XVIII. AHASUERUS VINCTUS.

Here before me is a formidable array of large—one might almost say fat—volumes, which I have hardly known whether to assign to England or Germany, but conclude that they belong to both, and also to America, and to the night-side of Protestantism everywhere. They are entitled: Chronicles, selected from the originals, of Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew, embracing a period of nearly XIX. centuries. Now first revealed to and edited by David Hoffman, Hon. J. U. D. of Göttingen. In two series, each of three volumes. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1853. This book contains a dedication, dated March 10, 1851, Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, to the author’s brother, Samuel Hoffman, Esq., of Baltimore, U. S. A. It contains also a dedication, dated September, 1852, Austin Friars, London, from Cartaphilus himself: “To the Children of the Dispersion—Jehovah’s favoured people during so many ages, Christ’s scattered flock during so many more—these chronicles are affectionately inscribed,” etc.

There is nothing in these volumes which bear upon the legendary Wandering Jew, except a tradition, incidentally mentioned, that in 1539 he visited Cornelius Agrippa, and was shown the face of Rebecca, whom he had loved fifteen centuries before, in a magic mirror. But the existence of such a book, embodying the vulgar Protestant superstitions about the “dispersion” and the gathering of the “chosen people;” the fact that so much labour can be expended on these notions by a man otherwise educated, the author apparently of several legal works, are phenomena to excite reflections. There is a good deal of suggestiveness, too, in the link between Austin Friars and Grosvenor Square. Cartaphilus, going his eternal round with cry of “O’ clo’!” has finally, it would appear, discovered that he need only have his Judaism baptized to be one of “Christ’s flock,” pastured as richly in the fashionable Square.

But even more significant just now is the fact that Germany is ready to supply the hand that can write of the Jews as for ages “Jehovah’s favoured people,” and in the next moment be clenched to smite them as an accursed race. So much this union of Cartaphilus and Austin Friars with the Hon. Mr. Hoffman and Grosvenor Square may mean for us, as we bid them farewell, finding nothing further in their voluminous sermons pertinent to our present inquiry or purpose.

Here are two pregnant facts. In various parts of the East Jews manifest a superstitious dread of a Christian’s curse. On the other hand, for a long time there prevailed among Christians a belief that an oath taken in a Jewish synagogue was more binding and efficient than one taken elsewhere.⁠[40] Add these two facts together, and their sum is in the following third fact: on Wednesday, April 13, 1881, a petition against the Jews was presented to the German Chancellor, in twenty-six volumes, 14,000 sheets, and with 255,000 signatures.

Every signature to that most shameful document which the nineteenth century has witnessed was set there by—Judaism itself. It was Israel that taught Christendom its black art of cursing. The Christian idea of a Chosen People of Christ, commissioned to make war upon other peoples as heathen, infidels, hosts of Antichrist, is a precise transcript of the Judaic idea of a Chosen People of Jahve, with commission to put Gentiles to the edge of the sword. In the darkest ages, when holocausts of Jews were offered in sacrifice to a deified member of their race, the Christian might have addressed his victim with a paraphrase of Shylock’s words, “If a Baalite disagreed with a Jew, what was his humility? Slaughter. If a Jew disagree with a Christian, what should his sufferance be by Jewish example? Why, slaughter. The intolerance your Testament teaches me I will execute, and it shall go hard but, with the aid of my Testament, I will better the instruction!”

When Moses Mendelssohn was asked, “When will the Jews become Christians?” he answered, “When the Christians cease to be Jews.”

