Chapter XX: Three Witnesses 281 (7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIX.

AHASUERUS DELIVERED.

There are certain races of mankind whose history or whose character has made them the tests of civilisation. In one direction the negro has been such. In the development of English self-government, on both sides of the Atlantic, there came a time when its fine theories of liberty were put to the test. In America the poor ignorant negro knelt chained before the genius of the Republic. His slavery represented many millions of money, his freedom must cost many thousands of lives; but Justice said, “There is that lowly man--helpless, of alien race from you, too poor to pay you anything: if you can do justice to him, can make him a citizen, the world will know that you are really a republic.”

In another direction the Jewish race has been the test and register of civilisation. It was the one visible embodiment of Antichrist in Christendom. While missionaries were going through the world to convert the world, the Jew also went through the world--moral, religious, learned--a compulsory wanderer and missionary, in whose scars might always be read the spirit of the Church he opposed, and the meaning of a vicarious atonement, whose corollary was the unending crucifixion of a race for the offence of three or four of their ancestors. This Wandering Jew knocked at the doors of law-courts. “Who art thou?” said the judges. “I am Antichrist.” “Come in and be burnt,” said they. He came in and was burnt. But ever rising from his ashes, the Wanderer marched on. Again, after some centuries, he knocked at the door marked Justice. “Who art thou?” asked the judges. “I am Antichrist,” he said. “Stay out and be mobbed,” said they. And so he wandered until he reached the century when England opened the door and said, “Enter and receive thy right.” Even Judge Jeffreys, in the time of James II., would not accept the old law which disabled a Jew from prosecuting a Christian. “Pay him his money,” he cried to the defendant. “His action is not against a Christian: you are more a Jew than he is!” At many doors this unconquerable Antichrist had to knock in this land: slowly, against frantic attempts to bar them, they swung open, one after the other; and it was proved that English justice, confronting what Christendom called a devil, was ultimately equal to giving that devil his due--in society, in the law-court, in the Parliament.

The English have managed to hold superstition more in order in their smaller territory than it is held in Eastern Europe, yet they must not take for their own race all the credit for the equality that has been accorded the Jew in England. The credit is mainly due to himself. Some forty years ago, when wild stories reached Great Britain from Damascus and Rhodes of how Jews were suffering horrible outrages on account of absurd accusations--such as sacrificing Christian priests and children--the entire English community joined to support Sir Moses Montefiore in his mission to repress that fanaticism. But when England had sent Sir Moses on his noble mission, it turned to consider its own relation to the Jews, and found on its statute-book laws which still bore witness of the ages when Jewish blood had mingled with Christian sacrifices. The laws were even then--forty years ago--not all obsolete. But some of them were, and others have since become so, largely through the fact that the Jews had made themselves useful to the country.

Just now England is again called to look abroad though nearer home, and consider the outbreak of fanaticism in Germany.

Dr. Carl Vogt, the naturalist, recently expressed his belief that the present persecution of Jews in Germany is a recurrence of ancient Teutonic barbarism. He explains Judenhetze scientifically, on the principles of Atavism. Every now and then there must be a recrudescence of suppressed barbarism. Those who have read, in _A Tramp Abroad_, those accounts of the duels witnessed by imperturbable Mark Twain in that country--duels in which students cut and slash each other in a friendly way, in the intervals of drinking beer together, and flaunt their facial gashes upon the street with pride, will suspect that the barbarism in coming back had not far to travel. Nevertheless, we must remember that Germany has not yet completed that revolution which shall bring the people under the influence of their best heads; its great science, art, and literature are still carried on as it were in cloisters. The throne of Germany’s noble Reason is usurped by heartless pretenders in politics and hypocrites in religion. Barbarossa will awake presently, and when he comes forth from his cave it will not be in the guise of Emperor William or Prince Bismarck, nor yet as the priest-ridden Jew-hater, but as a cultured and courageous People, with their feet alike on titled despotism and parochial barbarism.

