interpretation. The story is told that the Jew, who refused to
comfort Christ as he toiled under the weight of the cross, was
condemned to tarry until he came, and so wanders around the
world until the second coming. But it is the symbol also of the
restlessness of the race, roaming through Christendom, homeless
and rejected. It is the curse, says many a Christian heart, of
the people that crucified the Redeemer. This is the common theory
of the origin of the traditional antipathy to the Jews, and,
undoubtedly, this is with many persons a vague justification of
the feeling with which a Jew is regarded. But should it be nothing
to such persons that when, as they believe, the Creator would
incarnate himself, He became a Jew? Or, again, do they reflect
that if it was in the eternal decrees that the sins of men were
to be atoned and condoned by the innocent sacrifice, those who
accomplished the sacrifice were but the agents of the Divine
will? Are all such ingenious speculations other than devices to
explain and justify a mere prejudice of race, such as some African
tribes cherish against people of white skins? Those who find in
such prejudice a profound significance will continue to plead
the feeling as its own sufficient reason. But honorable men will
be careful how they carelessly use the name of a race to which
the religion, the literature, the art, the civilized progress of
humanity, are so greatly indebted, as a term of utter derision and
scorn."
* * * * *
Mr. Curtis in his reference to Shakespeare's "Shylock" truly says that
"there is nothing in Shakespeare more vital and intelligible than the
fervent appeal of Shylock to the common humanity around him." Much
has been said and written concerning this remarkable creation of the
dramatist's genius, and often and again it has been remarked that
Shakespeare's Jew was not the real Jew, not even the Jew of his own
imagination, but the Jew as mirrored in the distorted consciousness
of mediæval Europe. The great pathologist of human feeling only then
failed in his diagnosis when he sought to realize the Jew, the real Jew
and his attributes were beyond his ken.
One of the grandest and most cherished of our poets, WILLIAM CULLEN
BRYANT, long the editor of the New York _Evening Post_, in a trenchant
criticism of the character of Shylock on the occasion of a presentation
of the drama by Edwin Booth, wrote as follows:[118]
"In terming Shylock 'the Jew whom Shakespeare drew,' there is a
perfect logic, for Shylock is, of all Shakespeare's characters, the
only one untrue to nature. He is not a Jew, but a fiend presented
in the form of one; and whereas he is made a ruling type, he is but
an exception, if even that, and the exception is not to be met with
either in the Ghettos of Venice or of Rome. Shakespeare holds up
the love of money that marks the race, although he does not show
that this passion was but the effect of that persecution which, by
crowding the Jew out of every honorable pursuit, and thus cutting
off his nature from every sympathy with the world around, sharpened
and edged the keen corners of his brain for the only pursuit left
to him.
"It is true that money-changers once spat on in the Ghetto are now
hugged in the palace. But we fear that it is not so much that the
prejudice against the Jews has ceased, but that the love of money
among the Christians has increased. Shakespeare was not true in the
picture he has drawn of the Jew's cravings for revenge, and in the
contempt with which he is treated by his daughter. Revenge is not a
characteristic of the Jew. He is subject to sudden fits of passion,
but that intellect which always stands sentinel over the Hebrew
soon subdues the gust. However strong in Shylock's time might have
been the hatred of the Jew towards the Christian, the lust of lucre
was more strong, and Shakespeare might have ransacked every Ghetto
in Christendom without finding a Jew, or a Christian either, who
would have preferred a pound of flesh to a pound sterling; and Jews
also shrink from physical contests. Their disposition is to triumph
by intellect rather than violence. It was this trait more than any
other that rendered them, in the Middle Ages, so repulsive to the
masses, who were all of the Morrissey and muscular Christianity
school. The contempt of a daughter for her parent is equally
uncharacteristic of the Jew. The Jews are universally admired for
the affections which adorn their domestic life. The more they have
been pushed from the society of the family of man the greater has
been the intensity with which they have clung to the love of their
own family.
