[Illustration: _MARVIN M. LOWENTHAL (born in Bradford, Pa., in 1890)
is at present a Senior in the University of Wisconsin. He has won the
Wisconsin Menorah Society Prize twice--in 1912 for an essay on "The
Jew in the American Revolution," and in 1914 for the essay on
"Zionism" here published for the first time. Mr. Lowenthal is now the
President of the Wisconsin Zionist Society._]
At the head of an alley-way hard by the Place of the Temple, the
Haram-esh-Sherif, in Jerusalem, a long wall built in rough-hewn
courses lifts itself above the squalor of the Moghrebin quarter to an
eastern sky from which a sun that seldom sleeps bakes the grey stones,
bares every detail of a crumbling ruin, and intensifies the wistful
odor of decay. This, the remnant of Solomon's glory, is the Wailing
Wall of the Jews. Clad in sackcloth and covered with ashes,
patriarchal figures sway to and fro, press their lips to the hot
granite, beat now their chests and now the wall, and today, as every
day for eighteen hundreds of years, wail in the words of the Psalmist:
"Oh God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance;
Thy holy Temple have they defiled;
They have laid Jerusalem in heaps."[1]
This picture reveals the typical and traditional attitude of the Jew
toward the land of his forefathers. Taught as children in the Cheder
to turn their thoughts and desires toward Palestine; devoting
themselves as men to the study of the Law and the Prophets and to the
building upon this study of the vast Talmudic structure, until a
spiritual Land of the Book may be said to have been created wherein
they continually dwelt; crystallizing and adopting the Restoration as
a dogma of the faith; commemorating with solemn fasts the Ninth of Ab
as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple by Titus; and
repeating at each Passover with the pitiful hope of a child, "Next
year in Jerusalem," the Jews have bound the memory of Palestine as a
sign upon their hands and as frontlets between their eyes. They have
indeed written it upon the door-posts of their houses and upon their
gates, to the end--that they have wept and prayed. The vision of the
prophets, which created and sustained this passionate ideal, itself
inhibited the realization by emphasizing the redemption as
miraculous, as a consummation to come in its own time without man's
effort, and indeed in spite of man's will. And so, except for the
sporadic and meteoric fiascos of mock-Messiahs, the Jews--this most
practical of people--continued in hope and prayer to watch the
centuries creep by. Frequently the hope flowered into the songs of a
Judah Halevi or Ibn Gabirol, songs as sweet as have blossomed in the
medieval garden; and the prayer found expression in a poignancy
attributable only to the racial genius which created the Psalms; but
until the nineteenth century the dream preserved all the qualities of
a dream.
_A Crusade for A Birthright_
On August 29, 1897, a congress convened in Basel, Switzerland,
comparable in Jewry to the Council of Clermont; for in this congress
two hundred and four Jews, acting as delegates of their people from
half the countries in the world, assembled at the call of Theodor
Herzl to go crusading for the recovery of Palestine. This difference,
among others, may be apparent--the Christians sought the recovery of a
grave; the Jews, of a cradle. Palestine was to be a cradle in two
senses; this Congress, the first body representative of all Jewry to
be convened in the Diaspora, claimed the land of Israel not by virtue
of a death, but as a birthright, and furthermore hoped to find its
recovery the opportunity for the rejuvenation of a people.
Quoting from his book, "The Jewish State"[2]--a book journalistic in
style, but trumpet-toned in the note it sounded for political
Zionism--Theodor Herzl offered the following definition of Zionism
after the first Zionist Congress (1897): "Zionism has for its object
the creation of a home, secured by public rights, for those Jews who
either cannot or will not be assimilated in the country of their
adoption."[3] Zionism, in a word, is not the last truism in a weary
debate, nor a new verse to an old song; it is, on the contrary, a
definite answer to a perplexing and imperative question. What are
these Jews who cannot or will not be assimilated, and why cannot or
will not they be assimilated? This question constitutes what is known
as _the Jewish problem_, or, for those who deny or dislike the term,
_the Jewish position_; and this question must first be fully stated
before the Zionist or any other answer can be intelligible.
