Jewish tradition

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He loved truth, but truth for him had two aspects: there was truth as revealed by God, there was truth which God left man to discover for himself. In the mind of Maimonides, Moses and Aristotle occupied pedestals side by side. In the "Strong Hand," he had codified and given orderly arrangement to Judaism as revealed in Bible and tradition; he would now examine its relations to reason, would compare its results with the data of philosophy. ”

“ the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew. ”

“ The one and only civilisation which has preserved its continuity is that of the Jewish race. In spite of persecution the Jews have preserved unchanged the minutest details of ritual law and ceremony, the causes of their suffering. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As long as the Jews were self-respecting and self-governing, they and their government and their religion had been respected and left alone. As soon as their leaders began to riot and quarrel among themselves the fate of the bundle of sticks fell upon the people. ”

“ Its Jewish readers will find it an eloquent appeal for renewed devotion to the noble cause of Israel's mission; its Christian readers, recognizing the important part Judaism has played in the production of our present-day civilization, will recognize how baseless is the prejudice that reigns against the Jew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is unpleasant to speak harshly of the Jewish race, especially as we know personally some highly cultured, responsible, and eminently respectable men who form a decided exception to the general rule ”

“ I find the antechambers filled with people, both Jews and Gentiles, nobles and common people, judges and bailiffs, friends and foes—a mixed multitude, who await the time of my return. I dismount from my animal, wash my hands, go forth to my patients, and entreat them to bear with me while I partake of some slight refreshment, the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours. ”

“ As a second cause may be assigned the growing and regrettable propensity of Jews to draw a rigid line of separation between life and religion, and wherever this occurs, religious feasts tend towards a solemnity that cannot, and dare not, relax into amusement. This tendency is eating at the very heart of Jewish life, and ought to be resisted by all who truly understand the genius of Judaism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we understand them so, we have here an instance of what runs all through the letter; the taking hold of Jewish ideas for the purpose of lifting them into a loftier region, and transfiguring them into the expression of Christian truth. For example, we read in it: 'Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation' ”

“ 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. ”

“ In many ways, the Jewish experience is unique, freighted with the anguish of frequent persecution, but ennobled by an unyielding spirit that has always found a way to turn darkness into light. In the crucible of sorrow, the Jewish people have reaffirmed, time and again, the basic human values of faith, community, justice, and hope. ”

“ For, the Jewish nation, in being chosen of God to be a sacerdotal race, was to pass through a history which should embody struggles, oppressions, agonies, victories, and deliverances, such as should represent to all time the sorrows and joys, the trials and hopes, of humanity. To this day, the events of Jewish history so well express universal experiences, that its literature in all languages, and under all difference of climate and custom, has an imperishable hold on the human heart. ”

“ Communal Progress.—Meanwhile, by marriage or by conversion, or by simple aloofness and indifference, some of the more weak and the more selfish members of the community every now and then slipped from under the many burdens which their Judaism imposed upon them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another division was formed by those who stood uncompromisingly for the preservation of the traditional Jewish life based on a strict belief in the divine origin of the Bible and the authenticity of Rabbinic interpretation, differing from the old school only in so far as they admitted secular education. ”

“ It is superfluous to add that the Jewish people, thus thoroughly adopted into the comity of European nations, and Judaism recognized as the great and enlightened religion of that powerful and ubiquitous race, the true mission of Judaism, as taught by Bible and Talmud—that of holding up the torch of monotheistic truth to the world—would begin its practical 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. ”

“ In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Religion and ethics, exegesis and homiletics, jurisprudence and ceremonial laws, ritual and liturgy, philosophy and science, medicine and magics, astronomy and astrology, history and geography, commerce and trade, politics and social problems, all are represented there, and reflect the mental condition of the Jewish world in its seclusion from the outer world, as well as in its contact with the same whether in agreement or in opposition. ”

“ Then, too, the ideas of the Jew of the period, as regarded worship, were more or less of a hybrid character, while the modern repugnance to blood-shedding, and all the consequent unpleasantness of the sacrificial ceremonies, caused the Jewish leaders to construct a very much more simple ritual than anything approaching the original Mosaic standard. ”

“ The amiable optimism which insists on an inseparable union between a Jew and his money, and discerns an alliterative link between kings and contentment, or makes now and again a monopoly of the virtues by labelling them ‘Christian,’ has, we suspect, a good deal to do with the manufacture of debatable definitions, and the ready fitting of slop-made judgments. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ It is for the Jewish people at large to consider, which of these three reasons have influenced the champions of the oral law. The Jews certainly have a right to some explanation from those, whose learning and station point them out as the natural defenders of Judaism. ”

“ 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? ”

“ To toil for wealth which they might not openly enjoy, and to passionately believe in a religion which they might not openly profess, was the portion of the Jews for centuries. It was a sort of suffering which sapped at the very roots of self-respect, and which inevitably resulted in defects of bearing and of conduct. The outcast Jew learnt to stoop where he should have stood upright, and to swagger and to push when standing room was grudgingly allotted him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ American history is a tapestry woven from the fabric of traditions and beliefs from every corner of the globe and bound together by a common love for life and liberty. Since our Nation's earliest days, Jewish citizens have contributed to our success in virtually every field of human endeavor. The Jewish culture, a vibrant and distinctive strand in our richly textured tapestry, has helped to give our Nation its shape. ”