I 
 
 2 No. 
 
 ALCOVE 
 
 PROPERTY 
 
 
 Hebrew Union College Library J 
 
 OTTU TJ1J IJTJTJTJTTU LTI/1T1JTJTJ U" UTJIJTJTJ^
 
 V".-
 
 /; j 
 
 
 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 VERSUS 
 
 PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 ISAAC M. WISE. 
 
 
 
 1889. 
 AMERICAN ISRAELITE, CIXCIXXATI AXD CHICAGO.
 
 Knit-red According to Act of Congress, in the year 1 - 
 
 ISAAC M. \VISK. 
 In the office of the Librariiin of emigres:-, Ht. Washington.
 
 o 
 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 fPHE volume hereby presented to the reader was written 
 and published in response to those missionary cheiftains 
 <>f the city ot'Cinrinnati who took a vulgar renegade from 
 . Judaism by his hand, and appointed him a missionary to 
 the Jews; and, notwithstanding the man's illiteracy, fur- 
 nished him with a pulpit, and invited the .Jews week after 
 week by pompous advertisements in the public press and 
 handbill's freely distributed in the -tr-'ets. to d.me and hear 
 that renegade. The author, considering that uncalled-for 
 action of church dignitaries an insult to Judaism, felt it his 
 duty to re-ent it. and so he did. Here is an an>wer to the 
 main question, why the Israelite can not embrace Christian- 
 ity. Quite a number of books exists, in which the relative 
 points are discussed, although the author recollects none 
 written from his standpoint of universal brotherhood, univer- 
 sal salvation and universal religion, moral freedom, political 
 equality and the supremacy of reason, with the highest re- 
 t for Judaism, Christianity, the Islam and every other 
 religion in harmony with the postulate of reason and th" 
 
 standard of conscience. 
 
 THK AITIIOR. 
 
 CINCINNATI. March 26.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The Challenge Accepted in Self-Defense, o 
 II. Rejecting the Evangelical Story from Historical Mo- 
 tives, 16 
 
 III. The Testimony of Miracles is Inadmissible, 24 
 
 IV. The Doctrine of Personal Immortality, - 31 
 V. Universal Salvation Without the Messiah, - - 38 
 
 VI. Mundane Happiness Depends on Morality, Not on 
 
 Christology, 46 
 
 VII. Mundane Happiness Depends on Intelligence, Not on 
 
 Christology, 54 
 
 VI IT. No Christology in the Bible, - 61 
 
 IX. No Christology in Moses, 67 
 
 Elohim, - 67 
 
 Genesis i. 26, 69 
 
 Genesis xiv. 4; xxxii. 25, .... 79 
 
 Genesis xlviii. 16, 71 
 
 Genesis xlix. 10, - - 71 
 
 Deuteronomy xviii. 9-12, - - 72 
 
 Genesis iii., 74 
 
 X. No Christology in Isaiah, - 79 
 
 Isaiah vii 14, 83 
 
 Isaiah ix 5, 6, - 85 
 
 Isaiah liii , 87 
 
 XI. No Christology in Jeremiah, - ... 95 
 
 Jeremiah xxxi 15-17, 96 
 
 Jeremiah xxxiii. 14-26. 98 
 
 .leremiah xxxi. 31, e. ., - 101 
 
 XII. No Christology in Psalms, ... . 197 
 
 Psalm ii., 109 
 
 Psalm ex., H3 
 
 XIII. A Resume and Reference to Zachariah, - - - 121
 
 CHAPTER T. 
 
 THE CHALLRNUK Ai'CKI'TKD IN SKLF-DEFKXSK. 
 
 JUDAISM is the religion of intelligence. Those who be- 
 lieve in one God, as proclaimed and defined by Abra- 
 ham. M oses and the prophets, and the ethical principles, 
 doctrines and precepts contained in and with logical neces- 
 sity following from this sublime belief, believe in Judaism. 
 They are of Israel de jure, and if this belief controls their 
 conduct and directs their performance of duty toward God 
 and man they are of Israel also de facto, whether they know- 
 it or know it not, or, knowing it, confess it, or confess it not, 
 whoever or whatever their ancestors were. Judaism dena- 
 tionalized is universal religion, because it is in full accord 
 and harmony with the postulate of reason and the standard 
 of conscience, without permitting either one to dictate with- 
 out the consent and approbation of the other factor. 
 
 It is perhaps no exaggeration to maintain that there exist 
 now more Israelites, more conscious and unconscious be- 
 lievers in Judaism, than at any time in man's history prior 
 to this century, although no more than ten millions of the 
 Hebrew race proper exist in the world. We are reminded <>i' 
 the prophecy of Isaiah (xliv. 5), u One shall say, I am Jeho- 
 vah's ; and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob ; 
 and another shall subscribe with his hand unto Jehovah. 
 and surname himself by the name- of Israel," however they 
 differ in forms of worship and denominational peculiarities 
 According to the statement of the Talmud n-nzjn lQ*3n "?D 
 nin' Nip: mr. "Whoever discards Pagan worship maybe 
 called a Yehinli," vulgar, Jew, or also main me-JHi rmon "?3 
 n:2 mim "733 mrc I?M " Whoever professes belief in the 
 Ten Commandments is rtpia! to him who professes belief in 
 the whole Thorah "- all of them are entit)"d to the name of 
 Israel, if the term Jew does not suit them. 
 
 (5)
 
 6 A DEFENCE OF JTDAISM 
 
 Reason never goes begging. It is too proud, too self-con- 
 scious to beg, and on the other hand too modest and too 
 considerate to impose upon others. Man sees and judges 
 others in his own light. The man of wisdom sees fair intel- 
 ligence in every fellow-man of whom he knows nothing to 
 the contrary ; just as the rogue suspects cunning designs in 
 every neighbor's speech or deeds. Solomon said so (Pro- 
 verbs xxvii. 19 ) and experience corroborates it. Judaism 
 being the religion of intelligence could not go begging for 
 proselytes. Its expounders' and teachers' estimation of hu- 
 man nature and their implicit reliance and trust in the in- 
 destructibility of truth, taught the Hebrew mn nay nN 
 "truth will take care of itself," or "yet truth will triumph,'' 
 and depicted for him that final and universal triumph of 
 reason and goodness in the most sublime prophetical speech. 
 The nations will convert themselves, and we see now that 
 they do, by the natural development of intelligence, in the 
 progress of science, justice, freedom, art, culture, external 
 and internal, so to reach the prophetical climax of " God 
 will be king over all the earth, that day God will be one, and 
 One his name will be." (Zachariah xiv. 9.) 
 
 Again, the Israelite, looking upon his neighbor from the 
 standpoint of Judaism, can not discover a sinner in every 
 human being. He presumes the image of God in every hu- 
 man mind, a being whose two spiritual eyes, reason and 
 conscience, are sound and efficient. Defections of mind, 
 like deformities of the body, are exceptions to the general 
 rule of a normal and healthy state. All men are intellectual 
 and good in proportion to, and to the best of their knowl 
 edge. The Israelite sees sinners only in those exceptional 
 persons who are possessed by the demon of folly. There is 
 no necessity to convert everybody. He who lives up to tin 
 dictates of his conscience and to the best of his knowledge, 
 the conscientious man, be he Jew, Christian, Turk or heathen . 
 philosopher or illiterate, is no sinner, and needs none of your 
 conversion medicine. The Hebrew necessarily thinks, if you 
 give quantities of medicine to the healthy man, you make 
 
 him sick. 
 
 Furthermore, tin- Israelite from his standpoint can not
 
 Vs. PROSELYTIZING ell UISTIAXITY. , 
 
 see the gates of hell ajar, lor everybody who fails to see 
 through his neighbor's spectacles in matters of religion, as 
 little, indeed, as lie can discover the pavement in that hot 
 place, that peculiar conerete made of tin- skulls of non- 
 baptized children. The religion of intelligence could not 
 possibly suggest such an unreasonable dogma. Starting 
 from the premises of an all-wise, all-just and all-good Deity 
 and a human family consisting of individuals essentially 
 God-like, intellectual and conscientious, the Hebre\v n> 
 sarilv arrived at the conclusion : D-v? W D-?iyn nraw TDn 
 S3n D-?iy~? P*n. " All good men will inherit their share in 
 eternal life and bliss.'' It is neither necessary nor advisable 
 to medicate a healthy man. to supply the person of sound 
 limbs with crutches, or to show one bis way in his own 
 hou- 
 
 <)nce, in the time of the Maccabean princes, John Hyrcan 
 and his son. Alexander Jannai, conquered tribes were given 
 the choice either to leave the country or to be circumcised, 
 because they were of the seed of Abraham, as was main- 
 tained, upon whom circumcision was incumbent, and even 
 then the most prominent teachers in Israel, Simon ben She- 
 tach and Hillel. protested agains* that method of conversion* 
 by advancing most humane and intellectual means to that 
 end. In the century in which Christianity is supposed to 
 have originated, many proselytes in the Roman and Parthian 
 Empires attached themselves to Judaism, and among them 
 a whole royal family and relatives of the Ca-sars, as well as 
 Roman soldiers and Arabian herdsmen; but they came of 
 their own accord not as invited guests as later on many 
 thousands, like the Che/ars of Southern Russia attached 
 themselves to Israel without solicitation, of their own free 
 will and accord. Later on the Israelites might have imi- 
 tated the conversion institutions of Christendom and the 
 Islam, bad not Christian love and Mohammedan generosity 
 enacted stringent laws and spiced them with the penalty of 
 death against any Jew who converts a Gentile, and also 
 against such convert or converts. These laws still exist 
 only with a shade less severity in Russia and elsewhere. 
 and were in force less vigorously in all Europe, outside of
 
 8 A DKFENSE OK .It DAI.-.M 
 
 the city of Amsterdam, up to the year 1848, with some few 
 x'-rptions. This considerably spoiled the Jew's appetite 
 for proselytes, and he made no competition in this branch 
 of business to Christians and Mohammedans, which, we 
 think, is the cause of its unsuccessful operations. 
 
 The first conversion agent of the two daughter religions 
 was the sword, then came the pyre and the torture with 
 their convincing arguments, and as civilization advanced 
 they were replaced by persecution and ostracism, excep- 
 tional and oppressive laws or total expatriation for infidels, 
 schismatics, free thinkers, Jews and Judaizing Christians, 
 interchanging now and then with the prison or mob law. 
 The progress of humanism changed the conversion tactics 
 somewhat The brokers pay dividends in cash or promise-, 
 patronage or assistance, some form of bribery or other, al- 
 ways with the whip of persecution in one hand and the 
 money bag in the other. Although the doctors do not 
 admit that all the prejudices against the Jew in Christendom, 
 including the modern Anti-Semitism, Russian and Rouma- 
 nian legislation of this kind, and the never-ceasing antag- 
 onism between Catholic and Protestant, rise from the 
 conversion mania of Christianity, the impracticable and 
 unreasonable idiosyncrasy, that all men must embrace this 
 or that form of Christianity ; yet it is so. This is the source 
 of most of the evils under which millions of human beings 
 groaned, bled and died in wars or in dungeons : and is now 
 the cause of hatred, persecution and barbarism. 
 
 If you begin to think that religion certainly was not given 
 to man for the benefit of God, for he is perfect and exalted 
 iibove all influences rising from man, you will certainly ad- 
 mit that religion exists in human nature for the benefit of 
 man. If so, it must also be admitted that any religion, any 
 doctrine or institution of any religion, which brings mi scry. 
 sorrow, affliction, destruction of life or happiness to a large 
 number of human beings, is undoubtedly an erroneous, dan- 
 gerous and unreasoning superstition, to oppose which is 
 very good man's duty. If you read on the pages of historv. 
 ancient and modern, the misery, sorrow, allliction. destruc- 
 tion of life and happiness which the conversion mania, the
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING fllKIS TIAMTY. 9 
 
 piosclytizing fury did bring and brings now over millions 
 oi' innocent men, women and children, simply because they 
 can not think with other people's Drains and would not be 
 seduced to hypocrisy before God and man, you will !> 
 forced to admit that the conver.-ion mania and proselytizing 
 fury is an outrage on religion, is a blasphemy on the Most 
 High, a '-urse to the cause of humanity, hence the revers< - 
 the direct opposite, of true religion. 
 
 8till I do not feel called upon to reform Christianity or 
 the Islam, or to resort to the law of retaliation. What I do 
 feel called upon to do is to defend our own From all side- 
 the gauntlet is thrown out to us by zealous men and women 
 under the inlluenre of the same idiosyncrasy. From the 
 pulpit, in journals, tracts and books, by the learned and the 
 illiterate, the loyal and the renegade, the sincere and the 
 hypocrite, the sane and the insane, we are incessantly a.-- 
 sailed and attacked, wounded and mortified in the most 
 tender spot- of man's heart. All that is done with an air 
 and mien, as though experience would hold out the barest 
 ]M,s-ibility that the Jews could retrograde from Judaism to 
 Christianity, or that Christology ever could become the 
 univeisal religion of the human family. That unreasoning 
 mania has reached the very doors of our temples, the abodes 
 of our neighbors and friends, and perverts the heai- 
 clergymen to establish and maintain missions to the Jew-. 
 ot whom they can not say that they are inferior to their 
 Hock in piety or virtue. It is time to defend our own, or 
 else our silence might lead unsophisticated people to believe 
 that we groan under the ban of ignorance, superstition and 
 fanaticism, and the conversionists are the truly good people. 
 
 ('anon Taylor, an English gentleman, who seems to be a 
 fierce opponent of the proselytizing mania, boldly opj 
 that idiosyncrasy in the Fortnightly Review, of London. \\< 
 forcibly attempts to make otl. -clearly as he himself 
 
 does the magnitude of the sham which is perpetrated under 
 the guise of Christian missions to the so-called unconverted. 
 with.no other result than the increase of hypocrisy and the 
 annual waste of ten millions of dollars. Christianity. tin- 
 Canon proves, makes no headway among the heathens, in
 
 10 A DKFEXSE OK JUDAISM 
 
 spite of the efforts of hundreds of paid missionaries. The 
 fe\v converts made yearly are hut as a drop in the ocean when 
 compared with the annual increase from natural causes of 
 non-Christian population an increase which, according 
 to the Canon's computation, it would require the united ef- 
 forts of all the missionary societies for a hundred and eighty- 
 three years to overtake. The results, poor as they are, are 
 terribly expensive. It costs the Church Missionary Society 
 alone $15,000 per annum to make 3000 converts. China 
 has a population of hundreds of millions, but all the toll 
 it paid to the society's agents for the year was represented 
 by 167 adult converts, and these cost about -t7">.000. Egypt. 
 Arabia, Persia and Palestine the last of course being for 
 \\ork among the Jews proved altogether sterile ground. 
 The society spent over $115,000 in those countries, and has 
 nothing to show for the money. Exposures of the missionary 
 humbug (like this ) are not new in England. They are fre- 
 quently repeated, especially the missions to the Jews, which. 
 by facts and dates, have been proved a miserable failur< 
 that each converted Jew costs the societies thousands of dol- 
 lars, for which they have no more to show in London than 
 a few salaried missionaries, servants and colporteurs taken 
 from the dregs of society and turned into hypocrites and 
 claqueurs. 
 
 We need not go to London for proofs nor to the Berlin 
 missionary organ (Prof. Stiack's). in which it was but lately 
 tvported from London, that besides salaried persons there 
 are no Christianed Jews in London. We have the proof- 
 right here before us. Within the thirty-four y^ars I had the 
 honor to serve this community, one Jewish girl was cap- 
 tured by a missionary, and that is all. Xot ten Jewish per- 
 sona were heard from in all the large cities of the West that 
 had turned Christians, while T alone can show in my book 
 the names of thirty-seven Christian-born persons who em- 
 braced Judaism without any solicitation or persuasion on 
 iiir part. And yet. besides the appointed missionaries, al- 
 mo-t every deacon, pardon, clergyman, elder, sexton teacher, 
 v half-way truly good Christian man or woman, young 
 men's or young women'- associations, however young or old
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CII :;i>TI ANITY. 1 
 
 thev may be, do besides their regular business some mission- 
 arv work, whenever an opportunity offers, as though perpet- 
 ual polemics were the only nutriment of sectarianism, and 
 disturbing others in their religious convictions, the main 
 object of Christianity. 
 
 It is all Christian zeal, says my Christian friend, as though 
 z"al w,-ro not, where it is contrary to reason and disobedient 
 to c msrience, a twin sister, or a less violent form of fanati- 
 cism; as though, furthermore, fanaticism were not an 
 idiosvnrrasy. Tlie fanatic is as insane as the infuriated. 
 That the proselytizing mania is beyond the control of argu- 
 ment is evident en ipso from its blindness to the often-re- 
 ]>eated facts of its constant failures without taking any no- 
 tice of them. It is no less evident from the presumption 
 t'l it one ever could honestly believe in the Christological 
 iias, which, as St. Augustine maintained, must be believed 
 'because they are < b<urd, contrary to the postulate of reason, 
 unless his intellect has been trained, drilled and habituated 
 from childhood up to deny and abnegate its right and abil- 
 ity to reason naturally and correctly in these particular 
 points. 
 
 That the proselytizing idiosyncrasy is not under the con- 
 trol of conscience is no less evident from the following fads : 
 -cienee is the moral monitor in man urging him to do 
 the good and to shun evil to the best of his knowledge, and 
 mourning subsequently over the perpetration of evil and re- 
 joicing over the commission of the good which it urged. It 
 is unconscious reason the principle of optimism, an organ 
 of divine revelation from the universal to the individual 
 spirit. You may call this the Hebrew's definition of con- 
 ice, for in Christian parlance the term is understood to 
 refer to matters of religion chiefly or even exclusively, which 
 is rather characteristic. The principle of optimism is changed 
 into a principle of pessimism, and unconscious reason is 
 changed to affectation and emotion. It is a change of both 
 substance and accident. L-t us consider the subject under 
 discussion, from both standpoints. 
 
 A-ide of tli" powerful instinct of self-preservation and 
 preservation ot the race, nature, or rather the God of nature,
 
 12 A DEK;-:NSK OF JUDAISM 
 
 impressed every human being with love and consequent 
 consciousness of duty and responsibility to his family. 
 Husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sis 
 ters, kinsmen by blood or marriage, are the members of a 
 family particularly united by those mysterious ties of love 
 and consciousness of duty and mutual responsibility. If 
 anything in man can be called holy, it is certainly this love 
 which is exalted over space and time. It is not only the 
 richest source of human happiness, but also the fundamental 
 principle of morality, society, state, civilization, peace and 
 benevolence. The Decalogue begins man's duties to man 
 with the divine command : u Honor thy father and thy 
 mother," and human nature confirms it as the first law of 
 morality. The chief aim besides the universal one of 
 the legislation of Moses, the speeches of the prophets, and 
 the teachings of the sages in Israel, was to extend this love, 
 duty and responsibility to the whole house of Israel, to 
 make it one family, without weakening or impairing in 
 anywise the fundamental love of man to his family, and 
 history tells how well they succeeded ; our benevolent socie- 
 ties and institutions all over the habitable portion of the 
 globe tell the tale of success. 
 
 Whoever dares to disturb those natural and beautiful 
 family relations, alienate the affections or sense of duty of 
 spouses, parents, children,- kinsmen of any family is a crim- 
 inal before God and man ; whoever carries sorrow, affliction, 
 grief or pain into his neighbor's house is a sinner before the 
 judgment seat of sound conscience. None will deny this 
 postulate of right. 
 
 Cast a glance now upon the work of proselytizing Chris- 
 tianity and behold this crime and sin perpetrated a thousand 
 times without any compunction of conscience, simply be- 
 cause that mania is no longer under the control of con- 
 science. Without diving into the depth of history we can 
 find plenty of facts to illustrate our allegation and to prove 
 it. When the boy Mortara, years ago, was forcibly taken 
 from his parental home, because a nurse professed that she 
 >tealihily l>apti/ed the child in the name of the Trinity, it 
 was declared authoritatively that the Canon law was supe-
 
 VS. PKOSELYTIZIN<r Cll KISTIAXITY. 13 
 
 rior in authority to the natural law -also to the Decalogue 
 and the mother's anguish, the lather's grief, the family's 
 sorrow the child's first duty, the rights of man, the holiest 
 ties of nature were severed and set at naught and the 
 Church had saved a soul. Yes with this hollow phrase upon 
 their lips the conversionists eve-y day of the year perpetrate 
 any amount of wickedness besides the bribery which they 
 apply, the dissimulation which they practice, the serpentile 
 seduction which they try, the hypocrisy which they cultivate 
 besides all that immorality they care not for other people'.- 
 feelings, rights or sentiments; no family ties are holy to 
 them, no sense of conjugal, parental or filial duty interfere- 
 with them, the grief, sorrow and ailliction of others are none 
 of theirs; they save a soul by any diabolic means, because 
 that mania is no longer under the control of conscience. Is 
 not this conclusion as sound as the coyito ergo sum? 
 
 \< regards conscience, viewed from the religious aspect, the 
 missionary work done among Jews by orthodox Christians is 
 no less sinful and an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. 
 All orthodox Christians believe in the divinity of the Old 
 Testament Scriptures, i. e.,they profess to believe that these 
 books are the Word of God, dictated by the Almighty to 
 Moses, the prophets and other holy men, all of whom were 
 gifted with that sixth sense, the organ of conceiving directly 
 and instantaneously the words uitered by the Lord of the 
 Universe. They, according to their own confession, must 
 and do believe much more than the Hebrews ever did the 
 Karaites excepted the most orthodox of whom, as laid 
 d.>\vn in the Talmud, claimed plenary inspiration for Moses 
 only, hence only for the Pentateuch and not also for the other 
 books of the Old Testament Scriptures.* They must con- 
 sistently admit that every word of those Scriptures is abso- 
 lutely true, every doctrine therein is true forever, every prom- 
 ise and every prophecy of Scriptures must be literally fulfilled. 
 If they fail in believing this, the whole of orthodox Chris- 
 tianity falls to the ground L^e many other idealistic specu- 
 lations of the Middle Ages. 
 
 '* We treat on this point more extensively in our forthcoming 
 book, "The Theology of Judaism "
 
 14 A UEKKXSK OK .li'DAISM 
 
 In these Old Testament Scriptures, however, it is stated 
 plainly and repeatedly that (Jod made a covenant Avith Is- 
 rael, in which the Almighty promised to be forever the God 
 and King of Israel, and Israel should he forever his chosen 
 people ; and exacted the promise, which was solemnly given, 
 that Israel should forever be his servant, obey his laws, wor- 
 ship him only, and naught besides him, perpetuate his doc- 
 trine and promulgate it among the Gentiles. None can begin 
 to deny that these are the plain statements of the Bible and 
 the covenant was made D~?W iy iria^l 137 " for us and our 
 children forever " (Deuter. xxix. 28.) 
 
 It is stated, furthermore, and no less plainly, by Moses 
 and the prophets, that this covenant shall be everlasting.* 
 Everlasting like the hills and the mountains, the laws gov- 
 erning sun, moon and earth, as the prophets expounded it. 
 Based on these promises and prophecies, it is self-under- 
 stood, as the Rabbis of old have it, that every Israelite is 
 rD I'D nniyi yns^o " sworn from Mount Sinai " to remain a 
 member of the house of Israel, and none can be expelled or 
 excommunicate himself from it. By the will of God and the 
 testimony of sacred Scriptures every Israelite and his de- 
 scendants are obligated and sworn to remain faithful to iheir 
 colors. Any one who steps outside of the family of Israel 
 is a deserter, a renegade, who perjures his ancestors and re- 
 bels against the will of God. 
 
 Every orthodox Christian is bound to admit this conclu- 
 sion from his own premises ; hence his conscience ought to 
 l dl him that it is wrong and sinful to beguile any person 
 ;iway from his family, to counteract the will of God and 
 make of an Israelite a perjurer, deserter and renrtrade. which 
 certainly does not signify " to save a soul," it must rather 
 signify to send one to perdition. Therefore if their belief 
 riptures is correct, their conscience is dumb, as far as 
 
 * See Leviticus xxvi 44, 45 ; Deuter xxvi 26-19 ; xxix 0-14 ; xxx. 
 1-6, expounded by the prophets; Isaiah ii 1-4; xlii 5-9; xliv. 
 1-5 ;li. 1-8; liv. 9 10; Ivi. 1-8 ; lix 16-21: Ix. 18-21 ; Ixi 8, 9 ; Ixvi 
 22; Jeremiah xxxi 31-37; xxxii 36-41 ; xlvi. 28 ; xlix. 4 5; Exekiel 
 xx 39-44; xxxvii. 21-28: xxxix. 2~>-20; Hosea ii 18-22; Micah iv. 
 3-7; Zachariah viii. fO-23
 
 VS. l'i;oSKI.YTI/I\<; CIIIMSTIAMTV. 15 
 
 making proselytes among Hebrews is concerned. We have 
 then ;i right to maintain that the proselyti/ing mania is no 
 1 >nger, or in fact it never was, under the control of rational 
 argument or the dicta of conscience ; it has become a faith 
 which niu-t be believed because it is absurd, contrary to the 
 common sense of man and the word of God. 
 
 We rise in the name of God and Israel, we do rise to pro- 
 test against that pernicious practice, that violation of divine 
 :< achiiigsand human rights, ''to open the blind eyes, to bring 
 out the prisoners from the prison, and those that sit in dark- 
 - out of the prison house." We rise to state " which way 
 dwelleth the light, and where the place of darkness is;" 
 where there is truth and where speculation on legends; 
 where there is salvation and where perdition. If we can not 
 argue that mania out of the present generation, we will at 
 least furnish some argument to be used in the coming gen- 
 eration with better success.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 RK.iK(Ti\<; TIM-: KVAXIJKUCAL STORY FROM HISTORICAL 
 
 MOTIVES. 
 
 YTTHY should you not embrace Christianity?'' the con- 
 * versionist asks, " if three hundred millions of people 
 confess it, and among them the most civilized and most 
 enlightened nations?" We, in the style of our Eastern fellow- 
 citizens, could answer this question with some other ques- 
 tions, as for instance. " If } T ou are indeed the most civilized 
 and most enlightened nations, how can you believe the dog- 
 mas of Christology, mysteries as your teachers maintain 
 which no man's understanding can grasp, because they are 
 contrary to reason, which even Martin Luther confirms?" 
 Your proposition seems to be self-contradictory. Or AVC could 
 ask, " Why should you not embrace Judaism, when the most 
 distinguished men of God and righteousness as you verily 
 believe two thousand years prior to the advent of Christian- 
 ity, and three thousand years before your ancestors' conver- 
 sion (from and after Charlemagne in the year 800) to it, as 
 you verily know, believed in Judaism?" Or, also, " Why do 
 not the Musselmans and Pagans, as you call them, who arc 
 four times your number if numbers count with you ask 
 you the question why you do not come over to them, when 
 there is certainly no more difference of opinion in matters of 
 religion among Mohammedans, Brahmins, Buddhists, and 
 Zoroasterites than there exists among the Christian sects " 
 Nor can any sound logician establish by evidence the supe- 
 riority of the Christological dogmas over those of the Islam, 
 Brahminism, Buddhism or Zoroasterism, to say nothing of 
 the wisdom of Confucius and the monotheistic philosophers 
 of ancient Greece. 
 
 Still we will not be as unfair as some of our Eastern neigh- 
 bors arc, and answer one question by askinir another. Nor 
 (16)
 
 A HKFKXSK OP JUDAISM. 17 
 
 -.ye dodge this question, since it has been asked by some 
 venerable and earnest men, and conversion generals men 
 and scholars who seem to be unable to see the moral hero- 
 ism in the Jews' consistency, faithfulness and eelf-denial in 
 this tragedy of fifteen centuries' duration, and console their 
 compatriots again and anon with the stubbornness and 
 -till'-necked nature of the Hebrew. It seems, where truth and 
 principle are at stake, the Hebrew is rather stubborn and 
 -tiff-necked. There is n<t a man or woman, the quick or 
 the dead, among Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists or 
 the others, whose ancestors, or themselves, have not deserted 
 and denied the faith and the gods of their forefathers, at one 
 time or another ; all of them were renegades, except the Jew. 
 who still calls on the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, al- 
 though their remains have rested in the cave of Machpelah 
 SO many thousand years; and so the Jew only has the sat- 
 isfaction that he can point out the spot of his ancestors' sep- 
 ulcher, which no prince, no king and no pope in Christen- 
 dom can do.* 
 
 We have quite a number of answers to make to the ques- 
 tion ot'the ronversionist, but can not give more at one time 
 than we can argue in one chapter. Therefore, we give here 
 >n.- answer first, reserving the others for future discus- 
 sion. 
 
 The Jew can not believe the Christological dogmas, because 
 lie knows that the story upon which these dogmas are based is 
 not true and can not be true ns told by their accredited authors 
 and vnderstood by their dogmatic expounders. 
 
 The reader will please bear in mind that we use the three 
 ti-rms Christendom, Christianity and Cbristology in their ex- 
 act signification. Christendom applies to the aggregate of 
 all persons who confess <r are supposed to confess the relig- 
 ion called Christianity, without reference to locality. race or 
 
 * This, according to Mr. Darwin's theory of inheritance, may be 
 <>IK- of the causes that the Christians love renegades so well, and 
 the Jews show them no particular partiality. " The Greek is a. 
 beautiful (and lascivious?) boy '' pays Heine, "and the Jew always 
 was an earnest man," who hat. s f trees and despises ihe deserter.
 
 18 A DEFENSE OF JTDAIS.M 
 
 color. Christianity is the religion called so, because it i> 
 believed that its founder was the Messiah, of which term 
 t'hristos is the Greek and the "Annointed One " the English 
 translation, Christus is its Latin and Christ its English equiv- 
 alent. It consists of two distinct elements, the first (A which 
 is its monotheistic-ethical doctrine, which is essentially Ju- 
 daic or taken from the religion of the ancient Judea ; and the 
 second is its peculiar dogmas concerning the nature and 
 offices of the Messiah, and the fabric of salvation based 
 thereon, and is therefore called Christology. The question 
 of conversion involves only this second element of Chris- 
 tianity the first element it has in common with Judaism* 
 and so it is Christology only against which we argue. 
 
 It must furthermore be observed here, in order to prevent 
 misconstruction, that we distinguish three kinds of knowl- 
 edge, viz : subjective, relative and absolute. We may call 
 any knowledge subjectively true, if it is in full harmony with 
 all the other knowledge of the same person ; then we say 
 justly, " To the best of my knowledge this must be true." 
 It is relatively true, if in full harmony with all the other 
 knowledge of man ; then we say as far as human reason and 
 experience go, or rather have hitherto gone, this must be true. 
 It is absolutely true, if it is with like necessity postulated by 
 the ultimate laws of nature. We know of no other criteria 
 of truth. 
 
