much\nof his knowledge to his two daughters, who have worthily continued his\ntradition of Hebrew scholarship and culture.\n\nArthur Davis's life work, then, was that of a student and interpreter\nof Hebrew. It is a profoundly interesting fact that, in our age,\nmovements have been set on foot in more than one direction for the\nrevival of languages which were dead or dying. We see before our eyes\nWelsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, with the\nhope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose.\nSuch movements show that our time is not so utilitarian and\nmaterialistic as is often supposed. A similar revivifying process is\naffecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a ritual\nlanguage, sheltered within the walls of the Synagogue; often not fully\nunderstood, and never spoken, by the members of the congregations. Now\nit is becoming in Palestine once more a living and spoken language.\n\nHebrew is one example among many of a language outliving for purposes\nof ritual its use in ordinary speech. A ritual is regarded as a sacred\nthing, unchanging, and usually unchangeable, except as the result of\nsome great religious upheaval. The language in which it is framed\ncontinues fixed, amid the slowly developing conditions of the workaday\nworld. Often, indeed, the use of an ancient language, which has\ngradually fallen into disuse among the people, is deliberately\nmaintained for the air of mystery and of awe which is conveyed by its\nuse, and which has something of the same effect upon the intellect as\nthe \"dim religious light\" of a cathedral has upon the emotions.\nFurther, it reserves to the priesthood a kind of esoteric knowledge,\nwhich gives them an additional authority that they would desire to\nmaintain. So we find that in the days of Marcus Aurelius an ancient\nSalian liturgy was used in the Roman temples which had become almost\nunintelligible to the worshippers. The ritual of the religion of Isis\nin Greece was, at the same period, conducted in an unknown tongue. In\nthe present age Church Slavonic, the ecclesiastical language of the\northodox Slavs, is only just intelligible to the peasantry of Russia\nand the neighbouring Slav countries. The Buddhists of China conduct\ntheir services in Sanscrit, which neither the monks nor the people\nunderstand, and the services of the Buddhists in Japan are either in\nSanscrit or in ancient Chinese. I believe it is a fact that in\nAbyssinia, again, the liturgy is in a language called Geez, which is\nno longer in use as a living tongue and is not understood.\n\nBut we need not go to earlier centuries or to distant countries for\nexamples. In any Roman Catholic church in London to-day you will find\nthe service conducted in a language which, if understood at all by\nthe general body of the congregation, has been learnt by them only for\nthe purposes of the liturgy.\n\nOf all these ritual languages which have outlived their current use\nand have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so\nfar as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of\nrenewing its old vitality--like the roses of Jericho which appear to\nbe dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their\nvitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in\nPalestine Hebrew may recover something of its old supremacy in the\nfield of morals and of intellect.\n\nTo render this possible the work of scholars such as Arthur Davis has\ncontributed. To him this was a labour of love, and for love. He would\nreceive no payment for any of his religious work or writings. Part of\nthe profits that accrued from the publication of his edition of \"The\nServices of the Synagogue\" has been devoted to the formation of a fund\nfrom which will be defrayed the expenses--after the first--of a series\nof annual lectures on subjects of Jewish interest, to be delivered by\nmen of various schools of thought. We are fortunate that the initial\nlecture is to be delivered to-day by the most distinguished of living\nJewish men of letters.\n\nArthur Davis was a man of much elevation and charm of character. He\ntook an active part in the work of communal, and particularly\neducational, organizations. He was one of those men--not rare among\nJews, though the rest of the world does not always recognize it--who\nare philanthropic in spirit, practical in action, modest,\nself-sacrificing, devoted to a fine family life, having in them much\nof the student and something even of the saint. It is fitting that his\nmemory should be kept alive.\n\n                                                       HERBERT SAMUEL.\n\n\n\n\nCHOSEN PEOPLES\n\nI\n\n\nThe claim that the Jews are a \"Chosen People\" has always irritated the\nGentiles. \"From olden times,\" wrote Philostratus in the third century,\n\"the Jews have been opposed not only to Rome but to the rest of\nhumanity.\" Even Julian the Apostate, who designed to rebuild their\nTemple, raged at the doctrine of their election. Sinai, said the\nRabbis with a characteristic pun, has evoked _Sinah_ (hatred).\n\nIn our own day, the distinguished ethical teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit,\ncomplains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and\nblighted all other national inspiration: in his book \"The Soul of\nAmerica,\" he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally \"the claim\nto spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world.\"\n\nThe recent revelation of racial arrogance in Germany has provided our\nenemies with a new weapon. \"Germanism is Judaism,\" says a writer in\nthe American _Bookman_. The proposition contains just that dash of\ntruth which is more dangerous than falsehood undiluted; and the saying\nascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his time\npraying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. \"As he talks\nto-day at Potsdam and Berlin,\" says Verhaeren, in his book \"Belgium's\nAgony,\" \"the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousand\nyears ago at Jerusalem.\" The chronology is characteristic of\nanti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew\nreckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of\nJerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, like\nJudaism, has evolved a doctrine of special election. Spiritual in the\nteaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross and\nnarrow in the _Deutsche Religion_ of Friedrich Lange. \"The German\npeople is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of the\nLord.\" And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a\n\"Man of War\" who demands \"eye for eye, tooth for tooth,\" and cries\nwith savage sublimity:--\n\n    I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries,\n    And will recompense them that hate Me,\n    I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood,\n    And my sword shall devour flesh.\n\nJudaism has even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by\nMiriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is\na byword. \"We utterly destroyed every city,\" Deuteronomy declares;\n\"the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining;\nonly the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of\nthe cities.\" David, who is promised of God that his seed shall be\nenthroned for ever, slew surrendered Moabites in cold blood, and Judas\nMaccabaeus, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral city\nof Ephron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male in\nit, and passed across its burning ruins and bleeding bodies. The\nprophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations--the phrase is his, not\nAdam Smith's--streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. \"For that\nnation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.... Aliens\nshall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee.\nThou shalt suck the milk of nations.\" \"The Lord said unto me,\" says\nthe second Psalm, \"Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask\nof Me and I will give the nations for thine inheritance.... Thou shalt\nbreak them with a rod of iron.\"\n\nNor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. Every\nSaturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for material\nprosperity and the promise of ultimate glory: \"Thou shalt lend unto\nmany nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many\nnations but they shall not rule over thee.\" \"Our Father, our King,\" he\nprays at the New Year, \"avenge before our eyes the blood of Thy\nservants that has been spilt.\" And at the Passover Seder Service he\nstill repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath on\nthe heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling.\n\"Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the\nLord!