Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 5 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
329
FIFTH CHAPTER
THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS
INTO THE
HISTORY
OF THE WEST
“Let us forget whence
we
spring. No more talk of 'German,' or of 'Portuguese' Jews. Though
scattered
over the earth we are nevertheless a single people“ — RABBI
SALOMON LIPMANN-CERFBERR
in the opening speech delivered on July 26, 1806, at the meeting
preparatory
to the Synedrium of 1807 which Napoleon called together.
THE JEWISH
QUESTION
HAD I been
writing
a hundred years ago, I should hardly have felt compelled at this point
to
devote a special chapter to the entrance of the Jews into Western
history.
Of course the share they had in the rise of Christianity, on account of
the peculiar and absolutely un-Aryan spirit which they instilled into
it,
would have deserved our full attention, as well as also the economic
part
which they played in all Christian countries; but an occasional mention
of these things would have sufficed; anything more would have been
superfluous.
Herder wrote at that time: “Jewish history takes up more room in our
history
and more attention than it probably deserves in itself.“ * In the
meantime,
however, a great change has taken place: the Jews play in Europe, and
wherever
European influence extends, a different part to-day from that which
they
played a hundred years ago; as Viktor Hehn expresses it, we live
* Von
den deutsch-orientalischen Dichtern, Div. 2.
330 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to-day in a “Jewish age“; * we may
think
what we like about the past history of the Jews, their present history
actually takes up so much room in our own history that we cannot
possibly
refuse to notice them. Herder in spite of his outspoken humanism had
expressed
the opinion that “the Jewish people is and remains in Europe an Asiatic
people alien to our part of the world, bound to that old law which it
received
in a distant climate, and which according to its own confession it
cannot
do away with.“ † Quite correct. But this alien people, everlastingly
alien,
because — as Herder well remarks — it is indissolubly bound to an alien
law that is hostile to all other peoples — this alien people has become
precisely in the course of the nineteenth century a disproportionately
important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our
life.
Even a hundred years ago that same witness had sadly to confess that
the
“ruder nations of Europe“ were “willing slaves of Jewish usury“; to-day
he could say the same of by far the greatest part of the civilised
world.
The possession of money in itself is, however, of least account; our
governments,
our law, our science, our commerce, our literature, our art...
practically
all branches of our life have become more or less willing slaves of the
Jews, and drag the feudal fetter il not yet on two, at least on one
leg.
In the meantime the “alien“ element emphasised by Herder has become
more
and more prominent; a hundred years ago it was rather indistinctly and
vaguely felt; now it has asserted and proved itself, and so forced
itself
on the attention of even the most inattentive. The Indo-European, moved
by ideal motives, opened the gates in
* Gedanken
über Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 40. The passage as it stands reads,
“From
the day of Goethe's death, the 22nd March, 1832, Börne dated the
freedom
of Germany. In reality, however, one epoch was with that day closed and
the Jewish age in which we live began.“
† Bekehrung
der Juden. Abschnitt 7 of the Untersuchungen des vergangenen
Jahrhunderts
zur Beförderung eines geistigen Reiches.
331 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
friendship: the Jew rushed in like
an
enemy, stormed all positions and planted the flag of his, to us, alien
nature — I will not say on the ruins, but on the breaches of our
genuine
individuality.
Are we for that
reason
to revile the Jews? That would be as ignoble as it is unworthy and
senseless.
The Jews deserve admiration, for they have acted with absolute
consistency
according to the logic and truth of their own individuality, and never
for a moment have they allowed themselves to forget the sacredness of
physical
laws because of foolish humanitarian day-dreams which they shared only
when such a policy was to their advantage. Consider with what mastery
they
use the law of blood to extend their power: the principal stem remains
spotless, not a drop of strange blood comes in; as it stands in the Thora,
“A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to
his
tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord“
(Deuteronomy xxiii. 2); in the meantime, however, thousands of
side
branches are cut off and employed to infect the Indo-Europeans with
Jewish
blood. If that were to go on for a few centuries, there would be in
Europe
only one single people of pure race, that of the Jews, all the rest
would
be a herd of pseudo-Hebraic mestizos, a people beyond all doubt
degenerate
physically, mentally and morally. For even the great friend of the
Jews,
Ernest Renan, admits, “Je suis le premier à
reconnaître
que la race sémitique, comparée à la race
indo-européenne,
représente réellement une combinaison inférieure
de
la nature humaine.“ * And in one of his best but unfortunately
little-known
writings he says again, “L'épouvantable simplicité de
l'esprit sémitique rétrécit le cerveau humain, le
ferme à toute idée délicate, à tout
sentiment
fin, à toute
* Histoire
générale et système comparé des langues
sémitiques,
5e éd. p. 4. It will make little difference to this view when I
show, as I shall do immediately, that the Jews are not pure Semites but
half Syrians.
332 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
recherche rationelle, pour le
mettre
en face d'une éternelle tautologie: Dieu est Dieu“; * and he
demonstrates that culture could have no future unless Christian
religion
should move farther away from the spirit of Judaism and the
“Indo-European
genius“ assert itself more and more in every domain. That mixture then
undoubtedly signifies a degeneration: degeneration of the Jew, whose
character
is much too alien, firm and strong to be quickened and ennobled by
Teutonic
blood, degeneration of the European who can naturally only lose by
crossing
with an “inferior type“ — or, as I should prefer to say, with so
different
a type. While the mixture is taking place, the great chief stem of the
pure unmixed Jews remains unimpaired. When Napoleon, at the beginning
of
the nineteenth century, dissatisfied that the Jews, in spite of their
emancipation,
should remain in proud isolation, angry with them for continuing to
devour
with their shameful usury the whole of his Alsace, although every
career
was now open to them, sent an ultimatum to the council of their elders
demanding the unreserved fusion of the Jews with the rest of the nation
— the delegates of the French Jews adopted all the articles prescribed
but one, namely, that which aimed at absolute freedom of marriage with
Christians. Their daughters might marry outside the Israelite people,
but
not their sons; the dictator of Europe had to yield. † This is the
admirable
law by which real Judaism was founded. Indeed, the law in its strictest
form forbids marriage altogether between Jews and non-Jews; in Deuteronomy
vii. 3, we read, “Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son nor his
daughter shalt thou take unto thy son“; but, as a rule, emphasis is
laid
only on the last clause; for example, in Exodus
* De
la Part des peuples sémitiques dans l'histoire de la
civilisation,
p. 39.
† In
the second book I shall find it necessary to give more details
concerning
this famous synedrium and its casuistic distinction between religious
and
civil law — a distinction which neither Talmud nor Thora
recognises.
333 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
xxxiv. 16, the sons alone are
forbidden
to take strange daughters, not the daughters to take strange sons, and
in Nehemiah xiii., after both sides have been forbidden to
marry
outside the race, only the marriage of a son with a foreign wife is
described
as a “sin against God.“ That is also a perfectly correct view. By the
marriage
of a daughter with a Goy, the purity of the Jewish stem is in no way
altered,
while this stem thereby gets a footing in the strange camp; on the
other
hand, the marriage of a son with a Goya “makes the holy seed common“ as
the book of Ezra ix. 2, drastically expresses it. * The
possible
conversion of the Goya to Judaism would not help matters: the idea of
such
a conversion was rightly quite strange to the older law — for the
question
is one of physical conditions of descent — but the newer law says, with
enviable discernment: “Proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers
to a sound body.“ † Thus was the Jewish race kept pure in the past and
it is still kept so: daughters of the house of Rothschild have married
barons, counts, dukes, princes, they submit to baptism without demur;
no
son has ever married a European; if he did so he would have to leave
the
house of his fathers and the community of his people. ‡
*
In
the new literal translation of Professor Louis Segond the passage
reads,
“the sacred race defiled by mixture with strange peoples“; in the
translation
of De Wette it is, “they have mingled the holy seed with the peoples of
the earth.“
†
From
the Talmud, according to Döllinger, Vorträge
i.
237. In another place the Talmud calls the proselytes a
“burden.“
(See the Jew Philippson: Israelitische Religionslehre,
1861,
ii. 189.)
‡ How
pure the Jewish race still is, has been shown by Virchow's great
anthropological
examination of all the school children of Germany; Ranke gives details
in his book, Der Mensch, 2nd ed. ii 293: “The purer the race,
the
smaller is the number of mixed forms. In this connection it is
certainly
a very important fact that the smallest number of mixed forms was found
among the Jews, whereby their decided isolation as a race from the
Teutonic
peoples, among which they live, is shown most clearly.“ — Measurements
in America have, according to the American Anthropologist, vol.
iv., in the meantime led to the conviction that there too the Jewish
race
“has kept itself absolutely pure.“ (Quoted from the Politisch-anthropologische
Revue, 1904, March, p. 1003.)
334 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
These details are
somewhat premature; they really belong to a later portion of the book;
but my object has been at once and by the shortest way to meet the
objection
— which unfortunately is still to be expected from many sides — that
there
is no “Jewish question,“ from which would follow that the entrance of
the
Jews into our history had no significance. Others, again, talk of
religion:
it is a question, they say, of religious differences only. Whoever says
this overlooks the fact that there would be no Jewish religion if there
were no Jewish nation. But there is one. The Jewish nomocracy (that is,
rule of the law) unites the Jews, no matter how scattered they may be
over
all the lands of the world, into a firm, uniform and absolutely
political
organism, in which community of blood testifies to a common past and
gives
a guarantee for a common future. Though it has many elements not purely
Jewish in the narrower sense of the word, yet the power of this blood,
united with the incomparable power of the Jewish idea, is so great that
these alien elements have long ago been assimilated; for nearly two
thousand
years have passed since the time when the Jews gave up their temporary
inclination to proselytising. Of course, I must, as I showed in the
preceding
chapter, distinguish between Jews of noble and of less noble birth; but
what binds together the incompatible parts is (apart from gradual
fusing)
the tenacity of life which their national idea possesses. This national
idea culminates in the unshakable confidence in the universal empire of
the Jews, which Jehovah promised. “Simple people who have been born
Christians“
(as Auerbach expresses it in his sketch of Spinoza's life) fancy that
the
Jews have given up that hope, but they are very wrong; for “the
existence
of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope,“ as one of
the very moderate and liberal Jews lately wrote. * The whole Jewish
religion
is in fact founded on
*
Skreinka:
Entwickelungsgeschichte
der jüdischen Dogmen, p. 75.
335 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
this hope. The Jewish faith in God,
that which can and may be called “religion“ in their case, for it has
become
since the source of a fine morality, is a part of this national idea,
not
vice
versa. To assert that there is a Jewish religion but no Jewish
nation
is simply nonsense. *
The entry of the
Jews into the history of the West signifies therefore beyond doubt the
entrance of a definite element, quite different from and in a way
opposed
to all European races, an element which remained essentially the same,
while the nations of Europe went through the most various phases; in
the
course of a hard and often cruel history it never had the weakness to
entertain
proposals of fraternity, but, possessed as it was of its national idea,
its national past, and its national future, felt and still feels all
contact
with others as a pollution; thanks also to the certainty of its
instinct,
which springs from strict uniformity of national feeling, it has always
been able to
*
At
the Jewish congress held in Basle in 1898, Dr. Mandelstam, Professor in
the University of Kiev, said in the chief speech of the sitting of
August
29, “The Jews energetically reject the idea of fusion with the other
nationalities
and cling firmly to their historical hope, i.e., of world
empire“
(from a report of one who took part in the congress in Le Temps,
Sept. 2, 1898). The Vienna newspapers of July 30 and 31, 1901, report a
speech on Zionism which the Vienna Rabbi, Dr. Leopold Kahn, delivered
in
a room of the orthodox Jewish school in Pressburg. In this speech Dr.
Kahn
made the following admission: “the Jew will never be able to assimilate
himself; he will never adopt the customs and ways of other peoples. The
Jew remains Jew under all circumstances. Every assimilation is purely
exterior.“
Words well worth laying to heart! In the Festschrift zum 70.
Geburtstage
A. Berliner's, 1903, Dr. B. Felsenthal publishes a series of Jewish
Theses in which he supports with all his energy the thesis that
Jewry
is a people, not a religion, “Judaism is a special stem, and every Jew
is born into this stem.“ This stem is, according to him, “one of the
ethnically
purest peoples that exist.“ Felsenthal reckons that from Theodosius to
the year 1800, “perhaps not quite 300 non Semites were adopted into the
Jewish race,“ and it is characteristic that he denies proselytes the
right
of looking upon themselves as full-blooded Jews. “The Jewish people,
the
Jewish stem is the given fact, the constant thing, the necessary
substratum,
the substantial kernel. The Jewish religion is something attached to
this
kernel, a quality — an accident, as it is called in the language of the
philosophical schools.“ I quote from the special impression, made by
Itzkowski,
Berlin.
336
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
exercise a powerful influence upon
others,
while the Jews themselves have been influenced but skin-deep by our
intellectual
and cultural development. To characterise this most peculiar situation
from the standpoint of the European, we must repeat the words of
Herder:
the Jewish people is and remains alien to our part of the world; from
the
standpoint of the Jew the same fact is formulated somewhat differently;
we know from a former chapter how the great free-thinking philosopher
Philo
put it: “only the Israelites are men in the true sense of the word.“ *
What the Jew here says in the intolerant tone of racial pride was more
politely expressed by Goethe, when he disputed the community of descent
of Jews and Indo-Europeans, no matter how far back the origin was put:
“We will not dispute with the chosen people the honour of its descent
from
Adam. We others, however, have certainly had other ancestors as well.“
†
THE
“ALIEN PEOPLE“
These
considerations
make it our right and our duty to look upon the Jew in our midst as a
peculiar
and, in fact, alien element. Outwardly his inheritance was the same as
ours; inwardly it was not so: he inherited quite a different spirit.
One
single trait is all that is necessary to reveal in an almost alarming
manner
to our consciousness the yawning gulf which here separates soul from
soul:
the revelation of Christ has no significance for the Jew! I do not here
speak of pious orthodoxy at all. But read, for example, in Diderot, the
notorious free-thinker, the wonderful words on the Crucified One, see
how
Diderot represents man in his greatest sorrow turning to the
* See
p.
217.
† Conversations
with Eckermann, October 7, 1828. Giordano Bruno made a similar
assertion,
viz., that only the Jews were descended from Adam and Eve, the rest of
mankind were of much older origin. (See Lo spaccio della bestia
trionfante.)
337
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
Divine One, and makes us feel that
the
Christian religion is the only religion in the world. „Quelle
profonde
sagesse il y a dans ce que l'aveugle philosophie appelle la folie de la
croix! Dans l'état où j'étais, de quoi m'aurait
servi
l'image d'un législateur heureux et comblé de gloire? Je
voyais l'innocent, le flanc percé, le front couronné
d'épines,
les mains et les pieds percés de clous, et expirant dans les
souffrances;
et je me disais: Voilà mon Dieu, et j'ose me plaindre!“ I
have
searched through a whole library of Jewish books in the expectation of
finding similar words — naturally not belief in the divinity of Christ,
nor the idea of redemption, but the purely human feeling for the
greatness
of a suffering saviour — but in vain. A Jew who feels that is in fact
no
longer a Jew, but a denier of Judaism. And while we find even in
Mohammed's
Koran
at least a vague conception of the importance of Christ and profound
reverence
for His personality, a cultured, leading Jew of the nineteenth century
calls Christ “the new birth with the deathmask,“ which inflicted new
and
painful wounds upon the Jewish people; he cannot see anything else in
Him.
* In view of the cross he assures us that “the Jews do not require this
convulsive emotion for their spiritual improvement,“ and adds,
“particularly
not among the middle classes of the inhabitants of the cities.“ His
comprehension
goes no further. In a book, republished in 1880 (!)‚ by a Spanish Jew
(Mose
de Leon) Jesus Christ is called a “dead dog“ that lies “buried in a
dunghill.“
Besides, the Jews have taken care to issue in the latter part of the
nineteenth
century several editions (naturally in Hebrew) of the so-called
“censured
passages“ from the Talmud, those passages usually omitted in
which
Christ is exposed to our scorn and hatred as a “fool,“ “sorcerer,“
“profane
person,“ “idolater,“ “dog,“ “bastard,“ “child of lust,“ &c.; so,
too,
his sublime
*
Graetz:
Volkstümliche
Geschichte der Juden, i, 591.
338 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
mother. * We certainly do the Jews
no
injustice when we say that the revelation of Christ is simply something
incomprehensible and hateful to them. Although he apparently sprang
from
their midst, he embodies nevertheless the negation of their whole
nature
— a matter in which the Jews are far more sensitive than we. This clear
demonstration of the deep cleft that separates us Europeans from the
Jew
is by no means given in order to let religious prejudice with its
dangerous
bias settle the matter, but because I think that the perception of two
so fundamentally different natures reveals a real gulf; it is well to
look
once into this gulf, so that on other occasions, where the two sides
seem
likely to unite each other, we may not be blind to the deep abyss which
separates them.
When we understand
what a chasm there is between us we are forced to a further conclusion.
The Jew does not understand us, that is certain; can we hope to
understand
him, to do him justice? Perhaps, if we are really intellectually and
morally
superior to him, as Renan insisted in the passage quoted above, and as
other perhaps more reliable scholars have likewise said. † But we should
* See
Laible: Jesus Christus im Talmud, p. 2 ff. (Schriften des
Institutum
Judaicum in Berlin, No. 10; in the supplement the original Hebrew
texts
are given.) This absolutely impartial scholar, who is, moreover, a
friend
of the Jews, says: “The hatred and scorn of the Jews was always
directed
in the first place against the person of Jesus“ (p. 25). “The
Jesus-hatred
of the Jews is a firmly established fact, but they want to show it as
little
as possible“ (p. 3). Hatred of Christ is described by the same scholar
as the “most national trait of Judaism“ (p. 86); he says, “at the
approach
of Christianity the Jews were seized ever and again with a fury and
hatred
that were akin to madness“ (p. 72). Even to-day no orthodox Jew may use
the name of Christ either in speech or in writing (pp. 3 and 32); the
most
common cryptonyms are “the bastard,“ “the hanged,“ often, too, “Bileam.“
† See
especially the famous passage in Lassen's Indische Altertumskunde,
where the great Orientalist proves in detail his view that the
Indo-European
race is “more highly and more fully gifted,“ that in it alone there is
“perfect symmetry of all mental powers.“ (See i. 414, of the
1847
edition.)
339 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
then have to judge him from the
lofty
heights of our superiority, not from the low depths of hatred and
superstition,
and still less from the swampy shallows of misunderstanding in which
our
religious teachers have been wading for the last two thousand years. It
is surely an evident injustice to ascribe to the Jew thoughts which he
never had, to glorify him as the possessor of the most sublime
religious
intuitions, which were perhaps more alien to him than to any one else
in
the world, and at best are to be found only in the hearts of a few
scattered
individuals as a cry of revolt against the special hardness of heart of
this people — and then to condemn him for being to-day quite different
from what he should be according to such fictitious conceptions. It is
not only unfair, but as regards public feeling, regrettably misleading;
for through his connection with our religious life — a connection which
is entirely fictitious — his head seems enveloped in a kind of nimbus,
and then we are greatly incensed when we find no holy person under this
sham halo. We expect more of the Jews than of ourselves, who are merely
the children of the heathen. But the Jewish testimony is very different
and more correct; it leads us to expect so little that every noble
trait
discovered later and every explanation found for Jewish failings gives
us genuine pleasure. Jehovah, for instance, is never tired of
explaining,
“I have seen this people and behold it is a stiff-necked people,“ * and
Jeremiah gives such a characterisation of the moral constitution of the
Jews that Monsieur Edouard Drumont could not wish it to be more richly
coloured, “And they will deceive every one his neighbour, and will not
speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary
themselves to commit iniquity.“ † Little wonder, after this
description,
that Jeremiah calls the Jews “an
* Exodus
xxxii. 9, xxxiv. 9; Deuteronomy ix. 13, &c.
† ix.
5.
340 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
assembly of treacherous men,“ and
knows
only one desire, “Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of
wayfaring
men; that I might leave my people and go from them.“ For our incredible
ignorance of the Jewish nature we are ourselves solely to blame; never
did a people give so comprehensive and honest a picture of its own
personality
as the Hebrew has done in his Bible, a picture which (so far as I can
judge
from fragments) is made more complete by the Talmud, though in
faded
colours. Without, therefore, denying that it must be very difficult for
us who are “descended from other ancestors“ to form a correct judgment
of the “alien Asiatic people,“ we must clearly see that the Jews from
time
immemorial have done their best to inform the unprejudiced about
themselves,
a circumstance which entitles us to hope that we may gain a thorough
knowledge
of their nature. As a matter of fact, the events which take place
before
our eyes should be sufficient for that. Is it possible to read the
daily
papers without becoming acquainted with Jewish ways of thinking, Jewish
taste, Jewish morals, Jewish aims? A few annual volumes of the Archives
israélites teach us in fact more than a whole anti-Semitic
library,
and indeed not only about the less admirable, but also about the
excellent
qualities of the Jewish character. But here, in this chapter, I shall
leave
the present out of account. If we are to form a practical and true
judgment
concerning the significance of the Jew as joint-heir and fellow-worker
in the nineteenth century, we must above all become clear as to what he
is. From what a man is by nature follows of strict necessity what he
will
do under certain conditions; the philosopher says: operari sequitur
esse; an old German proverb expresses the same thing in a more
homely
way, “Only what a man is, can one get out of him.“
341 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
HISTORICAL
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW
Pure history in
this
case does not bring us either quickly or surely to our goal, and
besides
it is not my task to furnish a history of the Jews. As in other
chapters,
so here too I have a horror of copying what has been written before.
Every
one, of course, knows how and when the Jews entered into Western
history:
first by the Diaspora, then by being scattered. Their changing fortunes
in various lands and times are likewise no secret to us, although,
indeed,
much that we know is absolutely untrue, and of much that we ought to
know
we are entirely ignorant. But I do not need to tell any one that
throughout
the Christian centuries the Jews played an important though at times
circumscribed
rôle.
Even in the earliest Western Gothic times they understood how to
acquire
influence and power as slave-dealers and financial agents. Though they
were not everywhere, as they were among the Spanish Moors, powerful
Ministers
of State, who, following the example of Mardochai, filled the most
lucrative
posts with “their many brothers,“ though they did not attain
everywhere,
as they did in Catholic Spain, to the rank of Bishop and Archbishop, *
yet their influence was always and everywhere great. The Babenberg
princes
as early as the thirteenth century set their successors the example of
letting Jews manage the finances of their States and honouring these
administrators
with titles of distinction; † the great Pope Innocent III. gave
important
posts at his Court to Jews; ‡ the knights of France had to pledge their
* See
the book of the Jew, David Mocatta, The Jews in Spain and Portugal,
where a detailed account is given of how there were in Spain
“generations
and generations of secret Jews who mingled with all classes of society
and were in possession of every post in the State and especially in the
Church!“
†
Graetz,
ii. 503.
‡
Israel
Abrahams: Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.
342
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
goods with the Jews, in order to be
able to take part in the Crusades; * Rudolf von Habsburg favoured the
Jews
in every way; he vindicated them “as servants of his imperial
exchequer,“
and by freeing them from being subject to ordinary justice he made it
very
difficult indeed for any action brought against them to be carried
through;
† in short, what I call the entrance of the Jews into Western history
has
never ceased to make itself felt at all times and places. If any one
were
qualified to study history for the sole purpose of disentangling the
question
of Jewish influence, he would, I think, bring to light some unexpected
facts. Without this detailed study the fact of this influence can only
be established clearly and beyond doubt where the Jews were in
considerable
numbers. In the second century, for example, the Jews on the island of
Cyprus are more numerous than the other inhabitants; they resolve to
found
a national State and with this intent follow the procedure known from
the
Old Testament: they slay in one day all the other inhabitants, 240,000
in number; and in order that this island State may not be without
support
on the mainland, they at the same time slay the 220,000 non-Jewish
inhabitants
of Cyrene. ‡ In Spain they pursue the same policy with greater caution
and astonishing perseverance. Under the rule of that thoroughly Western
Gothic king, who had showered benefits on them, they invite their
kinsmen,
the Arabs, to come over from Africa, and, not out of any ill-feeling,
but
simply because they hope to profit thereby, they betray their noble
protector;
under the Kalifs they then acquire gradually an even larger share in
the
government; “they concentrated,“ their great supporter the historian
Heman
writes, “the intellectual and the material powers al-
*
André
Réville: Les payans au Moyen-Age, 1896, p. 3.
† See
among others Realis: Die Juden und die Judenstadt in Wien,
1846,
p. 18, &c.
‡
Mommsen:
Römische
Geschichte, v, 543.
343 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
together in their own hands“; the
prosperous
Moorish State was, it is true, thereby intellectually and materially
ruined:
but this was a matter of indifference to the Jews, as they had already
obtained as firm a footing in the Christian State of the Spaniards
which
was destined to take the place of the Moorish one. “The movable wealth
of the land was here absolutely in their power; the heritable property
they made gradually theirs by usury and the purchase of mortgaged
estates
of nobles. From the offices of Secretary of State and Minister of
Finance
downwards all the offices which had to do with taxes and money were in
Jewish hands. Through usury almost all Aragon was mortgaged to them. In
the cities they formed the majority of the wealthy population.“ * But
here,
as elsewhere, they were not always shrewd; they had employed their
power
to obtain all kinds of privileges; for example, the oath of a single
Jew
sufficed to prove debt claims against Christians (the same was the case
in the Archduchy of Austria and in many places), while the testimony of
a Christian against a Jew had no weight before a tribunal, and so on;
these
privileges they abused so outrageously that the people finally
revolted.
The same would probably have happened in Germany if the Church and
intelligent
statesmen had not put a stop to the evil in time. Charlemagne had
written
to Italy for Jews to manage his finances; soon, as farmers of taxes,
they
secured for themselves wealth and influence in every direction, and
used
these to get important concessions for their people, such as commercial
privileges, less severe punishment for crime and the like; the whole
population
was even forced to make Sunday their market day, as Saturday, the
customary
market day, did not suit the Jews because it was
*
Heman:
Die
historische Weltstellung der Juden, 1882, p. 24 ff. For a somewhat
differently tinged account which, however, in actual facts is entirely
at one with this, see Graetz Volksth. Gesch. d. Juden,
ii.
344 ff.
344 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
their Sabbath; it was at that time
fashionable
for courtiers to visit the synagogues! But the reaction set in soon and
strongly, and not only, as the historians are wont to represent it, as
the result of priestly agitation — such things belong to the shell, not
to the kernel of history — but in the first place because the Teuton is
in fact just as much a born merchant and industrialist as he is a born
warrior, and because, as soon as the growth of cities awakened these
instincts
in him, he saw the game of his unfair rival, and, full of violent
indignation,
demanded his removal. And so, if such were the purpose of this chapter,
we could trace the ebb and flow of Jewish influence to the present day,
when all the wars of the nineteenth century are so peculiarly connected
with Jewish financial operations, from Napoleon's Russian campaign and
Nathan Rothschild's rôle of spectator at the Battle of
Waterloo
to the consulting of the Bleichröders on the German side and of
Alphonse
Rothschild on the French side at the peace transactions of the year
1871,
and to the “Commune,“ which from the beginning was looked upon by all
intelligent
people as a Jewish-Napoleonic machination.
CONSENSUS
INGENIORUM
Now this political
and social influence of the Jews has been very variously judged, but
the
greatest politicians of all times have regarded it as pernicious.
Cicero,
for example (no great politician but an experienced statesman),
displays
a genuine fear of the Jews; where a legal transaction encroaches on
their
interest, he speaks so low that only the judges hear him, for he is
well
aware, as he says, that all the Jews hold together and that they know
how
to ruin the one who opposes them; while he thunders the most vehement
charges
against Greeks, against Romans, against the most powerful men of his
time,
he advises caution in dealing with the Jews; they are to him an
345 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
uncanny power and he passes with
tlie
greatest haste over that city of “suspicion and slander,“ Jerusalem:
such
was the opinion of a Cicero during the consulate of a Julius Caesar! *
Even before the destruction of Jerusalem the Emperor Tiberius, who was,
according to many historians, the best ruler that the Roman Imperium
ever
possessed, recognised a national danger in the immigration of the Jews.
Even Frederick the Second, the Hohenstauffen, certainly one of the most
brilliant men that ever wore a crown or carried a sword, a more
freethinking
man than any monarch of the nineteenth century, an enthusiastic admirer
of the East and a generous supporter of Hebrew scholars, nevertheless
held
it to be his duty, contrary to the custom of his contemporaries, to
debar
the Jews from all public offices, and pointed warningly to the fact
that
wherever the Jews are admitted to power, they abuse it; the very same
doctrine
was taught by the other great Frederick the Second, the Hohenzollern,
who
gave universal freedom, but not to the Jews; similar were the words of
Bismarck, while he still could speak openly, in the Landtag (1847) and
the great historian Mommsen speaks of Judaism as of a “State inside the
State.“ — As regards the social influence in particular, I will only
quote
two wise and fair authorities, whose judgment cannot be suspected even
by the Jews, namely, Herder and Goethe. The former says, “A ministry,
in
which the Jew is supreme, a household, in which a Jew has the key of
the
wardrobe and the management of the finances, a department or
commissariat,
in which Jews do the principal business ... are Pontine marshes that
cannot
be drained“; and he expresses the opinion that the presence of an
indefinite
number of Jews is so pernicious to the welfare of a European State,
that
we “dare not be influenced by general humane principles“; it is a
national
question,
* See
the Defence of Lucius Flaccus, xxviii.
346 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
and it is the duty of every State to
decide “how many of this alien people can be tolerated without injury
to
the true citizens?“ * Goethe goes still deeper: “How should we let the
Jews share in our highest culture, when they deny its origin and
source?“
And he became “violently enraged“ when the law of 1823 permitted
marriage
between Jews and Germans, prophesying the “worst and most frightful
consequences,“
particularly the “undermining of all moral feelings“ and declaring that
the bribery of the “all-powerful Rothschild“ must be the cause of this
“folly.“ † Goethe and Herder have exactly the same opinion as the great
Hohenstauffen, the great Hohenzollern, and all great men before and
after
them: without superstitiously reproaching the Jews with their peculiar
individuality, they consider them an actual danger to our civilisation
and our culture; they would not give them an active part in our life.
We
cannot proceed with our discussion and simply pass over such a consensus
ingeniorum. For to these well-weighed, serious judgments derived
from
the fulness of experience and the insight of the greatest intellects we
have nothing to oppose but the empty phrases of the droits de
l'homme
— a parliamentary clap-trap. ‡
*
Adrastea:
Bekehrung
der Juden.
†
Wilhelm
Meister's Wanderjahre, iii. 11, and the conversation with von
Müller
on September 23, 1823.
‡ I
have intentionally limited my quotations. But I cannot refrain from
defending
in a note the great Voltaire against the almost established myth that
he
was altogether favourable and as superficial in his humanitarian
judgment
of the influence of the Jews upon our culture, as is the modern
fashion.
Even Jews of such broad culture as James Darmesteter (Peuple Juif,
2e éd. p. 17) print the name Voltaire in thick type and
represent
him as one of the intellectual originators of their emancipation. The
opposite
is true; more than once Voltaire advises that the Jews be sent back to
Palestine. Voltaire is one of the authors whom I know best, because I
prefer
interesting books to wearisome ones, and I think I could easily collect
a hundred quotations of a most aggressive nature against the Jews. In
the
essay of the Dictionnaire Philosophique (end of Section 1) he
says:
“Vous
ne trouverez dans les Juifs qu'un peuple ignorant et barbare, qui joint
depuis longtemps la plus sordide avarice à la plus
détestable
superstition et à la plus invincible haine pour
347 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
PRINCES
AND NOBILITY
On the other hand,
it is certain and must be carefully observed that, if the Jews are
responsible
for many a shocking historical development, for the fall of many
heroic,
powerful peoples, still greater is the responsibility of those
Europeans
who have always from the most base motives encouraged, protected and
fostered
the disintegrating activity of the Jews, and these are primarily the
Princes
and the nobility — and that too from the first century of our era to
the
present day. Open the history of any European nation you like wherever
the Jews are numerous and begin to realise their strength, you will
always
hear bitter complaints against them from the people, from the
commercial
classes, from the circles of the learned and the poets; everywhere and
at all times it is the Princes and the nobility that protect them: the
Princes because they need money for their wars, the nobility because
they
live extravagantly.
tous les peuples
qui
les tolèrent et qui les enrichissent.“ In Dieu et les
hommes
(chap. x.) he calls the Jews “La plus haïssable et la plus
honteuse
des petites nations.“ Enough has surely been said to make his
attitude
clear! But this opinion should have all the more force, since Voltaire
himself in many long treatises has made a thorough study of Jewish
history
and the Jewish character (so thorough that he who has been decried as a
“superficial dilettante“ is occasionally quoted to-day by a scholar of
the first rank like Wellhausen). And so it is noteworthy when he writes
(Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. xlii.): “La nation juive ose
étaler
une haine irréconciliable contre toutes les nations, elle se
révolte
contre tous ses maîtres; toujours superstitieuse, toujours avide
du bien d'autrui, toujours barbare — rampante dans le malheur, et
insolente
dans la prospérité.“ His judgment of their mental
qualities
is brief and apodeictic, “Les Juifs n'ont jamais rien
inventé“
(La défense de mon oncle, chap. vii.), and in the Essai
sur les Moeurs he shows in several chapters that the Jews had
always
learned from other nations but had never taught others anything; even
their
music, which is generally praised, Voltaire cannot endure: “Retournez
en Judée le plus tôt que vous pourrez ... vous y
exécuteriez
à plaisir dans votre détestable jargon votre
détestable
musique“ (6me lettre du Dictionnaire). He explains
elsewhere
this remarkable mental sterility of the Jews by their inordinate lust
for
money; “L'argent fut l'objet de leur conduite dans tous
348 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Edmund Burke * tells us, for
example,
of William the Conqueror that, as the income from “talliage“ and all
kinds
of other oppressive taxes did not satisfy him, he from time to time
either
confiscated the notes of hand of the Jews or forced them to hand them
over
for next to nothing, and, as almost the whole Anglo-Norman nobility of
the eleventh century was under the thumb of Jewish usury, the King
himself
became the pitiless creditor of his most illustrious subjects. In the
meantime
he protected the Jews and gave them privileges of various kinds. This
one
example may stand for thousands and thousands. † If then
les temps“ (Dieu
et les hommes, xxix.). Voltaire scoffs at the Jews in a hundred
places;
for instance, in Zadig (chap. x.), where the Jew utters a
solemn
prayer of thankfulness to God for a successful piece of fraud; the most
biting satire against the Jews that exists is beyond doubt the treatise
Un
Chrétien contre six Juifs. And yet in all these utterances
there
was a certain reserve, as they were destined for publication; on the
other
hand, in a letter to the Chevalier de Lisle on December 15, 1773 (that
is, at the end of his life, not in the heat of youth), he could speak
his
opinion freely: “Que ces déprépucé
d'Israël
se disent de la tribu de Naphthali ou d'Issachar, cela est fort peu
important;
ils n'en sont pas moins les plus grand gueux qui aient jamais
souillé
la face du globe.“ Evidently this fiery Frenchman had just the same
to say of the Jews as any fanatical Bishop; he differs at most in the
addition
which he occasionally makes to his bitterest attacks, “Il ne faut
pourtant
pas les brûler.“ There is a further difference in the fact
that
it is a humane, tolerant and learned man that utters this very sharp
judgment.
But how, in a man of such open mind, can we explain the existence of a
view so pitilessly one-sided and so ruthlessly intolerant, a view which
in its utter lack of moderation compares very unfavourably with the
words
of the German sages quoted above? Our age could learn much here, if it
wished to! For we see that the Gallic love of equality and freedom is
not
based upon love of justice nor respect for the individual; and we may
draw
the further conclusion; understanding is not got from principles, and
universal
humanity does not ensure the possibility of living together in
dignified
peace, it is only the frank recognition of what separates our own kind
and our own interests from those of others that can make us just
towards
an alien nature and alien interests.
* An
Abridgment of English History, iii. 2.