After Shakspeare had startled the world with a suspicion that the Jew is a man, it still required a hundred and fifty years, or thereabout, to awaken the further suspicion that a Jew might be a good, even a religious man. This revelation came through Lessing. When he was coming of age, Lessing recognised the injustice done to the Jews of Germany. Every Jew entering Berlin was compelled to pay toll at Brandenburg Gate. The meanest Christian might gain credit by insulting or assaulting a Jew. Frederick the Great could write, “Jesus was a Jew, yet we persecute the Jews,” but his wide toleration left that people unprotected. Lessing wrote an early drama, Die Juden, which touched gently on the matter. In it a wealthy Jew of high character saves the life of a Christian baron and his daughter. The baron desires the youth to marry his daughter, but finding to what race and religion he belongs, that, of course, is impossible. So the drama ends. Why impossible? The answer to that question had to be postponed. There are some evils in this world which are like the birth-mark in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story: the chemist succeeded in extracting the birth-mark from his wife’s face, but the wife lay dead. When the mark of the cross disappears from the Wanderer’s brow, so that the Christian who has branded him shall no longer say as he passes, “He is a Jew,” nor for that part from his daughter’s lover, Christianity will be dead. The flower of Lessing’s great heart and mind was Nathan the Wise. The apologue of “The Three Rings,” in which the Jew, the Moslem, the Christian Templar, raised above their bigotry by mutual human service are seen in a tableau of charity, shone like the star of a new religion over Germany. It is the “Ideal of Religious Liberty,” said Schwartz, Historian of Modern Theology at Halle; “Truly can Deity be said to pervade every line of Nathan,” said Kuno Fischer, of Jena University; while in it Strauss sees one advancing the “Kingdom of God on earth.”⁠[41] Yet even Lessing was still not equal to the idea of having the Jewess marry the Christian. Just as we are listening to hear the marriage-bells ring out for the lovers, lo, they turn out to be brother and sister! So, the religious equality having been proclaimed a hundred and fifty years after Shakspeare had proclaimed the human equality, Lessing leaves it to a like time to establish the social equality of Jew and Christian.

But was this line drawn altogether by the Christian? Lessing’s friendship with Moses Mendelssohn had taught him otherwise. When Michaelis, the theologian, read his early play, “The Jews,” he wrote a criticism in which he expressed a doubt whether an oppressed and despised race could produce such a man as the hero. Mendelssohn replied, and Lessing, enclosing this reply to Michaelis, wrote concerning its author: “He really is a Jew, a man of five-and-twenty, who, without any instruction, has acquired great attainments in languages, in mathematics, in philosophy, in poetry. I foresee in him an honour to our nation, if he is allowed to come to maturity by his co-religionists, who have always displayed an unfortunate spirit of persecution towards men like him.” The confirmation of this apprehension on the part of the Jews’ earliest champion in Germany may be found in the enthusiasm which the next eminent Mendelssohn put into his oratorio of “St. Paul.”

Goethe tells us that he had intended to bring his Wandering Jew to a meeting with Spinoza. The great German had met with two illustrations of the legend he did deal with, of Faust carried off by demons. One was in the case of Lessing, who, for his defence of Jews and his attack on historic Christianity, had been piously impaled by a rumour that Satan had appeared at his death-bed. The other was in a tract he picked up in which Spinoza was denounced as an infidel, and upon which was a picture of the noble man, giving him diabolical features. But, alas! Spinoza had been more a martyr among his own people than among Christians. Ahasuerus with the red cross on his brow would have found Spinoza also a lonely wanderer, outcast from his people, but not under any Christian doom.

Were Goethe alive, he would find Spinoza still in Europe, and still a lonely wanderer amid the scowling hatred of both Jew and Christian. He would find in England, certainly, a steady tendency of synagogue-Judaism to find its ally and support in the Christianity which alone represents its ancient superstition and bigotry. It is the orthodox Jew who on Saturday sets the model of a Sabbath for the Christian to copy on Sunday. When the parliamentary oath—half Romish, half Jewish—is questioned, Jew and Christian stand side by side in its defence, and together seek to impose upon Englishmen of the nineteenth century the theological test of belief in an oath-bound and oath-guaranteeing deity in which no educated man can possibly believe. The orthodox male Jew thanks Jahve in his liturgy that he was not made a woman; and the male Christian responds by excluding women from political rights. While in Germany the Christian persecutes the Jew as Antichrist, in England the Jew persecutes the Antichristian as Armillus. The Jew recognises a believer in the Trinity as a true theist, and the Christian accepts the Jewish worshipper of Jahve as a theist; and they make common cause against the disbeliever in both as a “miscreant,” an “atheist.” Some influential Jews recently made an effort to “Boycott” the Jewish World newspaper for its criticisms on Christianity. From another “Jewish” quarter there came a sharp cry of distress and anger because a scholar attempted to prove that Jesus was not of the Jewish race!

