and a member of the synagogue. When his effort had proved vain, and he
must follow Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the path of exile, he wrote to
the wardens of Bevis Marks synagogue: “Many of your members are already
lost; many you are losing! Even those whose tempers and feelings would
still cling to you are gradually seceding. But against all this you are
perpetually pleading your existing laws, which you would enforce on all
the brethren alike. It is of these obsolete laws so many complain. They
were adapted by fugitives to their peculiar situation, quite distinct
from their own, and as foreign to us as the language in which they were
written. For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without
laws.”
Soon after his separation from the synagogue he wrote his work _The
Genius of Judaism_. In it is the following passage: “The religious
Judaism of the Theocracy degenerated into Rabbinical Judaism by
fabulous traditions and enslaving customs. Dictators of the human
intellect, the Rabbins, like their successors, the papal Christians,
attempted to raise a spurious Theocracy of their own. A race of
dreaming schoolmen contrived to place an avowed collection of mere
human decisions among the hallowed verities and the duties of devotion,
to graft opinions of men on the scion of divine institutions; nay,
even to prefer the gloss in direct opposition to the divine precept,
whenever, as they express it, ‘the tradition is not favoured;’ that
is, when the oral tradition absolutely contradicts the written law. The
Jews live according to their laws, and according to their traditions
and customs; for their traditions have become an integral part of their
written law, and their customs have been converted into rites. The
Judaic superstitions have been substituted for the code of Revelation.
We may ask, by what enthralling witchcraft, by what perverse ingenuity,
has such a revolution been brought about?”
In reading this I am reminded of the Russian folk-tale of “The
Devouring Sister.” The Vampire born into a family devours each member
of it successively, to the last--a brother who slays her. After she is
dead, he hears her voice gently entreating him to think with compassion
on her hard doom, and to preserve some bit of her remains. Moved by
this appeal, the brother folds one drop of her blood in a leaf and
carries it in his bosom. When he reaches home he falls dead; the one
drop of Vampire blood had devoured his heart. The fatal drop which
Isaac Disraeli carried away from his dead Judaism was folded in the
fine passage just quoted, as in a green leaf: it is in the phrase,
“scion of divine institutions.”
There is enough in that brief creed to sustain every persecution of
reason and conscience the world ever saw. The Sanhedrim is in it;
the Inquisition is in it. The belief that the God of the universe
established the institutions of ancient Judea is enough to eat the
human heart out of every generation that presses it, with whatever
sentiment, to its breast.
It was perfectly logical for Isaac Disraeli to have his son baptized
a Christian. Seeing in the so-called “religion” of his race a “scion
of divine institutions,” he rightly saw in Christianity the natural
expansion and historic development of that “scion.” He had said to the
synagogue, “For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without
laws.” Christianity supplied those laws. The same voice spake again
when, thirty-seven years ago, his son reminded Christendom that it was
obeying the laws and saturated in the literature of the Jewish race;
when he claimed that Moses was summoned by Jahve “to be the organ of an
eternal revelation of the divine will.”
The freethinker owes a certain debt to Lord Beaconsfield for his
logical treatment of Christianity. That unanswerable argument of his
in “A Political Biography,” that the Jews deserved gratitude for
prevailing on the Romans to crucify Jesus, so securing the Atonement;
that it was a sublime act and sacrifice, Jews being the ordained
immolators, securing the salvation of the world; that no one has
ever been permitted to write under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost
but a Jew; that all Christians acknowledge that the only medium of
communication between themselves and God is the Jewish race; that the
Mother of God was a Jewess; that, indeed, is a _reductio ad absurdum_,
which cannot be unwelcome to the age of common sense. But every nail he
thus drove into the coffin of Christianity was one which had pierced
the hands and feet of humanity from Canaan to Calvary, and from Calvary
to Smithfield.
