THE MODERN JEW; His Present and Future ,'v? By ANNA LAURKNS DA\VES lifornia onal -printed from THE AMERICAN HEBREW] {Reprinted from THE AMERICAN HEBREW] THE MODERN JEW; His Present and Future -BY ANNA LAURENS DAWES NEW YORK Office of THE AMERICAN HEBREW, 498-500 Third Ave 1884 PHIL. COWEN, PRINTER, 498-500 THIRD AVE., NEW YORK. SRI* URL THE MODERN JEW ; HIS PRESENT AND FUTURE, As in the fifteenth century there awoke a vast and powerful renaissance of learning, so in the nineteenth there has sprung into being a renais- sance of patriotism. And as in that time the light which burst in upon the world generated a new growth which still blesses it, so the new vigor which has come to the nations in our time will mark the beginning of an epoch. A single generation has borne the birth-pangs of a new nationality in all the great countries under the sun. Free Greece, new Italy, America weld- ed together in suffering, France re-baptized in blood and fire, Germany delivered of a great em- pire, Russia torn and agonized by the birth- throes of a new nation, Ireland waking from a long sleep and struggling with England for the right to be once more a people all these strong developments of patriotism have come in a single 4 generation, and all of them have sprung from a new hope and fresh belief in the people; not from the rapacity or revenge of kings. The historian of the future must mark this as the age of the people, the age when courts and thrones were but the setting of the scene, while the people were the actors in the drama, and the plot was a new recognition of the powers of national feel- ing newly understood. It is apparent thus that the sudden, and in some aspects inconsequent re- vival of national feeling among the Jews is but a fresh instance of the Zeitgeist, and has the prom- ise and potency of that awakening which comes from the spirit of the age. The question has arisen in three quarters, "What is to become of the Jew?" It interests the student of social life, the statesman concerned with the internal policy and welfare of nations, and the Jew himself. The very fact that it arises in so many varying relations, and is a necessity of adjustment in so many quarters of the globe, simultaneously, marks both its import- ance and the fact that the time has come for its consideration. A problem which all the world is thinking about will not only be soon solved, but a difficulty which vexes all the worid must be 5 soon got rid of. Is a new nation about to be born ? Or is a factitious growth sucking out the life-blood upon which it has fed, until the knife is the only remedy ? Or are these cries of pain among Jews and Gentiles but the growing pains of a natural development ? These are the ques- tions, or rather these are the three forms in which the question presents itself all over the civilized world, it might almost be said, to-day. The Jewish people are of unusual interest to students of social life. Can a piece of ancient society be dropped into modern civilization and survive ? Or, on the other hand, can a people so contradict all laws of heredity as to give up not the accidents of habit founded upon exter- nal condition but the very principle of nation- al growth inbred for centuries ? Can the Israel- ite, whose peculiar genius has been separateness, burst from that restriction which has given him force, and still be a race ? Or has his special mission in the evolution of peoples Ceased ? Has the time come for this race, like so many which have gone before, to become but a fertiliz- ing source from which new peoples of mixed blood and mingled possibilities shall flow ? Up to this time the Jew has preserved his distinct life and his mission. The substance of all com- plaint against him has been that he was every- where an alien. And the mission of his faith and his philosophy, wherever sought for, is still the upholding of monotheism against every per- version of the idea ; of a personal providential Deity against every vague substitute of force, or " power making for righteousness"; and of the purity and sanctity of domestic life. The nature of the people themselves must necessarily enter into the answer to these questions. We are not now concerned with the need of such tes- timony, but with the fact : does this people still represent this idea, and by what probable method will they continue to uphold it ? This on the philosophical side, and on the political side the present and future of a wonderful race, are what interests the world. We seldom stop to reflect how wonderful is this nation which we have so suddenly remem- bered. The Jew is the only race which has lasted through all recorded time. He is a piece of ancient life still going on in the very midst of modern environment. This is the same race which trod the banks of the Euphrates in the morning of the world. It is the same Hebrew nation which passed out of the splendid corrup- tion of the Chaldean capitol into the simple life of the desert. Ancient Egypt has become lit- tle else than a debating place for savants and philosophers, and the brilliant Persian has left behind him scarcely a trace of a civilization which antedated Homer : but the Jew remains. There is nought but broken and half- comprehen- ded relics to tell the story of