Chapter III (1)

It remains now to turn to another most potent motive which has affected the fortunes of religion in the nineteenth century. It may be called Nationalism, meaning by the term that higher conception of the life of the state or nation, slowly but most effectively asserting itself throughout the nineteenth century, never apart from religious convictions, always indeed in their support and furtherance. In illustration of this point, we turn again to the French Revolution, as giving the momentum, both directly and by way of reaction, to the conception of the sacredness of the state, as an ultimate fact in God’s government of the world. In that fearful outburst of the French people, their long pent-up indignation was vented no less against the state than against the Church—the one a device of kings and lawgivers for holding mankind in subjection, as the other was a scheme for the same end by a designing priesthood. The humanitarian sentiment received in consequence at this impressive moment a direction of antipathy to nationality as an evil to be overcome, or at least to be kept in subjection to some higher principle, if the rights of man were to be secured. Something even of this negative mood entered into the formation of the American Constitution, where there is to be noted a singular omission of any reference to Deity as the author and preserver of the national life. On the continent of Europe there was the phenomenon of Napoleon building on the ruins of the French Revolution, while yet preserving the destructive motives which inspired it. Napoleon revived the dream of empire, in whose expansive embrace the nations of Europe were to be subordinated, if not suppressed altogether. He proposed to reconstruct the map of Europe, as though nationalities and crowns were purely human artificial arrangements to be disposed of at his sovereign pleasure.

The failure of the French nation, its demonstrated inability to do the proper work of a state, as well as the fact that the career of a Napoleon was possible, indicates inherent weakness in all the nations of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They existed either in repose, and even stagnation, after the long turmoil of the age of the Protestant Reformation, averse to change, distrustful of enthusiasm, or were content to strive for purely selfish aims. In accordance with the principle that the people existed for the state, rulers followed their personal whims, indifferent to moral sanctions, heedless of the growing evils calling aloud for redress. Such in particular was the condition in France. It was better in England, but even there the same tendency existed, manifested in the unnecessary alienation of the American colonies. However this may be, there has been a reaction against nationality during the nineteenth century. The nations have been forced to struggle against this opposition, and through the struggle they have attained their rebirth, their purification.

The subject is connected with the fortunes of religion in many ways. The indifference to nationality, the distrust of the nation as incompetent for the exigencies of life, the placing of an abstract humanity as an ideal above nationality, so that to labor directly for the interests of humanity apart from the well-being of the nation, and even in its defiance, became the motive of reformers—these characteristics, when seen in the religious sphere, have led to a reaction against the various forms of Protestantism, and especially as represented in the state Churches. The Roman Catholic Church, which in all its history has subordinated national distinctions to the higher interests of a common Christendom, had fallen into inefficiency in the eighteenth century, and was no longer reckoned a force worthy of consideration, either by religious thinkers or by statesmen. But in the first third of the nineteenth century there came a change, when the Roman Church arose from its lethargy to meet the demand imposed upon it by the timid fears of statesmen and ecclesiastics, as the safeguard of religion and morality, where national Churches or particular Churches were thought to have failed. The Napoleonic aspiration after universal empire and the frantic effort to realize it by rearranging or suppressing nationalities has its counterpart in the religious world in the effort to restore a Christian empire with the Papacy at its head, as in the Middle Ages. The effect of this ambition may be seen in Germany and other countries, but is most clearly manifest in England, where the Oxford Movement (1833) appears as an unnational, if not anti-national, uprising in behalf of some imperfectly conceived cosmopolitan Church designated as “Catholicity.” The date of the “Movement,” as Newman fixed it, was Keble’s sermon on the “Apostacy of the National Church.” This same feeling, that national existence is inferior in importance to humanitarian reforms or to the expression of religion in some other shape than in any particular or national Church, has been shown in the break with the Established Church in Scotland, or in the difficulties experienced in Germany in consolidating the forms of Protestantism in a strong state Church, or in the aspirations after some universal form of religion to be accomplished by a parliament of religions. Beneath these various schemes there is the common principle that humanity is a worthier object of devotion than the state, and constitutes a higher ideal in whose cause to labor. This conviction, it may be added, has been strengthened vastly by the extraordinary way in which, during the nineteenth century, the whole world has been brought together by the material forces of steam and electricity.

That there is here a great truth no one can deny, but the point to be noticed now is that nationality has been at a disadvantage in the competition with humanity. Out of the necessities of the situation there has been born the spirit of a deeper inquiry into the place and significance of the nation as the indispensable medium by which the highest result can be secured for the world at large. Thus we have the studies in this direction of German students, Hegel and Stahl, Trendelenburg and Bluntschli, Maurice in England, and in America Mulford in his book _The Nation_, all of them combating the motive of Comte and setting forth the essential, even the eternal, significance of nationality. The ancient doctrine is still preserved that the people exist for the state, but it is justified on the ground that the state also exists for the people, for the freedom of the individual man, so that through the state the rights of man are better subserved and more securely guaranteed than by an exclusive one-sided devotion to the cause of an abstract humanity.

