Jewish Portraits

by Lady Katie Magnus

Johann Caspar Lavater.

‘Zurich, 25th of August 1769.’

It was a most unpleasant position for Mendelssohn. Plain speaking was not so much the fashion then as now, and defence might more easily be read as defiance. At that time the position of the Jews in all the European States was most precarious, and outspoken utterances might not only alienate the timid followers whom Mendelssohn hoped to enlighten, but probably offend the powerful outsiders whom he was beginning to influence. No man has any possible right to demand of another a public confession of faith; the conversation to which Lavater alluded as some justification for his request had been a private one, and the reference to it, moreover, was not altogether accurate. And Mendelssohn hated controversy, and held a very earnest conviction that no good cause, certainly no religious one, is ever much forwarded by it. Should he be silent, refuse to reply, and let judgment go by default? Comfort and expediency both pleaded in favour of this course, but truth was mightier and prevailed. Like unto the three who would not be ‘careful’ of their answer even under the ordeal of fire, he soon decided to testify plainly and without undue thought of consequences. Mendelssohn was not the sort to serve God with special reservations as to Rimmon. Definitely he answered his too zealous questioner in a document which is so entirely full of dignity and of reason that it is difficult to make quotations from it.[39] ‘Certain inquiries,’ he writes, ‘we finish once for all in our lives.’ ... ‘And I herewith declare in the presence of the God of truth, your and my Creator, by whom you have conjured me in your dedication, that I will adhere to my principles so long as my entire soul does not assume another nature.’ And then, emphasising the position that it is by character and not by controversy that he would have Jews shame their traducers, he goes fully and boldly into the whole question. He shows with a delicate touch of humour that Judaism, in being no proselytising faith, has a claim to be let alone. ‘I am so fortunate as to count amongst my friends many a worthy man who is not of my faith. Never yet has my heart whispered, Alas! for this good man’s soul. He who believes that no salvation is to be found out of the pale of his own church, must often feel such sighs arise in his bosom.’ ‘Suppose there were among my contemporaries a Confucius or a Solon, I could consistently with my religious principles love and admire the great man, but I should never hit on the idea of converting a Confucius or a Solon. What should I convert him for? As he does not belong to the congregation of Jacob, my religious laws were not made for him, and on doctrines we should soon come to an understanding. Do I think there is a chance of his being saved? I certainly believe that he who leads mankind on to virtue in this world cannot be damned in the next.’ ‘We believe ... that those who regulate their lives according to the religion of nature and of reason are called virtuous men of other nations, and are, equally with our patriarchs, the children of eternal salvation.’ ‘Whoever is not born conformable to our laws has no occasion to live according to them. We alone consider ourselves bound to acknowledge their authority, and this can give no offence to our neighbours.’ He refuses to criticise Bonnet’s work in detail on the ground that in his opinion ‘Jews should be scrupulous in abstaining from reflections on the predominant religion’; but nevertheless, whilst repeating his ‘so earnest wish to have no more to do with religious controversy,’ the honesty of the man asserts itself in boldly adding, ‘I give you at the same time to understand that I could, very easily, bring forward something in refutation of M. Bonnet’s work.’

Mendelssohn’s reply brought speedily, as it could scarcely fail to do, an ample and sincere apology from Lavater, a ‘retracting’ of the challenge, an earnest entreaty to forgive what had been ‘importunate and improper’ in the dedicator, and an expression of ‘sincerest respect’ and ‘tenderest affection’ for his correspondent. Mendelssohn’s was a nature to have more sympathy with the errors incidental to too much, than to too little zeal, and the apology was accepted as generously as it was offered. And here ended, so far as the principals were concerned, this somewhat unique specimen of a literary squabble. A crowd of lesser writers, unfortunately, hastened to make capital out of it; and a bewildering mist of nondescript and pedantic compositions soon darkened the literary firmament, obscuring and vulgarising the whole subject. They took ‘sides’ and gave ‘views’ of the controversy; but Mendelssohn answered none and read as few as possible of these publications. Still the strain and worry told on his sensitive and peace-loving nature, and he did not readily recover his old elasticity of temperament.

In 1778 Lessing’s wife died, and his friend’s trouble touched deep chords both of sympathy and of memory in Mendelssohn. Yet more cruelly were they jarred when, two years later, Lessing himself followed, and an uninterrupted friendship of over thirty years was thus dissolved. Lessing and Mendelssohn had been to each other the sober realisation of the beautiful ideal embodied in the drama of Nathan der Weise. ‘What to you makes me seem Christian makes of you the Jew to me,’ each could most truly say to the other. They helped the world to see it too, and to recognise the Divine truth that ‘to be to the best thou knowest ever true is all the creed.’

