An Epistle to the Jews

I

JEWISH writers are agreed that the Jews are to-day passing through a grave crisis — perhaps the gravest of their history. It is not only that the rising wave of anti-Semitism the world over is a serious business which justifies misgivings in the Jewish heart. Historically, the Jew is used to it. Persecution, indeed, has always served to harden and strengthen him. It has even, perhaps, served to preserve him as an entity. What is more serious to-day is the division among the Jews themselves. For the second time in their history they are disunited — in the face of a danger greater than any faced before. The enemy without is strong; the dissension within is scarcely less ominous. Israel lives as in a besieged city, surrounded by cohorts vaster and more dangerous than those of old Rome, and is at war with itself. Physical dispersion was the price paid by Israel for its dissensions nineteen centuries ago; to-day Israel is faced with spiritual, if not physical, extinction.

The Jewish problem, as we now know it, did not exist before the war. Roughly speaking, the Jews were then divided into two large camps: those who upheld Orthodoxy — what with the immense Central European ghettos and the Russian Government assisting, an easy matter — and those who avidly grasped at the benefits of the Emancipation, who saw the future in the glowing light of progress, freedom, and equality, and were in no sense hostile to the idea of assimilation.

The Orthodox faction lived its independent life, clinging to the One God, oblivious of the vast discoveries of science which were shaking the liberated world and precipitating new values. While waiting for the long-expected Messiah, Orthodox Jews zealously maintained the ancient customs. They circumcised their males, prayed with phylacteries on forehead and arms, fastened the mezuzoth on the door to ward off evil, and put in a periodical plea to the Almighty: ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ Inside their houses they displayed pictures of the two Moses’ — the first usually in the act of splitting the Red Sea; the other, Moses Montefiore, the great Anglo-Jewish philanthropist who, according to legend, could trace his genealogy two thousand years back, and who it is certain always traveled (but never on the Holy Sabbath) equipped with his private kosher kitchen, even when he went to Russia to intercede for his coreligionists with the Tsar. In some houses yet a third Moses graced the walls. This was Moses Maimonides, whose birth eight centuries ago was but lately celebrated by Jewry and the world. A great rabbi, physician, philosopher, and theologian, he was much admired by the great Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was not above borrowing something of the Jew’s dialectic.

If Orthodox Jewry still celebrated its heroes, — as, for example, Judas Maccabæus, during the Feast of the Candles, — it no less remembered the demise of its enemies. To this day the Feast of Purim commemorating the death of the arch Jew-baiter Haman, brought about by Esther, remains the gayest feast on the Jewish calendar, and children still dance round in the synagogue because the Hitler of his day was foiled by one more clever than he — Mordecai. Even in our household, which had lapsed from Orthodoxy, the name of Torquemada, the loathed Grand Inquisitor, was a byword among us children, as it was in other Jewish households. The reality of such persecutors of Jewry in the dim past was brought home to us by the cry of the muzhik children that often greeted us in the village street: ‘Christkiller! Christ-killer!’ Little wonder that the Jews are a historically-minded race!

Thus, Christianity achieved in the Jewish mind not the infinite mercy of its Jewish founder, but the conviction that the Jews could expect only cruelty at the hands of the followers of Christ. And because of his followers Christ himself suffered in the minds of his own race. True Christianity might have won the Jews over, and there might not have been any Jewish problem to-day. Essentially, then, the Jewish problem is inseparable from the Gentile problem. It is indeed inseparable from a proper reappraisal of Christ by both Jew and Gentile. They can both deny him, or meet in him. It is certain that a real acceptance of him by one or the other must inevitably involve both. It is a matter of the simplest logic, and Christ could have reduced it to a parable. And indeed he has done so; for the world to-day is as that herd of Gadarene swine possessed with devils and rushing to destruction. This is not mere religious symbolism, but stark realism.

II

The Jews to-day have a special problem: how to give the soft answer that turneth away wrath. Is there anything but a soft answer that will do it? In Germany the Jew has no choice but to offer the other cheek, whether he likes to or not. What of the other lands in which he fares better, but in which nevertheless he is being eyed askance? Even America is not free from Jew-baiting, and there are many, Jews and Gentiles alike, who view this fact with apprehension.

