[Illustration: _EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN (born in Cornwall, Conn.,
1870), Assistant Professor of English in the University of Illinois,
has taken a special and scholarly interest in the contributions of the
Jews to civilization, on which subject he has written a notable book
entitled "Our Modern Debt to Israel," besides articles in various
periodicals. He is an honorary member of the Illinois Menorah Society,
evincing a warm sympathy with the Menorah aims and actively
coöperating in the Menorah work._]
A study of great Jewish names in modern literature has impressed me
with the fact that every Jewish man of letters has attained his fame
by virtue of qualities that are essentially Jewish. In other words, we
cannot fully understand the work of even modern Jewish literary men
unless we know the fundamental qualities of Jewish genius. To
illustrate what is meant by this assertion, we may consider briefly
the work of three nineteenth century Jewish authors--Heine,
Beaconsfield, and Zangwill. These men are apparently wholly different;
and yet they attained literary eminence through qualities or mind and
heart which we have learned to associate with the race from which they
sprang.
_Heinrich Heine: A Jew at Heart_
Heinrich Heine is the one writer of the first rank that Germany can
boast between the death of Goethe in 1832 and the advent of the
younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann, Hauptmann, and the rest,
sixty years later. To free himself from such a limitation as his
Jewish birth seemed to him to be, and with the more specific object,
it is said, of securing a government position in Prussia, Heine
allowed himself to become a convert to Christianity. "Judaism," he
said, "is not a religion; it is a misfortune." His conversion,
however, failed to profit him. He lost the fellowship of his own
people, and was contemptuously called "the Jew" by his enemies. In a
sense, the designation was entirely just. A Jew at heart Heine
remained to the day of his death. On his death bed, speaking of the
Jews he said: "Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years,
weeping always, suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet
clinging to him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh,
if martyrdom, patience, and faith in spite of trial can confer a
patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond any other. It
would have been absurd and petty if, as people accuse me, I had been
ashamed of being a Jew."
Not only was Heine a Jew in his instinctive racial sympathies, but his
work bears the indelible impress of Judaism. It is a distinctively
Jewish product. In it appear the buoyancy of spirit which sustained
him under suffering that would have crushed a less resilient temper;
the intellectual arrogance; the proneness to censure rather than to
commend; and especially the excessive self-consciousness;--all these
distinctively Jewish traits were in him exaggerated and helped to make
his work what it was. It is his self-consciousness, in particular,
that made his _Buch der Lieder_ his best production. In that
remarkable collection of lyrics Heine appears at his best, because the
ability to compose songs that are the spontaneous utterance of
emotion, at one and the same time personal and representative, is a
Hebrew heritage. The Hebrew genius was essentially lyric, rather than
epic or dramatic; and in consequence, the lyrics of ancient Hebrew
literature are its chief glory. In proof of this, we have but to
recall the dirges and triumph songs, the reflective lyrics, and the
liturgical hymns that compose the collection we know as the Psalms.
The excellence of both the old Hebrew lyrics and of Heine's Lieder is
to be found in the extraordinary subjectivity of the Hebrew
temper--the racial fondness for impassioned, yet artistic,
self-expression.
Yet Heine's Jewish traits are evident not only in the subjectivity of
his lyrics, but in the new and richer character that he gave to the
German Lied. This, hitherto vague and dreamy, became in his hands
startlingly concrete and definite. And this is true even when he
expresses the most subtle feelings. Always the most evanescent
_Stimmung_, not less than moods more primitively simple, find
expression in metaphors so sensuously material as to recall Solomon's
Song. Compare a typical lyric of Heine, such as the following:
Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne
Die liebt' ich alle in Liebeswonne,
Ich lieb' sie nicht mehr, ich liebe allein
Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine;
Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne,
Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne
with the love lyric sung by one of Israel's nameless singers:
Behold thou art fair, my love;
Behold thou art fair;
Thine eyes are as doves.
Behold thou art fair, my beloved
Yea, thou art pleasant:
And our couch is green.
The beams of our house are cedars,
And our rafters are firs.
I am a rose of Sharon,
A lily of the valleys.
As a lily among thorns,
So is my love among the daughters.[C]
Even so brief a comparison may illustrate, though it may not prove,
that for the ultimate source of Heine's Oriental exuberance and
materialization, so new to German literature, we must look in Jewish
not in European culture.
