The conquest of Canaan was the next experience, and as sinfulness and idolatry were relentlessly washed away in rivers of blood, one doubts if the impressionable descendants of Jacob, to whom it was given to overcome, might not perchance have preferred to endure. But such choice was not given to them; the trust had to be realised before it could be transmitted, and its value tested by its cost. With Palestine at last in possession of the chosen people, this civilisation of which they were the guardians by slow degrees became manifest. Samuel lived it, and David sang it, and Isaiah preached it, and the nation clung to it, individual men and women, stumbling and failing often, but dying each, when need came, a hundred deaths in its defence; perhaps finding it on occasion less difficult to die for an idea than to live up to it.
The securities were shifted, the terms of the trusteeship changed when the people of the Land became the people of the Book. The civilisation which they guarded grew narrower in its issues and more limited in its outlook, till, as the years rolled into the centuries, it was hard to recognise the ‘witnesses’ of God in the hunted outcasts of man. Yet to the student of history, who reads the hieroglyph of the Egyptian into the postcard of to-day, it is not difficult to see the civilisation of Sinai shining under the folds of the gaberdine or of the san benito. It was taught in the schools and it was lived in the homes, and the Ghetto could not altogether degrade it, nor the Holy Office effectually disguise it. Jews sank sometimes to the lower level of the sad lives they led, but Judaism remained unconquerably buoyant. Judaism, as they believed in it, was a Personal Force making for righteousness, a Law which knew no change, the Promise of a period when the earth should be filled with the knowledge of the Lord; and the ‘witnesses’ stuck to this their trust, through good repute and through evil repute, with a simple doggedness which disarms all superficial criticism. The glamour of the cause, through which a Barcochba could loom heroic to an Akiba, the utter absence of self-consciousness or of self-seeking, which made Judas in his fight for freedom pin the Lord’s name on his flag, and which, with the kingdom lost, made the scrolls of the Law the spoil with which Ben Zaccai retreated—this was at the root of the national idea, and its impersonality gives the secret of its strength, ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name!’ This vivid sense of being the trustees of civilisation was wholly dissociated from any feeling of conceit either in the leaders or in the rank and file of the Jewish nation. It is curious indeed to realise how so intense a conviction of the survival of the fittest could be held in so intensely unmodernised a spirit.
The idea of their trusteeship was a sheet anchor to the Jews as the waves and the billows passed over them. In the fifteen hundred years’ tragedy of their history there have been no entr’actes of frenzied stampede or of revolutionary, revengeful conspiracy. A resolute endurance, which, characteristically enough, rarely approaches asceticism, marks the depth and strength and buoyancy of the national idea. Trustees of civilisation might not sigh nor sing in solitudes; nor with the feeling so keen that ‘a thousand years in Thy sight are but as a day,’ was it worth while to plot or plan against the oppressors of the moment. Time was on their side, and ‘that which shapes it to some perfect end.’ And this attitude explains, possibly, some unattractive phases of it, since however honestly the individual consciousness may be absorbed in a national conscience, yet the individual will generally, in some way, manage to express himself, and the self is not always quite up to the ideal, nor indeed is it always in harmony with those who would interpret it. When a David dances before the Ark it needs other than a daughter of Saul to understand him. There have been Jews in David’s case, their enthusiasm mocked at; and there have been Jews indifferent to their trust, and Jews who have betrayed it, and Jews too, and these not a few, who have pushed it into prominence with undue display. The infinite changes of circumstance and surrounding in Jewish fortunes no less than differences in individual character have induced a considerable divergence in the practical politics of the national idea. The persecuted have been exclusive over it, and the prosperous careless; it has been vulgarised by superstition, and ignored by indifferentism, till modern ‘rational’ thinkers now and again question whether Palestine be indeed the goal of Jewish separateness, and make it a matter for academic discussion whether ‘Jews’ mean a sect of cosmopolitan citizens with religious customs more or less in common, or a people whose religion has a national origin and a national purpose in its observances. With questioners such as these, Revelation, possibly, would not be admitted as sound evidence in reply, else the promise, ‘Ye shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,’ would, one might think, show a design that ritual by itself does not fulfil. It was no sect with ‘tribal’ customs, but a ‘nation’ and a ‘kingdom’ who were to be ‘holy to the Lord.’ But though texts may be inadmissible with those who prefer their sermons in stones, yet the records of the ages are little less impartial and unimpassioned than the records of the rocks, and doubters might find an answer in the insistent tones of history when she tells of the results of occasional unnatural divorce between religion and nationality among Jews.