old Greece, and the only lips which speak Roman words are the laws that were her legacy to the nations: but the Jewish scholar finds heroes of his own people when Greece was waste places, and he reads in the books of his own law, principles of human right and duty over the A B C of which modern scholars are stumbling. We of England and America find a great gulf between us and them. We count a long lineage, back, and back again, through mixed and com- posite peoples ; and in the black shadows of a time that knew neither nations nor history, we dream of possible descents and probable deriva- tions making the whole earth one. But the proud Jew was before this dream of a past. He was of eld when all that we call ancient was 8 young. He was a part of history while nations began, and waxed old and died. He was con- temporary with the new life that arose on the ruins which we still call ancient, and his was a nation with heroes and splendid victories when Rome was great and Gaul was conquered. And his people were no part of the life around them, but a race that had a past and hoped for a fut- ure when Germany began and England was not yet. And still they hoped against hope, in that long-past time when great Spain stretched out her hand to grasp a new land; and to-day, hun- dreds of years farther on in the story, to-day as always the Jew remains. All other peoples have intermingled, and of them have been born new races and differing types. Here and there are islands in the great sea of civilization like China or Corea, only just beginning to take part in the world's life. But the Jewish people, from the vague story of Cain until this very day, have wandered over the whole earth. Enterprising, vigorous, sufficient unto themselves, with a dash- ing and impetuous courage in the early time, and with a boundless curiosity they have been wont to scatter far and wide, to colonize, to initiate great commercial enterprises ; but always and everywhere they were Jews, a separate and pecul- iar people. Therefore it is that when to-day we can count their past by thousands of years, and find them always aliens among all their varying neighbors, they become vastly interesting, as a factor in social life, a piece of antiquity trying in vain to adjust itself to modern environments. The parallel would hardly fail if you imagined one of Caesar's legions or Pharaoh's cohorts set down in New York or St. Petersburg and obliged to struggle for adaptation and survival. Where is he to day ? What is he like this son of an older world? How does he live and what does he do ? These are some of the ques- tions that at once present themselves as we con- template the Jew from the standpoint of society. Does he any more assimilate than in the past, and what are his hopes for the future ? There are now about 7 ,000,000 Jews in the world, which is, curiously enough, about the same number that were in Palestine in the time of Christ. These are variously distributed. About 60,000 each in Great Britain, Holland and France ; 500,000 in Germany ; about 250,000 in America, and as many more in Turkey. All IO together make only a little more than 1,000,000 as against 5,000,000 in Russia and Poland. The Israelite is particularly healthy. He can live in all climates and all latitudes. He in- creases much faster than Christian races, and it is estimated that the death rate among them is only 89 in every 100,000, while that of Christians is 143. This and their great longevity is attributed by themselves to the strict sanitary regulations of the Mosaic code, and the desuetude of relig. ious fervor in great cities is much deplored as a certain loss to race vitality. They are most law- abiding citizens. The Mayor of New York testified a short time ago that although they formed ten per cent of the population of that city they contributed less than one per cent to the criminal classes. And it must be remembered in this connection how large a proportion of the Hebrews in that city belong to the cheap trading population. They are almost never in prisons; they are never intemperate, and they are phenomenally chaste. Indeed, for this last virtue .they are celebrated the world over. Their family life is very beau- tiful. Even among the poorest and lowest of them, his family and his reHgion make the whole II horizon of the Israelite. It is difficult for us to realize how these two things are interwoven, how really God and the Jew are familiar friends, and all the incidents of his daily life, take on a religious aspect. For centuries the Jew has had no country, but his hearth and his altar have bad double devotion. He has the peculiar domestic virtues of hospi- tality and charity. It is still common in many communities for the head of the household to invite the poor and the stranger to his own fire- side and table for the Friday night feast and the Sabbath rejoicing. This public charity is on a most generous scale. Fast institutions and bountiful associations for the care of the unfortu- nate go hand in hand with wise efforts toward teaching self-help, such as training schools for servants, technical and mechanical schools and kindergartens. The alleged peculiar adaptation to trade among the Hebrews is said by those who know them best to be simply the result of the long per- secution which forbade them every other re- source and at the same time both by law and privilege fostered among them the business of money lending. In this way they lost skill and . 