As the nineteenth century drew to its close, it became increasingly apparent that the nations had emerged from the depression in which they were found when the century opened. America may be said to have attained the consciousness of nationality in its highest form in consequence of the Civil War, and to have entered from that time upon a new career. In that awful conflict, whose origin dates back to the rise of the anti-slavery movement, may be discerned the issue of the century—humanitarianism, on the one hand, contending for the rights of man, careless, if need be, for the national unity if only a great reform could be secured; and on the other hand, the nation, slowly realizing that slavery was a force hostile to national unity and integrity, and on this ground demanding its suppression. The two attitudes in this instance appear organically related, while yet they spring from distinct and separate motives. In 1870 Germany and Italy took their places in the family of nations. Nor should there be omission to mention Greece, which, after its subsidence for hundreds of years, again attained its national independence.

It has become further apparent that it is to the Protestant nations, America, England, and Germany, that the leading place must be conceded, together with the determination of the world’s fortunes. And to these must be added Russia, which is also outside the pale of Latin Christianity. Those nations remaining in alliance with the Papacy are, for the present at least, in an inferior position.

The triumphant assertion of the spiritual significance of nationality in the latter part of the nineteenth century has made it further apparent that the forces working for religion, and especially for its Protestant forms, were stronger than the forces in opposition. The nation enters the arena of the controversy as a spiritual force, assuming as a first principle the existence of God and His supernatural government of the world. Never was this truth more impressively illustrated than in the experience of Lincoln, who, when he became President of the United States in the supreme crisis of its history, ceased to be indifferent to religion and passed into a devout belief in the mysterious control of the destiny of the nation by a sovereign, omnipotent hand. As the indifference to nationality was among the causes of religious doubt and of the weakness in the Churches in the middle of the century, so the triumphant assertion of nationality has contributed to turn the tide towards theistic belief and the Christian faith.

To give a full exposition of the inner relationship of the nation to religion and the Churches is not possible here, but some remarks may be offered which will tend to illustrate their organic connection.

(1) In any large historical survey the nation appears as guided by religious leaders. Religion is seen to have flourished in proportion as the nation is conscious of its strength and destiny. When the Roman Empire broke down the nationalities and merged them in a large composite unity, it broke down also religious faiths, and its own religion as well, till scepticism was the result and a consequent immorality. All attempts to build up religion on the basis of empire, as distinct from nationality, ended in failure.

(2) The Christian religion tended from the first to break up the empire and to restore nationality. Ultimately it became manifest that the cause which undermined the Roman Empire and accomplished its downfall was the Christian Church. In its Eastern half the empire was resolved into nationalities. In the West a Church, Latin Christendom, rose upon its ruins, but within this Latin Christendom the spirit of nationality began at once to work, forcing its way against the opposition of the Papacy, till, in the age of the Protestant Reformation, when nationality was felt as a conscious motive, it sundered Latin Christendom into fragments.

(3) The Old Testament in its form as a whole is simply the history of a nation from its birth through all its fortunes. Never did religion rise to a diviner and fuller expression than under the realization of the conviction that God was protecting the nation and determining its career. The Hebrew prophets were primarily statesmen, devoted to the nationality, as the incarnation of the divine will, in whose fortunes were revealed the divine purpose. Any nation which has not the similar conviction that it is the chosen people of God, and called to some important task, cannot maintain its independence and integrity, and has no future. This conviction to-day inspires the leading nations of the world.

(4) The nation mediates between humanitarianism and individualism. In serving its own ends and seeking to accomplish its mission, it works for the good of all, and also for the freedom of the individual man. The tendency of humanitarianism as a motive apart from the higher life of the state, or apart from its impersonation in Christ as its head and leader, is to weaken individualism and to defeat the very end it wishes to subserve, the achievement of the rights of man. Humanity as a whole lacks the visible, tangible embodiment of the nation. It has not yet the consciousness of itself nor of its unity. It cannot respond to the needs it awakens. It does not, as a whole, realize its relationship to God, nor is it placed in such a position as to make it feel the need of God. It is in danger of becoming an abstraction in so far as it exists without relationships. But the nation is close at hand, near, and felt as a moral personality or being, seeking ideal ends which are also within the bounds of possibility. Humanity as a whole undertakes no enterprises which make it tremble as it comes to unknown, trackless seas. But when the nation comes to great crises, where human wisdom is powerless to direct its course, it falls back instinctively and by necessity upon the belief in the guidance of God. Thus the nation as a whole appears in a higher form of personality than individual men can achieve, even the greatest men, and so prepares the way for the belief in the still higher, the invisible, infinite personality of God.

