David Baron

“ PERIOD AND THE RETURN OF THE GLORY OF JEHOVAH
WITH the fortieth chapter begins the second half of the Book of Isaiah, the last twenty-seven chapters forming a separate and continuous prophecy by itself. This grand prophetic Messianic epic of the Old Testament, the centre and heart of which is Christ, forms one of the very richest portions of God's self- revelation. Sublimely grand is its very style and language. " There is in fact no more Johannic book in the whole of the Old Testament than this book of consolation," says a great German Bible student. ”

“ No sooner did God bring Israel out of Egypt than, in keeping with His purpose of a theocracy, He Himself came, and took His place at the head of that nation, and the visible symbol of His as yet invisible presence was the pillar of cloud, which at night turned into a pillar of fire. ”

“ Here all virtues peculiarly Jewish were appreciated, and more especially by their development was that admiration to be attained which is the eager desire of the human heart. What did it matter to them that outside the Ghetto men despised what they valued so much. They cared nothing for the opinion of those outside, for it was the opinion of ignorant foes. The Jew strove to please his own people, and the approval of these brethren was to him the whole sum of life. And thus the life of the Ghetto Jew was not stunted or crippled, but whole. ”

“ It is a peculiar misery which befalls the Jews, not as men, but as Jews, and from which they would not suffer were they not Jews. Jewish distress is of two kinds, physical and moral.
"In Eastern Europe, in North Africa, in Western Asia, exactly in those lands where the overwhelming majority of Jews, probably nine-tenths of them dwell, Jewish misery is to be understood literally. It is a daily physical oppression, a terror of the day to follow, a torturous struggle to support a bare existence. ”

“ These who are not even in a position to protect their co-religionists against a miser- able rabble of Arabs, Moors, or Persians, who thirst for their blood ! These Jews, the personification of Mam- mon, of whom by far the greater number own not even a stone whereon to lay their head, or rag to cover their nakedness ! This is the mockery which drops poison into the wound which hatred has struck. True, there are some few Jews superfluously rich whose rumoured millions attract attention far and wide, but what has Israel to do with these? ”

“ The emancipated Jews of the past succeeded in a fairly short time in attaining to a measure of prosperity ; at any rate, the struggle for daily bread does not assume such dreadful forms as have been described in Russia, Roumania, and Galicia. But among these the second phase of Jewish misery appears, i.e., the moral.
" The Jew of the West has daily bread but man does not live by bread alone. The Western Jew no longer finds his body and life endangered by the mob, but wounds of the flesh are not the only ones which give pain, and of which one may bleed to death. ”

“ The written law in Austria, unlike that of Russia and Roumania, knows no difference between Jew and Christian. But the public authorities boldly treat the law as a dead letter, and custom recreates the Jewish ban, which the law had abolished. The sentiment of society which is inimical to the Jew makes it exceedingly difficult for him to make a living, and in the near future this will become wholly impossible. ”

“ This is the hope of Israel and of this sin-burdened earth. Not till then will the world be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Jehovah as the waters cover the sea ; not till then will the inhabitants of the earth learn righteousness, or the dream of universal peace be realised. ”

“ The Kaftan, temple locks, fur caps, and jargon, have certainly nothing in common with religion, yet in the East if a Jew attire himself in Western habit, and speak any language correctly, he is regarded with mistrust, as already almost an apostate from the faith, for he has destroyed those links which united him to his race, and they are aware that these alone secure adherence to their community, apart from which the individual Jew must perish morally and spiritually beyond hope of recovery. ”

“ Many of them forsake Judaism, and we wish them good speed, only regretting that they are at all of Jewish blood, though but of the dregs.
" No one should be indifferent to the suffering of the Jews, neither Christian nor Jew. It is a great sin to let a nation whose worst enemies do not deny that it is highly gifted to perish mentally and physically. It is a sin against the nation, and a sin against civilisation in general, in whose service it would be no indifferent co-worker. ”