† The
famous economist Dr. W. Cunningham, in his book The
Growth of
English
Industry and Commerce during the Early and Middle Ages (3rd
ed.,
1896,
p. 201), compares the activity of the Jews in England from the tenth
century
onward to a sponge, which sucks up all the wealth of the land and
thereby
hinders all economic development. Interesting,
349 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Jews have exercised a great and
historically baneful influence, it is to no small degree due to the
complicity
of these Princes and nobles who so shamefully persecuted and at the
same
time utilised the Jews. And in fact this lasts until the nineteenth
century:
Count Mirabeau was in closest touch with the Jews even before the
Revolution,
* Count Talleyrand, in opposition to the delegates from the middle
classes,
supported in the Constituante their unconditional emancipation;
Napoleon
protected them, when after such a short time bitter complaints and
entreaties
for protection against them were sent in to the Government from all
France,
and he did so although he himself had exclaimed in the Council of
State,
“These Jews are locusts and caterpillars, they devour my France!“ — he
needed their money. Prince Dalberg sold to the Frankfort Jews, in
defiance
of the united citizens, the full civic rights for half a million Gulden
(1811), the Hardenbergs and Metternichs at the Vienna Congress fell
into
the snare of the Rothschild bank, and, in opposition to the votes of
all
the representatives of the Bund, they supported the interests of the
Jews
to the disadvantage of the Germans and finally gained their point, in
fact,
the two most conservative States which they represented were the first
to raise to hereditary nobility — an honour which was never conferred
on
honest and deserving Jews — those members of the
too, is the proof
that
even at this early period the Government did everything in its power to
make the Jews take up decent trades and honest work and thereby at the
same time amalgamate with the rest of the population, but all to no
purpose.
*
With
regard to Mirabeau's being influenced by “the shrewd women of the Jews“
(as Gentz says) and his connection with essentially Jewish secret
societies,
see
besides Graetz, Volks. Geschichte der Juden (iii. 600, 610
ff.),
particularly L'Abbé Lémann, L'entrée des
Israélites
dans la société française, iii. chap. 7; as
converted
Jew this author understands what others do not, and at the same time he
tells what Jewish authors keep secret. The important thing in
Mirabeau's
case was probably that from youth he was deeply in debt to the Jews
(Carlyle:
Essay
on Mirabeau).
350 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
“alien Asiatic people“ who, in the
years
of general suffering and misery, had by the vilest means acquired
immense
wealth. * If then the Jews were for us pernicious neighbours, justice
requires
us to admit that they acted according to the nature of their instincts
and gifts, and showed at the same time a really admirable example of
loyalty
to self, to their own nation and to the faith of their fathers; the
tempters
and the traitors were not the Jews but we ourselves. We were the
criminal
abettors of the Jews, and it is so to-day, as it was in the past; and
we
were false to that which the lowest inhabitant of the Ghetto considered
sacred, the purity of inherited blood; that, too, was formerly the
case,
and to-day it is more so than ever. The Christian Church alone of all
the
great powers seems to have acted on the whole justly and wisely (of
course
we must discount the Bishops who were really secular Princes, as well
as
some of the Popes). The Church has kept the Jews in check, treated them
as aliens, but at the same time protected them from persecution. Every
seemingly “ecclesiastical“ persecution has its source really in
economic
conditions that have become unbearable; we see that nowhere more
clearly
than in Spain. To-day, when public opinion is so fearfully misled by
the
active, irreconcilable antagonism of the Jews, especially to every
manifestation
of the Christian faith, it may be well to remind the reader that the
last
act of the preparatory meeting to the first Synedrium summoned in our
times,
that of 1807, was a spontaneous utterance of thanks to the ministers of
the various Christian Churches for the protection extended to them
throughout
the centuries. †
*
This
is, of course, an old custom of Princes, by which not only the Jews but
others also profit; Martin Luther even had to write: “The Princes have
thieves hanged, who have stolen a Gulden or half a one, and yet make
transactions
with those who rob everybody and steal more than all others“ (Von
Kaufhandlung
und Wucher).
†
Diogène
Tama:
Collection des actes de l'Assemblée des Israélites
de France et du royaume d'ltalie (Paris, 1807, pp. 327, 328; the
author
is a
351 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
INNER
CONTACT
Here we must end
these
hastily sketched historical fragments. They show that “the entrance of
the Jews“ has exercised a large, and in many ways an undoubtedly fatal,
influence upon the course of European history since the first century.
But that tells us little about the Jew himself; the fact that the North
American Indian dies out from contact with the Indo-European does not
prove
that the latter is evil and pernicious; that the Jew injures or
benefits
us is a judgment which is conditional in too many ways to permit of our
forming a true estimate of his nature. In fact, for nineteen centuries
the Jew has had not merely an outer relationship with our culture as a
more or less welcome guest, but also an inner contact. As Kant rightly
says, the preservation of Judaism is primarily the work of
Christianity.
* From its midst — if not from its stem and its spirit — Jesus Christ
and
the earliest members of the Christian Church arose. Jewish history,
Jewish
conceptions, Jewish thought and poetry became important elements in our
mental life. It cannot be right to separate the outward friction
entirely
from the inner penetration. If we had not ceremoniously adopted the Jew
into our family circle, he would no more have found a home
Jew and was Secretary
of
the Jewish deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône, M. Constantini). After a
detailed
proof the document closes with the following: “Les
députés
israélites arrêtent: Que l'expression de ces sentiments
sera
consignée dans le procès-verbal de ce jour pour qu'elle
demeure
à jamais comme un témoignage authentique de la gratitude
des Israélites de cette Assemblée pour les bienfaits que
les générations qui les ont précédés
ont reçus des ecclésiastiques des divers pays d'Europe.“
The proposal was moved by Mr. Isaac Samuel Avigdor, representative of
the
Jews of the Alpes-Maritimes. Tama adds that the speech of Avigdor was
received
with applause and its insertion in the minutes in extenso
adopted.
— The Jewish historians of to-day do not say a word concerning this
important
event. Not only Graetz passes it over in silence, but Bédarride
also in his Les Juifs en France, 1859, although he seems as if
he
were reporting in full from the minutes.
* Die
Religion, general note to third chapter.
352 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
among us than the Saracen or the
other
wrecks of half-Semitic peoples who saved their existence — but not
their
individuality — by unconditional amalgamation with the nations of South
Europe. The Jew, however, was proof against this; though now and then
one
of them might be dragged to the stake, the very fact that they had
crucified
Jesus Christ surrounded them with a solemn, awe-inspiring nimbus. And
while
the people were thus fascinated, the scholars and holy men spent their
days and nights in studying the books of the Hebrews: struck down by
the
commands of Jewish shepherds like Amos and Micah, the monuments of an
art,
whose like the world has never since seen, fell to the ground; through
the scorn of Jewish priests science sank into contempt; Olympus and
Walhalla
became depopulated, because the Jews so wished it; Jehovah, who had
said
to the Israelites, “Ye are my people and I am your God,“ now became the
God of the Indo-Europeans; from the Jews we adopted the fatal doctrine
of unconditional religious intolerance. But at the same time we adopted
very great and sublime spiritual impulses; we were taught by prophets,
who preached such strict and pure morals as could have been found
nowhere
else save on the distant shores of India; we became acquainted with
such
a living and life-moulding faith in a higher divine power that it
inevitably
changed our spirit and gave it a new direction. Though Christ was the
master-builder,
we got the architecture from the Jews. Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalmists
became, and still are, living powers in our spiritual life.
WHO
IS THE JEW?
And now, when this
inner contact is beginning to grow weaker, while the outer friction
referred
to above is being daily more felt, now, when he cannot any longer
353 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
rid ourselves of the presence of
Jews,
it is not sufficient for us to know that almost all pre-eminent and
free
men, from Tiberius to Bismarck, have looked upon the presence of the
Jew
in our midst as a social and political danger, we must be in a position
to form definite judgments on the basis of adequate knowledge of facts
and to act accordingly. There have been published Anti-Semitic
catechisms,
in which opinions of well-known men have been collected in hundreds;
but
apart from the fact that many a remark when taken apart from the
context
does not give quite fairly the intention of the writer, and that out of
many others it is merely ignorant blind prejudice that speaks, a single
opinion of our own is manifestly worth more than two hundred
quotations.
Moreover I do not know how we can form a competent judgment, if we do
not
learn to take a higher standpoint than that of political
considerations,
and I do not know how we can arrive at this standpoint except through
history,
not, however, modern history — for there we should be judge and suitor
at the same time — but through the history of the growth of the Jewish
people. There is no lack of documents; in the nineteenth century
especially
they have been tested, critically sifted and historically classified by
the devoted work of learned men, mostly Germans, but also distinguished
Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen; much remains to be done, but enough
has already been accomplished to enable us to survey clearly and surely
in its general features one of the most remarkable pages of human
history.
This Jew, who appears so eternally unchangeable, so constant, as Goethe
says, really grew into what he is, grew slowly, even artificially. And
of a surety he will pass away like all that has grown. This fact
already
brings him nearer to us as a human being. What a “Semite“ is, no one
can
tell. A hundred years ago science thought it knew what it meant; Semites
354 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
were the sons of Shem; now the
answer
becomes more and more vague; it was thought that the criterion of
language
was decisive: a very great error! The idea “Semite“ indeed remains
indispensable
because it embraces collectively a many-sided complex of historical
phenomena;
but there is absolutely no sure boundary-line; at the periphery this
ethnographical
conception merges into others. Finally “Semite“ remains as the name of
an original race, like “Aryan,“ one of those counters without which one
could not make oneself understood, but which one must beware of
accepting
as good coin. The real genuine coins are those empirically given,
historically
developed national individualities, of which I have spoken in the
former
chapter, such individualities as the Jews for example. Race is not an
original
phenomenon, it is produced; physiologically by characteristic mixture
of
blood, followed by inbreeding; psychically by the influence which
long-lasting
historical and geographical conditions exercise upon that special,
specific,
physiological foundation. * If we wish then (and I think that must be
the
principal task of this chapter) to ask the Jew: Who art thou? we must
first
try to discover whether there was not a definite mixture of blood
underlying
the fact of this so clearly marked race, and then — if the answer is in
the affirmative — trace how the peculiar soul, which thus was produced,
differentiated itself more and more. Nowhere can we trace this process
as we can in the Jew: for the whole national history of the Jews is
like
a continuous process of elimination; the character of the Jewish people
ever becomes more individual, more outspoken, more simple; finally
there
remains in a way nothing of the whole being but the central skeleton;
the
slowly ripened fruit is robbed of its downy, fresh-coloured covering
and
of its juicy flesh, for these
* Cf.
p.
288. For the Semites,
see also p. 361.
355 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
might become spotted and worm-eaten;
the stony kernel alone remains, shrivelled and dry, it is true, but
defying
time. However, as I have pointed out, this was not always the case.
That
which has been transferred from the sacred books of the Hebrews to the
Christian religion does not come down from the senility of real
Judaism,
but partly from the youth of the much wider and more imaginative
“Israelite“
people, partly from the mature years of the Judean, just after he had
separated
from Israel and when he had not yet proudly isolated himself from the
other
nations of the earth. The Jew whom we now know and see at work has
become
Jew gradually; not, however, as pseudo-history would have us believe,
in
the course of the Christian Middle Ages, but on his national soil, in
the
course of his independent history; the Jew moulded his own destiny; in
Jerusalem stood the first Ghetto, the high wall which separated the
orthodox
and the pure-born from the Goyim, and prevented the latter from
entering
the real city. Neither Jacob, nor Solomon, nor Isaiah would recognise
his
posterity in Rabbi Akiba (the great scribe of the Talmud) much
less
in Baron Hirsch or the diamond king Barnato. *
Let us therefore
try by the shortest way, i.e., by the greatest possible
simplification,
to make plain the essential features of this peculiar national soul, as
it gradually became more clearly and one-sidedly developed. This needs
no great learning; for to the question: Who
*
For
the Messianic period the dream of the later Jews (in contrast to the
more
free-thinking Israelites of former centuries) was to keep strangers out
of Jerusalem altogether: read Joel iii. 2; and as this very
late
prophet — from the Hellenic period — says at the same time that God
will
always dwell in Jerusalem and only in Jerusalem, this command means the
banishment of all peoples from God's presence. Such was the tolerance
of
the Jews! — It is only logical that most of the Rabbis excluded all
non-Jews
from a future world, while others endured them there as a despised
throng
(see Tractate Gittin, fol. 57a of the Babylonian
Talmud,
and Weber,
System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie,
p. 372, from Laible); the comical thing is the assertion of the Jews
to-day
that their religion is the “religion of humanity!“
356 JEWS
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art thou? the Jew himself, as I have
said, and his ancestor the Israelite have given from the first the
clearest
of answers: then we have the mass of scientific work, from Ewald to
Wellhausen
and Ramsay, from De Wette and Reuss to Duhm and Cheyne; we have only to
make out the sum total, as the practical man needs it, who, in the
midst
of the stormy bustle of the world, wishes to be able to base his
judgment
upon definite ascertained facts.
I have only two more
remarks to make, about method pure and simple. Having already,
particularly
in the chapter on the Revelation of
Christ,
discussed the Jew in detail and as this theme will probably come up
again,
I may here confine myself to the central question and refer the reader
for much information on other points to what has been said or will be
said
elsewhere in my book. As regards the authors consulted, I could not
help
using, in addition to the Bible and some thoroughly competent modern
Jewish
writers, also some scholars who are not Jews; this was quite necessary
for our knowledge of the prophets and the correct interpretation of
historical
events; but these scholars, even the most free-thinking of them, are
all
men who display great — perhaps exaggerated — admiration of the Jewish
nation, at least in its earlier form, and who are all inclined to look
upon this people as in some sense a “chosen“ one, so far as religion is
concerned. I have, however, in the interests of the exposition entirely
disregarded those writers who are avowedly Anti-Semitic.
SYSTEMATIC
ARRANGEMENT OF THE INVESTIGATION
There is one point
— in my opinion a very important one — upon which the science of the
last
years has shed a good deal of light, namely, the anthropogeny of the
357 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Israelites, that is, the history of
the physical development of this special national race. Of course here,
as everywhere, there is a past which is closed to our knowledge, and
beyond
doubt much that daring archaeologists have felt and guessed with the
feelers
of their wonderfully trained instinct rather than seen with their own
eyes,
will yet be essentially corrected by newer investigations and
discoveries.
But that makes no difference to us here. The important thing — the
great,
solid achievement of history — is, first, the fact that the Israelite
people
represents the product of manifold mixing, and that, too, not between
related
races (as the ancient Greeks, or the English of to-day) but between
types
that morally and physically are absolutely distinct; and secondly, the
fact that genuine Semitic blood (if this makeshift word is to have a
sense
at all) makes up, I suppose, hardly the half of this mixture. These are
certain results of exact anatomical anthropology and of historical
investigation,
two branches of knowledge which here extend to each other a helping
hand.
A third point completes those just named; for it we are indebted to the
critical endeavours of Biblical archaeology, which has at last thrown
light
upon the very complicated chronology of the books of the Old Testament,
which belong to entirely different centuries and were put together
quite
arbitrarily, though not without a plan: these teach us that the real
Jew
is not to be identified with the Israelite in the wider sense of the
word,
that the house of Judah, even at the time of its settling in Palestine,
was through blood-mixture and character distinct in several points from
the house of Joseph (which embraced the other tribes): the Judean stood
in fact in a kind of intellectual dependence upon the Josephite, and
only
at a relatively late time, after the violent separation from his
brothers,
did he begin to go his own way, the way that led to Judaism, and which
very soon afterwards by the elevation
358 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
of inbreeding to a religious
principle
isolated him from the whole world. The Jew can be called an Israelite
in
so far as he is an offshoot of that family; the Israelites, on the
other
hand, even those of the tribe of Judah, were not Jews; the Jew began to
develop only after the more powerful tribes of the North had been
destroyed
by the Assyrians. In order to ascertain who the Jew is, we have
therefore
first of all to establish who the Israelite was and then to ask how the
Israelite of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin became a Jew. And here we
must be careful how we use our sources of information. For it was only
after the Babylonian captivity that the specifically Jewish character
was
artificially brought into the Bible, by whole books being invented and
ascribed to Moses and frequently by the introduction in verse after
verse
of interpolations and corrections which obliterated the wider views of
old Israel and replaced them by the narrow Jerusalemic cult of Jehovah,
giving the impression that this cult had existed from time immemorial
and
had been directly ordained by God. This has long prevented us from
clearly
understanding the gradual and perfectly human historical development of
the Jewish national character. Now at last light has been thrown on
this
sphere too. Here also we can say: we hold in our hand a sure and
lasting
result of scientific investigation. Whether later investigations prove
this or that sentence of the Hexateuch, which to-day is ascribed to the
“jahvistic“ text, to belong to the “elohistic,“ or to have been
inserted
by the later “editor,“ whether a definite utterance was made by Isaiah
himself or by the so-called second Isaiah — all these are certainly
important
questions, but their solution will never in any way alter the
established
fact that real Judaism, with the special Jehovah faith and the
exclusive
predominance of priestly law, is due to a demonstrable and very
peculiar
historical sequence of events and to
359 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the active intervention of certain
far-sighted
and clear-headed men.
These three facts
form the essential basis of all knowledge of the Jewish character; they
must not remain the possession of a learned minority but must be
incorporated
in the consciousness of all educated people. I repeat them in preciser
form:
(1) The Israelite
people has arisen from the crossing of quite different human types;
(2) The Semitic
element
may well have been the stronger morally, but physically it contributed
scarcely one-half to the composition of the new ethnological.
individuality;
it is therefore wrong shortly to call the Israelites “Semites,“ for the
part played by the various human types in the formation of the
Israelite
race demands a quantitative and qualitative analysis;
(3) The real Jew
only developed in the course of centuries by gradual physical
separation
from the rest of the Israelite family, as also by progressive
development
of certain mental qualities and systematic starving of others; he is
not
the result of a normal national life, but in a way an artificial
product,
produced by a priestly caste, which forced, with the help of alien
rulers,
a priestly legislation and a priestly faith upon a people that did not
want them.
This furnishes us
with the arrangement of the following discussion. I shall first of all
consult history and anthropology, in order that we may learn from what
races the new Israelite race (as the foundation of the Jewish) was
descended;
then the part played by these various human types must be analysed with
regard to their physical and particularly their moral significance, and
here our attention must be directed especially to their religious
views:
for the basis of Judaism is the faith which it teaches and we cannot
judge
the Jew correctly either in history or in our midst, if we are not
quite
clear about
360 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
his religion; last of all I shall
try
to show how under the influence of remarkable historical events
specific
Judaism was established and stamped for ever with its peculiar and
incomparable
individuality. In this way we shall perhaps attain the object of this
chapter,
as I have defined it; for the Jewish race — though later at certain
times
it adopted not a few alien elements — remained on the whole purer than
any other, and the Jewish nation has been from the first an essentially
“ideal“ one, that is, one resting on faith in a definite national idea,
not on the possession of a free State of its own, nor on communal life
and work on the soil of that State: and this idea is the same to-day as
it was two thousand years ago. Now race and ideal make up the
personality
of the human being; they answer the question: Who art thou?
ORIGIN
OF THE ISRAELITE
The Israelites *
sprang
from the crossing of three (perhaps even four) different human types:
the
Semitic, the Syrian (or, more correctly, Hittite) and the
Indo-European.
Possibly Turanian blood, or, as it is more frequently called in
Germany,
Sumero-Accadian blood, also flowed in the veins of the original
ancestors.
In order that the
reader may clearly understand how this crossing took place, I must
first
give a brief historical sketch. It will freshen the memory in regard to
familiar facts and help to make the history of the origin of the Jewish
race comprehensible.
Although the term
“Semite,“ as applied to a pure autonomous race existing since the
beginning
of time,
*
And
not they only but also their relatives, the Ammonites, the Moabites and
the Edomites. These four make up the family of the “Hebrews,“ a name
usually
— but wrongly — applied to the Israelites alone or sometimes even to
the
Jews. See Wellhausen: Israelitische
und jüdische
Geschichte,
3rd ed. p. 7. To the same family belong likewise the Midianites and the
Ishmaelites (Maspero: Histoire ancienne, 1895, ii. 65.)
361
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
a special creation of God, so to
speak,
is certainly a mere abstraction, yet it is not so hazardous as the word
“Aryan“: for there still exists to-day a people which is supposed to
represent
the pure, untarnished type of the primeval Semite, viz., the Bedouin of
the Arabian desert. * Let us discard the hazy Semite and confine
ourselves
to the Bedouin of flesh and blood. It is supposed, and there are good
grounds
for the supposition, that some thousands of years before Christ, human
beings, very closely resembling the Bedouins of to-day, migrated from
Arabia
in an almost unbroken stream to east and north into the land of the two
rivers. Arabia is healthy, so its population increases; its soil is
extremely
poor, so a portion of its inhabitants must seek sustenance elsewhere.
It
seems that sometimes great migratory hordes composed of armed men had
thus
wandered forth; in such cases the surplus population had been cast out
with irresistible force from their home, and left as conquerors upon
the
neighbouring countries; in other cases single families with their herds
wandered peacefully over the indefinitely marked boundary from one
grazing-place
to another: if they did not at once turn off to the west, as many of
them
did, it might happen that they advanced as far as the Euphrates and so,
following the stream, worked their way into the north. In historical
times
(under the Romans and subsequent to Mohammed) we have memorable
instances
of this summary manner of getting rid of superfluous population; † in
the
great civilised States between
*
This
seems to be unanimously asserted by all writers. I have quoted
Burckhardt
in the course of this chapter. Here I shall only refer to a more
modern,
universally recognised authority — W. Robertson Smith. In his Religion
of the Semites (1894, p. 8) he says: “It can be taken for granted
that
the Arabs of the desert have from time immemorial been an unmixed
race.“
The same author points out that it is inadmissible to put the
Babylonians,
Phoenicians, &c., down as “Semites“: the only established fact is
the
relationship of the languages, and all these so-called “Semitic“
nations
have sprung from a decided mixture of blood.
† The
last example was in the end of the nineteenth century, when the
362 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Tigris and the Euphrates,
Semitisation
was also the work of great, though more peaceful, masses. Wherever, in
fact, as in Babylonian Accadia, the Semites came into contact with a
ripe,
strong, self-reliant culture, they prevailed over it by fusion with the
people — a process which in the case of the Babylonians we can now
trace
almost step by step. * The Beni Israel, on the other hand, emigrated as
simple shepherds in small groups and had, in order to secure the safety
of their cattle, to avoid all warlike operations, of which their small
number would have rendered them incapable in any case. † The Bible
narrative
naturally gives us only the faint reflection of primeval oral
traditions
concerning the earliest wanderings of this Bedouin family; they are in
addition much falsified by the misconceptions, theories and purposes of
late-born scribes; still there is no reason to doubt the correctness of
the general details given, all the less so as they contain nothing that
is improbable. Everything is indeed much abbreviated: whole families
have
dwindled into a single person (a universal Semitic custom, “such as we
find only in the case of the Semites,“ says Wellhausen); other
pretended
ancestors are simply the names of the places in the neighbourhood of
which
the Israelites had long stayed; movements which required several
generations
to accomplish are accredited to a
Arabs, who from time
immemorial
had migrated not only to north and east, but also to west and south,
completely
devastated a great part of Central Africa. Immense kingdoms, which in
the
year 1880 were densely populated and entirely under cultivation, have
since
become a desert. Stanley tells us of a single Arab chieftain who laid
waste
a region of two thousand square miles! (See the books of
Stanley,
Wissman, Hinde, &c., and the short summary in Ratzel: Völkerkunde,
2nd ed. ii. 430.) Cf. also p.
115, note.
* See
Hummel, Sayce, Budge and Maspero with regard to the lost race of the
Accadians
or Sumerians, the creators of the magnificent Babylonian culture, and
their
gradual Semitisation.
† To
complete and correct what follows, see the interesting and
excellent
book of Carl Steuernagel: Die Einwanderung der israelitischen
Stämme
in Kanaan. Berlin, 1901.
363 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
single individual. This need of
simplifying
the complex, of pressing together what lies far apart, is just as
natural
to this people as it is to the poet who consciously creates. Thus, for
example, the Bible represents Abraham, when already a married man, as
emigrating
from the district of Ur, on the lower course of the Euphrates, to
northern
Mesopotamia, at the foot of the Armenian mountain range, to that
Paddan-Aram,
of which the book of Genesis so often speaks and which lies
beyond
the Euphrates, between it and the tributary Khabur, in a straight line
about 375 miles, but following the valley and the line of
grazing-tracts
at least 937 miles from Ur (cf. the map on p. 365); but more
than
that, this same Abraham is said to have moved later from Paddan-Aram
towards
the south-west, to the land of Canaan, from there to Egypt and finally
(for I leave his shorter journeys out of account) from Egypt to Canaan
again and all this accompanied by so numerous herds of cattle that he
was
forced, in order to find sufficient grazing land for them, to separate
from his nearest relatives (Genesis xiii.). In spite of this
compression
the old Hebrew tradition contains all we require to know, particularly
in places where the oldest tradition is before us in almost unfalsified
form, and Biblical criticism already gives us full information with
regard
to it. * From this tradition we learn that the Bedouin family in
question
first of all wandered into the valley of the southern Euphrates and
stayed
a considerable time in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur. This city
lay
to the south of the great river and formed the farthest outpost of
Chaldea.
Here for the first time the nomads came into touch with civilisation.
The
shepherds could not indeed enter into this district itself, since
magnificent
cities and a highly developed agriculture required every inch of ground
available, but here they
* Cf.especially
Gunkel's Handkommentar zur Genesis, 1901 (now published in a
second
improved edition).
364 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
received imperishable impressions
and
instruction (to which I shall refer later); it was here too that they
first
became acquainted with such names as Abraham and Sarah, which their
love
of punning make them translate later into Hebrew (Genesis xvii.
1-6). They could not stay long in the vicinity of such high culture, or
perhaps they were pushed forward by sons of the desert who were
pressing
on behind. And thus we see them moving ever farther and farther towards
the north, * to the then sparsely populated Paddan-Aram, † where they
must
have stayed for a long time — at the very least for several centuries.
When, however, the pasture of Mesopotamia was no longer sufficient for
the increased number of human beings and cattle, a portion of them
moved
from that north-eastern corner of Syria, Paddan-Aram, to the
south-western
corner nearest Egypt, to Canaan, where they were hospitably received by
a settled agricultural people and received permission to pasture their
herds on the mountains. But Paddan-Aram lived long in the memory of the
descendants of Abraham as their genuine home. Jehovah himself calls
Paddan-Aram
Abraham's “country“ (Genesis xii. 1), and the mythical Abraham
still
speaks, long after he has settled in Canaan, with longing of his
distant
“country“ and sends messengers to his “land“ (Genesis xxiv. 4
and
7), in order to get in touch again with the relatives who had remained
*
The
direction was marked out for them; from Ur they could choose no other
course;
for the wilderness runs for several hundred miles parallel to the
Euphrates,
only a small stretch of watered land separating the two; but suddenly,
exactly at the 35th degree, the wilderness ceases and the land of Syria
opens up to west, south and north. Syria stretches southwards to Egypt,
westwards to the Mediterranean Sea, northwards to the Taurus, in the
east
it is bounded to-day by the Euphrates, but according to former
conditions
and ideas it embraced Mesopotamia, which lies beyond the middle
Euphrates,
and here the children of Abraham had their home for centuries.
† At
a later time Mesopotamia was for long an artificially watered and
consequently
richly-cultivated region; in former times, however, it was, as it is
to-day,
a poor land, where only nomadic shepherds could find a living (cf.
Maspero: Histoire ancienne, i. 563.)
365
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
there. And thus the sons of Abraham,
although already settled in Canaan, remained half Mesopotamians during
all the long years which have been compressed and represented under the
pseudo-mythical names Isaac
SKETCH-MAP
and Jacob; it is a perpetual coming
and
going; the southern branch feeling that it belongs to one principal
northern
stem. * But the moment came when they had to move farther towards the
south;
in dry years the pastures of Canaan were no longer sufficient, and
perhaps
*
This
period, during which “Father Jacob developed into the people of
Israel,“
Wellhausen describes as an interval of several centuries' duration (Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, p. 11).
366 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
too the Canaanites felt the burden
of
their increasing numbers; so at the time when the friendly half-Semitic
Hyksos were in power, they wandered away to the land of Goshen,
belonging
to Egypt. It was this long stay in Egypt * that first broke off all
connection
between them and their kinsmen, so that, when the Israelites once more
returned to Palestine, they still recognised the Moabites, Edomites and
the other Hebrews as distant blood-relations, but felt for them no
longer
love but hatred and contempt, a state of feeling which received a
refreshingly
artless expression in the genealogies of the Bible, according to which
some of these races owe their origin to incest, while others are
descended
from harlots.
We can only speak
of Israelites in the historical sense of the word from the moment when,
as a not very numerous, but yet firmly united people, they forcibly
took
possession of Canaan on their flight from Egypt, and founded there a
State
that experienced many different but mostly very sad strokes of fortune,
but which, in spite of the fact that it lay (like the rest of Syria)
between
hammer and anvil, that is, between warring “great Powers,“ continued to
stand as an independent kingdom for almost seven hundred years. We must
emphasise the fact that these Israelites were not very numerous; it is
important from an historical as well as from an anthropological point
of
view; for to this circumstance we must ascribe the fact that the former
and really domiciled inhabitants of Canaan (a mixture of
*
According
to Genesis xv. four hundred years, which is naturally not to be taken
literally
but simply as an expression for an almost unthinkably long time. The
number
forty was among the Hebrews the expression for an indefinitely large
number,
four hundred a fortiori. Renan is of opinion that the stay of
the
Israelites in Egypt did not last more than one hundred years and that
only
the Josephites (probably only very distant relations with a strong
mixture
of Egyptian blood) were settled there for very long (Histoire du
peuple
d'Israël, 13e éd. i. pp. 112, 141, 142).
367 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Hittites and Indo-European Amorites)
were never destroyed and always formed and even still form the stock of
the population. * The mingling of races, of which I shall immediately
speak,
and which had begun as soon as the Israelites entered Syrian territory,
continued in the autonomous State of Israel, that is, in Palestine, and
came to a sudden stop only after the Babylonian exile, and that in
Judea
alone, by the introduction of a new law. The fact that the Jews at a
later
time separated as an ethnological unity from the rest of the Israelites
is purely and simply due to this, that the inhabitants of Judea by
energetic
enactments at last put a stop to the continual fusion (see Ezra
ix. and x.).
The reader who would
like further information on this matter may supplement the knowledge he
has derived from this hasty sketch by consulting Wellhausen's concise Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, Stade's Geschichte des Volkes
Israel,
Renan's detailed and yet lightly written Histoire du peuple
d'Israël,
and Maspero's comprehensive and luminous Histoire ancienne des
peuples
de l'Orient classique; † in the meantime my sketch may suffice to
show
the origin of the Israelites in broad outline and to impress upon the
memory
in the simplest form the seemingly complicated facts of the case. I
shall
now attempt to show how the original, purely Semitic
*
Sayce:
The
Races of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. pp.76, 113. “The Roman
drove
the
Jew out of the land that his fathers had conquered; the Jews, on the
other
hand, had never succeeded in driving out the genuine possessors of
Canaan....
The Jew held Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as the surrounding cities
and
villages, otherwise (even in Judea itself) he formed only a fraction of
the population. As soon as the Jew was removed, for example, at the
time
of the Babylonian exile or after the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans,
the original population, freed from the pressure, increased ... and the
Jewish colonies in Palestine are to-day just as much foreigners as the
German colonies there.“
† I
name only the latest, most important and most reliable books, written
by
real scholars but accessible to the unlearned. Of the older ones
Duncker's
Geschichte
des Altertums also remains unsurpassed in many respects for the
history
of Israel.
368 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
emigrant became by crossing first of
all a Hebrew and then an Israelite.
THE
GENUINE SEMITE
The preceding
historical
sketch shows us a Bedouin family as the starting-point. * Let us first
of all establish the one fact: this pure Semite, the original emigrant
from the deserts of Arabia, is and remains the impelling power, the
principle
of life, the soul of the new ethnical unity of the Israelites which
arose
out of manifold crossing. No matter how much, in consequence not only
of
their destiny but above all of crossing with absolutely different human
types, his descendants might differ in course of time morally and
physically
from the original Bedouin, yet in many points, good as well as bad, he
remained their spiritus rector. Of the two or three souls which
had their home in the breast of the later Israelites, this was the most
obtrusive and long-lived. However, we can only congratulate this
Bedouin
family on their crossing, for any change in the manner of living is
said
to have a very bad effect on the high qualities of the genuine and
purely
Semitic nomads. The learned Sayce, one of the greatest advocates of the
Jews at the present day, writes: “If the Bedouin of the desert chooses
a settled life, he, as a rule, unites in himself all the vices of the
nomad
and of the
*
As
a matter of fact the current opinion is that the Semite and even that
purest
Bedouin type are the most absolute mongrels imaginable, the product of
a cross between negro and white man! Gobineau preached this doctrine
fifty
years ago, and was laughed at; to-day his opinion is the orthodox one;
Ranke defines it thus in his Völkerkunde (ii. 399): “The
Semites
belong to the mulatto class, a transition stage between black and
white.“
But I think that caution is here necessary. What is taking place before
our eyes is not warranted to strengthen the belief that from mulattoes
there could spring a firm, unchangeable type that would survive the
storms
of time: quicksand is not more fickle and changeable than this
half-caste;
here, then, in defiance of all experience we should have to suppose
that
the unthinkable, the unexampled had taken place in the case of the
Bedouins.
(Cf., too, August Ford's remarks, 1900).
369 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
peasant. Lazy, deceitful, cruel,
greedy,
cowardly, he is rightly regarded by all nations as the scum of
mankind.“
* But long before they settled down, this Bedouin family, the Beni
Israel,
had fortunately escaped such a cruel fate by manifold crossing with
non-Semites.
We saw that the
original
Bedouin family first stayed for a considerable time on the Southern
Euphrates
in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur: did crossing take place at this
stage? It has been asserted that it did. And since fairly genuine
Sumero-Accadians
presumably formed the basis of the population of the Babylonian Empire
at that time — for the Semites had merely annexed this State and its
high
civilisation without performing either the mental work or the manual †
— it is assumed that the stock of Abraham was quickened by
Sumero-Accadian
blood. The occurrence of such strange names as Abraham (this was the
name
of the first legendary founder and king of Ur among the Sumerians) has
given weight to this view, as also the fragments of half-understood
Turanian
‡ wisdom and mythology, of which the first chapters of Genesis
are
composed. But such assumptions are purely hypothetical and hence, to
begin
with, hardly merit serious consideration. Not even probability speaks
for
this view. The poor shepherds had hardly touched the hem of
civilisation,
what people then would have entered into family relations with them?
And
as regards the adoption of such meagre cosmogonic conceptions as we
find
in the Bible, intercourse with other Hebrews is sufficient to explain
that;
for the mythology, the science and the culture of the Sumerians (in
which
we still share, thanks
* The
Races of the Old Testament, p. 106.
† See
especially Sayce: Assyria, p. 24 ff., and Social Life among
the
Assyrians and Babylonians; also Winckler: Die Völker
Vorderasiens
(1900), p. 8.
‡ The
word “Turanian“ has escaped my pen, because many authors regard the
Sumero-Accadians
as Turanians. See Hommel: Gesch. Babyloniens und Assyriens,
pp. 125, 244 f.
370 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to the idea of creation and of the
fall
of man, the division of the week and the year, the foundation of
geometry,
and the invention of writing) had spread far and wide; Egypt was their
pupil, * and the Semite, incapable of such deep intuition as the
Egyptian,
had long ago, before the Beni Israel began their wanderings, adopted as
much of Egyptian culture as seemed advantageous and practical and had,
as active mediators, spread it wherever they went. The crossing with
Sumero-Accadians
is therefore just as improbable as it is unproved.
We are, however,
on sure ground, as soon as the emigrants move to north and west. For
now
they are in the heart of Syria and they never again leave it (except at
the time of their short stay on the borders of Egypt). Here, in Syria,
our purely Semitic Bedouin family has been changed by crossing, here
its
members became Hebrews by mingling with an absolutely different type,
the
Syrian — as so many a Bedouin colony before and after them. At a later
period part of the family was forced to emigrate from Mesopotamia,
which
lay in the north-east corner, to Canaan, in the extreme south-west,
where
similar race-moulding influences, to which quite new ones were also
added,
asserted themselves in a still more definite way. It was only here, in
Canaan, that the Abrahamide Hebrews changed gradually into genuine
Israelites.