(5) The nation as a moral personality and depending upon God becomes the safeguard of morals. If there has been a decline in morality in the nineteenth century, as some maintain, shown in the general weakening of moral sanctions, or by the increase of divorce and indifference to the sacredness of family life, it must be attributed in some measure to the indifference to nationality from the time that political liberalism resting on an abstract humanitarianism, or in combination with a scientific naturalism, gained the ascendency. So far as this tendency has in any degree invaded the Christian Church it has been powerless to effect a change for the better. The great men whom humanity is directed to worship do not constitute a moral standard, nor can scientific postulates be made a basis for moral culture; for nature is at least unmoral, if not, as some assert, immoral, and it is only as acted upon by man that nature gives response to the increasing purpose of the world. Religious truths—the personality of God, His creation and government of the world, immortality, and the freedom of the will—these are shattered, we are told, “by the great eternal iron laws of the universe,” or “are in hopeless contradiction with the most solid truths of empirical science.” And so, it must be added, are the sanctions of ethics and moral law. It is when we turn to the state, to the moral personality of the nation, that we encounter other laws and living forces which restore what an empirical science or a transcendental humanitarianism has broken down. Here the supreme test is spiritual—the well-being of the nationality. The state must build upon the family as its corner-stone; it must enforce those moral laws which the history of nations, as well as human experience in its best estate, reveal to be the inmost expression of the normal life of man.

The beginning of a new century may seem like an artificial division of time, but the self-consciousness with which the nineteenth century closed, the efforts at introversive estimates of its place in history and of the work it had accomplished, indicate something more than a conventional barrier to be passed. Prophecies in regard to the new age may be futile, for God reserves to Himself the knowledge of the future. But it is much if we can to any extent read the meaning of the past and detect the sources of its strength and weakness. And for the rest, Christian faith and hope are inextinguishable, looking forward to the fulfilment of the Christian ideal—that higher unity where Christ appears as the embodiment of humanity and the voice of its yearning for a perfect brotherhood; where the nation also acknowledges Him as its overlord, so that, in the words of Christian prophecy, the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ. In that ideal conception, the _dominium_ belongs to the state, and the _ministerium_ to the Christian Church.

ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN.

THE JEWS AND JUDAISM

The opening years of the nineteenth century found the Jew blinded by the light of a new sun, the rays of which were beating upon the Ghetto and were forcing him to take off, one by one, the many garments with which he had clothed himself during the hostile Middle Ages. For the Jew these Middle Ages did not end with the Reformation and the Renaissance; but only disappeared in the transformation brought about gradually by the French Revolution. The beginning of the twentieth century sees him putting on some of these garments again, and trying to save his own warmth from being lost in the coldness of the outside world. During this period the Jew has passed through more upheavals than many nations have during three or four times the number of years. What outward struggles has he not been called upon to experience; through what alternating seasons of joy and sorrow has he not passed! What changes even within his own body has he not sustained! The modern European and American world has had a hard fight to find its way into its present changed condition; but much harder by far was the task laid upon the Jew; and, whether he has succeeded or not, he has made an honest fight. Evidences of the struggle abound on every hand, and the road is strewn with many a dead hope and many a lost opportunity. The Jew was bound more firmly to ancient traditions; and so interwoven were these ancient traditions with his whole being that the new life into which he came had of necessity to be blended with the old. The tale of the Jew of the nineteenth century is a record of his endeavor to do justice to the two demands which were made upon him: the one from the outside world—to fit himself to take his place worthily and do his work side by side with the other citizens of the state in which he lived; the other from within his own ranks—to harmonize his religious belief with his new point of view and to adapt his religious exercises to modern social conditions.

EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS

The struggle of the Jews in the various European countries for civil rights and for equality before the law was long drawn out, and was marked by varying fortunes dependent upon the political conditions of these countries. More than seventy years of the century had passed before this struggle had been fought out. Though it is true that a beginning was made in Germany and Austria (1750 and 1781), to France belongs the honor of having been the first to really do away with the mass of anti-Jewish legislation which the centuries preceding had piled up. On the 27th of September, 1791, the National Assembly at one stroke removed all the disabilities under which the Jews had been living—distinctive dress, special Jew’s oath, Jew’s tax, forced residence in certain localities, etc. From France, and under the influence which that country then exercised, the emancipation of the Jews spread to Belgium and Holland, and to some of the states of Germany; but the rest of Europe was not yet ready for this emancipation. The reaction which marks the period between 1814 and 1848 made itself felt upon the Jews, restoring, in many places, the disabilities under which they had formerly lived. The “Judengassen” became once more inhabited, and the principles of freedom and liberty for all members of the state seemed to have been wellnigh forgotten. The Revolution of 1830 stayed the downward course in some of the German states; but it was not until 1848 that the second great period in Jewish emancipation came about. In the breaking down of old institutions it was natural that the exceptional laws against the Jews should go also. The German Parliament of 1848, at Frankfort, forcefully proclaimed the doctrine of religious liberty; and of this parliament a Jew, Gabriel Riesser, was vice-president. But it was not until the formation of the German Empire, in 1871, that the emancipation of the Jews, which had gradually made its way in the various states, was carried through for the whole of that empire. In 1867, a decree was issued in Austria by virtue of which all citizens were declared equal before the law, and in 1870 the walls of the Ghetto fell in Rome. In 1874, Jews were admitted to the rank of citizens in Switzerland. In 1878, the Congress of Berlin, the leading spirit of which (Disraeli) was of the Jewish race, demanded equal rights for the Jews living in the Balkan Peninsula. These rights were accorded by the various states there, with the exception of Roumania; which, in spite of the treaty and in spite of the promises made at the time, still continues to refuse to allow the Jews living within its borders to become citizens or to treat them as an integral part of the population. In Turkey the laws which put certain restrictions upon non-Mohammedan citizens were sensibly changed in 1839; so that the Jews living in the dominions of the Sultan suffer from no exceptional legislation.