12 practice at other arts, and the score of trades and handicrafts mentioned by a recent German wri- ter as flourishing in Bible times, have altogether disappeared. Thus a talent lying close to their other qualities was cultivated and transmitted, until they have become the typical money-getters of the world, and have added the general dislike of that craft to their other hatreds. It is, however, claimed that freedom and social liberty are fast bringing back a variety of occu- pations, in so far as the spirit of the age, which unduly exalts trade, can be counteracted. It is a vast mistake to suppose that money drops into the coffers of the Jew without effort or risk. "If there be any genius in his success," says one of their great rabbis, "it is the genius for patience, courage, diligence, economy and consecration of his earnings to the comfort and elevation of his family. Those whose fortunes rest on a solid basis have secured it in the sweat of their brows, with downright hard work, rigid economy, severe self-denial, and resistance to the spirit of wild speculation." The Israelite is, above all things else, enam- ored of education. Since the time of Solomon the Jew has been eager to get wisdom. There 13 is no pursuit so attractive to him. It is a maxim of the Talmud that learning is better than law, and it is inculcated over and over by all their rabbis and all their books that schools must be kept up and learning encouraged. Their famil- iar precept, that every man should learn a trade, does not interfere with the other dogma that every workman must be a scholar. Free schools and technical schools, kindergartens and uni- versities flourish side by side wherever enough are gathered together to make it possible. They show, moreover, a peculiar aptitude for letters. Even in Russia their scholars far outnumber the Christian students in such universities as are open - ed to them. "The school-book, not the bayonet," to quote the brilliant Jewess, Nina Morais, "was always thre weapon of the Jew. The influence of Jewish learning upon pagan Rome made Chris- tianity possible. In the East, famous colleges of the Jew illumined the region of the Eu- phrates. In the West, when Moorish culture attained a perfection never surpassed, the Jew rivalled his Semitic brother in every branch of literature and science. While the spirit of the Saxon hovered between the dark of barbarism's -starless night and the dim dawn of civilization's 14 day, the Jew basked in the blaze of sunlight." A long list of names each one of which tells a story of achievement will best state the argu- ment for the Jews. This is the nation which* in its modern era. has brought forth the leaders of every art in every land. Here are such scholars as Emanuel Deutsch, and Franz De- litzsch, Ewald, Herzfeld, and Neander ; such masters of language as Oppert, and Bernays, and Benfey ; such students as Traube in medicine, or Ricardo in political economy ; such philosophers as Moses Mendelssohn, and Spinoza. This is the nation which has produced such women as Rahel von Ense, and Henrietta Herz, and Fanny Schlegel ; such actors as Rachel and Bernhardt. and Braham, and Grisi ; such authors as Auerbach and Heine ; such musical geniuses as Joachim and Rubenstein, Offenbach and Meyerbeer, and Moscheles, and Mendelssohn. This is the people which counts as children the Rothschilds, and Sir Geo. Jessel, and Judah P. Benjamin. In statescraft the Jew has done most of all. The time is but just gone by when the leader of the liberal party in Germany was a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France was a Jew, and the prime minister of England 15 was a Jew ! And over against the names of Jules Simon, of Fould, and Cremieux, and Gam- betta, of Lasker, and of Disraeli, are the no less distinguished but erratic leaders of social- ism, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lasalle and Johann Jacoby. I have by no means exhausted the list and I have not mentioned one of many great names whose public is confined to their own people and of whose just fame the Gentile world is deplora- bly ignorant. What I have said, however, finds its confirmation in the complaint which comes up from Germany and which is soberly pronounced as a sufficient reason for any injustice. "The German Jew," says Cherbuliez in the Revue des Deux Mondes, commenting on this feeling, "as soon as emancipated became a power, to the huge displeasure of a great many persons. They form an insignificant minority in Germany, and yet they already preponderate in the municipal councils of the largest cities of Prussia. They have taken possession of journalism. The place they occupy in the universities, at the bar, in all the liberal professions is entirely disproportioned to their numbers." A bitter opponent of this hated race complain- i6 ed, not long ago, that the mayor of Berlin, the president of the German parliament, two-thirds of the lawyers, and all the leading shop-keepers and financiers of the city of Berlin were Jews ! There is some justice apparently in Theophras- tus