Another world-famous scientist, ALPHONSE L. P. PYRAME De CANDOLLE, in his Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siécles, Geneva, 1873, makes the following very remarkable observations:
"If Europe had been peopled by Jews only we might have witnessed a curious spectacle. There would no longer be any wars; hence the moral sensibility would be violated much less and millions of people would not be torn away from useful occupations. Public debts and taxes would decrease. The cultivation of science, of literature, of fine arts, especially music, for which the Jews have a great predilection, would be furthered to the highest extent. Industry and commerce would flourish. Few crimes of personal violence would be committed, and those against property would but seldom be accompanied by violence. The wealth of the community as a whole and of individuals would largely increase by the effect of intelligent and regular labor, combined with economy. This wealth would have a beneficent effect. The clergy would not come in collision with the State. Perhaps there would be less corruption among the officials and greater firmness."
The above passage is approvingly quoted by another great leader in the world of science, Professor Carl Vogt, in an article published in Westerman's Monatshefte, wherein the writer, treating of the habits and qualities acquired by European peoples through hereditary transmission, speaks of the Jewish people as having attained the highest civilization notwithstanding their having lived for ages under oppression.
On the occasion of the centennial anniversary, in 1891, of the political enfranchisement of the French Jews, the celebrated leader of the French Liberal Catholics, PERE HYACINTHE, addressed to the Grand Rabbi of Paris the following expressive communication:
"Monsieur le Grand Rabbin:—You will have seen from the papers that our Gallican Catholic church intends to commemorate the centenary of the emancipation of the Jews by the Constituent Assembly. The 27th of September, 1791, is a date of even greater glory to France than it is to the Jews. It was a day that witnessed the reparation of a long and cruel injustice; it inaugurated for the whole world an era of liberty and brotherhood from which no evil disposed person has since been able to make us swerve. We are too enlightened and too liberal-minded to become anti-Semites. Besides, we are Christians, and as such we must not forget that it is from Israel's bosom that we have sprung. Israel, the grand old olive tree from which we have been grafted. For the French Jews the interregnum which commenced with Sedecias ended with Napoleon. Napoleon it was, who boasted of being the King of the Jews, and the Jews accordingly treated him as their political Messiah. Than him they could not have had a greater.
"But Napoleon's empire, like the kingdom of David, is no more, and the French Republic now has the keeping of these two illustrious necropoles, that at Jerusalem wherein reposes the race of David, that at Paris wherein rests the hero who was in himself his own sole dynasty.
"But none the less, France has remained, as Bonaparte remarked, the new tribe of Judah, where Frenchmen and Jews constitute one people.
"Republicans by virtue of the Mosaic legislation, I would almost say socialistic, in the best sense of the term, before they became monarchists by Samuel's dispensation, the traditions of the Jews comprise all the essentials for the service of France.
"'Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah and bring him unto his people; let his hands be sufficient for him, and be Thou a help to him from his enemies.'
"These are my wishes, Monsieur le Grand Rabbin and may the God of the Jews, who is also the God of the Christians, cause them to be fulfilled speedily.
"Accept, monsieur, the assurance of my fraternal friendship.
Hyacinthe Loyson,
Priest."
As focussing effectively the most salient aspects of this general subject, we will here cite a thoughtful statement from a strictly orthodox Roman Catholic source, the French clerical journal, Le Monde:
"The immortality of the soul has been repudiated by the Academie des Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. The Jews had to serve as the occasion. The Old Testament, however, was vindicated. But in how many feeble minds was not an uncertainty left? How many will take the trouble to read over the Sacred Books, when the reading of the daily papers absorbs all their time? Voltaire knew well enough that to sustain his iconoclastic views he had to discredit the Jewish people, to falsify their history, and to take up again the pagan theory of presenting them as the most degraded of people.
"Such, indeed, was the opinion of the Greeks and Romans in regard to the Jews. The Greeks, given over to all conceivable turpitude and tyranny, to an anarchy without bounds and without end, incapable of even simulating a defence against Rome, despised the Jewish people, and the Romans entertained the same feelings. They despised them for the same reason that the economists, the capitalists, the modern free-thinkers, despise the Catholics. The Jews did not worship idols; they alone did not prostrate themselves before nature; they condemned, despised that pantheism, that idol-worship, which sanctified the vices and the passions and which the Greeks and Romans embraced with such ardor. The dignity and regularity of their habits formed a striking contrast to pagan dissipation. They opposed in their individuality, the beauty of their rigorous law to the impure teachings of paganism. They never presented a disgraceful spectacle in the time of their prosperity; they never participated in the bloody games of the ring; they held human sacrifices in horror.
