The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent partisan of the existing state of affairs.

INTERNAL RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT

The facility with which the Jews attach themselves to changed circumstances stands out characteristically through their whole history. It might, indeed, be said with some show of truth that this pliability is the weak side in the Jewish character. The readiness of the Jew to be almost anything and not simply his own self has been one of the factors producing a certain ill will against him. Disraeli was the most jingo of all imperialists in England; Lasker, the most ardent advocate of the newly constituted German Empire. This pliability is the result of the wandering life he has led and the various civilizations of which he has been a part. He had to find his way into Hellenism in Alexandria, into Moorish culture in Spain, into Slavism in Russia and Poland. When the first wave of the modern spirit commenced to break from France eastward over the whole of Europe, it reached the Jew also. While in France the new spirit was largely political, in Germany it was more spiritual. In its political form as well as in its spiritual form it reacted not only upon the political condition of the Jew, but especially upon his mental attitude. The new spirit was intensely modern, intensely cosmopolitan, intensely Occidental, and intensely inductive. The Jew had preserved to a great degree his deductive, Oriental, particularistic, and ancient mode of thought and aspect of life. The two forces were bound to meet. As a great oak is met by the storm, so was Israel set upon by the fury of this terrible onslaught. It is of interest to see in what manner he emerged from this storm—whether he has been able to bend to its fury, to lose perhaps some of his leaves and even some of his branches, but to change only in such a way as to be able to stand upright again when the storm is past.

This great clash of ideas has produced what is known as the Reform movement. It had its origin in Germany under the spiritual influences of the regeneration of German letters produced by such men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. It was aided in a large measure by the fact that the government in Germany, although distinctly opposed to anything which militates against the established order of things, mixes itself very seldom in the internal affairs of the Jewish communities. This Reform movement has colored the religious development of Judaism during the three-quarters of the century which is past. The heat of the controversy is now wellnigh spent. Many of those who stood in the front ranks have passed away, so that a more just estimate of its value can be reached. It was a period of tremendous upheavals, of great physical as well as mental pain. Many a congregation was split in twain, many a family disrupted. At one time it looked as if two distinct bodies of Jews would emerge from the struggle, and the union of Israel be destroyed forever. A common enemy—anti-Semitism—joined the two forces together for a common defence; and the danger of such a split is now fairly a thing of the past.

The latter half of the eighteenth century found the Jews of Middle Europe at the lowest intellectual and social point they had up till then reached. The effect of the long Jewish Middle Ages was plainly visible. Few great minds lit up the darkness, and an intellectual torpor seems to have spread its pall over everything. A passive uniformity of practice prevailed in all the communities, whether Sefardic (Spanish and Portuguese) or Ashkenazic (German and Polish); a uniformity, because actual intellectual life had been made to run in one single groove. The Talmud had been the great saving of Judaism in the past. In the intellectual exercise which its study necessitated, the mind of the Jew had been given a field in which it could rove at will. Living apart from the rest of the world, with a wide jurisdiction over his own affairs, Talmudic law in its latest development was still the law supreme for the Jew. The Jewish Ghetto had everywhere the same aspect; the language in common use was, in all the Ashkenazic communities, the Judæo-German in one of its various forms. A certain severity in evaluating those things which were part of the outside world made itself felt. There was ample time and ample occasion for the practice of all those forms and ceremonies with which the Judaism of the Middle Ages had willingly and gladly fenced in the law. There had been little occasion for the practice of the beautiful arts or for the cultivation of letters. Life in the Ghetto was not necessarily gloomy, but it was solemn. The law was not felt as a burden, but it required the whole individual attention of those who bound themselves by it, from early morn till late at night, from the cradle to the grave. There was no place for things that come from outside, because there was no time to devote to them.

