Remarkable and inexplicable it certainly remains why in Western lands, with the prevailing scepticism in the cultured world, far more tolerance or indifference is shown towards the freethinker than towards people who hold different religious views from our own. In Asia the hatred of and fanaticism against those of another creed are the outcome of strong faith, and since these are fostered and upheld by the Government, antagonistic feelings, though probably deeper rooted, do not express themselves so vehemently or so frequently as with us. Our laws and our notions of decency guard against the outbreak of passion, but they cannot break the power of prejudice even in the breast of the most cultured. When we consider the relations of the Christian West towards the Moslemic East, it will strike us that the sympathies of Europeans, however unprejudiced they may think themselves, when it comes to the political questions of the day will always be more on the side of the Christian than of the Mohammedan subjects of Turkey, although the Mohammedan subjects of the Porte have to suffer more from the despotism of the Government than the Christians under the protection of the Western Powers. The European still looks upon the Mohammedan, Brahmanist, Buddhist, &c., as an inferior being whose faith he ridicules and blackens and whom he could not under any circumstances regard as his equal, and in spite of the protection extended by our laws to those of another creed, the follower of the doctrines of Mohammed, Buddha, and Vishnu feels always uncomfortable, strange, and restricted in Western lands. And the Jews do not fare much better, although they have adopted the language, manners, and customs of the various lands of Europe.
In the history of the Moslemic East, for instance, persecutions and violent outbreaks against the Jews are far less frequent than with us in the West, not merely in the Middle Ages but even in quite modern times. Enlightened Europe, mocking at the fanaticism of Asia, has of late years published, under the title of Anti-Semitism, things against the Jews which defy repetition; they form one of the darkest stains on the escutcheon of the modern world of culture. Even our most eminent freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists are not without blame in this matter; and the absurd excuse that the Jews are hated and persecuted not on account of their belief, but on account of their exclusiveness and strongly marked nationality, is ridiculous on the face of it, for all over Europe the Jew adopts the national proclivities of his native land, and often, plus catholique que le pape, he shows himself more patriotic than his Christian countryman. In consideration of these facts it is surprising that the Jew, treated as a stranger everywhere in Europe, still persists in ingratiating himself into the national bond. Why does he not accept the fact and simply say, "Since you want none of me I remain Jew, and you can brand me as a cosmopolitan if you like." There is no doubt that this innate prejudice of the Christian world finds its root in those virtues and characteristics which have enabled the Jews to accomplish so much, and which as the natural result of oppression may be seen in all oppressed people. "He who violently throws down the flaming torch to extinguish it will burn his fingers at the fiercer burning flame," as a German poet pithily remarks. Tyrants generally harm themselves most by their tyranny, and when the ruling Christian world considers itself justified in taking up arms against the professedly more highly gifted, more energetic, and persevering children of the so-called Semitic race, it is grossly mistaken. The Jew in Turkey, Persia, and Central Asia is more purely Semitic, more staunchly religious than his co-religionist in Europe, and yet I do not know any more miserable, helpless, and pitiful individual on God's earth than the Jahudi in those countries. Where is the Semitic sharpness, the Semitic energy and perseverance, which the European puts down and fears as dangerous racial characteristics? The poor Jew is despised, belaboured and tortured alike by Moslem, Christian, and Brahmin, he is the poorest of the poor, and outstripped by Armenians, Greeks and Brahmins, who everywhere act the same part which in Europe has fallen to the lot of the Jew for lack of a rival in adversity. I repeat, Anti-Semitism in Europe is a vile baseness, which cannot be justified by any religious, ethnical, or social motives, and when the Occident, boasting of its humaneness and love of justice, always tries to put all that is evil and despicable on to poor, starved, depraved Asia, one forgets that with us the sun of a higher civilisation truly has dawned, but is not yet risen high enough to illumine the many dark points and gloomy corners in this world of ours.
