Jewish History : An Essay in the Philosophy of History Part 3

They became thenceforward the equal partners of their brethren in faith in the rest of Europe. All without distinction had a share in the spiritual martyrdom which is the greenest bayleaf in the crown of Jewish history. To think and to suffer became the watchword of the whole nation.

At first, as we have said, a considerable portion of the Jewish people enjoyed the happy possibility of thinking. This was during the cla.s.sical epoch of the Arabic-Jewish Renaissance, which preceded the Italian Renaissance by four centuries. There is a fundamental difference between the two Renaissance periods: the earlier one was signalized by a re-birth of the sciences and of philosophy, the later one pre-eminently of the arts and of literature. The eleventh and twelfth centuries marked the meridian of the intellectual development of medieval Judaism. As once, in Alexandria, the union of Judaic with h.e.l.lenic culture brought in its train a superabundance of new ideas of a universal character, so again the amalgamation, on Spanish soil, of Jewish culture with Arabic gave rise to rich intellectual results, more lasting and fruitful than the Alexandrian, inasmuch as, in spite of their universal character, they did not contravene the national spirit. The Jewish people dropped its misanthropy and its leaning toward isolation. The Jews entered all sorts of careers: by the side of influential and cultivated statesmen, such as Chasdai ibn Shaprut and Samuel Hanagid, at the courts of the Khalifs, stood a brilliant group of grammarians, poets, and philosophers, like Jonah ibn Ganach, Solomon Gabirol, and Moses ibn Ezra. The philosophic-critical scepticism of Abraham ibn Ezra co-existed in peace and harmony with the philosophic-poetic enthusiasm of Jehuda Halevi. The study of medicine, mathematics, physics, and astronomy went hand in hand with the study of the Talmud, which, though it may not have occupied the first place with the Spanish Jews of this time, by no means disappeared, as witness the compendium by Alpha.s.si. Unusual breadth and fulness of the spiritual life is the distinction of the epoch.

This variety of mental traits combined in a marvelous union to form the great personality of Maimonides, the crown of a glorious period.

With one "Strong Hand," this intellectual giant brought order out of the Talmudic chaos, which at his word was transformed into a symmetrical, legal system; with the other, he "guided the Perplexed"

through the realm of faith and knowledge. For rationalistic clarity and breadth of view no counterpart to the religio-philosophic doctrine which he formulated can be found in the whole extent of medieval literature. The main feature of the philosophy of Maimonides and of the systems based upon it is rationalism, not a dry, scholastic, abstract rationalism, but a living rationalism, embracing the whole field of the most exalted psychic phenomena. It is not philosophy pure and simple, but religious philosophy, an harmonization, more or less felicitous, of the postulates of reason with the dogmas of faith. It is reason mitigated by faith, and faith regulated by reason. In the darkness of the middle ages, when the Romish Church impregnated religion with the crudest superst.i.tions, going so far as to forbid its adherents to read the Bible, and when the greatest philosopher representatives of the Church, like Albertus Magnus, would have rejected offhand, as a childish fancy or, indeed, as an heretical chimera, any attempt to rescue the lower cla.s.ses of the people from their wretched state of spiritual servitude--in a time like this, the truly majestic spectacle is presented of a philosophy declaring war on superst.i.tion, and setting out to purify the religious notions of the people.

Not a breath of this ample spiritual development of the Jews of Arabic Spain reached the Jews living in the Christian countries of Europe.

Their circ.u.mstances were too grievous, and in sombreness their inner life matched their outer estate. Their horizon was as contracted as the streets of the Jewries in which they were penned. The crusades (beginning in 1096) clearly showed the Jews of France and Germany what sentiments their neighbors cherished towards them. They were the first returns which Christianity paid the Jewish people for its old-time teaching of religion. The descendants of the "chosen people," the originators of the Bible, were condemned to torture of a sort to exhaust their spiritual heritage. Judaism suffered the tragic fate of King Lear. Was it conceivable that the horrors--the rivers of blood, the groans of ma.s.sacred communities, the serried ranks of martyrs, the ever-haunting fear of the morrow--should fail to leave traces in the character of Judaism? The Jewish people realized its imminent danger.

It convulsively held fast to its precious relics, clung to the pillars of its religion, which it regarded as the only asylum. The Jewish spirit again withdrew from the outer world. It gave itself up wholly to the study of the Talmud. In northern France and in Germany, Talmudic learning degenerated into the extreme of scholastic pedantry, the lot of every branch of science that is lopped off from the main trunk of knowledge, and vegetates in a heavy, dank atmosphere, lacking light and air. Ras.h.i.+ (1064-1105), whose genial activity began before the first crusade, opened up Jewish religious literature to the popular mind, by his systematic commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. On the other hand, the Tossafists, the school of commentators succeeding him, by their petty quibbling and hairsplitting casuistry made the Talmudic books more intricate and less intelligible. Such being the intellectual bias of the age, a sober, rationalistic philosophy could not a.s.sert itself. In lieu of an Ibn Ezra or a Maimonides, we have Jehuda Hacha.s.sid and Eliezer of Worms, with their mystical books of devotion, _Sefer Cha.s.sidim, Rokeach_, etc., filled with pietistic reflections on the other world, in which the earth figures as a "vale of tears." Poetry likewise took on the dismal hue of its environment. Instead of the varied lyrical notes of Gabirol and Halevi, who sang the weal and woe, not only of the nation, but also of the individual, and lost themselves in psychologic a.n.a.lysis, there now fall upon our ear the melancholy, heartrending strains of synagogue poetry, the harrowing outcries that forced themselves from the oppressed bosoms of the hunted people, the prayerful lamentations that so often shook the crumbling walls of the medieval synagogues at the very moment when, full of wors.h.i.+pers, they were fired by the inhuman crusaders. A mighty chord reverberates in this poetry: _Morituri te salutant_.