\"\n\n\n\n\nII\n\n\nMuch might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or\negotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia,\nwhich Napoleon wittily described as \"hatched from a cannon-ball,\"\nshould be found really resembling Judaea, whose national greeting was\n\"Peace\"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and\nthunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity;\nwhose mediaeval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might\nbe almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy \"that planned\nin secret, performed in daring.\" And, as a matter of fact, some of\nthese passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic\nprosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework:\nthe all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is\nto be avenged is the blood of martyrs \"who went through fire and water\nfor the sanctification of Thy name.\"\n\nBut let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore--as\ncompletely as Jesus did--that the legal penalty of \"eye for eye\" had\nbeen commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early\nPharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy\nof Christian multitudes? \"Destroy them from under the heavens of the\nLord!\" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck\nover Belgium and not of a mediaeval Jew over the desolated home of\nJacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the\nother Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she\nwould like to kill every German--man or woman--with her own hand!\n\nAnd here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its\nhistoric conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James\nHinton, \"The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it.\"\nAnd it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen\nPeople, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can\ngive us the clue to the Bible. This is the only \"Guide to the\nPerplexed,\" and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when\nby allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he\nlaboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the\neffort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The\n_Baraitha_ of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third\ntext must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that\ndistorted dialectic known as _Pilpul_. The only true \"Conciliador\" is\nhistory, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing\nrationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere--or rather everywhere. The\nsame method that softened the Oriental amorousness of \"The Song of\nSolomon\" into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in the\nhands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church.\nBut if Reason cannot always--as Bachya imagined--_confirm_ tradition,\nit can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands\nfrom the higher in that motley collection of national literature\nwhich, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with\nstrayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the\napocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes of\neven a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when\nput forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as\nuniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people\nthat produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and\ncanonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because\noccasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths\nthere is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\n\nAs Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his \"Biblical Archaeology\" and as Sir\nJames Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual\nis permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides\nhimself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a\npurer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and\ngradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with\npractices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries\nof spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly\nbeyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has\nreplaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was\nwiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes\nthe angels who wished to join in the song. \"How can ye sing when My\ncreatures are perishing?\" The very miracles of the Old Testament were\nside-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special\ncreations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went\nits course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages,\nis as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of\nthe soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered\nwith the voting on a legal point, _en mashgichin be-bathkol_--\"We\ncannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not\nheaven\"--was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason\nand the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the\nera of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the\nTalmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking.\nPost-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and\nsaints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from\nMendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has\nbeen at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never\nto have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a\nreverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the\nmasses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new\nback again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously\nforward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, \"a\nveritable museum of relics,\" or as whales have vestiges of hind legs\nwith now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had\nbegun to evolve \"the service of the Synagogue,\" but it did not shed\nthe animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the\ndestruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs\nsubstitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the\nages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the\nJehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular\nimagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing\nIsrael was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that\nJudaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago.\nThe truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that\nis reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by\nJudaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated\nwith the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for\nuniversal salvation, that the more material prophecies--evoked\nmoreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to\nforetell restoration and glory--are practically swamped. At the worst,\nwe may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are\nin the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the\nother setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to\nunderstand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's,\nif we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is\nconsecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are\nrarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own\nindividual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus\nlooked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the\nright hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the\nbalance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of\nidealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate\nserves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When\nhe brought the Roman ensigns with Caesar's effigies to Jerusalem, the\nJews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling\ndeification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers\nand menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and\nwent home. \"But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their\nnecks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather\nthan the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed.\" And Pilate,\ntouched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the\nJews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.\n\n\"God's witnesses,\" \"a light of the nations,\" \"a suffering servant,\" \"a\nkingdom of priests\"--the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission\nare as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur\nare unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion\nwith poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of\nIsaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of\nthe Bible we owe to America.)