Such's quotation, "The Jews have a dan- gerous tendency to get the uppermost places, not only in commerce but in political life. A people with Oriental sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatized, they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the best prizes." The Jew is brilliant and versatile. He is eager for liberty and conservative of advantage gained: he is bound to his people by ties that never weaken, though much enduring ; he is never de- stroyed but rather the stronger for the blows that fall upon him. Emotional, springing quick- ly to intuitions, patiently, persistently industrious, of an exceptional purity in his personal and fam- ily relations, affectionate and domestic, and the very guardian of religion, it has seemed to me that the Jew represents the feminine element in the world. A first step in understanding the race is to "cease the abominable injustice of holding the I? class responsible for the sin of the individual," but it is equally unjust to judge the class by the individual. It is at least premature judgment of a nation to measure it by the achievements of its geniuses, and it is never possible to judge a widely scattered people by any national stan- dard. The Jews of different nations differ as much as their geographical centres. It has been cleverly said that the Hebrew emphasizes the characteristics of whatever people he dwells among. Perhaps it would be wise to remember this in considering the peculiarities of the Poland Jew who is a Russian peasant, and the Prussian Jew who is a German trader. There is a con- stant tendency to confound the race character- istic with the prominent traits of certain aggres- sive classes, but it is only necessary to remember that no people is to be judged entirely by any one type. Frenchmen are not all cooks and dan- cing masters, nor are all Americans willing to be judged by the typical Yankee. But certain local characteristics have divided the Jews into classes which are well described by the local name, if only we will remember that these are not racial distinctions. The Polish Jew is the pariah of his race. He i8 is a peasant in his habits, and (as I have said) a Russian peasant at that, ignorant, dirty, and obsti- nate, wedded to his customs, and, as an emigrant, without much adaptability or any comprehension of the new conditions of a new world. He has a native shrewdness, much facility at trade and a long training in the peculiar abilities born of oppression. It is not strange that he does not prove an altogether charming or desirable citizen in the first generation. Moreover, his constant association with his own race, and the enforced restriction to them has combined with his pecul- iar religious tenets and his habit of mind, to make him the most narrow of bigots. It goes without saying that he and his 3,000,000 com- patriots, wherever you find them, here or at home, are orthodox, and still follow both Mosaic ritual and Talmudic law. He is the Chatham street old clo' man, the glazier, and the pawn- broker. But we have the authority of one of their famous men, Rabbi Gustav Gottheil, that coming here as he does with no education, as we understand the word, often without a handi- craft and always with a family, hampered by his scrupulous attention to strict religious ceremo- nial, without money or friends, he still manages 19 to live and that in a decent and orderly manner, never yielding to drunkenness, or sinking into pauperism, and never losing his domestic virtues. "That the despised Polish Jew is no burden to the community," says Dr. Gottheil, "is due to the sterling qualities he possesses, to the thoroughly practical and domestic character of his religion, and to the sympathy he finds here as everywhere at the hands of his brethren." It was this class of Hebrews and their countrymen who suffered so dreadfully in the Russian massacres. It is not necessary now to recount the bloody story, how fire and destruction, pillage and murder raged hand in hand over whole tracts of country, destroying nearly two hundred villages and $80,- 000,000 of property (these are the figures of the London Times], and exciting the protest of the world against the horrid butchery. The thou- sands of immigrants who thronged our shores, belonged, for the most part, to this class, but there was among them such a proportion of edu- cated men and delicate women as to make good the claim that nowhere is the peasant the sole representative of his people. What is known as the Anti-Semitic agitation 2O began in Germany nearly a dozen years ago. The Jew in that country is said to be the most intellectual race in Europe, but that variety of Hebrew long known to us as "the German Jew" is of a different class. He has the intelligence, the quick wits, the knowledge of men, the half- education, and the little breeding of the small trader. He adds to this the shrewdness of his nation, and the self-assertion which has grown out of the long certainty that he is despised. When such a man becomes very rich in a country where riches are made into a golden calf and worshiped as in America, or in a country where riches are a new and much envied possession as in Germany, he naturally assumes the manners of the peacock, and receives the usual