"No one can ever have visited the houses of the Jews without having
been struck by the glowing affection with which the daughter greets
the father as he returns from the day's campaign and the slights and
sneers his gaberdine and yellow cap provoke, and without observing
how those small, restless eyes that sparkle and gleam, shine out in
a softened, loving lustre as they fall upon the face of Rebecca, or
Jessica, or Sarah, and how he stands no longer with crooked back,
but erect and commanding, as he blesses his household gods with an
exultation as vehement as the prejudices which during the day have
galled and fretted his nature. To do justice to the grandeurs of the
Jewish race, and to brand with infamy its infirmities, it is not enough
to produce a repulsive delineation of the latter. It would only be just
to give expression to the former, and to exhibit that superiority of
intellect which has survived all persecution, and which, soaring above
the prejudices of the hour, has filled us with reluctant admiration on
finding how many of the great events which mark the progress of the age
or minister to its improvements, or elevate its tastes, may be traced
to the wonderful workings of the soul of the Hebrew, and the supremacy
of that spiritual nature which gave to mankind its noblest religion,
its noblest laws, and some of its noblest poesy and music."
* * * * *
Treating the same subject the great German critic, ROBERT BENEDIX,
writes as follows:[119]
"Let us look at this Shylock closer. Antonio calls him an usurer;
the proof he fails in. Shylock takes high interest; so did all the
merchants of Venice. Shylock deals in money; to-day we call him a
banker. Why does he deal in money? Because it is the only trade
permitted. He does not carry on an industry, has no agricultural
pursuits, no official station--only trade. If the Jews, under
centuries of restriction, ostracised from social life, did cling
to money and its uses, whose fault was it? No one can say anything
dishonorable of Shylock. He is penurious; in no law-book of the
world is that denominated as a crime. What is against this man?
Simply nothing more than that he is a Jew. But for the poet, who,
enthroned on Olympian heights, there should exist only _the man,
not the Jew_. Shylock is revengeful. Well, who has instigated it?
Only they who have despised him. After persecuting and deriding
him, they crown their infamy by asking him to turn Christian. That
is the very depth of baseness. What is left to the poor Jew, whom
you have trodden under foot, when you rob him of his faith? It is
the bond that binds him to his fathers, to his home. It has been
his solace in persecutions a thousand times repeated. To this faith
Israel clings with devoted love, and from this faith shall Shylock
turn to become a Christian? No wonder he turns with abhorrence from
those who torture him so cruelly. Christians they may be. Men they
are not. And is there no feeling for a father? To exalt a daughter
who absconds and robs him whom she should honor? Is that Jewish
or Christian? The grand speech, 'Has not a Jew eyes,' etc., is
the exclamation of a martyr people who for centuries had been the
victims of debauched, bigoted priests.
"It is impossible to acquit Shakespeare of the prejudice of his
age. He has morally sinned; artistically erred. Contrast Lessing;
and he wrote in an age of equal intolerance. His 'Nathan the Wise'
is an embodiment of morality and sublime virtues; his figures are
apostles of true humanity. Nathan is an evangelist of true worth;
and Lessing, taking for his hero a Jew, made thereby the amende
honorable in the name of humanity."
* * * * *
As a veritable anti-climax to these utterances of poet and critic, we
may here consider the views of the representative proletary of America,
who deals with the Shylock theme from an entirely different standpoint.
This dissertation is by Mr. TERRENCE V. POWDERLY, long the leader of
the organization of wage-earners known as the Knights of Labor, and
as such will command the attention of the reader. Under the caption
of "_The Real Shylock_," he writes in the _Journal of the Knights of
Labor_ as follows:
"Flings at the Jews are flying about promiscuously on every hand,
and it seems to me that this practice is neither just nor manly.
Turn the pages of history backward to the dawn of Christianity
and notice how the Jew has been persecuted by those who professed
to be actuated by Christian charity. Notice how he has been
driven from country and home, how he has been driven ahead of
the advanced guard of Christianity, and then pause for a moment
to ask if the Christian is not in some small measure to blame
for the money-lending characteristics of the Jew of this day and
generation. Driven from all other branches of trade, with a price
on his head, and his home at the mercy of others, how could the Jew
protect himself? It is well enough to single out Rothschild and
to point to him as a fit representative of an usury-taking class,
but when he is pointed to as 'Rothschild the Jew,' the bounds of
propriety are overstepped and common justice is violated.
