Chapter III (2)

In the first convulsions of the Mendelssohn period the way was paved for the second period of the Reform movement which covers the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The real issues touched the central point of Jewish life, the synagogue. It is interesting to note that during this period the chief questions were not so much theological as æsthetic. The æsthetic side of life could not be largely cultivated in the Ghetto; and the form of the service had greatly degenerated. In the course of centuries, so many additional prayers and songs and hymns had been added that the ritual was largely overburdened, and often tended rather to stifle than bring out the religious sense they were intended to conserve. Contact with the outside world created and fostered this æsthetic sense, and the influences of the writings of such men as Lessing and Mendelssohn was largely in this direction. As this æsthetic sense made its way into the homes, so also did it carve out its way into the synagogue. Demands were heard for a shorter service; for the organ to accompany the chanting of the reader; for the German language in some of the prayers and for the German sermon. Each point was bitterly contested; for the Orthodox wing had before it the wholesale apostasy of the Salon Jews. In order to introduce the vernacular into the service and into the sermon, private synagogues were opened by small coteries in Cassel (1809), Seesen (1810), Dessau (1812), and Berlin (1815). In Southern Germany the use of the vernacular was introduced between the years 1817 and 1818, also in Hungary through the influence of Abraham Chorin. In some countries the government gave its active aid. In Vienna, in 1820, German was made obligatory, and as early as 1814 Danish in Copenhagen. The greatest changes, however, were made in the Hamburg temple (under Kley and Salomon, 1818), where not only the service was made more æsthetic and the German language introduced, but certain prayers referring to the Messianic time were either omitted or altered. No wonder, then, that the Orthodox rabbis in Germany, with the support of the rabbis in various other countries, protested against such a course. The government even looked askance at these Reform proceedings, and in 1817 and 1823 ordered a number of these private synagogues to be closed. A further cause for displeasure was the introduction in 1814 of the confirmation of children in German, to replace or supplement the old Barmitzvah, a clear imitation of the ceremony in the Protestant Church of Germany. Despite opposition, however, the confirmation found its way into Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Cassel, Copenhagen, etc.

This æsthetic revolution in the synagogue could not, however, long remain the only outward sign of the new life. The great weakness of the Reform movement has been that it has lacked a philosophic basis; and, as in its first beginnings, with the exception of Hamburg, it took little note of the changed point of view from which those who fought for reform looked at the old theological ideas. Æsthetic reform was the work largely of individual persons and individual congregations. No attempt had been made either to formulate the philosophic basis upon which the reform stood, or to provide a body which should regulate the form which the new order of things was to take on. Two attempts were made to remedy these evils, both closely related one to the other.

The first was crystallized in what is now known as the “Science of Judaism”; by which is meant the untrammelled, scientific investigation of the past history of the Jews. The want of this was severely felt just in those centres where reform had taken up its abode; and those who assisted at its birth did so with the avowed purpose of getting at the real kernel of Judaism by such investigation, and of freeing that kernel from the accretions of ages. They saw also that some means had to be found by which the result of these researches could be brought before the people. The Mendelssohn period had also felt this; but its organ had been written in Hebrew, and could not, therefore, appeal to those who wished for the intellectual advancement of the Jews upon modern lines. The Society for Culture and the Science of Judaism in Berlin (founded 1819) started a journal, with L. Zunz as editor. Though it only lived during the years 1822 and 1823, it was the forerunner and the model for many of its kind that followed after. In 1835 appeared Geiger’s _Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology_, and in 1837 a regular weekly was established by L. Philippson, the _Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums_. Around these and other journals which quickly sprang up there gathered a coterie of historians, philologists, and students of literature which in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880 has built up a science which has extended its investigations into every corner of Jewish life in the past, and has followed to their sources the various lines of development which have appeared from time to time. A full estimate of what has been done will be apparent only when the great Jewish Encyclopædia will be ready which is now in course of publication in New York. Zunz, Geiger, Krochmal, Rapoport, Frankel, Löw, Steinschneider, Graetz, Luzzatto, and Reggio are only a few of the names of those who gave up their lives to this work. Most of the early labor of these men was not dry-as-dust investigation pure and simple, but was intended to have a bearing upon the actual life, upon the burning questions which were then agitating Jewish thought. This is clearly seen in the journal of which Zunz was editor, and in his _Gottesdienstliche Vortraege_, the basis of nearly all the work done after him, but which was evidently written to give the history of preaching in the synagogue in order to justify the shortening of the ritual and the introduction of the German sermon.