One small spot there was, in the whole of Europe, in which Jews could still hope to endure existence and enjoy a measure of security. This was Southern France, or the Provence. The population of Provence had a.s.similated the culture of the neighboring country, Arabic Spain, and become the mediator between it and the rest of Europe. This work of mediation was undertaken primarily by the Jews. In the twelfth century several universities existed in Provence, which were frequented in great numbers by students from all countries. At these universities the teachers of philosophy, medicine, and other branches of science were for the most part Jews. The rationalistic philosophy of the Spanish Jews was there proclaimed _ex cathedra_. The Tibbonides translated all the more important works of the Jewish thinkers of Spain from Arabic into Hebrew. The Kimchis devoted themselves to grammatical studies and the investigation of the Bible. In Montpellier, Narbonne, and Lunel, intellectual work was in full swing.

Rational ideas gradually leavened the ma.s.ses of the Provencal population. Conscience freed from intellectual trammels began to revolt against the oppression exercised by the Roman clergy. Through the Albigensian heresy, Innocent III, founder of the papal power, had his attention directed to the Jews, whom he considered the dangerous protagonists of rationalism. The "heresy" was stifled, Provence in all her magnificence fell a prey to the Roman mania for destruction, and, on the ruins of a n.o.ble civilization, the Dominican Inquisition raged with all its horrors (1213).

Thenceforward the Catholic Church devoted herself to a hostile watch upon the Jews. Either she persecuted them directly through her Inquisition, or indirectly through her omnipotent influence on kings and peoples. In the hearts of the citizens of medieval Europe, the flame of religious hatred was enkindled, and religious hatred served as a cloak for the basest pa.s.sions. Jewish history from that time on became a history of uninterrupted suffering. The Lateran Council declared the Jews to be outcasts, and designed a peculiar, dishonorable badge for them, a round patch of yellow cloth, to be worn on their upper garment (1215). In France the Jews became by turns the victims of royal rapacity and the scapegoats of popular fanaticism.

Ma.s.sacres, confiscations, banishments followed by dearly purchased permission to return, by renewed restrictions, persecutions, and oppressions--these were the measures that characterized the treatment of the Jews in France until their final expulsion (1394). In Germany the Jews were not so much hated as despised. They were _servi camerae_, serfs of the state, and as such had to pay oppressive taxes. Besides, they were limited to the meanest trades and to usury and peddling. They were shut up in their narrow Jewries, huddled in wretched cabins, which cl.u.s.tered about the dilapidated synagogue in a shamefaced way. What strange homes! What gigantic misery, what boundless suffering dumbly borne, was concealed in those crumbling, curse-laden dwellings! And yet, how resplendent they were with spiritual light, what exalted virtues, what lofty heroism they harbored! In those gloomy, tumbledown Jew houses, intellectual endeavor was at white heat. The torch of faith blazed clear in them, and on the pure domestic hearth played a gentle flame. In the abject, dishonored son of the Ghetto was hidden an intellectual giant. In his nerveless body, bent double by suffering, and enveloped in the shabby old cloak still further disfigured by the yellow wheel, dwelt the soul of a thinker. The son of the Ghetto might have worn his badge with pride, for in truth it was a medal of distinction awarded by the papal Church to the Jews, for dauntlessness and courage. The awkward, puny Jew in his way was stronger and braver than a German knight armed cap-a-pie, for he was penetrated by the faith that "moves mountains."

And when the worst came to the worst, he demonstrated his courage.

When his peaceful home was stormed by the b.e.s.t.i.a.lized hordes of Armleder, or the drunken bands of the Flagellants, or the furious avengers of the "Black Death," he did not yield, did not purchase life by disgraceful treason. With invincible courage he put his head under the executioner's axe, and breathed forth his heroic spirit with the enthusiastic cry: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d is One."

At length the turn of the Spanish Jews arrived. For the unbroken peace they had enjoyed, they had to atone by centuries of unexampled suffering. By degrees, the Arabs were forced out of the Pyrenean Peninsula, and the power they had to abdicate was a.s.sumed by the Catholic kings of Castile and Aragon. In 1236 occurred the fall of Cordova, the most important centre of Arabic Jewish culture.

