Chosen Peoples
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Israel Zangwill >> Chosen Peoples
Magic casements opening on the foam
Of faery lands in perilous seas forlorn.
But Israel had abundant time to perfect her conception of herself.
From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the
race are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a process
analogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into
a People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel was
inscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence
elsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord
would write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which
Britain received when "first at Heaven's command" she "rose from out
the azure main," or than that _Contrat Social_ by which Rousseau
expressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this is
not to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these vitalizing
impulses "Life-illusions," but the criteria of objective truth do not
apply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when
nations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution
rob them of their mystery. _Hamlet_ is not less inspired because
Shakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers.
If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under
its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical
vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal
tendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:--
O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat aether.
The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II,
assured the monarch:--
Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!
Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,
More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.
The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be "in
pursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the
Earth."
VI
Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that
"Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If
Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where
it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its
citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves
to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has
unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common
British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather
with Japan than with Judaea. For in Japan, too, beneath all the
romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the
individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of
those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely
existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the
State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater
scale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life
from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its
subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has
given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth."
Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw
clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that
"in which the slow suicide of all is called Life," and "a welcome
service unto all preachers of death"--a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous
idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "We
are," boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and the
Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible."
But Germany was not always thus. "High deeds, O Germans, are to come
from you," wrote Wordsworth in his "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty." And
it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she
lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her
by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness--to penetrate the life of
humanity by her religion--and he denounced the dreams of universal
monarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on his
people as "the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan,"
"To you," he says, "out of all other modern nations the germs of human
perfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of
mind and reason--to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the
ruler of the world." And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in
what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the
Goths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide
of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant
and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist
as Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied
that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they,
"by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of
their inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers": and in
curiously prophetic language he called for a hero "to realize by blood
and iron the political regeneration of Germany."
If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for
his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to
hold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the
world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as
the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as
Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: "If the devil knew he had
horns the cherubim would offer him their place." And though it was only
in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the
Will-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the "blood and iron" of
Junkerdom that perverted Prussia--Junkerdom still lives simply--as the
gross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. A
modern German author describes his countrymen--it is true he has turned
Mohammedan, probably out of disgust--as tragically degenerated and
turned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This
industrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by
Verhaeren--attacking Judaism from another angle--ascribed to its Jews,
so it is comforting to remember that when England started the East
India Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is
clearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in Prussia
England meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more
conscious and consequent than her "Rule, Britannia" period, with a
ruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While
England's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany's
right hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinister
activities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel--"The Sense of
the Past"--a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get
back to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization.
Nor is the civilization that followed the struggle for America by the
scramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for
the first melee and smarting under centuries of humiliation--did not
Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?--is avenging on our century the
sins of the seventeenth.
So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are
to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded
Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the
same alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the
armies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning
back the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was
approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of
war. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell,
but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates
the Puritan with the Cavalier. "From childhood," he is quoted as
saying, "I have been under the influence of five men--Alexander,
Julius Caesar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon." No
great man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical
greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus
were "the Kings of Jerusalem" even "six thousand years ago." Our kings
had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the
Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight
qualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a
good name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem
"Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in
the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference
between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his
enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and
violence, "and precious will their blood be in his sight."
VII
If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between
Judaism and Germanism, it would be the word "Recessional." While the
prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation,
the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. "You only have I
known among all the families of the earth," says the message through
Amos. "_Therefore_ I will visit upon you all your iniquities." The
Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. "Israel is the
villain, not the hero, of his own story." Alone among epics, it is out
for truth, not high heroics. To flout the Pharisees was not reserved
for Jesus. "Behold, ye fast for strife and contention," said Isaiah,
"and to smite with the fist of wickedness." While some German writers,
not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced,
vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael
Angelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposes
the flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracity
unknown among other peoples--is even Washington's story told without
gloss?--that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancient
savagery. "The title of a nation to its territory," says Seeley, "is
generally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if we
could recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre." The
dispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New
Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this
universal process is sophisticated.
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,
the AEneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the
contemporary ideal backwards--as all missons are put--and into the
prophetic mouth of Jove:--
Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.
It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy
Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him:
"Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost
thou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations
the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee."
In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded long
before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was to
reveal himself "first to His Englishmen," added that they "mark not
the methods of His counsel and are unworthy."
"Is India free," wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure from
actual warfare," sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell the
war-whoop." For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the
nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a "History of England" in
the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes "who loved fields
and seized them." But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the
chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian
Harden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the
only real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the
literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm,
ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding
any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its
most popular work--Lazarus's "Soziale Ethik im Judentum"--published as
late as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews--a grave
indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly
explaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the
individual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that
what unites individuals separates nations. "The work of justice shall
be peace," he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old
Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent--indeed,
we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary
that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and
that another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie des
Krieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men
to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest
and most practical treatise on "Perpetual Peace" came from that other
German professor, Kant, the hope is not altogether _ausgechlossen_ that
in the internal convulsion that must follow the war, there may be an
upheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proud
to say that it _is_ Judaism.