To this very Canaan the Israelites, now increased in numbers, returned
as conquerors, after their sojourn in Egypt; and here they received, in
addition to alien blood, a new culture, which transformed them from
nomads
into settled farmers and city-dwellers.
We can, therefore,
without making any mistake, distinguish two anthropogenetic spheres of
influence, which successively came into prominence, a more general one,
provided by the entrance into Syria and in particular
* See
Hommel: Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur
(1892).
371
JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
by the long stay in Mesopotamia, in
regard to which we have no very definite historical dates, but which we
may and must deduce from the known ethnological facts; in the second
place,
a more particular Canaanite influence, which we can prove from the
detailed
testimony of the Bible. Let us discuss first the more general sphere of
influence and then the more particular one.
THE
SYRIAN
If we turn up a
text-book
of geography or an encyclopaedia, we shall find it stated that the
present
population of Syria is “to the greatest extent Semitic.“ This is false;
just as false as the statement we find in the same sources, that the
Armenians
are “Aryans.“ Here again we see the widespread confusion of language
and
race; we should, on the same footing, logically have to maintain that
the
negroes of the United States were Anglo-Saxons. Scientific anthropology
has in recent years, by thorough investigation of an enormous amount of
material, irrefutably proved that from the most remote times to which
prehistoric
discoveries reach back, the main population of Syria has been formed
from
a type which is absolutely different, physically and morally, from the
Semitic, as it is from everything which we are wont to comprise under
the
term “Aryan“; and this applies not to the population of Syria alone,
but
also to that of all Asia Minor and the extensive region which we call
Armenia
at the present day. There are races which have an inborn tendency to
restless
wandering (e.g., the Bedouin, the Laplander, &c.), others
which
possess a rare power of expansion (e.g., the Teutonic races);
but
this inhabitant of Syria and Asia Minor seems to have been
distinguished
and still to be distinguished by his obstinate attachment to his native
soil and the invincible power of his physical constancy. His original
home
was the
372 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
trysting-place of nations, he
himself
almost always being vanquished, and the great battles of the world
being
fought over him — yet he survived them all and his blood asserted
itself
to such an extent that the Syrian Semite of to-day should be called
Semite
in language rather than in race, and the so-called Aryan Armenian, of
Phrygian
origin, has perhaps not 10 per cent. of Indo-European blood in his
veins.
On the other hand, the so-called “Syrian“ of to-day, the Jew and the
Armenian
can hardly be distinguished from one another, and this is easily
explained,
since the primal race which unites all three makes them daily more and
more like each other. We may most appropriately apply a quotation from
Schiller's
Braut von Messina to this Syrian stem:
Die
fremden Eroberer kommen und
gehen;
Wir gehorchen, aber wir bleiben
stehen.
Now the people which enters history at a
later time under the name of Israelites was subject to this powerful
ethnical
influence for many centuries, at least for over ten centuries. That is
what I called the general sphere of influence by which our genuine
Semitic
Bedouin family became a group of the so-called “Hebrews.“ Hebrews are,
in fact, a cross between Semite and Syrian. It must not be thought that
the nomad shepherds immediately crossed with the strange race, the
process
was rather as follows: on the one hand they found a considerable number
of half and quarter Hebrews, who formed the point of connection; on the
other hand they doubtless subdued the original inhabitants (as the
predominance
of the Semitic languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, &c., proves) and begot
sons
and daughters with their Syrian slaves; later (in half-historical
times)
we see them voluntarily intermarrying with the independent families of
the alien people, and this had beyond doubt been for centuries the
custom.
However, no matter what theories we
373
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
may hold about the process of
fusion,
certain it is that it did take place.
To be able to speak
of that other Syrian type it would be convenient to have a name for
him.
Hommel, the well-known Munich scholar, calls him the Alarodian;
* he thinks he may ascribe to him considerable expansion even over
Southern
Europe and finds him in the Iberians and Basques of to-day. But the
layman
must be very discreet in his use of such hypotheses; before this book
is
printed, the Alarodians may have been thrown among the scrap-iron of
science.
The example of the French zoologist and anthropologist, G. de Lapouge,
is worthy of imitation; he does not trouble himself about history and
origin,
but gives names to the various physical types according to the Linnean
method, such as Homo europaeus, Homo Afer, Homo contractus,
&c.
So far as formation of skull is concerned, this type from Asia Minor
would
correspond pretty exactly to Lapouge's Homo alpinus; † but here
we may safely and simply call him Homo syriacus, the primeval
inhabitant
of Syria. And just as we found a point of support for the Semitic type
in the Bedouin, so we find in the Hittite tribe a peculiarly
characteristic
representative of the Syrian type, and moreover the one with which the
Israelites in Palestine were closely connected; it no longer, of
course,
exists among us as a national individuality, but it is daily becoming
better
known from history and from manifold surviving representations. ‡ This
Syrian type is distinguished by the prevalence of a particular
anatomical
characteristic:
*
He
takes the name from a tribe mentioned by Herodotus as living at the
foot
of Mount Ararat.
†
Lapouge:
La
dépopulation de la France, Revue d'Anthropologie, 1888, p.
79.
F. von Luschan has definitely pointed out the resemblance of the Syrian
to the Savoyard.
‡ A
summary of our knowledge of the Hittites will be found in Winckler's Die
Völker Vorderasiens, 1900, p. 18 ff. The expression “Hittite“
in this book signifies the same to me as the x to a mathematician in a
properly stated but not yet numerically solved equation
374
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
he is round-headed, or, as the
natural
scientists say, “brachycephalous,“ that is, with a short skull, the
breadth
of which is nearly equal to the length. * The Bedouin, on the other
hand,
and also every Semite whose blood is not strongly mixed with foreign
elements,
is decidedly “dolichocephalic.“ “Long, narrow heads,“ writes von
Luschan,
“are a
SHORT SKULL
(brachycephalous)
|
LONG SKULL
(dolichocephalous)
|
(After de
Mortillet)
striking characteristic of the
Bedouin
to-day, and we should have to claim the same for the oldest Arabs were
it not proved from numerous illustrations on the old Egyptian monuments
fortunately preserved.“ † Naturally there is more than this one
anatomical
criterion; corresponding to the round head there is the thick-set body;
*
The
skull is regarded as particularly long when the relation of breadth to
length is not over 75 to 100, particularly short when it is 80 or more.
When I studied anthropology with Carl Vogt, all the students were
measured
craniometrically; in the case of one the rare relation of 92 to 100 was
established, that is, his head was almost quite round; he was an
Armenian,
a typical representative of the Syrian type of skull.
† F.
v. Luschan: Die anthropologische Stellung der Juden (Lecture
delivered
in the General Meeting of the German Anthropological Society of the
year
1892). This lecture is to be found in the Correspondenzblatt of
the Society for 1892, Nos. 9 and 10. It summarises extensive researches
and I shall often quote from it further on.
375 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
it is the expression of a complete
and
peculiar physiological character. But the skull is the most convenient
part of the skeleton for making comparative studies regarding extinct
races,
and it is also the most expressive, and no matter how endless the
variation
in the individuals, it maintains the typical forms with great
constancy.
But the Hittite had another and much more striking anatomical
distinguishing
feature, a very
HITTITES
ephemeral one, it is true, since
cartilage
and not bone went to form it, but it has been splendidly preserved in
pictures
and so is well known to us to-day — the nose. The so-called “Jewish
nose“
is a Hittite legacy. The genuine Arab, the pure Bedouin, has usually “a
short, small nose little bent“ (I quote von Luschan and refer to the
illustrations
given) and even when the nose is more of the eagle type, it never
possesses
an “extinguisher“ (as Philip von Zesen, the language-reformer, called
it)
of the specific, unmistakable Jewish and Armenian form. Now by
continuous
crossing with the round-headed type of the alien people the Israelite
has
gradually lost his narrow, long Bedouin head, receiving as compensation
the so-called Jewish nose. Certainly the long head still occurred,
maintaining
itself especially among the nobler families; even among the Jews of
to-day
we find a small percentage of genuine long heads; but the long head
disappeared
more and more. The
376 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
nose alone is no reliable proof of
Jewish
descent; the reason is clear; this Syrian legacy is common to all
peoples
who have Syrian blood in their veins. In the case of this
anthropological
discovery we have to do with no hypothetical assertions, such as too
frequently
occur in theological and critical or historical works; it is the sure
result
of thorough scientific investigation of a sufficiently large material;
* this material
TRUE BEDOUIN OF THE
PRESENT
DAY †
extends from a very ancient time down
to the present, and is excellently supported by the numerous
representations
found in Egypt and Syria, and gradually assigned to their proper
period.
We can in a way trace the process by which the Israelite “became Jew“
by
the Egyptian monuments, although, in fact, even in the oldest of them
(which
do not go far back into Israelite history, since it was only in
Solomon's
time that the Jewish people became known beyond their borders) there is
little of the genuine Semitic type revealed. Genuine Hittites and
half-Hittites
are here represented as Israelite soldiers; only the leaders (see,
for instance, the so-called portrait of
*
Von
Luschan's Mitteilungen of the year 1892 have 60,000
measurements
to support them.
†
From
a photograph in Ratzel's Völkerkunde. The other typical
pictures
are from well-known reliefs on Egyptian monuments.
377 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
King Rehoboam, Solomon's son) remind
us of Bedouin types, but even they sometimes rather resemble good
European
countenances.
With these last
remarks
we pass from the general prehistoric sphere of influence to that of
Canaan,
which likewise continued for over a thousand years and provides us with
plenty of sure facts to go upon. For before the Hebrew Israelites had
the
honour of
AMORITISH ISRAELITE
(portrait
of a son of Solomon)
being immortalised by the art of
Egyptian
painters, they had moved from Mesopotamia to Canaan. We must
distinguish
between their first appearance in Canaan and their second: in the
former
case they remained there as nomadic shepherds on the best terms with
the
rightful inhabitants of the cities and the owners of the tracts under
cultivation;
in the second case they entered the country as conquerors. In the
former
case, in fact, they were not numerous, in the second they were a whole
nation. However uncertain and disputed many historical details still
may
be, one fact is certain: when they entered the land first the
Israelites
found the Hittites living there, those Hittites who formed a most
important
stem of the Homo syriacus. Abraham says to the inhabitants of
Hebron,
to the “children of Heth,“ as he expressly calls them: “I am a stranger
and a sojourner
378 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
with you“ (Genesis xxiii. 4)
and he begs, as only a stranger on suffrance could beg, a
“burying-place“
for his wife Sarah. Isaac's eldest son, Esau, has only daughters of
Heth
as his wives (Genesis xxvi. 34); the younger son, Jacob, is sent
to distant Mesopotamia, that he may take a Hebrew woman as his wife,
and
from this we must conclude that there was none in Palestine, no Hebrew
girl at least, who would as regards wealth have been a suitable match
for
him. Isaac would not have insisted upon it, a well-to-do Hittite would
have pleased him, but Rebecca, his Mesopotamian wife, had no love for
her
Hittite daughters-in-law, the wives of Esau, and said she would rather
die than let any more such come into the house (Genesis xxvii.
46).
Among the sons of Jacob it is again specially mentioned of Judah that
he
married Hittite wives (i Chronicles ii. 3). These popular tales
are a source of historical information; we see that the Israelites had
a clear recollection of having, as a very limited number of shepherds,
lived among a strange, cultured and friendly people that dwelt in
cities;
the rich elders of the race could indulge in the luxury of sending for
wives for their sons from their former home; but these sons themselves
like to follow their direct inclination rather than the principle of
exclusiveness;
they married the maidens whom they saw around them — unless they were
such
heartless mercenary match-makers as Jacob; the poorer classes, of
course,
selected wives where they found them. In addition there was the
begetting
of children with slave girls. Of Jacob's twelve sons, for instance,
four
are the sons of slave girls and they enjoy the same rights as the
others.
— All this refers to the earliest contact with the Hittites of Canaan
which
the Bible mentions. Now there followed, according to legend, the long
stay
on the borders of Egypt, in the land of Goshen. But here, too, the
Israelites
were surrounded by Hittites. For the Hittites extended to the
379 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
borders of Egypt, where at that time
their kinsmen, the Hyksos, held the sceptre; the city of Tanis, which
was
the rallying-point for the Israelites in Goshen, was essentially a
Hittite
city; from the earliest times it had been in the closest contact with
Hebron;
when the Israelites moved with their flocks from Hebron to the district
of Tanis, they accordingly remained in the same ethnical surroundings.
* And when they afterwards returned to Canaan as conquerors, they,
indeed,
gradually overthrew the Canaanites, who consisted mostly of Hittites,
but
they also, for the first time, entered into close intercourse with
them.
For, as I insisted above, the Canaanite did not disappear. We need only
read the first chapter of the Book of Judges to see what
Wellhausen
too attests: “The Israelites did not conquer the former population
systematically,
but made their way among them ... it is impossible to speak of a
complete
conquest of the land of Palestine.“ And with regard to the manner in
which
this alien non-Semitic blood permeated the Hebrew blood more and more,
the same author says, “The most important event in the period of Judges
took place fairly quietly, namely, the fusion of the new Israelite
population
of the land with the old population. The Israelites of the time of the
Kings had a strong Canaanite admixture in their blood; they were by no
means pure descendants of those who once had immigrated from Egypt....
If the Israelites had destroyed the old settled inhabitants, they would
have made a desert of the land and robbed themselves of the prize of
victory.
By sparing them and, as it were, grafting themselves upon them, they
grew
into their culture. They made themselves at home in houses which they
had
not built, in fields and gardens which they had not laid out and
cultivated.
Everywhere, like lucky heirs, they reaped the fruits of
* Cf.
Renan: Israël i. chap. 10.
380 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the labour of their predecessors.
Thus
they themselves underwent an inner transformation fraught with many
consequences;
they grew quickly into a cultured people.“ * At an earlier time, in
Hebron
or Tanis, the Israelites had learned from the Hittites the art of
writing;
† now they learned from them how to cultivate crops and vines, how to
build
and to manage cities — in short, through them they became a civilised
people;
and through them also they became for the first time a State. Never
could
the various tribes, living as they did in constant jealousy, in
suspicious
isolation, have formed themselves into a unity but for the Canaanite
element,
the cement of the State. And what is more, their religious conceptions,
too, received their special colouring and organisation from the
Canaanites:
Baal, the God of agriculture and of peaceful work, coalesced with
Jehovah,
the God of armies and of raids. We see how much Baal was honoured among
the Israelites (in spite of later corrections on the part of the Jews)
from facts such as this, that the first Israelite hero on the soil of
Palestine
is called Jerubbaal, ‡ and, moreover, takes to wife a Hittite: that the
first King, Saul, calls one of his sons Ishbaal, David one of his
Baaliada,
Jonathan his only son Meribbaal, &c. The Israelite borrowed from
the
Canaanite the whole tradition of Prophets, as also the whole outward
cult
and the tradition of the sacred places. § I need not discuss in
detail
what every one can find in the Bible (sometimes certainly obscured by
so
many strange-sounding names that one needs an expert guide), namely,
the
great part played by the Hittites and by their relatives the
Philistines
in the history of Israel. Till the fusion
* Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, 3rd ed. pp. 37, 46 and 48.
†
Renan:
Israël
i. 136.
‡ A
fact which the later edition of the Bible sought to conceal (Judges
vi. 32) while the older editors thought nothing of it (1 Samuel
xii. 11).
§
Cf.
Wellhausen, as above, pp. 45 f., 102 f; concerning the sacred places see
his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 4th ed. p. 18 f.
381 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
was far advanced and the difference
in names had disappeared, we find them everywhere, particularly among
the
best soldiers; and how many details in this connection must have
disappeared
after the later editing of the Bible by the Jews, who endeavoured to
cut
out all that was alien to them and to introduce the fiction of a pure
descent
from Abraham! David's bodyguard is composed if not wholly yet to a
great
extent of men who do not belong to Israel; Hittites and Gittites hold
important
posts as officers; the bulk of the soldiers were Cerethites and
Pelethites,
Philistines and all other kinds of aliens, partly Syrian, partly almost
purely European, some of Hellenic race. * David, in fact, won the
throne
only by the help of the Philistines — and probably as their vassal; †
he
even did everything in his power to encourage the fusion of the
Israelites
with their neighbours, and himself set the example by marrying women of
Syrian and Indo-European descent.
THE
AMORITES
Since the word
“Indo-European“
has slipped from my pen I must here dwell upon a fact which I have as
yet
scarcely mentioned. The Canaanites consisted principally, but not
solely,
of Hittites; the Amorites lived in close connection with them, but they
were often settled in separate districts, and thus kept their race
relatively
pure. These Amorites were tall, fair, blue-eyed men of ruddy
complexion;
they were “from the north,“ that is, from Europe; the Egyptians,
therefore,
called
*
There
were also Arabs, Hebrews from non-Israelite stems, Arameans and all
kinds
of pseudo-Semitic aliens. As there are said to have been 1‚300,000 men
in Israel and Judah capable of bearing arms according to the (certainly
very false) popular account (2 Samuel xxiv.), we get the
impression
that the Israelites themselves were not very warlike. See
especially
Renan:
Israël ii. livre 3, chap. i.
†
Wellhausen:
Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte (3 Ausg.), p. 58.
382
JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
them Tamehu, the “North men,“ and
moreover
they seem, though this is of course problematic, not to have reached
Palestine
very long before the return of the Israelites from Egypt. * To the east
of the Jordan they had founded mighty kingdoms with which the
Israelites
later had to wage many wars; another portion had entered Palestine and
lived there in the closest friendship with the Hittites; † others had
joined
the Philistines, and that in such large numbers, increased perhaps by
direct
immigration from the purely Hellenic West, that many historians have
regarded
the Philistines as predominantly Aryan-European. ‡ These, our own
kinsfolk,
are those children of Anak, the “men of great stature“ who inspired the
Israelites with such terror, when the latter first secretly entered
Southern
Palestine on a scouting expedition (Numbers xiii.); to them
belonged
the brave Goliath, who challenges the Israelites to a knightly combat
but
is killed by the treacherously slung stone; § to them belong those
“Rephaims“ who carry gigantic spears and heavy mail of iron (1 Samuel
xvii. 5 ff., 2 Samuel xxi. 16 ff.). And while the Bible relates
in
*
The
fact that the book of Genesis (xiv. 13) represents Abraham as
already
living in peaceful alliance with three Amorites in the plain of Hebron
has naturally no claim to historical validity.
† See
especially Sayce: The Races of
the Old Testament, p. 110 ff.
‡ Cf.
Renan: Israël ii. livre 3, chap. 3. For the Hellenic
origin
of a considerable proportion of the Philistines and the introduction of
a number of Greek words through them into Hebrew, see Renan: Israël,
i. p. 157 note, and Maspero, ii. p. 698. As a matter of fact the
question
of the origin of the Philistines and Amorites is still very hotly
debated;
we can calmly leave the dispute to historians and theologians; the
anthropological
results are results of exact science, and philology must follow them,
not
vice
versa. Certain it is that the Amorites and at least a portion of
the
Philistines were tall, fair, blue-eyed dolichocephali: thus they belong
to the type homo europaeus. That is sufficient for us laymen.
§
The legend which ascribes this cowardly act to David is a late
interpretation;
the original account is given in 2 Samuel xxi. 19 (cf.
Stade:
Geschichte
des Volkes Israel i. 225 ff.). It is important to know this when
forming
an estimate of David's characters. See p. 385.
383 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
great detail the heroic deeds of the
Israelites against these tall fair men, it could not, on the other
hand,
conceal the fact that it was from them (the still very savage pure
Indo-European
tribe of the Gittites) that David drew his best and most reliable
soldiers.
It was only by the Philistines that the Philistines were conquered,
only
by the Amorites the Amorites. The Gittites, for example, were not
conquered
by David, but followed him of their own accord (2 Samuel xv. 19
ff.) from their love of war;
AMORITE
their leader, Ittai, was appointed
commander
of a third of the Israelite army (2 Samuel xviii. 2). Of this
“Aryan
corps,“ as he calls it, Renan says: “It was as brave as the Arabian but
excelled it in reliability; to establish anything permanently its
support
was necessary.... It was this that frustrated the treacherous plans of
Absalom, of Sebah, of Adonijah; it was this that saved the threatened
throne
of Solomon ... it supplied the cement of the Israelite kingdom.“ * But
these men were not only brave and faithful soldiers, but also builders
of cities; their cities were the best built and the strongest (Deuteronomy
i. 28); † one of them in particular became
*
Renan:
Israël
ii 30-32.
†
Sayce
(Races of the
Old Testament, p. 112) gives an account of
Flinders
Petrie's recent excavations of Amorite cities with walls 2½
metres
thick.
384 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
world-famous: not far from Hebron,
the
chief city of their Hittite friends, the Amorites founded a new city,
Jerusalem.
The King of Jerusalem who marches against Joshua is an Amorite (Joshua
x. 5), and even though the narrative says that he was defeated and
slain
with all the other kings, one must take that and the whole book of
Joshua
cum
grano salis; for the conquest of Palestine in reality cost the
Israelites
a great deal of trouble, and was accomplished only very slowly and by
the
help of foreigners; * at any rate the city of Jerusalem was till
David's
time an Amorite city, mixed with much Hittite blood, a mixed population
which the Bible calls Jebusites, but it remained free from Israelites;
it was only in the eighth year of his reign that David with his alien
mercenaries
won this fortress and, because of its strength, chose it as his
residence.
But the Amorite-Hittite population continued to be of importance by
reason
of their numbers and position; † David has to buy ground from a
well-to-do
Amorite, to erect an altar thereon (2 Samuel xxiv. 18 ff.), and
it is with a Gittite, one of his most trusted leaders, that he deposits
the sacred ark of the covenant, after he has transferred it to
Jerusalem
(2 Samuel iv. 10). ‡ Thus, too, the prophet Ezekiel represents
God
as calling to the city of Jerusalem: “Thy birth and thy nativity is of
the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an
Hittite!“
(Ezekiel xvi. 3). And then he reproaches the Israelite
inhabitants
with mixing with these alien elements: “Thou playedst the harlot and
pouredst
out thy fornications on every one that passed by“ (Ezekiel
* See
especially Wellhausen's Prolegomena, in many passages.
† In
Joshua
xv. 63 we read: “As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem,
the
children of Judah could not drive them out; the Jebusites dwell with
the
children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day.“
‡
Wellhausen
proves (Prolegomena, p. 43) that Obededom was really, as the
passage
quoted says, a Gittite and not a Levite, as the later version gives it
(1 Chronicles xvi. 18).
385
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
xvi. 15) — a piece of simplicity on
the part of the pious Jew, since the great men of his race had not been
sparing with the example, and he himself, as a Jerusalemite, was the
child
of this threefold crossing; Ezekiel, the real inventor of specific
Judaism,
had already before his mind that paradoxical idea of a Jew of pure
race,
which is a contradictio in adjecto. The Judean, in fact, had
adopted
more Amorite blood than any other Israelite, and that for the simple
reason
that the Amorites were pretty numerous in the south of Palestine, the
districts
of Simeon, Judah and Benjamin, whereas they were less numerous in the
north.
The Egyptian monuments, on which the various peoples are most
characteristically
represented, prove incontestably that at the time of Solomon and his
successors
the inhabitants of Southern Israel, especially the leaders of the army,
were distinguished by the predominance of the clearly marked Amorite,
that
is Indo-European, type.
Indeed it has been
sometimes questioned whether David himself was not half or
three-quarters
Amorite. The Bible emphasises in several places his fairness, and, as
Virchow
has proved by countless statistics, “the skin with all that belongs to
it is even more constant than the skull“; now fair complexion and light
hair never occurred among the Hebrews and the members of the Syrian
group,
these characteristics of the European being first brought into the land
by the Amorites and the Hellenes; that is why David's fairness was so
striking.
* In these circumstances it is probably not
*
Luther
had translated the passages in question (2 Samuel xvi. 12, xvi.
42) by the word “brownish“; Genesius, on the other hand, in his
dictionary
translates the Hebrew word by “red,“ and while admitting that it
usually
refers to the hair, he takes great pains to prove that David must have
been black-haired and that “red“ here refers to the complexion (in the
1899 edition this apologetic attempt is dropped); the best scientific
translators
to-day look upon the word as meaning “fair-haired,“ and it seems pretty
certain that David was distinctly fair-haired.
386 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
too daring to suppose that a
shepherd
born in Bethlehem (that is, in the district most thickly populated by
Amorites)
may have had an Amorite mother. His character, its great faults as well
as its fascinating qualities, his daring, his spirit of adventure, his
carelessness, his fanciful nature, distinguish David, it seems to me,
from
all the heroes of Israel; equally so his endeavour to organise the
kingdom
and to unite the scattered tribes into one whole, which drew upon him
the
hatred of the Israelites. His outspoken predilection for the
Philistines,
too, among whom he had gladly served as a soldier (see, for
example,
2 Samuel xxi. 3), is a striking feature, as also the remarkable
fact, pointed out by Renan (Israël, ii. 35), that he
treated
the Philistines generously in war, but the Hebrew peoples with
frightful
cruelty, as though they were repugnant to him. Should there be any
truth
in this supposition, Solomon could hardly be called an Israelite; for
it
is very unlikely that his mother Bathsheba, the wife of the Hittite
Uriah,
was an Israelite. * Thus we should have an explanation of the peculiar
incompatibility between Solomon's nature and aims and the character of
Israel and Judah. Renan says it openly: “Salomon n'entendait rien
à
la vraie vocation de sa race“; † he was a stranger with all a
stranger's
wishes and a stranger's aims in the midst of the people he thought to
make
great. And thus this short period of splendour in the history of the
Israelite
people — David, Solomon — would in reality be nothing else but an
“episode“
brought about by the exultant strength of an entirely different blood,
but soon crushed by the unbending will of the Syro-Semite, who was not
inclined to follow in those paths, nor indeed capable of doing so.
*
Renan;
Israël
ii. 97.
† Ibid.
ii. 174
387 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
COMPARATIVE
NUMBERS
Concerning that
which
I previously termed the special sphere of influence, we possess, as can
be seen, sufficient historical material. If my purpose were not limited
to describing the origin of the Jews I might add a great deal more —
for
example, that the tribe of Joseph, the most gifted and energetic of all
Israelites from whom are descended Joshua, Samuel, Jerubbaal, &c.,
and the great dynasty of the Omrides, were half-Egyptians, as Genesis
xli. 45 tells us with the brevity of such folklore, in that Joseph
marries
the daughter of a priest from Heliopolis, who bears him Ephraim and
Manasseh...
but this fact is of little or no importance in fixing the Jewish line
of
descent; for marriages between the different tribes of Israel were made
almost impossible by law, and were particularly improbable owing to the
persistent antipathy of the children of Joseph to those of Judah. It is
just as unnecessary to speak of their contact with many other Hebrew
families.
The later admixture of negro blood with the Jewish in the Diaspora of
Alexandria
— of which many a man of Jewish persuasion at this day offers living
proof
— is also a matter of little importance. What I have said is detailed
enough
to enable every one to picture to himself the anthropogeny of the Jew
in
its broad outlines. We have seen that there cannot be the least doubt
that
the historical Israelite, from whom the real “Jew“ later separated
himself,
is the product of a mixture. He even enters history as a half-caste,
namely,
as a Hebrew; this Hebrew then contracts marriages with alien
non-Semitic
women: first of all with the Hittites, a special stem of the widespread
and clearly marked homo syriacus; in the second place with the
tall,
fair, blue-eyed Arnorites from the Indo-European group. Now this
historical
testimony is confirmed in an irrefutable manner by that of science. F.
von Luschan thus sum-
388 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
marises the evidence in the paper
already
quoted: “The Jews are descended, first from real Semites, secondly from
Aryan Amorites, thirdly and chiefly from the descendants of the old
Hittites.
These are the three most important elements in the Jew, and in
comparison
other mixtures are of very little account.“ This diagnosis — let it be
noted — refers to the Jews at the time when they were separated from
Israel,
and it is equally applicable to-day; the measurements have been made on
old material and on the very newest, and that with the result that the
various adoptions of aliens (Spaniards, Southern French, &c.) into
Judaism, on which feuilletonists and unctuous moralists are wont to lay
much emphasis, have remained absolutely without influence; a race so
characteristically
composed and then kept so strictly pure immediately absorbs such drops
of water.
The first point is
thus settled: the Israelite people is descended from the crossing of
absolutely
different human types. The second point, in which the relation of the
different
races to each other has to be discussed, will require only one
paragraph
as far as pure statistics are concerned; but what would be the use of
figures
if they did not give us distinct conceptions? That would be purely and
simply the x, y, z of elementary algebra; the problem is correctly
solved,
but does not mean anything, as all the figures are unknown; the quality
of the different races will therefore detain our attention longer than
the quantity.
Now as far as the
quantitative composition of the Israelite blood is concerned, we must
not
forget that even 60,000 measurements are little in comparison with the
millions that have lived in the course of centuries; it would be wrong
to apply them to the single individual; statistics of masses cannot
lift
even the hem of the veil which envelops the personality. Nevertheless,
we should also remember that beyond the individuality of the person
389 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
there is the individuality of the
whole
people; and numbers can be much better applied to this more abstract
personality.
I cannot tell simply from the race of an individual what he will do in
a definite case; but I can, for example, with great certainty prophesy
how a large number of Italians, as a collective body, or an equal
number
of Norwegians will act in a definite case. For our knowledge of the
character
of a people anthropological figures are therefore of real value. Now
these
figures give the following results with regard to the Jews (of former
times
and to-day, in east and in west); 50 per cent. show clear evidence of
belonging
to the type homo syriacus (short heads, characteristic,
so-called
“Jewish“ noses, inclination to stoutness, &c.); only 5 per cent.
have
the features and the anatomical structure of the genuine Semite (the
Bedouin
of the desert); in the case of 10 per cent. we find a colour of skin
and
hair, often too of complexion, which points to the Amorite of
Indo-European
descent; 35 per cent. represent indefinable mixed forms, something of
the
nature of Lombroso's “combined photographs,“ where countenances occur
in
which the one feature contradicts the other: skulls which are neither
long
like those of the genuine Semite, nor half-long like those of the
Amorite,
nor round like those of the Syrian, noses which are neither Hittite,
nor
Aryan, nor Semitic, or, again, the Syrian nose, but without the head
that
belongs to it, and so on ad infinitum. The chief result of this
anatomical survey is that the Jewish race is in truth a permanent but
at
the same time a mongrel race which always retains this mongrel
character.
In the former chapter I have tried to make clear the difference between
mixed and mongrel races. All historically great races and nations have
been produced by mixing; but wherever the difference of type is too
great
to be bridged over, then we have mongrels. That is the case here. The
crossing
between Bedouin and Syrian
390
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
was — from an anatomical point of
view
— probably worse than that between Spaniard and South American Indian.
And to this was added later the ferment of a European-Aryan element!
CONSCIOUSNESS
OF SIN AGAINST RACE
It is very proper
to lay strong emphasis on this; for such a process, however
unconsciously
it may go on, is an incestuous crime against nature; it can only be
followed
by a miserable or a tragical fate. The rest of the Hebrews, and with
them
the Josephites, had a wretched end; like the families of the more
important
pseudo-Semitic mestizos (the Phoenicians, Babylonians, &c.) they
disappeared
and left no trace behind; the Jew, on the other hand, chose the tragic
fate: that proves his greatness, and that is his greatness. I shall
soon
return to this theme, since this resolve on his part means the founding
of Judaism; I shall only add one remark, for it is appropriate here and
has never yet, so far as I know, been made, namely, that this deep
consciousness
of sin, which weighed upon * the Jewish nation in its heroic days, and
which has found pathetic expression in the words of its chosen men, is
rooted in these physical relations. Naturally the intelligence, and the
vanity which is common to us all, explained it quite differently, but
the
instinct went deeper than the understanding, and as soon as the
destruction
of the Israelites and their own captivity had awakened the conscience
of
the Jew, his first act was to put an end to that incest (as I called it
above, using the very word of Ezekiel) by the strict prohibition of
every
crossing, even with nearly related tribes. An inexplicable
contradiction
has been found in the fact that it was the Jews who brought into our
*
“Since
the exile the consciousness of sin was (in the case of the Jews), so to
say, permanent,“ says Wellhausen in his Prolegomena, 4th ed p.
431.
391
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
bright world the ever-threatening
conception
of sin, and that they nevertheless understand by sin something quite
different
from us. Sin is for them a national thing, whereas the individual is
“just“
when he does not transgress the “law“; * redemption is not the moral
redemption
of the individual, but the redemption of the State; † that is difficult
for us to understand. But there is something more: the sin
unconsciously
committed is the same to the Jew as a conscious sin; ‡ “the notion of
sin
has for the Jew no necessary reference to the conscience of the sinner,
it does not necessarily involve the conception of a moral badness, but
points to a legal responsibility.“ § Montefiore also expressly
declares
that according to the view of the postexilic legislators “sin was
looked
upon not as a contamination of the individual soul, but as a pollution
of the physical purity, a disturbance of that untroubled purity of the
land and its inhabitants which is the one condition under which God can
continue to dwell among His people and in His sanctuary“ (p. 326).
Wellhausen
expresses himself thus: “In the case of the Jews ... there is no inner
connection between the good man and that which is good; the action of
the
hands and the desire of the heart are severed.“ ¶ I am, as I said,
convinced that the key to this remarkable and contradictory conception
is to be found in the history of the physical growth of this people:
their
existence is
*
See
Matthew
xix. 20. The Jew Graetz even to-day approves fully of the utterance of
the rich man and shows that the demand “to repent of his sins“ has no
meaning
for the Jew (Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden i. 577).
† W.
Robertson Smith: The Prophets of Israel and their Place in History,
1895, p. 247.
‡ Ibid.
p. 102; Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews, 2nd ed. p.
558 (supplement by Rabbi Schechter).
§
W. Robertson Smith: The Prophets of Israel and their Place in
History,
p. 103. In another place he writes: “Sin is to the Hebrew every action
that puts a man in the wrong with one who has the power to punish him
for
it.“ (p. 246).
¶
Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, 3rd ed. p. 380.
392
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
sin, their existence is a crime
against
the holy laws of life; this, at any rate, is felt by the Jew himself in
the moments when destiny knocks heavily at his door. Not the individual
but the whole people had to be washed clean, and not of a conscious but
of an unconscious crime; and that is impossible, “though thou wash thee
with nitre, and take thee much soap,“ as Jeremiah (ii. 22) says to his
people. And in order to wipe out the irretrievable past, in order to
fuse
that past with the present, in which wisdom and the power of will
should
set a limit to sin and make a place for purity — the whole Jewish
history
from the beginning had to be falsified, and the Jews represented as a
people
chosen above all other peoples by God and of stainlessly pure race,
protected
by Draconian laws against every crossing. Those who brought that about
were not liars, as has probably been supposed, but men who acted under
the pressure of that necessity which alone raises us above ourselves
and
makes us ignorant instruments of mighty dispensations of fate. * If
anything
is calculated to free us from the blindness of our times and the
phrase-making
of our authorities †
*
The
words of Jeremiah, “The pen of the Scribes is in vain“ (viii. 8), have
been applied to the then recent introduction of Deuteronomy and
to the recasting and extension of the so-called Law of Moses (of the
existence
of which none of the Prophets had known anything). This is the view of
the orthodox Jew Montefiore (Religion of the Ancient Hebrews,
201,
202), and is probably correct.
†
Herr
von Luschan also, as one can perceive from the conclusion of his work
on
the ethnographical position of the Jews which is so valuable from a
statistical
point of view, sees our salvation in the complete amalgamation and
fusion
of the various human races. One cannot believe one's eyes and ears when
these men of the school of Virchow pass from facts to thoughts. The
whole
history of mankind shows us that progress is conditioned by
differentiation
and individualisation; we find life and activity only where clearly
marked
national personalities stand side by side opposed to each other (as in
Europe to-day), the best qualities degenerate under the influence of
uniformity
of race (as in China), the crossing of incompatible types leads, as we
see in all organic spheres, to sterility and monstrosity ... and yet
“amalgamation“
is to be our ideal! Do they not see that uniformity and chaos are the
same?
“Ich liebte mir
dafür
das Ewigleere!“
393
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
and to open our eyes to the law of
nature,
that great peoples result only from the ennoblement of the race and
that
this can only take place under definite conditions, the neglect of
which
brings in its train degeneration and sterility, it is the sight of this
sublimely planned and desperate struggle of the Jews who had become
conscious
of their racial sin.
