The Jews of Barnow: Stories

by Karl Emil Franzos

Franzos's stories exhibit those barbarities even now practiced under the sacred name of religion. There are Jews who are not merely galled by the opprobrium which in some places is still attached to their race, but are sincerely desirous of removing it. Franzos, because he describes what is the iron law of Talmudical or rabbinical tradition, shows how superstition degrades the man. It is difficult at this day, when research and modern methods of criticism have thrown such a flood of light on the past, to realize the mental condition of that vast body of Jews at the time of the commencement of the Christian era and the destruction of Jerusalem. The whole national and municipal administration of the country was in the hands of the priesthood. Every law, every ordinance, every police and sanitary regulation, became a religious obligation. Every action in every man's family, whether social or political, was regulated for him by rules handed down from former generations, and these rules were barnacled by conventionalisms. For his guidance in the most commonplace actions, a Jew had perforce recourse to his rabbi. As must always be the case, when municipal administration emanates from a church, religious observances override legal or social obligations. With the crucifixion of Christ came that hatred of Jews, the intensity of which can only now be measured by its continuance. The exclusion of Jews from the society and communion of mankind petrified into marble-like hardness all those existing traditions which guided the Jew's methods of life. Forbidden by every conceivable form of oppression and disability from accompanying the rest of mankind on their march toward a higher civilization, every advance, mental or physical, denied them, it was as if a hot iron had been seared over the bloody wound which had lopped them off from the family of nations. It is a wonder that all future growth was not arrested. As to the charge of tribalism (the writer acknowledging that the vast majority of Jews believe in it), and even according some unknown and undefined power as derivable from tribalism, to make a charge of this is but to repeat the old fable of the wolf and the lamb.

All that intelligent Jews are doing to-day is to take advantage of their freedom. They are trying to rid themselves of that incubus which has been weighing them down. That large and increasing number of Reformers and Reform synagogues, springing up in the large cities of Western Europe and the United States; the decadence, the difficulty of maintaining synagogues of pure orthodox Jews; the complaints, the lamentations which are constantly heard from the mouths of orthodox ministers and their organs, over what they call "the neglect of religious observance," show that the time of change has come. Even among some of the orthodox, the gross superstitions accompanying the offerings (auction-sales of God's blessings, knocked down to the highest bidder) have been for the major part abolished. Efforts are continually made to modify the ritual by denationalizing the older-fashioned form of prayer, and giving it more of that spiritual life which Maimonides first developed. Dietary and physical observances, which the Eastern Jew borrowed or adopted from the nations which once surrounded him, are being expunged.

What is the true reason for this change, a change which, born in America and in England, is now commencing to exert some slight influence in Germany? The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Every act of wrong done to Jews rendered them the more rigid in their belief, causing at the same time differentiation in their surroundings. Whenever, through the operation of better, more humane laws, oppression was removed, Jews became more like the men among whom they lived. Why should M. Renan find fault with the French Jew, and take the Parisian Israelite as the type of some Hebraic Athenian? Under normal conditions men float in the general current, at about equal depths, for the social law of specific gravity remains forever the same. Those sociologists are ignorant of their calling who demand, then, of the Jew an instantaneous reversal of an existence formed by his surroundings, and a forgetting of the great belief which has been burned into his heart by the fires of thousands of years.

To the American Jew, "The Jews of Barnow" shows very clearly a great many things he may have been ignorant about. Jews who came to this country fifty years since, who by thrift, honesty, and intelligence, have secured an ample store of the world's goods, are prone to forget their early surroundings, or hesitate to tell their American children of that bigotry which existed in their European birth-places. They have educated their children in their own creed; but American school-boys or school-girls have had one inestimable blessing, the contact with an outer world and the opportunity of thinking for themselves. Education and superstition can never have a co-existence. These fathers would feel ashamed, then, did they tell their children the absurdities which they once were taught. That one story of Franzos's, "The Child of Atonement," is a revelation. As an American Jew reads it, he might be inclined to deem the Rabbi of Sadagóra a Torquemada, or that it was a clever creation, having no existence save in the brain of the romance-writer. But it is not a fancy-drawn picture, but had once actual being. Such stories as "The Child of Atonement" and "The Nameless Graves" can not be read by any intelligent Jew without the burning brand of shame rising to his cheeks. As to the truthfulness of many portions of Franzos's book, unfortunately there can be no possible doubt. There may not be many Rabbis of Sadagóra, but excommunication, the cherem, that social inquisition, is as prevalent in Russia and Poland, in 1882, as it was a thousand years ago. The Rabbi of Sadagóra of Franzos's book is dead, but his son actually lives, exercises perhaps not the same cruelties, but attributes to himself the identical miraculous functions as did his wicked father before him, and still this younger medicine-man has his followers.

