The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

Finding, after his return from temporary seclusion and retirement,[214] his chosen people worshipping a molten calf, the god Apis, and playing—in other words, a scene of Egyptian debauchery—Moses broke in wrath the first Tables of the Law (Exod. xxxii. 19). These consisted simply of the Ten Commandments, a forbiddal to make gods of gold and silver, easy directions for building an earthen altar of sacrifice, and a brief civil and criminal code embodied in three chapters. After another term of forty days and nights spent in solitude amongst the awful and impressive scenes which had witnessed his meditations when feeding Jethro’s flocks, and now saw the disappointment of his early aspirations, Moses returned with a code (Exod. xxxiv.) better fitted to the sickly and diseased condition of the Hebrew soul. Of this the proportion of the ritual to the moral precepts is as ten to two. It is a priestly system, a faith of feasts and sacrifices, of holy days and ceremonies purposely assimilated to those idolatries of Egypt with which the minds of the people were familiar but secured to the worship of Jehovah their God. The Lawgiver no longer disdained to borrow from symbolical religion, especially in the ceremonial worship, which at first he appears to have avoided. The ark and the tabernacle were old types amongst the Egyptians, memorials of their Northern migration. The Urim and Thummim (Ra and Thenei) were the Sun and personified Justice—Light and Truth. The Elohim were Kneph and Pthah, the presiding spirit and the creative intellect of the Supreme. The Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters is again the Deity Kneph. The silence with which Jehovah was to be adored appears to be an idea borrowed from Amun Ra, the Unutterable Word, similar to the Hindu “Aum,” which never must be spoken of man. The Tree of Life, whose fruit made gods of those who tasted it, was a mere symbol, long before the day of Moses incorporated in the Indian and Egyptian mythologies. It survived in the Christian’s early belief, and has even left its traces in the Tuba or Paradisiacal tree of El Islam.

The cosmogony of Moses may be traced to the same origin. The formation of the globe, so different from modern theory; the separating of matter into four elements, fiery firmament, air, sea, and earth; and the derivation of animals from dust, were Egyptian dogmas. The Hebrew historian held to the eternity of matter, the theory of ancient philosophy in general.

The creation of man (Gen. i.), which we take figuratively, referring divine resemblance to the soul, to righteousness, and to true holiness, the Hebrews believed in literally and physically. As the Lord formed man in his own image, so man in return anthropomorphized the Deity. Theirs was a personal God with mortal shape and human passions, who hated the Canaanites for no sin of their own, and loved the Hebrews for no merit of their own, but for the sake of their ancestors. The “angry God” and the “jealous God of Moses” stand for the orthodox opinion of even the modern Jews.[215]

In proportion as we return to the ignorance of antiquity and seek out the metaphysics of savage races, so we find the personality of a God, a description of his form, and an account of his actions and passions most prominently brought forward. Savages and barbarians cannot believe without anthropomorphizing their Great Spirit. On the other hand, Muslims reject the tenet. Amongst them some sects, as the Bayzawi, deny, and hold it impiety to assert, that even in a future state the eyes of the beatified shall see Allah.

Again, the Hebrew Paradise is the vestige of an old legend current throughout the Eastern world. The Hindus had their Satya Yug, the Persians Eriene Vigo, and the Greeks their Golden Age. It must be observed, however, that, though we place the Garden upon earth, learned Rabbis locate it in the first or lowest heaven, which is the exact reflection of this nether world. Sakya Buddha taught that human beings first appeared by apparitional birth. They were glorious and happy, pure and passionless, till one of them tasted a savoury substance produced by the earth. The example was followed by the rest; thus purity decayed, the empire of sense gained the ascendency, excess followed indulgence, and degeneracy excess. The same legend has been preserved in grosser form by El Islam. Adam is made to eat wheat, and thus became subject to human infirmities. The Magian Scriptures contain traditions of a migratory march of the people of Hormuzd, under their patriarch Jamshid, from Eriene Vigo or pure Iran, supposed by the Guebres to be the primeval seat of their race, and located near Balkh, the ancient Bactria. It was the region of all delights till Ahriman the Evil One made in its river the Serpent of Winter. With respect to the inhabitants of Paradise, our first parents, it may be mentioned that many Eastern as well as Western learned men have supposed that Adam prior to the creation of Eve was androgynous; that is to say, at once male and female (Mirabeau).

