the Pentateuch was translated into a foreign language――into Greek――was
considered by Jews as a day of great national calamity. It was feared
that the translation, being incorrect, might become the source of
error instead of being the fountain of divine truths. The fear felt
and expressed about two thousand years ago has been fully justified by
the history of the several versions that have since been undertaken,
and by the large number of false doctrines, supposed to be founded on
the authority of Holy Writ, whilst really originating in mistakes made
by translators.
M. FRIEDLÄNDER, 1886.
* * * * *
NEW translations of the Bible have appeared and are appearing in
various languages; but none of them has made, or intends to make, a
complete and exhaustive use of Jewish contributions to the subject.
Great university professors who know much, very much, but who do not
know Jewish literature, unconsciously assume that they do not know it
because it is not worth knowing――a judgement that no man has a right
to pronounce until he has studied it――and this they have not done.
M. SULZBERGER, 1898.
* * * * *
THE book, commonly known as the Authorized, or King James’s Version,
has been so long looked upon with a deep veneration almost bordering
on superstitious dread, that, to most persons, the very thought of
furnishing an improved translation of the Divine records will be viewed
as an impious assumption and a contempt of the wisdom of former ages.
Since the time of King James, however, the world has progressed in
biblical knowledge no less than in all other branches of science; and
giant minds have laboured to make clear what formerly was obscure.
ISAAC LEESER, 1855.
* * * * *
I FULLY admit the great merits of the Revised Version of the Bible. It
corrects many faults, amends many mistranslations of the so-called King
James’s Version, without impairing the antique charm of the English
Bible, without putting out of tune the music so dear to our ears. Yet
even that great work, compiled by the most eminent scholars and learned
theologians in the land, is disfigured by errors due to dogmatic
preconceptions.
HERMANN ADLER, 1896.
III
THE present translation[17] has a character of its own. It aims to
combine the spirit of Jewish tradition with the results of biblical
scholarship, ancient, mediaeval, and modern. It gives to the Jewish
world a translation of the Scriptures done by men imbued with the
Jewish consciousness, while the non-Jewish world, it is hoped, will
welcome a translation that presents many passages from the Jewish
traditional point of view.
The Jew cannot afford to have his own Bible translation prepared for
him by others. He cannot have it as a gift, even as he cannot borrow
his soul from others. If a new country and a new language metamorphose
him into a new man, the duty of this new man is to prepare a new garb
and a new method of expression for what is most sacred and most dear
to him.
_From_ TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE,
_Jewish Version of the Bible, 1916._
IV
SCRIPTURE must be interpreted according to its plain, natural sense,
each word according to the context. Traditional exposition, however,
may also be taken to heart, as it is said: ‘Is not My word like as
fire?’――consisting of many sparks――‘and like a hammer that breaketh
the rock in pieces?’――and therefore capable of various explanations.
RASHI, 1080.
V
THERE is none that hath ever made an end of learning it, and there
is none that will ever find out all its mysteries. For its wisdom is
richer than any sea, and its word deeper than any abyss.
ECCLESIASTICUS 24. 28, 29.
ISRAEL THE PEOPLE OF REVELATION
HAD there been no Israelites there would be no Torah. Israel’s
pre-eminence is not derived from Moses, it is Moses whose pre-eminence
is due to Israel. The Divine love went out towards the multitude of the
children of the Patriarchs, the Congregation of Jacob. Moses was merely
the divinely chosen instrument through whom God’s Blessing was to be
assured unto them. We are called not the people of Moses, but the
people of God.
YEHUDAH HALEVI, 1141.
* * * * *
THE Greeks were not all artists, but the Greek nation was alone capable
of producing a Phidias or a Praxiteles. The same was the case with
Judaism. It is certain that not all Jews were prophets; the exclamation,
‘Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets!’ was a pious
wish. Nevertheless, Israel is the people of Revelation. It must have
had a native endowment that could produce, that could rear, such men.
Nor does Judaism claim to be the work of single individuals; it does
not speak of the God of Moses, nor of the God of the Prophets, but of
the God of Israel. The fact that the greatest prophet left his work
unfinished contains a profound truth. _No man knoweth of his sepulchre
unto this day._ Thereon our ancient teachers remark: ‘His grave should
not serve as a place of pilgrimage whither men go to do honour to _one
man_, and thus raise him above the level of man’.
