Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 5 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
329
FIFTH CHAPTER
THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO THE
HISTORY
OF THE WEST
“Let us forget whence
we
spring. No more talk of ‘German,‘ or of ‘Portuguese‘ Jews. Though
scattered
over the earth we are nevertheless a single people — RABBI
SALOMON LIPMANN-CERFBERR
in the opening speech delivered on July 26, 1806, at the meeting
preparatory
to the Synedrium of 1807 which Napoleon called together.
THE JEWISH
QUESTION
HAD I been
writing
a hundred years ago, I should hardly have felt compelled at this point
to
devote a special chapter to the entrance of the Jews into Western
history.
Of course the share they had in the rise of Christianity, on account of
the peculiar and absolutely un-Aryan spirit which they instilled into
it,
would have deserved our full attention, as well as also the economic
part
which they played in all Christian countries; but an occasional mention
of these things would have sufficed; anything more would have been
superfluous.
Herder wrote at that time: “Jewish history takes up more room in our
history
and more attention than it probably deserves in itself.“ * In the
meantime,
however, a great change has taken place: the Jews play in Europe, and
wherever
European influence extends, a different part to-day from that which
they
played a hundred years ago; as Viktor Hehn expresses it, we live
* Von
den deutsch-orientalischen Dichtern, Div. 2.
330 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to-day in a “Jewish age“; * we may think
what we like about the past history of the Jews, their present history
actually takes up so much room in our own history that we cannot
possibly
refuse to notice them. Herder in spite of his outspoken humanism had
expressed
the opinion that “the Jewish people is and remains in Europe an Asiatic
people alien to our part of the world, bound to that old law which it
received
in a distant climate, and which according to its own confession it
cannot
do away with.“ † Quite correct. But this alien people, everlastingly
alien,
because — as Herder well remarks — it is indissolubly bound to an alien
law that is hostile to all other peoples — this alien people has become
precisely in the course of the nineteenth century a disproportionately
important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our
life.
Even a hundred years ago that same witness had sadly to confess that
the
“ruder nations of Europe“ were “willing slaves of Jewish usury“; to-day
he could say the same of by far the greatest part of the civilised
world.
The possession of money in itself is, however, of least account; our
governments,
our law, our science, our commerce, our literature, our art...
practically
all branches of our life have become more or less willing slaves of the
Jews, and drag the feudal fetter il not yet on two, at least on one
leg.
In the meantime the “alien“ element emphasised by Herder has become
more
and more prominent; a hundred years ago it was rather indistinctly and
vaguely felt; now it has asserted and proved itself, and so forced
itself
on the attention of even the most inattentive. The Indo-European, moved
by ideal motives, opened the gates in
* Gedanken
über Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 40. The passage as it stands reads,
“From
the day of Goethe‘s death, the 22nd March, 1832, Börne dated the
freedom
of Germany. In reality, however, one epoch was with that day closed and
the Jewish age in which we live began.“
† Bekehrung
der Juden. Abschnitt 7 of the Untersuchungen des vergangenen
Jahrhunderts
zur Beförderung eines geistigen Reiches.
331 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
friendship: the Jew rushed in like an
enemy, stormed all positions and planted the flag of his, to us, alien
nature — I will not say on the ruins, but on the breaches of our
genuine
individuality.
Are we for that
reason
to revile the Jews? That would be as ignoble as it is unworthy and
senseless.
The Jews deserve admiration, for they have acted with absolute
consistency
according to the logic and truth of their own individuality, and never
for a moment have they allowed themselves to forget the sacredness of
physical
laws because of foolish humanitarian day-dreams which they shared only
when such a policy was to their advantage. Consider with what mastery
they
use the law of blood to extend their power: the principal stem remains
spotless, not a drop of strange blood comes in; as it stands in the Thora,
“A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to
his
tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord“
(Deuteronomy xxiii. 2); in the meantime, however, thousands of
side
branches are cut off and employed to infect the Indo-Europeans with
Jewish
blood. If that were to go on for a few centuries, there would be in
Europe
only one single people of pure race, that of the Jews, all the rest
would
be a herd of pseudo-Hebraic mestizos, a people beyond all doubt
degenerate
physically, mentally and morally. For even the great friend of the
Jews,
Ernest Renan, admits, “Je suis le premier à
reconnaître
que la race sémitique, comparée à la race
indo-européenne,
représente réellement une combinaison inférieure
de
la nature humaine.“ * And in one of his best but unfortunately
little-known
writings he says again, “L‘épouvantable simplicité de
l‘esprit sémitique rétrécit le cerveau humain, le
ferme à toute idée délicate, à tout
sentiment
fin, à toute
* Histoire
générale et système comparé des langues
sémitiques,
5e éd. p. 4. It will make little difference to this view when I
show, as I shall do immediately, that the Jews are not pure Semites but
half Syrians.
332 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
recherche rationelle, pour le mettre
en face d‘une éternelle tautologie: Dieu est Dieu“; * and he
demonstrates that culture could have no future unless Christian
religion
should move farther away from the spirit of Judaism and the
“Indo-European
genius“ assert itself more and more in every domain. That mixture then
undoubtedly signifies a degeneration: degeneration of the Jew, whose
character
is much too alien, firm and strong to be quickened and ennobled by
Teutonic
blood, degeneration of the European who can naturally only lose by
crossing
with an “inferior type“ — or, as I should prefer to say, with so
different
a type. While the mixture is taking place, the great chief stem of the
pure unmixed Jews remains unimpaired. When Napoleon, at the beginning
of
the nineteenth century, dissatisfied that the Jews, in spite of their
emancipation,
should remain in proud isolation, angry with them for continuing to
devour
with their shameful usury the whole of his Alsace, although every
career
was now open to them, sent an ultimatum to the council of their elders
demanding the unreserved fusion of the Jews with the rest of the nation
— the delegates of the French Jews adopted all the articles prescribed
but one, namely, that which aimed at absolute freedom of marriage with
Christians. Their daughters might marry outside the Israelite people,
but
not their sons; the dictator of Europe had to yield. † This is the
admirable
law by which real Judaism was founded. Indeed, the law in its strictest
form forbids marriage altogether between Jews and non-Jews; in Deuteronomy
vii. 3, we read, “Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son nor his
daughter shalt thou take unto thy son“; but, as a rule, emphasis is
laid
only on the last clause; for example, in Exodus
* De
la Part des peuples sémitiques dans l‘histoire de la
civilisation,
p. 39.
† In
the second book I shall find it necessary to give more details
concerning
this famous synedrium and its casuistic distinction between religious
and
civil law — a distinction which neither Talmud nor Thora
recognises.
333 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
xxxiv. 16, the sons alone are forbidden
to take strange daughters, not the daughters to take strange sons, and
in Nehemiah xiii., after both sides have been forbidden to
marry
outside the race, only the marriage of a son with a foreign wife is
described
as a “sin against God.“ That is also a perfectly correct view. By the
marriage
of a daughter with a Goy, the purity of the Jewish stem is in no way
altered,
while this stem thereby gets a footing in the strange camp; on the
other
hand, the marriage of a son with a Goya “makes the holy seed common“ as
the book of Ezra ix. 2, drastically expresses it. * The
possible
conversion of the Goya to Judaism would not help matters: the idea of
such
a conversion was rightly quite strange to the older law — for the
question
is one of physical conditions of descent — but the newer law says, with
enviable discernment: “Proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers
to a sound body.“ † Thus was the Jewish race kept pure in the past and
it is still kept so: daughters of the house of Rothschild have married
barons, counts, dukes, princes, they submit to baptism without demur;
no
son has ever married a European; if he did so he would have to leave
the
house of his fathers and the community of his people. ‡
*
In
the new literal translation of Professor Louis Segond the passage
reads,
“the sacred race defiled by mixture with strange peoples“; in the
translation
of De Wette it is, “they have mingled the holy seed with the peoples of
the earth.“
†
From
the Talmud, according to Döllinger, Vorträge
i.
237. In another place the Talmud calls the proselytes a
“burden.“
(See the Jew Philippson: Israelitische Religionslehre,
1861,
ii. 189.)
‡ How
pure the Jewish race still is, has been shown by Virchow‘s great
anthropological
examination of all the school children of Germany; Ranke gives details
in his book, Der Mensch, 2nd ed. ii 293: “The purer the race,
the
smaller is the number of mixed forms. In this connection it is
certainly
a very important fact that the smallest number of mixed forms was found
among the Jews, whereby their decided isolation as a race from the
Teutonic
peoples, among which they live, is shown most clearly.“ — Measurements
in America have, according to the American Anthropologist, vol.
iv., in the meantime led to the conviction that there too the Jewish
race
“has kept itself absolutely pure.“ (Quoted from the Politisch-anthropologische
Revue, 1904, March, p. 1003.)
334 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
These details are
somewhat premature; they really belong to a later portion of the book;
but my object has been at once and by the shortest way to meet the
objection
— which unfortunately is still to be expected from many sides — that
there
is no “Jewish question,“ from which would follow that the entrance of
the
Jews into our history had no significance. Others, again, talk of
religion:
it is a question, they say, of religious differences only. Whoever says
this overlooks the fact that there would be no Jewish religion if there
were no Jewish nation. But there is one. The Jewish nomocracy (that is,
rule of the law) unites the Jews, no matter how scattered they may be
over
all the lands of the world, into a firm, uniform and absolutely
political
organism, in which community of blood testifies to a common past and
gives
a guarantee for a common future. Though it has many elements not purely
Jewish in the narrower sense of the word, yet the power of this blood,
united with the incomparable power of the Jewish idea, is so great that
these alien elements have long ago been assimilated; for nearly two
thousand
years have passed since the time when the Jews gave up their temporary
inclination to proselytising. Of course, I must, as I showed in the
preceding
chapter, distinguish between Jews of noble and of less noble birth; but
what binds together the incompatible parts is (apart from gradual
fusing)
the tenacity of life which their national idea possesses. This national
idea culminates in the unshakable confidence in the universal empire of
the Jews, which Jehovah promised. “Simple people who have been born
Christians“
(as Auerbach expresses it in his sketch of Spinoza‘s life) fancy that
the
Jews have given up that hope, but they are very wrong; for “the
existence
of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope,“ as one of
the very moderate and liberal Jews lately wrote. * The whole Jewish
religion
is in fact founded on
*
Skreinka:
Entwickelungsgeschichte
der jüdischen Dogmen, p. 75.