Thereafter Arab power held sway only in the province of Granada. The fortunes of the Spanish Jews underwent a calamitous change. The kings and the upper ten thousand were, indeed, favorably disposed toward them. At the courts of Castile and Aragon, the Jews were active as ministers, physicians, astronomers. But the people, incited by the propaganda of the clerics, nursed frightful hatred against the Jews, not only as "infidels," but also as intellectual aristocrats. The rage of the populace was the combustible material in the terrific explosions that occurred periodically, in the b.l.o.o.d.y saturnalia of the Pastouraux (1320), in the Black Death riots (1348), in the ma.s.sacre of Seville (1391).

Dire blows of fortune were unable to weigh down the Spanish Jew, accustomed to independence, as they did the German Jew. He carried his head proudly on high, for he was conscious that in all respects he stood above the rabble pursuing him, above its very leaders, the clerics. In spite of untoward fate his mental development proceeded, but inevitably it was modified by the trend of the times. By the side of the philosophic tendency of the previous age, a mystical tendency appeared in literature. The Kabbala, with its mist-shrouded symbolism, so grateful to the feelings and the imagination, chimed in better than rationalistic philosophy with the depressed humor under which the greater part of the Jews were then laboring. Another force antagonistic to rationalistic philosophy was the Rabbinism transplanted from France and Germany. The controversy between Rabbinism and philosophy, which dragged itself through three-quarters of a century (1232-1305), ended in the formal triumph of Rabbinism.

However, philosophic activity merely languished, it did not cease entirely; in fact, the three currents for some time ran along parallel with one another. Next to the pillars of Rabbinism, Asheri, Rashba, Isaac ben Sh.e.s.h.et, loomed up the philosophers, Gersonides (Ralbag), Kreskas, and Albo, and a long line of Kabbalists, beginning with Nachmanides and Moses de Leon, the compiler of the Zohar, and ending with the anonymous authors of the mysterious "Kana and Pelia."

The times grew less and less propitious. Catholicism steadily gained ground in Spain. The scowling Dominican put forward his claim upon the Jewish soul with vehement emphasis, and made every effort to drag it into the bosom of the alone-saving Church. The conversion of the Jews would have been a great triumph, indeed, for Catholicism militant. The conversion methods of the Dominican monk were of a most insinuating kind--he usually began with a public religious disputation.

Unfortunately, the Jews were experts in the art of debate, and too often by their bold replies covered the self-sufficient dignitaries of Rome with confusion. The Jews should have known, from bitter experience, that such boldness would not be pa.s.sed over silently. From sumptuous debating hall to Dominican prison and scaffold was but a short step. In 1391, one of these worthy soul-catchers, Bishop Ferdinando Martinez, set the fanatical mob of Seville on the Jews, and not without success. Terrorized by the threat of death, many accepted Catholicism under duress. But they became Christians only in appearance; in reality they remained true to the faith of their fathers, and, in secret, running the risk of loss of life, they fulfilled all the Jewish ordinances. This is the prologue to the thrilling Marrano tragedy.

Finally, the moment approached when gloomy Catholicism attained to unchallenged supremacy in the Pyrenean Peninsula. On the ruins of the enlightened culture of the Arabs, Ferdinand the Catholic and Isabella of Castile reared the reactionary government of medieval Rome. The Inquisition was introduced (1480). Torquemada presided as high priest over the rites attending the human sacrifices. _Ad gloriam ecclesiae_, the whole of Spain was illuminated. Everywhere the funeral pyres of the Inquisition flared to the skies, the air was rent by the despairing shrieks of martyrs enveloped in flames or racked by tortures, the prisons overflowed with Marranos,--all instruments of torture were vigorously plied.

At last the hour of redemption struck: in 1492 all Jews were driven from Spain, and a few years later from Portugal. Jewish-Arabic culture after five centuries of ascendency suffered a sudden collapse. The unhappy people again grasped its staff, and wandered forth into the world without knowing whither.

X

THE RABBINIC-MYSTICAL PERIOD, OR THE HEGEMONY OF THE GERMAN-POLISH JEWS (1492-1789)

The expulsion from Spain was a stunning blow. The h.o.a.ry martyr people which had defied so many storms in its long life was for a moment dazed. The soil of Europe was quaking under its feet. At the time when the medieval period had formally come to a close for Occidental Christendom, and the modern period had opened, the middle ages continued in unmitigated brutality for the Jews. If anything, the life of the Jews had become more unendurable than before. What, indeed, had the much-vaunted modern age to offer them? In the ranks of the humanistic movement Reuchlin alone stood forth prominently as the advocate of the Jews, and he was powerless before the prejudices of the populace. The Reformation in Germany and elsewhere had illuminated the minds of the people, but had not softened their hearts. Luther himself, the creator of the Reformation, was not innocent of hating the followers of an alien faith. The Jews especially did not enjoy too great a measure of his sympathies. The wars growing out of the Reformation, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries devastated Europe in the name of religion, were not calculated to favor the spread of tolerance and milder manners. The conflict raging in the bosom of the Church and setting her own children by the ears, was yet insufficient to divert her maternal care from her "unbelieving" stepchildren. In Spain and Portugal, stakes continued to burn two centuries longer for the benefit of the Marranos, the false Christians. In Germany and Austria, the Jews were kept in the same condition of servitude as before. Their economic circ.u.mstances were appalling. They were forced to emigrate _en ma.s.se_ to Poland, which offered the adherents of their faith a comparatively quiet life, and by and by was invested with the Jewish hegemony. Some of the smaller states and independent towns of Italy also afforded the Jews an asylum, though one not always to be depended upon. A group of hard-driven Spanish exiles, for instance, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Abarbanel had found peace in Italy. The rest had turned to Turkey and her province Palestine,

For a time, indeed, the Jewish spiritual centre was located in Turkey.

