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THE MODERN PHARISEE By Rabbi Joel Blau
Published in the Atlantic Monthly New York, New York, U.S.A. January 1922 (pages 1-13)
Being hated, despite its obvious inconvenience, is really a high distinction. Philosophers always knew this. Saints were passionately convinced of it. Hence the fierce pride of martyrs. For one thing, the position of the hated becomes automatically one of moral superiority over the hater—which is the subtlest and noblest revenge. And if the hated can but rise to the height of his opportunity, neither returning hatred nor attempting to avert the blows of the hater, he has decidedly solved his problem. He has solved it by not solving it. He has solved it by non-resistance. And non-resistance, though few people are aware of it, is the strongest form of resistance. There is a curious paradox in the case of the Jew, the classical example of the aristocratic tribe of the hated. Theoretically, the Jew is alleged to be an advocate of ruthless revenge. 'An-eye-for-an-eye'—a mere legal formula—has been accepted as the literal phrasing of his life- view. Historically, however, the Jews are the most non-resistant people on earth. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible how a people, admittedly endowed with rare intelligence, could defer the solution of its heart-rending problem for two thousand years. A vast wisdom, it must appear, prompted this millennial inactivity. It was the secret of the Jew's miraculous survival. The Jew lives by the resistless force of his non-resistance. Tolstoy seems to have understood this strange paradox. He tells us in his Confessions that he was reading the fifth chapter of Matthew with a Hebrew rabbi. At nearly every verse the rabbi said, 'That is in the Bible/ or, 'That is in the Talmud ' ; and he showed Tolstoy, in the Bible and in the Talmud, sentences very like the declarations of the Sermon on the Mount. But when they reached the verse about non-resistance to evil, the rabbi did not say, ' This also is in the Talmud,' but he asked the count: 'Do the Christians obey this command? Do they turn the other cheek?' And Tolstoy adds to the recital of this anecdote: 'I had nothing to say in reply, especially as at that particular time Christians were not only not turning the other cheek, but were smiting the Jews on both cheeks.' The unfortunate relation, then, between Jews and Christians simmers down to this: peoples that believe in non-resistance, but practise it not, hate a people that believes not in non-resistance, but practises it. Now, if no other element entered into the Jewish problem than the question of this external relation, the real impetus might be lacking for the abandonment of the traditional attitude of non-resistance. For the fierce pride of the martyr is still strong in the tortured breast of the Jew. But in these latter days other elements have entered into the problem, which compel the Jew to revise his attitude toward both his own inner world and the outer non-Jewish world. These newer elements, indeed, deal with the spiritual problem of Jewish life in the Diaspora; but they are usually unrecognized. It is depressing to see the Jewish problem discussed, even by Jews, from without and not from within; as if its inner aspect did not matter; at all events, as if this were something in which the world at large need take no interest, it being the concern of a few Jewish zealots only. Over against this mistaken position, these very Jewish zealots, who are far from obsolete, claim that the only way to solve the Jewish problem is from within. Find the right solution for the internal problem of the Jew, and the external problem, created by the persistence of anti-Semitism, will solve itself. These two modes of approaching the Jewish problem, the external and the internal, correspond with two eternal types within Jewry. It will do well to call these two types the extraverted Jew and the introverted Jew. Not a particularly pretty jargon, and in a way not very necessary, since the ancient prototypes of the introverted and extraverted Jew are found, respectively, in the Pharisee and the Sadducee. The Pharisee was always intent upon the spiritual problem of the Jew; in order to solve it, he was ready to bring the greatest sacrifices he was the introverted Jew. The Sadducee was always less spiritual, more worldly, more yielding to the lure of the environment, therefore a hellenizer—he was the extraverted Jew. And the distinction holds good, too, as between their latter-day counterparts. Your extraverted Modern Sadducee is turned outward : his chief concern is to make his bargain with the world even at the expense of the time-hallowed spiritual treasures of the distinctive Jewish life. He would lose his Jewish soul, if he could only gain the world. The result usually is that he loses both. Your introverted Modern Pharisee, on the contrary, is turned inward, toward the mystic recesses of the Jewish heart: his hope is to keep his own soul and thereby ultimately to gain the world. But he would rather lose the whole world than lose aught of the riches of his soul. To the extraverted Modern Sadducee the Jewish problem is social, philanthropic, economic, and political. Therefore, both his conception and his solution of the problem are wholly external. To the introverted Modern Pharisee the Jewish problem is chiefly spiritual; therefore, his solution is internal. He is greatly troubled by the outer foe; but he is still more seriously aggrieved at the inner foe. The dangers that in this pogrom-haunted world constantly threaten Jewish lives he is painfully aware of; but the perils that menace Jewish life