of long-repressed religion became manifest. They were so delighted
to be able again to openly read their Law and their Talmud, that even
in these sober pursuits they grew immoderate. Law and Talmud were
not enough for them in their restless mood of repentant energy. Many
scholars began eagerly to adopt and to accept the wildest and most
fanciful ‘extensions’ in religion and in philosophy. There is a whole
branch of Jewish doctrinal study which is called the Kabbala. Grätz
describes the Kabbala as a fungous growth which, since the thirteenth
century, crept over the body of the Law and of tradition. This Kabbala
is a weed of Eastern planting, but amongst Western scholars, in waste
places, it got some space to grow. It is a strange combination of faith
and philosophy, and its mystical character facilitated the introduction
of all sorts of un-Jewish beliefs and superstitions under the name of
Kabbala. Thus we have a quantity of so-called Kabbalistic literature,
containing a superstitious agglomeration of signs and wonders, which
would lead its students to credulous musings on evil spirits, and false
prophets, and spurious Messiahs, instead of to earnest belief in the
one true God and His servant Moses. It was only minds which had become
weakened and debased by Kabbalistic studies that could have believed in
such a Messiah as Sabbatai Zevi. That episode in 1666――some ten years
later than the date of Spinoza’s banishment and excommunication from
the Amsterdam synagogue――is an extreme instance of the tendency of
the zeal of superstition. The incident of Uriel da Costa, which had
its place in Amsterdam some sixteen years earlier, when Spinoza was
a boy of eight, is an instance of the lengths to which even good and
cultivated men may be carried by the zeal of intolerance.
=3. Spinoza’s Student Days.=――It was in a community shaped by such
influences and such experiences, among passionately observant and
rigorously conforming Jews, that Baruch Spinoza was brought up. And
to make the misunderstanding which came about between him and his
congregation more utterly hopeless, Spinoza was a born genius, an
original, creative thinker, whilst his masters, and teachers, and
elders were only cultivated, and clever, and commonplace. A wide
gulf separates knowledge, however great, from genius. The Amsterdam
congregation had acquired the one, and Spinoza possessed the other, and
this exceptional gift of his was not known, nor guessed at till it was
too late.
Little is known of the social position of Baruch Spinoza’s parents,
nor can much be inferred from the fact that he received an excellent
education, since in all classes, and at all periods, Jews have made
an effort to secure for their children the best that was obtainable
in the way of knowledge. The course of instruction in Jewish schools
was almost entirely confined to the Hebrew language and literature,
but this course, as in the ancient _Kallahs_,[53] was made to include
a very wide range of subjects. In the more advanced classes analysis
and mathematics were taught, and Maimonides and Ibn Ezra were the
text-books for philosophy and theology. The students, too, were kept
well abreast of the physical and natural science of the age. Manasseh
ben Israel was one of Spinoza’s teachers, and the Rabbi Saul Morteira
was another. Latin and German he seems to have studied outside of
the community, under a physician named Van den Ende. The French and
Italian languages also he mastered, and he gained something more than a
rudimentary knowledge of Greek. Spanish was more or less to him, as to
all of the Maranno-descended Jews, a native tongue. He was clever, too,
at drawing, but this long list of his acquirements gives no accurate
idea of his powers, for much scholarship is not in itself a guarantee
of ability. A mind may be filled full as a storehouse with facts,
and yet be empty of ideas, and feeble in intellectual grasp. Spinoza
not only learnt, but he thought. He not only acquired information,
but be propounded theories. The community was a little distrustful
of originality, and rather liked knowledge to run into ready-made
moulds. This young man, too, was unobservant of forms, and imprudently
free-spoken in his opinions. Though not above making use, as his
subsequent philosophical writings show, of ideas and principles and
arguments contained in Jewish works, he yet felt some contempt for
the tendency of current Jewish scholarship, and would express himself
very openly concerning Bible and Talmud and everything that was dear
and holy to Jews. On many grounds the Amsterdam Jews were afraid of
nonconforming members. They dreaded a relapse into nominal Judaism.
They felt it a duty to keep dangerous elements at arm’s length, from
a not unworthy fear that another Judaism might be set up before this
hardly regained Judaism of theirs was firmly established in hearts
and homes. And besides, not only for the sake of the synagogue had
they to be careful to guard themselves from disunion, but the new and
uncertain toleration which Jews enjoyed among Christians might easily
be imperilled by unseemly religious differences in the congregation.
So much or so little must justly be said in explanation of the attitude
of the Amsterdam community towards Spinoza. Not as much can be urged in
defence of their subsequent action.
=4. Things come to a Climax.=――Even in his student days, and by his
fellow-students, Spinoza had begun to be looked upon as dangerous,
and by the time he was twenty-three, matters came to their regrettable
climax. His speculative and independent opinions grew to be a subject
for serious discussion among the elders of the synagogue, and, of
course, to them he was only a young man, whose genius, even if guessed
at, was as yet quite unproved. They were acting, it must be borne in
mind, only on their knowledge of him, not on ours, and, from their
point of view, for the good of the community. They would have brought
back their wandering sheep to the fold, if it could be done; but
if not, it was thought well to drive such a one definitely outside
of it altogether, and so be rid of the responsibility of him. The
Spanish-descended Jews, it must be confessed, were always consistent
in their policy of prudent aloofness from any embarrassing contact with
brethren either of unsafe morals or of unpleasant manners. In this case
they did not want to argue with the young man, nor yet to punish him,
if it could be avoided; they wished, with simple selfishness, to be
free of a member who was likely to bring them into trouble. An offer
was made to Spinoza of an annuity of a thousand florins, if he would,
so far as utterance and observance were concerned, conform to the
rules and rites of the synagogue. The offer showed singularly little
knowledge of Spinoza’s character. It was, without a moment’s hesitation,
promptly and peremptorily declined. The elders grew angrier. He was
summoned before them, censured, and put ‘without the camp’ for thirty
days, and a little later, his firm and calm attitude incensing them yet
more, and it also being reported that young men were being misled by
him, these comparatively mild measures were followed up by a distinct
sentence of excommunication. The text of the excommunication is painful
to read. In solemn terms he was cursed with ‘all the curses that are
written in the Law,’ both in the mass, and in pretty separate detail,
and any and every form of communication with members of his own faith
was categorically denied to him. It was a terrible document, and the
only shadow of excuse that can be made for it lies in the fact that it
was a strong-spoken age, an age that hated heresy, and was much given
to the burning of heretics. Curse and anathema were in the air. Readers
of history will remember the terms in which Martin Luther spoke and
wrote of Erasmus, and how, in dealing with his religious adversaries
generally, the brave monk ‘hurled words like rocks and boulders on
their heads.’ Martin Luther’s work was more than a century old at the
time of Spinoza’s excommunication, but it is curious to trace how the
fierce struggles of the Reformation, like the deadly tactics of the
Inquisition, made their mark and left their influence on Jewish action.
=5. How Spinoza took his Sentence: his Mode of Life.=――
‘Vulgar minds
Refuse or crouch beneath their load; the brave
Bear theirs without repining,’
says an English poet.[54] Spinoza was a very different sort of man
from Uriel da Costa. He neither raged, nor protested, nor recanted. He
accepted the sentence passed upon him, recognising the cruel injustice
of it, but recognising also the force of circumstances, and what
had been his own share in bringing it about. He removed to a little
distance from Amsterdam, and altering his name to its Latin equivalent,
Benedict Spinoza, he faced his life under its new conditions. His
first necessity was to secure the means of living; and here the Jewish
instinct we have so often noted asserted itself at once, and the
hands made ready to help the head. He worked as an optician, and it is
characteristic of this great man that the lenses and glasses which he
cut were as much appreciated by opticians as are his books by scholars.
And he wrote and he taught, and in the latter occupation found some
compensations from the utter loneliness to which he had been condemned.
His pupils conceived an immense affection for him, and one named De
Vries, who knew himself doomed to an early death, earnestly desired
to make Spinoza his heir. But the young man had a brother living, and
Spinoza would not permit his pupil to put aside the righteous claim
of his own kindred. When De Vries died, the brother who came into his
fortune would have settled an annual income on Spinoza, but even this
he refused, taking only at last, after much persuasion, the half of
what was pressed upon him. A man’s conduct in money matters is a very
tolerable test of the stuff he is made of, and in another instance,
where a legacy was in question, Spinoza acted in precisely the same
serenely just and unimpulsive fashion. When his father died, there was
a small inheritance left for the family, which, besides this banished
son, consisted of two daughters. On the ground of his having been
expelled from the community of Israel, the sisters disputed Spinoza’s
right to his share of the property. Spinoza did not yield to this
injustice; he considered it a duty of every citizen to resist any form
of wrong-doing, whether his own advantage was concerned in the event
or no. He knew he had not forfeited his right to his fair share in the
division of their father’s property, and he would not waive his right.
But when his claim was established and allowed, he declined to profit
by it. Justice was satisfied, generosity might be indulged. He gave
up to his sisters every bit of his portion, save only one bed! He
cared very little about money, and even, which is rarer, very little
for most of the pleasures which money ensures. His mode of living was
most frugal. In his effort to make both ends meet, he once jestingly
compared himself to a snake, which has to wriggle to get its tail
in its mouth. Still he was not, in the very least, miserly or
misanthropical. He enjoyed social intercourse with people of the
ordinary as well as of the clever sort, and indulged his liking by
means of correspondence when he could not get talk. In the later years
of his life he took up his abode in the Hague, with a family by the
name of Van der Spyck, kind, good, uncultivated people, who grew to
have the sincerest affection and esteem for their gentle, scholarly
lodger. Perhaps it was in return for the interest and pleasure which
Spinoza took in the kind woman’s children, that she one day anxiously
asked him――for of course they all knew that he was not of the same
religion as his hosts――whether his form of belief or theirs was the
better. ‘All religions are good,’ he answered, ‘that lead one to a
good life; you need not seek further.’ The truth of this axiom was
demonstrated in his own life.
Spinoza never renounced his religion, but it shines out more perhaps
in his life than in his philosophy. Spinoza showed himself a Jew, in
despite, as it were, of himself. He was a faithful, patriotic citizen,
trustworthy always, and trusted greatly in a time of panic and danger,
which the Netherlands experienced in 1672, when the King of France
(Louis XIV.) ‘came down to Utrecht like a land flood.’ He never had
much longing for fame, and it was characteristic that when, after
the publication of his _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, the chair of
philosophy at Heidelberg was offered to him, he declined it, fearing
that in that responsible position he might feel fettered, and be unable
to speak out all the truth that was in him, and thus be less really
useful to his fellow-men.
=6. Unto this Last.=――He went on, year after year, with the work that
lay close to his hand, using his loneliness and his trials not as
weapons, but as tools. He continued day by day to write, and to teach,
and to make his spectacles, doing each different duty with all his
might, and each in as perfect fashion as was possible to him. He was
of a cheerful spirit, though never of robust health. And, with no wife
or child to whom his health was of supreme importance, he died, almost
unexpectedly, of consumption, when he was only forty-five years old
(Feb. 27, 1677).
=7. His Writings.=――Of these, the most celebrated are the treatise,
partly political and partly theological, called _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_, which was published in 1670, and the ‘Ethics,’
his great philosophical work, which was not published till after his
death. As it would be impossible to convey, to one who had never read
his plays, any intellectual idea of Shakespeare by merely saying that
he wrote ‘Hamlet,’ so is it hopeless to get at any notion of Spinoza
as an author by a bald statement of his works. Spinoza’s writings are
strong meat, and need a trained digestion. ‘His mind,’ says Auerbach,
‘has fed the thought of two centuries;’ and this picturesque statement
must serve as the only indication that can be here given of the fare so
provided.
=8. Results.=――To the world, the value of Spinoza is as a thinker; to
his people, a small section of whom in mistaken zeal cast him off, his
chief worth seems to lie in his mode of life. Among the more temperate
charges which have been brought against Jews, it has been often urged
that, whilst the race has produced good learners and clever adapters,
among the world’s teachers there have been no Jews in the foremost
rank. Jews need not be greatly concerned to deny whatever there may
be of truth in this impeachment. Their mission is not to be pioneers
in any particular path, but to be witnesses in the way of life. And it
is in so far as they fail in this, that as Jews they fail altogether.
Therefore that Spinoza, in the character of his genius, was an
exceptional Jew may be granted with all equanimity. Genius is always
exceptional in its nature, and of no especial nationality. But putting
his genius altogether on one side, we claim that in his steadfast,
lovable nature, in his temperate, frugal, hard-working life, and in his
sober, but humorous acceptance of the circumstances of his lot, Spinoza
was a typical Jew, and, moreover, a Jew of no uncommon type. Not an
easy-going, nor even a willing ‘witness’ often to the beauties of
Judaism was Spinoza, but always, and for all time, a powerful one, and
perhaps the more powerful because, to some extent, unconscious. Most of
the incidents of his biography have come down to us through a Lutheran
clergyman named Colerus, to whom all Spinoza’s philosophical theories
were detestable. Thus there can be no suspicion of undue praise about
these records of ‘M. Spinoza of blessed memory,’ as he was called by
a poor tradesman who knew the man, but had never read a line of the
author.
CHAPTER XXXV.
IN NORTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE, BEFORE THE DAWN.