What Europe, old, Christian, and hardhearted, refused the Jews, was granted them by Turkey, young, Mussulman, and liberal. On hearing of the banishment of the Jews from Spain, Sultan Bajazet exclaimed: "How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who has made his land poor and enriched ours?" His amazement characterizes the relation of Turkey to the Jews of the day. The one-time Marrano, Joseph Na.s.si, rose to be a considerable dignitary at the court of Sultan Selim (1566-1580). Occasionally he succeeded, by diplomatic means, in wreaking vengeance upon European courts in retaliation for the brutal tortures inflicted upon his people. With the generosity of a Maecenas, he a.s.sembled Jewish scholars and poets, and surrounded himself with a sunlit atmosphere of intellectuality and talent. All other Jewish communities looked up to that of Constantinople. Now and again its rabbis played the part of Patriarchs of the synagogue. To this commanding position the rabbis of Palestine especially were inclined to lay claim. They even attempted to restore the Patriarchate, and the famous controversy between Jacob Berab and Levi ben Chabib regarding the _Semicha_ is another evidence of the same a.s.sertive tendency. Among the Spanish exiles settled in the Holy Land a peculiar spiritual current set in. The storm-tossed wanderers, but now returned to their native Jordan from the sh.o.r.es of the blood-stained Tagus and Guadalquivir, were mightily moved at the sight of their ancestral home. Ahasuerus, who on his thorn-strewn pilgrim's path had drained the cup of woe to the dregs, suddenly caught sight of the home of his childhood razed level with the ground. The precious, never-to-be-forgotten ruins exhaled the home feeling, which took possession of him with irresistible charm. Into his soul there flowed sweet memories of a golden youth, past beyond recall. The impact of these emotions enkindled pa.s.sionate "longing for Zion" in the heart of the forlorn, homeless martyr. He was seized by torturing thirst for political resurrection. Such melancholy feelings and vehement outbursts found expression in the practical Kabbala, originating with Ari (Isaac Luria) and his famous Safed school. A mystical belief in the coming of Messiah thenceforward became one of the essential elements of the Jewish spirit. It vanquished the heart of the learned Joseph Karo, who had brought Rabbinism to its climax by the compilation of his celebrated ritual code, the Shulchan Aruch. With equal force it dominated the being of Solomon Molcho, the enthusiastic youth who, at one time a Marrano, on his public return to Judaism proclaimed the speedy regeneration of Israel. He sealed his faith in his prophecy with death at the stake (1532). The Marranos beyond the Pyrenees and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of the sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on the increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of hope. A mournful national feeling pervades the Jewish literature of the time. Recollections of torments endured enflamed all hearts. A series of chronicles were thus produced that record the centuries of Jewish martyrdom--_Jocha-sin, Shebet Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha_, etc.

The art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of spiritual union. The papal _index librorum prohibitorum_ was impotent in the face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and feeling carried on by the printing press.

After Palestine and Turkey, Holland for a time became the spiritual centre of the scattered Jews (in the seventeenth century). Holland was warmly attached to the cause of liberty. When it succeeded in freeing itself from the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king, Philip II, it inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of peaceful development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to the persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the hara.s.sed Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal, migrated to Holland. Amsterdam became a second Cordova. The intellectual life was quickened. Freedom from restraint tended to break down the national exclusivism of the Jew, and intercourse with his liberal surroundings varied his mental pursuits. Rabbinism, the Kabbala, philosophy, national poetry--they all had their prominent representatives in Holland. These manifold tendencies were united in the literary activity of Mana.s.seh ben Israel, a scholar of extensive, though not intensive, encyclopedic attainments. Free thought and religious rationalism were embodied in Uriel Acosta. To a still higher degree they were ill.u.s.trated in the theory of life expounded by the immortal author of the "Theologico-Political Tractate" (1640-1677).

This advanced state of culture in Holland did not fail to react upon the neighboring countries. Under the impulse of enthusiasm for the Bible Puritan England under Cromwell opened its portals to the Jews.

In Italy, in the dank atmosphere of rabbinical dialectics and morbid mysticism, great figures loom up--Leon de Modena, the antagonist of Rabbinism and of the Kabbala, and Joseph del Medigo, mathematician, philosopher, and mystic, the disciple of Galileo.