It is a significant fact that the man of whom the Jews of recent times have been proudest, the statesman whom every Israelite in Europe was glad to aid with his information and his wealth, was a Jew whose circumcision had been subordinated to Christian baptism. This combination of auspices—the heart of an ancient Jew with the political advantages of a Christian—made Lord Beaconsfield a symbolical figure. It is only in its Christianised form that Judaism can ever behold even a partial fulfilment of its ancient dreams of worldly power. The theocracy of Jahve is henceforth dependent for every shred of its authority upon the golden sceptre of Christ.

Christ is for the present a monarch—in England the last surviving sovereign whose rule is at all theocratic. The Jews, as we have seen, were really saved from extermination by powerful rulers who only hungered for their money while the mob thirsted for their blood. Fear of the populace was part of the heritage of the Jew, transmitted by heredity. However bravely the modern Jew—at least up to this generation—might begin with the radicalism of his prophets, he was pretty sure to develop into a supporter of strong government; and there has hitherto, in most countries, been always sufficient Christian intolerance to enable that evolution to pass its embryonic phases without arrest. Heine begins with revolutionism and atheism; ends with worshipping Napoleon I. (whom he sees protecting Jews along the Rhine), and God (of whose existence he was convinced by the sense of smell while mingling with the atheistical ouvriers in their Paris clubs). Benjamin Disraeli begins with poetical eulogy of regicide, and ends with turning a queen into an empress. So far as this ancient reactionism can survive into the immediate future, it must necessarily be the ally of Christianity. The English Jews who paid so large a sum to bring back Charles II. to his throne, were represented by those who gathered to the support of the Christian Lord Beaconsfield.

Lord Beaconsfield was for the Jews a triumph for their race, but a humiliation for their religion. They must needs find their leader in a family of apostates! But the orthodox Jews knew well that this humiliation was more than compensated to them in the new resource which their christened leader opened for them against their party of progress. Disraeli the Elder had fled from the dry bones of Judaism to find intellectual freedom. Disraeli the Younger, sent by his father into the Christian Church, found there the dry bones all turned into armed men.

Isaac Disraeli made an earnest effort to be at once a man of letters and a member of the synagogue. When his effort had proved vain, and he must follow Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the path of exile, he wrote to the wardens of Bevis Marks synagogue: “Many of your members are already lost; many you are losing! Even those whose tempers and feelings would still cling to you are gradually seceding. But against all this you are perpetually pleading your existing laws, which you would enforce on all the brethren alike. It is of these obsolete laws so many complain. They were adapted by fugitives to their peculiar situation, quite distinct from their own, and as foreign to us as the language in which they were written. For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without laws.”

Soon after his separation from the synagogue he wrote his work The Genius of Judaism. In it is the following passage: “The religious Judaism of the Theocracy degenerated into Rabbinical Judaism by fabulous traditions and enslaving customs. Dictators of the human intellect, the Rabbins, like their successors, the papal Christians, attempted to raise a spurious Theocracy of their own. A race of dreaming schoolmen contrived to place an avowed collection of mere human decisions among the hallowed verities and the duties of devotion, to graft opinions of men on the scion of divine institutions; nay, even to prefer the gloss in direct opposition to the divine precept, whenever, as they express it, ‘the tradition is not favoured;’ that is, when the oral tradition absolutely contradicts the written law. The Jews live according to their laws, and according to their traditions and customs; for their traditions have become an integral part of their written law, and their customs have been converted into rites. The Judaic superstitions have been substituted for the code of Revelation. We may ask, by what enthralling witchcraft, by what perverse ingenuity, has such a revolution been brought about?”

