By-paths in Hebraic bookland

Two great literary forces, poets both yet both greater in what they said than in how they said it, expressed their most intimate beliefs on life and destiny under the guise of a Jewish personation. Nathan the Wise, the hero of Lessing’s drama, was Lessing, just as Rabbi Ben Ezra, the supposititious soliloquist of Browning’s poem, was Browning. Lessing, it is certain, had a living model in Moses Mendelssohn. Nathan was drawn from his friend. Had Browning any such model? Yes and no. Many a writer since Furnivall has identified the hero of Browning’s poem with Abraham Ibn Ezra. It is probable that the poet had him vaguely in mind. When, however, it is sought—as several have done—to work out the identity in detail, the effort fails. The poet clearly meant to prevent any such error. For in Holy-Cross Day, he introduces a Rabbi Ben Ezra as singing a “Song of Death” quite different in tone from the poem in which Rabbi Ben Ezra unfolds his scheme of life. Browning obviously meant us to infer that Ben Ezra was no one in particular.

Browning’s Hebrew knowledge was probably good; like his wife he was apparently able to read the Bible in the original. He also had dipped into curious, out of the way books on Jewish lore. The Rev. Michael Adler cleverly detected that he owed some of the astonishing Hebrew words in his Jocoseria to a little read edition of the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. Very bad Hebrew it is, but its author was not Browning but Baratier (see Jewish Chronicle, April 25, 1890). On the other hand, Dr. Joseph Jacobs records in the Jewish Quarterly Review for April, 1890, an incident which shows that the poet was “shaky” in his use of Hebrew names. One of Browning’s most important “Jewish” poems was his Johanan Hakkadosh, Johanan the Holy. Dr. Jacobs tells us that the author was about to call this worthy “Hakkadosh Johanan.” But “through a common friend I pointed out the error to the poet, and the adjective was put in its proper position.” Another misconception of epithets will be noted below.

Similarly with the poem entitled Ben Karshook’s Wisdom. Who was “Ben Karshook”? I doubt whether the writer could have told. In the Tauchnitz copy of 1872, as well as in the English edition of 1889, as Mrs. Sutherland Orr points out, the name is spelt “Karshish.” Ben Karshook, seems a mere jumble of Ben Hyrkanos. But either way, there was no Rabbi of the name. Elsewhere, Browning employs the name Karshish to designate an Arabian physician. It was one of Browning’s foibles, to quote Dr. Jacobs again, to give an impression of recondite learning. Ben Karshook would seem to have been the poet’s first attempt at a Jewish, as distinct from a biblical subject. Holy-Cross Day was the first to be published; it appeared in 1855. Rabbi Ben Ezra came in 1864, Filippo Baldinucci in 1876, Johanan Hakkadosh (with other Jewish poems) in 1883. This list is not a complete summary, but (if one adds Abt Vogler) it includes the most important. Ben Karshook’s Wisdom was not published until a year later than Holy-Cross Day, for it was printed in the Keepsake for 1856. But it was written on April 27, 1854 (according to the statement of Berdoe). Browning himself omitted the poem, apparently by accident, from one of his own volumes, where it is included in the table of contents but not in the book. He never reprinted it. The result has been that it has often been reproduced by others for that very reason; and now, though it has been given a place in the Oxford Browning, let it be printed again!

I.

“Would a man ’scape the rod?”
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,
“See that he turn to God
The Day before his death.”

“Ay, could a man inquire
When it shall come?” I say
The Rabbi’s eye shoots fire—
“Then let him turn to-day.”

II.

Quoth a young Sadducee:
“Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls?”

“Son, there is no reply!”
The Rabbi bit his beard:
“Certain, a soul have I—
We may have none,” he sneered.

Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,
The Right-hand Temple-column,
Taught babes in grace their grammar,
And struck the simple, solemn.

The first part is an apt version of the saying of Rabbi Eliezer, son of Hyrkanos: “Repent one day before thy death” (Pirke Abot 2. 15). Whereon the Talmud (Shabbat 153a) records that Eliezer’s disciples asked Browning’s very question, and received precisely the same answer. The second group of stanzas introduces us to a young Sadducee who has doubts as to the existence of the soul. The poet obviously got his information from Mark, but was a trifle confused as to what he read there. The Sadducees (Mark 12. 18) denied the resurrection, and some have supposed their denial to have extended to the belief in immortality. (See Dr. Kohler’s remarks in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, p. 631, top of second column.) To Browning this may have seemed equivalent to questioning the existence of the soul. Assuredly, granted that there be a soul at all, it must be immortal.

