Chapter I: REJOICE to learn of the establishment of an organ by the Menorah (1)

Association. The Menorah Journal will, I take it, serve the threefold purpose of keeping the various groups of the Menorah throughout the universities of the land in constant touch with one another, of interpreting the ideals of the Menorah to widening circles of the Jewish youth, and of confirming anew, from time to time, the loyalty of the Menorah men to the Menorah ideal.

A truly great Jew said about fifteen years ago that a high self-reverence had transformed _arme Judenjungen_ into _stolze junge Juden_. I believe that the Menorah movement in this land is in part the cause and in other part the token of a transformation among young American Jews to-day parallel to that cited by Theodor Herzl. It marks a sea-change from the self pitying Jewish youth, immeasurably "sorry for himself" because of his exclusion from certain dominantly unfraternal groups, to the Jewish youth self-regarding, in the highest sense of the term, self-knowing, self-revering. That the self-respecting young Jew command the respect of the world without is of minor importance by the side of the outstanding fact that he has ceased to measure himself by the values which he imagined the unfriendly elements of the world without had set upon him.

The Menorah movement is welcome as a proof of a new order in the life of the young college Jew. He has come to see at last that it is comic, in large part, to be shut out from the Greek letter fraternities of the Hellenes and the Barbarians, but that it is tragic, in large part, to shut himself out from the life of his own people. For it is from his own people that he must draw his vision and spiritual sustenance if he is to live a life of self-mastery rather than the life of a contemptible parasite rooted nowhere and chameleonizing everywhere. Time was when their fellow-Jews half excused the college men, who drifted away from the life of Israel, as if the burden of the Jewish bond were too much for the untried and unrobust shoulders of our Jewish college men, as if their intellectual and moral squeamishness led to inevitable revolt against association with their much-despised and wholly misunderstood Jewish fellows. Now we see, and our younger brothers of the Menorah fellowship have caught the vision, that no Jew can be truly cultured who Jewishly uproots himself, that the man who rejects the birthright of inheritance of the traditions of the earliest and virilest of the cultured peoples of earth is impoverishing his very being. The Jew who is a "little Jew" is less of a man.

The Menorah lights the path for the fellowship of young Israel, finely self-reverencing. Long be that rekindled light undimmed!

A Call to the Educated Jew

BY LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

WHILE I was in Cleveland a few weeks ago, a young man who has won distinction on the bench told me this incident from his early life. He was born in a little village of Western Russia where the opportunities for schooling were meagre. When he was thirteen his parents sent him to the nearest city in search of an education. There--in Bialystok--were good secondary schools and good high schools; but the Russian law, which limits the percentage of Jewish pupils in any school, barred his admission. The boy's parents lacked the means to pay for private tuition. He had neither relative nor friend in the city. But soon three men were found who volunteered to give him instruction. None of them was a teacher by profession. One was a newspaper man; another was a chemist; the third, I believe, was a tradesman; all were educated men. And throughout five long years these three men took from their leisure the time necessary to give a stranger an education.

The three men of Bialystok realized that education was not a thing of one's own to do with as one pleases--not a personal privilege to be merely enjoyed by the possessor--but a precious treasure transmitted upon a sacred trust to be held, used and enjoyed, and if possible strengthened--then passed on to others upon the same trust. Yet the treasure which these three men held and the boy received in trust was much more than an education. It included that combination of qualities which enabled and impelled these three men to give and the boy to seek and to acquire an education. These qualities embrace: first, _intellectual capacity_; second, _an appreciation of the value of education_; third, _indomitable will_; fourth, _capacity for hard work_. It was these qualities which enabled the lad not only to acquire but to so utilize an education that, coming to America, ignorant of our language and of our institutions, he attained in comparatively few years the important office he has so honorably filled.

Now whence comes this combination of qualities of mind, body and character? These are qualities with which every one is familiar, singly and in combination; which you find in friends and relatives, and which others doubtless discover in you. They are qualities possessed by most Jews who have attained distinction or other success; and in combination they may properly be called Jewish qualities. For they have not come to us by accident; they were developed by three thousand years of civilization, and nearly two thousand years of persecution; developed through our religion and spiritual life; through our traditions; and through the social and political conditions under which our ancestors lived. They are, in short, the product of Jewish life.

_The Fruit of Three Thousand Years of Civilization_

OUR intellectual capacity was developed by the almost continuous training of the mind throughout twenty-five centuries. The Torah led the "People of the Book" to intellectual pursuits at times when most of the Aryan peoples were illiterate. And religion imposed the use of the mind upon the Jews, indirectly as well as directly, and demanded of the Jew not merely the love, but the understanding of God. This necessarily involved a study of the Laws. And the conditions under which the Jews were compelled to live during the last two thousand years also promoted study in a people among whom there was already considerable intellectual attainment. Throughout the centuries of persecution practically the only life open to the Jew which could give satisfaction was the intellectual and spiritual life. Other fields of activity and of distinction which divert men from intellectual pursuits were closed to the Jews. Thus they were protected by their privations from the temptations of material things and worldly ambitions. Driven by circumstances to intellectual pursuits, their mental capacity gradually developed. And as men delight in that which they do well, there was an ever widening appreciation of things intellectual.

