G. F. Abbott

“ In the night of their darkest desolation the Jews kept their eyes fixed to the East, and said to themselves and to one another, “Courage, the day is at hand.” Attachment to Faith and Fatherland—the religious and the national ideals—are the two strands, indissolubly entwined, of that great Messianic dream which runs like a golden thread through the black web of Jewish history. The Holy Land never ceased to be regarded as the true home of the race. ”

“ Success awakened jealousy, and economic distress—due to entirely different causes—stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?
The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence, had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. ”

“ It was the same spirit that now forbade the Jew to feel at home in the presence of the Gentile. Judaism has always lacked the magnetic attraction of Christianity and Islam, not because the rule of life which it prescribes is less pure, or the prospect of peace which it holds out less alluring to the heart that yearns for rest, but because, unlike Christianity and Islam, it deliberately repels instead of inviting outsiders. The doors of Moses’s heaven are jealously closed to the stranger; and those who have entered into it have at no time been more numerous than those who have come out of it. ”

“ Even the shrill song of the humble grasshopper held sweet music for the Greek. He revelled in the loveliness and colour of life. He was inspired by the glory of the human form. He extolled the majesty of man. The Hebrew mind was nursed by meditation; the Hellenic drew its nourishment from contemplation. Nature was the Greek’s sole guide in taste as well as in conduct; from nature he learnt the canons of the beautiful as well as the laws of right and wrong. Hence no country has produced greater poets than Greece, or fewer saints. ”

“ THE REFORMATION AND THE JEWS The love for liberty which gave birth to the Renaissance was also the parent of another child—the Reformation. The first saw the light in Latin, the second in Teutonic Europe. The vindication of man’s rights was their common object: but while the Renaissance strove to attain that object through the emancipation of the human reason, the Reformation endeavoured to reach it by the emancipation of the human conscience. Intelligence, the inheritance of Hellenism, was the weapon of the one: the other drew its strength from the Hebraic fountain of Intuition. ”

“ Tolerance and speculative freedom were never better understood than in pagan Greece and Rome. The Pagan was content to navigate his own ship by his own compass—whether of head or of heart—without insisting that every one else should adopt the same compass, or be drowned. The total absence of dogma, which forms at once the charm and the foible of polytheism, while precluding persecution, encouraged a free exchange of religious traditions, not only between sister nations, as the Greek and the Italian, but even between entirely foreign and even hostile races. ”

“ It is easy to understand why the one race should have drawn its inspiration from within and the other from without; why the one should have sunk the individual in the community and the other sacrificed the community to the individual; why the one should have worshipped the form and the other the spirit. It is especially easy to understand the Greek’s inextinguishable thirst for new things and the Jew’s rigid attachment to the past. Everything in Greece suggests progress; everything in Palestine spells permanence. ”

“ As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music, philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. ”

“ To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. ”

“ But though the dispassionate student can have nothing but pity for a brave man perishing in the performance of what he deemed to be his duty, he can also sympathise with those who hailed their arch-enemy’s death with savage delight. They saw in M. De Plehve, not a tragic character drawing upon himself the vengeance of an inexorable Atê, but only the merciless Minister, the oppressor of those who differed from him in their political ideals, the executioner of men whose sole crime was their loyalty to the faith of their fathers and the traditions of their race. ”

“ In Holland alone rebellion did not degenerate into a new species of despotism. While the hidalgos of Castile, impelled by lust for glory and gold, carried into a new world the cross and the cruelty of the old, conquering kingdoms for Charles and Philip, souls for Christ and wealth for themselves; while even in England one sovereign was engaged in persecuting Popery, another Puritanism, and a third both, the citizens of the Netherlands were laying the foundations of a less splendid but far more solid prosperity. ”

“ The Jewish millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic predominance” has been promoted by—O ye shades of King John and Torquemada—“the mild spirit of Christianity!” ”

“ A sentimentalist will, no doubt, find much to lament in the unsparing fury of the avengers. Their hand has struck down everything that stood high—good, evil, and indifferent alike—with elemental impartiality. But the philosopher may, on the whole, see reason to rejoice. At all events, he will, if he happens to be a Jew. For among the ruins of tyranny he will recognise the rusty chains which had for centuries weighed upon the limbs of Israel. ”