As, however, in the outrages on Jews at Damascus and Rhodes, in the last generation, England caught a glimpse, as in a mirror, of certain features from her own hideous past still surviving in her laws, so one can hardly turn from the Judenhetze of Germany without a consciousness that there are still certain scandals in the attitude of English Christianity towards the Jews. The chief scandal is that there should be an organised society for converting them--as if they were savages.

The existence of such a society in London will one day be quoted to show how much pious preadamitism survived amid our telegraphs and telephones. It is not civilised for men to suppose that a good Jew is inferior to a good Christian. It is scandal that the learned clergy should permit the people to suppose that Christian churches and sects have any moral or spiritual advantage over those who attend the synagogue. How many mothers who teach their children the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, or rehearse to them the parables of the New Testament, pity the children of Jewish mothers as knowing nothing of those beautiful and tender sayings? How many of them even realise that the Golden Rule is in the Pentateuch; and that every Jewish child learns those sweet sayings and parables where Jesus learned them--at his Jewish mother’s knee?

It is a great misfortune that religious liberalism, in its revolt from the primitive Judaism which Protestantism and Puritanism restored, and which survives now chiefly among Sabbatarian and dogmatic Christians, has kept before the world only that ancient Jahvism under which Canaanites were exterminated. It has thus indirectly fostered the fallacy which regards as Judaism much that even strict Jews have long ago outgrown. The Jews themselves, however, as we have seen, are largely to blame for the persistence of this vulgar delusion; indeed, even many of their liberal thinkers have obstinately preserved their new wine in ceremonial bottles, with the ancient labels, and helped to convey the popular impression that their religion is unchanged. But it _is_ changed. Even the strictest Jews are to-day less Sabbatarian, and more emancipated from the barbarism of sacrificial superstitions, than Christians. When Moses Mendelssohn said that the Jews would become Christians “when the Christians cease to be Jews,” he no doubt recognised that Christians are preserving as dogma the Judaism which Jews keep as a shell, but inwardly have outgrown; and that a conversion of the Jews to Christianity would really carry them back to Levitical beliefs long replaced by the modern ideas prevailing inside the hereditary and patriotic walls from which they fear to venture.

Spinoza was as representative a Jew as ever lived, and never more than when the synagogue disowned him. The history of his race for a thousand years had been to him an instruction in fidelity and independence. That there is a vigorous Left among the Jews is apparent in every direction; not only in Jewish scholarship, which is assisting in the work of detaching from their Bible and other sacred books a Hebrew Mythology, but also in the political and social influence of Jews. The outbreak of Judenhetze in Germany is a bad enough symptom for the Teutons, but a hopeful sign for the Jews. Socially they have excited jealousy by the extent to which, having become men and women of the world, they are able to support that character by their wealth. Politically, they would appear to have so completely entered into those liberal and popular movements which they so long eschewed, that the Imperial Power is under the necessity of reminding them that, as in the past they suffered from the mob, and were protected by princes, so it may be again. The retention of the Rev. Mr. Stoecker as Court Chaplain, while he is leading this agitation so unscrupulously, is a confession that the anti-Semitic movement has the encouragement of the Emperor and his Chancellor. To awaken Teutonic jealousy of Jewish wealth, just beginning to be displayed in the enjoyment of Gentile luxuries; to arouse Christian fanaticism against the growing freethought of a race ceasing to expect any Messiah: such are the obvious methods by which the German Government hope to separate Jewish means and radicalism from the masses, and drive Jews to their ancient refuge--the strong central power always purchasable by money and servility. What success will crown this imperial effort remains to be seen. But that there should be a necessity for it is a confirmation of what the late Lord Beaconsfield asserted, and such good judges as Herr Eydmann and Karl Blind attest, that the Jews are very extensively concerned in popular movements on the Continent.