The second attempt was to found or create some central body which would remove the purely personal element out of the Reform movement. In 1837 Geiger had called his friends to a conference at Wiesbaden for the purpose of formulating what they considered to be the essence of Judaism. In 1844 a second such rabbinical conference was held in Brunswick, largely at the suggestion of L. Philippson. Similar conferences were held at Frankfort in 1845, and at Breslau in 1846; for in the mean time the Reform Genossenschaft had been created at Berlin, which went beyond all previous attempts and demanded some positive statement of the theological position which it and its friends occupied. The Frankfort assembly not proving satisfactory, the Berlin society went ahead to establish its own synagogue; added a Sunday service (which in a short while became the only service), and under the guidance of S. Holdheim definitely broke with traditional Judaism, removing nearly all the Hebrew from its service, abbreviating the prayer-book still further, and diminishing the number of observances. In Europe this Reform synagogue in Berlin has gone to the furthest extreme; and though it has in a measure kept its members within the pale of Judaism, it has neither been a great power nor has it found imitators. The hope was generally expressed that a more general synod would be held, to which the previous conferences were looked upon as simply preparatory. The year 1848, however, put a stop to all normal development; and it was only after a number of years that the question was again taken up. In 1869 a synod was, indeed, held at Leipsic, attended by eighty-one members; and in 1871 at Augsburg, attended by fifty-two, both under the presidency of Prof. M. Lazarus. These synods dealt, in a spirit of moderate reform, with questions relating to the ritual, synagogue observance, the admission of proselytes, etc. The general stand there taken would to-day be looked upon as conservative; dogmatic questions were hardly touched upon excepting so far as they recognized the principle of development in Judaism both as a religious belief and as a form of religious exercise. It was fondly hoped that these synods would become a court, which would define and regulate whatever questions might arise. But it was not to be. The synod represented only a part of the Jewish world even in Germany. Not only did the large body of the Orthodox stand aside, but even the so-called Conservatives left the conferences, as they could not agree with some of the resolutions accepted there. In addition to this, the Franco-Prussian war diverted the attention of all German citizens; and ten years later the anti-Semitic movement succeeded in driving the Jew back into himself. Jewish religious life in Germany has therefore remained stationary since that time, the Orthodox and Conservative parties being largely in the ascendant, leaving to another land—America—the task of carrying further the work which it had commenced. Yet, in spite of this arrested development, the Reform movement has had a great influence also upon Orthodox Jews in Germany. It produced the so-called historical school, which has the Breslau Theological Seminary for its centre; and it called forth by way of opposition the neo-orthodoxy of S. R. Hirsch, of Frankfort, which seeks rather to understand the depths of the law than simply to follow it in compliant obedience.

The æsthetic movement of the earlier period has also left its traces, and especially in the Conservative congregation has succeeded in introducing a service more in consonance with our modern ideas of worship.

In 1840, under the influence of the movement in Germany, the attempt was made to introduce a certain reform in the service of some of the London synagogues. The measure demanded was exceedingly small—the shortening of a few prayers and the omission of others, which were not supposed to be in consonance with present ideas. The Orthodox party did not, however, see its way to grant these requests; and, when the Reformers protested, established their own synagogue, and issued their own prayer-book, they were immediately placed under the bann both by the Sefardim and the Ashkenazim. This congregation has not been of much importance, and since its inception has made no further changes. Compared with the Reform in America, the English movement would still be classed as thoroughly conservative.

It was in the United States that the Reform movement developed its full capacity and bore its most perfect fruit. In a new land, which was untrammelled by traditions of the past, and where the congregational system became the basis of Jewish communal life, the ideas which the German Reformers had sown had a most fruitful ground in which to grow. It cannot be said that the Reform movement here was actually started by the Germans, for already, in 1825, one of the congregations in Charleston, South Carolina, made up almost entirely of Sefardic Jews, had developed “The Reformed Society of Israelites”; and the formation of the society seems to have been due, not only to the demand for an æsthetic service, but to an attempt to formulate a creed which should omit all reference to the coming of the Messiah, the return to Palestine, and the bodily resurrection. This attempt at formulating a Theistic Church, however, was unsuccessful; and it was not until the advent from Germany in the 50’s and 60’s of rabbis who had been influenced by the movement in Germany that reform commenced to make itself felt here. Merzbacher in New York, Isaac M. Wise in Albany and Cincinnati, S. Hirsch in Philadelphia, David Einhorn in Baltimore, are only a few of the names of those who fought in the thick of the fight. About the year 1843 the first real Reform congregations were established, the Temple Emanu-el in New York and Har Sinai in Baltimore. It cannot be my purpose here to trace the history of the movement in this country; suffice it to say that the untrammelled freedom which existed here very soon played havoc with most of the institutions of the Jewish religion. Each congregation and each minister being a law to itself, shortened the service, excised prayers, and did away with observances as it thought best. Not that the leaders did not try, from time to time, to regulate the measure of reform to be introduced, and to evolve a platform upon which the movement should stand. Rabbinical conferences were held for that purpose in Cleveland (1856), Philadelphia (1869), Cincinnati (1871), and Pittsburg (1885). While in the earlier conferences the attempt was made to find some authoritative statement upon which all parties could agree, in the subsequent ones the attempt was given up. They became more and more meeting-places simply for the advanced Reform wing of the Jewish Church. The position of this wing of the Reformed synagogue may best be seen in the declaration of principles which was published by the Pittsburg conference. It declared that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God idea; that the Bible contains the record of the consecration of the Jewish people; that it is a potent instrument of religious and moral instruction; that it reveals, however, the primitive ideas of its own age; that its moral laws only are binding; and that all ceremonies therein ordained which are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization are to be rejected; that all Mosaic and rabbinical laws regulating diet, priestly functions and dress, are foreign to our present mental state; that the Jews are no longer a nation, and therefore do not expect a return to Palestine; that Judaism is a progressive religion, always striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason; that the belief in bodily resurrection, in the existence of a hell and a paradise, are to be rejected; and that it is the duty of Jews to participate in the great task of modern times to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness the problems presented by the transitions and evils of the present organization of society. Such a platform as this could not fail to arouse intense opposition on the part of the Orthodox Jews, and to lose for the conference even some of its more conservative adherents. As in Charleston, in 1825, a platform of Theism was here postulated, which was bereft of all distinctively Jewish characteristics, and which practically meant a breaking away from historic Judaism. This position of the advanced Reformers is also manifested in the stand which they have taken in regard to the necessity of the Abrahamic covenant. At a meeting of the Central Conference of American (Reformed) Rabbis, held at Baltimore in 1881, a resolution was passed to the effect that no initiatory rite or ceremony was necessary in the case of one desiring to enter the Covenant of Israel, and that such a one had merely to declare his or her intention to worship the one sole and eternal God, to be conscientiously governed in life by God’s laws, and to adhere to the sacred cause and mission of Israel as marked out in Holy Writ.

