XIX. AHASUERUS DELIVERED.

There are certain races of mankind whose history or whose character has made them the tests of civilisation. In one direction the negro has been such. In the development of English self-government, on both sides of the Atlantic, there came a time when its fine theories of liberty were put to the test. In America the poor ignorant negro knelt chained before the genius of the Republic. His slavery represented many millions of money, his freedom must cost many thousands of lives; but Justice said, “There is that lowly man—helpless, of alien race from you, too poor to pay you anything: if you can do justice to him, can make him a citizen, the world will know that you are really a republic.”

In another direction the Jewish race has been the test and register of civilisation. It was the one visible embodiment of Antichrist in Christendom. While missionaries were going through the world to convert the world, the Jew also went through the world—moral, religious, learned—a compulsory wanderer and missionary, in whose scars might always be read the spirit of the Church he opposed, and the meaning of a vicarious atonement, whose corollary was the unending crucifixion of a race for the offence of three or four of their ancestors. This Wandering Jew knocked at the doors of law-courts. “Who art thou?” said the judges. “I am Antichrist.” “Come in and be burnt,” said they. He came in and was burnt. But ever rising from his ashes, the Wanderer marched on. Again, after some centuries, he knocked at the door marked Justice. “Who art thou?” asked the judges. “I am Antichrist,” he said. “Stay out and be mobbed,” said they. And so he wandered until he reached the century when England opened the door and said, “Enter and receive thy right.” Even Judge Jeffreys, in the time of James II., would not accept the old law which disabled a Jew from prosecuting a Christian. “Pay him his money,” he cried to the defendant. “His action is not against a Christian: you are more a Jew than he is!” At many doors this unconquerable Antichrist had to knock in this land: slowly, against frantic attempts to bar them, they swung open, one after the other; and it was proved that English justice, confronting what Christendom called a devil, was ultimately equal to giving that devil his due—in society, in the law-court, in the Parliament.

The English have managed to hold superstition more in order in their smaller territory than it is held in Eastern Europe, yet they must not take for their own race all the credit for the equality that has been accorded the Jew in England. The credit is mainly due to himself. Some forty years ago, when wild stories reached Great Britain from Damascus and Rhodes of how Jews were suffering horrible outrages on account of absurd accusations—such as sacrificing Christian priests and children—the entire English community joined to support Sir Moses Montefiore in his mission to repress that fanaticism. But when England had sent Sir Moses on his noble mission, it turned to consider its own relation to the Jews, and found on its statute-book laws which still bore witness of the ages when Jewish blood had mingled with Christian sacrifices. The laws were even then—forty years ago—not all obsolete. But some of them were, and others have since become so, largely through the fact that the Jews had made themselves useful to the country.

Just now England is again called to look abroad though nearer home, and consider the outbreak of fanaticism in Germany.

Dr. Carl Vogt, the naturalist, recently expressed his belief that the present persecution of Jews in Germany is a recurrence of ancient Teutonic barbarism. He explains Judenhetze scientifically, on the principles of Atavism. Every now and then there must be a recrudescence of suppressed barbarism. Those who have read, in A Tramp Abroad, those accounts of the duels witnessed by imperturbable Mark Twain in that country—duels in which students cut and slash each other in a friendly way, in the intervals of drinking beer together, and flaunt their facial gashes upon the street with pride, will suspect that the barbarism in coming back had not far to travel. Nevertheless, we must remember that Germany has not yet completed that revolution which shall bring the people under the influence of their best heads; its great science, art, and literature are still carried on as it were in cloisters. The throne of Germany’s noble Reason is usurped by heartless pretenders in politics and hypocrites in religion. Barbarossa will awake presently, and when he comes forth from his cave it will not be in the guise of Emperor William or Prince Bismarck, nor yet as the priest-ridden Jew-hater, but as a cultured and courageous People, with their feet alike on titled despotism and parochial barbarism.

As, however, in the outrages on Jews at Damascus and Rhodes, in the last generation, England caught a glimpse, as in a mirror, of certain features from her own hideous past still surviving in her laws, so one can hardly turn from the Judenhetze of Germany without a consciousness that there are still certain scandals in the attitude of English Christianity towards the Jews. The chief scandal is that there should be an organised society for converting them—as if they were savages.

The existence of such a society in London will one day be quoted to show how much pious preadamitism survived amid our telegraphs and telephones. It is not civilised for men to suppose that a good Jew is inferior to a good Christian. It is scandal that the learned clergy should permit the people to suppose that Christian churches and sects have any moral or spiritual advantage over those who attend the synagogue. How many mothers who teach their children the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, or rehearse to them the parables of the New Testament, pity the children of Jewish mothers as knowing nothing of those beautiful and tender sayings? How many of them even realise that the Golden Rule is in the Pentateuch; and that every Jewish child learns those sweet sayings and parables where Jesus learned them—at his Jewish mother’s knee?

It is a great misfortune that religious liberalism, in its revolt from the primitive Judaism which Protestantism and Puritanism restored, and which survives now chiefly among Sabbatarian and dogmatic Christians, has kept before the world only that ancient Jahvism under which Canaanites were exterminated. It has thus indirectly fostered the fallacy which regards as Judaism much that even strict Jews have long ago outgrown. The Jews themselves, however, as we have seen, are largely to blame for the persistence of this vulgar delusion; indeed, even many of their liberal thinkers have obstinately preserved their new wine in ceremonial bottles, with the ancient labels, and helped to convey the popular impression that their religion is unchanged. But it is changed. Even the strictest Jews are to-day less Sabbatarian, and more emancipated from the barbarism of sacrificial superstitions, than Christians. When Moses Mendelssohn said that the Jews would become Christians “when the Christians cease to be Jews,” he no doubt recognised that Christians are preserving as dogma the Judaism which Jews keep as a shell, but inwardly have outgrown; and that a conversion of the Jews to Christianity would really carry them back to Levitical beliefs long replaced by the modern ideas prevailing inside the hereditary and patriotic walls from which they fear to venture.