Is not the Jews' indomitable will--the power which enables them to resist temptation and, fully utilizing their mental capacity, to overcome obstacles--is not that quality also the result of the conditions under which they lived so long? To live a Jew during the centuries of persecution was to lead a constant struggle for existence. That struggle was so severe that only the fittest could survive. Survival was not possible except where there was strong will--a will both to live and to live a Jew. The weaker ones passed either out of Judaism or out of existence.

And finally, the Jewish capacity for hard work is also the product of Jewish life--a life characterized by temperate, moral living continued throughout the ages, and protected by those marvellous sanitary regulations which were enforced through the religious sanctions. Remember, too, that amidst the hardship to which our ancestors were exposed it was only those with endurance who survived.

So let us not imagine that what we call our achievements are wholly or even largely our own. The phrase "self-made man" is most misleading. We have power to mar; but we alone cannot make. The relatively large success achieved by Jews wherever the door of opportunity is opened to them is due, in the main, to this product of Jewish life--to this treasure which we have acquired by inheritance--and which we are in duty bound to transmit unimpaired, if not augmented, to coming generations.

But our inheritance comprises far more than this combination of qualities making for effectiveness. These are but means by which man may earn a living or achieve other success. Our Jewish trust comprises also that which makes the living worthy and success of value. It brings us that body of moral and intellectual perceptions, the point of view and the ideals, which are expressed in the term Jewish spirit; and therein lies our richest inheritance.

_The Kinship of Jewish and American Ideals_

IS it not a striking fact that a people coming from Russia, the most autocratic of countries, to America, the most democratic of countries, comes here, not as to a strange land, but as to a home? The ability of the Russian Jew to adjust himself to America's essentially democratic conditions is not to be explained by Jewish adaptability. The explanation lies mainly in the fact that the twentieth century ideals of America have been the ideals of the Jew for more than twenty centuries. We have inherited these ideals of democracy and of social justice as we have the qualities of mind, body and character to which I referred. We have inherited also that fundamental longing for truth on which all science--and so largely the civilization of the twentieth century--rests; although the servility incident to persistent oppression has in some countries obscured its manifestation.

Among the Jews democracy was not an ideal merely. It was a practice--a practice made possible by the existence among them of certain conditions essential to successful democracy, namely:

First: _An all-pervading sense of the duty in the citizen._ Democratic ideals cannot be attained through emphasis merely upon the rights of man. Even a recognition that every right has a correlative duty will not meet the needs of democracy. Duty must be accepted as the dominant conception in life. Such were the conditions in the early days of the colonies and states of New England, when American democracy reached there its fullest expression; for the Puritans were trained in implicit obedience to stern duty by constant study of the Prophets.

Second: _Relatively high intellectual attainments._ Democratic ideals cannot be attained by the mentally undeveloped. In a government where everyone is part sovereign, everyone should be competent, if not to govern, at least to understand the problems of government; and to this end education is an essential. The early New Englanders appreciated fully that education is an essential of potential equality. The founding of their common school system was coincident with the founding of the colonies; and even the establishment of institutions for higher education did not lag far behind. Harvard College was founded but six years after the first settlement of Boston.

Third: _Submission to leadership as distinguished from authority._ Democratic ideals can be attained only where those who govern exercise their power not by alleged divine right or inheritance, but by force of character and intelligence. Such a condition implies the attainment by citizens generally of relatively high moral and intellectual standards; and such a condition actually existed among the Jews. These men who were habitually denied rights, and whose province it has been for centuries "to suffer and to think," learned not only to sympathize with their fellows (which is the essence of democracy and social justice), but also to accept voluntarily the leadership of those highly endowed morally and intellectually.

Fourth: _A developed community sense._ The sense of duty to which I have referred was particularly effective in promoting democratic ideals among the Jews, because of their deep-seated community feeling. To describe the Jew as an individualist is to state a most misleading half-truth. He has to a rare degree merged his individuality and his interests in the community of which he forms a part. This is evidenced among other things by his attitude toward immortality. Nearly every other people has reconciled this world of suffering with the idea of a beneficent providence by conceiving of immortality for the individual. The individual sufferer bore present ills by regarding this world as merely the preparation for another, in which those living righteously here would find individual reward hereafter. Of all the nations, Israel "takes precedence in suffering"; but, despite our national tragedy, the doctrine of individual immortality found relatively slight lodgment among us. As Ahad Ha-'Am so beautifully said: "Judaism did not turn heavenward and create in Heaven an eternal habitation of souls. It found 'eternal life' on earth, by strengthening the social feeling in the individual; by making him regard himself not as an isolated being with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as part of a larger whole, as a limb of the social body. This conception shifts the center of gravity not from the flesh to the spirit, but from the individual to the community; and concurrently with this shifting, the problem of life becomes a problem not of individual, but of social life. I live for the sake of the perpetuation and happiness of the community of which I am a member; I die to make room for new individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness as though it were his individual well-being, he finds satisfaction, and no longer feels so keenly the bitterness of his individual existence, because he sees the end for which he lives and suffers." Is not that the very essence of the truly triumphant twentieth-century democracy?