335 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
this hope. The Jewish faith in God,
that which can and may be called “religion“ in their case, for it has
become
since the source of a fine morality, is a part of this national idea,
not
vice
versa. To assert that there is a Jewish religion but no Jewish
nation
is simply nonsense. *
The entry of the
Jews into the history of the West signifies therefore beyond doubt the
entrance of a definite element, quite different from and in a way
opposed
to all European races, an element which remained essentially the same,
while the nations of Europe went through the most various phases; in
the
course of a hard and often cruel history it never had the weakness to
entertain
proposals of fraternity, but, possessed as it was of its national idea,
its national past, and its national future, felt and still feels all
contact
with others as a pollution; thanks also to the certainty of its
instinct,
which springs from strict uniformity of national feeling, it has always
been able to
*
At
the Jewish congress held in Basle in 1898, Dr. Mandelstam, Professor in
the University of Kiev, said in the chief speech of the sitting of
August
29, “The Jews energetically reject the idea of fusion with the other
nationalities
and cling firmly to their historical hope, i.e., of world
empire“
(from a report of one who took part in the congress in Le Temps,
Sept. 2, 1898). The Vienna newspapers of July 30 and 31, 1901, report a
speech on Zionism which the Vienna Rabbi, Dr. Leopold Kahn, delivered
in
a room of the orthodox Jewish school in Pressburg. In this speech Dr.
Kahn
made the following admission: “the Jew will never be able to assimilate
himself; he will never adopt the customs and ways of other peoples. The
Jew remains Jew under all circumstances. Every assimilation is purely
exterior.“
Words well worth laying to heart! In the Festschrift zum 70.
Geburtstage
A. Berliner‘s, 1903, Dr. B. Felsenthal publishes a series of Jewish
Theses in which he supports with all his energy the thesis that
Jewry
is a people, not a religion, “Judaism is a special stem, and every Jew
is born into this stem.“ This stem is, according to him, “one of the
ethnically
purest peoples that exist.“ Felsenthal reckons that from Theodosius to
the year 1800, “perhaps not quite 300 non Semites were adopted into the
Jewish race,“ and it is characteristic that he denies proselytes the
right
of looking upon themselves as full-blooded Jews. “The Jewish people,
the
Jewish stem is the given fact, the constant thing, the necessary
substratum,
the substantial kernel. The Jewish religion is something attached to
this
kernel, a quality — an accident, as it is called in the language of the
philosophical schools.“ I quote from the special impression, made by
Itzkowski,
Berlin.
336
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
exercise a powerful influence upon
others,
while the Jews themselves have been influenced but skin-deep by our
intellectual
and cultural development. To characterise this most peculiar situation
from the standpoint of the European, we must repeat the words of
Herder:
the Jewish people is and remains alien to our part of the world; from
the
standpoint of the Jew the same fact is formulated somewhat differently;
we know from a former chapter how the great free-thinking philosopher
Philo
put it: “only the Israelites are men in the true sense of the word.“ *
What the Jew here says in the intolerant tone of racial pride was more
politely expressed by Goethe, when he disputed the community of descent
of Jews and Indo-Europeans, no matter how far back the origin was put:
“We will not dispute with the chosen people the honour of its descent
from
Adam. We others, however, have certainly had other ancestors as well.“
†
THE
“ALIEN PEOPLE“
These
considerations
make it our right and our duty to look upon the Jew in our midst as a
peculiar
and, in fact, alien element. Outwardly his inheritance was the same as
ours; inwardly it was not so: he inherited quite a different spirit.
One
single trait is all that is necessary to reveal in an almost alarming
manner
to our consciousness the yawning gulf which here separates soul from
soul:
the revelation of Christ has no significance for the Jew! I do not here
speak of pious orthodoxy at all. But read, for example, in Diderot, the
notorious free-thinker, the wonderful words on the Crucified One, see
how
Diderot represents man in his greatest sorrow turning to the
* See
p.
217.
† Conversations
with Eckermann, October 7, 1828. Giordano Bruno made a similar
assertion,
viz., that only the Jews were descended from Adam and Eve, the rest of
mankind were of much older origin. (See Lo spaccio della bestia
trionfante.)
337
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
Divine One, and makes us feel that the
Christian religion is the only religion in the world. „Quelle
profonde
sagesse il y a dans ce que l‘aveugle philosophie appelle la folie de la
croix! Dans l‘état où j‘étais, de quoi m‘aurait
servi
l‘image d‘un législateur heureux et comblé de gloire? Je
voyais l‘innocent, le flanc percé, le front couronné
d‘épines,
les mains et les pieds percés de clous, et expirant dans les
souffrances;
et je me disais: Voilà mon Dieu, et j‘ose me plaindre!“ I
have
searched through a whole library of Jewish books in the expectation of
finding similar words — naturally not belief in the divinity of Christ,
nor the idea of redemption, but the purely human feeling for the
greatness
of a suffering saviour — but in vain. A Jew who feels that is in fact
no
longer a Jew, but a denier of Judaism. And while we find even in
Mohammed‘s
Koran
at least a vague conception of the importance of Christ and profound
reverence
for His personality, a cultured, leading Jew of the nineteenth century
calls Christ “the new birth with the deathmask,“ which inflicted new
and
painful wounds upon the Jewish people; he cannot see anything else in
Him.
* In view of the cross he assures us that “the Jews do not require this
convulsive emotion for their spiritual improvement,“ and adds,
“particularly
not among the middle classes of the inhabitants of the cities.“ His
comprehension
goes no further. In a book, republished in 1880 (!)‚ by a Spanish Jew
(Mose
de Leon) Jesus Christ is called a “dead dog“ that lies “buried in a
dunghill.“
Besides, the Jews have taken care to issue in the latter part of the
nineteenth
century several editions (naturally in Hebrew) of the so-called
“censured
passages“ from the Talmud, those passages usually omitted in
which
Christ is exposed to our scorn and hatred as a “fool,“ “sorcerer,“
“profane
person,“ “idolater,“ “dog,“ “bastard,“ “child of lust,“ &c.; so,
too,
his sublime
*
Graetz:
Volkstümliche
Geschichte der Juden, i, 591.
338 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
mother. * We certainly do the Jews no
injustice when we say that the revelation of Christ is simply something
incomprehensible and hateful to them. Although he apparently sprang
from
their midst, he embodies nevertheless the negation of their whole
nature
— a matter in which the Jews are far more sensitive than we. This clear
demonstration of the deep cleft that separates us Europeans from the
Jew
is by no means given in order to let religious prejudice with its
dangerous
bias settle the matter, but because I think that the perception of two
so fundamentally different natures reveals a real gulf; it is well to
look
once into this gulf, so that on other occasions, where the two sides
seem
likely to unite each other, we may not be blind to the deep abyss which
separates them.
When we understand
what a chasm there is between us we are forced to a further conclusion.
The Jew does not understand us, that is certain; can we hope to
understand
him, to do him justice? Perhaps, if we are really intellectually and
morally
superior to him, as Renan insisted in the passage quoted above, and as
other perhaps more reliable scholars have likewise said. † But we should
* See
Laible: Jesus Christus im Talmud, p. 2 ff. (Schriften des
Institutum
Judaicum in Berlin, No. 10; in the supplement the original Hebrew
texts
are given.) This absolutely impartial scholar, who is, moreover, a
friend
of the Jews, says: “The hatred and scorn of the Jews was always
directed
in the first place against the person of Jesus“ (p. 25). “The
Jesus-hatred
of the Jews is a firmly established fact, but they want to show it as
little
as possible“ (p. 3). Hatred of Christ is described by the same scholar
as the “most national trait of Judaism“ (p. 86); he says, “at the
approach
of Christianity the Jews were seized ever and again with a fury and
hatred
that were akin to madness“ (p. 72). Even to-day no orthodox Jew may use
the name of Christ either in speech or in writing (pp. 3 and 32); the
most
common cryptonyms are “the bastard,“ “the hanged,“ often, too, “Bileam.“
† See
especially the famous passage in Lassen‘s Indische Altertumskunde,
where the great Orientalist proves in detail his view that the
Indo-European
race is “more highly and more fully gifted,“ that in it alone there is
“perfect symmetry of all mental powers.“ (See i. 414, of the
1847
edition.)
339 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
then have to judge him from the lofty
heights of our superiority, not from the low depths of hatred and
superstition,
and still less from the swampy shallows of misunderstanding in which
our
religious teachers have been wading for the last two thousand years. It
is surely an evident injustice to ascribe to the Jew thoughts which he
never had, to glorify him as the possessor of the most sublime
religious
intuitions, which were perhaps more alien to him than to any one else
in
the world, and at best are to be found only in the hearts of a few
scattered
individuals as a cry of revolt against the special hardness of heart of
this people — and then to condemn him for being to-day quite different
from what he should be according to such fictitious conceptions. It is
not only unfair, but as regards public feeling, regrettably misleading;
for through his connection with our religious life — a connection which
is entirely fictitious — his head seems enveloped in a kind of nimbus,
and then we are greatly incensed when we find no holy person under this
sham halo. We expect more of the Jews than of ourselves, who are merely
the children of the heathen. But the Jewish testimony is very different
and more correct; it leads us to expect so little that every noble
trait
discovered later and every explanation found for Jewish failings gives
us genuine pleasure. Jehovah, for instance, is never tired of
explaining,
“I have seen this people and behold it is a stiff-necked people,“ * and
Jeremiah gives such a characterisation of the moral constitution of the
Jews that Monsieur Edouard Drumont could not wish it to be more richly
coloured, “And they will deceive every one his neighbour, and will not
speak the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary
themselves to commit iniquity.“ † Little wonder, after this
description,
that Jeremiah calls the Jews “an
* Exodus
xxxii. 9, xxxiv. 9; Deuteronomy ix. 13, &c.