Why deny it? In my many years' intercourse with the people of both these worlds, religion has not had a beneficial influence upon me. I have found in it nothing to ennoble man, not a mainspring of lofty ideals, and certainly no grounds for classifying and incorporating people according to their profession of faith or rather according to their interpretation and understanding of the great vital question as to the exact manner in which one should grope about in the prevailing darkness. If the division into many nationalities of people belonging to the same race and living under the same sky is an absurdity, how much more foolish is it to be divided on the point of a fanciful interpretation of the inscrutable mystery, and a fruitless groping into the unfathomable problem? The question of nationality will be further discussed presently, and as regards religion I will only add here that the ethical standard of faith, although much higher in Asia than in Europe, can after all have but a problematic influence, and only on intellects whose culture enables them to form high ideals, and to whom, being of a poetic or sentimental or indolent temperament, a roaming in loftier spheres seems a necessity. Beyond this, religion in Asia as in Europe reveals itself in outward show, miracles and mysteries, and where these are absent there is no true religion. Many of the ceremonies, usages, and superstitions which as an Orthodox Jew I practised in my youth I have discovered again one by one in faithful counterfeit amongst Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Moslems, Fire-worshippers, and Hindus, and nothing to my mind is more ridiculous than the revilings of one religion against another about these childish external things. So, for instance, as a pious Jew, I was always careful on Saturdays not to pass the Ereb, i.e., the line which marks the closer limit of the town, with my wallet full. Overstepping this cordon might be looked upon as a business transaction and a violation of the Sabbath; with a handkerchief on my loins and my eyes fixed on a bit of twine hanging between two sticks, I ventured, however, to take my walks abroad on the Sabbath day. Many years later I travelled from Samarkand to Herat in company with some Hindustani, who, having transacted some financial business in Bokhara, now with full pouches were returning to their sunny home on the Ganges. These Vishnu-worshippers, with the yellow caste-sign on their brow, used at night at the halting-place to separate themselves from the rest of the caravan. Small sticks about a finger in length were stuck in the ground to form a circle round them with a thin twine stretched from point to point, (for, like the Ereb, this line represented the cordon between them and the world of unbelievers), and behind this imaginary wall they prepared and ate their food without any fear of its being defiled by the glances of the heathen. As a child I was taught to look with disgust upon swine's flesh, and later, as Mohammedan, I had to feign horror and aversion at the very mention of the word Khinzir (swine). In my youth the wine prepared by a Christian was Nesekh (forbidden), as a Shiite, notwithstanding my ravenous hunger, I could not touch the food which the hand of a Christian had handled. Not only among Jews and Asiatic religionists, however, but even Christianity, whether in Europe or in Asia, is full of such flagrant superstitions and absurdities which are thrown in the teeth of those of another persuasion. The Abbé Huc tells us in his Book of Travels, that once on the borders of Tibet he sought a night's quarter and was directed to the house of a Buddha-maker. This led the French missionary to make some scoffing remark about the manufacturing of gods in Buddhism. I had a similar experience at St. Ulrich's in the Grödnerthal, in strictly Catholic Tyrol, for in my search for a house to put up at in that charmingly situated Alpine place I was directed successively to a Mary-maker, a God-maker, and a Christ-maker, for in this district live the best-known manufacturers of crosses and saints. In the Mohammedan world, knowing that I was acquainted with Europe, I have often been asked whether it was really true that the Franks worshipped a god with a dog's head, practised communism of wives, and such like things. In Tyrol, on the Achensee, where I lived among the peasants, I was asked if on my many travels I had ever visited the land of the Liberals, where the goat does duty as god, as the anti-Liberal minister had given the simple peasants to understand.
In many other respects the religions of the East and of the West agree in point of degeneracy, and it is incomprehensible how and with what right our missionaries manage to convince the Asiatics of the errors of their faith and to represent Christianity as the only pure and salvation-bringing religion. If our missionaries could point to our Western order and freedom as the fruit of Christianity, their insistence would be somewhat justified, but our modern culture has developed not through but in spite of Christianity. The fact that Asia in our days is given up as a prey to the rapacity of Europe is not the fault of Islam or Buddhism or Brahminism. The principles of these religions support more than Christianity does the laws of humanity and freedom, the regulations of State and society, but it is the historical development and the climate, the conditions of the soil, and, above all, the tyrannical arbitrariness of their sovereigns which have created the cliffs against which all the efforts of religion promotors must be wrecked.
