A noted Jewish rabbi has been uttering his mind concerning
“manufacturers of mixed marriages”—clergymen, that is to say, who marry
Christians to Jewesses and Jews to Christianesses. In the opinion
of this gentleman of God such marriages are accursed, and those of
his pious brethren who assist the devil in bringing them about are
imperfectly moral. Doubtless it is desirable that the parties to a
marriage should cherish the same form of religious error, lest in
their zeal to save each other’s immortal part they lay too free a hand
upon the part that is mortal. But domestic infelicity is not the evil
that the learned doctor has in apprehension: what he fears is nothing
less momentous than the extinction of Judaism! On consideration it
appears not unlikely that in a general blending of races that result
would ensue. But what then?—will the hand of some great anarch let the
curtain fall and universal darkness cover all? Will the passing of
Judaism be attended with such discomfortable befallings as the wreck
of matter and the crush of worlds?
Good old Father Time has seen the genesis, development, decay and
effacement of thousands of religions far more ancient and quite as
well credentialed as that of Israel. The most daring of that faith’s
expounders will hardly claim for it an age exceeding a half-dozen
millenniums; whereas the least venturesome anthropologian will affirm
for the human race an antiquity of hundreds. It is hardly likely that
the world has ever been without great religions, of which all but a few
(so new that they smell of paint and varnish) are as dead as the dodo.
No portents foreshadowed their extinction, no cataclysms followed. The
world went spinning round the sun in its immemorial way; men lived
and loved, fought, laughed, cursed, lied, gathered gold and dreamed
of an after-life as before. No mourners follow the hearse of a dead
religion, no burial service is read at the grave. Does the good rabbi
really believe that the faith which he professes, rooted in time, will
flourish in eternity? Can he suppose that its fate will be different
from that of its predecessors, whose temples, rearing their fronts in
great cities, the seats of mighty civilizations in every part of the
habitable globe, have perished with the empires that they adorned, and
left not a vestige nor a memory behind? Does he think that of all the
incalculable religions that have swept in successive dream-waves the
ocean of mystery his alone marks a continuous current setting toward
some shining shore of truth and life and bearing thither all ships
obedient to its trend?
I can not help thinking that the pious rabbi would better serve his
people by less zeal in broadening and blackening the delimiting lines
by which their foolish fathers circumscribed their sympathies and
interests and made their race a peculiar people, peculiarly disliked.
The best friend of the Jews is not he who confirms them in their narrow
and resented exclusiveness, but he who persuades them of its folly,
advises them to a larger life than is comprised in rites and rituals,
the ceremonies and symbolisms of a long-dead past, and strives to show
them that the world is wider than Judea and God more than a private
tutor to the children of Israel.
Why do they fear effacement by absorption? If the entire Jewish race
should disappear (as sooner or later all races do) that would not mean
that the Jews were dead, but that Judaism was dead. No single life
would have gone out because of that, and all that is good in the race
would live, suffusing and perhaps ennobling the characters of races
having still a name. All that is useful and true in Jewish law and
Jewish letters and Jewish art would be preserved to the world; the rest
could well be spared. Even the rabbis’ occupation would not be gone:
they would thrive as priests of another faith. Man is not likely to
cease forming himself into “congregations,” for he likes to see his
teachers “close to.” Even if preaching were abolished many kinds of
light and profitable employment would remain.
As matters now are, mixed marriages—between Jew and Gentile—are not to
be advised. But matters are now not as they should be, nor does our
holy friend’s teaching tend to make them so. Let the Jew learn why he
is subject to hate and persecution by the Gentile. It is not, as he
professes to think, and doubtless does think, because his ancestors,
ages ago, denied the Godhood and demanded the life of another Jew.
Other races and sects deny Christ without offense; and the Gentile who
daily crucifies him afresh is no less active in dislike of the Jew
than the most devout Christian of them all. Christ and Christianity
have nothing to do with it. Nor is the explanation found in the Jew’s
superior thrift, nor in any of those commercial qualities whereby,
legitimately or illegitimately, he gets the better of his Gentile
competitor; though those advantages too pitilessly used against
a stupid and improvident peasantry have sometimes compelled his
expatriation by sovereigns who cared no more what he believed than what
he ate.
