political enfranchisement of the French Jews, the celebrated leader of
the French Liberal Catholics, PERE HYACINTHE, addressed to the Grand
Rabbi of Paris the following expressive communication:
"MONSIEUR LE GRAND RABBIN:--You will have seen from the papers that
our Gallican Catholic church intends to commemorate the centenary
of the emancipation of the Jews by the Constituent Assembly.
The 27th of September, 1791, is a date of even greater glory to
France than it is to the Jews. It was a day that witnessed the
reparation of a long and cruel injustice; it inaugurated for the
whole world an era of liberty and brotherhood from which no evil
disposed person has since been able to make us swerve. We are
too enlightened and too liberal-minded to become anti-Semites.
Besides, we are Christians, and as such we must not forget that it
is from Israel's bosom that we have sprung. Israel, the grand old
olive tree from which we have been grafted. For the French Jews
the interregnum which commenced with Sedecias ended with Napoleon.
Napoleon it was, who boasted of being the King of the Jews, and the
Jews accordingly treated him as their political Messiah. Than him
they could not have had a greater.
"But Napoleon's empire, like the kingdom of David, is no more, and
the French Republic now has the keeping of these two illustrious
necropoles, that at Jerusalem wherein reposes the race of David,
that at Paris wherein rests the hero who was in himself his own
sole dynasty.
"But none the less, France has remained, as Bonaparte remarked, the
new tribe of Judah, where Frenchmen and Jews constitute one people.
"Republicans by virtue of the Mosaic legislation, I would almost
say socialistic, in the best sense of the term, before they became
monarchists by Samuel's dispensation, the traditions of the Jews
comprise all the essentials for the service of France.
"'Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah and bring him unto his people; let
his hands be sufficient for him, and be Thou a help to him from his
enemies.'
"These are my wishes, Monsieur le Grand Rabbin and may the God of
the Jews, who is also the God of the Christians, cause them to be
fulfilled speedily.
"Accept, monsieur, the assurance of my fraternal friendship.
HYACINTHE LOYSON, Priest."
* * * * *
As focussing effectively the most salient aspects of this general
subject, we will here cite a thoughtful statement from a strictly
orthodox Roman Catholic source, the French clerical journal, _Le Monde_:
"The immortality of the soul has been repudiated by the Academie
des Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. The Jews had to serve as the
occasion. The Old Testament, however, was vindicated. But in how
many feeble minds was not an uncertainty left? How many will take
the trouble to read over the Sacred Books, when the reading of the
daily papers absorbs all their time? Voltaire knew well enough that
to sustain his iconoclastic views he had to discredit the Jewish
people, to falsify their history, and to take up again the pagan
theory of presenting them as the most degraded of people.
"Such, indeed, was the opinion of the Greeks and Romans in regard
to the Jews. The Greeks, given over to all conceivable turpitude
and tyranny, to an anarchy without bounds and without end,
incapable of even simulating a defence against Rome, despised
the Jewish people, and the Romans entertained the same feelings.
They despised them for the same reason that the economists, the
capitalists, the modern free-thinkers, despise the Catholics.
The Jews did not worship idols; they alone did not prostrate
themselves before nature; they condemned, despised that pantheism,
that idol-worship, which sanctified the vices and the passions and
which the Greeks and Romans embraced with such ardor. The dignity
and regularity of their habits formed a striking contrast to pagan
dissipation. They opposed in their individuality, the beauty of
their rigorous law to the impure teachings of paganism. They never
presented a disgraceful spectacle in the time of their prosperity;
they never participated in the bloody games of the ring; they held
human sacrifices in horror.
"The Jews did not profess the principle of equity, of which the
Greeks and Romans boasted so much--themselves absolute partisans of
Slavery. They simply upheld the institution of family hierarchy,
the paternal authority. Their habits and institutions, inspired
by the parental sentiment--were they not full of kindliness and
foresight? Could they overlook the feeble and the poor? Amongst
them brothers could not know contention and strife, because they
were equals in reality. Without the parent, fraternity would
disappear.
"In order to subsist it is necessary that children should always
have before them the image, the memory, the principle of the
paternity from which they emanated, which formed the bonds of their
friendship. Their unity proceeds from thence, a unity, sweet,
lively, inculcated in infancy, formed by the heart before the mind
could grasp it. The lawgiver had no occasion, therefore, to enjoin
fraternity, but needed only to submit it to that law of nature
which organizes the paternal authority. The Jews were ignorant
of those social ideas that desolated the ancient cities and that
spring up again in modern times. The poor had no demands to make
upon the rich. The Jews never forget, and had they done so, the law
reminded them that the earth belongs to the Lord and that in God
they are all brothers. The constitutional wars between the poor and
the rich in Rome and Athens were caused by extortion. This question
of extortion fills Roman history with its pale shadow; it is at the
bottom of all the troubles, dissensions, periodical massacres and
revolts. It has again taken possession of society with the reform
of the Nineteenth Century. Only in 1789 France passed from under
the yoke of extortion. The Jewish fraternity condemned extortion as
a principle of tyranny.