† ix.
5.
340 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
assembly of treacherous men,“ and knows
only one desire, “Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of
wayfaring
men; that I might leave my people and go from them.“ For our incredible
ignorance of the Jewish nature we are ourselves solely to blame; never
did a people give so comprehensive and honest a picture of its own
personality
as the Hebrew has done in his Bible, a picture which (so far as I can
judge
from fragments) is made more complete by the Talmud, though in
faded
colours. Without, therefore, denying that it must be very difficult for
us who are “descended from other ancestors“ to form a correct judgment
of the “alien Asiatic people,“ we must clearly see that the Jews from
time
immemorial have done their best to inform the unprejudiced about
themselves,
a circumstance which entitles us to hope that we may gain a thorough
knowledge
of their nature. As a matter of fact, the events which take place
before
our eyes should be sufficient for that. Is it possible to read the
daily
papers without becoming acquainted with Jewish ways of thinking, Jewish
taste, Jewish morals, Jewish aims? A few annual volumes of the Archives
israélites teach us in fact more than a whole anti-Semitic
library,
and indeed not only about the less admirable, but also about the
excellent
qualities of the Jewish character. But here, in this chapter, I shall
leave
the present out of account. If we are to form a practical and true
judgment
concerning the significance of the Jew as joint-heir and fellow-worker
in the nineteenth century, we must above all become clear as to what he
is. From what a man is by nature follows of strict necessity what he
will
do under certain conditions; the philosopher says: operari sequitur
esse; an old German proverb expresses the same thing in a more
homely
way, “Only what a man is, can one get out of him.“
341 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
HISTORICAL
BIRD‘S-EYE VIEW
Pure history in
this
case does not bring us either quickly or surely to our goal, and
besides
it is not my task to furnish a history of the Jews. As in other
chapters,
so here too I have a horror of copying what has been written before.
Every
one, of course, knows how and when the Jews entered into Western
history:
first by the Diaspora, then by being scattered. Their changing fortunes
in various lands and times are likewise no secret to us, although,
indeed,
much that we know is absolutely untrue, and of much that we ought to
know
we are entirely ignorant. But I do not need to tell any one that
throughout
the Christian centuries the Jews played an important though at times
circumscribed
rôle.
Even in the earliest Western Gothic times they understood how to
acquire
influence and power as slave-dealers and financial agents. Though they
were not everywhere, as they were among the Spanish Moors, powerful
Ministers
of State, who, following the example of Mardochai, filled the most
lucrative
posts with “their many brothers,“ though they did not attain
everywhere,
as they did in Catholic Spain, to the rank of Bishop and Archbishop, *
yet their influence was always and everywhere great. The Babenberg
princes
as early as the thirteenth century set their successors the example of
letting Jews manage the finances of their States and honouring these
administrators
with titles of distinction; † the great Pope Innocent III. gave
important
posts at his Court to Jews; ‡ the knights of France had to pledge their
* See
the book of the Jew, David Mocatta, The Jews in Spain and Portugal,
where a detailed account is given of how there were in Spain
“generations
and generations of secret Jews who mingled with all classes of society
and were in possession of every post in the State and especially in the
Church!“
†
Graetz,
ii. 503.
‡
Israel
Abrahams: Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.
342
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
goods with the Jews, in order to be
able to take part in the Crusades; * Rudolf von Habsburg favoured the
Jews
in every way; he vindicated them “as servants of his imperial
exchequer,“
and by freeing them from being subject to ordinary justice he made it
very
difficult indeed for any action brought against them to be carried
through;
† in short, what I call the entrance of the Jews into Western history
has
never ceased to make itself felt at all times and places. If any one
were
qualified to study history for the sole purpose of disentangling the
question
of Jewish influence, he would, I think, bring to light some unexpected
facts. Without this detailed study the fact of this influence can only
be established clearly and beyond doubt where the Jews were in
considerable
numbers. In the second century, for example, the Jews on the island of
Cyprus are more numerous than the other inhabitants; they resolve to
found
a national State and with this intent follow the procedure known from
the
Old Testament: they slay in one day all the other inhabitants, 240,000
in number; and in order that this island State may not be without
support
on the mainland, they at the same time slay the 220,000 non-Jewish
inhabitants
of Cyrene. ‡ In Spain they pursue the same policy with greater caution
and astonishing perseverance. Under the rule of that thoroughly Western
Gothic king, who had showered benefits on them, they invite their
kinsmen,
the Arabs, to come over from Africa, and, not out of any ill-feeling,
but
simply because they hope to profit thereby, they betray their noble
protector;
under the Kalifs they then acquire gradually an even larger share in
the
government; “they concentrated,“ their great supporter the historian
Heman
writes, “the intellectual and the material powers al-
*
André
Réville: Les payans au Moyen-Age, 1896, p. 3.
† See
among others Realis: Die Juden und die Judenstadt in Wien,
1846,
p. 18, &c.
‡
Mommsen:
Römische
Geschichte, v, 543.
343 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
together in their own hands“; the
prosperous
Moorish State was, it is true, thereby intellectually and materially
ruined:
but this was a matter of indifference to the Jews, as they had already
obtained as firm a footing in the Christian State of the Spaniards
which
was destined to take the place of the Moorish one. “The movable wealth
of the land was here absolutely in their power; the heritable property
they made gradually theirs by usury and the purchase of mortgaged
estates
of nobles. From the offices of Secretary of State and Minister of
Finance
downwards all the offices which had to do with taxes and money were in
Jewish hands. Through usury almost all Aragon was mortgaged to them. In
the cities they formed the majority of the wealthy population.“ * But
here,
as elsewhere, they were not always shrewd; they had employed their
power
to obtain all kinds of privileges; for example, the oath of a single
Jew
sufficed to prove debt claims against Christians (the same was the case
in the Archduchy of Austria and in many places), while the testimony of
a Christian against a Jew had no weight before a tribunal, and so on;
these
privileges they abused so outrageously that the people finally
revolted.
The same would probably have happened in Germany if the Church and
intelligent
statesmen had not put a stop to the evil in time. Charlemagne had
written
to Italy for Jews to manage his finances; soon, as farmers of taxes,
they
secured for themselves wealth and influence in every direction, and
used
these to get important concessions for their people, such as commercial
privileges, less severe punishment for crime and the like; the whole
population
was even forced to make Sunday their market day, as Saturday, the
customary
market day, did not suit the Jews because it was
*
Heman:
Die
historische Weltstellung der Juden, 1882, p. 24 ff. For a somewhat
differently tinged account which, however, in actual facts is entirely
at one with this, see Graetz Volksth. Gesch. d. Juden,
ii.
344 ff.
344 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
their Sabbath; it was at that time
fashionable
for courtiers to visit the synagogues! But the reaction set in soon and
strongly, and not only, as the historians are wont to represent it, as
the result of priestly agitation — such things belong to the shell, not
to the kernel of history — but in the first place because the Teuton is
in fact just as much a born merchant and industrialist as he is a born
warrior, and because, as soon as the growth of cities awakened these
instincts
in him, he saw the game of his unfair rival, and, full of violent
indignation,
demanded his removal. And so, if such were the purpose of this chapter,
we could trace the ebb and flow of Jewish influence to the present day,
when all the wars of the nineteenth century are so peculiarly connected
with Jewish financial operations, from Napoleon‘s Russian campaign and
Nathan Rothschild‘s rôle of spectator at the Battle of
Waterloo
to the consulting of the Bleichröders on the German side and of
Alphonse
Rothschild on the French side at the peace transactions of the year
1871,
and to the “Commune,“ which from the beginning was looked upon by all
intelligent
people as a Jewish-Napoleonic machination.
CONSENSUS
INGENIORUM
Now this political
and social influence of the Jews has been very variously judged, but
the
greatest politicians of all times have regarded it as pernicious.
Cicero,
for example (no great politician but an experienced statesman),
displays
a genuine fear of the Jews; where a legal transaction encroaches on
their
interest, he speaks so low that only the judges hear him, for he is
well
aware, as he says, that all the Jews hold together and that they know
how
to ruin the one who opposes them; while he thunders the most vehement
charges
against Greeks, against Romans, against the most powerful men of his
time,
he advises caution in dealing with the Jews; they are to him an
345 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
uncanny power and he passes with tlie
greatest haste over that city of “suspicion and slander,“ Jerusalem:
such
was the opinion of a Cicero during the consulate of a Julius Caesar! *
Even before the destruction of Jerusalem the Emperor Tiberius, who was,
according to many historians, the best ruler that the Roman Imperium
ever
possessed, recognised a national danger in the immigration of the Jews.
Even Frederick the Second, the Hohenstauffen, certainly one of the most
brilliant men that ever wore a crown or carried a sword, a more
freethinking
man than any monarch of the nineteenth century, an enthusiastic admirer
of the East and a generous supporter of Hebrew scholars, nevertheless
held
it to be his duty, contrary to the custom of his contemporaries, to
debar
the Jews from all public offices, and pointed warningly to the fact
that
wherever the Jews are admitted to power, they abuse it; the very same
doctrine
was taught by the other great Frederick the Second, the Hohenzollern,
who
gave universal freedom, but not to the Jews; similar were the words of
Bismarck, while he still could speak openly, in the Landtag (1847) and
the great historian Mommsen speaks of Judaism as of a “State inside the
State.“ — As regards the social influence in particular, I will only
quote
two wise and fair authorities, whose judgment cannot be suspected even
by the Jews, namely, Herder and Goethe. The former says, “A ministry,
in
which the Jew is supreme, a household, in which a Jew has the key of
the
wardrobe and the management of the finances, a department or
commissariat,
in which Jews do the principal business ... are Pontine marshes that
cannot
be drained“; and he expresses the opinion that the presence of an
indefinite
number of Jews is so pernicious to the welfare of a European State,
that
we “dare not be influenced by general humane principles“; it is a
national
question,
* See
the Defence of Lucius Flaccus, xxviii.