_The Spiritual Depth of Heine_
Perhaps because Heine was in spirit an Oriental, the Germans never
have known exactly what to make of him. Professor Francke says
(_History of German Literature_, p. 526) that Heine "produced hardly a
single poem which fathoms the depths of life." This assertion seems
scarcely defensible in view of such poems as the following:
Wo wird einst des Wandermüden
Letzte Ruhestatte sein?
Unter Palmen in dem Süden?
Unter Linden an dem Rhein?
Werd' ich wo in einer Wüste
Eingescharrt von fremder Hand?
Oder ruh' ich an der Küste
Eines Meeres in dem Sand?
Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben
Gotteshimmel, dort wie hier,
Und als Todtenlampen schweben
Nachts die Sterne über mir.
To find an equally beautiful expression of faith in God as a universal
spiritual presence that transcends all space relations, we must go
back to the anonymous Jewish poet who wrote the psalm in which occur
the lines:
"Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
And whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me,
And the light about me shall be night;
Even the darkness hideth me not from thee;
But the night shineth as the day.
For the darkness and the light are both alike to thee."
As a matter of fact, both poems are to be accounted for as equally the
product of a rarely gifted people--a people with a unique genius for
religion.[D]
_Disraeli and His Oriental Imagination_
Benjamin Disraeli belonged to a family who left Spain in the fifteenth
century to avoid the horrors of the Inquisition. Upon their escape, in
gratitude to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unheard
of trials, they adopted the name Disraeli, in order that their race
might be forever recognized. Of such a family Benjamin Disraeli was a
worthy representative. He never was ashamed of his race. On the
contrary, he gloried in it, and lost no opportunity to put forth the
claim of his people to be the true aristocracy of the earth. "Has not
the Jew the oldest blood and the finest genius of the world?" he asks.
And again, in one of his books (_Tancred_, 1847), he says, "The Jews
are of the purest race; the chosen people; they are the aristocracy of
nature."
It is Disraeli's Jewish characteristics that have bewildered and
sometimes offended his critics. He has been charged with insincerity
because he was so clever, and because he wrote with a kind of Oriental
exuberance that was to him entirely natural and a part of his Jewish
heritage. Gilfillan is the only critic, so far as I know, who has
recognized that Disraeli's excellences, and his defects as well, were
racial rather than individual. Speaking of his Oriental fancy and
cleverness, Gilfillan says: "Disraeli has a fine fancy, soaring up at
intervals into high imagination, and making him a genuine child of
that nation from whom came forth the loftiest, richest, and most
impassioned songs the earth has ever witnessed--the nation of Isaiah,
Ezekiel, Solomon, and Job. He has little humor, but a vast deal of
diamond-pointed wit."[E]
_Disraeli's Wit: A Purely Jewish Product_
Disraeli's wit, which made him so many enemies, is a purely Jewish
product. It is satiric. Now satire was the form taken by Jewish wit in
the Middle Ages as a result of the hard conditions under which the
Jews lived. As one modern Jew has said, "The Jews seized the weapon of
wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other weapon." With
every door closed in hostility against them, there was little they
could do but laugh with bitter irony at their fate, and with savage
satire at their oppressors. With such an ancestry as this behind him,
it is not to be wondered at that Disraeli's wit is scornful, and that
he excelled in personal satire and invective. It was never, however,
unprovoked. Disraeli never indulged in personal satire or invective
except in his own defence. For example, his mockingly ironical reply
to the attack of a member of the House of Commons named Roebuck, which
was one of the most effective rejoinders Disraeli ever made, was in
answer to a most virulent arraignment of his political motives. "I
have always felt," he said, "that in this world you must bear a great
deal, and that even in this indulgent, though dignified, assembly,
where we endeavor so far as possible to carry on public affairs
without any unnecessary acerbity--still we must occasionally submit to
some things which the rules of this house do not permit. I could, no
doubt, have vindicated my character; but that would only have made the
honorable member from Bath speak once or twice more, and really I have
never any wish to hear him. I have had the most corrupt motives
imputed to me. But I know how true it is that a tree must produce its
fruit--that a crab-tree will bring forth crab apples, and that a man
of meagre and acid mind, who writes a pamphlet or makes a speech, must
make a meagre and acid pamphlet or a poor and sour speech. Let things,
then, take their course."