The devotion of Lord Beaconsfield to the Jewish people was a fearful
retribution on the synagogue that drove out his father. His kiss was
as fatal as it was sincere. He taught the Jewish youth that the path
to power and glory, not merely for themselves but for their race, lay
in the direction of Christianity. His spirit may yet survive as the
Moses of a journey through the baptismal sea to the Promised Land. He
confirmed them in every error--in all their race-egoism, in all their
indifference to the progressive enlightenment of the world, and gave
their bigotry a new lease of life by a Christian confirmation. The
most eloquent passage he ever wrote is in _Tancred_, in the “Feast of
Tabernacles,” which the _Jewish World_, in quoting it after his death,
said might have been uttered by a _Chasid_ in a moment of inspiration:
“The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law
enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race
that persist in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits
to gather, will regain their vineyards. What sublime inexorability in
the law! But what indomitable spirit in the people! It is easy for
the happier Sephardim, the Hebrews who have never quitted the sunny
regions that are laved by the Midland Ocean; it is easy for them,
though they have lost their heritage, to sympathise in their beautiful
Asian cities or in their Moorish and Arabian gardens, with the graceful
rites that are, at least, an homage to a benignant nature. But picture
to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid
quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that
can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet he must celebrate the vintage of
purple Palestine! The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy
clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower, and that he must
build it of the boughs of thick trees; and the Rabbins have told him
that these thick trees are the palm, the myrtle, and the weeping
willow. Even Sarmatia may furnish a weeping willow. The law has told
him that he must pluck the fruit of goodly trees, and the Rabbins
have explained that goodly fruit on this occasion is confined to the
citron. Perhaps, in his despair, he is obliged to fly to the candied
delicacies of the grocer. His mercantile connections will enable him,
often at considerable cost, to procure some palm-leaves from Canaan,
which he may wave in his synagogue while he exclaims, as the crowd
did when the divine descendant of David entered Jerusalem, ‘Hosannah
in the highest!’ There is something profoundly interesting in this
devoted observance of Oriental customs in the heart of our Saxon and
Sclavonian cities; in these descendants of the Bedoueens, who conquered
Canaan more than three thousand years ago, still celebrating that
success which secured their forefathers, for the first time, grapes and
wine. Conceive a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of Hamburg or
Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of our Houndsditch or Minories,
born to hereditary insult, without any education, apparently without
a circumstance that can develop the slightest taste, or cherish the
least sentiment for the beautiful, living amid fogs and filth, never
treated with kindness, seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest,
if not the vilest, toil--bargaining for frippery, speculating in
usury, existing for ever under the concurrent influence of degrading
causes which would have worn out, long ago, any race that was not of
the unmixed blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the law of Moses;
conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust,
perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that
being are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all
ages among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience;
filled with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most
joyous, and the most exuberant; a subject which has inspired poets, and
which has made gods--the harvest of the grape in the native regions
of the vine. He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel
market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously
given a commission, and which are brought, probably, from one of the
neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his
miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it, even profusely, with
the finest flowers and fruits he can procure, the myrtle and the citron
never forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the
service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and his children
in the open air, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee,
beneath its sweet and starry sky.”
“What sublime inexorability in the law!” Nay, what binding, paralysing,
mercilessness in the self-imposed law that holds the eyes of a race
for ever at the back of its head instead of in the forehead! In the
great and grievous error of those words is repeated once more the doom
of the Wandering Race. In them Jesus says again to Ahasuerus, “As thou
hast refused to go out in the general vineyard of humanity, to toil and
gather with the true and earnest of all races and religions, be this
thy sentence: Keep thy small province of mouldered faith; go on, and
on, and for ever, celebrating vineyards that do not exist, pressing
dead grapes that yield no wine, waving dead palm-leaves before a
Messiah that can never arrive, bound in thine everlasting Houndsditch
round by dreams of myrtle-bowers in a barbarian paradise long ago
turned to a Valley of Jehoshaphat!”
Lord Beaconsfield also dealt his blow to Spinoza. He defended the
rights of the Jews in Parliament on the ground that they were all Jews,
all believers in Moses and the Prophets; and that the alternative
of this was belief in Hume and Gibbon. The day of his burial was
solemnised by the party he had led with an effort to drive out of
Parliament an Englishman who preferred Hume and Gibbon to Moses and the
Prophets.
This is the doom of Judaism. This is Ahasuerus bound. There is a
nobility in the Ahasuerus that Shelley evokes in _Queen Mab_, a Semitic
Prometheus bound for ever on Time and its desolations, as a rock, with
bigotry and intolerance feeding vulture-like upon his heart because
he will not bend to tyrannical Jove, either in the form of Jahve or
of Jesus; suffering as the friend of a Humanity also groaning beneath
a celestial despotism, but cringing as he will not. But there is
nothing Promethean in the mere preference for the chains of one tyrant
over those of another. There is nothing noble in a sect accepting its
rock and vulture through servility to a deity of whose indifference
or impotence or non-existence the history of his worshippers is a
sufficient proof. There is no majesty in martyrdom unless it is endured
for the deliverance and welfare of all mankind. There was a time when
the Jews suffered nobly; they stood almost alone in preserving the
protest of the human mind against priestly impostures, which could not
be maintained by the thinking Greeks and Romans--who no doubt knew
the facts as well as Lucian and Celsus--against imperial decrees.
