II. Preface to the English Version.
Our age will constitute a critical, a supreme epoch in the long history of Israel. To-day the prophecies of the seers are at last approaching fulfilment, and Israel is really being scattered to the ends of the earth. We are witnessing a new diaspora, the great and final dispersal.
The tree of Israel, the ancient vine of Judah, transplanted to the Sarmatian plains, has again been rudely shaken by the blast of persecution; its branches have fallen and its seeds have blown afar, over the hills and across the deserts and oceans.
As in earlier times, the wrath of their persecutors is forcing Jews and Judaism into countries where the Sabbath-lamp has never yet been lighted. The spectacle witnessed during the Renaissance and at the end of the fifteenth century, in consequence of the edicts of Isabella of Castile—the exodus of a people driven forth, without means of existence, from the land of its ancestors because it clung to the faith of its fathers—this spectacle disgraces the closing years of our nineteenth century, in consequence of the ukases of a Russian czar.
What will be the verdict of history as to the effects upon Judaism of the harsh policy of Alexander III? Possibly in years to come, when the tears of her exiles and their present sufferings shall be forgotten, the historians of Israel may affirm that the Russian autocrat contributed, more than any other man, to the expansion and renovation of Judaism.
The Jews who are driven from Slavic soil by the law or by their own poverty, are forced to begin a new life under kindlier skies and in freer lands. They are torn from the old Jewries where, closely herded together, they had barely air enough to breathe; and this painful expatriation may well prove of equal benefit to their souls and their bodies.
The majority of these exiles have gone to America, and especially to the United States. To their brethren already established between the Atlantic and the Pacific this sudden influx of a whole people, in the main poor and ignorant, who demand from them shelter and support, must indeed prove a very heavy burden. The Jews of the United States have been confronted here with an enormous task, to which, however, they have shown themselves equal. Fortunately, the most trying years seem to be over. The accession of the young emperor, Nicholas II, to the throne of Russia gives rise to the hope of some mitigation of those antiquated laws which, under Alexander III, had furnished official intolerance with the means of hypocritical persecution. The stream of emigration, whose volume is already lessening, will probably slacken. It will not wholly cease, for free America will long continue to attract the victims of persecution.
I, for one, do not believe that the United States ought to view this Jewish immigration with any disquietude; I cannot see what there is to fear from it. Among all the races and nations that have furnished the United States with colonists and have thus helped to advance its marvelous growth, I can find none more intelligent or more industrious; nor can I find any that is more capable of assimilating American civilization and of introducing into it a useful competition.
I am told that one of the charges brought against the Jews of America is that they frequently manifest leanings toward socialism; or rather toward anarchism. This may be the case with many Russian and Roumanian Jews—we have some in Paris who show such tendencies—but the fact is due less to the racial character of the Jews than to the conditions under which they have long been forced to live in Europe, and to which they are still subjected in Russia and Roumania. If Lassalle and Karl Marx were the prophets of German socialism, one of the causes of their revolt against the old social order lay in the sort of life which that order imposed upon the sons of Israel, even in Germany. This is still more evident in the case of the Jews who have been infected in Russia by the germs of nihilism and anarchy. The Jew of the old secluded Jewry is—as I have shown in this book—essentially conservative. If, in the past twenty or twenty-five years, a certain number of young Jews and Jewesses have joined the ranks of the nihilists, if some of them have been concerned in the conspiracies against the person or the authority of Alexander II and of Alexander III, this is due to the social conditions imposed on the Jews by the Russian laws. This I think I have conclusively proved, both in my present volume and in my larger work: "The Empire of the Tsars."
Only the most systematic vexations and humiliations could have aroused the children of Abraham to this spirit of revolt, to these political conspiracies, so opposed to Jewish ideas and traditions. A further proof of this, which ought to appeal to the most furious anti-Semites, is that in Russia conspiracy can lead to nothing, as yet, but transportation or the gallows.
Moreover, I have often noticed that all the Israelites implicated in political trials were what I call "de-Judaized" Jews—that is to say, Jews who have renounced the beliefs and practices of Judaism. It was Christian contagion that gave the Jews their revolutionary ideas. Some of the Jewish emigrants from Russia and other parts of Europe have been obviously degraded and corrupted by centuries of oppression. Many years—perhaps one or two generations—will be needed to raise their moral plane, to imbue them with a sense of honor, and dignity. It is a great mistake to believe that this moral uplifting can be facilitated by detaching them from their religion. On the contrary, the least praise-worthy Jews that I have met have generally been "de-Judaized" Jews, those who had ceased to observe the Mosaic law. The Jew—such, at least, is my opinion—stands in even greater need of religious support than the Christian; and, as a rule, he can find that support only in the faith of his fathers. There are indeed, Israelites who become converts to Christianity. But, in order to be morally efficacious, such conversion should be genuine and disinterested. Its object should be to find favor, not in the eyes of society or of man, but of God. Now, it is well known that such true conversions are rare, and this accounts for the fact that the baptized Jews are often the least commendable.
I must confess that, in many cases, the Christian missionaries are to blame. They are too often satisfied with purely external, nominal conversions, and, for the winning of souls, they too often employ means that are neither holy nor honest. I have been told that there are missionaries—mainly of the Protestant faith—in London, New York, and the East, who angle for Jewish souls with the coarse bait of worldly benefits, taking unfair advantage of the poverty, abandonment, and loneliness of immigrants driven out of their country by want or persecution, to lead them to the Christian font. These conversions by seduction, if I may venture so to call them, are not a whit less odious than conversions by force. Such proselytizing is unworthy of the Christian ministry and is a disgrace to the churches that encourage it. It can result only in making bad Christians and in educating bad citizens.
I need say little, in addressing my English-speaking readers, of the fear entertained by some persons, that the Jewish newcomers are likely to monopolize the national wealth. Although these apprehensions are quite common among the simple souls of the old world, I do not imagine that they have crossed the Channel or the Atlantic. Englishmen and Americans have too much faith in themselves to share such visionary fears. However great may be the commercial talents of the Jews, the Anglo-Saxons feel themselves by no means inferior to them; and when it comes to "making money," the Yankee does not fear the competition of the Semite.
Nor do I believe that, in extending hospitality to the sons of Israel, the United States, or Australia, or even old England herself, has reason to apprehend what German anti-Semites call the "judaizing" of modern society.
This expression is often used in Europe to indicate the growing ascendancy of material interests and the encroachment of the mercantile spirit. I do not think that the Jew can be held responsible for this tendency, and I shall attempt to show this in my forthcoming work: "Le Règne de l'Argent." What the anti-Semites call the "judaizing" of society might, as I have taken the liberty of asserting, be more correctly called the "Americanizing" of morals. I trust that this remark will not bring down the resentment of my American readers. That would be unfair, for I am, in many respects, a sincere admirer of their great Republic. If I have ventured to speak of the "Americanizing" of modern society, it is simply because the typical characteristics of democratic industrial society were first revealed in the United States, and have there been developed on a larger scale than in any other country. This form of social organization, new to history, is gradually becoming dominant in all parts of the old world, as well as the new. If it has its advantages, it has also its faults, which we are all in duty bound to correct. The ascendancy of material interests, the greed for money, the frantic race for wealth, are the most deplorable characteristics of our modern industrial and democratic society. These are not social characteristics; they are peculiar neither to the Yankee nor to the Jew, although they sometimes seem to be most pronounced in the Jew and the Yankee. They are the result of our social conditions, and it is not by proscribing any particular race or any faith, but only by appealing to moral forces and by bringing all such forces to their highest development that our modern democracies can escape from the practical materialism that threatens to engulf them.
Paris, April, 1893.