There were times not a few, whilst their own judges ruled, and whilst their own kings reigned in Palestine, when, with a firm grip on the land, but a loose hold on the law, Israel was well-nigh lost and absorbed in the idolatrous peoples by whom it was surrounded; when the race, which was ceasing to worship at the national altars, was in danger of ceasing to exist as a nation. Exile taught them to value by loss what was possession. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ was the passionate cry in Babylon. Was it perchance the feeling that the land was ‘strange,’ which gave that new fervour to the songs, choking off utterance and finding adequate expression only in the Return? Did Judas, the Maccabee, understand something of this as he led his patriotic, ‘zealous’ troops to victory? Did Mendelssohn forget it when, nineteen hundred years later, he emancipated his people from the results of worse than Syrian oppression, at the cost of so many, his own children among the rest, shaking off memories and duties as lightly as they shook off restraints? Over and over again, in the wonderful history of the Jews, does religion without nationality prove itself as impossible as nationality without religion to serve for a sustaining force in Judaism. The people who, while ‘the city of palm-trees’ was yet their own, could set up strange gods in the groves, were not one whit more false to their faith, nor more harmful to their people, than those later representatives of the opposite type, Hellenists, as history calls them, who built a temple, and read the law and observed the precepts, whilst their very priests changed their good Jewish names for Greek-sounding ones in contemptuous and contemptible depreciation of their Jewish nationality. One inclines, perhaps, to accentuate the facts of history and to moralise over the might-have-beens where these fit into a theory; but so much as this at least seems indisputable—that those who would dissociate the national from the religious, or the religious from the national element in Judaism attempt the impossible. The ideal of the Jews must always be ‘from Zion shall come forth instruction, and the Word of God from Jerusalem’; and to this end—‘that all people of the earth may know Thy name, as do thy people Israel.’ This is the goal of Jewish separateness. The separateness may have been part of the Divine plan, as distinctive practices and customs are due in the first place to the Divine command; but they are also and none the less a means of strengthening the national character of the Jews. Jewish religion neither ‘happens’ to have a national origin, nor does Jewish nationality ‘happen’ to have religious customs. The Jewish nation has become a nation and has been preserved as a nation for the distinct purpose of religion. This, as we read it, is the lesson of history. And this too is its consolation. The faithful few who see the fulfilment of history and of prophecy in a restored and localised nationality—a Jerusalem reinstated as the joy of the whole earth; the careless many who, in comfortable complacency, are well content to await it indefinitely, in dispersion; the loyal many, who believe that a political restoration would be a retrogressive step, narrowing and embarrassing the wider issues; the children of light and the children of the world, the spiritual and the spirituel element in Israel, alike, if unequally, have each their share in spreading the civilisation of Sinai, as surely as ‘fire and hail and snow and mist and stormy wind’ all ‘fulfil His word.’ The seed that was sown in the sands of the desert has germinated through the ages, and its fruition is foretold. The promise to the Patriarch, ‘I will make of thee a great nation,’ foreshadowed that his descendants were to be trustees, ‘through them shall all families of the earth be blessed.’ There are those who would read into this national idea a taint of arrogance or of exclusiveness, as there are some scientifically-minded folks, a trifle slow perhaps, to apply their own favoured dogma of evolution, who can see in the Exodus only a capriciously selected band of slaves, led forth to serve a tribal deity. But the history of the Jews, which is inseparable from the religion of the Jews, rebukes those who would thus halt mid-way and stumble over the evidences. It lifts the veil, it flashes the light on dark places, it unriddles the weary puzzle of the travailing ages, leaving only indifferentism unsolvable, as it shows clear how the Lord, the Spirit of all flesh, the universal Father, brought Israel out of Egypt and gave them name and place to be His witnesses, and the means He chose whereby ‘all families of the earth should be blessed.’