The cause of Jewish emancipation in England suffered no such sudden changes as it did on the continent. It proceeded by regular stages through the abrogation of the Act of Test in 1828, the admission of Jews as citizens of London in 1830, as sheriffs in 1835, as magistrates in 1845, and in 1858 as members of Parliament by the removal of the words “upon the faith of a Christian” in the oath taken by the members. There can be no doubt that the emancipation in England, though long drawn out and fiercely contested, was more effective than anywhere else, owing to the fact that it was progressive in character and based upon the idea of rights demanded and not upon that of favors granted. Nothing was asked of the Jews in England other than that they be good citizens of the state; while the whole continental legislation regarding them, from the time of Napoleon on, had on the part of the legislators only one object in view—to break up the cohesion of the Jews as a body and to pave the way for their disappearance as a distinctive group. The idea that emancipation was a favor and not a right brought it about that the Jews themselves aided in their own disintegration. They believed that it was their duty to show themselves more patriotic than were the other citizens of the state in which they lived, as they were receiving greater favors. And so, even though Jews have sat in the parliaments of various continental states, they have with few exceptions steadfastly refused to acknowledge themselves to be in any way representatives of their brethren, and in some cases (notably in France) during the last few years have either remained supinely indifferent when Jewish questions were before their several parliaments, or have even aided those whose agitation was directed against their fellow-Jews. In England, on the contrary, the Jewish members of Parliament have never forgotten that, in addition to their interests as citizens of England, they have a duty to perform to the Jews, whom they also represent, and they have therefore been able, while giving their best services to the state, to be also useful to their co-religionists. It may be due to this cause that the emancipation of Jews on the continent has in no way been able to stem the recrudescence of anti-Semitism; while it has undoubtedly done this in England. The opposite effect is most clearly seen in Algiers, where the wholesale emancipation of the Jews in 1870, through the efforts of Crémieux, that bold champion of his people, has in a large measure contributed to make the riots possible which have in late years been witnessed in that French colony. Neither the population of Algeria nor the Jews there were at that time ready for such a measure; it did not therefore come as the result of a development among the people, but as something imposed upon them by the government.

In addition to Roumania, Russia is practically the only country which has refused to enter the European concert, and which by means of laws and ordinances represents still the dark period of the Middle Ages. It has turned the provinces on its western borders into a tremendous Ghetto, and driven the Jews to exile by making life within that pale practically impossible. Even Portugal in 1821, and Spain in 1868 (the two countries from which the Jews had been banished for a great number of years), opened their doors to them once more; though few Jews have ventured to return to the Peninsula, despite the fact that in 1886 a committee was formed in Madrid for the promotion of Jewish immigration into Spain.

THE WANDERING JEW

The Wandering Jew is not the Jew of legend, but the Jewish people of history. The dislocation of large Jewish bodies, which was characteristic of the Middle Ages, has been kept up during the nineteenth century; and this dislocation has, as in former times, profoundly modified Judaism in the various countries. From the fifteenth century on to the nineteenth, hostile legislation on the part of Western Europe had been continually driving the Jews to the East. The expulsion from Spain and Portugal, at the end of the fifteenth century, forced several hundred thousand into Turkey; while the hardships which they had to suffer in the smaller German states and in Austria caused large numbers to seek a refuge in Poland and Russia. The tide commenced to turn westward about the middle of the eighteenth century, though bands of Jews from Poland had been driven into Germany, Italy, and Holland in the terrible years of the Chmelnicki persecutions (1648–1651). The readmission of Jews into England, the relative kindness of Frederick William of Prussia and of Frederick the Great, aided a certain slow but continuous infiltration from Poland, so that at the end of the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century these Polish Jews were to be found in all parts of Germany, Holland, and England. This slow migration back again to Western Europe took on, however, much larger proportions in the latter part of the nineteenth century; but before this could happen a strong movement still farther westward had already taken place. Jews were among the earliest settlers on the American continent. They were in nearly every case of Spanish or Portuguese descent, having come from Holland and England to the possessions which these powers held on the new continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the tide of immigration from Germany was at its height, a large number of Jews from the southern states and the Rhine region found their way to these shores. The Russian atrocities of 1882 and the following years caused a greater shifting of the Jewish population westward than can be paralleled at any previous time. It has been estimated that between the years 1882 and 1900 fully one million Russian Jews left their homes in the pale of settlement, finding new dwelling-places in England, Germany, and France. The largest number (probably half a million) came to the United States and Canada. Untoward economic conditions existing in Galicia, and the frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism there, forced out during the 90’s a large number of Galician Jews; and in 1899 and 1900 the hostility of the Roumanian government has made it impossible for thousands of Jews to remain in a country in which most of them had been born; and, under circumstances the like of which has hardly ever before been seen, bands of the Roumanian Jews have been wandering over Europe, seeking the means by which to come to the American continent in order there to establish themselves anew. There are between ten and eleven million Jews to-day in the world: of these, about nine million live in Europe; one million in the United States and Canada; three hundred and fifty thousand in Africa; three hundred and fifty thousand in Asia; and sixteen thousand in Australasia.

COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION

All these changed circumstances variously modified the organization of the Jewish communities. Napoleon’s attempt in 1807, as the result of the Sanhedrin which he had convened in Paris, to found this organization upon a modern basis, dividing the Jews of France into certain consistories and arrondissements, had an effect not only upon France, but also upon those countries which for a time were under his influence (Holland, Belgium, etc.), and even upon many of the German states. In 1808 such consistories were established in Westphalia and Cassel; in 1809, an Oberrath was created in Baden; and in 1828 and 1831 an Oberkirchenbehoerde in Würtemberg. It was due also to Napoleon that in France and Germany the Jews were obliged to adopt family names, they having, in most cases, still retained the Oriental custom of simply adding to their own prænomen that of their father. Prussia was the only one of the German states which was not so affected. There the state exercises a supervisory influence, compelling all the Jews to be members of the Jewish community, but in no way further regulating the communal life. When the Reform tendencies commenced to make themselves felt in the larger Jewish communities, the Orthodox members safeguarded their own interests by making use of the law passed in 1873, mainly through the efforts of the Jew Lasker, which enabled the people to declare themselves “confessionslos” and form their own synagogues, thus nearing in a measure the system followed in English-speaking countries. In England and America no such organization was effected, as the state does not there take cognizance of the religious belief of the people. In both these countries attempts have been made by the Jews themselves to organize under one head upon a purely religious basis, but without much success. In France there is a Chief Rabbi of the Jews who is recognized by the state as their rabbi and head. But the Chief Rabbi of the Jews in the British Empire, though he is nominally the head of the Jews in the kingdom, has no actual position as such, and is even not recognized by certain schools of Jews themselves. The Sefardim, or descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, have always kept themselves distinct, and have their own Chief Rabbi, or Haham. In the year 1840, the more liberal-minded element among the London Jews cut themselves loose from the United Synagogue and formed a Reform party, their example being followed in Manchester and Bradford. Neither they nor the recent immigrants from Russia, who have formed their own “Federation of Synagogues” recognize the authority of the Chief Rabbi. This more congregational system has been carried to its utmost limits in the United States, where each congregation is a law unto itself and absolutely rejects any interference on the part of any larger body. From time to time a desire has been manifested to supersede this purely congregational system by some form of union. The late Dr. Isaac M. Wise, of Cincinnati, had at various times attempted to bring the Jews of the United States together with an authoritative synod at their head. Out of this and other attempts have come the Central Conference of American Rabbis and The Union of American Congregations (founded in 1873), which now comprises about ninety-one congregations. These organizations, however, do not by any means represent either all of the Jewish ministers or all of the Jewish congregations, and the Union itself is merely a deliberative body having no power to do anything in the internal affairs of one of its constituent synagogues. Since the union of American Jewish congregations comprises only such as stand upon a Reform platform, a union of Orthodox congregations was formed in New York two or three years ago, and it is hoped that this organization will do much towards binding together the very many congregations of those who adhere strictly to traditional Judaism.

But the organization of Jews as a church has not been found sufficient. Spread over so large a portion of the earth and coming under such varying influences, it was inevitable that the theological differences which already existed should grow apace, and a great cleavage be made between the Orthodox and the Reform wing of the synagogue. It was early felt that some more secular bond must be found which should unite the Jews of various persuasions for common and concerted action. The first attempt in this direction was nobly made by Narcisse Leven, Eugene Emanuel, Charles Netter, and a few others, in founding (1880) the “Alliance Israélite Universelle” in Paris, whose object it was to aid in removing Jewish disabilities wherever they might exist, and to raise the spiritual condition of their coreligionists in Northern Africa, Eastern Europe, and Western Asia by the founding of schools. From these small beginnings the Alliance has grown to be an important factor in the conservation of Jewish interests. Faithful to its programme, it has established a large number of elementary and technical schools, and has intervened actively in Algeria, Morocco, the Turkish Empire, and Persia whenever Jews or Jewish interests were in any way threatened. Its attempt, however, to represent the whole Jewish people has not been successful; for the reason that it has been allied too closely with French national interests; and side by side with the “Alliance Française” it has been an active propagandist of the French language and of French culture in the East. This one-sidedness of its work is best seen in the fact that by its side similar organizations have been created in other countries, “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites” in the United States, “The Anglo-Jewish Association” in England, “The Israeli-tisch Alliance” in Austria, and the “Deutsche Gemeindebund” in Germany. At one time it was hoped that the B’nai B’rith, established in this country in 1843, by Isidor Busch, Julius Bien, and others, would form such a union of Jews, where the theological differences would be eliminated. But though this order, which has 315 lodges in, the United States and Canada, has established itself in such countries as Germany, Roumania, Austria, Algeria, Bulgaria, and Egypt, and despite the good work it has so far done, the mere fact that it is a secret organization prevents it from standing forth as the representative of international Jewry. Where, then, and in what manner is such a body to be found?