346 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
and it is the duty of every State to
decide “how many of this alien people can be tolerated without injury
to
the true citizens?“ * Goethe goes still deeper: “How should we let the
Jews share in our highest culture, when they deny its origin and
source?“
And he became “violently enraged“ when the law of 1823 permitted
marriage
between Jews and Germans, prophesying the “worst and most frightful
consequences,“
particularly the “undermining of all moral feelings“ and declaring that
the bribery of the “all-powerful Rothschild“ must be the cause of this
“folly.“ † Goethe and Herder have exactly the same opinion as the great
Hohenstauffen, the great Hohenzollern, and all great men before and
after
them: without superstitiously reproaching the Jews with their peculiar
individuality, they consider them an actual danger to our civilisation
and our culture; they would not give them an active part in our life.
We
cannot proceed with our discussion and simply pass over such a consensus
ingeniorum. For to these well-weighed, serious judgments derived
from
the fulness of experience and the insight of the greatest intellects we
have nothing to oppose but the empty phrases of the droits de
l‘homme
— a parliamentary clap-trap. ‡
*
Adrastea:
Bekehrung
der Juden.
†
Wilhelm
Meister‘s Wanderjahre, iii. 11, and the conversation with von
Müller
on September 23, 1823.
‡ I
have intentionally limited my quotations. But I cannot refrain from
defending
in a note the great Voltaire against the almost established myth that
he
was altogether favourable and as superficial in his humanitarian
judgment
of the influence of the Jews upon our culture, as is the modern
fashion.
Even Jews of such broad culture as James Darmesteter (Peuple Juif,
2e éd. p. 17) print the name Voltaire in thick type and
represent
him as one of the intellectual originators of their emancipation. The
opposite
is true; more than once Voltaire advises that the Jews be sent back to
Palestine. Voltaire is one of the authors whom I know best, because I
prefer
interesting books to wearisome ones, and I think I could easily collect
a hundred quotations of a most aggressive nature against the Jews. In
the
essay of the Dictionnaire Philosophique (end of Section 1) he
says:
“Vous
ne trouverez dans les Juifs qu‘un peuple ignorant et barbare, qui joint
depuis longtemps la plus sordide avarice à la plus
détestable
superstition et à la plus invincible haine pour
347 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
PRINCES
AND NOBILITY
On the other hand,
it is certain and must be carefully observed that, if the Jews are
responsible
for many a shocking historical development, for the fall of many
heroic,
powerful peoples, still greater is the responsibility of those
Europeans
who have always from the most base motives encouraged, protected and
fostered
the disintegrating activity of the Jews, and these are primarily the
Princes
and the nobility — and that too from the first century of our era to
the
present day. Open the history of any European nation you like wherever
the Jews are numerous and begin to realise their strength, you will
always
hear bitter complaints against them from the people, from the
commercial
classes, from the circles of the learned and the poets; everywhere and
at all times it is the Princes and the nobility that protect them: the
Princes because they need money for their wars, the nobility because
they
live extravagantly.
tous les peuples
qui
les tolèrent et qui les enrichissent.“ In Dieu et les
hommes
(chap. x.) he calls the Jews “La plus haïssable et la plus
honteuse
des petites nations.“ Enough has surely been said to make his
attitude
clear! But this opinion should have all the more force, since Voltaire
himself in many long treatises has made a thorough study of Jewish
history
and the Jewish character (so thorough that he who has been decried as a
“superficial dilettante“ is occasionally quoted to-day by a scholar of
the first rank like Wellhausen). And so it is noteworthy when he writes
(Essai sur les Moeurs, chap. xlii.): “La nation juive ose
étaler
une haine irréconciliable contre toutes les nations, elle se
révolte
contre tous ses maîtres; toujours superstitieuse, toujours avide
du bien d‘autrui, toujours barbare — rampante dans le malheur, et
insolente
dans la prospérité.“ His judgment of their mental
qualities
is brief and apodeictic, “Les Juifs n‘ont jamais rien
inventé“
(La défense de mon oncle, chap. vii.), and in the Essai
sur les Moeurs he shows in several chapters that the Jews had
always
learned from other nations but had never taught others anything; even
their
music, which is generally praised, Voltaire cannot endure: “Retournez
en Judée le plus tôt que vous pourrez ... vous y
exécuteriez
à plaisir dans votre détestable jargon votre
détestable
musique“ (6me lettre du Dictionnaire). He explains
elsewhere
this remarkable mental sterility of the Jews by their inordinate lust
for
money; “L‘argent fut l‘objet de leur conduite dans tous
348 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Edmund Burke * tells us, for example,
of William the Conqueror that, as the income from “talliage“ and all
kinds
of other oppressive taxes did not satisfy him, he from time to time
either
confiscated the notes of hand of the Jews or forced them to hand them
over
for next to nothing, and, as almost the whole Anglo-Norman nobility of
the eleventh century was under the thumb of Jewish usury, the King
himself
became the pitiless creditor of his most illustrious subjects. In the
meantime
he protected the Jews and gave them privileges of various kinds. This
one
example may stand for thousands and thousands. † If then
les temps“ (Dieu
et les hommes, xxix.). Voltaire scoffs at the Jews in a hundred
places;
for instance, in Zadig (chap. x.), where the Jew utters a
solemn
prayer of thankfulness to God for a successful piece of fraud; the most
biting satire against the Jews that exists is beyond doubt the treatise
Un
Chrétien contre six Juifs. And yet in all these utterances
there
was a certain reserve, as they were destined for publication; on the
other
hand, in a letter to the Chevalier de Lisle on December 15, 1773 (that
is, at the end of his life, not in the heat of youth), he could speak
his
opinion freely: “Que ces déprépucé
d‘Israël
se disent de la tribu de Naphthali ou d‘Issachar, cela est fort peu
important;
ils n‘en sont pas moins les plus grand gueux qui aient jamais
souillé
la face du globe.“ Evidently this fiery Frenchman had just the same
to say of the Jews as any fanatical Bishop; he differs at most in the
addition
which he occasionally makes to his bitterest attacks, “Il ne faut
pourtant
pas les brûler.“ There is a further difference in the fact
that
it is a humane, tolerant and learned man that utters this very sharp
judgment.
But how, in a man of such open mind, can we explain the existence of a
view so pitilessly one-sided and so ruthlessly intolerant, a view which
in its utter lack of moderation compares very unfavourably with the
words
of the German sages quoted above? Our age could learn much here, if it
wished to! For we see that the Gallic love of equality and freedom is
not
based upon love of justice nor respect for the individual; and we may
draw
the further conclusion; understanding is not got from principles, and
universal
humanity does not ensure the possibility of living together in
dignified
peace, it is only the frank recognition of what separates our own kind
and our own interests from those of others that can make us just
towards
an alien nature and alien interests.
* An
Abridgment of English History, iii. 2.
† The
famous economist Dr. W. Cunningham, in his book The Growth of
English
Industry and Commerce during the Early and Middle Ages (3rd ed.,
1896,
p. 201), compares the activity of the Jews in England from the tenth
century
onward to a sponge, which sucks up all the wealth of the land and
thereby
hinders all economic development. Interesting,
349 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Jews have exercised a great and
historically baneful influence, it is to no small degree due to the
complicity
of these Princes and nobles who so shamefully persecuted and at the
same
time utilised the Jews. And in fact this lasts until the nineteenth
century:
Count Mirabeau was in closest touch with the Jews even before the
Revolution,
* Count Talleyrand, in opposition to the delegates from the middle
classes,
supported in the Constituante their unconditional emancipation;
Napoleon
protected them, when after such a short time bitter complaints and
entreaties
for protection against them were sent in to the Government from all
France,
and he did so although he himself had exclaimed in the Council of
State,
“These Jews are locusts and caterpillars, they devour my France!“ — he
needed their money. Prince Dalberg sold to the Frankfort Jews, in
defiance
of the united citizens, the full civic rights for half a million Gulden
(1811), the Hardenbergs and Metternichs at the Vienna Congress fell
into
the snare of the Rothschild bank, and, in opposition to the votes of
all
the representatives of the Bund, they supported the interests of the
Jews
to the disadvantage of the Germans and finally gained their point, in
fact,
the two most conservative States which they represented were the first
to raise to hereditary nobility — an honour which was never conferred
on
honest and deserving Jews — those members of the
too, is the proof
that
even at this early period the Government did everything in its power to
make the Jews take up decent trades and honest work and thereby at the
same time amalgamate with the rest of the population, but all to no
purpose.
*
With
regard to Mirabeau‘s being influenced by “the shrewd women of the Jews“
(as Gentz says) and his connection with essentially Jewish secret
societies,
see
besides Graetz, Volks. Geschichte der Juden (iii. 600, 610
ff.),
particularly L‘Abbé Lémann, L‘entrée des
Israélites
dans la société française, iii. chap. 7; as
converted
Jew this author understands what others do not, and at the same time he
tells what Jewish authors keep secret. The important thing in
Mirabeau‘s
case was probably that from youth he was deeply in debt to the Jews
(Carlyle:
Essay
on Mirabeau).