THE STORY OF A FALSE PROPHET
Each age has its illusions—illusions which succeeding ages with a recovered sense of sanity are often apt to record as the most incomprehensible of crazes. ‘That poor will-o’-the-wisp mistaken for a shining light! Oh, purblind race of miserable men!’ is the quick, contemptuous comment of a later, clearer-sighted generation. But one may question if such comment be always just. May not the narrow vision, too unseeing to be deceived, betoken a yet more hopeless sort of blindness than the wide-eyed gaze which, fixed on stars, blunders into quagmires? ‘Where there is no vision,’ it is written, ‘the people perish’; and though stars may prove mirage and quagmires clinging mud, yet a long rank of shabby, shadowy heroes, who, more or less wittingly, have had the hard fate to lead a multitude to destruction, seems to suggest that such deluded multitudes are no dumb, driven cattle, but, capable of being led astray, have also the faculty of being led into the light. And if this, to our consolation, be the teaching of history anent those whom it impartially dubs impostors, then wasted loves and wasted beliefs lose something of their hopeless sadness, and in the transfiguration even failures and false prophets are seen to have a place and use.
No more typical instance could be found of the heights and depths of a people’s power of illusion—and that people one which in its modern development might be lightly held proof against most illusions—than the suggestive career of a Messiah of the seventeenth century supplies to us. Undying hope, it has been said, is the secret of vision. When hope is dead the vision perchance takes unto itself the awful condition of death, corruption, for thus only could it have come to pass that that same people, which had given an Isaiah to the world, under the stress of inexorable and inevitable circumstance brought forth a Sabbathai Zevi.
‘Of all mortal woes,’ so declared the weeping Persian to Thersander at the banquet, ‘the greatest is this: with many thoughts and wise, to have no power.’ Under the crushing burden of that mortal woe the Jewish race had rested restlessly for over sixteen weary centuries. Power had passed from the dispossessed people with the fall of their garrisoned Temple, and under dispersion and persecution their ‘many thoughts and wise’ had grown dumb, or shrill, or cruelly inarticulate. The kingdom of priests and the kinsmen of the Maccabees had dwindled to a community of pedants and pedlars. Into the schools of the prophets had crept the casuistries and subtleties of the Kabbalists; and descendants of those who had been skilful in all manner of workmanship now haggled over wares which they lacked skill or energy to produce. East and west the doom of Herodotus was drearily apparent, and to an onlooker it must have seemed incredible that these poor pariahs, content to be contemned, were of the same race which had sung the Lord’s songs and had fought the Lord’s battles. In the seventeenth century the fires of the Inquisition were still smouldering, and Jewish victims of the Holy Office, naked and charred, or swathed and unrecognisable, were fleeing hither and thither from its flames, across the inhospitable continent of Europe. Nearer to the old scenes was no nearer to happiness; the farthest removed indeed from any present realisation of ancient prosperity seemed those wanderers who had turned their tired, sad faces to the East. The land on which Moses had looked from Pisgah; for which, remembering Zion, the exiles in Babylon had wept; for which a later generation, as unaided as undaunted, had fought and died—this land, their heritage, had passed utterly from the possession of the Jews. ‘Thou waterest its ridges: Thou settlest the furrows thereof.’ Seemingly out of that ownership too the land had passed, for His ridges had run red with blood, and in His furrows the Romans had sown salt. From the very first century after Christ, Jews had been grudged a foothold in Judæa, and from the date of the Crusades any dwelling-place in their own land was definitely denied to the outcast race. A new meaning had been read into that ancient phrase, ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ The Holy City had come, in cruel, narrow limitation, to mean to its conquerors the Holy Sepulchre, all other of its memories ‘but a dream and a forgetting.’ And now, although the fervour of the Crusades had died away, and the stone stood at the mouth of the Sepulchre as undisturbed and almost as unheeded of the outside world as when the two Marys kept their lonely vigil, yet enough still of all that terribly wasted wealth of enthusiasm survived to make the Holy Land difficult even of approach to its former rulers. Through all those centuries, for over sixteen hundred slow, sad, stormy years, this powerless people had borne their weary burden, ‘the greatest of all mortal woes.’ Occasionally, for a moment as it were, the passions of repulsed patriotism and of pent-up humanity would break bounds, and seek expression in a form which scholars could scarce interpret or priests control. With their law grudged to them and their land denied, ‘their many thoughts and wise,’ under cruel restraint, were dwindling into impotent dreams or flashing out in wild unlikeness of wisdom.