"The Jews of Barnow" should make the existence of a Rabbi of Sadagóra an impossibility. Jewish women who read "The Jews of Barnow" will be amazed to learn how degraded is the condition of their sex in Eastern Europe. That one horrible text in their prayer-book, said by the men, "Thank God that thou hast not made me a woman," belongs to the period of the coarsest barbarity. It is incorporated in innumerable volumes, now perhaps being printed. Educated Jews who read this vicious paragraph, who think of mother, wife, and daughter, feel the degradation of it, and loathe its interpretation. We can not agree with Frances Power Cobbe in the general application of this sentence of hers, that "something appears to be lacking in Jewish feeling concerning women. Too much of Oriental materialism still lingers. Too little of Occidental chivalry and romance has yet arisen." This might be applicable for the East, even in its most exaggerated sense, but is hardly just to the West. Still, as Franzos tells us in his book, girls are sold to men, and become, it is true, wives, but with as little ceremony as if they were Circassians.

The oldest source of any religion is not the purest, "If it be an historical religion, fanaticism always assumes the form of a return to the primitive type." The ultra-orthodox Jew is ruled by the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem, the most superstitious, the most ignorant of men. This sect still fights for power. Even the purity of the Ashkenazim's belief, monotheism, the only thing left it, must be taken with suspicion, because the sanity or sincerity of any Cabalist is to be doubted.

There are little, if any, differences existing in the social strata, educated or uneducated, which uphold Christian beliefs. If Rome is the fountain-head of Catholicity, Jerusalem ought to be the true source whence Hebraism flows. The Holy City of the Jews does exert its influence over millions of the ultra-orthodox, but for educated Israelites has no more weight than have the decrees of any miracle-working rabbi who holds forth in Cracow. If there be in Russia, Finland, Scandinavia, Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Turkey, some five and a half million Jews, and in England, France, and the United States, half a million more, what a vast proportion are steeped in darkness!

What does as much as anything else to injure the Jew, and to make mankind his enemy, is that belief he entertains that he is the race "God cherishes most." This is, indeed, tribalism. Selected by the Creator as his special favorites, pious Jews think that to them "all blessings shall be given." Once it was believed that a Jew's brain was made of a finer material, that he was less subject to dementia, than others. Some very sad personal observations assure the writer that such is not the case. If anything, in that struggle for wealth in which Jews engage in the large cities of the United States, they have children more prone to feeble-mindedness than Christians. The close-marriage system of the Jews may in a certain measure induce degeneracy by exhaustion of the original stock, for the laws of nature are inexorable, and act alike in Christian or Mohammedan. That preservation of his race is something the Jew most particularly prides himself about. The Parsee, who for so long a time has had a religion apart, presents the precise condition of an isolated existence which the Jew is so proud of. Morality, continence, the sacred character of the marriage-ties, do in a certain measure preserve the Jewish race, but the miraculous in such fractional existence has nothing marvelous about it. This self-laudation of race, that "pride-belief," is the most difficult to eradicate, for it has been the consolation of an oppressed race.

What, then, is reform, this Jewish reform? It is pure, unadulterated monotheism. It believes that men, though they may expound religion, can not create it. It looks on the Talmud, as did Emanuel Deutsch, as the most poetical, the most confusing of chronicles, but utterly worthless for the guidance of any human being—a curiosity, patched over, embroidered, by a thousand different hands, something to be placed in a cabinet, to be gazed on, but as practically useless for human instruction as would be the Arthurian romances. Yahya ibn Main was a worshiper of the Prophet, and labored all his life to purify the text of his Koran, and thus he is recorded to have said: "I wrote down numbers of traditions under the dictation of liars, and made use of the paper for heating my ovens. I thus obtained at least one advantage—my bread was well baked." One saying in the Talmud is applicable to it: "They dived into the ocean and brought up a potsherd." Oh, the olla-podrida of nonsense in it! And still it shapes the lives of millions of Jews; it warps their ways, for it is almost their only book.

The Reformer is no iconoclast, he is educated enough not to wish to destroy this relic of a past, but he is striving to expunge it, to deprive the Talmud from exerting its baleful influence. The reformed Jew believes in a God of mercy—one of love. He thinks that his Creator is not a vengeful being. He does not believe that Christ was the Son of God, doubts even a coming Messiah, but thinks that modern teachings have done for man's immortal soul what the older lawgivers did for grosser flesh and blood only. What the Reformer desires most especially is that he shall have readers, clergymen (call them what you please), who shall not only be familiar with the language they live in, but have the highest, the very highest education, be in fact the equals of those who preach to their Christian friends. These Reformers sicken over those attempts of crass ignorance which, through the borrowed sanctity of a salaried office, assume the direction of educated intelligence. The majority of these Reformers are utterly indifferent to dietary regulations. Can peace with God, a resurrection of the soul after the death of the body, entrance to heaven, have anything to do with the eating of a mollusk? Could the great Creator have made food for one man which another dare not eat? Trivialities, mixed up in religion, debase it, weaken it, sap it to its very vitals. A stronger, more hearty belief must emancipate itself from puerilities. A reformed Jew can not be a materialist, though he may strip religion of its symbolisms.