350 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
“alien Asiatic people“ who, in the years
of general suffering and misery, had by the vilest means acquired
immense
wealth. * If then the Jews were for us pernicious neighbours, justice
requires
us to admit that they acted according to the nature of their instincts
and gifts, and showed at the same time a really admirable example of
loyalty
to self, to their own nation and to the faith of their fathers; the
tempters
and the traitors were not the Jews but we ourselves. We were the
criminal
abettors of the Jews, and it is so to-day, as it was in the past; and
we
were false to that which the lowest inhabitant of the Ghetto considered
sacred, the purity of inherited blood; that, too, was formerly the
case,
and to-day it is more so than ever. The Christian Church alone of all
the
great powers seems to have acted on the whole justly and wisely (of
course
we must discount the Bishops who were really secular Princes, as well
as
some of the Popes). The Church has kept the Jews in check, treated them
as aliens, but at the same time protected them from persecution. Every
seemingly “ecclesiastical“ persecution has its source really in
economic
conditions that have become unbearable; we see that nowhere more
clearly
than in Spain. To-day, when public opinion is so fearfully misled by
the
active, irreconcilable antagonism of the Jews, especially to every
manifestation
of the Christian faith, it may be well to remind the reader that the
last
act of the preparatory meeting to the first Synedrium summoned in our
times,
that of 1807, was a spontaneous utterance of thanks to the ministers of
the various Christian Churches for the protection extended to them
throughout
the centuries. †
*
This
is, of course, an old custom of Princes, by which not only the Jews but
others also profit; Martin Luther even had to write: “The Princes have
thieves hanged, who have stolen a Gulden or half a one, and yet make
transactions
with those who rob everybody and steal more than all others“ (Von
Kaufhandlung
und Wucher).
†
Diogène
Tama:
Collection des actes de l‘Assemblée des Israélites
de France et du royaume d‘ltalie (Paris, 1807, pp. 327, 328; the
author
is a
351 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
INNER
CONTACT
Here we must end
these
hastily sketched historical fragments. They show that “the entrance of
the Jews“ has exercised a large, and in many ways an undoubtedly fatal,
influence upon the course of European history since the first century.
But that tells us little about the Jew himself; the fact that the North
American Indian dies out from contact with the Indo-European does not
prove
that the latter is evil and pernicious; that the Jew injures or
benefits
us is a judgment which is conditional in too many ways to permit of our
forming a true estimate of his nature. In fact, for nineteen centuries
the Jew has had not merely an outer relationship with our culture as a
more or less welcome guest, but also an inner contact. As Kant rightly
says, the preservation of Judaism is primarily the work of
Christianity.
* From its midst — if not from its stem and its spirit — Jesus Christ
and
the earliest members of the Christian Church arose. Jewish history,
Jewish
conceptions, Jewish thought and poetry became important elements in our
mental life. It cannot be right to separate the outward friction
entirely
from the inner penetration. If we had not ceremoniously adopted the Jew
into our family circle, he would no more have found a home
Jew and was Secretary
of
the Jewish deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône, M. Constantini). After a
detailed
proof the document closes with the following: “Les
députés
israélites arrêtent: Que l‘expression de ces sentiments
sera
consignée dans le procès-verbal de ce jour pour qu'elle
demeure
à jamais comme un témoignage authentique de la gratitude
des Israélites de cette Assemblée pour les bienfaits que
les générations qui les ont précédés
ont reçus des ecclésiastiques des divers pays d‘Europe.“
The proposal was moved by Mr. Isaac Samuel Avigdor, representative of
the
Jews of the Alpes-Maritimes. Tama adds that the speech of Avigdor was
received
with applause and its insertion in the minutes in extenso
adopted.
— The Jewish historians of to-day do not say a word concerning this
important
event. Not only Graetz passes it over in silence, but Bédarride
also in his Les Juifs en France, 1859, although he seems as if
he
were reporting in full from the minutes.
* Die
Religion, general note to third chapter.
352 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
among us than the Saracen or the other
wrecks of half-Semitic peoples who saved their existence — but not
their
individuality — by unconditional amalgamation with the nations of South
Europe. The Jew, however, was proof against this; though now and then
one
of them might be dragged to the stake, the very fact that they had
crucified
Jesus Christ surrounded them with a solemn, awe-inspiring nimbus. And
while
the people were thus fascinated, the scholars and holy men spent their
days and nights in studying the books of the Hebrews: struck down by
the
commands of Jewish shepherds like Amos and Micah, the monuments of an
art,
whose like the world has never since seen, fell to the ground; through
the scorn of Jewish priests science sank into contempt; Olympus and
Walhalla
became depopulated, because the Jews so wished it; Jehovah, who had
said
to the Israelites, “Ye are my people and I am your God,“ now became the
God of the Indo-Europeans; from the Jews we adopted the fatal doctrine
of unconditional religious intolerance. But at the same time we adopted
very great and sublime spiritual impulses; we were taught by prophets,
who preached such strict and pure morals as could have been found
nowhere
else save on the distant shores of India; we became acquainted with
such
a living and life-moulding faith in a higher divine power that it
inevitably
changed our spirit and gave it a new direction. Though Christ was the
master-builder,
we got the architecture from the Jews. Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalmists
became, and still are, living powers in our spiritual life.
WHO
IS THE JEW?
And now, when this
inner contact is beginning to grow weaker, while the outer friction
referred
to above is being daily more felt, now, when he cannot any longer
353 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
rid ourselves of the presence of Jews,
it is not sufficient for us to know that almost all pre-eminent and
free
men, from Tiberius to Bismarck, have looked upon the presence of the
Jew
in our midst as a social and political danger, we must be in a position
to form definite judgments on the basis of adequate knowledge of facts
and to act accordingly. There have been published Anti-Semitic
catechisms,
in which opinions of well-known men have been collected in hundreds;
but
apart from the fact that many a remark when taken apart from the
context
does not give quite fairly the intention of the writer, and that out of
many others it is merely ignorant blind prejudice that speaks, a single
opinion of our own is manifestly worth more than two hundred
quotations.
Moreover I do not know how we can form a competent judgment, if we do
not
learn to take a higher standpoint than that of political
considerations,
and I do not know how we can arrive at this standpoint except through
history,
not, however, modern history — for there we should be judge and suitor
at the same time — but through the history of the growth of the Jewish
people. There is no lack of documents; in the nineteenth century
especially
they have been tested, critically sifted and historically classified by
the devoted work of learned men, mostly Germans, but also distinguished
Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen; much remains to be done, but enough
has already been accomplished to enable us to survey clearly and surely
in its general features one of the most remarkable pages of human
history.
This Jew, who appears so eternally unchangeable, so constant, as Goethe
says, really grew into what he is, grew slowly, even artificially. And
of a surety he will pass away like all that has grown. This fact
already
brings him nearer to us as a human being. What a “Semite“ is, no one
can
tell. A hundred years ago science thought it knew what it meant; Semites
354 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
were the sons of Shem; now the answer
becomes more and more vague; it was thought that the criterion of
language
was decisive: a very great error! The idea “Semite“ indeed remains
indispensable
because it embraces collectively a many-sided complex of historical
phenomena;
but there is absolutely no sure boundary-line; at the periphery this
ethnographical
conception merges into others. Finally “Semite“ remains as the name of
an original race, like “Aryan,“ one of those counters without which one
could not make oneself understood, but which one must beware of
accepting
as good coin. The real genuine coins are those empirically given,
historically
developed national individualities, of which I have spoken in the
former
chapter, such individualities as the Jews for example. Race is not an
original
phenomenon, it is produced; physiologically by characteristic mixture
of
blood, followed by inbreeding; psychically by the influence which
long-lasting
historical and geographical conditions exercise upon that special,
specific,
physiological foundation. * If we wish then (and I think that must be
the
principal task of this chapter) to ask the Jew: Who art thou? we must
first
try to discover whether there was not a definite mixture of blood
underlying
the fact of this so clearly marked race, and then — if the answer is in
the affirmative — trace how the peculiar soul, which thus was produced,
differentiated itself more and more. Nowhere can we trace this process
as we can in the Jew: for the whole national history of the Jews is
like
a continuous process of elimination; the character of the Jewish people
ever becomes more individual, more outspoken, more simple; finally
there
remains in a way nothing of the whole being but the central skeleton;
the
slowly ripened fruit is robbed of its downy, fresh-coloured covering
and
of its juicy flesh, for these
* Cf.
p.
288. For the Semites,
see also p. 361.
355 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
might become spotted and worm-eaten;
the stony kernel alone remains, shrivelled and dry, it is true, but
defying
time. However, as I have pointed out, this was not always the case.
That
which has been transferred from the sacred books of the Hebrews to the
Christian religion does not come down from the senility of real
Judaism,
but partly from the youth of the much wider and more imaginative
“Israelite“
people, partly from the mature years of the Judean, just after he had
separated
from Israel and when he had not yet proudly isolated himself from the
other
nations of the earth. The Jew whom we now know and see at work has
become
Jew gradually; not, however, as pseudo-history would have us believe,
in
the course of the Christian Middle Ages, but on his national soil, in
the
course of his independent history; the Jew moulded his own destiny; in
Jerusalem stood the first Ghetto, the high wall which separated the
orthodox
and the pure-born from the Goyim, and prevented the latter from
entering
the real city. Neither Jacob, nor Solomon, nor Isaiah would recognise
his
posterity in Rabbi Akiba (the great scribe of the Talmud) much
less
in Baron Hirsch or the diamond king Barnato. *
Let us therefore
try by the shortest way, i.e., by the greatest possible
simplification,
to make plain the essential features of this peculiar national soul, as
it gradually became more clearly and one-sidedly developed. This needs
no great learning; for to the question: Who
*
For
the Messianic period the dream of the later Jews (in contrast to the
more
free-thinking Israelites of former centuries) was to keep strangers out
of Jerusalem altogether: read Joel iii. 2; and as this very
late
prophet — from the Hellenic period — says at the same time that God
will
always dwell in Jerusalem and only in Jerusalem, this command means the
banishment of all peoples from God‘s presence. Such was the tolerance
of
the Jews! — It is only logical that most of the Rabbis excluded all
non-Jews
from a future world, while others endured them there as a despised
throng
(see Tractate Gittin, fol. 57a of the Babylonian
Talmud,
and Weber,
System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie,
p. 372, from Laible); the comical thing is the assertion of the Jews
to-day
that their religion is the “religion of humanity!“
356 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
art thou? the Jew himself, as I have
said, and his ancestor the Israelite have given from the first the
clearest
of answers: then we have the mass of scientific work, from Ewald to
Wellhausen
and Ramsay, from De Wette and Reuss to Duhm and Cheyne; we have only to
make out the sum total, as the practical man needs it, who, in the
midst
of the stormy bustle of the world, wishes to be able to base his
judgment
upon definite ascertained facts.
I have only two more
remarks to make, about method pure and simple. Having already,
particularly
in the chapter on the Revelation of
Christ,
discussed the Jew in detail and as this theme will probably come up
again,
I may here confine myself to the central question and refer the reader
for much information on other points to what has been said or will be
said
elsewhere in my book. As regards the authors consulted, I could not
help
using, in addition to the Bible and some thoroughly competent modern
Jewish
writers, also some scholars who are not Jews; this was quite necessary
for our knowledge of the prophets and the correct interpretation of
historical
events; but these scholars, even the most free-thinking of them, are
all
men who display great — perhaps exaggerated — admiration of the Jewish
nation, at least in its earlier form, and who are all inclined to look
upon this people as in some sense a “chosen“ one, so far as religion is
concerned. I have, however, in the interests of the exposition entirely
disregarded those writers who are avowedly Anti-Semitic.
SYSTEMATIC
ARRANGEMENT OF THE INVESTIGATION
There is one point
— in my opinion a very important one — upon which the science of the
last
years has shed a good deal of light, namely, the anthropogeny of the
357 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Israelites, that is, the history of
the physical development of this special national race. Of course here,
as everywhere, there is a past which is closed to our knowledge, and
beyond
doubt much that daring archaeologists have felt and guessed with the
feelers
of their wonderfully trained instinct rather than seen with their own
eyes,
will yet be essentially corrected by newer investigations and
discoveries.
But that makes no difference to us here. The important thing — the
great,
solid achievement of history — is, first, the fact that the Israelite
people
represents the product of manifold mixing, and that, too, not between
related
races (as the ancient Greeks, or the English of to-day) but between
types
that morally and physically are absolutely distinct; and secondly, the
fact that genuine Semitic blood (if this makeshift word is to have a
sense
at all) makes up, I suppose, hardly the half of this mixture. These are
certain results of exact anatomical anthropology and of historical
investigation,
two branches of knowledge which here extend to each other a helping
hand.
A third point completes those just named; for it we are indebted to the
critical endeavours of Biblical archaeology, which has at last thrown
light
upon the very complicated chronology of the books of the Old Testament,
which belong to entirely different centuries and were put together
quite
arbitrarily, though not without a plan: these teach us that the real
Jew
is not to be identified with the Israelite in the wider sense of the
word,
that the house of Judah, even at the time of its settling in Palestine,
was through blood-mixture and character distinct in several points from
the house of Joseph (which embraced the other tribes): the Judean stood
in fact in a kind of intellectual dependence upon the Josephite, and
only
at a relatively late time, after the violent separation from his
brothers,
did he begin to go his own way, the way that led to Judaism, and which
very soon afterwards by the elevation
358 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
of inbreeding to a religious principle
isolated him from the whole world. The Jew can be called an Israelite
in
so far as he is an offshoot of that family; the Israelites, on the
other
hand, even those of the tribe of Judah, were not Jews; the Jew began to
develop only after the more powerful tribes of the North had been
destroyed
by the Assyrians. In order to ascertain who the Jew is, we have
therefore
first of all to establish who the Israelite was and then to ask how the
Israelite of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin became a Jew. And here we
must be careful how we use our sources of information. For it was only
after the Babylonian captivity that the specifically Jewish character
was
artificially brought into the Bible, by whole books being invented and
ascribed to Moses and frequently by the introduction in verse after
verse
of interpolations and corrections which obliterated the wider views of
old Israel and replaced them by the narrow Jerusalemic cult of Jehovah,
giving the impression that this cult had existed from time immemorial
and
had been directly ordained by God. This has long prevented us from
clearly
understanding the gradual and perfectly human historical development of
the Jewish national character. Now at last light has been thrown on
this
sphere too. Here also we can say: we hold in our hand a sure and
lasting
result of scientific investigation. Whether later investigations prove
this or that sentence of the Hexateuch, which to-day is ascribed to the
“jahvistic“ text, to belong to the “elohistic,“ or to have been
inserted
by the later “editor,“ whether a definite utterance was made by Isaiah
himself or by the so-called second Isaiah — all these are certainly
important
questions, but their solution will never in any way alter the
established
fact that real Judaism, with the special Jehovah faith and the
exclusive
predominance of priestly law, is due to a demonstrable and very
peculiar
historical sequence of events and to
359 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the active intervention of certain
far-sighted
and clear-headed men.
These three facts
form the essential basis of all knowledge of the Jewish character; they
must not remain the possession of a learned minority but must be
incorporated
in the consciousness of all educated people. I repeat them in preciser
form:
(1) The Israelite
people has arisen from the crossing of quite different human types;
(2) The Semitic
element
may well have been the stronger morally, but physically it contributed
scarcely one-half to the composition of the new ethnological.
individuality;
it is therefore wrong shortly to call the Israelites “Semites,“ for the
part played by the various human types in the formation of the
Israelite
race demands a quantitative and qualitative analysis;
(3) The real Jew
only developed in the course of centuries by gradual physical
separation
from the rest of the Israelite family, as also by progressive
development
of certain mental qualities and systematic starving of others; he is
not
the result of a normal national life, but in a way an artificial
product,
produced by a priestly caste, which forced, with the help of alien
rulers,
a priestly legislation and a priestly faith upon a people that did not
want them.
This furnishes us
with the arrangement of the following discussion. I shall first of all
consult history and anthropology, in order that we may learn from what
races the new Israelite race (as the foundation of the Jewish) was
descended;
then the part played by these various human types must be analysed with
regard to their physical and particularly their moral significance, and
here our attention must be directed especially to their religious
views:
for the basis of Judaism is the faith which it teaches and we cannot
judge
the Jew correctly either in history or in our midst, if we are not
quite
clear about
360 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
his religion; last of all I shall try
to show how under the influence of remarkable historical events
specific
Judaism was established and stamped for ever with its peculiar and
incomparable
individuality. In this way we shall perhaps attain the object of this
chapter,
as I have defined it; for the Jewish race — though later at certain
times
it adopted not a few alien elements — remained on the whole purer than
any other, and the Jewish nation has been from the first an essentially
“ideal“ one, that is, one resting on faith in a definite national idea,
not on the possession of a free State of its own, nor on communal life
and work on the soil of that State: and this idea is the same to-day as
it was two thousand years ago. Now race and ideal make up the
personality
of the human being; they answer the question: Who art thou?
ORIGIN
OF THE ISRAELITE
The Israelites *
sprang
from the crossing of three (perhaps even four) different human types:
the
Semitic, the Syrian (or, more correctly, Hittite) and the
Indo-European.
Possibly Turanian blood, or, as it is more frequently called in
Germany,
Sumero-Accadian blood, also flowed in the veins of the original
ancestors.
In order that the
reader may clearly understand how this crossing took place, I must
first
give a brief historical sketch. It will freshen the memory in regard to
familiar facts and help to make the history of the origin of the Jewish
race comprehensible.
Although the term
“Semite,“ as applied to a pure autonomous race existing since the
beginning
of time,
*
And
not they only but also their relatives, the Ammonites, the Moabites and
the Edomites. These four make up the family of the “Hebrews,“ a name
usually
— but wrongly — applied to the Israelites alone or sometimes even to
the
Jews. See Wellhausen: Israelitische und jüdische
Geschichte,
3rd ed. p. 7. To the same family belong likewise the Midianites and the
Ishmaelites (Maspero: Histoire ancienne, 1895, ii. 65.)
361
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
a special creation of God, so to speak,
is certainly a mere abstraction, yet it is not so hazardous as the word
“Aryan“: for there still exists to-day a people which is supposed to
represent
the pure, untarnished type of the primeval Semite, viz., the Bedouin of
the Arabian desert. * Let us discard the hazy Semite and confine
ourselves
to the Bedouin of flesh and blood. It is supposed, and there are good
grounds
for the supposition, that some thousands of years before Christ, human
beings, very closely resembling the Bedouins of to-day, migrated from
Arabia
in an almost unbroken stream to east and north into the land of the two
rivers. Arabia is healthy, so its population increases; its soil is
extremely
poor, so a portion of its inhabitants must seek sustenance elsewhere.
It
seems that sometimes great migratory hordes composed of armed men had
thus
wandered forth; in such cases the surplus population had been cast out
with irresistible force from their home, and left as conquerors upon
the
neighbouring countries; in other cases single families with their herds
wandered peacefully over the indefinitely marked boundary from one
grazing-place
to another: if they did not at once turn off to the west, as many of
them
did, it might happen that they advanced as far as the Euphrates and so,
following the stream, worked their way into the north. In historical
times
(under the Romans and subsequent to Mohammed) we have memorable
instances
of this summary manner of getting rid of superfluous population; † in
the
great civilised States between
*
This
seems to be unanimously asserted by all writers. I have quoted
Burckhardt
in the course of this chapter. Here I shall only refer to a more
modern,
universally recognised authority — W. Robertson Smith. In his Religion
of the Semites (1894, p. 8) he says: “It can be taken for granted
that
the Arabs of the desert have from time immemorial been an unmixed
race.“
The same author points out that it is inadmissible to put the
Babylonians,
Phoenicians, &c., down as “Semites“: the only established fact is
the
relationship of the languages, and all these so-called “Semitic“
nations
have sprung from a decided mixture of blood.
