The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions

by Frances Power Cobbe

Secondly, there is the party commonly called that of Reformed Jews, which separated about forty years ago from the Orthodox by a schism analogous to that which cut off the Free Kirk from the Kirk of Scotland. The raisons d’être of this reform were certain questions of ritual (the older ritual having fallen into neglect) and the relinquishment by the reforming party of the authority of the Talmud. The progress so effected occasioned great heart-burnings,—now happily extinguished,—and proceeded no further than these very moderate reforms.[^[15]]

Lastly, there is a third Jewish party, existing chiefly in Germany and America, and numbering a few members among the younger generations in England. For convenience’ sake, I shall distinguish it from the older Reformed party by calling it the party of the New Reform, or of Broad Church Jews, the analogy between its attitude towards Orthodox Judaism and that of the late lamented Dean Stanley and his friends to the Church of England being singularly close.

The attitude even of the Orthodox and older Reformed Jews (alike for our present purpose) is, theoretically, not wholly unprogressive, not necessarily purely tribal. They have admitted principles inconsistent with stagnant tribalism. They believe that, though the ceremonialism of Judaism is for Jews alone, yet the mission of Judaism is to spread through all the nations its great central doctrine of the Unity of God. As Philipsohn (who, it is said, has since somewhat receded from his position) observed in his Lectures so far back as 1847:—

Judaism has never declared itself to be in its specific form the religion of all mankind, but has asserted itself to be the religion of all mankind in and by the religious idea.... Talmudism itself admits that he even who no longer observes the law, but who utters as his confession of faith the words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Eternal is One,” may be considered still to be a Jew. Development of the Religious Idea, p. 256.

The saying of the Talmud, “The pious among all nations shall have a place in the world to come,” has become a stock quotation, and has been of the utmost value to modern Jewish orthodoxy. Thus even this most conservative party among the Jews is not without a certain expansive principle. It must be admitted, however, that it does little or nothing to make that principle practically efficacious, and is content to wait for the advent of Messiah to convert the nations by miracle without any trouble to Jews to strive to enlighten them beforehand. Considering what the Jews for ages have had to bear from those who vouchsafed to try to convert them, we may pardon this lack of zeal for proselytism as far from unnatural; yet the consequences have been deplorable. He who holds a precious truth concerning eternal things, and fails to feel it to be (as Mrs. Browning says) “like bread at sacrament,” to be passed on to those beside him, loses his right to it, and much of his profit in it. It is “treasure hid in a field.” The attitude is anti-social and misanthropic of a people who practically say to their neighbors: “We possess the most precious of all truths, of which we are the divinely commissioned guardians and witnesses. But we do not intend to make the smallest effort to share that truth with you, and generations of you may go to the grave without it for all we care. We are passive witnesses, not active apostles. By and by, the Messiah will appear, and convert all who are alive in his time, whether they will or not; but, for the present, Christendom is joined to idols, and we shall let it alone.” The faith which speaks thus stands self-condemned. If a creed be not aggressive and proselytizing, like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, it confesses either mistrust of itself or else misanthropic indifference to the welfare of mankind. Thus the Orthodox and the elder Reformed Jews have tacitly pronounced their own sentence.

Turn we now from these to the new Reformation. This last is a development of Judaism, truly on its own lines, but yet extending far beyond anything contemplated by the elder bodies. To measure it aright, we must cast back a glance over the path which Judaism traversed in earlier times, and note how completely this new and vast stride is a continuance of that march towards higher and wider religious truth.

From the earliest conception of Jahveh as the Tribal God,—a conception which even Kuenen admits to be native to the race of Israel, and untraceable to any other people,—from this conception, which plainly assumed the existence of other and rival gods of neighboring nations, it was an enormous step in advance to pass to the idea of One only Lord of all the earth, whose House should be a “House of prayer for all nations.”

Still vaster was the progress from anthropomorphic and morally imperfect ideas of the character of the tribal God to the adoration of Isaiah’s “High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity,” who dwells in the high and holy place with the pure in heart and the contrite.

Again, there was made a bound forward by Judaism when the earlier simple secularism and disbelief of, or indifference to, a future world vanished before the belief in Immortality which grew up in spite of the teachings of Antigonus and Sadok, and (after the Dispersion) never faded out again altogether.

And finally, with the development of the Prophetic spirit, Worship assumed more its true forms of praise, confession of sin, and thanksgiving; and, at the fall of Jerusalem, the bloody sacrifices (long limited to the sacred enclosure) came to an end forever amid the smoking ruins.