[¹] Abrabanel’s commentary on 1 Samuel viii.
[²] In Biblical Hebrew “Mezeg” means blended, or mingled [“Al Yechsar Hamazeg” (Cant.vii. 3)]: in mediæval Hebrew it signifies “Character,” “Individual Nature,” “Temperament.”
[³] It is worthy of notice that some Christian theologians have come—from another point of view—to the same conclusion as to the importance of the Jewish race:
“The question of their National Restoration is one of blood and not of creed, of race and not of conversion, of nationality which might include as many sects as in the days of Christ. One only question can be demanded by the hallowed soil of that country, and by the Providence of God—Are you a Jew? In this sense the twelve Apostles were Jews, and if now on earth their title to their land is as clear, undoubted, and equitable as that of Nehemiah or any modern Jew. The Christian creed does not make any of that nation less a Jew and a descendant of Abraham.... The question of Jewish nationality, and consequently of restoration, is not one of creed but of race, and as such it should be kept before the mind. The isolation of the Jew would be as great, if all were Christians, as at present. His separation from amongst the nations has been pronounced by that omnipotent word, whose truth and will in effecting its purposes are only equalled by the unalterable character of the Divine nature. They shall dwell alone. They are not amalgamated with the nations. In their final return, a peculiarity of religious rites and laws will keep them apart from other people. Once a Jew, he is always a Jew, whatever may be his creed” (Rev. A. G. H. Hollingsworth, Remarks, etc., London, 1852, p. 21).
This is more than the religious idea of the Z’chuth Aboth (Merits of the Fathers); it is, though mixed up with Cabbalistic notions, an ethnological conception—the real basis of the modern Jewish national idea.
Manasseh’s conception of the character (or particular blood mingling) of ancestors, which lives on in the nation, accords entirely with the mode of thought of a modern national Jew as this finds expression in the best writings of the new Zionistic literature. When the Jew feels the pulse-beat of nature in his heart, then the history of his forefathers comes to life within him. He no longer struggles alone through life, he is sensible of connections between himself and millions who have been and of whose spirit and soul he has received a share in life. The most glorious, invigorating feeling which an old race can offer; the consciousness of individual transitoriness and universal constancy, begins only then to be of value for him because the easily intelligible national future has made comprehensible his own infinite one. This psychic process is the unconscious aim of that which he perceives as national longing. The free individual must become a problematic nature if he cannot force the roots of his spiritual and physical personality into the soil of a soul-related community. The unit goes adrift in the chaos of social struggles when it is not linked by a thousand tender and yet untearable threads with the ethnical community of a nation. This ethnical community is the fount of two infinite perceptions which have become the mightiest supports of human civilization; first of all arises the consciousness of national control which develops into the unnoticed, yea, self-evident foundation of the ethnical unit, the moral consciousness of duty and sense of responsibility. National responsibility finds its complement in the right of recovery of the individual against the community. In the wrestle with other morals and conceptions of life, the individual has often to lean on those who are like-minded because like-born so as not to lose himself. It has been repeatedly experienced in Jewish history that many Jews have not only lost their veriest substance but have voluntarily surrendered it, so that their culture subsisted only through an ingenious system of exquisite imitations of foreign nature and foreign customs.
What Manasseh understood under “Character of Ancestors” pertains as little to atavism as the modern Jewish national idea. Atavism is something unconscious, it is found even among the dejudaized Jews. But what with the dejudaized is atavism becomes with nationalist Jews the historic basis of their whole life tendency. The comprehension of the past wafts the first breath of life into the present, upon the wreckage of bygone times dawns the premonition of the greatness of each lived moment—and new life blossoms upon the ruins. Therein lies also the power of the national consciousness to create cultural values. What is based upon heredity and tradition is no longer sacrificed to thoughtless recession of self—misconstrued as civilization—but replenished with national love. It is no longer the anarchy of aimless “culture” which wants to link up with the attainments of unfamiliar races so as to become like them, and which as an imitation it can never attain, but it is a strongly rooted culture, which reaches deep down to the national wells of life, and can thereby become equal to all other great and deep-rooted cultures.
The individual is the outcome of a nation, its ultimate aim. The nation is the circuitous way of nature to produce an individual. A nation is great, not only when great creative minds arise from its midst, but also when the many live intensively, so that they receive impulses from the few, and return impulses to the few—and when the past lives on in the present. It is this idea of Jewish nationality which Manasseh had forefelt in spite of his mysticism. He was permeated with religious enthusiasm and, at the same time, all aglow with intense national feeling. Therefore, his thoughts and sentiments tended to greatness; he understood that the best means of strengthening and reaffirming the national consciousness of a people about to lose the knowledge of its ethnical individuality, is just that it should be told its history, that its ancestors should be recalled to memory, their great deeds sung and praised, and that pride of the past should be instilled. As he poetised so sublimely he could also accomplish great deeds, because he kept his eye upon Palestine he was also able to achieve great results in the Diaspora. He was the father of post-exilic English Judaism, and this Judaism ought to follow in his footsteps.
To conclude, reference should be made to the Hebrew writer Perez Smolenskin, himself a pioneer of modern Zionism, who, though he did not deal with the matter in detail, was guided by a sound intuition when he characterized Manasseh in his Am Olam (1880) as a great pioneer of the national idea.