The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in certain cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the Universities Tests Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew had become Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to graduate at the English seats of learning without any violation to their religious principles. At the present day the House of Commons contains a dozen Jewish members, and there is scarcely any office or dignity for which an English Jew may not compete on equal terms with an English Christian. The one remnant of ancient servitude is to be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the King, in which the Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into his Majesty’s heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles, “that they may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”
Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which history has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier Christian princes, and in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance, the Jews cast off their aloofness and participated in the intellectual life of the Gentiles, so now they hastened to join in the work of civilisation. When the fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel, more than the body of the people was set free. The demolition of the walls of the ghettos was symbolical of the demolition of those other walls of prejudice which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies as so many patches of ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the mosaic of modern Europe. The middle of the eighteenth century, which marks the spring-time of Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-time of Jewish liberalism. It is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a new birth of the Hebrew soul. The Jew assumed a new form of pride: pride in the real greatness of his past. He became once more conscious of the nobler elements of his creed and his literature. And with this self-consciousness there also came a consciousness of something outside and beyond self. Moses Mendelssohn did for the Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for the Christians. By introducing it to the language, literature, and life of the Gentiles around it he opened for his people a new intellectual world, broader and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned by the persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when the shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had greeted the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the Restoration of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy of the nation manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe and distasteful to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself and who set the interests of sect above the interests of man; but thoroughly sane.
Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the past, to denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a sin, and to repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed their feelings in a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable. Equally inevitable was another phenomenon: a religious revival springing up simultaneously with the intellectual awakening. The Jewish race includes many types. As in antiquity we find Hellenism and Messianism flourishing side by side, as the preceding century had witnessed the synchronous appearance of a Spinoza and a Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was writing Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew, Israel Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious hysteria in Moldavia.[152] But the more advanced classes declared themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which was forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great extent abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent proportionate to the previous compulsory conformity. There was a vast difference of opinion as to the length to which reform should go. But one result of the movement as a whole was a more or less thorough purification of Judaism of the stains of slavery. The solemn puerilities of the Talmud and the ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic tradition, grotesque ritualism, and all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief and practice, with which ages of barbarism had encrusted Judaism, were relegated to the lumber-room of antiquarian curiosities, and all that was fresh and truly alive in the Jewish race sought new vehicles for the expression of new thoughts: modern emotions were translated into modern modes of utterance and action. The Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the night, destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was taken by an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews, based on their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who renounced the faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty to justify his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The conditions which produced that vulgar type of renegade having vanished, there began to appear apostates of another kind—men who, though unwilling to devote to a sect what was meant for mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice their own individuality to an obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to cherish those whom they deserted. In them the connection of sentiment outlasted the links of religion, and these men by their defection did more for their people than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich Heine, born in 1799, was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted partly by the desire to gain that fulness of freedom which in those days was still denied to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by a far deeper motive: “I had not been particularly fond of Moses formerly,” he said in after life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me, and I could not forgive the legislator of the Jews his hatred towards all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this country was an analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later examples may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish birth, but always spoke of it with pride—and that in a country where it still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these ex-Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation of aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly baseless.
Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an even more prominent part in the development of the European mind under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile by virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools—the school of adversity—came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world. Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine, and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic thought and economic practice owe their most daring achievements to Jewish speculation. Socialism—this latest effort of political philosophy to reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its constituent members—is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It would be hard to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.[153] But a few will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in politics, Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein and Joachim in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine; in psychology Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and comparative philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers who have made themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the press of Europe is to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people who control the sinews of war have contributed more than their share to the arts and sciences which support and embellish peace. And all this in the course of one brief half-century, and in the face of the most adverse influences of legislation, of religious feeling and of social repugnance. History can show no parallel to so glorious a revolution. Mythology supplies a picture which aptly symbolises it. Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no prophecy has ever received a more accurate fulfilment than the poetic conception couched in the following lines received in the Hebrew Palingenesia:
“Chaos begat Erebos and black Night;
But from Night issued Air and Day.”
CHAPTER XXI
IN RUSSIA
The one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV., surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. The latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause providing that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue trading freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not want these men who have brought us poison for our bodies and souls; they have sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our Lord and Saviour.” This speech affords a melancholy insight into the intellectual condition of the people over whom Ivan held his terrible sway. Nor can one wonder. Printing had been popular for upwards of a century in the rest of Europe before a press found its way into the Muscovite Empire, where it aroused among the natives no less astonishment and fear than the first sight of a musket did among the inhabitants of Zululand, and was promptly consigned to the flames by the priests, as a Satanic invention. Things did not improve during the succeeding ages. Till the end of the seventeenth century Russia remained almost as total a stranger to the development of the Western world and to its nations as Tibet is at the present day. Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably larger in contemporary imagination than the vast dominions of the White Czar. British traders at rare intervals brought from the port of Archangel, along with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the snow-clad plains and sunless forests of those remote regions, and of their savage inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty, squalor, and superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the even rarer testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of travel spoke of princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving peasants, and of ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind that kind of wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends the narratives of travellers in unknown lands.
This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire from Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer, and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore, no matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of the original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others. It must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian party, which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy with the Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a Western pattern. They wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found a leader in Peter’s own son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with his life. The idea for which Alexis and his friends suffered death is still alive. Opposition to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental modes of thought and conduct continue to exercise a powerful influence in Russian politics. Europe and Asia still fight for supremacy in the heterogeneous mass which constitutes this hybrid Empire, and there are those who believe that, although Russia poses as European in manner, in soul she is an Asiatic power; and that the time will come when the slender ties which bind her to the West will be snapped by the greater force of her Eastern affinities. Whether this view is correct or not the future will show. Our business is with the past.