\n\n    Behold My servant whom I uphold;\n    Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth;\n    I have put My spirit upon him,\n    He shall make the right to go forth to the nations:\n    He shall not fail or be crushed\n    Till he have set the right on the earth,\n    And the isles shall wait for his teaching.\n    Thus saith God the LORD,\n    He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth,\n    He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it,\n    He that giveth bread unto the people upon it,\n    And spirit to them that walk therein:\n    I the LORD have called thee in righteousness,\n    And have taken hold of thy hand,\n    And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people,\n    For a light of the nations;\n    To open the blind eyes,\n    To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,\n    And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.\n\nNever was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all\ncivilization. \"Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a\nmighty stream.\" \"Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither\nshall there be war any more.\"\n\nNor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external\ntriumph. \"Despised and forsaken of men,\" Isaiah paints Israel. \"Yet he\nbore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ...\nwith his stripes we were healed.\"\n\nHappily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or\nMatthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that\nthis ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less\nunderstood of the world. \"Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast\nchosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law.\" Here is no\nchoice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that\n\"from Zion shall the Law go forth\" it is obvious what that servant's\ntask is to be. \"What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of\nIsrael,\" says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist?\nIs it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. \"A Law, and\ncommandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us.\" Before\nthese were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records,\nIsrael was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them could\nhe enjoy peculiar favour. \"Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My\nvoice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure\nfrom among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be\nunto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.\" A chosen people is\nreally a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that\nthe Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel\naccepted the yoke.\n\nHow far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People\npostulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr.\nLucien Wolf once urged that \"the yoke of the Torah\" had fashioned a\nracial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over\naverage humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperance\nand family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and\nbrain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to\ninvite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen.\nBut whether this general superiority--a superiority not inconsistent\nwith grave failings and drawbacks--is due to the rigorous selection of\na tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu\nmaintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years\nthan that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the\npeople, or the people--precisely because of its greatness--made the\nTorah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial\nelection to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or\naim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic\naltruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed--when one considers the\nimpress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and\nimagination of the world--might well be credited with the intuition of\ngenius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the\nJews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would have\nthe ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that\nelection is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely\nfor world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when\nfashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the\nconsummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but\nthe symbol. It is with _Alenu_ that every service ends--the prayer\nfor the coming of the Kingdom of God, \"when Thou wilt remove the\nabominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off,\nwhen the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty and\nall the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn\nunto Thyself all the wicked of the earth.... In that day the Lord\nshall be One and His name One.\" Israel disappears altogether in this\ndiurnal aspiration.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\n\nIsrael disappears, too, in whole books of the Old Testament. What has\nthe problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of\nEcclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would\nscarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentially\nrooted in a race.\n\nIn the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ--half Whitman, half St.\nFrancis--not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under the\nbenediction of the Hebrew poet's mood. \"The high hills are for the\nwild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.... The young lions\nroar after their prey, and seek their food from God ... man goeth\nforth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening.\" Even in a\nmore primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism reveals\nitself. To the bard of Genesis the rainbow betokens not merely a\ncovenant between God and man but a \"covenant between God and every\nliving creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.\"\n\nThat the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist in\nface of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He shares\nin the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in his\nfinely felt but intellectually incoherent book, \"God the Invisible\nKing,\" dismisses Him as a malignant and partisan Deity, jealous and\npettily stringent. At most one is entitled to say with Mr. Israel\nAbrahams in his profound little book on \"Judaism\" that \"God, in the\nearly literature a tribal, non-moral Deity, was in the later\nliterature a righteous ruler, who, with Amos and Hosea, loved and\ndemanded righteousness in man,\" and that there was an expansion from a\nnational to a universal Ruler. But if \"by early literature\" anybody\nunderstand simply Genesis, if he imagines that the evolutionary\nmovement in Judaism proceeds regularly from Abraham to Isaiah, he is\ngrossly in error. No doubt all early gods are tribal, all early\nreligions connected with the hearth and ancestor worship, but the God\nof Isaiah is already in Genesis, and the tribal God has to be exhumed\nfrom practically all parts of the Bible. But even in the crudities of\nGenesis or Judges that have escaped editorship I cannot find Mr.\nWells's \"malignant\" Deity--_He_ is really \"the invisible King.\" The\nvery first time Jehovah appears in His tribal aspect (Genesis xii.)\nHis promise to bless Abraham ends with the assurance--and it almost\ninvariably accompanies all the repetitions of the promise--\"And in\nthee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.\" Nay, as I\npointed out in my essay on \"The Gods of Germany,\" the very first words\nof the Bible, \"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,\"\nstrike a magnificent note of universalism, which is sustained in the\nderivation of all humanity from Adam, and again from Noah, with one\noriginal language. Nor is this a modern gloss, for the Talmud already\ndeduces the interpretation. Racine's \"Esther\" in the noble lines\nlauded by Voltaire might be almost rebuking Mr. Wells:--\n\n    Ce Dieu, maitre absolu de la terre et des cieux,\n    N'est point tel que l'erreur le figure a vos yeux:\n    L'Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouvrage;\n    Il entend les soupirs de l'humble qu'on outrage,\n    Juge tous les mortels avec d'egales lois,\n    Et du haut de son trone interroge les rois.\n\n--there is the true Hebrew note, the note denounced of Nietzsche.\n\nIs this notorious \"tribal God\" the God of the Mesopotamian sheikh\nwhose seed was so invidiously chosen? Well, but of this God Abraham\nasks--in what I must continue to call the epochal sentence in the\nBible--\"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?