dislike of that bird among his fellows. We are apt to forget, under the combined irritation of a vexatious ill- breeding and an inward feeling of injustice that the money is not ours, under these circum- stances, I say, we are apt to forget the purity, the domestic virtues, the high commercial stand- ing, even the brilliant intellectual possibilities of the race, and charge to the Hebrew nation our discomfort and discomfiture ! In Germany something like this resulted from 21 the inflated values and extravagant assumption which followed the conquest of France. The tremendous opportunity for trade and specula- tion drew a large Hebrew population to their cities. The intellectual activity of which I have spoken at such length, exhibited itself in the speedy occupation of so many political offices, editorial chairs, and public places in general. In vain the old scholar caste, to whom all these things had previously fallen of right, protested. It was but a little more than twenty years since the Jew was emancipated, but nothing was safe from his eager brain or fierce hand. A German writer has described the feeling of his country- men in these bitter words : '-The ability, perse- verance, thrift and industry of the Jew are so many points of sympathy between himself and the German, since they are the virtues of all Teutonia ; but greed, unscrupulousness, vulgar cunning, underbred arrogance and ostentation, purse pride and an indifference to the means so the end is achieved, together with a cruel cal- lousness to the sufferings by which they grow rich, these are the characteristics which have aroused the hatred of the Hebrew in the German heart." 22 It is easy to see that financial envy, jealousy, and that unaccountable but ineradicable sentiment of race dislike is at the bottom of the difficulty, in Germany as it is in Russia, the Russians them- selves being taken as authority. But these are sentiments not easily quelled. There is every probability, that excellent citizen as he might be in his own land among his own people, the Jew is not likely at present to be an acceptable citi- zen in foreign countries ; and there is no guaran* ty but on the contrary, much probability, that the slumbering persecution, both social and physical, will break out again with new force. Indeed the former variety has just now appeared in a new quarter. An anti-Semitic agitation, with its usual accompaniment of riots, has but late- ly broken out in England, because, forsooth, there was much public rejoicing over the icoth birth- day of Sir Moses Montefiore, a philanthropist of such world-wide renown and such generous fame that all nations covet the honor of his birth! And here I must interrupt my sketch of the local development of the Hebrew race, to defin- itely recall the element in its environment which is responsible for many of their peculiarities and 23 much of their difficulty. In circumstances and characteristics alike, they are largely the children of persecution. I scarcely need to remind you of the unvarying and unexampled severity of treatment which has produced the modern Jew, but in any study of his character and his future, it must be noticed that the same spirit rages to- day, only changed in form, and even in that re- spect very little, sometimes. For eight hundred years priestly direction and the laws of the land united, in every country called civilized in the world, to forbid the He- brew to buy or hold land, to engage in any trade or become any kind of mechanic, to study any profession, to attend any school or university. Men were fined for employing them, to teach them was punishable by death. They were fined for the privilege of living in towns, their lives were not safe in the highway. Such teachers as Luther publicly advised the burning of their houses and synagogues. These were only a few of the restrictions and indignities heaped upon them. Even in England they could not hold land until 1846 ; while in France their disabilities were only removed by the first Napoleon, and in Germany a little later. And but a year or two 24 ago a royal commission in Russia actually rec- ommended officially to the Czar the enforcement of every one of these prohibitions except the overt acts of murder and violence which it shortly appeared it was unnecessary to recom- mend or suggest ! It is somewhat surprising to learn that in the State of New Hampshire no Jew could be Governor or member of the Legis- lature until five years ago! It is within our own memories that the Jew has come into the privilege of life and liberty in any civilized country, and yet there is already a strong move- ment to take it away from him. In Russia the effort was both legal and practical. In Ger- many it naturally took a more civilized form, and was controlled by the prominence of the German element in politics, but the feeling was no less virulent. In England it is already a cloud as big as a man's hand. In the United States the matter assumes a somewhat different aspect. Under our free in- stitutions, and what is more effective perhaps, in the free atmosphere of our body politic, the Jew has greatly changed his character, and the very spots of the leopard have faded. The number of Hebrews among us is less than 300,000, of whiqh 25 about