Deronda_ comes to us from Germany, in the form of a small book by Dr.
Kaufmann, professor in the recently instituted Jewish Theological
Seminary at Buda-Pesth. A certain prominence, which its very excellent
translation into English confers upon this work, seems to be due less to
any special or novel feature in its criticism than to the larger purpose
shadowed forth in the title, ‘George Eliot and Judaism.’ It is advowedly
‘an attempt to appreciate _Daniel Deronda_,’ and is valuable and
interesting to English society not as a critique on the plot or the
characters of the book--on which points it strikes us, in more than one
instance, as somewhat weak and one-sided--but as indicating from a
Jewish standpoint in how far and how truly modern Judaism is therein
represented. Unappreciative as the great mass of the reading public have
shown themselves to the latest of George Eliot’s novels, the work has
excited a considerable amount of curiosity and admiration on the ground
of the intimate knowledge its author has evinced of the inner lives and
of the little-read literature of the ‘Great Unknown of humanity.’ We
think Dr. Kaufmann goes too far when he says, ‘The majority of readers
view the world to which they are introduced in _Daniel Deronda_ as one
foreign, strange, and repulsive.... It is not only the Jew of flesh and
blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but
the Jew under whatever shape he may appear, and even the airy
productions of the poet’s fancy are denounced when they venture to take
that people as their subject’ (p. 92). We think this view concedes very
much too much to prejudice; but it is undoubtedly a fact that the first
serious attempt by a great writer to make Jews and Judaism the central
interest of a great work, has produced a certain sense of discord on the
public ear, and that criticism has for the most part run in the minor
key. Mr. Swinburne, perhaps, strikes the most distinctly jarring chord,
when, in his lately published ‘Note on Charlotte Brontë,’ he owns to
possessing ‘no ear for the melodies of a Jew’s harp,’ and, disclaiming
‘a taste for the dissection of dolls,’ ‘leaves Daniel Deronda to his
natural place over the rag-shop door’ (pp. 21, 22). Even an ear so
politely and elegantly owned defective might be able, it could be
imagined, to catch an echo from the ‘choir invisible’; and poetic
insight, one might almost venture to think, should be able to discern in
poetic aspirations, however unfamiliar and even alien to itself,
something different from bran. This arrow is too heavily tipped to fly
straight to the goal. There are numbers, however, of the like school
who, with more excuse than Mr. Algernon Swinburne, fail to ‘see
anything’ in _Daniel Deronda_, and a criticism we once overheard in the
Louvre occurs to us as pertinent to this point. The picture was
Correggio’s ‘Marriage of St. Katharine,’ and to an Englishman standing
near us it evidently did not fulfil preconceived conceptions of a
marriage ceremony. He looked at it long, and at last turned disappointed
away, audibly muttering, ‘Well, I can’t see anything in it.’ That was
evident, but the failure was not in the picture. Preconceived
conceptions count for much, whether the artist be a Correggio or a
George Eliot, and ignorance and prejudice are ill-fitting spectacles
wherewith to assist vision.
If it be an axiom that a man should be judged by his peers, we should
think that George Eliot would herself prefer that her work should be
weighed in the balance by those qualified to hold the scales, and should
by them, if at all, be pronounced ‘wanting.’ A book of which Judaism is
the acknowledged theme should appeal to Jews for judgment, and thus the
question becomes an interesting one to the outer world,--What do the
Jews themselves think of _Daniel Deronda_? Are the aspirations of
Mordecai regarded by them as the expression of a poet’s dream, or a
nation’s hope? What, in short, is the aspect of modern Judaism to the
book?
‘Modern’ Judaism is itself, perhaps, a convenient rather than a correct
figure of speech. There are modern manners to which modern Jews
necessarily conform, and which have a tendency to tone down the outward
and special characteristics of Judaism, as of everything else, to a
general socially-undistinguishable level. But men are not necessarily
dumb because they do not speak much or loudly of such very personal
matters as their religious hopes and beliefs, more especially if in
these days they are so little in the fashion as to hold strong
convictions on such subjects. Our author distinctly formulates the
opinion that ‘men may give all due allegiance to a foreign State without
ceasing to belong to their own people’ (p. 21); and in the same sense as
we may conceive a man honestly fulfilling all dues as good husband and
good father to his living and lawful wife and children, and yet holding
tenderly in the unguessed-at depths of memory some long-ago-lost love,
so is it conceivable of many an unromantic-looking nineteenth century
Jew, who soberly performs all good citizen duties, that the unspoken
name of Jerusalem is still enshrined in like unguessed-at depths, as the
‘perfection of beauty,’ ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ Conventionalities
conduce to silence on such topics, and therefore it is to published
rather than to spoken Jewish criticisms we must turn in our inquiry, and
the little book under review certainly helps us to a definite answer.