_Disraeli's Fondness for Allegory_
Another striking peculiarity of Disraeli was his fondness for veiled
allusion. Nearly all of his most popular novels--and this was _one_ of
the main reasons for their phenomenal popularity--were thinly veiled
representations of Disraeli's own contemporaries, who were easily
recognizable by the reading public. Take, for instance, the admirable
burlesque entitled _Ixion in Heaven_, where the author tells how
Ixion, king of Thessaly, having fallen into disrepute on earth, was
taken up into heaven by Jupiter and feasted by the gods. Here Jupiter
is really George the Fourth and Apollo is the poet Byron. The latter's
pose of gloomy misanthropy, as well as his habit of fasting to keep
from growing fat, are admirably satirized in the following dialogue:
"You eat nothing, Apollo," said Ceres.
"Nor drink," said Neptune.
"To eat, to drink, what is it but to live; and what is life but
death. . . . I refresh myself now only with soda-water and biscuits.
Ganymede, bring some."
Now this fondness for veiled allusion is distinctly a Hebrew
characteristic. The Arabs today have a saying, "as fond of a veiled
allusion as a Hebrew." This has always been a Hebrew trait. I suppose
no literature of any people consists so largely of allegory, in
proportion to its bulk, as does the Hebrew. In proof of this
assertion, one needs but to allude to the vogue in post-exilic Judaism
of the Apocalypse, in which contemporary history was presented in the
form of allegory, and to the Rabbinical fondness for the allegorical
interpretation of the Scriptures. So it would not be difficult to show
that not only these qualities I have mentioned, but all the qualities
that made Disraeli admired or feared were his by virtue of his Jewish
inheritance.
_Zangwill's Prophetic Spirit in "The War God"_
Israel Zangwill knows the Jews, not as George Eliot did, through a
process of philosophic induction, but at first hand, because he is a
Jew by birth and breeding. He, unlike Heine, has never tried to
conceal the fact that he is a Jew. In Israel Zangwill all the
tenderness and sympathy, all the tenacity, the suppleness and
adaptability, and it may be added, the baffling inconsistencies of his
race appear.
Inconsistent he certainly is. He has been an ardent Zionist, and in
his story "Transitional" (from _They That Walk in Darkness_) he seems
to hold that assimilation will never solve the Jewish problem; yet in
_The Melting Pot_ he obviously regards assimilation as the inevitable
and desirable end of Judaism.
In spite of his inconsistencies, Zangwill is one in whom the ancient
ideals of Israel live again. It is in the spirit of the prophets that
he wrote _The War God_ (1912). This play, with all its faults as an
acting drama, is nevertheless a remarkable document, voicing, as it
does, on the very eve of the breaking down of European civilization,
the old prophetic protest against the brutality and waste of war.
This protest dates back to at least the ninth century B.C. It may not
be generally known that it was a Hebrew prophet who first advocated
the humane treatment of prisoners of war. The story is told in the
Second Book of Kings that when a band of marauding Syrians were
corralled in Samaria, the "king of Israel said unto Elisha, when he
saw them, 'My father, shall I smite them? Shall I smite them?' And he
answered, 'Thou shalt not smite them: wouldst thou smite those whom
thou has taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow? Set bread and
water before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their
master.' And he prepared great provision for them: and when they had
eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master. So
the bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel" (2 Kings
6:1-23). Again, Amos, in the eighth century, in his arraignment of the
sins of the nations, pronounces God's severest judgments upon
Damascus, Edom, Ammon, and Moab for their cruelty in war. The charge
against Edom, for example, is that "he did pursue his brother with the
sword, and did cast off all pity, and his anger did tear perpetually,
and he kept his wrath forever." And the later prophets' visions of the
Messianic age include as the brightest feature of that wished-for time
the prediction that then "the nations shall not learn war any more."
Of such a spirit Mr. Zangwill's play _The War God_ is an expression.
It is a satire upon militarism, but a satire without exaggeration. The
arguments employed to justify the maintenance of a huge army and navy
are not a whit more absurd than the fallacies which have been put
forth for a generation by those who would justify the maintenance of
armaments. These so-called arguments are presented by "the Chancellor"
who represents Bismarck, and by the king of Gothia, in whom we may
easily recognize the Russian Czar. "Dominance," roars the
Chancellor,--
"There rings the password of the universe.
Who knows it, he is free of every camp.
Equality, your level, endless cornfield,
However fat and fair and golden-stalked,
Would set us pining for the snow-topped peaks
And barren glaciers. Life is fight, thank God!
"Take war away and men would sink to molluscs,
Limpets that wait the tide to wash them food.
The nations would grow foul with lazy feeling.
What heaven loves is breeds with life a-tingle,
Swift-gliding, flashing, darting death at rivals,
Men fearing God and with no other fear.
Thus were the Albans, now the turn is ours
To be the chosen people of Jehovah."