\" Abraham, in\nfact, bids God down as in some divine Dutch auction--Sodom is not to\nbe destroyed if it holds fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, nay\nten righteous men. Compare this ethical development of the ancestor of\nJudaism with that of Pope Gregory XIII, in the sixteenth century, some\nthirty-one centuries later: _Civitas ista potest esse destrui quando\nin ea plures sunt haeretici_ (\"A city may be destroyed when it harbours\na number of heretics\"). And this claim of man to criticize God Jehovah\nfreely concedes. Thus the God of Abraham is no God of a tribe, but,\nlike the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God\nof Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century\nMartineau, \"the seat of authority in Religion\" has passed to the\nhuman conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the\nSodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and\nmore wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free\nthought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and\nthe people He designs to destroy. \"Wherefore should the Egyptians\nspeak, saying, For evil did He bring them forth to slay them in the\nmountains...? Turn from Thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil\nagainst Thy people.\" Moses goes on to remind Him of the covenant, \"And\nthe Lord repented of the evil which He said He would do unto His\npeople.\" In the same chapter, the people having made a golden calf,\nMoses offers his life for their sin; the Old Testament here, as in so\nmany places, anticipating the so-called New, but rejecting the notion\nof vicarious atonement so drastically that the attempt of dogmatic\nChristianity to base itself on the Old Testament can only be described\nas text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses's\nquestioning--\"I AM THAT I AM\"--yields already the profound\nmetaphysical Deity of Maimonides, that \"invisible King\" whom the\nanonymous New Year liturgist celebrates as:\n\n      Highest divinity,\n    Dynast of endlessness,\n    Timeless resplendency,\n    Worshipped eternally,\n      Lord of Infinity!\n\nAnd the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and\nthat \"a mixed multitude\" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows\nthat the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable\nrejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity;\nwhile the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of \"Ruth,\"\nwith its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite\nwoman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have,\nin fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces,\nand what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of\nthe latter is that the race being one with the religion could not\nresist that religion's universal implications. If there were only a\nsingle God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be\nconfined to Israel? The Mission could not but come. The true God,\nurges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through\nidols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind\nseekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been\nthe governing principle in Jewish history. \"I do not know the origin\nof the term Jew,\" says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. \"The\nname is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs of\nthis people, even though they be of different race.\" Where indeed lay\nthe privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a\nnon-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as\ngreater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila\nand Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; while\nthe orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless\naccompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte\nOnkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinic\nliterature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque\nconception of their status towards their former families, cannot\ncounterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work,\n\"The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans,\" that there was a carefully\nplanned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the\nPharisees: \"Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte\"? Do not\nJuvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans\nproselytised almost by force? \"The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts,\"\nsays Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, \"became familiar facts in\nall the great cities.\" And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion,\nwhich Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest\ndocuments, declares in noble language: \"There ought to be but one\nTemple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He\nis the common God of all men.\"\n\nIt would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of\nthis temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were\nseventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediaeval\nand rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely\nexists--even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whose\nsuccess will be the test of his genuineness. And Spinoza--though he,\nof course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper--refused\nto see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system for\nensuring his eternity. The comparatively modern Chassidism,\nanticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has a\nspecial channel through which it receives God's gifts. Of contemporary\nReform Judaism, the motto \"Have we not one father, hath not one God\ncreated us?\" was formally adopted as the motto of the Congress of\nReligions at Washington. \"The forces of democracy _are_ Israel,\" cries\nthe American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra-modern adaptation of the\nTalmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblical\nliterature almost a note of apology for the assumption of the Divine\nmission: perhaps it is as much the offspring of worldly prudence as of\nspiritual progress. The Talmud observed that the Law was only given to\nIsrael because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. Abraham\nIbn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had to\nreveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himself\naloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the very\nargument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his\n\"Foundations of Belief.\" Crescas, in the fourteenth century,\ndeclared--like an earlier Buckle--that the excellence of the Jew\nsprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his\nrecent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when Rabbi\nAkiba called the Jews \"Sons of God\" he meant only that all other\nnations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said--what\nindeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards.\nIn the words of Hosea:\n\n    When Israel was a child, then I loved him,\n    And out of Egypt I called My son.\n\nNo evidence of the universalism of Israel's mission can away with the\nfact that it was still _his_ mission, the mission of a Chosen People.\nAnd this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature\nand broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendary\nfantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimes\ntouching in its tender mysticism, sometimes almost grotesque in its\ncrude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are\nbound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in His\nchastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehension\nproduced the concept of the _Chillul Hashem_, \"the profanation of the\nName.\" Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower the\nreputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the contrary, he\nwas to promote the _Kiddush Hashem_ \"the sanctification of the Name.\"\nThus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a sense\nof _Noblesse oblige_. As the \"Hymn of Glory\" recited at New Year says\nin a more poetic sense: \"His glory is on me and mine on Him.\" \"He\nloves His people,\" says the hymn, \"and inhabits their praises.\"\nIndeed, according to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceived\nGod as existing only through Israel's continuous testimony and ceasing\nwere Israel--_per impossibile_--to disappear. It is a mysticism not\nwithout affinity to Mr. Wells's. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr.\nWassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, like\nFather and Son, are each incomplete without the other. In another\npassage of Hosea--a passage recited at the everyday winding of\nphylacteries--the imagery is of wedded lovers. \"I will betroth thee\nunto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness and\nin judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy.\"\n\nBut it is in the glowing, poetic soul of Jehuda Ha-Levi that this\nelection of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supreme\nand uncompromising expression. \"Israel,\" declares the author of the\n\"Cuzari\" in a famous dictum, \"is among the nations like the heart\namong the limbs.\" Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump,\nfeeding the veins of the nations--Harvey was still five centuries in\nthe future--he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbol\nof the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thus\nchosen, he declares plumply that it is as little worthy of\nconsideration as why the animals had not been created men. This is, of\ncourse, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration bloweth\nwhere it listeth. As Tennyson said in a similar connection:\n\n    And if it is so, so it is, you know,\n    And if it be so, so be it!\n\n\n\n\nV\n\n\nBut although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Science\ncannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can\nshow us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in considering\nyourself a Chosen People--as indeed the accusation with which we began\nreminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a mission\nto itself is not a sudden growth. \"Unlike any other nation,\" says the\nlearned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his\narticle on \"Chosen People\" in the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, \"the Jewish\npeople began their career conscious of their life-purpose and\nworld-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious\ntruth.\" This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory\nthat its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his\nown, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and\nevolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic\nCovenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission\nwith it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples\nwill, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was\nother than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a\nsublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other\nnations must have been evolved still later. \"The conception or feeling\nof a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees,\" says Mr.\nMontefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said,\nhistory is the sole clue to the Bible--history, which according to\nBacon, is \"philosophy teaching by example.\" And the more modern the\nhistory is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it.\nWe have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of\nnations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest\nmission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great\nprophet--sprung like Amos from the people--through Abraham Lincoln,\nAmerica had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when she\nbegan to call herself \"God's own country,\" but her National Anthem,\n\"My Country, 'tis of thee,\" dating from 1832, fixes the date when\nAmerica, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814,\nconsciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens\nfelt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle\nrhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own\nfreedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others.\nFrom a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called \"The Melting\nPot,\" with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the\nworld at large.\n\nThe stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history.\nThat national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission\nof defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach\nundaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism\nwhich finds such moving expression in the paean of Shakespeare:\n\n    This happy breed of men, this little world,\n    This precious stone set in the silver sea,\n         .     .     .     .     .     .     .\n    This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,\n         .     .     .     .     .     .     .\n    This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.\n\nThis sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and\nat first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon\ndeveloped an assurance of special protection--\"the favour of the love\nof Heaven,\" wrote Milton in his \"Areopagitica,\" \"we have great\nargument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending\ntowards us\"--was tempered by that humility still to be seen in the\nliturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might\nof the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and\ntwenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethan\ntranslators of the Bible called \"Our Sion,\" and whose mission,\naccording to Milton, had been to sound forth \"the first tidings and\ntrumpet of reformation to all Europe,\" had sunk to the swaggering\nmilitarism that found expression in \"Rule, Britannia.\"\n\n    When Britain first at Heaven's command\n      Arose from out the azure main,\n    This was the charter of the land,\n      And guardian angels sung this strain:\n        Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;\n        Britons never will be slaves.\n\n    The nations not so blest as thee\n      Must in their turn to tyrants fall;\n    While thou shalt flourish, great and free,\n      The dread and envy of them all.\n\n    To thee belongs the rural reign,\n      Thy cities shall with commerce shine:\n    All thine shall be the subject main,\n      And every shore it circles, thine.\n\nIt is the true expression of its period--a period which Sir John\nSeeley in his \"Expansion of England\" characterizes as the period of\nthe struggle with France for the possession of India and the New\nWorld: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had\nreplaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritime\nStates of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley\nsums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Well may Mr.\nChesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old\nTestament sense of being \"answered in stormy oracles of air and sea\"\nlowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the sea\nserving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the\nhigh-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the\nEast India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is\nfounded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It\nhelps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in\nthe atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in\n1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the\nBible.\n\nIn Cromwell, that typical Englishman, these two strands of impulse\nare seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seized\nJamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not\nCatholic Spain the enemy of God? _Delenda est Carthago_ is his feeling\ntowards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. \"The Lord by\nhis Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the\nopportunity to draw off those horse.\" Yet this elect of God ruthlessly\nmassacres surrendered Irish garrisons. \"Sir,\" he writes with almost\nchildish naivete, \"God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon\nshot.\" We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite.\nDoes not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously like\nBismarck's that his deceased hero\n\n    The soldier taught that inward mail to wear\n    And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?\n\nThe fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with\nthe universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous\ntendency.\n\nAt the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations.\nBut it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty,\nignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of\n\"Rule, Britannia\" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of\nthe joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob\ncelebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade\nin the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the\nEmpire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is\nnot wholly true, for in \"The Masque of Alfred\" in which \"Rule,\nBritannia\" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of\nthe lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic\nexcogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the\ngrosser Hebrew prophecies:\n\n    I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:\n    All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,\n    Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,\n\nhe points to the virgin shores \"beyond the vast Atlantic surge\" and\ncries:\n\n                              This new world,\n    Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:\n    And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow\n    The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.\n\n    Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,\n    Awe with your navies every hostile land.\n    Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:\n    They rule the balanced world who rule the main.\n\nBut you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written\nexpressly to persuade the England of 1883 _not_ to give up India and\nthe Colonies, to see how little \"Rule, Britannia\" expressed the truer\nsoul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist\nmovement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in\nsweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for\nthe still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet\narose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize\nthe doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is\npurely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the\nvisions of the Hebrew bards.\n\n    The Lord our God Most High,\n    He hath made the deep as dry,\n    He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.\n\nBut it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is\ncharacteristically practical.\n\n    Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience;\n    Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,\n        Make ye sure to each his own,\n        That he reap where he hath sown;\n    By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.\n\nAnd it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England\non the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic\nmotives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky,\nagrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British\nimperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how\nthe prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how\nthe mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward\nrays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from\nthe stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining\nroad. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not\nunlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot\nthe arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves\npurposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the\ntingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of\nretrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that\ngreat struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland,\nEngland, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless\ncourage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one\nnation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There\ncould not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen\nfriend, the poet Vernede, yet even he writes:--\n\n    God grant to us the old Armada weather.\n\nThomson was not poet enough--nor the eighteenth century naive\nenough--to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he\nthrows \"Rule, Britannia\" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred\nthe Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future\nis prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective\nhabit of national missions.\n\nThe history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven\ncenturies has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping\nitself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always\ntroubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope\ncomplained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to\n\n    Magic casements opening on the foam\n    Of faery lands in perilous seas forlorn.\n\nBut Israel had abundant time to perfect her conception of herself.\nFrom Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the\nrace are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a process\nanalogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into\na People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel was\ninscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence\nelsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord\nwould write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which\nBritain received when \"first at Heaven's command\" she \"rose from out\nthe azure main,\" or than that _Contrat Social_ by which Rousseau\nexpressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this is\nnot to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these vitalizing\nimpulses \"Life-illusions,\" but the criteria of objective truth do not\napply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when\nnations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution\nrob them of their mystery. _Hamlet_ is not less inspired because\nShakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers.\n\nIf it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under\nits spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical\nvocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal\ntendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:--\n\n    O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat aether.\n\nThe Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II,\nassured the monarch:--\n\n    Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!\n    Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,\n    More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.\n\nThe preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be \"in\npursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the\nEarth.\"\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\n\nReturning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that\n\"Germanism is Judaism,\" we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If\nGermanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where\nit does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its\ncitizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves\nto great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has\nunfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common\nBritish breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather\nwith Japan than with Judaea. For in Japan, too, beneath all the\nromance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the\nindividual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of\nthose ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely\nexisted, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the\nState was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater\nscale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life\nfrom the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its\nsubservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has\ngiven a new reading to the Gospel: \"Blessed are the meek, for they\nshall inherit the earth.\"\n\nNietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw\nclearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that\n\"in which the slow suicide of all is called Life,\" and \"a welcome\nservice unto all preachers of death\"--a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous\nidol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. \"We\nare,\" boasts a Japanese writer, \"a people of the present and the\nTangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible.\"\n\nBut Germany was not always thus. \"High deeds, O Germans, are to come\nfrom you,\" wrote Wordsworth in his \"Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.\" And\nit throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she\nlay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her\nby Fichte was one of peace and righteousness--to penetrate the life of\nhumanity by her religion--and he denounced the dreams of universal\nmonarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on his\npeople as \"the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan,\"\n\"To you,\" he says, \"out of all other modern nations the germs of human\nperfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of\nmind and reason--to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the\nruler of the world.