"I know that maxim; it was forged in hell.
This wealth of ships and guns inflames the vulgar
And makes the very war it guards against.
How often, as the mighty master said, the sight
Of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done."

A Voice for Social Justice

QUITE outside the dramatic action of the play stands the Jew, Blum, the Chancellor's secretary. Through his astuteness in managing the Chancellor, he has hitherto moulded public policy according to his own will. Finally, near the end of the play, he denounces Christian civilization in a passage worthy of quotation:

"Man wins the realm of air and might have been
An eagle with a soul; you make him harpy,
More murderous than dragons of the ooze.
I tell you, we outsiders see the game,
We Jews, who bidden rise beyond the code
Of eye for eye, must rub both eyes to see
Not e'en eye-justice done in Christendom,
Whose cannon thunder 'gainst both God and Christ."

So might have spoken one of the ancient prophets of his race. Indeed Amos, amid the orgies of the autumn festival at Bethel, did speak in the same spirit when he denounced the formal service of worshippers who ignored the claims of social justice. "Seek good and not evil," cries Amos, "that ye may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment (justice) in the gate. It may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph."

So it is evident that even the literary work of modern Jews can be understood and appreciated only as an expression of the characteristics of the Jewish race. In this modern Jewish literature appears the exuberance, the emotional intensity, and the love of social justice that were characteristic also of ancient Hebrew literature as written by prophet, priest, and sage.

The Role of Israel in Human Emancipation

FAR greater, however, than the work of these three authors, far greater, indeed, than Israel's literature as a whole, of which they are a part, is the life of this people, of which their literature is the record. We speak of a nation's literature as great if it possesses three or four tragedies that are classics. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear would, for example, be sufficient to justify the title "great" as applied to English literature. What shall we say, then, as some one has suggested, of this people who for more than twenty centuries have lived a tragedy more pathetic than any the world's literature can show? Job has always seemed to me a type of the Jewish race. We recall that majestic picture in the thirty-first chapter, where Job stands up on his ash-mound, robbed of his wealth, bereaved of his children, deserted by his wife, suffering the agonies of a loathsome and incurable disease, and cast off, as it seems to him, by the very God in whom he trusted, and yet, in the face of poverty, and bereavement, and mortal pain, and bewildered isolation, asserts his own unchanged and unalterable belief that righteousness is salvation.

Similarly Israel, through the long centuries of its tragic history, has stood on the ash-mound of its national humiliation. Plundered, vilified, and persecuted, a nation of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, from whom men have hid their faces in aversion not concealed, Israel has yet clung with a grip that nothing could weaken nor dislodge to the fundamental idea that religion—the right relation of man to God—was not creed nor ritual, but simply doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.