The service in Reform synagogues in the United States has kept pace with this development of doctrine, or rather with this sloughing-off of so much that is distinctively Jewish. The observance of the second-day festivals has been entirely abolished, as well as the separation of the sexes and the covering of the head in prayer. The ritual has been gradually shortened, the ancient language of prayer (Hebrew) has been pushed further and further into the background, so that in some congregations the service is altogether English; and in a few congregations an additional service on Sunday, intended for those who cannot attend upon the regular Sabbath-day, has been introduced. Only one congregation, Sinai in Chicago, has followed the old Berlin Reform synagogue and has entirely abolished the service on Friday night and Saturday morning. But whatever criticism one might like to offer on the Reform movement in the United States, it deserves great praise for the serious attempt it has made to understand its own position and to square its observance with that position. It has also been most active in its modern institutional development. It has certainly beautified and spiritualized the synagogue service; it has founded a Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and a seminary (Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati). It has published a Union Prayer-book and a Union Hymn-book, and has given great care to the development of the Confirmation and the bettering of the Sunday-school. It has tried to make the synagogue a centre for the religious and spiritual development of its members; and it cannot be denied that the very large mass of educated Jews in this country, in so far as they have any affiliation with the synagogue, belong to the Reform wing. But at the same time, it must not be forgotten that there is a very large body of Orthodox and Conservative Jews, whose number has been greatly increased during the last twenty years through the influx of Russian, Galician, and Roumanian Jews. It would be outside of my province were I to attempt to criticise either the work or the results of Reform Judaism in this country. But it is a question in the minds even of some of the leading Reformers themselves how far success has been attained in developing the religious sentiment of their people in the direction of a pure Theism uncolored by any Jewish, or, as they call it, Oriental observances. They themselves confess that the Sunday-service movement has not developed as they had hoped it would, and a number of them feel that in weakening the hold which specific Jewish observances have always had on the Jewish people, they are doing away with one of the most powerful incentives to the rekindling of the religious flame among the Reformed Jews.

Reform Judaism without some centrifugal force is bound to continue on the road it has once taken. The logical outcome of the principles formulated at the Pittsburg conference is a gradual development into an ethical Theism without any distinctive Jewish coloring. The leader of advanced Reform Judaism in this country has recently said that Judaism must be recast along the lines of a universal ethical religion; that then all distinctive Jewish elements of the synagogue symbolism will pass away, and that such a denationalized Jewish temple will seek a closer alliance with Unitarianism and Theism, and with them, perhaps in a few decades, will form a new Church and a new religion for united humanity. That such a tendency is inherent in Reform Judaism is seen also in the formation of the Society of Ethical Culture in New York. The leader of this movement is the son of a former prominent rabbi of the leading Reform congregation in this country. In seeking to bring out the underlying ethical principles of Judaism, he has gone entirely outside the pale of the ancient faith; and the movement would not concern us here were it not that nearly all the members (at least of the parent society in New York) are Jews, whose evident desire it is not to be recognized as such, at least so far as religious ceremonies and social affiliations are concerned. The society does not even bear the name Jewish, but with a certain leaning towards liberal Christianity tries to find a basis for the morality and ethics of the old synagogue outside the sphere of supernatural religion. While the Ethical Culture Society has been quite a power in certain lines of charitable and educational work, it may reasonably be questioned whether it has any future as a form of Church organization. The inborn longing of man for some hold upon things which are supernatural will lead many of its members to seek satisfaction elsewhere. That they will seek it in the Jewish synagogue is hardly probable, seeing how the racial and other ties have been broken or at least greatly loosened. They or their children will glide rather into some form of the dominant Church, possibly, in the swinging of the pendulum, into some orthodox form of that Church. I cannot help quoting the words of an intelligent outside observer of the Jewish question, the Right Hon. James Bryce, M. P.: “If Judaism becomes merely Theism, there will be little to distinguish its professors from the persons, now pretty numerous, who, while Christian in name, sit loose to Christian doctrine. The children of Jewish theists will be almost as apt as the children of other theists to be caught up by the movement which carries the sons and daughters of evangelical Anglicans and of Nonconformists towards, or all the way to, the Church of Rome.”