 Xo Christian reasoner ever maintained that the dogmas of 
 Christology and the story upon which they are based belong- 
 to the category of absolute knowledge, as with this eertitude 
 they would cease to be matters of faith. Nor could any ad- 
 vocate of Christian faith reasonably maintain that thos. 
 dogmas and that story are relatively true, if he knows that 
 four-fifths of all men reject and discredit them. Most of them 
 have been entirely unknown to human consciousness SQO to 
 1,000 years ago, and all of them were entirely unknown 1,800 
 years ago, while the four doctrines of universal religion were 
 always present in man's mind, even in Adam and Kve, as 
 
 * See the author's " Judaism and Christianity, their Agreements 
 and Disagreements." Cincinnati, Bloch& Co., 1882.
 
 VS. I'KOSKJ.YTIZINK CHRISTIANITY 1U 
 
 Scriptures maintain.* Therefore there could lie claimed for 
 Christology and the story upon which it liases no more than 
 subjective knowledge. ' I know it to be true," the Christian 
 maintains, because there is nothing in his mind to contra- 
 dict it. With precisely the same reason and the same right 
 the Hebrew and others maintain '' to know" that theChr s- 
 tian dogmas and the story upon which they are based are not 
 true, because they do find in their mind essential contradic- 
 tions against those dogmas and that story. It must be ad- 
 mitted therefore, that in justice and equity, neither God nor 
 man could hold the Christian accountable for his belief or 
 the Hebrew and others for their disbelief. It is an acknowl- 
 edged fact that in all cases when- reason does not directly 
 sug'_ r e>t and demonstrate, man thinks and believes analo- 
 gous to what he has most frequently heard and seen, per- 
 ceived and conceived, as undisputed truth and right. Among 
 a hundred thousand, there may be one perhaps who asserts 
 his manhood and rises above and beyond his inherited dis- 
 positions and acquired prejudices. Your materialistic phy- 
 sicians and other naturalists are the best proof that men of 
 learning also think and believe that which has long enough 
 been imposed upon them as undisputed truth and then they 
 can scarcely form the idea how others think and believe 
 otherwise. Therefore the Christian believes in Christianity 
 and the Jew does not. The Christian " knows " subjective- 
 ly, of course that the Christian story is true, and the Jew 
 " knows " no less and no worse that it is not true. 
 
 The matter being fairly presented to the average intelligent 
 Hebrew, he must naturally think, first and foremost : How 
 
 * We formulate these four doctrines thus : 
 
 1. There exists a Supreme Being, living, mightier and higher than 
 any other being known or imagined. 
 
 2. There exists in the nature of that Supreme Being and in the 
 nature of man the desire and capacity of interrelation, intercommu- 
 nication and mutual sympathy. 
 
 3 The good, right, beautiful and true are desirable; Ihe oppo- 
 site thereof is objectionable and repugnant to the natu.es cf God 
 and man. 
 
 4. There exists for man a state of felicity or misery beyond this 
 state of mundane existence.
 
 20 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 do those neighbors kno\v that the Evangelical story is true ? 
 Because their books, which they consider holy scripture-. - 
 inform them. How do they know that those books are 
 really holy, that their authors were men of divine inspiration 
 or even of undoubted veracity ; that they themselves were 
 eye-witnesses of the story which they describe, or that they 
 only committed to writing what they had heard of others by 
 way of church traditions or from then existing documents 
 of which we possess no accounts, and if so, who Avere those 
 " others " on whom those writers relied? The answer to all 
 those queries is : So have we received it from our fathers and 
 forefathers, and so did they receive it from their fathers and 
 forefathers up to the original apostles, who maintain to have 
 been the eye-witnesses of the whole story. Then the He- 
 brew tells himself, they accept that entire belief on the tes- 
 timony of their fathers and forefathers and point in the 
 highest instance to twelve witnesses in whose veracity they 
 place implicit faith ; we also point to the testimony of our 
 fathers and forefathers and in the highest instance to mil- 
 lions of contemporaries of the apostles, who consistently 
 and invariably deny the whole Christian story ; why should 
 not we rather believe our ancestors than theirs, especially if 
 we know that the testimony of an entire people is much 
 more reliable than that 01 twelve individuals, be they even 
 saints or philosophers, if we have no guaranty for their state- 
 ments besides their own words, which, for all we know, may 
 be the inventions of writers that flourished a century post 
 festum? The Christian, of course, can argue against this 
 common-sense argument, but with what success? Eighteen 
 centuries of history reply, "With none;" for the Israelites 
 to-day, as did their ancestors eighteen centuries ago, main- 
 tain the same, the Christian story is not true, certainly not, 
 as the first writers narrate it, and the authors of the dogmas 
 expound it. 
 
 The Jews' argument is invigorated by the" protests of mil- 
 lions of Christians in past centuries against the orthodox 
 dogmas ; and in our century especially, by the disputes and 
 controversies of the hundreds of Christian sects now extant. 
 If YOU take together the sum of all denials bv those sect-
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 21 
 
 nothing is left of the whole orthodox Christology. Every 
 one of them denies something which the others consider 
 essential to true Christianity. It would sound like the voice 
 of the anti-Christ y if one would compile all the arguments of 
 the various sects against what others consider essential t> 
 Christianity. Then come the host of Christian anti-Chris- 
 tian writers in our century, whose books and essays would 
 fill any church in this city, who in fact all argue the same 
 thing, that the Hebrews' protest against dogmatic Christian- 
 i y is just and well founded. How could the conversionists 
 now expect of the Israelite that he should accredit and 
 accept his knowledge of Christianity in preference to that of 
 his own fathers and forefathers and over the heads of those 
 millions of Christians who simply deny the whole story and 
 the dogmas based on it? 
 
 Then if the Israelite can rise to any thing like a philosophi- 
 cal argument, he will say Christianity can advance in its fa- 
 vor the historical argument, it can not and does not appeal 
 to philosophical demonstration; if such alleged facts are 
 true, m/o, they can lie explained by such and such hypothe- 
 uly ; and in this only argument in its favor it falls de- 
 cidedly short of Judaism. The Sinaic revelation is an- 
 nounced as a direct communication of the Deity to 600,000 
 men, besides women, children and hoary hea Is, all of whom 
 saw the sights and heard the sounds, when God made a 
 covenant with Israel and made known to them the object 
 and law of that covenant. Then came their descendants 
 for 3,000 to 3,300 years, and confirm this tradition almost 
 without a dissenting voice, until at last Christendom and 
 the Islam one-third of the whole family of man em- 
 bracing the most civilized and most enlightened nations, 
 rose to testify to the Sinaic revelation and the covenant 
 made at Horeb. This is historical testimony, the like of 
 which you can adduce to no other fact accepted in history. 
 And now comes the conversion agent of the \e\\- Covenant 
 and offers you the historical testimony of Christendom to 
 prove that the New Buperceded the Old Covenant. You ask 
 him, Did Clod say so? lie must say no, but we believe his 
 son did say so, the son supplemented, amended or even
 
 L'L ; A DKFKXSK OK .ITDAISM. 
 
 pended the Father's word. You must believe God had a 
 son, a mother and brothers, because the Book tells you so. 
 Who testified to the allegation of the immaculate concep- 
 tion besides Mary? None. Who testified to Satan tempting 
 Jesus on the roof of the temple and on that particular moun- 
 tain from which he could see all the kingdoms of the earth? 
 None again. Who testified to the resurrection and ascen- 
 sion of the crucified besides a few women, and, according 
 to one version of the story, eleven of the twelve apostles? 
 Xone, none. Then came the sects right from the apostolic 
 age down to date, each denying this or that part of the 
 story, so that there is hardly sufficient evidence left to prove 
 that such a person as Jesus of Naxareth ever existed on this 
 globe. How can you compare the evidence of Judaism with 
 the historical evidence of Christianity, which is based upon 
 no testimony and is denied by all except the strictly ortho- 
 dox Christian? 
 
 Says the Israelite : t% I need not be a prophet nor the son 
 of a prophet, nor even a lawyer or the cousin of one, to 
 clearly enough that your argument, opposed to ours as far 
 as historical argument goes can not unsettle any Jew in 
 his conviction that as certain as the Christian believes to 
 know that the Evangelical story and the dogmas based on 
 it are true, so morally certain the Israelite knows that they 
 are not true, and can not be true as narrated in the Book 
 and understood by the authors of the dogmas. 
 
 Such is human nature. What appears to one indisputa- 
 ble knowledge inconsequence of impressions received when 
 his mind was yet unable to reason on them, or he has heard 
 .often enough when his mind was otherwise occupied, and 
 accepted them on the authority of others, appears to others 
 without those impressions in his mind the most incredible 
 absurdity. It is natural, therefore, that with the same jus- 
 tice and soundness of mind the Christian believes and the 
 Hebrew denies the Evangeli'-al story, as may be the case 
 with every other subjective knowledge.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE TESTIMONY oF MIKACLI> I> INADMISSIBLE. 
 
 THE conversionist approaching the Israelite, the infidel, 
 or any other interesting subject, us tin- physician says, 
 to practice on him, will invariably plead miracle, from the 
 supernatural standpoint of course. The heroes of the Evan- 
 gelical drama wrought astonishing miracles, he maintains, 
 and then basing upon these premises he advances the con- 
 clusion, therefore everybody must believe that whole fabric 
 of Christology as preached (and believed?) by this or that 
 particular sect. If one takes him at his own word, viz: If 
 those alleged miracles ;nv incredible the entire Christology 
 is a conglomeration of fallacies, he is stunned, for he knows 
 that millions of Christians, and among them thousands of 
 learned priests, preachers and celebrated authors, never did 
 believe in the X, -\y Test ameiit miracles. If an honest census 
 could be taken in any city to ascertain how many church 
 members do believe in those miracles, the result would as- 
 tonish the conversion agents and societies to learn what an 
 amount of work is left for them to do among their own con- 
 stituents. As long as those miracles appear incredible to 
 persons born and raised as Christians, they could not pos- 
 sibly appear credible to the outsider born and raised in a 
 faith which declares all those miracles products of fiction. 
 The Hebrew does not advance this argument, because lie 
 has a better one ; he argues thus : 
 
 Miracles in general prove nothing, and opposite Judaism, 
 irJiir.h bases none of its doctrines on the evidence of miracles, 
 they are dcnncdJij worthless. 
 
 In regard to miracles, it must be borne in mind that in 
 ancient times, and even now among the illiterate portions 
 of the human family, arts and sciences being almost un- 
 known to them, manv a performance or phenomenon ap- 
 
 (23)
 
 24 A J)EFE.\SE OF .JTDAISM 
 
 peared miraculous to them, which seem quite natural to us 
 now. The writers reporting such supposed miracles may 
 have been honest men, who were no more enlightened on 
 those points than their illiterate contemporaries for whom 
 they wrote. Besides, it must be taken into consideration 
 that imagination, especially the bold and vivid imagination 
 of the oriental poet, produces incidents and occurrences as 
 mere tropes, ornamentations or illustrations, which in most 
 cases the uncritical reader takes for actual facts. Therefore 
 every written miracle rouses in the mind the two questions : 
 Was not the writer ignorant of the natural cause underlying 
 that miraculous incident or phenomenon? Is it not tin: 
 writer's own poetical ornamentation or illustration of a doc- 
 trine, if we even do not charge him with wilful falsehood? 
 It seems to us unjust and unfair to charge writers of holy 
 books with wilful falsehood, unless final evidence forces one 
 to the accusation. But then the question arises, did the 
 writer intend to report facts, or was his book originally in- 
 tended to be legendary, i. e , written for ths purpose of being 
 read to produce devotion, wholesome reflection and contem- 
 plation? This may be the primary cause of all miracles. 
 
 The written miracle in proof of any doctrine requires two 
 acts of faith, one to believe the miracle and another to be- 
 lieve the doctrine which rests upon no other proof; and 
 aside of this it throws suspicion on the doctrine which t<> 
 prove it is intended, anyho\v with every person least inclined 
 to skepticism. He tells himself, If the doctrine is true, what 
 is the use of the miracle? If one is the eye-witness his mind 
 may be momentarily overwhelmed and overawed, to believe 
 a doctrine for which he has no other proof, although he must 
 know that the miracle and the doctrine have no connection 
 whatever in logic. The reader, cool and composed, whose 
 mind is not overawed by black spots on white paper, feels 
 more disgusted than convinced, if he finds a series of alleged 
 miracles imposed upon him in support of this or that doc- 
 trine, and inadvertently tells himself that miracles prove 
 nothing. 
 
 And now comes the conversionist and expect- of the He- 
 brew to accept Christology as true conclusions hascd nj.oti
 
 VS. PBO8ELYTIZING clIKISTIAMTV. 2-> 
 
 solid facts, after he lias read the Gospels, which begin and 
 end with the hugest miracles and produce new miracles on 
 almost every page between the first and la-t. And what 
 kind of miracles ! Some which the testimony of thousands 
 of eye-witnesses could not establish, as for instance Mary 
 conceiving of the Holy Ghost, being one person of the Deity, 
 and her son being also the son of David, another person of 
 the Deity; or Satan tempting the very son of God, dragging 
 him about, arguing with him and treating him like an infe- 
 rior companion; or that the crucified martyr rose from the 
 dead in his very body, and with that body he ascended t 
 heaven and sits at the right hand of God. which is also his 
 own right hand. No Israelite will ever he able to grasp the-- 
 impossibilities. Then comes the other class of miracles, 
 the fictitious character of which we all know. We all know 
 that there are no evil spirits, no unclean spirits, no kinds of 
 demons, hence no such devils ever could take possession of 
 any human being, and so nobody could drive them out, and 
 yet the New Testament is full of exorcism and thaumaturgy. 
 We all know that faith cure, cure by touch, uttering magic- 
 spells, or t'..e passing shadow, are delusive superstitions, and 
 yet there they are in the Gospels as veritabe miracles. Then 
 come the imitated miracles, as reviving the dead, like Elijah 
 and Elishah ; being buried three days (only one and a half), 
 like Jonah in the lish ; as-ending to heaven, like Elijah; 
 speaking down fiMiu a mountain to an audience in the val- 
 ley, like MM.-I-- speaking down from Sinai ; feeding a hun- 
 gry multitude with a few fishes and loaves, as was done hv 
 Elishah, precisely the same thing (2 Kings iv. 42-44). And 
 yet comes the conversionist and demands of the Hebrew 
 that he believe all those miracles, so that he might be able, 
 or rather prepared, to believe the fabric of Christology Evi- 
 dently he demands too much of the poor man, he could n>t 
 possibly believe all that, hence he can not believe in your 
 Christology, unless he change his whole mind from its ra- 
 tionalistic turn to the mystic proclivities of the person born 
 and bred under those peculiar infltieiic 3. 
 
 A main point in support of our thesis is that the orthodox. 
 Christian confesses that miracles prove nothing, anyhow
 
 26 A DEFENSE OF .H'DAISM 
 
 not the dogmas of Christology. Ho believes tho Xew Testa- 
 ment miracles, because they are written in that book. There 
 exists no other evidence supporting them. There are other 
 "i-ooks of the same kind, vix : to teach religion and right- 
 eousness, as, for instance, the Koran, Zendavesta, Vedas, 
 Kings and other "sacred hooks of the East," as Christian 
 theologians of England call them. In each of these hooks 
 miracles are recorded, and some o.' them even hear a strik- 
 ing resemblance to the evangelical miracles, as. for instance, 
 the inca'-nation and p-riodical resurrection of Buddha or 
 tiie passions of Prometheus. And yet the orthodox Chris- 
 tian strenuously refuses to accept the doctrines taught in 
 those very hooks, exactly as the Israelite refuses to believe 
 in Christology. All those miracles rest upon precisely the 
 same authority of this or that book or tradition; hence one 
 must believe all or none. Believing none of them, one is no 
 orthodox Christian. Believing all of them, one must believe 
 also all the doctrines taught in those books, or ho must con- 
 
 38 with us that miracles prove nothing. That is a sort of 
 dilemma. 
 
 Says the conversion 1 st : Those pagans, those heathens, 
 that unredeemed human ilesh, that fodder of Mephistophe- 
 r Beelzebub, invented a conglomeration of falsehoods, 
 no confidence can be placed in their statements, and no argu- 
 ments can be bas.-d on them. This is not exactly true, nor 
 are we willing to subscribe to it, that the most important of 
 human beings are fools or knaves, simply because we believe 
 in the God-like nature of man. Still, we will not argue tin' 
 question here. We rather point to other sources. 
 
 The Hebrews, the mo-' orthodox Christian must admit, 
 ar- 1 no pagans, no heathens, no polytheists, no infidels even. 
 They did not lie, certainly not in olden times, when they 
 wrote the Old Testament Scriptures and furnished the men 
 and material for the New Testament. They were repeatedly 
 redeemed since that 1'haraoh of old was baptized in the Red 
 nat the very word ''our Redeemer" is of Hehre\\ 
 origin : so that Mo.-cs could exclaim in the last momemts of 
 his life. ' Hail Israel, who is like unto thee a people saved 
 by Jehovah " (Peiiter. xxxiii. '29), and Isaiah could repeat :
 
 VS. ]'ROSELYTI/IN<; I'll RISTI ANITV. L'7 
 
 "Israel is s:ivi><l by Jehovah, an everlasting salvation" 
 ( I-aiah xlv. 17) : and furthermore (xlvii. 4) : " Our redeemer. 
 Jehovah Zehaoth is his name, the holy one of Israel." The 
 orthodox Christian can hardly afford to east those Israelites 
 of old into the same lumber-room with the so-called pagans, 
 heathen-, fetiehist.s and polvtheists. 
 
 Those self-same Hebrews who gave the Bible to the world 
 produced also another and mueh larger hook called the Tal- 
 mud, a book which in the main has that much in common 
 with the New Testament that it hases eliielly upon the Old 
 ;inent, expounds and expands the principles and laws 
 contained in the Helirew Scriptures. In the said hook we 
 read of quite a number of men who wrought stupendous 
 miracles. There you find the report- of < mias theCircle- 
 di<r_ r er and his two grandsons, Hilkiah and Onias the Hid- 
 den, whose pray-Ts for rain were always and instantly effec- 
 tive, which is certainly more miraculous than healing a man 
 of palsy. There you r 'ad of Xakdiimm hen (lorion, for 
 whose special liencfit the sun stood still several hours a- 
 once before Joshua. Th 'ii you find there the three heroes 
 of miracles. Rabbi Chan ina ben Dosa, Rabbi Pinchas ben 
 Ya'ir and R-ibbi Shimon b.-n Yo-hai, whose miva 
 most stupendous. One of them was known as an infallible 
 physician by prayer only and exclusively (Rerachoth 34). 
 Paul's snake miracle (Acts xxviii. 4) was enacted by the 
 same rabbinical saint. (Bcrnchoth 33.) The other commanded 
 the waters of a river to be divided and let him pass through, 
 and the irrational element obeyed hastily. (CLulin 7.) The 
 third bid the demon Ben Thalmion to go to Rome from tin- 
 ship at midsea and do there his bidding, ard the poor devil 
 tremblingly obeyed. Quite a number of miracle-workers 
 are mentioned in the Talmud, too numerous to be repeated 
 li'-re One of them, it is said, created a calf by the book of 
 .Ie/irah. as large as a two-year-old animal; another revived 
 his dead colleague whom he had slaughtered accidentally: 
 and Rabbi Klie/.er b^n Hyrcan could do almost anything 
 contrary to the laws of nature. ( Baba Mezia 5'..) Inter- 
 course with the angels, with the Prophet Elijah and with 
 \lmighty himself through the medium of the Bath Kol:
 
 J^ A DEFENSE OF Jl'DAISM 
 
 wrestling with the angel of death, prevailing over that 
 mighty potentate and going alive to Paradise, as did Rabbi 
 Joshua ben L-vi : ascending to heaven to ask Clod's opinion 
 on important questions, like Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha, the 
 cotemporary and counterpart of Paul,* were matters of fre- 
 quent occurrence with those men, as is plainly narrated in the 
 Talmud. 
 
 Whoever believes the miracles of the Gospels must no less 
 believe the miracles of the Talmud. Whoever believes that 
 miracles prove the agent by whom or for whom they were 
 wrought a man of God, gifted with special power by the Al- 
 mighty to domineer over nature's laws and forces, must, be- 
 lieve the very same thing of the miraculous heroes of the Tal- 
 mud. Whoever believes that the miracles prove the truth of 
 the Gospel doctrine, must in fairness and honesty admit that 
 the doctrine of the Talmud, proved by the same sort of evi- 
 dence, is no less true. All those miraculous heroes of the Tal- 
 mud were no Christians, rejected the whole fabric of salva- 
 tion, the entire system of Christology and dogmatic ortho- 
 doxy. Here is a dilemma, a labyrinth without exit ; either 
 you must admit, in spite of Aristotle, that a thing is true and 
 also not true at the same time and place, or you must con- 
 fess that miracles prove nothing ; you do deny and abso- 
 lutely reject the doctrine of those holy men of God who 
 wrought those stupendous miracles, as recorded in the Tal- 
 mud we say to the conversionist hence you do admit and 
 confess that miracles prove nothing ; how in the world could 
 you expect that miracles should prove to us the truth of 
 Christology? It is all one piece of inconsistency and self- 
 contradiction. 
 
 The conversionist might turn the same argument upon 
 the Israelite and advance the proposition : If you believe the 
 miracles of the Talmud or even if you believe the miracles 
 of the Old Testament, must you not on-the same principle 
 believe the miracles of the New Testament? But then we 
 would tell him that he does not understand the tenor and 
 
 * See the author's " History of the Hebrews' Second Common- 
 wealth."
 
 VS. I'KOSELYTI/CIM; 'II ItlSTlA.MTY !_". 
 
 essence of Judaism. Judaism acknowledges no dogma 
 on the belief of which salvation depends. It does net be- 
 lieve any doctrine because it is supported by a miracle ; on 
 the contrary, it judge* the alleged miracle by the soundness 
 of the doctrine which is to be thus supported, and rejects 
 e\vry miracle if the doctrine connected with it is pernicious ; 
 its standard is reason and the Sinaic revelation. (Deut. xiii.) 
 The Israelite might believe all miracles which are not con- 
 tradictory to the postulate of reason and the Sinaic standard, 
 but he is not obliged to believe them or be ostracised as an 
 infidel and heretic. Judaism bases no dogma on any mira- 
 cle. It does not maintain, for instance, that Elijah was 
 more of a son of God than the Christian one, because the 
 former rode to Heaven in a chariot of fire, drawn by steeds 
 of fire, and the latter had to make the journey on foot. Nor 
 does it maintain that Elishah was greater than Jesus because 
 the latter could revive the dead while he himself was alive 
 and the former performed the same feat after he was dead 
 (2 Kings xiii. 20, 21) ; or that Jonah was the greatest of the 
 two. because he was buried in the belly of the fish three days 
 and three nights, and Jesus was buried but one day and a 
 half and one night and a half. Judaism does not take the 
 address of Balaam's ass or the beguiling speech of the ser- 
 pent to Eve as the foundation of a dogma, as Christianity 
 does base its entire fabric of salvation on that fable, which 
 may be explained in many other ways. Nor does it attach 
 any faith to Moses, because he wrought miracles ; it does 
 not acknowledge the evidence of miracles ; it holds that 
 miracles prove nothing, not even to him who believes them 
 literally and firmly ; it admits that miraculous feats may In- 
 performed by false prophets or any other kind of impostors. 
 Opposite Judaism the argument basing upon miracles is per- 
 fectly worthless, as the greatest of all expounders of Judaism 
 have laid down as the postulate of religion.* 
 
 It' the conversionist would advance that the belief in the 
 Sinaic revelation is also a dogma based on a miracle. \\ 
 would reply that it is not necessarily so. But, even if so,, 
 
 * See Maimonides' Code, first book, chapters vii.-x.
 
 .30 A DSFE-XS'S OK .ITDAJSM. 
 
 we believe in the Sinaic revelation on aecoimt of the sound- 
 ness, rationality, universality and pure humanism of the 
 doctrine promulgated there, and not vice versa We believe 
 in the Sinaic revelation on account of the historical evidence 
 \vhirh supports it, the like of which can he adduced to a few 
 facts in history, certainly to no miracle aside of the creation 
 of the world. 
 
 V >u say th?n th Nraslito is a rationalist? So ha is, in 
 p-LMrd to miracles anyhow, although many of them are iirm 
 ln-lievers in miracles and believe also those of the Talmud. 
 Still none l>: i !ieve that salvation depends on this or that mir- 
 acle; hence aside of all otlrn* considerations opposite the 
 Hebrew the testimony of miracles is inadmissible, if it be in- 
 tended to prove Christology. He is too far advanced in his 
 onward march toward the postulate of reason to be en- 
 trapped in any sort of mysticism.
 
 rilAITKI! IV. 
 THE DMCTKIXI-: OF I-KKSONAL IMMORTALITY. 
 
 MV :riend .laeob lives with his family comfortably in his 
 own hoiist-.cn X Street. A real estate broker comes 
 to him one day ard oilers to him in exchange ; t better house, 
 as the agent maintains, than the one in \vliich he lives. Mr. 
 -Taeob inquire- : " Is that house a more solid structure than 
 mine, is it in a better location, has it more rooms and better 
 rooms, has it more air and light?" The agent,* of course, 
 a'lirms all this, but Mr. Jacob knows well what the agent's 
 "business requires him to tell, and so he goes to look at the 
 house, and discovers that there is nothing in that house 
 that is not in his own. while he knows that his is a strong 
 and solid building, and the house offered is unknown to 
 him as to its foundation, its walls and roof, and he say- to 
 the agent, it can not be done. 
 
 The conversion agent offers you another house for your 
 own. He must laud the advantages of his offer. Business 
 men believe best what they know best. You go and see the 
 house offered you in exchange, and you will soon discover, 
 that the agent knew that house but did not know yours. 
 You will soon discover that Christianity offers nothing to 
 the Israelite which he has not in his own house, yet it is 
 demanded of you to exchange your home with its solid 
 foundation for a structure whose foundation is the quick- 
 sand of legend and myth 
 
 Coming from the general to the particular, we follow the 
 conversion agent in his own line of argument. His first al- 
 legation most always is : The Messianic son of Mary brought 
 into the world that sublime doctrine, that soothing and 
 cheering belief of personal and self-conscious immortality of 
 man. life eternal, self-conscious life beyond the grave. Op- 
 
 (31)
 
 32 A DKFE.XSK OF ,in>AISM 
 
 posite this allegation we advance from the basis of authentic 
 history : 
 
 The consciousness of immortality is innate to man, was known 
 to and verily believed by all nations prior to Socrates, that in 
 the scale of culture had risen to the height of intelligible lan- 
 guage, and ivas no less known to and believed by the undent He- 
 brews up to prehistoric times 
 
 The first book of the Hebrew Bible, called rve>N-Q 1ED by 
 the Hebrews and Genesis by the Greeks, contains the oldest 
 records of the human family. Adam and Eve and their de- 
 scendants to the tenth generation are recorded there. Noah 
 and his three sons, with their descendants to the tenth 
 generation, the sires of the seventy nations that appear on 
 earth at the very beginning of history, "their origin, loca- 
 tion and fate are inscribed there, saved from oblivion by 
 the first eleven chapters of that wonderful book, over which 
 a host of learned professors still quarrel and dispute. 
 
 In those ancient records we are also informed what man 
 in those primitive days thought, felt and believed, and, 
 strange to say, the rudiments of that which all men always 
 did think, feel and believe, are there from the very beginning 
 of the human race. The belief in a Supreme Being who 
 gives commandment to man for his own well-being, was 
 present in the minds of the first parents. 
 
 The desire and duty of man to worship that Supreme Being 
 is on record in the sacrifices made by the first men born on 
 earth, and Enosh, the grandson of Adam, is the head of the 
 human family, when man began to worship God in words of 
 prayer. 
 
 In the same account of primitive man the book informs 
 us there was the belief current that God created man in his 
 own image, by giving to the animal body the breath of life. 
 the soul of man which is of God, comes from God and is as 
 ;-iosely related to its Maker as is the child to its parent, 
 while the relation of all things in nature to their Maker is 
 only that of a work of art to its artificer. The first man 
 knew that he is of God and in God, that among all the ani- 
 mals none is like him, none could be his companion, or in 
 short the lirst man knew that he is a man, superior to all
 
 VS. rKOSKI.YTIZINi; CII KISTIAMTY. 38 
 
 creatures, with the universe in his consciousness and the 
 grant of immortality and happiness in his soul. 
 
 So did and so do now all men think, feel and believe, 
 although some savages are unconscious of their own 
 thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and others have not the words 
 wherewith to communicate their beliefs to others ; although 
 there are skeptics and atheists in the world that expelled 
 this knowledge out of their souls very few succeed entirely 
 in this as the criminal by steady practice and self-delusion 
 deadens his conscience. Yet there is no nation on record 
 that has no conception and belief, in this or that form, of 
 <!nd and immortality, as these two beliefs are inseparable 
 from one another. If I am of God, I am in him. whatever is 
 <{' and in God is imperishable, because he himself is eternal. 
 If I were of water and in water, I would undoubtedly partake 
 <>f its nature ; the same must be the case with the soul. The 
 Chinese, Hindoos, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Syrians, 
 Arabs and Egyptians, speaking of the oldest nations known, 
 confirm that the belief in a Supreme Being and the immor- 
 tality of the soul is universally human, and none has a 
 definite notion of its beginning. The Scythians, Celts and 
 Teutons, savage and ignorant as they were in their forest 
 homes, held the same beliefs, only in other forms, as did the 
 nations of culture. So did and do the American Indians, the 
 nearest and most accessible patterns of primitive paganism. 
 