† The
last example was in the end of the nineteenth century, when the
362 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
the Tigris and the Euphrates,
Semitisation
was also the work of great, though more peaceful, masses. Wherever, in
fact, as in Babylonian Accadia, the Semites came into contact with a
ripe,
strong, self-reliant culture, they prevailed over it by fusion with the
people — a process which in the case of the Babylonians we can now
trace
almost step by step. * The Beni Israel, on the other hand, emigrated as
simple shepherds in small groups and had, in order to secure the safety
of their cattle, to avoid all warlike operations, of which their small
number would have rendered them incapable in any case. † The Bible
narrative
naturally gives us only the faint reflection of primeval oral
traditions
concerning the earliest wanderings of this Bedouin family; they are in
addition much falsified by the misconceptions, theories and purposes of
late-born scribes; still there is no reason to doubt the correctness of
the general details given, all the less so as they contain nothing that
is improbable. Everything is indeed much abbreviated: whole families
have
dwindled into a single person (a universal Semitic custom, “such as we
find only in the case of the Semites,“ says Wellhausen); other
pretended
ancestors are simply the names of the places in the neighbourhood of
which
the Israelites had long stayed; movements which required several
generations
to accomplish are accredited to a
Arabs, who from time
immemorial
had migrated not only to north and east, but also to west and south,
completely
devastated a great part of Central Africa. Immense kingdoms, which in
the
year 1880 were densely populated and entirely under cultivation, have
since
become a desert. Stanley tells us of a single Arab chieftain who laid
waste
a region of two thousand square miles! (See the books of
Stanley,
Wissman, Hinde, &c., and the short summary in Ratzel: Völkerkunde,
2nd ed. ii. 430.) Cf. also p.
115, note.
* See
Hummel, Sayce, Budge and Maspero with regard to the lost race of the
Accadians
or Sumerians, the creators of the magnificent Babylonian culture, and
their
gradual Semitisation.
† To
complete and correct what follows, see the interesting and
excellent
book of Carl Steuernagel: Die Einwanderung der israelitischen
Stämme
in Kanaan. Berlin, 1901.
363 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
single individual. This need of
simplifying
the complex, of pressing together what lies far apart, is just as
natural
to this people as it is to the poet who consciously creates. Thus, for
example, the Bible represents Abraham, when already a married man, as
emigrating
from the district of Ur, on the lower course of the Euphrates, to
northern
Mesopotamia, at the foot of the Armenian mountain range, to that
Paddan-Aram,
of which the book of Genesis so often speaks and which lies
beyond
the Euphrates, between it and the tributary Khabur, in a straight line
about 375 miles, but following the valley and the line of
grazing-tracts
at least 937 miles from Ur (cf. the map on p. 365); but more
than
that, this same Abraham is said to have moved later from Paddan-Aram
towards
the south-west, to the land of Canaan, from there to Egypt and finally
(for I leave his shorter journeys out of account) from Egypt to Canaan
again and all this accompanied by so numerous herds of cattle that he
was
forced, in order to find sufficient grazing land for them, to separate
from his nearest relatives (Genesis xiii.). In spite of this
compression
the old Hebrew tradition contains all we require to know, particularly
in places where the oldest tradition is before us in almost unfalsified
form, and Biblical criticism already gives us full information with
regard
to it. * From this tradition we learn that the Bedouin family in
question
first of all wandered into the valley of the southern Euphrates and
stayed
a considerable time in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur. This city
lay
to the south of the great river and formed the farthest outpost of
Chaldea.
Here for the first time the nomads came into touch with civilisation.
The
shepherds could not indeed enter into this district itself, since
magnificent
cities and a highly developed agriculture required every inch of ground
available, but here they
* Cf.especially
Gunkel‘s Handkommentar zur Genesis, 1901 (now published in a
second
improved edition).
364 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
received imperishable impressions and
instruction (to which I shall refer later); it was here too that they
first
became acquainted with such names as Abraham and Sarah, which their
love
of punning make them translate later into Hebrew (Genesis xvii.
1-6). They could not stay long in the vicinity of such high culture, or
perhaps they were pushed forward by sons of the desert who were
pressing
on behind. And thus we see them moving ever farther and farther towards
the north, * to the then sparsely populated Paddan-Aram, † where they
must
have stayed for a long time — at the very least for several centuries.
When, however, the pasture of Mesopotamia was no longer sufficient for
the increased number of human beings and cattle, a portion of them
moved
from that north-eastern corner of Syria, Paddan-Aram, to the
south-western
corner nearest Egypt, to Canaan, where they were hospitably received by
a settled agricultural people and received permission to pasture their
herds on the mountains. But Paddan-Aram lived long in the memory of the
descendants of Abraham as their genuine home. Jehovah himself calls
Paddan-Aram
Abraham‘s “country“ (Genesis xii. 1), and the mythical Abraham
still
speaks, long after he has settled in Canaan, with longing of his
distant
“country“ and sends messengers to his “land“ (Genesis xxiv. 4
and
7), in order to get in touch again with the relatives who had remained
*
The
direction was marked out for them; from Ur they could choose no other
course;
for the wilderness runs for several hundred miles parallel to the
Euphrates,
only a small stretch of watered land separating the two; but suddenly,
exactly at the 35th degree, the wilderness ceases and the land of Syria
opens up to west, south and north. Syria stretches southwards to Egypt,
westwards to the Mediterranean Sea, northwards to the Taurus, in the
east
it is bounded to-day by the Euphrates, but according to former
conditions
and ideas it embraced Mesopotamia, which lies beyond the middle
Euphrates,
and here the children of Abraham had their home for centuries.
† At
a later time Mesopotamia was for long an artificially watered and
consequently
richly-cultivated region; in former times, however, it was, as it is
to-day,
a poor land, where only nomadic shepherds could find a living (cf.
Maspero: Histoire ancienne, i. 563.)
365
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
there. And thus the sons of Abraham,
although already settled in Canaan, remained half Mesopotamians during
all the long years which have been compressed and represented under the
pseudo-mythical names Isaac
SKETCH-MAP
and Jacob; it is a perpetual coming
and
going; the southern branch feeling that it belongs to one principal
northern
stem. * But the moment came when they had to move farther towards the
south;
in dry years the pastures of Canaan were no longer sufficient, and
perhaps
*
This
period, during which “Father Jacob developed into the people of
Israel,“
Wellhausen describes as an interval of several centuries‘ duration (Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, p. 11).
366 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
too the Canaanites felt the burden of
their increasing numbers; so at the time when the friendly half-Semitic
Hyksos were in power, they wandered away to the land of Goshen,
belonging
to Egypt. It was this long stay in Egypt * that first broke off all
connection
between them and their kinsmen, so that, when the Israelites once more
returned to Palestine, they still recognised the Moabites, Edomites and
the other Hebrews as distant blood-relations, but felt for them no
longer
love but hatred and contempt, a state of feeling which received a
refreshingly
artless expression in the genealogies of the Bible, according to which
some of these races owe their origin to incest, while others are
descended
from harlots.
We can only speak
of Israelites in the historical sense of the word from the moment when,
as a not very numerous, but yet firmly united people, they forcibly
took
possession of Canaan on their flight from Egypt, and founded there a
State
that experienced many different but mostly very sad strokes of fortune,
but which, in spite of the fact that it lay (like the rest of Syria)
between
hammer and anvil, that is, between warring “great Powers,“ continued to
stand as an independent kingdom for almost seven hundred years. We must
emphasise the fact that these Israelites were not very numerous; it is
important from an historical as well as from an anthropological point
of
view; for to this circumstance we must ascribe the fact that the former
and really domiciled inhabitants of Canaan (a mixture of
*
According
to Genesis xv. four hundred years, which is naturally not to be taken
literally
but simply as an expression for an almost unthinkably long time. The
number
forty was among the Hebrews the expression for an indefinitely large
number,
four hundred a fortiori. Renan is of opinion that the stay of
the
Israelites in Egypt did not last more than one hundred years and that
only
the Josephites (probably only very distant relations with a strong
mixture
of Egyptian blood) were settled there for very long (Histoire du
peuple
d‘Israël, 13e éd. i. pp. 112, 141, 142).
367 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
Hittites and Indo-European Amorites)
were never destroyed and always formed and even still form the stock of
the population. * The mingling of races, of which I shall immediately
speak,
and which had begun as soon as the Israelites entered Syrian territory,
continued in the autonomous State of Israel, that is, in Palestine, and
came to a sudden stop only after the Babylonian exile, and that in
Judea
alone, by the introduction of a new law. The fact that the Jews at a
later
time separated as an ethnological unity from the rest of the Israelites
is purely and simply due to this, that the inhabitants of Judea by
energetic
enactments at last put a stop to the continual fusion (see Ezra
ix. and x.).
The reader who would
like further information on this matter may supplement the knowledge he
has derived from this hasty sketch by consulting Wellhausen‘s concise Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, Stade‘s Geschichte des Volkes
Israel,
Renan‘s detailed and yet lightly written Histoire du peuple
d‘Israël,
and Maspero‘s comprehensive and luminous Histoire ancienne des
peuples
de l'Orient classique; † in the meantime my sketch may suffice to
show
the origin of the Israelites in broad outline and to impress upon the
memory
in the simplest form the seemingly complicated facts of the case. I
shall
now attempt to show how the original, purely Semitic
*
Sayce:
The
Races of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. pp.76, 113. “The Roman drove
the
Jew out of the land that his fathers had conquered; the Jews, on the
other
hand, had never succeeded in driving out the genuine possessors of
Canaan....
The Jew held Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as the surrounding cities
and
villages, otherwise (even in Judea itself) he formed only a fraction of
the population. As soon as the Jew was removed, for example, at the
time
of the Babylonian exile or after the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans,
the original population, freed from the pressure, increased ... and the
Jewish colonies in Palestine are to-day just as much foreigners as the
German colonies there.“
† I
name only the latest, most important and most reliable books, written
by
real scholars but accessible to the unlearned. Of the older ones
Duncker‘s
Geschichte
des Altertums also remains unsurpassed in many respects for the
history
of Israel.
368 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
emigrant became by crossing first of
all a Hebrew and then an Israelite.