=1. A Long Night.=――Whilst the Jews of Holland were growing in
wealth and in importance, and the branch which Manasseh ben Israel
had grafted on England was there, though slowly, attaining to a healthy
and independent existence, the position of the Jews in the rest of
Europe was still deplorable. The dawn was far, as yet, from rising
on the Jews in Northern and Central Europe. In the south, in Italy,
there was a sort of twilight; a comparatively peaceful and uneventful
existence under the intermittently humane rule of the Popes. In Spain
and Portugal, the Inquisition, we know, had ended in expulsion, and in
France, the edict which banished the race from its shores in 1394 was
still in operation. The state of things which, in the east, had ensured
a welcome for a Sabbatai Zevi was at work in the west, and produced
different, but, as we shall see, quite as harmful results. The standard
was lowered throughout Europe. And yet, though deprived of the wealth,
and glory, and position which they had so long enjoyed in the Peninsula,
though in differing degrees oppressed and degraded in Germany and other
countries, the Jews were still, though blindly, ‘toiling upward in the
night,’ and taking their share in the slow progress of civilisation.
‘There is a Providence that shapes our ends,
Rough hew them how we may.’
Good results from sorrowful causes showed themselves often in
unexpected ways and in unforeseen directions; for instance, the
frequent theological disputations between Jews and Jews, and Christians
and Christians, the very charges now and again brought against Jews
and Jewish literature, turned the attention of Christian scholars
to the study of Hebrew. Johann Reuchlin, one of the most important
fore-runners of the German reformation, had a Hebrew teacher, one Jacob
Loans, physician to the Emperor Frederic III. This Loans remained in
favour with the Emperor, and also with his successor, Maximilian I.,
and it was probably owing to Jacob Loans’ influence that another member
of the same family, Joseph Loans of Rosheim (born 1480, died 1555), was
appointed as representative of the Jews at the Imperial Court. Joseph
Loans defended his brethren whenever accusations were made against them,
and became surety for them whenever that was required. The Jews called
him their ‘great defender,’ though his efforts on their behalf were not
always successful; the Emperor Maximilian being of a somewhat fickle
turn of mind, and apt to take ‘full easily all impressions from below.’
=2. Reuchlin and the Talmud.=――It was in Reuchlin’s time that the
Dominican monks, under the leadership of a man named Pfefferkorn,
and in their hatred of the Jews, brought charges against the Talmud,
and tried hard to induce the Emperor Maximilian to have all copies
of it confiscated and burnt. Reuchlin, who was at the head of
the Anti-Dominicans, defended the Talmud most energetically and
successfully. ‘I confess,’ he said on one occasion, ‘that I know very
little of the contents of the Talmud, but the opposite party know just
as much. How could one presume to give a judgment on mathematics if
he knew nothing of the science? The Talmud ought not to be burnt, for
so long as it exists a harmless subject is supplied for theological
discussion. Destroy the Talmud, and Christian divines will take to
disputing about their own religion, whether Paul was married, or if
“Saint” Augustine was a monk!’ Thus, curiously enough, the Talmud
divided the Christian camp into two parties, Humanists and Obscurants,
as they were called, and in their disputes the Talmud found its safety.
We have seen that it was not burnt that time.[55]
=3. Another Jewish Influence, Elias Levitas.=――Another successful
Jewish teacher among Christian scholars of this period was Elias
Levitas. He was born in 1468 at Neustadt, near Nuremburg. In 1504 we
find him at Padua, teaching Hebrew. In 1509, when Padua was suffering
from the effects of war and conquest, Levitas came to Rome. Here he
taught the Cardinal Egidio de Viterbo, in whose house he lived ten
years. George de Selve, Bishop of Lavour, was also one of his pupils,
and it was probably in consequence of the bishop’s recommendation that
Levitas was invited to come to France as professor of Hebrew. He must
have felt himself greatly honoured when thus begged to come into a
country in which no Jew was allowed to reside. And it is pleasant to
know that he did not accept the invitation, but refused a distinction
at the hand that dishonoured his race. In 1527, when Rome was abandoned
to disorder and plunder, Elias Levitas went to Venice. In 1540 we
find him employed as corrector in the printing office of one Fagius,
and in 1549 he died. His literary career commenced with a copious
editing of some grammatical works of the old masters, but he went on
to write books himself on every topic connected with Hebrew grammar and
lexicography. Many of these works were translated into Latin. Scholars
find a treatise which he wrote on the Massorah, and on the origin of
the vowel points, most interesting as well as valuable. He supplied
his Jewish brethren also with a German translation of the Pentateuch,
Megilloth, and Haphtaroth.
=4. Some Jewish Results from the Invention of Printing.=――The great
zeal expended at this period on the study of Hebrew was soon noticeable
in the extensive use made of the newly invented art of printing for
the multiplying of copies of Hebrew works. The printing firm of Daniel
Bomberg at Venice published the edition of the Biblia Rabbinica (i.e.
Hebrew text with Chaldaic version called Targum, Massoretic notes, and
various Hebrew commentaries) in 1516‒17, and of the Talmud in 1520‒26.
And these were by no means the first Hebrew works that were printed. A
commentary of Rashi’s[56] on the Pentateuch was published at Reggio in
1475, and in the same year the larger work, ‘Arba-Turim’ (Code of Laws),
in Pieve di Sacco. The first Hebrew printing establishment in Germany
was founded by Gerson Soncino in Prague, 1513. The family of Soncino
contributed much to the spread of printing among the Jews. Hebrew
printing presses were soon set up at Fano, Pesaro, Mantua, and other
places. The Jews showed from the first both zeal and skill in promoting
the printing of Hebrew literature. Their rejoicing at the new invention
was soon, however, damped by the introduction of a censorship for
Jewish books, and Jewish authors and compilers had to see their pet
works mutilated by priests and laymen who often were incapable of
getting at the sense of what they examined. Renegade Jews occasionally
officiated as censors, and added malice to ignorance. Printers and
editors by degrees, foreseeing the passages which would meet with
adverse censorship, would carefully prepare their text for examination
by omissions. And so, after all, not very much harm was done. Complete
copies could generally be found in States which were free from
censorship, and scholars with good memories were often at hand to
supply the missing links. In the present day books printed in Russia
or imported into Russia are subject to censorship, and passages which
to the censors appear objectionable are made illegible.
=5. Influence of Printing on Kabbalistic Literature.=――Through the
art of printing, mystic works of a kabbalistic character were also
multiplied and made accessible to the multitude. Reuchlin, in studying
Hebrew, aimed especially at gaining a knowledge of the Kabbala,
believing, in common with many Christians of that time, that in Kabbala
might be discovered many hidden mysteries of their own religion.
The most important work of the kind is the ‘Zohar’ (Splendour), a
volume of notes and reflections in the form of a running commentary
on the Pentateuch. Tradition gives the honour of authorship of the
Zohar to Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai (second century). Modern criticism,
however, declares it to be the work of the Middle Ages, at least as
regards certain parts of it. The Zohar contains many moral lessons,
interspersed with Hagadic legends and philosophical theories. It has
its attractions for contemplative minds, which like to indulge in
imaginative and speculative thought. A certain Isaac Luria, born at
Jerusalem, 1534, went into seclusion, and devoted his whole life to the
study of the Zohar, and to fasting and praying. In this way he hoped
to arrive at the right understanding of hidden truths. His labours, at
any rate, seem to have resulted in no injury to his moral nature, since
before his death he made solemn declaration of forgiveness to all and
any who may have cheated him, and desired that full compensation might
be made to all or any out of whom he may have made undue profit. Luria
died of the plague in 1572. The Kabbala of Luria was introduced into
Germany chiefly through a certain Rabbi Jesaja Hurwitz (born 1570).
He wrote a book for his own children, called ‘The Two Tables of the
Covenant’ (abridged Hebrew name שְׁלָה), but it was soon printed and
published, and proved very popular. Besides containing a sort of
commentary on each of the Haphtarahs, and many mystic and Midrashic
expositions on Biblical and Talmudic passages, the book gives rules for
conduct on all occasions, and recommends mastery over passions and the
regulation of appetites, in a frequently apt and happy fashion. Rabbi
Hurwitz emigrated to Jerusalem, where, like many others, he met with
cruel treatment at the hands of Mahomedan tyrants. He eventually went
to Tiberias, where, in 1630, he died.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
IN NORTHERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE, BEFORE THE DAWN (_continued_).
=1. A Group of Stars.=――Through the dull clouds which so rarely lifted,
little literary stars managed now and again to peep out, and to emit a
small pale radiance. Their rays were not very brilliant, but they did
what they could, and deserve an honourable mention. We will take them
chronologically, though this will make a lady and a poetess last on our
list.
In Spain, in 1488, was born a certain Joseph Caro. Whilst he was quite
a child his parents left Spain, and taking Joseph with them, wandered
about from place to place, till they finally settled in Nikopolis in
Turkey. The boy was taught Bible and Talmud by his father, and showed
from the first great industry and some talent. Presently he went to
Adrianople, where he wrote his first work, which was a commentary
on the אַרְבַּע טוּרים. Subsequently he wrote the שֻׁלְחָן עָרוּךְ (A table prepared),
which was an amplification of his first work, and, like it, had its
inspiration in the Code of Laws formulated by a long dead and gone
Rabbi Jacob, the son of Rabbenu Asher. The שֻׁלְחָן עָרוּךְ has become the
standard authority for Jewish ritual and ceremonial Law. It is divided
into four parts:
1. אֹרַח חַיִּים (Path of life). On Prayer, Sabbaths, festivals, and fasts.
2. יוֹרֶה דֵּעָה (Teaching knowledge). Dietary and other domestic laws.
3. אֶבֶן הָעֶזֶר (Stone of help). Marriage laws.
4. חשֶׁן מִשְׁפָט (Breastplate of judgment). Civil laws.
Notes were added to the שֻׁלְחָן עָרוּךְ of Rabbi Joseph Caro by a Polish
Talmudical authority, named Rabbi Moses Isserles. He was an author
himself, and his decisions had great weight with his Polish and German
co-religionists, but were not accepted by the Portuguese Jews. Joseph
Caro, before his death in 1575, had an attack from the Kabbala fever
which was so prevalent in those days. Under its influence he emigrated
to Palestine, and joined the sect of Kabbalists. He was elected Rabbi
of Saphed, and in possession of that dignity he died.
A contemporary of Caro’s, who lived in Saphed, was the author of the
beautiful Friday night song, לְכָה דוֹדִי: ‘Come, my beloved, to meet the
Bride, the approaching Sabbath we will receive.’ His name was Solomon
Alkabez.
Azariah de Rossi, born at Mantua in 1511, was one of the great
Jewish-Italian scholars of the sixteenth century. He was learned in
all branches of literature and science. His wide knowledge and his
critical powers are apparent in his work טְאוֹר עִינים (Light of the Eyes),
a collection of critical essays on various topics of Jewish archæology
and history. He freely and fearlessly compared statements in Talmud and
Midrash with those found in other works, Jewish and un-Jewish. Among
other subjects De Rossi discussed the Jewish chronology, and did not
hesitate to declare it faulty. Among his Jewish contemporaries he
did not find many admirers, but his works long after his death (1578)
received at last that place in Hebrew literature which they richly
deserve.
David Gans, who was born in Westphalia in 1541, and died in Prague in
1613, was a great scholar and writer. He began his studies at Cracow,
in a Rabbinical seminary, but after a while he gave up the learning of
the Talmud, and devoted himself to the study of astronomy and history
and geography. He wrote, in Hebrew, a chronological History, עֶמַח דָּוִד,
in two parts, consisting of Jewish history and general history. His
chief works besides were מָנֵן דָּוִד (Shield of David), an arithmetic guide;
מִנְדַּל דָּוִד (Tower of David), a geometrical work; and נֶחְמָד וְנָעִים (Pleasant
and Desirable), an astronomical volume. In the introduction to the last,
Gans gives a short account of astronomy up to his own time, including
a sketch of the astronomer Copernicus, with whom he was personally
acquainted.
David Oppenheim, Rabbi of Prague (born 1664, died 1736), is famous
as the owner of a valuable Hebrew library. The history of the books
which he collected is, perhaps, more interesting than a summary of the
contents of them might be. The nucleus of the collection was made by a
certain Samuel Oppenheim, who, an agent at the court of Vienna, asked
and received, as a reward for some financial transaction, a number
of valuable Hebrew books, which Prince Eugene had looted during the
Turkish war. These were left by will to Rabbi David Oppenheim, who
largely added to the collection. He made out a list of missing and
desirable volumes, and sent it in all directions, with orders to buy
for him. In this way he raised his number of printed books to 7,000,
and of MSS. to 1,000. Being afraid that the censor in Prague might
mutilate or confiscate some of the books, Rabbi Oppenheim kept his
beloved library at Hanover, in the house of his father-in-law, Lipman
Cohen. After Rabbi David Oppenheim’s death, his son, Herschel Isaac
Oppenheim, Rabbi at Hildesheim, got the collection. After his death
(1770) it was sent to Hamburg, and pledged to a senator there for
50,000 marks. It subsequently came into the hands of a certain Isaac
Cohen in Hamburg, and was valued by Moses Mendelssohn as worth 50,000
thalers.[57] After some negotiations with Jewish merchants and German
princes, the library was bought by the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in
1829, for 9,000 thalers, and there it is at the present time.
Sarah Copia Sullam, our poetess, was an enthusiastic Jewess. The
first literary effort which is recorded of her was an unsigned letter,
bearing date of the year 1618, which she sent to an Italian priest,
Ceba by name, who had written a poem on the Jewish subject of Queen
Esther. Our poetess was so delighted to see a Jewish heroine praised,
that her letter to the priest was full of gratitude and enthusiasm.
