Israel Abrahams

“ Wine bringeth joy; sorrow and sighing fly before it. It strengtheneth the body, maketh the heart generous, prolongeth pleasure, and deferreth age; faces it maketh shine, and the senses it maketh bright."
"Agreed, but let thy servant take the water first, as the ancient physicians advise; later I will take the wine, a little, without water."
When I had eaten and drunk with him, I asked for his name and his purpose. "I come," said he, "from a distant land, from pleasant and fruitful hills, my wisdom is as thine, my laws as thine, my name Enan Hanatash, the son of Arnan ha-Desh." ”

“ What are you going to do with me?' 'To tell thee the truth,' replied the fishes, 'the leviathan has heard thy fame, that thou art very wise, and he said, I will rend the fox, and will eat his heart, and thus I shall become wise.' 'Oh!' said the fox, 'why did you not tell me the truth at first? I should then have brought my heart with me, and I should have given it to King Leviathan, and he would have honored me; but now ye are in an evil plight.' 'What! thou hast not thy heart with thee?' 'Certainly not. It is our custom to leave our heart at home while we go about from place to place. ”

“ Sorrow has often produced great books, great psalms, to which the sorrowful heart turns for solace. But in the truest sense the Shechinah rests on man only in his joy, when he has so attuned his life that misfortune is but another name for good fortune. He must have learned to endure before he seeks the solace of communion with the souls of the great, with the soul of God. Very saddening it is to note how often men have turned to books because life has no other good. The real book-lover goes to his books when life is fullest of other joys, when his life is richest in its manifold happiness. ”

“ For the solace of books is never selfish—the book-miser is never the book-lover, nor does the mere collector of rarities and preciosities deserve that name, for the one hoards, but does not own; the other serves Mammon, not God. The modern cheapening of books—the immediate result of printing—not only extends culture, it intensifies culture. Your joy in a book is truest when the book is cheapest, when you know that it is, or might be, in the hands of thousands of others, who go with you in the throng towards the same divine joy. ”

“ I was soon to enter the streets and receive a rude awakening, when I saw the manner in which the fifteen hundred Jews of Hebron live. Hebron is a ghetto in a garden; it is worse than even Jerusalem, Jerusalem being clean in comparison. Dirty, dark, narrow, vaulted, unevenly paved, running with liquid slime—such are the streets of Hebron. You are constantly in danger of slipping, unless you wear the flat, heel-less Eastern shoes, and, if you once fell, not all the perfumes of Araby could make you sweet again. ”

“ While all present are joining in the game, each Jew will play with full abandonment to the humor of the moment. But as soon as some play the part of spectators, the Jew feels his limbs growing too stiff for dancing, his voice too hushed for song. All must participate, or all must leave off. Thus, a crowd of Italians or Southern French may play at carnival to-day to amuse sight-seers in the Riviera, but Jews have never consented, have never been able, to sport that others might stand by and laugh at, and not with, the sportsmen. ”

“ At home he saw his wife and his two babes. "Better," he cried, "is my wife than a kingdom. Cursed be all kings who tempt men to sip sorrow, calling it joy." The king waited his coming in vain; and then he sent messengers to the man's shop. When he found that the man's love had conquered his lust, he said, with a sneer, "Thou art no man: thy heart is a woman's."
In the evening the king summoned the woman secretly. She came, and the king praised her beauty and her wisdom. His heart, he said, was burning with love for her, but he could not wed another man's wife. ”

“ We wiser moderns should never dream of making the comparison between a dog and a book, but for the opposite reason. Judah shrank from equalling a book to a dog, but we know better than to undervalue a dog so far as to compare it with a book. The kennel costs more than the bookcase, and love of dogs is a higher solace than love of books. To those who think thus, what more convincing condemnation of books could be formulated than the phrase coined by Gilbert de Porre in praise of his library, "It is a garden of immortal fruits, without dog or dragon." ”

“ Here are many wise and friendly; while I live, they bear me on the wing of their love; when I die, they will make my death sweet.... I fear thee for thy long limbs, and in thy face I see, clear-cut, the marks of unworthiness; I fear thee, and I will not be thy companion, lest there befall me what befell the leopard with the fox. ”

“ It is with equal difficulty that one can depart, with any reverence left, from the mass of legend and childishness with which one is crushed in such places. One escapes with the thought of the real Abraham, his glorious service to humanity, his lifelong devotion to the making of souls, to the spread of the knowledge of God. One recalls the Abraham who, in the Jewish tradition, is the type of unselfishness, of watchfulness on behalf of his descendants, the marks of whose genuine relationship to the Patriarch are a generous eye and a humble spirit. ”

“ Still, if we choose to regard the Song of Songs as poetry merely of the wasf type, the Hebrew is not only far older than any extant Arabic instance, but it transcends the wasf type as a work of inspired genius transcends conventional exercises in verse-making. There are superficial similarities between the wasf and Canticles, but there is no spiritual kinship. The wasf is to the Song as Lovelace is to Shakespeare, nay, the distance is even greater. The difference is not only of degree, it is essential. The one touches the surface of love, the other sounds its depths. ”

“ We can suppose that after a century of experience of the delusions of urban comfort, the denizens of towns would welcome a reminder of the delights of life under the open sky. There would be a longing for something fresher, simpler, freer. At such a moment Theocritus, like the poet of Canticles, had an irresistible opportunity, and to this extent the Idylls and the Song are parallel. ”