“ The 1 50,000 Jews of Morocco,* and the Jews of Persia, whose number is unknown to me, I must leave out of count. Those whose plight is most miserable are power- less even to resist their wretchedness. They bear it with a dull endurance, and do not complain or attract our notice except when the rabble storms their Ghetto, plundering, abusing, and murdering. ”

“ The proverb runs thus : ' If a man wants to drown a dog, he says it is mad.' All manner of crimes are imputed to the Jews because their enemies would justify themselves in their abhorrence of the Jew. ”

“ The English nation does not endure that important changes should be im- posed upon it from without ; it develops them from within. In England Jewish emancipation is a reality it is not merely decreed, but it is experienced. Long before it had become law it was perfected in the con- science of the nation. Without doubt a great and thoughtful nation will not be diverted from its course whether good or evil by any intellectual tendency of the time, and so it comes to pass that in England there are still individual instances of anti-Semitism. ”

“ I must give utterance to the painful truth : the nations who have emancipated the Jews have been self-deceived as to their true sentiments. In order for the emancipa- tion to have been complete it must have been perfected in goodwill ere ever it found expression in law. But this was not the case. The opposite was the case. The history of Jewish emancipation is one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of European thought. It is not come of the perception that a race has been shamefully sinned against, and that it is high time to atone for a thousand years of injustice ”

“ A state which laid claim to a high grade of civilisation must necessarily have accepted some of the reforms of the great Revolution, such as representation of the people, freedom of the press, trial by jury, division of power, and so forth. Jewish emancipation became one of the indispensable signs of a highly civilised state, something like the piano which on no account must be missing in the drawing-room, though no single member of the family can play it. Thus in Eastern Europe Jewish emancipation came to pass not from heart com- pulsion, but merely in imitation of a fashion of the period ”

“ Of Roumania, with its quarter of a million Jews, we learn that our brethren there are also without rights. They are only permitted to live in towns, and are at the mercy of every whim of the civil authorities, and even of the lower officials, and from time to time they suffer terribly from the bloodthirsty mob, and are in the worst possible circumstances. 1 Our Roumanian informant places the number of Roumanian Jews who are entirely without means of support at one-half of the Jewish population. ”

“ Russian Jews indeed who are rich ; and also very few are the Russian Jews who can obtain an academical title, for the State, middle, and high schools admit but a very limited number of Jewish students, and foreign diplomas are not recognised by the law. To Jews in Russia many trades are closed which are free to all Russians. These unhappy ones are packed together in a few provinces where no opportunity is permitted them to exercise their talents and to prove their cap- abilities by lawful means. Education as provided by the State is very little accessible to them ”

“ Other Jews there are who anticipate relief from Zionism, which, to them, is no fulfilment of a mystic passage of Scripture, but the way to an existence in which the Jew at last shall acquire the right to enjoy these simplest original necessities of being which are matter of course to all men beside himself in both hemispheres, i.e., a secure social standing ”

“ In Hungary the Jews make no complaint. They enjoy full rights of citizenship, can work and trade freely, and their condition continually improves. It is true that this happy state of things has not lasted sufficiently long for the majority of the Jews in Hun- gary to have worked their way out of the deepest poverty and attained to even a commencement of comfort. And we are assured by observers of the times that in Hungary also hatred of the Jew begins ”

“ Essentially a social being, whose very religion recommends eating with three and praying in company with ten, as pleasing to God, he finds himself excluded from ordinary intercourse with his fellow-countrymen, and condemned to a tragic isolation. ”

“ In Russia, where the Jewish population is over five millions, and which is the home of more than half of the Jewish race, 1 our brethren are subject to many legal restraints. Only a small Jewish sect, the Karaites, enjoys the same privileges as the Christian subjects of the Czar. To the rest of the Jews residence in a number of the provinces is prohibited. Freedom of movement is only enjoyed by certain classes of Jews, such as merchants of the first guild, possessors of aca- demical titles, and so forth. ”

“ Neither his personality or his services give him any claim on the justice, not to say goodwill of his Christian countrymen, while he has lost cohesion with his Jewish compatriots. He feels that the world is cruel to him, that there is no place on earth where he can find true sympathy when he desires and longs for it. ”

