WHAT IS A JEW?
WHAT is a Jew? This question is not at all so odd as it seems. Let us see what kind of peculiar creature the Jew is, which all the rulers and all nations have together and separately abused and molested, oppressed and persecuted, trampled and butchered, burned and hanged—and in spite of all this is yet alive! What is a Jew, who has never allowed himself to be led astray by all the earthly possessions which his oppressors and persecutors constantly offered him in order that he should change his faith and forsake his own Jewish religion?
The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.
The Jew is the pioneer of liberty. Even in those olden days, when the people were divided into but two distinct classes, slaves and masters—even so long ago had the law of Moses prohibited the practice of keeping a person in bondage for more than six years.
The Jew is the pioneer of civilization. Ignorance was condemned in olden Palestine more even than it is to-day in civilized Europe.Moreover, in those wild and barbarous days, when neither life nor the death of any one counted for anything at all, Rabbi Akiba[39] did not refrain from expressing himselfopenly against capital punishment, a practice which is recognized to-day as a highly civilized way of punishment.
The Jew is the emblem of civil and religious toleration. ‘Love the stranger and the sojourner’, Moses commands, ‘because you have been strangers in the land of Egypt.’ And this was said in those remote and savage times when the principal ambition of the races and nations consisted in crushing and enslaving one another. As concerns religious toleration, the Jewish faith is not only far from the missionary spirit of converting people of other denominations, but on the contrary the Talmud commands the Rabbis to inform and explain to every one who willingly comes to accept the Jewish religion, all the difficulties involved in its acceptance, and to point out to the would-be proselyte that the righteous of all nations have a share in immortality. Of such a lofty and ideal religious toleration not even the moralists of our present day can boast.
The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He whom neither slaughter nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he whom neither fire nor sword nor inquisition was able to wipe off from the face of the earth, he who was the first to produce the oracles of God, he who has been for so long the guardian of prophecy, and who transmitted it to the rest of the world—such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is everlasting as is eternity itself.
LEO TOLSTOY.
THE BOOK OF THE AGES[40]
THE Bible is the book of the ancient world, the book of the Middle Ages, and the book of modern times. Where does Homer stand compared with the Bible? Where the Vedas or the Koran? The Bible is inexhaustible.
A. HARNACK.
WITHIN this awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries:
Happiest he of human race
To whom God has given grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch, and learn the way;
And better had he ne’er been born
Who reads to doubt, or reads to scorn.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
HOW many ages and generations have brooded and wept and agonized over this book! What untellable joys and ecstasies, what support to martyrs at the stake, from it! To what myriads has it been the shore and rock of safety—the refuge from driving tempest and wreck! Translated into all languages, how it has united this diverse world! Of its thousands there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotion.
WALT WHITMAN.
THE BIBLE, THE EPIC OF THE WORLD[41]
APART from all questions of religious and historical import, the Bible is the epic of the world. It unrolls a vast panorama in which the ages move before us in a long train of solemn imagery from the creation of the world onward. Against this gorgeous background we see mankind strutting, playing their little part on the stage of history. We see them taken from the dust and returning to the dust. We see the rise and fall of empires, we see great cities, now the hive of busy industry, now silent and desolate—a den of wild beasts. All life’s fever is there, its hopes and joys, its suffering and sin and sorrow.
J. G. FRAZER, 1895.
WRITTEN in the East, these characters live for ever in the West; written in one province, they pervade the world; penned in rude times, they are prized more and more as civilization advances; product of antiquity, they come home to the business and bosoms of men, women, and children in modern days.
R. L. STEVENSON.
THE Bible thoroughly known is a literature in itself—the rarest and the richest in all departments of thought or imagination which exists.
J. A. FROUDE, 1886.
THE BIBLE IN EDUCATION[42]
CONSIDER the great historical fact that for three centuries this Book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of a merely literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil?
T. H. HUXLEY, 1870.
THE greater the intellectual progress of the ages, the more fully will it be possible to employ the Bible not only as the foundation, but as the instrument, of education.
J. W. GOETHE.