“ It is thus that the lyric poetry of one age affects, or finds its echo in, that of another, but in this particular case it is, of course, a natural thought that true love must survive the grave. There is a mystical union between the two souls, which death cannot end. Here, again, we meet the close connection between love and mysticism, which lies at the root of all deep love poetry. ”

“ The moral of which seems to be that, though marriages are made in Heaven, love must be made on earth.
HEBREW LOVE SONGS Palestine is still the land of song. There the peasant sings Arabic ditties in the field when he sows and reaps, in the desert when he tends his flock, at the oasis when the caravan rests for the night, and when camels are remounted next morning. The maiden's fresh voice keeps droning rhythm with her hands and feet as she carries water from the well or wood from the scanty forest, when she milks the goats, and when she bakes the bread. ”

“ I quote Stevenson again: "When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue."
This line of thought leads me to the further remark, that some part of the solace derived from books has changed its character since the art of printing was invented. In former times the personality, if not of the author, at all events of the scribe, pressed itself perforce upon the reader. ”

“ Taken as wholes, as was said above, the Idylls and Canticles are the poles asunder in their moral attitude towards love and in their general literary treatment of the theme. Of course, poets describing the spring will always speak of the birds; Greek and Hebrew loved flowers, Jew and Egyptian heard the turtle-dove as a harbinger of nature's rebirth; sun and moon are everywhere types of warm and tender feelings; love is the converter of a winter of discontent into a glorious summer. ”

“ Not only was he, like Jehudah Halevi, a prolific writer of Wedding Odes, but in his most spiritual hymns he uses the language of love as no Hebrew poet before or after him has done. Starting with the assumption that the Song of Songs was an allegory of God's espousal with the bride Israel, Najara did not hesitate to put the most passionate words of love for Israel into God's mouth. He was strongly attacked, but the saintly mystic Isaac Luria retorted that Najara's hymns were listened to with delight in Heaven—and if ever a man had the right to speak of Heaven it was Luria. ”

“ But Heine did not write in Hebrew, and those who have so far written in Hebrew are not Heines. It is, I think, vain to look to Europe for a new outburst of Hebrew love lyrics. In the East, and most of all in Palestine, where Hebrew is coming to its own again, and where the spring once more smiles on the eyes of Jewish peasants and shepherds, there may arise another inspired singer to give us a new Song of Songs in the language of the Bible. But we have no right to expect it. Such a rare thing of beauty cannot be repeated. It is a joy forever, and a joy once for all. ”

“ Full well he knew the wisdom and the craft of the leopard's wife. "Nay," said he, "trust not thy wife. A woman's counsel is evil and foolish, her heart hard like marble; she is a plague in a house. Yes, ask her advice, and do the opposite.".... The leopard told his wife that he was resolved to go. "Beware of the fox," she exclaimed; "two small animals there are, the craftiest they, by far—the serpent and the fox. Hast thou not heard how the fox bound the lion and slew him with cunning?" "How did the fox dare," asked the leopard, "to come near enough to the lion to do it?" ”

“ The teacher has only succeeded when he feels that his students can do without him, can use their books by themselves and for themselves. But personal intercourse in studies between equals is never obsolete. "Provide thyself with a fellow-student," said the Rabbi. Friendship made over a book is fast, enduring; this friendship is the great solace. How much we Jews have lost in modern times in having given up the old habit of reading good books together in the family circle! Religious literature thus had a halo of home about it, and the halo never faded throughout life. ”

“ Some of the delight he felt in books arose from his preference of reading to oral intercourse. "The truth in speech perishes with the sound: it is patent to the ear only and eludes the sight: begins and perishes as it were in a breath." Personally I share this view, and I believe firmly that the written word brings more pleasure than the spoken word.
Plato held the opposite view. He would have agreed with the advice given by Chesterfield to his son, "Lay aside the best book when you can go into the best company—depend upon it you change for the better." ”

“ But if the happiness of serving thee in person is denied to me, yet I can at least serve thee as thou desirest, by writing to thee of my journey, by pouring my soul out to thee, by a full narrative of what I have seen and of the state and manners of the Jews in all the places where I have dwelt." After a long and valuable narrative, he concludes in this loving strain: "I have taken me a house in Jerusalem near the synagogue, and my window overlooks it. In the court where my house is, there live five women, and only one other man besides myself. He is blind, and his wife attends to my needs. ”

“ No, not to the writer, but to the soul whose progeny the book is, to the living intellect that bred it, in Milton's noble phrase, to "an Immortality rather than a life." "Many a man," he says, "lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." ”

“ Most remarkable concession of all, the Jewess on a journey might wear the dress of a man. The law of the land was equally open to reason. In Spain, the Jew was allowed to discard his yellow badge while travelling; in Germany, he had the same privilege, but he had to pay a premium for it. In some parts, the Jewish community as a whole bought the right to travel and to discard the badge on journeys, paying a lump sum for the general privilege, and itself exacting a communal tax to defray the general cost. In Rome, the traveller was allowed to lodge for ten days before resuming his hated badge. ”

“ A language is not living when it is merely ecclesiastical. No one calls Sanskrit a living language because some Indian sects still pray in Sanskrit. But when Jewish poets took to using Hebrew again—if, indeed, they ever ceased to use it—as the language of daily life, as the medium for expressing their human emotions, then one can see that the sacred tongue was on the way to becoming once more what it is to-day in many parts of Palestine—the living tongue of men. ”