either physically or morally, for a wrestler; and this little essay,
where there is no strain of argument or scope for deep erudition, is yet
no unworthy specimen of the great philosopher’s powers. Poetic attempts
too, and mostly on religious subjects, occasionally varied his
counting-house duties and his more serious labours; but although he
truly possessed, if ever man did, what Landor calls ‘the poetic heart,’
yet it is in his prose, rather than in his poetry, that we mostly see
its evidences. The book which is justly claimed as his greatest, and
which first gave him his title to be considered a wide and deep-thinking
philosopher, is his _Phædon_.[38] The idea of such a work had long been
germinating in him, and the death of his dear friend Abbt, with whom he
had had many a fruitful discussion on the subject, turned his thoughts
more fixedly on the hopes which make sorrows bearable, and the work was
published in the year following Abbt’s death.
The first part is a very pure and classical German rendering of the
original Greek form of Plato, and the remainder an eloquent summary of
all that religion, reason, and experience urge in support of a belief in
immortality. It is cast in the form of conversation between Socrates and
his friends--a choice in composition which caused a Jewish critic (M.
David Friedländer) to liken Moses Mendelssohn to Moses the lawgiver.
‘For Moses spake, and _Socrates_ was to him as a mouth’ (Ex. iv. 15). In
less than two years _Phædon_ ran through three German editions, and it
was speedily translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Danish,
and Hebrew. Then, at one stride, came fame; and great scholars, great
potentates, and even the heads of his own community, sought his society.
But fame was ever of incomparably less value to Mendelssohn than
friendship, and any sort of notoriety he honestly hated. Thus, when his
celebrity brought upon him a polemical discussion, the publicity which
ensued, notwithstanding that the personal honour in which he was held
was thereby enhanced, so thoroughly upset his nerves that the result was
a severe and protracted illness. It came about in this wise: Lavater,
the French pastor, in 1769, had translated Bonnet’s _Evidences of
Christianity_ into German; he published it with the following dedication
to Moses Mendelssohn:--
‘DEAR SIR,--I think I cannot give you a stronger proof of my
admiration of your excellent writings, and of your still more
excellent character, that of an Israelite in whom there is no
guile; nor offer you a better requital for the great gratification
which I, some years ago, enjoyed in your interesting society, than
by dedicating to you the ablest philosophical inquiry into the
evidences of Christianity that I am acquainted with.
‘I am fully conscious of your profound judgment, steadfast love of
truth, literary independence, enthusiasm for philosophy in general,
and esteem for Bonnet’s works in particular. The amiable discretion
with which, notwithstanding your contrariety to the Christian
religion, you delivered your opinion on it, is still fresh in my
memory. And so indelible and important is the impression which your
truly philosophical respect for the moral character of its Founder
made on me, in one of the happiest moments of my existence, that I
venture to beseech you--nay, before the God of Truth, your and my
Creator and Father, I beseech and conjure you--to read this work, I
will not say with philosophical impartiality, which I am confident
will be the case, but for the purpose of publicly refuting it, in
case you should find the main arguments, in support of the facts of
Christianity, untenable; or should you find them conclusive, with
the determination of doing what policy, love of truth, and probity
demand--what Socrates would doubtless have done had he read the
work and found it unanswerable.
‘May God still cause much truth and virtue to be disseminated by
your means, and make you experience the happiness my whole heart
wishes you.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER.
‘ZURICH, _25th of August 1769_.’
It was a most unpleasant position for Mendelssohn. Plain speaking was
not so much the fashion then as now, and defence might more easily be
read as defiance. At that time the position of the Jews in all the
European States was most precarious, and outspoken utterances might not
only alienate the timid followers whom Mendelssohn hoped to enlighten,
but probably offend the powerful outsiders whom he was beginning to
influence. No man has any possible right to demand of another a public
confession of faith; the conversation to which Lavater alluded as some
justification for his request had been a private one, and the reference
to it, moreover, was not altogether accurate. And Mendelssohn hated
controversy, and held a very earnest conviction that no good cause,
certainly no religious one, is ever much forwarded by it. Should he be
silent, refuse to reply, and let judgment go by default? Comfort and
expediency both pleaded in favour of this course, but truth was mightier
and prevailed. Like unto the three who would not be ‘careful’ of their
answer even under the ordeal of fire, he soon decided to testify plainly
and without undue thought of consequences. Mendelssohn was not the sort
to serve God with special reservations as to Rimmon. Definitely he
answered his too zealous questioner in a document which is so entirely
full of dignity and of reason that it is difficult to make quotations
from it.[39] ‘Certain inquiries,’ he writes, ‘we finish once for all in
our lives.’ ... ‘And I herewith declare in the presence of the God of
truth, your and my Creator, by whom you have conjured me in your
dedication, that I will adhere to my principles so long as my entire
soul does not assume another nature.’ And then, emphasising the position
that it is by character and not by controversy that _he_ would have Jews
shame their traducers, he goes fully and boldly into the whole question.
