The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow

by Edward Alfred Steiner

There are real antagonisms arising from the Jewish mind and habits, which are historic inheritances and cannot be easily overcome; but which have made it often a hard task for the Christian to be a real Christian towards his Jewish neighbour.

There are other barriers, however, and they exist first, in the historic development of Judaism and second, in the nature and content of historic Christianity.

The Jew is heterogeneous in cultural development. There are Orthodox Jews, wrapped in cabalistic mysticism, who have never moved an inch along the pathway of progress; to whom not only each word written in the law of Moses has divine origin and divine meaning, but to whom each word has as many meanings, as it has letters and dots and dashes. Upon these Jews, all the fetters of legalism are still rivetted, and to them, tradition and revelation are one and the same.

There are less Orthodox Jews who have progressed as far as the philosopher Mendelssohn led them a century ago.

There are nationalistic Jews to whom Zion is beckoning, and who hear the voice of the prophet bidding them “possess the land” and promising that “the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion, with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads” and that then, “sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

There are modern Jews, who have forsaken the law and the ordinances, the Sabbath and the full moons, to whom the reformed synagogue is merely a connecting link with the historic past.

There are rationalistic Jews to whom Karl Marx is the Messiah, and the Socialistic commonwealth, Jerusalem; and there are just Jews, who eat Kosher food because they like it, to whom Mammon is the Messiah and their business the Holy of Holies.

To none of these does Christianity in its historic development appeal very strongly: First, because becoming a Christian means separation from the race; for heterogeneous as the Jews are in cultural development, so homogeneous are they in their racial consciousness. This is something which baffles analysis; it is the strongest example of race cohesion which we have. People who have lost national unity, who have diverged widely in religious beliefs and ceremonial observances, who are as far apart in culture as Greek and Barbarian, are still one as a race, and the man is Anathema who breaks the racial tie. It matters not whether he does it to escape persecution, to gain preferment, or from deep conviction; to his fellow Jews it is always apostasy.

That the broad-minded Jew may have a race consciousness which breaks through the ties of blood, they admit; but he must not become a Christian, even if to him Christianity is the only escape from the narrow tribal idea and from his own outgrown race consciousness, into the broader realm where he can say that he is a member of the human race, and as such is under the obligations of brotherhood to all men.

In the second place, Christianity in its ceremonies, its ecclesiastical practices and its theology, is repellent to all these Jews, from the extreme radical to the extremest Orthodox.