A. GEIGER, 1865.
THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD AND ISRAEL IS HIS PROPHET[18]
WHEN one thinks how this earliest of
theistic creeds has persisted through the ages, by what wonderful
constructive statecraft it has built up a race of which the lowest unit
is no atom in a ‘submerged tenth’, but an equal member of a great
historic brotherhood, a scion of the oldest of surviving civilizations,
a student of sacred books, a lover of home and peace; when one
remembers how he has agonized――the great misunderstood of history――how
his ‘pestilent heresy’ has been chastised and rebuked by Popes and
Crusaders, Inquisitors and Missionaries, how he has remained sublimely
protestant, imperturbable amid marvellous cathedrals and all the
splendid shows of Christendom, and how despite all and after all he is
living to see the world turning slowly back to his vision of life; then
one seems to see the ‘finger of God’, the hand of the Master-Artist,
behind the comedy-tragedy of existence, to believe that Israel is
veritably a nation with a mission, that there is no God but God and
Israel is His prophet.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL.
MOSES[19]
HOW small Sinai appears when Moses stands upon it! This mountain is
only the pedestal for the feet of the man whose head reaches up to
the heavens, where he speaks with God.... Formerly I could not pardon
the legislator of the Jews his hatred against the plastic arts. I
did not see that, notwithstanding his hostility to art, Moses was a
great artist, and possessed the true artistic spirit. But this spirit
was directed by him, as by his Egyptian compatriots, to colossal and
indestructible undertakings. He built human pyramids, carved human
obelisks; he took a poor shepherd family and created a nation from
it――a great, eternal, holy people; a people of God, destined to outlive
the centuries, and to serve as a pattern to all other nations, even as
a prototype to the whole of mankind. He created Israel.
As of the master-builder, so of his work――the Hebrew people――I did not
speak with sufficient reverence. I see now that the Greeks were only
handsome youths, whilst the Jews were always men――powerful, indomitable
men――who have fought and suffered on every battlefield of human thought.
H. HEINE, 1854.
THE PROPHETS[20]
I
’TIS a little people, but it has done great things. It had but a
precarious hold on a few crags and highlands between the desert and
the deep sea, yet its thinkers and sages with eagle vision took into
their thought the destinies of all humanity, and rang out in clarion
voice a message of hope to the downtrodden of all races. Claiming
for themselves and their people the duty and obligations of a true
aristocracy, they held forth to the peoples ideals of a true democracy
founded on right and justice. Their voices have never ceased to re-echo
around the world, and the greatest things that have been done to raise
men’s lot have been always in the spirit, often in the name, of the
Hebrew prophets.
JOSEPH JACOBS, 1919.
* * * * *
THE mere foretelling of future events is the lowest stage of prophecy,
and in the eyes of the great Prophets of Israel it was of quite
secondary importance. Their aim was to fathom the secrets of holiness;
and their striving, by means of admonition and moral suasion, to guide
the peoples in the paths which lead mankind to spiritual and political
well-being.
SHEMTOB IBN SHEMTOB, 1489.
II
IT was part of the spirit of Prophecy to be dumb-founded at human
ferocity as at something against nature and reason. In the presence
of the iniquities of the world, the heart of the Prophets bled as
though from a wound of the Divine Spirit, and their cry of indignation
re-echoed the wrath of the Deity. Greece and Rome had their rich and
poor, just as Israel had in the days of Jeroboam II, and the various
classes continued to slaughter one another for centuries; but no voice
of justice and pity arose from the fierce tumult. Therefore the words
of the Prophets have more vitality at the present time, and answer
better to the needs of modern souls, than all the classic masterpieces
of antiquity.
JAMES DARMESTETER, 1891.
* * * * *
IN Hebrew prophecy we have no crumbling monument of perishable stone,
the silent witness of a past that is dead and gone, but the quickening
breath of the spirit itself. In the ardent souls of the Prophets
the thought of Deity was centred as in a burning-glass――a fire that
consumed them, a shining light for men. Theirs was the abiding sense
of an eternal Will and Purpose underlying human transient schemes, an
eternal Presence, transfusing all of life as with a hidden flame; so
that love of country, love of right, love of man, were not alone human
things, but also divine, because they were embraced and focussed in a
single living unity――the love of God.
