Lady Katie Magnus

“ THE STORY OF A FALSE PROPHET Each age has its illusions—illusions which succeeding ages with a recovered sense of sanity are often apt to record as the most incomprehensible of crazes. ‘That poor will-o’-the-wisp mistaken for a shining light! Oh, purblind race of miserable men!’ is the quick, contemptuous comment of a later, clearer-sighted generation. But one may question if such comment be always just. May not the narrow vision, too unseeing to be deceived, betoken a yet more hopeless sort of blindness than the wide-eyed gaze which, fixed on stars, blunders into quagmires? ”

“ When hope is dead the vision perchance takes unto itself the awful condition of death, corruption, for thus only could it have come to pass that that same people, which had given an Isaiah to the world, under the stress of inexorable and inevitable circumstance brought forth a Sabbathai Zevi.
‘Of all mortal woes,’ so declared the weeping Persian to Thersander at the banquet, ‘the greatest is this: with many thoughts and wise, to have no power.’ Under the crushing burden of that mortal woe the Jewish race had rested restlessly for over sixteen weary centuries. ”

“ Possibly, we are all in too great a hurry nowadays, too eager in search to be patient to find, for certain it is that the world’s already large stock of hows and whys seems to get bigger every day. We catch the echoes in poetry and in prose, in all sorts of tones and from all sorts of people, and Lord Lytton’s question sounds only like another of the hopeless Pilate series. His is such a large interrogation too—all the wisdom sown of all the ages suggests such an enormous crop! ”

“ Did Mendelssohn forget it when, nineteen hundred years later, he emancipated his people from the results of worse than Syrian oppression, at the cost of so many, his own children among the rest, shaking off memories and duties as lightly as they shook off restraints? Over and over again, in the wonderful history of the Jews, does religion without nationality prove itself as impossible as nationality without religion to serve for a sustaining force in Judaism. ”

“ These three lines indicate the sentiment of Judaism, and might almost serve as sufficient sample of Halevi’s simple creed, for, truth to tell, the religion of the Jews does not concern itself greatly with the ideal, being of a practical rather than of an emotional sort, rigid as to practice, but tolerant over theories, and inquiring less as to a man’s belief than as to his conduct. Work—steady, cheerful, untiring work—was perhaps Halevi’s favourite form of praise. Still, being a poet, he sings, and, like the birds, in divers strains, with happy, unconscious effort. ”

“ Jewish religion neither ‘happens’ to have a national origin, nor does Jewish nationality ‘happen’ to have religious customs. The Jewish nation has become a nation and has been preserved as a nation for the distinct purpose of religion. This, as we read it, is the lesson of history. And this too is its consolation. The faithful few who see the fulfilment of history and of prophecy in a restored and localised nationality—a Jerusalem reinstated as the joy of the whole earth; the careless many who, in comfortable complacency, are well content to await it indefinitely, in dispersion ”

“ The slow, smooth current of Eastern life seemed of a sudden stirred into a whirl of excited eddies. Men and women in swift-changing groups were sobbing, praying, laughing in a breath, their quick gesticulations in curious contrast with their sober, shabby garments, and their patient, pathetic eyes. And strangest thing of all, it was on a prophet in his own country, in the very city of his birth, that this extraordinary enthusiasm of greeting was being expended, and the name of the prophet was Sabbathai, son of Mordecai. ”

“ It is curious and interesting in these modern days to take up what Heine called the ‘family chronicle of the Jews,’ and to find, as in a long gallery of family portraits, the type repeating itself through every variety of ‘treatment’ and costume. Clear and distinct they stand out, the long line of our{178} Jewish maids and matrons, not ‘faultily faultless’ by any means, yet presenting in their vigorous lovableness a delightful continuity of wholesome womanhood, an unbroken line of fit claimants for fitting woman’s rights. ”

“ The poetry of the Jews he roundly declares to be universal, and that of the Arabs egotistic in its tendency; the sons of the desert finding subjects for their Muse in traditions of national glory and in dreams of material delight, whilst the descendants of prophets turn to the records of their own ancestry, and find their themes in remorseful memories, and in unselfish and unsensual hopes. With the Jewish poet, past and future are alike uncoloured by personal desire, and even the sins and sufferings of his race he enshrines in song. ”

“ Rather to prove that love at its best does not narrow the sympathies, but makes them widen and broaden out to enfold the less fortunate under its happy, brooding wings. And though at the crowning moment of his life Halevi could spare a tender thought for his ‘tribe,’ with very little right could the foolish, favourite epithet of ‘tribalism’ be flung at him, and with even less of justice at his race. In truth,{19} they were ‘patriots’ in the sorriest, sincerest sense—this dispossessed people, who owned not an inch of the lands wherein they wandered, from the east unto the west. ”

“ Whilst the leaders of society, the licentious crusader and the celibate monk, were stumbling so sorely in the shadow of the Cross, and whilst the rank and file throughout Europe were steeped in deepest gloom of densest ignorance and superstition, the lamp of learning, handed down from generation to generation of despised Jews, was still being carefully trimmed, and was burning at its brightest among the little knot of philosophers and poets in Spain. ”