_The Isolation of Medieval Jewry_
The Jews in the Middle Ages were considered by themselves, their few
friends, and their many enemies, as a twice separated nation--a people
separated from those among whom they dwelt and separated from the
land in which they originated. They were governed by their own
law--the Lex Judæorum--which was recognized by the authorities of the
land in which they lived as peculiar and proper to them;[4] they dwelt
in communal groups which were bound together by common interests; they
observed their own customs and nourished their own culture; they were
held to be foreigners, and in a comparison of their own with the
Christian civilization, they readily acknowledged this status. The
force of persecution without and the religious conviction of
superiority, separateness, and nationality within, preserved and
constantly increased this solidarity.[5]
That the existence of a separate, recalcitrant, and even obnoxious
nation within a nation did not constitute a problem for the medievals
may be attributable to two reasons: (1) the medieval theory of life
accentuated a hierarchical order of existence--a theory that found
expression in feudalism, in Church organization, and in guild and
craft life; in pursuance of this theory, the Jews were accorded a
recognized and distinct status; (2) furthermore, the Jews were an
economic necessity in the times when a ban was laid on money-lending,
and they constituted an important economic facility at a little later
period when capital could indeed be worked but when rivalry and
hatreds rendered communication uncertain.[6] To the maintenance of
Jewish solidarity and the preservation of things Jewish _qua_ Jewish,
sacrifices culminating in the surrender of life bequeathed to the race
a comprehensive martyrology.[7]
Ernest Renan defines a nation as "a great solidarity constituted by
the sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made and those
they feel prepared to make once more. It implies a past, but is summed
up in the present by a tangible fact--the clearly expressed desire to
live a common life." In sum, the Jews throughout the Middle Ages,
which was prolonged for them until a little less than two hundred
years ago, comprised a nation as virtual in point of their own claim
and its recognition by other nations as in the days when they were
established in Palestine. Renaissance, Reformation, and the
rediscovery of the world by science failed to make an impression on
the thick ghetto walls; and Jewish isolation, even as late as the
eighteenth century, may be vividly realized by thinking of Rousseau
and Voltaire in contrast with the contemporary lights of Jewry--Elijah
Gaon and Israel Besht,[8] men as medieval as a gargoyle.
The French Revolution with its early philosophy of naturalism and
humanism and its later political expression in liberty, equality, and
fraternity, razed the physical and spiritual walls of the ghetto and
set up the "Jewish problem." Following the Revolution, four currents
of thought and action, working both simultaneously and successively,
causing, reacting upon, and intermingling with one another, affecting
the Jews now favorably and now unfavorably, went into the making of
this problem. To deal with Emancipation, Enlightenment, Nationalism,
and Anti-Semitism in detail would consume a volume, but an outline of
their bearing on the present situation is essential.
_Emancipation and Enlightenment_
Emancipation may be defined as the removal of the civil disabilities
from the Jews, following the acceptance of liberal principles by the
European governments. The process was a gradual one. In 1791 the
French Assembly passed the vote for the complete emancipation of the
Jews, which procedure was ratified and firmly established by the
Napoleonic regime. Belgium (1830), England (1846), Sweden (1848),
Denmark and Greece (1849), Prussia (1850), Austria (1867), Spain
(1868), Italy (1870), and Switzerland (1874) followed the lead of
France. The Balkan States in the treaty of Berlin (1878), upon
pressure from Disraeli, agreed to the emancipation of the Jews as one
of the conditions for securing their own freedom; Roumania has been
notoriously delinquent, however, in adhering to the terms nominated in
the bond.[9] The removal of civil disabilities brought the Jew into a
wide contact with the Christian. This resulted for the Jews in
liberalization of outlook and liberation of capacities and talents, in
an abandonment of the "jargon" for the national tongues, in a
precipitation into the Haskalah movement (to be described in the next
paragraph), and in a restatement of their leading religious doctrines,
which amounted to a surrender in theory of their nationality and their
destiny as a Chosen People to be restored to Palestine. For the
Christians the removal of Jewish disabilities resulted in the
necessity of either accepting or rejecting the Jew's claim to be an
equal and a fellow-countryman.