That these liberal tendencies might be expected among the Jews generally when and where they feel assured of freedom and security, is suggested by the history of their race in America. It is certain that the leading Rabbins of that country would be regarded as perilously latitudinarian by their strict co-religionists of Europe. It is a significant unique fact that the high family of Adlers has produced a President of the Free Religious Association, which is made up of theists and agnostics developed out of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. But, furthermore, the leading Rabbins, Lilienthal, Wise, and Sonnenschein, are instances of the advanced Rationalism which pervades the Jewish body in America. These scholarly and eloquent Rabbins freely fraternise with the anti-supernaturalistic teachers of other antecedents than their own. It is pretty certain that they do not look for the advent of any personal Messiah, and never dream of any restoration of their race to power in Palestine. They are not theocratic in politics, but republican, and regard America as the real Jerusalem of their race. Such is my conviction, based not only upon the works of the gentlemen I have mentioned, but upon personal acquaintance with them; and I cannot doubt that, whatever may be their dissent from much that is written in these pages, they would confirm my opinion as to the tendency of the people of Jewish origin in America. Jews of the Old World are somewhat in the condition of the rich man who, when reproached for a stinted charity, said that he began life poor, and had never got the chill of poverty out of his bones; these Jews have vivid traditions of persecution, and have not yet got the chill of fear out of their bones. Recent events in Germany and Russia may even prolong this timidity; the ferocious reply to their attempt to mingle in the society and politics of the world may set back for a little their liberation. But the free heart and mind of Europe is with them, and will be felt not only in England but on the Continent. The unbinding of Ahasuerus is part of the civilised revolution which can never really go backward.

Shakspeare was the first to show the Jew to be a man. Lessing was the first to show that a Jew might be as good a man as a Christian, the indispensability of Christ to excellence being quite ignored. Thus the seventeenth century had its gospel for the Jew, and the eighteenth century had its gospel. But in essence the gospel according to Lessing was not so high as that of the master at whose feet he learned it. Shakspeare had raised up the standard of Manhood, and in its light Judaism and Christianism are seen to be comparatively small things, and their contentious tempers proof that they are no longer religious in any pure sense. Lessing, even in his famous apologue of the Three Rings which a father gave to his equally beloved sons--similitudes of the Jewish, Moslem and Christian religions--makes the wise judge end the dispute as to which is the true ring by consecrating all three. The true ring, which the fond father had caused to be copied in two others, so that neither son might be disappointed, had the power to draw the love of all on its owner. But it also carried the right to sovereignty; and this advantage so overbore the former virtue that each son, with his ring, was found to love himself alone. The Judge advises them to be each content with his ring:

“Let each of you comport him in such wise
As love unbribed commands; let each resolve
To show the world that in the ring he wears
He holds the prize, its virtues being shown
To Man in acts of justice, meekness, mercy,
To God in thoughts of love and heartfelt trust.”

But the nineteenth century should transmit to the twentieth a nobler gospel for Jew, Moslem, and Christian than that. Let each of them see that his ring is a survival from the ancient chain that fettered him to his several rock of superstition; that so long as he holds faith in it, no transmutation of it into gold, no decoration with opal, can make it other than a talisman to bind him, and isolate him from the real work of creating a Man able to be the providence of this world. Let the rings, not only of Israel, but of Christianity, and of all sects, be thrown into the flames of human love, that there may be formed a coronet for the Mother whose patient all-loving face poetry and science are revealing. “In this principle,” said Clifford, of the evolution of organic from inorganic things, “we must recognise the mother of life, and especially of human life, powerful enough to subdue the elements, and yet always working gently against them; biding her time in the whole expanse of heaven, to make the highest cosmos out of inorganic chaos; the actor, not of all the actions of living things, but only of the good actions; for a bad action is one by which the organism tends to be less organic, and acts for a time as if inorganic. To this mother of life, personifying herself in the good works of humanity, it seems to me we may fitly address a splendid hymn of Mr. Swinburne’s:

“Mother of man’s time-travelling generations,
Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart,
God above all Gods worshipped of all nations,
Light above light, law beyond law, thou art.

“Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder
Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things;
The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder
Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings.