one fourth are in the city of New York. They support one hundred and thirty eight con- gregations, holding in their corporate capacity nearly $7,000,000 property. Their princely charities abound in all our large cities, and, ac- cording to their custom, are for the most part open to all creeds. Their educational institutions are of every kind. Until very lately our Jewish population has been mostly German in its origin, with some sprinkling of other nationalities, much of the Polish element and a strong vital infusion of the Portuguese Jews. This branch of the race, always its aristocracy, is the head of gold, though the feet are Polish clay and the hands of German silver ! The Portuguese Jews some of them descended from families settled in Newport or elsewhere before the Revolution, have given tone to American ideas of the race, and helped to make impossible, until a very late date, the social persecution of foreign lands. The race in America is much indebted also to some of its learned men for a general belief in its good qualities. One of them indeed, Dr. Felix Ad- ler, has drawn a large Gentile following to his broad schemes of philanthropy, and his Deisti- cal philosophy. 26 But another cause, fatal to the Jews as a race, has contributed to their prosperity in America. They are fast giving up their religion with its peculiar rites. Many of them are uncircumcised, they are intermarrying and they have adopted a new ritual, omitting what was temporary in the Mosaic code. Some of them favor the adoption of Sunday as the Sabbath. These are the re- formed Jews, and they are of all stages of belief, from those who have altered only their form of worship, to those who have adopted all these new lines of thought, or, caught in the whirlwind of skepticism that has swept over the world, have given up all beliefs, and are practically pagans. This is the element strong in Germany and America which believes that the real future of their race is in breaking down the separateness, which has been their distinctive characteristic, and in the assimilation possible under a free sky. There are two ways of settling the difficulty . The way of assimilation, and the way of coloniz- ation. The first implies the abandonment of circumcision and many of their dietary restric- tions; it endangers the seventh day Sabbath, and it encourages intermarriage. Against this, there are seemingly insuperable obstacles in some 27 quarters. Russia and Germany alike will not have this alien element among them, and so strong is the race hatred that they will not to any appre- ciable extent assimilate the Jew. They will, they cry out, disgorge him, in one way or another. This bargain of assimilation, moreover, is emphat- ically a bargain which it takes two to make; but unfortunately for the bargain, neither of the two will agree. The Jew objects more strongly than his neighbor. For it must be remembered that if the Christian hates the Jew, it is equally true that the Jew hates the Christian; and in his breast, race and religion combine to refuse any such unholy alliance. The 5,000,000 Russian Jews are almost without exception, strictly, bit- terly orthodox. They cannot abide the idea of any project or manner of life which would tend by surrounding or through temptation to weaken their race bond. They see with horror the in- fluence of trade and freedom in France, in Germany, and worst of all in America, to weaken the bonds of faith and break up their separateness as a people. They believe with a vigor that has grown by persecution and fed upon martyrdom, that the Jews were meant to be always a peculiar people, teaching the world their sublime idea, 28 not by mingling with it, but by standing above it. It is impossible they say, to be a Jew in heart, and yet mingle blood and life with other peoples. Strongly, devoutly, overwhelmingly religious, their religion has become their sole treasure, and clinging still to the hope of a Messianic kingdom, it is set in their heavens like a bright star of promise. . Add to this the fact that this religion consists in daily, hourly performance of rites which com- pel their dwelling in communities by themselves, since bread and meat, house and church, birth and death depend upon a surrounding of their own people and it seems evident that unless the whole vast population could be changed by a miracle they must still live together, A similar feeling prevails among all Jewish communities, outside of Russia. Indeed what is called the reform element, though growing fast, is still very insignificant in proportion. In New York, for instance, one of its great strongholds, out of the fifteen thousand heads of families, only one thousand belong to the reform congregations. Wherever the Jew is still strongly orthodox, he sympathizes with the desire for separateness, and he rigidly practices its precepts. This is indeed 29 one great reason why all nations are so eager to spew them out. The Jew himself insists upon remaining a foreign element in every community, and an indigestible substance must be removed. This rigid determination to be always a Jew, requiring movement and action in the mass, and the bitter demand of so many rulers and people in so many lands, that he shall be no longer part or parcel of their