“ Governments and nations may well beware lest the Jews in like case become a cause of danger to them. Sorely may they have to repent any attempt to exter- minate the Jew, who, as a result of their own guilt, has become an occasion of hurt to them. ”

“ He led His disciples out as far as Bethany (on the Mount of Olives) , and He lifted up His hands and blessed them, " And it came to pass while He blessed them He was parted from them and carried up into heaven." And since that event since the departure of Jesus from Israel and the world, the word I have already quoted is written more legibly and in letters of fire across the eighteen or nineteen centuries of Jewish history : " Icha- bod." Where is the glory ? The Temple destroyed ; the land a continual desolation ; the people given over to be tossed to and fro among the nations. ”

“ For Judaism which suffers on their account, they have done nothing beyond throwing an alms which cost them nothing, and which keeps alive the cancer of Schnorring from which Judaism suffers. For ideal purposes they have never stretched out a helping hand, nor ever will. ”

“ THE RETURN OF THE GLORY OF JEHOVAH 59
presence of Jehovah only in symbol, and then the glory was always associated with the cloud, which while re- vealing also concealed ; for man was not yet able to bear the full unveiling of His majesty, and even Israel's prophets, who heard His voice, and were borne along by His power, had wonderingly to cry : " Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel the Saviour ! ”

“ Not seldom do we hear him say that he must learn from his foes, and seek to cure himself of the evils which they point out, not considering that the reproaches of the anti-Semites can work him no good, since they are not the result of observation of actual characteristics, but come of the working out of a law of psychology by which children, savages, and fools make other beings or things responsible for their own sufferings, and visit ill-will upon them. At the time of the Black Death the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells ”

“ God dwelt as in no other nation, although His presence fills the universe. Thus it continued until a particular point in the history of Israel, recorded in the Book of Ezekiel. The prophecy of Ezekiel forms a very important link in the progress of Old Testament revelation, but it is specially im- portant for the light it throws on two great events in Jewish history. ”

“ The lands of which I have made mention determine the lot of over seven millions of Jews, and, with the exception of Hungary, they all oppress the Jew, and official and social disfavour reduce him to a condition of wretchedness and professional beggary, without pos- sible hope either by personal or united effort of being able to rise a single grade in the social scale. ”

“ Once granted that prophecy is supernatural in its essence, and that there is nothing improbable in the fact that one speaking from the mouth of God could definitely foretell things to come, and speak of things and persons which as yet were not, as though they were and most of the arguments in favour of a later date and different author for these chapters fall to the ground. ”

“ This is Jewish suffering in its moral aspect, which is far more bitter to endure than the physical, because it touches men of finer calibre and greater pride.
"The emancipated Jew is unstable, uncertain in his relations with other men ; anxious in dealing with strangers, mistrustful even of the secret feelings of friends. ”

“ When we began to preach Zionism, and to try to win followers and supporters for that movement, the wiseacres of our nation always urged the politico-anthropological argument, ' You speak of the Jewish nation ; there is no such thing ; Israel is not a nation.' We admit that as regards Western Jewry . . . that in those there is not left the slightest trace of Jewish national feeling, so speaking from their own sentiment they are right to deny the existence of a Jewish nation. But how many Jews are there in the world f According to the latest statistics, we muster about 12,000,000. ”

“ Nordau acknowledges that there is at least "a minority" among Jews who have become Christians from conviction. For the rest he may be assured that right- minded Protestant Christians deplore even more than he does, the fact that Jews should nominally profess Christianity for the sake of worldly advantage and be received into the Church with minds unconvinced and hearts unsubdued to the gospel. ”

“ Prophecy is not of man's origina- tion, but emanates from the Great Omniscient God. " Holy men," Scripture assures us, " spake as they were moved (or borne along) by the Holy Ghost." Now God forbid that I should characterise alike all who have been entrapped by the novelties and the daring
1 " Great " the writer of these chapters certainly was, but for that very reason we may doubt his being unknown, or that there was any necessity of a work which bears on its very face the true prophetic stamp being smuggled in under another name to give it authority. ”