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

The economic condition of the Jews in the large Eastern European Ghettos is, naturally, extremely bad. Huddled together, either in certain districts of large towns or in villages where they form the greater part of the population, they are compelled to live off and on each other. Crowded into certain walks of life by anti-Jewish legislation or anti-Jewish sentiment, few of them can gain more than sufficient to keep body and soul together. In Galicia it has been estimated that five thousand Jews perish every year from typhus-fever. The Jewish wax-miners in Boryslav, to take but one instance, were forced out of the mines and reduced to utter starvation, for no other reason but because they were Jews. The failure of the harvests in Southern Russia during the last few years has reduced the wage-earners in that part of the country to the position of dependants upon the charity of others; but the Jews who live there in such large numbers do not even benefit from the assistance sent by the government. Similar conditions prevail almost continually in the rest of the Russian pale and in Roumania. The standard of life has naturally been lowered among these people and their general _morale_ has not come out of the trial unscathed.

Nor must it be forgotten that the violent dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people, such as has taken place among the Jews during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has naturally disturbed existing economic conditions, not only among the Jews themselves, but also among those into whose midst they came. These outcasts from Eastern Europe did not come to virgin soil as did the Pilgrim Fathers, but to cities and towns which were already filled with a proletariat engaged in the eager fight for life. The Jews of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, had their hands full with the proper care of the needy ones already in their midst.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Jews as a people are rich. The proletariat among them is proportionately much larger than it is among other people; and thus it came about that the Jewish quarters in all the large cities were already well filled when they were (almost at a moment’s notice) called upon to receive double or triple the number they already held. The actual number of the Jewish poor was thereby greatly increased; for many a family that had been wealthy or in easy circumstances in Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, had been reduced to want and been compelled to take its place among those who needed the help of their brethren. This help was freely and cheerfully given all the world over. Great sacrifices were made by the richer Jews to meet the pressing needs of the hour, and, with no help from the outside world, excepting the London Mansion House Fund in 1882, the thousands and tens of thousands of immigrants were cared for. The Jewish charitable organizations, the development of which has been during the latter half of the nineteenth century the brightest spot in Jewish communal life, rose to the demands of the occasion, and the more than princely munificence of Baron and Baroness Maurice de Hirsch, in regard to the Russian Jews, may justly be looked upon with pride.

New Ghettos, however, were formed in nearly all the cities to which these immigrants came; and this name for the habitat of the poorer Jews became again familiar, aided by the popularity which some modern novelists had given to it. In the Middle Ages and down to our own time the Jews had been forced by the state to live apart in such Ghettos; sometimes for their own protection, sometimes to preserve the outside world from contact with them. The modern Ghetto is a voluntary gathering of the Jews for the purpose of mutual help and from a feeling of reciprocal obligations. To the outside observer it presents an unsightly appearance; it is the abode of poor people, and its population is usually strange in dress, manners, and speech. The sweating system (which in one form or another is to be found in all these Ghettos) has been a dreadful incentive towards grinding the face of the poor; and the results of too great a hoarding are often quite apparent; so that the general morality of the Jews in these Ghettos has suffered in consequence. A people ignorant of the language of their new home are a prey to the evil-intended, who make use of their ignorance for their own commercial and political advancement. This has been notably seen in the city of New York, where a lax city government has permitted the vampires of society to fasten their fangs upon the Ghetto and to produce conditions which call for the active interference of all those forces which seek to stamp out crime and vice. But, on the other hand, to one who is acquainted with the inner life of the Ghetto the virtues which have hitherto characterized the Jews—industry and sobriety—are still to be found there; much more frequently than in those parts where the richer classes congregate, and whose wealth enables them to withdraw their doings from the public gaze. Its members are as industrious as bees in a hive; and though extremely litigatious, drunkenness is unknown and actual crime is comparatively rare.