population, seems to make wholesale colonization the only remedy unless you would contemplate extermination or a war for the supremacy to which the Jew believes him- self entitled ! A large division of the race, however, protest bitterly against any general scheme of coloniza- tion, which shall compel their adherence even by implication. These are the rich Jews, the in- fluential officials and great bankers of Germany, the statesmen of France, the prosperous English and American Jews. With them is the large class who hope for a similar success and think they see an open way thither. Their God is success, their religion is effort, their ritual, adap- tation to their surroundings. None of this class care for sentiment, or wish to further an unpro- ductive patriotism. And there join in the feel- 3 ing of protest if not in the cry, all those Jews who, wearying of unfulfilled hope and inex- plicable prophecy, have made for themselves a new religion, seek a new life in the people where they dwell, and look for a great future by assimi- lation as the Saxon is still great in his English descendants. The practical difficulty is also urged against this idea of colonization, that the Hebrew of every country hates his brethren of every other country so vigorously, that no common home is possible. Meanwhile in the face of this effort and this philanthropy, or rather contemporaneously with it, arose both its opportunity and a motive strong enough to fuse, in some measure, all its conflicting elements. Palestine, the hope of the orthodox Jew, and the sacred memory of every Hebrew, was suddenly thrown into the eye of the world. A great and complicated Eastern ques- tion had been precipitated upon Europe, and this little vacuum in the midst of her entangled alliances was abhorred. Its strategic advantages became as apparent to England as to Cyrus of old, and even Turkey woke up, before the mat- ter was done, to Palestinian possibilities never seen before. It became evident all at once to a great many powers, that if England would keep her endangered position in India, her hardly established Egyptian rule, and her Eastern supremacy in general, she must have some other base of operations than Cyprus, and especially some other highway from West to East than the Suez Canal. What so simple as the possession of Palestine ? And the fact that in one way or another she still feels that this must be ac- complished, is seen by her tremendous and futile scheme to make the Jordan valley itself a canal, thus wiping out Palestine altogether, her more practicable plans for trans- Syrian railways, and her sudden but constant interest in the agri- cultural and commercial possibilities of this hitherto neglected land. Would the nations of the earth agree to English settlement of Palestine ? Hardly, it would seem. And here it was that diplomacy, philan- thropy and patriotism united in the scheme of Jewish colonization. Its inception and practical working-out were largely due to Mr. Lawrence Oliphant. His brilliant diplomatic ability, trained in Eastern schools, and his cosmopolitan experience, gave weight to his opinions. A journey to Palestine convinced him of their practicability, and he has persuaded his audience of the considerable possibilities of that country, in many directions. He showed the great promise of its soil, and the rich com- mercial regions tapped by its seaports, answering the common objection that Jews do not love ag- riculture by the practical suggestion that Pales- tine and its wider boundary of Syria does not need to be agricultural only. The hard argu- gument of money was brought to bear in the cheapness of transportation, and the possible simplicity of life. We were reminded that here the race, though long expatriated, was still native to the soil and climate. Sentiment would induce all nations to favor a Hebrew state in the Holy Land, while as a neutral power with affiliations in every country, the balance of na- tions would be advantaged, not overturned. Strict religious belief would hail it as the res- toration seen by the prophets. Disgusted and over- Hebraized communities would eagerly wel- come the relief afforded. The English protec- tion would make it possible even under the un- certain rule of Turkey. It was to philanthropy a welcome solution of the difficult problem of 33 help for so persecuted a people who were yet so difficult to relieve. No less than forty societies were formed in different parts of Europe to fur- ther the matter, and nearly $10,000,000 were contributed for the purpose. Simultaneously with this great movement from the outside,furnishing the opportunity,there arose a national movement among the Jews themselves, furnishing the common motive to their divided bands. The great wave of patriotism in the social atmosphere reached this nation also. It is impos- sible to tell whether George Eliot was the prophet whose words wakened the slumbering fire of pa- triotism, or only the poet who gave expression to what was already in the hearts of Deronda's countrymen, but she did much to foster it. While the unhappy, crowded out Jew of Eastern Eu- rope was seeking in Palestine a new home where his religion and his separateness would give him half the battle, instead of handicapping him, the