For this reason the gentlemen who stated the object of the Society in the constitution of the Harvard Menorah Society were compelled to take into consideration the following historic fact: There was a time in the history of mankind when religion and life were coincident. You know that the prophets were reformers. The orthodox religion which they fought was the religion of the land. They were progressive religionists, just as the gentlemen who are in the Reform sect to-day claim to be progressive religionists. When they established their religion, it became the religion of the whole nationality, for all ancient religion is national religion. Religion for the Greeks, and religion for the Jews, and religion for the Syrians, and for the Babylonians, and the Romans, was essentially national and political, and the political nationalism of religion in the time of the Roman Empire was the immediate basis for the persecution of the Jews by the Romans. The latter persecuted the Jews not primarily because they disliked the Jews, but because the Jews were a political danger in their refusal to worship the representative of the State in the shape of the Emperor. But in the development of civilization, religion became detached from the totality of civilized living. In the progressive division of labor religion became specialized. The priestly group learned to confine itself more and more to the "things of the spirit"—cult, ritual, dogma, while the other elements in civilization loomed larger and larger. Religion remained social, but society was no longer religious. Life was secularized. I think that the representatives of the Reform sect, in one of their conferences, declared that America is not a Christian country. In so doing they acknowledged this fact.
Continuity of the Jewish Spirit
THROUGHOUT the history of the Jewish people, there is a continuity of spirit which is very different from the continuity of form that attends both the secular and the religious developments of Jewish life. This is the same in both these aspects of Jewish life—in the secular Jewish poetry and thought of the middle ages and up to the present day. Even a Bergson, ostensibly a Frenchman, expresses in his philosophy what is essentially the Hebraic conception of the nature of reality and the destiny of man. From Amos through Job, through the philosophers of the middle ages, to Ahad Ha-'Am there is a clear and accountable continuity. Finally, there is the development of the whole of the secular life of modern Jewry, in Yiddish and in Hebrew. Yiddish may be unpleasant, but Yiddish is no less the speech of the Jews than English, no less the speech of the Jews than Aramaic, and Arabic and Ladino, and all of these have acquired literary and qualitative characteristics which are identical as expressions of the spirit of the Jew, of the Hebraic spirit.
This may be seen generally in the case of Yiddish alone. Yiddish, as you know, is a German dialect; it is middle high German in its base, and German is an inflected language; its rhythms are essentially long, periodic, indeterminate, radically different from the rhythms of Hebrew, involving a different kind of co-ordination and mode. But compare Yiddish with German, and you find quite an antagonistic literary quality. Yiddish reads like the Psalms, and the Bible, and the Talmud; it doesn't read like German until it is Germanized. The whole genius of the tongue has been altered by Jewish use so that its spiritual quality has taken on the quality of the race that uses the tongue, and its literary kinship has become Hebraic.
Again, there is this whole mass of neo-English, neo-Russian, neo-German literatures which, written by Jews, deal with the life of the Jews, with their interests and character. This is not religious. What is its relation to Jewry? Yet again, there is any number of Jewish individuals, among whom I must count myself, who find it impossible to adjust their consciences with any official type of theological doctrine, who are interested in discovering the truth, and are compelled to acknowledge that no truth has been discovered finally, once and for all; there are hundreds and thousands such. What is to be their relation to their people if Jews are to be considered members merely of Judaistic sects? Yet Jews they are, and if they do not contribute directly to Judaism, they do contribute to Hebraism.
Hebraism stands not for that particular expression of the Jewish mind, religion, but for all that has appeared in Jewish history, both religious and secular. The term Judaism stands for that partial expression of the Jewish genius which is religious.
The Ethical Motive of Judaism
IT has been said that the genius of the Jew is entirely religious. I do not think that that is historically a demonstrable proposition. For the dominant motive even in Judaism is not a religious motive. It is an ethical motive. Judaism does not conceive its God as requiring man to be damned for his glory. It conceives its God as an instrument by the worship of whom "thy days may be lengthened in the land." Righteousness and not salvation is the aim even of the Jewish religion. Hebraism is the name for this living spirit which demands righteousness, expressed in all the different interests in which Jews, as Jews, have a share—in art, science, philosophy and social organization and in religion. Hebraism, hence, is a wider term than religion and its continuity embraces, but is not embraced by, the continuity of religion.
Now the Harvard Menorah Society, taking this fact into consideration, made use, because of the tradition of English usage, of the term "Hebraic." It recognized that since Hebraism is more comprehensive than Judaism, many people might be Hebraists who are not and need not be Judaists. It refused to exclude them from a share in Jewish life and an opportunity for Jewish service. The organization goes on the principle—both the Intercollegiate and the constituent Societies—that nothing Jewish is alien to it. For this reason the Menorah takes no sides; for this reason it is Hebraic and not Judaistic. For this reason it welcomes everything Jewish without exception—theological and secular, Russian, German, French, English. It requires only that a thing shall be Jewish, that it shall be a possible part of the organic total we call Hebraism.
Hebraism is the flower and fruit of the whole of Jewish life. Its root is the ethnic nationality of the Jewish people, and with this also the secularizing reformers agree when they prohibit and discourage the marriage of Jew with Gentile.