HOMO
SYRIACUS
If we now return
to
racial statistics, we find ourselves face to face with a difficult
theme;
we may measure skulls and count noses, but how do these results reveal
themselves in the inner nature of the Jew? We hold the bone of the
skull
in the hand, it is what Carlyle calls “a hard fact.“ This skull,
indeed,
symbolises a whole world; any one with the skill to weigh the mass of
it
rightly, and to interpret its lines in their mutual relations, could
tell
us much about the individual: he would see possibilities of which the
race
in question becomes conscious only after generations, and recognise
limitations
which separate one man from the other from the very first. On looking
at
the two skulls on p. 374, the long one and the round one, we seem to
see
two microcosms. But the power of interpretation is denied us; we judge
men by their deeds, that is really indirectly and according to a
fragmentary
method, for these deeds are determined only by definite circumstances.
Everything remains piecework here. Now the protoplasm of a one-celled
alga
is such an extremely complicated structure that the chemists do not yet
know how many atoms they must suppose in the molecule, and how they can
unite them under a symbolical formula that is at all acceptable; who
would
presume to find the formula for a human being or a whole people? The
following
characterisation of the Hittites, the Amorites and the Semites can only
serve to give a very general conception.
394 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
On the Egyptian
pictures
the Hittites look anything but intelligent. The exaggerated “Jewish“
nose
is continued upwards by a retreating brow and downwards by a still more
retreating chin. * Perhaps the homo syriacus was not really
distinguished
by the possession of great and brilliant gifts; I cannot say that he
has
given any signs of it in modern times in places where he is supposed to
predominate. But he unquestionably possessed good qualities. That his
race
predominated and still predominates in the various crossings shows
great
physical power. Moreover, he possessed corresponding endurance and
diligence.
To judge from the few pictures he must also have been shrewd, in fact
extremely
cunning (which of course has nothing to do with brilliant intellect, on
the contrary). His history, too, shows him to be shrewd: he has known
how
to rule and how to submit to an alien power where the conditions were
favourable.
He put barren districts under cultivation, and when the population
increased,
he built cities and was such a capable merchant that in the Bible the
same
word served to denote merchant and Canaanite. That he could face death
bravely is proved by the long struggle with Egypt † and the occurrence
of such characters as Uriah. ‡ A feature of kindliness is evident in
all
the otherwise very different portraits. We can form a vivid mental
picture
of how these men — equally remote
* See
especially the figures on a Hittite monument near Aintab (Sayce: Hittites,
p. 62), and the types from Egyptian monuments on p. 375.
† The
Hittites seem for a long time to have ruled all Syria and probably all
Asia Minor; their power was as great as that of Egypt in its splendour
(see Wright: Empire of the Hittites, 1886; and Sayce: The
Hittites, 1892). But one should be cautious, for the Hittite script
is not yet deciphered, and though Hittite physiognomy, dress, art and
writing
form a definite idea for science, the history of this people, of whom
nothing
was known a few years ago, is still to a large extent wrapt in mystery.
‡ See
(2 Samuel xi.) in what a noble, manly way Uriah acts. This
stern
undemonstrative devotion to duty presents an agreeable contrast to
David's
criminal levity.
395 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
from symbolical mythology and from
fanatical
Bedouin delusion — could introduce that simple cult, which the
Israelites
found in Palestine and adopted — the festival of the vintage (it was
New
Year also to them, and the Jews later called it the Feast of the
Tabernacle),
the festival of spring (Easter, transformed later by the Jews into
Passover)
with the offering of the first-born of cattle and sheep, the festival
of
the finished harvest (Pentecost, called by the Jews “Festival of the
Weeks“),
nothing but joyful festivals of a long-settled agricultural people, not
those of a nomadic race, festivals without any deeper connection with
the
spiritual life of man, a simple nature-religion such as may have suited
and still certainly would suit simple, industrious and “tolerably
honest“
people. * As we find human sacrifice only where (as in Phoenicia) the
Semitic
element strongly predominated, † we may assume that a Semitic and not a
Hittite custom reveals itself in the cases where the Canaanite service
of Baal permits such horrors at the festival: they are, however,
exceptional
and probably occur only when alien princesses have come by marriage
into
the land... ‡ On the whole the Hittites give us the impression of a
respectable
* Cf.
the details in Wellhausen: Israelitische
und jüdische
Geschichte,
chap. vi. In spite of the later careful expurgation we find still here
and there in the Thora mention of this joyful nature-cult, as, for
example,
the festival of the vintage in the house of God at Sichem (Judges
ix. 27). See, too, how the ark of the covenant is brought by
David
to Jerusalem “amid joy and exultation,“ with music, song and dance (2 Samuel
vi. 12-15).
† Von
Luschan has, by numerous measurements, established the fact that the
Phoenician
type “was closely related to the Arabian.“
‡
Concerning
the much more complicated cult in the former capital of the Hittite
kingdom,
Carchemish (Mabog), see Sayce: The Hittites, chap. vi.
But
I consider Lucian, whom he quotes, a very late and unreliable witness.
On the other hand, it is interesting to see how far the lack of
imagination
went in the case of the Hebrews. Even in the laying out of the Jewish
temple,
of the outer and inner court, of the curtain before the Holy of Holies,
as also the privilege of the High Priest to enter this place: all these
(said to have been dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai) are exact
imitations
of the primeval Hittite cult.
396 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
mediocrity with great vitality
rather
than of any special capacity for extraordinary achievements, they
possess
more endurance than power. Goethe says somewhere that there is no
greatness
without something extravagant; according to this definition of Goethe
the
Hittites can hardly lay claim to greatness.
HOMO
EUROPAEUS
On the other hand,
in the Amorites — “tall as cedars and strong as oaks“ (Amos ii.
9), with their bold challenges, their unbridled love of adventure,
their
insane loyalty even to death towards alien, self-imposed masters, their
thick city walls, from which they loved to make forays in the
mountains,
— the element of extravagance seems to me to be peculiarly
characteristic.
It was a wild, cruel extravagance, but capable of the very highest
things.
We seem to catch a glimpse of quite another being when on the Egyptian
monuments among the countless number of physiognomies we suddenly see
before
us this free, frank, open countenance so full of character and
intelligence.
Like the eye of genius amid the common throng of men, so these features
appear to us amid the mass of cunning and bad, stupid and evil
countenances,
amid this whole riffraff of Babylonians, Hebrews, Hittites, Nubians and
all the rest of them. O homo europaus! how couldst thou stray
among
such company? Yes, thou seemst to me like an eye that looks into a
divine
transcendental world. And fain would I call to thee: follow not the
advice
of the learned anthropologists, do not amalgamate with that crowd,
mingle
not with the Asiatic rabble, obey the great poet of thy race, remain
true
to thyself... but I am 3000 years too late. The Hittite remained, the
Amorite
disappeared. This is one among the many differences between noble and
ignoble:
nobility is more difficult to
397 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
maintain. Though giants in form
these
men are nevertheless very delicate in their inner organisation. No
people
degenerates so quickly as Lapouge's homo europaeus; how
rapidly,
for instance, the Greeks became barbarians, in Syros, Parthos,
Aegyptios
degenerarunt, as Livy himself testifies (38, 17, 11). He completely
loses his peculiar qualities, that which is his alone he seems
incapable
of giving to others, the others do not possess the vessel to hold it;
he,
on the other hand, possesses a fatal capacity of assimilating all that
is alien. People, it is true, talk to-day of the fair-haired Syrians,
we
hear too that 10 per cent. of the Jews are fair; but Virchow has told
us
that skin and hair endure longer than the skull, and it is probable
that
the skull would last longer than the brain; I do not know, but I really
believe that the Indo-European left in Asia, as elsewhere, beyond the
memory
of his deeds, little more than skin and hair. I have looked for him in
the Talmud, but in vain. *
HOMO
ARABICUS
It seems to me
very
difficult to say anything about the third of this group, the genuine
Semite;
for it is characteristic of this homo arabicus not to enter
into
or influence human history until he has ceased to be a genuine Semite.
So long as he remains in his wilderness (and for his peace and
greatness
of soul he should always remain there), he really does not belong to
history
at all; it is also very difficult, indeed wellnigh impossible, to get
definite
*
Yet
one Teuton actually occurs there (Tractate Schabbeth, vi. 8.
fol.
23a of the Jerusalem Talmud). He is the slave of a Jew. Ordered
to accompany home Rabbi Hila, a friend of his master, he saved him from
death by inducing a mad dog that rushed at the latter to attack
himself,
and he was fatally bitten. But this loyalty does not induce the pious
Jew
to utter one word of admiration or thanks. He merely quotes Isaiah
xliii. 4: “Since thou wast precious, O Israel, in my sight, thou hast
been
honourab!e, and I have loved thee: therefore I will give men for thee
and
people for thy life.“
398 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
particulars concerning him there; we
merely hear that he is brave, hospitable, pious, also revengeful and
cruel
— these are mere elements of character, there is nothing to give us a
clue
to his intellectual gifts. Burckhardt, who travelled for years in
Arabia,
represents the Bedouin as absolutely dormant intellectually, so long as
love or war does not stretch the slack bow — and then he at once goes
to
extremes. * But if he breaks into the civilised world, it is to murder
and burn, as under Abu Bekr and Omar, or to-day in Central Africa. † As
soon as he has laid waste everything far and wide, the genuine Semite
disappears,
we hear nothing more of him; wherever he appears in the history of
civilisation
crossing has in the meantime taken place — for no type seems to mix
more
quickly and more successfully than that which has sprung from a
compulsory
inbreeding of thousands of years' duration. The noble Moor of Spain is
anything but a pure Arab of the desert, he is half a Berber (from the
Aryan
family) and his veins are so full of Gothic blood that even at the
present
day noble inhabitants of Morocco can trace their descent back to
Teutonic
ancestors. That is why Harun-al-Raschid's reign is such a bright moment
in a dark, sad history, because the pure Persian family of the
Barmecides,
which remained true to the Iranian religion of Zarathustra, ‡ stands by
the side of the Khalif as a civilising and refining influence. Not a
single
one of the so-called “Semitic“ civilised States of antiquity is purely
Semitic, — no, not one: neither
* Beduinen
und Wahaby, Weimar, 1831.
†
Note
how the famous Moorish historian of the fourteenth century, Mohammed
Ibn
Khaldun, considered by many the founder of scientific history and
himself
half Arab, speaks: “Cast your eyes around, look at all lands, which
have
been conquered by the inhabitants of Arabia since the earliest times!
The
civilisation and population disappeared, the soil itself seemed to
change
and become unfruitful at their touch“ (Prolegomena zur Weltgeschichte)
2nd Part; I quote from Robert Flint: History of the Philosophy of
History,
1893, p. 166.
‡
Renan:
L'islamisme
et la science (Discours et Conférences, 3e éd.
p. 382).
399 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Babylonian nor the Assyrian nor
the Phoenician. History tells us so and anthropology supports the
statement.
We still hear “wonders and fairy tales“ about the rich blessing poured
upon us by this civilising work of the so-called Semites: but when we
look
more closely we always find that the genuine Semitic is simply
“grafted“
upon the really creative element (as Wellhausen said of the
Israelites),
and so it is very difficult to decide how much and what in particular
is
to be ascribed to the Semite as such, and what, on the other hand, to
his
host. * We know to-day, for example, that the Semites did not invent
writing
with letters any more than they did the so-called “Arabian ciphers“; it
is from the Hittites that the pretended “Phoenician“ or “Semitic“
* See
Jhering's suggestive but very fanciful Vorgeschichte der
Indoeuropäer,
in which the author characterises the whole Babylonian culture as
Semitic,
although he admits that the Semites “took it over“ and although he
points
out that the Sumero-Accadians were an influential and vigorous force
even
in late times (pp. 133, 243, &c.). So, too, von Luschan in the
essay
mentioned, where he takes the trouble at the end to blow the trumpet of
the“ Semites“ although in the same lecture he has already proved that
the
most famous Semitic peoples had but little Semitic blood in their
veins....
O logic of the scientists! And finally he dishes up the old story of
how
Arabian science flourished luxuriantly in Spain and what it meant for
us
— a tale the foolishness of which no other than Renan had exposed years
ago. “The Semitic spirit,“ he writes, “is fundamentally
antiphilosophical
and antiscientific ... there is much talk of an Arabian science and an
Arabian philosophy, and certainly the Arabs were our teachers during
one
or two centuries; but that was the case simply because the original
Hellenic
writings were yet undiscovered. This whole Arabian science and
philosophy
was nothing but a wretched translation of Hellenic thought and
knowledge
As soon as authentic Greece stepped forth from the shadow, these poor
products
fell into nothing, and it is not without reason that all the
authorities
on the Renaissance undertake a real crusade against them. Moreover we
find
on closer examination that this Arabian science was in no respect
Arabian.
Not only was its basis purely Hellenic, but among those who devoted
their
energies to the introduction and spread of knowledge, there was not a
single
genuine Semite; they were Spaniards and (in Bagdad) Persians, who made
use of the prevailing Arabian tongue. It is exactly the same with the
philosophical
part ascribed to the Jews in the Middle Ages; they translated from
foreign
tongues, nothing more. Jewish philosophy is Arabian philosophy; not a
single
new thought is added. One page of Roger Bacon possesses
400 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
writing * is derived, and “the
legend
of the handing down of the alphabet to the Aryans by the Phoenicians is
now discarded for good,“ since much older letters have been found than
the oldest pseudo-Semitic ones — letters which prove the existence of a
“primitive Aryan-European script, which only at a later period was
somewhat
influenced, in the east, by the Asiatic writings.“ † — We see, on the
other
hand, that where the Semitic will prevailed in the pure sphere of
religion
(not of property) it forced and commanded mental sterility: we see it
in
the Jews after the Babylonian captivity (for the victory of the
religious
party is unquestionably a victory of the Semitic element) and we see it
in Mohammedanism. “Jewish life was, after the exile, devoid of all
intellectual
and mental interests except the religious ... the typical Jew
interested
himself neither in politics, literature, philosophy nor art .... The
Bible
really formed his whole literature, and its study was his only mental
and
more scientific value
than
the whole of this borrowed Jewish wisdom, which we must, of course,
respect,
but which is absolutely devoid of originality.“ (De la part des
peuples
sémitiques dans l'histoire de la civilisation, éd.
1875,
p. 22 ff.). Renan treats the same subject in more detail in his lecture
of the year 1883: L'islamisme et la science: “Not only are
these
thinkers and scholars not of Arabian descent,“ he says there, “but the
tendency of their minds is altogether non-Arabian.“
*
Renan:
Israël,
i. 134 ff.
‡
Professor
Hueppe: Zur Rassen- und Sozialhygiene der Griechen, 1897, p.
26.
All authorities at the present day admit that the so-called
“Phoenician“
letters were not the invention of Semitic genius: Halévy
supposes
an Egyptian origin, Hommel (with more probability) a Babylonian, that
is
Sumarian, origin. Delitzsch thinks that the Syrian half-Semites had
formed
their alphabet by the fusion of two different ones, the Babylonian and
the Egyptian; the last investigator of this matter, however, arrives at
the conclusion that the alphabet is altogether an invention of the
Europeans,
and was first brought to Asia by the Hellenic Myceneans (see H.
Kluge: Die Schrift der Mykenier, 1897). With regard to the
Mycenean
letters which have now become quite well known, a reliable authority,
Salomon
Reinach, writes (L'Anthropologie, 1902, xiii. 34): Une chose
est certaine: c'est que l'écriture linéaire des tablettes
ne dérive ni de l'Assyrie ni de l'Egypte, qu'elle
présente
un caractère nettement européen, qu'elle offre comme une
image anticipée de l'épigraphie hellénique.
401
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
intellectual interest“; this is
written
by an unprejudiced critic, the Jewish scholar C. G. Montefiore (pp. 419
and 543). An equally reliable witness, Hirsch Graetz, quotes a remark
of
Rabbi Akiba: “Whoever devotes himself to reading exoteric writings
(that
is, to any study but the sacred Jewish Thora) has lost his right to
future
life.“ * The Mishna teaches, “to have one's son taught Greek science is
as accursed as to engage in the breeding of swine.“ † That the
Hittites,
who form, as we have seen, the half of the Jewish blood, always
protested
against such doctrines and devoted their attention by preference to
everything
“exoteric,“ is a different matter; I am here trying to define the
“Semite“
only. As regards the sterilising influence of the most genuine Semitic
religion, the Mohammedan, it is too obvious to require proof. We stand
here then, to begin with, before a mass of negative and very few
positive
facts; any one who is not content with phrases will find it difficult
to
get a clear conception of the personality of the genuine Semite, and
yet
for our purpose the answering of the question, Who is the Jew? is so
important
that we must strive to get that conception. Let us call the learned to
our aid!
If I consult the
work of the most eminent and consequently most reliable of all
ethnographists
in Germany, Oskar Peschel, I shall find no answer to this question; he
was a prudent man. Ratzel writes as follows: The Semite has greater
intensity,
or, so to say, one-sidedness of religious feeling than either the
Hamite
or the Indo-Teuton; violence, exclusiveness, in short fanaticism, is
his
distinguishing-mark; religious extravagances, including human
sacrifices,
are nowhere so widespread as in his midst; the general of the Mahdi even
* Gnosticismus
und Judentum (Krotoschin, 1846, p. 99). The meaning of the word
“exoteric,“
which is not quite clear in this connection, is explained when we
compare
other passages, where, for example, the reading of Greek poets is
called
an “exoteric“ occupation (p. 62).
†
Quoted
from Renan: L'Origine du Christianisme, i. 35.
402 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
in 1883 had prisoners roasted alive
in ovens; the Semite is individualistic, he clings more to family and
religion
than to the State; since he is not a good soldier, foreign mercenaries
had to win his victories for him; in the oldest times the Semite may
have
done great things for science, but it is possible that these
achievements
are of foreign origin — later at any rate he does not accomplish much
in
this sphere, his best work being in religion. * This characterisation
seems
to me to be very unsatisfactory and scrappy; it says very little, and
besides
is in certain respects false. It is all very fine to roast one's
enemies
in ovens — from China to the artistic Netherlands of the sixteenth
century
where do we not find cruelty? — but to see in that a “higher
intensity
of religious feeling“ is silly, especially when one places the Semite
in
this respect above the profoundly religious and wonderfully creative
Egyptian,
and also above the Indo-Teuton, whose religious literature is by far
the
greatest in the world, and whose “religious feeling“ has from time
immemorial
revealed itself in the fact that thousands and millions of human
existences
were dedicated and sacrificed to religion alone. When the Brahman, in
one
of the oldest Upanishads (at least 800 or 1000 years before Christ †
teaches
that man should regard every inhalation and exhalation by day and by
night
as a continual sacrifice to God, ‡ does that not represent “the
greatest
intensity of religious feeling“ that the world has ever known? And what
is the meaning of the phrase, the Semite is individualistic? As far as
we can judge, wherever religion came under Semitic influence,
* Völkerkunde,
ii. 391; summarised from Ratzel's own words.
† Cf.
Leopold von Schröder: Indiens Litteratur und Kultur
(1887),
20th Lecture.
‡ Kaushîtaki-Upanishad
ii. 5. Deussen, the greatest living authority, gives the following
gloss
to this passage: The Brahman means, “Religion shall not consist in
outward
worship but in devoting one's whole life with every breath to its
service“
(Sechzig Upanishad's des Veda, p. 31).
403 JEWS
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it differed from the Indo-Teutonic
(and
East-Asiatic) creed in becoming national. The individual, except as
member
of the community, shrunk almost to a negligible quantity (cf. p.
245); and the pseudo-Semitic States have, without exception,
deprived
the individual of all freedom. It seems to me that there is more
individualism
among Teutonic than among Semitic peoples; at any rate the assertion
that
the Semite is individualistic could only be made with many
qualifications.
Much more profound are the remarks of that thorough scholar Christian
Lassen,
who knew more of souls than of skulls. Although his characterisation of
the Semite dates from the fourth decade of last century, when the
half-Semites
were not yet clearly distinguished from the genuine stem, he seizes
upon
points which reveal the intellectual kernel of the Semitic personality.
He writes: “The Semitic way of looking at things is subjective and
egoistical.
His poetry is lyrical, hence subjective, his soul pours out its joys
and
sorrows, its love and hatred, its admiration and its contempt; ... the
epic, in which the Ego of the poet steps into the background, he cannot
successfully treat, still less the drama, which demands from the poet a
still greater abandonment of the personal standpoint.“ * Nor does
philosophy
belong to the Semites; they have adopted, or rather, only the Arabs
*
Is
this individualism after all? Certainly, but in a quite different sense
from the case of the Indo-Teuton. In the case of the Semite, as we see
from Lassen's remarks, the individual stands, so to speak, in his own
way,
hence his achievements are only collective. In the case of Greek and
Teuton,
each work bears the stamp of a definite personality, of an individual.
Fr. von Schack holds exactly the same view as Lassen: “The whole
creative
activity of the Arabs bears a subjective character. Everywhere it is
preferably
their own 'soul-life' that they express. They draw into it the things
of
the outer world, and show but little inclination to look straight at
reality,
and so to represent nature in sharp and definite outlines, or to study
the individuality of others, thus representing men and conditions of
life
in a concrete manner. Accordingly those forms of poetry which demand
abandonment
of the Ego and imaginative power are least congenial to them“ (Poesie
und Kunst der Araber, i. 99).
404
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
have, the philosophy of the
Indo-Teutons.
Their views and conceptions occupy their minds too much to allow them
to
rise sufficiently out of themselves to grasp pure thought, and to
separate
the more general and the necessary from their own individuality and its
contingencies. * “In his religion the Semite is selfish and exclusive;
Jehovah is merely the God of the Hebrews, and they acknowledge no other
than him: all other Gods are absolutely false and have neither share
nor
part in the truth; Allah wishes to be not only the God of the Arabs,
but
to conquer the whole world, and his nature is as egoistic as that of
Jehovah;
he, too, denies every iota of truth to all other Gods, but it is of no
use to acknowledge Allah, unless you serve him under the exclusive form
which proclaims Mohammed his prophet. According to their doctrine the
Semites
were bound to be intolerant and inclined to fanaticism, as also to
stubborn
clinging to their religious law. Tolerance appears most pronounced in
the
case of the Indo-Teutonic peoples; this tolerance is the result of
greater
freedom of thought, which does not bind itself exclusively to mere
form...
The qualities of the Semitic spirit, the passionate temperament, the
stubborn
will, the firm belief in exclusive justification, their whole
egoistical
nature — were bound to make their possessors in the highest degree
capable
of great and daring deeds.“ † Lassen then proceeds to discuss the
pseudo-Semitic
States, with regard to which he says that these magnificently planned
structures
all went to ruin because “here, too, the intractable arbitrariness of
the
*
Concerning
science in particular, Grau writes in his well-known philo-Semitic
work,
Semiten und Indogermanen (2nd ed. p. 33): “The Hebrews, like all
Semites, are much too subjective to allow the pure impulse of knowledge
to become a power in them. Natural science, in the objective sense
which
it has among the Indo-Teutons, viz., that nature should retain her own
essence and character, while man is merely her interpreter, is unknown
to the Hebrew.“ On p. 50 Grau says: “Everything objective is strange to
the Hebrew.“
† Indische
Altertumskunde (ed. 1847), i. 414-416.
405 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
stubborn selfish will interfered as
a hindering power.“ * From this characterisation we have really learned
something, almost everything indeed, but the facts must be polished and
pointed before a clear and transparent conception enters our
consciousness.
I shall try to do this. Lassen shows us that the will is the
predominant
power in the soul of the Semite; it is at the root of all his actions.
This will impels, but it also retards. It makes its possessor capable
of
great and daring deeds: it stands in his way wherever the spirit soars
to a loftier activity. The result is a character that is passionate and
eager for great deeds, coupled with an intellect which is by no means
adequate
to this impulse, since it can never unfold itself by reason of the
impetuousness
of the will. In this being the will is at the head, the mind stands
next,
and lowest of all the understanding. Lassen especially emphasises the
egoism
of the Semite, he repeatedly refers to it. In his poetry, his
philosophy,
his religion, his politics, everywhere he sees an “egoistical nature“
at
work. That is an unavoidable consequence of that hierarchy of
qualities.
Selfishness is rooted in will; the only things that can keep it from
excess
are the gifts of feeling and understanding — a warm heart, profound
knowledge
of the system of the universe, artistic-creative work, the noble thirst
after knowledge. But, as Lassen hints, as soon as the stormy will with
its selfishness predominates, even beautiful qualities remain
undeveloped:
religion degenerates into fanaticism, thinking becomes magic or
caprice,
art expresses only the love
*
It
is interesting and important to note how the organ of the mind —
language
— is suited to and expresses this special Semitic type. Renan writes:
“A
quiver full of steel arrows, a firmly wound cable, an iron trumpet,
whose
few strident notes rend the air: that is the Hebrew language. This
language
is incapable of expressing a philosophical thought, a scientific
result,
a doubt, or even the feeling of the Infinite. It can say but little,
but
what it does say is like the blow of the hammer on the anvil“ (Israël
i. 102). Is that not the language of stubborn will?
406 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
and the hatred of the moment, it is
expression but not creation, science becomes industry.
This Semite would
seem, then, to be the right counterpart to the Hittite; in the case of
the one we have the beautiful harmony of a nature developed on all
sides
with moderation, tenacious constancy of will united with prudence and a
genial view of life; in the other we find a leaning towards the
Immoderate
and the Arbitrary, a character in which the balance is disturbed, one
in
which the most necessary and at the same time the most dangerous gift
of
man — the will — has been abnormally developed. Those who do not
believe
that the so-called “races“ fell ready-made from heaven, who refuse,
like
me, to pay heed to the delusion of supposed primeval beginnings (since
growth is only a phase of existence, not vice versa), will
probably
surmise that this unexampled development of the one quality with the
corresponding
neglect of the others is the result of a life in the desert for
thousands
of years, during which the intellect was starved and the feelings
confined
to a narrow circle, while the will — the will of this individual who
had
to stand entirely on his own feet, who though in the midst of the
unbroken
silence of nature was surrounded day and night by foes and danger — was
bound to demand all the sap of the body for its service, and constantly
to strain to the utmost the powers of the intellect. Be that as it may,
such a character has assuredly in it the possibility of true greatness.
The extravagance which we missed in the Hittite is here present. And as
a matter of fact now that we have carried the analysis to the inner
being
of the Semite, we are able to lay our finger on the only point where
greatness
can be expected: clearly only in the sphere of will and in all those
achievements
which result from the predominance of will over other qualities. That
Ibn
Khaldun who asserts that “the Semite is utterly incapable of
establishing
anything permanent,“ praises as
407
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
incomparable the simplicity of his
needs
(lack of imagination), the instinct which makes him cling to his family
and separates him from others (impoverished feelings), the ease with
which
he can be exalted by a prophet to the delirium of ecstasy, obeying the
divine command in deep humility (bad judgment in consequence of the
non-development
of the reasoning faculty). In this sentence I have commented on each
assertion
of Ibn Khaldun, but my motive has been in no way to undervalue the
merits
of contentedness, loyalty to family, and obedience to God, but merely
to
show how each one of the qualities named means the triumph of the power
of will. The important thing, however, is to distinguish — this is, in
fact, altogether the most important task of the thinker; and to
understand
rightly what a genuine Semite is, we must comprehend that the
contentedness
of an Omar, for whom nothing in the world has any interest, is not the
same thing as that of an Immanuel Kant, who desires no outward gifts
simply
because his all-embracing mind possesses the whole world; that loyalty
to one's own blood is something quite different from the loyalty of the
Amorites, for example, to their self-imposed master — the one is simply
an instinctive expansion of the egoistical circle of the will, the
other
a free, personal decision of the individual, a kind of lived poetry;
above
all we must, or rather we ought to, learn (I dare not hope to live to
see
it) to distinguish between true religion and an insane belief in some
God,
and also not to confuse monolatry with monotheism. That does not at all
prevent us from acknowledging the specifically Semitic greatness.
Though
Mohammedanism may be the worst of all religions, as Schopenhauer
asserts,
who can repress a thrill of almost uncanny admiration when he sees a
Mohammedan
go to his death as calmly as if he were going for a walk? And this
power
of the Semitic will is so great that it forces itself, as in the case
mentioned,
408 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
upon peoples who have not a drop of
Arab blood in their veins. By contact with this will man becomes
transformed;
there is in it such a power of suggestion that it fascinates us as the
eye of the serpent does the bird, and at its command we seem to lose
the
power of song and flight. And thus it was that the Semite became a
power
of the first moment in the history of the world. Like a blind power of
nature — for the will is blind — he hurled himself upon other races; he
disappeared in them, they took him in; it was obvious what these races
had given him, not what he had given them; for what he gave possessed
no
physiognomy, no form, it was only will: an increased energy which often
impelled to great achievements, an excitability difficult to control,
and
an unquenchable thirst after possession which often led to destruction,
in short, a definite direction of will; wherever he settled, the Semite
had, to begin with, only adopted and assimilated what he found, but he
had changed the character of the people.
HOMO
JUDAEUS
Cursory as may
have
been this attempt to illustrate clearly some distinguishing
characteristics
of the Hittites, the Amorites and the Semites, I believe that it will
contribute
to a sensible and true discernment of the Israelite and Jewish
character.
We must in any case approach such a task with modesty and
self-effacement.
At any rate clear pictures of living men and their deeds will give a
more
vivid conception than figures, though figures are better than phrases.
But with every step we must become more cautious, and if we look back
at
those figures, we shall not be inclined to “construct“ the Israelite
from
percentages of Semites, Amorites and Hittites, somewhat as the cook
makes
a pudding from a recipe; that would be childish folly. But that dis-
409 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
cussion of the matter brings many
points
more humanly home to us. Whatever, for instance, in a national
character
is inexplicable contradiction — and the Jewish people is fuller of
contradictions
than any other — confuses us to begin with, often indeed distresses us;
but this impression passes away when we know the organic cause of the
contradiction.
Thus it is at once apparent that from the crossing of Hebrews and
Hittites
contradictory tendencies must result; for while the Hebrews physically
grafted themselves upon the Hittites, they were inoculated with a
culture
which morally and intellectually did not belong to them, which had not
sprung naturally from their own need, from an inventive richness of
their
own mind; it was taking possession in contrast to original possession.
As a matter of fact the Hebrews obtained a real title to this culture
by
adopting the blood of the creative Hittites and becoming Israelites;
but
by this very act contrast and inner discord were henceforth assured.
The
two types were fundamentally too different to amalgamate completely,
and
this became evident especially in the contrast between Judah and Israel
which soon manifested itself; for in the north the Syrian was
predominant
and the crossing had been much more rapid and thorough; * in the south,
on the other hand, the Amorites were more numerous, and an almost
constant
infiltration of genuine Semitic blood from Arabia continued. What here
took place between tribe and tribe repeated itself inside the narrower
unity: so long as Jerusalem stood, those of weak faith and the
worldly-minded
continually withdrew; they fled from the home of strict law and
unadorned
life. The same phenomenon is seen to-day, but not so clearly. I think
that
without straining a point we may fairly say that we can trace here the
lasting influence of the homo
*
The
Hittites were more numerous in the north, the Amorites in the south. (See
Sayce: Hittites, pp. 13 and 17.)
410 JEWS
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syriacus on the one hand, and
of the homo arabicus on the other.
I leave it to the
reader to make further observations of this kind on the contributions
of
the various types to the formation of this particular human race, and
turn
my attention at once to the most vital point — the influence of the
Semitic
spirit upon religion. That is clearly the essential question, if we are
to understand the origin and character of Judaism; and while the
special
business talent is perhaps rather a Hittite than a Semitic legacy, in
the
sphere of religion the Semitic element probably strongly predominates.
* I prefer to discuss this matter at once, and from the general
standpoint,
rather than later, when the Jewish religion as a particular phenomenon
will occupy our attention; for the wider horizon will give us a broader
view, and if we ask ourselves how the special Semitic spirit, the
predominant
feature of which we now know to be Will, everywhere and of
*
In
regard to business aptitude a proof is given us by the Armenians, in
whose
veins there is much more “alarodic,“ that is, Syrian blood (about 80
per
cent. according to a communication by letter from Professor Hueppe),
but
apart from that only Indo-European, Phrygian and not Semitic blood, and
who — without the characteristic “Jewish nose,“ the Hittite legacy —
show
the same greed, the same business cunning and the same passionate
fondness
for usury as the Jews, but all to a much higher degree, so that there
is
a proverb in the Levant that an Armenian is a match for three Jews. In
David Hogarth's book, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896,
p.
147 ff.), we find interesting details concerning the character of the
Armenians,
especially their genius for intrigue and incitement. It is true that
Burckhardt
in his famous book, Über die Beduinen und Wahaby (Weimar,
1831)‚
represents the genuine Semites, too, as evil, over-cunning business
people.
“In their private dealings the Arabs cheat each other as much as
possible,“
he says, “they practise usury, too, whenever they have an opportunity“
(p. 149, 154). But after Burckhardt had lived longer among the Bedouins
he somewhat modified his judgment, and while admitting that “greed of
gain“
is one of their chief characteristics, declared that the inclination to
cheating originated from their contact with the cities and the thieving
population settled there (p. 292). Whoever lies has lost his honour
among
them (296) and Burckhardt can assert that “with all their faults the
Bedouins
are one of the noblest nations with which I ever had occasion to be
acquainted“
(288). — In regard to this not unimportant question the recent
experiences
of the French in
411
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
necessity affects the religious
sentiment
of peoples, the answer to that question will enlighten us regarding the
case in hand, and will in addition considerably facilitate the task we
have set ourselves in the further course of this work. For it is a
question
of a power which is still at work in our midst, and which presumably
will
make itself felt in future, distant centuries — a power which we cannot
fathom by the exclusive consideration of limited, specific Judaism.
EXCURSUS
ON SEMITIC RELIGION
I have said that
the
Semite changed the character of nations. The change of character is
most
evident in the sphere of religion. While in other spheres it is
difficult
to define the share of the specifically Semitic spirit in mixed races,
here we clearly and unmistakably see its influence; for here its
tyrannical
will extends to cosmic dimensions and changes the whole view of
“religion.“
Schopenhauer says in one place: “Religion is the metaphysics of the
people.“
Now consider what kind of religion men can have whose most outstanding
characteristic is the absolute lack of every metaphysical emotion,
every
philosophical capacity! * This one sentence expresses the profound
contrast
between Semite and Indo-European. It would be inexplicable how one
could
see in the Semite the religious man κατ΄
έξοχην, if
Algiers are of
interest:
the Kabyles gladly return to civilisation, whereas the pure Arabian
stems
have little inclination thereto and demand from the world freedom and
nothing
more; they reveal themselves as an element absolutely hostile to
culture.
They prefer to give rather than to sell, to steal than to bargain, they
prefer licence to any law. In all these points the contrast to the
Hittites,
as we see them in history, is very striking. The immoderate will of the
Semites, their greed of gain, of which Burckhardt speaks, will have
quickened
very much the Syrian talent for business, nevertheless this capacity
seems
to be a Syrian, not a Semitic legacy.
*
Renan:
Histoire
des langues sémitiques, p. 18, “L'abstraction est inconnue
dans
les langues sémitiques, la métaphysique impossible.“
412
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
we were not still living in the
dense
mist of inherited historical prejudices and superstition; it is certain
at any rate that wherever Semitic influence penetrated, the conception
of religion underwent a great change. * For everywhere else in the
whole
world, even among savage peoples, religion is interwoven with the
mysterious.
Plato says that in the other world the soul “will be initiated into a
mystery,
which one may name the perfect bliss.“ † Jesus Christ says of the
doctrine
which is the essence of His religion, that it is a “mystery.“ ‡ What
here
has been most sublimely expressed, we find in all stages of the human
hierarchy
except among the Semites. Schopenhauer calls this, from his standpoint
as a philosopher, “metaphysics“; we may, I think, simply say that in
the
world of feeling as of thought man everywhere meets inexplicable
contradictions;
this attracts his attention, and he begins to have a feeling that his
understanding
is only adequate to a portion of existence, that what his five senses
convey
to him and what his combinative logic constructs therefrom neither
exhaust
the essence of the world outside himself nor his own being; he
conjectures
that besides the perceptible cosmos there is an imperceptible, besides
the thinkable an unthinkable; the simple world extends and becomes a
“double
kingdom.“ § The sight of death itself points to an unknown world,
and birth seems to him like a message from the same realm. At every
step
we see only “miracles“; the greatest wonders for us are ourselves. How
simply the savage wonders and everywhere suspects the existence of
another
world is from travellers' accounts well known to us; of Goethe, on the
other hand, perhaps the most finely organised brain that humanity has
produced,
Carlyle says: “Before his eye lies the whole world extended and
transparent,
as though melted
* See
p. 213 ff.