He shows with a delicate touch of humour that Judaism, in being no
proselytising faith, has a claim to be let alone. ‘I am so fortunate as
to count amongst my friends many a worthy man who is not of my faith.
Never yet has my heart whispered, Alas! for this good man’s soul. He who
believes that no salvation is to be found out of the pale of his own
church, must often feel such sighs arise in his bosom.’ ‘Suppose there
were among my contemporaries a Confucius or a Solon, I could
consistently with my religious principles love and admire the great man,
but I should never hit on the idea of converting a Confucius or a Solon.
What should I convert him for? As he does not belong to the congregation
of Jacob, my religious laws were not made for him, and on doctrines we
should soon come to an understanding. Do I think there is a chance of
his being saved? I certainly believe that he who leads mankind on to
virtue in this world cannot be damned in the next.’ ‘We believe ... that
those who regulate their lives according to the religion of nature and
of reason are called virtuous men of other nations, and are, equally
with our patriarchs, the children of eternal salvation.’ ‘Whoever is not
born conformable to our laws has no occasion to live according to them.
We alone consider ourselves bound to acknowledge their authority, and
this can give no offence to our neighbours.’ He refuses to criticise
Bonnet’s work in detail on the ground that in his opinion ‘Jews should
be scrupulous in abstaining from reflections on the predominant
religion’; but nevertheless, whilst repeating his ‘so earnest wish to
have no more to do with religious controversy,’ the honesty of the man
asserts itself in boldly adding, ‘I give you at the same time to
understand that I could, very easily, bring forward something in
refutation of M. Bonnet’s work.’
Mendelssohn’s reply brought speedily, as it could scarcely fail to do,
an ample and sincere apology from Lavater, a ‘retracting’ of the
challenge, an earnest entreaty to forgive what had been ‘importunate and
improper’ in the dedicator, and an expression of ‘sincerest respect’ and
‘tenderest affection’ for his correspondent. Mendelssohn’s was a nature
to have more sympathy with the errors incidental to too much, than to
too little zeal, and the apology was accepted as generously as it was
offered. And here ended, so far as the principals were concerned, this
somewhat unique specimen of a literary squabble. A crowd of lesser
writers, unfortunately, hastened to make capital out of it; and a
bewildering mist of nondescript and pedantic compositions soon darkened
the literary firmament, obscuring and vulgarising the whole subject.
They took ‘sides’ and gave ‘views’ of the controversy; but Mendelssohn
answered none and read as few as possible of these publications. Still
the strain and worry told on his sensitive and peace-loving nature, and
he did not readily recover his old elasticity of temperament.
In 1778 Lessing’s wife died, and his friend’s trouble touched deep
chords both of sympathy and of memory in Mendelssohn. Yet more cruelly
were they jarred when, two years later, Lessing himself followed, and an
uninterrupted friendship of over thirty years was thus dissolved.
Lessing and Mendelssohn had been to each other the sober realisation of
the beautiful ideal embodied in the drama of _Nathan der Weise_. ‘What
to you makes me seem Christian makes of you the Jew to me,’ each could
most truly say to the other. They helped the world to see it too, and to
recognise the Divine truth that ‘to be to the best thou knowest ever
true is all the creed.’
The death of his friend was a terrible blow to Mendelssohn. ‘After
wrinkles come,’ says Mr. Lowell, in likening ancient friendships to
slow-growing trees, ‘few plant, but water dead ones with vain tears.’ In
this case, the actual pain of loss was greatly aggravated by some
publications which appeared shortly after Lessing’s death, impugning his
sincerity and religious feeling. Germany, as Goethe once bitterly
remarked, ‘needs time to be thankful.’ In the first year or two
following Lessing’s death it was, perhaps, too early to expect gratitude
from his country for the lustre his talents had shed on it. Some of the
pamphlets would make it seem that it was too early even for decency.