In reading this I am reminded of the Russian folk-tale of “The Devouring Sister.” The Vampire born into a family devours each member of it successively, to the last—a brother who slays her. After she is dead, he hears her voice gently entreating him to think with compassion on her hard doom, and to preserve some bit of her remains. Moved by this appeal, the brother folds one drop of her blood in a leaf and carries it in his bosom. When he reaches home he falls dead; the one drop of Vampire blood had devoured his heart. The fatal drop which Isaac Disraeli carried away from his dead Judaism was folded in the fine passage just quoted, as in a green leaf: it is in the phrase, “scion of divine institutions.”

There is enough in that brief creed to sustain every persecution of reason and conscience the world ever saw. The Sanhedrim is in it; the Inquisition is in it. The belief that the God of the universe established the institutions of ancient Judea is enough to eat the human heart out of every generation that presses it, with whatever sentiment, to its breast.

It was perfectly logical for Isaac Disraeli to have his son baptized a Christian. Seeing in the so-called “religion” of his race a “scion of divine institutions,” he rightly saw in Christianity the natural expansion and historic development of that “scion.” He had said to the synagogue, “For the new circumstances which have arisen you are without laws.” Christianity supplied those laws. The same voice spake again when, thirty-seven years ago, his son reminded Christendom that it was obeying the laws and saturated in the literature of the Jewish race; when he claimed that Moses was summoned by Jahve “to be the organ of an eternal revelation of the divine will.”

The freethinker owes a certain debt to Lord Beaconsfield for his logical treatment of Christianity. That unanswerable argument of his in “A Political Biography,” that the Jews deserved gratitude for prevailing on the Romans to crucify Jesus, so securing the Atonement; that it was a sublime act and sacrifice, Jews being the ordained immolators, securing the salvation of the world; that no one has ever been permitted to write under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost but a Jew; that all Christians acknowledge that the only medium of communication between themselves and God is the Jewish race; that the Mother of God was a Jewess; that, indeed, is a reductio ad absurdum, which cannot be unwelcome to the age of common sense. But every nail he thus drove into the coffin of Christianity was one which had pierced the hands and feet of humanity from Canaan to Calvary, and from Calvary to Smithfield.

The devotion of Lord Beaconsfield to the Jewish people was a fearful retribution on the synagogue that drove out his father. His kiss was as fatal as it was sincere. He taught the Jewish youth that the path to power and glory, not merely for themselves but for their race, lay in the direction of Christianity. His spirit may yet survive as the Moses of a journey through the baptismal sea to the Promised Land. He confirmed them in every error—in all their race-egoism, in all their indifference to the progressive enlightenment of the world, and gave their bigotry a new lease of life by a Christian confirmation. The most eloquent passage he ever wrote is in Tancred, in the “Feast of Tabernacles,” which the Jewish World, in quoting it after his death, said might have been uttered by a Chasid in a moment of inspiration: “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards. What sublime inexorability in the law! But what indomitable spirit in the people! It is easy for the happier Sephardim, the Hebrews who have never quitted the sunny regions that are laved by the Midland Ocean; it is easy for them, though they have lost their heritage, to sympathise in their beautiful Asian cities or in their Moorish and Arabian gardens, with the graceful rites that are, at least, an homage to a benignant nature. But picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the squalid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes. Yet he must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine! The law has told him, though a denizen in an icy clime, that he must dwell for seven days in a bower, and that he must build it of the boughs of thick trees; and the Rabbins have told him that these thick trees are the palm, the myrtle, and the weeping willow. Even Sarmatia may furnish a weeping willow. The law has told him that he must pluck the fruit of goodly trees, and the Rabbins have explained that goodly fruit on this occasion is confined to the citron. Perhaps, in his despair, he is obliged to fly to the candied delicacies of the grocer. His mercantile connections will enable him, often at considerable cost, to procure some palm-leaves from Canaan, which he may wave in his synagogue while he exclaims, as the crowd did when the divine descendant of David entered Jerusalem, ‘Hosannah in the highest!’ There is something profoundly interesting in this devoted observance of Oriental customs in the heart of our Saxon and Sclavonian cities; in these descendants of the Bedoueens, who conquered Canaan more than three thousand years ago, still celebrating that success which secured their forefathers, for the first time, grapes and wine. Conceive a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of Hamburg or Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of our Houndsditch or Minories, born to hereditary insult, without any education, apparently without a circumstance that can develop the slightest taste, or cherish the least sentiment for the beautiful, living amid fogs and filth, never treated with kindness, seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest, if not the vilest, toil—bargaining for frippery, speculating in usury, existing for ever under the concurrent influence of degrading causes which would have worn out, long ago, any race that was not of the unmixed blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the law of Moses; conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all ages among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience; filled with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most joyous, and the most exuberant; a subject which has inspired poets, and which has made gods—the harvest of the grape in the native regions of the vine. He rises in the morning, goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought, probably, from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it, even profusely, with the finest flowers and fruits he can procure, the myrtle and the citron never forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and his children in the open air, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee, beneath its sweet and starry sky.”