These purple patches were nothing more than the accidents of a transition period. The people as a whole was on the decline. The Jewish mind darted hither and thither, like a startled bird seeking its nest. Holland or Turkey was an inadequate subst.i.tute for Spain, if only for the reason that but a tiny fraction of the Jews had found shelter in either. The Jewish national centre must perforce coincide with the numerical centre of the dispersed people, in which, moreover, conditions must grant Jews the possibility of living undisturbed in closely compacted ma.s.ses, and of perfecting a well-knit organization of social and individual life. Outside of Spain these conditions were fulfilled only by Poland, which gradually, beginning with the sixteenth century, a.s.sumed the hegemony over the Jewry of the world.

This marks the displacement of the Sephardic (Spanish, in a broader sense, Romanic) element, and the supremacy of the Ashken.a.z.ic (German-Polish) element.

Poland had been a resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to the position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude. As the merchant middle cla.s.s, the Jews were protected and advanced by the kings and the Szlachta. The consequent security of their position induced so rapid a growth of the Jewish element that in a little while the Jews of Poland outnumbered those of the old Jewish settlements in Occidental Europe. The numerous privileges granted the Jews, by Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the Great (1347-1370), Witowt (1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their successors, fortified their position in the extended territory covered by Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circ.u.mstances in Poland left an impress upon their inner life. An intense mental activity was called forth. This activity can be traced back to German beginnings, though at the same time it is made up of many original elements. For a s.p.a.ce Rabbinism monopolized the intellectual endeavors of the Polish Jews.

The rabbi of Cracow, Moses Isserles, and the rabbi of Ostrog, Solomon Luria (d. 1572), disputed first place with the foremost rabbinical authorities of other countries. Their decisions and circular letters regarding religious and legal questions were accorded binding force.

a.s.sociates and successors of theirs founded Talmud academies throughout the country, and large numbers of students attended them.

Commentators upon the Talmud and expounders of cla.s.sical works in Jewish theological literature appeared in shoals. Jewish printing establishments in Cracow and Lublin were a.s.siduous in turning out a ma.s.s of writings, which spread the fame of the Polish rabbis to the remotest communities. The large autonomy enjoyed by the Polish and Lithuanian Jews conferred executive power upon rabbinical legislation.

The _Kahal_, or Jewish communal government, to a certain degree invested with judicial and administrative competence, could not do without the guiding hand of the rabbis as interpreters of the law. The guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a "college of judges," with fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their own members. The organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the "Synods of the Four Countries," formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the system of Talmud academies (_Yes.h.i.+both_) that covered the whole of Poland remind one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the Babylonia of the Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the "golden age," did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the Orient at Saadia's time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides.

Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised between the cla.s.ses of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness that gave peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew as an individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the same exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a sharply defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting violent shocks and beyond the danger point of extinction through foreign invasion.

The fateful year 1648 formed a turning point in the history of the Polish Jews, as in the history of the countries belonging to the Polish crown. The Cossack butcheries and wars of extermination of 1648-1658 were the same for the Polish Jews that the Crusades, the Black Death, and all the other occasions for carnage had been for the Jews of Western Europe. It seemed as though history desired to avoid the reproach of partiality, and hastened to mete out even-handed justice by apportioning the same measure of woe to the Jews of Poland as to the Jews of Western Europe. But the Polish Jews were prepared to accept the questionable gift from the hands of history. They had mounted that eminence of spiritual stability on which suffering loses the power to weaken its victim, but, on the contrary, endues him with strength. More than ever they shrank into their sh.e.l.l. They shut themselves up more completely in their inner world, and became morally dulled against the persecutions, the bitter humiliations, the deep scorn, which their surroundings visited upon them. The Polish Jew gradually accustomed himself to his pitiable condition. He hardly knew that life might be other than it was. That the Polish lord to whom he was a means of entertainment might treat him with a trace of respect, or that his neighbors, the middle cla.s.s merchant, the German guild member, and the Little Russian peasant, might cherish kindly feelings toward him, he could not conceive as a possibility. Seeing himself surrounded by enemies, he took precautions to fortify his camp, not so much to protect himself against hostile a.s.saults from without--they were inevitable--as to paralyze the disastrous consequences of such a.s.saults in his inner world. To compa.s.s this end he brought into play all the means suggested by his exceptional position before the law and by his own peculiar social const.i.tution. The _Kahal_, the autonomous rabbinical administration of communal affairs, more and more a.s.sumed the character of an inner dictators.h.i.+p. Jewish society was persistently kept under the discipline of rigid principles. In many affairs the synagogue attained the position of a court of final appeal. The people were united, or rather packed, into a solid ma.s.s by purely mechanical processes--by pressure from without, and by drawing tight a noose from within. Besides this social factor tending to consolidate the Jewish people into a separate union, an intellectual lever was applied to produce the same result. Rabbinism employed the mystical as its adjutant. The one exercised control over all minds, the other over all hearts. The growth of mysticism was fostered both by the unfortunate conditions under which the Polish Jews endured existence and by the Messianic movements which made their appearance among the Jews of other countries.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the "practical Kabbala." The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi. As by magic he attracted to himself a tremendous company of adherents in the East and in the West. For a quarter of a century (1650-1676), he kept the Jewish communities everywhere in a state of quivering suspense.

