History of the Jews, Vol. 3 (of 6)

by Heinrich Graetz

A heathen, who knew nothing of the wisdom of the schoolmen, nor of the three existing religions, but who felt the necessity of uniting himself in a spiritual, affectionate union with his Creator, becomes convinced of the truth of Judaism. This heathen is Bulan, the king of the Chazars, who himself embraced the Jewish faith. Him the Castilian philosopher makes use of to give an historical character to his work, and hence it bears the name of Chozari (wrongly spelt Kusari). The clever preface, written in an appropriate style, stirs the interest of the reader.

An angel repeatedly appeared in a dream to the king of the Chazars, who was a zealous adherent of his idolatrous cult, but a man of pious mind, and addressed him in these very significant words: "Thy intention is good, but not the manner in which thou servest God." In order to ascertain with certainty in what manner the Deity should be worshiped, the king applied to a philosopher. The sage, a follower partly of the Aristotelian and partly of the neo-Platonic system, fostered in the king more of disbelief than belief. He told him that God was too exalted to come into any relation whatsoever with man, or to demand any reverential worship.

The king of the Chazars did not feel at all satisfied with this comfortless exposition. He felt that acts intended to honor God must be of absolute value in themselves, and without these, pious and moral thoughts could be of but little merit. It was impossible to understand why, if the form of worshiping God was to be an altogether indifferent matter, Christianity and Islam, which had divided the world between them, should war against each other, and even consider mutual slaughter as holy work whereby paradise might be attained. Both religions, moreover, appeal to divine manifestations and wise prophets, through whose agency the Deity has worked miracles. God must then, in some way, be in relation to mankind. There must exist something mysterious of which the philosophers have no notion. Thereupon the king determined to apply to a representative of the Christian faith and to a Mahometan, in order to learn from them the true religion. He did not think of asking the counsel of the Jews at first, because from their abject condition and the universal contempt in which they were held, the degraded state of their religion was sufficiently apparent.

A priest acted as the exponent of the tenets of the Christian belief to the king. Christianity, he said, believes in the eternity of God and the creation of the world out of nothing, and that all men are descended from Adam; it accepts as true all that the Torah and the Scriptures of Judaism teach, but holds as its fundamental dogma, the incarnation of the Deity through a virgin of the Jewish royal house. The Son of God, the Father and the Holy Ghost form a unit. This trinity is venerated by the Christians as a unity, even though the phrase appears to indicate a threefold personality. Christians are to be considered as the real Israelites, and the twelve apostles take the place of the twelve tribes.

The mind of the king was as little gratified by the answer of the Christian as by that of the Philosopher, the reply not being in accordance with the dictates of reason. The Christian, he thought, should have adduced positive, incontrovertible proofs, which would satisfy the human intellect. He, therefore, felt it his duty to seek further for true religion.

Thereupon he inquired of a Mahometan theologian as to the basis of the faith of Islam. The Moslem believe, as he affirmed, in the unity and eternity of God, and in the creatio ex nihilo; but reject anthropomorphic conceptions. Mahomet was the last and most important among the prophets, who summoned all people to the faith, and promised to the faithful a paradise with all the delights of eating, drinking, and voluptuous love, but to the infidels, the eternal fire of damnation. The truth of Islam depends upon the fact that no man is capable of producing so remarkable a book as the Koran, or even a single one of its Suras. To him also the king replied that the fact of the intimate intercourse of God with mortals must rest upon undeniable proofs, which the internal evidence for the divine origin of the Koran does not afford, for even if its diction is able to convince an Arab, it has no power over those who are unacquainted with Arabic.