And we may notice, as a significant fact, that while on the part of
general critics there has been some differing even in their adverse
judgments, and a more than partial failure to grasp the idea of the
book, there seems both here and abroad a grateful consensus of Jewish
opinion that not only has George Eliot truly depicted the externals of
Jewish _life_, which was a comparatively easy task, but has also
correctly represented Jewish thought and the ideas underlying Judaism.
Our author emphatically says, ‘_Daniel Deronda_ is a Jewish book, not
only in the sense that it treats of Jews, but also in the sense that it
is pre-eminently fitted for being understood and appreciated by Jews’
(p. 90); and again, ‘it will always be gratefully declared,’ he
concludes, ‘_that George Eliot has deserved right well of Judaism_’ (p.
95). Does this, then, mean that the ‘national’ idea is a rooted,
practical hope? Do English Jews, undistinguishable in the mass from
other Englishmen, really and truly hold the desire, like Mordecai, of
‘founding a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old’?
(_Daniel Deronda_, Book IV.) Do they indeed design to devote their
‘wealth to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors,’ to
cleanse their fair land from ‘the hideous obloquy of Christian strife,
which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of wild beasts to which he
has lent an arena’ (_ibidem_)? Was Daniel’s honeymoon-mission to the
East to have this practical result? The general Jewish verdict, as we
read it, scarcely concedes so much; it sees rather in the closing scene
of _Daniel Deronda_ the only weak spot in the book. Vague and visionary
as are all honeymoon anticipations, those of Daniel, their beauty and
unselfishness notwithstanding, strike Jewish readers as even more
unsubstantial, even less likely of realisation, than such imaginings in
general. Possibly, as in the old days of the Babylonian exile, ‘there be
some that dream’ of an actual restoration, of a Palestine which should
be the Switzerland of Asia Minor, which, crowned with ancient laurels,
might sit enthroned in peace and plenty,--
‘Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-Be.’
But save with such few and faithful dreamers, memory scarcely blossoms
into hope, and hope most certainly has not yet ripened into strong
desire. It may come; but at present we apprehend the majority of Jews
see the ‘future of Judaism’ not in the form of a centralised and
localised nationality, but rather in the destiny foreshadowed by our
author, in which ‘Israel will be greatest when she labours under every
zone,’ when ‘her children shall have spread themselves abroad, bearing
the ineradicable seeds of eternal truth’ (pp. 86, 87). This conception
of ‘nationality’ would point rather to a spiritual than to a temporal
sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter, and appears
to be in accord with the tone pervading both ancient and modern Jewish
literature, which exhibits Judaism as a perpetual living force,
maintained from within rather than from without, and destined
continually to influence religious thought, and to survive all
dispensations.
In his undefined mission to the East Deronda is, therefore, to that
extent perhaps, out of harmony with the general tone of modern Jewish
thought. We at least are constrained to think that more Jews of the
present day would be ready to follow Mordecai in imagination than
Deronda in person to Judæa. It is, nevertheless, in strict artistic
unity that, shut out for five-and-twenty years from actual practical
knowledge of his people, Deronda should represent the _ideal_ rather
than the _idea_ of Judaism. Mordecai, sketched as he is supposed to be
from the life, with his deep poetic yearnings, which are stayed on the
threshold of action, strikes us as a truer and more typical figure than
Deronda hastening to their fulfilment. And on the subject of these same
vague yearnings another point suggests itself. We have heard it said
that the religious belief of Mordecai centres rather in the destiny of
his race than in the Being who has appointed that destiny, and we have
heard it questioned whether the theism of Mordecai is sufficiently
defined to be fairly representative of Jewish thought, or if Judaism
indeed is also passing under that wave of Pantheism which, like the
waters of old, is threatening to submerge all ancient landmarks, and to
leave visible only ‘the tops of the mountains’ of revealed religion.