* * * * *

“All old grey histories hiding thy clear features,
O secret spirit and sovereign, all men’s tales,
Creeds woven of men thy children and thy creatures,
They have woven for vestures of thee and for veils.

“Thine hands, without election or exemption,
Feed all men fainting from false peace or strife,
O thou, the resurrection and redemption,
The godhead, and the manhood, and the life!”

XX.

THREE WITNESSES.

In Prague there is an ancient Synagogue, the interior of which is black with the mould and dust of seven centuries. There is a tradition that at some unknown point in it the holy name of Jahve is written, and, for fear of its obliteration, no cleansing or sweeping, however slight, has been permitted, until now the Synagogue has become a show-place of accumulated dirt, which tourists pass through with torches. This ancient structure is but a too faithful symbol of temples which preserve the superstitions of ages through fear that, if some holy name or creed be touched, religion and morality will suffer.

Early in the last generation three Jewish boys--Israel, Jacob, and Henoch--were seated together in this Synagogue on a Saturday morning, awaiting the beginning of service. They were of different families, but playmates. No person was near them, and, oblivious of the traditional prohibitions, they began to amuse themselves by scraping off with their knives an inch of the black mould, here and there, to see what wood or stone was beneath. The Rabbi, happening to pass at the time, cried out with horror at the sacrilege, and said, “The curse of Heaven may fall on you for that act!”

The terrified lads put up their knives. Some neighbours who heard the voice of the angry Rabbi, but not his exact words, reported that he had said, “May the curse of Heaven fall on you for that act!” And this was the form in which the story was whispered about. Gradually a small saga grew up among the Jews of Prague about these three boys. They were regarded with an evil eye, under which their prospects suffered blight; they were supposed to be under some mysterious doom, they were avoided, and their families suffered much distress. The venerable Rabbi, repenting of his hasty words, tried to disabuse the minds of his congregation as to what he had said; but he was unable to undo what had been done. As the three advanced towards youth, the prejudices against them, and the belief that a doom overhung them, made their lives so miserable, that they desired to leave Prague altogether, and their parents thought this the best course. The families were in good circumstances, and the young men went off fairly well educated and with some means. They resolved to emigrate to different regions.

Jacob went to Northern Germany. He entered a university there and succeeded in his studies. Animated by the hope of doing so well in life that his parents might ultimately have the happiness of seeing the prejudices of their neighbours disappear, he presently excelled all other students. He became a favourite with the professors. But this excited the jealousy of other students. These conspired against him, and one of their best swordsmen was appointed to pick a quarrel with him. The quarrel came; Jacob was challenged; in the duel he received an ugly wound, which deprived him of one eye, disfigured him, and injured his health. These troubles gradually affected his nerves to such an extent that his mind was partially affected. He began to suspect that there might be some truth in the belief of the neighbours in Prague, that he had fallen under a divine curse for having cleaned an inch of the old Synagogue-wall. This dread grew upon him to such an extent that, from having been a courageous youth, he became timid. Whenever he went out at night he seemed to be confronted by the student with whom he had fought the duel. He began to be looked upon as an uncanny person by the common people in the city where he dwelt. Some even hustled him on the street, and the Christian boys sometimes threw refuse at the miserable man. He was one evening purposely tripped by some one and suffered a severe fall, which lamed him. Amid the shadows that darkened his room, which had gradually become dingy through poverty, he imagined that, like the patriarch after whom he was named, he had wrestled with a dark phantom, which, however, had prevailed against him. The curse seemed to be fixed upon him irremissibly. The accumulated filth of the old Synagogue of Prague had carried with it the accumulated superstitions of ages; his childish attempt to clear away a little of that visible mould had been vain, and he was now equally helpless to free any smallest space of his own mind from hereditary beliefs in dooms, spectres, spells. Thus he wandered, limping, miserable, amid Christian scoffs and Jewish suspicions, and so he wanders this day.