_The Two-fold Command of Noblesse Oblige_

SUCH is our inheritance; such the estate which we hold in trust. And what are the terms of that trust; what the obligations imposed? The short answer is _noblesse oblige_; and its command is two-fold. It imposes duties upon us in respect to our own conduct as individuals; it imposes no less important duties upon us as part of the Jewish community or race. Self-respect demands that each of us lead individually a life worthy of our great inheritance and of the glorious traditions of the race. But this is demanded also by respect for the rights of others. The Jews have not only been ever known as a "peculiar people"; they were and remain a distinctive and minority people. Now it is one of the necessary incidents of a distinctive and minority people that the act of any one is in some degree attributed to the whole group. A single though inconspicuous instance of dishonorable conduct on the part of a Jew in any trade or profession has far-reaching evil effects extending to the many innocent members of the race. Large as this country is, no Jew can behave badly without injuring each of us in the end. Thus the Rosenthal and the white-slave traffic cases, though local to New York, did incalculable harm to the standing of the Jews throughout the country. The prejudice created may be most unjust, but we may not disregard the fact that such is the result. Since the act of each becomes thus the concern of all, we are perforce our brothers' keepers. Each, as co-trustee for all, must exact even from the lowliest the avoidance of things dishonorable; and we may properly brand the guilty as traitor to the race.

But from the educated Jew far more should be exacted. In view of our inheritance and our present opportunities, self-respect demands that we live not only honorably but worthily; and worthily implies nobly. The educated descendants of a people which in its infancy cast aside the Golden Calf and put its faith in the invisible God cannot worthily in its maturity worship worldly distinction and things material. "Two men he honors and no third," says Carlyle--"the toil-worn craftsman who conquers the earth and him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable."

And yet, though the Jew make his individual life the loftiest, that alone will not fulfill the obligations of his trust. We are bound not only to use worthily our great inheritance, but to preserve and, if possible, augment it; and then transmit it to coming generations. The fruit of three thousand years of civilization and a hundred generations of suffering may not be sacrificed by us. It will be sacrificed if dissipated. Assimilation is national suicide. And assimilation can be prevented only by preserving national characteristics and life as other peoples, large and small, are preserving and developing their national life. Shall we with our inheritance do less than the Irish, the Servians, or the Bulgars? And must we not, like them, have a land where the Jewish life may be naturally led, the Jewish language spoken, and the Jewish spirit prevail? Surely we must, and that land is our fathers' land: it is Palestine.

_A Land Where the Jewish Spirit May Prevail_

THE undying longing for Zion is a fact of deepest significance--a manifestation in the struggle for existence. Zionism is, of course, not a movement to remove all the Jews of the world compulsorily to Palestine. In the first place, there are in the world about 14,000,000 Jews, and Palestine would not accommodate more than one-fifth of that number. In the second place, this is not a movement to compel anyone to go to Palestine. It is essentially a movement to give to the Jew more, not less, freedom--a movement to enable the Jews to exercise the same right now exercised by practically every other people in the world--to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or in some other country; a right which members of small nations as well as of large--which Irish, Greek, Bulgarian, Servian or Belgian, as well as German or English--may now exercise.

Furthermore, Zionism is not a movement to wrest from the Turk the sovereignty of Palestine. Zionism seeks merely to establish in Palestine for such Jews as choose to go and remain there, and for their descendants, a legally secured home, where they may live together and lead a Jewish life; where they may expect ultimately to constitute a majority of the population, and may look forward to what we should call home rule.

The establishment of the legally secured Jewish home is no longer a dream. For more than a generation brave pioneers have been building the foundations of our new old home. It remains for us to build the superstructure. The Ghetto walls are now falling, Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed, assimilation cannot be averted, unless there be reëstablished in the fatherland a center from which the Jewish spirit may radiate and give to the Jews scattered throughout the world that inspiration which springs from the memories of a great past and the hope of a great future. To accomplish this it is not necessary that the Jewish population of Palestine be large as compared with the whole number of Jews in the world. Throughout centuries when the Jewish influence was great, and it was working out its own, and in large part the world's, destiny during the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman Empires, only a relatively small part of the Jews lived in Palestine; and only a small part of the Jews returned from Babylon when the Temple was rebuilt.

The glorious past can really live only if it becomes the mirror of a glorious future; and to this end the Jewish home in Palestine is essential. We Jews of prosperous America above all need its inspiration. And the Menorah men should be its builders.

_THERE are two things necessary in the Jewish life of
this country. The one is an heroic attempt to organize
the Jews of the country for Jewish things. That can be
done, I believe, primarily through the organization of
self-conscious Jewish communities throughout the
country. The other thing necessary is, that we have
vigorous Jewish thinking. We need a theory, a
substantial theory, for our Jewish life, just as much
as we need Jewish organization. We need to have our
college men think their problems through without fear,
courageously, by whatever name their theories may be
known, be these theories called Zionism or
anti-Zionism, Reform Judaism or Orthodox Judaism. We
need some vigorous Jewish thinking._--_From a Menorah
Address by Dr. J. L. Magnes._

Menorah

By WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD

WE'VE read in legends of the books of old
How deft Bezalel, wisest in his trade,
At the command of veilèd Moses made
The seven-branched candlestick of beaten gold--
The base, the shaft, the cups, the knops, the flowers,
Like almond blossoms--and the lamps were seven.