loom to him much larger. By the Divine Dispensation the Jew is in Galuth, in exile; but the greater calamity is, according to the poignant old phrase, that the Shekinah is in Galuth. This is the real Judenschmertz—the Sorrow of the Jewish Soul. Facing the catastrophe of the utter decadence of Jewish life, as he observes it particularly in the Occident, the Modern Pharisee can no longer content himself with non-resistance. He, more than anyone else, knows that a new way must be found. But a new way means first a new education, a new understanding, a new vision. He knows that the best minds among his people are groping for a new understanding of the spiritualities of human living; that they are reaching out after a new vision of the relation of the Jew to the Christian world. And he seeks to place this relation on a new basis—a basis that will render unnecessary the traditional attitude as between hater and hated. Let none believe that the Modern Pharisee is nervously apprehensive. Let no anti-Semite assume that he can seriously disturb the miraculous poise of the Semite. If no other shadow lay athwart the path of the Jew than this grotesque, contorted, ridiculously exaggerated shadow of anti-Semitism, the Wandering Jew would pass on with the wan smile of those who have captured the secret of eternal life. But there are other, more familiar, yet more menacing shapes darkening the way of his pilgrimage. Therefore, the Modern Pharisee would at last actively engage in the solution of the Jewish problem. He would cry out, not so much against the world that wrongs the Jew, as against the Jew who wrongs himself. He would save the Jew; and, in saving the Jew, he would save the world from the nightmare of anti-Semitism. For anti-Semitism endangers, not so much the Semite, as the anti-Semite; and the Modern Pharisee would redeem the world from the age-long curse of a hatred which has brutalized the hater more than the hated. This, in substance, is the cry of the Modern Pharisee.
II Nothing is so difficult as the delineation of the soul of a people. Many deny that the ethnic soul is more than a convenient abstraction, a verbal handle. It has come to be rather fashionable to scout the theory of race, on both physical and psychological sides. But Emerson says somewhere that race 'is a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit,' and, surely, in the case of the ancient people, this symmetry of the wit, this integral structure of the Self, has remained true to itself down to our own time. No one would maintain that it is impervious to outside influence; no one—alas!—could say that it cannot be warped into a caricature of itself; but fundamentally it ever remains the same. Ancient monuments unearthed in Bible lands exhibit Jewish types whose modern representatives may be met walking the streets of Lodz or London, of Warsaw or Washington. But if you pass from a reverent reading of the Bible to a thoughtful study of the Jewish character, you will find a still more striking persistence of type—the survival in the recesses of the Jewish heart of the indomitable desert-born spirit that gave the world its law and its religion. Though men forget, the meanest Jew tailor in an East-Side shop is a descendant of the Prophets, and in his veins runs the blood that quickened the pulse of the world. When Paul spoke of his former, dead self as 'Hebraios ex Hebraion, kato nomon Pharisaios,'—a Hebrew of Hebrews and a Pharisee,—and as a Pharisee son of Pharisees, he sent adown the ages a note of Pharisee pride, the key-note of the Jewish spirit. And although the world, from superficial acquaintance, has accepted this Pharisee pride as a symbol of hypocrisy and self-righteousness, the introverted Jew of our own time does not hesitate to repeat the words of Paul (without, of course, his undertone of contempt), and proclaim himself still 'a Hebrew of Hebrews and a Pharisee': changeless, distinct, unique. The charge of hypocrisy he can easily brush aside; and as for pride, he admits it, yet holds himself guiltless. For pride is no sin, except when one will not live up to it. Then it becomes a vain boast, the repulsive opposite of humility. But there is a species of pride—not at all the opposite, but rather the other side of humility—which is tantamount to a pledge of obligation. It aims at manhood's highest fulfilment. It is compounded of a clear knowledge of one's place, a consciousness of both powers and limitations, and a desire to participate wholeheartedly in the passionate business of living. This pride is the child of reverence: the last summing up of the sanctities of Individuality. Its absence, far from being commendable, is the mark of the worthless fellow—nur Lumpe sind bescheiden. Its presence is the distinguishing sign of divinely stubborn men, 'terribly meek,' who inherit the earth and heaven, too. Of peoples, too, even as of persons, the same holds true: modesty is a sin in any people. The chief duty that a people owes both itself and the world is reverence for its own soul, the mystic centre of its being. There is greatness in being able to turn worldward and say without fear or favor: 'Such as I am, with my strength and my weaknesses, I will take my place in the sun!' particularly when by this is meant the Sun of Righteousness. Now, this group-pride, this heroic self-assertion, is strongly developed in the Jewish people. It has been the one sustaining force in its precarious existence. The Church maintains that the Jew has survived as an everlasting example of shame—a deterrent—a kind of universal bogey-man. The Jew rejoins that he has survived as an everlasting object-lesson in noble pride, an encouragement for all who cherish