JOSEPHINE LAZARUS, 1893.
THE TALMUD[21]
THE Talmud is the work which embodies the civil and canonical law of
the Jewish people, forming a kind of supplement to the Pentateuch――a
supplement such as took 1,000 years of a nation’s life to produce. It
is not merely a dull treatise, but it appeals to the imagination and
the feelings, and to all that is noblest and purest. Between the rugged
boulders of the law which bestrew the path of the Talmud there grow
the blue flowers of romance――parable, tale, gnome, saga; its elements
are taken from heaven and earth, but chiefly and most lovingly from
the human heart and from Scripture, for every verse and every word in
this latter became, as it were, a golden nail upon which it hung its
gorgeous tapestries.
The fundamental law of all human and social economy in the Talmud was
the absolute equality of men. It was pointed out that man was created
alone――lest one should say to another, ‘I am of the better or earlier
stock’. In a discussion that arose among the Masters as to which was
the most important passage in the whole Bible, one pointed to the verse
‘And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. The other contradicted
him and pointed to the words ‘This is the book of the generations of
man’ (Gen. 5. 1)――not black, not white, not great, not small, but _man_.
‘The law given on Mount Sinai’, the Masters said, ‘though emphatically
addressed to one people, belongs to all humanity. It was not given in
any king’s land, not in any city or inhabited spot――it was given on
God’s own highway, in the desert――not in the darkness and stillness
of night, but in plain day, amid thunder and lightning. And why was it
given on Sinai? Because it is the lowliest of mountains――to show that
God’s spirit rests only upon them that are meek and lowly in their
hearts.’
The Talmud taught that religion was not a thing of creed or dogma or
faith merely, but of active goodness. Scripture said, ‘Ye shall walk in
the ways of the Lord’. ‘But the Lord is a consuming fire; how can men
walk in His ways?’ ‘By being’, the rabbis answered, ‘as He is――merciful,
loving, long-suffering. Mark how on the first page of the Pentateuch
God clothed the naked――Adam; and on the last he buried the dead――Moses.
He heals the sick, frees the captives, does good to His enemies, and is
merciful both to the living and to the dead.’
The most transcendental love of the rabbis was lavished on children.
All the verses of Scripture that spoke of flowers and gardens were
applied to children and schools. The highest and most exalted title
which they bestowed in their poetical flights upon God Himself was that
of ‘Pedagogue of Man’. Indeed, the relationship of man to God they
could not express more pregnantly than by the most familiar words which
occur from one end of the Talmud to the other, ‘Our Father in Heaven’.
I have been able to bring before you what proves, as it were, but
a drop in the vast ocean of Talmud――that strange, wild, weird ocean,
with its leviathans, and its wrecks of golden argosies, and with its
forlorn bells that send up their dreamy sounds ever and anon, while the
fisherman bends upon his oar, and starts and listens, and perchance the
tears may come into his eyes.
EMANUEL DEUTSCH, 1868.
JEWISH LITERATURE
RABBINISM was a sequel to the Bible, and if, like all sequels, it
was unequal to its original, it nevertheless shared its greatness.
The works of all Jews up to the modern period were the sequel to this
sequel. Through them all may be detected the unifying principle that
literature in its truest sense includes life itself; that intellect
is the handmaid to conscience; and that the best books are those which
best teach men how to live. This underlying unity gave more harmony
to Jewish literature than is possessed by many literatures more
distinctively national. The maxim ‘Righteousness delivers from death’
applies to books as well as to men. A literature whose consistent theme
is Righteousness, is immortal.