We know at least that on the templed rock
Of Zion hill, with earth's revolving hours
Under the changing centuries of heaven,
It stood upon the solemn altar block,
By every Gentile who had heard abhorred--
The holy light of Israel of the Lord;
Until that Titus and the legions came
And battered the walls with catapult and fire,
And bore the priests and candlestick away,
And, as memorial of fulfilled desire,
Bade carve upon the arch that bears his name
The stone procession ye may see today
Beyond the Forum on the Sacred Way,
Lifting the golden candlestick of fame.

The city fell, the temple was a heap;
And little children, who had else grown strong
And in their manhood venged the Roman wrong,
Strewed step and chamber, in eternal sleep.
But the great vision of the sevenfold flames
Outlasted the cups wherein at first it sprung.
The Greeks might teach the arts, the Romans law;
The heathen hordes might shout for bread and games;
Still Israel, exalted in the realms of awe,
Guarded the Light in many an alien air,
Along the borders of the midland sea
In hostile cities, spending praise and prayer
And pondering on the larger things to be--
Down through the ages when the Cross uprose
Among the northern Gentiles to oppose:
Then huddled in the ghettos, barred at night,
In lands of unknown trees and fiercer snows,
They watched forevermore the Light, the Light.

The main seas opened to the west. The Nations
Covered new continents with generations
That had their work to do, their thought to say;
And Israel's hosts from bloody towns afar
In the dominions of the ermined Czar,
Seared with the iron, scarred with many a stroke,
Crowded the hollow ships but yesterday
And came to us who are tomorrow's folk.
And the pure Light, however some might doubt
Who mocked their dirt and rags, had not gone out.

The holy Light of Israel hath unfurled
Its tongues of mystic flame around the world.
Empires and Kings and Parliaments have passed;
Rivers and mountain chains from age to age
Become new boundaries for man's politics.
The navies run new ensigns up the mast,
The temples try new creeds, new equipage;
The schools new sciences beyond the six.
And through the lands where many a song hath rung
The people speak no more their fathers' tongue.
Yet in the shifting energies of man
The Light of Israel remains her Light.
And gathered to a splendid caravan
From the four corners of the day and night,
The chosen people--so the prophets hold--
Shall yet return unto the homes of old
Under the hills of Judah. Be it so.
Only the stars and moon and sun can show
A permanence of light to hers akin.

What is that Light? Who is there that shall tell
The purport of the tribe of Israel?--
In the wild welter of races on that earth
Which spins in space where thousand other spin--
The casual offspring of the Cosmic Mirth
Perhaps--what is there any man can win,
Or any nation? Ultimates aside,
Men have their aims, and Israel her pride.
She stands among the rest, austere, aloof,
Still the peculiar people, armed in proof
Of Selfhood, whilst the others merge or die.
She stands among the rest and answers: "I,
Above ye all, must ever gauge success
By ideal types, and know the more and less
Of things as being in the end defined,
For this our human life by righteousness.
And if I base this in Eternal Mind--
Our fathers' God in victory or distress--
I cannot argue for my hardihood,
Save that the thought is in my flesh and blood,
And made me what I was in olden time,
And keeps me what I am today in every clime."

The Jews in the War

BY JOSEPH JACOBS

IT is of course difficult to conjecture what will be the ultimate effect of such a world-cataclysm as the present European war on the fate of the Jews of the world. The chief center of interest naturally lies in the eastern field of the war which happens to rage within the confines of Old Poland. This kingdom, founded by the Jagellons, brought together Roman Catholic Poland and Greek Catholic Lithuania and could not, therefore, apply in full rigor the mediaeval principle that only those could belong to the State who belonged to the State Church. Hence a certain amount of toleration of religious differences, which led to Poland forming the chief asylum of the Jews evicted from Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As a consequence here lies the most crowded seat of Jewish population in the world. From it comes the vast majority of the third of a million Jews in the prime of life who are fighting for their native countries and often against their fellow-Jews. Probably three hundred thousand Jewish soldiers are under arms in this district. Besides the inevitable loss by death of many of these and the distress caused by the removal of so many others for an indefinite period from breadwinning for their families, there must be ineffable woe caused by the fact that this district is the scene of strenuous conflicts, which lead to the wholesale destruction of the Jewish homes in a literal sense. When one reflects that one out of every six of the inhabitants of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Poland is a Jew, the extent of the misery thus caused may be imagined. One meets friends whose birth-place changes nationality from week to week, according as the different armies take possession. The Jewish inhabitants of Suwalki, for example, must be doubtful whether they are Germans or Russians, according as Uhlan or Cossack holds control of their city. But whichever wins, for the time being, the non-combatants suffer by the demolition of their houses, the requisition of their property, and above all by the dislocation of their trade. The mass of misery caused by the present war in this way to the Jews of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Poland is incalculable.

