Hebrew culture

“ Dwelling in this atmosphere of culture and research, the Hebrew mind rapidly expanded and began to take its part as an active force in civilization. It acquired the love of knowledge in a wider sense than it had recognized before, and assimilated the teachings of Hellas in all their variety. ”

“ The Hebrew stranger is encompassed in his own home by an atmosphere of culture, and his friends are among the educators of men. I doubt not that his associations are of the learning and the splendor of Cordova, and that he has drunk deep of the widely diffused maxims of Saadia and the sages of Sora. ”

“ For ages it had been inhabited by expatriated Jews; but early in the fourth century two Arab tribes, the Aus and the Khazraj, settled there. But the Hebrew residents were much superior to the newcomers in general culture, in agriculture and wealth, and, it was darkly rumored, in the black art of magic; for the Pagan usurpers held to the primitive belief that the perfect man was one who could write Arabic, swim and shoot—and not many of them could write Arabic. ”

“ They were mostly young men, fresh from the universities, profoundly versed in Hebrew and rabbinic lore, zealous lovers of their religion, equipped with the elements of ancient and modern culture, and anxious to harmonize the conflicting claims of both in their private lives and public station. ”

“ It nourished the Jews in their amazing obstinacy, and led to the annihilation of their State which, to the very end, they saw in their dreams bruising all other nations with a rod of iron, and breaking them in pieces like a potter's vessel. But, as any idealism is better than none, the Hebrew race has won remarkable triumphs, though of a kind which it never desired. ”

“ They obey the laws and comply with the customs of the land in which they reside; they converse in its language and respect its religious observances. But they cling to the Jewish laws and customs, so far as it is possible for them [Pg 41] to do so. The Hebrew is still their national language; the ancient worship of Israel the only one they will render. Like the stream of the Rhone at Chalons, which mingles with that of the Saone, yet continues to retain the peculiarity of its colour, they are dwellers among many nations, but Jews after all, and Jews only. ”

“ Indeed, the Hebrew poets soar far above all others in that energy of feeling, impetuous and irresistible, which penetrates, warms, and moves the very soul. They reveal their anxieties as well as their hopes; they paint with truth and love the actual condition of the human race, with its sorrows and consolations, its hopes and fears, its love and hate. They select their images from the habitual ideas of the people, and personify inanimate objects—the mountains tremble and exult, deep cries unto deep. Another characteristic of Hebrew poetry is the strong feeling of nationality it expresses. ”

“ The Israelites among us talk of their own kingdom, and I wonder if the Hebrew means to set up a nation within us, or assail the throne of the Pharaohs, or go forth and settle in another country."
The lady shrugged her shoulders. "The Hebrews talk in similitudes. The prospect of freedom so uplifts them that they chant their purposes to you, and bewilder you with quaint words and hidden meanings. But these three facts, my Lord, are apparent and most potent in results when combined; they are oppressed beyond endurance; they are many; they are captained by a mystic. ”

“ The history of the development of modern Hebrew literature, its character, the extraordinary conditions fostering it, its very existence, are of a sort to surprise one who has not kept in touch with the internal struggles, the intellectual currents that have agitated the Judaism of Eastern Europe in the course of the past century. ”

“ A whole school of literary humanists undertook the work of emancipating the Jewish masses, and pursued it for several generations with admirable zeal. Hebrew became an excellent instrument of propaganda in their hands. Thanks to their efforts, the language of the prophets, inarticulate for nearly two thousand years, was developed to a striking degree of perfection. It was shown to be a flexible medium, varied enough to serve as the vehicle for any modern idea. ”

“ Hebrew has never been dead. At no time in its long history has it ceased to be employed by the Jewish people, as a medium for the expression, whether in speech or in writing, of the living thoughts and the living feelings of the Jew. ”

“ I dare not say that we owe no benefits to the Jewish nation, I do not feel sure whether we do or do not, but I can see no good thing that I can point to as a notoriously Hebrew contribution to our moral and intellectual well-being as I can point to our law and say that it is Roman, or to our fine arts and say that they are based on what the Greeks and Italians taught us. ”

“ To be a nation without a fatherland, yet with a mother-tongue, Hebrew—there is the spiritual originality, the miracle of history. Such has been the real kingdom of Israel in the past—we have been 'sons of the Law' as other men have been sons of France, of Italy, of Germany. ”

“ Hence they who deny the Divine origin of the Hebrew Polity, bear the highest testimony to the splendor of that intellect which created it. If all was the product of one mind, it is the most illustrious instance in history of the power of a great spirit to impress itself on the race. The name of Moses stands alone, as the greatest of antiquity, and the Hebrew law remains as its most wonderful monument. ”

“ To the Hebrew, as the original custodians of the Old Testament, we are indebted for keeping the faith pure when all other nations either forgot or abandoned it, or else mixed it up with errors and idolatry. What Moses records of the creation of the world and the first ten Fathers, is embodied by the Persians, Indians and Chinese in whole volumes of mythology, and surrounded by a host of fanciful traditions. Thus we see in the Hebrew as the chosen people of God, a nation able to preserve its literature intact through captivity, dispersion and persecution, for a period of four thousand years. ”

“ Hebrew thought, in its inception, its ethics, its morals, is the pure wine of religion; in America, they have thinned it with the water of reform, and put it into fine-looking bottles with gold labels. ”

“ In all regions where civilisation has made any marked progress, wherever its blessings are really experienced, Hebrew literature is regarded as its most precious feature, and all nations ardently cultivate its study and render homage to its worth. May it therefore please the Imperial Government to allow the Israelites themselves, the people by whose agency this boon has been given to mankind, to have the direction of those establishments in which they are to be trained in the true knowledge of their own inalienable inheritance. ”