The hara.s.sed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated its agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly. Not even the apostasy and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his followers. Under the guise of a symbolic faith in a Messiah, many of them, publicly or secretly, continued the propaganda for his doctrines.

This propaganda prepared the fertile soil from which, in the eighteenth century, shot up Messianic systems, tending to split Judaism into sects. Nowhere did the mystical teachings evoke so ready a response as in Poland, the very centre of Judaism. At first an ally of the rabbinical school, mysticism grown pa.s.sionate and uncontrollable now and again acted as the violent opponent of Rabbinism. Secret devotion to the Sabbatian doctrines, which had made their home in Poland, sometimes led to such extremes in dogma and ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves. Chayyim Malach, Judah Cha.s.sid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of the eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of excommunication. The mystical tendency was the precursor of the heretical half-Christian sect of Frankists, who ventured so far as to lift a hand against the fundamentals of Judaism: they rejected the Talmud in favor of the Zohar (1756-1773). At the same time a much more profound movement, instinct with greater vitality, made its appearance among the Polish-Jewish ma.s.ses, a movement rooted in their social and spiritual organization. The wretched, debased condition of the average Jew, conjoined with the traditions of the Kabbala and the excrescences of Rabbinism, created a foothold for Cha.s.sidic teaching. Cha.s.sidism replaced Talmudic ratiocination by exalted religious sentiment. By the force of enthusiasm for faith, it drew its adherents together into a firmly welded unit in contrast with Rabbinism, which sought the same goal by the aid of the formal law. Scenting danger, the rabbinical hierarchy declared war upon the Kabbala. Emden opposed Eibeschutz, the Polish Sabbatians and Frankists were fought to the death, the Wilna Gaon organized a campaign against the Cha.s.sidim. Too late! Rabbinism was too old, too arid, to tone down the impulsive outbreaks of pa.s.sion among the people. In their religious exaltation the ma.s.ses were looking for an elixir. They were languis.h.i.+ng, not for light to illumine the reason, but for warmth to set the heart aglow. They desired to lose themselves in ecstatic self-renunciation. Cha.s.sidism and its necessary dependence upon the Zaddik offered the ma.s.ses the means of this forgetfulness of self through faith. They were the medium through which the people saw the world in a rosy light, and the consequences following upon their prevalence were seen in a marked intensification of Jewish exclusiveness.

The same aloofness characterizes the Jews of the rest of the eighteenth century diaspora. Wherever, as in Germany, Austria, and Italy, Jews were settled in considerable numbers, they were separated from their surroundings by forbidding Ghetto walls. On the whole, no difference is noticeable between conditions affecting Jews in one country and those in another. Everywhere they were merely tolerated, everywhere oppressed and humiliated. The b.l.o.o.d.y persecutions of the middle ages were replaced by the burden of the exceptional laws, which in practice degraded the Jews socially to an inferior race, to citizens of a subordinate degree. The consequences were uniformly the same in all countries: spiritual isolation and a morbid religious mood. During the first half of the "century of reason," Jewry presented the appearance of an exhausted wanderer, heavily dragging himself on his way, his consciousness clouded, his trend of thought obviously anti-rationalistic. At the very moment in which Europe was beginning to realize its medieval errors and repent of them, and the era of universal ideals of humanity was dawning, Judaism raised barricades between itself and the world at large. Elijah Gaon and Israel Besht were the contemporaries of Voltaire and Rousseau.

Apparently there was no possibility of establis.h.i.+ng communication between these two diametrically opposed worlds. But history is a magician. Not far from the Poland enveloped in medieval darkness, the morning light of a new life was breaking upon slumbering Jewry in German lands. New voices made themselves heard, reverberating like an echo to the appeal issued by the "great century" in behalf of a spiritual and social regeneration of mankind.

XI

THE MODERN PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT (THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)

Two phenomena signalized the beginning of the latest period in Jewish history: the lofty activity of Mendelssohn and the occurrence of the great French Revolution. The man stands for the spiritual emanc.i.p.ation of the Jews, the movement for their political emanc.i.p.ation. At bottom, these two phenomena were by no means the ultimate causes of the social and spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people. They were only the products of the more general causes that had effected a similar regeneration in all the peoples of Western Europe. The new currents, the abandonment of effete intellectual and social forms, the subst.i.tution of juster and more energetic principles, the protest against superst.i.tion and despotism--all these traits had a common origin, the resuscitation of reason and free thought, which dominated all minds without asking whether they belonged to Jew or to Christian.

It might seem that the rejuvenation of the Jews had been consummated more rapidly than the rejuvenation of the other peoples. The latter had had two centuries, the period elapsing since the middle ages, that is, the period between the Reformation and the great Revolution, in which to prepare for a more rational and a more humane conduct of life. As for the Jews, their middle ages began much later, and ended later, almost on the eve of 1789, so that the revolution in their minds and their mode of life had to accomplish itself hastily, under the urgence of swiftly crowding events, by the omission of intermediate stages. But it must be taken into consideration that long before, in the Judeo-h.e.l.lenic and in the Arabic-Spanish period, the Jews had pa.s.sed through their "century of reason." In spite of the intervening ages of suffering and gloom, the faculty of a.s.similating new principles had survived. For the descendants of Philo and Maimonides the rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century was in part a repet.i.tion of a well-known historical process. They had had the benefit of a similar course of studies before, and, therefore, had no need to cram on the eve of the final examination.