The Enlightenment, or Haskalah movement, broadly speaking, comprises
the Jewish absorption of secular learning, particularly in literature
and science, the abandonment of the study of the Talmud for modern
subjects, and the adoption of farm and craft life.[10] Moses
Mendelssohn in Germany and Lilienthal in Russia were the first great
protagonists of these radical departures; and the movement, which in
part led to the demand for Emancipation and in part resulted from it,
further removed the differences between Jew and non-Jew, at least from
the standpoint of the former, and further removed him from his
religious and historical past, perceptibly weakening and in many
cases practically destroying the medieval sense of solidarity. Each
Jew adopted the culture of his native country, and so one Jew became
virtually a foreigner to another. Haskalah, in a word, is a looking
outward on the part of the Jew; for all its virtues this movement had
the consequence of blunting racial consciousness and blurring racial
identity.
_Nationalism and Anti-Semitism_
All might have been well but for the presence of a third and
conflicting element. While the Jew became infected with the
universalism of the Revolutionary spirit, the majority of Europeans
were absorbing and developing the particularistic implications of '89.
Nationalism is the self-consciousness of a people, and it found its
European expression in the creation of the modern States of Germany,
Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the small Balkans. It is a race's
recognition of itself, a looking inward, and it leads to the pursuit
of racial ideals and development of racial qualities--an inward
expansion which, indifferent to the charge of chauvinism, can only be
secured by an outward discrimination. The Jew and the Christian had
changed places since medieval times: the Jew now stood for a universal
society and a universal church, and the Christian for exclusion and
separation upon racial bases. Emancipation thus brought the conflict
directly to the attention of the strong majority, namely, the
Christians, and anti-Semitism was their answer.
In its restricted sense, anti-Semitism is a scientific stick used to
beat the Jewish dog with. After impartial, impersonal scientific
investigation, French and German scholars[11] demonstrated the racial
inferiority of the Semite to the Aryan, enumerated the inherent
Semitic qualities as greed, special aptitude for money-making,
aversion to hard work, clannishness, obstrusiveness, lack of social
tact and of patriotism, the tendency to exploit and not to be overly
honest. Ernest Renan adequately sums up the anti-Semite position when
he claims for the Aryans all the great military, political, and
intellectual movements of history.[12] The Semites never had a
comprehension of civilization in the sense in which the Aryan
understands the word; they were at no time public-spirited.[13] In
fact, intolerance was the natural consequence of Semitic
monotheism.[14]
In the wider sense,[15] anti-Semitism is the modern word for the old
and apparently ineradicable hatred of the Jew, partly dependent, as G.
F. Abbott well shows,[16] not only upon Christian faith, but upon the
Christian frame of mind and feeling--a hatred to which the Nationalism
of the nineteenth century furnished a reasonable fuel, which found a
social expression in ostracism and rioting[17] and a political
expression in the formation of the Christian Socialist Party in
Germany (1878), and similar parties in Austria and Hungary (1882-99),
seeking the suppression of equal rights for Jews, the Dreyfus affair
in France (1895), and the open, violent persecutions in Roumania--all
aimed at annulling the privileges granted by the Emancipation.
Clerical, economic, and social opposition to the Jews combined to
support the nationalistic contention summed up in the words of
Heinrich von Treitschke (Professor of History, University of Berlin):
"Die Juden sind unser Unglück."[18] This essay is not concerned with
the truth of the contention; suffice that it is advanced, supported,
and acted upon.
_The Jewish Situation in the Four Zones_
A review of the Jewish situation is now possible. But before
presenting this review, a definition of two words which will be
frequently used may not be irrelevant. The _Jewish problem_ is taken
to mean an immediate concrete maladjustment where life and property
are imperiled, much as we speak of the Mexican problem. The _Jewish
position_, on the other hand, is taken to mean a social, cultural, or
spiritual disharmony or repression, much as we speak of the position
of the Poles in Galicia and Russia.