VIII
But meantime we are waiting, and the soul "waiteth for the Lord more
than watchmen look for the morning, yea, more than watchmen for the
morning." Again, as in earlier periods of history, the world lies in
darkness, listening to the silence of God--a silence that can be felt.
"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient
Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from
empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an
inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since.
Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded
Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes,
began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the
discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St.
Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet
this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on
the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no
contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But
that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril
from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus.
And it was always an exaggerated quarrel--half misunderstanding, like
most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was
other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively--as
logicians say--those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering
service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology
of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them
might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which
its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just
missed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly
recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the
work of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done
by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the
universalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason
why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism
less future than Buddhism--that religion of negation and
monkery--whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and
contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that
apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the
disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its
ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the
Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of
the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen
maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably
narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent
tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last
word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future
Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement
as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a
stumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain
man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and
with the simplicity of greatness he confessed: "I have never united
myself to any Church, because I have found difficulty in giving my
assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated
statements of the Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles
of Belief and Confessions of Faith." "When any church," he added,
"will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for
membership, ... 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and thy neighbour as
thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my
soul."
Can one read this and not wonder what Judaism has been about that
Lincoln did not even know there _was_ such a church? But call the
coming religious reconstruction what you will, what do names matter
when all humanity is crucified, what does anything matter but to save
it from meaningless frictions and massacres? "Would that My people
forgot Me and kept My commandments," says the Jerusalem Talmud. Too
long has Israel been silent. "Who is blind," says the prophet, "but
My servant, or deaf as My messenger?" He is not deaf to-day, he is
only dumb. But the voice of Jerusalem must be heard again when the new
world-order is shaping. The Chosen People must choose. To be or not to
be. "The religion of the Jews is indeed a light," said Coleridge in
his "Table Talk," "but it is as the light of the glow-worm which gives
no heat and illumines nothing but itself." Why let a sun sink into a
glow-worm? And even a glow-worm should turn. It does not even
pay--that prudent maxim of the Babylonian Talmud, _Dina dimalchutha
dina_ ("In Rome do as the Romans"). Despite every effort of Jews as
individual citizens the world still tends to see them as Crabbe saw
them a century ago in his "Borough":--
Nor war nor wisdom yields our Jews delight,
They will not study and they dare not fight.
It is because they fight under no banner of their own. But the time
has come when they must fight as Jews--fight that "mental fight" from
which that greater English poet, Blake, declared he would not cease
till he had "built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." To
build Jerusalem in every land--even in Palestine--that is the Jewish
mission. As Nina Salaman sings--and I am glad to end with the words of
a daughter of the lofty-souled scholar in whose honour this lecture is
given--
Wherefore else our age-long life, our wandering landless,
Every land our home for ill or good?
Ours it was long since to join the hands of nations
Through the link of our own brotherhood.
AFTERWORD
DR. ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic
Literature in the University of Cambridge, in seconding the vote of
thanks to the speakers, moved by the President of the Jewish
Historical Society (Sir Lionel Abrahams, K.C.B.), said that the
Chairman had already paid a tribute to the memory of Arthur Davis. But
a twice-told tale was not stale in repetition when the tale was told
of such a man. He was a real scholar; not only in the general sense of
one who loved great books, but also in the special sense that he
possessed the technical knowledge of an expert. His "Hebrew Accents"
reveals Arthur Davis in these two aspects. It shows mastery of an
intricate subject, a subject not likely to attract the mere
dilettante. But it also reveals his interest in the Bible as
literature. He appreciated both the music of words and the melody of
ideas. When the work appeared, a foreign scholar asked: "Who was his
teacher?" The answer was: himself. There is a rather silly proverb
that the self-taught man has a fool for his master. Certainly Arthur
Davis had no fool for his pupil. And though he had no teacher, he had
what is better, a fine capacity for comradeship in studies. "Acquire
for thyself a companion," said the ancient Rabbi. There is no
friendship equal to that which is made over the common study of books.
At the Talmud meetings held at the house of Arthur Davis were founded
lifelong intimacies. Unpretentious in their aim, there was in these
gatherings a harmony of charm and earnestness; pervading them was the
true "joy of service." Above all he loved the liturgy. Here the
self-taught man must excel. Homer said:--
Dear to gods and men is sacred song.
Self-taught I sing: by Heaven and Heaven alone
The genuine seeds of poesy are sown.
And, as the expression of his inmost self, he gave us the best edition
of the Festival Prayers in any language: better than Sachs'--than
which praise can go no higher. This Prayer Book is his true memorial,
unless there be a truer still. Perhaps his feeling that he might
after all have lost something because he had no teacher made him so
wonderful a teacher of his own daughters. In their continuance of his
work his personality endures. At the end of his book on Accents he
quoted, in Hebrew, a sentence from Jeremiah, with a clever play on the
double meaning of the word which signifies at once "accent" and
"taste." Thinking of his record, and how his beautiful spirit animates
those near and dear to him, we may indeed apply to him this same text:
"His taste remaineth in him and his fragrance is not changed."
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