Let us face realities. A single Jew has the power to cast odium on the whole race. A single Jewish banker lends credence to the absurd notion that all Jews are rich; a single Jewish Communist gives rise to the cry that all Jews are bent on destroying the government. The Jew is Judas who betrayed the Lord, but it is conveniently overlooked that He, the betrayed, was also a Jew. The Jew is rich, the Jew is successful, the Jew is aggressive (give him an inch and he will take a mile!), the Jew is clever — he takes all the summa cum laude degrees in the colleges. But there is the other side. ’With the handicap against us, what can we do but try to be smart? It’s what makes us plod harder than the Gentile.’ This is the voice of a Jewish undergraduate at Harvard. ‘We are shut out from so many things, what’s left for us to do but try to make money?’ This the voice of a great Jewish scholar in England.

It would be futile to go into the rights and wrongs of the matter. One thing is clear: either the Jew must go on doing the things for which the Gentile dislikes him, or he must rise above human nature and, like Cæsar’s wife, be above suspicion. Of what avail is it, indeed, that the individual Jew is a decent fellow if his neighbor’s sins are counted against him? Every Jew is his brother’s keeper.

There is a tendency to-day to attribute all ills to economics and try to find a solution for all problems on an economic basis; and it has been confidently asserted that the Jewish problem is no longer a religious problem, but wholly an economic one. It has been argued that if the Jews would only thin out their professional classes and go in for proletarian and farming occupations the causes for the dislike of the race might be removed. And, in support of this theory, it has been pointed out that the Soviet Government has solved the Jewish problem within its borders, in the first place by abolishing wealth and the middle classes, and in the second by diverting Jewish energies into industry and agriculture. It has been carefully glossed over, however, that this solution of the Jewish problem has been accomplished at the cost of social freedom, and with the practical extinction of Russian Jewry.

But those who solve all problems on material bases have yet to learn that the gains are inevitably material, the losses wholly spiritual. In destroying Russian Jewry the Soviets have imposed on the converted their own material doctrines, at the same time declining with thanks the spiritual heritage of a people with a history of four millenniums. The poverty in the creative arts in Soviet Russia may be laid directly at the door of those who have deliberately removed all spiritual forces capable of generating that beauty which is possible only where the mind and the heart are free.

Death — the extinction of the Jews — would be a pitiful solution to the Jewish problem; unless — but of that later.

A people that has produced an Isaiah, a Hillel, a Christ,—yes, even a Karl Marx, — is not, in any case, destined to suffer so ignominious an end. There is a solution to the problem: the Jewish people can save itself, in the culturalspiritual sense, by returning to its appointed destiny, to itself. Vast reservoirs of faith are still here, waiting to be tapped. But they can be tapped only if the Jewish people will return to its original spiritual sources — or rather to the point where it left off its traditional spiritual life. Its long strenuous battle for survival should have merely strengthened it for this.

I am not referring to Zionism, though Zionism need not hinder what I have in mind, and may possibly even help it. Zionism, as all know, advocates a new revolt against Pharaoh’s taskmasters, a new trek across water and desert, a new conquest of the land of milk and honey. Certainly all the preliminary plagues already prevail in this modern Egypt. Heaven knows the Pharaohs seem only too willing to see these stiffnecked people go — anywhere. Poland, for instance, would welcome such a solution. Even so, there are the Amorites, Amalekites, Hittites, Canaanites, and so forth, waiting at the other end — only they go by the name of Arabs.

To make a reconquest of the Promised Land it looks as if the Jews would have to fight. They have tried economics — the modern way—that is, by buying the land; but, as late events have shown, they may have to hold it at the price of their blood — the traditional way. They may find that they will need not only a new Moses but a new Joshua: a Moses who will have to stiffen their backbone to match their neck; a Joshua who, in place of the trumpets that brought down Jericho, will have to produce howitzers and machine guns and aeroplanes. And when he has destroyed the enemy — granted that he has destroyed it — he will, perhaps, have to establish a little dictatorship, forcibly to prevent the populace from doing homage to the Golden Calf. This is no reflection on Israel. The Golden Calf is an ancient and universal god, worshiped equally by all nations, whatever their secondary gods may be. While in exile, the children of Israel many a time and oft, not without reason, had to seek his patronage and protection.

III

If there is a measure of Mosesism in the Jewish national movement (Zionism), there is an even greater measure of Mosesism in Marxism, or MarxismLeninism, as it is called in Soviet Russia.

This brings me back to a walk I took with Prince (now Comrade) Mirsky during an Oxford week-end in 1930. Mirsky had at the time just finished the process of turning from Orthodox Russian to Communist, and he seemed anxious to convert me to his new religion. (‘Communism is the opiate of the people,’ I had said, to pull his leg.) As I went on rebutting him and the argument waxed hot, he brought up heavy guns by stressing the personality of Lenin. Was he not a unique personality? Was there another personality in history that had remoulded a nation, impressed his will to make it a vehicle of stern social justice?

