Israel Zangwill

“ I said mischievously: "the Song of Solomon."
He turned on me with strange earnestness, as if not perceiving my irony. "Ay, indeed," he cried; "but when the Rabbis do read it, they turn it into a bloodless allegory, Jewish demons as they are! What is the beauty of yonder maiden but an emanation from the divine? The more beautiful the body, the more shiningly it leads us to the thought of God."
I was much impressed with this odd fellow, whom I perceived to be an original.
"But that's very dangerous doctrine," said I; "by parity of reasoning you would make the lust of the flesh divine." ”

“ The Countess seemed to divine what was passing through his mind. "If you could get a wife worthy of you," she cried. "A brain to match yours, a soul to feel yours, a heart to echo the drum-beat of yours, a mate for your dungeon or your throne, ready for either—but where is this paragon?"
[389] "You are right," cried Lassalle, subtly gratified. After all Helene was a child with a child's will, broken by the first obstacle. "Never have I met a woman I could really feel my mate. If ever I have kindled a soul in one, it has been for a moment. No, I have always known I must live and die alone. ”

“ Yea; thy lips have wooed mine away from prayer, thine arms have drawn me down from the steeps of righteousness. Thou hast made me unfaithful to my bride, the Law. For nigh forty years I lived hard and lonely, steeped my body in ice and snow, lashed myself—ay, lashed myself, I who now fear the lash—till the blood ran from a dozen wounds, and now, O God! O God! Woman, thou hast polluted me! I have lost the divine spirit. It hath gone out from me; it will incarnate itself in another, in a nobler. Once I was Messiah, now I am man. ”

“ And in a spiritual darkness as black, Manasseh tottered home to sit with his wife on the floor and bewail the death of their Joseph, while a death-light glimmering faintly swam on a bowl of oil, and the prayers for the repose of the soul of the deceased rose passionately on the tainted Ghetto air. And Miriam, her Madonna-like face wet with hot tears, burnt the praying-shawl she was weaving in secret love for the man who might one day have loved her, and went to condole with the mourners, holding Rachel's rugged hand in those soft, sweet fingers that no lover would ever clasp. ”

“ If Evolution was a truth, what mystic force working in life! From the devil-fish skulking towards his prey to the Christian laying down his life for his fellow, refusing the reward of the stronger; from the palpitating sac—all stomach—of embryonic life to the poet, the musician, the great thinker. The animality of average humanity made for hope rather than for despair, when one remembered from what it had developed. It was for man in this laboring cosmos to unite himself with the stream that made for goodness and beauty. ”

“ I am tragedy, I am comedy—Heraclitus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a god."
"God's satire weighs heavily upon me. The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly so-called German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery." ”

“ And so, not without hope, yet with no expectation of a miracle, I give the Jews a Christ they can now accept, the Christians a Christ they have forgotten. I rebuild for my beloved America a type of simple manhood, unfretted by the feverish lust for wealth or power, a simple lover of the quiet moment, a sweet human soul never dispossessed of itself, always at one with the essence of existence. Who knows but I may suggest the great question: What shall it profit a nation to gain the whole world and lose its own soul? ”

“ Yes, he was a dreamer and a fool, and Mendelssohn was a sage, indeed. In his bitterness he distrusted even his own Dissertation, his uncompromising logic, destructive of all theology. Perhaps Mendelssohn was right: perhaps he had really solved the Jewish problem. To be a Jew among Germans, and a German among Jews: to reconcile the old creed with Culture: to hold up one's head, and assert oneself as an honorable element in the nation—was not this catholic gathering a proof of the feasibility of such an ideal? ”

“ Happy burghers of Berlin in their Sunday best trooped through the Rosenthaler gate in the cool of the August evening for their customary stroll in the environs: few escaped noticing the recumbent ragged figure of a young man, with a long dirty beard, wailing and writhing uncouthly just outside the gate: fewer inquired what ailed him.
He answered in a strange mixture of jargons, blurring his meaning hopelessly with scraps of Hebrew, of Jewish-German, of Polish, of Russian and mis-punctuating it with choking sobs and gasps. One good soul after another turned away helpless. ”