But that time passed when thought became free. The emancipation of
the Jews politically brought to their side Herakles--a human-hearted
deliverer--who cut their outward cords. Judaism, remaining on its
Caucasus, apart from the evolution of humanity, is bound only by inward
chains. Its doom, in free countries, comes only from within.
It is forbidden that any man or race shall find strength and happiness
in isolation, and this race is withheld by its traditional system
and its dogmas from co-operation with mankind in its nobler aims
and tendencies. Their fundamental error is to regard the God of
Israel as different from the Gods of other people. Upon that rests
the wild superstition that the Jews, in some sense or other, are “a
chosen people” or “a peculiar people.” It is the doctrine alike of
Christianity and Judaism; but as in the dreary past it has been the
dogma most fatal to the Jews--their accepted supernatural eminence
logically leading to their supernatural doom--it must be equally fatal
in their future of freedom, in an intellectual sense. So long as they
are marked off in the human world in this way they will not find rest;
for that can be found only when their genius--earning such wreaths as
adorn the brow of Spinoza and Heine, or those which came from every
capital to lie on the grave of Offenbach--is identified with the
general work and play of the world, and their religious aims such as
are common to all who acknowledge allegiance to reason and pursue the
equal welfare of mankind.
XIX.
AHASUERUS DELIVERED.
There are certain races of mankind whose history or whose character
has made them the tests of civilisation. In one direction the negro
has been such. In the development of English self-government, on both
sides of the Atlantic, there came a time when its fine theories of
liberty were put to the test. In America the poor ignorant negro knelt
chained before the genius of the Republic. His slavery represented many
millions of money, his freedom must cost many thousands of lives; but
Justice said, “There is that lowly man--helpless, of alien race from
you, too poor to pay you anything: if you can do justice to him, can
make him a citizen, the world will know that you are really a republic.”
In another direction the Jewish race has been the test and register
of civilisation. It was the one visible embodiment of Antichrist
in Christendom. While missionaries were going through the world
to convert the world, the Jew also went through the world--moral,
religious, learned--a compulsory wanderer and missionary, in whose
scars might always be read the spirit of the Church he opposed, and
the meaning of a vicarious atonement, whose corollary was the unending
crucifixion of a race for the offence of three or four of their
ancestors. This Wandering Jew knocked at the doors of law-courts.
“Who art thou?” said the judges. “I am Antichrist.” “Come in and be
burnt,” said they. He came in and was burnt. But ever rising from
his ashes, the Wanderer marched on. Again, after some centuries, he
knocked at the door marked Justice. “Who art thou?” asked the judges.
“I am Antichrist,” he said. “Stay out and be mobbed,” said they. And
so he wandered until he reached the century when England opened the
door and said, “Enter and receive thy right.” Even Judge Jeffreys, in
the time of James II., would not accept the old law which disabled a
Jew from prosecuting a Christian. “Pay him his money,” he cried to the
defendant. “His action is not against a Christian: you are more a Jew
than he is!” At many doors this unconquerable Antichrist had to knock
in this land: slowly, against frantic attempts to bar them, they swung
open, one after the other; and it was proved that English justice,
confronting what Christendom called a devil, was ultimately equal
to giving that devil his due--in society, in the law-court, in the
Parliament.
The English have managed to hold superstition more in order in their
smaller territory than it is held in Eastern Europe, yet they must
not take for their own race all the credit for the equality that has
been accorded the Jew in England. The credit is mainly due to himself.
Some forty years ago, when wild stories reached Great Britain from
Damascus and Rhodes of how Jews were suffering horrible outrages on
account of absurd accusations--such as sacrificing Christian priests
and children--the entire English community joined to support Sir Moses
Montefiore in his mission to repress that fanaticism. But when England
had sent Sir Moses on his noble mission, it turned to consider its own
relation to the Jews, and found on its statute-book laws which still
bore witness of the ages when Jewish blood had mingled with Christian
sacrifices. The laws were even then--forty years ago--not all obsolete.
But some of them were, and others have since become so, largely through
the fact that the Jews had made themselves useful to the country.
Just now England is again called to look abroad though nearer home,
and consider the outbreak of fanaticism in Germany.