In order to correct the abuses of the Ghetto, two things are absolutely necessary—the increase of the actual number of Jews there must be stopped, and the crowding into certain distinct fields of work must be brought to an end. A determined effort has already been made to force the new immigrants into less crowded parts of the land to which they come. In this country this is being done by the United Hebrew Charities, and notably by the B’nai B’rith. A distinct clannish feeling has, however, to be overcome, and a fear of venturing into an unknown country where the immigrant will be surrounded by people who do not understand his peculiar social and religious customs.

That the Jew has taken by preference to certain branches of trade and work is due to the fact that anti-Jewish legislation has for centuries closed many walks of life to him, and the guild organization excluded him rigorously from many spheres of activity. Then, too, his richly developed home life has induced a certain distaste for occupations which take the wage-earner out of his home and away from his family. That, however, these inherited instincts can easily be overcome is clearly seen whenever the occasion offers. Even in Amsterdam, where three-fourths of the diamond industry is in the hands of Jews, there are to be found Jewish cobblers, cigar-makers, plumbers, carpet-weavers, mattress-makers, watch-makers, etc. In the East End of London there are, it is true, ten thousand Jews who are engaged in the clothes-making trades, but the rest of the forty thousand Jewish wage-earners of this quarter are scattered over all possible branches of work—masonry, metal-working, textile industries, furniture-making, cap-making, and the like. The same is true of New York, where, although the number of Jews employed in the tailoring industries is disproportionately large, the following list of Hebrew unions shows how far afield the Jewish workman has gone: Cap-Makers, Cap-Blockers, Shirt-Makers, Mattress-Makers, Purse-Makers, Liberty Musical Union, Jewish Chorus Union, Jewellers’ Union, Tin-Smithers’ Union, Bill-Posters, Waiters’ Alliance, Architectural Ironworkers, Hebrew Typographical Union, Tobacco Cutters, Paper-Makers, Bookbinders. The same is relatively true of all other countries where Jews live in large numbers.

It is a popular misconception that the Jew has an innate distaste for agriculture. His continued commercial life, forced upon him for many centuries, has, it is true, disaccustomed the Jew to the life of a tiller of the soil. But the Jewish state was largely an agricultural one; the legislation of the Bible and the later Law Books was clearly intended for an agricultural people; and Jews have never shown an unwillingness to return again to the soil. In Southern Russia there are to-day 225 Jewish colonies with a population of 100,000. In Palestine there are now more than twenty colonies with a population of more than 5000, and similar agricultural colonies have been established at various times in the United States, Canada, and the Argentine Republic. In many cases, it is true, these colonies have not yet become self-supporting, but this has been due in a large measure to maladministration and to the peculiar conditions under which the colonies were founded.

It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent partisan of the existing state of affairs.

INTERNAL RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT

The facility with which the Jews attach themselves to changed circumstances stands out characteristically through their whole history. It might, indeed, be said with some show of truth that this pliability is the weak side in the Jewish character. The readiness of the Jew to be almost anything and not simply his own self has been one of the factors producing a certain ill will against him. Disraeli was the most jingo of all imperialists in England; Lasker, the most ardent advocate of the newly constituted German Empire. This pliability is the result of the wandering life he has led and the various civilizations of which he has been a part. He had to find his way into Hellenism in Alexandria, into Moorish culture in Spain, into Slavism in Russia and Poland. When the first wave of the modern spirit commenced to break from France eastward over the whole of Europe, it reached the Jew also. While in France the new spirit was largely political, in Germany it was more spiritual. In its political form as well as in its spiritual form it reacted not only upon the political condition of the Jew, but especially upon his mental attitude. The new spirit was intensely modern, intensely cosmopolitan, intensely Occidental, and intensely inductive. The Jew had preserved to a great degree his deductive, Oriental, particularistic, and ancient mode of thought and aspect of life. The two forces were bound to meet. As a great oak is met by the storm, so was Israel set upon by the fury of this terrible onslaught. It is of interest to see in what manner he emerged from this storm—whether he has been able to bend to its fury, to lose perhaps some of his leaves and even some of his branches, but to change only in such a way as to be able to stand upright again when the storm is past.

This great clash of ideas has produced what is known as the Reform movement. It had its origin in Germany under the spiritual influences of the regeneration of German letters produced by such men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. It was aided in a large measure by the fact that the government in Germany, although distinctly opposed to anything which militates against the established order of things, mixes itself very seldom in the internal affairs of the Jewish communities. This Reform movement has colored the religious development of Judaism during the three-quarters of the century which is past. The heat of the controversy is now wellnigh spent. Many of those who stood in the front ranks have passed away, so that a more just estimate of its value can be reached. It was a period of tremendous upheavals, of great physical as well as mental pain. Many a congregation was split in twain, many a family disrupted. At one time it looked as if two distinct bodies of Jews would emerge from the struggle, and the union of Israel be destroyed forever. A common enemy—anti-Semitism—joined the two forces together for a common defence; and the danger of such a split is now fairly a thing of the past.