“ Hast thou not thrilled with me at the fairness of a pictured face, at the glow of luminous color, at the white radiance of a statue?"
"I sinned if I loved beauty for itself alone, and—forgive me if I wound thee, lady—this worship of beauty is for the rich, the well-fed, the few. What of the poor and the down-trodden who weep in darkness? What comfort holds thy creed for such? All these wonders of the human hand and the human brain are as straws weighed against a pure heart, a righteous deed. The ages of Art have always been the ages of abomination, Signora. ”

“ Worship? He could have prostrated himself for hours on the flags, worn out his knees in prayer. O Luther, O Galileo, enemies of the human race! How wise of the Church to burn infidels, who would burn down the spirit's home—the home warm with the love and treasures of the generations—and leave the poor human soul naked and shivering amid the cold countless worlds. O Napoleon, arch-fiend, who, opening the Ghettos, where the Jews crouched in narrow joy over the Sabbath fire, let in upon them the weight of the universe. ”

“ Should you not wish to come again into the society of Mendelssohn?"
Maimon was silent.
Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was indeed as a fiery scourge. Too late he realized that the passion for Truth had destroyed him. Knowledge alone was not sufficient for life. The will and the emotions demanded their nutriment and exercise as well as the intellect. Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract formula, pale ghost of living realities. ”

“ The Sphinx brooded solemnly under the brooding stars. Sabbataï's voice was as the wail of a wind.
"Yea, I will save Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the desert, and speak comfortably unto her. ”

“ Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life, soul cut adrift from body, and sent floating through the empyrean, when it can only at best be a captive balloon. At the same time, don't take your idea of Judaism from the Jews. It is only an apostolic succession of great souls that understands anything in this world. The Jewish mission will never be over till the Christians are converted to the religion of Christ. Lassalle is a better pupil of the Master than the priests who denounce socialism. ”

“ Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination conjured it up as it was ere he was born: the one campo, bordered with a colonnade of shops, the black-bearded Hebrew merchants in their long robes, the iron gates barred at midnight, the keepers rowing round and round the open canal-sides in their barca. The yellow cap? The yellow O on their breasts? Badges of honor; since to be persecuted is nobler than to persecute. Why had they wished for emancipation? Their life was self-centred, self-complete. ”

“ Nay, it is but mischief thou wouldst do, with thy passionless ghost of a creed. It is the artists who have brought back joy to the world, who have perceived the soul of beauty in all things. And though they have feigned to paint the Holy Family and the Crucifixion and the Dead Christ and the Last Supper, it is the loveliness of life that has inspired their art. Yea, even from the prayerful Giotto downwards, it is the pride of life, it is the glory of the human form, it is the joy of color, it is the dignity of man, it is the adoration of the Muses. ”

“ O just and joyous edict! The Jewish Kingdom was on the eve of restoration—how then longer bewail its decay!
But the staunchest pietists were staggered, and these the most fervent of the followers of Sabbataï. What! The penances and prayers of sixteen hundred years to be swept away! The Yoke of the Torah to be abolished! Surely true religion rather demanded fresh burdens. What could more fitly mark the Redemption of the World than new and more exacting laws, if, indeed, such remained to be invented? True, God himself was now incarnate on earth—of that they had no doubt. ”

“ Poor Maimon stole a glance at the buxom, blue-eyed matron doing the honors of her salon so gracefully, assisted by two dazzling young ladies in Parisian toilettes—evidently her daughters—and he groaned at the thought of his peasant-wife and his uncouth, superstition-swaddled children: decidedly he must give Sarah a divorce.
"I can't delude myself with such day-dreams," he said hopelessly.
"Wait! Wait! So long as you don't day-dream your time away. That is the danger with you clever young Poles—you are such dreamers. Everything in this life depends on steadiness and patience. ”

“ To be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, what a tragedy! No, your limited intellects are happier: those that see life in some one noble way, and in unity find strength. I should have loved to be a Milton—like one of your English cathedrals, austere, breathing sacred memories, resonant with the roll of a great organ, with painted windows, on which the shadows of the green boughs outside wave and flicker, and just hint of Nature. Or one of your aristocrats with a stately home in the country, and dogs and horses, and a beautiful wife. ”