Dr. Carl Vogt, the naturalist, recently expressed his belief that the
present persecution of Jews in Germany is a recurrence of ancient
Teutonic barbarism. He explains Judenhetze scientifically, on the
principles of Atavism. Every now and then there must be a recrudescence
of suppressed barbarism. Those who have read, in _A Tramp Abroad_,
those accounts of the duels witnessed by imperturbable Mark Twain in
that country--duels in which students cut and slash each other in a
friendly way, in the intervals of drinking beer together, and flaunt
their facial gashes upon the street with pride, will suspect that the
barbarism in coming back had not far to travel. Nevertheless, we must
remember that Germany has not yet completed that revolution which
shall bring the people under the influence of their best heads; its
great science, art, and literature are still carried on as it were in
cloisters. The throne of Germany’s noble Reason is usurped by heartless
pretenders in politics and hypocrites in religion. Barbarossa will
awake presently, and when he comes forth from his cave it will not be
in the guise of Emperor William or Prince Bismarck, nor yet as the
priest-ridden Jew-hater, but as a cultured and courageous People, with
their feet alike on titled despotism and parochial barbarism.
As, however, in the outrages on Jews at Damascus and Rhodes, in the
last generation, England caught a glimpse, as in a mirror, of certain
features from her own hideous past still surviving in her laws, so one
can hardly turn from the Judenhetze of Germany without a consciousness
that there are still certain scandals in the attitude of English
Christianity towards the Jews. The chief scandal is that there should
be an organised society for converting them--as if they were savages.
The existence of such a society in London will one day be quoted to
show how much pious preadamitism survived amid our telegraphs and
telephones. It is not civilised for men to suppose that a good Jew is
inferior to a good Christian. It is scandal that the learned clergy
should permit the people to suppose that Christian churches and sects
have any moral or spiritual advantage over those who attend the
synagogue. How many mothers who teach their children the precepts of
the Sermon on the Mount, or rehearse to them the parables of the New
Testament, pity the children of Jewish mothers as knowing nothing of
those beautiful and tender sayings? How many of them even realise that
the Golden Rule is in the Pentateuch; and that every Jewish child
learns those sweet sayings and parables where Jesus learned them--at
his Jewish mother’s knee?
It is a great misfortune that religious liberalism, in its revolt from
the primitive Judaism which Protestantism and Puritanism restored, and
which survives now chiefly among Sabbatarian and dogmatic Christians,
has kept before the world only that ancient Jahvism under which
Canaanites were exterminated. It has thus indirectly fostered the
fallacy which regards as Judaism much that even strict Jews have long
ago outgrown. The Jews themselves, however, as we have seen, are
largely to blame for the persistence of this vulgar delusion; indeed,
even many of their liberal thinkers have obstinately preserved their
new wine in ceremonial bottles, with the ancient labels, and helped to
convey the popular impression that their religion is unchanged. But
it _is_ changed. Even the strictest Jews are to-day less Sabbatarian,
and more emancipated from the barbarism of sacrificial superstitions,
than Christians. When Moses Mendelssohn said that the Jews would
become Christians “when the Christians cease to be Jews,” he no doubt
recognised that Christians are preserving as dogma the Judaism which
Jews keep as a shell, but inwardly have outgrown; and that a conversion
of the Jews to Christianity would really carry them back to Levitical
beliefs long replaced by the modern ideas prevailing inside the
hereditary and patriotic walls from which they fear to venture.
Spinoza was as representative a Jew as ever lived, and never more than
when the synagogue disowned him. The history of his race for a thousand
years had been to him an instruction in fidelity and independence. That
there is a vigorous Left among the Jews is apparent in every direction;
not only in Jewish scholarship, which is assisting in the work of
detaching from their Bible and other sacred books a Hebrew Mythology,
but also in the political and social influence of Jews. The outbreak
of Judenhetze in Germany is a bad enough symptom for the Teutons, but
a hopeful sign for the Jews. Socially they have excited jealousy by
the extent to which, having become men and women of the world, they
are able to support that character by their wealth. Politically,
they would appear to have so completely entered into those liberal
and popular movements which they so long eschewed, that the Imperial
Power is under the necessity of reminding them that, as in the past
they suffered from the mob, and were protected by princes, so it may
be again. The retention of the Rev. Mr. Stoecker as Court Chaplain,
while he is leading this agitation so unscrupulously, is a confession
that the anti-Semitic movement has the encouragement of the Emperor
and his Chancellor. To awaken Teutonic jealousy of Jewish wealth, just
beginning to be displayed in the enjoyment of Gentile luxuries; to
arouse Christian fanaticism against the growing freethought of a race
ceasing to expect any Messiah: such are the obvious methods by which
the German Government hope to separate Jewish means and radicalism from
the masses, and drive Jews to their ancient refuge--the strong central
power always purchasable by money and servility. What success will
crown this imperial effort remains to be seen. But that there should be
a necessity for it is a confirmation of what the late Lord Beaconsfield
asserted, and such good judges as Herr Eydmann and Karl Blind attest,
that the Jews are very extensively concerned in popular movements on
the Continent.