As both the Christian and the Moslem had referred their religions to Judaism in order to verify the historic basis of each, the truth-seeking king at length determined to overcome his prejudice against Judaism, and to make inquiries of a Jewish sage. The latter made the following statement of the tenets of his creed, in reply to the request of the king: "The Jews believe in the God of their ancestors, who delivered the Israelites from Egypt, performed miracles for their sake, led them into the Holy Land, and raised up prophets in their midst—in short, in all that is taught in the Holy Scriptures." Thereupon the king of the Chazars replied, "I was right, then, in not asking of the Jews, because their wretched, low condition has destroyed every reasonable idea in them. You, O Jew, should have premised that you believe in the Creator and Ruler of the world, instead of giving me so dry and unattractive a mass of facts, which are of significance only to you." The Jewish sage replied: "This notion that God is the Creator and Ruler of the universe requires a lengthy demonstration, and the philosophers have different opinions on the matter. The belief, however, that God performed miracles for us Israelites demands no proof, as it depends upon the evidence of undoubted eye-witnesses." Starting from this point, the religious philosopher, Jehuda Halevi, has an easy task to unfold proofs of the truth and divine character of Judaism. Philosophy discards God and religion entirely, not knowing what place to assign to them in the world. Christianity and Islam turn their backs on reason, for they find reason in opposition to the cardinal doctrines of their religions. Judaism, on the contrary, starts from a statement of observed facts, which reason cannot possibly explain away. It is quite compatible with reason, but assigns to reason its limits, and does not accept the conclusions of reason, often degenerating into sophistry, when certainty can be attained in another way.

In his correct view of the value of speculative thought, Jehuda Halevi stood alone in his own time, and anticipated many centuries. The thinkers of his time, Jewish, Mahometan and Christian, Rabbi, Ulema and Churchman, bowed the knee to Aristotle, whose philosophical judgments upon God and His relation to the world they placed above Holy Writ, or at least they strained and subtilized the Biblical verses until they expressed a philosophical idea, and thus they became at once believers and sceptics. Jehuda Halevi alone had the courage to point out the limits set by nature to human thought, and to proclaim, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further." Philosophy has no right to attack well-accredited facts, but must accept them as undeniable truths; it must start with them for bases, bringing to bear its power of co-ordinating the facts and illuminating them by the aid of reason. Just as in the realm of nature the intellect dare not deny actual phenomena when they present themselves, however striking and contrary to reason they may appear, but must strive to comprehend them, so must it act when touching on the question of the knowledge of God. This excellent and irrefutable idea, which of late years, after many wanderings in the labyrinth of philosophy, has at length discovered a way for itself, was first enunciated by Jehuda Halevi. In a poem, which is as beautiful as its matter is true, he thus expresses his opinion of the Greek spirit which studious disciples of philosophy so eagerly affected:

"Do not be enticed by the wisdom of the Greeks,
Which only bears fair blossoms, but no fruit.
What is its essence? That God created not the world,
Which, ever from the first, was enshrouded in myths.
If to its words you lend a ready ear, you
Return with chattering mouth, heart void, unsatisfied."

Judaism cannot, according to this system, be assailed by philosophy at all, because it stands on a firm basis, which the thinker must respect, the basis of historical facts. The Jewish religion entered the world not gradually, little by little, but suddenly, like something newly created. It was revealed to a vast multitude—to millions of men—who had sufficient means of inquiring and investigating whether they were deceived by some trickery. Moreover, all the miracles that preceded the revelation on Sinai, and continued to occur during the wandering in the desert, took place in the presence of many people. Not only on one occasion, the beginning of Israel's nationality, was the evident interference of God manifested, but it revealed itself often, in the course of five hundred years, in the outpouring of the spirit of prophecy upon certain individuals and classes. By virtue of this character, of the confirmed authenticity of these facts, Judaism is invested with a certainty greater than that established by philosophy. The existence of God is demonstrated more powerfully by the revelation of Sinai than by the conclusions of the intellect. Jehuda Halevi believed that he had not only cut away the ground from beneath the philosophical views of his time, but that he had also undermined the foundations both of Christianity and Islam, and laid down the criterion by which the true could be distinguished from the false religion. Judaism does not feed its adherents with the hope of a future world full of bliss, but grants them here on earth a glimpse of the heavenly kingdom, and raises, through an enduring chain of indisputable facts, the hope of the immortality of the soul to the plane of absolute certainty.