And the King endorses such sentiments with the sage observation,
"No doubt we must protect our growing commerce."
In opposition to such militarists stands Count Frithiof, in whom we
may easily see the lineaments of Tolstoi. His motto is, "Resist not
evil, but reform yourself." In answer to the Chancellor's declaration,
"To safeguard peace, we must prepare for war," he replies,
"I know that maxim; it was forged in hell.
This wealth of ships and guns inflames the vulgar
And makes the very war it guards against.
How often, as the mighty master said, the sight
Of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done."
_A Voice for Social Justice_
Quite outside the dramatic action of the play stands the Jew, Blum,
the Chancellor's secretary. Through his astuteness in managing the
Chancellor, he has hitherto moulded public policy according to his own
will. Finally, near the end of the play, he denounces Christian
civilization in a passage worthy of quotation:
"Man wins the realm of air and might have been
An eagle with a soul; you make him harpy,
More murderous than dragons of the ooze.
I tell you, we outsiders see the game,
We Jews, who bidden rise beyond the code
Of eye for eye, must rub both eyes to see
Not e'en eye-justice done in Christendom,
Whose cannon thunder 'gainst both God and Christ."
So might have spoken one of the ancient prophets of his race. Indeed
Amos, amid the orgies of the autumn festival at Bethel, did speak in
the same spirit when he denounced the formal service of worshippers
who ignored the claims of social justice. "Seek good and not evil,"
cries Amos, "that ye may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts,
shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil, and love the good, and
establish judgment (justice) in the gate. It may be that the Lord God
of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph."
So it is evident that even the literary work of modern Jews can be
understood and appreciated only as an expression of the
characteristics of the Jewish race. In this modern Jewish literature
appears the exuberance, the emotional intensity, and the love of
social justice that were characteristic also of ancient Hebrew
literature as written by prophet, priest, and sage.
_The Role of Israel in Human Emancipation_
Far greater, however, than the work of these three authors, far
greater, indeed, than Israel's literature as a whole, of which they
are a part, is the life of this people, of which their literature is
the record. We speak of a nation's literature as great if it possesses
three or four tragedies that are classics. _Hamlet_, _Othello_,
_Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ would, for example, be sufficient to justify
the title "great" as applied to English literature. What shall we say,
then, as some one has suggested, of this people who for more than
twenty centuries have lived a tragedy more pathetic than any the
world's literature can show? Job has always seemed to me a type of the
Jewish race. We recall that majestic picture in the thirty-first
chapter, where Job stands up on his ash-mound, robbed of his wealth,
bereaved of his children, deserted by his wife, suffering the agonies
of a loathsome and incurable disease, and cast off, as it seems to
him, by the very God in whom he trusted, and yet, in the face of
poverty, and bereavement, and mortal pain, and bewildered isolation,
asserts his own unchanged and unalterable belief that righteousness is
salvation.
Similarly Israel, through the long centuries of its tragic history,
has stood on the ash-mound of its national humiliation. Plundered,
vilified, and persecuted, a nation of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief, from whom men have hid their faces in aversion not concealed,
Israel has yet clung with a grip that nothing could weaken nor
dislodge to the fundamental idea that religion--the right relation of
man to God--was not creed nor ritual, but simply doing justly, loving
mercy, and walking humbly with God.
We have been looking backward at the literary accomplishment of three
Jewish men of genius. It is, I believe, a fault of modern Judaism to
look backward instead of forward, as if the glory of Israel had indeed
departed, and as if nothing were left but to look back with pride and
regret upon what has passed like a dream away. But I believe Jews may
look forward now with confident hope toward the years that are to be.
That Israel has completely played its role--that it has finished its
service to the world--cannot for a moment entertain. Surely no one who
believes in a philosophy of history, who sees in human history more
than a meaningless and unrelated succession of events, can think that
Israel has been preserved through centuries of discipline for no end
whatever. On the contrary, we must believe that Israel has still a
mission. What that mission is to be we cannot now foretell. We of this
generation are looking upon the breaking down of European
civilization. Some of us hope and expect that when the smoke of battle
has cleared away there will gradually be built up a new and better
social order. In this constructive work of rebuilding, who is better
fitted to take a prominent part than the Jew, with his noble heritage
of ideals, his passion for social justice? Jews may well rejoice as
they reflect upon what individual members of their race have through
literature contributed to the emancipation of the human spirit. And
they may rejoice also in the hope of what Israel may yet accomplish in
the years that are to be.
[Illustration: Signature: Edward Chauncey Baldwin]