“ Willingly, did space permit, we would follow the author through his account of the Judaism of his time. The majority of Jews, he says, are poor, yet annually they send “Almes to Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron.” The Jews never “torment, or abuse, or put to any cruel death, any Brute [Pg 142] Beast.” Very few Jews are able to speak Hebrew; all learn the language of the countries where they are born. “Onely those of the Morea still retain the Hebrew Tongue also, and use it in their Familiar Letters.” ”

“ On the other hand, it is somewhat inferior to many others, as, for example, the Greek, in poetical forms and shape, in richness and variety of development, and in precision of scientific diction. In its essential character, the Hebrew language is prophetical, like the people itself, even in the present evil days of their dispersion—the people in whom the living word of the twofold ancient prophecy, now that the Jews have handed it over to the Gentiles, has first attained its perfect accomplishment. ”

“ It must be the pride of every Jew to be enabled to pray at home, and especially in the Synagogues, in that same language, and if Hebrew be not the language of his every-day life, he should seek to perfect his knowledge of it to such an extent that he shall be able to understand the prayers and to pray with his whole heart. ”

“ Hebrew literature, faithful to its Biblical mission, has within it the power of replenishing the moral resources of the masses and making their hearts thrill with enthusiasm for justice and the ideal. It is the focus of the rays vivifying all that breathes, that struggles, that creates, that hopes within the Jewish soul.
To misunderstand this moral bearing of the renascence of the Hebrew language is to fail to know the very life of the better part of Judaism and the Jew. ”

“ Although they have constantly married among themselves, the Jews have everywhere been modified by their surroundings—the English, Russian, Polish, German, and Oriental Jews differing from each other in many respects as much as do the other people of those countries. Yet they have much in common, and have everywhere preserved their individuality. The reason is clear. It is the Hebrew religion—and certainly religion is not transmitted by generation, but by association—which has everywhere preserved the distinctiveness of the Hebrew race. ”

“ Good results from sorrowful causes showed themselves often in unexpected ways and in unforeseen directions; for instance, the frequent theological disputations between Jews and Jews, and Christians and Christians, the very charges now and again brought against Jews and Jewish literature, turned the attention of Christian scholars to the study of Hebrew. ”

“ The bare possibility of the existence of a modern literature in Hebrew seemed so strange, so improbable, that the best-informed circles refused to entertain the notion seriously—perhaps not without some semblance of a reason for their incredulity. ”

“ In spite of obstacles of every kind, and in spite of the dangerous rivalry of the European languages, the rivalry of the Jewish- German itself, the Hebrew language has given proof of persistent vitality, and displayed surprising power of adaptation to all sorts of circumstances and all departments of literature, and widely separated countries have been the scene of its development. So far as the earliest humanists had planned, the Hebrew language was to serve only as an instrument of propaganda and emancipation. ”

“ Compared with the great empires of Babylon and Nineveh and Egypt, the Hebrew nation was small, crude, barbarous, insignificant, but the idea of one god controlling all, who passed in conception from a god of authority, imminence, and revenge, to a god of justice and righteousness, who controlled the affairs of men, developed the Hebrew concept of human relations. ”

“ And so the Golden Age of Hebrew Literature ends. We know only its sacred poetry, and much indeed of this has disappeared. [11] The harvest and vintage songs which wakened the echoes amid the vales of Palestine, the pastorals that accompanied the shepherd’s pipe on the hill-sides of Ephraim, all are lost forever; “the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the bride,” were forgotten in the streets of Jerusalem, when the land was desolate under the Babylonian and “the daughters of music were brought low.” ”

“ One of the most reliable, but at the same time most hazardous, sources of Hebrew, as of Aryan, mythological investigation is the language itself, and above all, the appellations to which the myth is attached. ”

“ The same passionate intensity which makes the grandeur of the ancient Hebrew literature still lives among them, though often narrowed by ages of oppression, and gives them the peculiar effectiveness that comes from turning all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel what it may. ”

“ The question continually recurs, whence came things like these among the natives of our continent, or the American savages, unless these savages are the very tribes of Israel? No evidence is furnished that such a variety of Hebrew rites is found among any other people on earth, except the Jews. ”

“ Little, or rather nothing, can properly be said of Hebrew art, for it is a non-entity. The Hebrews are a mixed race. They assert themselves to be of the Semitic group of mankind, but ethnologically they are a composition of black, yellow, and white men, and are closely related to the Arabs and Phœnicians. They were generally slaves. For 450 years they were in bondage in Egypt, whence they first emerged into a national existence. From Moses to Saul, for 450 years, they lived under a kind of theocratic democracy: God, the supreme ruler in heaven, and the Jews on earth his chosen people. ”

“ Thus, viewed from a purely literary standpoint, we are now enabled to trace back to a primitive age the ancestry of the traditions, which, under a very different aspect, eventually found their way into Hebrew literature. ”

“ The employment in worship of the Hebrew languages, in which the priceless treasures of divine revelation have been preserved and the immortal monuments of a literature dominating all civilization have been handed down, must be regulated by the knowledge or ignorance of that language by the people for whom the ritual is arranged. ”

“ But the people with whose traditions we are ultimately concerned are the Hebrews. In the first series of Schweich Lectures, delivered in the year 1908, the late Canon Driver showed how the literature of Assyria and Babylon had thrown light upon Hebrew traditions concerning the origin and early history of the world. The majority of the cuneiform documents, on which he based his comparison, date from a period no earlier than the seventh century B.C., and yet it was clear that the texts themselves, in some form or other, must have descended from a remote antiquity. ”