The death of his friend was a terrible blow to Mendelssohn. ‘After wrinkles come,’ says Mr. Lowell, in likening ancient friendships to slow-growing trees, ‘few plant, but water dead ones with vain tears.’ In this case, the actual pain of loss was greatly aggravated by some publications which appeared shortly after Lessing’s death, impugning his sincerity and religious feeling. Germany, as Goethe once bitterly remarked, ‘needs time to be thankful.’ In the first year or two following Lessing’s death it was, perhaps, too early to expect gratitude from his country for the lustre his talents had shed on it. Some of the pamphlets would make it seem that it was too early even for decency. Mendelssohn vigorously took up the cudgels for his dead friend; too vigorously, perhaps, since Kant remarked that ‘it is Mendelssohn’s fault, if Jacobi (the most notorious of the assailants) should now consider himself a philosopher.’ To Mendelssohn’s warmhearted, generous nature it would, however, have been impossible to remain silent when one whom he knew to be tolerant, earnest, and sincere in the fullest sense of those words of highest praise, was accused of ‘covert Spinozism’; a charge which again was broadly rendered, by these wretched, ignorant interpreters of a language they failed to understand, as atheism and hypocrisy.

But this was his last literary work. It shows no sign of decaying powers; it is full of pathos, of wit, of clear close reasoning, and of brilliant satire; yet nevertheless it was his monument as well as his friend’s. He took the manuscript to his publisher in the last day of the year 1785; and in the first week of the New Year 1786, still only fifty-six years old, he quietly and painlessly died. That last work seems to make a beautiful and fitting end to his life; a life which truly adds a worthy stanza to what Herder calls ‘the greatest poem of all time—the history of the Jews.’

THE NATIONAL IDEA IN JUDAISM

Once find a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy; and undoubtedly to get at any true notion of character, one must discover these. They may be covered close with conventionalities, or jealously hidden, like buried treasures, from unsympathetic eyes; but the patient search is well worth while, since it is his ideals—and not his words nor his deeds, which a thousand circumstances influence and decide—which show us the real man as known to his Maker. And true as this is of the individual, it is true in a deeper and larger sense of the nations, and most true of all of that people with whom for centuries speech was impolitic and action impossible. With articulate expression so long denied to them, the national ideals must be always to the student of history the truest revelation of Judaism; and it is curious and interesting to trace their development, and to recognise the crown and apex of them all in battlefield and in ‘Vineyard,’ in Ghetto and in mart, unchanged among the changes, and practically the same as in the days of the desert. The germ was set in the wilderness, when, amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai, a crowd of frightened, freshly rescued slaves were made ‘witnesses’ to a living God, and guardians of a ‘Law’ which demonstrated His existence. Very new and strange, and but dimly understanded of the people it must all have been. ‘The lights of sunset and of sunrise mixed.’ The fierce vivid glow under which they had bent and basked in Egypt had scarcely faded, when they were bid look up in the grey dawn of the desert to receive their trust. There was worthy stuff in the descendants of the man who had left father and friends and easy, sensuous idolatry to follow after an ideal of righteousness; and they who had but just escaped from the bondage of centuries, rose to the occasion. They accepted their mission; ‘All that the Lord has spoken will we do,’ came up a responsive cry from ‘all the people answering together,’ and in that supreme moment the ill-fed and so recently ill-treated groups were transformed into a nation. ‘I will make of thee a great people’; ‘Through thee shall all families of the earth be blessed’; the meaning of such predictions was borne in upon them in one bewildering flash, and in that flash the national idea of Judaism found its dawn; they, the despised and the downtrodden, were to become trustees of civilisation.

As the glow died down, however, a very rudimentary sort of civilisation the wilderness must have presented to these builders of the temples and the treasure cities by the Nile, and to the vigorous, resourceful Hebrew women. As day after day, and year after year, the cloud moved onward, darkening the road which it directed, as they gathered the manna and longed for the fleshpots, it could have been only the few and finer spirits among those listless groups who were able to discern that a civilisation based upon the Decalogue, shorn though it was of all present pleasantness and ease, had a promise about it that was lacking to a culture, ‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’ It was life reduced to its elements; Sinai and Pisgah stood so far apart, and such long level stretches of dull sand lay between the heights. One imagines the women, skilled like their men-folk in all manner of cunning workmanship, eagerly, generously ransacking their stores of purple and fine linen to decorate the Tabernacle, and spinning and embroidering with a desperately delighted sense of recovered refinements, which, as much perhaps as their fervour of religious enthusiasm, led them to bring their gifts till restrained ‘from bringing.’ The trust was accepted though in the wilderness, but grudgingly, with many a faint-hearted protest, and to some minds, in some moods, slavery must have seemed less insistent in its demands than trusteeship.