Spinoza was as representative a Jew as ever lived, and never more than when the synagogue disowned him. The history of his race for a thousand years had been to him an instruction in fidelity and independence. That there is a vigorous Left among the Jews is apparent in every direction; not only in Jewish scholarship, which is assisting in the work of detaching from their Bible and other sacred books a Hebrew Mythology, but also in the political and social influence of Jews. The outbreak of Judenhetze in Germany is a bad enough symptom for the Teutons, but a hopeful sign for the Jews. Socially they have excited jealousy by the extent to which, having become men and women of the world, they are able to support that character by their wealth. Politically, they would appear to have so completely entered into those liberal and popular movements which they so long eschewed, that the Imperial Power is under the necessity of reminding them that, as in the past they suffered from the mob, and were protected by princes, so it may be again. The retention of the Rev. Mr. Stoecker as Court Chaplain, while he is leading this agitation so unscrupulously, is a confession that the anti-Semitic movement has the encouragement of the Emperor and his Chancellor. To awaken Teutonic jealousy of Jewish wealth, just beginning to be displayed in the enjoyment of Gentile luxuries; to arouse Christian fanaticism against the growing freethought of a race ceasing to expect any Messiah: such are the obvious methods by which the German Government hope to separate Jewish means and radicalism from the masses, and drive Jews to their ancient refuge—the strong central power always purchasable by money and servility. What success will crown this imperial effort remains to be seen. But that there should be a necessity for it is a confirmation of what the late Lord Beaconsfield asserted, and such good judges as Herr Eydmann and Karl Blind attest, that the Jews are very extensively concerned in popular movements on the Continent.

That these liberal tendencies might be expected among the Jews generally when and where they feel assured of freedom and security, is suggested by the history of their race in America. It is certain that the leading Rabbins of that country would be regarded as perilously latitudinarian by their strict co-religionists of Europe. It is a significant unique fact that the high family of Adlers has produced a President of the Free Religious Association, which is made up of theists and agnostics developed out of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. But, furthermore, the leading Rabbins, Lilienthal, Wise, and Sonnenschein, are instances of the advanced Rationalism which pervades the Jewish body in America. These scholarly and eloquent Rabbins freely fraternise with the anti-supernaturalistic teachers of other antecedents than their own. It is pretty certain that they do not look for the advent of any personal Messiah, and never dream of any restoration of their race to power in Palestine. They are not theocratic in politics, but republican, and regard America as the real Jerusalem of their race. Such is my conviction, based not only upon the works of the gentlemen I have mentioned, but upon personal acquaintance with them; and I cannot doubt that, whatever may be their dissent from much that is written in these pages, they would confirm my opinion as to the tendency of the people of Jewish origin in America. Jews of the Old World are somewhat in the condition of the rich man who, when reproached for a stinted charity, said that he began life poor, and had never got the chill of poverty out of his bones; these Jews have vivid traditions of persecution, and have not yet got the chill of fear out of their bones. Recent events in Germany and Russia may even prolong this timidity; the ferocious reply to their attempt to mingle in the society and politics of the world may set back for a little their liberation. But the free heart and mind of Europe is with them, and will be felt not only in England but on the Continent. The unbinding of Ahasuerus is part of the civilised revolution which can never really go backward.

Shakspeare was the first to show the Jew to be a man. Lessing was the first to show that a Jew might be as good a man as a Christian, the indispensability of Christ to excellence being quite ignored. Thus the seventeenth century had its gospel for the Jew, and the eighteenth century had its gospel. But in essence the gospel according to Lessing was not so high as that of the master at whose feet he learned it. Shakspeare had raised up the standard of Manhood, and in its light Judaism and Christianism are seen to be comparatively small things, and their contentious tempers proof that they are no longer religious in any pure sense. Lessing, even in his famous apologue of the Three Rings which a father gave to his equally beloved sons—similitudes of the Jewish, Moslem and Christian religions—makes the wise judge end the dispute as to which is the true ring by consecrating all three. The true ring, which the fond father had caused to be copied in two others, so that neither son might be disappointed, had the power to draw the love of all on its owner. But it also carried the right to sovereignty; and this advantage so overbore the former virtue that each son, with his ring, was found to love himself alone. The Judge advises them to be each content with his ring:

But the nineteenth century should transmit to the twentieth a nobler gospel for Jew, Moslem, and Christian than that. Let each of them see that his ring is a survival from the ancient chain that fettered him to his several rock of superstition; that so long as he holds faith in it, no transmutation of it into gold, no decoration with opal, can make it other than a talisman to bind him, and isolate him from the real work of creating a Man able to be the providence of this world. Let the rings, not only of Israel, but of Christianity, and of all sects, be thrown into the flames of human love, that there may be formed a coronet for the Mother whose patient all-loving face poetry and science are revealing. “In this principle,” said Clifford, of the evolution of organic from inorganic things, “we must recognise the mother of life, and especially of human life, powerful enough to subdue the elements, and yet always working gently against them; biding her time in the whole expanse of heaven, to make the highest cosmos out of inorganic chaos; the actor, not of all the actions of living things, but only of the good actions; for a bad action is one by which the organism tends to be less organic, and acts for a time as if inorganic. To this mother of life, personifying herself in the good works of humanity, it seems to me we may fitly address a splendid hymn of Mr. Swinburne’s: