The fact which stands out in the whole agitation is not that the charges have been made, in most cases by men who sought in some way or other to fish in troubled waters, but that these charges find a ready echo and a ready response among the people at large. It emphasizes so clearly that the Jews are a defenceless people, with no means of effectually warding off attacks; and though in Germany and Austria societies of Christians have been formed for the purpose of combating anti-Semitism, there is no power which can effectually enter the lists in their behalf. This was notably seen in the great London demonstration of 1882, when the petition signed by the foremost members of Church and state never even reached the Czar, to whom it was addressed.
Among the few bright spots on the world’s chart are those countries inhabited by the Anglo-Saxon race. Anti-Semitism is unknown in England (though the attempt has been made to fix the blame for the Boer war on the Jews); and the institutions of the United States have up till now prevented the entrance here of the disease, though in the mild form of social anti-Semitism which debars Jewish children from private schools and Jewish people from clubs and summer hotels, it has insinuated itself into some of the Eastern cities, notably into New York.
ZIONISM
There can be no doubt that next to the Reform movement the profoundest modification of the forces within Judaism has come about during the last years of the century through the rise and progress of the Zionist movement. It has been said by some that Zionism is the expression of Jewish pessimism, by others that it is the highest form of Jewish optimism. I venture to say that it is both. The emancipation of the Jews has not been able to do away with anti-Semitism; history has repeated itself time and time again. When the Jews of a country were few in number and of little influence, they led a tolerably secure existence; but as soon as their number increased and their influence commenced to be felt, anti-Semitism was the effective weapon in the hands of their opponents. In so far, then, as Zionism takes account of this fact, it is pessimistic; for conditions in the future will hardly differ from those in the past. It sees the Wandering Jew of history continuing still his dreary march through the ages, never at rest and never able to effect a quiet and even development of his own forces. It explains this phenomenon from the fact that Israel has in all the changed circumstances striven to maintain its racial identity, and as this racial identity has a religious side as well, that the two combined may well be called a separate national existence; that a people holding tenaciously to this separate existence, but having no home of its own, must become, when occasion demands, the scape-goat and the play-ball of other forces. It recognizes anti-Semitism as continually existent, and in so far the opponents of Zionism may be right in saying that its rise is the result of the anti-Jewish movement. It is the Jewish answer from the Jewish point of view. On the other hand, Zionism is optimistic in believing that real help for the Jews can only come from within their own body; and that the Jewish question will only be solved when the Jews return to that point in their history whence they set out on their wanderings, and again found a permanent home to which all the persecuted can flee and from which a light will go forth to every nook and corner of Jewry. It does not hope that all Jews will return to Palestine, but it believes that only in a national centre can the centrifugal force be found which will hold the Jews together in the various countries of their sojourn.
When Theodore Herzl, a littérateur in Vienna, published in 1897 his pamphlet on the Jewish state, he little imagined that it would call forth an echo in every country in which the Jews were scattered. He was not the first to attempt this solution of the problem. Far-seeing Russian Jews before him had, many years previous to that, propounded this method of dealing with the question, and it had been practically the assumption upon which the Judaism of the past had been built up. Reform Judaism, in relinquishing the hope of a return, and in cutting out from the prayer-book all mention of Palestine and the restoration, broke one of the strongest links which bound the Judaism of to-day with that of the past, and cast aside a great ideal, the realization of which had been a light to the feet of the Jews since the destruction of the Temple. The idea of a “Mission” has taken its place, the preaching of a pure Monotheism.
The Zionist congresses (which have now been held during four successive years) have found the platform, so often sought for in vain during the nineteenth century, upon which all Jews, regardless of theological opinions and of economic theories, can stand. They represent the old unity of Israel; for Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and even the purely racial Jew are to be found there as well as in the Zionist societies which have grown up in every Jewish community, whether in Europe or in Africa, in North or in South America, even in the distant Philippines. The Orthodox Jew must be, by his very profession, a Zionist; but he often doubts whether the plan as formulated by Dr. Herzl is feasible, and holds himself aloof, waiting for the realization of his hopes at the hands of others, or for some supernatural sign of divine assistance. The very fact that the Jewish opponents of Zionism (and they are the only opponents it has) come from various parts of the Jewish camp is in itself a proof of the above statement. The Orthodox complain that some of the leaders of the movement are not sufficiently Jewish; the Reform, that some are too Jewish. That this opposition is exceedingly strong cannot be denied. The demand made that the Jew should assert himself first and foremost as a Jew has been distasteful to many who were soaring in the mystic hazes of Universalism, or who had hoped to get out of Judaism as it were by the back door, without being seen by the world at large.
But even in those circles which do not formally affiliate with Zionism, or who at times even oppose it, there has of late years been a very strong revival of Jewish feeling and a movement towards a stronger expression of that feeling. Germany is honeycombed with societies for the study of Jewish literature; the Hebrew language has been revived, notably in Russia, not only as a form of literary expression, but also as a vehicle of social intercourse; France has its Society of Jewish Studies; America and England have their Jewish Historical Societies, and their Jewish Chautauqua movements; Jewish national societies have sprung up among the students of German and Austrian universities—all influences—tending in this one direction.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
As we look ahead into the century which is now opening and cast our eye over the forces which the Jews will bring into its life, we can easily see that these forces tend in various directions.
We have first the Orthodox wing of the Jewish Church, which stands upon the broad basis of what the past has evolved. It holds firmly to the inspiration of the biblical word and the divine character of its interpretation as handed down in the oral law; it tries to regulate its life by Talmudic ordinances as evolved in the latest law books, and is unwilling to make any but æsthetic concessions to changed circumstances, believing that we must adhere strictly to all the time-honored ceremonies of the synagogue. At its side stand the Conservatives, who are willing to make some concession to present demands, but believe that these concessions should be most sparingly and grudgingly made, and who theologically, at least in theory, occupy the same position as do the Orthodox. It is safe to say that the greater number of Jews in the Western European states belong to this wing of the synagogue. Between the Conservatives and the Ethical Culturists stands the Reform party, more numerous in the United States than anywhere else, whose position it is hard to define and in whose midst there are various shades of opinion and of practice. All the Reformers have openly or tacitly broken with Talmudic Judaism—the more conservative among them seem to believe that a new Judaism can be built up upon the Bible, only without its traditional interpretation; while the advanced body do not even look upon the Bible as binding, but merely as a starting-point for a further development. They do not consider the Bible as inspired in the old accepted sense of the term; they welcome biblical criticism as an aid to the understanding of the early history of their people; they do not believe in the special election of Israel, and have a well-defined abhorrence of anything like a creed. They are practically Theists with a Jewish racial coloring. Nor do they believe in the coming of a personal Messiah; rather, in the advent of a Messianic time in which righteousness and good-will shall prevail and all the earth acknowledge the one God. To bring about this time is, according to them, the Mission of the Jew—a phrase very current in these latter days, the fulfilling of which has been made the pretext for dejudaizing Judaism, so as to make it acceptable to non-Jews. Mr. Oswald John Simon, of London, has even gone further. He believes that if the Reform party is earnest in its pretensions, it ought—as it did once before in its history—to become an active missionary power. A few years ago he attempted to found a Jewish Theistic Church, which should in no way be colored by Jewish ceremonial. The movement was, of course, a failure. The original attempt, some nineteen hundred years ago, led to the founding of the Christian Church, and Jews themselves have suffered too much from missionaries of other faiths to take to this work with pleasure. But, in addition to these, there is also a large body of Jews whose connection with the synagogue is purely nominal, and who know of it only when they need the services of its sanction or the respectability of its connections. The hold which the Jewish Church has upon them is small indeed, and many of them hope, in the twentieth century, to doff their Jewish gaberdine. The open or concealed pressure of anti-Semitism (particularly on the continent of Europe) which makes it impossible for the Jew as such to attain to social distinction or political position will drive most of these into the arms of the dominant Church of the country in which they live. In a remarkable article published in the Deutsche Jahrbücher of October, 1900, a writer who uses the nom de plume of Benedictus Levita openly urges those of his fellow-Jews who have become estranged from the synagogue to have their children baptized, in order that they may not suffer as their parents have, but may become really believing Christians, since their affiliation with the Christian Church has become necessary in the modern Christian state. Another German Jew at about the same time advises his brethren to declare themselves “Confessionslos,” so as to become lost, not in Christianity, but in “Deutschtum.” A similar request was made to the Jews of Roumania, in 1900, by the historian Xenopol of Bucharest. There is little fear that this advice of wholesale apostasy will find many adherents, notwithstanding the fact that an unusually large number of conversions have taken place in Germany and Austria, due wholly to pressure from without rather than to conviction from within. The defection even of comparatively large numbers can, however, hardly affect the Jewish cause as a whole; for these numbers living on the periphery, or even beyond it, have been of little service to the Jewish cause; and all through the ages Jews have made just such contributions as these to the general society in which they lived.