Where, then, is this centrifugal force to be found, which will hold together the various elements in Israel, no matter what their theological opinions may be?

ANTI-SEMITISM

Before attempting to answer this question, a word must be said in regard to the anti-Semitic movement, the recrudescence of which has so profoundly affected the Jewish people during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. A word only, because the facts are of too recent date to need a detailed statement here. The great master-mind, Zunz, writing in Germany in 1832, believed that persecution for religious belief could not withstand the onslaughts of the new era. Theodore Reinach, some fifty years later, asserted that anti-Semitism was impossible in France. How sadly has a _démenti_ been given to the hopes thus expressed, especially in these two countries!

I pass over the outbreaks against the Jews during the early years of the nineteenth century, even the Damascus blood-accusation in 1840, and the forcible baptism of little Edgar Mortara in 1858; they were believed to belong to the old order of things, with which the new, at least in that direction, had nothing in common. I confine myself simply to the modern form of anti-Judaism, which has been dignified with the name of anti-Semitism. It is hard for a Jew to speak of these things with composure or with the judicial mind of a mere chronicler of events. Neither emancipation from without nor Reform from within has been able to stay the hand of the destroyer of Israel’s peace. It has been contended that in most countries the Jews were not ready to be emancipated; that in some the non-Jewish population was not sufficiently advanced to make emancipation effective. The first may be true in regard to the Algerian Jews; the second, in regard to those in Roumania; but it is not true of the other nations on the European continent. Starting in Germany, perhaps as a political move on the part of Bismarck, it spread into Russia, Galicia, Austria, Roumania, and France. In most of these countries it not only found expression in the exclusion of the Jews from all social intercourse with their fellows, but in Russia produced the riots of 1881 and 1882; in Austria and Bohemia the turbulent scene in the Reichstag, and even the pillaging of Jewish houses and Jewish synagogues; in Roumania it received the active support of the government and reduced the Jews there to practical penury; while in France it showed itself in accusations against the Jews which for barbarity could match any that were brought against them in the Middle Ages. The charges against the Jews are varied in their character. In Germany they have been blamed for exploiting the agricultural class and for serving the interests of the Liberal party, forgetting that Leo and Stahl, the founders of the Orthodox party in Prussia, were themselves Jews, and that Disraeli in England was born of the same race. The most foolish accusations on almost every conceivable subject have been lodged against them by such men as Ahlwart, Stöcker, Lueger, and Drumont; and in late years the old and foolish charge that the Jews use the blood of Christian children in the making of Passover bread has been revived, in order to infuriate the populace; despite the fact that popes, ecclesiastics, and hosts of Christian professors have declared the accusation to be purely imaginary and malignant. The false charge that a Jewish officer in France had betrayed secrets of his government was sufficient to unloosen the most savage attacks upon the Jews which the modern world has seen.

The fact which stands out in the whole agitation is not that the charges have been made, in most cases by men who sought in some way or other to fish in troubled waters, but that these charges find a ready echo and a ready response among the people at large. It emphasizes so clearly that the Jews are a defenceless people, with no means of effectually warding off attacks; and though in Germany and Austria societies of Christians have been formed for the purpose of combating anti-Semitism, there is no power which can effectually enter the lists in their behalf. This was notably seen in the great London demonstration of 1882, when the petition signed by the foremost members of Church and state never even reached the Czar, to whom it was addressed.

Among the few bright spots on the world’s chart are those countries inhabited by the Anglo-Saxon race. Anti-Semitism is unknown in England (though the attempt has been made to fix the blame for the Boer war on the Jews); and the institutions of the United States have up till now prevented the entrance here of the disease, though in the mild form of social anti-Semitism which debars Jewish children from private schools and Jewish people from clubs and summer hotels, it has insinuated itself into some of the Eastern cities, notably into New York.