“ Torn from the stem that bore and from the soil that nourished them, and for nearly twenty centuries exposed to the wintry blasts of adversity and persecution, the children of Israel still bud and blossom and provide the world with the perennial problem now known as the Jewish Question—a question than which none possesses a deeper interest for the student of the past, or a stronger fascination for the speculator on the future ”

“ To the latter the cigarette which the student coolly puffed on the Sabbath was desecration; the non-Jewish meals in which the student indulged daily were regarded with pious horror and indignation. Not for this had the other come to Basel, and the sad-eyed and silent delegate who tramped half-way across Europe on what he deemed a holy pilgrimage sighed and thought that Israel was in greater darkness in the centre of its new-born hope than in the unhappy land of persecution wherein he was suffered to exist. ”

“ This was an unexpected blow for the wretched Jews, who feared exile even more than execution. They had borne imprisonment, ignominy, penury, and mutilation unflinchingly, in the hope that time would soften the heart, or at least wear out the arm, of persecution. But final banishment, with all the terrible perils of shipwreck, of famine, of attack by pirates and of disease which a large and unprotected crowd voyaging the high seas was certain to encounter in those days, would mean irretrievable ruin for the whole race. ”

“ Those fools the Papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would have rather been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. ”

“ THE RENAISSANCE While Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to act as they pleased were a fortiori ready to vindicate their right to think what they pleased. ”

“ It would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration to assert that the life of Israel through the Middle Ages was an unbroken horror of carnage and rapine. There were spells of respite, some of them fairly long, during which the Jew was permitted to live and grow fat. But these Sabbaths of rest can be likened not inaptly to the periods during which a prudent husbandman suffers his land to lie fallow, in the hope of a richer harvest. They are only intervals between the acts of a tedious and bloody tragedy, with a continent for its stage and seven centuries for its night. ”

“ The upshot of this refusal to move with the rest of the world has been mutual hatred, discord, and persecution; each age adding a new ring to the poisonous plant of anti-Judaism. For this result both sides are to blame—or neither. No race has ever had the sentiment of nationality and religion more highly developed, or been more intolerant of dissent, than the Jewish; no race has ever suffered more grievously from national and religious fanaticism and from intolerance of dissent on the part of others. ”

“ Thus these holy men lived, turning away from the sorrows of the earth to the peace of an ideal heaven; deriving patience with the present from apocalyptic promises of future glory; and waiting for the day when the unrighteous would be smitten to the dust, the dead rise from their graves, and the just be restored to everlasting bliss under the rule of the Redeemer—the Son of Man revealed to the holy and righteous because they have despised this world and hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits. ”

“ This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire from Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the course of many centuries. ”

“ JUDAISM AND PAGANISM Over and above the two great causes of the unpopularity of the Jew, already adduced, namely, man’s intolerance of dissent, and the antipathy between the European and the Asiatic, there was another and more obvious barrier to a good understanding between the two elements—one sin which the Gentile could not pardon in the Jew: the Jew’s infatuated arrogance—that contempt for all men born outside the pale of the Synagogue, which national humiliation, instead of effacing, had deepened and embittered. ”

“ In this and like domestic rites the memory of the past was annually revived, and, if its splendour made the sordid present look more sordid still, it also kept alive the hope of redemption. The magic carpet of faith, that priceless heirloom of Israel, transported the inmates of the Ghetto out of their noisome surroundings far away to the radiant realms of Zion. The Messianic Utopia never was more real to the Jews than at this time. ”

“ But an essential part of the mission of both bodies was to hunt out dissent, to root out free-thought, and to realise the bigot’s ideal of spiritual peace by means of intellectual starvation. Uniformity was their idol, and to that idol they were prepared to sacrifice the moral sense of mankind and the lives of their fellow-creatures. The Jews supplied them with a splendid field for the exercise of their missionary ardour: numerous, obstinate, rich and unpopular, they offered a prey as tempting as it was safe. ”