THE SORROWS OF TATNU
Tatnu has a weird sound. But it is not the title of a fetich; it is not a personal name; it is not even a word at all. It is, indeed, a figure; but the figure it stands for is numerical. The letters which compose the Hebrew combination Tatnu amount to 856 (taw = 400; taw = 400; nun = 50; waw = 6). It represents a date. To transpose it from the era anno mundi to the current era, it is necessary to add 240. This brings us to 1096, the year of the First Crusade.
If Tatnu is no person, neither do its sorrows form a book. They constitute rather a library of narratives, small in size but great in substance. They are hardly literary, yet they belong to the masterpieces of literature. Their story is recorded with few ornaments of style, but their simple, poignant directness is more effective than rhetoric. Martyrdom needs no tricks of the word-artist; it tells its own tale.
The Historical Commission for the History of the Jews in Germany had but a brief career, though it has revived under the newer title of the Gesamtarchiv. The Commission aimed at two ends: to introduce to Jewish notice information about the Jews scattered in Christian sources, and to make accessible to Christians facts about themselves contained in Jewish authorities. From 1887 to 1898, the Commission was actively at work, and among the books it published were two valuable volumes dealing with the martyrologies of the Jews. For the first time, these narratives were adequately edited. The pathetic records of sufferings endured in the Rhine-lands and elsewhere stand, for all time, ready to the hand of the historian.
The first moral to be extracted from these records is the certainty that war is an evil. No one can dispute the noble motives of the crusaders. The unquenchable enthusiasm which led high and low to forsake their homes and engage in eastern adventures, the unflinching courage with which the dangers of battle and the hardships and privations of wearisome campaigns were borne, the transparent singleness of purpose which animated many a soldier of the cross—all these factors tend to cover the sordid truth with a glamor of idealism and chivalry. But the wars of the Crusades were tainted with savagery, and if so what wars can be clean? The barbarities inflicted in Europe on the Jews color with a red and gruesome haze the heroisms performed against Mohammedans in Asia. War, it is said, brings to the fore some of the finest qualities of human nature. Exactly, but the war of man against nature calls for the exercise of the same qualities. The heroism of the coal-mine is as great from every point of view as the heroism of the battlefield. And the battlefield from first to last is the scene of human nature at its lowest as well as at its highest. Nor is the battlefield the whole of war. Those who persuade themselves that war, though an evil, is not an unmixed evil, will find in the Sorrows of Tatnu and allied books a rather useful corrective to their complacency.
When in 1913 I re-read Neubauer and Stern’s volume (1892) and Dr. Salfeld’s magnificent edition of the Nuremberg Martyrology (1898)—it was not long before the outbreak of the European war—I was so moved that I sent a donation to the Peace Society. Quite a nice thing to do, some will urge, but is it worth while, for such an end, to rake up these miserable tales? The whole of this class of literature was long neglected because of a similar feeling. Stobbe, who rendered such conspicuous service to the Jewish cause, was actuated by the identical sentiment, when he wrote that it would be “a grim and a thankless task” to enter fully into the sufferings of the Jews in the medieval period. But the Commission above referred to took another view; it printed the texts and circulated them in the completest detail. Now it depends entirely on the purpose with which such remorseless crimes are as remorselessly dragged to the light of day. If the desire is to revive bitterness, then it is a foul desire which ought to be crushed. And not only if this be the desire, if it prove to be the consequence, if as a result of such re-publication animosity is rekindled, then the re-publication is to be condemned. But in the case of the Sorrows of Tatnu, neither the motive nor the consequence is of this character. Salfeld gave us his edition of these monuments of the Jewish tribulations, “den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre”; to honor the dead, to inspire the living. Neither he nor any other Jewish writer wishes to play the part of Virgil’s Misenus, who was skilled in “setting Mars alight with his song” (Martem accendere cantu). The heroism of the sufferers, not the brutality of the aggressors, is the theme of the Jewish historian who deals with the Sorrows of Tatnu and of many another year; not the lurid glow of the bloodshed, but the white light of the martyrdom; not the pain, but the triumph over it; not the infliction, but the endurance unto and beyond death. These aspects of the story ought, indeed, to be told and retold “to honor the dead, to inspire the living.”
Closely connected with this thought is another. The Commission, be it remembered, was a Jewish body, appointed by the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund in 1885. But Graetz was not appointed a member. (Comp. the Memoir in the Index Volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1898, p. 78). Why did the leaders of Berlin Jewry ignore Graetz, the man who, above all others, had stirred the conscience of Europe by his vivid pictures of the medieval persecution so poignantly illustrated in the Sorrows of Tatnu? That was the very ground for excluding Graetz. There is no doubt but that Graetz’s method of writing Jewish history was somewhat roughly handled at about the period named. This assault came from two sides. Treitschke, the German and Christian, attacked Graetz as anti-Christian and anti-German, and used citations from Graetz to support his propaganda of academic anti-Semitism. Certain Jews, on the other hand, felt that, though Treitschke was wrong, Graetz was too inclined to regard the world’s history from a partisan and sectarian point of view. Whether or not this was the reason for the exclusion of Graetz from the Commission, what is interesting to note is the fact that the Commission, when it came to grips with the records, produced quite as emphatic an exposure of the medieval persecution as Graetz himself. It is, in brief, impossible for any student of the records to do otherwise.
The Commission included among its members some (conspicuously L. Geiger) who subsequently proved to be the strongest anti-Zionists. The duty and the desire to honor the dead for the inspiration of the living are not restricted to any one section of our community. There is nothing nationalistic or anti-nationalistic in our common sympathy with the Sorrows of Tatnu, in our common impulse to turn those sorrows to vital account in the present. In a soft age it is well to be reminded that Judaism is above all synonymous with hardihood. Thus these memories are cherished because “the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church.” This magnificent thought originated with Tertullian, though the precise phrase is not his. The idea conveyed by these oft-quoted words must be carefully weighed, lest we make of it a half-truth instead of a truth. No institution is founded on its dead, it is its living upholders who alone can support it. We tell these stories of the dead, because, in their day, they, living, recognized that to save themselves men must sometimes sacrifice themselves. To pay, as the price of life, the very thing that makes life worth living is an ignoble and futile bargain. The Sorrows of Tatnu, regarded as the expression of this conviction, are converted from an elegy into a pæan. But the song is discordant unless we, who sing it, are also prepared to act it, in our own way and in our own different circumstances. Den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre.
PART II