ZIONISM

There can be no doubt that next to the Reform movement the profoundest modification of the forces within Judaism has come about during the last years of the century through the rise and progress of the Zionist movement. It has been said by some that Zionism is the expression of Jewish pessimism, by others that it is the highest form of Jewish optimism. I venture to say that it is both. The emancipation of the Jews has not been able to do away with anti-Semitism; history has repeated itself time and time again. When the Jews of a country were few in number and of little influence, they led a tolerably secure existence; but as soon as their number increased and their influence commenced to be felt, anti-Semitism was the effective weapon in the hands of their opponents. In so far, then, as Zionism takes account of this fact, it is pessimistic; for conditions in the future will hardly differ from those in the past. It sees the Wandering Jew of history continuing still his dreary march through the ages, never at rest and never able to effect a quiet and even development of his own forces. It explains this phenomenon from the fact that Israel has in all the changed circumstances striven to maintain its racial identity, and as this racial identity has a religious side as well, that the two combined may well be called a separate national existence; that a people holding tenaciously to this separate existence, but having no home of its own, must become, when occasion demands, the scape-goat and the play-ball of other forces. It recognizes anti-Semitism as continually existent, and in so far the opponents of Zionism may be right in saying that its rise is the result of the anti-Jewish movement. It is the Jewish answer from the Jewish point of view. On the other hand, Zionism is optimistic in believing that real help for the Jews can only come from within their own body; and that the Jewish question will only be solved when the Jews return to that point in their history whence they set out on their wanderings, and again found a permanent home to which all the persecuted can flee and from which a light will go forth to every nook and corner of Jewry. It does not hope that all Jews will return to Palestine, but it believes that only in a national centre can the centrifugal force be found which will hold the Jews together in the various countries of their sojourn.

When Theodore Herzl, a _littérateur_ in Vienna, published in 1897 his pamphlet on the Jewish state, he little imagined that it would call forth an echo in every country in which the Jews were scattered. He was not the first to attempt this solution of the problem. Far-seeing Russian Jews before him had, many years previous to that, propounded this method of dealing with the question, and it had been practically the assumption upon which the Judaism of the past had been built up. Reform Judaism, in relinquishing the hope of a return, and in cutting out from the prayer-book all mention of Palestine and the restoration, broke one of the strongest links which bound the Judaism of to-day with that of the past, and cast aside a great ideal, the realization of which had been a light to the feet of the Jews since the destruction of the Temple. The idea of a “Mission” has taken its place, the preaching of a pure Monotheism.

The Zionist congresses (which have now been held during four successive years) have found the platform, so often sought for in vain during the nineteenth century, upon which all Jews, regardless of theological opinions and of economic theories, can stand. They represent the old unity of Israel; for Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even the purely racial Jew are to be found there as well as in the Zionist societies which have grown up in every Jewish community, whether in Europe or in Africa, in North or in South America, even in the distant Philippines. The Orthodox Jew must be, by his very profession, a Zionist; but he often doubts whether the plan as formulated by Dr. Herzl is feasible, and holds himself aloof, waiting for the realization of his hopes at the hands of others, or for some supernatural sign of divine assistance. The very fact that the Jewish opponents of Zionism (and they are the only opponents it has) come from various parts of the Jewish camp is in itself a proof of the above statement. The Orthodox complain that some of the leaders of the movement are not sufficiently Jewish; the Reform, that some are too Jewish. That this opposition is exceedingly strong cannot be denied. The demand made that the Jew should assert himself first and foremost as a Jew has been distasteful to many who were soaring in the mystic hazes of Universalism, or who had hoped to get out of Judaism as it were by the back door, without being seen by the world at large.

But even in those circles which do not formally affiliate with Zionism, or who at times even oppose it, there has of late years been a very strong revival of Jewish feeling and a movement towards a stronger expression of that feeling. Germany is honeycombed with societies for the study of Jewish literature; the Hebrew language has been revived, notably in Russia, not only as a form of literary expression, but also as a vehicle of social intercourse; France has its Society of Jewish Studies; America and England have their Jewish Historical Societies, and their Jewish Chautauqua movements; Jewish national societies have sprung up among the students of German and Austrian universities—all influences—tending in this one direction.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As we look ahead into the century which is now opening and cast our eye over the forces which the Jews will bring into its life, we can easily see that these forces tend in various directions.