The promulgation of Moses’ new code was not popular among the Hebrews. Checked in his patriotic intentions, the Lawgiver, however, bravely persisted in the course of preparation which he had commenced. Long and long years the Chosen People wandered in danger and difficulty round and round a region ever and in every way fitted to produce a hardy, rugged, and warlike race. And when all was prepared for the work of conquest, the great Leader would not head the expedition to the Land of Promise. In his latest act he displayed the magnanimity which had supported him through a life of labour and disappointment, the real vigour and grandeur of his mind. Casting away the superstitions concerning man’s body which Egypt taught, and resisting the temptation that might have seduced a softer soul, namely, a train of mourners and a mausoleum as a last home, he did for himself what he had done for his followers: he wandered over the desert till his hour approached, he chose as leader of the expedition a younger and more energetic man, and finally he died and left the place of his tomb to this day unknown. He bequeathed, however, to the world a cosmogony, history, and ethnography the essence of old Oriental learning, and to the present day perhaps the most interesting document of the kind ever penned by man. He gave to his followers a code in which the highest intellect is blended with experience and thought in the most trivial things; the cantonment orders, for instance, cannot be improved in the present century. He left men where he had found slaves, a successor trained to carry out the favourite scheme and hope of his life, and finally a name that will float down the stream of time till merged into the ocean of eternal oblivion.

But Moses left his dispensation imperfect. He feared the relapse of his followers into the dark idolatries of the Nile. He therefore dealt only in obscure allusions to a resurrection, to another life, to a futurity of rewards and punishments—the mighty lever with which religion moves the moral world of man. That such was the case is proved by this fact: the prophets and others who succeeded Moses, viewing the future practically and not with philosophical indifference, made in all their schemes the hereafter of man a prominent feature. The dogma, moreover, as we have seen, was known, and well known, to all the semi-civilized races of men. In the creed of Moses, however, a purely temporal system of rewards and punishments supplied the place of that future retribution so elaborated in the Hindu, the Guebre, and the Egyptian systems. This was the great defect in his grand scheme. The hope and fear of a life to come, of a world in which the apparent inconsistencies of the transient mundane state shall be explained and remedied, where suffering virtue shall triumph and triumphant vice shall suffer—a proclivity for this belief is implanted by nature in the very soul and heart of man. Like veneration, it is instinctive rather than reasoning, an exertion of sentiment rather than an effect of intellect. Against a dogma based upon such foundations it is vain to contend. And in the moral government of the world it presents such vantage-ground to all who would discipline and elevate mankind, that it has been cultivated in every system, proscribed by none. The Hebrews, however, were left to learn this essential article of faith, during the Babylonish captivity, from the Assyrians, the Guebres, and other Pagans.

The Jehovah of Moses, moreover, was in other points than personality an imperfect conception. The Deity, it is true, was drawn forth from the thick veil of mystery with which the learned of India and Egypt had invested him. His existence was proclaimed not to a caste or a class; it was published to a whole people. Still, he was the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, not the God of Eternity—the God of all men. A local deity, his cult and knowledge were confined to one people, to a mere fraction of the human kind. Moses, then, was essentially a benefactor to the Hebrews, but he was not a benefactor to man.

Presently a new Reformer appeared upon the worldly stage. The Hebrew code had long before his day begun to decline; for forms of faith, being but earthly things, are subject to that eternal law which to every beginning pre-creates and ordains an end. Its decay was hastened by political convulsions. The captivity of the Jews had supplied them with a multitude of new and strange articles of belief derived from their Pagan masters. Hence arose heresies and schisms, which further weakened the ancient edifice, tottering as it was from the effects of age, from the new creed-wants of the people, and from the shocks of the passing events. The Sadducees, adhering to the letter, rejected the spirit of the Books of Moses. Pharisaic superstition founded upon tradition—that earthy alloy ever added to the pure ores of heavenly revelation—was fast undermining the temple of Judaism. Idolatry had perished by slow degrees out of the land; but the contrary extreme, bibliolatry, to use a modern word, sown upon the wide ground of priestly pride and castish prejudice, had spread rankly over the world of Judaism. To clear away this poison growth, to reform the people of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry.

A man of humble fortune, but of proud birth, the Founder of Christianity preached a creed in conformity with his circumstances. His tenets were the Essene, the third sect of philosophizing Jews. “While the Pharisees were heaping traditions upon the original structure of the Mosaic system, and the Sadducees were rigidly preserving and adhering to the simplicity of that structure, the Essene gave their whole mind to the ascertainment and realization of its moral import.” They were thus the Sufis, the Spiritualists, and the Gnostics of Judaism. They abounded most at Alexandria, then the grand centre where the Greek and the Roman, the Indian and the Persian, met the Arab and the Egyptian. A species of anchorite philosophers, they called themselves physicians of souls and bodies; they lived in voluntary poverty, rigid chastity, and implicit obedience to the civil power; they were purists in language, non-resistants, and haters of political action.