the handsomeness of the 'symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit,' to whom Personality spells the mystery of mysteries the last word of life for which all the worlds and all the ages are in ceaseless travail. And it is this Pride of Jewish Personality which the Modern Pharisee is bent upon preserving and enhancing. It is this Pride of Jewish Personality which he dares to claim much for, in the face of the all-too-patent fact that mankind refuses to accept the Jew qua Jew, and girds at the qualities which make for his uniqueness in a world tending increasingly toward monotony. The incongruity pointed out by Mr. Lloyd George of singing Jewish hymns on Sunday and killing Jewish men on Monday is not as glaring as the inconsistency between the belief that, when the Divine Personality sought a worthy incarnation, it chose a Jewish personality for its terrestrial garb, and the practice of destroying Jewish personality in the shape of as many Jewish persons as possible. Only the other day six hundred Jews were reported to have been buried alive somewhere in Eastern Europe. In the western part of the world pogroms are subtler, and vivisepulture is not so apparent, but is all the more agonizing for reaching unto the soul and leaving the poor flesh unharmed. Here lack of respect for Jewish individuality is even more keenly felt than elsewhere, set off as it is in sinister fashion by the grant of the purely technical freedom of the ballot-box. It almost seems that Autocracy kills only the body, but Democracy destroys the very soul. Why this world-wide failure to accord due consideration to the Jewish race-soul? The world, indeed, tends toward democratic standardization; yet it recognizes all other racial and national individualities. French, English, and German differ among themselves; nevertheless, they perceive that race-difference, while oft a source of conflict, is on the whole the creative force behind progress and civilization, making for 'life more abundant.' They do at times poke fun at each other's peculiarities; they call each other names all in a fairly good-humored way. They do not call one another nasty names except in war-time; but even Boche has no such withering effect, and is never so hissingly uttered, as the opprobrious names that even men of refinement do not scruple to hurl at the people of God. The Sin of Being Different is visited upon no people with such Old-Testament wrath as upon the Jew and that by the followers of the New Testament. 'Ah' they say, 'if Jews were only not so distinctive, clannish, separate; if they only consented to commit race-suicide by conversion, intermarriage, assimilation!' It reminds one of the old suggestion that the only way to stop fighting in Ireland is to dip the Emerald Isle in the ocean for just five minutes. But Jews cannot be dipped into the baptismal font, even for several generations, without coming up again the same old Jews. There is scarcely any point in Shylock's pathetic plea, in which he recounts the similarities (omitting, of course, the Semitic nose) between the Gentile physiognomy and the Jewish: for it is precisely the dissimilarities, not alone physical, but chiefly mental, that seem to irk the non-Jewish world. But the Modern Pharisee knows that these dissimilarities hold the secret of Jewish individuality. Upon this knowledge he stands four-square, neither pleading nor apologizing. He has nothing to hide, nothing to gloss over. He calmly faces all attacks upon the citadel of Jewish personality, no matter whence they emanate: from foe or friend, from the Christian world, or from his own Sadducee brother. The broad way of assimilation—one might call it the Jewish 'Main Street'—he would not tread: he knows too well the egregious folly of assimilation. Moses Hess, one of the first writers on Zionism in the last century, tells amusingly in his startling Rom und Jerusalem of the son of a rich German-Jewish banker, who would stand in front of his mirror for hours on end, desperately endeavoring to iron out the Semitic kinks of his hair. But, straight hair or curly locks, can any Jew ever hope to straighten out the 'kinks' of his oriental soul? This oriental soul the Modern Pharisee claims as his birthright, not to be traded away for the contents of any pot—even though it be the Melting-Pot. What both the ill-will of the world and the cowardice of his weaker brethren regard a reproach and a shame he considers a glory and an honor. And his highest aspiration is to bring the spirit he is made of to its fairest flowering. His very name—Pharisee—means distinctiveness, separation, noble aloofness. He believes the eternal Pharisee spirit to be one of the redeeming forces of the world. For one thing, it is a serious spirit, terribly serious. Then, it is an intense spirit, unspeakably intense: of the deathless quality that moves mountains. Lastly, it is a severely religious spirit, withal shot through with tender humanity, whose chief aim is the abolition of the unjustified difference between the holy and the profane, whose chief protest is against the damning secularization of life. Granted the eccentricities of this spirit, the world cannot very well be without its heroism, its glorified self-insistence. The Modern Pharisee is profoundly convinced of the worth-whileness of Jewish individuality, not only for its own sake, but also for the sake of mankind. Therefore, more devoutly than the ancient Pharisee ever bound the phylacteries upon his head, the Modern Pharisee,—no longer, perhaps, wearer of these ritualistic symbols—binds pride around his brow. But he insists that it is generous pride: not self-consciousness—rather, consciousness of self!