In point of fact, the transformation in the life of the Jews did take place with extraordinary swiftness. It was hastened in France by the principles of the Revolution and the proclamation of the civil equality of Jews with the other citizens. In Germany, however, it advanced upon purely spiritual lines. Mendelssohn and Lessing, the heralds of spiritual reform, who exposed old prejudices, carried on their labors at a time in which the Jews still stood beyond the pale of the law, a condition which it did not occur to Frederick II, "the philosopher upon the throne," to improve. A whole generation was destined to pa.s.s before the civil emanc.i.p.ation of the German Jews was accomplished. Meantime their spiritual emanc.i.p.ation proceeded apace, without help from the ruling powers. A time so early as the end of the eighteenth century found the German Jews in a position to keep step with their Christian fellow-citizens in cultural progress. Enlightened Jews formed close connections with enlightened Christians, and joined them in the universal concerns of mankind as confederates espousing the same fundamental principles. If they renounced some of their religious and national traditions, it was by no means out of complaisance for their neighbors. They were guided solely and alone by those universal principles that forced non-Jews as well as Jews to reject many traditions as incompatible with reason and conscience.

Non-Jews and Jews alike yielded themselves up to the fresh inspiration of the time, and permitted themselves to be carried along by the universal transforming movement. Mendelssohn himself, circ.u.mspect and wise, did not move off from religious national ground. But the generation after him abandoned his position for that of universal humanity, or, better, German nationality. His successors intoxicated themselves with deep draughts of the marvelous poetry created by the magic of Goethe and Schiller. They permitted themselves to be rushed along by the liberty doctrines of 1789, they plunged head over heels into the vortex of romanticism, and took an active part in the conspicuous movements of Europe, political, social, and literary, as witness Borne, Heine, and their fellow-combatants.

The excitement soon evaporated. When the noise of the liberty love-feasts had subsided, when the cruel reaction (after 1814) had settled heavily upon the Europe of the nineteenth century, and G.o.d's earth had again become the arena of those agents of darkness whom dreamers had thought buried forever beneath the ruins of the old order, then the German Jews, or such of them as thought, came to their senses. The more intelligent Jewish circles realized that, in devotion to the German national movement, they had completely neglected their own people. Yet their people, too, had needs, practical or spiritual, had its peculiar national sphere of activity, circ.u.mscribed, indeed, by the larger sphere of mankind's activities as by a concentric circle, but by no means merged into it. To atone for their sin, thinking Jews retraced their steps. They took in hand the transforming of Jewish inner life, the simplification of the extremely complicated Jewish ritual, the remodeling of pedagogic methods, and, above all, the cultivation of the extended fields of Jewish science, whose head and front is Jewish historical research in all its vastness and detail. Heine's friend, Zunz, laid the cornerstone of Jewish science in the second decade of the nineteenth century. His work was taken up by a goodly company of zealous and able builders occupied for half a century with the task of rearing the proud edifice of a scientific historical literature, in which national self-consciousness was sheltered and fostered. At the very height of this reforming and literary activity, German Jewry was overwhelmed by the civil emanc.i.p.ation of 1848. Again a stirring movement drew them into sympathy with a great general cause, but this time without drawing them away from Jewish national interests. Cultural and civil a.s.similation was accomplished as an inner compelling necessity, as a natural outcome of living. But spiritual a.s.similation, in the sense of a merging of Judaism in foreign elements, was earnestly repudiated by the n.o.blest representatives of Judaism. It was their ideal that universal activity and national activity should be pursued to the prejudice of neither, certainly not to the exclusion of one or the other, but in perfect harmony with each other. In point of fact, it may be a.s.serted that, in spite of a frequent tendency to go to the one or the other extreme, the two currents, the universal and the national, co-exist within German Jewry, and there is no fear of their uniting, they run parallel with each other. The Jewish genius is versatile. Without hurt to itself it can be active in all sorts of careers: in politics and in civil life, in parliament and on the lecture platform, in all branches of science and departments of literature, in every one of the chambers of mankind's intellectual laboratory. At the same time it has its domestic hearth, its national sanctuary; it has its sphere of original work and its self-consciousness, its national interests and spiritual ideals rooted in the past of the Jew.

By the side of a La.s.salle, a Lasker, and a Marx towers a Riesser, a Geiger, a Graetz. The leveling process unavoidably connected with widespread culture, so far from causing spiritual desolation in German Judaism, has, on the contrary, furnished redundant proof that even under present conditions, so unfavorable to what is individual and original, the Jewish people has preserved its vitality to the full.