† Phoedrus,
250.
‡ See
p.
187.
§
Faust,
Second Part, Act i., last words of Faust.
413
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
to glass, but on every side
surrounded
by wonders, everything Natural being in truth a Supernatural“; * and
Voltaire,
the so-called scoffer, closes his scientific researches with the words:
“Pour
peu qu'on creuse, on trouve une abîme infini.“ And so all
mankind
from the highest to the lowest are agreed: the living feeling of a
great
world-secret, the vague realisation that the natural is “supernatural,“
is common to all; it unites the Australian negro to a Goethe and a
Newton.
The Semite alone stands apart. Of the Arab of the desert Renan says:
“No
one in the world has so little inclination to mysticism, no one is more
averse to contemplation and devotion. God is the creator of the world,
he has made it, that is sufficient to him as an explanation.“ † This is
pure materialism in contrast to what other men call religion, by which
they all understand “something unthinkable and inexpressible.“ Thus
Montefiore
can proudly say of the religion of his fathers, in which the Semitic
impulse
has found its highest and most perfect form, that it contains nothing
esoteric,
not the least inner incomprehensibility; and that hence this religion,
which knows neither superstition nor secret, has become the teacher of
nations. ‡ The same Jewish author is never tired of pointing out with
admiration
that the Semites never knew anything of the Fall, of justification by
faith,
of redemption, of grace; § by this he merely shows that they have
scarcely any idea of what the rest of the world calls religion. In Dr.
Ludwig Philippson's Israelitische Religionslehre (Leipzig,
1861),
an orthodox Jewish work
*
In
the essay Goethe's Works, towards the end.
† L'islamisme
et la science, p. 380. Here there is evidently an intellectual
want,
as Renan elsewhere admits when he writes: “The Semitic people almost
totally
lack the questioning thirst after knowledge; nothing excites their
wonder“
(Langues sémitiques, p. 10). According to Hume the lack
of
wonder is the characteristic token of inferior intellectual power.
‡ Cf.
Religion
of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 160.
§
Pp. 514, 524, 544, and many other places.
414
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
dedicated to the “future of the
Israelite
religion,“ we find, as one of the three “distinguishing features“ of
this
religion, the sentence, “The Israelite religion has and knows no
secrets,
no mysteries“ (i. 34). Renan, too, in a moment of reckless honesty,
admits
that “the Semitic faith (monotheism) is in reality the product of a
human
race whose religious needs are very few. It signifies a minimum of
religion.“
* An important and true remark which has only failed to have effect
because
Renan did not show in how far and for what compelling reasons the
Semite,
who is famed for the glow of his faith, yet possesses a minimum of true
religion. The explanation is easy for us: where understanding and
imagination
are under the yoke of blind will, there cannot and must not be any
miracle,
anything unreachable, any “path into the untrodden, and the
not-to-be-trodden,“
† nothing which the hand cannot grasp and the moment (even if it be but
as a clearly conceivable hope) cannot possess. Even such a great mind
as
the second Isaiah looks upon religious faith as something which is
based
on empiric foundation and which can be tested, as it were, by a legal
process:
“Let the people bring forth their witnesses that they may be justified;
or let them hear and say, It is truth“ (xliii. 9). We read exactly the
same in the second Sura of the Koran: “Call your witnesses if
you
speak the truth.“ The Jewish teacher Philippson, mentioned above, tells
in detail how the Jew “believes solely what he has seen with his eyes,“
a “blind faith“ being unknown to him; and in a long note he quotes all
the passages in the Bible where “faith in God“ is mentioned, and
asserts
that this expression occurs without exception only where
* Nouvelles
considérations sur les peuples sémitiques (Journal
asiatique, 1859, p. 253). Also Robertson Smith (The Prophets of
Israel, p. 33) testifies that the genuine Semite has “little
religion.“
† Or
as the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad renders the same
conception,
“the path of the universe, which one has to follow, to get from the
part
into the whole universe“ (1, 4, 7).
415
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
“visible proofs have gone before.“ *
It is always, therefore, a question of outward experience, not of
inner;
the conceptions are always thoroughly concrete, material; as Montefiore
assures us, even in the advanced Jewish religion there is nothing which
the dullest might not immediately understand and fathom to its
uttermost
depth; as soon as a man has a feeling of a mystery, as soon as he, for
instance, supposes that there can be anything symbolical in the history
of the creation, he is a heretic and a gallows-bird. † Even the utterly
materialised history of creation given in the book of Genesis
is
so manifestly alien and borrowed that it remains totally isolated amid
the Israelitish tradition and without actual connection with it. ‡ The
will in fact gives little rope to the understanding and the
imagination.
So it is that the Semite who has begun to doubt at once becomes an
atheist;
there is in any case no secret, no mystery: if Allah is not the
creator,
then must matter be; as an explanation of the world there is scarcely
the
shadow of a difference between the two views, for in the case of
neither
does the Semite feel himself in the presence of an inexplicable riddle,
a superhuman mystery.
But if we wish to
appreciate the influence of Semiticism upon religion, it will not
suffice
to speak of understanding and non-understanding, of feeling and
non-feeling
of the mystery; we must remember also the creative influence of the
imagination,
that “all-uniting heavenly companion,“ as Novalis calls it. Imagination
is the handmaid of religion, she is the great mediator; born, as
Shakespeare
says, of the wedlock of head and heart, she moves on the frontier of
the
“double kingdom“ of
*
Philippson:
Israelitische
Religionslehre, i. 35 ff.
† See,
for example, in Graetz, Gnosticismus und Judentum, the passage
on
Ben Soma.
‡
Fully
discussed by Renan: Langues sémitiques, p. 482 ff. See,
too, the note on p. 485 and my quotation from Darmesteter, p. 421,
note.
Cf.,
too, the introduction to the 4th ed. of
this book.
416
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Goethe and so unites the one half to
the other: her forms signify more than what the eye alone can see in
them,
her words proclaim more than the ear alone can hear. She has not the
power
to open up that which is closed, but she raises before us the mystery
of
mysteries and convinces our eyes that its veil cannot be raised.
Symbolism,
as the necessary language of the unspeakable mystery of the world, is
her
work. Plato calls this language a swimming-board that bears us down the
stream of life; it is as widespread as the feeling of this mystery, its
vocabulary as varied as the stages of culture and the climates. Thus
the
inhabitants of the Samoan Islands have represented symbolically to
themselves
the inexplicable and yet directly felt mystery of the omnipresence of
God
in the following manner. They represent the body of their God
Saveasiuleo
as composed of two separable parts; the upper, humanly shaped part (the
real God) dwells in “the home of spirits“ among the dead, the under
part
is an immensely long structure like a sea-serpent that winds itself
round
all the islands of the great sea, and pays attention to the doings of
men.
* It is indeed a long way from such a comparatively crude conception to
the idea of the omnipresence of God held by Christian theology; and it
is still further removed from the transcendental idealism which is a
Sankara's
conception of the same mystery, yet I can find no fundamental
difference.
Moreover we see from many examples how this occupation of the
imagination
with religious conceptions everywhere gradually leads to very clear
ideas.
Tylor, the cautious and reliable scholar, asserts that there is
probably
on the whole African continent, from the Hottentots to the Berbers, not
a single tribe which does not believe in a supreme deity, and he shows
how this faith gradually arises out of simple animism. But most of
them,
as, for example, the negroes of the
*
E.
B. Tylor: The Beginnings of Culture, Germ. ed., 1873, II. 309.
417 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Gold Coast, think it beneath the
dignity
of the great spirit of the world to busy himself with the trifling
affairs
of the world; it is seldom, according to them, that he intervenes.
Another
tribe, that of the Yorubas (negroes of the Slave coast, at a
perceptibly
higher stage of civilisation), teaches that “no one can directly
approach
God, but God has appointed intercessors and mediators between himself
and
the human rare. Sacrifice is not offered to God, because he needs
nothing;
on the other hand, the mediators, who are very like men, delight in
presents
of sheep, pigeons and other things.“ * That seems to me a very high
kind
of “popular metaphysics,“ a religion which deserves all respect. On the
other hand, we know how the richest mythology in the world, that of the
Indian Aryans, in the very oldest hymns (before the immigration to
India)
teaches that “the many Gods are a single being that is worshipped under
different names,“ † and how this mythology afterwards led to the
sublimest
conception of the one God in Brahman, in fact to a wonderfully sublime
though at the same time one-sided and consequently inferior religion;
we
further know how from the same root sprang the ever-blossoming garden
of
the Hellenic Olympus and the admirable ethical teaching of the Avesta
and
of Zoroaster; we know, finally, how all these things, together with the
metaphysical speculations pertaining thereto and the ever-active
necessity
of our inborn creative impulse, saved Christianity from the fate of
becoming
a mere annex of Judaism, how they give it mythical (i.e.,
inexhaustible)
significance and charm, how they quickened it with the deepest symbols
of the Indo-European mind, and made it a sacred vessel for the secrets
of the human heart and the human brain, a pathway into “the untrodden
and
the not-to-be-
*
Tylor,
pp. 348, 349.
† Rigveda,
i. 164, 46 (quoted from Barth, Religions de l'Inde, p. 23).
418
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
trodden,“ a “pathway of the
universe.“
* There can therefore be no doubt of the importance of the part which
imagination
plays in religion. Can we say that the Semite possesses no imagination?
All such unqualified statements are false; although the necessary
brevity
of the written thought often forces us to adopt this form, we may well
presuppose that the reader automatically supplies the necessary
correction.
The Semite is a human being like others; it is merely a question of
degrees
of difference, which, however, in this case, thanks to the extreme
character
of this human type, come very near to the borderland of Affirmation and
Negation, of the To be or the Not to be. All who have any claim at all
to speak, testify unanimously that lack — or let us say poverty — of
imagination
is a fundamental trait of the Semite. I have already given weighty
proofs,
e.g.,
the evidence of Lassen, and I could add many more, but the question is
not worth further discussion: Mohammedanism and Judaism are sufficient
proofs; what we hear of the Bedouins † shows us only the beginning of
this
poverty. As Renan happily remarks: “le sémite a
l'imagination
comprimante,“ that is, his imagination narrows, limits, confines; a
great thought, a deeply symbolical image returns from his brain small
and
thin, “flattened,“ robbed of its far-reaching significance. “In the
hands
of the Semites the mythologies which they borrowed from strange peoples
became flat historical narratives.“ ‡ Wellhausen says: “The fading of
the
myths is synonymous with their Hebraising.“ § And not only did the
Semites possess little creative imagination, but they also
systematically
checked every tendency in that direction. Just as man must not wonder
and
think, so, too, he must not form any conception of things invisible.
Every
attempt to conceive the superhuman
*
Concerning
mythology in Christianity, see vol.
ii. chap. vii.
† See
p. 427.
‡
Renan:
Israël,
i. 49, 77, 78.
§
Prolegomena,
4th ed. p. 321.
419 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
is idolatry; the Saveasiuleo of the
Samoans is an idol, the Sistine Madonna of Raphael is an idol, the
symbol
of the Cross is an idol. * I shall not repeat what I have said in a
former
chapter on this subject, but ask the reader to look at it again (p.
224 f.). I have there tried to make it clear why the Semite had to
hold this view, how his zeal and the particular nature of his faith,
springing
as it did from the Will, forced it upon him; I pointed also to the fact
that the Semite, wherever he defied this law of his nature, as in
Phoenicia,
became himself the most horrible, and perhaps the only genuine idolater
humanity has ever known. For while the Indian taught the negation of
will,
and Christ its “conversion,“ religion is for the Semite the idolisation
of his will, its most glowing, immoderate and fanatical assertion. If
he
had not this faith, which makes him the protagonist of fanatical
intolerance
and at the same time a paragon among sufferers, he would have no
religion,
or hardly any; hence the ever-repeated warning of his legislators
against
“molten gods.“
From these details
the following conclusions, to begin with, may be drawn: the Semite
banishes
from religion contemplative wonder, every feeling of a superhuman
mystery,
and he banishes likewise creative fancy; of these he admits only the
indispensable
minimum, that “minimum of religion“ of which Renan spoke. Wherever,
therefore,
Semitic influence makes itself felt, whether by physical crossing (as
in
the case of the Jews) or by the mere force of ideas (as in
Christianity)
we shall meet with these two characteristic endeavours. We can express
both by one single word — materialism. Schopenhauer, one of the
greatest
thinkers that ever lived, whose thought, moreover, possessed unexampled
symbolical plasticity — unequalled even by Plato — so that his
*
That
the Cross is to be regarded as the same thing as the idols of
Heathendom
is said expressly by Professor Graetz: Volkstümliche
Geschichte
der Juden, ii. 218.
420
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
philosophy seems in many ways
related
to religion, has as metaphysician given this definition: “matter is the
mere visibility of will... what in appearance, that is, for the
conception,
is matter, is in itself will.“ * I shall not enter into metaphysics
here,
nor shall I champion Schopenhauer's speculative symbolism; but it is
striking
that in the sphere of purely empiric psychology an analogous relation
unavoidably
asserts itself. Where the will has enslaved the questioning
understanding
and the imagination, there can be no other view of life and no other
philosophy
than the materialistic. I do not use the word in a depreciatory sense.
I do not deny the advantages of materialism, I do not dispute that it
can
be harmonised with morals; I simply state a fact. Pure materialism is
the
religious doctrine of the Arab Mohammed, as are also the transitory
processes
of his revelations from God, and his paradise with eating and drinking
and beautiful houris; pure materialism is the bargain which Jacob
enters
into with Jehovah (Genesis xxviii. 20-22), in which he makes
five
conditions, or, as the Jurist would say, stipulations, and then
concludes:
as thou doest this, so thou shalt be my God. The whole history of
creation
in Genesis — which, it appears, all Hebrews, all Syrian and
Babylonian
Semites possessed in similar form † — is pure materialism; it was not
so
originally; it was the mythical and symbolical conception of an
imaginative
people (probably the Sumero-Accadians), but, as Renan has taught us,
the
myth becomes in the hands of the Semite an historical chronicle. ‡
* Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2 vol., Book II. chap. xxiv. In no
connection with this, but nevertheless interesting as a reflection of
the
same discernment is the doctrine of the Sâmkhya philosophy (the
rationalistic
system of the Brahman Indians), according to which willing is not a
mental
but a physical function. (Cf. Garbe: Die
Sâmkhya-Philosophie,
p. 251.)
† Cf.
Gunkel: Handkommentar zur Genesis, p. xli. ff.
‡ The
pro-eminent imagination of the Sumero-Accadians is obvious from their
scientific
achievements, moreover their language is said to
421
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
Of all the deep ideas which
thoughtful
and reflective minds had breathed into this story in their own
wonderful
way, the Semites perceived nothing, so absolutely nothing that the
Jews,
for example, first acquired the conception of an evil spirit, opposed
to
the good, through Zoroaster during the Babylonian captivity; till then
they had regarded the serpent of their bible just as a serpent! * Why
talk
of their ignorance of an evil principle, when in spite of their book of
Genesis,
chaps. i. and ii., the idea even of a God, creator of heaven and earth,
was quite unknown to the Israelites till the Babylonian captivity? The
thought appears for the first time in the so-called second Isaiah (see
chaps. xl. to lvi. of the book of Isaiah). The
testify to a
special
tendency
to abstraction, for it is richer in abstract ideas than in nomina
concreta
(see Delitzsch: Die Entstehung des ältesten
Schriftsystems,
1898, p. 118). A more direct contrast to the Semitic nature cannot be
imagined;
we can easily fancy what a degradation the Sumerian theories of the
creation
may have suffered under Israelite hands. But it becomes ever more
probable
that this whole mythology is permeated with old Aryan conceptions, to
which,
for example, the tree of life, the flood, the Godhead in water (hence
baptism),
the stories of the temptation belong. Professor Otto Franke
(Königsberg)
writes in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1901, No. 44, col.
2763:
“Such passages in the Semitic tradition always stand isolated and in
strange
surroundings, but form organic links in whole Aryan systems of thought:
they are often bare and artificial in their Semitic setting, whereas in
the Aryan they spring forth like foaming streams from full and
sparkling
springs.“
* Cf.
Montefiore, p. 453. How deeply rooted in the organism of the Semite
this
incapacity is we see from the fact that a man like James Darmesteter,
one
of the most frequently named Orientalists of the nineteenth century, a
man of universal knowledge, could in the year of grace 1882 write: “The
biblical cosmogony, hastily borrowed from an alien source, and all its
stories of apples and serpents, concerning which the generations of
Christians
have passed sleepless nights, have never caused our Israelite scholars
the slightest uneasiness or occupied their thoughts.“ All his knowledge
could not enable this absolutely free thinking Jew — “an honest Jew,“
as
Shakespeare would have said — to understand any more profoundly; and
thus
we may well smile when he tells us, after he has finished with the
apples,
that the cross is already “rotten“ and Christianity an “abortive“
religion.
When we behold such utter want of intelligence the yawning gulf reveals
itself to our eyes! (See Coup d'oeil sur l'histoire du peuple juif,
p. 19 f.)
422 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
conception was still strange to the
real Isaiah, as also to Jeremiah. * The fantastically scientific idea,
in Genesis concerning the origin of the organic world, the
profound
myth of the fall of man, the theory of the development of man up to the
first organisation of society... all that became “history,“ and thereby
it at the same time lost all significance as religious myth; for the
myth
is elastic, inexhaustible, whereas here a simple chronicle of facts, an
enumeration of events, lies before us. † That is materialism. Wherever
the Semitic spirit has breathed, we shall meet with this materialism.
Elsewhere
in the whole world religion is an idealistic impulse; Schopenhauer
called
it “popular metaphysics“; I should rather call it popular idealism; in
the case of the Semites, too, we observe this wistful awakening of a
feeling
of the superhuman (read the life of Mohammed), but the imperious will
immediately
lays hold of every symbol, every profound divination of reflective
thought,
and transforms them into hard empirical facts. And thus it is that with
this view of religion only practical ends are pursued, no ideal ones.
It
is to provide for prosperity in this world, and aims particularly at
power
and wealth, it is moreover to provide for happiness in the future world
(where the idea of immortality is present — an idea introduced into the
Israelite faith from the Persian and into the Arabian from
Christianity).
Downright materialism! as the comparison with the Saveasiuleo of the
Samoans
and the great world-spirit of the Yorubas has shown.
This then would be
a negative influence of Judaism upon all religion: infection with
fundamental
views of a materialistic kind. Now we must consider the positive
influence,
which usually is the only one to be taken into
*
Even
the Jewish scholar Montefiore explicitly admits this: Religion of
the
Ancient Hebrews, p. 269. Further detail on p. 425.
† For
further details concerning the Bible as an historical work and its
significance
as such for the Jewish people, see the chapter on “The
Revelation
of Christ,“ p.
228
f. and further on, p. 486.
423 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
account. I think we may assert
without
qualification that nowhere in the whole world is there to be found a
faith
like that of the Semites, so glowing, so unreserved, so unshakeable.
Without
them we might perhaps not have possessed the idea of religious faith,
of
fides,
at all. The German word Glaube is very ambiguous; fundamentally
it is almost as near doubt as conviction, the original meaning is
merely
to approve (gutheissen). * When we go to the Latin we are no
better
off, for in truth fides means trust and nothing more; † the bona
fides of legal agreements shows the word in its original
significance,
the latter
fides salvifica is a makeshift. Characteristically, in
Sanscrit also the word çraddhâ, faith, is
distinguished
from the Semitic “faith“ by the colourlessness and uncertainty of its
significance;
we get the impression, which is strengthened when we carefully survey
the
events of history, that we have here to deal with two different things.
‡ It may frequently happen that an increase of the quantity altogether
alters the quality; § that seems to be the case here too. The
genuinely
Semitic faith can be destroyed by nothing, can be injured by nothing;
it
resists every experience, every evidence. Here Will triumphs, and in
fact
— this should be noted, for here we have the psychological explanation
of this remarkable phenomenon — it triumphs not merely because of its
uncommon
strength, but at the same time in consequence of the impoverishment of
the understanding and the imagination: opposed to a minimum of religion
we find a maximum of unconditional, unshakeable capacity of faith, of
need
of faith that stretches out like
*
Kluge:
Etymologisches
Wörterbuch.
†
Similarly
the Greek πίστις.
‡ Çraddhâ
denotes “trust, confidence, faith, also fidelity, honesty,“ the verb Çrad-dhâ,
“to trust, to consider true.“ But the idea has something vague and
colourless
about it, and above all we must carefully note the fact that the word Çraddhâ
plays a very unimportant part in the life of this pre-eminently
religious
people.
§
See
p.
23.
424
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
an avaricious hand — a faith that
will
and must give to the believer the whole world as his own, but to him
personally
and alone, to the exclusion of all others. It is characteristic of the
absolutism of this “faith-will“ (if I may coin the phrase) that
originally
every tribe, every little group of the Semites has its own God. The
Semite
would never wish to share with another; his will is unconditional, he
alone
must possess all; and his faith is as boundless as his will: these two
expressions are for him almost synonymous. Religion does not appear to
be present, so to speak, for its own sake, but as a means to an end, as
an instrument, to widen as much as possible the sphere of what can be
attained
by Will. * The view that the Semite from the first was monotheist, to
which
Renan's famous phrase “le désert est monothéiste“
† had contributed a good deal, has long ago been proved erroneous; ‡ we
see each little tribe of the Hebrews in possession of its own God, who
exercises power only over this tribe and inside this stretch of land.
If
any one leaves the circle of the family and enters a new region, he
comes
under the jurisdiction of another God; that is surely not monotheism.
§
I consider the idea of divine unity
*
Many
authors testify that even to-day the genuine Bedouins do not in reality
acknowledge the cosmopolitical God of the Koran. Robertson Smith, Religion
of the Semites, p. 71, hints that Mohammedanism is in a way a
religion
of the cities in contrast to the religion of the desert. Similarly
Burckhardt:
Beduinen,
p. 156.
† Langues
sémitiques, éd. 1878, p. 6. These words were
originally
uttered by Renan in 1855.
‡ Cf.
Robertson Smith: Religion of the Semites, ed. 1894, p. 75 f. It
is well known what zealous polytheists many pseudo-Semitic nations
were;
of course, that does not justify one in drawing conclusions in regard
to
the pure Semites. In the introduction to the first edition of his Langues
sémitiques Renan has laid great stress on this reservation,
which is scarcely ever observed.
§
David, when driven by Saul from Palestine, cannot do otherwise than
serve
strange gods on strange soil (1 Samuel xxvi. 19); cf.
with
this particularly Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel (ed.
1895,
p. 44) and the list of characteristic passages, which reveal the same
conception,
in Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 4th ed. p. 22. The polytheism
appears
in a particularly simple fashion in Moses' song of praise. “Who is like
425 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to be altogether un-Semitic — to be,
in fact, anti-Semitic, for this reason, that it can only arise from
speculation:
in the over-plentiful material which the imagination has heaped out,
thought
brings about order, and thus arrives at the conception of unity; here,
on the other hand, there is neither imagination nor speculation but
only
history and will: from these the one cosmic world-spirit of the
Indians,
Persians, Hellenes and Christians could never originate, any more than
the “one only“ God of the Egyptians. * It can be proved that the idea
of
the one God of the world only entered Judaism at a very late postexilic
period, and beyond all doubt under foreign and especially Persian
influence;
if we wished to be very exact, we should have to say: this idea never
really
obtained, for to this day, as three thousand years ago, Jehovah is not
the God of the cosmic universe but the God of the Jews; he has only
destroyed
the other Gods, consumed them, as he will one day consume other
nations,
with the exception of those who shall serve the Jews as slaves. † That
is really not monotheism but, as I have already remarked, unvarnished
monolatry.
unto Thee, O Lord,
among
the Gods?“ (Exodus xv. 11). In the much later Deuteronomy
a distinction is drawn between Jehovah and the “strange gods“ as quite
homonymous beings (xxxii. 12) and it is only on very solemn occasions
that
the former is addressed as “God of all Gods“ (x. 17). Even in the time
of the Maccabees (more than five hundred years later) we meet the same
expression “God of all Gods“ in the book of Daniel, xi. 36, and
find in Jesus Sirach the conception of “subordinate deities“ who are
appointed
by Jehovah to rule over the different peoples (Jes. Sir. xvii.
17).
*
There
is much needless dispute regarding Egyptian monotheism, for it cannot
be
doubted, when one reads in The Book of the Dead: “Thou art the
one,
the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality,
self-produced
and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make men...“
(Introductory
hymn to Ra; see the complete translation of the Book of the
Dead
from the Theban text by E. A. W. Budge, 1898.) Budge calls attention to
the fact (p. xcviii.) that the formula in Deuteronomy iv. 4,
“The
Lord, our God, is one Lord“ is a literal imitation of the Egyptian.
† See,
for example, the Apokalypse of Baruch (lxxii.), a famous Jewish
work belonging to the end of the first century after Christ: The men of
all nations shall be subject to Israel, but those who have
426 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
On the other
hand,
this consideration teaches us what peculiar and important truth lay in
the over-generalised remarks of Renan; as so often, he had seen
rightly,
but analysed most superficially. He wrote: “The desert is monotheistic;
the sublimity of its immeasurable monotony first revealed to man the
conception
of the Infinite.“ How false everything is that follows the semicolon in
this sentence is proved by Renan's own remarks in another passage,
where
he shows that the Semitic languages are “incapable of expressing the
feeling
of the Infinite“ (see p. 299). In the dark primeval woods of
India
the feeling of the Infinite had attained such an intensity that man
felt
his own Ego merge into the All, whereas the inhabitant of the
sun-parched
desert, blinded by the excess of light, lost the power of his eyes and
saw nothing but himself; far from feeling the Infinite that reveals
itself
to us only in the night or in the million voices of thronging life, he
felt lonely — lonely and yet endangered, lonely yet hardly capable of
finding
the barest subsistence, utterly incapable of doing so if a second
family
should desire to join his own. This life was a struggle, a struggle in
which only unfeeling egoism could exist. While the Indian, quite lost
in
thought, had only to stretch out his hand to the trees to still his
hunger,
the Bedouin was day and night on the alert, and had
ruled over you shall
be
destroyed with the sword“ (quoted from Stanton, The Jewish and the
Christian
Messiah, p. 316). We see how merely national this supposed creator
of Heaven and earth has remained. Montefiore also admits this when he
writes,
“Jehovah had certainly gradually come to be the one God of the world,
but
this God remained still Jehovah. Though he had become the absolute
ruler
of the universe, he did not cease to be the God of Israel“ (p. 422).
Robertson
Smith, one of the first authorities of the day in these questions,
interprets
Isaiah
ii. as a prophecy that Jehovah will gradually make himself God of all
humanity
through the acknowledgment of his virtues as a ruler. Hence we find
even
in the most sublime phases of the Semitic conception of religion, even
where
God is spoken of, the predominance of the purely historical, flagrantly
anthropomorphic, unconditionally materialistic standpoint.
427
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
something else to do than to think
of
the Infinite — for which he was, moreover, so absolutely devoid of
capacity
and gifts that his language did not offer him the least help in that
direction.
On the other hand, we can understand perfectly well how the monotonous
poverty of the surroundings could lead to unexampled poverty of
mythological
conceptions; for man is quite incapable of feeding his imagination from
his own resources; it is, as Shakespeare says, “born in the eye“; where
the eye is offered nothing but monotony, the imagination fades and
withers.
* And we can also easily understand how such surroundings would tend to
develop that absolutely egoistic monotheism, where the one God is not
the
great spirit that presides over the world, as in the case of the poor
negroes
of the slave-coast, but a hard task-master, who is there only for me
the
one — that is, for me and my children — who, when I blindly devote
myself
to him, gives me lands which I have not planted, full of oil and wine,
houses which I have not built, and wells which I have not sunk — all
those
glorious things which I have seen only occasionally from a distance,
when,
impelled by hunger, I have left the desert and gone on a foray; and all
these men who revel there in work and wealth — and with joyful song and
dance and fat offerings worship Gods who give them all these riches, I
will sacrifice to my God of the desert and overturn their altars; only
my God shall henceforth be God, I alone will be master in the world!
This
is the monotheism of the desert; it arises not from the idea of the
Infinite
but from the poverty of ideas of a poor, hungry, greedy man whose range
for thought hardly rises above the conception that possession and power
would be the highest bliss.
To make quite clear
the very profound change of
*
Burckhardt,
who lived for years in Arabia, testifies that the monotony of the
desert
life and the lack of all occupation lie like an unbearable burden upon
the mind and finally quite paralyse it (Beduinen und Wahaby, p.
286).
428
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
sentiment that is wrought in the
human
mind by this Semitic view of faith, I cannot do better than quote
Goethe.
His words are cited everywhere: “The real and only and most profound
theme
in the history of the world and of men, to which all other themes are
subordinate,
is the conflict between belief and unbelief.“ * But more important is
the
following passage in the fourth book of Wahrheit und Dichtung:
“The
universal, natural religion really requires no faith; for the
conviction
that a great, creative, ordering and guiding Being is, as it were,
concealed
behind nature, in order to make itself comprehensible to us, forces
itself
upon every one, and even should a man occasionally let go the thread of
this faith which guides him through life, he will nevertheless be able
to pick it up again at any time and place. It is quite a different
matter
with the particular religion which tells us that this great Being takes
under his care, by preference and choice, a single individual, a tribe,
a people, a country. This religion is founded on faith, which must be
unshakeable
if it is not to be destroyed altogether. Every doubt about such a
religion
is fatal to it. We may return to conviction but not to faith.“ This
process
of reasoning brings us on to the right track; it enables us to say
exactly
what the Semite has in this case given to the world, or, if we will,
forced
upon it. An important question, for in this is contained his
world-affecting
significance as an influence upon others, and in this, too, lies at the
present day the particular strength of Judaism, which Herder and so
many
other great minds felt as “alien.“ Goethe has clearly recognised the
essential
point and also hinted, but unfortunately not in such detail that every
one may see it as he does; for he distinguishes between a natural
religion
and another which is therefore unnatural. Now according to Goethe's way
of thinking, the contrast to the natural is the arbi-
* Noten
zum Westöstlichen Divan (Israel in the Desert).
429
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
trary, that in which Will is the
“arbiter,“
that in which Will — not pure understanding, and not the undimmed
natural
instinct — has decisive influence. And hereby he not only points out to
us that there are essential differences between religions, so essential
that the same word can mean two different things, but he tells us at
the
same time how this difference is fundamentally explicable — that the
religion
which he contrasts with the natural is, in fact, the religion of Will.
On the other hand, the use of the word Glaube (faith) by him is
vague and confusing; he has tried to simplify too much. Goethe says,
“The
natural religion really needs no faith,“ but in the non-Semitic
religions
there is really more of that which is believed than in the
Semitic;
the material of faith is richer; and Glaube is expressly
demanded
by them. What is the truth in this matter? The nature of faith is in
the
two cases just as different as the nature of religion; to the word
“religion“
Goethe in the passage quoted gives two significations, to the word Glaube
only one, hence the misunderstanding. In reality we nowhere find
religion
without faith; certainly without faith in the specifically Semitic
sense,
but not without faith of some kind. Faith is everywhere the invisible
soul,
religion the visible body. We must therefore proceed further if we wish
to develop Goethe's utterance until it becomes quite clear. I shall
take
an illustration.
So far as I know,
dogmatism and the idea of revelation are nowhere so developed as among
the Aryan Brahmans; yet the result in their case is quite other than in
that of the Semites. The sacred Vedas of the Indians were looked upon
as
divine revelation; every word of theirs was for all matters of faith
authoritative
and indisputable — and in spite of this, from this one complex of
scripts,
everywhere recognised as infallible, there sprang no fewer than six
entirely
different systems of philo-
430 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
sophy, * — systems in which (as is
characteristic
of the Indian spirit) philosophy and religion grow up inseparably
connected,
so that the view of the nature of the Godhead, of the relation of the
individual
to it, of the importance of redemption, &c., is very different in
the
different systems; whereby, of course, not only the philosophy, but
above
all the religion of the believer is influenced. And all these
doctrines,
which frequently contradict each other in important points, were,
nevertheless,
regarded as orthodox, the one as much as the other. They all were based
on the same scripts, originated in other words from the same
fundamental
mythological images of the hymns, and all gave evidence of the same
reverence
for the deep speculations in the precepts of the cult and in the
Upanishads.
That was sufficient. There were no historical dates, no chronicle of
the
creation and of generations, in which men should blindly believe; for
anything
of that kind was meant from the first merely as an image, a symbol.
Thus,
for example, the strictly orthodox commentator of the sacred writings,
Sankara, says in regard to various images and speculations applied to
the
Creation: “The script has no intention to instruct us in regard to the
extension of the world which began with Creation, because it is neither
visible, nor anywhere said, or even thinkable, that anything that is of
importance for man depends upon this.“ † In the same way, each one was
free to think as he pleased of the relation between spirit and matter.
The monist was just as orthodox as the dualist, the idealist as the
materialist.
One comprehends how, with such a conception of religion and faith, “in
India at all times the most absolute
*
There
were more, but the others can be classified under the six great systems.
† The
Sûtra's
des Vedânta. (Deussens' translation). Who does not here think
of the great remark of Goethe: “Animated inquiry into cause does great
harm!“ (see pp. 230
and
267).
Carlyle in his essay on Diderot well remarks, “Every religious faith,
which
goes back to origins, is fruitless, inefficient and impossible.“
431
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
freedom of thought has prevailed“ *
— I mean, how it was possible to let orthodoxy and unhampered
metaphysical
speculation exist side by side. But no! we who to-day live under the
influence
of the Semitic view of faith, find it very difficult to harmonise these
conceptions — the acknowledged infallibility of sacred books of
religion
and at the same time the most absolute freedom of thought! But we
should
also note the following carefully, for hereby alone will this
illustration
be instructive in regard to the nature of faith. Life was much more
religious
in India that it ever was among us, even in the ecclesiastical age, and
the Indian religion as such has borne quite different fruits from
Judaism,
for example, where religion (as a Jewish author assured us) banished
from
life science, art, literature, in fact, everything but faith and
obedience.
† For the enormous intellectual activity of the Indian people, whose
poetical
literature alone surpasses in extent the whole classical literature of
Greece and Italy together, ‡ is rooted in their faith; their most
important
achievements, even in remote spheres, radiate from their profound
religious
feeling. An example. Pânini's Grammar of the Sanscrit
Language,
written two thousand five hundred years ago, and as the culmination of
a long, scientific development reaching back for centuries, is
recognised
as the greatest philological achievement of mankind. Regarding it
Benfey
writes: “No language of the world can show such a complete grammar; not
even the German, in spite of the remarkable works of the Grimms.“ Georg
von der Gabelentz says in his Sprachwissenschaft (2nd ed., 1901,
*
Richard
Garbe:
Die Sâmkhya-Philosophie, p. 121.
† See
p. 400. Spinoza too, who in each of his thoughts is so thorough a Jew
and
anti-Aryan, writes, “Fidei scopus nihil est praeter obedientiam et
pietatem“
(Tract. theol.-pol. chap. xiv.); that religion can be a creative
element of life is a conception which remained quite incomprehensible
to
this brain.
‡ Max
Müller:
Indien in seiner weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung (1884)
p. 68.
432
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
p. 22), “Pânini's wonderful
work
is the only really complete grammar which any language possesses“;
Pânini
still forms the corner-stone of his science. What, we may ask, was it
that
spurred on the Indian thinkers to these high scientific achievements?
The
longing to awaken to new life the sacred songs of the Rigveda,
which
in the course of centuries had almost ceased to be understood. It was,
as Benfey testifies, no simple aimless enthusiasm for science as
science,
but deep religious sentiment which gave them strength for the
undertaking.