The priest found out the name of his correspondent, and did his best
to convert her. Sarah, however, was firm in her faith, and her replies
give full reasons for her firmness. Recognising at last that his
arguments had failed, the priest wrote to her again, begging permission
to pray for the salvation of her soul. To this she responded, granting
him his request on the condition that he would allow her to pray for
his conversion to Judaism. We do not hear of any further correspondence
between the priest and the poetess. Later on, she was accused by
another Christian priest of denying the immortality of the soul. She
indignantly defended herself from this charge in an eloquent manifesto.
She seems to have applied herself with great zeal not only to
literature, but to science, and she had a tragedy dedicated to her.
Deborah Ascarelli, another Jewish poetess, translated many Hebrew hymns
into Italian, and composed also original poems in Italian.
=2. Polish Jews.=――It was at the northern extremity of Europe, in
Poland, that the most dull and dismal night prevailed. Refugees of the
very poor and hunted sort had found their way to Poland from the date
of the eleventh century, and had met and mingled there with members
of the Karaite sect, and, perhaps, with some remnants of that once
powerful, converted nation of the Khozars, who flourished on the shores
of the Caspian Sea in the eighth and ninth centuries.[58] One hears
little concerning the Jews in Poland till the fourteenth century,
when, under Casimir the Great, and possibly owing to the influence
of a Jewess of whom the king was very fond, a certain legal status
was accorded to them. It was not a very elevated one, and mostly of
a ‘protective’ nature. Their lives and property were secured to them,
and their synagogues and burial-grounds were defended from pillage
and desecration. Rights of trading were granted, but public or state
employment was withheld. This tolerable, but somewhat sordid condition
of things continued till towards the middle of the seventeenth century,
by which time the Jews of Poland, who were mostly German by descent
and by language, formed a very large proportion of the middle-class
population of the country. They were not, at any time, a very high
class of Jews. The original settlement had consisted of cruelly hunted
and persecuted small traders, and reinforcements had come from the
like stock. It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but
the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of
modern methods of manuring. In theory and practice, in manners, outward
appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were most
conservative, some might even say stagnant or retrogressive. There came
to be among their students many who inclined more to Kabbala than
to Talmud, and to Talmud than to Torah; and then, towards the middle
of the seventeenth century, fierce oppressions arose, with the
effect of yet more completely lowering the standard. At this date, a
Cossack chief, with the help of Tartars and Russians, overran Poland,
and perpetrated unspeakable atrocities on the Jewish and Catholic
inhabitants of the country. And when the Cossacks had finished their
work, the Russians began theirs. Between 1648 and 1651, more than
200,000 Jews were slaughtered in the Polish dominions. Those who
survived were not of the heroic stuff to rise superior to such terrible
circumstances. They sank under them, both morally and physically. The
small industries were given up, or pursued in a shambling way, and many
schools were closed, and those that were kept open degenerated in aim
and method. Crowds of Polish Rabbis were reduced to actual beggary, and
emigrated in starving batches to Holland and Germany, or even so far as
Italy and England. Those who remained in Poland relapsed into something,
to superficial gaze, not very unlike barbarism.
=3. French Jews.=――From France, in consequence of the edict of
Charles VI., the Jewish race was exiled in 1394. This edict remained
in force for nearly four centuries――till, in fact, the year 1784, when,
during the reign of the good though weak Louis XVI., royal letters
patent were issued which authorised Jews to live in any part of the
French dominions. During this long interval, France, through conquest
and by treaty, had extended her boundaries, and in the newer portions
of her territory the rule of expulsion was not always strictly enforced.
Gradually in the course of these centuries, and without any formal
permission being granted them, Jews had returned to French soil, and
in most cases the authorities had shut their eyes to these illegal
infringements of an unrepealed law. Whenever legislation, however, was
directed to the fact, it proved equal to the occasion, and generally
recognised the presence of Jews in the spirit of Louis XIII., who in
1615 issued a solemn edict forbidding his subjects, under the severest
penalties, to hold any converse with Jews, or to receive them in their
houses. Still, though always socially banned, and often plundered and
persecuted, these Jews in their French ghettos managed to exist and
to hold their own. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were
small communities of Jews established in various parts of France, and
a settlement of some 500 in Paris itself. In Bordeaux there had existed
an influential community of Marannos from the year 1552, when the first
contingent of refugees arrived from Portugal. These Bordeaux settlers
were much superior to the rest of the Jews in France, both in position
and in cultivation. They did not, however, diffuse much of their
superior sweetness and light; on the contrary, they were so very
anxious to preserve both from any possible deterioration, that when,
during the reign of Louis XIV. (1761), fugitives from less fortunate
parts of France sought asylum in Bordeaux, they received no sort of
welcome from their co-religionists, who gave a chilling support to the
State order to move on. The most numerous section of French Jews was
to be found in Alsace, which province, from the date of the treaty of
Westphalia (1648) till the termination of the Franco-German war (1871),
was French. The nationality of the Government, however, made very
little difference to the Jews who lived under it. Their position in the
Rhenish provinces was most miserable. They were limited to the lowest
forms of trading, reviled for pursuing such, and then taxed far beyond
any honest possibilities of payment. It was not till Mendelssohn’s
efforts, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had begun to
bring about a change in the general position of the Continental Jews
that these Alsace Jews, among the rest, began to share in the result.
=4. Social Life in Germany.=――In the Austrian and German principalities,
although wholesale massacre, and conversion by means of fire and rack,
were slowly passing away with other miserable customs of the Middle
Ages, yet expulsions, and exactions, and disabilities of all kinds
were still in full force against the Jews. Throughout the many separate
states which in these days constitute the great united Empire of
Germany, the race, as we have seen,[59] were reckoned as serfs of
the Imperial Chamber, and were thus under the nominal protection of
the Emperor. A typical instance of the sort of ‘protection’ which the
German Jews enjoyed is afforded to us by the ancient Jewish charter
of Frankfort. By the terms of this document we find that it was only
on the most humiliating terms that Jews gained the privilege of living
there at all, and that this official permission had, in every case, to
be renewed on petition every three years. The inhabitants of the Jewish
quarter might not leave it, except within rigidly fixed hours; nor
could they receive a guest, nor even remove a sick person, without a
special magistrate’s licence. Worse hardships were not unusual, and
irritating and petty restrictions of this Frankfort charter type were
general in all the cities of Germany where Jews settled.
In Bohemia and its capital, Prague, Jews suffered unspeakable miseries.
The more sensational sort may be omitted, but one instance will give
an idea of the perfectly matter-of-course injustice with which Jews
were treated in the concerns of everyday life. There died in Prague,
in 1601, a certain Mordecai Meisel, a very rich man and an upright one,
who had used his money in his lifetime most generously and justly. He
died childless, and left his property to a nephew. The Emperor Rudolf,
without the shadow of an excuse, or the smallest claim of any kind, set
aside this will, and took the dead man’s property for himself.
In Vienna, the Austrian capital, the Jews, in spite of disabilities,
enjoyed for some time comparative prosperity. This happier state
of things came to an abrupt close in 1670, when, under the Emperor
Leopold I., the community was heavily fined, the tombs of their dead
were burst open, half in hopes of pillage, half in wanton desecration,
and their schools and synagogues first despoiled, and then turned into
churches. In 1745 there was a revival of the older and more wholesale
way of doing things. In midwinter of that year, by order of the Empress
Maria Theresa, 20,000 Jews were suddenly expelled from Bohemia and
Moravia.
=5. Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.=――Walled off from
the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths,
the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly
deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in
by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with
contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again,
and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt
for everything belonging to their persecutors. Spinoza once wrote, ‘The
heaviest burden that men can lay upon us is not that they persecute us
with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and
scorn in our souls. We cannot breathe freely, we cannot see clearly.’
This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have
entered into the Jewish system. They would not speak the language of
their enemies, they would not read their books. They huddled in their
own close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares,
and speaking, with bated breath, a barbarous dialect, half Hebrew, half
German, _Judisch Deutsch_, as it was called, and as different from the
old grand Hebrew tongue as were they themselves from Palestinian or
even from Spanish Jews. The love of religion and of race was as strong
among them as ever, but the love had come to be of a jealous and a
sullen sort. They dreaded progress or prominence of any kind. Long
and miserable experience seemed to show that safety for themselves and
tolerance for their faith lay, if anywhere, in being by the outside
world altogether unnoticed and unheeded. The culture of the Christians
they hated, with a hate born half of repulsion at its palpable effects
in persecution, half of fear for its possible tendency to conversion.
And so by degrees they locked, from the inside also, those closed gates
which led out on the open roads to use, and name, and fame. Intelligent
men were content to limit all intellectual occupation to the study
of the Law, and to find sufficient interest and entertainment in
the endless discussion of its more intricate passages. ‘Talmudical
mountebanks,’ one old chronicler somewhat unkindly calls these grim
and unattractive students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It seems a harsh phrase. The long-winded, hair-splitting arguments
over trivial, abstruse points were rather a forced than a voluntary
kind of mental gymnastics; and if such discussions were not interesting
to outsiders, they were never meant for them. Learned philologists,
before and since, have indulged in discussions, quite as long, over
the meaning and form of a single particle in Homer! The Jewish Rabbis
never forgot the moral education of their disciples; and the longest
and weariest of these dismal dissertations of theirs seldom wound up
without some popular moral lesson. At any rate, these crowds of Jewish
‘unemployed,’ oppressed and distressed as they were, did not meet to
talk sedition or to plot revenge. And in their attitude of resolute
aloofness from the interests of the hard outside world, there was at
least no trace of self-seeking. Perhaps, in the cruel circumstances
of their lot, they were not altogether so mistaken as, at the first
look, they seem. One may hardly dare to blame them, these ringleted,
gaberdined, bigoted heroes, who, for generations, turned their faces
to the wall, and seemed, to superficial gaze, to hug their chains. They
were quite sharp enough to know that, in shutting themselves in, they
were also shutting themselves out, but it was so they made their dogged,
miserable choice between the chances and the prizes of conversion, and
the blanks――the weary, hopeless, certain blanks of a rigid loyalty to
their race and their religion.
As we read the story of the wise and liberal philosopher, who broke
through the barriers and let in the light of learning, and of social
countenance, on mediæval benighted Judaism, we shall see that the very
children of the emancipator were dazzled by the unaccustomed rays, that
his sons wavered and his daughters apostatised, and that in the third
generation――only the third――the fetters which degraded were called
degrading, and were altogether cast off, and the grandchildren of Moses
Mendelssohn, the typical Jew, were Jews no longer.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
MOSES MENDELSSOHN.
=1. Early Days in Dessau.=――Under a very humble roof, in a very poor
little street in Dessau, there was born, on September 29, 1729, to a
certain Mendel and his wife, a weakly boy, who was destined to work
a wonderful change in the position and circumstances of the Jews of
Germany. Not much fit for such a task did this ghetto baby seem, for,
delicate from the first, his poor little body soon grew both stunted
and deformed. The father was a סוֹפֵר, or scribe, getting his modest
living by transcribing portions of the Law on parchment for _Mezuzoth_
and _Tephilin_, and this professional connection with the fount of
learning made him perhaps more eagerly anxious even than were Jewish
parents generally that their children should ‘get wisdom and get
understanding.’ לֶחֶם לְפִי הַטָּף, food for the little ones, in its literal
sense, was often hard to get, but food for their minds was always at
hand, and free to the poorest Jewish parent. So by the time little
Moses Mendel――or Mendelssohn, as he came to be called――was five years
old, it was taken as a matter of course that he should attend the
Talmud Torah School. But the mornings were bleak, and the tiny student
was weak and frail, so the mother would wrap him up first in an old
cloak of her own, and the father, before he began his day’s work, would
carry the bright-eyed and not very heavy bundle to the neighbouring
class-room. The little lad was diligent and sweet-tempered, and high
hopes soon began to be entertained of his powers and abilities. He soon
got his remove from the lower school to the higher class, which was
taught by the distinguished scholar Rabbi Frankel, and very early
began to indulge the desire that when he grew up, he, in his turn,
might become a learned Rabbi like his dear master. The parents did
not very heartily second this ambition on the part of their little son.
Times were hard in the ghetto, and Rabbis were many. Though a greatly
respected, it was a poorly paid profession, whereas as a hawker, or
a pedlar, a boy might begin to pick up a living by the time he was
בַּר מִצְוָה. In 1742, before Moses was thirteen, Rabbi Frankel received the
appointment of Chief Rabbi of Berlin, and went to take up his residence
in Berlin. With Frankel’s departure from Dessau a stop was put to
the boy’s learning, and, as it seemed, to his hopes, for now that his
master was gone, again and more strongly his parents urged upon him to
use his books only as a holiday task, and to make trading the serious
business of his life. But it was of no use. The boy was bent upon
becoming a scholar. Day after day, and often far on into the night,
he would be with his beloved books, forgetting, in their company,
all aches and pains or hunger, and desiring no other interest or
amusement. His favourite volume was Maimonides’ מוֹרֶה נְבוּכִים, Guide to the
Perplexed,[60] which he patiently puzzled out, and read and re-read,
till something of the spirit of the large and liberal-minded author
seemed to have entered into the delicate deformed body of the patient
little student. Long years after, he would often laughingly call his
hump a legacy from Maimonides. ‘Maimonides,’ he would say, ‘spoilt my
figure in my youth, and ruined my digestion; but still,’ he would add
more seriously, ‘I dote upon him; for if those long hours spent with
him, instead of at play, weakened my body, they at the same time gave
strength to my soul. Maimonides may have stunted my stature, but he
developed my mind.’ And so, in the narrow little room, he would sit
and read and think, till his pale cheeks grew hot, and his whole frame
thrilled with dreams and longings――he too would live to become a Guide
to the Perplexed among his people.
