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CHOSEN PEOPLES
The American Jewish Book Company
New York
1921
Chosen Peoples
Copyright, 1919,
By The MacMillan Company.
Printed by
The Lord Baltimore Press
Baltimore, Md.
CHOSEN PEOPLES
Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture"
delivered before the Jewish Historical Society
at University College on Easter-Passover
Sunday, 1918/5678
TO
MRS. REDCLIFFE N. SALAMAN
THIS LITTLE BOOK IN HER
FATHER'S MEMORY
NOTE
The Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture was founded in 1917, under the
auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, by his
collaborators in the translation of "The Service of the Synagogue,"
with the object of fostering Hebraic thought and learning in honour of
an unworldly scholar. The Lecture is to be given annually in the
anniversary week of his death, and the lectureship is to be open to
men or women of any race or creed, who are to have absolute liberty in
the treatment of their subject.
FOREWORD
Mr. Arthur Davis, in whose memory has been founded the series of
Lectures devoted to the fostering of Hebraic thought and learning, of
which this is the first, was born in 1846 and died on the first day of
Passover, 1906. His childhood was spent in the town of Derby, where
there was then no Synagogue or Jewish minister or teacher of Hebrew.
Spontaneously he developed a strong Jewish consciousness, and an
enthusiasm for the Hebrew language, which led him to become one of its
greatest scholars in this, or any other, country.
He was able to put his learning to good use. He observed the wise
maxim of Leonardo da Vinci, "Avoid studies of which the result dies
with the worker." He was not one of those learned men, of whom there
are many examples--a recent and conspicuous instance was the late Lord
Acton--whose minds are so choked with the accumulations of the
knowledge they have absorbed that they can produce little or nothing.
His output, though not prolific, was substantial. In middle life he
wrote a volume on "The Hebrew Accents of the Twenty-one Books of the
Bible," which has become a classical authority on that somewhat
recondite subject. It was he who originated and planned the new
edition of the Festival Prayer Book in six volumes, and he wrote most
of the prose translations. When he died, though only two volumes out
of the six had been published, he left the whole of the text complete.
To Mr. Herbert M. Adler, who had been his collaborator from the
beginning, fell the finishing of the great editorial task.
Not least of his services lay in the fact that he had transmitted much
of his knowledge to his two daughters, who have worthily continued his
tradition of Hebrew scholarship and culture.
Arthur Davis's life work, then, was that of a student and interpreter
of Hebrew. It is a profoundly interesting fact that, in our age,
movements have been set on foot in more than one direction for the
revival of languages which were dead or dying. We see before our eyes
Welsh and Irish in process of being saved from extinction, with the
hope perhaps of restoring their ancient glories in poetry and prose.
Such movements show that our time is not so utilitarian and
materialistic as is often supposed. A similar revivifying process is
affecting Hebrew. For centuries it has been preserved as a ritual
language, sheltered within the walls of the Synagogue; often not fully
understood, and never spoken, by the members of the congregations. Now
it is becoming in Palestine once more a living and spoken language.
Hebrew is one example among many of a language outliving for purposes
of ritual its use in ordinary speech. A ritual is regarded as a sacred
thing, unchanging, and usually unchangeable, except as the result of
some great religious upheaval. The language in which it is framed
continues fixed, amid the slowly developing conditions of the workaday
world. Often, indeed, the use of an ancient language, which has
gradually fallen into disuse among the people, is deliberately
maintained for the air of mystery and of awe which is conveyed by its
use, and which has something of the same effect upon the intellect as
the "dim religious light" of a cathedral has upon the emotions.
Further, it reserves to the priesthood a kind of esoteric knowledge,
which gives them an additional authority that they would desire to
maintain. So we find that in the days of Marcus Aurelius an ancient
Salian liturgy was used in the Roman temples which had become almost
unintelligible to the worshippers. The ritual of the religion of Isis
in Greece was, at the same period, conducted in an unknown tongue. In
the present age Church Slavonic, the ecclesiastical language of the
orthodox Slavs, is only just intelligible to the peasantry of Russia
and the neighbouring Slav countries. The Buddhists of China conduct
their services in Sanscrit, which neither the monks nor the people
understand, and the services of the Buddhists in Japan are either in
Sanscrit or in ancient Chinese. I believe it is a fact that in
Abyssinia, again, the liturgy is in a language called Geez, which is
no longer in use as a living tongue and is not understood.