“ How curious are men! All these years since first we met at Rijnburg he has been goading and spurring me on to give my deepest thought to the world. 'Twas always, 'Cast out all fear of stirring up against thee the pigmies of the time—Truth before all—let us spread our sails to the wind of true Knowledge.' And now the tune is, 'O pray be careful not to give sinners a handle!' Well, well, so I am not to tell men that the highest law is self-imposed; that there is no virtue even in virtues that do not express the essence of one's being. ”

“ States are the expression of souls; in any land the Jewish soul could express itself in characteristic institutions, could shake off the long oppression of the ages, and renew its youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there is this longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it—capital that will return its safe percentage. A rush to Palestine will mean all that seething medley of human wants and activities out of which profits are snatched by the shrewd—gold-rush and God-rush, they are both one in their economic working. May not the Jews themselves take shares in so promising a project? ”

“ For as he grew more and more in love with the Old Testament, with its simple doctrine of a people, chosen and consecrate, so grew his sense of far-reaching destinies, of a linked race sprung from the mysterious East and the dawn of history, defying destruction and surviving persecution, agonizing for its faith and its unfaith—a conception that touched the springs of romance and the source of tears—and his vision turned longingly towards Amsterdam, that city of the saints, the home of the true faith, of the brotherhood of man, and the fatherhood of God. ”

“ I saw this simple son of the people—made more simple by my knowledge that His representative was a baker—moving amid the ancient peasant and fisher life of Galilee; I saw Him draw men and women, saints and sinners, by the magic of His love, the simple sweetness of His inner sunshine; I saw the sunshine change to lightning as He drove the money-changers from the Temple; I watched the clouds deepen as the tragedy drew on; I saw Him bid farewell to His mother; I heard suppressed sobs all around me. ”

“ My position in Berlin, my feeling for literature—for we Jews have all stifled our love for the beautiful and grown dead to poetry."
"Well, but what is a poet but a liar?"
"Ah, my dear Herr Maimon, you will grow out of that. I must lend you Homer. Intellectual speculation is not everything. For my part, I have never regretted withdrawing a portion of my love from the worthy matron, philosophy, in order to bestow it on her handmaid, belles-lettres. I am sorry to use a French word, but for once there's no better. You smile to see a Jew more German than the Germans." ”

“ Now that I have come to the close of my earthly days, and that the higher circles will soon open to me, whereof I have learned the secrets from my revered Master—where there is neither eating nor drinking, but the pious sit crowned and delight themselves with the vision of the Godhead—I would fain leave some chronicle, in these confused and evil days, of him whom I have loved best on earth, for he came to teach man the true life and the true worship. To him, the ever glorious and luminous Israel Baal Shem, the one true Master of the Name, I owe my redemption from a living death. ”

“ He laughed bitterly. "Thou believest that! Thou who knowest me man!"
"I know thee all divine. I have worshipped thee in joy. Art thou not Messiah?"
"Messiah! Who cannot save myself!"
"Who can hurt thee? Who hath ever hurt thee from thy youth up? The Angels watch over thy footsteps. Is not thy life one long miracle?"
He shook his head hopelessly. "All this year I have waited the miracle—all those weary months in the dungeon of Constantinople, in the Castle of Abydos—but what sure voice hath spoken? To-morrow I shall be disembowelled, lashed with fiery scourges—who knows what these dogs may do?" ”

“ Do you not remember what the Almighty says to Eleazar ben Pedos, in the Talmud, when the Rabbi complains of poverty? 'Wilt thou be satisfied if I overthrow the universe, so that perhaps thou mayest be created again in a time of plenty?' No, no, my friend, we must trust the scheme."
"But the fools enjoy prosperity," said the Red Beadle.
"It is only a fool who would enjoy prosperity," replied Zussmann. "If the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes flourish, that is just the very condition of virtue. What! would you have righteousness always pay and wickedness always fail! ”

“ Then, blushing painfully, she said quickly, "But how do you worship Napoleon and Moses in the same breath?"
"Ah, my dear Lucy, if your soul was like an Aladdin's palace with a thousand windows opening on the human spectacle! Self-contradiction the fools call it, if you will not shut your eyes to half the show. I love the people, yet I hate their stupidity and mistrust their leaders. I hate the aristocrats, yet I love the lilies that toil not, neither do they spin, and sometimes bring their perfume and their white robes into a sick man's chamber. ”