* Their eminent achievements in the sphere of mathematics — we know
that
the Indian Aryans are the inventors of the so-called “Arabian ciphers“
— have their origin in religion. The solution of the well-known
geometrical
problem which gives Pythagoras his title to fame, the Indians had in
long
past ages discovered, automatically, as a necessary consequence of the
measurements prescribed for sacrificial ceremonies; here, in these
religious
calculations, we have the germs of a clear knowledge of irrational
quantities,
and later of the higher algebra, the theory of numbers, &c. † In
what
sense, therefore, can Goethe say of a religion which informed the whole
public life, and at the same time had such an influence upon mind and
imagination,
that it really needed no faith? Am I not right in asserting that in
that
passage from Goethe the word “Faith“ refers to two different things —
two
things as different as the beings whose souls they reflect? Goethe, in
fact, holds the Semitic view, and according to this view (in contrast
to
the Indian) religious belief refers solely to historical dates and
material
facts. Here God is known from historically certified manifestations,
not
postulated from inner experience, not found out from the contemplation
of nature, and not created by the power of the imagination; here
everything
is even simpler than Ernst Haeckel's history of creation. The
* Geschichte
der Sprachwissenschaft (1869), pp. 77, 55.
† Cf.
Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder, chap. iii.
433
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
one thing that is necessary is blind
faith, and in this faith is concentrated the whole power of great
leading
spirits and of the responsible shepherds of the people: punishments on
the one hand, promises on the other; in addition, historical proofs and
preternatural miracles. As a contrast to every unadulterated Semitic
creed
take the so-called apostolic confession of the Christian Church! Half
of
the clauses refer to mysteries that cannot be represented, and of which
the theologians themselves say, “The layman cannot understand them“;
but
in reality it is so little a question of understanding in the logical
and
comprehensible meaning of the word, that from this one short creed
there
have been derived the most diverse and most contradictory doctrines. *
And now take the Athanasian symbolism! Here the material of religious
faith
consists of the most abstract speculations of the human brain. How
could
faith in the Semitic sense comprehend ideas to which not one man in a
million
can attach the faintest conception? Jesus Christ Himself said, when
children
were brought to Him, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven,“ but He
nevertheless
added in the same passage: “All men cannot receive this saying, save
they
to whom it is given. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it“
(Matthew xix. 11, 12). † The Semite is quite different, and
hence
also his form of faith is different. Even the simple sentence, “I
believe
in God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,“ forms no part of his creed; this
circumstance is only casually mentioned in the Koran, and scarcely
thrice
mentioned in the whole sacred writings of the Jews. On the other hand,
the first commandment of Moses is, “I am the Lord, who have brought
thee
out of the land of Egypt!“ The faith at once attaches itself, as one
sees,
to historical
* Cf.
Harnack: Dogmengeschichte (Grundriss, 2nd ed.), p. 63 f.
† In
the Syrian translation of the oldest text it runs thus, “Every one who
has the power,“ so that there is no doubt about the meaning. See
Adalbert Merx' translation of the palimpsest, 1897.)
434 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
facts, which the people regard as
authenticated,
and never does it rise above the level of the ordinary eye. As
Montefiore
has taught us, there are no mysteries in the Jewish religion (see
p. 413 f.). When we, therefore, speak of the incomparable power of the
Semitic faith, we must not overlook the fact that this faith refers to
an extremely scanty and limited material, that it intentionally leaves
out of account the great wonder of the world, and that by the
imposition
of a law (in the juristical sense of the word), it also reduces the
inner
life of the heart to a minimum — whoever obeys the law is without sin,
he need trouble his head no further; regeneration, grace, redemption,
&c.,
do not exist. Thus we begin to see that this strong faith presupposes
as
counter-condition a minimum of the first condition of faith, a minimum
of religion. Moses Mendelssohn has expressed this truth intelligently
and
honestly: “Judaism is not revealed religion, but revealed legislation.“
*
“The Semite has
really
little religion,“ Robertson Smith, the greatest authority on the
Semitic
religion, says with a sigh. “Yes, but much faith,“ answers Goethe. And
Renan supplies the commentary: “The mind of the Semite can embrace
extremely
little, but this little it embraces with great power.“ † I think,
however,
that we are beginning to distinguish better between faith and faith,
between
religion and religion, than did Smith, Goethe and Renan; we shall soon
get to the root of the matter. To make the matter thoroughly clear, I
must
once more contrast the Semite and the Indian.
The Aryan Indian
can stand as an example of the extreme contrast to the Semite — a
contrast,
however, which clearly reveals itself in all peoples that are devoid of
Semite blood, even in the Australian negroes, and which
* Rettung
der Juden, 1872. (I quote from Graetz: Volks. Gesch., iii,
578).
† Langues
sémitiques, p. 11.
435 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
slumbers in the hearts of all of us.
The mind of the Hindoo embraces an extraordinary amount — too much for
his earthly happiness; his feelings are tender and full of sympathy,
his
sense pious, his thought metaphysically the deepest in the world, his
imagination
as luxuriant as his primeval forests, as bold as the world's loftiest
mountain
peak, to which his eye is ever drawn upwards. But two things he
entirely
lacks; he has no historical sense at all. This people has produced
everything,
but no history of its own career — not the trace of a chronicle. That
is
the first want. The second is the capacity to regulate his imagination,
for want of which the Indian, as hyper-idealist, loses the right sense
of proportion for the things of this world, and — although there is no
one who fears death less — loses at the same time his position as
energetic
moulder of the world's history. He is not materialist enough. Far from
considering himself, with Semitic pride, the “one man in the real sense
of the word,“ he looks upon humanity as a phase of life like other
phases,
and teaches as the basis of all wisdom and religion the tat tvam
asi:
that thou too art, i.e., man shall recognise his own self in
everything
living. Here we certainly are far removed from the little chosen
people,
in whose favour the creation of the cosmos was undertaken, for whose
advantage
alone the rest of humanity lives and suffers; and it is at once clear
that
the divinity, or divinities, as it may be, of these Indians will not be
such as one can carry about in an ark of the covenant, or can imagine
as
present in a stone. Even the tat tvam asi itself points to a
cosmic
religion, and a cosmic religion again implies — in contrast to a
national
faith — a direct relation between the individual and the divinely
superhuman.
What a difference there must have been in the meaning which religion
and
faith had for this Aryan Indian and for the Semite. “In reality no
faith,“
says the German sage, and the Frenchman echoes with the superficiality
of parody: “The
436 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Indo-European peoples have never
regarded
their faith as the absolute truth.“ * Ah no! this is surely not
possible,
and it is splendidly contradicted by the life of the Brahmins. For the
Indo-Aryans, too, “bring forward their witnesses,“ though not quite in
the same sense as the second Isaiah and Mohammed meant. When the Aryan
bids farewell to wife, child and children's children, in order to
devote
the last years of his life — void of all possessions, living on herbs,
naked, in the loneliness of his forests — to pious contemplation and
the
redemption of his soul; when he digs his grave with his own hands and
on
the approach of death lays himself down in it to die, with folded
hands,
resigned and happy; † — can one say then that “in reality he has no
faith“?
that he “does not look upon his faith as the truth“? It boots not to
dispute
over words, but at any rate this man possesses religion, and, as it
seems
to me, a maximum of religion. In his youth he became acquainted with
the
most luxuriant mythology; all nature was to his childlike eye alive,
inspired;
in it there dwelt great friendly forms ‡ which constantly gave fresh
scope
to his fancy, even being urged to further flights by the new hymns
which
ceaselessly broke upon his ear. As Carlyle said of Goethe, this Hindoo
youth saw himself “surrounded by wonders, everything natural in truth
*
Renan:
Langues
sémitiques, p. 7.
†
Even
to-day one comes upon fresh graves of this kind in the depths of the
woods.
Without convulsion or struggle these holy men pass from time into
eternity,
so that when one sees their corpses one might think that the hand of
love
had put their limbs aright and closed their eyes. (According to oral
communications
and sketches from nature.) One can see how living and unchanged,
because
springing from an inner soil that always remains the same, old Aryan
religion
even to-day is, from Max Müller's life-history of a holy man of
Brahman
family who died as recently as 1886, Râmakrishna, his Life
and
Sayings, 1898.
‡
Oldenberg
(Religion des Veda) testifies that the gods of the Aryan
Indians,
in contrast to others, were bright, true, friendly forms, without
malice,
cruelty and perfidy (pp. 30, 92, 302, &c.).
437
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
supernatural.“ The first years of
manhood
brought something new; his mind was exercised and strengthened by the
most
difficult problems, and an all-embracing symbolism was taught him by
the
contemplation that attached to the sacrificial ceremonies — a symbolism
which almost goes beyond our modern powers of conception, * the chief
features
of which we can, however, clearly deduce from their wonderful effect.
As
his mind ripened he began more and more to realise, not merely that
those
mythological forms possessed existence in his brain only, had a meaning
only for his special, limited human spirit — in other words, were
symbols
of a something which the reason could not reach — but also that his
whole
life, the world that served him as a stage, the actors that moved upon
this stage, the thoughts that he thought, the love that intoxicated
him,
the duties he fulfilled, were to be regarded as mere symbols; he did
not
deny the reality of these things, but he denied that their significance
was exhausted by the empirically perceptible: “On the standpoint of the
highest reality, all empirical activity has no existence,“ say the
sacred
writings of the Hindoos † — a fact to which Goethe has given immortal
expression
when he says:
Alles
Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis.
And the more deeply this conviction
settled
in his consciousness, the higher rose the conception of the
significance
of his individual life; this life at once received a cosmic importance.
For the script had taught him that “only unity is in the highest sense
real, complexity is but a cleft gaping out of false perception.“ The
good
works,
*
Oldenberg,
Religion
des Veda: “The details of sacrifice appealed to the Hindoos as
representing
analogous facts in the universe which were united to them by a mystical
tie.“ We find proofs of this on every page of the Satapatha-Brâhmana,
that remarkable code of sacrificial ceremonies.
†
Cankara:
Vedântasûtra's
II. 1, 14 (also for the following quotation).
438 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
which formerly appeared to him as
part
of the divine command had lost all value; henceforth only the inmost
purpose,
that is to say the inner life, every movement of the mental faculties,
every throb of the heart, was regarded as important. If the Semitic law
looked to results, not to intention, here we have the other extreme:
all
idea of result was excluded and moreover a matter of indifference. The
important thing was to bring to perfection the highest act of creation
in the reformation of man's own soul; not to chastise — that would be
petty
— but to transform the slightest stirrings of foolish personal longing,
till the One was merged in the All. This was “redemption.“ But do not
fancy
that we have to see in this only a philosophical process; it was a
deeply
religious one, for the strength of the individual was not sufficient.
The
Sanscrit word for the highest and only God is Brahma, i.e.,
“prayer“;
only by grace could man have a share in redemption, and before he could
attain such grace by fervent prayer a man must have proved himself
worthy
of it by a pious life. This point once reached, then the individual no
longer believed that he lived and died for himself alone but for the
whole
world; hence the feeling of all-embracing responsibility. The one stood
for all: his actions, which the delusion of the past seemed to leave to
the almost insignificant decision of his own Will, were now of
everlasting
importance; for just as the natural is in truth supernatural, so the
moment
includes eternity and is but its symbol. This was looked upon by the
Aryan
Indians as religion, this is what they understood by faith.
By this contrast
I hope to have made clear the peculiar and distinctive nature of the
Semitic
view of religion and faith; I think I have shown wherein lay that great
power which inspired so many daring deeds, so many self-sacrificing
thoughts;
also what were its limitations. Nothing more is necessary here; the
historical
import-
439 JEWS
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ance which this power and these
limitations
attained is well known. One would almost be inclined to risk the
paradox:
religion and faith mutually exclude each other, or at least, when the
one
increases the other decreases. But that would be playing with words,
since
religion and faith manifestly have for the Semite a different meaning
from
that which they have for other men. The matter becomes especially
intricate
where we meet not the pure Semite or, as in the case of the Jews, the
strong
one-sided predominance of the Semitic will, but merely an infiltration
of the Semitic spirit as in our own European history since the
beginning
of the Christian era. That gives rise to an almost inextricable
confusion
of ideas, and for that reason I have had to discuss the theme in
considerable
detail; for the entrance of the Jews into Western history derived its
chief
significance from the fact that the Christian Church was founded on a
Semitic
basis, and that the ideas of “faith“ and “religion“ were introduced in
their Semitic sense into a religion which was fundamentally and also
through
the life of Christ the direct unconditional negation of the Semitic
view,
and which besides by its further mythological and philosophical
development
became altogether Indo-European and un-Semitic. It is impossible to
calculate
the influence of Judaism upon our whole history from its beginnings to
the present day unless we are quite clear in regard to these
fundamental
ideas “religion“ and “faith.“ I confess that I have not seen a work, no
matter of what kind, which has succeeded in making this even
approximately
plain; in most cases the problem is not even felt as such. An abstract
definition of religion is of little use, it does not clear our
judgment;
nor are the learned and extremely interesting researches on the origin
of religion and its evolution of any value for our present purpose. It
is of more importance to see with our eyes what Semitic, especially
Jewish,
religion is, and what are its
440 JEWS
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distinguishing marks; we shall then
realise how much of the Semitic has entered our own thought. For the
character
of this religion at once reveals to us the nature of its influence; and
as, on the other hand, force of will is peculiarly characteristic of
the
Semite, we may expect that this influence will be great. Materialism in
philosophy, prominence given to the historical motive power as opposed
to the ideal, strong emphasis laid upon “justice“ in the secular sense
of the word, that is, of legal and moral conduct and justification by
works,
in contrast to every attempt at spiritual conversion and to redemption
by metaphysical perception or divine grace, * the limitation of the
imagination,
the forbidding of freedom of thought, deep-rooted intolerance towards
other
religions, red-hot fanaticism — these are things that we must expect to
meet everywhere to a greater or less extent where Semitic blood or
Semitic
ideas have gained a footing. We shall meet them frequently in the
course
of this book, even in the most modern and advanced views of the
nineteenth
century; for instance, in the teaching of Socialism. As far as
intolerance
in particular is concerned — this absolutely new element in the life of
the Indo-European peoples — I shall postpone what I have to say about
the
“entrance of the Jews“ in this connection to the next chapter but one,
where we shall see that the earliest Christians in eloquent language
demanded
unconditional religious freedom, while those of a later period took
from
the Old Testament the divine commandment of intolerance.
*
Zoroaster
gives powerful expression to the Indo-European view in contrast to the
Semitic in the following passage: “Secular justice, you miser! you form
the whole religion of evil spirits and are the destruction of the
religion
of God“ (Dinkard VII, 4, 14).
441
JEWS
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ISRAEL
AND JUDAH
And now I again
take
up the thread where we left off our discussion of the relation of the
various
types in the blood of the Israelites and the possible influence of
these
mixtures upon their character (omitting the religious question just
discussed).
After all that I have said, it is clear that so far as religion was
concerned
the Semitic element was bound in time to prevail over the Hittite; but
this victory was gained slowly and with difficulty, and, in fact, only
in the south, i.e., in Judea (Judah and Benjamin), where a
frequent
influx of fresh Arabian (i.e., pure Semitic) blood may also have
been of some influence. * In Israel (i.e., in the north of the
land)
the old Syrian cult remained in honour till the last — the feasts on
the
heights, the pilgrimages to sacred places, the images of Baal, &c.;
† even Elijah, who as a prophet was so strict in regard to “strange
Gods,“
had not the slightest objection to the worship of the golden calves; he
defended only the “God in Israel“ against the strange Gods imported by
the daughters of Phoenician kings. From Israel itself Judaism would
never
have sprung. All the more necessary is it that we should now become
acquainted
with the Jewish idea — the specifically Jewish in contrast to that of
the
people of Israel. And so I now pass to the third point, namely, that
the
real Jew only developed in the course of centuries by gradual physical
separation from the rest of the Israelite family, as also by
progressive
development of some mental qualities and systematic starving of others;
he is not the result of a normal national life, but, so to speak, an
artificial
product — the product of a priestly caste which, with the help of alien
priests, forced
*
Robertson
Smith (The Prophets of Israel) lays great stress on this (p.
28);
see
also Wellhausen: Prolegomena.
† For
details see Wellhausen and Robertson Smith (e.g., The
Prophets
of Israel, pp. 63, 96).
442
JEWS
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upon the people against its will a
priestly
legislation and a priestly faith as having been given by God (359).
Hurried as my sketch
has been, and although for the sake of simplification I have passed
over
many facts in silence, I think that the reader has received a fairly
vivid,
and in its essential elements accurate conception of the mixtum
compositum
from which the Israelite people sprang; he has also noticed that the
mixed
blood in the south of the country, where Judah and Benjamin lay, * was,
from the very first moment of the arrival in Palestine, partly subject
to exceptional modifying influences, that is to say, the Semitic
element
in the south was constantly reinforced by new arrivals. Probably this
difference
was of older standing. From the beginning we see the great strong
tribes
of the Josephites, Ephraim and Manasseh, round which most of the other
tribes grouped themselves like a family, looking upon Judah † with a
certain
contempt, or even with distrust. The emigration to Egypt and the
conquest
of Palestine take place under the leadership of the Josephites; Moses
belongs
to them, not to Judah (if he was not altogether an un-Semitic
Egyptian);
‡ Joshua belongs to them,
*
The
borders of Judah and Judea (to which since David's time Benjamin also
belonged)
have changed very much in the course of time: the whole southern part
was
joined to Idumea after the exile; on the other hand, the district was,
later, extended somewhat towards the north into the former Ephraimite
territory
by the annexations of Judas Maccabaeus.
†
Even
in the Old Testament in the later time there is a clear distinction
between
Judah and Israel: “Then I cut asunder mine other staff, even Bands,
that
I might break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel“ (Zechariah
xi. 14; see, too, 1 Sam. xviii. 16); frequently Israel
(that
is, the ten tribes besides Judah and Benjamin) is simply called “the
house
of Joseph“ in contrast to the “house of Judah“ (thus Zechariah
x.
6).
‡
Renan
says: “Il faut considérer Moïse presque comme un
Égyptien“
(Israël i. 220); his name is said to be of Egyptian and not
Hebrew origin (p. 160). So too Kuenen: National Religions and
Universal
Religions, 1882, p. 315. According to Egyptian tradition he is a
renegade
priest from Heliopolis, called Osarsyph (see Maspero: Histoire
ancienne ii. 449). To-day, as a reaction from former exaggerations,
443 JEWS
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also Jerubbaal; in fact, all the men
of importance, including Samuel. Judah plays in former times so modest
a part that this tribe is not mentioned in the triumphal song of
Deborah.
Like Simeon and Levi, Judah was almost destroyed when it entered
Palestine,
so that it was hardly taken into account; of the three branches of
which
it consisted one only remained, and it was only by amalgamation with
the
settled Hittites and Amorites that Judah gradually received a new lease
of life and strength. * With David it steps into the forefront, but
only
for a time, and that after the Benjaminite Saul, from the closely
related
tribe of Ephraim, had shifted the centre of influence somewhat towards
the south. Immediately after Solomon's death the Kings of Judah fell
into
a kind of vassal relationship to those of Israel — at least they were
their
forced and subordinate allies. But here it is a question not merely of
political jealousy — that would not deserve our attention — but of a
profound
difference in talent and in moral nature, a difference which is
emphasised
in all historical works and which forms the foundation, and a most
important
one, for the later so peculiar and anti-Israelite development of
Judaism.
In after times, seven centuries before Christ, Judah was practically
isolated
and separated from Israel for ever by the carrying off of the latter
into
captivity; Judah, however, retained from its brother an intellectual
legacy
— the history of the people, the bases of its political organisation,
of
its religion, of its cult, of its law, of its poetry. All this, that is
to say, every creative element, is
it is fashionable to
deny
every Egyptian influence on the Israelite cult; this question can only
be settled by specialists, particularly in so far as it affects
ceremonial,
priestly dress, &c.; but we who are not scholars must be struck by
the fact that the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian — chastity, pity,
justice,
humility (see Chantepie de la Saussaye: Religionsgeschichte
i. 305) — which do not at all agree with those of the Canaanites, are
the
very virtues to which the Mosaic law attaches most importance.
*
Wellhausen:
Die
Komposition des Hexateuchs, 2nd ed. pp. 320, 355.
444 JEWS
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essentially Israelite work, not the
work of Judah. Now, however, Judah alone remained behind and worked up
this material in its own way. From this — this activity of the sons of
Judah, hitherto like minors under the care of guardians and now
suddenly
left to themselves — grew Judaism; and as a natural process from
Judaism
grew the Jew.
All authors are
unanimous
in laying stress upon the intellectual superiority of the house of
Joseph;
I will quote only one. Robertson Smith writes: “It was the northern
kingdom
that upheld the standard of Israel. Its whole history is more
interesting
and richer in heroic elements; its struggles, its calamities, and its
glories
were cast into a larger mould... if the life of the north was more
troubled,
it was also larger and more intense. Ephraim took the lead in
literature
and religion as well as in politics. It was in Ephraim far more than in
Judah that the traditions of the past were held sacred, and at the same
time it was there that the religious development took place which led
the
way to new problems and so to the arising of the Prophets. So long as
the
northern kingdom endured, Judah was content to learn from it for good
or
for evil. It would be easy to show in detail that every great wave of
life
and thought in Ephraim awakened an enfeebled echo in the southern
kingdom.“
* All the history that the old Testament contains prior to the exile,
up
to David's time, and much that is later, comes from Israel, not from
Judah.
In order to prove that, I should have to analyse in some detail the
results
of Biblical criticism, and this would take me too far; the layman will
find the clearest and briefest summary in Renan's Israël,
Book
IV., chaps. ii. and iii.; the critical works of Dillmann, Wellhausen,
&c.,
offer much
* The
Prophets of Israel, p. 192. Here in a clear manner we have a
summary
of what the same scholar and others have elsewhere proved in detail.
445 JEWS
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more detail and therefore profounder
insight, if he will take the trouble to read them. The “Book of the
Wars
of the Lord,“ as it is called in Numbers xxi. 14, and other
lost
sources, from which not only the historical parts of the Hexateuch, but
also the books of Samuel, of the Kings, &c., were
later
composed, originated in the house of Joseph and celebrate its glory.
Wherever
the tribe of Judah is mentioned, it is manifestly done with the
intention
to disparage it; for instance, in Genesis xxxvii., where Judah
alone
hits upon the base idea of selling Joseph for money, and still more in
the following chapter, where this tribe from the first is represented
as
devoid of morality and as the children of incest, the history of the
chaste
Joseph following as a contrast. This I give merely as an example. The
religious
law, too, in its great and fundamental features is derived from Israel,
not from Judah. There has been much discussion with regard to the Ten
Commandments,
especially since Goethe's discovery — which Wellhausen has rescued from
oblivion and scientifically perfected — that the original Ten
Commandments
(Exodus xxxiv.) had quite a different purport from those which
were
interpolated at a later time and which referred merely to matters of
the
cult. * It is sufficient for us to know that the later decalogue in Exodus
xx., which has found a place in the Christian catechism, is, in the
opinion
of so learned and orthodox a Rabbi as Solomon Schechter, the work of a
priest from the northern kingdom, and not from Judea, a man who may
have
lived in the ninth century — that is, at least a hundred or a hundred
and
fifty years after Solomon, at the time of the great dynasty of the
Omrides.
† This fact is not merely interesting but even amusing; for the later
purely
*
Goethe:
Zwo
wichtige, bisher unerörterte biblische Fragen, zum ersten Mal
gründlich
beantwortet. Erste Frage: Was stund auf den Tafeln des Bundes?
† See
Schechter's Appendix to Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews,
p. 557.
446 JEWS
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Jewish editors of the sacred books
have
given themselves all imaginable trouble to represent the Israelite
kingdom
as apostate and heathen, whereas it now appears that the foundations of
the religious law originate from this tabooed kingdom and not from
pious
Judah. For the accurate definition of what is specifically Jewish it is
important to know this: the Jew has never distinguished himself by
creative
power, even in the limited sphere of religious legislation; indeed,
what
is most his own is borrowed. For even the great prophetic movement,
which,
well considered, is the only manifestation of the Hebrew intellect
which
possesses enduring worth, originated in the north. Elijah, in many
respects
the most remarkable and most imaginative personality in the whole
Israelite
history, exercised his influence there only. The accounts of Elijah are
so scanty that many look upon him as a mythological personage, * but I
agree with Wellhausen in thinking that this is historically impossible,
for Elijah is the man who sets the stone rolling, the inventor in a way
of the true religion of Jehovah, the great mind which has a vague
feeling,
though not a clear idea, of the monotheistic essence of that worship.
Here
a great personality is at work, and to work it must have lived. Of
special
interest is the one exact piece of information which we possess
regarding
him; according to it he was not an Israelite, but a “settler with half
rights“ from the other side of the Jordan, from the farthest boundaries
of the land — a man, therefore, in whose veins in all probability
almost
pure Arabian blood must have flowed. † This is interesting, for it
shows
the genuine Semitic element at work, trying to save its religious
ideal,
which in the south by the eclecticism of such half-Amorites as David
and
Amorite-
* See
especially Renan: Israël ii. 282 f.
† See
especially Graetz: Geschichte der Juden i. 113; also Maspero, Histoire
ancienne ii. 784.
447 JEWS
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Hittites as Solomon, and in the
north
by the secular tolerance of the predominantly Canaanite population, had
been seriously threatened. In the north alone, which was favoured by
its
situation, and the inhabitants of which probably were distinguished by
greater industry and talent for commerce, there was already prosperity,
and with it luxury and the taste for art had developed; one of the sins
with which Amos reproaches the Israelites is that “they make songs like
David.“ Against this the anti-civilising spirit of the more genuine
Semite
rebelled. The noble-minded man felt instinctively and powerfully the
incompatibility
between the alien culture and the mental qualities of his people; he
saw
before his feet the pit open, into which in truth all mongrel Semitic
kingdoms
had quickly sunk and left no trace behind, and, fearless as the
Bedouin,
he prepared for the struggle. From Elijah onwards this prophetic
movement
is like a healthy, dry desert wind, which, coming from afar, withers up
the blossoms of idleness — but at the same time the buds of beauty and
of art. Elisha, too, the successor of Elijah, has his home in Ephraim.
Now, however, appears the first great prophet, whose words we still
possess.
I say “great,“ though because of the fewness of his writings he is
reckoned
among the minor prophets; for Amos is, in point of depth of religious
thought
and acuteness of political insight, equal to the greatest. This prophet
is said to have been born in Judea, but this is doubted by many (e.g.,
by Graetz); * at any rate, he knows the country of Joseph as well as if
it were his home, and his warnings are directed solely to this tribe.
The
next great “lesser“ prophet, Hosea, likewise a unique personality, is
an
Ephraimite; he, too, is bound up with the destiny of the one house of
Joseph;
with all his
*
Many
modern authorities too (e.g., Cheyne) have since proved that the
famous passage “The Lord will roar from Zion“ (Amos i. 2) is a
late
Jewish interpolation.
448 JEWS
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heart he devotes himself to his
beloved
people, and, as is the manner of prophets, he prophesies many things
which
did not take place — the saving of Israel by almighty Jehovah and the
everlasting
rule of this people. Here the series closes, here ends the influence of
Israel upon Judah; for presumably in the lifetime of Hosea — at any
rate
soon after his death — the whole northern people was carried off into
captivity
by the Assyrians and nevermore returned.
DEVELOPMENT
OF THE JEW
It was only now —
that is, from the year 721 before Christ — that the true Jew could
begin
to develop; up till then, as we have just seen, Judah had politically,
socially, and religiously been forced to follow the lead of the much
more
talented Israel; now this tribe stood alone, on its own feet. The
situation
was alarming. With horror and trembling the Jews witnessed the fate of
their brothers, who robbed themselves of their only protection; now the
circle of enemies closed in around this small land; how could it exist
in opposition to world-empires? First it existed as the willing vassal
of the Assyrians and enjoyed their protection against its nearest
oppressors
the inhabitants of Damascus; then it took advantage of the
death-struggle
of its mighty protector, in order to make itself free from him; it
intrigued
with Egypt, but became again reconciled with the Chaldeans, the new
lords
of Asia Minor, by the payment of heavy indemnity and the ceding of
certain
lands... in short, the kingdom dragged on its somewhat miserable
existence
for a hundred and twenty years more, till, at last, on the occasion of
a new revolt, Nebuchadnezzar lost all patience and bore off the king
and
10,000 of the most distinguished personages in captivity to Babylon.
Eleven
years later, when they persisted in their intrigues, he destroyed
449 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Jerusalem and the temple and had the
rest of the free-men of Judea with their families carried off to
Babylonia;
some of them, among whom was Jeremiah, fled to Egypt and founded the
Diaspora
there. After sixty more years a portion of the exiles returned, but
only
a portion; the majority of the wealthier preferred to remain in
Babylon.
It was more than a century before the small colony that returned home —
which included a comparatively large number of priests and Levites —
organised
itself in Jerusalem and the neighbouring very much shrunken Jewish
district,
and once more built up the temple and the walls of their city; but for
the gracious protection of the Persian monarchs and the gifts of those
Jews who had quickly grown rich in exile they would never have
succeeded
in their task. There were thus once more a Jerusalem and a Judea, but
from
this time onwards there was never again an independent Jewish state. *
Thus the development
of the Judean into the real Jew took place under the influence of
definite
historical conditions. One is wont to say that history repeats itself;
it never does. † The Jew is a unique phenomenon, to which no parallel
can
be offered. Without definite historical conditions he would, however,
not
have become what he did become; the particular ethnological mixture out
of which he arose, and his further history to the isolation from
Israel,
would not have produced the abnormal phenomenon of Judaism had not a
series
of remarkable circumstances favoured this special development. These
circumstances
are easy to enumerate; they are five in number, and, like the wheels of
a well-
*
It
was only with the help of the Syrians that the Maccabees obtained the
chief
power, and the princes too who sprang from them and belonged to the
Hasmonian
house have only acquired now and then an appearance of independence
amid
the confusion which preceded the supremacy of Rome.
† See
p.
145, note.
450 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
made watch, fit into each other —
the
sudden isolation, the hundred years in which they might develop their
individuality,
the breaking off of all historical local tradition owing to the exile,
the renewing of old associations by a generation born abroad, the
condition
of political dependence in which the Judeans thenceforth lived. A few
remarks
on these five influences, which followed each other successively, will
make the growth of Judaism absolutely clear to us.
(1) The men of Judah
had as in statu pupillari been wont to receive all inspiration
from
the older, stronger and cleverer brother; now all at once they stood
alone,
in possession of a tradition which was probably only fragmentary, and
compelled
henceforth to order their intellectual development themselves. It was a
sudden powerful movement, which could have but one kind of reaction, a
violent and by no means harmonious one.
(2) If the Assyrians
had immediately invaded Judah and scattered the inhabitants, these
would
unquestionably have vanished as completely as the Israelites. But the
Judeans
were spared for more than a century, and that in a position which
actually
compelled them to use to the utmost the last suggestion which they had
received from Israel, namely, that which their prophets Amos and Hosea
had given them — moral conversion, humility before God, confidence in
His
almighty power. That was in truth their last anchor of hope; victory by
force over the world-power that was drawing near was out of the
question.
But the Judeans took a purely materialistic view of the sublime
doctrine
of Amos. In their need they even went so far as madly to think that
Jerusalem,
as the dwelling-place of Jehovah, was impregnable. * Sensible people of
course shook their heads sceptically, but when the army of Sennacherib,
after laying waste the
*
See
Isaiah,
chap. xxxvii., particularly the verses 33-37.
451 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
surrounding land and beginning the
siege
of Jerusalem, suddenly had to retire, then the Prophets were in the
right;
a pestilence had broken out in the camp, said the one; inner
dissension,
said the other, caused the retreat; * it did not matter, on that
morning
of the year 702 B.C. upon which the inhabitants of Jerusalem no longer
saw the host of Sennacherib underneath their walls, the Jew was born,
and
with him the Jehovah whom we know from the Bible. That day was the
turning-point
in the history of Judah. Even the foreign peoples saw in the saving of
Jerusalem a divine miracle. All at once the Prophets who had hitherto
been
despised and persecuted — Isaiah and Micah — became the heroes of the
day;
the king had to join their party and begin to purify the land from
strange
gods. The faith in the providence of Jehovah, the confident belief that
all prosperity depended upon passive obedience to his commands, that
every
national calamity came as a trial or punishment, the unshakeable
conviction
that Judah was the chosen people of God, while the other nations stood
far below it — in fact, the whole complex of conceptions which was to
form
the soul of Judaism — now came into existence, developed rapidly from
germs
which under normal circumstances would never have produced such
results,
giving great power of resistance but on the other hand choking much
that
was sensible, sound and natural until it became a fixed idea. Now for
the
first time were written the momentous words: “Only the Lord had a
delight
in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them, even
you
above all people, as it is this day“ (Deut. x. 15). From the
year
701 to the year 586, when Jerusalem was destroyed, the Jews
* Cf.
Cheyne: Introduction to the Book of Isaiah, p. 231 f. It is
interesting
to learn from Assyrian accounts that Jerusalem was defended by an army
of Arabian mercenaries; Judah had been distinguished from time
immemorial
for its lack of military capacity.
452
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
had more than a hundred years to
develop
this idea. The Prophets and Priests, who now had their opportunity,
made
good use of their time. In spite of the liberal reaction of Manasseh,
they
succeeded first in banishing the other gods and then in introducing by
a stroke of genius the mad idea that Jehovah could be worshipped in
Jerusalem
alone, for which reason Josiah destroyed the “high places“ and all the
other most holy altars of the people, killed most of the Levites of
these
sanctuaries which were said to have been founded by the Patriarchs and
consecrated by divine manifestations, while the rest he made into
subordinate
servants of the house of God in Jerusalem; now there was but one God,
one
altar, one High Priest; the world was richer by the idea (though not
yet
by the word) Church; the foundation of the present Roman church, with
its
infallible head, was laid. In order to bring this about, they had to
have
recourse to a clever fraud, the pattern of many later ones. In the year
622, when the Temple was being repaired, a “book of law“ was said to be
“found“; * that it was only then written, there can to-day be not the
slightest
doubt. Deuteronomy or the fifth book of Moses (“a quite
superfluous
expansion of the Ten Commandments,“ as Luther called it) was meant to
introduce
a rule of the priesthood, such as had never existed in Israel or Judah,
and to form the legal (and at the same time, as always with the
Hebrews,
the historical) foundation of the justification of Jerusalem alone — an
idea which, as long as the northern kingdom, Israel, stood, never could
have been entertained, and which had been quite strange even to Isaiah,
in spite of all his fanatical patriotism and love for Jerusalem. † This
*
2
Kings
xxii.
† R.
Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. 438. In Deuteronomy the
foundation
of real Judaism is laid. It forms the central point of the New
Testament
in its present form: “and that is the standpoint from which we can and
must push our inquiries backwards and forwards if we are to
453
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
was all done, not with an evil
intention
to deceive, but in order henceforth to keep pure the cult of the
Saviour
God Jehovah, and at the same time as the beginning of a moral
regeneration.
There, for example, appears for the first time, shyly and guardedly,
the
commandment that we should love God the Lord; at the same time this
book
contained the fanatically dogmatic assertion that the Jews alone were
the
people of God, and along with this came for the first time the
prohibition
of mixed marriages, as also the commandment to “destroy“ all “heathens“
wherever Jews dwell, and to stone to death every Jew, man or woman, who
is not orthodox (xvii. 5); two witnesses were to be sufficient to
justify
the death sentence: the world was richer by the idea of religious
intolerance.
How new this course of thought was to the people, and under what
particular
circumstance alone it could obtain a hold — namely, amidst hourly
danger
and after the wonderful saving of Jerusalem from the hands of
Sennacherib
— is shown by the ever-repeated formula: “The Lord hath commanded that
we should fear him, that it may be well with us all the days of our
life,
as it is to-day.“ Frightful punishments on the one hand, boundless
promises
on the other and, in addition, the constant enumeration of the
wonders
which Jehovah had done on behalf of Israel — these are the methods of
conviction
employed by the book of Deuteronomy, the first independent work
of the Judeans in the sphere of religion. * Sublime this religious
motive
is not; this I must assert in spite of all Jewish and Christian
commentators;
yet when grasped by a fanatical
have any prospect of
rightly
understanding the rest,“ said Reuss many years ago in his fundamental Geschichte
des Alten Testaments, § 286.
