Jewish culture

“ This other-worldliness, in the course of historical development, in the measure that the nations approached the Jewish historical religion, assumed more and more of a secular character. And the more Jewish, the more humane the pagan world became, the more could Jews participate in the culture of this world and contribute to its progress. ”

“ Our knowledge of Judaism is slight; we have barely a suspicion of what in the course of centuries, nay, of thousands of years, it has done for the progress of civilization. In my estimation, our house-warming cannot more fittingly be celebrated than by taking a bird's-eye view of Jewish culture.
The Bible is the text-book of general literature. Out of the Bible, more particularly from the Ten74 Commandments, flashed from Sinai, mankind learned its first ethical lesson in a system which still satisfies its needs. ”

“ Mention of the well-known fact that the Hebrew studies prosecuted by Christians in the eighteenth century were carried on under Jewish influence brings us to the threshold of the modern era, the period of the Jewish Renaissance. Here we are on well-worn ground. Since Jews have been permitted to enter at will upon the multifarious pursuits growing out of modern culture, their importance as factors of civilization is universally acknowledged, and it would be wearisome, and would far transgress the limits of a lecture, to enumerate their achievements. ”

“ With emotion, with pain, not with resentment, Jewish history tells of those women, who spurned Judaism, knowing only its external appearance, its husk, not its essence, high ethical principles and philosophical truths—of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, Regina Fröhlich, Dorothea Mendelssohn,132 Sarah and Marianne Meyer, Esther Gad, and many others, first products of German culture in alliance with Jewish wit and brilliancy. ”

“ When the shadows of barbarism were gradually lifting from the mist-shrouded earth, and light universally diffused could not fail to strike the Jews scattered everywhere, a remnant of old Hebrew learning attached itself to new, foreign elements of culture, and in the course of centuries enlightened minds elaborated the heterogeneous ingredients into the literature called rabbinical. ”

“ Many of the cities and towns from which the expulsions took place were centers of Jewish culture. Most of the Jewish colleges and schools have been closed and many of the buildings and synagogues have been destroyed. It is safe to say that these losses cannot be repaired for generations to come.
The demoralization and pauperization of the individual refugees is painfully noticeable everywhere. Beggary, which was practically unknown among the Jews, is now only too frequent. ”

“ Power has gradually passed from the mailèd knights, from heroes of the battlefield to the counting house, because in gold there is more power than in fearless argonauts. If Germany excels us in armament and was better prepared in every other way it is because her nation is older than ours, older in its culture by several hundred years. Herein lies our weakness. But the Jews are the oldest people on earth. ”

“ Modern Judaism presents a curious spectacle. The tiniest of national groups in Eastern Europe, conceiving the idea of establishing its independence, proceeds forthwith to create a literature, if need be, inventing and forging. ”

“ Judaism has preserved the Jews! Judaism, that is, the Law with its development and ramifications of a great religious thought, was the sustaining power of the Jewish people under its burden of misery, suffering, torture, and oppression, enabling it to survive its tormentors. The Jews were the nation of hope. Like hope this people is eternal. The storms of fanaticism and race hatred may rage and roar, the race cannot be destroyed. ”

“ Good men, and wise men, and successful men, at different periods, and in different countries, stood out from the ranks, and made the name of Jew a name of honour, and not of reproach. Some of these men were like shooting stars, just raising a bright swift track of light, and dying down as quickly, having lit up only their own pathway. ”

“ Amid all the wretched physical squalor of the street he would have found little mental and less spiritual destitution. If the law of the land bid Jews shrink before men, the law of the Book bid them rejoice before God. ”

“ That the Jews had grown rich because they were thrifty, and temperate, and industrious, gained them no popularity among neighbours who were just a little short of these virtues. The clergy, too, had great influence over the populace, and they all but uniformly used it to the prejudice of the Jews. ”

“ Let us consider the real worldly Jews, not the Sabbath Jews, as Bauer does, but the every-day Jews.
We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, egoism.
What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money.
Very well. Emancipation from huckstering and from money, and therefore from practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our epoch.
An organization of society, which would abolish the fundamental conditions of huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would render the Jew impossible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the vast city in which they were sitting, the 'Easy Chair' knew that the Jewish Heine was living, breathing his weird and melancholy song, while in Paris and London and Frankfort and Vienna the great masters of the mainspring of industrial activity, the capitalists, who held peace and war in their hands, and by whose favor kings ruled, were Jews. The philosophy, the arts, the industry, the politics of Christendom were full of the Jewish genius, the gayety of nations, the delight of scholars, the scepters of princes, the movements of civilization, hung in great degree upon it. ”

“ Do you realize the present helplessness of poor Israel? We sometimes hear the Jews spoken of by Christians of a certain stamp, after this manner: "After all, they are not so badly off as the heathen. They are a moral, God-fearing people; they have the Old Testament Scriptures in their possession. They are intelligent, clever, influential, and certainly not so low and degraded as the heathen." ”

“ Yet we meet the Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere there is power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative vision which almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence he is more marked than any other race. ”