"This fraternity, so powerful a principle, led the Jews to love
their fellow-beings, to see in them colleagues and brothers;
they received the stranger willingly, extended to him their
hospitality, even a share in the benefits of their law--something
that was foreign to all other nations. With these other nations the
stranger was regarded simply as an enemy; "enemy" and "stranger"
were expressed by one and the same word. Pantheism, denying the
principle of unity, as indicated in the Divine origin, left men in
a continual state of war. And war never ceased; the cities fought
with each other, until the strongest had subdued the others, and in
their turn were conquered and absorbed by a greater. This is the
invariable history of Greece and Rome. The dogma of Divine creation
exhibited to the Jews all men as brethren. They did not treat the
stranger therefore as a barbarian. They, the Israelites, alone of
all the nations of antiquity, did not carry on aggressive wars;
once established upon their soil, they had no other desire than to
live in peace by living out their laws. This is the object of all
their institutions. They do not make war upon the stranger, because
they had no hate against him.
"Their God, greater than the gods of the Olympus, neither flattered
nor served their passions. He was a jealous God, who exacted the
submission of the heart. He chastised his rebellious children. And
this people purified by persecution and misfortune, returned to the
laws of their fathers, to the observance of their precepts. No city
in ancient, no people in modern times could have passed through
like vicissitudes and recovered again. It is not through progress
that they endured and were capable of resistance, but by holding
fast to the past; by rallying around the law, which they had never
abandoned and which they never modified, hard as it was. It often
became irksome, it never bargained with its conscience. What
else existed, before the laws of Moses, than that paganism which
legalized all vices? The Jews defended their law with their lives;
they fought for it against the Greek kings of Syria; they preferred
to be buried under the ruins of Jerusalem to making a compact with
Roman paganism. The Greeks and Romans never had the idea that one
can die for one's religion.
"By their habits in the government of the State the Jews were
separated completely from Greece and Rome. They never brooked the
insults of the ancient or modern mobocracy, because they respected
the principle of the family, the foundation of their political,
judicial, administrative and military organization. They alone in
antiquity repudiated slavery. They practiced a national brotherhood
which the Christian people are hardly capable of comprehending;
it is so sublime, and almost beyond human nature. The institution
of the jubilee, of the seventh year, the seventh day, was the
perfection of social order; but even with Christianity these
institutions could not maintain themselves. Dispersed, reduced to
direst need and to the humiliation of exile, the Jews have never
abandoned these first principles. Tacitus remarked the close
ties of brotherhood that united them in his time. _Inter ipsos
obstinata fides_. Since then and up to this time is it not the
same sentiment? Are there many dissensions amongst them? This
moral greatness of the Jewish people made them the target of pagan
enmity. The policy of Rome was to be enforced upon all nations. The
Jews share with the Christians the honor of having been singled out
as the victims of utter extermination.
"The Jewish nation has survived all its victors; it alone, says
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, withstood the power of time, fortune and
defeat. Greece and Rome were enveloped in a system of superstition
which weighed heavily upon the actions of public and private life.
The Jews lived beyond the pale of that ignominy. The causes of this
intellectual and moral superiority became the subject of jealous
depreciation generally."
* * * * *
The essential spirit of the Jewish polity has seldom, if ever, been
more effectively portrayed than by REV. DR. HENRY M. FIELD, in his
scholarly work, _On the Desert_, published by Charles Scribner's Sons,
New York, 1883. It deals with the system of law instituted by Moses,
which became ingrained in the Jewish people through long centuries of
victorious contention against barbarism in all its historic forms, and
which remains to-day the guiding principle of Jewish life in all the
relations of man to man.
We quote from Dr. Field's work as follows:
THEOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY.
"Perhaps it does not often occur to readers of the Old Testament
that there is much likeness between the Hebrew Commonwealth and the
American Republic. There are more differences than resemblances, at
least the differences are more marked. Governments change with time
and place, with the age and the country, with manners and customs;
yet at the bottom there is one radical principle that divides a
republic from a monarchy or an aristocracy; it is the natural
equality of men--that "all men are born free and equal"--which is
as fully recognized in the laws of Moses as in the Declaration of
Independence. Indeed the principle is carried further in the Hebrew
Commonwealth than in ours; for not only was there equality before
the laws, but the laws aimed to produce equality of condition in
one point, and that a vital one--the tenure of land--of which even
the poorest could not be deprived, so that in this respect the
Hebrew Commonwealth approached more nearly to a pure democracy.