This seems a criticism based rather on negative than on positive
evidence, and derived possibly from the obvious leanings of George
Eliot’s other writings, and it is, perhaps, somewhat unfair to assume
that, even if, on this point, she does not sympathise with the Jews, she
has any intention of colouring her picture of modern Judaism with
intellectual prepossessions of her own. In the silence of Mordecai with
respect to his beliefs, he represents the great body of Jews, whose
religion finds expression rather in action than in formula, and who are
slow to indulge in theological speculations. Mordecai was true to Jewish
characteristics in the fact that his belief was concealed beneath his
hopes and aspirations, but had he in any degree shared the views of the
new school of sceptics, he could not have been the typical Jew, who sees
in the unity of his people a symbol of the unity of his God.
The pure theism of Judaism may be said to have its poles in the
anthropomorphic utterances of some of the Rabbinical writers, and in
the present pantheism of the extreme German school; but we should say
that the ordinary, the representative Jewish thought of the day lies
between these two extremes, and, in so far as it gives expression to any
belief on the subject, distinctly recognises a personal God presiding
over human destiny and natural laws. There may be here and there an
inquiring spirit that wanders so far afield that his attraction towards
his people is lost, and with it the influence his genius should exert;
but Jewish thought, if owning a somewhat nebulous conception of the
Deity, slowly progressing towards one fuller and grander, cannot be said
to be drifting towards Pantheism. Judaism, unlike many other faiths, has
not a history and a religious belief apart,--the one not only includes
and supplements, but is actually non-existent, ‘unthinkable,’ without
the other. Thus to have made an earnest Jew, with the strong racial
instinct of Mordecai, a weak theist, would have been an inartistic
conception, and Jewish criticism has not discovered this flaw in George
Eliot’s exceptional but faithful Jewish portraiture. Judging, then, from
such sources as are open to us, we are led to infer that the feeling of
nationality is still deeply rooted in the Jewish race, and that the
religious feeling from which it is inseparable perhaps gives it the
strength and depth to exist and to continue to exist without the
external props of ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Dr. Kaufmann,
therefore, very well expresses what appears to be the general conviction
of his co-religionists, when he suggests that ‘in the very circumstance
of dispersion may lie fulfilment’ (p. 87).
MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL
PRINTER AND PATRIOT
When the prophet of the Hebrews, some six-and-twenty hundred years ago,
thundered forth his stirring ‘Go through! go through the gates! prepare
a way, lift up a standard for the people!’ it may, without irreverence,
be doubted if he foresaw how literally his charge would be fulfilled by
one of his own race in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. The
story of how it was done may perhaps be worth retelling, since many
subjects of lesser moment have found more chroniclers.
It was in 1290 that gates, which in England had long been ominously
creaking on their hinges, were deliberately swung-to, and bolted and
barred by Church and State on the unhappy Jews, who on that bleak
November day stood shivering along the coast. ‘Thy waves and thy billows
have passed over me’ must have lost in tender allegory and gained some
added force of literalness that wintry afternoon. Scarce any of the
descendants of that exodus can have had share in the return. Of such of
the refugees as reached the opposite ports few found foothold, and fewer
still asylum. The most, and perhaps they were the most fortunate of the
fifteen thousand, were quick in gaining foreign graves. Those who made
for the nearest neighbouring shores of France, forgetful, or perhaps
ignorant, of the recent experiences of their French brethren under
Philip Augustus, lived on to earn a like knowledge for themselves, and
to undergo, a few years later, another expulsion under Philip the Fair.
Those who went farther fared worse, for over the German States the
Imperial eagle of Rome no longer brooded, now to protect and now to prey
on its victims; the struggle between the free cities and the
multitudinous petty princelings was working to its climax, and whether
at bitter strife, or whether pausing for a brief while to recruit their
powers, landgrave and burgher, on one subject, were always of one mind.
To plunder at need or to persecute at leisure, Jews were held to be
handy and fair game for either side.
Far northward or far southward that ragged English mob were hardly fit
to travel. Some remnant, perhaps, made effort to reach the
semi-barbarous settlements in Russia and Poland, but few can have been
sanguine enough to set out for distant Spain in hope of a welcome but
rarely accorded to such very poor relations. And even in the Peninsula
the security which Jews had hitherto experienced had by this date
received several severe shocks. Two centuries later and the tide of
civilisation had rolled definitely and drearily back on the soil which
Jews had largely helped to cultivate, and left it bare, and yet a little
longer, Portugal, become a province of Spain, had followed the cruel
fashions of its suzerain.