=2. Goes to Berlin.=――As Frankel passed out of Dessau, he saw his
young pupil standing on a little hill just outside the town, watching,
with streaming eyes, for a last glimpse of him. The kind-hearted master
caught up the little fellow in his arms, said good-bye once more, and
soothed him with hopes of meeting again in Berlin. The boy resolved
to make that hope a reality, and the poor parents, when they saw
how earnest was their child’s desire, ceased at last to oppose it.
They gave him their blessing, and put what they could――it was very
little――in his pocket, and, with a very slender wallet slung on his
crooked shoulders, some six months after Frankel had left Dessau, Moses
Mendelssohn set out for Berlin.
=3. How he fares there.=――There were no railways in those days, and if
there had been, Moses Mendelssohn had no money to pay even third-class
fare. He walked the many and weary miles which lay between Dessau and
Berlin, and it was a very tired and foot-sore little lad who, at the
close of the fifth day’s tramp, presented himself for admission at
the Jews’ gate of the city. The porter at the gate, used as he was
to shabby figures, looked doubtfully at the poor, dusty, crippled
boy, and it was only when Mendelssohn said that he knew Rabbi Frankel,
and wanted to see him, that the man let him through. And when Frankel
saw the penniless little student, whom he had inspired with such
difficult devotion, the kind-hearted scholar was touched and puzzled
too, but he quickly resolved that, so far as in him lay, the uphill
path of knowledge should be made smooth to those determined little
feet. Meanwhile the bread-and-butter question was very pressing. Moses
explained enthusiastically and sincerely enough that he wanted nothing
beyond bread and water, and a straw pallet to sleep on, and the master
responded a little drily that even such small luxuries as these were
not to be had for any length of time out of the three silver groschen,
about equal to ninepence of our money, which were left at the bottom
of his wallet. However, the difficulty got solved, as difficulties
mostly do when boys are thoroughly in earnest, and for a good object.
Frankel settled to give him his dinner on Sabbaths and festivals, and
a kind-hearted Jewish gentleman, Bamberger by name, promised to supply
two everyday meals, and to let the boy sleep in an attic in his house.
That was three dinners a week provided for, and on the remaining four
days, by dint of economy and imagination, he supplied himself with
quite a series of satisfying meals. He would earn a trifle by doing
copying work, then he would buy a big loaf, and notch the bread at
once into divisions, so much, or rather so little, for each dinner
and each breakfast, so as to prevent the possibility of his appetite,
and means of satisfying it, outrunning his purse. It often resulted
in a close race. Poverty and poor feeding, however, were fortunately
no new experiences to him. Still, poverty encountered all by himself
in a great city full of strangers, was a harder thing than poverty as
his kind loving mother had let him feel it. But he met it bravely and
uncomplainingly, and, best of all, with unfailing good humour. He never
took a kindness as his due, nor thought that his talents gave him a
right to claim toll from his richer brethren. ‘Because I want to drink
at the well,’ he would say, in his pretty poetic fashion, ‘am I to
expect every one to hurry to fill my cup from his pitcher? No; I must
draw the water for myself, or else I must go thirsty.’ And in this way
he preserved his self-respect, and those who had the great pleasure
of helping him, received, in the boy’s cheerful, grateful use of his
opportunities, quite as much benefit as they gave.
=4. Seed-time.=――He worked very hard, and the first thing he set
himself to thoroughly learn was the German language. Germany had shown
herself but a harsh stepmother to her adopted Jewish children; but he
wisely thought if the children would cease to whimper in exasperating
and half-understood dialect, if they would plead, or even on occasion
scold back again, in the same good guttural German as their neighbours
used, there was a better chance of their gaining for themselves a
respectful hearing. It was scarcely a safe branch of learning, for the
poor oppressed Jews of that period were so afraid of any encroachment
on their Judaism, that not only was the study of the Law their
favourite study, but any other was looked upon with jealous fear, and
even in some cases prohibited by authority. But Moses Mendelssohn had
no selfish object in his overmastering desire for knowledge. He meant
to be a good Jew and a good German citizen at one and the same time,
and to show his people how that could be done. The first writing work
he did was translating parts of the Bible and the Prayers into good
German. He might have made translations which would have found a ready
sale among scholars, but he chose to do unpaid work, which would at
best find but a very limited market, in order that his people might get
to know the language of the country in which they lived, through the
only books which there was any likelihood of their studying. He never
lost sight of the one set purpose of his life――to be a guide to the
perplexed, to help the people from darkness into light. There _is_ a
royal road to learning, and they are kings who tread it disinterestedly,
desiring to minister to the needs of their fellow-men. Some such kings
carry burdens, and some bear lamps, and most are unrecognised as they
trudge along, but nevertheless that road to learning is always _royal_.
Moses Mendelssohn, poor and deformed as he was, and hemmed in by
prejudice, found books to read and teachers to instruct him, and by
the time he was one-and-twenty, was not only a good Hebrew scholar,
which was a matter of course to a self-respecting Jew in those days,
but an excellent mathematician and a fair classic, with an accurate
and grammatical knowledge of the language and literature of his native
country, and a tolerable mastery of French and of English.
=5. Harvest.=――He had given lessons for some time in the family of a
Mr. Bernhardt, a prominent member of the Berlin synagogue, and in 1750
this gentleman proposed to the learned young man to become resident
tutor to his children. This Mr. Bernhardt was a kind man as well as
a rich and a cultured one, and as tutor in his house Mendelssohn found
both congenial occupation and welcome leisure. He was teacher by day,
student by night, and author at odd half-hours. At the end of three or
four years of this work, Mr. Bernhardt offered Mendelssohn the position
of bookkeeper in his silk manufactory, with some especial emoluments
and responsibilities attached to the office. It was a splendid opening,
and Mendelssohn gladly and gratefully accepted it. It gave him leisure
and independence, and in due time wealth, for as the years went on
he came to be a manager, and finally a partner in the house. He did
not sink into a mere business man, but the money gave him the means
wherewith to indulge his taste for books, to enjoy the society of
clever and cultivated people, and to send, too, many a welcome gift
to the old home in Dessau.
=6. Nathan der Weise.=――Mendelssohn’s tastes had very early drawn him
into the outer literary circle of Berlin, which at this time had its
head-quarters in a sort of club which met to play chess, and to discuss
politics and philosophy. His good manners soon overcame any lingering
social prejudices, and he was already quite a popular member, when
the poet Lessing, coming to Berlin in 1754, was welcomed to these
gatherings as an honoured guest. Very soon an intimacy grew up between
the author, whose reputation was already high, and the struggling
young Jewish student. The intimacy ripened into a lifelong friendship.
Lessing was on the road to become a great author, and Mendelssohn was
the first Jew he had ever known. The German author and the German Jew
grew very soon to be real friends, and by-and-by Lessing wrote a play,
which is now the most celebrated of his works. It is called ‘Nathan the
Wise.’ The hero, Nathan, is a Jew, and Mendelssohn was Lessing’s model
for Nathan. ‘Let me make a nation’s ballads, and I care not who makes
their laws,’ once said a keen statesman; and the ballads, and the plays,
and the literature of a country undoubtedly have an immense influence
on its people’s thought and action. A Jew of the Nathan der Weise
type was an altogether new experience for the Germans, and the ‘divine
lessons’[61] which the drama teaches had been hitherto undreamt of in
their philosophy. They put on their spectacles, as a matter of course,
to commentate and to criticise the text, but by-and-by they took them
off again, to study it in the original. Lessing had sketched his Jew
from the life, and there were quantities of such hitherto neglected
and misunderstood models on all sides about them. Other Lessings among
Christians began to look for, and to find, other Mendelssohns among
Jews.
=7. Literary Successes.=――And presently Mendelssohn grew famous.
He wrote a great deal, and Lessing was godfather to his first book;
and then they brought out together a little work called ‘Pope as a
Metaphysician.’ A year or two later, Mendelssohn gained the prize
which the Academy of Berlin offered for the best essay on the
problem ‘Are Metaphysics susceptible of Mathematical Demonstration?’
Kant, the great German philosopher, was one of the competitors whom
Mendelssohn distanced in this contest. Together with Lessing and one
or two other friends, he brought out for some years a serial called
‘Literatur-Briefe,’ a sort of literature, science, and art review. The
works, however, by which he is best known are his ‘Jerusalem’ and his
‘Phædon.’ ‘Jerusalem,’ published in 1783, is a sort of comprehensive
survey of Judaism in its religious and its national aspect. ‘Phædon,’
published in 1767, is an eloquent summary of all that religion and
reason and experience urge in support of our belief in the immortality
of the soul. In less than two years ‘Phædon’ ran through three
editions, and it was quickly translated into English, French, Dutch,
Italian, Danish, and Hebrew. He paraphrased the whole of the Pentateuch
into pure German, and made a metrical translation of the Psalms. He
translated, too, Manasseh ben Israel’s famous _Vindiciæ Judæorum_ into
German, and published it with a very eloquent preface in 1782. Another
literary enterprise, which brought him more notice than he cared for,
was a correspondence with a too zealous Swiss minister named Lavater,
who, with a keen eye to conversion, sought to draw Mendelssohn into
a public religious discussion on the relative merits of Judaism and
Christianity. Mendelssohn hated controversy, and, moreover, had a
sincere conviction that no cause, and certainly no religious cause,
is ever forwarded by it. ‘It is by character, and not by controversy,’
as he wrote, ‘that Jews can shame the bad opinion that may be held of
them.’ Nevertheless, when the choice, between standing to his colours
or sneaking behind them, was forced upon him, we may be sure that
he did not take refuge in any comfortable compromise. Like the three
who were not ‘careful’[62] of their answer, even under fear of the
fiery furnace, he too testified to the truth, and had no dread. The
correspondence ended with a sincere apology from Lavater, and an added
respect for Mendelssohn.
=8. His Home Life.=――At the age of thirty-three he had married. We
do not know much of his wife beyond the facts that she was young and
blue-eyed. The first few years of the marriage were very happy years,
spent in a small house in the outskirts of Berlin――for by this time
Mendelssohn’s friends had procured for him the privilege, not at that
time, nor for long after, generally accorded to Jews, of living in
whatever part of the city he liked. It was a modest little house, with
a garden. The ornaments were perhaps rather out of proportion in size
and number to the rest of the surroundings, but that was hardly the
fault of the newly married couple, since one of the smaller vexations
imposed on the Jews of that time was the obligation laid on every
Jewish bridegroom to treat himself to a large quantity of china for the
good of the king’s manufactory. It was, of course, a sort of extra tax
legally imposed upon Jews, but the most vexatious part of it was, that
neither the tastes of the purchaser nor his wants were ever considered.
He had to buy just what the manufactory wanted to sell. In this
instance twenty life-sized china apes fell to Mendelssohn’s lot. But
the ugly ornaments notwithstanding, Mendelssohn and his wife were very
happy. Happier perhaps as husband and wife than, when their children
grew up, as father and mother. Parenthood was a very hard task in
those days. It is never quite easy, but a century ago, when Jews could
not walk the streets without being insulted, when all gates save the
Jews’ gate were closed against them, it was terribly difficult to
bring up children to be good Jews and good citizens at the same time.
Mendelssohn did not altogether succeed with his children. ‘Who is best
taught?’ says the Talmud; and it answers, ‘He who has learned first
from his mother.’ Mendelssohn’s clever boys and girls never seem to
have had that teaching, and this may account in part for the mistakes
they made when they grew up. They became impatient of the obstacles
and the insults that beset the Jews’ path, and when their turn came
to marry and bring up children, they determined to save them all
such humiliating experiences by bringing them up as Christians. Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the great musician, was the grandson of Moses
Mendelssohn, but he was not a Jew.
=9. Last Years.=――In 1780 Lessing died, and a friendship of nearly
thirty years was thus dissolved. For Mendelssohn, the loss of his
friend was a terrible blow, but for the world the work of that
memorable friendship was accomplished. It had improved the position of
the Jews throughout Europe, for it had made Jew known to Christian, and
Christian known to Jew. The hero of Lessing’s play ‘Nathan the Wise’
had come in those thirty years to be a well-known and famous personage,
and he, Moses Mendelssohn, and not the shambling pedlar whom they
passed contemptuously in the street, was talked of now among cultivated
people as ‘a Jew.’ The individual Jew whom they happen to come across
is generally accepted by outsiders as a representative of his race, and
thus the work that Mendelssohn did by being scholarly and good-mannered
and straightforward was, perhaps, even more valuable to his people
than his literary services. Mendelssohn himself was an interpretation
of Judaism for Christians in as true a sense as his translation of
Pentateuch and Psalms was a revelation of their adopted country to the
Jews. His brave and sensible efforts for the study of secular subjects,
and for the speaking and the writing of pure German, did much to banish
the confusing, narrowing influence of a separate jargon among his
people, but certainly no less did his loyal, beautiful character go
far to silence that noisy, national expression of prejudice which, even
to these days, debases the German tongue, making it a dialect among
the languages of civilisation. Lessing’s love for his Jewish friend,
and the expression of that love in his drama, had smoothed the way
and hastened the work which Mendelssohn in his boyhood had longed to
accomplish. The work was done when Lessing died; and the remainder of
the way which he who was left had to tread alone was fortunately not
long. ‘Spend in all things else,’ says an American poet,[63]
‘But of old friends be most miserly.
Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring,
As to an oak; and precious more and more,
Without deservingness or help of ours,
They grow....
’Tis good to set them early, for our faith
Pines as we age; and after wrinkles come,
Few plant, but water dead ones with vain tears.’
To Mendelssohn this poetic truth was very apparent. He had been liberal
in intimacies, but ‘miserly’ in friendships, and now at fifty years old
he was bankrupt. Still, as befitted his steadfast Jewish nature, he did
not let his keen sorrow for his old comrade express itself in selfish
inaction. An opportunity soon presented itself for Mendelssohn to rouse
himself on his friend’s behalf. Germany, as its greatest poet[64] once
rather bitterly remarked, ‘needs time to be thankful.’ A year or two
after Lessing’s death was too early for any anniversary celebrations
of his genius, and some of his countrymen got up an agitation against
his memory instead. In articles many and bitter, the dead poet was
accused of want of principle and want of religion, and of a great many
other bad qualities, which were summarised as ‘covert Spinozism.’ It
was a fine phrase with which to cover up ignorant and jealous abuse.
Mendelssohn, with grief and indignation, tore off the disguise, and in
a brilliant pamphlet, full alike of pathos and of wit, he cleared the
reputation and defended the character of his dead friend. This was his
last literary work. It was his monument as well as Lessing’s. He took
the manuscript to his publisher on one of the last days of the year
1785, and in the first week of the new year 1786, then only fifty-six
years old, he quietly and painlessly died.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS.
(1780‒1880.)
=1. Light and Shadows.=――The influence of Mendelssohn did not die out
with his death. He had stirred the conscience of the Christians, he had
roused the consciousness of the Jews. Things could never again be quite
as they had been. But there was a danger in the difference, as there is
in all sudden and violent changes of feeling, even when the changes are
good and right. Cultivated Jews quickly became quite the fashion in the
literary circles of Berlin, and the reception-rooms of Mendelssohn’s
daughters, and of Henrietta Herz, the charming wife of a Dr. Marcus
Herz, and of several other pleasant, intelligent Jewish women were
thronged by the leading men of the day. Christians seemed to find a
certain delightful flavour, beyond the charm which is common to all
cultivated intercourse, in this new taste of what had been for so long
forbidden fruit. And almost as quickly, ambitious Jews and Jewesses
grew to be a little intoxicated with their success. Many restrictions,
both social and political, were still in force against the race, and
these people who were so well received amongst Christians thought that
they were liked and admired in spite of their Judaism, whereas they
owed to it those very qualities which gained for them this flattering
notice. One by one, slowly and shyly at first, they dropped Jewish
observances; then, more boldly, they dropped Jewish acquaintances;
and lastly, and quite in logical sequence, they dropped their Judaism
altogether. It was always, and in every case, from first to last, a
sacrifice to selfishness and self-interest. And perhaps the first proud
step of ‘hiding themselves from their own flesh’ in their fashionable
wrappings of superior cultivation, was quite as wicked as that last
distinctly separate step which many took of baptism. Mendelssohn’s
daughters were baptized, and his grandchildren; so was Heine the poet
in 1825, and Börne the patriot in 1818, and so were a host of minor
folks in the first forty years immediately succeeding Mendelssohn’s
death. These ‘conversions’ were the deep shadows thrown from the light
which Mendelssohn had lovingly and loyally let in upon his people. Yet,
nevertheless, the light was ‘good,’ and in time it lost its blinding,
dazzling quality. If a prism is put in the way of a ray of sunlight, we
get a view of the most beautiful colours, but the experiment needs nice
handling. If the prism be not of the right shape, and set at the right
angle, instead of added colours we get our ray of light obscured. Some
of the Jews of Germany managed with their pushing, self-adjusted prisms
to hinder the effects of Mendelssohn’s rays of light. When he himself
stood as a prism in the beams, we got _Nathan der Weise_ as a result.
=2. Leopold Zunz.=――Eight years after the death of Mendelssohn, in
the person of Leopold Zunz another good, steadfast Jew and great
scholar was born to Germany. Mendelssohn had done much to free his
people from fetters, both external and internal; from the outward
shackles of prejudice and oppression, and from the inward rust of
ignorance and superstition. Zunz carried on this work, and, perhaps, in
a safer, because in a more purely historic spirit. His aim was to build
up, rather than to cast down or cast aside, and to make an ideal for
Israel’s future out of the actual of Israel’s past. His knowledge of
the national literature was wide and profound, and his memory was as
remarkable as his scholarship. He began to write from a very early age,
and his celebrated monograph on Rashi[65] was published before he was
thirty years old. His most valuable work was an historical review of
Jewish ethics,[66] which gives the whole account of the development of
the spiritual life of Israel from Biblical days to the present time.
This book, which took nine years to write, shows forth the thought
and the feeling of a nation of ‘witnesses,’ collecting and presenting
their evidence of over a thousand years. Zunz wrote, too, standard
works on Jewish literature, under the titles ‘Contributions to History
and Literature’[67] (1845), ‘The Synagogue Poetry of the Middle Ages’
(1855), ‘The Rites of the Synagogue Service’ (1859), and ‘History of
the Literature of Synagogue Poetry’ (1865). In these works we find a
history of the sorrows of the Jewish race, and a delightful account
of the poets and the poetry of the Jews of the Middle Ages. Zunz’s
mind was as accurate and as full of facts as a dictionary, and yet
as charming and as full of fancies as a poem. He lived till this year
(1886), and up to the very last preserved his faculties, and added to
his friends. Throughout his long life Zunz was faithful to his nation,
to his religion, and to his national literature. His immense knowledge
of Judaism made him its enthusiastic admirer, and it is as well,
perhaps, for lesser scholars, who are greater critics, to recall this
fact. Zunz was a cultivated man as well as a theologian and a Talmudist.
He had received, and he was one of the first Jews in Germany who were
permitted to receive, a university education. And his attitude towards
the heroes of the past, at whose oddities it is so impertinently easy
to smile, was consistently reverent. Zunz felt――
‘If these had not walked
Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?’
=3. Progress of Events and of Legislation in Germany.=――The frequent
laxity of observance, and the occasional conversions among the higher
class of Jews, had the natural reactionary consequence among the lower
class. These became more rigidly, and even repellently, orthodox. The
temptations to cultivated society, which hardly assailed them, they
regarded with bitter hatred and contempt, and they clung to their own
distinctive ways and customs and modes of dress and speech, with a
fervour of anger as well as of religion. Thus it came to pass that the
main body of the Jews in Germany continued to be almost as little as
ever German citizens, and social prejudice against Jews remained at its
old high-water mark till Napoleon’s wonderful series of conquests, at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a change in the position.
In Westphalia, which was then created a kingdom, with Jerome Bonaparte
for its king, and in all the Rhenish provinces which were annexed
to France, the liberal _Code Napoléon_ took the place of that other
written and unwritten code in which Jews were pariahs, liable to be
condemned without evidence, and sentenced without appeal. Whether from
dynastic reasons, or as a matter of conscience, the Corsican conqueror
confirmed the doctrine of full and free emancipation which the
Revolution had introduced. All subjects of the French Empire were to be
legally looked upon simply as French citizens, and it was henceforward
no one’s business to inquire whether such subjects professed the Jewish
religion, or the Christian, or no religion at all. The humiliating
_Leibzoll_, or body tax, which in Russia had been discontinued since
1790, was now definitely and altogether abolished, and, equally with
Christians, office in the army and in all civil departments of the
state was thrown open to Jews. Only positions directly under Government
were still denied to them.
This happier condition of things, however, lasted but a very few
years. With Napoleon’s downfall in 1814 it was at an end, and in
the subsequent German reaction against French supremacy the Jews of
Germany fared worse than ever. The famous Treaty of Vienna (1815)
secured to Jews only such rights as they had possessed before the
French occupation. These ‘rights,’ as we know, were all wrongs, and
the different States were quick to reassert, and even to add to them.
Frankfort led the van. She shut them up again in their _Judengasse_,
and ingeniously imposed some extra restrictions, limiting, among other
matters, the number of marriages to be annually permitted. Other States
celebrated their emancipation from French rule in an equally liberal
and grateful spirit, reserving to their own co-religionists not only
every office in state, army, law, and university, but forbidding to
Jews even the use of Christian names. And then, from legislating,
German _savants_ took to the composing of abstruse little pamphlets
against the Jews; and, as befitted a nation who were developing into
philosophers, they persecuted them pedantically instead of religiously.
It came to much the same thing in results. In 1819 these attacks
from professional pens culminated in serious riots at Heidelberg and
Frankfort, and other towns, in all of which Jews were pillaged to the
once again revived cry of ‘_Hep, Hep_.’
Things did not improve during the thirty years that Count Metternich
was minister in Austria. But in 1848 the whirlwind of the Revolution
brought its breath of liberty to the Jews, and most of the German
states, in deference to the new strong tendency of public opinion,
at last admitted their Jews to the rank of citizens. In 1850,
Frederick William IV. of Prussia, brother of the present Emperor of
Germany, although opposed by his ministers, removed all municipal and
administrative disabilities from his Jewish subjects, and the new and
united Empire of Germany, which was settled in 1866, and consolidated
by the issue of the war in 1870, retains in its constitution no traces
of any separate and restrictive legislation concerning Jews. Social
prejudices, however, are tough, and often outlive legal disabilities.
Nations, like individuals, have a predisposition to some especial
ailments, and an old writer says that Germany is periodically subject
to the distemper of Judea-phobia. Some colour is given to this theory
by the dull persistency in persecution which that country has always
shown towards the race. It broke out yet once again in 1875, in
a sort of violent rash of anti-Semitic essays, a literature which
exhibited the fever in a very pronounced form, and which was treated,
unfortunately, homœopathically, by as thick a rash of replies. This
_Judenhetze_, however, died out by degrees, and in the enlightened
views of their Crown Prince and Princess the Jews of Germany look
confidently forward to a ‘fair field and no favour’ being by-and-by
accorded to them.
=4. Progress of Events and Legislation in France (1780‒1880).=――At
the time when Moses Mendelssohn’s efforts were producing a reform
in feeling and in conduct among and towards the Jews of Germany, the
Jews in France thought that his influence might be brought to bear
upon their rulers. The Jews in Alsace accordingly, who, numbering by
this date some 20,000, were the most numerous of the various French
communities, forwarded an appeal to Mendelssohn, setting forth their
wrongs and their hopes. In deference to this appeal a very famous
memoir in favour of Jewish claims to fair treatment came to be written
by a learned and enlightened Christian scholar named Dohm. Dohm was one
of Mendelssohn’s influential friends, and thought well of all Jews for
Mendelssohn’s sake. When the Jews of Alsace begged Mendelssohn to speak
up for them, he wisely thought that a Christian advocate might gain
more hearers than a Jewish one; and so, at his friend’s request, Dohm
wrote and published in 1781 a book on the Political Reform of the Jews,
which work had a great, though indirect, share in the bringing about
of better times. Another friend for the French Jews was found in Count
Mirabeau, who, before he came to be a power in the stirring events on
which the eighteenth century closed in France, was, with Dohm and other
noteworthy people, a frequent visitor in the salons of Henrietta Herz
and of Mendelssohn’s daughters at Berlin. The Abbé Grégoire was another
personage who, having had the opportunity of intimate intercourse with
Jews, used such knowledge to their benefit. Both Mirabeau and Grégoire
wrote and spoke frequently and earnestly on the subject of Jewish
emancipation, which was rapidly becoming one of the questions of the
day. Whether French Jews should be admitted to the rights of French
citizens, was over and over again debated in the French Assembly.
Many ignorant arguments were brought against it. One speaker urged
that Jews could not serve the state; that they could not be soldiers,
since their laws forbade them to fight on their Sabbath; nor artisans,
added another orator, nor agriculturists, for their holidays were
too numerous for continuous labour. Such speakers must have forgotten
all about the Land and the Book――all about the oliveyards and the
vineyards of Palestine, the ‘borders set with precious stones,’ and
the battlefields drenched with more precious blood. The discussion
went on. Their own friend Abbé Grégoire hurt their cause by remembering
something of all this past, and pleading for them as a ‘people.’
This roused the stupid folks. Could a ‘people,’ dispersed among other
‘peoples,’ be patriots? they asked. And when that was answered out
of history, and Jewish loyalty and law-abidingness taken as proved to
demonstration, then a new doubt was raised on the score of the alleged
money-lending proclivities of the race. Robespierre answered this. ‘The
vices of the Jews,’ said he, ‘are born of the abasement in which you
have plunged them. Raise their condition, and they will speedily rise
to it.’