"Of course the political rights of the people did not extend to the
choice of a ruler, nor did it to the making of the laws. As there
was no king but God, it was the theory of the State that the laws
emanated directly from the Almighty and his commands could not be
submitted to a vote. No clamorous populace debated with the Deity.
The Israelites had only to hear and to obey. In this sense the
government was not a popular, but an absolute one.
"But how could absolutism be consistent with equality? There is
no contradiction between the two, and indeed, in some respects,
no form of government is so favorable to equality as a theocracy.
Encroachments upon popular liberty and the oppression of the
people do not come from the head of the State so often as from
an aristocratic class which is arrogant and tyrannical. But in a
theocracy the very exaltation of the Sovereign places all subjects
on the same level. God alone is great and in His presence there is
no place for human pride. Divine Majesty overawes human littleness,
and instead of a favored few being lifted up above their fellows,
there is a general feeling of lowliness and humility, in the sight
of God, in which lies the very spirit and essence of equality.
"As the Hebrew law recognized no natural distinctions among
the people, neither did it create any artificial distinctions.
There was no hereditary class which had special rights; there
was no nobility exempted from burdens laid on the poor, and from
punishments inflicted on the peasantry. Whatever political power
was permitted to the Hebrews belonged to the people as a whole.
No man was raised above another; and if in the making of the laws
the people had no voice, yet in the administration of them they had
full power, for they elected their own rulers.
"Moses found soon after he left Egypt that he could not administer
justice in person to a whole nation, so he directed the tribes to
choose out of their number their wisest men, whom he would make
judges to decide every common cause, reserving to himself only the
more important questions. Here was a system of popular elections,
which is one of the first elements of a republican or democratic
state.
"In the administration of justice a Theocracy is an ideal
government, for it is Divinity enthroned on earth as in Heaven,
and no other form of government enforces justice in a manner so
absolute and peremptory. In the eyes of the Hebrew lawgiver the
civil tribunal was as sacred as the Holy of Holies. The office
of the judge was as truly authorized, and his duty as solemnly
enjoined, as that of the priest. The judgment is God's, said Moses,
and he who gave a false judgment disregarded the authority of Him
whose nature is justice and truth. The judgment seat was a holy
place, which no private malice might profane. Evidence was received
with religious care. Oaths were administered to give solemnity to
the testimony. Then the Judge, standing in the place of God, was to
pronounce equitably, whatever might be the rank of the contending
parties. 'Ye shall not respect persons in judgment, but ye shall
hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of
the face of man, for the judgment is God's.' He recognized no
distinctions, all were alike to him. The judge was to know no
difference. He was not to be biased even by sympathy for the poor.
'Neither shall thou countenance a poor man in his cause. Thou
shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of
the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor.'
Magistrates were not allowed to accept a gift; 'for the gift
blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.'
"The humanity of the Hebrew code is further seen in its mitigation
of slavery. This was a legal institution of Egypt, out of which
they had just come. They themselves had been slaves. Their
ancestors, the patriarchs, had held slaves. Abraham had over
three hundred servants born in his house. The relation of master
and slave they still recognized, but by how many limitations was
this state of bondage alleviated! No man could be subjected to
slavery by violence. Man-stealing was punished with death. The
more common causes of servitude was theft or debt. A robber might
be sold to expiate his crime, or a man overwhelmed with debt might
sell himself to pay it; that is, he might bind himself to service
for a term of years: still he could hold property, and the moment
he acquired the means might purchase back his freedom, or he
might be redeemed by his nearest kinsman. If his master treat him
with cruelty; if he beat him so as to cause injury the servant
recovered his freedom as indemnity. At the longest his servitude
came to an end in six years. He then recovered his freedom as a
natural gift; 'If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall
serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.' A
Hebrew slave was therefore merely a laborer hired for six years.
Nor did the law permit the servant to go forth in naked poverty,
and with the abject feeling of a slave still clinging to him. He
was to be loaded with presents by his late master--sheep, oil,
fruits, and wine--to enable him to begin housekeeping. Thus for
a Hebrew there was no such thing as hopeless bondage. The people
were not to feel the degradation of being slaves. God claimed them
as his own, and as such they were not to be made bondmen. Every
fiftieth year was a jubilee, a year of universal emancipation.
Then 'liberty was proclaimed throughout all the land to all the
inhabitants thereof.' This was the time of the restitution of all
things. Though a man had sold himself as a slave, his right in the
land was not alienated. It now returned to him free of encumbrance.
At the year of jubilee all debts were extinguished. His native
plot of ground, on which he played in childhood, was restored to
him in his old age. Again he cultivated the paternal acres. He was
not only a free man but a holder of property. Says Michaelis: 'The
condition of slaves among the Hebrews was not merely tolerable, but
often extremely comfortable.'