Nor is this direct loss and misery compensated for by any hope of improved conditions after the war is concluded. One may dismiss at once the rumor that the Czar has promised his Jewish soldiers any alleviation of their lot, on account of their loyalty and bravery. Such rumors are always spread about when the Russian autocracy needs Jewish blood or money. Besides, we all know the value of the plighted word of the crowned head of the Russian Church; the emasculation of the Duma is sufficient evidence of this. And even if the Czar carries out his promise of giving autonomy to Poland, including any sections of Prussian and Austrian territory which he may acquire by the present war, the Jewish lot will not be ameliorated in the slightest. For, unfortunately, Poles have of recent years turned round on their Jewish fellow sufferers from Russian tyranny somewhat on the principle of the boy at school who "passes on" the blow which he has received from a bigger boy to one smaller yet.

_The Probable Strengthening of Anti-Semitic Influences_

BUT the chief evil which will result from the present war, whatever its outcome, will be the increased influence of just those circles from whom the anti-Semitic movement has emanated throughout Europe for the past forty years. It is, in my opinion, absurd to think that militarism will be killed or even scotched by the present war; militarism cannot cast out militarism. Even if Germany is defeated, it is impossible to imagine that she will rest content with her defeat, and practically the only change in the situation will be that "La Revanche" will be translated into "Die Rache"; and in Russia, the defeat of Germany will simply increase the prestige and influence of the grand-ducal circles from which the persecution of the Jews has mainly emanated.

In the contrary case, if Germany gets the upper hand, the influence of the Junkers in Germany, with their anti-Semitic tendencies, would be raised to intolerable limits, while the Reaction in Russia, even if it loses prestige, will yet be granted more power in order to carry out the projected revenge.

_Diminished Chances of Emigration_

ANOTHER unfortunate result for Jews from the present war will be the decreased stream of emigration from Russia and Galicia to this country, so that the escape from the House of Bondage would be still more limited. Many will be so impoverished by the war that they will not be able to afford the minimum sum needed for migration. Death on the battle-field or in the military hospitals will remove many energetic young fellows who would otherwise have come to this country and afterwards have brought their relatives with them. Conditions here too, in the immediate future, are likely to be less attractive for the immigrant from the economic point of view owing to the dislocation of trade caused by the current conflict.

Altogether, as will have been seen from the above enumeration, I am strongly of opinion that the Jews will suffer even more than most peoples concerned in the present war. They have nothing to gain by it; they are sure to lose by it.

_SURELY a law, the essence of which is mercy and
justice to one's fellow men, is not a narrow rule of
life, to be discarded by us today on any plea that we
have outgrown it; surely a history of thousands of
years' devotion to spiritual ideals is not a history
to be forgotten. America is a land of divers races and
divers religions. Each race and each religion owes to
it the duty of bringing to its service all its
strength; it derives no added strength from a race
which has forgotten the lessons it has learnt in the
past, a race which deliberately discards the spiritual
strength which it has obtained by devotion to its
ideals._--_From a Menorah Address by Justice Irving
Lehman._

Jewish Students in European Universities

BY HARRY WOLFSON

THE Jewish student is no longer a _déraciné_. Deeply rooted to the soil of Jewish reality, he is like the best of the academic youth of other nations responsive to the needs of his own people. If in spots he is still groping in the dark, he is no longer a lone, stray wanderer, but is seeking his way out to light in the company of kindred souls. A comprehensive and exhaustive study of native Jewish student bodies in countries like England, Germany, Austria, France and Italy, as well as of the Russian Jewish student colonies strewn all over Western Europe, would bring out, in the most striking manner, contrasting tendencies in modern Jewry. But that is far from the direct purpose of this brief paper. As a student and traveler in various European countries during the years 1912-1914 I had the opportunity of observing Jewish student life and Jewish conditions in general abroad, and it is merely a few random impressions of certain aspects of these European conditions that I have here gathered together for the readers of the Menorah Journal.

_In England_

JUDAISM in England, though of recent origin, is completely domesticated. The Jewish gentleman is becoming as standardized as the type of English gentleman. But more insular than the island itself, Anglo-Jewry, as a whole, prefers to remain within its natural boundaries, and is disinclined to become the bearer of the white Jew's burden. Two of her great Jews, indeed, had embarked upon a scheme of Jewish empire building. The attempts of both of them, however, ended in a fizzle, for one was an unimaginative philanthropic squire, and the other is an interpreter of the dreamers, himself too wide-awake to become a master of dreams.

Yet within its own narrow limits, Anglo-Jewry is active enough to keep in perfect condition. Over-exertion, however, is avoided. Cricket Judaism is played according to the rules of the game, and the players are quite comfortable in their flannels. The established synagogue of Mulberry Street is as staid and sober as the Church of England, the liberalism preached in Berkeley Street as gentle and unscandalizing as the nonconformity of the City Temple, and the orthodoxy of the United Synagogue as innocuously papish as the last phases of the Oxford movement.

