Polish Jews, as in the history of the countries belonging to the
Polish crown. The Cossack butcheries and wars of extermination of
1648-1658 were the same for the Polish Jews that the Crusades, the
Black Death, and all the other occasions for carnage had been for the
Jews of Western Europe. It seemed as though history desired to avoid
the reproach of partiality, and hastened to mete out even-handed
justice by apportioning the same measure of woe to the Jews of Poland
as to the Jews of Western Europe. But the Polish Jews were prepared to
accept the questionable gift from the hands of history. They had
mounted that eminence of spiritual stability on which suffering loses
the power to weaken its victim, but, on the contrary, endues him with
strength. More than ever they shrank into their shell. They shut
themselves up more completely in their inner world, and became morally
dulled against the persecutions, the bitter humiliations, the deep
scorn, which their surroundings visited upon them. The Polish Jew
gradually accustomed himself to his pitiable condition. He hardly knew
that life might be other than it was. That the Polish lord to whom he
was a means of entertainment might treat him with a trace of respect,
or that his neighbors, the middle class merchant, the German guild
member, and the Little Russian peasant, might cherish kindly feelings
toward him, he could not conceive as a possibility. Seeing himself
surrounded by enemies, he took precautions to fortify his camp, not so
much to protect himself against hostile assaults from without--they
were inevitable--as to paralyze the disastrous consequences of such
assaults in his inner world. To compass this end he brought into play
all the means suggested by his exceptional position before the law and
by his own peculiar social constitution. The _Kahal_, the
autonomous rabbinical administration of communal affairs, more and
more assumed the character of an inner dictatorship. Jewish society
was persistently kept under the discipline of rigid principles. In
many affairs the synagogue attained the position of a court of final
appeal. The people were united, or rather packed, into a solid mass by
purely mechanical processes--by pressure from without, and by drawing
tight a noose from within. Besides this social factor tending to
consolidate the Jewish people into a separate union, an intellectual
lever was applied to produce the same result. Rabbinism employed the
mystical as its adjutant. The one exercised control over all minds,
the other over all hearts. The growth of mysticism was fostered both
by the unfortunate conditions under which the Polish Jews endured
existence and by the Messianic movements which made their appearance
among the Jews of other countries.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its
zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the
"practical Kabbala." The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school
established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances
intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the
false Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi. As by magic he attracted to himself a
tremendous company of adherents in the East and in the West. For a
quarter of a century (1650-1676), he kept the Jewish communities
everywhere in a state of quivering suspense.
The harassed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved
about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated
its agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly. Not even the
apostasy and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his
followers. Under the guise of a symbolic faith in a Messiah, many of
them, publicly or secretly, continued the propaganda for his
doctrines.
This propaganda prepared the fertile soil from which, in the
eighteenth century, shot up Messianic systems, tending to split
Judaism into sects. Nowhere did the mystical teachings evoke so ready
a response as in Poland, the very centre of Judaism. At first an ally
of the rabbinical school, mysticism grown passionate and
uncontrollable now and again acted as the violent opponent of
Rabbinism. Secret devotion to the Sabbatian doctrines, which had made
their home in Poland, sometimes led to such extremes in dogma and
ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves. Chayyim Malach,
Judah Chassid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of the
eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of
excommunication. The mystical tendency was the precursor of the
heretical half-Christian sect of Frankists, who ventured so far as to
lift a hand against the fundamentals of Judaism: they rejected the
Talmud in favor of the Zohar (1756-1773). At the same time a much more
profound movement, instinct with greater vitality, made its appearance
among the Polish-Jewish masses, a movement rooted in their social and
spiritual organization. The wretched, debased condition of the average
Jew, conjoined with the traditions of the Kabbala and the excrescences
of Rabbinism, created a foothold for Chassidic teaching. Chassidism
replaced Talmudic ratiocination by exalted religious sentiment. By the
force of enthusiasm for faith, it drew its adherents together into a
firmly welded unit in contrast with Rabbinism, which sought the same
goal by the aid of the formal law. Scenting danger, the rabbinical
hierarchy declared war upon the Kabbala. Emden opposed Eibeschütz, the
Polish Sabbatians and Frankists were fought to the death, the Wilna
Gaon organized a campaign against the Chassidim. Too late! Rabbinism
was too old, too arid, to tone down the impulsive outbreaks of passion
among the people. In their religious exaltation the masses were
looking for an elixir. They were languishing, not for light to
illumine the reason, but for warmth to set the heart aglow. They
desired to lose themselves in ecstatic self-renunciation. Chassidism
and its necessary dependence upon the Zaddik offered the masses the
means of this forgetfulness of self through faith. They were the
medium through which the people saw the world in a rosy light, and the
consequences following upon their prevalence were seen in a marked
intensification of Jewish exclusiveness.