But the new European spirit in its French political form was knocking hard at the gates of the Ghetto. Little by little it made its way here and there, into all sorts of nooks and corners. It was bound in time to be heard by some of those living behind these gates. The name of Moses Mendelssohn is indissolubly connected with the history of German Judaism during the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was due to him that a vehicle was found which the new spirit could use. Himself a strictly observant Jew, he felt the pulse of the new era. The friend of Lessing and of Nicolai, he entered fully into the revival which was then making itself felt. Through his translation of the Pentateuch (1778, etc.) into High-German, he prepared the way for the further introduction of German writings to the Jewish masses. This was bound to bring with it a larger culture and a greater freedom of thought. Many of his friends, such as Wessely, Hertz-Homberg, and David Friedlander, stood by his side in this work. With the introduction of the German language and German literature, better and more modern schools were needed in which secular education should go hand in hand with the former one-sided religious training. David Friedlander was the first to found a school in the modern sense of the term; and he was followed by Jacobson in 1801, at Seesen, Westphalia, and at Cassel, and by Johlson, at Frankfort, in 1814. Between the years 1783 and 1807 such modern Jewish schools arose in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, and even in Poland. Literature was cultivated, and the first Jewish journal (though still in Hebrew) was published in Königsberg, 1783 (Hameassef—the Collector). The Gesellschaft der Freunde, founded in Berlin in 1792, was distinctly intended for the spread of this modern culture; yet Mendelssohn’s own position was quite an untenable one. He was a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in practice, but his mental attitude was that of a modern German. He was and he was not a reformer. He held that it mattered little what philosophical position a Jew held, the Jew must observe all the ceremonies connected with the faith; these were binding upon him by the mere fact of his having been born into the Covenant. It is therefore no wonder that his translation was put under the bann in Hamburg, Altona, Fuerth, Posen, etc. His friend Friedlander wished to make of the synagogue a sort of Ethical Culture Society; and Jacobson’s preaching in Berlin contained very little of what was distinctly Jewish. The salons of Berlin, Königsberg, and Vienna, which were presided over by brilliant women, who were more or less immediate disciples of Mendelssohn, nurtured the cosmopolitan spirit which was bound to be destructive of practical Judaism. That this fruit on the Tree of Knowledge ripened too quickly is seen from the fact that all the descendants of Mendelssohn, Friedlander, and others, led astray by this cosmopolitan spirit and the philosophic presentation of Christianity by Schleiermacher, have all become devoted members of the Lutheran Church and have been completely lost to Judaism.

It was natural that these new influences should influence also the training of the modern rabbis. Secular education had been introduced into primary schools, and in some places—as, for instance, Lombardy, in 1820—the government demanded a certain amount of secular knowledge from the candidates for rabbinical positions. The Jew also desired that his leaders should have the same training as he gave his children, that they should be educated in the same atmosphere in which he himself had grown up. The old rabbinical seminaries, or Yeshibot, in which the instruction was entirely on Talmudic lines, had already run their course; the study had been found insufficient by the pupils themselves, and the schools of Frankfort, Fuerth, Metz, Hamburg, and Halberstadt had all been closed for want of students. The need of a modern seminary was felt quite early during the century; and in 1809, a Lehrer-Seminar was founded in Cassel. The earliest regular seminary for the training of rabbis, however, was founded in Padua in 1829. In Germany attempts had been made in the year 1840, but these attempts were unsuccessful. The first modern seminary was not founded in Germany until the year 1854 (Breslau). Then followed Berlin, in 1872; Cincinnati, in 1873; Budapest, in 1876. Similar institutions exist now in London, Paris, and Vienna.