III But Individuality is not the name he would give to Jewish shortcomings. The dividing line between Individuality and Individualism is as thin as, the Talmud says, is the partition between heaven and hell. He has no desire to nurse racial excrescences into rank growth, call their sum by a pretty name like Race-Soul, Mission, Kultur or what not, and palm them off on an unwilling world as the special Jewish contribution to the greatest misery for the largest number. That may be Junkerism; it is not Judaism. The Modern Pharisee does not maintain that his people has never been guilty of this offense. There is in the very phrase ' Chosen People ' that which tends toward sublimation of the failings of the racial Ego into the sanctities of Individuality. And, by all the laws of Freud and common sense, an oppressed people cannot be altogether blamed if it seeks refuge in just such a sublimation; especially when it happens to be dowered with a high-strung, sensitive temperament. Such a people cannot accept the world's unfavorable judgment without some counter-move on the part of the outraged spirit; cannot easily engage in the strenuous exercise of self-criticism. Nevertheless, the Modern Pharisee dares to call his people to honest self-scrutiny. Let none say that it ill becomes him to issue this call. Contrary to popular notions, the Pharisee spirit was never one of smug self-exaltation. More scathingly than the writers of the New Testament ever did, the Pharisee scribes themselves denounced the hypocritical swaggering brother in the camp. The truth is that the Pharisee was not pharisaic. Neither is his modern counterpart. He would steer clear of the extremes of self-love and self-depreciation. Bobbie Burns's prayer for the 'giftie' to see ourselves as others see us does not exactly appeal to the Modern Pharisee: he has no particular taste for caricature. Why assume off-hand that others would see us with clearer sight? If we must beware of the vanity of the Ego, must we not equally be on guard against the malice of the world? The Modern Pharisee asks for the far higher grace of seeing himself, with his virtues and failings, in utter nakedness, yet unashamed, as God sees him—as he is! The usual apologetic methods he scorns. Timidity he loathes. He objects to the very notion of having to assume an apologetic attitude. He leaves that to his Sadducee 'coreligionist.' He does not care to stand in the public square frantically waving the flag. Why should it be necessary for any American of Jewish blood and belief to rave and shout, 'I am an American'? He knows that all this waving and raving raises the ghost of the doubt it seeks to lay. Why should the Jew alone have to prove by statements and statistics that he is patriotic ? He has proved it on all battlefields brother killing brother; why all this extra pother? No less distasteful to him is the constant harping on Jewish achievement, of the well-known 'The-Jew-and-' type: the Jew and Science; the Jew and Art; the Jew and what-not. He hates timidity when it is timid; he hates still more the boldness of timidity; and nothing is quite so bold as timidity when it is thoroughly scared. Why should we have to beat our own drum for the purpose of making out a claim to the world's consideration? True enough, we are a clever and versatile people; too clever, it seems, to produce out of our own body and soul a genius of the highest creative order; but is it not humiliating for a people with a hoary culture to begin at this late date to prove its intellectual attainments ? And suppose we were a people of dunces, should we not be entitled to draw mortal breath, to live as freemen, and enjoy full equality before the law, and even behind it? All this noisy 'Apologia pro Vita Sua,' joined in by a whole people, begets an impression of queerness, of abnormality. It smacks of upstartism, of sticky newness. The intellectual parvenu, who is uneasy under the burden of his newly acquired knowledge, is no less objectionable than the shiny nuisance of the recently filled perambulating gold-sack. Some of the results of this tendency are ludicrous. For the attempt to fasten greatness upon the Jew results in fastening Judaism upon the great. No sooner does someone win fame in any field than we appropriate him for ourselves he must be a Jew! It has become part of the proverbial curse of greatness.