“What sublime inexorability in the law!” Nay, what binding, paralysing, mercilessness in the self-imposed law that holds the eyes of a race for ever at the back of its head instead of in the forehead! In the great and grievous error of those words is repeated once more the doom of the Wandering Race. In them Jesus says again to Ahasuerus, “As thou hast refused to go out in the general vineyard of humanity, to toil and gather with the true and earnest of all races and religions, be this thy sentence: Keep thy small province of mouldered faith; go on, and on, and for ever, celebrating vineyards that do not exist, pressing dead grapes that yield no wine, waving dead palm-leaves before a Messiah that can never arrive, bound in thine everlasting Houndsditch round by dreams of myrtle-bowers in a barbarian paradise long ago turned to a Valley of Jehoshaphat!”

Lord Beaconsfield also dealt his blow to Spinoza. He defended the rights of the Jews in Parliament on the ground that they were all Jews, all believers in Moses and the Prophets; and that the alternative of this was belief in Hume and Gibbon. The day of his burial was solemnised by the party he had led with an effort to drive out of Parliament an Englishman who preferred Hume and Gibbon to Moses and the Prophets.

This is the doom of Judaism. This is Ahasuerus bound. There is a nobility in the Ahasuerus that Shelley evokes in Queen Mab, a Semitic Prometheus bound for ever on Time and its desolations, as a rock, with bigotry and intolerance feeding vulture-like upon his heart because he will not bend to tyrannical Jove, either in the form of Jahve or of Jesus; suffering as the friend of a Humanity also groaning beneath a celestial despotism, but cringing as he will not. But there is nothing Promethean in the mere preference for the chains of one tyrant over those of another. There is nothing noble in a sect accepting its rock and vulture through servility to a deity of whose indifference or impotence or non-existence the history of his worshippers is a sufficient proof. There is no majesty in martyrdom unless it is endured for the deliverance and welfare of all mankind. There was a time when the Jews suffered nobly; they stood almost alone in preserving the protest of the human mind against priestly impostures, which could not be maintained by the thinking Greeks and Romans—who no doubt knew the facts as well as Lucian and Celsus—against imperial decrees. But that time passed when thought became free. The emancipation of the Jews politically brought to their side Herakles—a human-hearted deliverer—who cut their outward cords. Judaism, remaining on its Caucasus, apart from the evolution of humanity, is bound only by inward chains. Its doom, in free countries, comes only from within.

It is forbidden that any man or race shall find strength and happiness in isolation, and this race is withheld by its traditional system and its dogmas from co-operation with mankind in its nobler aims and tendencies. Their fundamental error is to regard the God of Israel as different from the Gods of other people. Upon that rests the wild superstition that the Jews, in some sense or other, are “a chosen people” or “a peculiar people.” It is the doctrine alike of Christianity and Judaism; but as in the dreary past it has been the dogma most fatal to the Jews—their accepted supernatural eminence logically leading to their supernatural doom—it must be equally fatal in their future of freedom, in an intellectual sense. So long as they are marked off in the human world in this way they will not find rest; for that can be found only when their genius—earning such wreaths as adorn the brow of Spinoza and Heine, or those which came from every capital to lie on the grave of Offenbach—is identified with the general work and play of the world, and their religious aims such as are common to all who acknowledge allegiance to reason and pursue the equal welfare of mankind.