The same aloofness characterizes the Jews of the rest of the
eighteenth century diaspora. Wherever, as in Germany, Austria, and
Italy, Jews were settled in considerable numbers, they were separated
from their surroundings by forbidding Ghetto walls. On the whole, no
difference is noticeable between conditions affecting Jews in one
country and those in another. Everywhere they were merely tolerated,
everywhere oppressed and humiliated. The bloody persecutions of the
middle ages were replaced by the burden of the exceptional laws, which
in practice degraded the Jews socially to an inferior race, to
citizens of a subordinate degree. The consequences were uniformly the
same in all countries: spiritual isolation and a morbid religious
mood. During the first half of the "century of reason," Jewry
presented the appearance of an exhausted wanderer, heavily dragging
himself on his way, his consciousness clouded, his trend of thought
obviously anti-rationalistic. At the very moment in which Europe was
beginning to realize its medieval errors and repent of them, and the
era of universal ideals of humanity was dawning, Judaism raised
barricades between itself and the world at large. Elijah Gaon and
Israel Besht were the contemporaries of Voltaire and Rousseau.
Apparently there was no possibility of establishing communication
between these two diametrically opposed worlds. But history is a
magician. Not far from the Poland enveloped in medieval darkness, the
morning light of a new life was breaking upon slumbering Jewry in
German lands. New voices made themselves heard, reverberating like an
echo to the appeal issued by the "great century" in behalf of a
spiritual and social regeneration of mankind.
XI
THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)
Two phenomena signalized the beginning of the latest period in Jewish
history: the lofty activity of Mendelssohn and the occurrence of the
great French Revolution. The man stands for the spiritual emancipation
of the Jews, the movement for their political emancipation. At bottom,
these two phenomena were by no means the ultimate causes of the social
and spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people. They were only the
products of the more general causes that had effected a similar
regeneration in all the peoples of Western Europe. The new currents,
the abandonment of effete intellectual and social forms, the
substitution of juster and more energetic principles, the protest
against superstition and despotism--all these traits had a common
origin, the resuscitation of reason and free thought, which dominated
all minds without asking whether they belonged to Jew or to Christian.
It might seem that the rejuvenation of the Jews had been consummated
more rapidly than the rejuvenation of the other peoples. The latter
had had two centuries, the period elapsing since the middle ages, that
is, the period between the Reformation and the great Revolution, in
which to prepare for a more rational and a more humane conduct of
life. As for the Jews, their middle ages began much later, and ended
later, almost on the eve of 1789, so that the revolution in their
minds and their mode of life had to accomplish itself hastily, under
the urgence of swiftly crowding events, by the omission of
intermediate stages. But it must be taken into consideration that long
before, in the Judeo-Hellenic and in the Arabic-Spanish period, the
Jews had passed through their "century of reason." In spite of the
intervening ages of suffering and gloom, the faculty of assimilating
new principles had survived. For the descendants of Philo and
Maimonides the rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century was in
part a repetition of a well-known historical process. They had had the
benefit of a similar course of studies before, and, therefore, had no
need to cram on the eve of the final examination.