The second of the lads that left Prague, Israel, came to England, where he was well educated. He thought over this Prague incident carefully, and came to feel a certain contempt for a Synagogue which so jealously cherished all its dirt. He found it written in the Talmud that “next to godliness is cleanliness,” and began to perceive that the filth he had tried to scrape off was a type of the irrational usages and petty exactions which had overlaid the religion of his race. He had united himself to a Synagogue in London which was kept fair and beautiful; but, as time wore on, he found that around the good hearts and fine minds of the English Jews there were walls on which had gathered the repulsive dust and dirt of ages transmitted from ancient Syria. So Israel resolved that he would make good the promise of his boyish knife, and clear away some of the spiritual mould from English Judaism. His attempts at reform awakened the ire of Wardens, the hostility of Rabbins, and the opposition of a wealthy Semitic caste. Israel still believed in Jahve, and in the fundamental doctrines of the Jewish faith; he believed that if Judaism could be freed from its antiquarian walls it must lead the world. But he struggled in vain for years to secure from the chiefs of the Synagogues any modification of their usages. Furthermore, his efforts in this direction began to tell seriously upon his personal prospects. He had studied law, been admitted to the bar, and for a time found some employment from his co-religionists; but after it was discovered that he was endeavouring to interfere with the traditional usages of the Synagogue, he soon found himself without clients, and with but a few friends--these being of Christian families.

One evening Israel went to a theatre in London to witness the performance of the _Merchant of Venice_. He was much impressed by an incident of the Bible used by Shylock as a parable, wherein Jacob stuck wands before the ewes in breeding-time, and secured parti-coloured lambs, which, according to Laban’s agreement, were all to fall to his (Jacob’s) part. Shylock says:

“This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not.”

The Christian Antonio must needs accept the “holy witness” of a book infallible to him and Shylock alike, and says that the result so good for Jacob was “sway’d and fashioned by the hand of Heaven.” Israel went away from the theatre to his poor room, and bethought him that, great as was the wealth and power of a few Jews, the parti-coloured lambs had somehow fallen to the Christian lot. Was the “hand of Heaven” in this? If the declaration of Jahve of old that his approval should be manifest in blessings, his disapproval in cursings, were faithful, could there be any doubt where the divine approbation rested in England? Was Houndsditch the seal of Jahve’s benediction on his people? or was not Belgravia rather the expression of his smile? Houndsditch and Belgravia alike appealed to Jahve; to which had he sent the multitude of spring lambs and the plenteous wool?

The germ that fell into Israel’s mind at the theatre gradually grew. He presently found that the traditions of Judaism attained their real power and glory in Christianity. In the end he was baptized; he was speedily surrounded by troops of friends. He possessed brilliant powers, and became eminent in literary and political life. Even his former co-religionists were inclined to utilise him, now that he no longer attempted to use his pen-knife on their mouldy customs. He was able to serve them in many ways, they were willing to repay his services; and, thus, assisted by the race which gained prestige through his genius without the danger of it, and by the Christian community which saw in him a triumph of Christ, he became a great minister of State and a favourite in Palaces. And such he is to this day.

The third of the three youths who left Prague, Henoch, wandered restlessly through Asia and Europe--then came to France. He also was a man of brilliant powers, and for some time kept up his friendship with young Israel in London. In the course of their correspondence, the idea arose in him also of trying to reform the Synagogue to which he had attached himself in Paris. He failed in the same way, but the effect on his mind was different. He could not recognise a direction from Jahve in the superior thrift of Christendom. He had heard that in America the Jews were in every way more liberal and progressive, and he resolved to emigrate thither. For this purpose he engaged a passage, and repaired to Havre to take his steamer.