In England it is quite fashionable to admit Judaism into the parlor. Parlor Judaism, to be sure, is not more vital a force nor more creative than kitchen Judaism, but it seems to be more vital than the Judaism restricted to the Temple. At least it is voluntary and personal, and, what is more important, it is engaging. So engrossed in the subject of his discussion was once my host at tea, that while administering the sugar he asked me quite absent-mindedly: "Would you have one or two lumps in your Judaism?" "Thank you, none at all," was my reply. "But I am wont to take my Judaism somewhat stronger, if you please."

_Jewish Student Groups at Oxford and Cambridge_

AS compared with ourselves, English Jews have a long tradition behind them, in which they glory. That tradition does not at present seem to stand any imminent danger of being interrupted. The younger generation follow in the footprints of the older. Nowhere is there so narrow a rift between Jewish fathers and sons as in England. Hence you do not find there any prominent organization of the young. Last winter an anonymous appeal for the organization of the Jewish students in England ran for several weeks in the _Jewish Chronicle_, but it seems to have resulted in nothing.

Independent local organizations of Jewish students, however, are to be found in almost every university in England. In Oxford and Cambridge they are organized in congregations, having Synagogues of their own, in which the students assemble for prayer on every Friday night and Saturday morning. In Cambridge they hold two services, an orthodox and a liberal, both well attended. In Oxford they have recently published a special prayer book of their own, suitable for the needs of all kinds of students, it being a medley of orthodoxy and liberalism, which if rather indiscriminate in its theology is, on the whole, made up with good common sense. English liberal Judaism, it should be observed, is markedly different from its corresponding cults in Germany and in the United States. In Germany, reformed Judaism has its nascence in free thought, and it aims to appeal to the intellectual. With us liberalism is stimulated by our pragmatic evaluation of religion, and is held out as a bait to the indifferent. In England it arises from the growing admiration on the part of a certain class of Jews for what they consider the inwardness and the superior morality of Christianity, and is concocted as a cure to those who are so affected. As a result, English liberal Judaism is more truly religious than the German, and more sincerely pious than the American. In a sermon delivered before the Oxford congregation, a young layman of the Liberal Synagogue of London apostrophized liberal Judaism as the safeguard of the modern Jews from the attractiveness of the superior teachings of Christ.

_Social Service Work of Jewish Students_

ENGLAND is the classic home of old-fashioned begging and of old-fashioned giving. You are stopped for a penny everywhere and by everybody, from the tramp who asks you to buy him a cup of tea, to the hospital which solicits a contribution to its maintenance "for one second." Pavement artists abound in Paris as much as in London, but in Paris it is a Bohemian-looking denizen of the "Quartier" posing as a pinched genius forced to sell his crayon masterpieces for a couple of sous, whereas in London it is always a crippled ex-soldier trying to arouse your pity in chalked words for a "poor man's talent." But England is also the classic home of modern social service of every description. The Salvation Army had its origin in London, where also Toynbee Hall, the first University settlement of its kind, came into existence. Likewise among the Jews, there are, on the one hand, the firmly established old-fashioned charitable institutions to help the "alien" brethren of the East End, and on the other hand, there are also the equally well organized boys' clubs for the "uplifting" of the "alien" little brethren of the same East End.

The Jewish University men in England take an active interest in both these branches of philanthropy. It was a fortunate coincidence that when I came to Oxford the Jewish students there had among them a social worker of the latter type, who had come to make arrangements for the reception of a squad of Whitechapel boys who were under his tutelage. When I afterwards went to Cambridge I found there a delegate of some charitable board of the London Jewish community, seeking to enlist the aid of the Jewish students in his work.

_What the Bulletin Boards Told at Berlin_

AT the University of Berlin I did not have to go far to find traces of the presence of Jewish students. With their far-famed efficiency the Germans have contrived to turn the large university hall into a medium of information more adequate than our University Bulletins and Registers combined. The bulletin boards covering every vacant spot on the walls told me the story of all the phases of Jewish activities in the University, professional, social, vocational and, if you please, also gastronomical, more fully than the frescoed walls of Dido's temple told their story to pious Æneas. In the announcement of courses by the various faculties, well-known Jewish names stand out quite prominently,--none of them above the rank of Honorar-Professor, to be sure, but in popularity and achievement they are among the foremost. Among the long rows of the variegated Wappen of the Korporationen, the Borussias, Teutonias and Germanias, there hang the insignia of the Jewish students' societies, the yellow and white of the Sprevia and the black and gold of the Hasmonea, both announcing the dates of their Kneipe held in their respective places in the students' quarters around Linienstrasse and Charlottenburg. In another nook of the hall, from the midst of a jumble of little slips of paper enumerating in minute detail in microscopic German script what dishes are offered at the paltry sum of so many pfennig in the various "Privat-Mittagtische" and "bürgerliche-Küche" there looms up unblushingly, proud in the clearness of its square characters, the Hebrew word כשר over the notice of a Lebanon restaurant run by a Palestinian Jew. Still further on the wall, students of unmistakably Jewish names offer instruction in almost all the languages spoken, while a German young lady wants to exchange lessons in Russian with an _orthodox Christian_ and one who hails from the mendacious little country, cautiously states, as an inducement to a prospective pupil in the Roumanian tongue, that the would-be instructor is a _true_ Roumanian. Here you have a picture of Jewish life in the Berlin University, in its outer paraphernalia, in its cosmopolitan character, in its relation to the rest of the student body, in its freedom and restriction, as portrayed in the unjaundiced tales of bulletin boards.

