_President of Clark University_
[Illustration: _G. STANLEY HALL (born in Ashfield, Mass., in 1846),
President of Clark University, is a leading authority on education and
psychology, and author of a number of important books, notably
"Adolescence" (2 vols. 1904). The present address, delivered at a
recent dinner of the Clark Menorah Society, has been revised by Dr.
Hall for publication in The Menorah Journal._]
I feel an unwonted embarrassment in speaking to you to-night, first
because the light After-Dinner View of Life, which is my theme on your
program, is far from being serious enough, and I must totally abandon
my plan and speak entirely extemporaneously, although upon a subject
in which I have an old and strong interest.
Again, I am always embarrassed in talking to members of your race
because I feel a little as Napoleon did when he told his soldiers in
Egypt that forty generations looked down on them from the top of the
Pyramids. You know your ancestry in general back for thousands of
years, and I am rarely fortunate in being able to go back as much as
nine or ten generations to the Puritans of the "Mayflower," but there
I stop and everything before that is a blank. David Starr Jordan tells
us in his book that there is perhaps no man alive who has not kings or
queens in his ancestry, but adds that we all have had murderers among
our predecessors, too.
_There Is Much In Common Between Yankee and Jew_
There is much in common between the Yankees, whom I represent, and the
Jews, and this alone ought to give us a friendly feeling toward one
another. We are both misunderstood and caricatured. The Yankee stands
for a peculiar sort of closeness in money matters and a shrewdness
which has even given its slang name to a neighboring New England
State, the "Nutmeg State." Perhaps we have both done too much in the
past to deserve this reputation for super-cleverness. One of you has
referred to the fact that there are Jews who do not like to
acknowledge their race. In that respect we are alike, for there are
many Yankees who are ashamed of being known as such. Long years ago,
when I was a student in Germany, I was introduced one evening to a
young German countess. She said in her broken English, "I am so glad
to meet an American. I have heard you have many funny people there,
the Dago, the Paddy, the Nigger, and many more; but I have heard that
the lowest people there are what they call the 'damn Yankees.' How I
would like to see one of them!" This, bear in mind, was soon after our
Civil War, and she received her impression of us doubtless from
Confederates. I did not have the courage to acknowledge my nationality
to her, but diverted the topic to some of the other people she had
mentioned.
The old New England Puritan taught sternly. He was a patriarchal head
of his family. In my boyhood, Saturday evening or perhaps better
Thanksgiving Day, when their descendants all gathered together as long
as either of the grandparents lived, we had an illustration of
something very like Heine's touching picture of an old Jewish peddler
who worked hard through the week, but on Friday night put on his long
black coat and his three-cornered hat, lit the seven candles at the
table, and told his children and grandchildren how Jehovah had led His
people through the wilderness, and how the Egyptians and all the other
naughty people who persecuted them were long since dead, while the
chosen race survived. And so happy in his race was this poor peddler
and so proud of his pedigree that, as Heine says, had the great
Rothschild entered at that moment and asked him what favor he could
do, he would reply simply: "Stand out of my light, that I may finish
telling the law to my children."
_The Eugenics of the Jewish Race_
We Puritans were brought up on the Old Testament, the spirit of which,
far more than that of the New, pervaded the life of old New England.
Every day after breakfast, no matter how busy the season or how late
the breakfast, my grandfather read to the assembled family a chapter
from the Old Testament, and perhaps remarked upon certain passages.
After graduating from college and when I became a tutor in a prominent
Hebrew family in New York, and especially when I had to teach the
children their Sunday school lessons and freshen up the small
knowledge of the Hebrew language that I had, I realized very keenly
how closely related were the Jews to the Yankees,--with this
tremendous difference, that you are increasing in numbers while we are
decreasing.
As I read the Old Testament, the substance of the covenant with
Abraham was that if he kept Jehovah's law, his seed would be
multiplied like the stars of Heaven. This placed society and life in
that early day squarely on a eugenic basis, for it makes the number
and success of good children the supreme test of every human
institution, activity, and every kind of culture. This I take it is
one of the chief characteristics of your race, and I hope it may long
be so.
I am going to avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words
about a topic that has for centuries been a point of the very greatest
difference and tension between your people and mine, namely, the
character and work of Jesus. Please do not be shocked till you hear
what I have to say. Such of us psychologists as have recently been
interested in the psychological aspect of Jesus' life and work
understand, as had never been understood before, how purely Jewish he
was. Scholars have lately given to his figure a radically new
interpretation.