I. ABRAHAMS, 1899.
THE WORK OF THE RABBIS[22]
JUDAISM and the Bible are by no means identical; the Bible is only
one constituent part of Judaism, though the most fundamental one. Who
taught the average Jew to understand his Judaism, to love his religion
and his God? Without the zeal of the Rabbis, the Bible would never have
become the guide of every Jew. They translated it into the vernacular
for the people, and expounded it to the masses. They taught them not
to despair under the tortures of the present, but to look forward to
the future. At the same time they developed the spirit of the Bible
and never lost sight of the lofty teachings of the Prophets. It is
the immortal merit of the unknown Rabbis of the centuries immediately
before and after the common era that they found and applied the proper
‘fences’ for the preservation of Judaism, and that they succeeded in
rescuing real morality and pure monotheism for the ages that were to
follow.
A. BÜCHLER, 1908.
ISRAEL’S HISTORY NEVER-ENDING
ISRAEL’S ‘Heroic History’, as Manasseh ben Israel called it, is in
truth never-ending. Line upon line is still being added, and _finis_
will never be written on the page of Jewish history till the Light
which shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day shall fall upon
it, and illumine the whole beautiful world. Each Jew and each Jewess
is making his or her mark, or his or her stain, upon the wonderful
unfinished history of the Jews, the history which Herder called the
greatest poem of all time. _‘Ye are my witnesses’, saith the Lord._
Loyal and steadfast witnesses is it, or self-seeking and suborned ones?
A witness of some sort every Jew born is bound to be. He must fulfil
his mission, and through good report and through evil report, and
though it be only writ in water, he must add his item of evidence to
the record that all who run may read.
LADY MAGNUS, 1886.
* * * * *
THE story of this little sect――the most remarkable survival of the
fittest known to humanity――in no way corresponds with its numbers; it
is not a tale of majorities. It is a story that begins very near the
beginning of history, and shows little sign of drawing to a conclusion.
It is a story that has chapters in every country on earth, that has
borne the impress of every period. All men and all ages pass through it
in unending procession.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1895.
THE MEANING OF JEWISH HISTORY
MAN is made man by history. It is history that causes the men
of historic nations to be more civilized than the savage. The Jew
recognizes that he is made what he is by the history of his fathers,
and feels he is losing his better self so far as he loses his hold on
his past history.
JOSEPH JACOBS, 1889.
* * * * *
ISRAEL is the heart of mankind.
YEHUDAH HALEVI.
* * * * *
THE high-road of Jewish history leads to wide outlooks. That which is
great and lasting in Jewish history is the spiritual wealth accumulated
through the ages; the description of the fierce battles fought between
the powers of darkness and light, of freedom and persecution, of
knowledge and ignorance. Our great men are the heroes of the school
and the sages of the synagogue, not the knights of the sanguinary
battlefield. No widow was left to mourn through our victory, no mother
for her lost son, no orphan for the lost father.
M. GASTER, 1906.
THE HALLOWING OF JEWISH HISTORY
THE first part of Jewish history, the Biblical part, is a source
from which, for many centuries, millions of human beings belonging to
the most diverse denominations have derived instruction, solace, and
inspiration. Its heroes have long ago become types, incarnations, of
great ideas. The events it relates serve as living ethical formulas.
But a time will come――perhaps it is not very far off――when the second
half of Jewish history, the record of the two thousand years of the
Jewish people’s life after the Biblical period, will be accorded the
same treatment. The thousand years’ martyrdom of the Jewish people,
its unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion,
its martyrs, philosophers, champions――this whole epic will in days to
come sink deep into the memory of men. It will speak to the heart and
conscience of men, not merely to their curious mind. It will secure
respect for the silvery hair of the Jewish people, a people of thinkers
and sufferers. It is our firm conviction that the time is approaching
in which the second half of Jewish history will be to the noblest part
of _thinking_ humanity what its first half has long been to _believing_
humanity, a source of sublime moral truths.
S. M. DUBNOW, 1893.
ISRAEL’S MARTYRDOM
IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the
nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are borne ennoble, the Jews can challenge the aristocracy of every
land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic
tragedies――what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen
hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?
LEOPOLD ZUNZ, 1855.
* * * * *
COMBINE all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies have
ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have reached the
full measure of suffering which this martyr people was called upon to
endure century upon century. It was as if all the powers of earth had
conspired――and they did so conspire――to exterminate the Jewish people,
or at least to transform it into a brutalized horde. History dare not
pass over in silence these scenes of wellnigh unutterable misery. It
is her duty to give a true and vivid account of them; to evoke due
admiration for the superhuman endurance of this suffering people,
and to testify that Israel, like his ancestor in the days of old, has
striven with gods and with men, and has prevailed.
