CHAPTER XXVI.
CONCERNING JEWISH LITERATURE AND LITERARY MEN.

1. Starlight.—The darkness which closed in upon the Jews when Jerusalem fell, in the year 70, lasted for 1,500 years. Through all those long centuries the clouds of prejudice and of persecution hung low and lowering over all the countries in which Jews dwelt, and it was only in Spain, and for a comparatively short interval, that there was any break in the gloom. Through all those centuries, the race was outcast and alien, under the lash of the Church and under the ban of the State. Church and State changed faiths and names, old dynasties and old beliefs gave place to new, boundaries were shifted, and civilisation took fresh forms, but the darkness that had fallen on the Jews when Titus ruled overpagan Rome, never lifted in all those centuries, save for that brief period during the Mahomedan occupation of Spain. In the dense gloom, the word of God was, to His ‘witnesses,’ in literal truth what David had declared it should be, ‘a lamp unto their feet.’ It did not keep them from stumbling, but it saved them from being utterly lost and cast away in the terrible thick darkness. Burdens were heavy, and a ‘lamp unto the feet’ was sorely needed, for men stooped under their loads, and their eyes looked mostly earthwards. But also, from time to time, through that long night of sorrow, stars, as it were, rose on the black background, giving, to those who could look up, some trembling and uncertain light on their weary way. Good men, and wise men, and successful men, at different periods, and in different countries, stood out from the ranks, and made the name of Jew a name of honour, and not of reproach. Some of these men were like shooting stars, just raising a bright swift track of light, and dying down as quickly, having lit up only their own pathway. And some gave forth but tiny rays, yet, grouped together in patient scholarship, these unnamed units gradually grew into useful constellations. And just a few, in their great gift of shining, were like fixed stars, and the wide white light of their wisdom endures even unto these days.

2. How the Stars shone.—But every star has its own especial orbit. The men who made starlight in the long night of Jewish history were not of the sort who mostly make epochs in national history. It has been well said that there are some great men, who are not doers nor speakers, but influences.Among a dispersed people there was small room for doers or for speakers. For warriors or for statesmen there was no place, and but little opportunity for ‘heroes’ in any generally received sense of the word, and thus, the names of eminent Jews, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, include no doers of startling deeds. But if there be heroism in endurance, in patient fulfilment of duty when desire is altogether unsatisfied, in earnest endeavour for good, with evil rampant all round, then these Jewish men lived heroic lives, although it was life lived from within rather than from without. They worked on without hurry and without rest, and in trust when hope failed. Their outward action on passing events was small, but the impression they made on the spirit and intellect of their time was great, and on the liturgy and the literature of their people they have left enduring marks. And truly, as the Bible says, ‘the light is sweet.’ The mere light cast on dark places by the sight of men living clean, and wholesome, and scholarly lives, must have been doubly ‘sweet’ in those dark days when all refining and ennobling influences were so sadly needed.

3. Piyutim.—Apart from the work of the schools, which found its outcome in the Talmud,[29] the earliest Jewish literature of post-Biblical times comes to us in the form of Piyutim.Piyut is derived from a Greek word which is rendered poet.[30] A large numberof Piyutim are in existence, which range in dates of composition over some thousand years, and represent contributions from all parts of Europe. They are chiefly found in the Machzor (prayer-book for festivals—literally cycle) of the various minhagim, or rituals. In this store there is a whole section of what are called Selichoth, or penitential poems. The word Selichoth comes from the Hebrew [a]‏סְלִחָה‎], meaning forgiveness, and the theme of most of these singers of the synagogue is of hope for divine forgiveness, founded on the memory of human sorrow. The Selichoth, and many of the Piyutim, tell a never-ceasing tale of persecution and oppression. They take the form sometimes of dirge and sometimes of elegy, and now and again the recital of an actual experience becomes poetic through its very literalness. ‘We are abused,’ says one Selichah, ‘spat upon, treated like mire in the street.’ ‘We are trampled upon like mire, seethed in the caldron, threshed like straw, and crushed as in a winepress,’ begins another. Sometimes the suffering teaches strength, and a poet protests in all his pain,‘Because I fear the one Lord God, I fear amongst the many—none,’[31] or counsels his companions in misery to ‘endure dispraise for fearing Him whose name is One.And never be through idols raised to power and might.’[32] But sometimes the undoubting belief in God which is breathed forth in these productions, takes, as is hardly unnatural under the terrible circumstances, an expression of passionate appeal to Him for active interference, oreven of a more distinct cry for divine vengeance on the ‘tyrants and their race.’

The earlier of the Piyutim are quite rugged and rhymeless, and about many of them there is considerably more suggestion of martyrdom than of minstrelsy. It must have been difficult for the Chazan of the synagogue to make this so-called poetry form any musical part of the service. And here it is as well to note that the familiar title Chazan is derived from the Hebrew word [a]‏חָזָה‎], to see, and was used in the same sense as Episcopus, bishop, which means literally inspector, or superintendent. The [a]‏חַזָן‎] of the synagogue, in addition to other duties, read or intoned the prayers, and in course of time the reader or singer became, and was called, the minister of his congregation. And hence the word Chazanuth, a word which is only applied to the melody, and not to the poetry of the synagogue, and which may be rendered sacred minstrelsy. In actual fact, till about the tenth century the Piyutim, which up to this date are mostly anonymous, have little claim to any musical or rhythmical charm. They are more or less articulate cries of exile, uttered by patient generations of men, who told of miseries past singing, almost past praying about. Towards the second half of the tenth century, the French and Spanish Jews, who were more cultivated and more happy than the rest of their European brethren, begin to add their share to the store of national religious poetry, and at once a change comes over the style. It grows more polished in form, and less uniformly mournful in subject. In these Piyutim, God resumes His place as Creator and Father, as wellas Protector and Avenger of mankind, and His glories and His powers, and man’s hopes and man’s duties, and the relations of the human spirit to the divine, are said and sung in more metrical language. ‘Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,’ was once acutely remarked, and the saying is often quoted to show how much influence national songs have upon national character. In this sense it is very interesting to find what was the general tone and tendency of Jewish ‘minstrelsy’ through all those long centuries of darkness and of degradation. And first we notice that it was mainly of a religious sort—that the intellectual wealth of the Jewish nation flowed chiefly into the channels of the synagogue. In all the unutterable misery of the Middle Ages, the national poetry of the Jews never ceased to be religious, and it never, under all that cruel provocation, became revolutionary. The tone of some of the Piyutim is fierce and vengeful, but it is never cowardly even in its hate. The writers recount openly, and often passionately enough, the wrongs suffered by their race, but for all redress they ‘lift up their eyes to the hills, whence cometh their help.’ To the credit of these patient poets of the Selichah be it said that they never used their power of national song to rouse their people to any secret plotting, nor to any working of harm against their oppressors. But to keep up a feeling of pride and hope in the poor Ghetto folks old tales of ancient glories are recited over and over again. It is somewhat curious to see how, through all the sad and often despondent strains of the Piyutim, there sounds every now and then a note of self-satisfiedtrustfulness, that seems, at first, almost like a sign of national arrogance or conceit.

‘A race that has been tested,

And tried through fire and water,

Is surely prized by Thee,

And purified from sin,’

is an instance of the kind. But it was probably just this sure sense that God never would desert His people that saved them from utter degradation. And so, if the Piyutim occasionally insist a little strongly on God’s especial and peculiar love for Israel, under Israel’s especial and peculiar need for it in those days, the slight exclusiveness of their religious aspirations may well be forgiven to them.