“ Do you suppose that their sacred traditions, their glorious history, their divine calling, must have broken the charm of custom for them, or have lifted the incubus of the world from their hearts? If you do, you adopt a notion which the Scriptures confute in every line. They never tell us that the gravitation of the Jewish soul to earth was less strong than that of other men. They never represent the Jew as wanting one bad and base tendency which belongs to you and me. ”

“ It is therefore to be expected that the English-speaking people, which has never disregarded but has at all times recognised and appreciated the peculiar character of the Jewish race, will feel an increased sympathy for it, on reading the alternations of its sublime and tragical history. ”

“ Jews accepted the new state of things. They bravely adapted themselves to the altered circumstances of their lot, and made the best of it. They had to live, though a hard and hurried and undignified sort of living it became. With a quickness which experience taught and self-interest quickened, they tried to make themselves useful and acceptable. Their own wants, as wayfarers in strange lands, made them swift to perceive the wants of others. ”

“ Why, it cannot be done; the Jews have left too great an impress on the world. Religion, history, science, the fine arts, commerce, is there anything in which they have never had a place? We went to church this evening: was your enjoyment of the anthem marred because the music was composed by Mendelssohn, a Jew? And has it ever occurred to you that our Liturgy is almost entirely of Jewish origin? The Magnificat—what is it but the joy-song 313of a Jewish maiden?—the Nunc Dimittis, that of Simeon the Jew? Why, the whole Bible belongs to the Jews—is Jewish literature from Genesis to Revelations. ”

“ Even to-day, the great majority of Occidental Jews pay homage to their ancient religion. Neither emancipation nor Christian proselytism, with its bait of material advantages, has succeeded in estranging the majority of Jews from their traditions. On the contrary, there have appeared of late, even among those who were formerly estranged from Judaism, men who display strong sympathies for the ancient Jewish mode of life. ”

“ This conception of ‘nationality’ would point rather to a spiritual than to a temporal sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter, and appears to be in accord with the tone pervading{64} both ancient and modern Jewish literature, which exhibits Judaism as a perpetual living force, maintained from within rather than from without, and destined continually to influence religious thought, and to survive all dispensations. ”

“ The Jewish race connects the modern populations with the early ages of the world, when the relations of the Creator with the created were more intimate than in these days, when angels visited the earth, and God himself even spoke with man. The Jews represent the Semitic principle; all that is spiritual in our nature. They are the trustees of tradition and the conservators of the religious element. They are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times—the natural equality of man. ”

“ He shows with a delicate touch of humour that Judaism, in being no proselytising faith, has a claim to be let alone. ‘I am so fortunate as to count amongst my friends many a worthy man who is not of my faith. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One inclines, perhaps, to accentuate the facts of history and to moralise over the might-have-beens where these fit into a theory; but so much as this at least seems indisputable—that those who would dissociate the national from the religious, or the religious from the national element in Judaism attempt the impossible. The ideal of the Jews must always be ‘from Zion shall come forth instruction, and the Word{156} of God from Jerusalem’; and to this end—‘that all people of the earth may know Thy name, as do thy people Israel.’ This is the goal of Jewish separateness. ”

“ Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.—Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. ”

“ None whatever, except the Jews’ own consciousness that the course they are pursuing is due for a check. The Jews always know that. They are not in the stream of the world, and every little while the world finds out what Judah always knows. ”

“ Moreover, no matter how prone a modern generation may be to disregard such things, the mere fact that they may have existed as a secret racial ideal for centuries is a powerful argument for their respectable acceptance, if not active execution, by the generation that now is. There is no idea deeper in Judaism than that Jews constitute a Chosen People and that their future is to be more glorious than their past. ”

“ Seeds once planted can, nevertheless, only follow the law of nature, and blossom and bear fruit according to their kind. Forced into secret and sordid ways, denied hope, aim, or ambition of any worthy sort, contemptuously shunned when they were not actively hunted, ‘protected’ by princes and persecuted by priests, what wonder if Jews at last became ‘degraded,’ never indeed to the level of what they were thought, but something undoubtedly below the level of what they should have been? ”

“ But save with such few and faithful dreamers, memory scarcely blossoms into hope, and hope most certainly has not yet ripened into strong desire. It may come; but at present we apprehend the majority of Jews see the ‘future of Judaism’ not in the form of a centralised and localised nationality, but rather in the destiny foreshadowed by our author, in which ‘Israel will be greatest when she labours under every zone,’ when ‘her children shall have spread themselves abroad, bearing the ineradicable seeds of eternal truth’ (pp. 86, 87) . ”

“ Likenesses between Islam and Judaism.—There was a kinship of religious thought, as well as of language and of race, between the Arab and the Jew. The Unity of God is the first principle of Islam as it is of Judaism. Abraham and Moses are the heroes of the Koran as of the Pentateuch, and the covenant of Abraham and the dietary laws of Moses are enjoined by Mahomed on his followers.
5. Differences between Islam and Judaism.—But there were differences too, and these of a very vital sort. ‘Allah was God.’ That doctrine of the new faith, the Jews, worshippers of One, might agree with. ”