"_An Extremely Representative Man of Your Race_"
According to many conceptions the chief trait of Jesus was a strong
and deep enthusiasm for the loftiest things of life. He was a little
ecstatic all the time, illustrating the higher powers of man. His soul
was unconquerable by misfortune and disaster, like that of the Jewish
race itself. He was also organizing victory out of defeat, and his
greatest triumph was over death itself. Some think that his youthful
dreams and ideals were to be an agrarian lord of a manor, or a grand
country gentleman of the Jewish order, making contracts with servants,
leasing out farms and vineyards, giving feasts, and the like, for more
than half the parables pertain directly or indirectly to such a
vocation. But this youthful dream he was unable on account of poverty
and his station in life to realize; so two very natural changes took
place in his soul. He came to hate the rich because they were wasting
their opportunities and never doing anything; but far more important,
he developed from these juvenile reveries his world-transforming ideas
of the kingdom, which created the church, visible and invisible, and
re-made society.
The Jews are never beaten; if checked in their aspirations they, like
the prophets in the days of captivity, strike out in higher and nobler
ways. Thus you ought to be proud of Jesus for, as he is now being
understood, he was an extremely representative man of your race. The
real enemies of the Jews are now claiming that no such man ever lived,
which is the view of Drews and his school, some holding that he was a
deliberate invention of the early decades of the first century, and
others, like Jensen, that he was a revived Babylonian myth. But these
new views show that Jesus was not an Aryan, as a few of the
pan-Germanists have claimed, but a typical Semite. It does look now,
in view of the teachings of such men as Gobineau and various of his
successors, that the Aryans are the highest and best people in the
world and that the Germans are the very best of all the Aryans, that
it is Germany that has come to consider itself the chosen people, the
elite, superior race. But certainly Germany is not very Christian. It
was only converted in the thirteenth century, and Luther soon threw
off the fully developed Christianity of Rome. Since then we have had
the Tübingen School, that resolved everything into myth, and the very
many other negative points of view expressed in Nietzsche's supremest
condemnation of Jesus as a wretched degenerate, while Wagner's
deliberate slogan was, "_Das Deutschtum muss das Christentum siegen_."
_The Rapprochement of Jew and Gentile in America_
I wonder if the time is not near at hand when your people will
reconstruct your conceptions so much as to recognize Jesus as a
typical, golden, Jewish youth, worthy of being an ideal for young men.
We certainly do have in his life as now interpreted exactly what youth
needs above all things,--ambition, enthusiasm, idealism, all of them
absorbing, all of them diverting physical and sensuous energy into the
very highest culture sphere, sublimating desire, and making us
understand that youth is not complete without a great effort at
achievement. The very essence of youth is excitement. There must be
tension, strain, a tiptoe attitude, a strong "Excelsior"-like ambition
to climb, and a corresponding horror of inferiority, _Miderwertigkeit_.
Youth is an age of idealism, and the tension decade of adolescence
needs a regimen and an idealization all its own, to set back-fires to
temptation. Instead of the current altogether too plain talk on sex
hygiene and teaching, we must realize that every enthusiasm or real
interest, be it in the multiplication table or in literature, debate,
athletics, is an alternative. It reduces temptation and stores up
energy as the great reservoirs in the middle west store up the floods
that come down from the mountains, so that they shall irrigate and not
devastate the land. Jesus, in the new interpretation of Holzmann and
Baumann, stands for this kind of enthusiasm.
I cannot but wonder, therefore, whether, in view of these new
conceptions, Jew and Gentile are not going to meet in this country and
even agree about Jesus. It is difficult at least to see which of us
would change most if there were this _rapprochement_. We must neither
of us abandon our birthright. We must be the very best Puritan
Anglo-Saxons we possibly can, and you must be the best Jews possible,
for out of these component elements American citizenship is made up.
This country stands for the dropping of old prejudices, such as those
that are inflaming Europe now with war. If we can satisfy each other's
ideals and meet half way the thing is done, and the melting pot which
America stands for has got in its work. I want the Menorah Society to
feel that it is in the van of this movement.
[Illustration: Signature: G. Stanley Hall]
"Golden Rule" Hillel