 No just man acquainted with these facts will seriously 
 maintain that the ancient Hebrews, Abraham and Moses in- 
 cluded, were ignorant of that belief which was known to all 
 and stamls before us in the first chapter of the Bible, of 
 which they were the first authors. It is not reasonable to 
 think that those who bequeathed to all the world the highest 
 ideas of Ik'ity, righteousness and holine-s. creation, nature 
 and cosmos, were ignorant of human nature. The only le- 
 gitimate question in this connection is : Why did not Abra- 
 ham and Moses speak more distinctly on this matter, or at 
 least as distinctly as did the authors of the Psalms, Isaiah, 
 E/ekiel, Daniel, !' tea, Wisdom Of Solomon, Macca- 
 
 bees and others? We can not discuss this point lr re. BJ 
 only wish to show that the Hebrews, like all other nations,
 
 ?>-! A DKFENSK oK JUDAISM 
 
 did believe the immortality doctrine, and knew not when, 
 where, or with whom it originated ; although one reason for 
 this silence is stated plainly enough in Deuteronomy xxix. 
 L )v >. Moses, agreeable to his system of teaching and legisla- 
 tion, would not go beyond the line of induction, and this line 
 reaches not into the region or personal immortality. Xot 
 only is the Talmud, with its traditions, reaching up to the 
 beginning of the Maccabean period, and the ancient books 
 on which it comments,* brimful of the immortality doctrine 
 in the two forms of immortality of the sou! and resurrection 
 of the body, and num -rous legends based on this belief; 
 but at a very early date the dogma was established most 
 likely opposite the Grecising Helenists, whose immortality 
 doctrine was that of Socrates and Plato that one must be- 
 lieve that the Thorah of Moses teaches the immortality doc- 
 trine. Prior to that time, about 150 B. C.. Josephus informs 
 us. the three sects quarrelled over this doctrine, the Phar 
 held 'the resurrection of the body, the Kssenes the immor- 
 tality of the soul, and the Sadducees' belief in this matter 
 was unknown to the historian. f The Ixabbis date this con- 
 troversy back to the disciples of Simon the Just, who died 
 '2^2 B. C.. and it appears from Kcdesiastes and Daniel that 
 it did exist in their respective times. Sects do not cjuarrel 
 over the form of a doctrine which is not known and believed. 
 Hence the immortality doctrine existed among the Israelites 
 long before the advent of Christianity. The Witch of Kudor, 
 we are told in the Book of Samuel, j; conjured the spirit of 
 Samuel to appear and to speak to King Saul ; mint lie not 
 have believed in immortality? The prophets Klijah and 
 Klishah. we are told in King-, reanimated th dead children 
 of the widow at Zarefath and the celebrated Shunamith. 
 must not they have believed in the Incorruptibility of th.- 
 soul? In I. Kings xvii. 17-22 it is specially state.! and re- 
 
 * These books are, Mishnah, Thosephtha, Mechiltha, Saphni 8 
 phri, Meguillath Thanith, Seder ).'ani, 1'irkei Rabbi Kliezer, all ex- 
 tant, besides the Bible and the book of Jesus lu.-n Sirach. 
 
 t Wars II . viii. 
 
 i 1 Samuel xxviii.
 
 VS. PKOSKI.YTIZI.V; i 'IIKISTI ANITY. 35 
 
 pealed that death means the departure of the soul out of the 
 body (now U mnw K-?"U7K ly), that the soul is a substantial 
 being which dies not (nin T?n &EJ K: 3CTI) and coming back 
 to the dead body it reanimates the same (ntn nm 5?a: 3tm 
 m mp -?y). When that same book tells us that Klijali 
 went alive to heaven to remain forever incorruptible, and 
 that a dead man, whose remains were thrown upon the 
 grave of Klishah, was reanimated, then- remains no doubt 
 that the lEebrews, 800 B. ('., knew and believed the immor- 
 tality doctrine. Could one be a. prophet and feel the presence 
 of God in his inspired mind, or behold the glory of the Eter- 
 nal in his soul, as did Isaiah and E/ekiel. and not know that 
 he is of God and in God, hence an imperishable (rod-like 
 creature? It seems impossible. 
 
 It must be admitted, then-fore, as far a< the 1 <raelite< wen- 
 concerned, it was not necessary for the (iospel writers to let 
 an innocent man he crucified and pierced witli a spear to 
 prove him being really dead, in order to let him then res- 
 urrect and leave the realm of death, to serve as an ocular de- 
 monstration of man's immortal nature: it was known and 
 believed long before the crucifixion. Those who believe by 
 miracles had enough to convince them in the miraculous 
 performances of Elijah and Klishah ; and those who base 
 their beliefs on the higher plane of rationalistic grounds, at- 
 tach little importance in spiritual matters to ocular demon- 
 stration, and would certainly not believe the Christian resur- 
 rection miracle. Thousands of men and women maintained 
 to have seen glio.-ts, phantoms- in evi'i'V form, and testified 
 loudly and emphatically to the reality of their visions, with- 
 out convincing intelligent people that such was the fact : 
 how could it be expected that the testimony of some women 
 and a few disciples to the same etlect could convince any- 
 body, especially if he must rely on written reports the wit- 
 inu; dead which are contradictory to man's knowl- 
 : he laws of nature? 
 
 In the face of the indisputed facts, that the heathen na- 
 
 3 the world over, both ancient and modern, knew and 
 
 believed in a conscious existence of man beyond tie- grav.-, 
 
 long before they had any knowledu r of Christianity, long be-
 
 36 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 fore it existed, the position that the New Testament brought 
 this doctrine to sinful humanity must he abandoned as un- 
 tenable. In the Epistles of Paul it is maintained that it was 
 the Pharisean belief of the resurrection of the body which was 
 preached to the heathens as a new doctrine, the immortal- 
 ity of the soul being well known to them and universally be- 
 lieved. (Romans viii. 2.) 
 
 The Evangelist Mark felt this defect in the evangelical 
 teachings. Besides the Messianic pretensions and the per- 
 sonal aggradizements of the main hero there was nothing of 
 importance in it that was at all new to the Jews, and that 
 which was new they could not believe. Therefore he, with 
 Paul as his guide, laid particular stress upon believing the 
 Messianic story (faith with Paul), and let his Messiah him- 
 self, after his resurrection, as almost his last words on earth, 
 say to his disciples: "He that believeth and is baptized 
 shall be saved ; but he that believeth not shall be damned." 
 This is very pathetic and emphatic, although there are some 
 mistakes in it. It was not said by the Messiah to the Jew-. 
 but by Paul to the Gentiles (Romans x. 9) without the word 
 baptized, however, on which neither of them put any such 
 stress. The other evangelists evidently did not believe 
 Mark, that the resurrected Messiah then and there spoke 
 those harsh words, although each of them pretends to record 
 literally what he did say past mortem 
 
 This is a new doctrine. It was unknown to -Jew and Gen- 
 tile. It is the doctrine against which all men outside of the 
 Christian circle loudly and- emphatically protest all who 
 believe in the goodness and justice of the Supreme Being. 
 It is the foundation for that most intolerant dogma of sal- 
 vation by that particular faith and the performance of that 
 special ceremony of bapti/ement ; and on this unreasonable 
 dogma the conversion mania bases its claims and justifica- 
 tion. The whole idiosyncrasy is concentrated in the phrase. 
 " to save souls." 
 
 \\'e must discuss this point next, and will here only state 
 that Judaism from Father Abraham and Moses down to tin- 
 last of the prophets never advanced such an idea, the Tal- 
 mud and its expounders condemn it. and rationalistic Juda-
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 37 
 
 ism to this very day looks upon it as being the most narrow- 
 minded dogma of all religious creeds known in history, and 
 the source of unspeakable misery to millions besides the 
 sufferers from the Crusades, Inquisition and autos dafe.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 UNIVERSAL SALVATION WITHOTT THE MESSIAH. 
 
 IT was an angel of salvation that said to Lot. lleeing tVoin 
 doomed Sodom : Al thabbit acharecha, " Look not behind 
 thee ; " look forward, proceed, go onward, and never back- 
 ward. That hapless woman who did look backward was 
 turned into a pillar of salt : she was petrified. That is the 
 penalty for retrogression. In all spiritual affairs petrifica- 
 tion is the penalty for retrogression. Running down from 
 the sunny summit of rationality into the dusky valley of 
 obscure mysticism is eertainly spiritual retrogression. Juda- 
 ism has in its rear the labor of three thousand years of edu- 
 cation and progression from the dim twilight of semi-con- 
 scious faith to the postulate of reason, and now, at this high 
 noon hour, comes the kabbalistic conversionist and seeks 
 to entice us down into the misty and chilly dale of an unrea- 
 soning faith in Christology, which wages a hopeless conflict 
 with the dicta of reason. Fools or knaves, agnostics or 
 sualists, with whom the loaf of bread outweighs reason and 
 conscience, may tumble doAvn the declivity ; the sound and 
 fair Hebrew can not go back and l>c petrified. 
 
 The Church reasons not, it dictates. because it is a super- 
 natural revelation, says the priest. It tells you in plain and 
 unmistakable language that he who believes and is bap- 
 tized shall be saved, and he who believes not shall 
 damned; in order to gain the precious prise of eternal life 
 and bliss you must overrule and override all consider;;- 
 of reason, all hesitations of conscience, and believe the v. 
 evangelical story and the entire Christology based upon it ; 
 if you can not do this, or you could and do not do it. yol 
 damned to everlasting torments or final destruction of the 
 soul. Mr. Calvin iroes one step beyond this and ii 
 that those who are predestined or elected by the Father of 
 
 (38;
 
 VS. I'KOSEI.YTIZIN*; CHRISTIANITY. 39 
 
 imin will lie saved, all others are damned. Christian sa- 
 vants ditl'er widely in their definitions of the ideas >! 
 saved," and "damned," although in the main they all agree 
 that salvation depends on that particular faith which Christ- 
 ology teaches; and we think the whole is a conglomeration 
 of human speculations basing on erroneous premises. 
 
 We maintain that alvation is promised to all men who do 
 not wilfully and violently destroy the divine in human nature, 
 and has been specially and unconditionally promised to all who 
 are of Israel. 
 
 We agree that there is in us and above us the eternal God, 
 Greater, Preserver and Governor of all beings, Source of life, 
 love and intelleet, Father and Providence of mankind, who.-.- 
 attributes, like those of love, mercy, grace, goodness, wisdom 
 justice and freedom, are infinite and absolute as himself, 
 above and beyond all comparisons with similar qualities of 
 any finite being. He is the All-in-All and the beings in this 
 All are the products of his will. There can be no contradic- 
 tions in the Perfect Being, there can be no evil and no evil 
 one, nothing aimless, nothing without an intelligent purpose 
 in (rod's creation. There must be an eternal fitness of all 
 things in their times and places, all things properly co-ordi- 
 nate and subordinate for the well-being of the whole, and 
 everything perfectly equipped and qualified to fulfill its des- 
 tiny and to attain its full share of happiness. If one can 
 get the conversion agent to interrupt his memorized speech 
 long enough till he has heard this confession of faith, he 
 will, if he is candid, aflirm that he also believes in it, and 
 that all this is well said in the Old Testament Scriptures, 
 nothing can he added to it, nothing taken away from it 
 without offending the authority of revelation and the maj- 
 of reason. 
 
 In this harmonious All, however, man appears to be an 
 alien, an interloper, a disturbing element, a tormenting and 
 tormented wretch, overburdened with care and labor to pro- 
 vide for himself sustenance and shelter, of which even, the 
 fish in the water is free. In his childhood the weakest and 
 most helpless of all creatures, in old age a child again, in the 
 prime of Hie exposed to nuiiieruus d iscase-. ] tain, grief, mor-
 
 40 A DEFENSE (IK .TTDAISM 
 
 tification, gnawing disappointments, gifted or cursed with 
 the consciousness of threatening danger and approaching 
 death, under the pauseless combat of passion and conscience, 
 man ekes out the few brief years on earth, all of which is 
 unknown to the animal, whose every day is unconscious and 
 careless happiness. On the top of all this misery then- 
 comes the Darwinist and tells you that you are the son of 
 an ape, taking out of the poor creature the little pride of an- 
 cestry which afforded him some consolation in his misery.* 
 Then comes the priest and informs you that all men are 
 sinners, all bear the burden of an original sin besides, and 
 groan helplessly under the curse of universal depravity, so 
 that the poor man is not merely the son of an ape, but the 
 damned son of a chimpanzee. Man may justly ask Provi- 
 dence : Why is it thus? Why am I gifted with nobler feelings, 
 these loftier sentiments, this restless and sleeples conscience, 
 this indomitable consciousness, this superior intellect, these 
 hopes and fears, this insatiable longing, yearning and dis- 
 satisfaction, which reduce my share of happine>s in this 
 beautiful world below T that of the irrational beast? Where 
 is God's justice, love and wisdom manifested in human na- 
 ture and fate? 
 
 At this point of the cogitation reason's voice chimes into 
 the melancholy and confused accents of plaintive man and 
 swells the discords into harmony and soothing melody. It 
 is a revelation, a divine revelation, a revelation of the di- 
 vine, only in another form, it reached man by the mediation 
 of reason, therefore it came alike to all men. It is the great 
 truth, that man is an immortal being His sojourn on this 
 earth is the first stage of his existence. His life on this 
 planet is a continuous state of development and preparation 
 for another and higher state of existence, if he does not vio- 
 lently obstruct this course of the divine in his nature. His 
 order on happiness which lie brings along from on high is 
 
 * It took a Christian savan, one that grew up under the pessimis- 
 tic and degrading estimate of human nature, to hit upon the idea 
 of man's descendency from a brute, in none else could the ideal of 
 manhood become so debased.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZIM. < ' II 1USTIAMTY. 41 
 
 nt fully honored in this state of existence : it must be re- 
 deemed in another state of existence, when In.- is sufficiently 
 developed and prepared to receive, enjoy and appreciate it. 
 The chicaneries, the teaming afflictions, the pains, griefs and 
 \\-ot-sto which man is exposed in this life a"e to many ad- 
 monitions and impulses to him to continue his course of 
 development and preparation for a higher and purer life ; "to 
 be reminded that mundane life is not the only nor the high- 
 est object of man's existence. Pain, grief, sorrow, woe. dis- 
 appointment and mortification, the dark clouds on life s ho- 
 ri/on, are providential means of education for a better and 
 higher existence, and that existence is man's real aim and 
 ultimate purpose. So reason solved 'In- mystery of human 
 existence and human woes. 
 
 If this is so and that it is so the beliefs of all nations, 
 ancient and modern, seem to confirm and (lod is all wise, 
 all just and most merciful, he must have provided ample 
 means for every human being, and placed thorn within his 
 reach, to fulfill his destiny on earth and in heaven, to attain 
 the object of his exist-'iice. the ultimate aim of his being. 
 If salvation and bliss, in that higher state of existence, be 
 the end and aim of the human being, then the means to at- 
 tain it, like the knowledge there f, must be innate in man 
 and with equal liberality equally bestowed on all children 
 of man. We must believe this or deny the justice and good- 
 of our Maker, and yield to pessimism and despair. 
 
 If the Church maintains that salvation depends on its 
 particular belief and practice, of which nine-tenths of all 
 human beings from Adam to our days never heard, never 
 knew of its existence, it blasphemes the Creator of man by 
 the Hat denial of his justice ami goodness. If those nine- 
 tenths of humanity are damned in the estimation of the 
 Church, then it must admit that its God is not only the 
 most merciless tyrant and most furious despot but also the 
 most unwise and unskilled workmaster. having made ?o 
 nfany millions of human beings in vain. ;,s they did not ful- 
 fill their destiny, did not attain the end and aim for which 
 they were originally intended. If that be so, then the God 
 of the Church owes a heavy debt to those uncounted millions
 
 42 A MKKKNSK OF .ITDAISM 
 
 of men whoso order on happiness was not redeemed, whose 
 sufferings and afflictions in mundane life were not recom- 
 pensed. What kind of a God is he who is not even as good 
 as that /.ealous conversionist who would go thousands of 
 miles to save one soul; not as merciful as any ordinary 
 mortal, who is willing and ready to save any human being 
 from perdition, and alleviate the sufferings of even the most 
 abject criminal ; not as wise and provident as any common 
 machinist, any ordinary watchmaker, who would not con- 
 struct any wheel or any other part of a machine which would 
 fail to fulfill its destiny? Before the judgment seat of com- 
 mon sense such a God is an idol of human fabrication. 
 
 Hold on, says the conversion agent, the Evangelist, or 
 rather Paul, did not mean that, although the stern dogmatic 
 understands it so. For Mark says first ; " Go ye into all the 
 world and preach the Gospel to every creature ; " hence tin- 
 sense of the next passage must be, that only those who shall 
 hear the Gospel and know it, and believe not, shall be 
 damned. Yes, yes, it might be understood so, but it never 
 was, especially not by him who wrote the Gospel according 
 to Nicodemus, with the story of Christ's descending to hell, 
 which has become a part of Christian belief. Paul did not 
 think so, when he excused the unbelief of the Jews, and 
 maintained that they could be saved by the Law. Still if we 
 do admit this, it does not improve the cause of Christology. 
 For, in the first place it admits that many millions of 
 human beings were saved and are saved now not knowing 
 the Christian story without the interference of the crucified 
 Mi-ssiah. hence the power of salvation must be in human 
 nature or in God, however imperfect the roneeption of 
 Deity was in those millions of men. If so, there was not 
 only no necessity of enacting that whole Gospel drama, or 
 rather tragedy, as men were saved without it, but it made 
 the case so much worse, as formerly all men could be saved, 
 and now those who know the story and do not believe it 
 ar<- damned. So much advantage millions of men have loft 
 by a special derive of the Deity, as they maintain. 
 
 Where is the justice, goodness, mercy and wisdom of that 
 supposed God who issued that despotic mandate? If one
 
 VS. 1'KOSELYTI/IM; < 'HKISTI AXITY. 43 
 
 <-an justify this merciless absolutism in connection with 
 the All-good and All-wise, he must also admit that at that 
 time when the Gospel-drama was enacted God changed hu- 
 man nature in such a peculiar manner that those who know 
 nothing of the story remain in statu quo, and those who 
 hear and do not believe it lose their inherent power of sal- 
 vation. There is no fact known in nature or history and no 
 law in logic to prove such an anomaly in (rod's govern- 
 ment. 
 
 It might be maintained that we who worship God as the 
 supreme goodness, justice, wisdom and love are mistaken, 
 although M<.-es and the Prophets taught so. The Supreme 
 Being, taught from the standpoint of Christology, would 
 appear to us so merciless and revengeful that he could not 
 forgive the sins of his children, as any good, human father 
 would cheerfully do, and would grant them no pardon till 
 he had sacrificed his only begotten son, which no good hu- 
 man father and no other just man would do. We condemn 
 those heathen kings and princes of old who in time of great 
 distress sacrificed their own sons to move the compassion 
 of the gods, as did Mesha, the King of Moab, some Pho>- 
 nician kings and other heathens. We know that God said 
 to Abraham not to slay Isaac, who was ready to be sacri- 
 ficed, and to M'>se~ : " Him who sinned to me will I blot 
 out from my hook." hence God wants no human victims, no 
 vicarious atonement, no innocent man to die for the sins of 
 others. 
 
 To us, indeed, such a God appears the most relentless, im- 
 placable and cruel Moloch which the most bewildered phan- 
 of a barbarous age could invent. Still the Supreme 
 J>eing, taught from the standpoint of Christology, is entirely 
 different from our ideal and knowledge of Deity. What we 
 call mercy, love, grace, long-suffering, justice and wisdom, 
 is not that at all in the Supreme Being as understood by the 
 believers in Christology. Hence we unbelievers do not know 
 at all what love, justice, wisdom, etc., in the Supreme Being 
 is. and so we can not see why this one should be saved and 
 that other one damned ; we can not see why and wherefore 
 the salvation of mankind should depend upon a book, a
 
 44 A DEFENSE OF .H'DAISM 
 
 particular belief or performance. We let them have this ar- 
 gument, if it does them any good, as long as they do not at- 
 tempt to force it on us. Subjective truth is a factor in man's 
 mind, which produces the same wonderful effects as does 
 the excited phantasy. It is difficult to sit in judgment over 
 it. We only say, because no human reason can think it and 
 no man's unprejudiced conscience can indorse it, we reject it. 
 But when one indirectly or directly maintains that the God 
 of the Old Testament is either an impostor and said things 
 which are not true, or an ignorant power, Avho said and 
 promised then and there and repealed or countermanded it 
 afterward, then he knows better, we are sure that the man, 
 church, angel or devil who maintains this utters a blasphe- 
 mous falsehood. So does he, however, who maintains that 
 after the crucifixion and ascension God decreed that he who 
 knows and believes the Christian story and is baptized shall 
 be saved, the rest shall be damned ; when in the Old Testa- 
 ment Scriptures it is repeatedly and emphatically stated 
 that Israel is saved an everlasting salvation, and we are of 
 Israel, know and do not believe that story ; when it is 
 repeatedly and emphatically stated there that God alone 
 and himself is the redeemer and savior of Israel ; when. 
 God said, " This is my covenant with them, my spirit which 
 is upon thee, and niy word which I have put into thy 
 mouth shall not depart from thy mouth, and from the 
 mouth of thy seed, and from the mouth of thy seed's seed, 
 saith Jehovah, even from now to eternity," and a hundred 
 similar passages, upon which ancient expounders based 
 their dogmas. "Every Israelite has part in the future 
 world," and "The good men among the Gentiles have part 
 in the future world." When did God utter a falsehood? 
 Certainly not when he spoke to Israel. When and where 
 did God repeal or revoke his promises and assurances? 
 < Vrtainly not on Mount Calvary or in any ecumenical coun- 
 cil. When and where did God violently change human na- 
 ture to push millions into the oblivion of damnation? Cer- 
 tuinly not at any time within man's memory. Hence, that 
 salvation argument of the conversionist is a poor dodge to 
 hide the weak point of Christology, that it has nothing to
 
 VS. PKOSKI.YTI/IM. < ' 1 1 1! I STIAXITY. 45 
 
 offer to the Hebrew except a little worldly advantage in a 
 society benighted with childish prejudices, steeped in myths 
 and selfishness. No retrogression, no petrification, no 
 Christology for us. With all men of reason, we believe in 
 universal salvation and need none of your crutches, because 
 we believe, as did our ancestors, in the true God whose 
 grace endures forever, and whose mercy is as infinite as his 
 power and wisdom.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MUNDANE HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON MORALITY, XOT ON CHRIST- 
 
 OLOGY. 
 
 UTJONOR thy father and thy mother, that thy days be 
 J-l prolonged upon the soil which God thy Lord giveth 
 thee." This is one of the Ten Commandments, which are 
 fundamental laws to all nations professing in any form the re- 
 ligion of monotheism. In that same good book the promise 
 is often repeated, "that it may be well with thee and thy 
 days be prolonged," that thou mayest live long and live well, 
 content and happy It must be evident, therefore, at least 
 to all who believe in the divine revelations of the good book, 
 that the natural yearning of man to live long and happy is 
 no less a law of God than the dicta of conscience and rea- 
 son. If so, all Nazirite practices, all ascetic self-inflictions, 
 unless in individual cases they are intended to bridle over- 
 grown animal passions, all voluntary misery, every curtail- 
 ing oi happiness to any human being, be it self or others, is 
 sinful, because it is a transgression of the law of God. The 
 question in divine jurisprudence can only be, when and to 
 what extent am I permitted to sacrifice my own happiness 
 to that of others? The framers of the Constitution of the 
 United States, in fact the authors of any constitution for just 
 government paid close attention to this important ques- 
 tion 
 
 We will say nothing here about the direct contrary princi- 
 ple underlying Christology which goes so far as to maintain 
 that even God himself inflicted the utmost passion, pain 
 and suffering upon his own person, suggesting to all believ- 
 ers ' Go and do likewise.' We only call attention to the ir- 
 refutable inductions that those who believe in the revela- 
 tions on Mt Sinai and all who believe that the laws revealed 
 in human nature are no less divine, must admit that mun- 
 (46)
 
 A DEFENSE oF .JUDAISM. 47 
 
 dane happiness is at least one main object of religion. 
 Therefore it might justly be maintained, if Christology of- 
 fers no special advantage to any one in aquiring that unde- 
 fined bliss in the future state of existence, it might offer 
 mundane advantages which recommend it to our special 
 consideration. True, the proselytizing Christian I mean 
 him who is honest does not hold out any worldly induce- 
 ments to the lost soul, he only speaks of salvation and bliss 
 hereafter. He does that in accordance with his faith, the 
 founder of which said, ''My kingdom is not of this world." 
 But you who do believe that mundane happiness according 
 to the will of God is of some importance, it is at least one of 
 man's ultimate objects of existence, you might take into 
 consideration the point upon which the conversionist can 
 not well dwell, as quite a number of renegades from our 
 camp have Actually done, and all those disreputable indi- 
 viduals do, who sell their birthright for a mess of lentils, 
 prostitute their conscience for a loaf of bread, to speak with 
 King Solomon. It is proper, therefore, to investigate this 
 point. 
 
 It must be said right here that any momentary advan- 
 tage, the purchase of any brief happiness is not what I mean, 
 or else the thief or the robber to whom the booty affords a 
 momentary advantage and a sort of happiness, or the re- 
 vengeful man who slays his foe that is in his way, to gain a 
 momentary advantage and satisfaction, would be justifiable 
 on the same principle. What I mean to discuss is, does 
 Christology offer any lasting and universal advantage to hu 
 manity to gain mundane happiness? With every good 
 Christian I answer this question in the negative : It offers 
 no such advantage. 
 
 Not Christology but sound morality is the first main factor to 
 produce mun'lanc happiness to the individual and society. 
 
 The first condition of lasting and universal happiness 
 we all agree is sound morality. Any country, society or 
 individual can enjoy only so much happiness as is counter 
 poised by so much sound and just morality in principle and 
 action. The exceptions to this rule are few and short-lived. 
 Any one whose standard of happiness is correct and not
 
 48 A DEFENSE OF JFDAISM 
 
 imaginary, judges individuals and communities from their 
 own standpoints, and not his particular one, and considers 
 a person's whole career in life or a nation's long period of 
 history, can easily convince himself that mundane happi- 
 ness is commensurate to the quantity and quality of moral 
 ity. 
 
 It is with mundane happiness as with eternal bliss. If 
 the Maker of man is the benign, merciful and gracious 
 father of all his ch'ldren, he must have destined them for 
 happiness. Love is the desire to shower happiness upon its 
 object. If so he must have endowed ever)' human being 
 with adequate capacities and placed the means within his 
 reach to acquire his share of happiness. This or that par- 
 ticular religion is not within everybodys reach, sound mo- 
 rality is ; everybody can be moral to the best of his knowl- 
 edge, and this quantity suffices to procure mundane happi- 
 ness. Therefore individuals and communities under the 
 influence of the most opposite and not seldom most perni- 
 cious doctrines of faith acquired an adequate share of 
 happiness. 
 
 In this particular point, however, Christology can do 
 nothing for us theoretically or practically. The forte of 
 Christianity is its moral doctrine. All the good it ever did 
 and ever can do is accomplished by the spread of this 
 moral doctrine among such nations or tribes with whom, on 
 account of their defective intelligence the s andard of 
 morals was low and inadequate to attain that amount of 
 happiness which man is naturally endowed to enjoy. Press- 
 ing the honest and considerate Christian to the sequences 
 of his logic, he will confess that Christology has nothing 
 to do with morality, per se, whose kingdom is not of this 
 world. He will only claim that Christology is the vessel 
 in which this morality was shipped from Judea, to Damas- 
 cus, Alexandria and Rome, and distributed fr in those 
 points far east, west, south and north, and as such a vessel 
 it was quite a success. Besides this, he will claim that the 
 will of man must have an incentive to encourage and 
 strengthen him in the practical realization of that which 
 he has learned to be good, right and proper, and Christ
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 49 
 
 ology has proved such an incentive, which we can not un- 
 conditionally admit, and will discuss it later on; here, 
 however, for argument sake we admit it all. 
 
 If I borrow every day twenty five dollars from you and 
 pay y u back twenty dollars a day you would not get 
 richer by this operation. All the moral doctrine in pos 
 session of Christianity is borrowed bodily from Judaism. 
 How could it come now to us to teach morals? It could 
 not give us back all it borrowed, because it lost largely 
 from its original capital, hence we could expect only 
 twenty dollars for the t-.venty five dollars loaned. We are 
 too far advanced to do any such business This is not 
 said in fun, it is a solid fact. With Moses the revelations 
 of Deity closed ; so much and no more the human mind is 
 enabled to know of the Supreme Being, that he is and 
 what he is, that he rules and how he rules. Reason has no 
 means to rise beyond the infinite, absolute, eternal One 
 who is the source and cause of all being. No phantasy, no 
 intellect and no acquired wisdom can soar higher, there is 
 the limit of human ability ; and so did Moses see and 
 teach his Jehovah, nothing can be added to it. All theos- 
 ophists, theologians and philosophers after Moses could 
 not and did not add one iota to our knowledge of God 
 where Mo?es leaves us. That God is merciful, beneficent, 
 long-suffering, but just, the highest ideal of grace and truth 
 which man could possibly conceive, that he is our Father 
 and we are his children, of him and in him, Moses has ex- 
 plained mo-i expressively and most impressively; that it 
 is man's duty to love God with all his heart, with all his 
 soul and with all his might, to love our neighbor, to love 
 the stranger, to embrace lovingly God and his creation, by 
 which we remain in continual connection with God and 
 nature, was revealed fully and abundantly to Israel, di- 
 rectly and indirectly, by Moses. Nothing was, nothing 
 could possibly be added thereto ; the mind of man and the 
 reason of mankind can not rise higher in conceiving the 
 Absolute Deity, the divine in nun or the interconnection 
 of the universal with the individualized spirit. 
 
 We furthermore know with moral certitude that all
 
 50 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 teachings, doctrines, precepts, law, commandments, or in 
 any other form concerning form of worship, faith in im- 
 mortality and providence, forgiveness of sin, all ethical 
 principles, all moral doctrines and commandments, if true, 
 humane and beneficial, are no more and no less than 
 the necessary sequences of our conceptions of Deity, from 
 which they flow with inevitable necessity as categoric 
 imperatives, imperative categories as laid down in the Dec- 
 alogue and elsewhere. As is a man's or nation's or any 
 system's conception of Deity, so true or false, so high or 
 low, is their moral conception, their ethical principle or 
 principles. In Moses we have the loftiest and purest con- 
 ception of Deity, hence also the loftiest and purest moral 
 conception, the most eminent ethical principle and princi- 
 ples, to which nothing can possibly be added, although 
 much could be and has been taken away. 
 
 Christianity started out originally, earnestly, zealously and 
 energetically with the Mosaic God-conception, somewhat 
 dimmed by the then prevailing mysticism, Gnosticism and 
 Alexandrian electicism ; and took along from home as much 
 of the moral principle as was compatible with that dimmed 
 conception of Deity. It was meek, gentle, affectionate, tol- 
 erant and unselfish. The further away from its birthplace 
 it went, the more conquests it made among the Gentiles, the 
 more it accommodated itself and its God-conception to 
 pagan notions, sentiments, habits, forms and heritages. As 
 its God-conception was toned down, so its moral principle 
 was enfeebled. When it came to power it was arrogant, 
 combative, intolerant, its meekness and gentility were 
 turned into a haughty spirit of persecution, its unselfish- 
 ness was drowned in despotic imperialism and an imperi- 
 ous hierarchy, its humane affections were submerged in 
 the barbarous rudeness of half-civilized masses, from all of 
 which it never did fully recover. When it first broke forth 
 in its complete heathen garb in the Crusades, it bore no 
 more resemblance to its original state than a block house 
 does to a gorgeous palace, as every knowing Christian of 
 to-day will readily confirm. It is evident, therefore, that as 
 the God conception was obscured under the mist of pagan
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 51' 
 
 notions, in the same ratio the moral principle was de- 
 graded, as even Paul of Tarsus said, truth became a mock- 
 ery and God's law a dead letter, buried under the rubbish 
 of fantastic speculations, pervert and froward practices. 
 Christianity did not recover yet from the dogmatism of 
 the Medieval church, and just so is its moral principle 
 sickly yet, as morbid as its God-conception ; it can teach 
 us no morals theoretically. Judaism also, you say, retro- 
 graded. Indeed it did, lamentably so. It learned too 
 much of its neighbors. But it never degraded its God- 
 conception, and so its moral principle remained intact, 
 sound, firm and unalloyed. The literature of both Chris- 
 tians and Jews, from the dark ages of mysticism and igno- 
 rance, afford proof positive in this matter. 
 