*
Chapter
xxviii. (which is certainly postexilic) contains the blessings, “and
thou
shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this
day,“
and then the curses, more than a hundred in number, containing all the
horrors which a sickly imagination can picture to itself, “for God will
rejoice over you to destroy you.“
454 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
faith it is an incomparably powerful
one. And henceforth all efforts are directed towards strengthening this
faith, and once more the circumstances are favourable to those efforts.
(3) One would have
thought that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Captivity would have
shaken their trust in Jehovah; but the finishing blow did not come all
at once, and the inspiring strength of such a faith as Jeremiah's had
ample
time to attune itself to new conditions. In the meantime, among the
great
ones of the kingdom, moral regeneration had quickly turned into the
opposite;
they did evil without fear. But Jeremiah saw the future otherwise; in
the
Babylonian this prophet saw the scourge of God, sent to punish Judah
for
its sins; just as salvation had proceeded from the love of Jehovah to
his
chosen people, so was the present chastisement love; and so Jeremiah,
in
contradiction to Isaiah, prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, and
for
this he was persecuted as a traitor and hireling of the Babylonians.
But
the Prophet was once more right, the shrewd men of the world wrong; for
the latter relied this time upon Jehovah; had they not been taught for
a century that Jerusalem was impregnable? And when now destruction
came,
they said: “Behold the prophet has spoken true; that is the hand of
Jehovah.“
It is easy to understand the great importance of the Captivity for the
further development and strengthening of this delusive conception.
Without
the banishment the true yet so wonderfully artificial Judaism would
never
have survived. The kings Hezekiah, Josiah and Zedekiah had been able to
overturn the altars and cut down the sacred trees, but the people clung
to its old sanctuaries; now all at once it was torn away from every
tradition.
The sixty years' sojourn in the Babylonian kingdom cut, so to speak,
the
thread of history in two. Not a man who had left the land of his
fathers
at
455 JEWSENTER
INTO WESTERN HISTORY
an age when he could form his own
judgment,
ever came back. When a single individual leaves his fatherland for
fifty
years — aye, even for twenty — he returns home to relations and friends
as a stranger among strangers; he is unable to accommodate himself once
more to the special organic law of the individual growth of this
particular
people, especially if he has left his fatherland in early youth. In
this
case a whole nation left its historical home; those who returned later
had been born and brought up, almost without exception, in the foreign
land; there was, perhaps, not one who consciously remembered Judea. And
meanwhile, in Babylon, while the blessed connection with the past (the
relation of child to mother) was broken off, the embittered zealots
among
the exiled were brooding over their fate and making resolves which they
could never have thought of in the land of their home. * It was in the
captivity that specific Judaism had its foundation, and this was
brought
about by Ezekiel, a priest of the family of the High Priest; hence it
is
that Judaism has from the very beginning borne the stamp of the
Captivity.
Its faith is not the faith of a healthy, free people that is fighting
for
its existence in honest rivalry; it breathes impotence and thirst for
vengeance,
and seeks to blind men to the misery of the moment by forecasting an
impossible
future. The book of Ezekiel is the most frightful in the Bible;
by its employment of extreme means — horrible threats and the most
atrocious
promises — this narrow-minded, abstractly formalistic, but noble and
patriotic
spirit † wished to save the much-
*
With
regard to the incalculably great influence of Babylon upon all Jewish
thought
from the first one finds the fullest information in Eberhard Schrader's
book, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 3rd ed.,
revised
by Zimmern and Winckler, 1903; a short summary is found in Winckler's Die
politsche Entwickelung Babylonien und Assyriens, p. 17 f.
†
Splendidly
described in chap. xii. of Duhm's Theologie der Propheten.
Eduard
Meyer says in the Entstehung des Judentums, p. 219, “Ezekiel
456 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
shaken faith of his brothers, and
with
it the nation. Up to his time in Israel religion had been, as in Rome,
Greece, Egypt, a fact among other facts of the national life, and a
priesthood
a part of the national organisation. Ezekiel said: “No, Israel is not
in
the world, to toil and wage war like other peoples, to do work and to
think,
but to be the sanctuary of Jehovah; let it observe Jehovah's law, and
all
will be given to it.“ The State was now to be replaced by the rule of
the
religious law, the so-called nomocracy. Even Deuteronomy had
admitted
that other peoples had other gods; Amos, as an isolated great mind, had
had a vague feeling of the existence of a cosmic god, who was something
more than the political deus ex machina of a special little
nation:
Ezekiel now united both views and invented therefrom the Jehovah of
Judaism,
monotheism in a frightful, distorted form. Of a surety Jehovah is the
only
and almighty God, but He lives merely for His own glory;
sympathetically
gracious towards the Jews (for through them He will proclaim His glory
and show His power under the condition that they devote themselves
solely
to His service), but to all other peoples of the earth He is a cruel
God,
who will visit them with “pestilence and blood,“ in order that “He may
become glorious, sacred and known“! All these other peoples are to be
destroyed,
and Jehovah commands His prophets to call together the birds and the
animals
of the world “that they may eat the flesh of the strong and drink the
blood
of princes.“ Besides this, the book contains the sketch of the
organisation
of a hierarchy and of a new straight-jacket of worship — just the
things
in regard to which a prophet living in exile could indulge his
imagination,
was manifestly quite
an
honest nature, but narrow-minded, and moreover he had grown up in the
narrow
views of the priesthood, not to be named in the same breath with the
great
figures, with whom he, by the donning of a very threadbare prophet's
mantle,
ventured to put himself side by side.“
457
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
as he could not have done had he
stood
in the midst of a national life, where every new statute would have had
to contend with custom and tradition.
But not long after Ezekiel's death the noble Persian king Cyrus
conquered
the Babylonian Empire. With the simplicity of the inexperienced
Indo-European
he permitted the return of the Jews and gave them a subsidy for the
rebuilding
of the temple. Under the protection of Aryan tolerance the hearth was
erected
from which, for tens of centuries a curse to all that is noblest and an
everlasting disgrace to Christianity, Semitic intolerance was to spread
like a poison over the whole earth. Whoever wishes to give a clear
answer
to the question, Who is the Jew? must never forget the one fact, that
the
Jew, thanks to Ezekiel, is the teacher of all intolerance, of all
fanaticism
in faith, and of all murder for the sake of religion; that he only
appealed
to toleration where he felt himself oppressed, that he himself, on the
other I hand, never practised it nor dared to practise it, for his law
forbade it as it forbids it to-day and will forbid it to-morrow.
(4) Ezekiel had
dreamt,
but by the return from captivity his dream became a reality; his book —
not the history of Israel, not the voices of the great prophets — was
henceforth
the ideal according to which Judaism was organised. And this again
could
only take place thanks to the circumstance that the historical process
began with a new generation, in which even the language of the fathers
was forgotten and only the Priests still understood it. * It was simply
due to the coincidence
*
Soon
after this, more than four hundred years before Christ, the Hebrew
language
died out altogether (Paschal: Völkerkunde, 2nd ed. p.
532);
its adoption once more many centuries later was artificial and with the
object of separating the Jews from their hosts in Europe. In
consequence
we find such strange things happen, as for instance that the French
citizens
of “Jewish belief“ can only fill their voting papers in Hebrew, an
achievement
of which Judas Maccabaeus would have been incapable! The absolute lack
of feeling for language among
458 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
of such unusual circumstances that
something
became now possible of which the history of the world gives no second
example;
that a few clever and determined men could force an absolutely
fictitious,
artificially thought out, and exceedingly complicated history of
religion
and culture upon a whole people under the guise of time-hallowed
tradition.
The process is quite different from that of the Christian councils,
where
it was decided that man must believe this and that, on the ground that
it was eternal truth. Dogma in our sense of the word is foreign to the
Jew; for the materialistic view which prevails wherever the Semitic
spirit
rules even if only, as here, as spiritus rector, every
conviction
must rest on an historical basis. And thus the new Jehovah-faith, the
new
rules for the temple-cult, the many new religious laws, * were
introduced
as historical things which had been ordained by God of old and had
since
then been constantly observed except by apostate sinners. The beginning
was made by Deuteronomy before the Captivity; but that had only
been a timid attempt, and, in fact, not a very successful one in
presence
of the still vigorous popular consciousness. Now the situation was
quite
changed. In the first place the Captivity had, as I have already said,
cut the historical thread, and secondly, the exiles who returned
consisted
chiefly of two classes: on the one hand of the poorest, most ignorant
and
dependent of the people, on the other of Priests and Levites. † The
richer
more worldly inclined Jews had preferred to remain in the foreign land;
they felt themselves more comfortable there than in
the Jews to-day is
explained
by the fact that they are at home in no language — for a dead language
cannot receive new life by command — and the Hebrew idiom is just as
much
abused by them as any other.
* Law
and religion, one should never forget, are to the Jew synonymous (see
Moses Mendelssohn).
† Cf.
Wellhausen: Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, p. 159.
The same author writes in his Prolegomena, p. 28: “From the
exile
the nation did not return, but a religious sect only.“
459 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
their own community, but they
remained
(at least the majority remained) Jews — partly, doubtless, because this
faith suited them; partly because of the privileges which they knew how
to assure to themselves everywhere, among the first of which was
exemption
from military service. * It is easy to see how the priesthood now had
both
these elements in its hand — the ignorant
*
From
the standpoint of the philosophy of history we should certainly explain
this peculiar preference of the Jews for a more or less parasitic
condition,
by their long dependence upon Israel. It is at any rate very noteworthy
that the Judeans did not wait for the Captivity (still less for the
so-called
scattering) to show their preference for this life. In a number of
cities
on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates Israelite seals of older
epochs
have been found, and already at the time of Sennacherib, i.e.,
a
hundred years before the first destruction of Jerusalem, the greatest
banking
house in Babylon was Jewish; this firm, “Egibi brothers,“ is said to
have
occupied in the East a position similar to that of the Rothschilds in
Europe.
(Cf. Sayce: Assyria, its Princes, Priests and People, p.
138.) I hope we shall hear no more of the nursery tale that the Jews
“by
nature“ are peasants and only became usurers in spite of themselves
during
the Middle Ages, because they were cut off from every other occupation;
if we read the prophets carefully we shall see how often they complain
of usury, which serves the rich as a means of ruining the peasants; we
should call to mind the famous passage in the Talmud: “Whoever has 100
Gulden in commerce can eat flesh every day and drink wine; whoever has
100 Gulden in agriculture must eat herbs and vegetables, and also dig,
be wakeful and in addition make enemies.... But we are created that we
may serve God; is it then not right that we should nourish ourselves
without
pain?“ (Herder, from whom I quote the passage, adds, “Without pain
certainly!
but not by fraud and cunning,“ Adrastea v. 7). We should also
read
Nehemiah,
chap. v., and see how, when the Jews neglected everything to build the
destroyed temple again, the councillors and priests took advantage of
the
solemn moment to practise usury and to sweep in the “fields, vineyards,
olive-groves and houses“ of their poorer comrades among the people.
Nothing
in the Aryan Medes is so strange to the Jews as the fact that they do
not
“regard silver nor delight in gold“ (Isaiah xiii., 17); and
among
the most fearful curses with which Jehovah threatens his people in case
of disobedience there is one which says (Deut. xxviii): “that
the
Jew will no longer lend money to the stranger“! We should remember,
too,
that in the book of Tobias (about a hundred years before
Christ)
an angel is sent from Heaven to enforce the payment of the gold which
is
invested in the neighbouring countries at compound interest (chaps. v,
and ix.). It should be mentioned in this connection that already at the
time of Solomon the Jews were the horse-copers of all Syria (Sayce: Hittites,
p. 13).
460
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
colonists who were bound by no
tradition,
and the educated members of the Diaspora, who were, however, far
removed
from the one centre of the cult. And thus the priesthood set up the
artificial
structure: Deuteronomy was completed (especially by the first
eleven
so effective historical chapters), then the so-called “priestly code“
was
made (the whole book of Leviticus, three-fourths of Numbers,
the half of Exodus and about eleven chapters of Genesis);
* besides, the historical books of the Old Testament were collected
from
various sources and put together in the form in which they have come
down
to us, naturally only after those sources had been revised, expunged
and
interpolated in order to push the new hierocracy and the new faith in
Jehovah
together with the new “law,“ under which the poor Jews were henceforth
to groan. This, however, was a work which was beyond the standard of
education
at the time, so that contradictions burst forth at all corners and we
can
see pious caprice at work through the gaps that are left. † This Thora
(i.e., “Law“) was then gradually completed by selections from
the
partly very old didactic literature and by carefully worked up
collections
of the prophetic books, enriched by as many vaticinia ex eventibus
as possible, but so stupidly edited that it is only with the most
unspeakable
difficulty that we can find out the intention of the
* Cf.
Montefiore: Ancient Hebrews, p. 315, and for the detailed
analytic
enumeration, Driver: Introduction to the Literature of the Old
Testament
(1892), p. 150 (printed in Montefiore's book, p. 354).
† The
old Christians knew very well that the Old Testament was a late and
revised
piece of work. Thus, for example, in his answer to the twenty-first
question
of Heloise, Abelard refers to the Church historian Beda, who at the
beginning
of the eighth century wrote as fellows: „Ipse Esdras, qui non solum
legem, sed etiam, ut communis majorum fama est, omnem sacrae Scripturae
seriem, prout sibi videbatur legentibus sufficere, rescripsit....“
Thus the most modern “Biblical criticism,“ which is so opposed by the
Protestant
as well as by the Catholic orthodox theologians, has been promoted
simply
by the scientific confirmation of a fact which a thousand years ago was
common property and to which not even the most pious soul took
exception.
461 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Prophets; still later some freely
invented
didactic poems were added, as Esther, Job, Daniel, also the Psalms,
&c. Still, long after the time of Ezra, according to Jewish
tradition,
a collegium of a hundred and twenty scribes, the “great synagogue,“
worked
at the completion and revision of the canon; the two books of Chronicles,
for instance, were written two hundred years later, “after the fall of
the Persian Empire, out of the midst of Judaism.“ * I shall have to
return
immediately to this religion of Ezekiel; but first I shall discuss the
fifth and last historical condition, without which it would never have
been able, in spite of all that had gone before, to obtain a footing.
(5) After the
Babylonian
captivity the Jews never again formed an independent nation. Herder has
rightly dwelt upon one profound influence that this fact must have
exercised
upon the character of the people: “The Jewish people was spoiled in its
education because it never attained to the ripeness of political
culture
on its own soil, and consequently never to the real feeling of honour
and
freedom.“ † It is impossible to assert that at first the Jew was
organically
wanting in the sense of honour and freedom; his fate, too, would
perhaps
not have sufficed to produce such a complete atrophy of these precious
qualities had not that faith been added which robbed the individual of
every freedom and also completely rooted out the “true feeling of
honour“
by refusing to concede honour to other and higher nations. But the
people
of the tribe of Judah would never have
*
Wellhausen:
Prolegomena,
p. 170. A simple exposition of the growth of the Old Testament, after
the
manner of Wellhausen's Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte,
is unknown to me. The fundamental work of Eduard Reuss,
Geschichte der
heiligen Schriften Alten Testaments, is planned and written for
scholars,
and Zittel, Die Entstehung der Bibel in Reclam's series does
not
at all correspond to the title and does not satisfy even modest claims,
however much interesting matter the book otherwise contains.
† Ideen
zur Geschichte der Menschheit, P. III. Bk. 12, Div. 3.
462 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
allowed this faith to be forced upon
them if its political impotence, as a small vassal State endured on
sufferance,
had not delivered it over bound hand and foot to its religious
teachers.
Such short episodes of half independence as that under Simon Maccabaeus
only suffice to show that on entering into the sphere of practical life
this faith, as genuine popular faith, must needs have undergone
profound
modifications; for the Maccabees originally sprang into prosperity
because
they (the children of distant Modin, in what was formerly the
Ephraimite
mountains) broke one of the strictest laws, that of the Sabbath. * How
impossible it would have been to enforce this priestly faith, this
priestly
cult, this priestly law upon an independent people, we see from the
fact
that it was difficult enough even under the given conditions, and would
not have succeeded but for the vigorous support of the kings of
Babylon.
For though the Jews had been cut off from all traditions, yet neither
their
neighbours nor that original and genuinely Canaanite population which
had
been left behind in considerable numbers in Judea met with the same
fate.
And thus in the first period after the return they began to form
connections
again on all sides. The Hittite-Amorite peasants wished, as worshippers
of Jehovah, to take part in the sacrifice as before; they did not feel,
and would not admit, that Jehovah, the God of their own land, should
henceforth
be the monopoly of the Jews; on the other hand, the well-to-do among
those
Israelites who returned contracted marriages with the neighbouring
peoples,
not minding whether these worshipped Milkom, Moloch or Baal; just as in
our days the nobility, however Anti-Semitic, like to marry Jewesses, so
the members of the high priestly caste considered marriage with an
Ammonite
or an Edomite “conformable to their rank,“ provided the maiden had
sufficient
money. How
* Maccabees
ii. 41.
463 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
under such conditions could the
faith,
as Ezekiel taught it, have been imparted and the new law with its
countless
prescriptions have become the rule of life? The unnatural product of an
overheated priestly brain would within a generation have been consigned
ad
patres. But the Jews did not form an independent State. They had
returned
to Jerusalem under the leadership of a half-Persian agent, who
undoubtedly
had definite instructions to support the priests and on the other hand
to put down every movement of political ambition. As soon as the
religious
party saw the work which had just begun endangered by the events just
mentioned,
they sent to Babylon for help. In the first place reinforcements
consisting
of priests and scribes were sent; those were chosen who, with Ezra —
“the
clever scribe“ — at their head, wished to set up the Thora; they
brought
with them also kingly edicts and money. * But even this did not
suffice;
a man of action was needed, and so the cup-bearer of King Artaxerxes,
Nehemiah,
was despatched to Jerusalem, armed with dictatorial power. Energetic
measures
were at once taken. Those worshippers of Jehovah who did not belong
officially
to the Jewish people were rejected “with horror“; not faith but
genealogy
was henceforth to be the decisive thing; all Jews who had married
non-Jewesses
must get a divorce or emigrate; in the book of Leviticus the
law
was inserted: “I have severed you from other people that ye should be
mine“
(xx. 26). Henceforth no Jew was
*
Ezra
brought from the king in money alone £250,000! The authenticity,
or at least essential authenticity, of the Persian documents quoted by
Ezra has in spite of the views of Wellhausen and others finally been
proved
by Eduard Meyer: Die Entstehung des Judentums (1896), pp. 1-71.
This settles one of the most important questions in history. Any one
who
has read the little but very complete book of Meyer will understand his
conclusions: “Judaism originated in the name of the Persian king and by
the authority of his Empire, and thus the effects of the Empire of the
Achemenides extend with great power, as almost nothing else, directly
into
our present age.“
464 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to marry outside his people, under
penalty
of death; every man who married a foreign woman committed “a sin
against
God.“ * Nehemiah also built high walls round Jerusalem and put strong
gates
at the entrances; then he forbade the stranger to enter, that the
people
“might be purified from everything foreign.“ Wellhausen rightly says:
“Ezra
and Nehemiah became, by the grace of King Artaxerxes, the definite
constructors
of Judaism.“ † What Ezekiel founded they completed; they forced Judaism
on the Jew.
These, then, are
in my opinion the five historical motive powers by which Judaism was
rendered
possible and furthered. I shall summarise them once more, to impress
them
on the memory; the unexpected, sudden separation from the more gifted
Israel;
the continuance for a hundred years of the tiny State threatened on all
sides, which could hope for help only from a superhuman power; the
rending
of the historical thread and of all local traditions by the
carrying-off
of the whole people from their home into a foreign land; the reviving
of
these associations under a generation which was born abroad and hardly
understood the language of their fathers; the condition of political
dependence
which henceforth existed, and to which the priesthood owed its
dominating
power.
When Ezra for the
first time read to the assembled people from the new law, which was to
be the “law of Moses,“ then “all the people wept when they heard the
words
of the law“; this is the account of Nehemiah, and we can believe it.
But
it did not help them, for great Jehovah, “powerful and fearful,“ had
commanded
it; ‡ and now the so-called “Old Covenant“ was renewed,
* Nehemiah
xiii. 27. Cf. the beginning of this chapter, p. 333.
† Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, 3rd ed. p. 173.
‡
According
to the Talmud, Jehovah occupies himself on Sunday with reading the
Thora!
(Wellhausen: Isr. Gesch., p. 297; Montefiore, p. 461).
465 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
but this time in writing, like a
notary's
contract. Every priest, Levite, and influential man in the country put
his seal under it, also every scribe; they and all other men, “with
their
wives, sons and daughters,“ had to “bind themselves by oath to walk in
the law of God that is given by Moses, the servant of God.“ * This was
now the “New Covenant.“ It is probably the first and last time that in
this way a religion originated in the world! Fortunately, religious
instinct
still lived among the people, from the midst of which a short time
before
a Jeremiah and a second Isaiah had arisen. Human nature does not permit
itself to be stamped out and distorted without leaving a trace behind,
but in this case all that was possible in that way had been done; and
if
in consequence the Jews became generally unpopular, the reason is
solely
to be sought in this artificially constructed and mechanically enforced
faith, which gradually grew into an ineradicable national idea and
destroyed
in the Jewish heart the purely human legacy which is common to us all.
In the Canaanite-Israelite nature-cult, quickened by Semitic
seriousness
and Amorite idealism, there must have been many germs promising the
finest
blossoms; how otherwise should we be able to trace such a development
as
that which, starting from the orgiastic dance around the image of the
calf,
still common in all Israel and Judah before the Captivity, leads up to
the God of Amos, who “despises feast-days“ and “has no pleasure in
burnt-offerings“
(v. 21, 22), and to the second Isaiah, who considered every temple
building
unworthy of God, to whom sacrifice and incense are “a horror,“ and who
writes the almost Hindoo words: “He that killeth an ox is as if he slew
a man“ (Isaiah lxvi. 1-3). But henceforth all development was
broken
off. And as I must a thousand times repeat — for no one says it, and it
is the only thing that has to be said — the only thing that makes
*
See
Nehemia,
chaps. viii.-x.
466 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the position of the Jews among us
children
of the nineteenth century comprehensible — this so-called reform of
Ezra,
which in reality signifies the foundation of Judaism, this reform which
became only possible through the coincidence of the five historical
conditions
enumerated, does not betoken a stage in religious development, but is a
violent reaction from every development; it leaves the tree standing,
but
cuts away all roots from below it; now it may stand and wither,
supported
by the 13,600 neatly cut stakes of the law, that it may not fall. When,
therefore, so important a scholar as Delitzsch writes, “The Thora shows
how the Mosaic law continued for a thousand years to develop in the
consciousness
and practice of Israel,“ we must offer the objection that the Thora on
the contrary does everything which it can to mask the process of
development
which had hitherto taken place; that it does not hesitate to utter any
lie in order to represent the law as absolutely stationary, and fixed
since
time immemorial, that it gives even such manifest absurdities as the
story
of the Tabernacle and its arrangement; and we must assert that the
Thora
is directed not only against the so-called “idolatry“ (from which the
whole
Israelite cult proceeded), but just as much against the free spirit of
genuine religion which had begun to stir in the Prophets. Not one of
these
great men — neither Elijah nor Amos, nor Hosea, nor Micah, nor Isaiah,
nor Jeremiah, nor the second Isaiah — would have put his seal on that
document
of the New Covenant — otherwise he would have had to deny his own words.
THE
PROPHETS
I must pause a
moment
to discuss the Prophets just mentioned. For it is particularly from the
contrast between what they aimed at and sought and the teachings of the
Jerusalemite hierocrats that it becomes clear to
467 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
what an extent the Jew was made Jew,
artificially made (so to speak) by the conscious, calculated religious
politics of individual men and individual associations, and in
opposition
to all organic development. It is necessary to emphasise this in order
to judge aright the Israelite character, which in a way was founded in
Judaism. In the New Covenant the observances of the cult have the first
place; the word “sanctity,“ which occurs so often, signifies in the
first
place absolutely nothing but the strict observance of all ordinances; *
purity of heart is hardly considered, † “purity of skin and cleanness
of
vessels are more important,“ as Reuss says with some exaggeration, ‡
and
in the midst of these observances stands as the most sacred of all — an
extraordinarily complicated sacrificial ritual. § A more flagrant
departure from the prophetic teaching is scarcely thinkable. Let us
see.
Hosea had represented God as saying, “I desired mercy and not
sacrifice,
and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings“ (vi. 6). Amos I
have
just quoted (p. 465). Micah writes: “Wherewith shall I come before the
Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with
burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old? (vi. 6). He hath showed
thee,
O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do
justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?“ (vi. 8).
Isaiah
expresses exactly the same thing, but in greater detail, and as if by a
miracle we have a saying of his preserved, in which he
*
Montefiore:
Religion
of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 236.
†
Robertson
Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. 424.
‡ Geschichte
der heiligen Schriften Alten Testaments, § 379.
§
Whoever wishes to form an idea of this should read, in addition to the
books of Leviticus, Numbers, &c., the eleven tractates of
the
sacrificial ordinances (Kodaschim) in the Babylonian Island
(the
Haggadian portions form the fourth volume of the only reliable
translation,
that of Wünsche). One cannot assert that the Jews have got rid of
this ritual since the destruction of Jerusalem, for they still study
it,
and certain things, as killing according to their rites, belong to it,
for which reason an animal killed by a non-Jew is carrion to the Jew (see
Treatise Chullin, fol. 13b).
468
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
says, “God wishes not for the
Sabbath“
and “your new moons and appointed feasts my soul hateth!“ The people
should
rather occupy itself with other things, “learn to do well, seek
judgment,
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow“ (i.
13-17).
Jeremiah, in the impetuous manner characteristic of him, goes still
further;
he places himself in the doorway of the temple of Jerusalem and cries
out
to those that enter: “Trust ye not in lying words, saying, Here is the
temple of the Lord! Here is the temple of the Lord! But amend your ways
and your doings; execute judgment between a man and his neighbour;
oppress
not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and shed not innocent
blood
in this place“ (i.e., do not sacrifice) (vii. 4-6). Jeremiah
even
wishes to hear no more of the sacred old ark of the covenant, “neither
shall it come to mind; neither shall they remember it; neither shall
they
visit it; neither shall that be done any more“ (iii. 16). In the Psalms,
too, we read: “For thou desirest not sacrifice; thou delightest not in
burnt-offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit! A broken
and
a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise“ (li. 18-19). * That all
these utterances are followed by fanatical and national ones, as
“Jerusalem
is God's throne and all other gods are idols,“ &c., shows a
narrowness
appropriate to the time, † but does not annul the fact that all these
men
aimed at a progressive simplification of the cult and, like the Yoruba
negroes on the Slave coast (see p. 417), declared the sacrifice
of food to be senseless, and demanded the abolition, if possible, of
every
service in the temple, like that great unknown ‡ who represents God as
saying, “The Heaven
* See
also xl. 7 and l. 13.
† It
has been proved that almost all these passages are interpolations of a
later time.
‡ See
Cheyne's Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (1895), and Duhm's Jesaia
(1892), for information about the writer of chaps. xl-lv. of the
469 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
is my throne and the earth is my
footstool;
where is the house that ye build unto me? Or what is the place of my
rest?...
but to this man will I look, even to him who is poor and of a contrite
spirit and trembleth at my word“ (lxvi. 1, 2). The contrast to the
commandments
of the Thora which were soon afterwards introduced could hardly be
greater.
The whole tendency of the Prophets, as we see, is directed to
inculcating
the piety of the heart; not he who sacrifices, but he who does good,
not
he who observes the Sabbath, but he who protects the oppressed, is in
their
opinion good. One must also notice that in the case of the Prophets
nationalism
nowhere (except in the later interpolations) has the dogmatic and
inhuman
character of the later official faith. Amos, a noble man whom the great
synagogue has cruelly used, makes perhaps the only humorous remark
which
the whole literature of the Bible contains: “Are ye not as children of
the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? said the Lord“ (ix. 7).
And
he expresses the opinion that just as God led the Israelites out of
Egypt,
so He brought the Philistines out of Caphthor and the Syrians out of
Kir.
Micah writes with the same tolerance: “For all people will walk, every
one, in the name of his God, and we will walk in the name of our God“
(iv.
5). The second Isaiah, the only real and conscious monotheist, simply
says:
“God of the whole earth He shall be called“ (liv. 5). Here too,
therefore,
a direction is clearly marked out, which later was violently departed
from.
But at the same time that promising tendency, those longings and
attempts
to find a less historical and more genuine
Book of Isaiah,
usually designated the Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah, the only one
who
now and again reminds one of Christ and whose name the Jews, in
characteristic
fashion, forgot as soon as he died, though in all other cases they
follow
genealogy till the hundredth generation. The second Isaiah wrote during
the second half of the exile, hence a century and a half later than the
historical Isaiah. Cheyne is of opinion that chaps. lvi.-lxvi., which
are
mostly ascribed to the second Isaiah, were really written by a still
later
author.
470 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
religion — a religion of the
individual
soul in contrast to faith in national destinies — were nipped in the
bud;
naturally this tendency sprang up anew again and again in many
individual
hearts, but it could not inspire with life the organism which the
priestly
code had paralysed, there was no longer room for development. And yet
Jeremiah
had made important steps in this direction; he (or some other in his
name)
had represented God as saying, “I the Lord search the heart, I try the
reins, even to give to every man according to his ways“ (xvii. 10).
Yes,
in absolute contrast to the Judaic justification by works, which the
Roman
Catholic Church adopted from the Jews, we seem to see a faint glimmer
of
the conception of grace when Jeremiah fervently cries out, “Heal me, O
Lord, and I shall be healed! Save me, and I shall be saved!“ (xvii.
14.)
And with the second Isaiah's beautiful verse, in which God says, My
thoughts
are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,“ we stand on the
threshold of a transcendental mystery where the true religion of the
Indian
and of Jesus Christ begins. With what justice does the theologian Duhm
say that the writers of Deuteronomy and Ezekiel, and
with
them Judaism, to the present day, stand “in point of religion and
morals
far beneath Jeremiah!“ *
But it seems to me
more than doubtful whether the common Semitic qualities, which reveal
themselves
in
*
Duhm:
Die
Theologie des Propheten, p. 251. Jeremiah's divination of grace
disappeared
immediately, never to return again; even the noblest, most talented
Jews,
like Jesus Sirach, teach that “whoever knows the law is virtuous“; God
has created man and then “left him to his own counsel“; from this we
can
logically draw as conclusion the doctrine of absolute freedom of will,
destitute of all divine assistance: “Before man stand life and death,
he
can choose what he will... if thou wilt, thou canst keep the law“ (see,
for example, Ecclesiasticus xv. 12-15). The Essenes alone form
an
exception, for according to Josephus they taught the doctrine of
predestination
(Jüd. Altertümer, 520); this sect, however, was never
recognised but persecuted, and presumably counted few real Jews among
its
number; it is an ephemeral thing without influence.
471
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
these pre-eminent men, would have
produced
much religion in our sense of the word; for as these quotations (with
the
exception of the two last) prove, it is always morals that the Prophets
oppose to cult, not a new or reformed ideal of religion. * The
Israelite
prophets (in addition to whom we must reckon some Psalmists) are great
by their moral greatness, not by creative power; in this they reveal
themselves
as essentially Semites — in whom the will is always supreme — and their
influence in the purely religious sphere is to a great extent merely a
reaction from the Canaanite cult ascribed to Moses, and introduced
nothing
in its place. But to believe that one can take from the people one cult
without replacing it by another shows but little insight into the human
character; just as little as it testifies to religious understanding,
when
the Prophets imagined that faith in a God who had never been conceived
and never represented, who revealed himself only in political events,
and
who must be served with good deeds and humility alone, could satisfy
even
the most modest demands of the imagination. It was in fact through the
sublimity of prophetic feeling, through the passionate glow of
prophetic
words, that one of those materialistic Syro-Semitic peoples, poor in
religious
conceptions, first received the revelation of the gulf between God and
man, and now this gulf yawned threateningly, and not the slightest
attempt
was made to bridge it over. And yet what constitutes the essence of
religion
if not the bridging over of this gulf? All else is philosophy or
morals.
We are consequently justified in calling the
*
This
is still truer of such later phenomena as Jesus Sirach, who, generally
speaking, are content with giving very wise, noble rules of life: one
must
not strive after riches, but generosity, not knowledge, but wisdom,
&c.
(xxix, xxxi., &c.). The only attempt (and it was owing to Greek
influence)
on the part of the Jewish spirit to attain to the metaphysical, had a
poor
ending: the so-called “preacher Solomon“ has no better advice to give
than
that we should think of to-day and enjoy our works — “all is vanity!“
472 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
mythology of Greece a religion, for
by furnishing conceptions it brings us nearer the Divine. * Not the
thought
of a God, who has created heaven and earth, but the paraclete hovering
between Him and me, represents the essential purport of all religion.
Mohammed
is scarcely less than Allah, and Christ is God himself, descended upon
the earth. And here we must admit that Isaiah, who placarded his
prophecies
at the street corners; Jeremiah, the acutest politician of his time;
the
second Isaiah, the venerable, lovable figure from the Babylonian
captivity;
and Amos, the landed proprietor, who saw a national danger in the
corruption
of the leading grades of society; Hosea, who considered the priests
even
more dangerous; Micah, the Socialist Democratic peasant, who wishes to
wipe out cities (except Jerusalem) from the face of the earth; — these
are splendid men, in whom we note with delight how strong in faith and
at the same time generous, how noble, how vigorously the Israelite
spirit
moved before it was bound hand and foot, yet they are by no means
religious
geniuses. If they had had that power which they did not possess, their
people would have been spared their bitter fate; the people would not
have
needed to weep “when it heard the words of the law.“
THE
RABBIS
What the Prophets
had failed to accomplish was achieved by the priests and scribes. They
arranged the connection between God and man by fixing an invented but
exact
historical tradition, by the retention and further development of the
sacrificial
service and above all by the so-called “law,“ that is, by hundreds of
*
It
is not unimportant to note here how much more insight into the essence
of religious need is shown by a Socrates, who taught that not the
sacrifice
and its costliness pleased the gods, but the innermost feelings of the
sacrificer, though he at the same time considered the offering of the
usual
sacrifices as a duty (Xenophon: Memorabilia i. 3). Similarly
Jesus
Christ.
473 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
directions which hedged in every
step
of a man the whole day long, and continually accompanied him through
all
seasons — in the field, at home, asleep and awake, eating and drinking.
According to the Talmud tradition, in the days of mourning for the
death
of Moses three thousand such ordinances were forgotten; * that marks
the
tendency. The manifest purpose was to keep the thought of God
continually
alive among the people, and at the same time the thought that they were
the chosen of God and of faith in their own future. The object was
noble
enough, as every one who judges impartially must admit, and it may well
be that this Draconian rule had a more moral life as its result, and
that
thousands of good souls lived contented and happy in the fulfilment of
the law; and yet what happened here was a stroke of violence against
nature.
It is contrary to nature to hem in every step of a man; contrary to
nature
to plague a whole people with priestly subtleties, † and to forbid it
all
healthy, free, intellectual nourishment; contrary to nature to teach
pride,
hatred and isolation as the bases of our moral relations to our
fellow-men;
contrary to nature to transfer all our efforts from the present to the
future. To establish Judaism, a religion was killed, and then mummified.
Ambrosius praises
in the religious doctrine of the Jews especially “the victory of reason
over feeling.“ ‡ The word reason is perhaps not very happily chosen,
Will
would be nearer the point; but he is quite right in regard to the
subjection
of the feelings, and he here says in simple form something of so great
significance that his
*
Treatise
Themura,
fol. 16a (Wünsche).
†
According
to the testimony of a contemporary Jew, Rubens, Der alte und der
neue
Glaube (Zurich, 1878, p. 79), the Jew who lives according to the
ordinances
needs “about half the day for religion alone.“ God wished, says Rabbi
Chanania
ben Akasiah, to give Israel opportunity to do good service, therefore
he
imposed on it a mass of rules and observances.
‡ In
his work Von den Pflichten der Kirchendiener i. 119.
474 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
words will spare me considerable
discussion.