After an immense amount of eloquence had been expended on the
question, the Assembly, on September 27, 1791, passed the vote for
the emancipation of the Jews, and mainly on the grounds that those
who fought against the measure were actually fighting the Constitution,
which proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, without reservation
or exception, to all subjects of the French republic. By this vote,
France gained for herself the distinction of being first among modern
nations to give not only tolerance, but liberty, in its full social,
legal, and political meaning, to her Jewish subjects. It remained
for Napoleon Bonaparte to complete the work. When that extraordinary
man came to be Emperor of France, he showed an extreme interest in
the history and the position of his Jewish subjects. He summoned an
assembly of representative Jews, composed of Rabbis, merchants, and
literary men, and calling it a Sanhedrin, he desired this assembly
to report on the present religious and political status of their
nation, and to define their duties towards God and their country. This
so-called Sanhedrin did its difficult work very well. Starting with
a quotation from one of the _Amoraim_,[68] that the law of the State
is a binding law on the Jews of that State, the Assembly showed, by
proof and by principle, that Judaism constrains Jews to be in every
sense true and worthy sons of the soil. Passing from declaration to
suggestion, the Assembly advised with great sagacity on many subjects,
on that especially of mixed marriages, on the practice of ‘usury,’ and
on the choice of trades and professions. Napoleon gave the sanction
of authority to much of this counsel, and altogether the deliberations
of this latter-day Sanhedrin greatly helped forward the progressive
movement which had set in. The wave of liberty, which swept over
France in such terribly tumultuous fashion at the end of the eighteenth
century, has known no ebb tide. The many and various forms of
government, which have changed much and effaced much since 1793 in the
fair and fickle land of France, have, to their honour, left religious
freedom at high-water mark. It has been well said that, from that date
to this, one cannot accurately speak of the ‘Jews of France,’ but only
of French citizens professing the Jewish religion.[69] Rabbis of the
Jewish Synagogue, since 1830, have been considered to hold the same
relation towards the state as curés of the Catholic church, receiving,
like them, their salaries from the Government. Not only in the army
and in the learned professions, but also in every class of society,
the Jews of France march, nowadays, shoulder to shoulder with their
fellow-countrymen. The war of 1870, which made Alsace and Lorraine
German, was a great blow to the loyal French-Jewish inhabitants of
these provinces, but the loss to France of her Alsatian Jews was
balanced by the gain of some 30,000 Algerian ones; for in 1870 the Jews
of Algiers became, in a body, naturalised Frenchmen, and are proving
themselves excellent and enlightened subjects of France.
=5. In Italy.=――In Italy, the Popes personally were, as a rule, mild
in their treatment of the Jewish race. At the coronation of each new
Pope the Jews of Rome had to offer the Holy Father a scroll of the Law,
which the Pontiff would take in his hand, and sadly remarking, ‘Your
Law is good, but you understand it not,’ would return to them, turning
his back on the deputation as he did so. This old custom, somewhat
humiliating in its form, and which can be traced back so far as the
twelfth century, remained in force until our own times, as if to remind
Jews that they were accounted heretics; but with this exception, and
with only a very occasional baptism effected by force or by stratagem,
there was little done to bring home the fact to them. In the Middle
Ages, as we have seen, the Popes had small need for robbing Jews in the
name of religion. They had all Christendom to draw on for revenue, and
when the period of paying for indulgences and dispensations had passed
away, the period of licensed plundering and proselytising was passing
too. And many of the later Popes were learned and enlightened men, who
were humane by nature as well as by habit. The downfall of Napoleon
caused, for a time, a cloud to spread over that dawn of wider liberty
which had broken with the Revolution. Once more, and until the year
1848, the Jews in the Papal dominions were shut up in their ghetto, and
in Rome, they were not altogether emancipated, till 1870. From 1848,
however, their position throughout Italy steadily, if somewhat slowly,
improved. Since 1859, the Jews in Tuscany and Lombardy have been
emancipated; since 1861, in Naples and Sicily; since 1866, in Venice;
and since 1870, in the capital. At the present time, in all the Italian
dominions, Jews are in possession of civil and religious rights.
=6. In Spain and Portugal.=――In 1821, Portugal opened her gates again
to her long-expelled Jews. At the consecration service of the first
reopened synagogue in Lisbon there was a curious sight. Members of
what had always been accounted Catholic families hurried up from the
interior of the country to take part in the ceremony. What could these
Catholics want in a Jewish place of worship? thought the authorities.
The mystery was soon explained. The strangers proved to be Marannos,
who, from generation to generation for 300 years, had worn a disguise,
and were now anxious to cast it off, and to take upon themselves once
again the ‘inheritance of Jacob.’ Spain held longer than Portugal to
the old bad policy, but in 1868 she, too, annulled the decree which
kept Jews from her shores.
=7. In Austrian Dominions.=――The _Leibzoll_ was abolished by
Joseph II. of Austria in 1783. Other reforms followed, and slowly, and
not without some occasional relapses into ancient barbaric ways, the
Jewish inhabitants of Austria, Hungary, and Galicia were enfranchised.
The capital of Austria was slowest at the good work, and in Vienna,
until quite recent times, many humiliating restrictions were in force.
The last legal disabilities which were in force in the Austrian Empire
were, however, removed in 1867, and in Brody, the capital of Galicia,
so numerous and so comfortable have the Jews become, that some of its
grateful residents call it the ‘Galician Jerusalem.’ The Hungarian
capital, Buda-Pesth, boasts an excellent Rabbinical college, and this
modern seat of Jewish learning may serve as evidence that the old
Jewish spirit, which ever sought cultivated expression directly the
barest chance of such expression was open to it, is as active in Europe
as it used to be in Babylon.
=8. In other European States.=――In the Netherlands, from the date
of the French Revolution (1793), the Jews were legally emancipated.
Practically, however, they had been free, and had enjoyed all the
advantages of emancipation, from the time when the Portuguese refugees
first found an asylum in Holland. Some of the chief men of the Dutch
Jewish communities were not entirely pleased with the decree which,
at the close of the eighteenth century, made Jews ‘citizens,’ and
substituted the authority of the ‘States-General’ for that of the
‘Mahamad.’[70] This and other causes led to a secession from the more
conservative members of the community, and to the establishment in 1796
of a separate synagogue in Amsterdam. The Jews of Holland continue to
maintain their respectable and respected position.
Belgium emancipated her Jews in 1830, Sweden in 1848, Denmark and
Greece in 1849. Switzerland delayed her claim to take rank among
enlightened nations till 1874; and Norway, up to the present day, still
only tolerates Jews, and very few are to be found in that country.
=9. In Russia and Poland.=――The two and a half million Jews who are
to be found at the present day in these wide and but semi-civilised
territories, are still unhappily circumstanced. The ignorance and
fanaticism of the native population, and the unintelligent policy
of the governing classes, combine to make the position of the Jews a
painful and a precarious one. Little progress has been made in the last
hundred years. Many of the ‘blunders worse than crimes’ of the Middle
Ages seem to lead a charmed life in Russia and in Russian Poland,
and to be proof against the educating and humanising influences of
these latter days. Jews are still confined to mean trades for their
sole occupation, and are separate in dress and in social usage from
their neighbours. Numberless legal restrictions are in force, which
practically shut out Russian and Polish Jews from any worthy ambition,
and condemn them to seek inglorious ends by sordid means. In spite,
however, of ‘ukase’ after ‘ukase’ conceived in this ‘Middle Age’ spirit,
the Jews are struggling upward in the old good fashion to the light,
and a society for the promotion of education, which, since 1870, has
been established at St. Petersburg, is helping them much in their
efforts to rise.
=10. In Danubian Provinces.=――At the beginning of this century the
persecutions in Russia caused a number of Jews to emigrate to those
States on the Danube which, by the treaty of Berlin in 1878, at which
Lord Beaconsfield presided, received a recognition of independence
from the European Powers. The emancipation of the Jewish inhabitants
of these provinces was a condition of the treaty, a condition which the
conduct of the refugees since their settlement has fully justified. The
Jewish immigrants rapidly multiplied, and their intelligence, industry,
sobriety, and loyalty bore down prejudice, and won them friends. Of
these Danubian states, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro have honestly
observed their part of the compact, but Roumania has distinguished
itself by its systematic disregard of it――an attitude the more
ignorantly ungrateful since, in the Roumanian war of independence,
the Jewish Roumanians were among the bravest and staunchest of the
soldiery.
=11. A Glance at the Rest of the Map.=――One can scarcely put one’s
finger on any part in which there are not some Jews. When, in 1868,
M. Joseph Halévy, at the request of the Alliance Israélite, travelled
for a year in Abyssinia, he came across some black men whom he believed
to be descendants of Jewish refugees from Egypt. This remnant of a
tribe is known by the name of Falashas, which in Abyssinian dialect
means exiles. M. Halévy made friendly advances, but the little black
crowd stood aloof from the white men, silent and suspicious as to their
motives in seeking them. ‘Accidentally,’ says M. Halévy, who tells the
story, ‘I mentioned the name of Jerusalem. As if by magic, the attitude
of the most incredulous was changed. “Oh! do you come from Jerusalem,
the blessed city? Have you beheld with your own eyes Mount Zion?” All
doubt was gone. They were never weary of asking these questions, and
I must confess,’ continues M. Halévy, ‘I was deeply touched at seeing
their black faces light up at the memory of our glorious history.’
Travellers, also, in remote mountain recesses of Asia Minor, in the
ancient cities of Hindostan, and in the vast empire of China, have come
across various small settlements bearing undeniable traces of a Jewish
origin, and keeping up, in a greater or lesser degree, the distinctive
rites and customs of Judaism.
In the new world of the colonies, and in the United States, the
numerous and prosperous Jewish communities, owing to their speaking
European languages, are of course more readily recognisable as Jews,
although, in America especially, the Judaism of these dispersed
and transplanted Jews is not always in a very much better state of
preservation than among the semi-savage sects of ancient civilisation.
Among some American congregations Judaism seems to be occasionally
rather a religion of sentiment and of complaisant remembrance, than of
active and steadfast observance.
In the eastern parts of the world less change is observable among
the Jewish inhabitants. Throughout the Ottoman Empire the Jews are not
ill-treated, and they keep to the old paths in the somewhat sluggish
fashion of Orientals. In Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan they are not
very prosperous nor very enlightened, but the efforts of the Alliance
Israélite and of the Anglo-Jewish Association in establishing schools
for secular study, and for the teaching of handicrafts, are gradually
leavening the mass. In Palestine the chief Jewish settlements are
at Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, and there are small agricultural
colonies at Jaffa and Safed. At Nablous there is a remnant of
Samaritans who, as in the old days, are quite distinct and aloof
from their Jewish half-brothers. At Jerusalem all sects and many
nationalities are represented. Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Karaites,
Russians and Poles, and Rabbis from all parts of the world, come to
weep and to pray, and to lay their bones among the ruins of the city
which was once the joy of the whole earth. In these days, the leaders
among us are wisely endeavouring to direct this beautiful religious and
historic enthusiasm into healthy and useful channels, and to impress
on these simple pious souls that labour is one form, and not the least
admirable form, of praise.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
TWO CENTURIES AND A QUARTER IN ENGLAND.
(1660‒1885.)
=1. First Fifty Years.=――Manasseh ben Israel’s petition for the
return of the Jews to England met, as we have seen, with no formally
favourable response; but nevertheless, from the date of his visit,
(1656), Jews began to settle in England, and no serious attempts were
ever made to dislodge them. In 1662 there was a well-attended little
synagogue in King Street, City; and by 1664 the small community had
grown sufficiently in numbers and in importance to draw up for itself
a regular constitution, and to appoint wardens and a treasurer to
administer the laws and the funds of the congregation. These laws, or
_Ascamoth_,[71] were written in Spanish, and it was not till 1819 that
they were rendered into English. The _Ascamoth_ settled the service
of the synagogue in its spiritual and financial aspects, provided for
the raising of the necessary funds, and, under penalty of _Cherem_, or
excommunication, dictated most stringent rules of conduct. A standard
of honour as well as of honesty was set up in the congregation, and
it was distinctly and authoritatively announced that any member who
dropped below this fixed high level, depending on his community to
be raised again, would be disappointed. ‘No time and no money’ would
be expended on the defence of such culprits; they must expect the
law of the country to take its course, and to be ‘chastised according
to their crimes.’ The _Mahamad_, or council of the congregation, was
endowed with almost despotic powers over it. It could equally interdict
a marriage, or interfere in a betting transaction, or prohibit the
publishing of a book.[72] At first reading, some of the _Ascamoth_ may
seem arbitrary, and at first sight some of the actions of the _Mahamad_
may appear tyrannical, but the circumstances must be remembered. These
early settlers in England dwelt ‘in the midst of alarms,’ they were
tolerated, not welcomed, and in their precarious position it would not
have been wise for frequent appeal to have been made to the law of the
country, in cases of dispute or of wrong-doing among themselves. The
_Mahamad_ had practically no means of punishment for erring members
but moral law and communal opinion. It certainly brought these down, on
occasion, rather heavily, and dealt out excommunication and money fines
in cases which would, in these days, be adequately met by argument, or
even by a gentle policy of letting alone. Such stringent regulations,
however, kept up a high, if somewhat narrow, tone in the community, and
the general morality of these early Jewish residents left nothing to be
desired. Moreover, this heedfulness concerning the things they were not
to do, made them by no means neglectful of the things they were to do;
and schools, and a society for visiting and relieving the poor and sick,
were set on foot by Ben Israel’s countrymen before they had been ten
years in England.
The Restoration made no change in the position of the new-comers.
