Elijah Benamozegh

“ Not only is Charity carefully distinguished from simple alms- giving, and from every other good work, but it is declared far superior to all special benevolence, to Tzedaka, for instance, which it surpasses, they add, in many respects; for the one has to do but with things exterior to man; the other, with man's whole nature, body and soul; the one serves the living only; the other, the dead as well; the one concerns itself for the poor only; the other, for the rich also; for with them, too, Charity finds wounds to heal, tears to dry, griefs to ease. ”

“ Shall the need of a new revelation, manifesting itself a little more than ten centuries after the first, never again show itself in twenty, thirty, or even fifty centuries after the Gospel? To maintain this is impossible. There is a word which Christianity by its assumption of superiority has attached forever to its existence, to its role in the world; there is a name, which, after centuries, has become the mark of the greatest schism, the greatest rupture that the Church has as yet undergone—namely Protestantism. ”

“ What is the reward of this pardon of our enemies? It is pardon for ourselves. He who forgives not, shall not get forgiveness himself. We read in Matthew (vi. 14) : "If you pardon men their offenses, your heavenly Father will pardon yours, but if you," &c. Is not this the thousand-times repeated doctrine of the Pharisees? If Moses says that God has tolerance for sin, and pardons rebellion, the Pharisees interpret this after their fashion: "Whose sins does God pardon? His, who himself pardons injury." "Whoever is quick, they say, to forgive, his sins too shall be forgiven." ”

“ Do they not announce in every page the contempt and condemnation of the flesh? Do they not declare its works null, useless for salvation, provided there be faith in Jesus Christ? Do they not advocate a worship in spirit as the highest degree of human perfection? Do they not propose to man, as his noblest task here below, the detachment of his spirit from the flesh of sin, so as to gain this "liberty of the children of God," procured by faith, and not by works, the evidence, per contra, of lapse and slavery? ”

“ In vain did the world rage against the old weak Israel; Israel, that in its infancy struggled with the angel, found always new force to oppose to the world. In vain did this world display before it all that was horrible and revolting—destitution, torture, slavery—nothing could shake its faith in the world, never by it made the synonym of evil and sin. The more Judaic life was compressed, the more vigorously it rebounded from its falls, reacting with new energy against the causes that should seemingly have exasperated it against the world. ”

“ Why art thou led to the scaffold?—Because I circumcised my child. Why art thou nailed to the cross?—Because I have obeyed the commands of the Most high. Why art thou whipped?—Because I have taken up the loulab (palm-branch) .
In vain does Christian ethics, as if to defy the ancient ethics of Israel, raise the standard of its requirements; it finds the latter always beyond it. To the rich man, who asks to follow him, Jesus says: "Go sell all thou hast and give to the poor; it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." ”

“ Should a good thought, a noble doctrine then, have the same value coming from the Christian as from the Jew? Assuredly not. If historical criticism is just, it must admit that whenever Hebrew charity disengages itself from a thousand obstacles, a thousand adverse sentiments, it rises spontaneously to those heights where all men appear equal. For the doctrine itself is too old, too rooted in the hearts of men to disown it, and men are too loyal, too generous to do so. ”

“ While the priesthood, ever on the alert, half religious, half secular, watches over Catholic morality lest it should stray to paths, where society might be lost with it, the breath of liberty, the spirit of philosophy, logic and its claims, penetrate through those gratings, those iron walls that a compact hierarchy oppose to their entrance ”

“ Christianity, with the best intentions in the world, believed it could do nothing better than occupy the throne itself, than seize, itself, the scepter of justice, that is to say, subject to its dogmas, its religion and its laws, the public authority; in other words to enlist law, state, royalty in the service of its religion, to place its dogmas on an equal footing with political institutions, to substitute religion for national duties, and to give ethics the same rank as public virtues; in a word, to substitute for the citizen, conscience. ”