"What right has a Christian to drive a man from every walk in life
but that of money-lending and then insult his race and religion
because of that fact, in sneeringly calling him a Jew. It is
proper to call a money-lender a 'Shylock,' for that is a term that
is applicable to men of all races and religions if they practice
usury, but to single the Jew out as the only one who should wear
that appellation is an outrage. I know Christians, and the reader
knows them, who on every Sunday morning will walk slowly down the
middle aisle in the Christian church, and with sanctimonious mien
bend the knee before the altar of God with no more of Christianity
in their hearts than may be found in the stone steps leading up
to the church door. If a living representative of 'Shylock' is to
be singled out, one whose talon-like fingers itch for usury and
stretch out toward your pocket for the principal as well, let us
be honest enough to admit that we can throw a stone into any of
our temples of Christianity and hit such a sinner. Do not lay it
all to the Jew. I admit that he knows how to deal in money, but,
who gave him points in the game of usury? Look over the United
States to-day. Contrast the acts of pretended Christians with the
principles of Christ, and then dare to lay the blame of all the
wrong that usury has wrought, to the door of the Jew. Look at our
American Congress and tell us if those who obey the voice of greed
in that body are all Jews.... Are all who have cornered lands,
railroads and homes Jews? Let the reader whose home is mortgaged
inquire who it is holds the mortgage, and if he happens to be a
Christian, as in nine cases out of ten he will be, ask him to be
lenient with you, and you will learn that he wants his 'pound
of flesh,' and will be anxious to go old Shylock one better, by
sucking the blood along with it."
* * * * *
_The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews_, published by
Harper and Brothers, New York, 1894, contributes a valuable addition
to historical literature. The work ably elucidates its comprehensive
subject matter and deserves the careful perusal of every student of
whatever creed. A few characteristic extracts are collated in the
following:--
"If we turn to Europe, in which we are chiefly interested, we find
that the Jews were settled there as early as Roman times, and
lived on terms of perfect equality with all their neighbors, until
religious intolerance set itself to repress them or directed and
intensified the jealousy which their success elicited. When the
west of Europe was raised out of its barbarism by Charlemagne,
this great leader of modern civilization also took account of the
valuable civilizing influence of the Jews, especially as regarded
commerce and learning. He granted them privileges, and even made
use of them for diplomatic services; and as he transplanted learned
men from Italy into France and Germany in order that their wisdom
might be diffused among those people, so he also desired to engraft
the learning of the Jews in these districts. He encouraged them
to found Talmudic Schools and transplanted from Lucca the learned
family Kalonymos to Narbonne about the year 787, gave them a large
tract of land, where the chief of the family and his successors
were called princes, while the part of the town where they lived
was called 'The Court of the King of the Jew.' The position which
the Jew, Isaac, held in the embassy of Charlemange to Haroun al
Rashid is a matter of history."
* * * * *
"As to the pluck and courage of the Jews it certainly did not die
out with the Maccabees and the Zealots. I will not mention the
spiritual courage it required for the whole race to survive at
all during the persecutions which might have been avoided by the
simple act of conversion, or of the thousands that burned at the
stake singing. I should say, even numerically, more than the whole
Christian martyrology has to show. The numbers who heroically
during the Spanish Inquisition, and at other times and places,
preferred burning at the stake to baptism, the perfidy which often
met their heroic resistance, would fill volumes. In the history of
the Spanish Jews more than in that of any other of their numerous
communities do we meet with heroism, courage and chivalry. They
fought, in the Spanish battles as the bravest knights. Alfonso X
of Castile, rewarded them en masse for their war-like assistance
against Seville and gave them, when the enemies' land was divided,
a village which was called "Aldea de los Judeos." They fought
desperately for Dom Pedro, even after the Black Prince had forsaken
him, defended Burgos to the last man, so that even their opponent,
Dom Enrico, recognized publicly their valor."
