By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding tool, by the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship.
Helpless victims of all the horrors enumerated in these burning lines of Robert Browning, these Jews were yet free men. Not a trace of what a modern Jewish thinker—Achad Ha’am—has called ‘spiritual slavery’ was theirs. In all fundamental matters they were totally indifferent to the opinion of those who might torture the body but could never crush the soul.
J. H. HERTZ, 1915.
THE history of the daughter religions of Judaism is one uninterrupted series of attempts to commit matricide.
M. STEINSCHNEIDER, 1893.