In point of fact, the transformation in the life of the Jews did take
place with extraordinary swiftness. It was hastened in France by the
principles of the Revolution and the proclamation of the civil
equality of Jews with the other citizens. In Germany, however, it
advanced upon purely spiritual lines. Mendelssohn and Lessing, the
heralds of spiritual reform, who exposed old prejudices, carried on
their labors at a time in which the Jews still stood beyond the pale
of the law, a condition which it did not occur to Frederick II, "the
philosopher upon the throne," to improve. A whole generation was
destined to pass before the civil emancipation of the German Jews was
accomplished. Meantime their spiritual emancipation proceeded apace,
without help from the ruling powers. A time so early as the end of the
eighteenth century found the German Jews in a position to keep step
with their Christian fellow-citizens in cultural progress. Enlightened
Jews formed close connections with enlightened Christians, and joined
them in the universal concerns of mankind as confederates espousing
the same fundamental principles. If they renounced some of their
religious and national traditions, it was by no means out of
complaisance for their neighbors. They were guided solely and alone by
those universal principles that forced non-Jews as well as Jews to
reject many traditions as incompatible with reason and conscience.
Non-Jews and Jews alike yielded themselves up to the fresh inspiration
of the time, and permitted themselves to be carried along by the
universal transforming movement. Mendelssohn himself, circumspect and
wise, did not move off from religious national ground. But the
generation after him abandoned his position for that of universal
humanity, or, better, German nationality. His successors intoxicated
themselves with deep draughts of the marvelous poetry created by the
magic of Goethe and Schiller. They permitted themselves to be rushed
along by the liberty doctrines of 1789, they plunged head over heels
into the vortex of romanticism, and took an active part in the
conspicuous movements of Europe, political, social, and literary, as
witness Bôrne, Heine, and their fellow-combatants.
The excitement soon evaporated. When the noise of the liberty
love-feasts had subsided, when the cruel reaction (after 1814) had
settled heavily upon the Europe of the nineteenth century, and God's
earth had again become the arena of those agents of darkness whom
dreamers had thought buried forever beneath the ruins of the old
order, then the German Jews, or such of them as thought, came to their
senses. The more intelligent Jewish circles realized that, in devotion
to the German national movement, they had completely neglected their
own people. Yet their people, too, had needs, practical or spiritual,
had its peculiar national sphere of activity, circumscribed, indeed,
by the larger sphere of mankind's activities as by a concentric
circle, but by no means merged into it. To atone for their sin,
thinking Jews retraced their steps. They took in hand the transforming
of Jewish inner life, the simplification of the extremely complicated
Jewish ritual, the remodeling of pedagogic methods, and, above all,
the cultivation of the extended fields of Jewish science, whose head
and front is Jewish historical research in all its vastness and
detail. Heine's friend, Zunz, laid the cornerstone of Jewish science
in the second decade of the nineteenth century. His work was taken up
by a goodly company of zealous and able builders occupied for half a
century with the task of rearing the proud edifice of a scientific
historical literature, in which national self-consciousness was
sheltered and fostered. At the very height of this reforming and
literary activity, German Jewry was overwhelmed by the civil
emancipation of 1848. Again a stirring movement drew them into
sympathy with a great general cause, but this time without drawing
them away from Jewish national interests. Cultural and civil
assimilation was accomplished as an inner compelling necessity, as a
natural outcome of living. But spiritual assimilation, in the sense of
a merging of Judaism in foreign elements, was earnestly repudiated by
the noblest representatives of Judaism. It was their ideal that
universal activity and national activity should be pursued to the
prejudice of neither, certainly not to the exclusion of one or the
other, but in perfect harmony with each other. In point of fact, it
may be asserted that, in spite of a frequent tendency to go to the one
or the other extreme, the two currents, the universal and the
national, co-exist within German Jewry, and there is no fear of their
uniting, they run parallel with each other. The Jewish genius is
versatile. Without hurt to itself it can be active in all sorts of
careers: in politics and in civil life, in parliament and on the
lecture platform, in all branches of science and departments of
literature, in every one of the chambers of mankind's intellectual
laboratory. At the same time it has its domestic hearth, its national
sanctuary; it has its sphere of original work and its self-consciousness,
its national interests and spiritual ideals rooted in the past of the Jew.
By the side of a Lassalle, a Lasker, and a Marx towers a Riesser, a
Geiger, a Graetz. The leveling process unavoidably connected with
widespread culture, so far from causing spiritual desolation in
German Judaism, has, on the contrary, furnished redundant proof
that even under present conditions, so unfavorable to what is
individual and original, the Jewish people has preserved its vitality
to the full.
An analogous movement stirred the other countries of Western
Europe--France, Italy, and England. The political emancipation of the
Jews was accomplished earlier in them than in Germany. The
reconstruction of the inner life, too, proceeded more quietly and
regularly, without leaps and bounds, and religious reform established
itself by degrees. Yet even here, where the Jewish contingent was
insignificant, the spiritual physiognomy of the Jews maintained its
typical character. In these countries, as in Germany, the Jew
assimilated European culture with all its advantages and its
drawbacks. He was active on diplomatic fields, he devoted himself to
economic investigations, he produced intellectual creations of all
kinds--first and last he felt himself to be a citizen of his country.
None the less he was a loyal son of the Jewish people considered as a
spiritual people with an appointed task. Crémieux, Beaconsfield,
Luzzatti are counterbalanced by Salvador, Frank, Munk, Reggio, and
Montefiore. All the good qualities and the shortcomings distinctive of
the civilization of modern times adhere to the Jew. But at its worst
modern civilization has not succeeded in extinguishing the national
spirit in Jewry. The national spirit continues to live in the people,
and it is this spirit that quickens the people. The genius of Jewish
history, as in centuries gone by, holds watch over the sons of the
"eternal people" scattered to all ends of the earth. West-European
Jewry may say of itself, without presumption: _Cogito ergo sum_.
Russian Jewry, the Jewry that had been Polish, and that is counted by
the millions, might, if necessary, prove its existence by even more
tangible marks than Occidental Jewry. To begin with, the centre of
gravity of the Jewish nation lies in Russia, whose Jews not only
outnumber those of the rest of Europe, but continue to live in a
compact mass. Besides, they have preserved the original Jewish culture
and their traditional physiognomy to a higher degree than the Jews of
other countries. The development of the Russian Jews took a course
very different from that of the Jews of the West. This difference was
conditioned by the tremendous contrast between Russian culture and
West-European culture, and by the change which the external
circumstances of Jews outside of Russia underwent during the modern
period. The admission of the Polish provinces into the Russian Empire
at the end of the eighteenth century found the numerous Jewish
population in an almost medieval condition, the same condition in
which the non-Jewish population of Russian Poland was at that time.
The Polish regime, as we saw above, had isolated the Jews alike in
civil and spiritual relations. The new order did not break down the
barriers. The masses of Jews cooped up in the "Pale of Settlement"
were strong only by reason of their inner unity, their firmly
established patriarchal organization. The bulwark of Rabbinism and the
citadel of Chassidism protected them against alien influences. They
guarded their isolation jealously. True to the law of inertia, they
would not allow the privilege of isolation to be wrested from them.
They did not care to step beyond the ramparts. Why, indeed, should the
Jews have quitted their fortress, if outside of their walls they could
expect nothing but scorn and blows? The unfortunates encaged in the
sinister Pale of Settlement could have been lured out of their
exclusive position only by complete civil emancipation combined with a
higher degree of culture than had been attained by Russian society, an
impossible set of circumstances in the first half of the nineteenth
century. The legislative measures of the time, in so far as they
relate to the Jews, breathe the spirit of police surveillance rather
than of enlightenment and humanity. To civilizing and intellectual
influences from without the way was equally barred. Yet all this
watchfulness was of no avail. Nothing could prevent the liberty
principles espoused by the Jews of Western Europe from being smuggled
into the Pale, to leaven the sad, serried masses. A sluggish process
of fermentation set in, and culminated in the literary activity of
Isaac Beer Levinsohn and of the Wilna reformers of the second and
fourth decades of the nineteenth century. They were the harbingers of
approaching spring.
When spring finally came (after 1855), and the sun sent down his
genial rays upon the wretched Jewry of Russia, life and activity began
to appear at once, especially in the upper strata. As in Germany, so
in Russia spiritual emancipation preceded political emancipation.