After all this I need not comment any further upon my own confession of faith, which is contained within the pages of this autobiography. To my thoroughly practical nature one grain of common sense is of more value than a bushel of theories; and it has always been trying to me to go into questions the solution of which I hold à priori to be impossible, and I have preferably occupied myself with matters of common interest rather than with the problems of creation, the Deity, &c., which our human understanding can never grasp or fathom. I have honoured and respected all religions in so far as they were beneficial and edifying, i.e., in so far as they endeavoured to improve and ennoble mankind; and when occasion demanded I have always, either out of respect for the laws of the land, or out of courtesy to the society in which I happened to be, formally conformed to the prevailing religion of the land, just as I did in the matter of dress, although it might be irksome at times. In matters of secondary importance, religious and otherwise, I have strictly adhered to the principle, "Si fueris Romæ romano vivito more," and to the objections raised by religious moralists to my vacillating in matters of religion I can but reply: A vacillating conviction is, generally speaking, no conviction at all, and he who possesses nothing has nothing to exchange. Nothing to me is more disgusting than the holy wrath with which hypocrisy in Europe censures and condemns a change of religion based on want of conviction. Are the clergy, pastors, and modernised rabbis so fully convinced of the soundness of the dogmas they hold, and do they really believe that their distortions of face, their pious pathos and false enthusiasm can deceive cultured people of the twentieth century? When certain Europeans in their antiquated conservatism still carry high the banner of religious hypocrisy, and although possessing a good pair of legs prefer to go about on the crutches of Holy Scripture, we have no occasion to envy them their choice. The idea of carrying the lie with me to the grave seems to me horrible. The intellectual acquisitions of our century can no longer away with the religion of obscure antiquity; knowledge, enlightenment, and free inquiry have made little Europe mistress of the world, and I cannot see what advantage there can be in wilfully denying this fact, and why, in the education of the young, we do not discard the stupefying system of religious doctrine and cultivate the clear light of intellectual culture. Those who have lived among many phases of religion, and have been on intimate terms with the adherents of Asiatic and European creeds, are puzzled to see the faint-heartedness and indecision of the Western world; and if there be anything that has astonished me in Europe, it is this everlasting groping and fumbling about in matters of religion and the constant dread lest the truth, acknowledged by all thinking men, should gain the victory. For governing and ruling the masses religion may perhaps remain for some time to come a convenient and useful instrument, but in the face of the progress in all regions of modern knowledge and thought it becomes ever clearer and more evident that this game of hide-and-seek cannot go on very much longer. The spirit of the twentieth century cries, "Let there be light!" The light must and shall come!
2. Nationality.
Frail and brittle as is the foundation of the partition wall dividing the religions of Europe, the same may be said of the boundaries of nationalities which separate people into various corporations. If nationality were a question of common origin, based on consanguinity, i.e., on natural proclivities, there would be nothing to say against the idea of unity and cohesiveness. Mankind would be divided into different families separated by certain conspicuous racial characteristics; such separation, based on natural causes, would be quite justifiable. But in the various nationalities, as we now see them in Europe, there is not a symptom of any such idea; their ethnical origin lies in obscurity. These nations are an agglomeration of the greatest possible mixture of kindred and foreign elements, and, according to the longer or shorter process of development, it is at most their common language, customs, and history which constitute the so-called national stamp. If we observe a little more closely the European nations of our time we shall find that the older the influence of culture the sooner the national crystallisation of such a country began, and consequently is still in process in the later-developed Eastern portion of Europe. The French are a mixture of Iberians, Ligurians or Gauls, Kelts, and eventually also Phœnicians, and the German Franks, who found this ethnical conglomeration in ancient Gaul and gave it the present national name. In the German national corporation there are many nationalities whose German origin is by no means proved. A large portion of Eastern Germany was Slavonic; Berlin, Leipsic, Dresden, Chemnitz, &c., point to a Slavonic origin, and the oldest inhabitants of Steiermark, Kärnten, and the Eastern Tyrol were Slavs. In Italy we find a most curious mixture of Etruscans, Latins, Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, and Germans, which in course of time Church and State have amalgamated and impressed with the stamp of linguistic unity, although the typical features of the various fragments are not obliterated even now. In Hungary Ural-Altaic fragments have mixed with Slavs and other Aryans, and in spite of numerical minority the Magyar element, through its warlike propensities, has for centuries maintained the upper hand and gradually absorbed the foreign elements. The real ground-element of the Magyar nation, however, it would be almost impossible to discover.