_The Opposing Views of Student Societies at Berlin_

OF the two Jewish organizations mentioned above, the Hasmonea is a branch of the inter-varsity K. Z. V. (Kartell Zionistischer Verbindungen), whereas the Sprevia belongs to the K.-C. (Kartell-Convent der Tendenzverbindungen deutscher Studenten jüdischen Glaubens). The former, as the name implies, is Zionistic; the latter is opposed to Zionism. Their relation to each other, however, is not like that between the Menorah and the Zionist societies in American colleges. The Hasmonea and the Sprevia are mutually exclusive, rather than complementary to each other. The German Jewish student does not come to the university with a mind open and free as to Judaism. He comes there with definite views on the subject which have already been crystallized under the influence of early training. Judaism, of whatever shade it may happen to be, is more potent a factor in the domestic life of German Jews and in the bringing up of the young than it is with us here. Jewish boys there evince a keener interest in Judaism than do Jewish boys in America. Their intelligent understanding of Judaism is therefore not necessarily preceded by a period of indifference and lack of knowledge. It steadily grows and develops with them from their early youth. And so by the time they enter the university, at an age somewhat older than that of our average freshman, their Jewish consciousness is mature and fixed. They are able to judge whether they can work for or against Zionism, for to them Zionism is the only vital question in present-day Judaism, a question which they are willing to face squarely and once for all determine their position towards it; and it is on this question of Zionism and the future destiny of the Jews as a nation that the two leading student organizations radically differ.

There is another quite as notable distinction between our Menorah and the Jewish students' organizations in Germany. With us the Menorah is primarily an undergraduate society. When graduate Menorah Societies arise, they may be confederated with the undergraduate organization, but they will of course retain their separate character. In Germany this distinction between undergraduate and graduate does not exist. Matriculation in the University, not the taking of a degree in it, introduces one into the society of the educated with its appellative "intellectual" corresponding to our "high-brow" rather than to our "college grad." Joining the membership of a student organization marks the entrance into that large class of "intellectuals." And once you join such an organization you are a member ever after. In Germany, in fact, nobody graduates from a university in the same sense that we do. There the taking of a degree is merely an episode. If you take it, you will thenceforth be addressed as "Herr Doktor"; if you do not take it, you will keep on printing on your visiting card "Kandidat Philosophie" all the rest of your lifetime, and be addressed by the uninitiate as "Herr Doktor" just the same. Thus the achievements generally ascribed to Jewish students' organizations in Germany are in reality the collective work of all the Jewish men of academic training, and not necessarily of students actually engaged in university studies. Read over the names of contributors to publications issued by what are known as "student organizations," and you will notice how loosely that term is used.

_Intellectual Problems of the German Jewish Youth_

THE Jewish university men in Germany, whom we commonly call Jewish students, take more interest in Jewish life than do our university men in this country. This is chiefly due to the peculiar position of the modern Jews in Germany. German Jewry, by the total disappearance of its laboring class during recent times, has ceased to be a people by itself and has become a part of the middle class of the general German population. Among the native Jews of Germany, if Berlin is to be taken as a typical example of Jewish communities in large cities, there is no organic social body, complete in itself, consisting of various classes, following all imaginable trades, ranging from the chimney-sweep and the cobbler to the merchant prince. Such communities, forming organic wholes in themselves, you may find in Russia, Galicia, Roumania, and in the newer Jewish settlements of England and America. You do not find them in Germany. Higher up in the social scale, Jews are represented everywhere, but lower down you cannot find any native Jew below a shop clerk or master tailor. Being thus interspersed among the middle class of the general population, that part of the population which more than any other sends its children to universities, the number of academically trained men engaged in liberal professions among the German Jews is exceedingly large. These professional Jews encounter greater difficulties in their careers than those engaged in commerce. While the latter are given free range for the development of the native Jewish talents, the former find their road toward recognition blockaded. Consequently they are hurled back upon their Judaism, and their energies not finding vent elsewhere turn into Jewish channels.

The activities of Jewish university men in Germany are chiefly literary and intellectual, for the problem with which they are faced is quite different from that of ours. With us the problem of Americanism and Judaism is in its ultimate analysis the possible conflict between two sets of social duties, in themselves not necessarily contradictory, which can be easily reconciled by a working program adjusting the practical demands of both without curtailing the scope and efficiency of either. For Americanism in the abstract has no existence. The American mind is as yet unknown in its essence; it is only manifest by its functions, of which Jewish activities may form a complementary part. In Germany it is quite different. If Germanism stand for Aryanism and Occidentalism, Judaism must inevitably stand for Semitism and Orientalism,--and can the twain ever meet? That the Jew manifests in his works and actions good practical patriotism does not radically solve the problem; that the Jews are capable of being good patriots is no longer questioned, but can they be genuine ones? Will not the Jews always remain the carriers of an alien culture, unabsorbable and unassimilable, despite their conversion and intermarriage? It is this problem that confronts the Jewish intellectuals in Germany, in the over-hanging shadow of which the "Sorrows of the Jewish Werther" was written, and the martyrdom of Otto Weininger, self-inflicted, was made possible. Hence the great introspective literary activity of the German Jewish youth.