It was in the summer of the year 1666 that some such incomprehensible craze seemed to possess the ancient city of Smyrna. The sleepy stillness of the narrow streets was jarred by a thousand confused and unaccustomed sounds. The slow, smooth current of Eastern life seemed of a sudden stirred into a whirl of excited eddies. Men and women in swift-changing groups were sobbing, praying, laughing in a breath, their quick gesticulations in curious contrast with their sober, shabby garments, and their patient, pathetic eyes. And strangest thing of all, it was on a prophet in his own country, in the very city of his birth, that this extraordinary enthusiasm of greeting was being expended, and the name of the prophet was Sabbathai, son of Mordecai. Mordecai Zevi, the father, had dwelt among these townsfolk of Smyrna, dealing in money and dying of gout, and Sabbathai Zevi, the son, had been brought up among them, and not so many years since had been banished by them. In that passionately absorbed crowd there must have been many a middle-aged man old enough to remember how this turbulent son of the commonplace old broker had been sent forth from the city, and the gates shut on him in anger and contempt; and some there surely must have been who knew of his subsequent career. But if it were so, there were none sane enough to deduce a moral. It was in the character of Messiah and Deliverer that Sabbathai had come back to Smyrna, and long-dead hope, quickened into life at the very words, was strong enough to strangle a whole host of resistant memories, though, in truth, there was a great deal to forget. It had been at the instance of the religious authorities of the place, whose susceptibilities were shocked by the utterance of opinions advanced enough to provoke a tumult in the synagogue, that the young man had been expelled from the city. To young and ardent spirits in that crowd it is possible that this early experience of Sabbathai bore a very colourable imitation of martyrdom, and the life in exile that followed it may have appealed to their imaginations as the most fitting of preparations for a prophet. But then unfortunately Sabbathai’s life in exile had not been that of a hermit, nor altogether of a sort to fit into any exalted theories. Authentic news had certainly come of him as a traveller in the Morea and in Syria, and rumours had been rife concerning travelling companions. Three successive marriages, it was said, had taken place, followed in each instance by unedifying quarrels and divorce. Of the ladies little was known; but it came to be generally affirmed, on what, if sifted, perhaps amounted to insufficient evidence, that each wife was more marvellously handsome than her predecessor. And then, for a while, these lingering distorted sounds from the outside world had died out in the sordid stillness of their lives, to rise again suddenly, after long interval, in startling echoes. The wildest of rumours was all at once in the air, heralding this much-married, banished disputant of the synagogue, this turbulent, troublesome Sabbathai, as Messiah of the Jews. What he had done, what he would do, what he could do, was repeated from mouth to mouth with an ever-growing exactness of exaggeration which modern methods of transmitting news could hardly surpass. One soberly circumstantial tale was of a ship cruising off the north coast of Scotland (of all places in the world!), with sail and cordage of purest silk, her ensign the Twelve Tribes, and her crew, consistently enough, speaking Hebrew. A larger and certainly more geographically minded contingent of converts was said to be marching across the deserts of Arabia to proclaim the millennium. This host was identified as the lost Ten Tribes, and Sabbathai, mounted on a celestial lion with a bridle of serpents, was, or was shortly to be—for the reports were sometimes a little conflicting—at the head of this imposing multitude, and about to inaugurate a new and glorious Temple, which, all ready built and beautified, would straightway descend from heaven, and in which the services were likely to become popular, since all fasts were forthwith to be changed into festivals.
The rumours, it must be confessed, were all of a terribly materialistic sort, and one wonders somewhat sadly over Sabbathai’s proclamation, questioning if the promise of ‘dominion over the nations,’ or the permission ‘to do every day what is usual for you to do only on new moons,’ roused most of the long-repressed human nature in those weary pariahs, the ‘nation of the Jews,’ to whom it was roundly addressed. All the cities of Turkey, an old chronicler tells us, ‘were full of expectation.’ Business in many places was altogether suspended. The belief in a reign of miracle was extended to daily needs, and trust in such needs being somehow supplied was esteemed as an essential test of general faith in the new order of things. So none laboured, but all prayed, and purified themselves, and performed strange penances. The rich people grew profuse and penitent, and poverty, always honourable among Jews, came in those strange days to be fashionable.