 That is all theory and speculation, one might say. Take 
 into consideration the practical results and you will find 
 that after all Christianity has built up this civilized world 
 on three continents with all its grand institutions of justice, 
 virtue and righteousness not, however, without the aid of 
 Hebrew and Moor. Is this no mundane advantage? Must 
 it not appear so clearly, especially to the Hebrew, who has 
 neither king nor country? Thank you for this little re- 
 minder which we hear so often and indelicately, although 
 there is not overmuch truth in it. Christology no more 
 than Greco-Roman heathenism built up no civilization as 
 an improvement on the former. The Christian empires of 
 to-day are in proportion no more powerful and no better 
 organized than the Roman Empire was in its day. Slavery, 
 serfdom, despotism and corruption in all strata of society, 
 are to-day not wiped out in Christendom, the feudal laws, 
 originating in robbery, are extant, and fanaticism is ram- 
 pant yet. 
 
 If the Messiah produced this civilization, then you must 
 give credit to Jupiter, Zeus and Chronos, who did the same 
 thing in a much shorter time, as it took Christendom fif- 
 teen to sixteen centuries to produce anything like a decent 
 civilization, although they were the heirs of Rome, Athens 
 and Jerusalem. Did the Greco-Roman heathens whip more 
 slaves than did the Christian knights? Did they shed more
 
 52 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 blood in war than the Christian potentates? Did the Roman 
 lords oppress and rob their subjects more than did the 
 Christian barons, princes and kings by the grace of God? 
 Did those heathens steal, rob, murder, lie, swindle defraud, 
 bribe and misrepresent facts more than did the Christians? 
 The Romans threw the captives of war before ferocious 
 beasts and were delighted with the sport, and Christians tor- 
 tured and roasted alive witches, heretics, Jews, Mohamme- 
 dans and American Indians, and sang to it the praise of the 
 Lord. That Christian civilization which is superior to the 
 Roman is not two hundred years old yet, in the main it 
 dates from the American and the French revolutions, and 
 is limited yet to one-half of Christendom, the other half 
 stands to-day below the Greco-Roman civilization. This 
 superior civilization was not produced by Christology or by 
 the Church at all; it was produced by the progress of the 
 moral principle in the consciousness of humanity, the prog- 
 ress of commerce and industry, the discoveries of Schwarz, 
 Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Guttenberg and Columbus, all 
 of whom the Church opposed. Cromwell and the Puritans 
 were the only religious factors who assisted in producing 
 this civilization, and they were heretics, who did cling most 
 tenaciously to the Old Testament, with hardly a trace of or- 
 thodox dogma about them. 
 
 Practically the Hebrew's morality is certainly not below 
 that of the Christian. He is as merciful, benevolent, libe- 
 ral generous, peace-loving and law-abiding as any good 
 Christian. His family relations are a-t pure, his daughters 
 as chaste and his business relations as proper j\s one has a 
 right to expect from the best Christian. And he is and 
 does all that without the devil with the lash swinging whip- 
 ping him into virtue and righteousness, without the priest's 
 hell and surveillance, and the Holy Ghost's impetus or in- 
 centive to strengthen his will to overcome his lethargy, to 
 make him feel decently. The Hebrew has no king of his 
 own, so Greece has not, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor Sweden, 
 nor even Prussia; most all potentates are foreigners in 
 their own countries. The Hebrews thank God that they 
 have no king. They have as much country as anybody else
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 53 
 
 has, except the barons of England and Russia, they own it 
 all, and the poor man is a tolerated tenant, as a precious 
 heritage of the Christian civilization. No nation has a 
 country any longer, every country is inhabited by different 
 nationalities and mongrel races. Jerusalem is in the hands 
 of strangers, so is Constantinople, Cairo and Bombay, Alex- 
 andria and New York City. None of the ancient nations 
 now exists intact, and none of the modern nations is a na- 
 tion in fact. Who is usually the best man of the two, the 
 persecutor or the persecuted, the fanatic or his victim? 
 Ask history and it will reply in favor of the Hebrew. 
 Neither practically nor theoretically, as far as this mun- 
 dane life and happiness are concerned, could the Hebrew 
 possibly learn anything of or gain any actual advantage by 
 Christology, therefore do not molest him, he would not 
 do it.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MUNDANE HAPPINESS DEPENDS ON INTELLIGENCE, NOT ON 
 CHRISTOLOGY. 
 
 unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call under- 
 standing a chosen friend : to deliver thee from the 
 strange woman, the stranger with her beguiling speech." 
 (Proverbs vii. 4, 5.) This says that wisdom and under- 
 standing afford protection against the allurements of vice 
 and sin, the beguiling counsel of the irrational instincts. If 
 unbridled these instincts sacrifice life's real happiness to 
 a brief, momentary gratification; if under proper control 
 they contribute continually to man's mundane happiness. 
 
 If this be so and so the wise King Solomon says in all 
 variations in the first nine chapters of his Proverbs then 
 we know that the impetus to and the supporter of the will 
 to do the good and right and to shun the opposite is intel- 
 ligence, or, as the Book calls it, " Wisdom and understand- 
 ing ; " not the Holy Ghost, but the human spirit, is the 
 comforter, guide and protector of man, the Creator's gift to 
 every human being, as you might expect from a just and 
 benign God, who distributes equally his gift of happiness 
 among all his creatures. Said Job, " And thou sayest to 
 man (all the children of Adam), Behold the fear of Jehovah 
 is wisdom, and to eschew evil is understanding." 
 
 If this be so we may lay down the proposition : 
 
 The second, though not secondary , factor producing mundane 
 advantage, success and happiness, is intelligence, on the opera- 
 tion, development, progress and steady application of which 
 man's happiness depends. 
 
 Nobody doubts the correctness of this proposition in all 
 worldly affairs. The more intelligently and circumspect- 
 ively any piece of work is begun and accomplished, the 
 more successful will it prove. Luck, chance and brainless 
 
 (54)
 
 A DEFENSE OF JTDAI.-M. 55 
 
 labor may exceptionally prove beneficial, but generally in- 
 telligent work accomplishes its purpose. This is a world 
 of cause and effect, there is nothing outside thereof. Wis- 
 dom presages the effects one wishes to produce, under- 
 standing or intelligence proper discovers the cause or 
 causes producing such effects, together with the mode and 
 method of proper application. 
 
 The intelligent laborer, mechanic, agriculturist or artificer 
 contributes vastly more to the comfort and wealth of the 
 community than any four of his thoughtless crew. The in- 
 telligent teacher teaches and develops heart and soul, the 
 unprepared schoolmaster drills mechanically. A regiment 
 of intelligent soldiers is worth three of machine warriors. 
 The same is the case with industrials, merchants, bankers, 
 professional men, politicians and statesmen, the most in- 
 telligent connected with the requisite energy and mor|ality 
 is also the most successful and approaches nearest to perfec- 
 tion in his particular vocation, hence he achieves so much 
 more success and happiness from his labor, while he is of 
 so much more benefit to his fellow-men, contributing so 
 much more to their happiness. 
 
 If reasoning from analogy is legitimate, we might say in- 
 telligence is here one of the main causes of mundane hap- 
 piness ; furthermore there can be no more essentiality in the 
 effect than in the cause, happiness in quantity and in quality 
 depends on the quantity and quality of the efficient intelli- 
 gence ; therefore this must hold good also in regard to eter- 
 nal happiness in that other state of existence. The Jewish 
 Aristotelian philosophers, indeed, consider this axiomatic 
 truth ; but we are not to discuss here this point, being 
 foreign to our subject, with which we proceed. 
 
 All morality and morals depend upon the intelligence, and 
 can, in quantity and quality, only be corresponding to it. 
 Men may be born blind, deaf, without the proper organs or 
 limbs, but no man is born without the capacity of conscience. 
 Conscience is characteristic of human nature and appears 
 active in every human being, infants and idiots excepted. 
 Every one feels and knows that the good, the right, the true 
 are good and ought to be done, and that wrong is wrong and
 
 56 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 ought to be shunned. The most degraded criminal respects 
 the righteous man above the wicked Few are so debased 
 as not to abhor the wickedness of others. The moral senti- 
 ment, the sent-e of duty, conscience, is in every man who is 
 not completely brutalized. A good God has given this com 
 pass to every one of his children. The definition, however, 
 as to what is right and what is wrong, is the work of reason, 
 and depends largely on outward conditions. Therefore, the 
 moral law varies in different ages and countries and depends 
 for its breadth or narrowness on the state of the intelligence 
 of individuals and nations. Aa narrow and as uncultivated 
 as is the intelligence of the savage, so is his moral code. As 
 the intelligence expands and is more enlightened among 
 nations of culture, the moral vision widens and its code is 
 enlarged. All depends at last on the grade and state of the 
 intelligence. 
 
 The same is the case with morality,* e., subjecting the de- 
 sires, wishes, impulses, instincts, passions and volitions to 
 the commandments of the moral code. The lower the in- 
 telligence, the less authority it exercises over the will ; the 
 higher the intelligence the more authority it exercises over 
 the will. The reason of all this is quite plain. The lower 
 intelligence can not look ahead very far the animal can 
 not do it at all consequently it does not calculate the evil 
 consequence of evil deeds, directly to the evil-doer himself, 
 or indirectly through the injured society; it can not see 
 how the evil deed of the individual affects society, or in bib- 
 lical language, how the iniquity of parents is visited on their 
 offspring, even to the third and fourth generations. This in- 
 tellectual inability of looking far ahead leaves the instincts 
 and passions without restraint, and they move the will to 
 prompt actions, gratifying the instincts and passions, which 
 may be good, bad or indifferent. The higher intelligence 
 does look far ahead this is its very nature calculates the 
 consequences of every deed or omission, as experience 
 teaches, shrinks back at the dire consequences of evil deeds 
 and eschews them, or is prompted by the gratifying results 
 of the good deeds and seeks the opportunities to do them.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 57 
 
 So it is intelligence again which lead? to a higher morality 
 by the higher authority it exercises upon the will.* 
 
 The religion which the individual or the community pro- 
 fesses exercises a marked influence on its professors. Its 
 finished and authoritatively established laws, command- 
 ments, doctrines and precepts support and direct the intel- 
 ligence to define correctly that which the conscience in 
 general or individual cases calls good or bad, as the indi- 
 vidual intelligence does not and can not in all cases appeal 
 to itself and wait for its own decisions, just as it is with 
 the public law in general. Conscience, for instance, de- 
 clares that it is good to be grateful to parents, as they are 
 our first and greatest benefactors, the protecting angels of 
 God for the tender plant of childhood. But if parents do 
 not care for their offspring, neglect or even abandon them, 
 reason asks, Does the son or daughter owe them any spe- 
 cial consideration? If father or mother be low and de- 
 spicable, rebellious and worthies?, does the child owe them 
 any particular respect? Reason might arrive at different 
 and contradictory decisions on these points ; religion, how- 
 ever, has decided the question and commands: "Honor 
 thy father and thy mother," or " Every man shall fear his 
 father and his mother." It makes no difference whatso- 
 ever they be or do, being thy father and thy mother you 
 owe them honor and respect and whatever these senti- 
 ments suggest and prompt you to do for them. Conscience 
 considers it bad and wrong to slay a human being. If, 
 however, a person is too old and decripit to enjoy the boon 
 of life, in painful and woful agony, without hope of recov- 
 ery, like Saul and Jonathan on Mount Gilboa, or the hap- 
 less child of wretched parents who could only raise it to a 
 life of misery, reason asks, Is it not best to slay them, is it 
 not best for themselves and society to slay them? Religion 
 decides the question apodictically, '* Thou shalt not kill," 
 and shuts out all individual opinions on the subject. So 
 your religion decides the questions in all cases where the 
 individual intelligence, or even the intelligence of a nation 
 or nations might arrive at contradictory or conflicting re- 
 sults. Nation and nations considered it just and right to
 
 58 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 have and enforce exceptional laws for different clans and 
 classes of society, more or less oppressive, and it is held so 
 yet ; but your religion tells you once for all and forever : 
 "One law and one statute shall be for you and the alien." 
 Nation and nations considered it right, century after cen- 
 tury, that certain men are privileged to enslave and hold 
 in bondage their fellow-men, and it is held so yet in various 
 forms in different communities, yes, right here in this 
 State and in this city. Your religion, eo ipso, forbids to make 
 a slave or bondsman of any fellow-citizen, and cuts short 
 all definitions, excuses or dodges which the individual in- 
 telligence might invent by the medium of a nation or na- 
 tions. So your religion, by its laws, commandments, ordi- 
 nances, doctrines and precepts, supports and directs the in- 
 telligence to judge and decide correctly the suggestions of 
 conscience. Religion strengthens, prompts and elevates 
 both the will and the intellect. It influences the will by its 
 very revelations that there is a just God above us, a holy 
 God, to whom every wickedness is an abomination, and 
 none goes unpunished. As cause and effect are linked 
 universally, so are wickedness and misery an All-wise and 
 All-seeing God, who is present in the secret recesses of the 
 heart and witnesses every deed, every thought, sentiment, 
 wish and hope of the human being, how could one sin 
 in the presence of his Maker? It rouses, prompts and 
 strengthens the intelligence by directing it to this cosmos 
 as God's creation, wherein the will, power and wisdom of 
 the eternal God are realized, actualized, indellibly im- 
 printed, although readable to human intelligence only. It 
 rouses and raises the intelligence far above this material 
 world, and its mechanism in search of the cause and the 
 cause of all cause, the source of all being, all wisdom, jus- 
 tice and love, prompts it and presses it onward from the 
 finite to the infinite, the timely to the eternal, the perish- 
 able to the absolute, the manifold and fragmentary to 
 unity and oneness. Nothing within the bounds of human 
 knowledge is so eminently and excellently fitted to rouse and 
 raise the intelligence as is the contemplation and cogita- 
 tion of the one, infinite, absolute, only and true God.
 
 VS. PRO<ET.YTIZIN<; ("HKISTI AXITV. 59 
 
 This is the influence of your religion on the mundane ad- 
 vantages of man, on his morals, morality and intelligence, 
 which are the great factors of happiness, and, as stated 
 already, of immortality and eternal bliss. This solves the 
 historical riddle of Israel's covenant with God, preserva- 
 tion and selection by benign Providence, Israel's superior 
 morality and intelligence among the nations, which even 
 his enemies of to-day loudly proclaim as the cause of their 
 hatred against God's chosen people. 
 
 And now comes the conversionist, and with fair or foul 
 means urges on us the particular Christology of this or that 
 sect, the morals of which are far below the ethical code of 
 Judaism, and the morality which it produced rendered 
 visible also to the cursory inspector in the large pictures of 
 public government and its history of eighteen centuries, and 
 prevailing yet in the majority of Christian countries, stands 
 far below the Hebrew ideal ; that very Christology which 
 cripples the intelligence by imposing upon it myths and 
 legends, mysteries and impossibilities, to drag it down from 
 its height of buoyancy and freedom into the dim and dusky 
 dale of uninquired faith and direct opposition to reason's 
 rights and reason's growth; that Christology which robs 
 man of the highest ideal of intelligence, brings the eternal 
 Deity down to the painful and helpless condition of a suffer- 
 ing man dying on Mt. Calvary, and thus destroys reason's 
 fulcrum to lift up the intelligence to the highest and holiest, 
 above this earth, above this cosmos, to the eternal, infinite 
 and absolute ; that Christology which they seek to impose 
 on you, and others consider this offering mundane advan- 
 tages. We compare notes theoretically and practically, on 
 earth or in heaven, in morals or intelligence, and necessar- 
 ily find Judaism in every point far above Christology, and 
 can not condescend to it. It can never become the world's 
 religion, while denationalized Judaism forces its way far 
 and wide and with a wonderful rapidity in this nineteenth 
 century, the future world's religion, with which Christology 
 has no more in common than Brahminism and Buddhism, 
 Zabian, or Greco-Roman Paganism have in common with 
 the modern sciences of physics and chemistry. The world
 
 60 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM. 
 
 will not accept Christology as a religion, nor will the He- 
 brews do it. It can accept only that which is in harmony 
 and unison with reason, which Christology is not and can 
 never be, as its expounders and advocates freely admit. It 
 is mystery depending on faith, neither of which subjects it- 
 self to reason, and the leading persons of the human family 
 reason. The Hebrew who submits his intelligence to de- 
 menting mysteries, gives up his ghost. Decapitation can not 
 produce that person's mundane happiness. If there is no 
 salvation in truth there is certainly none in fiction. If 
 there is damnation in reason, truth is a forlorn and forsaken 
 widow, and the prince of falsehood is the world's poten- 
 tate. So likewise in all mundane affairs, if reason is not 
 the main factor to produce happiness, then folly, ignorance 
 and stupidity are, which is good doctrine for all who wish 
 to return to the fleshpots of Egypt or to the primeval for- 
 ests of barbarism. The religion of intelligence teaches 
 mundane happiness, freedom, progress of law and civiliza- 
 tion, onward to the postulate of reason and the loftiest 
 standard of morals. The religion which teaches mysticism 
 as the tutor and taskmaster of reason, teaches the progress 
 of stupidity, slavery and fanaticism. The Hebrew will 
 never submit to Christology.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 NO CHRISTOLOGY IX THE BIBLE. 
 
 WE love the Christian as our fellow-man and Christian- 
 ity as a daughter religion of our own. The injuries of 
 the past we have forgotten long ago, the liberty, justice 
 and humanism of the present day are " bone from my 
 bone and flesh from my flesh," as was Eve from Adam, re- 
 uniting and fraternizing the discordant elements of so- 
 ciety, " and they shall be one flesh," one organic, sound 
 and sane body. For all that, and with the best will to 
 please our neighbors, we can not discover Christology in 
 the Bible, nor can we persuade ourselves that it is a re- 
 ligion in harmony with the divine principles acknowl- 
 edged as such by Jew and Gentile. It will sound some- 
 what harsh, but it is nevertheless true, that 
 
 The whole Christology, as carried along in the books of dog- 
 matic thfology, the special creed* and catechisms of Christian 
 sects, is the work of human ingenuity end scholastic specula- 
 tion, without any solid foundation in. the Old Testament Scrip- 
 tures. 
 
 It is an established principle with philosophers of his- 
 tory that all violent eruptions of fanaticism, so numerous 
 in Christendom, are not the effects of religion, which to be 
 true must be benign and tolerant ; they are the effects of 
 errors and aberrations, the excrescences of religion noth- 
 ing is too good for man to be abused which produced the 
 horror of ignited fanaticism. It is no less evident that the 
 outrages committed in Christendom in the name and be- 
 half of religion, of Christians against fellow-Christians 
 these are most numerous Jews, Mohammedans, American 
 Indians, philosophers, infidels, schismatics and sectarian?, 
 up to the murdering of Mormon elders and oppressing 
 
 Jews in Russia and Roumania invariably originated in 
 
 (61)
 
 62 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 Christology as momentarily understood in this or that 
 state or church. This always was and is now the incentive, 
 the fire brand, the dynamite bomb, working destruction. 
 It seems, therefore, logically correct to maintain that 
 Christology is no religion, it is an excrescence thereof, and 
 whoever contributes a straw to reform and correct it does 
 so much humane work. It would seem strange that in- 
 telligent men shut their eyes to these facts, if we would 
 not know how bribery makes the seeing blind, how pru- 
 dence seals the lips of the wise, how the dicta of self- 
 preservation override all other considerations, and chiefly 
 how subjective knowledge, like imagination, holds in bond- 
 age the understanding of millions. 
 
 Opposite the Orthodox Israelite, however, the Christian 
 conversionist defends this and all the other weak points of 
 Christology with the very convenient argument of super- 
 natural revelation, from which there is no appeal to reason. 
 God did so or said so, and your highest virtue is to believe 
 it, however absurd it may appear to your frail and narrow 
 reason. Then he shows you how all this was predicted by 
 the Old Testament prophets, and fulfilled in the New by 
 the Evangelical drama ; the New Testament, he says, is the 
 continuation and completion of the Old ; how can you help 
 believing it as a Divine revelation? 
 
 The intelligent Israelite, of course, would say, if indeed 
 it was prophesied in the Old Testament that God will over- 
 shadow the affianced bride of a man, and the child thus un- 
 naturally produced will not be a human being, but God 
 himself, and also a son of David, and that God, son of 
 David, appeared on earth for the sole purpose of suffering 
 painful death, in order to expiate the sins of man, to 
 appease God, who is also the crucified man himself; I 
 would think at once, either that those prophets must have 
 been under the influence of delusive visions, which they ex- 
 pounded contrary to the religious teachings of Moses and 
 the other prophets, or I myself labor under a delusion and 
 am unable to understand those prophecies ; for both can 
 not be true they contradict and exclude one another. The 
 New Testament can no more be the continuation and com-
 
 VS. PROSELYTI/INi; CHKISTI AXITV. 63 
 
 pletion of the Old than the incarnation of Buddha, the Hin- 
 doo Trinity, the sufferings of Prometheus or the sacrifie of 
 Mesha's son can be the continuation of the Koran, as they 
 have nothing in common besides the various points in 
 ethics. 
 
 The Israelite who knows and tolerably well understands 
 his Bible would simply say : Show me in this entire book 
 one passage which informs me that (a) God said he will 
 some time be not God, but a man God his own and also 
 David's son ; (6) God, the Creator of all things, will have a 
 mother, who is also his spouse ; (c) God will die on the cross 
 because he could not otherwise forgive the sins of man ; (d) 
 God will rise from the dead, ascend to heaven and sit at his 
 own right hand. 
 
 Or if that Israelite be a little more generous and consider- 
 ate, and the conversionist more enlightened and liberal, he 
 would ask of the zealous man to show him anywhere in the 
 Bible, not in dubious and equivocal terms which everybody 
 could expound to suit his preconceived notions, but in clear 
 and intelligible words 
 
 (a) that God promised to send a Messiah, the son of David 
 or any other man, to save, redeem, ransom or liberate the 
 people of Israel, any other people or individual, when the 
 word Messiah never occcurs in the Prophets* except as 
 a title of an anointed high priest and the kings Saul, David, 
 Solomon and the heathen Cyrus (Isaiah xlv.), when there 
 is not the mention of or allusion to an}* Messiah to come, or 
 any savior to reconstruct the kingdom of Israel, the throne 
 of David, or to save a soul in the whole realm of God's ex- 
 istence. 
 
 (6) If by exegetic or homiletic artifice, by disjoining pas- 
 
 * In Psalms ii it refers to Solomon. In Lamentations iv 20, it re- 
 fers to King Joyakin (2 Kings) carried captive to Babylon (2 
 Kings xxiv. 8-16) being the son of Joshiah, who was again king of 
 all Israel. Pie was called again Messiah. Psalms Ixxxix. 52 refers 
 to the same king and catastrophe. In all earlier Psalms the term 
 Messiah refers to David or Solomon. Psalms cv. 15, Messiah oc- 
 curs in the plural number, and refers to the Patriarchs, as is evi- 
 dent from the context
 
 64 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 sages from their context and conjoining the distant phrases 
 centuries apart from one another, one can discover some or 
 another martyr savior to be sent to Israel or other people ; 
 how do you know that it must refer to Jesus of Nazareth? 
 Perhaps it refers to Judah Maccabee, to his brothers Jona- 
 than and Simon, to Simon Bar Cochba or any other of the 
 heroic martyrs who sacrificed their lives to save God's peo- 
 ple and their religion, or the prophecies are not yet but will 
 be fulfilled in some person who, for all we know, may appear 
 any day ; your kabbalistic construction of prophecies will fit 
 to the one as well as the other. We know for sure that the 
 Maccabean brothers did die in defense of the sacred cause 
 and did save it, where is your evidence that Jesus saved one 
 in heaven or on earth? You must know that on earth hu- 
 man nature is the same as it was thousands of years ago, 
 the crimes, vices and corruptions are all the same ; and that 
 which transpires in heaven you do not know and can not 
 show. 
 
 (c) If by some means or other the mystic expounder of 
 Holy Scriptures could overcome d.fficulties a and 6, he 
 would have to meet this third point, viz : What entitles any 
 reader of the prophecies to the supposition that any prophet 
 had in view a very distant future, when in most instances 
 they spoke plainly of present affairs and their next conse- 
 quence?, where they do go beyond they merely repeat or 
 expound the words of Moses. The prophets to whom the 
 conversionist refers lived betweeen 800 and 450 B. C., where 
 is the rational ground for maintaining that those patriotic 
 seers were at any time so flighty and visionary as to leave 
 the solid ground of present events and their probable out- 
 comings, fly 500 to 800 years into the future and prophesy 
 what? the coming of a Messiah who would overthrow and 
 uproot the covenant and the faith of Israel, especially if one 
 knows that no such an idea as a coming Messiah, crucified 
 or glorified, martyred or triumphant, c mid possibly be dis- 
 covered in Moses as little indeed as any sanction of poly- 
 theism or trinitarianism ; and f jrthermore if all those 
 prophetical passages to which expounders of Christology 
 refer can very easily and with much more justice be ex-
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 65 
 
 plained by concurrent events and their nearest conse- 
 quences. 
 
 (d) Then comes the last resort, the priest's dodge, telling 
 you: "That is what your rabbis, what all unenlightened, 
 obdurate and blind infidels pay. You must be regenerated, 
 born again, get religion, viz : that special kind of Christian 
 religion; then you will understand Scriptures and prophe 
 cies in their true light by the aid of the Holy Ghost, and you 
 will prima vista discover the Messiah and the Church on 
 every page of the sacred volume " The argument in other 
 wo'ds, is this : Whenever you will firmly believe the Chris- 
 tian story and have subjected your reason to this belief, you 
 will approach the sacred volume with this prejudice domi- 
 neering your soul, then you will find in it all points which 
 you presupposed; or in other words, if you believe the 
 Evangelical story, you will believe to see it predicted by the 
 Hebrew prophets. That is the way true Christians read the 
 Old Testament. It will do well for believers, but is very poor 
 logic for other people They will argue : Then it is God's 
 fault that we can not see your Christology in the Old Tes- 
 tament, as he dictated those predictions to ths prophets in 
 such a style that the Christians only can understand them 
 and we can not. We can not imagine that the All-wise is 
 such an unskilled and obscure writer that only th jse should 
 be able to understand him whose mind is in a state contrary 
 to reason ; for what is it to get religion, to be regenerated, 
 to b3come converted, if it is not a suspension of reason and 
 a submission thereof to a faith contrary to reason? The 
 question then arises : What is it in any particular case, is it 
 not an emotional insanity, a fit of indigestion, an attack of 
 hysterics, melancholia, or distemper, or any nervous disir- 
 der? None can tell. Thus much is sure, if it is not by 
 reason, it is by imagination or disease. We can not ex 
 pect that one in such a state of mind knows and under- 
 stands better than we do. 
 
 The Hebrew, however, will say : Nothing reasonably en- 
 titles you in any state of mind to claim that your ancestors 
 and teachers understood the Hebrew Bible better than 
 ours did, and these consistently and positively deny the
 
 66 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM. 
 
 existence of any prophecy or allusion in the Bible to the 
 Christian story or Christology. No rational man claims to 
 understand the Greek or Latin classics better than the 
 Greeks or Romans did ; how could the ex-heathens of for- 
 eign tongues have understood the Hebrew Bible better 
 than the Hebrew in his own country up to 400 A. C ? The 
 authors of the Christian books, it seems, Paul excepted, 
 did not even know the Hebrew, for all their quotations in 
 the Gospels, Acts and most of the Epistles are from the 
 Greek translation called Septuagint, and not from the He- 
 brew Bible, and, what is most remarkable, Jesus also, ac- 
 cording to the Synoptics, quoted from the Greek and not 
 from the Hebrew original. No intelligent man will ever be 
 able to convince himself that the Christian, because he is a 
 Christian, understands the Hebrew Bible better than the 
 Israelite, because he is no Christian, as little as one could 
 admit that the Latin or Germanic Christian understands 
 the Koran better than the Arab does. 
 
 After this general review of the Scriptural argument in 
 support of Christology it will be proper to review in detail 
 the various Bible passages in this connection, with which 
 we begin in the next chapter, although as long as these gen- 
 eral arguments are not refuted, a review of the details 
 would seem superfluous, and we do not apprehend a suc- 
 cessful refutation from any of the conversion agents or so 
 cieties. As a general thing they do not argue at all, they 
 preach, which is quite wholesome for believers and does 
 not require much brain work. The pulpit is no forum and 
 Christology is no philosophy, hence those gentlemen argue 
 not, they merely state.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 NO CHRISTOLCHJY IN M 
 
 THE ancient Hebrews called God, the Supremo BUHL', 
 ELOIIJ.M, as is recorded in the first verse of the Scrip- 
 tures. With Moses, we are inf6rmed, there came the word 
 JEHOVAH, the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of the 
 Supreme Being, enison DE>. In course of time Jehovah 
 became among the Hebrews the only proper name of God, 
 and the word Elohim was used in the appelative form. It 
 was applied to pagan gods, to judges, also to angels, so 
 that if applied to the one and only God it was necessary to 
 say HA-ELOIIIM, THE Elohim, as we now spell Lord with a 
 capital L, if it is intended to designate God. Scriptures 
 contain many other terms designating the Supreme Being, 
 like AIL SIIADDI, " the Self-sufficient All-supporter," AIL 
 ELYON, '' the Most High," ADONI, " the Ruler or Governor," 
 HAT-ZUR, " the Rock/' in later times connected with 
 ZEI'.AOTH, " Lord of Hosts," in royalistic times also, MELECH, 
 " King," and other appelatives, but these two names, Elohim 
 and Jehovah, were most frequently and alternately used 
 to designate the one and only God. This is best illustrated 
 by the very first sentence of the Decalogue, beginning, 
 ' And Elohim spake all these words, saying v 'I, Jehovah, am 
 thy Elohim, who,'' etc. ; the Shema, " Hear, Israel, Jehovah 
 is our Elohim," etc., and by the people's exclamation on Mt. 
 Carmel, "Jehovah, he is" the Elohim." In this connection, 
 however, we need not define all these terms, we have only to 
 place in proper light the term Elohim. 
 
 ELOHIM. 
 