The Christians will cease to dislike and persecute the Jews when
the Jews abandon their affronting claim to special and advantageous
relations with the Lord of All. The claim would be no less irritating
if well founded, as many Christians believe that once it was. When has
it not been observed that a favorite child is hated by its brothers and
sisters? Did not the brethren of Joseph seek his undoing? In missing
the lesson of it the Jew “recks not his own rede.” When was it not
thought an insult to say, “I am holier than thou,” and when did not
small minds “strike back” with brutal hands? The Christian mind is a
small mind, the Christian hand a brutal hand.
The Jew may reply: “I do not say so; in the pulpit I forbear to
denounce other peoples and other creeds as outside the law and devoid
of the divine grace.” In words he does not say so, but he says so with
emphasis in his care to preserve his racial and religious isolation; in
his practice of self-mutilation and the affronting reasons in which he
disguises his consciousness of the shame of it; in his maintenance of
a spiritual quarantine; in the diligence with which he repairs time’s
ravages in his Great Wall, lest Nature take advantage of the breach
and some caroling Gentile youth leap lightly through to claim a Jewish
maid. In a thousand ways, all having for purpose the safeguarding of
his racial isolation in a ghetto of his own invention, the orthodox
Jew shouts aloud his conviction of his superior holiness and peculiar
worth. Naturally, the echo is not unmixed with Christian denial,
formulated too frequently into unrighteous decrees by the voice of
authority.
None than I can have a greater regard for the Jewish character, as
found at its best in the higher types of the Jewish people, and not
found at all in those members of the race who alone are popularly
thought of as Jews. None than I can have a deeper detestation of
the spirit at the back of persecution of the Jews, in all its forms
and degrees. Rather than have a hand in it I would have no hand. Yet
I venture to say that if a high degree of contributory negligence,
constituting a veritable invitation to evil, is foolish the calamity
entailed is entitled to a place in the list of expectable phenomena;
and if a certain presumptuous self-righteousness is bad its natural and
inevitable punishment is not entirely undeserved.
In the mud that the Christian hand flings at the Jew there is a little
gold; in the Christian’s dislike of him there is what the assayers and
analysts call “a trace” of justice. He who thinks that whole races of
men, through long periods of time, hate for nothing has considered
history to little purpose and knows not well the constitution of
the human mind. It should seriously be considered whether, not the
chief, but the initial, fault may not be that of the Jew, who was not
always the unaggressive non-combatant, the long-suffering victim, that
centuries of oppression and repression have tended to make him. If we
may believe his own historical records, which the Christian holds in
even higher veneration than he does himself, he was once a very bad
neighbor. No worse calamity could then befall a feeble people than
the attention of an Israelite king. Believing themselves the salt of
the earth, his warlike subjects had always in pickle a rod for every
Gentile back. Every contiguous tribe which did not accept their God
incurred their savage hatred, expressed in incredible cruelties. They
ruled their little world with an iron hand, dealing damnation round and
forcing upon their neighbors a currency of bloody noses and cracked
crowns. Even now they have not renounced their irritating claim to
primacy in the scale of being, though no longer able to assert it with
fire and sword. It is significant, however, that here in the new world,
at a long remove from the inspiring scenes of their petty power and
gigantic woes—their parochial glory and imperial abjection—they have
somewhat abated the arrogance of their pretensions; and in obvious
consequence, the brutal Christian hand is lifted more languidly against
them in service of a softened resentment.
Being neither Christian nor Jew, and with only an intellectual
interest in their immemorial feud, I find in it, despite its most
tragic and pathetic incidents, something essentially comic—something
to bring a twinkle to the eye of an Apuleius and draw the merriment
of a Rabelais, “laughing sardonically in his easy chair.” That two
races of reasoning beings, inhabiting one small planet and having the
same sentiments, passions, virtues, vices and interests, should pass
loveless centuries, distrusting, hating and damaging each other is so
ludicrous a proposition that no degree of familiarity with it as a
fact suffices to deprive it altogether of its opéra bouffe character.
Nevertheless it is not to be laughed away. It must be dealt with
seriously, if at all; and it is encouraging to observe that more and
more it is taking attention in this country, where it can be considered
with less heat, and therefore more light, than elsewhere.
If the Jew cares for justice he must learn, first, that it does not
exist in this world, and second, that the least intolerable form of
injustice goes by favor with the hand of fellowship; and the hand of
fellowship is not offered to him who stands austerely apart saying: “I
am holier than thou.” America has given to the Jews political and civic
equality. If they want more more is attainable. But it is their move.
1898.