Mendelssohn vigorously took up the cudgels for his dead friend; too
vigorously, perhaps, since Kant remarked that ‘it is Mendelssohn’s
fault, if Jacobi (the most notorious of the assailants) should now
consider himself a philosopher.’ To Mendelssohn’s warmhearted, generous
nature it would, however, have been impossible to remain silent when one
whom he knew to be tolerant, earnest, and sincere in the fullest sense
of those words of highest praise, was accused of ‘covert Spinozism’; a
charge which again was broadly rendered, by these wretched, ignorant
interpreters of a language they failed to understand, as atheism and
hypocrisy.
But this was his last literary work. It shows no sign of decaying
powers; it is full of pathos, of wit, of clear close reasoning, and of
brilliant satire; yet nevertheless it was his monument as well as his
friend’s. He took the manuscript to his publisher in the last day of the
year 1785; and in the first week of the New Year 1786, still only
fifty-six years old, he quietly and painlessly died. That last work
seems to make a beautiful and fitting end to his life; a life which
truly adds a worthy stanza to what Herder calls ‘the greatest poem of
all time--the history of the Jews.’
THE NATIONAL IDEA IN JUDAISM
Once find a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy;
and undoubtedly to get at any true notion of character, one must
discover these. They may be covered close with conventionalities, or
jealously hidden, like buried treasures, from unsympathetic eyes; but
the patient search is well worth while, since it is his ideals--and not
his words nor his deeds, which a thousand circumstances influence and
decide--which show us the real man as known to his Maker. And true as
this is of the individual, it is true in a deeper and larger sense of
the nations, and most true of all of that people with whom for centuries
speech was impolitic and action impossible. With articulate expression
so long denied to them, the national ideals must be always to the
student of history the truest revelation of Judaism; and it is curious
and interesting to trace their development, and to recognise the crown
and apex of them all in battlefield and in ‘Vineyard,’ in Ghetto and in
mart, unchanged among the changes, and practically the same as in the
days of the desert. The germ was set in the wilderness, when, amid the
thunders and lightnings of Sinai, a crowd of frightened, freshly rescued
slaves were made ‘witnesses’ to a living God, and guardians of a ‘Law’
which demonstrated His existence. Very new and strange, and but dimly
understanded of the people it must all have been. ‘The lights of sunset
and of sunrise mixed.’ The fierce vivid glow under which they had bent
and basked in Egypt had scarcely faded, when they were bid look up in
the grey dawn of the desert to receive their trust. There was worthy
stuff in the descendants of the man who had left father and friends and
easy, sensuous idolatry to follow after an ideal of righteousness; and
they who had but just escaped from the bondage of centuries, rose to the
occasion. They accepted their mission; ‘All that the Lord has spoken
will we do,’ came up a responsive cry from ‘all the people answering
together,’ and in that supreme moment the ill-fed and so recently
ill-treated groups were transformed into a nation. ‘I will make of thee
a great people’; ‘Through thee shall all families of the earth be
blessed’; the meaning of such predictions was borne in upon them in one
bewildering flash, and in that flash the national idea of Judaism found
its dawn; they, the despised and the downtrodden, were to become
trustees of civilisation.
As the glow died down, however, a very rudimentary sort of civilisation
the wilderness must have presented to these builders of the temples and
the treasure cities by the Nile, and to the vigorous, resourceful Hebrew
women. As day after day, and year after year, the cloud moved onward,
darkening the road which it directed, as they gathered the manna and
longed for the fleshpots, it could have been only the few and finer
spirits among those listless groups who were able to discern that a
civilisation based upon the Decalogue, shorn though it was of all
present pleasantness and ease, had a promise about it that was lacking
to a culture, ‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’ It was life
reduced to its elements; Sinai and Pisgah stood so far apart, and such
long level stretches of dull sand lay between the heights. One imagines
the women, skilled like their men-folk in all manner of cunning
workmanship, eagerly, generously ransacking their stores of purple and
fine linen to decorate the Tabernacle, and spinning and embroidering
with a desperately delighted sense of recovered refinements, which, as
much perhaps as their fervour of religious enthusiasm, led them to bring
their gifts till restrained ‘from bringing.’ The trust was accepted
though in the wilderness, but grudgingly, with many a faint-hearted
protest, and to some minds, in some moods, slavery must have seemed less
insistent in its demands than trusteeship.