 The two words, Jehovah and Elohim, are purely Hebraic, 
 they are found in no other language. Elohitn is supposed 
 bv trinitarians not by manv now any more having the 
 
 (67)
 
 68 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 plural form ' : im." suggests a plurality of Deity. It is the 
 plural of Elovahh. Against this we have to say, if Elohim 
 .means more than one God, it does not necessarily mean 
 trinity ; it may nvan the two gods of Zoroaster, or the thou- 
 sands of heathendom. In this latter signification the term 
 appears even in the Decalogue, but as trinity it appears no- 
 where in the Old or New Testament. But it is no plural, 
 although it ends in " im," like Shomayim, ''heaven ; " Mayim, 
 " water ; "* Chayim, "life;" Neurim, "youth;" Pam'm, 
 " face ; " Mitzraim, " Egypt ; " Yerushalaim, " Jerusalem," 
 and many other Hebrew words, which, as in other lan- 
 guages, have the plural form and singular signification. 
 It is a prehistoric term, preceding the pure monotheism of 
 Abraham, and was originally coined to designate the Deity 
 as the unity and source of all elements and forces of na- 
 ture. When Abraham discarded that pantheism he could 
 not banish the word from the language, but coined the 
 more spiritual name of EL-SHADDI, "the Self-sufficient, All- 
 supporting Power." This was still too materialistic for 
 Moses, and he named the Deity by the purely abstract term 
 of " Absolute Existence," which is the tetragrammaton, 
 without eliminating the older terms from the language. 
 When the Christians of the fourth century advanced the 
 Elohim argument in favor of the trinity, we see from Tal- 
 mud Babli and Yerushalmi, the rabbis pointed to all pass- 
 ages in the Bible where the verb with Elohim as its subject 
 is always in the singular number; hence it could not have 
 been understood as a plural. Besides that Elohim is purely 
 Hebraic, and is employed by Moses and the Prophets. You 
 might just as well suppose to find Baal, Ormuzd, Zeus or 
 Jupiter in the New Testament as a trinity or polytheism in 
 the Old, espacially in Mosas, who might be called the arch- 
 enemy of all such speculations. He advances that God 
 himself told him, "No mm can see me and live," which, 
 translated in our language, says, if God indeed were triune, 
 man could not know it, for none could know the nature, es- 
 sence or substance of the eternal Deity. We know not 
 what life, intellect, or even what force is, how should we be 
 able to comprehend what the source and substance of life
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 69 
 
 and intellect, the power of all powers, is in his very nature? 
 In nature and revelation there is but one God discern- 
 ible; if the Christian believes three in one he must have 
 I- irued it from another revelation or imagination, being 
 ii-ither in reason nor in nature ; in revelation it is certainly 
 not, the New Testament positively knows nothing of the 
 trinity, and the Old certainly not; hence the dogma is a 
 piece of imagination hatched out in the third and fourth 
 centuries to adjust contradictory statements of the Gospels 
 and various traditional beliefs concerning the offices, per- 
 son and nature of the Messiah who was son of David to 
 the nascent church, Metathron to Paul, Logos to John, and 
 finally one of the trinity to ex-heathens, hanged according 
 to Peter, crucified according to Paul, ascended and deified 
 according to the church. That is all right to the Christian, 
 but when the conversionist comes with that matter to the 
 Jew he must tell him it is a piece of speculation, originat- 
 ing in imagination, which neither Moses and the Prophets 
 nor any other Jewish mind could ever hatch or advance. 
 The Jew always had too much respect for the very name of 
 God and was too realistic a reasoner, always remaining 
 within the bounds of nature, to hit upon such an idea; the 
 Kabbalah grew upon Hindo-Parsic Christian soil. 
 
 XKSIS i. 26. 
 
 But here it is written in the same first chapter of Genesis, 
 that God said, '' Let us make man," does not God speak of 
 himself in the plural number as potentates and newspaper 
 editors do, and it can not be said of God that the idiosyn- 
 crasy of an imagined self-importance and self-aggrandize- 
 ment swells his head to the bombastic "we," consequently 
 here is the declaration that God is a plurality. True, it may 
 just as well mean a thousand-fold or a dual God as trinity, 
 but the Christian comes to the passage with the trinity pre- 
 judice, hence this " we " signifies to him a triune God. The 
 non-Christian, however, observes in that very same passase 
 all verbs in the singular number. "God made" the "body of 
 clay. " God blew in his nostrils" the spirit of life, "God 
 created inan " when the soul changed the form of clay into
 
 70 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 a God-like being, and all these verbs are in the singular 
 number. This " we" must be plural, says one party, " God 
 held a counsel with the family on high," says another, and 
 the one piece of exegesis is as good or as bad as the other, 
 for neither of them is based upon the terms or the spirit of 
 the whole piece in which the expression occurs. Here in the 
 first place we are told that God " created " first of all, heaven 
 and earth. Any child, almost, can see that this means that 
 God first created nature with its forces, laws, harmony and 
 material. After that first deed of the Almighty he creates 
 no more except animal life (verse 21) and human nature 
 (verse 27), where the verb bara, "he created," occurs again ; 
 because animal life is justly supposed to be a new creation, 
 it is not discernible in physical nature ; human nature, with 
 its superior intellect, ideality, mental variability, and that 
 wonderful capacity of education and elevation to all con- 
 sciousness, is again a new creation in addition to animal life. 
 In all other acts of creation, the word " created " is used no 
 more ; God " said " let there be light, let the water be gath- 
 ered together, let the earth sprout grass, let there be lumina- 
 ries, let the water abound in moving, living beings, let the 
 earth bring forth living beings, etc. That is, God commands 
 and nature works in obedience to each command. Man be- 
 ing a product of nature and a special creation of God, it is 
 quite plain that he said to creative nature in this case, " Let 
 us make man." Those mystic Rabbis, who made angels of 
 nature's forces understand the passage that God counseled 
 with them; the trinitarian, however, has nothing in that 
 grand piece of Scripture to support his supposition. 
 
 GENESIS xrv. 4; xxxii. 25. 
 
 The funniest piece of exegesis is that the 318 men who 
 went to war with Abraham (Genesis xiv. 14), signify Jesus, 
 who was the army of Abraham, although it? 1 in numerals 
 makes but 316, and yet Barnabas says it was the greatest 
 truth he ever uttered. Next to it comes that the man who 
 wrestled with Jacob till the morning dawned (Genesis xxxii. 
 25) was also Jesus, which gave rise to the English phi 
 he wrestles with the Lord. That Eesh, " man," mentioned
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 71 
 
 there in course of time grew into an angel (Hosea xii. 4-6), 
 and with Christian interpreters it became Jesus, although 
 that whole story, says Maimonides, was a dream, or as that 
 other man isavs, he (Eesh) must have been a freebooter, that 
 wanted to rob Jacob, and this " other " man appears to have 
 a correct understanding of the obscure passage. Legends 
 grow in proportion to the distance from their source. (Com- 
 pare Exodus xiv. with Psalms cxiv.) 
 
 GENESIS XLVIII. 16. 
 
 When Father Jacob said to the sons of Joseph, " The 
 angel that redeemed me from all evil, may bless the lads," 
 he certainly did not think of a ivdi-cmer to make his ap- 
 pearance on earth fifteen centuries later; such a power of 
 prediction was not given to Jacob. Nor was the Messiah 
 expected to be of Ephraim or Manasseh. He certainly 
 thought of his own iron will and unshaken faith in the jus- 
 tice and goodness of Providence, which was his angel re- 
 deeming him from all the evil which he encountered on life's 
 meandering path, therefore, he continued, "May there be 
 called upon them my name, and the name of my ancestors," 
 i. e., this, our character, may be duplicated in the lads thus 
 blessed. This is a blessing indeed worthy of a venerable 
 patriarch to bestow upon his grandsons, as we, under such 
 circumstances might say, may the character of our family be 
 continued and honored in your live*, my sons. 
 
 <;K.\ESIS XLIX. 10. 
 
 But then comes Jacob's blessing to Judah, " the scepter 
 shall not depart from Judah " (Genesis'xlix. 10) ; therefore 
 the Messiah had to be a son of David, who was a scion of 
 Judah, simply because Jacob said so, although it is not 
 maintained there that God said so to Jacob. This is a piece 
 of misinterpretation common to both Jews and Christians. 
 It is ridiculous to suppose that the shepherd prince Jacob 
 knew anything of a scepter which a thousand years after 
 that still was a thing unknown, unknown even to David and 
 Solomon, to all the kings of Judah and Israel, and all other 
 kin;j;s of that high antiquity. The man who speaks the Ian-
 
 72 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 guage of nature so forcibly that he compares his sons to the 
 lion, wolf, ass, serpent, speaks also of so artificial a thing as 
 a scepter, as a symbol of royalty, although the Hebrew lan- 
 guage has many centuries later to adopt the term " Sharbit " 
 (in Esther) to name that thing. In the same place the word 
 " Shebet " occurs three times ; twice it is rendered u tribe," 
 but that once it must mean scepter, because prejudiced ex- 
 pounders want it so, and Shiloh, then the capital of Canaan 
 (Joshua xviii.), must signify Messiah. You might just as 
 well say that Salem, Jerusalem or Philadelphia means Mes- 
 siah. The worst in the case is, the scepter did not come into 
 the hands of Judah until about six hundred years after Ja- 
 cob's death, and was lost again and never restored 586 B. C., 
 and previous to that time, after the death of King Solomon, 
 Judah ruled itself and Benjamin only, it wielded no scepter 
 over Israel any more. If Jacob prophesied the royal suprem- 
 acy to Judah for all time to come, he must have been a 
 very poor sort of a prophet The verse in question must In- 
 rendered by any honest translator : 
 
 "No tribe shall turn from Judah, 
 And the commander from between his feet (warriors), 
 Until he shall come to Shiloh (capital of Canaan), 
 And nations (of Canaan) shall have submitted to him " 
 
 This translation is literal. Honest men can see no more 
 in it than Jacob's will that the tribes should remain united 
 with Judah, who should lead them in the conquest of the 
 land of Canaan and be their head until this is accomplished 
 excluding every idea of prophecy; and this was literally 
 carried out. Judah always was in the van (Numbers ii. ; 
 Joshua xiv. 6 to xv. 63 and xviii. 1 ; Judges 1. 1, 2. ) 
 
 DEUTERONOMY XVIII. 9-12. 
 
 The prophet, however, whom God promised to Israel 
 (Deuteronomy xviii. 9-21), that means Jesus surely, say> 
 the Christian exegetic, namely, he who does not read the 
 whole passage; which can surely not mean that or any 
 other Messiah. For, in the first place, it is stated that the 
 prophet promised should be " like Moses," and Moses was 
 no god, no son of a god, and no person in the trinity ; it
 
 VS. TROSELYTIZIX ; CHRISTIANITY. 73 
 
 was not bis mother, but his sister, that was called Miriam, 
 and Joseph was not his father, but his great-great-grand- 
 uncle; there exists no more similarity between Moses and 
 .ICsus than between the architect of a grand structure and 
 the fresco painter that decorates some of its rooms. In the 
 second place, it is stated there plainly enough that Israel 
 should not be dependent for the knowledge of God's will 
 on sorcerers, diviners, astrologers, necromancers, thauma- 
 turgists, and the like, but God will always send them a 
 prophet like unto Moses, who should announce to them the 
 divine messages, ' ; to whom ye shall hearken," and not to 
 impostors like those who mislead the Gentiles. If the 
 promise does not mean that God would always send 
 prophets to Israel, as he actually did, but waited fifteen 
 hundred years till he keut his word, then Israel was per- 
 mitted, or rather forced, all that time to consult those im- 
 postors concerning the will of God, and yet the Law and 
 the Prophets forbid this repeatedly and expressly, and Saul 
 already made the attempt to drive that kind of people from 
 the land, although he did not succeed fully. (1 Samuel 
 xxviii. 9.) A man who gave his sanction to the same 
 superstition which Moses promised should be prevented and 
 replaced by divine messages, viz : the existence and de- 
 moniac power of the evil spirits, as Jesus did, was certainly 
 no prophet like Moses, who denounced this and every other 
 superstition of that kind, not could he be the prophet pre- 
 dicted by Moses. With that piece of exegesis Christian in- 
 terpreters did a poor kind of business, for they must admit 
 that Jesus anyhow was only like Moses, hence he was no 
 god. Then they must admit that either all the ghost 
 stories of the New Testament are fabulous, or Jesus was 
 not the prophet promised to Israel. And lastly they must 
 confess that either God did not fulfill his promise and keep 
 his word for fifteen centuries, till the Messiah appeared, 
 then nobody could think or imagine that this was the man 
 whose coming Moses prophesied, and all prophets before 
 him must have been counterfeits ; or they must admit that 
 the promise means that each time will have its prophet in
 
 74 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 Israel, which admission is equal to a confession that their 
 interpretation is false. 
 
 These misinterpretations alone seem sufficient to honest 
 expounders of the Bible to send that whole canon of exe- 
 gesis to oblivion, and to characterize conversion agents still 
 harping on those often refuted arguments either as wilful 
 impostors, or too ignorant to read intelligently what is be- 
 fore them in Scriptures as plain as daylight, as men under 
 the influence of an idiosyncrasy generally do. 
 
 CEXESIS III. 
 
 Therefore it will hardly be considered necessary to enter 
 upon any special argument on Genesis iii., containing that 
 beautiful and instructive fable of Mother Eve's enticement 
 by the beguiling and cunning serpent, turned and twisted 
 into the fall of man, the original sin, the necessity of re- 
 demption and the other dogmas connected therewith. 
 Since there is no clue whatever in the whole of Moses' 
 writings to any Messiah or redeemer, of any kind of redemp- 
 tion except from the bondage of Egypt, the fable can not 
 be expounded by such a hypothesis. No person has a right 
 to expound any document by an event which transpired 
 thousands of years post festum, how much less then a fable 
 which may mean a dozen different things, of which we 
 have no longer any knowledge. If so important a code of 
 religion as Christology maintains to be was hidden under 
 that fabulous garb, we would have a right to censure its 
 author in harsh terms for his unkindness and unfairness of 
 burying so important a lesson of salvation under so child- 
 like and delusive a little story, subject to any amount of 
 different interpretations. If any lesson of particular relig- 
 ious import was contained in the little story, some one of 
 the prophets must have alluded to it, which, however, is 
 not the case anywhere in the Bible The passages in the 
 Talmui referring to it were produced from 300 to 500 years 
 after the origin of Christianity, and are no more than 
 thoughtless repetitions of what Christian exenetics had ad- 
 vanced. It need hardly be said that this is certainly also 
 the case in tin- Kabbalistic literature, it being generally 1-
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING C!I RISTIAXITY. 75 
 
 lieved now that Zohar is the product of the twelfth or thir- 
 teenth Christian century. 
 
 Whatever the import of Genesis iii. is, the form is that of 
 the fable. The speaking animal, in this case the serpent, is 
 characteristic of the fable. It appears that the author be- 
 gins this narrative with the word Vehannachash, " And the 
 serpent," in quite an unusual way, to tell us at once that 
 this is a fable. Christian and Kabbalistic expounders 
 maintain the serpent was not that animal, it was the evil 
 one, although it is said expressly in the text that it was the 
 most cunning of all the beasts of the field which God had 
 made, that an enmity should always exist between the seed 
 of the woman and the seed of the serpent, and the evil one, 
 to the best of our knowledge, had no children. If Satan it 
 was, why did that author not call the thing by its right 
 name? How could we think of a personal Satan if the 
 writings of Moses and the Prophets negate and exclude 
 the existence of that prince of pessimism? If he indeed 
 meant Satan when he said serpent, how could the ex- 
 pounders know it, if they are no prophets? The serpent 
 has to remain a serpent and a speaking animal which rea- 
 sons and argues, hence the story, however didactic, in- 
 structive, suggestive and philosophical, remains a fable, 
 which no sensible man will take to be the fundamental 
 structure of the religion and salvation of the human family. 
 And yet the whole of Christology falls to the ground if this 
 story is not literally understood, as its expounders do. That 
 is like building a tower upon a woman's thimble. 
 
 None can read the introductory chapters of Genesis 
 without feeling that one of the objects of that author was to 
 dethrone the gods of ancient heathenism, which benighted 
 the nations of culture, especially in the original home of 
 Abraham, Ur of Chaldoa, and in Egypt, The earth, the 
 sea, the elements, together with all living beings, the sacred 
 animals and vegetables of Egypt included, are not only 
 one God's creatures and subject to his will, they are even 
 placed under the control of man, who should subdue them 
 and have dominion over all living beings ; hence they are 
 no gods, not as much divine even as man is, who was
 
 <0 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 made in the image of his Maker. When he comes to sun, 
 moon and stars, then most universal objects of worship, he 
 speaks extensively of the purpose of the Creator in pro- 
 ducing those luminaries, saying in as many words, clearly 
 and distinctly, these are certainly no gods, there are no ter- 
 restrial and no celestial gods. The serpent also was one of 
 the gods, an important figure in ancient mythology.* Gen- 
 esis iii. deposes that supposed divinity. Perhaps that is 
 the principal import of the fable. But there remained one 
 most dangerous divinity, more dangerous even than earth 
 and heaven, elements, luminaries and sacred animals, and 
 that is man. Also this divinity is overthrown in Genesis 
 iii., which tells us man is so long a sort of a god on earth 
 aa he lives in obedience to God's will and command ; when 
 he rebels, is led astray by his lower instincts and the specu- 
 lations prompted by them, he is driven out of paradise, 
 and his godhead vanishes. 
 
 This seems sufficient moral for one didactic fable. But 
 there appears to be much more in it. Various hypotheses and 
 theories have been advanced, but none as little as the Chris- 
 tian conception affords a satisfactory solution of the mysteri- 
 ous trees of knowledge and life, the Cherubim and the flaming 
 and revolving sword, and the truly enigmatical words after 
 the supposed fall : "And Jehovah, Elohim, said, behold man 
 hath become like one of us (or one of its kind) to know good 
 and evil" (Genesis iii. 22), corresponding to the words of the 
 serpent (verse 4). This sounds as though by this act of eat- 
 ing of the forbidden fruit, human nature had been per- 
 fected and finished, not that man fell, but he rose to a higher 
 state of perfection. All of it may or may not have been 
 intended to dethrone heathen deities and deified man espe- 
 cially ; still none can tell, with any degree of certainity, what 
 
 * Dr. Moriz Winternitz, of Vienna, pupil of Prof, Buehler and as- 
 sistant of Prof. Max Mueller, has just published in the Mittheilungtn 
 der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft, of Vienna, an interesting mono- 
 graph of forty-three pages on the Old Indian Serpent cult. The 
 arguments are chiefly derived from Assyrian sources, Pali, San- 
 skrit, Zend, etc., but the Semitic scholars will find many points re- 
 lating to the Serpent cult in the Bible and among the Arabs.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 77 
 
 the author's actual intention was, to what end he employed 
 those symbols, and symbols only they can be, as is the speak- 
 ing and arguing serpent. 
 
 Still if we admit the Christian conception of the fall of 
 man and original sin, although it .does not explain those 
 symbols and words, it does not benefit Christology, and 
 proves nothing in its favor. This sin could have poisoned 
 only Cain and Abel, for after these are disposed of in Scrip- 
 ture, we are told that Sheth was born in his likeness and 
 image, viz : of Adam, who was made Bidmuth Elohim, " in 
 the likeness of God," which certainly signifies uncorrupted, 
 sinless. (Genesis v. 1-3.) If Sheth was born in the likeness 
 of Adam, and Adam was made in the likeness of God, then 
 Sheth must have been born also in the likeness of God, with- 
 out the poison of the original sin. If this is so and none 
 can see why it should not be the original sin, if inheritable, 
 would cling only to the seed of Cain, and those only to the 
 fourth generation. (Exodus xx. 5; xxxiv. 7.) If it be main- 
 tained that this law of God was not in operation yet, and all 
 the descendants of Cain inherited the poison, or it be even 
 maintained that the seed of Sheth also inherited the same 
 poison, it would not benefit Christology ; for all Cainites and 
 Shethites, except Xoah and his family, perished in the Deluge, 
 and it is stated clearly and expressly in Scriptures that 
 Noah was free of all iniquities. " Noah was a righteous man, 
 perfect was he in his generation, with God did Noah walk," 
 or conduct himself. (Genesis viii. 9.) There is no trace of any 
 iniquity or sin whatever. In chapter ix. we are told that God 
 blessed Noah, precisely as he did Adam before he sinned 
 (Ibid. i. 2S\ and then that God made a covenant with 
 Noah, or rather continued with him the original covenant 
 made with man and mankind. In all this not the shadow 
 of original sin or the fall of man is perceptible, nor does the 
 Bible anywhere refer to it again. Consequently if Genesis 
 iii. is to be understood in the Christian sense, it must any- 
 how be admitted that consequences of the first parents' sin 
 did not extend beyond the fourth generation of Cain, or at 
 the utmost it certainly was wiped out in the Deluge. Then 
 Noah was the promised redeemer, if one was promised, and
 
 78 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM. 
 
 after him no redeemer was necessary, and none appeared ex- 
 cept redeemers from oppression, slavery, despotism, de- 
 moralization and corruption, the first of which was Moses, 
 and the last to date George Washington.
 
 CHAPTKIl X. 
 
 NO CHKISTOLOGY IN ISAIAH. 
 
 THP]RE are some passages in the Old Testament to which 
 conversion agents never refer, perhaps because their 
 knowledge of that book reaches not beyond that limited num- 
 ber of prophetical oracles, which, so to say, are their stock in 
 trade. Some of those neglected passages are very interest- 
 ing. Let us quote some : 
 
 " Put not your trust in princes, in the son of man, in whom 
 there is no salvation. When his spirit goeth forth, he re- 
 turneth to his (native) earth: on that very day perish his 
 thoughts. ( But) happy is he who hath the God of Jacob 
 for his help, whose hope is on the Lord his God, who hath 
 made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is therein; 
 who keepeth truth forever." (Psalms cxlvi. 3-6.) 
 
 If this is a prophecy, is it not very plainly to the effect 
 that none should put his trust in the hero of the Evangel- 
 ical story, the son of man, as he called himself, in whom 
 there is no salvation ; death cut short his career, defeated 
 his schemes, while He who is the Maker of heaven and earth 
 liveth and keepeth his word forever? It looks rather like a 
 passage written long after the crucifixion, when the son of 
 man had grown into a prince of salvation among his BibLe- 
 <'xpounding disciples. Still we know that this Psalm \vas 
 there long before the year one. I had an idea that it referred 
 to Deuteronomy xiii. 2-6. 
 
 "If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a 
 dreamer of dreams, and he givetli. thee a sign or a token, and 
 the sign or token come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee, 
 >ayiiv_ r . Let us L r o after other gods, which thou dost not know, 
 and l-t us serve them, then shalt thou not hearken unto 
 the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer of dreams ; 
 for the Lord your God pro\vth you to know whether you in- 
 
 (79)
 
 80 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 deed love the Lord your God with all your heart and with 
 all your soul. After the Lord your God shall ye walk, and 
 him shall ye fear, and his commandments shall ye keep, and 
 his voice shall ye obey, ami him shall ye serve, and unto 
 him shall ye cleave. And that prophet or that dreamer of 
 dreams shall be put to death, because he hath spoken revolt 
 against the Lord your God, who hath brought you out of the 
 land of Egypt, and who hath redeemed you out of the house 
 of bondsmen, to mislead thee from the way which the Lord 
 thy God commanded thee to walk therein ; and thou shalt 
 put the evil away from the midst of thee." 
 
 But it seems I fell into the same error as the conversion- 
 ists do, for the Messiah of the Synoptics at least never-said 
 that he was a god, or a son of God, hence did mislead none 
 to worship other gods ; on the contrary, he taught his disci- 
 ples to pray to " Our Father who art in heaven,'' exactly as 
 the Hebrews did to D'CBCff H'DK. * 
 
 Let us read some interesting passages from Isaiah In 
 chapter xliii. the prophet opens in these solemn words : 
 " Thus saith Jehovah, thy creator, O Jacob, and thy maker, 
 O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed thee ; I have called 
 thee by my name, mine thou art." Then he goes on with 
 promises of redemption (from Babylon) until he reaches 
 the following climax : " Ye are my witnesses, saith the 
 Lord, and my servant, whom I have chosen in order that 
 ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am 
 he; before me there was no God formed, and after me there 
 
 * It is strange that the learned expounders of Christology never 
 paid any attention to this law of Moses, which so plainly ordains 
 that the prophet who proposes to his cotemporaries, " Let us go and 
 worship other gods," should be put to death. If Jesus did main- 
 tain that 1 e was a god or a person of the trinity, performed those 
 miracles to prove his divinity, and exacted of his disciples faith iu 
 his own divinity, any criminal court acting under the laws o Mo- 
 ses was obliged, the fact being proved, to have him put to death ; 
 and yet in the trials preceding the crucifixion, also according to 
 John, no reference to this law is made. This ought to be sufficient 
 proof to believers that the son of man never claimed to be more 
 than man.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 81 
 
 will be none. I am the Lord, and besides me there is no 
 Savior. I myself have announced it, and I have saved, 
 and I have let it be heard, and there was no strange (god) 
 among you; and ye are mv witnesses, saith the Lord, I am 
 God." 
 
 In the same strain (xliv. G) that prophet says : " Thus 
 saith Jehovah. King of Israel and redeemer, even Jehovah 
 Zdiaoth, I am the first, and I am the last, and besides me 
 there is no God I am Jehovah, this is my name, and I 
 will not give my honor to another, or my praise to idols." 
 (Ibid. xlii. 8.) " I am Jehovah, and besides me no God ; I 
 will help thee, if thou even didst not know me. That all 
 may know from the rising of the sun and from the west 
 that there is naught besides me, I am Jehovah and none be- 
 snlrs.'' (Ibid xlv. 5-6.) "Am not I Jehovah, and there is no 
 other God, besides me there is no righteous God and no Sa- 
 vior. Turn unto me, and be ye saved all ends of the earth, 
 for I am God and none besides " (xlv. 22.) 
 
 These interesting passages from Isaiah inform everybody 
 that this prophet did not and could not think that God, in 
 whose name he speaks, ever would create or otherwise 
 produce another God, or any demi-god with whom he 
 should divide his glory and the veneration due to him 
 alone. If this is a declaration, of theological principle, it 
 declares clearly and intelligibly enough the fallacy of the 
 trinitarian doctrine and the man-worship connected with it ; 
 if it is a prophecy, it declares in advance, and in the name of 
 r.od. that the whole of Christology, with its scheme of salva- 
 tion, is of human invention, unjustly and illegitimately 
 propped on some misinterpreted passages from Scriptures, 
 against which the prophet in advance cautioned his people. 
 
 Aside of that, however, these passages are of peculiar in- 
 terest also in this respect. The Church believes that the 
 sixty-six chapters of that book were written by the one 
 and the same Isaiah. And yet the same church which 
 reads these unequivocal declarations of the prophet 
 against all kinds of polytheism, trinitarianistn. any and 
 every kind of redeemer or savior, points almost exclusively 
 to the same Isaiah and this is done in the Gospels for
 
 82 A DEFENSE OK JUDAISM 
 
 oracles that predicted the miraculous birth, life, work and 
 death of the Messiah who certainly was "another god" as 
 long as he wore baby's clothes or man's habiliment and 
 walked about on this earth, and remained that " other god," 
 to whom prayers are still addressed and homage is done at 
 least every Sunday, and every feast instituted in honor of his 
 name. Those good people, clinging to their subjective 
 knowledge, have no idea how paganized they are in theory 
 and practice, and how self-contradictory their allegation? 
 are. wherever they attempt to prop the Evangelical story by 
 passages from the Old Testament. But we who labor not 
 under the burden of that subjective knowledge, we consider 
 it an irrevocable truism, that 
 
 The prophet like Isaiah with these emphatic declarations of 
 the purest monotheism, which exclude in the Deity all kinds of 
 dualism or trinitarianism, all conceptions of plurality, corporeal- 
 ity and anthropomorphism, could not possibly intend with any 
 of his prophecies to predict the coming of any son of god, any di- 
 vine messiah or supernatural redeemer or savior, person of the 
 trinity, or any other superhuman being. Therefore every pre- 
 sumption of discovering Christological predictions in any pro- 
 phetical passage must be the outcome of prejudice and misinter- 
 pretation. 
 
 Isaiah (chapter vi. ) and Ezekiel (chapter i.) describe 
 their sublime visions of the Ufarcabah, "Throne of Glory." 
 They inform us that they saw their Seraphim, Cherubim, 
 Ophanim, Hayoth, Hashmalim, all in the plural number, 
 poetical figures with wings of fantastic shapes, colors and 
 movements. But they saw no son of God anywhere If 
 such a conception had ever been in their minds, they would 
 have seen it in their prophetical vision just then and there. 
 If they did not see him, we certainly could not. William 
 Gesenius and other Christian expounders of the book of 
 Isaiah, Psalms and such other books, have given up the 
 idea of finding Messianic predictions in those books, but the 
 conversionist has his own canon of exegesis and clings \<> 
 old errors, because he can do no better. If Isaiah, for in- 
 stance, did not predict that particular Messiah, there not 
 only exists no biblical proof that he was a M.- iah at all, but
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 83 
 
 the Gospel itselr must contain at least as many errors as it 
 has references to that prophet. The general principle just 
 laid down shows the impossibility of actually discovering 
 such predictions in Isaiah, hence the conversionist can do 
 no better than cling tenaciously to his old errors. 
 Let us point out some of them. 
 
 ISAIAH VII. 14. 
 
 This verse is translated in the English Bibles : " Behold a 
 virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name 
 Emanuel " In Matthew i. 23 it reads : " Behold a virgin 
 shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they 
 shall call his name Emanuel." This, says Matthew, refers 
 to the son of Mary, although none before him nor any of the 
 Gospel writers after him ever understood it so, none referred 
 to this supposed prophecy besides Matthew ; and what is still 
 more surprising, Jesus knew nothing of this miracle, never 
 refers to it, and vulgarly calls his mother woman, and Mary 
 also evinces no knowledge of it, and calls him Joseph's son. 
 ( Luke ii. 48-50.) 
 
 If we say that but two words in the translation of that 
 verse are correct, viz : ben and shemo, we do not exaggerate. 
 Let us see : 
 
 HA-ALMAH does not mean " a virgin ; " it means the 
 maiden, or this young woman Bethulah is the Hebrew 
 term for a virgin, and without that Ha. 
 
 HARAH does not mean " shall conceive," which would be 
 Tkehcrah; it means she is with child, as is evident from the 
 parallel passage, Genesis xvi. 11, hence she was no virgin.* 
 
 VEYOLEDETH is not in the future tense, it is the present 
 participle, feminine gender, not she shall bear a son ; it 
 means (as the next verb proves) and thou (woman) bearest 
 a son (now or shortly thereafter). f 
 
 * In the case of Hagar, who certainly was pregnant when the 
 angel spoke to her, the angel addresses to her precisely the same 
 words as the prophet does to this Almah. "p r~i~?"*" r~nn "j-H 
 
 v:r rx-p 
 
 t In the case of the mother of Samson (Judges xiii.), who was not 
 pregnant yet when the angel spoke to her, the same terms are used
 
 84 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 VEKARATH does not mean " and she shall call," or else it 
 must read Vethikra; it means thou (woman) callest his 
 name. 
 