But we need not go to earlier centuries or to distant countries for
examples. In any Roman Catholic church in London to-day you will find
the service conducted in a language which, if understood at all by
the general body of the congregation, has been learnt by them only for
the purposes of the liturgy.
Of all these ritual languages which have outlived their current use
and have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so
far as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of
renewing its old vitality--like the roses of Jericho which appear to
be dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their
vitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in
Palestine Hebrew may recover something of its old supremacy in the
field of morals and of intellect.
To render this possible the work of scholars such as Arthur Davis has
contributed. To him this was a labour of love, and for love. He would
receive no payment for any of his religious work or writings. Part of
the profits that accrued from the publication of his edition of "The
Services of the Synagogue" has been devoted to the formation of a fund
from which will be defrayed the expenses--after the first--of a series
of annual lectures on subjects of Jewish interest, to be delivered by
men of various schools of thought. We are fortunate that the initial
lecture is to be delivered to-day by the most distinguished of living
Jewish men of letters.
Arthur Davis was a man of much elevation and charm of character. He
took an active part in the work of communal, and particularly
educational, organizations. He was one of those men--not rare among
Jews, though the rest of the world does not always recognize it--who
are philanthropic in spirit, practical in action, modest,
self-sacrificing, devoted to a fine family life, having in them much
of the student and something even of the saint. It is fitting that his
memory should be kept alive.
HERBERT SAMUEL.
CHOSEN PEOPLES
I
The claim that the Jews are a "Chosen People" has always irritated the
Gentiles. "From olden times," wrote Philostratus in the third century,
"the Jews have been opposed not only to Rome but to the rest of
humanity." Even Julian the Apostate, who designed to rebuild their
Temple, raged at the doctrine of their election. Sinai, said the
Rabbis with a characteristic pun, has evoked _Sinah_ (hatred).
In our own day, the distinguished ethical teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit,
complains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and
blighted all other national inspiration: in his book "The Soul of
America," he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally "the claim
to spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world."
The recent revelation of racial arrogance in Germany has provided our
enemies with a new weapon. "Germanism is Judaism," says a writer in
the American _Bookman_. The proposition contains just that dash of
truth which is more dangerous than falsehood undiluted; and the saying
ascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his time
praying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. "As he talks
to-day at Potsdam and Berlin," says Verhaeren, in his book "Belgium's
Agony," "the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousand
years ago at Jerusalem." The chronology is characteristic of
anti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew
reckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of
Jerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, like
Judaism, has evolved a doctrine of special election. Spiritual in the
teaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross and
narrow in the _Deutsche Religion_ of Friedrich Lange. "The German
people is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of the
Lord." And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a
"Man of War" who demands "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and cries
with savage sublimity:--
I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries,
And will recompense them that hate Me,
I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood,
And my sword shall devour flesh.
Judaism has even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by
Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is
a byword. "We utterly destroyed every city," Deuteronomy declares;
"the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining;
only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of
the cities." David, who is promised of God that his seed shall be
enthroned for ever, slew surrendered Moabites in cold blood, and Judas
Maccabaeus, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral city
of Ephron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male in
it, and passed across its burning ruins and bleeding bodies. The
prophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations--the phrase is his, not
Adam Smith's--streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. "For that
nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.... Aliens
shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee.
Thou shalt suck the milk of nations." "The Lord said unto me," says
the second Psalm, "Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask
of Me and I will give the nations for thine inheritance.... Thou shalt
break them with a rod of iron."
Nor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. Every
Saturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for material
prosperity and the promise of ultimate glory: "Thou shalt lend unto
many nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many
nations but they shall not rule over thee." "Our Father, our King," he
prays at the New Year, "avenge before our eyes the blood of Thy
servants that has been spilt." And at the Passover Seder Service he
still repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath on
the heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling.
"Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the
Lord!"
II
Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or
egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia,
which Napoleon wittily described as "hatched from a cannon-ball,"
should be found really resembling Judaea, whose national greeting was
"Peace"; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and
thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity;
whose mediaeval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might
be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy "that planned
in secret, performed in daring." And, as a matter of fact, some of
these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic
prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework:
the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is
to be avenged is the blood of martyrs "who went through fire and water
for the sanctification of Thy name."