In the first convulsions of the Mendelssohn period the way was paved for the second period of the Reform movement which covers the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The real issues touched the central point of Jewish life, the synagogue. It is interesting to note that during this period the chief questions were not so much theological as æsthetic. The æsthetic side of life could not be largely cultivated in the Ghetto; and the form of the service had greatly degenerated. In the course of centuries, so many additional prayers and songs and hymns had been added that the ritual was largely overburdened, and often tended rather to stifle than bring out the religious sense they were intended to conserve. Contact with the outside world created and fostered this æsthetic sense, and the influences of the writings of such men as Lessing and Mendelssohn was largely in this direction. As this æsthetic sense made its way into the homes, so also did it carve out its way into the synagogue. Demands were heard for a shorter service; for the organ to accompany the chanting of the reader; for the German language in some of the prayers and for the German sermon. Each point was bitterly contested; for the Orthodox wing had before it the wholesale apostasy of the Salon Jews. In order to introduce the vernacular into the service and into the sermon, private synagogues were opened by small coteries in Cassel (1809), Seesen (1810), Dessau (1812), and Berlin (1815). In Southern Germany the use of the vernacular was introduced between the years 1817 and 1818, also in Hungary through the influence of Abraham Chorin. In some countries the government gave its active aid. In Vienna, in 1820, German was made obligatory, and as early as 1814 Danish in Copenhagen. The greatest changes, however, were made in the Hamburg temple (under Kley and Salomon, 1818), where not only the service was made more æsthetic and the German language introduced, but certain prayers referring to the Messianic time were either omitted or altered. No wonder, then, that the Orthodox rabbis in Germany, with the support of the rabbis in various other countries, protested against such a course. The government even looked askance at these Reform proceedings, and in 1817 and 1823 ordered a number of these private synagogues to be closed. A further cause for displeasure was the introduction in 1814 of the confirmation of children in German, to replace or supplement the old Barmitzvah, a clear imitation of the ceremony in the Protestant Church of Germany. Despite opposition, however, the confirmation found its way into Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Cassel, Copenhagen, etc.

This æsthetic revolution in the synagogue could not, however, long remain the only outward sign of the new life. The great weakness of the Reform movement has been that it has lacked a philosophic basis; and, as in its first beginnings, with the exception of Hamburg, it took little note of the changed point of view from which those who fought for reform looked at the old theological ideas. Æsthetic reform was the work largely of individual persons and individual congregations. No attempt had been made either to formulate the philosophic basis upon which the reform stood, or to provide a body which should regulate the form which the new order of things was to take on. Two attempts were made to remedy these evils, both closely related one to the other.

The first was crystallized in what is now known as the “Science of Judaism”; by which is meant the untrammelled, scientific investigation of the past history of the Jews. The want of this was severely felt just in those centres where reform had taken up its abode; and those who assisted at its birth did so with the avowed purpose of getting at the real kernel of Judaism by such investigation, and of freeing that kernel from the accretions of ages. They saw also that some means had to be found by which the result of these researches could be brought before the people. The Mendelssohn period had also felt this; but its organ had been written in Hebrew, and could not, therefore, appeal to those who wished for the intellectual advancement of the Jews upon modern lines. The Society for Culture and the Science of Judaism in Berlin (founded 1819) started a journal, with L. Zunz as editor. Though it only lived during the years 1822 and 1823, it was the forerunner and the model for many of its kind that followed after. In 1835 appeared Geiger’s Scientific Journal for Jewish Theology, and in 1837 a regular weekly was established by L. Philippson, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. Around these and other journals which quickly sprang up there gathered a coterie of historians, philologists, and students of literature which in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880 has built up a science which has extended its investigations into every corner of Jewish life in the past, and has followed to their sources the various lines of development which have appeared from time to time. A full estimate of what has been done will be apparent only when the great Jewish Encyclopædia will be ready which is now in course of publication in New York. Zunz, Geiger, Krochmal, Rapoport, Frankel, Löw, Steinschneider, Graetz, Luzzatto, and Reggio are only a few of the names of those who gave up their lives to this work. Most of the early labor of these men was not dry-as-dust investigation pure and simple, but was intended to have a bearing upon the actual life, upon the burning questions which were then agitating Jewish thought. This is clearly seen in the journal of which Zunz was editor, and in his Gottesdienstliche Vortraege, the basis of nearly all the work done after him, but which was evidently written to give the history of preaching in the synagogue in order to justify the shortening of the ritual and the introduction of the German sermon.