 E.MANUEL is not Jesus ; he is not called so anywhere. 
 The translator, following Matthew, makes of that verse 
 Hinnah Bethulah Theherah, Vetholid ben Vethikra Shemo 
 Yishu, so that nothing remains of the original paragraph 
 except the words ben and s^emo. 
 
 A woman standing before him is addressed by the 
 prophet, as also the situation there in Isaiah and Kings 
 show. Ahaz, the King of Judah, is threatened an invasion 
 of his capital by the Kings of Israel and Syria, which was 
 about ten to twelve years prior to the fall of Samaria. 
 Ahaz wants to call to his assistance Tiglath Pileser, King of 
 Assyria, and did finally do so, which the Prophet Isaiah just- 
 ly opposes, because he dreaded the invasion of Palestine by 
 that warlike king and people ; and his apprehension proved 
 to be well grounded, for in a few years later Assyria over- 
 threw the Kingdom of Israel, and Sennacherib would have 
 captured Jerusalem, if he had not lost his army under its 
 walls. All this is clearly sketched in 2 Kings and 2 Chron- 
 icles. Isaiah tries to dissuade King Ahaz from his scheme 
 of purchasing the assistance and invasion by the Assyrian, 
 and tells King Ahaz that God gives him a sign to assure 
 him that those enemies would not conquer him, and that 
 both countries which now distress him would be depopu- 
 lated before the child of the Almah, even if fed on milk and 
 honey, would be old enough to despise evil and to ch< 
 good. It is absurd to maintain that this sign referred to 
 an event to come to pass seven hundred years, or even one 
 year later, when Isaiah spoke to King Ahaz. Therefore the 
 passage must read as said : A young woman, perhaps the 
 queen, being in an advanced stage of pregnancy, standing 
 before them, the prophet says : This woman will give 
 birth to a son and this was the sign whom she might 
 
 in the future tense (verse 4). p mT*1 mm The passage in Isaiah 
 is an imitation of the ab we two, as is the angel coming to Mary. 
 Therefore Matthew quotes (he passage from Isaiah.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 85 
 
 call Emanuel, " God with us. 1 ' for he will not permit those 
 two kings to conquer this country. 
 
 The irrefutable proof for this conception of the matter is 
 the beginning of Isaiah viii., where it is narrated that the 
 same sign was given before two high-ranked witnesses, as 
 the king rejected the prophet's sign and message ; then fol- 
 low the prophecies in viii. 4, the same precisely as in vii. 16. 
 Then in viii. 18 he refers to both cases, that the signs given' 
 h:id been fulfilled literally, the two boys had been born as 
 predicted; therefore his prophecies oughMo be believed in 
 preference to the necromancers and sorcerers, that most. 
 likely advised the king contrary to Isaiah's predictions 
 Xow take up the book and read from Isaiah vii. to viii., in- 
 elusive. and you will be astonished how glaringly absurd 
 the Christological exegesis is. 
 
 ISAIAH IX. "), 6. 
 
 lu the same connection a number of oracles follow after 
 each other, all in reference to the Assyrian invasion. King 
 Ahaz disobeyed the prophet, sent an embassy with heavy 
 sums of money to Tiglath Pileser (2 Kings xvii. 8, 9), who 
 invaded Syria and decimated it. Now the prophet an- 
 nounces his oracles as to the consequences ot this invasion, 
 which will not end with the overthrow of the two kingdoms 
 of Israel and Syria, hitherto Judah's protection against 
 As-vria, but Judah also will be invaded and hard pressed 
 by the enemy whose.- friendship King Ahaz bought so dearly ; 
 but Judah will not perish, it will be saved by the successor 
 of King Ahaz, the then crown prince Hezekiah, in reference 
 to whom he says, what the English version renders : " For 
 unto us a child will be born, a son will be given, and the 
 rnment shall be on his shoulders, and his name shall 
 be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Ever- 
 lasting Father, the Prince of Peaec." This, of course, 
 must refer to that Messiah that should come 700 to 750 
 years after that, although the prophet always speaks of the 
 present distress, and of one who should deliver Judah from 
 the power of that invader (Sennacherib). The whole, how- 
 ever, is another abuse and misrepresentation of Scriptures
 
 80 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 for dogmatic purposes. The verbs yullad and nitthan are in 
 the absolutely past tense, can only be translated in the past, 
 tense, " A child was born to us, a son was given to us," they 
 can refer only to a person born long before those words 
 were spoken, and can not be tortured to refer to one to be 
 born 700 years later. To whom did the prophet refer? To 
 one who will take the government upon his shoulder, which 
 could be the then Crown Prince Hezekiah only, who was 
 then from twenty-three to twenty-five years old. He, the 
 Prophet believed, will change the pernicious and God-defy- 
 ing policy of his father, Ahaz. He will be heir to the de- 
 structive consequences of his father's policy, the Assyrians 
 will invade, overrun and distress the land, but by the merits 
 and piety of this prince the country will be saved at last, 
 and then he will be called ""\Vonderful." Why will he be 
 called so? Because he will be a mighty strong counsellor 
 (in time of national distress), <; master of the booty " (in 
 time of war), and a " prince of peace " (after the invader 
 shall shall have been expelled). The English translators 
 made of yoez el-gibbor, which by the accents and good gram- 
 mar is one phrase, a noun, yoez, with two adjectives, el and 
 gibbor, two phrases, to bring out " counsellor and mighty 
 god," contrary to the sense and spirit of the whole Bible, 
 which never calls any man a god ; contrary also to good 
 grammar and the Massoretic accents. Then they make of 
 Abi-ad an everlasting father, when everybody who knows 
 the Hebrew Bible also knows that ad nowhere signifies 
 everlasting, which the Hebrew expresses by the phrase 
 adei-ad, olam-woed. Ad as a preposition signifies a limit in 
 space or time, " until or unto," also " so that " in New He- 
 brew, it never signifies endless time or space, hence the 
 "everlasting" must be dropped. Nor does Abi signify 
 father, it signifies progenitor, producer, inventor or master 
 ( Genesis iv. 20, 21). But we know that Ad in Gnu-sis xlix. 
 -7, signifies "booty," and the prophet most likely referred 
 to Benjamin as included in Judah, whom he calls the gibbor, 
 and so he calls the king in t<pe mighty in strong counsel and 
 master or producer of the booty ; and the war over he is 
 again Sar Shalom, ' prince of peace." All this was literally
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 87 
 
 fulfilled in the days of King Ilezekiah. He was the great 
 reformer of his people and the restorer of its literature. 
 The Assyrian power, then the terror of all adjoining coun- 
 tries, broke down under the walls of Jerusalem, and soon 
 thereafter ceased to exist. The reign of He/ekiah, with the 
 exception of its fourteenth year, was a period of prosperity, 
 peace and dory, literary, moral and religious triumph^. 
 Nothing of the kind came to pass in the lifetime of either 
 the Messiah of Naxareth or the Messiah of Bethar. 
 
 So frail are all the references of the New Testament to the 
 Old, where the attempt is made to prop Christology by the 
 oracles of the old prophets in Israel. If you even admit 
 their unreasonable construction of those passages, it proves 
 nothing in favor of the Messiah which it does not also in 
 favor of Alexander the (treat, who was a son of Apollo, or 
 any other Roman or Greek who was a son of some god, as 
 cases of that kind were not rare even in the time when Mary 
 eoneeived of the Holy ( rhost, as you can B66 in Josephus (An- 
 tiquities xviii. 3, 4), the story of Paulina and Dicius Mundus 
 in the time of the Emperor Tiberius ; and before that Olym- 
 pus was full of nods enamored of beautiful women. 
 
 ISAIAH LIII. 
 
 It is maintained in the Gospels that the passion and cruci- 
 fixion of the Christian Messiah came to pass exactly as pre- 
 dicted in some chapters of the Bible. This assumption is 
 turned into an argument by the conversionist that the He- 
 brew who believes in his Scriptures must also believe that 
 this was the Messiah whose coining was predicted by his 
 prophets. To this, however, we have to say, if all that is 
 literally true, all happened with that particular man, as those 
 prophets predicted, it does not prove his Messiahship, for in 
 all those Bible passages not a word is said about any Mes- 
 siah, redeemer, savior or son of God. This does away at 
 once with the conversionist s' argument. To this, however, 
 comes a second consideration. The cruel fate of some suf- 
 fering man is lamented in Isaiah, not which he should meet 
 in future, but which he did meet in the past Accidents of 
 this kind have happened so numerously in the course of bis-
 
 ^ A DKFKNSK OF JfDAISM 
 
 tory that men hundreds of miles and year? apart, having n<> 
 connection with one another, met with precisely the same 
 fate, good or ill luck. It is almost impossible to be other- 
 wise among so many uncountable millions of human careers. 
 many duplicates must occur Besides these two we have to 
 urge a third objection: as Hebrews, we could not believe in 
 fatalism, because our Scriptures teach a God of freedom and 
 a free humanity. The criterion of intellect is freedom, and 
 intellect is the main criterion of Deity and humanity. With 
 us God is perfect, which a God without freedom can not be. 
 man is hi si mage which lie could not be without the quality 
 of freedom. That fatalism that any living man sutlers and 
 perishes because the prophet in the name of God did centu- 
 ries ago foretell it and as he did foretell it, can 7iot be believed 
 by us, who are the children of the covenant with the God of 
 freedom. 
 
 It is one of the fallacies of Christology advancing the be- 
 liefs that events must come to pass literally as prophesied 
 centuries ago, which means as foreordained by Providence, 
 and then count it a merit to the one, or a crime and sin to the 
 other, on whom or by whom the inevitable and uncontrolla- 
 ble will of God as foreordained and foretold is actualized. In 
 the case under consideration it was no merit to Jesus to suf- 
 fer what he did suffer under the ban of inevitable necessity : 
 nor could it be accounted a crime to those who crucified 
 him under the compulsory will and force of the Deity. The 
 Hebrew could not base any religious belief or doctrine upon 
 such a contradiction in re. 
 
 Most disastrous in this case against the conversionists' al- 
 legations is the fact that Isaiah liii. contains no prophecy at 
 all, it is plain narrative of a past event. You take up this 
 chapter in the original and you discover at once two strange 
 facts. The one is that the whole chapter is not at all of the 
 Isaiah style, and the second is that it breaks the connection 
 between chapter lii and liv. so perceptibly and ostensibly 
 that no honest critic, even reading the translation only, can 
 help seeing there an interloper, the product of another 
 writer, put there for a purpose. The same seems to be tin- 
 case with Ivi. 10 to Ivii. 13, which also breaks the connection
 
 VS. I'UOSELYTIZINi; CHRIST. AMTY. 89 
 
 between Ivi. 11 and Ivii. 14, is also written in the same style 
 as liii., and cm tin 1 same or n similar subject, so that evi- 
 dently those two pi. .-> were originally one, belonging to 
 some unknown writer. But what is n:"-t striking in both 
 pieces is that they are written in the past tense ami do not 
 in anywise claim to be a prophecy. In verses 10-12 occurs 
 the future tense in strict accordance with a rule in Hebrew 
 grammar.* It is plain and unmistakable narrative of tin- 
 fate of a despised, suffering, woe-stricken, righteous man,who 
 bore up Courageously and with unshaken faith in the time of 
 misery, which brings him prosperity, happiness, victory and 
 glory at the end. The whole could refer only to one who 
 had lived before this chapter was written. There is not the 
 slightest allusion to any future event in the whole chapter. 
 
 No unprejudiced reader can find the Christian Messiah in 
 that chapter, also not if he does so much violence to the text 
 that he turns the past into the future tense. In verse three 
 it is said of that suffering hero. '' He was despised, shunned 
 of men, a man of painful afflictions and in sickness ex- 
 perienced," all of which, according to the Evangelical story, 
 the son of Mary was not. None despised, none shunned 
 him ; on the contrary, we are informed that thousands of all 
 classes of people came to him, treated him quite respectfully, 
 and many loved him well. Nor was he a man of sore afflic- 
 tions and many diseases; he is described rather as a healthy 
 and cheerful young man, free from bodily blemishes and dis- 
 3. Iii verse 9 we are told, "And he gave (to) the 
 wicked ones his sepulcher and (to) the rich his height," or 
 cast'e. -I- -u- had no sepulcher of his own to give away to 
 anv wicked men, and certainly no high pla.-e or castle to 
 give to the rich. In verse 10 that suffering hero is promised 
 -.-ed (and) length of days," and both terms Sera and 
 
 * It must be borne in mind as a fixed rule of Hebrew grammar, 
 that relating a past event of two or more actions the verb express- 
 ing the first in time is in the past tense and the succeeding actions, 
 although also past are marked by the future tense of the respective 
 verb or verbs because the narrator places himself in the time, when 
 his narrative begins then the succeeding actions were all lying in the 
 future.
 
 90 A PKFKNSF. OF .H'UAISM 
 
 Yaarich Yamim, everywhere in the Bible have the literal 
 sense exclusively, literally children, descendancy and long 
 life on earth, none of which was given to Jesus. The hero of 
 Isaiah liii does not perish in the sufferings, on the contrary 
 he lives to see all the blessings showered upon him from 
 verse 10 to 12, and Jesus did perish in the catastrophe. 
 
 The question might be asked, to whom does that chapter 
 refer if not to the Christian Messiah? It would be proper 
 to say. 1 (]o not know: 1 only know that it does not refer 
 to any future event, and could not refer to your Messiah. 
 Still, we have to advance some rational and probable prop- 
 ositions in explanation of that part of Scriptures. 
 
 All kinds of suggestions have been advanced as to the 
 real subject of that chapter. It is the Prophet Jeremiah, 
 says one class of expounders, to whose life of incessant 
 struggle, sorrow, disappointment and alHiction the whole 
 chapter tits ; and it was written shortly after his death 
 (Ivii. 1), perhaps a funeral oration by some mourning pa- 
 triot over that sorely n filleted prophet, who had suffered so 
 much by the sins of his people. 
 
 Others maintain it is the people of Israel, so often called 
 in Isaiah the servent of the Lord, in the time of Oambysus 
 and Smerdes, when the young colony was in great distre--. 
 prohibited to continue the rebuilding of the temple, the 
 laud trodden down by invading armies alternately from 
 Persia and Egypt, oppressed by despotic king-, scorned and 
 derided by their neighbors round about, and coming out 
 triumphantly in the days of Darius II. 
 
 Kabbalistic expounders, who see prophecy and mystery 
 everywhere, found in it the Messiah ben Joseph, who must 
 be slain prior to the approach of the real Messiah, or also 
 the right Messiah ben David, as they had learned it from 
 Christian expounders in the third to the fourth century. 
 
 Another opinion, basing on 2 Chronicles xxxv 25, i^ 
 that Jeremiah wrote Isaiah liii., a lamentation on King 
 Joshiah, after he had lost his life in the battle of Megido. 
 But this seems not to fit to the close of the chapter from 
 
 Vel'Se 10 to the end.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 91 
 
 Still there are many other rases possible, even more 
 plausible than the former. 
 
 1 It is a didactic poem without reference to any special 
 individual, on the same subject exactly as the whole book 
 of Job was written, showing the truly righteous man, who 
 in affliction despairs not of God's justice and wisdom, and 
 triumphs at last over misery and degradation, as foreshad- 
 owed in Malachi iii. 13-18. Isaiah liii. is the counterpart 
 of Psalms Ixxiii. and xciv 
 
 2. It is the funeral oration delivered over the demised 
 Job ; every word in Isaiah li.ii. applies to him most exactly. 
 Job lived in the time of Daniel and Ezekiel, as the latter 
 testifies. He was one of the men who returned from the 
 Babylonian captivity, according to the testimony of Rabbi 
 Jochanan in the Talmud, and according to the most re- 
 spected critics that was the exact time when Isaiah liii. was 
 written These obsequies are even mentioned in the Tal- 
 mud Sotnh 35. 
 
 3. It is a panegyric on the royal sire of Zerubabel, King 
 Jehoiachin or Jekoniah, whose life and fate correspond pre- 
 cisely and exactly to the entire chapter from beginning to 
 end. At the age of eighteen he was made King of Judah, 
 three months later the Babylonians overran the country 
 and threatened Jerusalem with destruction, he laid down 
 his crown, delivered himself up to the enemy without a 
 murmur, and, like a sheep dragged to the slaughter-pen, he 
 went into captivity, left his family sepulcher to the wicked 
 invaders, and his castle or high place to his rich brother 
 and successor. He then was thirty-seven years a captive 
 and prisoner, despised, shunned, disgraced and sick on ac- 
 count of his people's sins, till Evil mcrodaeh took him out 
 of prison and bestowed upon him the highest honors (2 
 Kings xxiv., xxv. and elsewhere). This was in the year 
 5-")9 B. C In the year 536 Zerubabel returned to Palestine 
 and so that king did see " seed, length of days " If he 
 lived yet he was but seventy-eight years old when Zerubabel 
 returned. At any rate he could not have been dead many 
 years when that panegyric was written, under the influence 
 of the great prophetical triumph, Zerubabel leading home
 
 92 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 the colony, to restore the ancient kingdom, to rebuild the 
 temple on Mount Moriah The sins of the king in his 
 youth were forgotten by his sufferings, the glory of the 
 living prince cast its rays on the deceased king. The tra- 
 ditions treat this king much better than sacred history- 
 does, and Abraham Ibn Ezra maintains that the whole of 
 Deutero-Isaiah (xl.-lxvi.) was written by that very King 
 Jehoiachin.* 
 
 It must be admitted that any of these opinions explains 
 Isaiah liii. better, more natural and sensible, more agree- 
 able to common sense and history, than the Evangelical 
 conception of the matter, which belongs to the homiletic 
 speculations of an uncritical age and an unphilosophical 
 school, if school you can call it. Consequently no intelli- 
 gent person will expect of the Hebrew to submit to the con- 
 versionists' argument, which has nothing in its favor except 
 the belief that Jesus indeed was crucified, that the event 
 transpired exactly as narrated in the Gospels, and it was 
 not an accident, a peculiar and accidental concurrence of 
 two men's fates turning out exactly alike ; but that is the 
 very thing which this portion of Scriptures is called into 
 requisition to prove. If it does not prove this it proves 
 nothing in favor of the conversionist, and in order to prove 
 this the story must first be believed. This is the regular 
 vicious circle. 
 
 If we look upon the New Testament from the standpoint 
 which the English, German and French critics established^ 
 it is nearly impossible to prove that any such person as 
 Jesus of Nazareth ever existed, or if this be taken for 
 granted on the testimony of Paul and those passages from 
 the Talmud which I pointed out elsewhere, it is next to an 
 impossibility to point out with any degree of certainty what 
 he did or said and what his biographers invented for him. 
 In regard to his crucifixion the proof is still more difficult 
 to produce, because (a) it is three times denied according 
 to " Acts " by no less a person than Peter. (Acts v. 30 ; x. 30 ; 
 
 * See on this point Nachman Krochmal'a Morth Rcbuchei haz- 
 Zeman, p. 82, e. B.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CIIKISTIA.MTY. 93 
 
 xiii. 29). According to Toland (Na/aren. Letter 1, chapt. 5) 
 Barnabas maintained in his gospel that Jesus was not 
 crucified, which was also the belief of the Basilidians, and 
 in this form the Gospel story reached Mohammed (Koran 
 iii. 53; iv. 156). (6) In the rabbinical traditions he is 
 not known as the crucified one, but as M"?n one who was 
 hanged, as maintained by Peter in >( Acts." (c) " Him 
 crucified " was preached by Paul only, and, according to 
 Toland's statement, opposed by his own companion and co- 
 laborer, Barnabas. The crucifixion story in the Gospels 
 was written according to Paul's version of the matter, and 
 contrary to Peter's, and Paul, who had never seen Jesu>. 
 had a particular reason to preach " him crucified," which 
 renders his testimony suspicious, as I have explained else- 
 where.* Anyhow, there exists no available material, out- 
 side of the Gospel to establish the fact that .Jesus wa> 
 crucified. This is proof enough to the Christian, who 
 comes to the matter with his subjective knowledge and 
 faith, but the non-Christian could not possibly accept this 
 uncertainty, as the corpus delicti in the case, from which to 
 conclude that the prophets predicted it, to say the least is 
 not produced. 
 
 This leads us to our point of conclusion. It is uncertain 
 that the Messiah was crucified at all. It is impossible that 
 Isaiah liii. or the other passages from the Old Testament 
 refer to that event, hence but one presumption is left, viz. : 
 That the incidents in the crucifixion story were partly in- 
 vented and partly so changed and shaped that they should 
 seemingly fulfill certain Scriptural tropes and supposed 
 prophecies, in order to lead devout Gentiles to believe that 
 the new religion was the continuation and fulfillment of the 
 Old Testament. Paul undoubtedly was the original author 
 of " him crucified," as he was the author of the last supper 
 and resurrection accounts. The first gospel writer, Mark, 
 who \\as called as bishop of the Xa/arenes from Alexandria 
 to Jerusalem about 130 A. C., wrote the story in Greek for 
 the purpose of being read in the churches, as it was pro- 
 
 * History of the Hebrews' Second Commonwealth.
 
 "94 A DEKiNSK ()F .Il'DAlSM 
 
 hibited by the Emperor Hadrian to read Moses in the syna- 
 gogues, hence also in the churches. His gospel gives in brief 
 tin- story as prepared by Paul. Matthew and Luke wrote 
 after Mark, not in Palestine, but in Syria, and lastly John 
 wrote in Alexandria, all before 170 A. C. Each of them took 
 his story from Paul and added to it such matter as he found 
 in the traditions of the various churches and his own a priori 
 reflections. The few Jew Christians, who were called Ebion- 
 ites, had left Jerusalem in 130 A. C. The gospels were written 
 for ex-heathens only, who were not conversant with the He- 
 1 >ivw Scriptures, and for them only such applications could be 
 made of Scriptural passages as were made by the Gospel 
 writers, the author of Acts and of the Epistle to the Hebrew.-. 
 There is abundant proof in the New Testament in support 
 of this theory, only that I do not wish to write the matter 
 again, having done so in 1874, in a book called u The Martyr- 
 dom of Jesus of Nazareth," and subsequently also in another 
 bonk called "Judaism and Christianity, Their Agreements 
 and Disagreements " Here I think I have proved n.y origi- 
 nal proposition, that the New Testament is a continuation of 
 the Old by the grace of the church and the book binder. 
 There is nothing in the Thorah, nothing in Isaiah which 
 could honestly be construed to support or justify the stories 
 of the Gospel upon which Christology is based.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 NO CHRISTOLOGY IN JEREMIAH. 
 
 IF the conversion agent should call upon us again, after 
 having read the previous chapters, we would have to 
 ask him the following question : Suppose you would find 
 in any book, ancient or modern, the story that three wise 
 men, magii, princes or dervishes, had discovered a star, 
 which they recognized as the star of a new-born prince of 
 a distant country and this particular star, moving from 
 east to west, guides those persons to that distant country, 
 and does it so exactly that by it they discover that very 
 stable in which that prince was born, would you not say 
 that this is plainly a piece of astrological superstition 
 woven into a legend? That good man, if an orthodox 
 Christian, would say : " If you refer to Matthew ii., I say 
 it is no astrological superstition, it is a miracle." This 
 would but dodge the question, still we accept it was a 
 miracle, although skepticism would suggest quite a num- 
 ber of objections, such as, to what purpose did God go to 
 the far east to work a miracle to no conceivable purpose, as 
 those three obscure strangers did no good to Jesus or his 
 Messiahship, and were never heard from again ; why was 
 not a miracle wrought nearer home, to convince such men 
 that the Messiah was born who could assist and support him 
 and advance his cause? Why did God work this excep- 
 tional miracle, which became the immediate cause of the 
 cruel slaughter of so many innocent babes in Bethlehem, if 
 he is the loving father of man? How does it come that both 
 the astrological miracle and the massacre of the babes of 
 Bethlehem remained unknown not only to all unenlightened 
 Hebrews like Josephus, but to all the Gospel writers be- 
 sides Matthew? None of them, not even Luke, noticed it 
 
 How does it come that Luke contradicts that whole story 
 
 (95)
 
 96 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 of Matthew except in one point, viz : that Jesus was- born 
 in Bethlehem? How is it that in this one point both record 
 the chronological error that in the lifetime of Herod I. 
 Joseph and Mary came from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be 
 registered or counted, because then the Roman officer took 
 the census of Judea, when it is well known that no census 
 could have been taken and none was taken during the 
 reign of Herod or his son Archelaus ; none could be taken 
 before Judea was a Roman province, which it became after 
 the banishment of Archelaus, six or seven years after the 
 death of Herod I , as recorded in Josephus (Antiquities, 
 book xviii.)? As long as these objections are not removed 
 Matthew's story must appear to every unprejudiced reader 
 a legend by or for a believer in astrology, to which class we 
 do not belong, nor did the Prophet Jeremiah, who said : 
 ' Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, 
 and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven, becauss the 
 heathens are dismayed at them, for the customs (statutes) 
 of the Gentiles are vain." (Jeremiah x. 2, 3.) 
 
 If our conversion agent is well versed in Christian her- 
 meneutics, he will be ready to reply: "However improb- 
 able, impossible or even immoral and contradictory the two 
 narratives may seem, it must, nevertheless, be true, for so it 
 was prophesied especially in 
 
 JEREMIAH xxxi 15-17 : 
 
 " Thus saith the Lord, A voice was heard in Ramah, 
 lamentation and bilter weeping; Rachel weeping for her 
 children, refused to be comforted for her children, because 
 they were not. Thus saith the Lord, Refrain thy voice 
 from weeping and thine eyes from tears, for there is a re- 
 ward for thy work, saith the Lord, and they shall return 
 from the land of the enemy; and there is hope in thy 
 future, saith the Lord, that thy children shall return to thine 
 own border.' 1 
 
 As this prophecy could not possibly relate to the affairs 
 in Bethlehem, which are said to have transpired six hun- 
 dred years later, and yet Matthew refers to it (ii. 18) in 
 support of his story; he betrays himself as a writer of
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 97 
 
 legend, as he does with his other Scriptural quotations in 
 the same connection (ii. 6, 15, 23 1, the latter exists no- 
 where in the Old Testament. These Scriptural passages 
 suggested to him the touching though superstitious legend. 
 The whole story is Derusk, a homiletic attempt for the 
 fdification of an illiterate audience, then called Am-ha- 
 retz, as was the popular method in the earlier centuries of 
 Christianity, some remote ideas or Biblical tropes were 
 changed into a story for the purpose of edification. Luke, 
 who certainly must have seen Matthew's Gospel, understood 
 the character of the story and would not accept it, but 
 took its idea and incarnated it in an entirely different 
 story to the same effect, with a different genealogy and 
 soie additions; neither of the two stories was adopted by 
 Johii, simply, perhaps, because they were written much 
 later than the two Gospels. 
 
 It is not difficult to see that the prophecy of Jeremiah if 
 such it was has no connection with and no reference to 
 the Bethlehem story. The voice of lamentation heard in 
 Ramah can not refer to the lamentation in Bethlehem. 
 Ramah was located in Benjamin and Bethlehem in Judah. 
 Rachel was not the mother of the Judaites, she was the 
 mother of the Benjaminites and the Ephraimites, to whom 
 the prophet refers in the next verses (xxxi. 19,20). Ac- 
 cording to Matthew's story the verse should read : "A voice 
 \v;is heard in Bethlehem, Leah weeping for her children, etc." 
 Besides the first part of the Jeremiah passage is no prophecy 
 at all, the verb nithina is in the absolutely past tense, the 
 prophet narrates a past event, Rachel's voice was heard in 
 Ramah, really or fictitiously, some time before that, hence 
 he could not think of the Bethlehem affair. When her chil- 
 dren were led away into captivity, either the Benjaminites 
 or Ephraimites, the latter it appears from verse 20 were up- 
 permost in the prophet's mind, he prophesied not only the 
 restoration of Judah, of which Benjamin was an integral 
 portion, but also of Israel or the northern kingdom, of 
 which Ephraim was the ruling tribe. The prophecy an- 
 nounced in this passage is, "And they (those captives) will 
 return from the land of the enemy," and furthermore, "And
 
 U8 A DEFENSE OK JUDAISM 
 
 the sons (of those captives) will return to their borders." So 
 Jeremiah understood the words of Moses as recorded in 
 Leviticus xxvi. 38-45 and Deuteronomy xxx. 1-10, and ^o 
 it came to pass seventy years later, when the sons of those 
 captives returned to those borders. Nothing of the kind o > 
 curred after Matthew's Bethlehem story, none returned from 
 the land of the enemy an 1 none cams back home to their 
 borders. The Jeremiah prophecy has no relation whatever 
 to the Bethlehem story. The two stories in Matthew and 
 Luke were originally conceived, to connect the birth of Je 
 sus with two prophetical passages in Micah v. 1 and Zacha- 
 riah ix. 9, to which we refer in the last chapter of this book 
 although the Evangelists did not know where or when Jesus- 
 was born, certainly not the 25th of December, where or when 
 he died and was buried ; it is all the same Deru?h " that it be 
 fulfilled." 
 
 .IERKMIAH XXXIII 14-26. 
 
 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will perform that 
 good thing which I have promised unto the house of Israel and to 
 the house of Judah. In those days, and at that time, will I cau-e 
 the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall 
 execute judgment and righteousness in the land. In those days 
 shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely : and this /* 
 the name wherewith she shall be called, the Lord our righteousness 
 For thus saith the Lord ; David shall never want a man to sit upon 
 the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall the priests, the 
 Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle 
 meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually. And the word of the 
 Lord came unto Jeremiah, saying, thus saith the Lord; if ye can 
 break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and 
 that there should not be day and night in their season ; then may als> > 
 my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not 
 have a son to reign upon his throne ; and with the Levites, the 
 priests, my ministers. As the host of heaven can not be numbered , 
 neither the sand of the sea measured : so will I multiply the seed 
 of David my servant, and the Lev tes that minister unto me. More- 
 over the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying. Considerest 
 thou not what this people have spoken, saying, The two families 
 which the Lord hath chosen, he hath even cast them off? thus they 
 have despistd my people, that they should be no more a nation be- 
 fore them. Thus saith the Lord : If my covenant be not with day 
 and night, and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. ( .9 
 
 earth; then will I cast away the seed of Jacob, and David my ser 
 vant KO that I will not take any of his seed to b? rulers over the seed 
 of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ; for I will cause their captivity to re- 
 turn, and have mercy on them. 
 
