By-paths in Hebraic bookland

by Israel Abrahams

KALISCH’S “PATH AND GOAL”

Of Marcus Kalisch’s learned commentaries on the Bible it has been truly said that they are a thorough summary of all that had been written on the subject up to the date when those commentaries were published. He not only knew everything, but he had assimilated it. Nor was it only his learning that placed him among the first among the Jewish scholars of the second part of the nineteenth century. He was original as well; that he “anticipated Wellhausen,” more than one has declared of him, as they have declared of others before Kalisch.

Learning and originality make a fairly strong instrument for drawing out the truth. But another strand is needed to compose the threefold cord that shall not easily be broken. This, too, Kalisch had at his command. It is the strand of sentiment. In his more orthodox days when he produced his Exodus (1855), and in his more rationalistic period when he gave to the world his Balaam and his Jonah (1887-8)—at all stages of his activity he was never the mere philologist. Like Sheridan’s character, he was a man of sentiment; but unlike Joseph Surface, his sentiment was genuine. He was, to put the same truth in other words, an expounder of ideas as well as a critic of words.

It should have surprised no one to meet Kalisch in any situation where the qualities above defined could be exercised. Yet some of those who only thought of him as the Hebrew grammarian must have opened their eyes when the fact was brought to their notice that within a couple of years of printing his Genesis (1858) he issued a small volume on Oliver Goldsmith. In 1860 he spoke the substance of this volume as “two lectures delivered to a village audience.” The theme was treated by him with considerable learning, but with an even more considerable good feeling. I remember particularly two or three sentences in this book. “Forgive his faults, but do not forget them” is one—I quote from memory and may not be verbally exact. Forgiveness not only differs from forgetfulness, but, humanely considered, the two things are scarcely consistent. You really can only forgive when you remember—all that the man was whom you are judging. Another sentence that I recall is this: “You will find Goldsmith’s life again in his writings, and his writings in his life.” This is a notable conception, not original to Kalisch. But the turn he gives to it seems to me quite fresh. Goldsmith, he asserts, was a great writer and—despite the faults aforementioned—a good man. “You see his goodness in his writings and his greatness in his life”—a brilliant epigram, but also a neat description of the ideal man of letters.

But how came it that Marcus Kalisch, a German and a Jew, was addressing village audiences in England at all? Born in Pomerania in 1828, he had come to England fresh from the Universities of Berlin and Halle. Like so many others of various nationalities and creeds, he had played a generous part in the 1848 affair, and felt unsafe after its suppression. Nathan Marcus Adler had settled in London in 1845. The refugee found an asylum with the new chief rabbi: Kalisch served the latter as secretary for five years. His former employer must have felt fairly uncomfortable when Kalisch’s Leviticus appeared (1867-72), for this was a pretty thorough departure from the old-fashioned standpoint. Kalisch, of course, was not without honor in his own community. He had a real, though not an undiscriminating, admirer in the late A. L. Green. We still, however, seem rather far off from solving the riddle: how came Kalisch to be talking to English village audiences on Oliver Goldsmith or on any other subject? The answer is given with the names of the villages. They were Aston Clinton and Mentmore in the county of Buckinghamshire—places long associated with the country homes of the Rothschilds. In 1853 Kalisch was appointed tutor to the sons of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. From that date until Kalisch’s death, in 1885, there was no break in the cordial relations between the Rothschilds and the scholar. They provided the leisure, and he provided the capacity to make worthy use of it. Countless are the honorable incidents in the Rothschild record, but there is none on which a Jewish writer more loves to dwell than on the association of the family with the author of Path and Goal.

The scene of that work is Cordova Lodge, the house of Gabriel de Mondoza, situated in one of the northern suburbs of London. It was “an unpretending structure of moderate dimensions, but adorned with consummate taste and judgment.” The further description of the house rather reminds one of Disraeli’s creations. And this Lodge, “a veritable rus in urbe,” with its Greek busts and “modest conservatories”—there is not lacking even “a diminutive farm”—was, we are told, so located and ordered as to afford “an atmosphere of calm cheerfulness, inviting the mind at once to concentration and intercommunion.” The owner, in whose abode Kalisch represents his characters as gathered, was descended from a distinguished family of Spanish Jews, who had come from Holland to England during Cromwell’s protectorate. His mother was a German, “of an essentially artistic nature.” From his father he derived his love for the Bible, from his mother his admiration for the Classics; and doubtful as to which to prefer, “he clung the more firmly to both, and laboured to weld the conceptions of the Scriptures and of Hellenism into one homogeneous design.”

His house was the habitual meeting-place for many native and foreign guests, and during the International Exhibition a specially representative group are found at Cordova Lodge, conducting a “discussion of the elements of civilisation and the conditions of happiness.” This discussion is the substance of the volume entitled Path and Goal. Such symposia go back to Plato, but it was W. H. Mallock who, with his New Republic, re-popularized the genre in England. This appeared in 1877; Kalisch’s Path and Goal followed it in 1880. The disputants in the latter work include Christians of all degrees of high and low Churchiness; a naturalist and a Hellenist; a Reform and an Orthodox Rabbi; a Parsee and a Mohammedan; a Brahman and a Buddhist. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this gathering is Kalisch’s recognition of the importance of the Eastern religions. Sometimes, indeed, those who try to prefigure the future of the world’s religion take account of Islam. But very few remember the beliefs and institutions of India. The learning with which Kalisch discusses the Indian systems would be amazing were one not prepared for it by previous knowledge of his encyclopedic acquirements.

We will not follow out into any detail the course of the conversations at Cordova Lodge. It is cleverly constructed, being based on a discussion of Ecclesiastes. The whole of that biblical book appears in the second chapter of Path and Goal, and it is the text for what follows. What is the object of the interchange of these opinions? “We do not search for that which appertains to one time or to one nation, but those truths which flow from the constitution and wants of human nature, and are on that account universal and unchanging.” No definite result is reached, except, perhaps, the final justification of Mondoza’s suggested “eucrasy”—the “harmony of character which is the perfection of culture.” Here, then, we have the very antithesis to the view expressed in Herzberg’s Jewish Family Papers. Kalisch believed in the possible harmonization of various elements into a perfect culture. But he does not describe as Jewish the resultant harmony. He would not have cared at all about the name; he was chiefly concerned with the thing. And in the light of this—for I think we may not unjustly attribute the host’s sentiments to the host’s author—he regarded the “political community as only an elementary stage”; nationality was at best preparatory for the “universal union” of men; while “the feeling of nationality is a onesidedness to be merged in a genuine and ardent cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is the political correlative to a belief in culture. In the end there is a very general agreement among the visitors at Cordova Lodge. “Is this a dream?” cries Mondoza. “It heralds,” said Rabbi Gideon, with a trembling voice, “the approach of the time predicted by our prophets, when ‘the Lord shall be One and His name One’; and when ‘He shall bless the nations saying, Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.’” (Isaiah 19. 25.) So, after all, Kalisch’s “Goal” is not widely distant from the Goal that may rightly be termed Jewish.