“ Judaism, unlike many other faiths, has not a history and a religious belief apart,—the one not only includes and supplements, but is actually non-existent, ‘unthinkable,’ without the other. Thus to have made an earnest Jew, with the strong racial instinct of Mordecai, a weak theist, would have been an inartistic conception, and Jewish criticism has not discovered this flaw in George Eliot’s exceptional but faithful Jewish portraiture. ”

“ Do English Jews, undistinguishable in the mass from other Englishmen, really and truly hold the desire, like Mordecai, of ‘founding a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old’? (Daniel Deronda, Book IV.) Do they indeed design to devote their ‘wealth to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors,’ to cleanse their fair land from ‘the hideous obloquy of Christian strife, which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of wild beasts to which he has lent an arena’ (ibidem) ? ”

“ So Mendelssohn went again, and found Fromet with the blue eyes bent steadily over her work; perhaps to hide a tear as much as to prevent a glance, for Fromet, as the sequel shows, was a tender-hearted maiden, and although she did not like to look at her deformed suitor, she did not want to wound him. Then Mendelssohn began to talk, beautiful glowing talk, and the spell which his writings had exercised began again to work on the girl. From philosophy to love, in its impersonal form, is an easy transition. ”

“ The pleasures and the hopes which Jews might not share they came by slow degrees to hate and to despise, and the men with the yellow badges on their garments learnt to cringe and stoop under their load, and the dark-eyed women with the blue stripes to their veils lifted them only to look upon their children. Undeniably, by every outward test, the poor pariahs of the Ghetto were degenerate, and their sad and sordid lives must have looked both repellent and unpicturesque to the passer-by. ”

“ His whole life had been an upholding of the ‘standard’; publicists who sneered at the ostentatious rich Jew, priests who railed at the degraded poor Jew, were each bound to recognise in Manasseh ben Israel a Jew of another type: one poor yet self-respecting, sought after yet unostentatious, conservative yet cosmopolitan, learned yet undogmatic. They might question if this Amsterdam Rabbi were sui generis, but they were at least willing to find out if he were in essentials what he claimed to be, fairly representative of the fairly treated members of his race. ”

“ With Palestine at last in possession of the chosen people, this civilisation of which they were the guardians by slow degrees became manifest. Samuel lived it, and David sang it, and Isaiah preached it, and the nation clung to it, individual men and women, stumbling and failing often, but dying each, when need came, a hundred deaths in its defence; perhaps finding it on occasion less difficult to die for an idea than to live up to it. ”

“ Foremost among all heroines of all love tales comes, of course, she whose long wooing seemed ‘but as a few days’ to her young lover, so strong and so steadfast was the worship she won. To the young, that maiden ‘by the well’s mouth’ will stand always for favourite text and familiar illustration, but to older folks the sad-eyed mater dolorosa of the Old Testament is to the full as interesting and as suggestive an ideal. ”

“ In the long centuries since Jerusalem fell there has been time and to spare for the green grass to wither into dusty weeds above those desolate dead whose ‘place knows them no more.’ That Halevi with his ‘poetic heart,’ which is a something different from the most metrical of poetic imaginations, cherished a closer ideal of patriotism than some of his brethren may not be denied. ”

“ And equally clear is it that the poor, though cared for and protected, are not to be petted. At this very three-times-a-day gleaning, if one should keep a corner of his ‘corner’ to himself, hiding his harvesting and defrauding his neighbour, justice is prompt: ‘Let him be forced to depart,’ it is written, ‘and what he may have received let it be taken out of his hands.’ Neither is any preference permitted to poverty of the plausible or of the picturesque sort: ‘He who refuseth to one and giveth to another, that man is a defrauder of the poor,’ it is gravely said. ”

“ Safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith, lay, if anywhere, in the neglect of the outside world. And so the poor pariahs huddled in their close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a dialect of their own, half Jewish, half German, and as wholly degenerate from the grand old Hebrew as were they themselves from those to whom it had been a living tongue. ”

“ One sees them now as victims, and now as spectators, but never as actors in that strange show, yet always, we fancy, realising the barbarism, and with that undoubting faith of theirs in the ultimate dawning of a perfect day, seeming to regard the long reign of brute force, of priestcraft, and of ignorance as phases of misrule, which, like unto manifold others, should pass whilst they would endure. ”

“ When a David dances before the Ark it needs other than a daughter of Saul to understand him. There have been Jews in David’s case, their enthusiasm mocked at; and there have been Jews indifferent to their trust, and Jews who have betrayed it, and Jews too, and these not a few, who have pushed it into prominence with undue display. The infinite changes of circumstance and surrounding in Jewish fortunes no less than differences in individual character have induced a considerable divergence in the practical politics of the national idea. ”

“ That eighteenth century had been but a dreary one for the Jews of Europe. It set in darkness on Heine’s cradle, and on his ‘mattress grave,’ some fifty years later, the dawn of nineteenth century civilisation, for them, had scarcely broken. ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘is not that they persecute us with{34} their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered the Jewish system. ”

“ Judaism, as they believed in it, was a Personal Force making for righteousness, a Law which knew no change, the Promise of a period when the earth should be filled with the knowledge of the Lord; and the ‘witnesses’ stuck to this their trust, through good repute and through evil repute, with a simple doggedness which disarms all superficial criticism. ”