On his way to the wharf in Havre, Henoch was passing a small book-stall, when his attention was arrested by the appearance of the bookseller. This was an extremely aged Jew, with long white beard, deep-set eyes, and a queer, antique figure. He sat beside his little stand of dingy fourth-hand books, holding a small volume in his bony fingers, which he perused attentively. Henoch approached him and, speaking in Hebrew, asked him what books he had suitable for a traveller. The old man asked him whither he was travelling, and having received the reply, said: “Ah, that, too, was my dream; but I never got farther than this. I am too old now--too old and too poor--and must leave the New World hope for our younger men. But I sit here, and read about that land of promise, and my dim old eyes follow every ship that sails that way.” Henoch asked to look at the book the aged Jew had been reading. It was an old Spanish book--Herrera’s _History of the Indies_. Israel knew the language, and proposed to buy the book. The aged bookseller was somewhat reluctant but finally said: “It is the story of the discovery of the New World to which you are going; take it, with an old man’s good will; and may you carry to America something better than those Spaniards did, who tried to plant there every evil the Old World had produced!”

On board the steamer Henoch read this book, and one narrative in it haunted his memory. It related that when the Spaniards had taken possession of the newly-discovered island they called Hispaniola--now Cuba--they began to trade in the Indians, who were shipped off as slaves to various regions. The island found itself in want of Indians, and having heard that the neighbouring Lucayan Isles were full of them, asked permission of King Ferdinand to allow them to bring these Lucayans over to Hispaniola, “that they might enjoy the preaching and political customs” which they (the Spaniards) had introduced. Having received this permission, the Spaniards went over to the Lucayans and told those simple islanders that they had come from the paradise of their ancestors; they said that all whom they (the Lucayans) had loved and lost by death were now in a happy abode, enjoying perfect repose and every felicity; and that their ships were ready to bear them to that happy land. The poor Lucayans crowded with laughter and joy to the Spanish ships; the light of the Blessed Isle shone upon their faces. They sailed away from their island home, where they had known only peace and friendship, and were soon all working in dark mines under the slave-driver’s scourge. The kid was seethed in its mother’s milk.

Henoch read and re-read this tragic history, and looked out over the sea westward. What a fearful fate was that of hearts that followed a dream of paradise which led them into slavery and despair! But slavery, what is it? Is it only the subjection of one will to another? or bondage of the body to toil for others? May there not be islanders, even amid continents, following dreams of paradise, and of clasping their ancestral dead, into spiritual slavery, into a living entombment among skeletons and simulacra of things for ever turned to dust?

In the vision of Henoch there arose a memory of the ancient Synagogue at Prague. His eyes filled with tears as he recalled the dear and tender faces that he had seen there. His kind father, his gentle mother, the good-hearted neighbours, the once happy circle of playmates--how fair and peaceful that Lucaya had been! But it was all at the mercy of a bit of dirt come down from the thirteenth century, consecrated by awe of four letters of a dead language. Under that spell kindly hearts had turned to stone, suspicions arisen, fear and dread, and from the ruin of a happy home he had been sent to wander through the world. The dream of an ancestral paradise had made that blackened Synagogue as dark a mine as any in which the discoverers of the New World set the islanders to toil; it had imprisoned the Jewish genius and chained the Jewish heart.

One morning, when his thought was full of these reflections, and the book received from the ancient Jew at Havre was open before him, Henoch caught his first sight of the New World, radiant in the sunshine. He resolved that into that land of fresh opportunity he would carry no dogma or custom which rested upon tradition or authority. In that land he saw the human race given a fresh opportunity, and he also would begin again. The Old World had followed its dreams of heaven through massacres and martyrdoms into a dreary and endless routine of wrong, which found its fit symbol in that fable his experience could well interpret, of an eternal Wanderer.

His own race had been mainly responsible for that fatal misdirection of the energies and enthusiasm of the Old World which, had it not sought a Paradise among the dead, might have made the earth a paradise for the living. Now he would consecrate his powers to persuade the people of the human race, to which in America he might belong, to burn behind them all these holy ships of Zion in which the Past might be imported, and to receive the Past only as it might be able to minister to science, or might come in confessions of the moral ruin it had wrought, as a warning for the new Age.