What is the point of calling Karshook “Hiram’s Hammer?” Browning is probably drawing on Josephus. Hiram, who helped in building the temple, also interchanged difficult problems with Solomon. (Antiquities, viii, 5. 3). Hence, Browning uses the name in relation to these puzzles, so wisely answered in the poem. It was also Hiram—not identical with the king of Tyre—who constructed the two temple columns Jachin and Boaz. Or, as Dr. Halper has cleverly suggested, the poet may have had in his mind a confused reminiscence of the Rabbinic praise of Johanan ben Zaccai, who (in Berakot 28 b.) is described as Right-hand Temple-column, Strong Hammer. Browning possibly mixed up the Hebrew hazak (strong) with hiram, and so transformed the epithet into “Hiram’s Hammer.” If these and similar reminiscences were passing through Browning’s mind, they might well result in the verse which terminates with the brilliant phrase “struck the simple, solemn.” It needs rare wisdom to make a fool think—or even better, make him silent.

Dr. Jacobs well summed up our indebtedness to Browning when he said that “it is not in the minutiae of Hebrew scholarship that we are to look for Browning’s sympathy with the Jewish spirit,” so markedly shown in his writings. Mr. Stopford Brooke (The Poetry of Robert Browning, 1902, pp. 33-4) puts the case strongly but truly when he declares that “no English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock unpitied, had spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in Browning.” The writer of those sentences no doubt would not call Richard Cumberland a poet; his plays were friendly enough to the Jew. But Browning’s understanding was more profound than Cumberland’s. It is a mistake to say, as a recent critic has said, that “Browning would have us see that the purest religion is of any creed or none.” That was perhaps Lessing’s view. Browning seems to go further. He saw in Judaism certain elements of absolute truth; therefore he presented those elements through Jewish characters.

K. E. FRANZOS’ “JEWS OF BARNOW”

George MacDonald was a novelist of distinction. When an English translation of Ein Kampf ums Recht appeared (under the title For the Right), MacDonald wrote an introduction. “Not having been asked to do so, I write this preface from admiration of the book.” It was a significant fact, he continued, that the generation had produced a man capable of such an ideal as the book represented. It was a work which substituted for the “half wisdom” of the cry “art for art’s sake” the whole wisdom of the cry “art for truth’s sake.” And MacDonald concluded as he began: “I have seldom, if ever, read a work of fiction that moved me with so much admiration.” Mr. Gladstone, too, was among the enthusiastic eulogists of the novel.

Its author was Karl Emil Franzos, to whom we owe, besides that masterpiece of his genius, For the Right (1887), also the less mature work of his earlier years, The Jews of Barnow (1877). He will always be remembered for a saying of his which appeared in his first-published book, a narrative of travel-sketches, Aus Halb-Asien (1876): Jedes Land hat die Juden die es verdient (“Every country has the Jew that it deserves”). Macaulay said much the same thing, but less epigrammatically, nearly half a century earlier. It is not a completely satisfactory generalization, but it is an effective counter to the cruel theory that every Jew gets the country he deserves. “It is not the fault of the Polish Jews that they are less civilized than their brethren in the faith in England, Germany, and France.” Writing this sentence forty years ago, Franzos used the word “civilized” in a narrow sense. All that it really amounted to was that the conventions of Barnow were not those of Berlin. Franzos makes quite a grim problem out of the Barnow Jewess’s revolt against the Scheitel, without seeing that in point of fact the revolt was only one, and an early, phase of the new feminist movement which was to spread all over the world.

What were Franzos’ qualifications for becoming the historian of a Podolian ghetto? He lived out his boyhood there; and he never lost the Jewish sympathies generated by his early experiences. Years afterwards, when he was at the summit of his renown, the most famous Jewish littérateur of his age, he associated himself heartily at Berlin with the work being done for Israel in Russia. The Barnow of his tales was the Czortkow of his youth. Whether he, therefore, presented a true picture is not so certain. He himself was convinced that, though he strove to give poetic value to the scenes, he none the less depicted the scenes accurately. “I have never permitted my love of the beautiful to lead me into the sin of falsifying the facts and conditions of life, and am confident that I have described this strange and outlandish mode of existence precisely as it appeared to me.” Franzos’ claim that he drew a sincere picture cannot be disputed, but a sincere picture is not necessarily an accurate one. Things may not “appear” to one truly. How stands it with Franzos?