By the close of the sixteenth century a settlement of the dispossessed
Spanish and Portuguese Jews had been formed in Holland, and Amsterdam
was growing into a strange Dutch likeness of a new Jerusalem, for
Holland alone among the nations at this period gave a welcome to all
citizens in the spirit of Virgil’s famous line, ‘_Tros Rutulusve fuat,
nullo discrimine habebo_.’ And the refugees, who at this date claimed
the hospitality of the States, were of a sort to make the Dutch in love
with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. Under
Moorish sway, for centuries, commerce had been but one of the pursuits
open to the Jews and followed by the Jews of the Peninsula, and thus it
was a crowd, not of financiers and traders only or chiefly, but of
cultivated scholars, physicians, statesmen, and land-owners, whom
Catholic bigotry had exiled. The thin disguise of new Christians was
soon thrown off by these Jews, and they became to real Christians, to
such men as Vossius and Caspar Barlæus, who welcomed them and made
friends of them, a revelation of Judaism.
It was after the great _auto-da-fé_ of January 1605, that Joseph ben
Israel, with a host of other Jews, broken in health and broken in
fortune, left the land which bigotry and persecution had made hideous to
them, and joined the peaceful and prosperous settlement in Amsterdam.
The youngest of Ben Israel’s transplanted family was the year-old
Manasseh, who had been born in Lisbon a few months before their flight.
He seems to have been from the first a promising and intelligent lad,
and his tutor, one Isaac Uziel, who was a minister of the congregation,
and a somewhat famous mathematician and physician to boot, formed a high
opinion of the boy’s abilities. He did not, however, live to see them
verified; when Manasseh was but eighteen the Rabbi died, and his clever
pupil was thought worthy to be appointed to the vacated office. It was
an honoured and an honourable, but scarcely a lucrative, post to which
Manasseh thus succeeded, and the problem of living soon became further
complicated by an early marriage and a young family. Manasseh had to
cast about him for supplementary means of support, and he presently
found it in the establishment of a printing press. Whether the type gave
impetus to the pen, or whether the pen had inspired the idea of the
press, is hard to decide; but it is, at least, certain that before he
was twenty-five, Manasseh had found congenial work and plenty of it. He
taught and he preached, and both in the school-room and in the pulpit he
was useful and effective, but it was in his library that he felt really
happy and at home. Manasseh was a born scholar and an omnivorous reader,
bound to develop into a prolific, if not a profound, writer. The work
which first established his fame bears traces of this, and is, in point
of fact, less of a composition than a compilation. The first part of
this book, _The Conciliator_, was published in 1632, after five years’
labour had been expended on it, and it is computed to contain quotations
from, or references to, over 200 Hebrew, and 50 Latin and Greek authors.
Its object was to harmonise (_conciliador_) conflicting passages in the
Pentateuch, and it was written in Spanish, although it could have been
composed with equal facility in any one of half-a-dozen other languages,
for Manasseh was a most accomplished linguist.
Although not the first book which was issued from his press, for a
completely edited prayer-book and a Hebrew grammar had been published
in 1627, _The Conciliator_ was the first work that attracted the
attention of the learned world to the Amsterdam Rabbi. Manasseh had the
advantage of literary connections of his own, through his wife, who was
a great-granddaughter of Abarbanel--that same Isaac Abarbanel, the
scholar and patriot, who in 1490 headed the deputation to Ferdinand and
Isabella, which was so dramatically cut short by Torquemada.
