The close is tragic. Both Judith and Uriel perish at their own hands. But the tragedy did not end there. Mention has been made of Da Silva. If Uriel is the counterpart of the talmudic arch-heretic, Elisha ben Abuyah, then is Da Silva the reincarnation of Elisha’s contemporary Meir. Who has not wept over the heart friendship but mind estrangement of these two men? Da Silva stands in the same relation to Uriel. He hates the heresy, but loves the heretic. Uriel himself uses words which sum up the situation. “Love or Truth? What if the heart be wiser than the mind?” Spinoza (who was really fifteen years of age when Uriel died) flits across the scene as a little boy, strewing flowers and wondering why people wonder at his childish thoughts. Uriel bids him “Keep thy soul’s secret and so find peace.” This is perhaps the most tragic incident in the play, though the dramatist contrives to relieve the tension by the simple beauty of the Spinoza interlude.
Still, however, the whole of the tragedy has not yet been told. For Hermann Jellinek has not yet been named. Indeed, three remarkable Jellinek brothers now come on the scene. In 1847 two little works appeared on Gutzkow’s Uriel. The one (Elischa ben Abuya) was written by Adolf Jellinek, then the youthful preacher of Leipzig, afterwards the famous pulpit orator of Vienna. The other was Uriel Acosta’s Leben und Lehre, and its author was Hermann Jellinek (younger than Adolf by a couple of years). The booklet was inscribed to a third brother, Moritz. Now Hermann Jellinek was roused to a heated indignation by Gutzkow’s “fictions” about Uriel. Uriel was no lovelorn boy, but a middle-aged philosopher; he died not for loss of Judith, but as a martyr to truth. Hermann Jellinek in so many words sees his own prototype in Acosta; less than a year later he at all events shared his hero’s tragic end; but under more dignified circumstances. What the historical Uriel Acosta lacked, Hermann Jellinek possessed in over measure—the quality of determination. Hermann was a revolutionary, and took part in the Viennese rising of 1848, being twenty-six at the time. He does not seem to have actually resisted the troops, but he was court-martialled, and sentenced to death. His friends made every effort to save him, but he was relentless. Nothing could move him to present a conciliatory front to the authorities. In this at least he could be no Uriel! Recant? No! “Shoot me,” he cried, “but ideas cannot be shot.” They shot him, and his ideas may be found in two or three volumes, of which dusty copies occur in a few libraries. I have some of them on my table as I write. It is not easy to say which is the greater tragedy, Acosta’s or Jellinek’s; but for the moment at least let Jellinek have his way. For an hour we have resurrected, if not his ideas, at all events his name.
GRACE AGUILAR’S “SPIRIT OF JUDAISM”
Known to the many for her novels, Grace Aguilar is known to the few for her Spirit of Judaism. The book passed through a real adventure, quite as exciting as the fictional fortunes of any of her romantic heroes. Somewhat before 1840, Miss Aguilar wrote to Isaac Leeser, of Philadelphia. She had, in 1839, read the Rabbi’s first published sermons—his Bible was yet to come. She asked him “to undertake the editorial supervision of her manuscript work on the Spirit of our religion.” Leeser courteously responded to the request. “I shall readily be believed,” he wrote in 1842, “that I felt truly happy that such a demand had been made upon me; and I accordingly offered my services to do as I was desired.” Miss Aguilar completed the book, but chance decreed that it was not to reach its goal. She sent it out to America “through a private channel,” and it never came to Leeser’s hands. Such a mishap did not thwart so ardent and industrious a girl—she was not much over twenty at the time. She accordingly proceeded to re-write it “from her original sketches,” made in 1837. On the second occasion fortune was more kind, though the book encountered some further delays before it appeared, in 1842, in America.
A second edition—much inferior from the point of view of “get-up”—was published in 1849, again in Philadelphia. The second issue was No. xiii of the Jewish Miscellany of the original Jewish Publication Society. The book was never printed in England. My own introduction to it was curiously made. Being deeply interested in the new plans for teaching Hebrew, I wrote (in 1903), a preface to a book on the Yellin method. I showed the proof of my essay to the late Rev. S. Singer, whereupon he remarked: “Grace Aguilar said much the same thing more than half a century ago.” And so, indeed, she did. She saw that Hebrew must be taught naturally, that the language must be made to “engage a child’s fancy,” by first of all introducing to it familiar Hebrew words from the child’s every-day life. Glad was I to find this anticipation of modern opinion, and I cited it fully.
GRACE AGUILAR
From that time I have, for other reasons, grown very fond of the book—of which I possess the 1849 reprint. It is so delightfully fresh and young, so confident and enthusiastic. Moreover, there is something entertaining in Leeser’s conception of his editorial function. Not that he could well help himself. He was almost compelled to apply a wet blanket to her fire. She had expressly invited him to confine himself to removing obscurities and appending the necessary notes. “The chief point of difference between Miss Aguilar and myself,” says Leeser, “are her seeming aversion to the tradition, and her idea that the mere teaching of formal religion opens the door to the admission of Christianity.” On the second point, Leeser’s answer is effective. If, through unintelligent teaching, ceremonial religion degenerates into a burden, then the outcome is more likely to be disregard for the old than regard for a new faith. “Indifference is a far greater enemy to us than conversion,” said Leeser in 1842, and assuredly we can use identical words now. It is not so clear, however, that Leeser was equally successful in meeting Miss Aguilar on the problem of tradition. She was very emphatic in her desire to base Judaism on the Bible, but she was only verbally, not spiritually, a Karaite. She often uses the very language of tradition, and in one place says: “The religion of no Hebrew is perfect, unless the form be hallowed by the spirit, the spirit quickened by the form. The heart must be wholly given to the Lord, yet still the instituted form must be obeyed.” Miss Aguilar probably objected to the minutiae of pietism—in the ritual sense—when she spoke of tradition; she had no philosophical conception of it. Leeser could hardly be expected to set her right; he was as little of a mystic as she was.
No doubt, however, she was to this extent an anti-traditionalist that she thought the Bible in itself an all-sufficient basis for Judaism. Her book is cast in the form of a commentary on the Shema—in fact, it is called “Shema Israel, the Spirit of Judaism.” She begins by expounding the unity of God; she shows that it is the real difference between Synagogue and Church; and then ends her chapter with a passionate plea for friendly intercourse between Jew and Christian on the basis of frank and unashamed profession of Judaism by the former. She was absolutely right. It is not merely the only honest, it is also the only stable basis for such intercourse.
To Grace Aguilar, Moses was “the mouth of God” (that is her own phrase). There is nothing between a theory of verbal inspiration and the belief that Moses “invented” and “presumed on the ignorance and superstition of the rescued nation.” With a feminine love of italics she contends that “we must believe God framed every law mentioned in the Mosaic books or none.” How crude this sounds! On the one hand, it cuts off all thought of inspiration before Moses, on the other, all thought of it after the close of the scriptural canon. It would have seemed to her almost blasphemous to regard Hillel as animated with the same spirit of God that moved Haggai. She dismisses the “Oral Law” in an aside. “The Bible is the foundation of religion.” Miss Aguilar goes on to complain that English Bibles were not found in Jewish homes. But the explanation is easy. In those days it was impossible to find an acceptable English Bible for Jewish use. The Authorized Version was marred not only by Christological renderings, but also by the Christological insertions of the headings to the chapters. Before the publication of the Revised Version it had become possible to obtain an Anglican edition without the headings. But I doubt whether that was the case so early as 1842. Moreover, Jews have always been slow to acknowledge that the Hebrew Bible was insufficient. There was much that is creditable in this reluctance to face facts; though there was also much that was dangerous.