If these methods of apologetics
appear vulgar, they are also bankrupt. They fail of their
intended effect. Nay, they act boomerang-fashion: they serve
as a handle to the anti-Semite. Einstein had to defend his
theory of relativity against the attacks of the anti-Somites
even more than against the arguments of physicists. Of old
the stars in their courses fought against Sisera; but today
the foe of Israel would fight the In Germany, conditions are no better. The presence of the Jew in the literary and scientific world is regarded an intrusion,—worse than his presence in a high-class American hotel or fashionable residential section, and by that token, the greater his achievement, the greater the offense. The soul even more than the body of the Semite is the objective of the attacks of the anti-Semite. The latter cries out in alarm—often honest enough—at the infiltration of the ubiquitous Semitic spirit into the national art and culture, arguing that it mongrelizes the national spirit. Mendelssohn filled his music with oriental motifs; and no Teuton can forgive Heine for having introduced into Germanic literature, not alone French esprit, but also mordant Jewish wit. Poor Heine! For his pointed wit, a statue erected in his honor had to be shipped all over the earth before it could find rest in the Bronx, among his own brothers, the Russo-Jewish needle-workers. The world cannot forgive the Jew his virtues. The world will not forgive him his virtues, so long as the Jew refuses to forget them. The Modern Pharisee, therefore, objects to the romantic idealization of the Jew . It is doing the Jew poor justice to condemn him to the wearing of a halo. It is almost worse than the wearing of a yellow badge. Humanly speaking, there is nothing so imperfect as perfection. There must be something desperately wrong about a people that is always in the right! No—the Modern Pharisee does not believe that Jew and Judaism are always right. He believes in self-criticism. He believes in Individuality well disciplined, well cultivated. The only way he would counter the universal criticism of his people is by himself engaging in it, and performing a painful operation with tender hand, which others are sure to perform with ruder touch. And, therefore, he does not like the word 'Prejudice,' applied by his people to every form of opposition manifested toward it. The word begs the question. Prejudice means a judgment without foundation in reason or justice: but to characterize all opposition to us as without foundation is not the way to cope with anti-Semitism. All anti-Semitism is not due to Christian bias, nor is it of Christian origin. By some inner or outer fatality, the Jew was never beloved of mankind. Jew-hatred harks back to the beginnings of the Jewish people—it is as old as the Jew. It necessitated the first Ghetto in Goshen; but traces thereof are found as early as Abraham's time. The Jewish Bible is the oldest record of anti-Semitism as of Semitism. In the face of the curious fact that we have through timeless time been a target for the hatred of a world, to say that all this was caused by 'prejudice,' unfounded, unreasoned, blind, is to beg the whole question. The charges leveled against us by Pharaoh or Ford (the first famous for his chariots, the second for his automobiles) are indeed false; but what is back of them—the relentless hatred—remains with all its dark flowering of passion. Why? Surely, the time is ripe for the searchings of the Jewish heart. It does not take much of a flaw to detract from the value of the most brilliant gem. A race-personality may have every brilliant trait, every sterling quality, marred by some fatal flaw. The excellences of Jewish individuality are not to be doubted: they are all on the intellectual and moral side. Its flaw, unfortunately, is on the aesthetic side: the Jew lacks form. And form is, if not everything, a great deal. It is the graceful touch that lessens the natural human impact of personality upon personality; that makes a man acceptable to his fellows in spite of his defects, nay, in spite of his virtues. Superiority is a cardinal sin; to atone for it one must possess this grace. Even morals are made tolerable only by manners. Lacking this grace, one becomes a source of vague but persistent irritation. The Jew seems to be a cause of irritation and unease everywhere. It is the mark of the gentleman, not only that he possesses ease, but, chiefly, that he knows how to put others at ease. This is an inimitable faculty ; and to its absence must be attributed most of the social discrimination the Jew complains of. The Jew is, himself, not at ease. Even the most emancipated Jew has something in his eye, something the Ghetto eye is never without the look of a deer at bay. In no costly bronze or marble was written the grim story of the Jew, but in the cheaper yet more enduring material of Jewish flesh and blood (is there anything cheaper?); in nerve-fibre and brain-cell; in the dumb unvoiced dreams that live below the threshold of consciousness; in gestures and glances—in all the instinctive mimicry of a past that refuses to die: Hence this atmosphere of unease which the Jew carries about him, and which he communicates unwittingly to his surroundings. The loudness and vulgarity he is often charged with are but extreme manifestations of this unease: the Jew's way of 'whistling to keep up his courage.' It may be that the aesthetic shortcomings of the Jewish individuality are due to the racial preoccupation with the intellectual and moral aspects of life, to the neglect of the aesthetical, and are the defects of its virtues. But defects they are, nevertheless. Granted the world could forgive the Jew his virtues—his defects never! However, most grievances against the Jew may be traced not so much to racial shortcomings as to historic causes. And