Chosen Peoples
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Israel Zangwill >> Chosen Peoples
IV
Israel disappears, too, in whole books of the Old Testament. What has
the problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of
Ecclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would
scarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentially
rooted in a race.
In the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ--half Whitman, half St.
Francis--not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under the
benediction of the Hebrew poet's mood. "The high hills are for the
wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.... The young lions
roar after their prey, and seek their food from God ... man goeth
forth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening." Even in a
more primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism reveals
itself. To the bard of Genesis the rainbow betokens not merely a
covenant between God and man but a "covenant between God and every
living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."
That the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist in
face of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He shares
in the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in his
finely felt but intellectually incoherent book, "God the Invisible
King," dismisses Him as a malignant and partisan Deity, jealous and
pettily stringent. At most one is entitled to say with Mr. Israel
Abrahams in his profound little book on "Judaism" that "God, in the
early literature a tribal, non-moral Deity, was in the later
literature a righteous ruler, who, with Amos and Hosea, loved and
demanded righteousness in man," and that there was an expansion from a
national to a universal Ruler. But if "by early literature" anybody
understand simply Genesis, if he imagines that the evolutionary
movement in Judaism proceeds regularly from Abraham to Isaiah, he is
grossly in error. No doubt all early gods are tribal, all early
religions connected with the hearth and ancestor worship, but the God
of Isaiah is already in Genesis, and the tribal God has to be exhumed
from practically all parts of the Bible. But even in the crudities of
Genesis or Judges that have escaped editorship I cannot find Mr.
Wells's "malignant" Deity--_He_ is really "the invisible King." The
very first time Jehovah appears in His tribal aspect (Genesis xii.)
His promise to bless Abraham ends with the assurance--and it almost
invariably accompanies all the repetitions of the promise--"And in
thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." Nay, as I
pointed out in my essay on "The Gods of Germany," the very first words
of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"
strike a magnificent note of universalism, which is sustained in the
derivation of all humanity from Adam, and again from Noah, with one
original language. Nor is this a modern gloss, for the Talmud already
deduces the interpretation. Racine's "Esther" in the noble lines
lauded by Voltaire might be almost rebuking Mr. Wells:--
Ce Dieu, maitre absolu de la terre et des cieux,
N'est point tel que l'erreur le figure a vos yeux:
L'Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouvrage;
Il entend les soupirs de l'humble qu'on outrage,
Juge tous les mortels avec d'egales lois,
Et du haut de son trone interroge les rois.
--there is the true Hebrew note, the note denounced of Nietzsche.
Is this notorious "tribal God" the God of the Mesopotamian sheikh
whose seed was so invidiously chosen? Well, but of this God Abraham
asks--in what I must continue to call the epochal sentence in the
Bible--"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham, in
fact, bids God down as in some divine Dutch auction--Sodom is not to
be destroyed if it holds fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, nay
ten righteous men. Compare this ethical development of the ancestor of
Judaism with that of Pope Gregory XIII, in the sixteenth century, some
thirty-one centuries later: _Civitas ista potest esse destrui quando
in ea plures sunt haeretici_ ("A city may be destroyed when it harbours
a number of heretics"). And this claim of man to criticize God Jehovah
freely concedes. Thus the God of Abraham is no God of a tribe, but,
like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God
of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century
Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the
human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the
Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and
more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free
thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and
the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians
speak, saying, For evil did He bring them forth to slay them in the
mountains...? Turn from Thy fierce wrath and repent of this evil
against Thy people." Moses goes on to remind Him of the covenant, "And
the Lord repented of the evil which He said He would do unto His
people." In the same chapter, the people having made a golden calf,
Moses offers his life for their sin; the Old Testament here, as in so
many places, anticipating the so-called New, but rejecting the notion
of vicarious atonement so drastically that the attempt of dogmatic
Christianity to base itself on the Old Testament can only be described
as text-blind. And the great answer of Jehovah to Moses's
questioning--"I AM THAT I AM"--yields already the profound
metaphysical Deity of Maimonides, that "invisible King" whom the
anonymous New Year liturgist celebrates as:
Highest divinity,
Dynast of endlessness,
Timeless resplendency,
Worshipped eternally,
Lord of Infinity!
And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and
that "a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows
that the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable
rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity;
while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth,"
with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite
woman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have,
in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces,
and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of
the latter is that the race being one with the religion could not
resist that religion's universal implications. If there were only a
single God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be
confined to Israel? The Mission could not but come. The true God,
urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through
idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind
seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been
the governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the origin
of the term Jew," says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. "The
name is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs of
this people, even though they be of different race." Where indeed lay
the privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a
non-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as
greater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila
and Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; while
the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless
accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte
Onkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinic
literature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque
conception of their status towards their former families, cannot
counterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work,
"The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans," that there was a carefully
planned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the
Pharisees: "Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte"? Do not
Juvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans
proselytised almost by force? "The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts,"
says Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, "became familiar facts in
all the great cities." And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion,
which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest
documents, declares in noble language: "There ought to be but one
Temple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He
is the common God of all men."