‘What about Moses?’ I said in all earnestness, waking wrath in Mirsky’s soul and almost causing him to bring down his stick upon my head.

‘Moses is a legend!’ he retorted.

‘And so Lenin will be! Indeed, he is a legend already!’ I answered, and went on: ‘What real difference is there between them? Moses came from Jehovah with his tablets of the Law and his eugenic-hygienic programme, while Lenin came from Marx (a Jehovah of sorts!) with a somewhat different set of commandments and a modern eugenichygienic programme. One promised his people material prosperity and a long life if they were good; the other a full tummy and a share in the good things of the earth.’

Whereupon my friend Mirsky dismissed me as a hopeless romantic. Doubtless he meant it, for he considered himself a realist, one who presumably sees things as they are, the type of human being whom Shakespeare has already answered in ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ and so forth. But a true realist, to my way of thinking, would take into consideration the fact that hidebound principles which arise out of material phenomena are not enough, that some vital principle, some spiritual energy, animates humanity as well as the desire for bread and social justice.

I do not speak in terms of theology, but in terms of religion, which is not the same thing at all. The great Jewish transgression consists in the refusal to accept the ultimate expression of the Jewish genius, which, step by step, inevitably had led from Moses to Christ, from tribalism to universality, from formalism to freedom.

Christ has sometimes been called the supreme romantic. I should call him the supreme realist. That the Jews should have rejected him, even as has the rest of humanity, proves nothing except the truth of the words, ‘Ye stiffnecked, and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.’ And so we have the spectacle of a wholly unrealistic world at cross-purposes with itself, professing the faith of Christ and in practice acting on the eye-for-an-eye principles of Moses.

But the best of the social justice advocated by Moses and the ultimate objective of a ‘classless society’ advocated by Marx are both incorporated in Christ’s doctrines, which contain much else undreamt of in Moses’ and Marx’s philosophies. Above all, there is the evident superiority: there is no compulsion in Jesus’ doctrine. He asked men to believe in his truth as free men. He was a realist in that he knew there could be no real spirituality without freedom. ‘Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’

All of this has much to do with the Jewish problem in so far as it concerns the Jew himself, in that innermost part of him which we call the soul.

It is a problem not alone of persecution, of economics, of maintaining the Jewish entity intact against a host of enemies, imagined and real; it is primarily a question of spirit, of culture, of keeping alive that vital spark which is both Israel’s Jewishness and its universality, and assures both its integrity and its self-respect. It is a remarkable fact that three figures under discussion here, Moses, Christ, and Marx, so vital in the history of the European, — yes, even of the ‘good European,’ — have been Jews. And it has been one of those preposterous, even ironic, mistakes of history that the Jews, having achieved the apex of their peculiar culture in Christ, should then have rejected him; it is their supreme tragedy that, having produced Christ, they should have failed of the final effort to incarnate him in life.

IV

Whether the Bible is an ‘inspired’ book, or Christ the Son of God, has no place in this discussion. But it is certain that the author of the Sermon on the Mount, the noblest expression of the human spirit, was no accident. Modern scholarship has demonstrated beyond every shadow of doubt that Christ was the natural and inevitable culmination of evolutionary processes which carried Israel from the tribal state in which Moses found it to Isaiah, then by slow stages to Hillel, and finally to Christ. Immediately preceding Christ was Hillel, who had already formulated ‘Do not do unto others that which you would not have others do unto you’ — a principle which with Christ merely passed into the positive stage. And contemporaneous with Christ was Philo Judæus, who as a religious philosopher was already combining Jewish theology with Greek mystery. Moses was essential as a beginning, but for the Jews to-day, in a cultural sense, to espouse the cause of Marx is therefore a going back to the formalistic didactic temper of Moses, a going back to the letter and not an advance forward to the spirit, to the apex of their culture, which was Christ. It is an absurdity equaled only by the German return to the gods of Valhalla. The history of the Jews, then, during the past nineteen centuries, has indeed been a deflection from their spiritual destiny — even perhaps as, according to Berdyaev, Christian history has been an unfortunate deflection from Saint Francis, the apex of the specific Christian culture. There is little to choose between tribal hatred and class hatred, which may be only another form of tribal hatred.

The impetus of an ennobling idea is wanted, an idea born of the race and waiting to be projected into life. The thread of tradition must be resumed where it was broken. Either that, or spiritual bankruptcy must be frankly acknowledged — what there is left of the Jewish idea ‘liquidated,’ as our Communist comrades would say. To avoid the latter contingency, the leaders of Jewry must come out with a complete avowal of the ultimate implications of Jewish teaching which found its expression in Christ.

