Chapter D: Philipson, 1894

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SAY what you will of the Judaism of the Middle Ages; call it narrow; deride it as superstitious; unless lost to all sense of justice, or without power to dive beneath the surface of the seeming to the roots of the real, you cannot but witness to the incontrovertible fact that for sweetness and spirituality of life, the Jew of the Ghetto, the Jew of the Middle Ages, the Jew under the yoke of the Talmud, challenges the whole world.

E. G. HIRSCH, 1895.

THE JEWISH WOMAN

IN the days of horror of the later Roman Empire, throughout the time of the migration of nations, it was not war alone that destroyed and annihilated all those peoples of which, despite their former world-dominating greatness, nothing remains but their name. It was rather the ensuing demoralization of home life. This is proved――it cannot be repeated too often――by the Jews; for they suffered more severely and more cruelly by wars than any other nation; but, among them, the inmost living germ of morality――strict discipline and family devotion――was at all times preserved. This wonderful and mysterious preservation of the Jewish people is due to the Jewish woman. This is her glory, not alone in the history of her own people, but in the history of the world.