The Barnow of the tale is a gloomy little town, and the houses of its ghetto small and dirty. Yet it boasts the great white mansion of its millionaire; it has its real spring days when the air is deliciously soft and warm. And it knows how to keep the Sabbath, how to welcome the bride with an emotion which stirs its spirit to the very depths. But all the passion is expended on the adoration of the Divinity. “The same race whose genius gave birth to the Song of Songs—the eternal hymn of love—and to whom the world owes the story of Ruth, the most beautiful idyl of womanhood ever known—has now, after a thousand years of the night of oppression and wandering, learned to look on marriage as a mere matter of business, by which to secure some pecuniary advantage, and as a means of preventing the chosen of the Lord from dying off the face of the earth.” The author grows more and more indignant as he writes: “These men know not what they do—they have no suspicion of the sin of which they are guilty in thus acting.”

This, for Franzos, was the tragedy of Barnow. It is the theme of several of his tales. Sometimes it is the boy, sometimes the girl, who rides a-tilt against the paternal choice of a mate. The father selects for his son or daughter the most pious and wealthy partner available. They will not know each other, but what of that? They will have plenty of time to make acquaintance after marriage. One Barnow father thus defends the system: “We don’t look upon the chicken as wiser than the hen. And, thank God, we know nothing of love and all that kind of nonsense. We consider that two things are alone requisite when arranging a marriage, and these are health and wealth. The bride and bridegroom in this case possess both.” Franzos obviously regards this justification as one of the “outlandish” features of Barnow’s manners. But were he alive to-day, he would recognize that Moses Freudenthal, the Barnow father who thus argues, was anticipating the latest formula of Eugenics! The novelist, however, remorselessly sees only the tragedy and not the amenities of the system. From the side of the man, in the story Nameless Graves, Franzos put it thus: “As a general rule, the long-haired Jewish youth never even thinks of any girl until his father tells him that he has chosen a wife for him. He sometimes sees his bride for the first time at betrothal, but in a great many cases he does not see her until his marriage-day; and then, whether she pleases him or not, he makes up his mind to get used to her, and generally succeeds.” But the Barnow young men turn and look at Lea as she walks down the street—“a thing hitherto unknown.” Even in the Klaus, when “quiet, dreamy, and very dirty Talmudists bent over their heavy folios, her name was sometimes mentioned, followed by many a deep sigh.” A revolution in male manners, undoubtedly.

On the other side, things are even worse in Barnow. If the men actually think of choosing for themselves, the women go and do likewise. And with fatal results. Half educated, feasting on surreptitious and precocious courses of the works of Paul de Kock, fascinated by Christian lovers, the girls of Barnow go through agitating experiences, sometimes heading for the rocks, always wrecking the harmony of the home. Esther and Chane differ only in externals; the one openly defies Mrs. Grundy, the other, in appearance only, obeys her. But both are led by passion to kick over the traces; both are treated by Franzos as victims of the loveless marriage system. Esterka Regina makes renunciation, but her last act was to write to the lover—a Jew this time—whom she had renounced, practically to confess to him that her marriage had been a failure. She had chosen the course mapped out by her parents, not from motives of obedience, but because her ignorant bringing-up had unfitted her for the position she would have had to occupy had she followed the dictates of her heart.

I have hinted above my doubts whether Franzos drew for us a correct picture of Barnow conditions. Amid all the realistic touches, here and there one comes across evidence of defective vision. He painted Barnow as he saw it, but he did not see it as it was. His father was district physician, a real friend of his fellow-Jews, but not living their life. The son saw Galician Jewish life from an aloof point of view. It is significant that in one of his tales he confuses the Friday eve with the Saturday night prayers. It is a slip with no serious consequences, but it does reveal the limitations of Franzos’ knowledge. None of his tragic heroines strikes so convincing a note as does, for instance, Bernstein’s graciously pathetic Voegele. Bernstein ceased to be a Jew, while Franzos remained faithful. Spiritual fidelity, however, does not necessarily carry with it realistic artistry.

HERZBERG’S “FAMILY PAPERS”

Wilhelm Herzberg was a victim to the world’s sensitiveness. And a queer sensitiveness it is! You may abuse a man as much as you like, and as unfairly as you like, while he is alive. But you must not speak harsh, even if they be true, things of him when he is recently dead. De mortuis nil nisi bonum! After a decent interval, criticism may resume operations. But for the hour you may only say soft things of the departed.

Far be from me to deny that there is an amiable and humane side to this convention. For my part, I prefer to moderate my judgments while the man is still alive. I do not admire over much those who bespatter another with abuse in his lifetime, and with flattery in the moment of his death. But the world thinks differently. Herzberg sinned against this convention; he wrote severely, even bitterly, and also unjustly, of an Anglo-Jewish worthy soon after the interment of the latter. And so he lost his friends, and was ostracized here for the rest of his own life. He resigned his post as Director of the Jerusalem Orphanage—though probably for other reasons. He died in Brussels in 1898.