the chief of these causes is that Jewish individuality has come in contact with other national individualities in every land on the face of the globe, and thereby become warped, distorted. This is the heart of the entire problem. Certain colors, placed side by side, enhance each other; certain others, when contiguous, kill each other. So also with peoples. If the anti-Semite charges that the Semitic spirit mongrelizes his national culture, the Modern Pharisee complains that the mongrelization is quite mutual. In his concern for the preservation and enhancement of the Jewish type, the latter is horrified to behold to what extent the Semitic strain and spirit become weakened, diluted, hybridized, through contact with alien civilizations. In fact, Jews being a minority people, they are more mongrelized than mongrelizing. Socially and politically the Jew occupies an inferior position; and it is a trite historic observation that, when two races commingle, the weaker race is quicker to adopt the vices than the virtues of the dominant race: Christians, for instance, have always been more successful in spreading among uncivilized tribes whiskey and white plague than in propagating the gospel and salvation. Whatever grain of truth there may be in anti-Semitic charges must be traced to this social phenomenon. We are grateful to the anti-Semites for having called our attention to it; in guarding against mongrelization at the hand of Jews, they will help us preserve our own type. It looks to us as if anti-Semitism were an International Benevolent Society for the Preservation of Semitism. If Jewish individuality were left to itself, given ample latitude to develop along its own lines, wholesomely and normally, it would, by the moral intensity, moral earnestness, moral vision of the everlasting Pharisee spirit, produce one of the most attractive human types. The fault lies largely, if not wholly, in wrong contacts. For example, we are being charged with Bolshevism on the one hand, and on the other with materialism. We are alleged to be both the rabid enemies and the avid lovers of wealth. In our Bolsheviki the world refuses to see the prophetic passion for social justice, as in our bankers the intellectual ability forcibly directed toward ruthless acquisition. But is Jewish Bolshevism in Russia other than Jewish intensity in contact with and perverted by Slav morbidity and mysticism? And what is the crass Jewish materialism in America, if not Jewish intensity in contact with and perverted by Yankee business acumen? Examples might be multiplied : they are all misshapen creatures born of a cultural mésalliance. What God has joined together let no man put asunder; yes and what God has put asunder—let no man join together. In speaking of unlovely Jewish traits, the Gentile world must not forget that it is a party—and the party of the first part—to this mésalliance; that it is one of the parents—and the stronger one—of the resultant miscarriage. When looking in the face of the Jew, the Gentile must not forget that the something—the je-ne-sais-quoi—in the Ghetto eye, reminiscent of a deer at bay, is a mirror, not of the soul of the Jew, but of his own soul. Shelley, while living at San Lorenzo, is said to have waked once at midnight with a piercing shriek; and was found standing, with eyes wide open, as if he had seen things not good to look upon. On coming to himself, he told that a figure had beckoned to him, and when he got up, the phantom lifted its hood, showed Shelley the phantasm of himself, and cried: 'Siete satisfatto?' (Are you satisfied?) In the eye of the Jew, in the dread ghost of an age-long hate lurking there, the world might well recognize the phantasm of itself. And the dark phantom cries to the world: Look at me, look! I am the Jew as you have made me; I am—you! Are you satisfied?
IV The havoc wrought by the abnormal position that Israel occupies among the nations is most tragically apparent in the inner life of the Jew. Here the decadence is appalling. One hesitates to speak of the progressive deterioration of the Jewish type; but one does not see how to avoid speaking of something so conspicuous. The inexorable fact to envisage is that, so far as the Jew qua Jew is concerned, political emancipation has failed, and failed miserably. It took the Jew out of the Ghetto, but it put him nowhere in particular. It snatched him from a dingy milieu of unsplendid isolation, but it made him run amuck in an environment where his best instincts became thwarted and stunted. In the meantime, while the visible walls were broken down, he was hedged about with the invisible Ghetto, all the harder to bear for its impalpable partitions. The older Ghetto at least gave him a home,—a home especially for his spirit,—but what does the New Ghetto offer him? Political emancipation, indeed, tendered him the cold comforts of civic equality ; but it deprived him of the intimacy, the hominess, without which legal recognition is but a mockery. It gave him the ballot-box; and the wealthy Sadducees in the Jewish camp hailed and still hail it as a Messiah (fancy a Messiah in the box!); but oh, what a poor compensation for the loss of the Ark of the Lord! A box for the Ark, and a paper-slip for the Scrolls! It is difficult to see why Jews could not have kept both,—their old religion and their new citizenship,—but they did not. In the Occident, at all events, they sacrificed to citizenship much, if not all, of their religion ; and the pathetic part of it is that citizenship never required such a sacrifice. An illustration in point is the Jewish reform movement, 'made in Germany' and transplanted to America. Reform Judaism is the religious expression of Political Emancipation; and it failed to solve the religious aspect of the Jewish problem even as Emancipation failed to solve its political aspect.