 This and similar passages, especially in Jeremiah ami 
 Ezekiel, in which the restoration of the Davidian dynasty 
 after the captivity is prophesied, have become favorites with 
 Christological expounders of Scriptures. They forget that 
 in none of these pas?ages is it stated that the son or scion of 
 David will save the nation, or any individual ; hence if these 
 prophecies are Messianic they certainly do not point to the 
 Christian Messiah who is announced as the savior of every- 
 body. In all those passages, as in the above, the son or 
 scion of David becomes great and renowned only with Judah 
 and Israel, and after they are restored and re-established, 
 not by him, but he after them there can be no throne 
 without a people which could not possibly refer to the son 
 of Mary, who appeared upon the stage when Judah and Is- 
 rael had ceased to be an independent people and were never 
 again restored and re-established. On the other hand it is 
 a well-known fact that after the return from Babylon the 
 Davidian dynasty was restored in the person of Zerubabel 
 and his descendants prior to Nehemiah, and Zerubabel was 
 a righteous and eminent ruler in Israel, hence those prophe- 
 cies concerning the Davidian scion were fulfilled. The 
 Davidian dynasty, as said by David himself (1 Kings ii. 
 2-4 and elsewhere) was not given the perpetual heriditary 
 right, it was granted on condition, which many a Davidian 
 prince violated and forfeited the throne, till at last they lost 
 it altogether. That was also the casa with the descendants 
 of Zerubabel, as is evident from the Book of Nehemiah, 
 their claim was forfeited, and they were replaced by Nehe- 
 tniah, by the high-priests then, and at last by the Herodians. 
 They are never mentioned again till after the Chiistian era, 
 simply because nobody in Palestine believed that those 
 prophecies extended beyond Zerubabel and his descendants 
 up to Nehemiah. 
 
 In the passage before us this is evident enough. It says 
 first (verses 14 to 16) that the good words spoken concern-
 
 100 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 ing the house of Israel and the house of Judah shall be ful- 
 filled, the nation will be restored. Then God will raise to 
 David a sprout of righteousness (after the restoration) and 
 he will do justice and righteousness in the land (as Zeru- 
 babel actually did). Then Judah will flourish or ' be ^aveil,'' 
 and Jerusalem will dwell in safety (under the reign of that 
 ruler); and it will be called, viz : Jerusalem, God is our 
 justice, or "God is just to us." * 
 
 Then in verses 17 and 18 Jeremiah reiterates that both 
 the Davidian dynasty and the Levitical priesthood should 
 be restored with the nation, which many who believed in the 
 reconstruction of the nation did not consider ne:essary, to 
 restore the Davidian dynasty or the Levitical priesthood 
 and the sacrifices. The prophet maintained all that must be 
 simultaneously restored. Hence he certainly did not think 
 of the Christian Me?siah, with whom the sacrifices and the 
 Levitical priesthood certainly were not restored ; both, ac- 
 cording to Christology, were forever abolished by him. 
 
 Then inverses 19 to 22 he merely amplifies the aforesaid 
 with an exaggerating figure of speech, perhaps in response 
 to those who knew how sma'l the number of the princes of 
 the Davidian blood and the Levites then were; but always 
 the two, David and the Levitical priesthood with their sacer- 
 dotal functions in close connection. 
 
 Then inverses 23-26 he argues against those who believed 
 that no national restoration would follow, closing up the 
 whole passage with the characteristic expression that Da- 
 
 *Here may be noticed a peculiar error of some Christian secta- 
 rians. This expression Jehovah Tzidkenu, occurs twice in Jeiemiah 
 in the same conne :tion. Jeremiah xxiii 6. The Davidian to exe- 
 cute justi e and righteousness in the land is called Jeh/vah Tzidkenu, 
 ' And that is the name which they will call him " Jeremiah xxxiii 
 speaking of Judah and last of Jerusalem, which shall dwell in safety, 
 it iseaid : "They will call her Jehor a h Tzidkenu. viz, Jerusalem which 
 word is feminine in Hebrew, it having no neuter gender This Je- 
 hovah Tzidkenu being suppo ed to mean Jesus we could not tell 
 why to whom the prophet refers once as him and then as her, and 
 Jesus came on earth as a man the first time, he must come the sec- 
 ond time as a wo ran. That is one of those pieces of theology 
 based absolutely upon ignorance of the Hebrew language.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 10] 
 
 vidians (in the plural number, not one Jesus) will rule 
 asain over the seed of Abraham Isaac and Jacob (not over 
 ll nations of the world), u When (not if or for) I will bring 
 back their captives and show them mercy.' 
 
 There is no trace in the whole passage of any Messiah to 
 come six hundred years later, or of any savior from the 
 house of David, political or theological, or any person to die 
 at all a natural or unnatural death as a vicarious atonement. 
 Tins is the case with all similar passages in Jeremiah and 
 E/ j kiel. They prophesied the restoration under the old re- 
 g HH-, with the Levitical priesthood, the sacrifices and a Da- 
 vidian ruler, and never go beyond this, except where they 
 expound the prophecies of Moses, viz. : the indestructibility 
 of the Hebrew people and the covenant which includes the 
 final triumph of truth, justice, freedom and humanism for 
 the whole family of man, without the slightest allusion to 
 any person or individual to produce that indestructibility or 
 this triumph. 
 
 JEREMIAH XXXI. 31 E S. 
 
 ' Behold days come, saith Jehovah, and I make (or cut) 
 a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house 
 of Judah; not like unto the covenant which I have made 
 with their fathers in the day when I took them by their 
 hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, when they frus- 
 trated my covenant and I lorded over them (or lovingly em- 
 braced them), saith Jehovah." 
 
 This is the prophecy, say the Christian expounders, clearly 
 foretelling the ad vent of Christianity which, is called the new 
 coven mt; but they never tell that Christianity was called 
 th<3 new covenant, because these two words (Be.rith Chadn- 
 shah) were conveniently found in a propheov of Jeremiah 
 concerning the restoration of Israel after the Babylonian 
 nativity, when in fact it predicts rathe* the catalog of 
 Christology than the genesis of Christianity, according to 
 \vrse 34. 
 
 Such misinterpretation of Scriptures would appear par- 
 donable with popular preachers, for whom the texts are 
 mere pretext, to be used to advantage without reference to
 
 102 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 the preceding and succeeding statements. It appears un- 
 pardonable, however, if men of learning and critical sense ad- 
 vance impossibilities as the meaning of Scriptures, simply 
 because it was imposed upon their minds that Christianity is 
 called a new covenant. They must know that the section 
 of the book of Jeremiah from chapter xxx. to the end of 
 chapter xxxi. is one speech which the prophet wrote in a book 
 by special command of God. Having prophesied the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem, the dissolution of the commonwealth, and 
 the subsequent captivity, he prophesies now the restoration 
 of the people, viz. : Israel and Judah (xxx. 2), the indestruc- 
 tibility of the Hebrew people (verses 10, 11), the rebuilding 
 of the city of Jerusalem and its temple (verse 18), and the 
 state of happiness, of peace, concord, virtue and piety, the 
 nourishing condition to ensue after that, and this is the 
 very sense of that new covenant ; and closes the whole 
 speech with a forcible reiteration of the indestructibility of 
 the Hebrew people as a people, and the rebuilding of Jeru- 
 salem as a city. The whole speech is one solid piece, with 
 this purpose in the prophet's mind. Nothing foreign to 
 this purpose could honestly be interpreted, nothing else 
 can rationally be discovered in it, if one reads the speech as 
 a unit. Certainly the man of truth can not state now, 
 ' For behold days come, saith Jehovah, and I will return 
 with the captives of my people Israel and Judah, saith Je 
 hovah, and I will bring them back to the land which I have 
 given to Abraham, and they shall possess it ; " then add 
 (xxxi. 22), "And you shall be my people and I will to you 
 be God," and closes the same speech with the solemn assur- 
 ance of the indestructibility of the same people, and the city 
 rebuilt ; but in the midst of that very speech he contradict? 
 his own statements by prophesying a new covenant to 
 supercede the old, and make an end of that very people, 
 city, temple, Thorah, and all institutions connected there- 
 with, all replaced by Christianity. No honest inquirer can 
 charge a prophet with such contradiction, although those 
 learned gentlemen in consequence of their subjective knowl- 
 edge fail to see that they discover Christianity in the'
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 103 
 
 prophet's "new covenant," because the two terms are iden- 
 tical in their minds. 
 
 Taking the passage in question out of its connection it 
 remains no less evident that the Berith chadashah can have 
 no relation to Christianity. The passage begins with the 
 express words that God will make a covenant " with the 
 house of Israel and the house of Judah," the Hebrew peo- 
 ple as it then was and never again thereafter. Not with the 
 sons of Israel, with some of Israel, not with any persons 
 outside of Israel, but with the people comprised in tbe 
 house of Israel and the house of Judah, the prophet says, 
 this new covenant should be made. These express terms 
 can not be stretched or spiritualized to refer to any state 
 or persons besides the Hebrew people, as it then was. If 
 we even take for granted that Christianity at its inception 
 was a new covenant, it was certainly not the one an- 
 nounced by Jeremiah, for it was not made with the house 
 of Israel and the house of Judah. They never recognized 
 the Christian Messiah nor the religion supposed to have 
 been advanced by him, nor the redemption ascribed to 
 him, hence that new covenant was never made or con- 
 summated with the Hebrew people, and the prophet's 
 prediction never came to pass, or it was fulfilled in the 
 second Hebrew Commonwealth, or it is to be fulfilled here- 
 after ; in the Christian dispensation it certainly was not 
 fulfilled. 
 
 Investigate the nature of the new covenant as described 
 by the prophet, and you must arrive at the same result. It 
 should not be like the covenant which God made with their 
 fathers " in the day when I took them by their hands TO 
 BRING THEM OUT of the land of Egypt," which they frus- 
 trated, and God lorded over them (verse 32). Mark the ex- 
 pression Lehoziom, the old covenant which is referred to is 
 one that was made with the fathers and not with the peo- 
 ple, before they came out of Egypt, and with the end in 
 view to bring them out of that land. It is not the covenant 
 at Horeb to which Jeremiah refers, for this was made with 
 the people and not merely with the fathers, after they had 
 left Egypt, and not before as the means of bringing them
 
 104 A DKFFNSF OF JUDAISM 
 
 out. He must have referred to the covenant which was to be 
 partially fulfilled and renewed by the exode from Egypt. 
 This could only be the covenant recorded in Genesis xv., in 
 which the Egyptian bondage and redemption are announced 
 (verses 13-16), the land of Canaan is promised to Abraham 
 (verse 7), and God covenants with him that this land 
 should be given to his descendants (verses 18-21). This 
 covenant is referred to again in unmistakable terms and 
 repeatedly, " In the day when I (God) took them by their 
 hands to bring them out of the land of Egypt," and Moses 
 was sent to accomplish it, in Exodus iii. 6-10, 17; vi. 2-8; 
 xiii. 5. It embraces no more than Israel's title to possess 
 the land of Canaan, and is again referred to by Moses 
 (Leviticus xxvi. 42) as a special covenant concerning the 
 land. This covenant was frustrated, the right of possessing 
 the land was forfeited, as Jeremiah himself states in chap- 
 ter xi. 3-10, in the same words (verse 10) as he does in 
 xxxi. 32, which is certainly not accidental. At the same 
 time, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah speak not only of the 
 eternity of the covenant and the people, but also of pos- 
 sessing again the very land of promise, although the right 
 to possess it was forfeited. Therefore Jeremiah announces 
 a new covenant, which means no more and no less than a 
 renewal of the title to the land, a new grant by the Al- 
 mighty to the sinful people. All this has certainly nothing 
 to do with Christianity or any other religion, the Christian 
 or any other Messiah. 
 
 The condition of the old covenant was the worship of 
 the one, only and true God ; it was frustrated by idolatry 
 and polytheism. So Moses said, and the prophets repeat 
 it. The question then was, if this covenant be renewed, 
 the land of promise be reoccupied, will it not be frustrated 
 again by the same causes? Jeremiah answers no, it will 
 not, "I have given my law in their raids'. ' which can not 
 fail to enlighten them ; they have gone astray, but by their 
 downfall, national disasters, captivity, and consequent 
 misery, they will be purified, take the la\v to their heart, 
 ' and I will write it upon their heart, and I shall be to them 
 God and they shall be to me the people." So said Moses,
 
 :'i;<>sKLYTizi.\i; CIIUISTIAMTY. 105 
 
 and the prophets repeated it; BO it actually came to pass, 
 even literally so. From and after their return from the 
 Babylonian captivity there was no more idolatry, no poly- 
 theism, none from Zerubabel to this day in Israel. With 
 the Christian covenant, however, these aberrations of the 
 mind did not only not cease, but went from bad to worse, 
 as darkness and superstition from century to century pro- 
 gressed, so that the Protestants still call Catholicism a 
 huge paganism, the Unitarian considers the trinitarian a 
 heathen, and all of them denounce the Greek church as a 
 conglomeration of sin and aberration. As the cause of 
 this change and conversion from the state of idolatry, 
 polytheism and immorality to that of pure religion and 
 morality, the prophet states, u And they will no more 
 teach i ne his neighbor and a man his brother, Know ye 
 Jehovah ; for all will know me, even from their small to 
 their great ones, saith Jehovah," as all true religion and 
 morality depend on the correct knowledge of the Supreme 
 Being; all religious beliefs and moral principles are rays 
 from this central sun, man's knowledge of God. Also this 
 prophecy was literally fulfilled in the Hebrews' second 
 commonwealth, the knowledge of the tne, only and true 
 God was universal in Israel, while darkness and thick 
 clouds covered the nations from one end of the earth to 
 the other. On Mt. Moriah was the only temple in the 
 world where the one, only and true God was worshiped 
 and proclaimed. This was never the case in Christianity, 
 and is but exceptionally the case now. A forest of saints of 
 both sexes, images, pictures, crucifixes, a mother, son and 
 assistant of God, Satan, demons and hell-fire obstructed 
 the vision, and Christology does the same work yet. So 
 Jeremiah explains his own words in the xxxii. chapter, 
 verses 38-41. 
 
 The cause, however, of this change from pagan corrup- 
 tion to the monotheistic religiousness and morality, the 
 prophet continues, is " for I will forgive their iniquity and 
 iheir sinfulnesa will I not remember again." Steeped in 
 sensuality, wealth, sin and shame in their own county, 
 thev could not see truth and righteousness any longer, and
 
 106 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM. 
 
 so their sight was obscured and their mind bewildered 
 they could behold and know God no more. Captivity and 
 miser)', calamity and grief far away from home will rouee 
 them from their sensual dream life and purify them, their 
 sins will be expiated, their iniquity will be burned out with 
 the fire of repentance, and they will again behold the glory 
 of God, the majesty of truth and righteousness. The captiv- 
 ity will be the furnace of purification. And so it was, as 
 Moses predicted, the prophets, especially Jeremiah, Ezekiel 
 and Deutero-Isaiah, repeated, and the next foil owing chap- 
 ters of history confirmed. This, again, has nothing in com- 
 mon with Christianity, which acknowledges no forgiveness 
 of sin, no pardon of iniquity, no expiation of transgression 
 without the vicarious atonement through the blood of the 
 son. The new covenant of Jeremiah's prediction took 
 effect in Israel with Zerubabel and the returning captives, 
 and was never again frustrated. Israel remained faithful 
 to his God, as Jeremiah announces in conclusion of that 
 divine message (xxxi. 35-37). 
 
 There is no Christology either in Moses or Isaiah, none 
 in Jeremiah, certainly none in Ezekiel, who in the main, in 
 principle and doctrine, was the counterpart of the former 
 We need but consult one more book, the Psalms, to prove 
 that the New Testament is the fulfillment and continuation 
 of the old, by the grace of the church and the bookbinder.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 NO CHUISTOLOGY IX PSALMS. 
 
 AMONG all the prayers, hymns, adorations, anthems and 
 doxologies written by poets, none can equal the Psalms 
 of David, none have found such universal acknowledgment 
 and admiration, none have brought to the uncounted mil- 
 lions of human beings so much consolation, comfort, hope, 
 faith and santification. Every line in those one hundred 
 and fifty chapters breathes stirring religious inspiration in 
 the simplest, often child-like language of nature, rising on 
 the pinions of nameless piety to the very pinnacle of poeti- 
 cal affluence, now soaring aloft witli the strains of a heavenly 
 lyre to the very throne of the ineffable Deity, then bringing 
 down Eternal Mercy so close, so near to the petitioner, that 
 be feels the ecstasy of his loving kindness, sees and grasps 
 his hand outstretched to rescue, to save him, feels and sees 
 hi:? nearness. These Psalms form the substance of all exist- 
 ing devotional literature among civilized nations, they have 
 furnished the modern language with their main phraseology, 
 and are the fountain of consolation to millions of aching 
 hearts. 
 
 This collection of pious effusions certainly deserves par- 
 ticular 3 Mention. \Ve can learn from it the natural language 
 of the suul under the most varied states of the mind, from 
 shunting joy to dumt'ounded grief and sorrow. We can also 
 learn from it the religious and theological sentiments and 
 doctrines as they lived and coursed in the people's hearts 
 and souls during all the centuries from David to the Macca- 
 hcan prince Simon, a period of nine hundred years, free of 
 all dogmatic artifice, political bias and philosophical ab- 
 straction, the religion and theology of the people in that 
 
 people's lantruaire. 
 
 (107)
 
 108 A DEFENSE OF JfDAISM 
 
 The most ivniark;il>lr points, perhaps-, in this connection 
 an- 
 
 1. The stern and uncompromising monotheism through- 
 out the hook. It is the one, only and true God who is wor- 
 shiped, no angel, no saint, no mediator, no .savior, no hypos- 
 tasis, nothing besides God himself. Heaven and earth,with 
 all that fills them, the elements and the intelligences, all 
 strains of music and all phantoms of poetry are invoked, 
 personified and apostrophized to worship, adore and glorify 
 the majesty 011 high, the maker, ruler and preserver of the 
 universe, but to none of them any homage is paid, the Great 
 I Am is all in all. 
 
 2. The nearness of God to man and man to God, the most 
 intimate relation between the Father and his children char- 
 acterizes the entire book. Man appears in the brightest 
 sunlight of the Deity, and God is manifested with the most 
 tender affections of the noblest humanity. 
 
 3. The lofty position ascribed in the dispensations of 
 Providence to virtue, righteousness, purity and holiness in 
 God and man, as the very points in which they meet, and 
 which are the scales to reach the summuin b<,num. 
 
 It is not a religion, it is THE religion, not a theology, but 
 TBE theology, which attain most adequate expression in 
 those Psalms. 
 
 And yet the advocates of Christology want to make us be- 
 lieve that the peculiar doctrines or dogmas of that faith are 
 outlined, foreshadowed or prophesied in the Psalms, in which 
 there is not the slightest attempt at predicting or foretelling 
 any event the praying man, the God-adoring poet, never 
 prophesies and not an iota of an idea contrary to absolute 
 monotheism is discernible anywhere in the whole book, it 
 seems to be even more illegitimate and arbitray to discover 
 Christology in the Psalms than in Moses and Isaiah, the 
 fallacy of which we have exposed; because popular prayers 
 and hymns naturally contain no mysteries unknown to or 
 not understood by every petitioner or worshiper; and it is 
 certainly absurd to presume that the ancient Hebrews prayed 
 for a thousand years prayers, the import of which they did 
 not understand.
 
 VS. PKOSELYTIZIXii ril KI STIAMT Y. 109 
 
 The most renowned Christian expounders of I'salms have 
 given up the idea of Messianic prophecies in the Psalms. 
 Not so the conversion agent ; lie must cling to his inveterate 
 errors, he has no other stock in trade. He goes on telling 
 the same old story, however often refuted, and it takes 
 well with church members, who never could read a line of 
 Hebrew, because their minds are saturated with the Christ- 
 ological stories and dogmas ; consequently the missionarv's 
 expositions suit their prejudices with which they come to the 
 Bible, and they do exactly as he does. That is all right as far 
 as it goes. But when they come with those old stories to 
 the unprejudiced Hebrew, who can examine Scripture iuth-- 
 original, it becomes all wrong. In proof thereof we examine 
 some of those Psalms. 
 
 Right in the very beginning of the book, in the sec- 
 ond chapter, a son of (lod is mentioned twice, who is also 
 called King, and Messiah. The P^nglish version of it reads 
 thus : 
 
 ' Wherefore do nations rage, and people meditate a vain 
 thing? The kings of the earth raise themselves up, and 
 rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his 
 anointed : Let us break asunder their bands, and castaway 
 from us their cords. He who dwelleth in the heavens will 
 laugh : the Lord will hold them in d rision Then will he 
 speak unto them in anger, and in his displeasure will lie ter- 
 rify them (Saying.) Yet have I appointed my king upon 
 Zion my holy mount. I will announce the decree, the Lord 
 hath said unto me : My son art thou : I have indeed thi.- 
 day begotten thee. Ask it of me, and I will give the nations 
 as an inheritance, and for thy possession the uttermost 
 ends of the earth. Thou shall, break them with a rod of 
 iron; like a potter's vessel shalt thou dash them in pi' 
 And now, O ye kings be wise : take warning ye judges of tin- 
 earth. Serve the Lord Avith fear, and rejoice with trembling. 
 Do homage to the son, lest he be angry and ye be lost on the 
 way; for his Avrath is so speedily kindled. Happy are all 
 they Avho put their trust in him."
 
 110 A DKFENSK OK .H DAIS.M 
 
 In this translation it looks almost like a prophecy con- 
 cerning a king, Messiah and son of God, which it will be 
 shown in a moment it is not. If it were a prophecy it 
 could not refer to the Christian Messiah. This "son of 
 God " does not amount to much as a proof in favor of any 
 person, as the whole of Israel was called by God " my first- 
 born son/' which Moses and Hosea repeated. 
 
 The -whole tone of the psalm is too martial, too much re- 
 bellion and conspiracy-like, to fit to a prince of peace. And 
 then the gentle son of man to break the nations with a 
 rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel ; 
 who can find in that tone of wild uproar and that furious 
 punishment following any prediction of the Messiah lamb- 
 kin? We could easier discover in this chapter John Hyr- 
 can, Alexander Jannai, Mohammed, Charlemagne, Atilla or 
 Cromwell, than the son of Mary. Besides it must be ad- 
 mitted that nothing of the kind occurred in the life of the 
 Christian Messiah. No heathens raged and no people im- 
 agined vain things. No kings set themselves up and no 
 rulers conspired against God and his Messiah. No bands 
 and no cords were either put on or broken by anybody, and 
 no nation was broken with any sort of a rod and none 
 dashed in pieces; nothing of the kind happened. It takes 
 a goodly stretch of the imagination to see in this chapter a 
 prediction concerning the Christian Messiah. 
 
 This psalm, however, read in the light of grammar, is 
 no prophecy, no prediction at all ; it is a poem on a lately 
 transpired event, like Psalm i., written by some anonymous 
 poet, who does not maintain at all to be either a prophet or 
 the son of a prophet. 
 
 The psalm begins thus : Lamah ragueslu Goyim, the verb 
 strictly in the past tense, which, to be honest, must be 
 translated, " Why did the Gentiles rage?'' then, of course, 
 all the verbs following the first, describing the actions con- 
 nected with it in chronological order are and must be in 
 tin- future tense But as soon as that chain of actions is 
 closed, and a new one begins in verses o and 6, there is 
 again the past tense, Va'ani nasachti Malki, ic I did anoint
 
 VS. J'ROSELYTI/I.\<i CHRISTIANITY. Ill 
 
 my king"* (or set up), to follow again ly the future tense 
 or the imperative mode, for the same reason :ts above. It is 
 a past event on which the poet dwells, and not a prediction 
 at all. 
 
 Xow let us see to what person and event the poet may 
 refer 
 
 The event is clearly expressed to have 'been n rebellion 
 among Gentile?, not in Israel, as the plural of Goyim and 
 Lf.ummim (verse 1) nowhere in the Bible refers to Israel. 
 Those Gentiles consist of a number of petty kingdom 
 their Mdachim kings in verse _ shows, and other national- 
 ities or tribes led by chiefs (Pozcnim \ all of whom conspired, 
 formed a compact combination nosedu yachar (from yasad, 
 to establish firmly) to effect a revolution The conspiracy 
 is overthrown, the rebellion is quelled, as said in verse 9, 
 and the heads thereof are advised to return to their legiti- 
 mate allegiance (verses 10, 11 ) or the deserved punishment 
 might overreach them (verse 11). Anybody least ac- 
 quainted with the history of the past must know that no 
 such event transpired in the time of the Christian Messiah, 
 nor at any time after his death, that Gentiles conspired, 
 in rebellion against Israel and were totally vanquished. 
 
 To come nearer to the event, we must investigate against 
 whom those Gentiles rebelled. In verse 2 it is stated they re- 
 belled against Jehovah and his Messiah, whose bands they 
 want to break asunder and whose curds they mean to cast 
 away. So they are admonisln-d at the end to return to their 
 allegiance to Jehovah ami his Messiah or son. Who was that 
 Messiah in Israel against whom those Gentiles rebelled be- 
 - the anointed high priest? Only one person in Israel wa> 
 called Messiah, or the Anointed, and that was the King of 
 all Israel, Saul, David and Solomon, later on King Josiah, 
 who had again assumed the scepter over all Israel ; and still 
 
 r King Cyrus was called Messiah, although he v 
 heathen, because all Israel was under hifi r. King 
 
 * The beginning of verse 5 is falsely translated in the future 
 tense; it should be, " Then did he speak as IT" TX (Exodus xvi. ; 
 Numbers xxi 17); -V *N (Joshua xii. 2); Hir TJ* (1 Kings xi. 7); 
 also 1 Kings viii. 1, and elsewhere.
 
 112 A J>KFKNSK ol .H'DAISM 
 
 Hezekiah did attempt, as the Talmud says, to become a 
 M'-ssiah, but he did not reach it.* The Messiah of the Lord 
 must have been Saul, David, Solomon or Josiah. Let us 
 see whether we can not pick out the right man. 
 
 The Messiah of Psalm ii. must have been one who was 
 anointed upon Zion, for nasach (verse 6) means primarily 
 to anoint, and is synonymous with ma shack. That was cer- 
 tainly not the Christian Messiah, who was never anointed, 
 nor can anybody tell that he ever was on Mount Zion at all. 
 It was not Saul, he never reigned on Mount Zion, nor was it 
 David, lor he was not anointed on Mount Zion. This limits 
 the matter to Solomon and Josiah. Let us see whether we 
 can select the right man from the two without casting lots. 
 
 The particular Messiah of Psalm ii., according to verse 
 7, must he he concerning whom God said, " Thou art my 
 son, this day have I begotten thee ; '' and all that in the 
 past tense (dinar and yelacW.icha), hence it refers not to the 
 Christian Messiah, as it must have been said before the 
 psalm was written. Besides that, even according to Chris- 
 tian authority, it is not God ; it is the Holy Ghost in the 
 form of a dove, cooing something which was understood to 
 that effect, about which the Synoptics considerably dis- 
 agree. It was not Josiah, of whom it is reported nowhere 
 that God called him his son. Solomon is the only person 
 of whom we are informed in Scriptures that God called him 
 his son. 
 
 The Prophet Nathan brings to David the divine message 
 (2 Samuel vii. 4-17; 1 Chronicles xvii.) that he should 
 build no house to the Lord, but his son and successor 
 should do so; and concerning this son and temple builder 
 the prophet in the name of God announces Ani eheyek lo 
 I'ab, vehu yiheyeh lee l"ben: " I will be to him (like) a father, 
 and he shall be to me (like) a son" (1 Chronicles xvii. 
 13, and 2 Samuel vii. 14). Besides Israel, whom ' 
 calls '' my first-born son " ( Kxodus iv. 22). to which refer.- 
 
 * Psalm Ixxxix. was written on the death of King Josiah, in he 
 battle of Megido, and on the humiliating sequences. There the 
 Messiah reallv was slain.
 
 VS. PIUfSKI.YTI/IM. rmusTIANITY. 11. 
 
 Deuteronomy xiv. 1, "Ye are sons of the Lord your God," 
 and llosea xi.. " For Israel was a lad, and from Egypt have 
 I called my son," no one was called a son of God except Sol- 
 onion. To him, then, and to him only, could the poet refer 
 when he let him exclaim. " Jehovah said to (or concerning) 
 me, thou art my son." This certainly was a dose court 
 secret, of which, besides Nathan and David, none had any 
 knowledge, or else David's son, Adoniah, would not have 
 himself proclaimed David's successor, nor would Joah and 
 Khyathar have supported him (1 Kimrs i. 5-7). Therefore, 
 we suspect Xathan to have been the author of Psalms i., ii. 
 and Ixxii. 
 
 This rebellion must have occurred when Solomon mounted 
 the throne, or else it could not be maintained that God said 
 of him, " To-day have 1 begotten thee." which again could 
 not refer to the Christian Messiah, if he was the eternal 
 Logos. And here, again, we have before us positive Scriptu- 
 ral proof, in 1 Kings, chapters i. and ii., that there was a re- 
 bellion in Jerusalem with quite a bloody catastrophe when 
 Solomon was anointed successor to his father. Then comes 
 a brie.' mention of that same rebellion at the same time 
 in Syria under Resan and in Edom under Adad (1 Kings 
 xii 14-25). Here arc the " kings of Syria," the Malchei Erez, 
 not kings of the whole earth, and the Rozenim princes, chiefs 
 and judges of the Gentiles and also of Jerusalem that re- 
 belled against Jehovah and his Messiah. David was King 
 of Syria up to the Euphrates Uiver, of Kdom, Ammon, Moab 
 and Midian. These Gentiles rebelled against Jehovah and 
 his Messiah when Solomon mounted the throne. This is the 
 event to which Psalm ii. refers Therefore the Syriae bar 
 comes in>tead of the Hebrew ben. The Goyim refers to the 
 Syrian principalities and the Lcumim to the Edomitic tribes, 
 as in Genesis xxv. 23, which the poet had in view. 
 
 P-AI.M X. 
 
 Another example of misinterpretation and misapplica- 
 tion of Scriptures for dogmatic purposes is the Evangelical 
 presentation of Psalm ex., or rather the first ver>e thereof, 
 to make King David testily to the plurality in the Deit;
 
 114 A DEFENSE OF .ll'DAISM. 
 
 though there were two Gods. This teat was accomplished 
 by a simple trick not uncommon at that time among homi- 
 letic expounders of Scriptures, known in the Talmud as 
 "ipn ~N "Do not read this word as is its established read- 
 ing, but read it so as I propose," and it will tell that which 
 the preacher wants it to say. This rule of-exegesis may be 
 unobjectionable, if it is applied in support of some moral 
 lesson which might thus be better impressed on the minds 
 of the hearers by being seemingly based upon the Scriptural 
 testimony. But when this is used to establish a fact other- 
 wise unknown, it is not only illegitimate, but downright mis- 
 representation, and this is evidently the case in the Evan- 
 gelical presentation of the first verse in Psalm ex. 
 