brilliant, cosmopolitan Jew, who believes in growth and progress, suddenly discovered that he was without a country. He discovered that he who had given up being a " sect," was scarcely a "race, "since he had no land he could call his own. The appeal of his countrymen sounded in his ears. The desperate cry of denationalized Ire- 34 land and the proud triumph of new France were to him a great reproach. Was he only to be the people whose very name was but empty words ? Was he to wander forever up and down the. lands seeking a place to lay his head, and find the broad earth nowhere holding out welcoming hands to him? Had his children no future, but to buy and sell and get gain ? Was there no- thing the wide world over that should any more awake a thrill in his heart, but the sad memories of despair? Were all peoples to profit by his presence, to move at the command of his brain, and yet all the glory of the world to be ever- more to him but Dead-Sea apples, since there was nowhere any country at whose feet he might proudly lay the tribute he, the nation with a history and a mission ! There awoke what George Eliot well describes as the organized memory of a national conscious- ness, asking "for the restoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground, as a centre of nation- al feeling,a source of dignifying protection, a spe- cial channel for special energies which may con- tribute some added form of national genius and an added voice in the councils of the world." A Jewish state, a free Jewish state, means in- ternal reform based on higher education, now im- 35 possible except under Christian or apostate con- ditions. A Jewish state in Palestine, means such a renationalization under such conditions as will neither interfere with the Sabbath, or their sump- tuary laws certain obstructions in the way of any successful settlement, in the United States for in- stance, except at the dangerous sacrifice of reli- gious belief. That most able Jewess, Emma Laz- arus, quotes with great effect the pregnant saying of a young Russian refugee, that the mission of the Hebrew to uphold the moral idea is not yet gone but that he needs the force and centre of action furnished by a national life, to give effect to his work. This indeed seems to be a growing feeling among Jews of all classes, the common point where the widely separated and variously circumstanced Hebrews unite. A new nation, repatriation. For a great people whom necessity drives thither, or religion draws, a permanent home. For the citizen of the world, successful and prosperous in his well- beloved adopted land, a national centre whence he draws courage and dignity, place and a new power among the peo- ples of the earth. And where the wide world over, so favorable a spot as Palestine for a Jewish nation? Palestine which must and will be speedily settled once 36 more by some one, but which is to every Jew (be his religion what it will,) as truly motherland as Switzerland to the exiled Swiss, or Great Britain to the wandering Englishman ! The objections are innumerable, and the difficulties tremendous, but the first sink away before a great patriot- ism, the latter are trifles to a great necessity- At present all things sleep. The Sultan, fear- ful of the consequences to his kingdom and his shrines, has forbidden Jewish immigration to his dominions, and the Eastern question itself is lying couchant. But the quiet is not a perma- nent one, and we are likely to see the matter break out again in any one of many forms which would make the present possibility not only a probability, but an opportunity. The Jewish question, it appears, does not yet resolve itself. The world is hardly nearer the solution than at first. The historical student still enquires unanswered, if an alien people can survive amidst hostile surroundings, or if a na- tion can give up its peculiar hereditary charac- teristics and yet remain. And the philosophical enquirer still asks the old skeptical question, "can a nation enter into the womb of history and be born when it is old ?" Liberal in Thought. Vigorous in Expression. Scholarly in Treatment. The American Hebrew, 498-SOO THIRD AVE., NEW YORK. Published every Friday. $3.00 per annum. THE AMERICAN HEBREW is the acknowledged representative of American Jewish thought and has come to be considered as such by its tone, its fairness, and the ability with which it is conducted. THE AMERICAN HEBREW is conducted by a Board of Editors ; represents all the various shades of Judaism ; is the organ of no clique, congregation, institution, or individual. THE AMERICAN HEBREW publishes a larger amount of original mat- ter of Jewish interest, specially written for, or contributed exclusively to its columns, than any other Jewish Journal. Articles by the following prominent writers appeared originally in recent volumes of THE AMERICAN HEBREW : Miss EMMA LAZARUS, Miss NINA MORAIS, Miss ANNA L. DAWES, Miss MARY M. COHEN, Mrs. M. D. Louis, Mr. LAWRENCE OLI- PHANT, Mr. CLAUDE G. MONTEFIORE, Mr. M. HEILPRIN, Hon CARL SCHURZ, Hon. S. S. Cox, Hon. ZEBULON B. VANCE, Hon. ANDREW D. WHITE, Rev. Dr. ADOLPH HUEBSCH, Rev. Dr. K. KOHLER, Rev. S. MORAIS, Rev. Dr. F. DE SOLA MENDES, Rev. Dr. H. 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