We have first the Orthodox wing of the Jewish Church, which stands upon the broad basis of what the past has evolved. It holds firmly to the inspiration of the biblical word and the divine character of its interpretation as handed down in the oral law; it tries to regulate its life by Talmudic ordinances as evolved in the latest law books, and is unwilling to make any but æsthetic concessions to changed circumstances, believing that we must adhere strictly to all the time-honored ceremonies of the synagogue. At its side stand the Conservatives, who are willing to make some concession to present demands, but believe that these concessions should be most sparingly and grudgingly made, and who theologically, at least in theory, occupy the same position as do the Orthodox. It is safe to say that the greater number of Jews in the Western European states belong to this wing of the synagogue. Between the Conservatives and the Ethical Culturists stands the Reform party, more numerous in the United States than anywhere else, whose position it is hard to define and in whose midst there are various shades of opinion and of practice. All the Reformers have openly or tacitly broken with Talmudic Judaism—the more conservative among them seem to believe that a new Judaism can be built up upon the Bible, only without its traditional interpretation; while the advanced body do not even look upon the Bible as binding, but merely as a starting-point for a further development. They do not consider the Bible as inspired in the old accepted sense of the term; they welcome biblical criticism as an aid to the understanding of the early history of their people; they do not believe in the special election of Israel, and have a well-defined abhorrence of anything like a creed. They are practically Theists with a Jewish racial coloring. Nor do they believe in the coming of a personal Messiah; rather, in the advent of a Messianic time in which righteousness and good-will shall prevail and all the earth acknowledge the one God. To bring about this time is, according to them, the Mission of the Jew—a phrase very current in these latter days, the fulfilling of which has been made the pretext for dejudaizing Judaism, so as to make it acceptable to non-Jews. Mr. Oswald John Simon, of London, has even gone further. He believes that if the Reform party is earnest in its pretensions, it ought—as it did once before in its history—to become an active missionary power. A few years ago he attempted to found a Jewish Theistic Church, which should in no way be colored by Jewish ceremonial. The movement was, of course, a failure. The original attempt, some nineteen hundred years ago, led to the founding of the Christian Church, and Jews themselves have suffered too much from missionaries of other faiths to take to this work with pleasure. But, in addition to these, there is also a large body of Jews whose connection with the synagogue is purely nominal, and who know of it only when they need the services of its sanction or the respectability of its connections. The hold which the Jewish Church has upon them is small indeed, and many of them hope, in the twentieth century, to doff their Jewish gaberdine. The open or concealed pressure of anti-Semitism (particularly on the continent of Europe) which makes it impossible for the Jew as such to attain to social distinction or political position will drive most of these into the arms of the dominant Church of the country in which they live. In a remarkable article published in the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ of October, 1900, a writer who uses the _nom de plume_ of Benedictus Levita openly urges those of his fellow-Jews who have become estranged from the synagogue to have their children baptized, in order that they may not suffer as their parents have, but may become really believing Christians, since their affiliation with the Christian Church has become necessary in the modern Christian state. Another German Jew at about the same time advises his brethren to declare themselves “Confessionslos,” so as to become lost, not in Christianity, but in “Deutschtum.” A similar request was made to the Jews of Roumania, in 1900, by the historian Xenopol of Bucharest. There is little fear that this advice of wholesale apostasy will find many adherents, notwithstanding the fact that an unusually large number of conversions have taken place in Germany and Austria, due wholly to pressure from without rather than to conviction from within. The defection even of comparatively large numbers can, however, hardly affect the Jewish cause as a whole; for these numbers living on the periphery, or even beyond it, have been of little service to the Jewish cause; and all through the ages Jews have made just such contributions as these to the general society in which they lived.

There can be no doubt that Zionism is a strong protest against these weaklings, and that the coming century will witness the Jews divided into two camps not necessarily hostile to each other, the Zionists and the Non-Zionists—those who plead for a conservation of the old energy and the old ideals, and those who look forward to the disintegration of Judaism and its gradual passing away into other forces. That Judaism can only conserve its force if that force is attached to a racial and national basis is seen clearly in the fact that just those Jews in Germany who have been most loudly clamorous against the Zionists propose to have now what they call a German “Judentag,” which can certainly mean nothing unless it become Zionist in its tendency.

Confident in this hope, we of the House of Israel look calmly into the future. The message of the prophet of old is full of meaning for us: “Thus saith the Lord God: behold I, even I, will both search my sheep and seek them out, as a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his flock which is scattered, and I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.” We can echo the sentiments expressed by a Christian Zionist, George Eliot, many years ago: “Revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.”

RICHARD J. H. GOTTHEIL.

FREE-THOUGHT

The history of religion during the past century may be described as the sequel of that dissolution of the mediæval faith which commenced at the Reformation. The vast process of disintegration proceeds by degrees, is varied by reactionary effort, and gives birth to new theories in its course. In our day the completion of the process and a new departure seem to be at hand. A sharp line cannot be drawn at the beginning of the last century, the leaders of religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries having been to a great extent the leaders, and their works the text-books, of the nineteenth.

At the Reformation Protestantism threw off the yoke of Pope and priest, priestly control over conscience through the confessional, priestly absolution for sin, and belief in the magical power of the priest as consecrator of the Host, besides the worship of the Virgin and the saints, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, and other incidents of the mediæval system. Ostensibly, Protestantism was founded on freedom of conscience and the right of private judgment. In reality, it retained Church authority over conscience in the shape of dogmatic creeds and ordination tests. It besides enforced belief in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, by which the exercise of private judgment was narrowly confined. Not for some time did it even renounce persecution. In grimly Calvinistic Scotland a boy was hanged for impugning the doctrine of the Trinity at the end of the seventeenth century. The Anglican Church, suspended by the will of the Tudor sovereigns between Catholicism and Protestantism, oscillated from side to side, producing by one of its oscillations the great civil war. It burned heretics in the reign of James I. All the Protestant Churches except the Baptists, who at first were objects of persecution, fell under the dominion of the state, which repaid them for their submission and support by endowments, temporal privileges, and persecution of dissent.