It would be a very tough tribal God that could survive worshippers of
this temper. An ancient Midrash taught that in the Temple there were
seventy sacrifices offered for the seventy nations. For the mediaeval
and rationalist Maimonides the election of Israel scarcely
exists--even the Messiah is only to be a righteous Conqueror, whose
success will be the test of his genuineness. And Spinoza--though he,
of course, is outside the development of the Synagogue proper--refused
to see in the Jew any superiority save of the sociological system for
ensuring his eternity. The comparatively modern Chassidism,
anticipating Mazzini, teaches that every nation and language has a
special channel through which it receives God's gifts. Of contemporary
Reform Judaism, the motto "Have we not one father, hath not one God
created us?" was formally adopted as the motto of the Congress of
Religions at Washington. "The forces of democracy _are_ Israel," cries
the American Jew, David Lubin, in an ultra-modern adaptation of the
Talmudic scale of values. There is, in fact, through our post-biblical
literature almost a note of apology for the assumption of the Divine
mission: perhaps it is as much the offspring of worldly prudence as of
spiritual progress. The Talmud observed that the Law was only given to
Israel because he was so peculiarly fierce he needed curbing. Abraham
Ibn Daud at the beginning of the twelfth century urged that God had to
reveal Himself to some nation to show that He did not hold Himself
aloof from the universe, leaving its rule to the stars: it is the very
argument as to the need for Christ employed by Mr. Balfour in his
"Foundations of Belief." Crescas, in the fourteenth century,
declared--like an earlier Buckle--that the excellence of the Jew
sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his
recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when Rabbi
Akiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all other
nations were idolaters. But in reality Akiba meant what he said--what
indeed had been said throughout the Bible from Deuteronomy downwards.
In the words of Hosea:
When Israel was a child, then I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called My son.
No evidence of the universalism of Israel's mission can away with the
fact that it was still _his_ mission, the mission of a Chosen People.
And this conviction, permeating and penetrating his whole literature
and broidering itself with an Oriental exuberance of legendary
fantasy, poetic or puerile, takes on in places an intimacy, sometimes
touching in its tender mysticism, sometimes almost grotesque in its
crude reminder to God that after all His own glory and reputation are
bound up with His people's, and that He must not go too far in His
chastisements lest the heathen mock. Reversed, this apprehension
produced the concept of the _Chillul Hashem_, "the profanation of the
Name." Israel, in his turn, was in honour bound not to lower the
reputation of the Deity, who had chosen him out. On the contrary, he
was to promote the _Kiddush Hashem_ "the sanctification of the Name."
Thus the doctrine of election made not for arrogance but for a sense
of _Noblesse oblige_. As the "Hymn of Glory" recited at New Year says
in a more poetic sense: "His glory is on me and mine on Him." "He
loves His people," says the hymn, "and inhabits their praises."
Indeed, according to Schechter, the ancient Rabbis actually conceived
God as existing only through Israel's continuous testimony and ceasing
were Israel--_per impossibile_--to disappear. It is a mysticism not
without affinity to Mr. Wells's. A Chassidic Rabbi, quoted by Mr.
Wassilevsky, teaches in the same spirit that God and Israel, like
Father and Son, are each incomplete without the other. In another
passage of Hosea--a passage recited at the everyday winding of
phylacteries--the imagery is of wedded lovers. "I will betroth thee
unto Me for ever, Yea I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness and
in judgment and in loving-kindness and in mercy."
But it is in the glowing, poetic soul of Jehuda Ha-Levi that this
election of Israel, like the passion for Palestine, finds its supreme
and uncompromising expression. "Israel," declares the author of the
"Cuzari" in a famous dictum, "is among the nations like the heart
among the limbs." Do not imagine he referred to the heart as a pump,
feeding the veins of the nations--Harvey was still five centuries in
the future--he meant the heart as the centre of feeling and the symbol
of the spirit. And examining the question why Israel had been thus
chosen, he declares plumply that it is as little worthy of
consideration as why the animals had not been created men. This is, of
course, the only answer. The wind of creation and inspiration bloweth
where it listeth. As Tennyson said in a similar connection:
And if it is so, so it is, you know,
And if it be so, so be it!
V
But although, as with all other manifestations of genius, Science
cannot tell us why the Jewish race was so endowed spiritually, it can
show us by parallel cases that there is nothing unique in considering
yourself a Chosen People--as indeed the accusation with which we began
reminds us. And it can show us that a nation's assignment of a mission
to itself is not a sudden growth. "Unlike any other nation," says the
learned and saintly leader of Reform Judaism, Dr. Kohler, in his
article on "Chosen People" in the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, "the Jewish
people began their career conscious of their life-purpose and
world-duty as the priests and teachers of a universal religious
truth." This is indeed a strange statement, and only on the theory
that its author was expounding the biblical standpoint, and not his
own, can it be reconciled with his general doctrine of progress and
evolution in Hebrew thought. It would seem to accept the Sinaitic
Covenant as a literal episode, and even to synchronise the Mission
with it. But an investigation of the history of other Chosen Peoples
will, I fear, dissipate any notion that the Sinaitic Covenant was
other than a symbolic summary of the national genius for religion, a
sublime legend retrospectively created. And the mission to other
nations must have been evolved still later. "The conception or feeling
of a mission grew up and was developed by slow degrees," says Mr.