 The worst, perhaps, in the matter is that the Evangelists 
 produce that cunning misrepresentation of Scriptures with- 
 out feeling that by so doing they bring their master down i 
 the level of such preachei> whose object is not to teach 
 truth but to produce some sham testimony in support of 
 what they assert. They did not succeed any too well after 
 all, for they let Jesus quote this verse in one place to prove 
 that he was, and in another that he was not, a son of David, 
 hence they did not know exactly what Jesus said or that he 
 said it at all ; the latter is most likely. 
 
 Let us see how that psalm, according to Evangelical sug- 
 gestion, reads in English 
 
 " The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand, 
 until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall 
 send the rod of thy strength out of Zion : rule thou in the 
 midst of thine enemies. Thy people shall be willing in the 
 day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb 
 of the morning : thou hast the dew of thy youth. The Lord 
 hath sworn, and will not repent. Thou art a priest forever, 
 after the order of Melchizedek. The Lord at thy right hand 
 shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. lie shall 
 judge among the heathen, he shall fill the place* with th<- 
 dead bodies : he shall wound the heads over many countries. 
 He shall drink of the brook in the way ; therefore shall he 
 lift up the head." 
 
 According to this version, it is to be understood that J ';-
 
 VS. I'ROSKI.YTl/IM; r 1 1 KISTI AMTY. 11") 
 
 vid prophesied which he never did or maintained that 
 (iod said to (Jod, "Sit at my right hand," etc. This is the 
 very place where the trick conies in At that time the 
 vowel points and accents were nut written with the P>ihle 
 text. The consonants were written as now in the scrolls of 
 the Law in tin- synagogues, the vocali/.ation was traditional 
 The re fore that al tJi/kra trick was easy enough, especially 
 when the Hebrew was no longer the popular tongue, opposite 
 people not so very well versed in the Hebrew Bible, and ni< T. 
 especially by the evangelist-, who had not the original but 
 the (Jreek version, or a Syriac rendition from the Creek be- 
 fore them 
 
 It so happens that one of the Hebrew names of God is in 
 consonants identical with that of " My human ma>ter or 
 lord," both are A D N Y; the difference is only in th<- 
 vowels. That name of God is pronounced "Adonoi,'' and that 
 of the human master is " Adonee," my master. In the origi- 
 nal the second "Lord" of the translation reads '\\donee, " 
 my (human) master, or as in England, "my lord," which 
 was then common address in polite language, and occurs al- 
 ready in Genesis (xxiii. 6, 11, 15; xliv. 18) several tim< ~. 
 That verse reads literally, "Jehovah saith (or communic. 
 to my master, sit at my right hand." But by that al tfiikri 
 trick the "Adonee" became "Adonoi " in the Gospels, and 
 in the English version, " the Lord saith to my Lord," both 
 with a capital " L '' to which is added the second blunder of 
 making of the second Lord "my Lord," which "Adonoi " 
 never signified; hence either the capital " L " or the " my " 
 is false, According to the text the capital " L " is a de 
 tion. Had that poet had the idea to say God said to God, 
 he would certainly have said, Jehovah saith to Elohim, to 
 avoid misunderstanding. Besides the t^rmneum is no verb. 
 does not signify said or saith, it signifies "a communication 
 of Jehovah to my master or lord," it being absurd to sup- 
 pose that God communicates something to himself, then tin- 
 object to whom the comunication is directed must he the 
 Adonee, God's communication to Adonee. As this ee can 
 not be used in Hebrew, except to a person addressed or men- 
 tioned before in the same connection, consequently this
 
 116 A DKKKNSK (K .1CDAISM 
 
 A<lon r e must refer to David, the first word in the psalm, and 
 th" Le-David can not mean "of David." Imt literally k> to 
 David :" somebody brings that message to the king and an- 
 nounces it to him personally; then that heading of Psalm 
 ex. reads thus, "To David, a psalm, Jehovah's communica- 
 tion to my lord (the king), sit at my right hand," etc., and 
 tho whole dualism of Deity vanishes. 
 
 Perhaps the Hebrew is wrong, and the Evangelical read- 
 ing is right, the Massorites falsiiied that word or any similar 
 dodge which conversionists have on hand. Unfortunately 
 the whole chapter, like Psalm ii., is too martial and cruel 
 i prince of peace. ''The Lord is at thy right hand,'' in 
 ">. can not refer to that Messiah, who is himself seated 
 at God's right hand, as supposed to be said in verse 1. Then 
 comes in the sanv verse splitting or cutting in twain as the 
 term m-tchaz signifies the king on the day of his wrath, fill- 
 ing the land with dead bodies and splitting heads over many 
 countries, in verse 6, which the English version changes into 
 <k wounding," although it is the same machaz as in verse 5. 
 S not this the language of a bloody war? Can this refer to 
 a prince of peace? Could it possibly refer to the son of Mary, 
 of whom no such or similar deeds are known, or be even im- 
 aginable, if his biographers did not entirely misrepresent 
 him? Any sensible reader can see that we have before us in 
 this a psalm written by a warrior poet referring to a fierce 
 contest on the battle field. 
 
 Besides all that, the last verse of the psalm. t- He shall 
 drink of the brook on the way." finds no application what- 
 ever in the life of the Christian Messiah : and the whole in 
 language and diction is entirely foreign to the genuine Da- 
 vidian productions, so much so that modern critics want to 
 make of it a Maccabean psalm, written under the wild 
 < xeitement of patriotic fanaticism, when the exasperated 
 Maccabees fought the armies of the Syrian oppressors. In- 
 deed the brief and abrupt phrases of this p-al;n a:i 1 the fre- 
 quent omission of copulas an 1 connecting t Tins between 
 th members of it, point to a tremendous state of excitement 
 in the poet's mind, such as th" nearne-s ,,f a furious battle 
 only could produce. In the life of the warrior kins, however,
 
 VS. PROSKLYTIZI.Xi; CHRISTIANITY. 117 
 
 who fought all nations round about Israel, there are un- 
 doubtedly numerous incidents as excitable as any in the 
 time of the Maccabees, and one of them must have been in 
 the poet's mind. Let us see whether we can discover it. 
 
 Absalom, we are told in 2 Samuel xv.-xix., incited a most 
 tremendous rebellion against his father, the hoary King Da- 
 vid. With a large and fanaticised army the son approaches 
 the city of Jerusalem, not only to dethrone but to slay the 
 father, who, not prepared for th<> emergency, must seek sal- 
 vation in speedy flight. Attended by a small band of heroic 
 companions and trained warriors, David precipitately leaves 
 the capital he had established, mourning and weeping, and 
 followed by a lamenting multitude he hastens toward the Jor- 
 dan, to cross it before the enemy would overtake him, to seek 
 refuge and shelter somewhere in the wilderness, to protect 
 him against the fury of his own rebellious son. Before he 
 reached the Jordan, Shimei, son of Gera, comes out, insults 
 and curses the exasperated old hero, and he bears it all without 
 a murmur. Imagine David's state of mind ; it is not described 
 except partially in Psalm iii. By the strategy of his wise 
 friends left behind in Jerusalem, David succeeded in reaching 
 Mahanaim, east of the Jordan River, and in gaining time 
 and succor for organization. Before Absalom, with his army, 
 could reach him, he had completed an organization of his 
 forces and reinforcements under three chief captains to fight 
 the fratricidal battle, David is ready to lead his hosts in the 
 combat, but his men would not permit it, and said to him : 
 ''Thou shalt not go forth, for if we flee away, they will not 
 care for us ; neither if half of us die will they care for us, but 
 now thou art worth ten thousand of us ; therefore now it is 
 better that thou succor us from the city." (2 Samuel 
 xviii. 3.) The king obeyed. What his feelings were when he 
 stood at the gate of Mahanaim to see the hundreds and 
 thousands of his host marching out to fight the horrid bat- 
 tle what were his hopes and fears, his anxieties and regrets, 
 the hurricane of most contradictory sentiments which up- 
 heaved his soul can hardly bo expressed in adequate words. 
 Then and there, perhaps, at the gate an inspired poet, with 
 harp in hand, sang the Mizmor to David. A communica-
 
 118 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 tion of Jehovah to my lord (the king), " Sit thou at my right 
 hand," under the protection of God sit quietly in Mahanaim, 
 as the people want it, "until I shall have made (or put) 
 thine enemies thy footstool," till the battle is fought and 
 won, and the enemy is subdued, " Jehovah will send from 
 Zion the staff of thy power, rule thou (wilt again) in the 
 midst of thine enemies," after the rebellious host will be con- 
 quered and scattered. Now this poet continues with giving 
 reasons in support of his consoling and hopeful message : 
 "Thy generous people (or thy people of generosity those 
 not engaged in this rebellion) in the day of thy might, in 
 holy attire from the womb of the morning, thine is the dew 
 of thy youth." (All those who fought with thee and sup- 
 ported thee in the days of thy youth, when thou didst per- 
 form all those valorous deeds, are still with thee. This re- 
 fers to the heroic host that have just left Mahanaim, to the 
 succor he received there from the East (2 Samuel xvii. 27) 
 and the thousands of Judah and Benjamin, that faithfully" 
 stood by him in the days of peril at the zenith of his power.) 
 The poet then gives a second reason why the king should be 
 hopeful and cheerful : " Jehovah hath sworn and will not 
 revoke, Thou art Kohen (ruler, 2 Samuel viii. 18) forever, 
 by my decree (Ibid, chapter vii.) art thou my just and 
 legitimate king." (God will never revoke his decree which 
 made him the legitimate king. Aldibr-ithi nowhere in 
 Scriptures signifies " on the order," although Gesenius says 
 so on the strength of this one passage ; in connection with 
 God it only signifies decree, command, revelation, propheti- 
 cal speech. Tzedek signifies true, righteous, as wt-11 as just 
 and legitimate. " Melkizedek " is not there in the Hebrew 
 text, it reads : Malki Zedek, two words connected by a makif, 
 which may be intended to refer to the fact that David was 
 the first kins of Jerusalem, as was the Malkisedek of old the 
 first king of Salem, while in the main it signifies, " my le- 
 gitimate king.") Basing upon these two pillars of strength 
 and hope, the love of his people and the decree of God, the 
 poet announces to the king, "Adonoi is at thy right hand, 
 who crusheth kings in the day of his wrath, and ju<l.!_ r r<l 
 among populous nations, even ho who crushed the head upon
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING ril IMST. A.NITY. 119 
 
 the land of Rabbah (Ammon) ; from the brook (the Jordan) 
 will he drink by the way, therefore shall he lift up the head." 
 (Pie who crushed the head of Ammon then, will lift up the 
 head, of Israel's king now, bring him back to the land west 
 of the Jordan, drinking by the way from its water in march- 
 ing homeward.) This refers back to the beginning of the 
 psalua, ''Jehovah will send from Zion the staff of thy power," 
 as also to Deuteronomy xxxii. 39. Mole guevioth does not 
 signify dead bodies with which he will fill the places, as mole 
 signifies that something is or was full or filled without any 
 idea of future, and guevioth does not mean only carcasses or 
 corpses, it means also living bodies, as in Genesis xlvii. 18. 
 In this case it could only mean a nation of many living 
 bodies, a populous nation only, as it does not make any 
 sense whatever that God will judge among nations filled 
 with dead bodies. A nation can not be full of dead bodies, 
 and 'places" is not in the text, but God can well judge 
 among most populous nations and demonstrate his power. 
 That Nachal points to the Jordan is evident from Genesis 
 xxxii. 24 ; 2 Chroni les xx. 16, where the Jordan is called 
 han-Nachal because it is the main stream of Palestine. 
 
 And now I leave it to any professor of Hebrew, to any 
 person acquainted with the Hebrew history and rational 
 canon of criticism, to decide whether my exposition of 
 Psalm ex. is not most natural, scrupulously exact, gram- 
 matically correct and psychologically most likely and ac- 
 ceptable. If so the Evangelic conception of this psalm is 
 false, and all arguments based upon it, together with the 
 anthropomorphic phrase " sitting at the right hand of God," 
 falls dead to the ground. Anyhow, every student will be 
 bound to admit that Avith such bait no Jewish fish can be 
 caught. The Hebrew least acquainted with his literature 
 understands that kind of al thikri trick, and places no con- 
 fidence in it. It proves to him the wit, sagacity or dullness 
 of the preacher. The same is the case with every so-called 
 Messianic psalm there exists none a little reflection and 
 investigation of the original show, that all Christian head- 
 ings of Psalms are radically false, and all Christological
 
 120 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM. 
 
 quotations from them are utterly erroneous. There is no 
 Christology in Psalms. 
 
 I wrote and published the substance of this thirty-nine 
 years ago in a New York weekly called the Asmonean. It 
 was repeated often enough without my name and none 
 has undertaken to refute it. But conversion agents must 
 and do tenaciously adhere to the old errors and perversion 
 of Scriptures.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A RESUME AND REFERENCE TO ZACIIAKIAH. 
 
 THE method of expounding Hebrew Scriptures to which 
 the authors and expounders of Christology resorted and 
 orthodox conversionists still tenaciously cling, appears to- 
 day as erroneous and absurd to intelligent Bible students 
 as does the philosophy of those ancient Hebrews, who took 
 the golden ear-rings and nose-rings of their women, made of 
 them an idol, and, dancing around that golden calf, lustily 
 shouted, " This is thy God, O Israel." The Biblical passages 
 reviewed in preceding chapters fully prove the absurdity of 
 that method of exegesis, consequently it would be superflu- 
 ous to discuss any more passages of Scriptures, upon which 
 Christology bases its claims. The method being false in 
 main points as we have seen it can not be correct in the 
 minor points. Any deviation from the straight line between 
 two given points in the same plane, and persisting in the 
 direction indicated by the angle of deviation, leads always 
 farther from the objective point the more the line is pro- 
 longed. David said : " Behold, he who will conceive in- 
 iquity, be pregnant with mischief, will bring forth false- 
 hood." (Psalms vii. 14.) I do not understand this to be a 
 prediction of Mary's case, although two of the verbs are in 
 the future tense, simply because I do not believe the case. 
 nor that David prophesied ; but I believe that it is generally 
 true. An iniquitous method of expounding Scriptures also 
 brings forth falsehood in all c;< 
 
 That method, it seems, was iniquitous at its inception, for 
 it was adopted by men who knew better, for dogmatic or 
 ecclesiastical purposes, to support by divine authority 
 adapted incidents and dramatized a priori productions, 
 when they well knew the process, and must have under- 
 
 (121)
 
 122 A DKFKNSK t)K JUDAISM 
 
 stood that the Scriptural argument was intended only to 
 beguile unsophisticated, credulous and devout people to ac- 
 cept the sham evidence upon their teachers' word and wit. 
 The ultimate purpose may have been good and laudable, 
 the primary purpose, however, looks iniquitous like pious 
 fraud and the educational means in an infant school. 
 
 The examples of adaptation are very numerous. The 
 miracles in the Gospels, together with th.- ascension, being 
 imitations of similar miracles of the Old Testament 
 prophets, have been mentioned before. The character of the 
 main hero of the Gospels is a careful imitation of Jeremiah, 
 with a slight touch of Job features. It is possible that 
 Jesus studied those characters so long and so well that he 
 became identified with them However, there is nothing 
 original in it except the conception, which is of heathen 
 origin, and the idea of vicarious atonement, which also 
 seems to be a piece of exegesis on Isaiah Ivii., on which the 
 rabbis of the Talmud base a similar doctrine, not, however, 
 without showing that another construction of that passage 
 is just as probable. Even the report of Jesus resting two 
 days in a sepulcher and rising on the third is an adaptation 
 of Hosea vi. 3. It is difficult not to suspect the authors of 
 conscious adaptation. That peculiar story, parable, legend 
 or whatever it may be called, Satan tempting Jesus in a vile 
 and violent manner, is certainly no more than an adapta- 
 tion of Zachariah iii., with the only difference that in Zach- 
 ariah it is announced as a vision and in Matthew it is 
 turned into an alleged fact. 
 
 Speaking of Zachariah, we feel tempted to quote some 
 other incidents in the Gospel story which are adaptations 
 of a similar nature. The crucifixion story, it has been ob- 
 served, is an adaptation from Isaiah liii., not, however, 
 without supplementing the whole by imaginary incidents 
 shaped according to other Bible passages, especially Psalms 
 xxii. and Ixix., as shown in our book, "The Martyrdom of 
 Jesus of Nazareth,'' pp. 117 and 118. Zachariah had to 
 contribute quite a share toward the Gospel story, one, per- 
 haps, best calculated to expose the spurious character of 
 those incidents. Zachariah xiv. furnished several incidents
 
 VS. PftOSELYTlZIXG CHRISTIANITY. 123 
 
 to the crucifixion story. Because it is stated there (verse 4), 
 " And his feet will stand that day on .Mount Olives," etc., 
 therefore the principal seem- in the last days of Jesus is 
 laid on Mount Olives. It is said there that Mount Olives 
 will be cleaved in two halves, and the mountains will flee 
 as they did before the earthquake in the time of 1'x/iah ; the 
 Evangelists produce an earthquake on the crueiiixion dav, 
 and Mount Olive not being split yet, they tell by a little 
 stretch of exegetie ingenuity that the veil of the temple was 
 rent in twain, although this is impossible by an earthquake, 
 and the same veil was there whole and undamaged when 
 Titus ransacked and destroyed the temple, not only one, 
 but even two veils, as really were in the last temple, al- 
 though the Evangelist did not know it. It is said there 
 furthermore (verse 5), "And Jehovah my (Jod eometh, all 
 saints with thee." (God, with whom all saints are, not that 
 they should come with him.) And the Evangelists pro- 
 duced a partial resurrection on the day of crucifixion, the 
 graves open, the saints rise and come bodily to Jerusalem, 
 and nobody besides the Evangelists ever betrayed any 
 knowledge of the stupendous miracle. It says there fur- 
 ther (verse 7), " And it will be one special day, it will be 
 known to Jehovah, not day and not night, and at evening 
 time there shall be light." This is turned into an eclipse of 
 the sun on the day of crucifixion by the Evangelists. None 
 mention that eclipse, not even old Pliny. It gave orthodox 
 doctors as much trouble as does the star of Bethlehem. 
 They were so much enamored with Zachariah's grotesque 
 figures and tropes, that the Messiah had to enter Jerusalem 
 riding on an ass, because Zachariah said so (ix. 9). The 
 king who will come to the daughter of Zion will be righteous 
 and saved, a poor man (and yet) riding on an ass, "even 
 upon a young ass, the foal of an ass." Matthew, who did 
 not know the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, has two asses, 
 and shows distinctly that it is an adaptation and no fact 
 which he represents.* The very plainest of all adaptations, 
 
 * That passage in Zacbariah ix., which misled also Rabbi Heze- 
 kiah, of the Talmud, to discover in it a Messianic prophecy, is 
 plainly an imitation of Micah v., and there it is, no doubt, a mes-
 
 124 A DEFENSE OF .U'DAISM 
 
 perhaps, is Luke's Judas Jscariot and the thirty pieces he 
 received and cast into the treasury, which is the clearest 
 adaptation of Zachariah xi. 12 and 13. If anybody should 
 be inclined to opine that Zachariah prophesied the fate of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, he can easily disabuse his mind by read- 
 ing xiv. 8, to the end of the chapter. It could not possibly 
 refer to the son of Mary, although the driving cut of the 
 money-changers and traders from the temple, as it is re- 
 ported he did, is again no more and no less than an adapta- 
 tion of the last verse of that chapter, " And there shall be 
 no longer a Canaanite (or merchant) in the house of Jeho- 
 vah Zebaoth on that day." Therefore, the incident, accord- 
 ing to the Synoptics, occurred during the last days of his 
 life, and according to John several years prior. 
 
 Thus the Bible was turned upside down. The heirs of 
 this method continued the work of turning the Bible down- 
 side up, which was no less iniquitous in its inception. Paul 
 started this method. The theocracy taught and established 
 by Moses meant the democratic state with personal liberty, 
 equality and uncompromising justice on earth, God only to 
 be the king and his law to be supreme, with the most ex- 
 alted humanism to protect the poor and weak, stranger and 
 friendless, the dumb beast and the fruit tree. Paul turned 
 that whole magnificent structure of government into a theo- 
 logical kingdom of heaven ai subtle as gas, banished free- 
 dom, right and justice from the earth by declaring the law 
 a curse now abolished, and opened the gates widely to the 
 
 sage to King Hezekiah, as evident from verses 4 and 5, with the 
 only difference that Micah calls him MOSHEL and Zachariah calls 
 him MELECH, the former addressed him when yet Crown Prince, 
 and the latter when he was King Rabbi Hezekiah did not 
 know, as we do now, that Zachariah ix. to xiii. was not written by 
 the same who wrote the eight chapters of that book ; it is the work 
 of a much older author, not only according to the Etyle of \\r\t por- 
 tion, but according to the frequent references to the kingdom of 
 Ephraim or Joseph, the glory of the Philistine cities, Tyre and 
 Sidon, Damascus and Hamath, all of which had no existence in 
 the time of Zachariah, the contemporary of Zernbabel. He evi- 
 dently was a contemporary of Micah, hence he may have been the 
 Zachariah ben Jeberechiah of Isaiah viii. 2.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 125 
 
 abject despotism and slavery which existed in Christendom 
 up to the very dawn of our century, and flourishes yet not 
 only in Russia and Abyssinia, but, in a little milder form, 
 in all military and police states of Christendom. There- 
 fore, Moses, with his democratic, theocratic foundation, 
 abolished slavery and emancipated women in Israel, and 
 Paul, with his monarchic, heirarchic, Messianic heir of a 
 throne, upheld slavery, declared the inferiority of woman, 
 and preached to primitive Christians servile respect for him 
 who bears the sword. Then that turning downside up con- 
 tinued almost endlessly, until the whole Bible became a 
 mystic symbolic conglomeration, Jerusalem is a city in 
 heaven, where the angels and the saints are encamped. The 
 throne of David was turned into a throne of God, and the 
 Davidian dynasty was exalted to a progeny of God him- 
 self. The political institutions of ancient Israel, minus 
 their democratic spirit, were resurrected and remodeled to a 
 new church establishment. The mission of Israel to bring 
 God's truth and light to suffering humanity was concen- 
 trated into a fabric of salvation and transported from earth 
 to heaven, or to a place from which no wanderer returns to 
 tell the tale of his experience. The hopes of Israel for the 
 redemption and salvation of mankind, the triumph of 
 truth and goodness, were adjourned to a second advent of 
 the Messiah, and conditioned by all men believing the same 
 thing which reason forbids. The very terms of Scriptures 
 were evaporated, rarified, spiritualized and rendered incon- 
 ceivable. The Zeraseed. of Israel, which everywhere in the 
 Bible means human or even animal offspring, or vegetable 
 seed, without any spiritual sense, was turned into spiritual 
 seed, which must signify Jesus ; although the prophet said 
 concerning the children of Israel, "And their seed shall be 
 known among the Gentiles, and their offspring (plural) 
 among the people; all that see them shall acknowledge 
 them that they are the seed (plural ) which the Lord hath 
 blessed." (Isaiah Ixi. 9.) The redemption of Israel from 
 Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and other countries was changed 
 into a theological redemption, as the very concrete king- 
 dom, throne and dynasty had been, and all redeeming had
 
 126 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 to be done over again by one redeemer. After all that 
 transformation, transportation and translation were FC- 
 coroplished in the Christian mind, it became quite easy for 
 advocates of Christology to find Scriptures for every no 
 tion, dogma or creed, especially if grammar, history and i 
 common sense are not permitted to testify in the case at 
 all, as we have seen all the time. We need not go into any 
 further criticism of Scriptures. All details in this con- 
 nection are superfluous, after it is known that the system is 
 erroneous and the methods iniquitous ; the outcome any- 
 where can be falsehoods only. 
 
 This, however, is all right and just to the faithful and 
 orthodox Christian, who first believes it all because his an- 
 cestors did and all men of his acquaintance do so. It is his 
 subjective knowledge and personal conviction, so his con- 
 science was shaped and moulded, against which nothing can 
 be said. It may also be all right and proper to the Chris- 
 tian latitudinarian, who is still a Christian in name, theist 
 or agnostic in fact, because he believes that if Christian- 
 born people had not this Christianity tied to this heavy sand- 
 bag of Christology, they would fly away from all religion 
 and morality, and chaos would be on hand ; as the princes of 
 Europe think, they could not govern the nations without the 
 aid of church and priest. It may be all right even to those 
 fashionable people who own pews in the most elegant 
 churches and believe in nothing, because it belongs to the 
 good tone of society to be no infidel, no Jew, no eccentric 
 or marked person, as they in fact never reason, never care 
 for truth, and hardly ever think of it. All of them profess 
 belief in the New Testament story and the Christology based 
 upon it, naturally find it everywhere in Scriptures, also in 
 the Song of Solomon, anywhere, everywhere. What man 
 once believes he meets anywhere. The earnest spiritualist 
 meets spirits. The Mormon, every sectarian meets his creed 
 in the same Scriptures, but he believed it first and then he 
 discovered it in that book. We would not disturb those 
 infidels even in their belief, who maintain that the Christian 
 story is not true, but the world would have gone to pieces if 
 it had not been for Jesus and his disciples, who saved some
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZIM; CHHISTIAXITY. 127 
 
 fragments of salvation anyhow which keep together the loose 
 and heterogeneous elements of society ; for this is after all a 
 religious reminiscence which they retain, perhaps the only 
 one they have, and their knowledge of history in its spirit 
 and evolutions is too limited to know that the fate of 
 humanity at no time depended on one person or one book. 
 That one-man importance, a residue from centuries of mon- 
 archical training of minds, is no less idolatrous than man- 
 worship. As that savant said, if one rides his hobby 
 through all the streets of the city, let him be undisturbed ; if 
 he wants you to ride with him, then it is time to resent the 
 indignity ; and we consider it sinful to molest others or even 
 disturb one in his religious convictions, whatever they 
 may be. 
 
 However, when the oflicious conversionist comes to us 
 with his sanctimonious wisdom, and with all fair or ugly 
 means seeks to impose on us his Christology, we must re- 
 sent the indignity and tell him, as plain as language can 
 convey it, that no intelligent and honest Hebrew would re- 
 trograde from rational Judaism to that negation of reason 
 which is called Christology. Its dogmas rest upon no logi- 
 cal evidence, because they begin with exacting a faith con- 
 trary to the postulate of reason ; they rest upon no histori- 
 cal evidence, as there exists none to prove what Jesus said 
 or did, that he did or said anything, or what hia biographers 
 invented for him a century after his demise ; and taking all 
 that for granted, it is still doubtful whether any one of the 
 dogmas is true, as the variety of creeds in Christendom, all 
 basing upon the same story, sufficiently proves. It rests 
 upon no Scriptural evidence whatever, as we have proved in 
 the main points. E^en if our exposition of Scripture prove 
 unacceptable to many, it proves anyhow that other than 
 Christological explanations are no less possible an 1 only 
 more natural, historically and grammatically more exact 
 than the Christian construction. No sensible man can ac- 
 cept a religion upon such slender grounds, upon somebody's 
 understanding of Scriptural passages, where numerous other 
 explanations are even more likely and more natural. 
 
 Christology can never become the religion of all mankind,
 
 128 A DEFENSE OF JUDAISM 
 
 because its teachings are contray to the common sense of 
 man, are discredited in Christendom to-day, not only by 
 infidels and philosophers, but by the sectarians themselves, 
 each maintaining to be orthodox ; and by the uninterrupted 
 protest against that fabric of salvation by the Jews during 
 all the years of its existence, from beginning to end a pro 
 test which torture, sword and pyre could not silence, 
 bribery and deception could not alter, and the sum of $15,- 
 000,000 spent annually in the mission societies does not 
 influence. Here is the proof that Christology never can be- 
 come the world's religion. It can not make us better men 
 and better women, as it did not succeed in sixteen centuries 
 in civilizing and humanizing the nations under its sway to 
 the altitude, even, where ancient Greece and Rome stood ; 
 despotism, slavery and lawless violence were characteristic 
 of the Christian civilization till the revival of letters, class- 
 ical and philosophical study, commerce and industry, till 
 bloody revolutions against church and state changed the 
 status for the better, and gave birth to the progress of hu- 
 manity to the present altitude, all of which is of recent 
 birth.* The conversionist must admit that the Hebrews, as 
 a class, in any country, are as intelligent, moral, industrious 
 sober, honest, charitable, liberal, chaste, patriotic, inventive 
 and genial as the best class of their neighbors ; hence Christ- 
 ology is not the mother of these virtue?, ic can do us no 
 good, it has done more harm than good to the nations of 
 Europe. It is an excrescence of the religions idea and rep- 
 resents the various ages of darkness, ignorance and priest- 
 craft in past centuries. No Israelite can subscribe to it. 
 
 As regards the religion of mankind, to secure union, 
 peace, freedom and sense of duty and benevolence, with jus- 
 tice and humanism as the only potentates, the happiness of 
 man as the only policy, we can point to the clear and un- 
 equivocal language of the prophets and the ljud voice of 
 history, that it will be denationalized Judaism, as partly 
 
 * The Humanists of the sixteenth century began the work of re- 
 demption from the rude ascetic and priest-ridden establishment, 
 they were the dawn of the day of emancipation.
 
 VS. PROSELYTIZING CHRISTIANITY. 1'JO 
 
 realized already in Christianity, the Islam, the philoso- 
 phemes of most prominent philosophers, the government of 
 free rations, the reign of freedom and justice. This and 
 nothing more is compatible with human reason as the fabric 
 of salvation in time and eternity, this and nothing more will 
 it accept. This and nothing more the prophets predicted as 
 the ultimate purpose of the religious process. So it re- 
 echoes from every page of prophecy; and Isaiah closes his 
 book thus : " For as the new (created) heavens and the new 
 earth which I make shall remain before me, saith Jehovah, 
 eo shall remain your seed and your name. A.nd it shall come 
 to pass that every returning New Moon and every returning 
 Sabbath all flesh shall come to worship before me, saith Je- 
 hovah " Israel's seed and name, the vessel of that eternal 
 truth, is indestructible, because the cause is. Also its forms, 
 New Moon and Sabbath for worship, are imperishable. Pre- 
 pare, pious souls suffering from the idiosyncrasy of proselyt- 
 ism toChristology, prepare for your conversion to denation- 
 alized Judaism ; such being the will of God, as you know, it 
 is inevitable, do it gracefully, early and thoroughly. If you 
 know not how, read the first chapter of Isaiah and follow his 
 advice : " Wash ye, make you clean ; put away the evil of 
 your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn 
 to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppresed, judge the 
 fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now and let us rea- 
 son together, saith Jehovah, though your sins be as scarlet, 
 they shall bo as white as snow, though they be red like crim- 
 son they shall be as wool." This is the best method of con- 
 version. 
 
 This volume was published on the author's seventieth 
 birthday, and written during the last months preceding 
 its publication.
 
 Works of Rev. Dr. I. M. Wise. 
 
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