Though Protestantism produced a multitude of sects, especially in England at the time of the Commonwealth, hardly any of them were free-thinking or sceptical; those of any importance, at all events, were in some sense dogmatic and were anchored to the inspiration of the Bible. Nor is it easy to convict Hobbes, bugbear of the orthodox as he was, of scepticism or even of heterodoxy. The expression of heterodox opinions, indeed, would have been a violation of his own principle, which makes religion absolutely an affair of the state, to be regulated by a despotic government, and confines liberty to the recesses of thought. It is true that in making religion a political institution, variable at a despot’s will, he covertly denied that it was divine.

Under the Restoration religious thought and controversy slept. The nation was weary of those subjects. The liberty for which men then struggled was political, though with political liberty was bound up religious toleration, which achieved a partial triumph under William III.

The Church of Rome, to meet the storm, reorganized herself at the Council of Trent on lines practically traced for her by the Jesuit. A comparison of Suarez with Thomas Aquinas shows the change which took place in spirit as plainly as a comparison of the Jesuit’s meretricious fane with the Gothic churches shows the change in religious taste. Papal autocracy was strengthened at the expense of the episcopate, and furnished at once with a guard and a propagandist machinery of extraordinary power in the Order of Loyola. That the plenary inspiration of the Bible in the Vulgate version, and including the Apocrypha, should be reaffirmed was a secondary matter, inasmuch as the Church of Rome holds that it is not she who derives her credentials from Scripture, but Scripture which depends for the attestation of its authority upon her. She now allied herself more closely than before with the Catholic kings, with Philip II., and afterwards with Louis XIV., who paid her for her support of political absolutism by sanguinary persecution of heretics. She hereby parted with her Hildebrandic supremacy over the powers of the world, though she did not, like the Anglican Church, recognize the divine right of kings. The liberal and peace-making movements which had been set on foot, or were afterwards set on foot, within her pale, such as the Oratory of Divine Love, which held justification by faith and wished to compromise with the Protestants, were effectually put down. Jansenism, when it appeared, with its half-Calvinistic theory of Grace, shared the same fate. Gallicanism afterwards, having nationality to back it, was more successful. But it brought no freedom of conscience; it was merely a repartition of the despotic power over conscience between the King and the Pope.

In Spain, and for the most part in Italy, Rome, by the aid of the Jesuit and the Inquisition, completely succeeded in killing free-thought. In France, where there was no Inquisition, her triumph was not so complete. She succeeded only in driving scepticism into disguise and subterfuge. The Commonwealth of Holland did France and the world in general the immense service of affording a printing house for free-thought which was on the confines of France, but beyond the reach of the French government. Descartes, without directly assailing the faith of the Church, planted in her face the standard of thorough-going reason and entitled himself to a place in the Index. Growing sensuality and love of pleasure brought with them laxity of belief and impatience of priestly control. The authority of the clergy was impaired by their scandalous wealth and vice, which at the same time enhanced the odium of their persecuting tyranny. At last came Voltaire, Diderot, the _Encyclopædia_, and Rousseau. With literary cleverness unmatched and an incomparable genius for subtle attack, combined with a winning philanthropy, Voltaire converted and drew into the work of demolition, to them suicidal, the thrones of Louis XV., or rather of the Pompadour, of Catherine, and Frederick. The influence extended even to Spain, where Aranda, and to Portugal, where Pombal reigned. The Pope was constrained to dissolve the Order of Jesus. As Voltaire demolished in the name of Reason, Rousseau demolished in the name of Nature, taking an artificial society by storm. Helvétius went to the length of extreme materialism; but Voltaire, the master-spirit of the movement, remained a theist, and Rousseau was even for compulsory theism as the foundation of the state. The Revolution also, when it came, though violently and profanely anti-Christian, was in the main theist, and in the midst of the Terror held its Feast of the Supreme Being, with Robespierre for high priest. Atheism, in the persons of Chaumette and Anacharsis Clootz, went to the guillotine.

One hardly knows what to say about the _Last Will and Testament_ of Jean Meslier, the priest who after thirty years’ service as a country curé bequeathed to his parishioners a profession of atheism. The work appears to have passed through the hands of Voltaire. It urges the arguments against natural theology in a very forcible as well as thorough-going way. But it seems, when it appeared, to have made little impression and can be mentioned historically only as an indication of the masked ferment of the time.