But whoever wishes to know to what this subjugation of the feelings
leads
in the case of a religion should study the history of the Rabbis and
attempt
to read through some of the fragments of the Talmud. He will meet noble
Rabbis and in the Talmud more praiseworthy rules for a man's daily walk
and life (especially in the treatise Pirke Aboth, i.e.,
sayings
of the fathers) than he perhaps expects, but the whole literature of
the
world has nothing to show that is so dreary, so childishly wearisome,
so
composed of the desert sand of absolute sterility, as this collection
of
the wisest discussions which were held among Jews for centuries
concerning
the Thora. * And this spiritless
*
Examples
teach more than differences of opinion. In regard to the belief in
God's
almightiness: “Rabbi Janai was so afraid of insects that he placed four
vessels with water under the feet of his bed. Once he stretched out his
hand and found insects in the bed; then he said with reference to Psalm
cxvi. 6: Lift the bed from the vessels, I rely on divine protection“ (Terumoth
viii. 3, 30a). In regard to Biblical exegesis: “Rabbi Ismael has
taught“
— we find it in Leviticus xiv. 9 — “on the seventh day he shall
shave all his hair off his head and beard and his eyebrows, even all
his
hair he shall shave off“; all his hair, that is general; his head, his
beard, his eyebrows, that is special, and his hair, that is again
general.
In the case of general, special and general the rule is that you can
only
render that which is like to the special, i.e., as the special
is
a place which embraces in itself such a collection of hairs“ (Kidduschin
i. 2, 9a). In regard to the law: “Rabbi Pinchas came to a place where
the
people complained to him that the mice devoured their grain. He
accustomed
the mice to listen to his call; they assembled before him and began to
squeak. Do you understand, said the Rabbi to the people, what they are
saying? No, was their answer. They say, in fact, that you do not give a
tithe of their grain. Thereupon the people said, we are grateful to you
for leading us into better paths. Since then the mice did no more
damage“
(Demai i. 3, 3b). In regard to knowledge of nature:
“According
to Rabbi Judah the thickness of the heavens amounts to a journey of
fifty
years, and since a man of ordinary strength can go in one day 40 miles
and, till the sun breaks through the sky, 4 miles, so one can conclude
that the time of the breaking through the sky amounts to the tenth part
of a day. But as thick as the sky is also the earth and the abyss. The
proof (!) is got from Isaiah xl. 22., Job. xxii. 14 and
Prov.
viii. 27“ (Berachoth i. 1, 4b). In regard to daily life: “Rabbi
bar Huna did not breakfast till he had brought his child to school“ (Kidduschin
Div. 1). That one finds many a fine saying amid the rubbish of the
Talmud
must, on the other hand, be
475 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
was held more sacred by later Jews
than
the Bible! (Treatise Pea ii. 5). Indeed, they had the
impertinence
to say, “The words of the elders are more important than the words of
the
Prophets“! (Treatise Bera-
emphasised, but with
the
addition that these sayings refer only to morals; these collections do
not contain beautiful thoughts, in fact almost nothing that has any
family
resemblance to a thought. And the fine moral sayings, too, are often
like
the poems of Heine: the end spoils the beginning. An example: “A man
should
sow peace with his brothers and relatives and with every one, even with
the stranger upon the street“ — up to this point no minister in the
pulpit
could give better advice: but now the reason, that is usually the weak
point with the Jews (see p. 453): “that we may be beloved in
heaven
and liked on earth“ (Berachoth, fol. 17a). Or again, we read
with
pleasure, “Let a man take heed of the honour of his wife, for blessing
is found in the house of a man only because of his wife“ — in truth not
quite correct, but these words testify to a sentiment which we gladly
hear
expressed; but here again the conclusion: “Honour your wives, that you
may become rich!“ (Baba Mezia, fol. 59a). However it must also
be
mentioned that besides the beautiful moral sayings there are very ugly
and abominable ones; as, for example. that a Jew cannot transgress the
seventh commandment with a non-Jewess: “For the heathen have no
lawfully
wedded wife, they are not really their wives“ (Sanhedrin, fol.
52b
and 82a). I give intentionally only one example, in order that the
reader
may see the tone, that suffices: ab uno disce omnes. Of course
there
are Rabbis who dispute this fearful doctrine; but where the Rabbis
contradict
each other, the Jew can choose for himself, and no casuistry can annul
the fact that this contempt for the non-Jew is one of the bases of the
Jewish faith; it follows logically from their insane over-estimation of
themselves; they represent Jehovah as calling to them “ye are gods“ (Psalms
lxxxii. 6). Other interpretations, too, of the Ten Commandments show
how
the idea of morality was only skin-deep in the Semitic Hittites; thus
the
Rabbis (Sanhedrin, fol. 86a) utter the doctrine: “the words of
the
eighth Commandment, 'thou shalt not steal,' refer according to the
script
only to man-stealing“! —and as another passage quoted by scribes of
greater
moral sentiment says, “thou shalt not steal“ (Leviticus xix.
11),
and refers expressly to the Israelites “the one from the other,“ so in
this case, too, the simple moral command leads to an ocean of
casuistry;
the Talmud does not indeed teach (as far as I could find from the
fragments
at my disposal) that “thou mayest rob the non-Jew,“ but it nowhere
teaches
the opposite. Fearful, too, are the many precepts in the Talmud
concerning
the persecution and the destruction of the unorthodox Jews: how
individuals
are to be stoned and the people executed with the sword, and still more
frightful are the descriptions of the tortures and executions which
this
equally dismal and spiritless book expatiates upon with pleasure; here
too only one example: “The criminal is placed in dirt up to the
476 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
choth, i. 4). So surely had
the
new covenant led them on the downward religious path. In the
“bottomless
sea,“ as they themselves call the Babylonian Island, their nobler
religious
sentiments were drowned for ever. *
knees; a hard cloth
is
then laid in a soft one and wrapped round his neck; the one witness
pulls
the one end towards himself and the other the other, till the prisoner
opens his mouth. In the meantime the lead is heated and poured into his
mouth so that it enters his vitals and burns them up“ (Sanhedrin,
fol. 52a). Then there are learned discussions about such things in the
Talmud, thus the extremely pious Rabbi Jehuda thinks it would be
advisable
to open the poor man's mouth with pincers and to pour the lead down
quickly,
otherwise he might die of strangulation and then his soul would not be
consumed with his body.
This
is what one comes to with “the subjection of the feelings to the
reason!“
There
is not even yet a complete translation of the Talmud. Many have
concluded
from this that it must contain things that are fearful and dangerous to
the Goyim; it is asserted that it is the Jews who hitherto frustrated
every
attempt at a complete translation, a suspicion by which they feel
themselves
greatly flattered. The historian Graetz grows angry with those of his
people
who “reveal the weaknesses of Judaism to the eyes of Christian
readers,“
and mutters terrible things about certain writings of Spanish Jews, in
which the “weaknesses of the Christian articles of faith and sacraments
are so openly represented that one cannot venture to explain the
purport
wherever Christianity is the prevailing religion“ (iii. 8). Now we are
not so delicate and sensitive, such “revelations“ are indifferent to
us;
if the Jews keep their literary products secret, that is their
business;
but tragical suspicion is out of place, it is merely a question of a
feeling
of shame easy to understand. (All the above quoted passages are taken
from
the only reliable translation, that of Dr. Wünsche, which has been
revised by two Rabbis: Der Jerusalemische Talmud, Zürich,
1880,
and Der babylonische Talmud, Leipzig, 1886-1889; only the
quotation
concerning Rabbi bar Huna is from Seligman Grünwald's collection
of
Talmudic sayings in the Jewish Universal-Bibliothek. Cf.,
further,
Strack, Einleitung in den Talmud, No. 2 of the writings of the
Jewish
Institute in Berlin, where one will find a complete enumeration of all
the fragments translated, p. 106 f. Much clearer and less pedantic is
the
supplement on the Talmud in the excellent little book of William
Rubens,
Der
alte und der neue Glaube im Judentum, 1878.
* To
this day every orthodox Jew regards the Rabbinical ordinances as divine
and holds fast to the Talmudic sentence: “If the Rabbis call left right
and right left, you must believe it“ (see the book of the
anti-Rabbinical
Jew, Dr. William Rubens, p. 79). The close connection with Jesuitism (see
next chapter) is here as in many other things very obvious.
477 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
THE
MESSIANIC HOPE
All this, however,
represents as it were the negative element in the founding of Judaism:
of the beautiful legacy — simple and lively memories and popular tales
of the Hebrews, impressive religious ordinances belonging to the
Canaanites,
as also many customs such as the Sabbath which rested on
Sumero-Accadian
influence and were all common to Western Asiatics — of this legacy the
priests had made a rigid law; by art of magic * they had transformed
warm
blood into cold metal, and of this they had forged a vice for the soul
— an instrument of torture like the iron maid at Nürnberg; they
had
tied the arteries of spontaneous feeling, or “of the feelings,“ as
Ambrosius
says — the arteries of the instinctive creative activity of a people,
by
which its faith, its customs, its thoughts, adapt themselves to
changing
times and by new formations arouse to new life what is eternally true
in
the old; but their work would have had no permanence if it had halted
half-way
and been content with this negative element. If in physiological
experiments
we cut the connection between brain and heart, we have to arrange for
artificial
breathing or the functions of life cease; this the priestly founders of
religion did by the introduction of the Messianic kingdom of the future.
I have frequently
demonstrated, † and shall not do so again, that a materialistic
philosophy
is necessarily based on an historical view of things, and moreover,
that
history, wherever it serves as the basis of a religion, must
necessarily
embrace the future as well as the present and the past. It is therefore
beyond all doubt that thoughts of
*
It
is known that Cabal is a Jewish word and a Jewish thing. The impulse
common
to all men, which in our case leads to mysticism, leads in the case of
the Semite to magic. Always and everywhere the rule of blind will!
† Pp.
229,
244
note, 419, 421 f., 440, &c.
478 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the future formed a very old element
of the Hebraic legacy. But how modest, how natural, how completely
within
the limits of the possible and actual! Canaan alone presented Jehovah
to
the Israelites, for he was the God of Canaan alone; apart from many
unavoidable
feuds, until the captivity, the tribe of Judah lived, just like the
other
tribes, on the best terms with its neighbours; there are immigrations
and
emigrations (see the book of Ruth); the God of the
country
where a man settles is adopted as a matter of course (Ruth i.
15,
16); the national pride is scarcely greater than in France or Germany
to-day.
Of course the future is more definite to the Prophets, in harmony with
their other ideas and particularly in view of the extremely dangerous
political
situation (for Prophets arose only in times of political crisis, never
in peace); * as a foil to the moral admonitions and threatened
punishments,
which form almost the whole purport of their proclamations, they
required
a bright picture of blessings which would fall to a pious, God-fearing
people, but in the genuine writings of the Prophets before the exile
there
is never a word of universal empire. Even Isaiah does not go farther
than
the idea that Jerusalem is impregnable and that punishment will fall
upon
his enemies; then, in the “sure dwelling,“ “salvation, wisdom,
prudence,
and fear of the Lord will be the treasure of the inhabitants,“ and as
an
especial blessing the great man seems to foresee that “at that time
there
will be no scribes“! † I have the support of the greatest living
authority
when I assert that the conception of an especial sanctity of the Jewish
people — that conception which is the basis of Jewish faith — was quite
unknown to Isaiah. ‡ All those passages — as, for instance, chap. iv.
3,
“He that is left in Zion shall be called holy“;
*
Wellhausen
(from Montefiore, p. 154).
† See,
for instance, chap. xxxiii.
‡
Cheyne:
Introduction
to Isaiah (ed. 1895), pp. 27 and 53.
479 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
chap. lxii. 12, “And they shall call
them the holy people,“ &c. — have been proved to be late
interpolations,
that is to say, the work of the great synagogues already named; the
language
of a much later century which no longer freely mastered the Hebrew has
betrayed the pious forgers. Invented are also almost all those
“consoling
additions“ which are found after most of the threats of Amos, Hosea,
Micah,
Isaiah, &c., * and absolutely forged, from the first to the last
word,
are such chapters as Isaiah lx., that famous Messianic
prophecy,
according to which all the kings of the world will lie in the dust
before
the Jews, and the doors of Jerusalem be open day and night in order
that
the treasures † of all people may be carried in. The genuine Isaiah
promised
his people “wisdom and prudence“ as their reward, the ideal of the
still
greater second Isaiah (the one who would have neither sacrifice nor
temple)
was that Judah should be the servant of God, called to bring
consolation
everywhere to the weary, the blind, the poor and the heavily laden. But
now things had changed; the curse of God is henceforth to smite him who
maintains that “the house of Judah is like unto all the heathen“ (Ezekiel
xxv. 8), for it shall be a “kingdom of priests“ (Exodus xix. 6).
‡ The Jews were now promised the possession of all treasures of the
world,
particularly of all gold and all silver. § “Thy people shall
inherit
the land for ever“ (Isaiah lx. 21); that is henceforth the
future
which is held out to the Jews. In humility he shall bow before God, but
not in that inner humility, of which Christ speaks — he bows the head
before
Jehovah, because of the promise that by the fulfilment
*
Cheyne
in his Introduction to Robertson Smith: Prophets of Israel, p.
xv.
f.
†
Luther
has “might“ by mistake.
‡
Wellhausen,
Composition
des Hexateuchs, pp. 93 and 97, proves that the passage xix. 3-9 is
an interpolation of post-Deuteronomic time.
§
Isaiah,
the whole of chap. xl. See, too, the postexilic Prophet
Haggai,
who promises to the Jews “the treasures of all Heathens“: “The silver
is
mine, the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts“ (ii. 8, 9).
480 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
of this condition he will put his
foot
upon the neck of all the nations of the world and be Lord and possessor
of the whole earth. * This one basis of Jewish religion includes,
therefore,
a direct criminal attempt upon all the peoples of the earth, and the
crime
cannot be disavowed because hitherto the power has been lacking to
carry
it out; for it is the hope itself which is criminal and which poisons
the
heart of the Jew. † To the misunderstanding and intentional
falsification
of the Prophets were added other dreams of the future, which, however,
were no better. From the Persians the Jews had during their captivity
for
the first time heard vague tales of an immortality and a future life;
they
had also heard of angels and devils, heaven and hell. ‡ On this basis
there
was now produced an enormous apocalyptic literature of which the book
of
Daniel,
in spite of its senseless mystery-mongering, would give a much too
favourable
idea, which dealt with the end of the world, the resurrection of the
just,
&c., without in any way idealising the Messianic hopes; at the best
it is a case of a resurrection of the body, which shall give support to
the dubious
*
The
absurdity of the idea, that this religion is the stem of Christianity,
Christianity its blossom, must be manifest to the most prejudiced.
‡ The
Jewish apologists reply that they obey the law, not “because it is by
these
means that they are to attain to empire, but because Jehovah commands
it;
that Jehovah gives the world to the Jews as one sacred people is done
to
his own honour not theirs.“ But this seems to me pure contemptible
casuistry.
A reliable author, Montefiore, says literally, “Beyond question the
argument
— 'obey the law, for it will pay you' — forms the chief and fundamental
motive in Deuteronomy“ (p. 531). That countless Jews are pious
men
who fulfil the law and lead a pure noble life, without thinking of
reward,
only proves that here as elsewhere morals and religion do not go
together
and that in the whole world there are men who are very much better than
their faith. But even to-day fairly free-thinking Jews still write:
“The
existence of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope“ —
the definite expectation of world empire thus still forms the soul of
Judaism
(cf. above, p. 334).
‡ In
connection with the borrowing of Zoroastric (half-understood)
conceptions
by the founders of Judaism, see Montefiore: Religion of the
Ancient
Hebrews, pp. 373, 429, 453, &c.
481
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
assurance “to-day you must obey the
law and later you will receive your reward“ (Talmud, Treatise Erubin,
Div. 2), and this Jewish “Kingdom of God“ will, as one of the most
eminent
of Israelite thinkers, Saadia (tenth century), assures us, “be a
kingdom
on earth.“ The quotation from the Apok. of Baruch, on p. 425,
shows
what was the Jewish idea of this future world; it differed from the
world
of to-day almost solely in the predominant position of the Jewish
nation.
An interesting trace of this view has by mistake found its way even
into
the New Testament. According to Matthew the twelve apostles, seated on
twelve thrones, will judge the twelve tribes of Israel, which of course
assumes that no others than Jews enter into heaven. *
Thus the invented
and utterly falsified past is completed by an equally fictitious,
Utopian
future, and so the Jew, in spite of the materialism of his religion,
hovers
between dreams and delusions. The mirage of the desert of their fathers
conjures up by magic for these half-Semites sweet consolation for their
tragic destiny — an airy, empty and delusive consolation; but by the
strength
of their will — called faith — it is a sufficiently vigorous living
power,
and indeed often a dangerous one for others. The power of the idea
triumphs
here in an alarming fashion; in a people with good capacities but not
pre-eminent
physically or mentally it produces the delusive idea of a particular
selectness,
of a special pleasantness in the sight of God, of an incomparable
future;
it isolates them in an insane pride from all the nations of the earth;
forces upon them, as laid
* Matthew
xix. 28; Luke xxii. 30. This utterance put in the mouth of
Christ
directly contradicts what is said in Matthew xx. 23. The
clinging
to the twelve tribes also, although for more than five hundred years
there
were only two, is genuinely Rabbinical. The Rabbis, too, expressly
teach
the doctrine: “The non-Jews are as such precluded from admission to a
future
world“ (cf. Laible: Jesus Christus im Talmud, p. 53).
Concerning
the Messianic expectations, see chap. iii. p.
235 note.
482
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
down by God, a law which is
senseless,
unreasonable, and impossible in practice; it nourishes them with lying
memories and lulls them with criminal hopes; — and, while it thus
raises
this people in its own conceit to giddy Babel-like heights, it in truth
depresses their souls deeply, weighing so heavily upon their best
qualities,
isolating them from suffering, striving and creating humanity,
confirming
them hopelessly in the most unfortunate fixed ideas, and making them in
every form (from the extremest orthodoxy to outspoken free-thinking) so
inevitably the enemy, open or secret, of every other human being, and a
danger to every culture, that at all times and places it has inspired
the
deepest mistrust in the most highly gifted, and horror in the unerring
instincts of the common people. I said just now that orthodoxy and
free-thinking
could be regarded by us as equivalents here, in fact the question
to-day
is not so much what a Jew believes as what, to use a paradoxical
antithesis,
he can believe or is capable of believing. Intellectual endowments and
morality are individual qualities. The Jew is, like other men, shrewd
or
stupid, good or bad; whoever denies that is not worth talking to; but
there
is something which is not individual, namely, les plis de la
pensée,
as
the Frenchman says, the inborn tendencies of thought and action, the
definite
bent, which the mind takes from the habits of generations. * And thus
we
see to-day Jewish atheists of the most modern type who, by their
tendency
to regard senseless hypotheses or mere makeshift conceptions of science
as material, actual facts, by their total incapacity to rise above the
narrow historical standpoint, by their talent for planning impossible
*
If
we reckon twenty-four years as a generation, which is not exaggerated
considering
how soon the Jews are mature, the Jew of to-day belongs on an average
to
the hundredth generation since the return from Babylon and the founding
of Judaism. That holds of the male line of descent; an unbroken female
line would be in about the one hundred and fiftieth generation.
483 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
socialistic and economic Messianic
empires
without inquiring whether they thereby destroy the whole of the
civilisation
and culture which we have so slowly acquired, by their childish belief
that with decrees and laws the souls of the people can be changed from
to-day to to-morrow, by their lack of understanding for everything
genuinely
great outside the narrow limits of their own circle of thought, end by
their ridiculous overestimation of every Lilliputian intellectual work
which has a Jew for its author — we see, I say, such so-called
free-thinkers
who prove themselves to be genuine children of the religion of the
Thora
and the Talmud in a much more thorough and striking fashion than many a
pious Rabbi who exercises the lofty virtues of humility and obedience
to
the law, united with love to neighbour, sympathy with the poor,
tolerance
towards the Gentile, and lives in such a way that he would be an honour
to any nation and a glory to any religion.
THE
LAW
Now in spite of
all,
there is greatness in the specifically Jewish theory of life, and I
have
already hinted in a former part of the chapter what makes this
greatness
(see p. 390 f.). Even if, as Robertson Smith assures us, the
purely
pecuniary interests of the priestly noble caste and their political
ambition
may have weighed in the momentous decision to centralise the cult in
the
one city Jerusalem, * yet I am convinced that barren, critical minds
always
attach far too much importance to such considerations. We cannot, by
purely
egoistic consideration of interests, found a nation which survives
being
scattered; such a belief is an error of judgment. †
* Prophets
of Israel, p. 365.
† A
really classical example of this so-called critical but in reality just
as uncritical as inappreciative method is seen in Professor Hermann
Oldenberg's
Religion
des Veda, where the symbolism and the mysticism of the Hindoos are
represented continuously as priestly swindle!
484 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Neither can we see that Ezekiel,
Ezra
and Nehemiah, who bore the burden and the danger, had any personal
advantage
in the matter. In fact idealism was required to leave Babylon for
Jerusalem;
the more luxurious, worldly-minded men remained in the metropolis on
the
Euphrates. In aftertimes too the Jew was always better off abroad than
at home, and the Rabbi who earned his scanty livelihood by tailoring
and
cobbling and then devoted all his leisure hours to the study of the
script,
to teaching and discussion, was anything but a pursuer of pecuniary
interests.
An egoist certainly, a fanatical egoist, but only for his nation, not
for
himself personally. Here, therefore, as everywhere the ideal sentiment
is the only one which has power to create and to maintain, and even the
religion of materialism rests upon it. These men forged; that is beyond
question. And forging history is in a sense worse than forging cheques;
its consequences may be immeasurable; the many millions who were
massacred
by or for Christianity, * as well as the many Jews who died for their
faith,
are all victims of the forgeries of Ezra and the great synagogue. But
we
cannot suspect the motives of these men, They acted in the greatest
despair;
they wished to accomplish the impossible — to save their nation from
downfall.
Certainly a noble goal! They could conquer only by the employment of
the
most extreme means. It was a delusive but not an ignoble aim, for above
all they wished to serve their God. “I shall be sanctified in the sight
of the heathen“ (Ezekiel xxviii. 25); “this people have I formed
for myself; they shall show forth my praise“ (Isaiah xliii. 21,
postexilic interpolation). If the Jewish people disappeared, Jehovah
remained
behind unhonoured. That the founders of Judaism
*
Voltaire
in his article Dieu et les hommes gives a detailed calculation,
according to which ten million human beings fell victims to the
Christian
Church doctrine, but everywhere he has reduced the numbers very much,
sometimes
by half, so as not to be charged with exaggeration.
485 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
thought so purely and unselfishly,
that
they raised their eyes to a God, was the source of their strength. The
idea of isolating the nation by forbidding mixed marriages, and of
rearing
a noble race from the hopelessly mongrel Israelite, is nothing if not
brilliant;
equally so the idea of representing the purity of the race as an
historical
legacy, as the special, characteristic feature of the Jew. In this
connection
the whole law should be mentioned; for it was by this law that they
succeeded
in banishing every thought but the thought of Jehovah in making the
people
really “sacred“ in the Semitic sense. A Jewish writer informs us that
“for
the Sabbath alone there are thirty-nine chapters of forbidden
occupations,
and every chapter had sub-divisions ad infinitum.“ * Moses is
said
to have been taught three hundred and sixty-five prohibitions and two
hundred
and sixty-four commands on Mount Sinai, † and this only provides the
preliminary
scaffolding for the detailed “law.“ Montefiore asserts also that the
obeying
of the law had soon become with the Jew the ruling thought to such an
extent
that it was for him the summum bonum, the best, noblest and
sweetest
occupation in the world. ‡ While memory and taste were thus paralysed,
the faculty of judgment was simply broken by the law; a poor woman who
on the Sabbath gathered dry wood for her fire committed, by this
transgression
of the law, as great a
*
Montefiore:
Religion
of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 504.
†
Talmud,
Treatise Maccoth, Div. 3 (according to Grünwald).
‡
Montefiore,
p. 530. “The huge number of ceremonial prescriptions is the high
privilege
of Israel,“ says the Talmud (Montefiore, p. 535), and in Lamentations
(falsely ascribed to Jeremiah) we read: “It is good for a man that he
bear
the yoke in his youth. He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there
may be hope“ (iii. 27, 29). For the opposite view one should read the
beautiful
remarks in Kant's Anthropologie, § 10 a, concerning
religious
obligations, in which the great thinker expresses the opinion that
nothing
is more difficult for a sensible man than “the commands of a bustling
do-nothingness
(Nichts-thuerei), such as those which Judaism established.“
486
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
crime as if she had broken her
marriage
vow. * ... I say, therefore, that the men who founded Judaism were not
impelled by evil, selfish motives, but goaded on by a demoniacal power,
such as only honest fanatics can possess; for the terrible work which
they
completed is perfect in every point.
THE
THORA
The everlasting
monument
of this perfection is their Thora, the books of the Old Testament. Here
history again shapes history! What scientific work could ever hope to
exercise
such an influence upon the life of humanity? It has frequently been
asserted
that the Jew lacks imaginative power; the study of this remarkable book
must teach us something different. At least they acquired this power in
their direst need and created a true work of art, for in this history
of
the world, which begins with the erection of heaven and earth, to end
with
the future kingdom of God upon earth, all perspective relations serve
to
emphasise especially the one central thing — the Jewish people. And
wherein
lies the strength of this people — that vigour which so far has
successfully
defied every destiny — wherein, if not in this book? We have learned
that
the Israelites in former times were in no way distinguished from the
neighbouring
Hebrew races; we saw in the Syrian-Hittites an exceedingly hardy but
remarkably
“anonymous“ human type without physiognomy, the nose being more
prominent
than anything else. And the Judeans? They were so unwarlike, so
unreliable
as soldiers, that their king had to entrust the country and his person
to the protection of mercenary troops; they had so little enterprise
that
the mere sight of the sea, on which their kinsmen,
*
According
to the law (see Num. xv. 32-36) she must be punished with death.
487 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Phoenicians, had attained such
brilliant
fortunes, frightened them; so little capacity for industry that for
every
undertaking artists and overseers, and for the finer pieces of work
even
artisans, had to be procured from the neighbouring lands; they were so
little adapted to agriculture that in this (as is clear from many
passages
of the Bible and the Talmud) the Canaanites not only remained their
teachers
but also the labour element in the country. * Indeed, even in purely
political
matters they were such opponents of all stable, ordered conditions that
no sensible form of government could exist among them, and from first
to
last they were always most comfortable under the yoke of a foreign
Power,
which did not, however, prevent them from trying to throw it off....
Such
a people seems predestined to disappear quickly from the history of the
world; and in fact of the other, much more vigorous, half-Semitic races
of that time only the names are now known. What saved the small people
of the Jews from the same destiny? What kept it together when it was
scattered
over the world? What made it possible for the new world-principle of
Christianity
to spring from its midst? This book alone. It would lead us too far if
we were to analyse the distinctive features of this book which has
played
such a part in history. Goethe writes concerning it in one passage:
“These
writings are so happily grouped that from the most alien elements a
delusive
whole presents itself to us. They are complete enough to satisfy us,
fragmentary
enough to stimulate us, sufficiently barbaric to provoke us,
sufficiently
tender to soothe us.“ Herder explains the widespread influence of the
Old
*
Thence
it is that one of the worst threats against the Jews, if they did not
keep
Jehovah's commandments, was that “they would have to do their own work,
instead of getting it done by others“ (Talmud, Treatise Berachot,
chap. vi., according to Grünwald). The idea that “the sons of the
alien shall be the ploughmen and the vine-dressers“ is also found (as a
prophecy) in Isaiah lxi. 5.
488 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Testament principally from the fact
that “it satisfied the human craving for knowledge by furnishing for
such
questions as the age and the creation of the world, the origin of evil,
&c., popular answers that every one understands and can easily
grasp.“
Thus we see how this book meets the demands of the educated mind and of
the man of the people — of the one, because it admires the daring
arbitrariness
in the “delusive whole“; of the other, because the mystery of existence
is, like Jehovah behind the temple curtain, concealed from his gaze,
and
he receives to every question “popular answers.“ This book marks the
triumph
of materialistic philosophy. In truth no small achievement! It
signifies
the victory of will over understanding and every further effort of
creative
imagination. Such a work could be created only by pious sentiment and
demoniacal
power.
We cannot understand
Judaism and its power, as well as its ineradicable tenacity, we cannot
form a just and proper estimate of the Jew among ourselves, his
character
and way of thinking, until we have recognised his demoniacal genius and
can explain its growth. Here it is a struggle of one against all; this
one has taken upon himself every sacrifice and every shame, in order at
some time, no matter when, to enter into the Messianic empire of
supreme
power, to the eternal glory of Jehovah. The Talmud thus expresses it:
“Just
as thy oppression will follow from transgressing the law, so obedience
to it will be rewarded by the fact that thou thyself wilt one day
command“
(Aboth iv. 5; after Montefiore).
JUDAISM
One more word in
conclusion.
My reply to the question, Who is the Jew? has been, in the first place,
to point out whence he came, what was his physical foundation, and
secondly,
to reveal the leading idea of Judaism in its origin
489 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
and nature. I cannot do more; for
the
personality belongs to the single individual, and nothing is falser
than
the widespread procedure of judging a people by individuals. I have
brought
forward neither the “good“ Jew nor the “bad“ Jew; “no one is good,“
said
Jesus Christ, and when is a man so utterly despicable that we would be
inclined to call him unconditionally bad? Before me are lying several
criminal
statistics; the one set tries to prove that the Jews are the most pious
and lamb-like citizens of Europe, the others assert the opposite. How
both
conclusions are juggled out of the same figures beats me, but I am
still
more surprised that people should imagine that this is the way to deal
with the psychology of nations. No one steals for the pleasure of it,
unless
he is a kleptomaniac. Is the man who through need or in consequence of
a bad example steals, necessarily a bad man, and he who has not the
least
occasion to do so a good one? Luther says: “Whoever steals bread from
the
baker without being forced by hunger is a thief; if he is forced by
hunger
he acts rightly, for people ought to give to him.“ Give me a statistic
which shows how many people who live in direst need, oppression and
abandonment,
do not become criminals; from it one might eventually draw some
conclusions
— yet no very far-reaching ones. Were not the ancestors of our feudal
nobility
highway robbers? and are their descendants not proud of it? Did the
Popes
not have kings assassinated by hired murderers? And in our present
civilised
society are not lying and misleading recognised in high diplomacy? Let
us therefore leave morality alone, as also the almost equally slippery
question of predisposition; that there are more Jewish than European
lawyers
in a country only proves that law pays there — nothing more; special
ability
has nothing to do with it.... In all these things, especially if they
are
presented statistically, we can prove anything. On the other hand, the
two facts of
490 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
race and ideal are fundamental.
There
are no good and bad men, at least for us, but only before God, for the
word “good“ refers to a moral estimation, and this again depends on a
knowledge
of motive, which can never be revealed. “Who can know the heart?“ was
the
cry of Jeremiah (xvii. 9). * On the other hand there are certainly good
and bad races, for here we have to deal with physical relations,
general
laws of organic nature, which have been experimentally investigated —
relations
in which, in contrast to those mentioned above figures provide
irrefutable
proofs — relations concerning which the history of humanity offers us
abundant
information. And scarcely less manifest are the leading ideas. In
reference
to race these must in the first place be looked upon as a consequence;
but one should not underestimate this inner, invisible anatomy, this
purely
spiritual dolichocephaly and brachycephaly, which as cause also has a
wide
range of influence. Hence it is that every strong nation has so much
power
of assimilation. The entrance into a new union in the first place
changes
not a fibre of the physical structure, and only very slowly, in the
course
of generations, affects the blood; but ideas have a more rapid effect,
because they direct the whole personality almost at once into new
channels.
And the Jewish national idea seems to exercise a particularly strong
influence,
perhaps for the very reason that in this case the nation exists merely
as an idea and never, from the beginning of Judaism, was it a “normal“
nation, but above all, a thought, a hope. It is therefore quite wrong,
in the case of the Jews especially, to lay much weight — as Renan for
example
was fond of doing in his last years — upon the adoption of alien blood
which took place from time to time. Renan knew better than anybody else
*
As
Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason says (in explaining the
cosmological
idea of freedom): “The real morality of actions (merit and guilt)
remains
quite concealed from us, even in the case of our own conduct.“
491
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
that the conversion of Greeks and
Romans
to Judaism was an absolutely unimportant phenomenon. What were those
“Hellenes“
from Antioch, of whom he tells us in his lecture “Judaïsme,
race
ou religion“? and who are said to have been converted in crowds to
Judaism, a fact for which we possess only the evidence of a very
unreliable
Jew, Josephus? They were Hebrew-Syrian mongrels, in whose veins
probably
not a drop of Greek blood flowed. And those “Romans,“ for whom Renan
quotes
the evidence of Juvenal (Sat. xvi. 95 f.)? The dregs of the
people
composed of the freed Asiatic and African slaves. Let him name one
single
Roman of importance who became a Jew! Such assertions are an
intentional
misleading of the unlearned public. But even if they were based on
truth
instead of arising out of bias and falsification, what would that
signify?
Are we to suppose that the Jewish national idea has not the force of
other
national ideas? On the contrary, it is more powerful, as I have shown,
than any other, and transforms men to its own image. One does not need
to have the authentic Hittite nose to be a Jew; the term Jew rather
denotes
a special way of thinking and feeling. A man can very soon become a Jew
without being an Israelite; often it needs only to have frequent
intercourse
with Jews, to read Jewish newspapers, to accustom himself to Jewish
philosophy,
literature and art. On the other hand, it is senseless to call an
Israelite
a “Jew,“ though his descent is beyond question, if he has succeeded in
throwing off the fetters of Ezra and Nehemiah, and if the law of Moses
has no place in his brain, and contempt of others no place in his
heart.
“What a prospect it would be,“ cries Herder, “to see the Jews purely
humanised
in their way of thinking!“ * But a purely humanised Jew is no longer a
Jew because, by renouncing the idea of Judaism, he ipso facto
has
left
* Adrastea
7, Stück V., Abschnitt “Fortsetzung.“
492 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
that nationality, which is composed
and held together by a complex of conceptions, by a “faith.“ With the
apostle
Paul we must learn that “he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he
is
a Jew who is one inwardly“ (Rom. ii. 28-29).
Now such national
or religious ideals can exercise their revolutionising influence in two
ways, positive or negative. I have shown in the case of the Jews how a
handful of men forced a definite national idea upon a people not at all
inclined to accept it, and so impressed the stamp of this idea upon it
that it would seem impossible for that people to efface it; but
consanguinity
and congeniality were necessary for the accomplishment of this. In this
case, then, the idea exercised a positively creative influence. Just as
remarkable a case is the sudden conversion of the bloodthirsty, wild
Mongolians
by the adoption of the Buddhist faith to mild, pious men, a third of
whom
have become monks. * But an idea can also have a purely negative
result;
it can lead a man out of his own course without opening up another
which
is suited to his race. A well-known example is the way in which
Mohammedanism
has affected the Turkomans: by adopting the fatalistic view of the
world
this wildly energetic people has gradually sunk into complete
passivity.
If the Jewish influence were to gain the upper hand in Europe in the
intellectual
and cultural sphere, we should have one more example of negative,
destructive
power.
I have thus pointed
out the method adopted by me and its chief results; I cannot otherwise
summarise this chapter. Formulae are mere phrases in respect of organic
phenomena. The anecdote Le voilà, le chameau! is well
known.
Such a pretension is ridiculous even in respect of the camel, and it
would
never occur to me to close this sketch with generalisations and
formulae,
as
* Cf.
Döllinger; Akademische Vorträge i. 8.
493 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
if I should say, Le
voilà,
le juif! For the theme is inexhaustible and unfathomable; I have
scarcely
used the twentieth part of my illustrations and notes: But my belief is
that every one who reads this chapter will feel qualified to form a
sharper
and clearer judgment of Judaism and its product, the Jew. From this
judgment
will follow of itself the answer to the question, What is the
significance
of the entrance of the Jew into the history of the West? It is not my
task
to trace this influence century by century. The indirect influence of
Judaism
on Christianity was and still is immense; its direct influence on the
nineteenth
century appears for the first time as a new influence in the history of
culture: it thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day, and I
have felt bound therefore to lay a sound foundation for its
appreciation.
Towards this end neither the passionate assertions of the Anti-Semites,
nor the dogmatic platitudes of the humanitarians, nor even the many
learned
books, theological or archaeological, from which I have gathered the
materials
for this chapter, give us any assistance. In the task imposed upon me
by
necessity, I hope I have not striven in vain to arrive at a clear
understanding.
We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present,
but
also the future of the world.
Last
update: January 13th, 2008