* * * * *
"Even in Germany during the Black Death and the butchery of Jews,
and in Poland, the spirit of the Maccabees and the Zealots had
not forsaken them. It very often met with the basest treachery on
the part of their enemies and allies. One instance is a striking,
if not a typical one. During the onslaught of the Cossacks into
Poland in the Thirty Years' War the Jews were brave defenders of
the Polish territory. When a horde of Hadamaks attacked the town
of Tulczyn, six thousand Christians and about two thousand Jews
retreated to the fortress. Nobles and Jews pledged themselves by
oath to defend the fortress to the last man. The Cossacks resorted
to a stratagem, and assured the Nobles that they were only fighting
against their real enemies, the Jews. If they were handed over to
them they would withdraw. The nobles asked the Jews to give up
their arms; and when they complied, they opened the gates to the
Cossacks. When the Cossacks had plundered the Jews, they proposed
to them the alternative of death or baptism. Not one of them
accepted the latter, and they were put to the sword. But the nobles
suffered the same fate, as the Cossacks held that there was no
cause to hold faith by the faithless."
* * * * *
"The late James Russell Lowell was wont to say that a large
proportion of the great families of the English aristocracy had
some admixture of Jewish blood, while some of the great names
were in a direct line to be traced back to Jewish ancestors. So,
for instance, he believed, and he must have had good grounds for
his belief, that the families of the Cecils and the Russells were
originally Jewish. Of course such conversational statements must
not be taken literally. Many years ago I met a Russian scholar,
deeply read in literature and science--the pure Russian, without
any associations with Jews--who told me he was engaged upon a work
which set itself the task of tracing the origin of most of the
great men in letters and science that were then living in Germany,
and that he was coming to the conclusion that, not only were a
great many of them actually Jews, but that a large proportion
of the best known among the Christian dignitaries had also some
admixture of Jewish blood."
* * * * *
Our symposium could not be more effectively and fitly rounded out than
by a quotation of the Preface to M. Anatole Leroy Beaulieu's celebrated
work, "_Israel chez les nations_," and of the Preface written by the
author for the English translation by Mrs. Theodore Hellman, which has
just been announced as soon to be published by Messrs. G. P. Putnam's
Son's, New York. M. Leroy Beaulieu, whose mastery of the philosophy of
history has commanded universal recognition, makes clear his standpoint
in the preface to the original work, and in the preface to the English
translation he evinces his thorough insight, not only into his general
subject, but furthermore into its American phases especially.
We copy these extracts from the columns of the _American Hebrew_, New
York, September 13, 1895, and from its editorial reference to the
subject we gladly quote the concluding paragraph, as follows:
"The publication of M. Leroy Beaulieu's work in its English dress
will be timely for two reasons: Its Jewish readers will find it
an eloquent appeal for renewed devotion to the noble cause of
Israel's mission; its Christian readers, recognizing the important
part Judaism has played in the production of our present-day
civilization, will recognize how baseless is the prejudice that
reigns against the Jew. May the book find many readers."
FOOTNOTES:
[118] See note, next page.
[119] These citations are gleaned from the notable lecture by
Hon. Simon Wolf, on "The Influence of the Jews on the Progress of the
World," delivered before the Schiller Bund in Washington, April 1st,
1888.
ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS.
THE PREFACES TO M. LEROY-BEAULIEU'S "_Israel chez les nations_."
[_Copyrighted, 1895, by_ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS.]
I. PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL WORK.
The author of this book is a Christian and a Frenchman. As a
Christian, he is one of those who believe that a spirit of
intolerance is repugnant to Christianity, and nothing appears to
him less consistent with the Gospel than race-hatred. Be it a war
of races or a war of classes, popular jealousy can never screen
itself behind the robe of Christ. Be it Aryan or Semitic, a nation
should never purchase its salvation at the cost of another's rights.
As a Frenchman, the author is one of those who are convinced that
France ought to remain true to her traditions of justice and
liberty. They are the only glory and the only wealth which the
fortunes of war cannot wrest from her. The more severe the trials
that she has undergone, the more menacing the dangers that await
her, the more essential is it to her honor that she should remain
herself and not belie, in the eyes of the nations, those great
ideas which she was the first to proclaim. To abjure them would
be not only an act of apostasy, but a forfeiture of her place in
history. A France that should stoop, more than a century after
1789, to abridge religious and civil liberty and to establish among
her inhabitants distinctions based upon name or birth, would no
longer be the France that the world has thus far known.
The inheritance of the Revolution, which we have come to regard
with so much reverence, may possibly include rash postulates and
exaggerated inferences that tend to intoxicate, almost to madness,
a people infatuated with its title of sovereign; but surely neither
religious liberty nor civil equality is likely to produce such
effects; neither the one nor the other can have any tendency to
turn the people's heads; and, after having been the first to preach
these principles to Europe, France will not disavow them now, when,
thanks to our propaganda or our example, they have conquered almost
all the countries of both hemispheres. On others be the shame of
such a recantation!