\" And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in\nwhat the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the\nGoths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide\nof tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant\nand Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist\nas Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied\nthat if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they,\n\"by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of\ntheir inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers\": and in\ncuriously prophetic language he called for a hero \"to realize by blood\nand iron the political regeneration of Germany.\"\n\nIf Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for\nhis nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to\nhold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the\nworld. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as\nthe stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as\nPol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: \"If the devil knew he had\nhorns the cherubim would offer him their place.\" And though it was only\nin the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the\nWill-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the \"blood and iron\" of\nJunkerdom that perverted Prussia--Junkerdom still lives simply--as the\ngross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. A\nmodern German author describes his countrymen--it is true he has turned\nMohammedan, probably out of disgust--as tragically degenerated and\nturned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This\nindustrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by\nVerhaeren--attacking Judaism from another angle--ascribed to its Jews,\nso it is comforting to remember that when England started the East\nIndia Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is\nclearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in Prussia\nEngland meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more\nconscious and consequent than her \"Rule, Britannia\" period, with a\nruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While\nEngland's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany's\nright hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinister\nactivities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel--\"The Sense of\nthe Past\"--a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get\nback to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization.\nNor is the civilization that followed the struggle for America by the\nscramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for\nthe first melee and smarting under centuries of humiliation--did not\nLouis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?--is avenging on our century the\nsins of the seventeenth.\n\nSo far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are\nto be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded\nGermany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the\nsame alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the\narmies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning\nback the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was\napproaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of\nwar. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell,\nbut with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates\nthe Puritan with the Cavalier. \"From childhood,\" he is quoted as\nsaying, \"I have been under the influence of five men--Alexander,\nJulius Caesar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.\" No\ngreat man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical\ngreatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus\nwere \"the Kings of Jerusalem\" even \"six thousand years ago.\" Our kings\nhad the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the\nRabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight\nqualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a\ngood name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem\n\"Heil dir im Siegeskranz\" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in\nthe seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference\nbetween Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his\nenemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and\nviolence, \"and precious will their blood be in his sight.\"\n\n\n\n\nVII\n\n\nIf I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between\nJudaism and Germanism, it would be the word \"Recessional.\" While the\nprophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation,\nthe Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. \"You only have I\nknown among all the families of the earth,\" says the message through\nAmos. \"_Therefore_ I will visit upon you all your iniquities.\" The\nBible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. \"Israel is the\nvillain, not the hero, of his own story.\" Alone among epics, it is out\nfor truth, not high heroics. To flout the Pharisees was not reserved\nfor Jesus. \"Behold, ye fast for strife and contention,\" said Isaiah,\n\"and to smite with the fist of wickedness.\" While some German writers,\nnot content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced,\nvaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael\nAngelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposes\nthe flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracity\nunknown among other peoples--is even Washington's story told without\ngloss?--that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancient\nsavagery. \"The title of a nation to its territory,\" says Seeley, \"is\ngenerally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if we\ncould recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre.\" The\ndispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New\nZealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this\nuniversal process is sophisticated.\n\n    Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,\n\nthe AEneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the\ncontemporary ideal backwards--as all missons are put--and into the\nprophetic mouth of Jove:--\n\n    Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,\n    Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.\n\nIt was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy\nPalestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him:\n\"Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost\nthou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations\nthe Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.\"\n\nIn English literature this note of \"Recessional\" was sounded long\nbefore Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that \"God's manner\" was to\nreveal himself \"first to His Englishmen,\" added that they \"mark not\nthe methods of His counsel and are unworthy.\"\n\n\"Is India free,\" wrote Cowper, \"or do we grind her still?\" \"Secure from\nactual warfare,\" sang Coleridge, \"we have loved to swell the\nwar-whoop.\" For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the\nnations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a \"History of England\" in\nthe very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes \"who loved fields\nand seized them.\" But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the\nchorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian\nHarden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the\nonly real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the\nliterature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm,\nought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding\nany swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its\nmost popular work--Lazarus's \"Soziale Ethik im Judentum\"--published as\nlate as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews--a grave\nindictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly\nexplaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the\nindividual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that\nwhat unites individuals separates nations. \"The work of justice shall\nbe peace,\" he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old\nGermany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent--indeed,\nwe know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary\nthat the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and\nthat another now lies in prison for explaining in his \"Biologie des\nKrieges\" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men\nto act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest\nand most practical treatise on \"Perpetual Peace\" came from that other\nGerman professor, Kant, the hope is not altogether _ausgechlossen_ that\nin the internal convulsion that must follow the war, there may be an\nupheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proud\nto say that it _is_ Judaism.