The Jewish situation falls naturally into four geographical zones. The
first, which contains the _problem_ in its most serious aspect, is
Eastern Europe, including Russia, Poland, and Roumania, where are
settled six of the twelve million Jews of the world.[19] In this zone,
the Jews are for the most part maintaining medieval solidarity and
separation, are suffering from medieval repression and persecution;
but on the other hand, (and this appears to be the determining factor
in the gravity of the _problem_), the Russian Jew is by no means a
necessity to the Russian in any way similar to that in which the
medieval Jew was a necessity to the medieval Christian. The eastern
Jew is beginning to expand with the leaven of the Haskalah, and is
simultaneously strangling for lack of the release and exercise of his
powers afforded by Emancipation. The Russian and Roumanian, in what
they believe to be the preservation of Nationalism, are determined on
crippling or destroying the inimical and unassimilative factor in
their population; and although the Russian is politically medieval, he
is economically modern and considers himself restrained by no need of
Jewish money.[20] The outcome for the Jews is economic impoverishment,
social persecution, political enslavement, and spiritual
degeneration.[21]
The second zone includes Austria, Germany, and to a minor degree
France, where are settled approximately three millions of Jews. Save
in Galicia, where political and racial turmoil is constantly giving
the Jewish situation the sombre tinge of a _problem_, the Jews are
finding themselves, for the most part, in a precarious _position_.
Nationalism demands that they surrender their racial identity and
proclivities; anti-Semitism declares upon the verdict of science that
such surrender is impossible, and substitutes repression,
assimilation, or extinction. The Jews in attempting to satisfy the
conditions by entering fully into all the activities of national life
arouse through their success only greater hostility; and the situation
becomes converted into a vicious circle.
France to a large degree and England comprise the third zone, where
the Jewish _position_ is identical with that of the fourth zone, the
United States, save in one important detail. The Jews in these two
zones, numbering only one-and-a-half million, have entered freely into
the national life about them, and, except for minor social
disabilities which can only make the judicious smile, have been
accorded equality, with the result that the Jew _qua_ Jew is exposed
to complete assimilation. The distinction between the third and fourth
zone is that in England and France, anti-Semitism based on Nationalism
is a potentiality (though the recent Aliens Bill and Chesterton trial
would suggest that it might be more than this), whereas the open-door
theory of settlement which created the United States militates
basically against race-discrimination. The Jew of England and America
does not face persecution nor repression, but a gradual and apparently
pleasant extinction.
The medieval Jew found himself a necessary, well-paying, if not
honored, guest in the households of Europe; but the day when the Jew
resolved on adopting the life and manners of his host, the host
resolved on drawing tightly the family lines. The modern Jew has
discovered it necessary either to convince the obdurate host, who
points to a scientifically certified chart of the family-tree, that he
too is of blood germane, or take himself to lodgings in the cellarage.
And yet--a third possibility here insinuates itself--why may not the
Jew set up housekeeping for himself?
_The Vain Effort of Reform Judaism_
The medieval Jew would have accepted without hope the unfortunate
predicament; the modern Jew, nerved with a distillation of the
Revolutionary "rights of men" and confident that he was not combating
the implacability of a religious hatred, adopted expedient and
remedial measures, the chief of which, since they form the opposition
to Zionism, will be outlined.
To justify Emancipation before and after it was secured, assimilative
doctrines of a peculiar type, known as Reform Judaism,[22] whereby the
essentials of Jewish life were to be separated and saved, constituted
the main attempt of the Jew to demonstrate that he was a member of the
households of Europe and not an intruder. Reform Judaism began as a
result of the Haskalah by simplifying and beautifying, according to
European standards, the Orthodox religious service (Germany 1810-20),
and ended by abandoning the Messianic Restoration, the doctrine that
Israel is in exile and that the prophecies are literally to be
fulfilled. The expediency of these measures is apparent. To refute the
anti-Semitic charge of racial inferiority, the existence of the race
as a separate entity was denied, and the necessary scientific backing
has lately been secured.[23] To meet the Nationalists, Israel's
national hopes were declared void, and it was strongly urged that the
basis of a modern nation is citizenship and not race.