The Stuarts, in their light-hearted fashion, took the Jews lightly,
and their courtiers seemed to find in the Jewish synagogue a novel
and rather amusing sort of entertainment. In ‘Pepys’ Diary,’ under
date October 14, 1663, there is a full account of a visit paid by
Charles II. and some friends, during the Tabernacle holydays, to the
little place of worship in King Street. The fashionable visitors, by
degrees, became an interruption both to worship and to decorum, and a
law, in 1665, had to be added to the _Ascamoth_, to the effect that,
however flattered members of the congregation might feel at this
interest shown in them, they were to give their feelings no outward
expression during service by moving from their seats to greet their
visitors. In 1673 there was an attempt made to take from the Jews
the right of public worship. Strong in their confidence in King
Charles’ good nature, and in his freedom from religious prejudices, the
community petitioned him on the subject, and an order in council set
things right at once. It is possible that Queen Catherine’s influence
may have had something to do with this fortunate result. On impersonal
matters, and on subjects which did not affect his own pleasures, it
is not unlikely that the king was ready to gratify the wishes of his
much-enduring consort; and it is certain that Catherine employed and
much valued a Jewish physician, one Antonio de Mendes, who took an
interest in the affairs of his co-religionists. James II. was also
amiably disposed towards the Jews, and during his reign the alien
duties, which required a certain sum to be paid by every ‘alien,’ both
on merchandise and on personal property, were remitted. The concession,
however, aroused great opposition among the English traders, and
William III., though not personally ill-disposed to the Jews, and with
all his Holland memories to guide him as to the wisdom of treating them
generously, had to yield to the pressure put upon him, and to see this
heavy tax re-imposed on Jewish enterprise.
=2. Influx of Germans and Poles: how received.=――The tolerably secure
position to which the Spanish-descended Jews from Holland attained
in England tempted, in a short time, less happily placed Jews to join
them. The new immigrants, who were mostly persecuted Ashkenazim from
Germany and Poland, received but the coldest of welcomes from the
Sephardic community, and so little was their fellowship desired, that
by the end of the seventeenth century especial restrictive legislation
was added to the _Ascamoth_ of the congregation on the subject. It was
enacted that no ‘Tedescos’ (Germans or Poles) should vote at meetings
or receive religious honours; that they should not be allowed to
intermarry with the Sephardim,[73] nor to hold any higher office in
their synagogue than that of beadle. In fact, socially and religiously,
the Spanish and Portuguese Jews ‘boycotted’ their German brethren.
Undoubtedly the Ashkenazim were of an altogether lower class than
these others――less refined, less cultivated, and less well off, and
the Sephardim, in thus holding themselves aloof, probably considered
that they were taking the safest course for their own reputation. By
this time (1702) the Spanish and Portuguese congregation had erected
and consecrated a beautiful synagogue in Bevis Marks, to which building
Queen Anne had contributed a beam.[74] The community had imported from
Italy an eminent scholar as chief Rabbi (חָכָם), and their schools and
institutions were liberally supported and wisely administered. The
Ashkenazim would willingly have joined in all these good works, but,
baffled in their hopes of union, they more or less good-temperedly
accepted the situation, and built synagogues, and founded schools
and institutions of their own. They increased rapidly in numbers,
and gradually spread over the United Kingdom, establishing small
congregations in most of the principal towns. Time has now so
readjusted things that, in these days, the German-descended Jews of
England rival in wealth and in culture, and in numbers far exceed,
those who claim ancestry from among the Sephardim. Intermarriage
between Sephardim and Ashkenazim is a frequent and welcome occurrence,
and all the old feelings of separateness have disappeared with the
causes for it.
=3. Converts.=――In all communities there are individuals who, besides
an aptitude for coming to the front, have a very strong liking for
that position. They like their voices to be loudly heard, their talents
to be widely seen, their wealth to bring them its full social benefit
and recognition. For Jews with such tendencies, the conditions of
Jewish life for near upon fifteen hundred years had been hard, and the
temptation to throw off the cruel, crippling restraints, and to let
their light shine out before men, was strong. Some found the temptation
impossible to resist, and through the gate of baptism such men and
women passed, to gain the open vantage-ground for which they longed.
There were many so-called converts to Christianity among the Jews
of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perjurers for
position would be perhaps a more accurate if a harsher phrase by which
to describe them, for there was very little of religious motive, or
even of pretence of it, about these ‘conversions.’ Those who deserted
Judaism did so from their keen desire of a career of social and
political equality with their Christian countrymen. To this end they
took the easiest and quickest road. They would not patiently work,
and wait to be emancipated; it was so much simpler to walk into church
and be married, or ‘converted.’ And so they left their posts, these
deserters, but Judaism survived their loss, and perhaps was all the
stronger and purer for the definite defection of such weak and selfish
adherents. It is curious to note how insincere were these ‘converts.’
Sampson Abudiente, who in 1754 changed his name and his religion, may
serve as a typical instance. Sampson Abudiente was a very rich man, and
his special temptation was to possess a landed estate, which, as a Jew,
was in those days impossible. By a special Act of Parliament, obtained
through the influence of Sir Robert Walpole, Sampson Gideon, late
Abudiente, gained his desire, and to ensure this estate passing to
his children, he brought them all up as Christians. His son, under
the title of Lord Eardley, subsequently became a member of the Irish
peerage. Sampson Gideon lived in great state at Belvedere House, Erith,
entertained ‘nobility and gentry,’ cut all connection with his people,
and died in 1763, to all outward seeming, a good Christian _parvenu_.
Then came the reading of the will. In it 1,000l. was left to the
Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, on the condition, and with the
earnest request, that the testator might be buried in the בֵּית חַיִּים at
Mile End, and that his name might be included in the loving mention of
our dead which is made in Jewish synagogues on the Day of Atonement and
other holy days. It was further found that ever since his conversion,
Sampson Gideon had anonymously kept up all his payments as a member of
the congregation, and thus there was no ground for refusing the dead
man’s request.
Some twenty years after this incident the process of conversion was,
in a remarkable instance, reversed, and Lord George Gordon, a member of
a distinguished ducal house, became a Jew. In the earlier part of his
career, Lord George had been an enthusiastic, almost fanatic upholder
of the State religion, and had incited, if not actually led, the ‘No
Popery’ riots of 1780. Quite as vehemently, a year or two later he
took up the Jewish cause, and gave a proof of the strength of his new
opinions by entering into the covenant of Abraham. He became one of the
most observant of Jews; he studied the language, he kept the dietary
laws, and followed even Rabbinical regulations. The conversion, however,
was received with little welcome or favour by the Jewish community. The
sincerity of the convert was not questioned, but his sanity, perhaps,
was suspected. Throughout the subsequent short and stormy experiences
of Lord George, the Jews, as a body, maintained an attitude which was
entirely consistent with their own self-respect; they acted as if they
considered a man’s religious opinions were a matter that concerned only
himself, and were not a subject to make a fuss over; nor would they for
a moment permit the rank of the convert to make any difference in their
sensible view of his actions. Lord George Gordon died in 1793, and his
wish to be buried among Jews was not acceded to by the authorities of
the Synagogue.
=4. Progress of Anglo-Jewish Legislation.=――In 1723 an Act was passed
through Parliament which permitted Jewish evidence to be received
in all courts of justice, unprefaced by the words ‘On the true faith
of a Christian.’ This was a small but important start on the path of
tolerance, that path which was to ‘slowly broaden down from precedent
to precedent,’ till English law and English custom gave full rights of
all kinds to English Jews. Another step on the right road was made in
1740, when another Act of Parliament granted to foreign Jews, who had
for two years served in a British man-of-war, the right of becoming
naturalised British subjects.
The attempt of the Stuarts, in 1745, to regain the throne which they
had dishonoured, gave the Jews of England an opportunity of showing
their capacity for loyalty and patriotism. They helped as soldiers,
and they helped as financiers in the defence of the country and the
dynasty. Great numbers of Jews enrolled themselves in the hastily
raised militia, whilst the older and richer merchants subscribed
largely, and on far from profitable terms, towards a loan for the
Government. Others, again, formed themselves into an association which
agreed to take paper instead of specie in payment so long as money
continued scarce in the country, and two Jews, in particular, placed
vessels, which they had fitted out at their own cost, at the disposal
of the Government. The good feeling which this ready patriotism on the
part of the Jews evoked, showed itself in 1753 in a hearty attempt on
the part of the ministry to pass through Parliament a bill permitting
Jews, who had lived in England three years, to become naturalised
Englishmen. The matter was very hotly discussed, and gave rise to a
great expenditure both of literature and of eloquence. In Ireland,
which at that date had a Parliament of its own, the Naturalisation Act,
as it was called, had twice passed the Irish Commons, in March 1746,
and in December 1747. But this partial victory proved almost worse
than a defeat, for it attracted so much attention, and provoked so much
opposition, and directly the Bill reached the Upper House, it was, on
both occasions, violently thrown out. At Westminster, however, in 1753,
after a struggle, the Naturalisation Bill passed the House of Lords and
became law; but so strong was the feeling against it, that in the very
next session (1754) it was repealed by 150 votes to 60. Even something
in the way of a reaction of injustice would seem to have set in, for
when, a year or two later, a certain Elias de Pass bequeathed 1,200l.
for the purpose of erecting a Jewish college, we find the courts of the
day deciding, and the Government upholding their decision, that such a
bequest was illegal, as tending to perpetuate superstitious practices;
finally the money was taken and passed on to the treasurer of the
Foundling Hospital, to be applied to the support of a chaplain to
preach Christianity to the inmates.
For a while the efforts of the English Jews to obtain general rights
of citizenship were abandoned, and their energy was steadily and
steadfastly limited to the righting of one wrong in especial. The
marriage law of England, which counted no marriage legal unless
performed by a Christian priest, pressed very hardly on the Jews. It
put difficulties not only in the way of happiness, but also of property,
and made both insecure. Years, however, and patience and perseverance
were needed to get this seemingly simple matter set right, and it was
not till the reign of William IV. (1830) that an Act was passed which
made properly solemnised Jewish marriages in all respects equal, in the
eyes of the law, with properly solemnised Christian ones.
=5. Communal Progress.=――Meanwhile, by marriage or by conversion, or
by simple aloofness and indifference, some of the more weak and the
more selfish members of the community every now and then slipped from
under the many burdens which their Judaism imposed upon them. The brave
majority straightway took up the neglected duties of these occasional
deserters, and did a double portion of communal work and communal
charity. Their synagogues and their institutions supplied to them their
only possibilities of distinction. Possibly an honourable ambition to
be ‘known in the gates’ may have combined with religious zeal to make
office in the synagogue eagerly sought after. There were, at any rate,
good men in plenty who, unlike Sampson Gideon, were content to use
their brains and their wealth, not as stepping-stones for themselves,
but as scaffolding for the community――men who carried out in the
practical, everyday actions of their life the words לֹא לָנוּ יְיָ לֹא
לָנוּ כִּי לְשִׁמְךָ תֵּן כָּבוֹד. And as Sampson Gideon served as an instance of the
one sort, so Benjamin Mendes da Costa, a man who lived as befitted his
wealth, and yet spent 3,000l. a year on ‘the poor of all creeds,’ and who
was generally known as ‘the truly good Jew,’ may be taken as an example of
the other. Da Costa died in 1764. Meanwhile, the synagogues and schools
and institutions, both of the Sephardim and Ashkenazim, continued to
flourish, and every now and again new ones were founded. The present
Portuguese Board of Deputies, instituted to look after Jewish interests
generally, held its first meeting and presented its first address,
which was one of congratulation to George III. on his accession, at
the close of the year 1760. In this proceeding the German congregations
united, and from that date forward the two sections of Jews in England,
the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, drew constantly closer to each other
in every kindly feeling, and in all good works. The bond of brotherhood
between European Jews was further cemented and extended by reason of
the active correspondence which was maintained between the Jews of
London and the older established committees on the Continent, and this
intercourse was good not only for the religious, but for the commercial,
interests of the various congregations.
As the eighteenth century drew to its close, echoes from the thunders
of the French Revolution (1789) were borne to English shores, and the
pitiful, passionate cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity, which,
after all, was but a stammering version of ‘Love thy neighbour as
thyself,’ seemed in the air; but yet, and for a long while, in the
air only. The conscience of men was stirred, yet still, for many years
to come, the Jews of England were regarded not as neighbours, but
as ‘aliens.’ It is written that ‘it is good that a man should both
hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.’ The long hoping
without fuss, the long waiting without anger, of those days were good
for the English Jews; and their quiet steadfastness, no less than their
active work, had a share in bringing about the happy state of things
that was, though so slowly, coming to them.
=6. The Nineteenth Century.=――The years went on, and the nineteenth
century opened on a numerous community of Jews in England, who were
loyally fulfilling all the duties of Englishmen, and who were still
denied most of the privileges and many of the rights of English
subjects. When Benjamin d’Israeli was born, in 1804, trade was fettered
by restrictions, professions were handicapped, university education
was barred, and any municipal or state service was impossible to
Jews. Prejudice certainly was dying down, and this was due, in some
respects, to Jewish conduct, and in some respects, it may be gratefully
acknowledged, to Christian effort. Novelists and dramatists often
can preach to wider audiences than priests, and a certain Richard
Cumberland, in 1794, by a kindly conceived and well-written play called
‘The Jew,’ did what he could to make Jews better known and better
appreciated. His play became fashionable, and thus Richard Cumberland,
in his degree, helped, like Lessing, in good work. But the work was of
terribly slow accomplishment, and clever Jews and ambitions Jews grew
often impatient, and now and again steadfast and observant Jews grew
unwise in their zeal. Those who were in authority saw so plainly the
temptations to apostasy, that their very keenness of vision was a
danger. They drove too straight, and held the reins too tight, for
waverers on the road. ‘For us or for our enemies?’ the Synagogue seemed
to ask. It listened to no compromise. ‘Belong to us altogether, or
leave us altogether,’ was its way of meeting half-hearted adherents.
