The volume, as we are told in the Preface, "owes its appearance to the Union of Jewish Literary Societies" in London, and it does credit to their earnestness and loyalty to the cause of Jewish learning. Let us hope it may serve as an example and incentive to the revival of Jewish interests in this country. It is well that all should read this useful little book and many others of the kind which we hope will follow. But it is more important that such reading shall inspire the student with a desire to study at first hand the original depositories of Jewish thought. For this purpose a serious study of Hebrew is imperative. And let us cherish the hope that we may witness a revival of, and a wide-spread interest in, Jewish literature in this country where next to Russia the greatest number of Jews are found and where, moreover, they enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
University of Pennsylvania
IV
A General Survey of Jewish Life[E]
THROUGH his Jewish Life in Modern Times Israel Cohen has made a notable contribution to the literature of Jewish life and thought. In a single volume of scarce 350 pages of text there is presented a description and estimate of the Jewish position in the modern world which may well be considered among the most comprehensive and the most authoritative now available in the English language.
Taken as a whole, the volume is noteworthy because of three commendable characteristics. It deals with Jewish life as it appears in modern times, not as it should be in the light of the literature of the ancient Hebrews. It presents Jewish life in all its important aspects and complexities, not on the basis of the theory so widely prevalent that religion, of all human activities, constitutes the sole binding force and the only distinguishing characteristic of the separate Jewish existence. Finally, it aims to picture the life of the Jews in all corners of the Diaspora, and not their problems and activities in a single country or section of the globe.
Jewish Life Not Synonymous With Jewish Religion
AN exposition of Jewish life as it is actually lived in modern times helps to clarify a much-beclouded situation. It enables the Jew the better to know himself; it presents to the outside world a clearer outline of a figure who must ever, to some extent, remain "strange" and "unknowable." Moreover, the reader's sense of proportion is adjusted by a work which does not make Jewish life synonymous with Jewish religion. Whether there is sufficient evidence of a biological and anthropological character to support the claim of those who look upon the Jews as a separate race, whether the Jewish people in their dispersion may properly be considered as a distinct national group in spite of the absence of a government and a territory of their own, it is certainly difficult, in all intellectual honesty, to maintain that the Jews are merely a religious community. One of our brilliant young philosophers has strikingly said that a Jew can change his religion, but that he cannot change his grandfather; nor, he might have added can he destroy his more general antecedents, that complex of customs, traditions and ideals which have manifested themselves in the course of thirty-five centuries of recorded history and which create within him an ineradicable historic consciousness. Jewish solidarity is not grounded in religion alone, and the distinctiveness of the Jewish people manifests itself in activities other than religion.
A work which like the present aims to present the Jew in every important phase of life, which describes the social, political, economic, and intellectual aspects of Jewish life, as well as the religious, deserves commendation because of its mere scope and completeness. But Mr. Cohen has gone further. He has not fallen into the error of many of the spokesmen for the cultural or historical unity of Jewry of denying or even minimizing the potency of religion as a factor in Jewish survival. Indeed, he everywhere recognizes that the primary or motor force in the organization of the Jewish community, which is the concrete expression of Jewish solidarity, is religious, springing from the desire for public worship. But while religion is the underlying factor, it is not the only factor. There is a sane coordination of the leading aspects of Jewish life, a clear grasp of the relationship between them.