But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore--as
completely as Jesus did--that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had
been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early
Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy
of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the
Lord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck
over Belgium and not of a mediaeval Jew over the desolated home of
Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the
other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she
would like to kill every German--man or woman--with her own hand!
And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its
historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James
Hinton, "The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it."
And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen
People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can
give us the clue to the Bible. This is the only "Guide to the
Perplexed," and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when
by allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he
laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the
effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The
_Baraitha_ of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third
text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that
distorted dialectic known as _Pilpul_. The only true "Conciliador" is
history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing
rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere--or rather everywhere. The
same method that softened the Oriental amorousness of "The Song of
Solomon" into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in the
hands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church.
But if Reason cannot always--as Bachya imagined--_confirm_ tradition,
it can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands
from the higher in that motley collection of national literature
which, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with
strayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the
apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes of
even a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when
put forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as
uniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people
that produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and
canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because
occasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths
there is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery.
III
As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his "Biblical Archaeology" and as Sir
James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual
is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides
himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a
purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and
gradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with
practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries
of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly
beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has
replaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was
wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes
the angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when My
creatures are perishing?" The very miracles of the Old Testament were
side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special
creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went
its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages,
is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of
the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered
with the voting on a legal point, _en mashgichin be-bathkol_--"We
cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not
heaven"--was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason
and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the
era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the
Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking.
Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and
saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from
Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has
been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never
to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a
reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the
masses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new
back again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously
forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, "a
veritable museum of relics," or as whales have vestiges of hind legs
with now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had
begun to evolve "the service of the Synagogue," but it did not shed
the animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the
destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs
substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the
ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the
Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular
imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing
Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that
Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago.
The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that
is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by
Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated
with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for
universal salvation, that the more material prophecies--evoked
moreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to
foretell restoration and glory--are practically swamped. At the worst,
we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are
in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the
other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to
understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's,
if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is
consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are
rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own
individual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus
looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the
right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the
balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of
idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate
serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When
he brought the Roman ensigns with Caesar's effigies to Jerusalem, the
Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling
deification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers
and menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and
went home. "But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their
necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather
than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed." And Pilate,
touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the
Jews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.
"God's witnesses," "a light of the nations," "a suffering servant," "a
kingdom of priests"--the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission
are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur
are unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion
with poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of
Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of
the Bible we owe to America.)
Behold My servant whom I uphold;
Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth;
I have put My spirit upon him,
He shall make the right to go forth to the nations:
He shall not fail or be crushed
Till he have set the right on the earth,
And the isles shall wait for his teaching.
Thus saith God the LORD,
He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth,
He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it,
He that giveth bread unto the people upon it,
And spirit to them that walk therein:
I the LORD have called thee in righteousness,
And have taken hold of thy hand,
And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people,
For a light of the nations;
To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.
Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all
civilization. "Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a
mighty stream." "Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither
shall there be war any more."
Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external
triumph. "Despised and forsaken of men," Isaiah paints Israel. "Yet he
bore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ...
with his stripes we were healed."
Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or
Matthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that
this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less
understood of the world. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast
chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law." Here is no
choice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that
"from Zion shall the Law go forth" it is obvious what that servant's
task is to be. "What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of
Israel," says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist?
Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. "A Law, and
commandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us." Before
these were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records,
Israel was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them could
he enjoy peculiar favour. "Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My
voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure
from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be
unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation." A chosen people is
really a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that
the Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel
accepted the yoke.
How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People
postulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr.
Lucien Wolf once urged that "the yoke of the Torah" had fashioned a
racial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over
average humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperance
and family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and
brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to
invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen.
But whether this general superiority--a superiority not inconsistent
with grave failings and drawbacks--is due to the rigorous selection of
a tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu
maintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years
than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the
people, or the people--precisely because of its greatness--made the
Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial
election to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or
aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic
altruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed--when one considers the
impress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and
imagination of the world--might well be credited with the intuition of
genius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the
Jews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would have
the ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that
election is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely
for world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when
fashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the
consummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but
the symbol. It is with _Alenu_ that every service ends--the prayer
for the coming of the Kingdom of God, "when Thou wilt remove the
abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off,
when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty and
all the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn
unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth.... In that day the Lord
shall be One and His name One." Israel disappears altogether in this
diurnal aspiration.