In the New World, Henoch began his work of founding societies whose religion is to perform divine service for mankind, to make every day eternal, and to steadily transfigure man with the shining light of science and pure raiment of a renovated world. The wanderings of Henoch have changed to unhasting, unresting progressions, traceable in fair transformations. His eloquence, which has learned every sweet and subtle tone of the Past, and caught the brave accents of hope, wins the Christian from his cross and the Jew from his altar. He is still a welcome Voice in the cities, sierras, savannas, eldorados, crying THE KINGDOM OF MAN IS AT HAND.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Some excellent remarks on this subject, and historical illustrations, are contained in an article in the late _Theological Review_ (July, 1871) on the “Nero Saga,” by W. M. W. Call.

[2] The _Heimskringla_. Translated by Samuel Laing. Longmans, 1844. Vol. i., p. 225.

[3] Macaulay’s “History of England,” ch. viii. Fourth edition.

[4] “La Morte d’Arthur.” Compiled by Sir Thomas Mallory (Conybeare’s edition). Moxon, 1868, p. 404. The Cornish legend was that Arthur would return to drive the Saxons from Britain. Similar stories are told of Sir Gawaine, Ogier, and others.

[5] “Demonology and Devil-lore.” (Index.) See Sir G. W. Cox, “Mythology of the Aryan Nations.” Keightley, “Fairy Mythology,” i. 74, _sq._ Folk-lore Record, ii. 1, _sq._

[6] Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, i. 318.

[7] Haug’s Essays, etc., p. 277.

[8] Max Müller’s _Science of Language_, vol. ii. p. 563.

[9] See the statement by one of the interlocutors in Dr. Kalisch’s admirable work _Path and Goal_, p. 348. (Longmans, 1880.)

[10] See Ewald’s _Geschichte des Volkes Israel_, i. 353 (Russell Martineau’s Translation, p. 264, _sq._). For traditions concerning Seth, see also my _Demonology and Devil-lore_, as per Index.

[11] Pierotti; _Customs and Traditions of Palestine_.

[12] When the abyss between biblical and other mythology has ceased to be so convenient, perhaps there may be traced some connection between the ravens that fed Elias and those birds of Odin that circle around Raven’s Hill where Barbarossa sleeps; and also between Elias and our folk-tales of Æolus.

[13] It would be an interesting question, but one that cannot be discussed here, to consider how far the idea of eternal Wanderers may have been primarily connected with the ever-returning heavenly bodies. Ewald and Goldziher agree that the years of Enoch’s visible life, 365, indicate the solar year. Ewald thinks he was probably a god of the New Year.

[14] See Professor Drummond’s “The Jewish Messiah,” etc. In Haug’s _Essays_ will be found a full account of Yima and his earthly paradise.

[15] The blindness ascribed to Teiresias presents a curious coincidence with that attributed to Lamech in Legendary Art, which leads to his accidentally killing Cain with an arrow. In both cases the significance probably is that of one who is blind to immediate consequences while seeing or carrying out the decrees of Fate.

[16] Mrs. Jameson (_Sacred and Legendary Art_, i., 208) has given fully the legend of St. James. In the year 936 he appeared to King Ramirez in Spain promising him a victory over the Moors, and, on the following day, he (St. James) appeared at the head of the army on a milk-white horse, when sixty thousand Moors were slain; hence the Spanish war-cry “Santiago.”

[17] The sacred footprints of Christ are also pointed out on the Mount of Olives, and at Poitiers, Arles, Fécamp, Rheims, and Soissons.

[18] Herbelot: _Bibl. Orient._ iii. p. 607 (ref. by Grässe).

[19] A curious instance of the supremacy of the artist over the man, when Goethe’s horror of dogs is remembered. Goethe threw up his connection with Weimar Theatre because Carl August insisted on admitting, to ‘perform’ on the stage, the animal which this poem introduces into Paradise.

[20] This legend may, in turn, have helped to create the figure of Don Juan, the unsaintly Wanderer whose story is possibly related to the mythology we are considering. There are interesting suggestions in Le Sage’s _Diable Boiteux_, but the figure of Don Juan awaits further study.