November 6, 1899.
From BARON DAVID VON GÜNZBURG, St. Petersburg, Russia:
Jesus of Nazareth sought to regenerate the common people of Galilee by infusing into them the moral teaching of the academies; and to this end he stripped the religious ideal of its scientific garb. Understood perfectly by those who listened to him, his simple language, nevertheless, proved a stumbling-block for those who had not known him, but who desired, after his death, to commune with his apostles. They construed current phrases as predicating actual entities, and having thus created a certain type of Messiah, it therefore devolved upon succeeding ages, under the influence of controversy and in the ardor of religious polemics, to harmonize at once all the genuine traditions, all the ill-understood and ill-reported addresses made by him, all his noble aspirations which later generations failed to comprehend, and to bring them all into accord with the ardent faith of new converts as well as with the Bible texts relative to the Messiah.
September 29, 1899.
From PROF. DAVID CASTELLI, author of “Storia degli Israeliti,” Florence, Italy:
… Jesus in a certain sense fulfilled in his person the prophecies of the Old Testament; they reached in him a height beyond which it is impossible to go. He was not the magnificent worldly king, since there could be no question of a worldly king in Israel again, for whom the Hebrews waited in vain; but he was the great teacher of mankind, spreading among all nations that principle of love and humanity which, until then, had remained confined within the limits of Judaism. His word, and after him that of the Apostles, who, like himself, were born and reared in Judaism, were a powerful means of carrying into effect the yet unfulfilled prophecy of the Old Testament: “The Lord will be King of all the earth; in that day God will be one and his name one.”
September 28, 1899.
From MARCUS JASTROW, Ph.D., Rabbi Emeritus of Rodeph-Shalom Congregation, Philadelphia, Pa., Author of the “Dictionary of the Talmud,” etc.:
The thoughtful Jews of all days, and especially of modern tendency of thought, see in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament, the exponent of a part of the ethics of Judaism, and more especially of its milder side—love and charity. The ethical sayings of Jesus reflect the conception of Judaism in his own period, as it was current among its spiritual leaders, such as Hillel, Rabbi Akiba, Ben Zoma, and others. To a heathen world merged in vice and crime, to a civilization that led the thoughtful among Romans and Greeks toward the abyss of pessimism and despair, Christianity offered the bright prospect of forgiveness and reconciliation with goodness. For the Jews it had no mission, no new gifts to offer. Its ethics appear to the modern Jew one-sided and exaggerated; the sense of justice appears to be pushed into the background in favor of an unrealizable ideal of love.