THE
GENUINE SEMITE
The preceding
historical
sketch shows us a Bedouin family as the starting-point. * Let us first
of all establish the one fact: this pure Semite, the original emigrant
from the deserts of Arabia, is and remains the impelling power, the
principle
of life, the soul of the new ethnical unity of the Israelites which
arose
out of manifold crossing. No matter how much, in consequence not only
of
their destiny but above all of crossing with absolutely different human
types, his descendants might differ in course of time morally and
physically
from the original Bedouin, yet in many points, good as well as bad, he
remained their spiritus rector. Of the two or three souls which
had their home in the breast of the later Israelites, this was the most
obtrusive and long-lived. However, we can only congratulate this
Bedouin
family on their crossing, for any change in the manner of living is
said
to have a very bad effect on the high qualities of the genuine and
purely
Semitic nomads. The learned Sayce, one of the greatest advocates of the
Jews at the present day, writes: “If the Bedouin of the desert chooses
a settled life, he, as a rule, unites in himself all the vices of the
nomad
and of the
*
As
a matter of fact the current opinion is that the Semite and even that
purest
Bedouin type are the most absolute mongrels imaginable, the product of
a cross between negro and white man! Gobineau preached this doctrine
fifty
years ago, and was laughed at; to-day his opinion is the orthodox one;
Ranke defines it thus in his Völkerkunde (ii. 399): “The
Semites
belong to the mulatto class, a transition stage between black and
white.“
But I think that caution is here necessary. What is taking place before
our eyes is not warranted to strengthen the belief that from mulattoes
there could spring a firm, unchangeable type that would survive the
storms
of time: quicksand is not more fickle and changeable than this
half-caste;
here, then, in defiance of all experience we should have to suppose
that
the unthinkable, the unexampled had taken place in the case of the
Bedouins.
(Cf., too, August Ford‘s remarks, 1900).
369 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
peasant. Lazy, deceitful, cruel, greedy,
cowardly, he is rightly regarded by all nations as the scum of
mankind.“
* But long before they settled down, this Bedouin family, the Beni
Israel,
had fortunately escaped such a cruel fate by manifold crossing with
non-Semites.
We saw that the
original
Bedouin family first stayed for a considerable time on the Southern
Euphrates
in the neighbourhood of the city of Ur: did crossing take place at this
stage? It has been asserted that it did. And since fairly genuine
Sumero-Accadians
presumably formed the basis of the population of the Babylonian Empire
at that time — for the Semites had merely annexed this State and its
high
civilisation without performing either the mental work or the manual †
— it is assumed that the stock of Abraham was quickened by
Sumero-Accadian
blood. The occurrence of such strange names as Abraham (this was the
name
of the first legendary founder and king of Ur among the Sumerians) has
given weight to this view, as also the fragments of half-understood
Turanian
‡ wisdom and mythology, of which the first chapters of Genesis
are
composed. But such assumptions are purely hypothetical and hence, to
begin
with, hardly merit serious consideration. Not even probability speaks
for
this view. The poor shepherds had hardly touched the hem of
civilisation,
what people then would have entered into family relations with them?
And
as regards the adoption of such meagre cosmogonic conceptions as we
find
in the Bible, intercourse with other Hebrews is sufficient to explain
that;
for the mythology, the science and the culture of the Sumerians (in
which
we still share, thanks
* The
Races of the Old Testament, p. 106.
† See
especially Sayce: Assyria, p. 24 ff., and Social Life among
the
Assyrians and Babylonians; also Winckler: Die Völker
Vorderasiens
(1900), p. 8.
‡ The
word “Turanian“ has escaped my pen, because many authors regard the
Sumero-Accadians
as Turanians. See Hommel: Gesch. Babyloniens und Assyriens,
pp. 125, 244 f.
370 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
to the idea of creation and of the fall
of man, the division of the week and the year, the foundation of
geometry,
and the invention of writing) had spread far and wide; Egypt was their
pupil, * and the Semite, incapable of such deep intuition as the
Egyptian,
had long ago, before the Beni Israel began their wanderings, adopted as
much of Egyptian culture as seemed advantageous and practical and had,
as active mediators, spread it wherever they went. The crossing with
Sumero-Accadians
is therefore just as improbable as it is unproved.
We are, however,
on sure ground, as soon as the emigrants move to north and west. For
now
they are in the heart of Syria and they never again leave it (except at
the time of their short stay on the borders of Egypt). Here, in Syria,
our purely Semitic Bedouin family has been changed by crossing, here
its
members became Hebrews by mingling with an absolutely different type,
the
Syrian — as so many a Bedouin colony before and after them. At a later
period part of the family was forced to emigrate from Mesopotamia,
which
lay in the north-east corner, to Canaan, in the extreme south-west,
where
similar race-moulding influences, to which quite new ones were also
added,
asserted themselves in a still more definite way. It was only here, in
Canaan, that the Abrahamide Hebrews changed gradually into genuine
Israelites.
To this very Canaan the Israelites, now increased in numbers, returned
as conquerors, after their sojourn in Egypt; and here they received, in
addition to alien blood, a new culture, which transformed them from
nomads
into settled farmers and city-dwellers.
We can, therefore,
without making any mistake, distinguish two anthropogenetic spheres of
influence, which successively came into prominence, a more general one,
provided by the entrance into Syria and in particular
* See
Hommel: Der babylonische Ursprung der ägyptischen Kultur
(1892).
371 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
by the long stay in Mesopotamia, in
regard to which we have no very definite historical dates, but which we
may and must deduce from the known ethnological facts; in the second
place,
a more particular Canaanite influence, which we can prove from the
detailed
testimony of the Bible. Let us discuss first the more general sphere of
influence and then the more particular one.
THE
SYRIAN
If we turn up a
text-book
of geography or an encyclopaedia, we shall find it stated that the
present
population of Syria is “to the greatest extent Semitic.“ This is false;
just as false as the statement we find in the same sources, that the
Armenians
are “Aryans.“ Here again we see the widespread confusion of language
and
race; we should, on the same footing, logically have to maintain that
the
negroes of the United States were Anglo-Saxons. Scientific anthropology
has in recent years, by thorough investigation of an enormous amount of
material, irrefutably proved that from the most remote times to which
prehistoric
discoveries reach back, the main population of Syria has been formed
from
a type which is absolutely different, physically and morally, from the
Semitic, as it is from everything which we are wont to comprise under
the
term “Aryan“; and this applies not to the population of Syria alone,
but
also to that of all Asia Minor and the extensive region which we call
Armenia
at the present day. There are races which have an inborn tendency to
restless
wandering (e.g., the Bedouin, the Laplander, &c.), others
which
possess a rare power of expansion (e.g., the Teutonic races);
but
this inhabitant of Syria and Asia Minor seems to have been
distinguished
and still to be distinguished by his obstinate attachment to his native
soil and the invincible power of his physical constancy. His original
home
was the
372 JEWS
ENTER INTO WESTERN HISTORY
trysting-place of nations, he himself
almost always being vanquished, and the great battles of the world
being
fought over him — yet he survived them all and his blood asserted
itself
to such an extent that the Syrian Semite of to-day should be called
Semite
in language rather than in race, and the so-called Aryan Armenian, of
Phrygian
origin, has perhaps not 10 per cent. of Indo-European blood in his
veins.
On the other hand, the so-called “Syrian“ of to-day, the Jew and the
Armenian
can hardly be distinguished from one another, and this is easily
explained,
since the primal race which unites all three makes them daily more and
more like each other. We may most appropriately apply a quotation from
Schiller‘s
Braut von Messina to this Syrian stem:
- Die fremden Eroberer kommen und
gehen;
- Wir gehorchen, aber wir bleiben
stehen.
Now the people which enters history at a
later time under the name of Israelites was subject to this powerful
ethnical
influence for many centuries, at least for over ten centuries. That is
what I called the general sphere of influence by which our genuine
Semitic
Bedouin family became a group of the so-called “Hebrews.“ Hebrews are,
in fact, a cross between Semite and Syrian. It must not be thought that
the nomad shepherds immediately crossed with the strange race, the
process
was rather as follows: on the one hand they found a considerable number
of half and quarter Hebrews, who formed the point of connection; on the
other hand they doubtless subdued the original inhabitants (as the
predominance
of the Semitic languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, &c., proves) and begot
sons
and daughters with their Syrian slaves; later (in half-historical
times)
we see them voluntarily intermarrying with the independent families of
the alien people, and this had beyond doubt been for centuries the
custom.
However, no matter what theories we
373
JEWS ENTER INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
may hold about the process of fusion,
certain it is that it did take place.
To be able to speak
of that other Syrian type it would be convenient to have a name for
him.
Hommel, the well-known Munich scholar, calls him the Alarodian;
* he thinks he may ascribe to him considerable expansion even over
Southern
Europe and finds him in the Iberians and Basques of to-day. But the
layman
must be very discreet in his use of such hypotheses; before this book
is
printed, the Alarodians may have been thrown among the scrap-iron of
science.
The example of the French zoologist and anthropologist, G. de Lapouge,
is worthy of imitation; he does not trouble himself about history and
origin,
but gives names to the various physical types according to the Linnean
method, such as Homo europaeus, Homo Afer, Homo contractus,
&c.
So far as formation of skull is concerned, this type from Asia Minor
would
correspond pretty exactly to Lapouge‘s Homo alpinus; † but here
we may safely and simply call him Homo syriacus, the primeval
inhabitant
of Syria. And just as we found a point of support for the Semitic type
in the Bedouin, so we find in the Hittite tribe a peculiarly
characteristic
representative of the Syrian type, and moreover the one with which the
Israelites in Palestine were closely connected; it no longer, of
course,
exists among us as a national individuality, but it is daily becoming
better
known from history and from manifold surviving representations. ‡ This
Syrian type is distinguished by the prevalence of a particular
anatomical
characteristic:
*
He
takes the name from a tribe mentioned by Herodotus as living at the
foot
of Mount Ararat.
†
Lapouge:
La
dépopulation de la France, Revue d&