\n\n\n\n\nVIII\n\n\nBut meantime we are waiting, and the soul \"waiteth for the Lord more\nthan watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the\nmorning.\" Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in\ndarkness, listening to the silence of God--a silence that can be felt.\n\n\"Watchmen, what of the night?\" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient\nJews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from\nempty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an\ninner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since.\nSuch a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded\nRome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes,\nbegan to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the\ndiscarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St.\nAugustine to create an inner \"City of God.\" How shall humanity meet\nthis blackest crisis of all? What new \"City of God\" can it build on\nthe tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no\ncontribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But\nthat quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril\nfrom the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus.\nAnd it was always an exaggerated quarrel--half misunderstanding, like\nmost quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was\nother than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively--as\nlogicians say--those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering\nservice which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology\nof atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them\nmight have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which\nits essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just\nmissed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly\nrecalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the\nwork of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done\nby Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the\nuniversalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason\nwhy the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism\nless future than Buddhism--that religion of negation and\nmonkery--whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and\ncontemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that\napocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the\ndisciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its\nancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the\nApocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of\nthe Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen\nmaintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably\nnarrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent\ntribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last\nword is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future\nChristian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement\nas injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a\nstumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain\nman, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and\nwith the simplicity of greatness he confessed: \"I have never united\nmyself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my\nassent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated\nstatements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles\nof Belief and Confessions of Faith.\" \"When any church,\" he added,\n\"will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for\nmembership, ... 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,\nand with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as\nthyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my\nsoul.\"\n\nCan one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that\nLincoln did not even know there _was_ such a church? But call the\ncoming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matter\nwhen all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save\nit from meaningless frictions and massacres? \"Would that My people\nforgot Me and kept My commandments,\" says the Jerusalem Talmud. Too\nlong has Israel been silent. \"Who is blind,\" says the prophet, \"but\nMy servant, or deaf as My messenger?\" He is not deaf to-day, he is\nonly dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new\nworld-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to\nbe. \"The religion of the Jews is indeed a light,\" said Coleridge in\nhis \"Table Talk,\" \"but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives\nno heat and illumines nothing but itself.\" Why let a sun sink into a\nglow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not even\npay--that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud, _Dina dimalchutha\ndina_ (\"In Rome do as the Romans\"). Despite every effort of Jews as\nindividual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw\nthem a century ago in his \"Borough\":--\n\n    Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight,\n    They will not study and they dare not fight.\n\nIt is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the time\nhas come when they must fight as Jews--fight that \"mental fight\" from\nwhich that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not cease\ntill he had \"built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.\" To\nbuild Jerusalem in every land--even in Palestine--that is the Jewish\nmission. As Nina Salaman sings--and I am glad to end with the words of\na daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture is\ngiven--\n\n    Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless,\n      Every land our home for ill or good?\n    Ours it was long since to join the hands of nations\n      Through the link of our own brotherhood.\n\n\n\n\nAFTERWORD\n\n\nDR. ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic\nLiterature in the University of Cambridge, in seconding the vote of\nthanks to the speakers, moved by the President of the Jewish\nHistorical Society (Sir Lionel Abrahams, K.C.B.), said that the\nChairman had already paid a tribute to the memory of Arthur Davis. But\na twice-told tale was not stale in repetition when the tale was told\nof such a man. He was a real scholar; not only in the general sense of\none who loved great books, but also in the special sense that he\npossessed the technical knowledge of an expert. His \"Hebrew Accents\"\nreveals Arthur Davis in these two aspects. It shows mastery of an\nintricate subject, a subject not likely to attract the mere\ndilettante. But it also reveals his interest in the Bible as\nliterature. He appreciated both the music of words and the melody of\nideas. When the work appeared, a foreign scholar asked: \"Who was his\nteacher?\" The answer was: himself. There is a rather silly proverb\nthat the self-taught man has a fool for his master. Certainly Arthur\nDavis had no fool for his pupil. And though he had no teacher, he had\nwhat is better, a fine capacity for comradeship in studies. \"Acquire\nfor thyself a companion,\" said the ancient Rabbi. There is no\nfriendship equal to that which is made over the common study of books.\nAt the Talmud meetings held at the house of Arthur Davis were founded\nlifelong intimacies. Unpretentious in their aim, there was in these\ngatherings a harmony of charm and earnestness; pervading them was the\ntrue \"joy of service.\" Above all he loved the liturgy. Here the\nself-taught man must excel. Homer said:--\n\n    Dear to gods and men is sacred song.\n    Self-taught I sing: by Heaven and Heaven alone\n    The genuine seeds of poesy are sown.\n\nAnd, as the expression of his inmost self, he gave us the best edition\nof the Festival Prayers in any language: better than Sachs'--than\nwhich praise can go no higher. This Prayer Book is his true memorial,\nunless there be a truer still. Perhaps his feeling that he might\nafter all have lost something because he had no teacher made him so\nwonderful a teacher of his own daughters. In their continuance of his\nwork his personality endures. At the end of his book on Accents he\nquoted, in Hebrew, a sentence from Jeremiah, with a clever play on the\ndouble meaning of the word which signifies at once \"accent\" and\n\"taste.\" Thinking of his record, and how his beautiful spirit animates\nthose near and dear to him, we may indeed apply to him this same text:\n\"His taste remaineth in him and his fragrance is not changed.\"\n\n\n\nPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA","title":"Chosen Peoples: Being the First \"Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture\" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter-Passover Sunday, 1918/5678","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":12166}