Montefiore, and this sounds much nearer the truth. For, as I said,
history is the sole clue to the Bible--history, which according to
Bacon, is "philosophy teaching by example." And the more modern the
history is, and the nearer in time, the better we can understand it.
We have before our very eyes the moving spectacle of the newest of
nations setting herself through a President-Prophet the noblest
mission ever formulated outside the Bible. Through another great
prophet--sprung like Amos from the people--through Abraham Lincoln,
America had already swept away slavery. I do not know exactly when she
began to call herself "God's own country," but her National Anthem,
"My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from 1832, fixes the date when
America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814,
consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens
felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle
rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own
freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others.
From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting
Pot," with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the
world at large.
The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history.
That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission
of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach
undaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism
which finds such moving expression in the paean of Shakespeare:
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
. . . . . . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
. . . . . . .
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.
This sense of itself had been born only in the thirteenth century, and
at first the growing consciousness of national power, though it soon
developed an assurance of special protection--"the favour of the love
of Heaven," wrote Milton in his "Areopagitica," "we have great
argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending
towards us"--was tempered by that humility still to be seen in the
liturgy of its Church, which ascribes its victories not to the might
of the English arm, but to the favour of God. But one hundred and
twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the land which the Elizabethan
translators of the Bible called "Our Sion," and whose mission,
according to Milton, had been to sound forth "the first tidings and
trumpet of reformation to all Europe," had sunk to the swaggering
militarism that found expression in "Rule, Britannia."
When Britain first at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain:
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.
The nations not so blest as thee
Must in their turn to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish, great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
To thee belongs the rural reign,
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles, thine.
It is the true expression of its period--a period which Sir John
Seeley in his "Expansion of England" characterizes as the period of
the struggle with France for the possession of India and the New
World: there were no less than seven wars with France, for France had
replaced Spain in that great competition of the five western maritime
States of Europe for Transatlantic trade and colonies, in which Seeley
sums up the bulk of two centuries of European history. Well may Mr.
Chesterton point to the sinking of the Armada as the date when an Old
Testament sense of being "answered in stormy oracles of air and sea"
lowered Englishmen into a Chosen People. Shakespeare saw the sea
serving England in the modest office of a moat: it was now to be the
high-road of Empire. The Armada was shattered in 1588. In 1600 the
East India Company is formed to trade all over the world. In 1606 is
founded the British colony of Virginia and in 1620 New England. It
helps us to understand the dual and conflicting energies stimulated in
the atmosphere of celestial protection, if we recall that it was in
1604 that was initiated the great Elizabethan translation of the
Bible.
In Cromwell, that typical Englishman, these two strands of impulse
are seen united. Ever conceiving himself the servant of God, he seized
Jamaica in a time of profound peace and in defiance of treaty. Was not
Catholic Spain the enemy of God? _Delenda est Carthago_ is his feeling
towards the rival Holland. Miracles attend his battle. "The Lord by
his Providence put a cloud over the Moon, thereby giving us the
opportunity to draw off those horse." Yet this elect of God ruthlessly
massacres surrendered Irish garrisons. "Sir," he writes with almost
childish naivete, "God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon
shot." We do not need Carlyle's warning that he was not a hypocrite.
Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously like
Bismarck's that his deceased hero
The soldier taught that inward mail to wear
And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?
The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with
the universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous
tendency.
At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations.
But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty,
ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of
"Rule, Britannia" when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of
the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob
celebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade
in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the
Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is
not wholly true, for in "The Masque of Alfred" in which "Rule,
Britannia" is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of
the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic
excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the
grosser Hebrew prophecies:
I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:
All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,
Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,
he points to the virgin shores "beyond the vast Atlantic surge" and
cries:
This new world,
Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:
And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow
The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.
Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,
Awe with your navies every hostile land.
Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:
They rule the balanced world who rule the main.
But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written
expressly to persuade the England of 1883 _not_ to give up India and
the Colonies, to see how little "Rule, Britannia" expressed the truer
soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist
movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in
sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for
the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet
arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize
the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is
purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the
visions of the Hebrew bards.
The Lord our God Most High,
He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is
characteristically practical.
Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience;
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own,
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.
And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England
on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic
motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky,
agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British
imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how
the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how
the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward
rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from
the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining
road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not
unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot
the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves
purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the
tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of
retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that
great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland,
England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless
courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one
nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There
could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen
friend, the poet Vernede, yet even he writes:--
God grant to us the old Armada weather.
Thomson was not poet enough--nor the eighteenth century naive
enough--to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he
throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred
the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future
is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective
habit of national missions.
The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven
centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping
itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always
troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope
complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to