H. GRAETZ.
UNDER THE ROMAN EMPERORS
THERE had now a tumult arisen in Alexandria between the Jewish
inhabitants and the Greeks, and three ambassadors were chosen out of
each party that were at variance who came to Caius (Caligula). Now,
one of the Greek ambassadors was Apion, who uttered many blasphemies
against the Jews; and among other things he said that while all who
were subject to the Roman Empire built altars and temples to Caesar,
and in other regards universally received him as they received the
gods, these Jews alone thought it a dishonourable thing for them to
erect statues in honour of him, as well as to swear by his name.
Hereupon Caligula, taking it very heinously that he should be thus
despised by the Jews alone, gave orders to make an invasion of Judea
with a great body of troops, and, if they were obstinate, to conquer
them by war, and then to erect the statues. Accordingly Petronius,
the Governor of Syria, got together as great a number of auxiliaries
as he possibly could, and took with him two legions of the Roman army.
But there came many ten thousands of the Jews to Petronius, to offer
their petitions to him, that he would not compel them to transgress
and violate the law of their forefathers. ‘If’, said they, ‘thou art
entirely resolved to bring this statue, and erect it, do thou first
kill us, and then do what thou hast resolved on; for, while we are
alive, we cannot permit such things as are forbidden us to be done by
the authority of our Legislator.’
Petronius then hasted to Tiberias; and many thousands of the Jews met
Petronius again, when he was come to Tiberias. Then Petronius said to
them: ‘Will you then make war with Caesar without considering his great
preparations for war and your own weakness?’ They replied: ‘We will not
by any means make war with him, but still we will die before we see our
laws transgressed’. So they threw themselves down upon their faces, and
stretched out their throats, and said they were ready to be slain. Thus
they continued in their resolution, and proposed to themselves to die
willingly rather than to see the dedication of the statue[23].
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, 1st cent.
* * * * *
IN the world-wide Roman Empire it was the Jews alone who refused the
erection of statues and the paying of divine honours to Caligula, and
_thereby saved the honour of the human race_ when all the other peoples
slavishly obeyed the decree of the Imperial madman.
J. FUERST, 1890.
IN MEDIAEVAL ROME
IN the whole history of heroism there is nothing finer than the example
of the Jews of the Roman Ghetto, a handful of men who for 1,500 years
and longer remained true to their own ideals――unmoved and undazzled by
the triumphant world-power of the dominant faith; and undaunted
By the torture prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding tool, by the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship.
Helpless victims of all the horrors enumerated in these burning lines
of Robert Browning, these Jews were yet _free men_. Not a trace of what
a modern Jewish thinker――Achad Ha’am――has called ‘spiritual slavery’
was theirs. In all fundamental matters they were totally indifferent to
the opinion of those who might torture the body but could never crush
the soul.
J. H. HERTZ, 1915.
* * * * *
THE history of the daughter religions of Judaism is one uninterrupted
series of attempts to commit matricide.
M. STEINSCHNEIDER, 1893.
THE FIRST CRUSADE (1096)[24]
YEA, they slay us and they smite,
Vex our souls with sore affright;
All the closer cleave we, Lord,
To Thine everlasting word.
Not a word of all their Mass
Shall our lips in homage pass;
Though they curse, and bind, and kill,
The living God is with us still.
We still are Thine, though limbs are torn;
Better death than life forsworn.
Noblest matrons seek for death,
Rob their children of their breath;
Fathers, in their fiery zeal,
Slay their sons with murderous steel,
And in heat of holiest strife,
For love of Thee, spare not their life.
The fair and young lie down to die
In witness of Thy Unity;
From dying lips the accents swell,
‘Thy God is One, O Israel’;
And bridegroom answers unto bride,
‘The Lord is God, and none beside’,
And, knit with bonds of holiest faith,
They pass to endless life through death.
KALONYMOS BEN YEHUDAH.
(_Trans. E. H. Plumptre._)
THE SECOND CRUSADE