"That the sympathies of the law were with the oppressed appears
from the singular injunction that a foreign slave who fled to
a Hebrew for protection should not be given up: 'Thou shalt
not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from
his master unto thee.' No Fugitive Slave Law remanded the
terror-stricken fugitive to an angry and infuriated master and to a
condition more hopeless than before.
Such was the democracy of Theocracy--a union in which one sprang
out of the other. Men were equal because God was their Ruler--a
Ruler so high that before him there was neither great nor small,
but all stood on the same level. But the Hebrew Law did not stop
with equality; it inculcated fraternity. A man was not only
a man, he was a brother. That law contains some of the most
beautiful provisions ever recorded in any legislation, not only
for the cold administration of justice, but for the exercise of
humanity. The spirit of the Hebrew law was broader than race,
or country, or kindred. What liberality, for example, in its
treatment of foreigners. Against race hatred Moses set up this
command, 'Thou shalt not oppress a stranger,' which he enforced
upon the Israelites by the touching remembrance of their own bitter
experience, 'for ye know the heart of a stranger seeing ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt.' But not only were foreigners to be
tolerated; they were to receive the fullest protection. 'Ye shall
have one manner of law as well for the stranger as for one of your
own country.'
"In several requirements we discern a pity for the brute creation.
Long before modern refinement of feeling organized societies for
the prevention of cruelty to animals, Moses recognized dumb beasts
as having a claim to be defended from injury. Birds' nests were
protected from wanton destruction.
"But perhaps the most beautiful provision of the law was for the
poor.
"'When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap
the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings
of thy harvests. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither
shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt have them
for the poor and the stranger.' If the reaper dropped a sheaf in
the field, he might not return to take it. Whatever olives hung
on the bough, or clusters on the vine, after the first gathering,
were the property of the stranger, the fatherless and the widow.
Under the shelter of this law came many a Ruth, gleaning the
handfuls of golden corn to carry home to her mother, who was thus
saved from utter destitution. By these means the law kept the poor
from sinking to the extreme point of misery. At the same time, by
throwing in their path these wayside gifts, it saved them from
theft or vagabondage. As a proof of its successful operation, it is
a curious fact that, in the five books of Moses, such a class as
beggars is not once mentioned. The tradition of caring for those of
their own kindred, remains to this day and it is an honorable boast
that among the swarms of beggars that throng the streets of the Old
World or the New, one almost never finds a Jew.
"The law took also under its care all whom death had deprived
of their natural protectors; 'Ye shall not afflict any widow or
fatherless child.' They were sacred by misfortune. God would punish
cruelty to them. 'If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry
unto me, I will surely hear their cry; and your wives shall be
widows and your children fatherless.'
"Thus the Hebrew law took the poor and the weak under its special
protection; death, sorrow, widowhood, orphanage, all threw a shield
of protection over the desolate and the unhappy. By this spirit of
humanity infused into the relations of life, all the members of a
community--the rich and poor, the strong and the weak--were united
in fellowship and fraternity. One sacred tie bound them still
closer; not only were they of the same race and nation, but they
had the same religious inheritance; all were fellow-citizens with
the saints and of the household of God."
* * * * *
As a supplement to Dr. Field's effective presentation of his subject
we add here, an extract from the _Christian Union_, on "Moses and his
Laws," by HARRIET BEECHER STOWE:
"The strongest impulse in the character of Moses appears to have
been that of protective justice, more particularly with regard
to the helpless and down-trodden classes. The laws of Moses, if
carefully examined, are a perfect phenomenon; an exception to the
laws of either ancient or modern nations in the care they exercised
over women, widows, orphans, paupers, foreigners, servants and dumb
animals. No so-called Christian nation but could advantageously
take a lesson in legislation from the laws of Moses. There is a
plaintive, pathetic spirit of compassion in the very language
in which the laws in favor of the helpless and suffering are
expressed, that it seems must have been learned only of superhuman
tenderness. Not the gentlest words of Jesus are more compassionate
in their spirit than many of these laws of Moses. Delivered in the
name of Jehovah, they certainly are so unlike the wisdom of that
barbarous age as to justify of them to Him who is Love."
* * * * *
Another woman of commanding authority, GEORGE ELLIOT, speaks on this
topic as follows:
"Unquestionably the Jews, having been more than any other race
exposed to the adverse moral influences of alienism, must, both in
individuals and in groups, have suffered some corresponding moral
degradation; but in fact they have escaped with less abjectness,
and less of hard hostility toward the nations whose hands have
been against them, than could have happened in the case of a
people who had neither their adhesion to a separate religion
founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family
affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the _corpus vile_
on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their
name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and
contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one
call this an evil pride? The pride which identifies us with a great
historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of mind, inspiring
sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition,
for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man swayed by such a
sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew of Smyrna,
where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too
officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, 'I am
a Jew,' is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of
understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history.