It was an attitude which admits of defence, and even excites admiration,
but it was one, nevertheless, which lost many a member to the fold,
among the rest the family of D’Israeli. The future Lord Beaconsfield
was a boy of nine years old when (in 1812) his father, Isaac d’Israeli,
then leading the life of a scholarly recluse, was fined 40l. for
refusing to accept the office of warden in the Spanish and Portuguese
synagogue. Much correspondence ensued, Isaac d’Israeli eloquently
pointing out that he was by habit and by inclination unfit to hold
office, and the authorities stubbornly insisting that each son of
Israel should take his share of communal burdens, or, failing this,
should pay without protest the money penalty which such refinements of
disability, by the laws of the Synagogue, entailed. It ended, in 1817,
by Isaac d’Israeli formally withdrawing from the Synagogue. His four
sons and his one daughter were subsequently baptized.
More and more the disastrous effects of being thus shut out, by reason
of their religious opinions, from use and name and fame impressed
itself on the Jews. The time seemed ripe for active and sustained
effort, and thoughtful and enlightened men in the community, Isaac
Lyon Goldsmid foremost among them, began to work in earnest for the
boundaries to be enlarged. Their energies were directed to the entire
removal by Parliament of all remaining civil and religious disabilities,
to the end that Jews might take their rightful place among their
fellow-citizens in every department of the State. From the year 1833
onwards, a bill for the removal of Jewish disabilities was passed by
the House of Commons, and each time by an increasing majority. Ten
times was it sent up to the Lords, and ten times was it rejected by
the Upper House. Year by year, however, the opposition declined, and
Macaulay, in a very famous speech, demolished all the arguments that
could be brought against it. In 1847, Baron Lionel de Rothschild was
elected a member of Parliament for the City of London. For two years
he did not attempt to take the oath nor his seat, but in 1850 he
was admitted to be sworn on the Old Testament, and took the oath of
allegiance, omitting the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian.’ The
House counted this a disqualification, and ruled that the Baron could
not sit nor vote. Sir David Salomons, when elected for Greenwich in
1851, disregarded this ruling of the House. He took the oath in the
same form as Baron Rothschild had done, but sat and voted, incurring
the legal penalty of a 500l. fine each time he did so. This of course
brought things to a crisis, and a long struggle ensued. In 1858
the Commons (by 297 votes to 144) passed Lord John Russell’s Bill,
which permitted Jews to omit the words which were to them unmeaning,
unnecessary, and untrue. In the Lords the second reading of the Bill
was rejected by 119 to 80. The dead-lock was averted by a suggestion
that the House should be competent on occasion, by special resolution,
to modify the form of oath. This was agreed to, and on July 26, 1858,
Baron Lionel de Rothschild, by special resolution of the House, took
the oath of allegiance, with the distinctively Christian words omitted.
In 1860 this concession was made a standing order of the House, and
finally, in 1866, the Parliamentary Oaths Amendment Act was passed, an
Act which removed the obnoxious words altogether. Since that date there
has been but one form of oath for the two Houses, and Sir Nathaniel de
Rothschild, on becoming our first English Jewish peer in 1885, had no
trouble nor hesitation about taking his seat and vowing his allegiance
in the Lords.
=7. A Slander revived and slain.=――In 1840 an anonymous writer in the
‘Times’ created a most painful sensation by gravely asserting that an
accusation just then raised against some Jews of Damascus, of having
killed Christian children and used their blood for Passover biscuits,
was very likely to be true, since such rites were formulated in the
Rabbinical writings of the Jews, and frequently practised in Jewish
communities. An assertion so positively and authoritatively made, in a
paper like the ‘Times,’ was a most serious matter for the Jews. Denial,
of course, was easy, but something more than the scores of indignant
letters which were despatched to the ‘Times’ was needed to disperse the
readily aroused prejudice of ignorant folks, and to dispose once and
for ever of this lying accusation. The necessary champion of the truth
was found in Professor Theodores of Manchester. In a most remarkably
able and scholarly letter,[75] which occupied two and a half columns of
the ‘Times,’ the matter was exhaustively treated, and so entirely and
successfully was the blood accusation disproved, that no echo of that
wicked calumny has been heard in England from that day to this.
=8. The Man of the Nineteenth Century.=――In English courts of law,
the issue of a case depends less on its advocates than on its merits,
and, in the long run, the like is true of the cases that come before
the wider courts of public opinion. The emancipation of the Jews in
England was greatly helped by the character of the Jews in England, and,
despite the many restrictions which were still in force, the nineteenth
century produced some noteworthy figures among them. Of the men who,
by conduct and by effort, by using their riches or their talents as a
trust rather than as a possession, helped to make the Jews respected
and worthy of respect, the names of the Goldsmids, father and son, of
many of the Rothschild family, of Sir David Salomons, and of Dr. Joshua
van Oven, will be gratefully recalled. Among women writers of a
wholesome and unsensational sort, Grace Aguilar (1800‒1844) takes her
graceful and honoured place; and Arthur Lumley Davids (1811‒1832) and
Emanuel Deutsch (died 1867) have each a niche among the scholars of the
time. There are other names, both of workers and of scholars, some too
valuable, some too recently lost, to be less than familiar. Numa Hartog,
and Leonard Montefiore, and Edward Emanuel call on our hearts as well
as our intellects for remembrance; but these, and such as these, may
well be left.
In the goodly procession of nineteenth-century English Jews, the
foremost figure is undoubtedly that of Sir Moses Montefiore (1784‒1884).
Both in his private character and in his public life, Sir Moses was a
realisation of the Laureate’s ideal knight,――
‘Whose glory was redressing human wrong;
Who spoke no slander, no, nor listened to it;
Who loved one only, and who clave to her.’
Born in 1784, and living to receive congratulations on his hundredth
birthday, Moses Montefiore’s long life covers a century of wonderful
progress in the position of his race, a progress to which his conduct,
and his presence, and his efforts very largely contributed. His
circumstances permitted him to be widely and wisely generous, and
whenever and wherever help was wanted for a good cause, or a blow
was needed to be dealt at a bad one, Sir Moses was to the fore. His
courtesy acted as a charm alike on princes and on beggars. To his
far-reaching philanthropy Damascus did not seem distant, nor Russia
nor Roumania remote; and Syrian Christians, when oppressed, gained his
sympathy as readily and as heartily as Jews and Christians nearer home.
But because his people, and especially those of them under foreign rule,
needed more of his advocacy and of his help, it was to them he gave
most. Seven times he journeyed to the Holy Land, trying what heart and
purse could do against the rooted forces of poverty and neglect. His
first pilgrimage to the city ‘sitting desolate’ was made with his wife,
when he was forty-three, and his latest, as a faithful widower, when
he was ninety-one. The biography of Sir Moses Montefiore[76] makes good
reading for the boys and girls of his race, who may gather from it that
Jewish heroes of the old single-minded and enthusiastic type are by no
means an extinct product of this prosaic age.
=9. Conclusion.=――And here, with this brief record of Sir Moses
Montefiore, these ‘Outlines of Jewish History’ may well end. But the
‘Heroic History,’ as Manasseh ben Israel called it, the miserable
glorious record of the ages, is itself, 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. ‘_For
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.
And on the Jews, and even more perhaps on the Jewesses, of the present
it depends whether the men and women of our race in the future shall be
worthy of these of the past, of these kindred of ours who loved their
faith in the days when ‘love was grief, and love besides.’
INDEX.
Abarbanel,
Don Isaac, 149, 241
Ephraim, 253
Abd-el-mumen, 138
Abd-er-rahman III., 134
Abed-nego, 60
Abraham ibn Ezra, 184, 194, 195, 202
Abudiente, 321
Abyssinia, 112, 313
Actium, 41
Ælia Capitolina, 85
Africa, 73, 221, 308
Agobard, 129
Agrippa, Herod, 54, 55, 56
Agrippa II., 57, 58
Aguilar, Grace, 330
Akiba, 81, 84
Alcharisi, Judah, 132
Alexander,
the Great, 11, 12
Balas, 23
Jannæus, 32
son of Aristobulus, 37
III., Pope, 160
Alexandra, Salome, 33
Alexandria, Jews in, 12, 52
Alfadhel, 207
Alfonso
VI., 137, 195, 198
VIII., 139
X., the Wise, 140
Alfred, 166
Algeria, 308
Alkabez, Sol., 273
Alkimos, 21
Alliance, Israelite, 314
Almamun, 128
Almohades, 138, 139, 205
Alsace, Jews in, 279, 304
Amoraim, 8
Amsterdam, 233
Anan, 121, 188
Ananias, 66
Anglo-Jewish Association, 314
Anne, Queen, 319
Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, 37, 39
Antioch, Jews in, 52
Antiochus
III., 14
IV., 16, 21
Sidetes, 24
Antipas, Herod, 55
Antipater,
the Idumean, 33, 38
son of Herod, 43
Antonio de Mendes, 318
Antony, Mark, 37
Apocrypha, 12, 13
Apollonius, 19
‘Apology for the honourable nation,’ &c., 249
Arabia, Jews in, 113
Aramaic, 12
Archelaus, 47, 48
Archipelago, 100
Aristobulus
II., 33, 37
brother of Mariamne, 40, 41
Arragon, 137
Artaxerxes, 7
Ascamoth, 315
Ascarelli, Deborah, 276
Ashi, Rabbi, 93
Ashkenazim, 116, 234
Asmoneans, 8
Asturias, 137
Auerbach, B., 264
Augustus, 43
Austria, 310
Auto-da-fé, 147
Avicebron, 191
Azariah de Rossi, 273
Babylon,
Jews in, 1, 6, 78, 97, 109
schools, 79, 109
Badge, worn by Jews, 173, 176
Bagdad, Kaliphs of, 124, 128
Bamberger, 288
Barcelona, massacre in, 144
Barcochba, 81
Barlæus, Caspar, 243
Beaconsfield, 328
Belgium, 311
Benedict
XIII., 145
of York, 169
Benjamin of Tudela, 161, 196
Berenice, 58, 72
Berlin, treaty of, 312
Bernal, Jac. Israel, 318
Bernard, St., 160
Bernhardt, Isaac, 290
Bertrand du Guesclin, 142
Bevis Marks Synagogue, 319
Bill for the removal of Jewish disabilities, 328 _sq._
Bishop of
Spires, 160
Cologne, 160
Bither, 81
Black pestilence, 163, 221
Board of Deputies, 325
Boerne, 299
Bohemia, 281
Bomberg, Daniel, 269
Bonaparte, Jerome, 302
Bordeaux, Marannos in, 279
Bristol, 172
Bulan, 113, 201
Burying-place in London, 166, 321
Byzantine emperors, 99, 110
Cadiz, 148
Cæsar, Julius, 37, 38
Cæsarea, 48
Cairo,
Kaliphate of, 128
school at, 134
Calendar, fixed, 96
Caligula, 55, 56, 57
Caorsini, 174
Carlovingian dynasty, 128
Caro, Joseph, 272
Carlyle, 251
Casimir, the Great, 277
Cassius, 37
Castile, Jews in, 137
Catherine, Queen, 317
Ceba, 275
Censorship, 270
Central Europe, 152
Cestius Gallus, 58
Charlemagne, 124
Charles,
the Bald, 151, 161, 193
VI., 164
I., of England, 245, 249
II., 317
Chasidim, 18, 19
Chaucer, 168
Chazan, 185
Cherem, 315
Child-killing charge, 167, 330
Chilperic, 100
Choice of Pearls, 192
Chosroes
I., 110
II., 112, 119
Christianity, 53
state-religion, 94
Christians, 53
Jewish, 75
New, 147
Christina of Sweden, 243
Chronicles, Saxon, 127, 165
Church,
on Temple-mount, 96, 110
councils, 107, 108
Claudius, 57
Cleopatra, 41
Clotaire, 119
Code Napoléon, 302
Cohen,
Lipman, 275
Isaac, 275
Coin-clipping charge, 178
Colerus, 265
Colleges, _see_ Schools
Cologne, 158
Commentary on the Mishnah by Maimonides, 206
Conciliator, 241
Constantine, 95, 96
Constantinople, 99
Constantius, 96
Conversions to Christianity, 299, 320
Copernicus, 274
Copia Sullam, Sarah, 275
Cordova,
Kaliphate of, 128
Jews in, 205
schools in, 132
Cossacks, massacre of Jews by, 278
Costa, Benj. Mendes da, 325
Crimea, 123
Cromwell, Oliver, 245
Crusades, 157
Cumberland, Richard, 327
Cuthea, 5
Cyrus, 2
Dagobert, 119
Daniel, 1
Danubian Provinces, 312
Darius, 6
David ben Maimon, 205
David ben Saccai, 189
Davids, Arthur Lumley, 330
Davis, Isr., 332
Deborah Ascarelli, 276
Demetrius, 23
Denmark, 311
Dessau, 284
Deutsch, Emanuel, 330
Dohm, 305
Dominicans, 267
Drusus, 55