Still shorn almost entirely of the elementary rights of citizens, the
Russian Jews nevertheless followed their ideal promptings, and
participated enthusiastically in the movement for enlightenment which
at that time held the noblest of the Russians enthralled. In a
considerable portion of the Russian Jewish community a process of
culture regeneration began, an eager throwing off of outworn forms of
life and thought, a swift adoption of humane principles. Jewish young
men crowded into the secular schools, in which they came in close
contact with their Christian contemporaries. Influenced by their new
companions, they gave themselves up to Russian national movements,
often at the cost of renunciation of self. Some of them, indeed, in
one-sided aspiration strove to become, not Russians, but men. The
influence exercised by literature was more moderate than that of the
schools. Rabbinic and Chassidistic literature, on the point of dying
out as it was, abandoned the field to the literature of enlightenment
in the Hebrew language, a literature of somewhat primitive character.
It consisted chiefly of naive novels and of didactic writings of
publicists, and lacked the solid scientific and historical element
that forms the crown of Western Jewish literature. It is indisputable,
however, that it exerted an educational influence. Besides, it
possesses the merit of having resuscitated one of the most valuable of
Jewish national possessions, the Hebrew language in its purity, which
in Russia alone has become a pliant instrument of literary expression.
A still greater field was reserved for the Jewish-Russian literature
that arose in the "sixties." It was called into being in order to
present a vivid and true picture of the social and spiritual interests
of the Jews. Proceeding from discussions of current political topics,
this literature gradually widened its limits so as to include Jewish
history, Jewish science, and the portrayal of Jewish life, and more
and more approached the character of a normal European literature. All
this was in the making, and the most important work had not yet begun.
The lower strata of the people had not been touched by the fresh air.
In time, if all had gone well, they, too, would have had their day.
And if the minority of the Jewish people in the West in a short span
of time brought forth so many notable workers in so many departments
of life and thought, how much superior would be the culture
achievements of the Eastern majority! How vigorously the mighty mental
forces latent in Russian Jewry would develop when their advance was no
longer obstructed by all sorts of obstacles, and they could be applied
to every sphere of political, social, and intellectual life!
Nothing of all this came to pass; exactly the opposite happened. Not
only were the barriers in the way of a prosperous, free development of
Jewry not removed, but fresh hindrances without number were
multiplied. Some spectre of the middle ages, some power of darkness,
put brakes upon the wheel of history. It first appeared in the West,
under the name anti-Semitism, among the dregs of European society. But
in its earliest abode it was and is still met with an abrupt rebuff on
the part of the most intelligent circles, those whom even the present
age of decadence has not succeeded in robbing of belief in lofty moral
ideals. Anti-Semitism in the West is in _anima vili_. Its cult is
confined to a certain party, which enjoys a rather scandalous
reputation. But there are countries in which this power of darkness,
in the coarser form of Judophobia[13], has cast its baleful spell upon
the most influential members of society and upon the press. There it
has ripened noxious fruit. Mocking at the exalted ideals and the
ethical traditions of religious and thinking mankind, Judophobia
shamelessly professes the dogma of misanthropy. Its propaganda is
bringing about the moral ruin of an immature society, not yet
confirmed in ethical or truly religious principles. Upon its victims,
the Jews, it has the same effect as the misfortunes of the middle
ages, which were meted out to our hoary people with overflowing
measure, and against which it learnt to assume an armor of steel. The
recent severe trials are having the same result as the persecutions of
former days: they do not weaken, on the contrary, they invigorate the
Jewish spirit, they spur on to thought, they stimulate the pulse of
the people.
"The hammer shivers glass,
But iron by its blows is forged."[14]
[13] As anti-Semitism is called in Russia.
[14] Pushkin.
The historical process Jewry has undergone repeatedly, it must undergo
once again. But now, too, in this blasting time of confusion and
dispersion, of daily torture and the horrors of international
conflict, "the keeper of Israel slumbereth not and sleepeth not." The
Jewish spirit is on the alert. It is ever purging and tempering itself
in the furnace of suffering. The people which justly bears the name of
the veteran of history withdraws and falls into a revery. It is not a
narrow-minded fanatic's flight from the world, but the concentrated
thought of a mourner. Jewry is absorbed in contemplation of its great,
unparalleled past. More than ever it is now in need of the teachings
of its past, of the moral support and the prudent counsels of its
history, its four thousand years of life crowded with checkered
experiences.
XII
THE TEACHINGS OF JEWISH HISTORY