Anti-Semitism is consistent with neither the principles nor
the genius of our nation. It came to us from the outside, from
countries which have neither our spirit nor our traditions. It came
to us from across the Rhine, from old Germany, always ready for
religious quarrels, and always imbued with the spirit of caste;
from new Germany, all inflated with race-pride and scornful of
whatever is not Teutonic.
Anti-Semitism may be traced also to Russia, to that huge and
shapeless Russia, which, with its steppes and forests, has remained
isolated from the great currents of modern life; to holy, Orthodox
Russia, half Oriental, half Asiatic, which endeavors to find
its national unity in its religious unity, and which regards
the Catholic and the Lutheran with little more favor than the
Israelite; to that autocratic Russia, which differs from us in
all its institutions, as well as in all its conditions, be they
economic, political, religious or social. Whatever sympathy we may
feel with the Slavonic mind or the Russian spirit, the Russians,
who so often emulated us, would be greatly surprised to see us
copying them; as well might one propose to the Czar to model the
government of his moujiks and cossacks on that of the French
Republic.
Men of my age, who have grown up under the Second Empire and in the
worship of liberty--it was fashionable then among the young--have
witnessed many distressing sights. How often was the lie given to
our youthful faith in right and justice! How many truths which we
thought established forever were again called into question by the
selfish passions or the ignorant claims of new generations! How
many of the conquests won by reason and liberty were we unable
to maintain against the encroachments of power or the delusions
of political sophistry! Popular rights trodden under foot in the
name of the principle of nationality, everywhere heralded as a
principle of emancipation; European states transformed, for half a
century, into entrenched camps and separated once more from each
other by custom-house barriers and ramparts of prejudice almost
as high as the Wall of China; freedom of thought and religious
toleration cynically overridden or hypercritically evaded by those
very political parties that professed to be their champions; laws
passed to the detriment of special persons; decrees of exile or
confiscation promulgated in the name of liberty, within so-called
free countries and by self-styled liberals; appeals to secular
power, demands for legal restriction, for paternalism, addressed to
the government by all manner of clashing interests and passions.
And all this, not only in Eastern Russia, buried neck-deep in the
Middle Ages or rather in the ancien régime, but in the West, in
France, in Germany, among nations said to be the most advanced of
ancient Europe. Oh, how old she is, this ancient Europe, and how
difficult it is for her to slough her skin and regain her youth!
What an effort it is for her to strip off her old prejudices and
practices and clothe herself in the spirit of a new age!
And this new age, the age that we have so ardently invoked, what
will it bring us and how will it fulfil its boasted promises?
To judge by the methods and the teachings extolled by those who
proclaim themselves its representatives, this new age is in great
danger of reviving the worst practices of the past. Men who
boast of being the pioneers of the future openly praise deeds
of absolutism, and smile sanctimoniously at legal brutalities
borrowed from the _ancien régime_ by the jurists of the Revolution.
Visions of the future and mediæval prejudices; Utopias conceived
by dreamers deluded with misty ideals and belated memories of a
superannuated past; unceasing race-competition and ever-recurring
class jealousies, all these have become confused and entangled in
the minds of the learned as well as in those of the masses. And
something of all this is contained in anti-Semitism; something of
the old and of the new, of the far-off Middle Ages and of visionary
socialism, of reactionary instincts and of revolutionary passions;
and it is because of this that anti-Semitism finds an echo in
such different quarters, from the drawing-rooms of society to the
grog-shop of the working-man.
Let us confess it once again: we have presumed too much on reason,
and relied too confidently on civilization. This brilliant
civilization, which inspires our idlers with such ludicrous pride,
is often shallow and unsound, even in the most advanced countries
of the continent. In our proudest capitals it is barely thicker
than a light veneer, underneath whose surface, if we scratch it
ever so little, we shall find all the ignorance and savagery of the
ages that we deem barbarous. Thus, in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, the
close of our century suffers the disgrace of seeing measures of
proscription and confiscation advocated by people who are really
good-natured and ordinarily harmless.