David Kaufmann

“ In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. ”

“ Will the hopes with which the thirsty have for centuries allayed their pangs keep ever running drier and drier, and finally shrink to the miserable remnant to which they are compared by shallow merriment? Are the Jews still a people, a sickly body indeed, but one to which youth and health may return, or a bleached and scattered heap of bones? Are these bones destined ever again to live and move? The questions which arise in the contemplative mind at the spectacle of the Jewish community are not easy to answer. ”

“ What a people must that be which can produce from its very lowest ranks so pure and lofty a religious genius as Mordecai; and what a system must that be in which a mother's ideal presence is sufficient to keep a daughter modest and dutiful in the very slough of temptation! I am far from imagining that a thinker and poetess of George Eliot's calibre would ever have attempted to represent Judaism as the only source of high-mindedness, and the Jews as the sole and hereditary possessors of all morality. ”

“ The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world—not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. ”

“ Will that force inherent in the idea of nationality, which leads to the formation of States, and which, in recent times, has so wonderfully transformed the map of Europe, impel the Jews also to be in earnest with the hopes of thousands of years, and turn their patient longings into rapid actions? Will the march of history lead them, after all their wanderings and sufferings, to reestablish a definite centre, and solemnly to complete their outward and visible unification? ”

“ He laid bare his father's nakedness and said, 'They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.' Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames. ”

“ But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities—let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. ”

“ She has given her hand to a man whom she cannot but despise; she has broken the promise which she gave to his discarded victim, that she would never become his; and she repents in nameless sufferings to which this loathed and detested husband subjects her with an inhuman coolness. One thing alone binds her to life—her guiding-star amid the thunder-clouds and her safety in shipwreck—the memory of Deronda. He is her protector, her guide, philosopher, and friend—but her husband he can never be. ”

“ Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth—where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they were hunted with a hatred as fierce as the forest-fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? ”

“ The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in their darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance—sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. ”

“ Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting and born blind—the ancestral life would be within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious meanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music. ”

“ When it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our nationality—let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. ”

“ Poor psychologists are they who are so little able to follow the subtle development of these two characters, as to feel disappointed when they are not united at the end. For while Gwendolen is the prototype of that more harmless form of egotism which loves to fancy that the universe revolves around itself, and which is sadly disconcerted when that self is at all roughly handled by fate; Deronda's whole being is love and resignation, and he has been knitted to all that is great too early to imagine that life contains nothing more desirable or valuable than his own existence. ”

“ He is the only man for whose respect she has ever craved, gauging as she does, with a woman's acuteness of perception, his uncontaminated purity and dignity. No encouragement of her weaknesses, no words of flattery, fall from his grave lips. The beauty, accustomed to homage and admiration, and whose caprices have seemed hitherto to rule all the men she has come in contact with, meets, for the first time, in Deronda, with a man of self-possession, whose keen, searching eyes subdue her. ”

“ Loud has been the weeping and terrible the gnashing of teeth in the camp of the critics. Of what has the revered and idolised Queen of novelists been thinking that she should descend to the Jews? George Eliot has experienced personally what the world's hatred of that race amounts to, and that she has done so affords the strongest proof of the moral tendency which lies in her inimitable performance. It is not only the Jew of flesh and blood whom men encounter every day upon the streets that they hate, but the Jew under whatever shape he may appear ”

“ The blood of the prophets surges in his veins, the voice of God calls to him, and he becomes conscious and emphatically declares that he is not as others are; the days of levelling are over. Contrasted with the revolting treatment to which public opinion still subjects Judaism, its glorious exaltation in 'Deronda' is most healthy and beneficial. Where calumny and obtuseness see nothing but disjecta membra, the prophetic eye of the poetess perceives a complete and perfect body destined to a renewed life of fresh and manly vigour. ”

“ The spirit of our religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but wrong. The Masters have said, an offence against man is worse than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed—what wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? ”

“ What is needed is the leaven—what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions: it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. ”

“ George Eliot has not thrown herself away upon an unworthy object. It is a beautiful characteristic of Judaism that it cherishes the memory of its alien benefactors in imperishable remembrance and everlasting honour. It is a hundred years since Lessing heralded in his 'Nathan' the dawn of a new epoch for the race, and from 'Nathan' to 'Deronda' the world has not stood still; the most unlooked-for events have taken place, and the self-consciousness of Judaism has itself undergone a change. ”