England had a series of deists, Toland, Tindal, Collins, Chubb, and the rest, not men of much mark, though seekers of truth after their measure and in their day. The ecclesiastical polity of England was comparatively mild, and there was nothing to provoke indignant resistance to clerical tyranny like that which was provoked by the cases of Calas and LaBarre. Shaftesbury, a deist of a higher stamp, was, with his “moral taste,” a philosopher for men of taste, and could little stir the common world. In defence of orthodoxy came forth Bishop Butler, with a work which will be memorable forever as a model of earnest and solemn inquiry into the deepest questions, though its fundamental assumption is unwarrantable, since we should expect the difficulties of natural theology not to be reproduced but to be dispelled by revelation. Butler’s tone in discussion was an effective rebuke to those who had treated Christianity with levity as an obsolete interference with the pleasures of the world. His profound analysis of the moral nature of man in like manner rebuked the shallow and cynical theories which resolved everything into self-love; though here again his assumption of the authority of conscience as a divinely implanted monitor has by modern investigation been disallowed. Butler, however, with all his piety and his orthodox conclusions, must essentially be reckoned among rationalists. He frankly admits that the use of our reason is the only means we have of arriving at truth, never appealing from it to Church authority. He who recognizes reason as supreme must be deemed rationalist, let his own reason lead him or mislead him as it may. This is the vital line of cleavage which runs through the whole religious history and divides the religious world at the present day.

Butler had a popular shield-bearer in Paley, an extremely acute and effective though not profound writer. Paley’s supposed proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator from the design visible in creation told greatly at the time and long continued to tell; though we now see that the universe, unlike the watch, presents terrible proofs of undesign as well as apparent proofs of design; not to mention that in the case of the universe, though adaptation is visible, the aim is not revealed. Paley’s _Horae Paulinae_, however, is about the only piece of historical apologetics which has in any degree survived the destructive influence of modern criticism.

Warburton hardly calls for mention. In his _Divine Legation_ he is right enough in saying that Moses did not teach the immortality of the soul; but the notion that the Mosaic dispensation must have had divine support because it could afford to dispense with that doctrine would now only provoke a smile.

Among literary apologists we can scarcely reckon Johnson. Yet he was a living defence, intellectual as well as moral, of his religion. That he speculated, we cannot doubt, and we know that he was not satisfied with the proofs of the immortality of the soul; but he suppressed doubt in himself and frowned it down in others. He was well justified in treating with contempt the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, which have not the slightest force or value beyond their literary form. Bolingbroke’s scepticism, however, had a certain effect if it inspired Pope’s _Universal Prayer_.

In Hume, on the other hand, we have the mightiest of all sceptics in the literal sense of the term, inasmuch as he was purely a doubter and seems hardly to have felt the desire of arriving at any positive result. He who has given rise to so much controversy was himself uncontroversial. His writings, considered as the vehicle of his opinions, are the perfection of literary art. Over common minds the teacher who merely suspends judgment, seeming not to be in quest of positive truth, can never have much influence; but Hume had great influence over cultivated men of the world. His argument against the credibility of miracles, though it became as standard on one side as Paley’s apologue of the watch upon the other, will hardly bear examination. Assuming the existence of God and His care for man as His work, which Hume does not openly deny, there is no presumption against His revelation of Himself in the only conceivable way, which is by an interruption of the general course of things; there is rather a presumption that He would so reveal Himself. Nor can it be maintained that no degree of evidence, say that of a multitude of scientific men, after providing all possible safeguards against deception, would satisfy us of the fact.

Gibbon’s great work is instinct with the tendency of men of the world in the generation of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Hume. Its spirit is identical with that of Hume’s philosophy and history. It is of first-rate importance in the religious controversy as having opened the trenches historically against revealed religion in undertaking to account for the success of Christianity by natural causes. But its cynical treatment of that which, on any hypothesis, was the prevailing and formative force is unphilosophical and detracts largely from the value of the work. He who could imagine that man had been happiest in the Roman Empire under the Antonines was an apt partisan of Lord North. Gibbon no doubt imagined himself a rich patrician of his golden era. Would he have liked to be a Roman slave? Conyers Middleton in his _Free Inquiry_ into the ecclesiastical miracles glanced at the credibility of the Gospel miracles and had thus partly paved the way for Gibbon.

Among the disintegrating forces may be counted Unitarianism, which was growing among thinkers, and probably before very long became the mask for profounder scepticism in Protestant Europe as it did afterwards in New England. We find it in England on the eve of the French Revolution, combined with science in Priestley and with mathematics and philosophy in Price.

Among the apologetic and defensive forces may be numbered the practical vindication of Christianity by a certain revival of piety in the Anglican Church which produced Wilberforce, Cowper, and the Evangelicals, and still more by the religious crusade of John Wesley. Wesley’s achievements, however, were among the poor and illiterate, and were consequently demonstrations of the power of Christianity rather than of its truth. His Church had the advantage of being born, not like other Protestant Churches in doctrinal controversy, but in evangelical reaction against the impiety and vice of the age. It was, however, not undogmatic; besides what might be called the dogma of sudden conversion, it implicitly accepted not only the literal inspiration of Scripture, but the bulk of the Anglican Articles, to which was afterwards added, as an ordination test, general agreement with the more important of Wesley’s sermons.