The conquest of Canaan was the next experience, and as sinfulness and
idolatry were relentlessly washed away in rivers of blood, one doubts if
the impressionable descendants of Jacob, to whom it was given to
overcome, might not perchance have preferred to endure. But such choice
was not given to them; the trust had to be realised before it could be
transmitted, and its value tested by its cost. With Palestine at last in
possession of the chosen people, this civilisation of which they were
the guardians by slow degrees became manifest. Samuel lived it, and
David sang it, and Isaiah preached it, and the nation clung to it,
individual men and women, stumbling and failing often, but dying each,
when need came, a hundred deaths in its defence; perhaps finding it on
occasion less difficult to die for an idea than to live up to it.
The securities were shifted, the terms of the trusteeship changed when
the people of the Land became the people of the Book. The civilisation
which they guarded grew narrower in its issues and more limited in its
outlook, till, as the years rolled into the centuries, it was hard to
recognise the ‘witnesses’ of God in the hunted outcasts of man. Yet to
the student of history, who reads the hieroglyph of the Egyptian into
the postcard of to-day, it is not difficult to see the civilisation of
Sinai shining under the folds of the gaberdine or of the _san benito_.
It was taught in the schools and it was lived in the homes, and the
Ghetto could not altogether degrade it, nor the Holy Office effectually
disguise it. Jews sank sometimes to the lower level of the sad lives
they led, but Judaism remained unconquerably buoyant. Judaism, as they
believed in it, was a Personal Force making for righteousness, a Law
which knew no change, the Promise of a period when the earth should be
filled with the knowledge of the Lord; and the ‘witnesses’ stuck to this
their trust, through good repute and through evil repute, with a simple
doggedness which disarms all superficial criticism. The glamour of the
cause, through which a Barcochba could loom heroic to an Akiba, the
utter absence of self-consciousness or of self-seeking, which made Judas
in his fight for freedom pin the Lord’s name on his flag, and which,
with the kingdom lost, made the scrolls of the Law the spoil with which
Ben Zaccai retreated--this was at the root of the national idea, and its
impersonality gives the secret of its strength, ‘Not unto us, O Lord,
not unto us, but unto Thy name!’ This vivid sense of being the trustees
of civilisation was wholly dissociated from any feeling of conceit
either in the leaders or in the rank and file of the Jewish nation. It
is curious indeed to realise how so intense a conviction of the survival
of the fittest could be held in so intensely unmodernised a spirit.
The idea of their trusteeship was a sheet anchor to the Jews as the
waves and the billows passed over them. In the fifteen hundred years’
tragedy of their history there have been no _entr’actes_ of frenzied
stampede or of revolutionary, revengeful conspiracy. A resolute
endurance, which, characteristically enough, rarely approaches
asceticism, marks the depth and strength and buoyancy of the national
idea. Trustees of civilisation might not sigh nor sing in solitudes; nor
with the feeling so keen that ‘a thousand years in Thy sight are but as
a day,’ was it worth while to plot or plan against the oppressors of the
moment. Time was on their side, and ‘that which shapes it to some
perfect end.’ And this attitude explains, possibly, some unattractive
phases of it, since however honestly the individual consciousness may be
absorbed in a national conscience, yet the individual will generally, in
some way, manage to express himself, and the self is not always quite
up to the ideal, nor indeed is it always in harmony with those who would
interpret it. When a David dances before the Ark it needs other than a
daughter of Saul to understand him. There have been Jews in David’s
case, their enthusiasm mocked at; and there have been Jews indifferent
to their trust, and Jews who have betrayed it, and Jews too, and these
not a few, who have pushed it into prominence with undue display. The
infinite changes of circumstance and surrounding in Jewish fortunes no
less than differences in individual character have induced a
considerable divergence in the practical politics of the national idea.
The persecuted have been exclusive over it, and the prosperous careless;
it has been vulgarised by superstition, and ignored by indifferentism,
till modern ‘rational’ thinkers now and again question whether Palestine
be indeed the goal of Jewish separateness, and make it a matter for
academic discussion whether ‘Jews’ mean a sect of cosmopolitan citizens
with religious customs more or less in common, or a people whose
religion has a national origin and a national purpose in its
observances. With questioners such as these, Revelation, possibly, would
not be admitted as sound evidence in reply, else the promise, ‘Ye shall
be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,’ would, one might
think, show a design that ritual by itself does not fulfil. It was no
sect with ‘tribal’ customs, but a ‘nation’ and a ‘kingdom’ who were to
be ‘holy to the Lord.’ But though texts may be inadmissible with those
who prefer their sermons in stones, yet the records of the ages are
little less impartial and unimpassioned than the records of the rocks,
and doubters might find an answer in the insistent tones of history when
she tells of the results of occasional unnatural divorce between
religion and nationality among Jews.