"The Jews did not profess the principle of equity, of which the Greeks and Romans boasted so much—themselves absolute partisans of Slavery. They simply upheld the institution of family hierarchy, the paternal authority. Their habits and institutions, inspired by the parental sentiment—were they not full of kindliness and foresight? Could they overlook the feeble and the poor? Amongst them brothers could not know contention and strife, because they were equals in reality. Without the parent, fraternity would disappear.
"In order to subsist it is necessary that children should always have before them the image, the memory, the principle of the paternity from which they emanated, which formed the bonds of their friendship. Their unity proceeds from thence, a unity, sweet, lively, inculcated in infancy, formed by the heart before the mind could grasp it. The lawgiver had no occasion, therefore, to enjoin fraternity, but needed only to submit it to that law of nature which organizes the paternal authority. The Jews were ignorant of those social ideas that desolated the ancient cities and that spring up again in modern times. The poor had no demands to make upon the rich. The Jews never forget, and had they done so, the law reminded them that the earth belongs to the Lord and that in God they are all brothers. The constitutional wars between the poor and the rich in Rome and Athens were caused by extortion. This question of extortion fills Roman history with its pale shadow; it is at the bottom of all the troubles, dissensions, periodical massacres and revolts. It has again taken possession of society with the reform of the Nineteenth Century. Only in 1789 France passed from under the yoke of extortion. The Jewish fraternity condemned extortion as a principle of tyranny.
"This fraternity, so powerful a principle, led the Jews to love their fellow-beings, to see in them colleagues and brothers; they received the stranger willingly, extended to him their hospitality, even a share in the benefits of their law—something that was foreign to all other nations. With these other nations the stranger was regarded simply as an enemy; "enemy" and "stranger" were expressed by one and the same word. Pantheism, denying the principle of unity, as indicated in the Divine origin, left men in a continual state of war. And war never ceased; the cities fought with each other, until the strongest had subdued the others, and in their turn were conquered and absorbed by a greater. This is the invariable history of Greece and Rome. The dogma of Divine creation exhibited to the Jews all men as brethren. They did not treat the stranger therefore as a barbarian. They, the Israelites, alone of all the nations of antiquity, did not carry on aggressive wars; once established upon their soil, they had no other desire than to live in peace by living out their laws. This is the object of all their institutions. They do not make war upon the stranger, because they had no hate against him.
"Their God, greater than the gods of the Olympus, neither flattered nor served their passions. He was a jealous God, who exacted the submission of the heart. He chastised his rebellious children. And this people purified by persecution and misfortune, returned to the laws of their fathers, to the observance of their precepts. No city in ancient, no people in modern times could have passed through like vicissitudes and recovered again. It is not through progress that they endured and were capable of resistance, but by holding fast to the past; by rallying around the law, which they had never abandoned and which they never modified, hard as it was. It often became irksome, it never bargained with its conscience. What else existed, before the laws of Moses, than that paganism which legalized all vices? The Jews defended their law with their lives; they fought for it against the Greek kings of Syria; they preferred to be buried under the ruins of Jerusalem to making a compact with Roman paganism. The Greeks and Romans never had the idea that one can die for one's religion.
"By their habits in the government of the State the Jews were separated completely from Greece and Rome. They never brooked the insults of the ancient or modern mobocracy, because they respected the principle of the family, the foundation of their political, judicial, administrative and military organization. They alone in antiquity repudiated slavery. They practiced a national brotherhood which the Christian people are hardly capable of comprehending; it is so sublime, and almost beyond human nature. The institution of the jubilee, of the seventh year, the seventh day, was the perfection of social order; but even with Christianity these institutions could not maintain themselves. Dispersed, reduced to direst need and to the humiliation of exile, the Jews have never abandoned these first principles. Tacitus remarked the close ties of brotherhood that united them in his time. Inter ipsos obstinata fides. Since then and up to this time is it not the same sentiment? Are there many dissensions amongst them? This moral greatness of the Jewish people made them the target of pagan enmity. The policy of Rome was to be enforced upon all nations. The Jews share with the Christians the honor of having been singled out as the victims of utter extermination.
"The Jewish nation has survived all its victors; it alone, says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, withstood the power of time, fortune and defeat. Greece and Rome were enveloped in a system of superstition which weighed heavily upon the actions of public and private life. The Jews lived beyond the pale of that ignominy. The causes of this intellectual and moral superiority became the subject of jealous depreciation generally."