Like _The Conciliator_, all Manasseh’s subsequent literary ventures met
with ready appreciation, but with more appreciation, it would seem, than
solid result, for his means appear to have been always insufficient for
his modest wants, and in 1640 we find him seriously contemplating
emigration to Brazil on a trading venture. Two members of his
congregation, which, as a body, does not seem to have acted liberally
towards him, came forward, however, at this crisis in his affairs, and
conferred a benefit all round by establishing a college and appointing
Manasseh the principal, with an adequate salary. This ready use of some
portion of their wealth has made the brothers Pereira more distinguished
than for its possession. Still, it must not be inferred that Manasseh
had been, up to this date, a friendless, if a somewhat impecunious,
student, only that, as is rather perhaps the wont of poor prophets in
their own country, his admirers had had to come from the outer before
they reached the inner circle. He had certainly achieved a European
celebrity in the Republic of letters before his friends at Amsterdam had
discovered much more than the fact that he printed very superior
prayer-books. He had won over, amongst others, the prejudiced author of
the _Law of Nations_, to own him, a Jew, for a familiar friend, before
some of the wealthier heads of his own congregation had claimed a like
privilege; and Grotius, then Swedish ambassador at Paris, was actually
writing to him, and proffering friendly services, at the very time that
the Amsterdam congregation were calmly receiving his enforced farewells.
There was something, perhaps, of irony in the situation, but Manasseh,
like Maimonides, had no littleness of disposition, no inflammable
self-love quick to take fire; he loved his people truly enough to
understand them and to make allowances, had even, perhaps, some humorous
perception of the national obtuseness to native talent when unarrayed in
purple and fine linen, or until duly recognised by the wearers of such.
Set free, by the liberality of Abraham and Isaac Pereira, from the
pressure of everyday cares, Manasseh again devoted himself to his books,
and turned out a succession of treatises. History, Philosophy,
Theology, he attacked them all in turn, and there is, perhaps, something
besides rapidity of execution which suggests an idea of manufacture in
most of these works. A treatise which he published about 1650, and which
attracted very wide notice, significantly illustrated his rather fatal
facility for ready writing. The treatise was entitled _The Hope of
Israel_, and sought to prove no less than that some aborigines in
America, whose very existence was doubtful, were lineal descendants of
the lost ten tribes. The Hope itself seems to have rested on no more
solid foundation than a traveller’s tale of savages met with in the
wilds, who included something that sounded like the עמש (Shemang[17]) in
their vernacular. The story was quickly translated into several
languages, but it was almost as quickly disproved, and Manasseh’s
deductions from it were subsequently rather roughly criticised. Truth to
say, the accumulated stores of his mind were ground down and sifted and
sown broadcast in somewhat careless and indigestible masses, and their
general character gives an uncomfortable impression of machine-work
rather than of hand-work. And the proportion of what he wrote was as
nothing compared to what he contemplated writing. Perhaps those
never-written books of his would have proved the most readable; he
might have shown us himself, his wise, tolerant, enthusiastic self, in
them. But instead, we possess, in his shelves on shelves of published
compilations of dead men’s minds, only duly labelled and catalogued
selections from learned mummies.
The dream of Manasseh was to compose a ‘Heroic History,’ a significant
title which shadows forth the worthy record he would have delighted in
compiling from Jewish annals. It is as well, perhaps, that the title is
all we have of the work, for he was too good an idealist to prove a good
historian. He cared too much, and he knew too much, to write a reliable
or a readable history of his people. To him, as to many of us, Robert
Browning’s words might be applied--
‘So you saw yourself as you wished you were--
As you might have been, as you cannot be--
Earth here rebuked by Olympus there,
And grew content in your poor degree.’[18]
He, at any rate, had good reason to grow content in his degree, for he
was destined to make an epoch in the ‘Heroic History,’ instead of being,
as he ‘wished he were,’ the reciter, and probably the prosy reciter, of
several. Certain it is that, great scholar, successful preacher, and
voluminous writer as was Manasseh ben Israel, it was not till he was
fifty years old that he found his real vocation. He had felt at it for
years, his books were more or less blind gropings after it, his
friendships with the eminent and highly placed personages of his time
were all unconscious means to a conscious end, and his very character
was a factor in his gradually formed purpose. His whole life had been an
upholding of the ‘standard’; publicists who sneered at the ostentatious
rich Jew, priests who railed at the degraded poor Jew, were each bound
to recognise in Manasseh ben Israel a Jew of another type: one poor yet
self-respecting, sought after yet unostentatious, conservative yet
cosmopolitan, learned yet undogmatic. They might question if this
Amsterdam Rabbi were _sui generis_, but they were at least willing to
find out if he were in essentials what he claimed to be, fairly
representative of the fairly treated members of his race. So the ‘way
was prepared’ by the ‘standard’ being raised. Which, of the many
long-closed ‘gates,’ was to open for the people to pass through?