Reform Judaism started out with
the right diagnosis of the religious ills of Judaism; but it
failed to provide the right cure. It realized that Judaism
had to purge itself from backward ideas and backward
practices; hence it sought to remove what was uncouth in the
orthodox service; but in so doing, it banished also what was
original and distinctive, while it made no essential
contribution to religious thought, as it did not differ in"
its nature from the orthodox faith—both Reform and Orthodoxy
belonging to the legalistic type of religion and not to the
inspirational type. Only, while Orthodoxy overcame—or,
rather, glorified legalism by means of an instinctive piety,
Reform became coldly and correctly formal, philistine,
respectable. Over against Orthodoxy, it rightly asserted the
claims of rationalism, and admitted the findings of the
Higher Criticism: but in the process it chilled all
religious enthusiasm, reduced religion to the dead-level of
commonplace ethicality; and failed to kindle a new
God-passion in the heart of the Thus it failed to initiate a truly liberal religion for this age by showing the modern Jew—in fact, the modern man—how to rise above the merely negative phases of criticism to the heights of a glowing religious affirmation. Thus far, at all events, they have missed the opportunity, which was undoubtedly within their reach, to become the fathers of a genuine latter-day reformation, prophets of a new vision of God to an unbelieving and repellently materialistic generation. Perhaps it is not yet too late to make up for the omissions of the past. Not long ago, when Sargent's painting, The Synagogue, was hung in the Boston Public Library, with its central figure of a decrepit woman amid broken ruins, the hue and cry against it came chiefly from Reform-Jewish pulpits. And the artistic rejoinder to this piece of unkind symbolism came in the form of a plaque by the daughter of the venerable head of the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, a seminary for the training of Reform rabbis—a plaque adorned, in proof of the enduring vitality of the Synagogue, with various Jewish symbols, such as the ram's-horn, the prayer-shawl, the palm-branch, and so forth. One who knows how these symbols have fallen into desuetude, and how much the sponsors of Reform have contributed toward their obsolescence, can but marvel at the fact that irony can be so subtle, so insidiously unconscious. The truth is that Sargent's symbolism is both right and wrong. It is wrong if applied to the Synagogue, it is right if applied to the synagogues. Synagogues are dead, but the Synagogue lives. The Pattern in the Mount cannot be destroyed, even though the copies that we make of it are poor portraits of the Ideal. So far as the synagogues are concerned, they seem beyond resuscitation. There is little left. Talmudical Judaism has broken down it seems,—irrevocably. The old ceremonial law is honored more in the breach than in the observance. The dietary laws linger, apparently as an occasion for periodical meat-riots and an excuse for profiteering. The Saturday Sabbath is all but gone: even in thickly populated Jewish sections there is open selling and buying on the Seventh Day, although both merchants and customers are Jews. Recently, when a wealthy uptown congregation sold its synagogue to Seventh Day Adventists, malicious tongues remarked that for the first time in the history of this ' temple' its congregants would be Sabbath-observers. Add to all this that the old training based on rabbinics is gone, but no new culture has yet taken its place. A generation ago, Hebrew learning was widespread; nowadays, Jewish parents refuse to have their children taught in the sacred tongue of the Prophets, for they regard it as old-fashioned. What, then, is left? A lifeless formalism that no one takes very seriously; here and there a pathetic bit of folklore in connection with death—or marriage customs; a little ostentatious charity; all of this scarcely relieved by the annual visit to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement. It is as if the spirit had long fled the husk. The old words fail to move. The old ideals fail to thrill. And there is no new Sinai from whose thundering top the God of Fathers might speak to his backsliding children. One does not deplore the loss of customs and ceremonies, for where religion is vital, new forms and rites can be evolved; but one deplores the loss of the transfiguring power of faith, the mystic grace of a triumphant belief. One deplores the coarsening of the texture of Jewish life. If this process of decadence is not somehow stayed, the Jew is in imminent danger of becoming a Sabbathless, religionless devotee of business and pleasure—a being without a sense of God, with no ear for the vast, tender suggestions of Eternity, no understanding of the spiritual meaning of human life. And how distressing such a change would be—from the Man of Sorrows, who bore the pains of the world, to the creature whom nothing hurts any more! One looks vainly, in the circumstances, for an enlightened leadership to submit the Jew to the hard mercy of self-scrutiny and thus point the way to Jewish regeneration. And Jewish leadership has long passed from the rabbinate to the laity. Formerly learning was the standard of leadership; to-day, it is wealth. Nestroy, Viennese dramatist of the first half of the nineteenth century, represents in one of his plays the prophet Isaiah addressing the people; but as he pours out upon them the lava of his volcanic spirit, they nudge each other sneeringly and say: 'Und das lebt von unserm Geld!' (To think that this creature lives off our money!) This jibe certainly applies to the relation of laity and clergy in American Judaism. Jewish leadership in America is in the hands of the wealthy