In his undefined mission to the East Deronda is, therefore, to that extent perhaps, out of harmony with the general tone of modern Jewish thought. We at least are constrained to think that more Jews of the present day would be ready to follow Mordecai in imagination than Deronda in person to Judæa. It is, nevertheless, in strict artistic unity that, shut out for five-and-twenty years from actual practical knowledge of his people, Deronda should represent the ideal rather than the idea of Judaism. Mordecai, sketched as he is supposed to be from the life, with his deep poetic yearnings, which are stayed on the threshold of action, strikes us as a truer and more typical figure than Deronda hastening to their fulfilment. And on the subject of these same vague yearnings another point suggests itself. We have heard it said that the religious belief of Mordecai centres rather in the destiny of his race than in the Being who has appointed that destiny, and we have heard it questioned whether the theism of Mordecai is sufficiently defined to be fairly representative of Jewish thought, or if Judaism indeed is also passing under that wave of Pantheism which, like the waters of old, is threatening to submerge all ancient landmarks, and to leave visible only ‘the tops of the mountains’ of revealed religion. This seems a criticism based rather on negative than on positive evidence, and derived possibly from the obvious leanings of George Eliot’s other writings, and it is, perhaps, somewhat unfair to assume that, even if, on this point, she does not sympathise with the Jews, she has any intention of colouring her picture of modern Judaism with intellectual prepossessions of her own. In the silence of Mordecai with respect to his beliefs, he represents the great body of Jews, whose religion finds expression rather in action than in formula, and who are slow to indulge in theological speculations. Mordecai was true to Jewish characteristics in the fact that his belief was concealed beneath his hopes and aspirations, but had he in any degree shared the views of the new school of sceptics, he could not have been the typical Jew, who sees in the unity of his people a symbol of the unity of his God.
The pure theism of Judaism may be said to have its poles in the anthropomorphic utterances of some of the Rabbinical writers, and in the present pantheism of the extreme German school; but we should say that the ordinary, the representative Jewish thought of the day lies between these two extremes, and, in so far as it gives expression to any belief on the subject, distinctly recognises a personal God presiding over human destiny and natural laws. There may be here and there an inquiring spirit that wanders so far afield that his attraction towards his people is lost, and with it the influence his genius should exert; but Jewish thought, if owning a somewhat nebulous conception of the Deity, slowly progressing towards one fuller and grander, cannot be said to be drifting towards Pantheism. Judaism, unlike many other faiths, has not a history and a religious belief apart,—the one not only includes and supplements, but is actually non-existent, ‘unthinkable,’ without the other. Thus to have made an earnest Jew, with the strong racial instinct of Mordecai, a weak theist, would have been an inartistic conception, and Jewish criticism has not discovered this flaw in George Eliot’s exceptional but faithful Jewish portraiture. Judging, then, from such sources as are open to us, we are led to infer that the feeling of nationality is still deeply rooted in the Jewish race, and that the religious feeling from which it is inseparable perhaps gives it the strength and depth to exist and to continue to exist without the external props of ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Dr. Kaufmann, therefore, very well expresses what appears to be the general conviction of his co-religionists, when he suggests that ‘in the very circumstance of dispersion may lie fulfilment’ (p. 87).
MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL
PRINTER AND PATRIOT
When the prophet of the Hebrews, some six-and-twenty hundred years ago, thundered forth his stirring ‘Go through! go through the gates! prepare a way, lift up a standard for the people!’ it may, without irreverence, be doubted if he foresaw how literally his charge would be fulfilled by one of his own race in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. The story of how it was done may perhaps be worth retelling, since many subjects of lesser moment have found more chroniclers.
It was in 1290 that gates, which in England had long been ominously creaking on their hinges, were deliberately swung-to, and bolted and barred by Church and State on the unhappy Jews, who on that bleak November day stood shivering along the coast. ‘Thy waves and thy billows have passed over me’ must have lost in tender allegory and gained some added force of literalness that wintry afternoon. Scarce any of the descendants of that exodus can have had share in the return. Of such of the refugees as reached the opposite ports few found foothold, and fewer still asylum. The most, and perhaps they were the most fortunate of the fifteen thousand, were quick in gaining foreign graves. Those who made for the nearest neighbouring shores of France, forgetful, or perhaps ignorant, of the recent experiences of their French brethren under Philip Augustus, lived on to earn a like knowledge for themselves, and to undergo, a few years later, another expulsion under Philip the Fair. Those who went farther fared worse, for over the German States the Imperial eagle of Rome no longer brooded, now to protect and now to prey on its victims; the struggle between the free cities and the multitudinous petty princelings was working to its climax, and whether at bitter strife, or whether pausing for a brief while to recruit their powers, landgrave and burgher, on one subject, were always of one mind. To plunder at need or to persecute at leisure, Jews were held to be handy and fair game for either side.