I have in mind, of course, not Christ the God, but Christ the ‘god-man,’ to borrow a term from Dostoevsky; Christ liberated from Christian commentaries, Christian dogmas, Christian theology; Christ as we know him from the four Gospels and the Revelation of Saint. John, uncolored by the interpretations of Saint Paul and the Church Fathers, untainted by the specific readings of the Prophet by separate cults; a Christ who was of the ‘sons of God,’ perhaps the favorite ‘Son of God,’ who was what he was quite regardless of whether he was born of a virgin or rose from his tomb after the Crucifixion; a Christ whose perfection, whose godlikeness, are not affected by symbols or extraneous meanings that men have sought to attach to him, and whose words neither lose nor gain any of their beauty or significance whether they were spoken by a man or by a God. All that we can know and must admit is that he was greater than Ilillel and Isaiah who preceded him, even as they were greater than Moses who preceded them. Christ could not have been without Moses, yet these two — one with ‘resist not evil,’ the other with ‘a tooth for a tooth’ — were antipodes. Why stop at Hillel, when a greater than Hillel came after him? It is this question that modern Jewry must answer, and, if the answer is the only answer that can be honestly given, Jewry must make a new start.

This the Jewish leaders must acknowledge, or else accept Nietzsche’s idea that the Jews invented Christ for other peoples in order themselves to escape the fury of the strong and to benefit by the charity of the gentle and the meek!

They — the rabbis — have been saying nice things about Christ from their own and Christian pulpits, and some of them doubtless have patted themselves on the back for this token of their liberal opinion. But that is not enough. The only reasonable and logical thing they can do is to establish the most perfect Jew and the most perfect man among the fully acknowledged hierarchy of their Prophets, their ‘sons of God.’ Why not acknowledge him together with these others? The rabbis should frankly and openly affirm: ‘Christ is our own, our very own, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and he came not “to destroy the law, or the prophets . . . but to fulfill.” He is our Prophet, our greatest prophet, the keystone of our ultimate faith. We will answer the challenge of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by making known Christ’s struggle to establish a free spiritual kingdom on earth.’

‘The people of Christ have been a Christ among the peoples,’ said Israel Zangwill. That, too, is not enough. The people of Christ must try to be the Christian among the peoples. Have not its leaders again and again reiterated, ‘The mission of Israel is peace’? Why, then, not acknowledge ‘officially’ the Prince of Peace? He was a Jew, was he not? And is there anything in his teaching contrary to the spirit of Judaism?

It is perhaps too much to hope that the Jews, any more than their Gentile neighbors, can put into living practice the ultimate principles taught by their greatest Prophet. Yet the life of their specific culture demands that these principles be set up as the goal of aspiration. Converted by this culture to its highest self, — that self, indeed, which produced Christ, — the Jewish people might ultimately hope to convert their Christian neighbors to a creed which preaches the only kind of ‘classless society’ worth having, a society persuaded to classlessness not by force and legal decree but by love and free choice.

In stating these views, views for which in Uriel Acosta’s day I should have been subjected to the public indignity of ‘forty stripes save one’ and afterwards trampled upon by gathered crowds, I do not yield my place as a Jew. On the contrary, I affirm it. But as that day is past, so also is the time past to balk at what is true and inevitable.

Intelligent Jews to whom I have spoken of my mad notion have, contrary to my expectations, agreed to the logic of the proposal I have outlined. And I recall the words spoken to me by a living world-famous Jewish novelist: ‘We Jews must come to terms with Christianity. It is the only way out for us.’ Did he not fear crucifixion by his own for so audacious a thought? Nor, indeed, do I anticipate friendly comments on the heresy to which I have given expression. There is too much stiffnecked intellect in the Jewish fibre to-day. Pride and intellect corrupt; only faith gives life.

One thing more. Would the above proposal create a schism in Jewry if an attempt were made to bring it into force? As I have said at the beginning, the dissensions in Israel are already so numerous and so grave that another dissension or two cannot possibly do it any harm. And again — who knows?

Is the idea set forth in this essay ‘reactionary’? It is the fashion nowadays to call reactionary anything that savors of a religious nature. But may it not be that, in the present state of irreligion, such an idea may be regarded in the highest sense as revolutionary? Again, may it not be that the world’s problem, as well as that of the Jews, is precisely in the main a religious one? Certainly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would have thought so.