laity; but this lay leadership is worldly in character, with no other aim and purpose than to conduct Judaism as a private eleemosynary institution. These rich leaders, indeed, are not wholly to blame; they simply lack the religious vision to recognize the Jewish problem as chiefly spiritual; to feel any consternation at the gradual attrition of all original Jewish values; and so, in their kind-heartedness, they turn to philanthropy and social service, as a sort of outlet for their better impulses; really, as the highest possible expression of an ingrowing materialism. Wealth being its one necessary qualification, a lay leadership based on lucre would seem to be self-perpetuating. As a matter of fact, however, philanthropic Judaism is in its last throes. It is doomed, not only by its inherent quality of showy worldliness, but because it is inadequate to cope with the Jewish problem. One does not have to read the will of the late Jacob H. Schiff, its greatest and noblest representative, who personified the best there was in its ideals, to know that philanthropic Judaism is all but dead. Yet to many it had seemed that philanthropic Judaism was the last refuge of a spiritually bankrupt people. Turning, then, from the external relations of the Jew with the world to his intimate life, one is bound to observe that, great as is the tragedy of the Jew, greater still is the tragedy of Judaism. What greater tragedy than the life of a people that has lost its God? The greater tragedy is the fate of a religion that has been the suffering mother of religions, pierced by more than seven wounds, forsaken by her own. But when we search for the cause of this tragedy, this martyrdom of a living spirit, we find it to be the same that underlies other phenomena of Jewish maladjustment already referred to—hybridization through wrong contacts. The Jewish spirit, as history attests, is deeply religious. Tolstoy exclaims somewhere in his writings: 'I have never seen a non-believing Jew.' Tolstoy should have been in New York or Chicago. However, it cannot be that, in the short space of a generation or two, Jewry should lose all religious instinct, except in consequence of a temporary aberration that is but a passing incident in a long and perilous history. The task, as the Modern Pharisee sees it, is to bring the Jew back to himself; to aid him in self-recovery; and self-recovery is conditioned upon self-discovery. The Jew must be led back to the Discovery of the Jewish Soul. The Modern Pharisee's argument, then, is simple. If, looking both within and without,—but particularly within,—we find this unnatural perversion of Jewish individuality through promiscuous contact with diverse civilizations, then the best solution for the Jewish problem is to separate the Jewish type from 'entangling alliances,' restore it to its pristine character, and give it full play to develop in keeping with its own inner law. And this means the gradual repatriation of the Jew in Palestine. The cure for all Jewish ills lies in geography.
V Heine said whimsically that Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune. But it is equally true that every sharply marked individuality may be a misfortune. Individuality hangs like a millstone about our necks. We cannot escape from it. It is the fatality within the heart, in a way worse than the dark fatality behind the screen, which was the preoccupation of the Greek genius. Individuality, however, need not be a misfortune. It need not be a weight about our necks; we can make it into wings to our shoulders. It is the prerogative of the human spirit to turn all compulsions into freedom. The secret of this transformation of weight into wing is with the creative force of individuality, which nobly imposes itself upon the world. The Jewish spirit ever understood this secret, and throughout history proudly availed itself of its prerogative. Jewish history is one long attempt—non-combative, non-resistant—at having the world accept Jewish individuality. It cannot be that so enduring and so heroic an attempt should taper down into failure. The task, therefore, is not merely to save Jews, but to save Jewish individuality. Saving Jews at the expense of Jewish individuality would mean the most dismal failure imaginable, worse than the extermination of the entire race. Saving Jewish individuality, preserving the type, even at the expense of some Jews, would mean success for this unique historic attempt. Jews must understand this—so must non-Jews; and, what with a better understanding and clearer vision, both may yet combine to provide in Zion a new-old setting for the enhancement of Jewish individuality. There alone can weight be turned into wing: for without Zion, the fatality lurking within Jewish individuality must work itself out to a disastrous conclusion. Probably the boldest and most poignant expression to this fatality is given by Beer-Hoffman, the German playwright, in his thrilling drama, Jaákobs Traum. In the scene representing Jacob's flight from Esau, the servant, on their arrival at Beth-el, says to Jacob:—
'They whisper timidly, a mighty God Is with you.'
Jacob answers bitterly:—
'Too much with us, Idnibaal, too much!'
And again:—
'Too near he hovers about us, this God What wills He?'
And anon:—
'Why choose us, ne'er asking if we consent?'
Here the Eternal Pharisee Spirit turns daringly upon the Maker Himself, with a piercing heart-cry. The Jewish people is a Chosen People, not in the conventional sense, but in the fatal sense of never having had a chance to choose—it always was chosen. Chosen for what? Let History answer. But the time has at last come for it to choose, and by its sovereign choice, aided by a sympathetic world, to turn the burden into a blessing. Thus shall it be. The cry of the Eternal Pharisee will yet be heard. |