There is, on the one hand, the great, ever-increasing inrush of the Jews into the inmost sanctum of German cultural life, where their Germanic protestations are more vociferous than those of the native Teuton,--and they sometimes have, too, as must be admitted, a false ring. Ludwig Fulda openly proclaims that as to his relation with Judaism there is none: Goethe is his Moses and the German war of liberation is his Exodus; and Jewish "Gymnasium" seniors inundate the columns of the _Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums_ with introspective analyses of their Teutonic souls. On the other hand, there are those who, while quite as good Germans as the others, so far as practical patriotism is concerned, do not renounce the intellectual and spiritual heritage which is their own. Their self-imposed task is therefore the cultivation, enrichment, and modernization of Jewish thought and tradition. Hence the great output of highly meritorious literary works on purely Jewish subjects which, if not as scholarly as those of the German Jewish scientists of the past generation, are far more stimulating and of greater educational value.

(_To be concluded_)

_IT may interest you to know that in this country,
during the early years of our leading universities,
Hebrew not only formed, a subject of instruction, but
also appeared upon the Commencement programs. Upon
such grandiloquent occasions you will find that side
by side with a poem in Greek there figured a speech in
Hebrew. What the Hebrew was like that was poured out
there I have difficulty in imagining. But that the
instruction was of much use to the student, I have
grave reasons to doubt. Will you allow me to read to
you a note written in regard to that famous professor
of Hebrew at Yale towards the end of the eighteenth
century--Ezra Stiles. Stiles was a very learned
Christian Hebraist. One of his pupils wrote about him:
"For Hebrew he possessed a high veneration. He said
one of the Psalms he tried to teach us would be the
first we should hear sung in Heaven, and that he
should be ashamed that any one of his pupils should be
entirely ignorant of that holy language."_--_From a
Menorah Address by Professor Richard Gottheil._

The Twilight of Hebraic Culture

_The Transition from Hebraism to Judaism_

BY MAX L. MARGOLIS

SO long as Jewish psalms are sung in the cathedrals of Christendom and Jewish visions are rehearsed by Christian catechumens, the Synagogue will continue to hold in veneration the chest where reposes its chiefest glory. Surely a book which thrills the religious emotions of civilized mankind cannot but be an object of pride to the people that produced it. Stupendous as the literary output of the Jewish people has been in post-biblical times, the Scriptures stand on a footing of their own. Throughout the era of the dispersion they have held their unique position and have exercised a most potent influence on the Jewish soul. And the modern man taught by Lowth and Herder, and the modern Jew under the spell of Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, have their minds open to the æsthetic side of the "Bible as literature."

To the Jew, however, the Scriptures are possessed of an interest beyond the religious and literary. They are the record of his achievements in the past when his foot rested firm and steady on native soil, of a long history full of vicissitudes from the time when the invaders battled against the kings of Canaan to the days when the last visionary steeled the nation's endurance in its struggle with the heathen. They are the charter of Jewish nobility, linking those of the present to the wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees.

As a finished product the Hebrew Scriptures came after the period of national independence. When canon-making was in its last stage, Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. The canon was the supreme effort of Judæa--throttled by the legions of Rome--withdrawing to its inner defences. The sword was sheathed and deliverance was looked for from the clouds. The Scriptures were to teach the Jew conduct and prayer, and the chidings of the prophets were listened to in a penitential mood, but also joyfully because of the consolations to which they led. The canon-makers had an eye to the steadying of a vanquished people against the enemy without and the foe within. For there arose teachers who proclaimed that the mission of the Jew was fulfilled: free from the fetters of a narrow nationalism, of a religion bound up with the soil, he was now ready to merge his individuality with the large world when once it accepted that measure of his teaching suited to a wider humanity. The temple that was made with hands was destroyed, and another made without hands was building where men might worship in spirit and truth. The dream was fascinating, the danger of absorption was acute, because it was dressed up with the trappings of an ideal to which many believed the Scriptures themselves pointed.

There was a much larger range of writings in Palestine and a still larger in Egypt. The list included historical works carrying on the story of the people's fortunes beyond Alexander the Great; novelistic tales like that of the heroic Judith luring the enemy of her people to destruction, or that exquisite tale of Jewish family life as exemplified by the pious Israelite captive Tobit; books like the wise sayings of Jesus, son of Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, or the Psalms of Solomon, all modelled after patterns in the canon; midrashic expositions of the law, like the Little Genesis; apocalyptic visions going by the name of Enoch and the Twelve Patriarchs and Moses and Isaiah and Esdras, whose prototype may be sought in the canonical Daniel. Over and above the three parts which the Synagogue accepted there were a fourth and fifth; but by an act of exclusion the canon was concentrated upon the three and the others were cast overboard. The canon was the creation of the Pharisaic doctors, who drew a line at a point of their own choosing, and decreed that writings "from that time onward" did not defile the hands.

_The Making of the Canon by the Pharisees_