Five decades after Heine's death there appears a Polish Jew in the firmament of French literature who acquires for himself the name of the maître écrivain. The French, with their great literary and artistic traditions and with their own exquisite literary taste, are not so hasty in bestowing upon one of their writers the honor of the title of maître écrivain. But they lost no time in giving that honor to the Polish Jew, Bergson. Educated Frenchmen agree that even if all the philosophic teachings of Bergson should prove to be false or should be refuted he would nevertheless remain a great figure in the gallery of French literature. He may die as a philosopher, but he will remain immortal as a litterateur.
We have mentioned only the principal great books written within the last three hundred years, which have caused true revolutions in the literary world and for which most other peoples have no match. If an historian of literature were to study the subject of the influence of the Jews on world literature, especially of modern times, he would have to write not one, but five volumes, and even then he would not exhaust the subject, not because of the multitude of the books the Jews have written, but because of the creative values of these books and of the influence exercised on their contemporaries. It is a remarkable fact that the best piece of German literary eloquence was written by a Jew, Ludwig Boerne, and every German schoolboy has to know his piece of eloquence, "Denkrede ueber Jean Paul," by heart. Of Israel Zangwill the English say that he comes nearest to Dickens. Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, the offspring of a Galician Jew and a relative of the late Graf von Aehrenthal, today holds such a unique position in German literature that even the wildest anti-Semites do not dare to attack him. The French Academy has recognized another German Jew, Ludwig Fulda, as the best German metrician of his time. And there are such powerful publicists as Maximilian Harden and Max Nordau, such men as Wasserman and Schnitzler, who have contributed to the literary glory of the Jewish people in recent times.
The Aryan peoples will seldom concede that the Jews are one of the most capable literary peoples that have ever lived, but there are many signs that would go to indicate that they are fully conscious of it. The French never forget to mention the fact that the mothers of Rabelais and Montaigne were Jewesses and there is a German folksong that begins with the verse:
"Er hat wie Börne geschrieben
Er hat wie Heine gedichtet."
The humorous papers in Italy, when taking Luigi Luzzatti to task, are always cartooning him as a little Jew buried in books, and it is a current expression in Italy today that "he eats books like Luzzatti."
A Jew and a book are nearly synonymous. We were and we are to the present day a bookish people. The book has been until now our greatest glory. For thousands of years we have been dreamers and writers. The book was our shield and our weapon and the only outlet for our energies. Now it seems that a great and radical change is going to take place in our lives. We may and will probably never abandon the book altogether, but we are on the verge of becoming an active people, instead of being solely a bookish people.