The latter half of the eighteenth century found the Jews of Middle Europe at the lowest intellectual and social point they had up till then reached. The effect of the long Jewish Middle Ages was plainly visible. Few great minds lit up the darkness, and an intellectual torpor seems to have spread its pall over everything. A passive uniformity of practice prevailed in all the communities, whether Sefardic (Spanish and Portuguese) or Ashkenazic (German and Polish); a uniformity, because actual intellectual life had been made to run in one single groove. The Talmud had been the great saving of Judaism in the past. In the intellectual exercise which its study necessitated, the mind of the Jew had been given a field in which it could rove at will. Living apart from the rest of the world, with a wide jurisdiction over his own affairs, Talmudic law in its latest development was still the law supreme for the Jew. The Jewish Ghetto had everywhere the same aspect; the language in common use was, in all the Ashkenazic communities, the Judæo-German in one of its various forms. A certain severity in evaluating those things which were part of the outside world made itself felt. There was ample time and ample occasion for the practice of all those forms and ceremonies with which the Judaism of the Middle Ages had willingly and gladly fenced in the law. There had been little occasion for the practice of the beautiful arts or for the cultivation of letters. Life in the Ghetto was not necessarily gloomy, but it was solemn. The law was not felt as a burden, but it required the whole individual attention of those who bound themselves by it, from early morn till late at night, from the cradle to the grave. There was no place for things that come from outside, because there was no time to devote to them.

But the new European spirit in its French political form was knocking hard at the gates of the Ghetto. Little by little it made its way here and there, into all sorts of nooks and corners. It was bound in time to be heard by some of those living behind these gates. The name of Moses Mendelssohn is indissolubly connected with the history of German Judaism during the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was due to him that a vehicle was found which the new spirit could use. Himself a strictly observant Jew, he felt the pulse of the new era. The friend of Lessing and of Nicolai, he entered fully into the revival which was then making itself felt. Through his translation of the Pentateuch (1778, etc.) into High-German, he prepared the way for the further introduction of German writings to the Jewish masses. This was bound to bring with it a larger culture and a greater freedom of thought. Many of his friends, such as Wessely, Hertz-Homberg, and David Friedlander, stood by his side in this work. With the introduction of the German language and German literature, better and more modern schools were needed in which secular education should go hand in hand with the former one-sided religious training. David Friedlander was the first to found a school in the modern sense of the term; and he was followed by Jacobson in 1801, at Seesen, Westphalia, and at Cassel, and by Johlson, at Frankfort, in 1814. Between the years 1783 and 1807 such modern Jewish schools arose in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, and even in Poland. Literature was cultivated, and the first Jewish journal (though still in Hebrew) was published in Königsberg, 1783 (_Hameassef_—the Collector). The _Gesellschaft der Freunde_, founded in Berlin in 1792, was distinctly intended for the spread of this modern culture; yet Mendelssohn’s own position was quite an untenable one. He was a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in practice, but his mental attitude was that of a modern German. He was and he was not a reformer. He held that it mattered little what philosophical position a Jew held, the Jew must observe all the ceremonies connected with the faith; these were binding upon him by the mere fact of his having been born into the Covenant. It is therefore no wonder that his translation was put under the bann in Hamburg, Altona, Fuerth, Posen, etc. His friend Friedlander wished to make of the synagogue a sort of Ethical Culture Society; and Jacobson’s preaching in Berlin contained very little of what was distinctly Jewish. The salons of Berlin, Königsberg, and Vienna, which were presided over by brilliant women, who were more or less immediate disciples of Mendelssohn, nurtured the cosmopolitan spirit which was bound to be destructive of practical Judaism. That this fruit on the Tree of Knowledge ripened too quickly is seen from the fact that all the descendants of Mendelssohn, Friedlander, and others, led astray by this cosmopolitan spirit and the philosophic presentation of Christianity by Schleiermacher, have all become devoted members of the Lutheran Church and have been completely lost to Judaism.

It was natural that these new influences should influence also the training of the modern rabbis. Secular education had been introduced into primary schools, and in some places—as, for instance, Lombardy, in 1820—the government demanded a certain amount of secular knowledge from the candidates for rabbinical positions. The Jew also desired that his leaders should have the same training as he gave his children, that they should be educated in the same atmosphere in which he himself had grown up. The old rabbinical seminaries, or Yeshibot, in which the instruction was entirely on Talmudic lines, had already run their course; the study had been found insufficient by the pupils themselves, and the schools of Frankfort, Fuerth, Metz, Hamburg, and Halberstadt had all been closed for want of students. The need of a modern seminary was felt quite early during the century; and in 1809, a Lehrer-Seminar was founded in Cassel. The earliest regular seminary for the training of rabbis, however, was founded in Padua in 1829. In Germany attempts had been made in the year 1840, but these attempts were unsuccessful. The first modern seminary was not founded in Germany until the year 1854 (Breslau). Then followed Berlin, in 1872; Cincinnati, in 1873; Budapest, in 1876. Similar institutions exist now in London, Paris, and Vienna.