“ Led by cordial and loving inclination to the profound study of Jewish national and family life, she has set herself to create Jewish Characters, and to recognise and give presentment to the influences which Jewish education is wont to exercise—to prove by Types that Judaism is an intellectual and spiritual force, still misapprehended and readily overlooked, but not the less an effective power, for the future of which it is a good assurance that it possesses in the body of its adherents a noble, susceptible, and pliant material which only awaits its final casting to appear in a glorious form. ”

“ From the leonine uprising of Judæa, and from the safe and wondrous return of the exiles from the Babylonian Captivity, should not the lesson for all time be drawn that the deep-rooted love and longing of the Jewish people for Palestine is something more than a wild and antiquated absurdity, something more than a barren dream of foolish enthusiasm? ”

“ The specifically Jewish virtues may go along with the specifically Jewish vices, concerning which hatred has invented so many fables. The contrast of the two sets of circunistances is not meant to lead us to one-sidedness and injustice. On the contrary, we ought to learn from it, above all, that Judaism is no obsolete petrifaction, but a force beating and pulsating in the hearts and minds of men—no indifferent shadow unworthy of our attention, but a fact of incalculable significance—no object to be neglected and despised, but a profound mystery, and a vital challenge to reflection. ”

“ The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? ”

“ It is the sign of a sound organism that its members perform their functions unconscious of activity. No charge, therefore, can be brought against the Jews when the assertion is put forward that, as yet, they have adhered to their doctrines with absolute and unwavering fidelity, but without a definite consciousness of their national vocation. They have defended a trust, the future of which is raised and established in their eyes beyond all doubt, without subtilising concerning its peculiarities. Judaism has, certainly, at all times been more than a mere religion for its adherents. ”

“ She does not introduce us to ideas, but to men and women of flesh and blood in whom these ideas work and act consciously and unconsciously; we are shown not a creed, but its professors—not a faith, but those who have been nurtured in it. None but a poetess cunning to transform convictions into motives, and thoughts into actions, would have ventured to animate her work with a sentiment so strange and even unintelligible to the majority of the cultivated as the longing of the Jews for the re-establishment of their kingdom. ”

“ The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile.' ...
"Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us. ”

“ In contemplating a work of art, it is not a matter of primary inquiry whether an idea be true or false, whether a sentiment be authorised or not; we have only to consider whether or not the work has succeeded in adequately representing the power of that idea or the dominion of that sentiment. George Eliot has taken care to draw her figures true; and no sympathetic reader can gainsay her there, that even this much-ridiculed longing after Palestine is well fitted to inform a human life with rapturous and noble impulses. ”

“ The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. ”

“ The history of German pulpit eloquence among the Jews will have to take note of this phenomenon and portray its growth; and a comparative glance at the works of Jost and Graetz shows us what measure of significance the national movement has attained to in modern thought. The consciousness of the wonderful union of Religion and Nationality in Judaism has already become so distinct that men are beginning to sever the inseparable, and to clare themselves enthusiastic admirers of its national, while they have long since cast away its religious side, as an irksome chain. ”

“ It can be pointed out that it is in England pre-eminently that the Jews have the courage to confess their nationality, and to bring it into bold relief. Nor have they cause, nowadays, to fear vexatious interference with their rights on that account: the English are too mature in wisdom not to allow true citizens their harmless hopes; knowing as they do from their own experience that men can give all due allegiance to a foreign State without ceasing to belong to their own people. English literature, too, is by no means poor in authors tolerant and well-disposed towards the Jews. ”

“ And even when the race again lay broken on the ground, borne down with meek submissiveness beneath the Roman yoke, there blazed forth Bar-Cochba, the Son of the Star, and hosts of devoted warriors sprang from the earth, compelling Rome to send her ablest commander to coerce them, a handful though they were. Nor did the inhuman lord of oppression set his iron heel upon the backs of the vanquished till streams of the blood of Judah's heroes had flowed down to the Mediterranean, and till treachery had crept in and broken their serried ranks. ”

“ On this point the Jews are divided into two camps. For the one party the hope of rebuilding the ancient State is a childish and ridiculous enthusiast's dream, and the desire for a return to Sion an empty lie, for the obliteration of which from all forms of prayer moral duty calls, if truthfulness before the Almighty is to be respected; for the other party these longings are as the breath of Jewish national life, and their expression is a sacred command, and an inviolable law. ”

“ In judging an imaginative work, it is not the critic's business to determine whether or not its ideas be true, but solely to examine whether these ideas have permeated the flesh and blood of the characters, and made them lifelike, and able to captivate and carry us along with them. And it is not till we have taken up this point of view that the conclusion will force itself upon us that 'Daniel Deronda' is a Jewish book not only in the sense that it treats of Jews, but also in the sense that it is pre-eminently fitted for being understood and appreciated by Jews ”