“ Here it is, that the diverse genius of each religion shows itself to every eye.
The Word, says Christianity, the eternal Logos, becomes flesh; is born, lives, speaks, teaches, sacrifices himself as a sin-expiation; and all mankind suffer, die, rise with him, and through him recover their primitive purity. Incarnation, sacrifice, virtue, merit, atonement, all quite exterior things, are applied to mankind by a single word, and that is imputation. Is it the same in Cabalistic Judaism? ”

“ Once converted, the sinner need not envy the lot of the most just! Jesus, as we have seen, is eager to place him above the innocent, and that always, without observing the limits which common sense, justice and morality impose, and which the Pharisees are careful not to overstep. Can, indeed, every sort of convert aspire to the same degree of happiness and reward that attends the most just? Jesus, who wishes to attract to him, at any price, sinners, has no reserve. ”

“ Much more: we have seen how Christianity, when obliged to postpone the new resurrectional era it preached as impending, and to concern itself about the imperious needs of the present life, always subordinated those needs, and the interests of the actual world, to that fictitious, imaginary world of the resurrection, whither Christians thought themselves transplanted, in spirit at least, if not in body.
Judaism, ever mutilated, ever deprived of that element connecting it with this life, namely, of the body, the family, society, country; of life, in short, in all its various aspects! ”

“ We are dead—dead, indeed, with Jesus; we are in him and he is in us; he has died for all; he has crucified in himself our flesh of sin; by dying on the cross he has fulfilled for us the whole Law. Behold us, then,- in full life, come into the precious liberty of pure souls, and no one can henceforth charge the dead with neglect of the Law. Have we transcended the thoughts and expressions of Paul himself? Then let us cite his words: "Our flesh is considered as dead if Christ is in us." "He who is dead is freed from sin." ”

“ Much more—have the Talmud and the Talmudists as much weight in Judaism, as the apostles in Christianity? The Gospel language is divine and infallible; the Talmudical (in what does not regard precept or dogma) is in no respect so. No Jew concedes inspiration to the Pharisees, as no Christian refuses it to the Gospels. Paul is the Moses of Christians. The Pharisees are the Fathers of the Jewish Church. Can the words of the one have the same weight, the same value, as those of the other? No one will say so. Besides, when the Jewish Church formulized its doctrines it was dominant. ”

“ Jewish ethics is justice and charity united, each tempering the other and both working in unison for the government of the grand family, mankind; the one, having as its special organ, the written law; the other represented rather by the oral law; the one having to deal with society whose interests it governs, the other having its seat rather in the conscience of the individual. Thus Judaism includes the whole man, body and spirit, life actual and life to come; the first coming from the Mosaic code, the second from tradition, which is the code of conscience. ”

“ In vain would Christianity lift itself into the regions of an almost mystical morality; it is on the wings of Hebraism that it soars to these heights. In vain does it assert "God is Charity,"—this sublime saying that deeply stirred the whole Pagan world lapped in sensuality—it got this from Judaism. "God is Charity, God is Love," says the Cabala, and also the Midrasch. And what have the doctors made of the Mosaic precept, "Love thy neighbor as thyself?" ”

“ Easy for Christianity, that knows no country or nationality to dispute a religious nation's, a sacerdotal kingdom's right of existence and the consequences of that right; to be scandalized whenever the preservation of Israel demands a restriction of that limitless charity which is the final object of the restriction. Israel, with erect head and calm heart, shall never blush for its political character, given it by the God of Christians, nor for the exercise of the rights appertaining thereto. But has Christianity itself no enemies? ”

“ There, the Word, Logos, Tipheret, besides its eternal incarnation as substance in nature, incarnates itself also as thought in the Law; law, which under a thousand phases and a thousand applications, governs the universe, from the angel before God or the star that rolls in infinite space, to the worm that creeps on the earth, to man who is included also in the universal harmony, and for whom this thousand-faced, thousand-sided law circumscribes itself, adapts itself to the plan he occupies in creation, and becomes the law of Moses. ”