The Reformers proceeded further and maintained that the Jewish people
were themselves the Messiah, whose mission was "to spread by its
fortitude and loyalty the monotheistic truth all over the earth, and
to be an example of rectitude to all others,"[24] whose goal was "not
a national Messianic State, but the realization in society of the
principles of righteousness as enunciated by the prophets;"[25]
wherefore, it was not only just that they receive citizenship, but
religious duty compelled the Jew to demand it.
The Jewish religion was considered the essential possession of the
Jewish people--so essential that it was to be maintained at the
sacrifice of assimilation; but nowhere is it made apparent how a
religion can be maintained without a people, how a people can be
maintained without separation, and how separation can be maintained
without abandoning the no-race, no-nation propositions. If these are
abandoned, the Jews are precisely where they began--another circle
whose viciousness is becoming obvious and is resulting in the constant
discarding of Jewish rite and form, until the religion which was to be
prized and saved is fast becoming a watery Unitarianism, and its
adherents are allowing themselves, where permitted, to become
completely assimilated. Reform Judaism which began as a compromise is
ending as a surrender. The final and unanswerable objection to Reform
Judaism as a solution is that the majority of Jews will not even in
theory accept it. The devotion to race, religion, and separation is
too strong. The Gentile in asking the Jew to assimilate is undoubtedly
right; the refusal of the Jew undoubtedly is not wrong; and the ring
of true tragedy becomes audible.
_The Palliative Measures of Philanthropy_
Contemporary with the unsuccessful attempt at clearing up the Jewish
_position_ in western Europe, palliative measures were undertaken to
solve the _problem_ in eastern Europe. In 1860 the Alliance Israelite
Universelle was founded at Paris with the following purposes in
chief:[26]
1. To work everywhere for the emancipation and moral
progress of the Jew.
2. To give effectual support to those who are
suffering persecution because they are Jews.
The Alliance began by distributing pamphlets and calling the attention
of western governments to eastern injustice; it gradually, however,
undertook practical work. Influenced by Rabbi Kalischer, religious
enthusiast, a farm school (Mikveh Israel) was established at Jaffa;
and after the Russian persecutions of 1880-82, active colonization for
the relief of refugees became the chief work, in which the Alliance
received substantial aid from Baron de Rothschild. Meanwhile Baron de
Hirsch, another philanthropist of international proportions, dedicated
millions to the foundation of colonies in Argentine and Palestine. In
the latter place the Hirsch activities were incorporated under the
title of the Jewish Colonization Association ("IKA", 1891), working in
harmony of aim with the Alliance and with still a third movement--one
more of the people--styled Chovevei-Zion (Lovers of Zion). The only
activities of the Chovevei-Zion, a general term attached to small and
ardent semi-affiliated societies throughout Europe and America, with
which we are here concerned are the philanthropic; and their services
in this respect were haphazard and negligible.[27]
To cast up briefly the sum of practical work accomplished by 1898: 94
schools in Asia and Africa,[28] and 25 colonies in Palestine
supporting 5,000 Jews.[29] Such philanthropy is to be considered an
attempt, however valiant and noble, to empty the sea with a pail--with
a leaking pail.
Thus, upon a review of the situation, three alternatives present
themselves: (1) Maintenance of the _status quo_ with its dull round of
persecution and degradation on one hand, and the soul-destroying life
in the Fool's Paradise of Reform Judaism on the other; (2)
Amalgamation with the surrounding peoples--a grim race-suicide; (3)
Re-establishment of a national center where, perhaps not the entire
people, but a remnant can be saved.
(_To be concluded_)
_As Greece stands for art and Rome stands for law and
order, so Judaea stands for morality, and so it
occupies an exalted position in history. The Menorah
Society comes to the University with a challenge and
defies us to ignore at our peril that which Judaism
has contributed to civilization and which we have
derived from it. We have derived our own religion from
it, and that spirit of Puritanism which was so closely
connected with the settlement of the new
world._--_From an Address before the Cornell Menorah
Society by President Jacob Gould Schurman of Cornell
University._