An a.n.a.logous movement stirred the other countries of Western Europe--France, Italy, and England. The political emanc.i.p.ation of the Jews was accomplished earlier in them than in Germany. The reconstruction of the inner life, too, proceeded more quietly and regularly, without leaps and bounds, and religious reform established itself by degrees. Yet even here, where the Jewish contingent was insignificant, the spiritual physiognomy of the Jews maintained its typical character. In these countries, as in Germany, the Jew a.s.similated European culture with all its advantages and its drawbacks. He was active on diplomatic fields, he devoted himself to economic investigations, he produced intellectual creations of all kinds--first and last he felt himself to be a citizen of his country.

None the less he was a loyal son of the Jewish people considered as a spiritual people with an appointed task. Cremieux, Beaconsfield, Luzzatti are counterbalanced by Salvador, Frank, Munk, Reggio, and Montefiore. All the good qualities and the shortcomings distinctive of the civilization of modern times adhere to the Jew. But at its worst modern civilization has not succeeded in extinguis.h.i.+ng the national spirit in Jewry. The national spirit continues to live in the people, and it is this spirit that quickens the people. The genius of Jewish history, as in centuries gone by, holds watch over the sons of the "eternal people" scattered to all ends of the earth. West-European Jewry may say of itself, without presumption: _Cogito ergo sum_.

Russian Jewry, the Jewry that had been Polish, and that is counted by the millions, might, if necessary, prove its existence by even more tangible marks than Occidental Jewry. To begin with, the centre of gravity of the Jewish nation lies in Russia, whose Jews not only outnumber those of the rest of Europe, but continue to live in a compact ma.s.s. Besides, they have preserved the original Jewish culture and their traditional physiognomy to a higher degree than the Jews of other countries. The development of the Russian Jews took a course very different from that of the Jews of the West. This difference was conditioned by the tremendous contrast between Russian culture and West-European culture, and by the change which the external circ.u.mstances of Jews outside of Russia underwent during the modern period. The admission of the Polish provinces into the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century found the numerous Jewish population in an almost medieval condition, the same condition in which the non-Jewish population of Russian Poland was at that time.

The Polish regime, as we saw above, had isolated the Jews alike in civil and spiritual relations. The new order did not break down the barriers. The ma.s.ses of Jews cooped up in the "Pale of Settlement"

were strong only by reason of their inner unity, their firmly established patriarchal organization. The bulwark of Rabbinism and the citadel of Cha.s.sidism protected them against alien influences. They guarded their isolation jealously. True to the law of inertia, they would not allow the privilege of isolation to be wrested from them.

They did not care to step beyond the ramparts. Why, indeed, should the Jews have quitted their fortress, if outside of their walls they could expect nothing but scorn and blows? The unfortunates encaged in the sinister Pale of Settlement could have been lured out of their exclusive position only by complete civil emanc.i.p.ation combined with a higher degree of culture than had been attained by Russian society, an impossible set of circ.u.mstances in the first half of the nineteenth century. The legislative measures of the time, in so far as they relate to the Jews, breathe the spirit of police surveillance rather than of enlightenment and humanity. To civilizing and intellectual influences from without the way was equally barred. Yet all this watchfulness was of no avail. Nothing could prevent the liberty principles espoused by the Jews of Western Europe from being smuggled into the Pale, to leaven the sad, serried ma.s.ses. A sluggish process of fermentation set in, and culminated in the literary activity of Isaac Beer Levinsohn and of the Wilna reformers of the second and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. They were the harbingers of approaching spring.

When spring finally came (after 1855), and the sun sent down his genial rays upon the wretched Jewry of Russia, life and activity began to appear at once, especially in the upper strata. As in Germany, so in Russia spiritual emanc.i.p.ation preceded political emanc.i.p.ation.

Still shorn almost entirely of the elementary rights of citizens, the Russian Jews nevertheless followed their ideal promptings, and partic.i.p.ated enthusiastically in the movement for enlightenment which at that time held the n.o.blest of the Russians enthralled. In a considerable portion of the Russian Jewish community a process of culture regeneration began, an eager throwing off of outworn forms of life and thought, a swift adoption of humane principles. Jewish young men crowded into the secular schools, in which they came in close contact with their Christian contemporaries. Influenced by their new companions, they gave themselves up to Russian national movements, often at the cost of renunciation of self. Some of them, indeed, in one-sided aspiration strove to become, not Russians, but men. The influence exercised by literature was more moderate than that of the schools. Rabbinic and Cha.s.sidistic literature, on the point of dying out as it was, abandoned the field to the literature of enlightenment in the Hebrew language, a literature of somewhat primitive character.

It consisted chiefly of naive novels and of didactic writings of publicists, and lacked the solid scientific and historical element that forms the crown of Western Jewish literature. It is indisputable, however, that it exerted an educational influence. Besides, it possesses the merit of having resuscitated one of the most valuable of Jewish national possessions, the Hebrew language in its purity, which in Russia alone has become a pliant instrument of literary expression.

A still greater field was reserved for the Jewish-Russian literature that arose in the "sixties." It was called into being in order to present a vivid and true picture of the social and spiritual interests of the Jews. Proceeding from discussions of current political topics, this literature gradually widened its limits so as to include Jewish history, Jewish science, and the portrayal of Jewish life, and more and more approached the character of a normal European literature. All this was in the making, and the most important work had not yet begun.