The strongly mixed character of the English people is universally known, and when we look a little more closely at the gigantic Russian Empire we shall find that in the small nucleus of the Slavonic provinces, Tartars, Bashkirs, Kirghiz, Buriats, Votiaks, Cheremiss, Suryanes, Shuvashes, Greeks, Ostiaks, Voguls, Caucasians, &c., have been swallowed up. The growth of the Russian nation is of comparatively modern date and still in process. At the time of Peter the Great the entire population of Russia was estimated at thirty millions; now the number of Russians alone is over eighty millions.
And now I ask, in the face of all the above difficulties, can there be a question of consanguinity in the various nationalities, and what is there to insure a feeling of brotherly fellowship? Those who argue in favour of this point bring forward the national peculiarities, the outcome of their common language, customs, and historical antecedents, all of them psychical causes, and nationality is represented as a moral and not as a material conception. Very well, we will accept this, only let us remember that language, like all other psychical things, is subject to changes, and we must not be astonished if Islam, ignoring all former national restrictions, seeks to classify the human race only according to profession of faith, and has advanced the thesis, "All true believers are brothers." In the Mohammedan organisation the various shades of nationality practically do not exist, in obedience to the maxim: "Hubb ul watan min el iman." Patriotism proceeds from religion; at any rate they are always of secondary importance. When Islam, inspired by such lofty ideas, can accomplish this, why cannot we, under the powerful protection of our modern culture, produce some equivalent in our Western lands, and, putting aside national restrictions, create a cultural bond and united corporation, excluding all national hatred and discord? This indeed would be one of the most ideal forms of national life, and its realisation in the distant future is not at all an impossibility. But as yet, alas! we have not reached this exalted station of peace and happiness. Behold in our cultured West the uninterrupted struggle of great and mighty nationalities against smaller and weaker ones—a struggle in which Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" is fully justified. No one likes to act the part of the weaker, doomed to destruction; none wants to be absorbed by others, and the inferior in numbers have to defend their claim for existence as a political nation upon historical grounds. It is the rapacity and the tyranny of the great nations which have called forth and justify the fight for existence in the smaller ones, for why should not all want to preserve their individuality, all want to be entirely free in promoting the intellectual and material development of their own commonwealth? And this being so, there can, for the present, be no question of cosmopolitan tendencies. This fact becomes more conspicuous where it concerns a small ethnical island surrounded by the wild waves of a mighty ethnical sea, which threaten to destroy it, as we see exemplified in Hungary. Encompassed by German, Slav, and Roman elements, it has for centuries skilfully and successfully held its own, and the preservation of its national independence is an absolute necessity, as otherwise a collision between the three large national bodies just mentioned would be unavoidable, and the existence of a buffer-state must therefore be hailed as a fortunate coincidence. All lovers of peace and of quiet expansion of Western culture in the East must hail with joy the buffer afforded by the Hungarian State, and all true friends of culture must heartily desire the growth of Hungary. In this spirit I have always preserved my Hungarian patriotism, and will do so to the end of my days, although for many decades of years I have occupied myself with questions of universal interest, and have kept aloof from home politics. It is not surprising that the patriotism of a cosmopolitan differs considerably from that of his stay-at-home compatriots. But the keen interest in the affairs of the various nations with whom the traveller comes into contact hardly ever succeeds in suppressing or weakening in him his warmer feelings for the weal and woe of his native land. The tears I have shed in my younger days over the cruel sufferings and mortifications inflicted upon my native land by Austria's absolutism would have promoted a more luxurious growth of the plant of patriotism, if I had always remained at home and had had intercourse with Hungarians only. But even when one's horizon has widened one may still cling lovingly to one's native sod. One does not so lightly agree with Tolstoy, who maintains that patriotism is a crime, for although there are proverbs such as "Ubi bene ibi patria," or its English equivalent, "If you happen to be born in a stable, it does not follow that you are a horse," the cosmopolitan, be he ever so infatuated, always in the end is glad to get home again.