Far northward or far southward that ragged English mob were hardly fit to travel. Some remnant, perhaps, made effort to reach the semi-barbarous settlements in Russia and Poland, but few can have been sanguine enough to set out for distant Spain in hope of a welcome but rarely accorded to such very poor relations. And even in the Peninsula the security which Jews had hitherto experienced had by this date received several severe shocks. Two centuries later and the tide of civilisation had rolled definitely and drearily back on the soil which Jews had largely helped to cultivate, and left it bare, and yet a little longer, Portugal, become a province of Spain, had followed the cruel fashions of its suzerain.
By the close of the sixteenth century a settlement of the dispossessed Spanish and Portuguese Jews had been formed in Holland, and Amsterdam was growing into a strange Dutch likeness of a new Jerusalem, for Holland alone among the nations at this period gave a welcome to all citizens in the spirit of Virgil’s famous line, ‘Tros Rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo.’ And the refugees, who at this date claimed the hospitality of the States, were of a sort to make the Dutch in love with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. Under Moorish sway, for centuries, commerce had been but one of the pursuits open to the Jews and followed by the Jews of the Peninsula, and thus it was a crowd, not of financiers and traders only or chiefly, but of cultivated scholars, physicians, statesmen, and land-owners, whom Catholic bigotry had exiled. The thin disguise of new Christians was soon thrown off by these Jews, and they became to real Christians, to such men as Vossius and Caspar Barlæus, who welcomed them and made friends of them, a revelation of Judaism.
It was after the great auto-da-fé of January 1605, that Joseph ben Israel, with a host of other Jews, broken in health and broken in fortune, left the land which bigotry and persecution had made hideous to them, and joined the peaceful and prosperous settlement in Amsterdam. The youngest of Ben Israel’s transplanted family was the year-old Manasseh, who had been born in Lisbon a few months before their flight. He seems to have been from the first a promising and intelligent lad, and his tutor, one Isaac Uziel, who was a minister of the congregation, and a somewhat famous mathematician and physician to boot, formed a high opinion of the boy’s abilities. He did not, however, live to see them verified; when Manasseh was but eighteen the Rabbi died, and his clever pupil was thought worthy to be appointed to the vacated office. It was an honoured and an honourable, but scarcely a lucrative, post to which Manasseh thus succeeded, and the problem of living soon became further complicated by an early marriage and a young family. Manasseh had to cast about him for supplementary means of support, and he presently found it in the establishment of a printing press. Whether the type gave impetus to the pen, or whether the pen had inspired the idea of the press, is hard to decide; but it is, at least, certain that before he was twenty-five, Manasseh had found congenial work and plenty of it. He taught and he preached, and both in the school-room and in the pulpit he was useful and effective, but it was in his library that he felt really happy and at home. Manasseh was a born scholar and an omnivorous reader, bound to develop into a prolific, if not a profound, writer. The work which first established his fame bears traces of this, and is, in point of fact, less of a composition than a compilation. The first part of this book, The Conciliator, was published in 1632, after five years’ labour had been expended on it, and it is computed to contain quotations from, or references to, over 200 Hebrew, and 50 Latin and Greek authors. Its object was to harmonise (conciliador) conflicting passages in the Pentateuch, and it was written in Spanish, although it could have been composed with equal facility in any one of half-a-dozen other languages, for Manasseh was a most accomplished linguist.
Although not the first book which was issued from his press, for a completely edited prayer-book and a Hebrew grammar had been published in 1627, The Conciliator was the first work that attracted the attention of the learned world to the Amsterdam Rabbi. Manasseh had the advantage of literary connections of his own, through his wife, who was a great-granddaughter of Abarbanel—that same Isaac Abarbanel, the scholar and patriot, who in 1490 headed the deputation to Ferdinand and Isabella, which was so dramatically cut short by Torquemada.
Like The Conciliator, all Manasseh’s subsequent literary ventures met with ready appreciation, but with more appreciation, it would seem, than solid result, for his means appear to have been always insufficient for his modest wants, and in 1640 we find him seriously contemplating emigration to Brazil on a trading venture. Two members of his congregation, which, as a body, does not seem to have acted liberally towards him, came forward, however, at this crisis in his affairs, and conferred a benefit all round by establishing a college and appointing Manasseh the principal, with an adequate salary. This ready use of some portion of their wealth has made the brothers Pereira more distinguished than for its possession. Still, it must not be inferred that Manasseh had been, up to this date, a friendless, if a somewhat impecunious, student, only that, as is rather perhaps the wont of poor prophets in their own country, his admirers had had to come from the outer before they reached the inner circle. He had certainly achieved a European celebrity in the Republic of letters before his friends at Amsterdam had discovered much more than the fact that he printed very superior prayer-books. He had won over, amongst others, the prejudiced author of the Law of Nations, to own him, a Jew, for a familiar friend, before some of the wealthier heads of his own congregation had claimed a like privilege; and Grotius, then Swedish ambassador at Paris, was actually writing to him, and proffering friendly services, at the very time that the Amsterdam congregation were calmly receiving his enforced farewells. There was something, perhaps, of irony in the situation, but Manasseh, like Maimonides, had no littleness of disposition, no inflammable self-love quick to take fire; he loved his people truly enough to understand them and to make allowances, had even, perhaps, some humorous perception of the national obtuseness to native talent when unarrayed in purple and fine linen, or until duly recognised by the wearers of such.