The incident alluded to in these preceding lines was typical of the man’s nature. He was not easy to get on with. He was not so much quarrelsome as aggressive. Witty, keen-minded, he was above all a man of impulsive emotions. He never defended a cause; he always attacked its opponents. If his fortress were besieged, he answered with a sortie; he could not fight behind the walls. And this is true of the wonderful book which, under the pen-name of “Gustav Meinhardt,” he first published in Hamburg in 1868, calling it Jüdische Familienpapiere. It is the most brilliant vindication of Judaism published in the nineteenth century. But it is an attack on rival systems more than a mere apology for his own religion. The author throughout is plaintiff rather than defendant.

The book consists of a series of letters written from Germany to England. The author of the letters is a youth, Samuel; the recipient of them is an Englishman of means, Samuel’s adoptive father. A Jew by birth, Samuel has been brought up in England as a Christian by the kind-hearted aristocrat, who found the child destitute after the death of his real father, a poor hawker. And now he is sent home to his Jewish relatives on a mission—he is to convert them to his new faith. The letters describe Samuel’s arrival in the abode of his uncle, Rabbi Nathan, and with exquisite charm unfold the gradual reversion of Samuel to his ancestral allegiance. This part of the book is certainly constructive enough. Samuel is overwhelmed with his discoveries. He is fascinated by Rabbi Nathan, and also by his cousin, Rachel. I think it would be difficult to find in literature a more beautiful description of Jewish home-life than Herzberg presents. No wonder that in the end the would-be converter becomes the converted.

The great part of the argument, however, is occupied less with showing the success of Judaism, than the failure of Christianity. Herzberg speaks out; there is no hesitation, no reserve. He never loses his courteous manner, but this formal suavity does not mitigate the truculence of the statements he makes, the severity of the arguments he uses. He is one-sided in that he sets the Church’s failure against the Synagogue’s success, and does not attempt to balance against each other the successes of each and the failures of each. But he is confessedly an advocate and not a judge. It is this that makes his book so valuable. It is an outspoken criticism of modern culture by a well-equipped mind. For to Herzberg, naturally and rightly enough, the Church is typical of Western civilization. Attacking the former, he is assailing the latter, denying the validity of Western—or rather—Germanic, ideals, and disputing their permanent worth.

Before pointing out in a sentence the significance of this attitude for the present condition of Jewish thought, one or two other things must be said about the book. There were three German editions in the author’s lifetime, the third appearing in Zurich in 1893. Why was the third issue made in Switzerland and not in Hamburg? In the circular announcing it, Cæsar Schmidt made a remarkable statement. The author had been urged by his friend to soften some parts of it. He refused. Anti-Semitism made the book, in its unaltered shape, the more necessary; but it also made it desirable to issue it in “free Switzerland.” The author would have bettered the book in one sense, had he yielded to his friend’s counsel. Its historical surveys are not unassailable, and its logic is not always perfect. Yet to have modified its polemical tone would have been to destroy its efficacy. Moreover, Herzberg’s friends can have known little of him if they imagined that he would alter even a comma to please them! I met him several times before 1893, and I could have told them that they were wasting their time in giving him advice. He always went his own way; and he would have been the last to complain because that way was a rugged one.

The author had this satisfaction: his work was enthusiastically admired by a notable circle of readers. Graetz had a high opinion of it. David Kaufmann, a lad of sixteen at the time of its first appearance, was its ardent eulogist; to him the third edition is inscribed. “You will find your erstwhile darling unchanged; for to change it would be to mangle it”—so writes Herzberg to Kaufmann. One would not talk of changing it now, for one does not mutilate classics.

Kaufmann, young as he was in 1868, was already a student of the Breslau Seminary. Let another student of the same institution tell us of the impression the Family Papers made there. Dr. F. de Sola Mendes writes that “he was yet studying at the Breslau Theological Seminary when the book was first brought under his notice by a fellow-student, one of its most enthusiastic admirers. A large number of copies were at once procured and read with avidity by our comrades. It is impossible to describe the applause the book called forth; never had we read so glowing and so powerful a vindication of pure Judaism. We were rejoiced that the country which produced an Eisenmenger, a Wagenseil, Schudt, Pfefferkorn et hoc genus omne, should have yielded in our day, too, so triumphant a Defender of the Faith. Our venerable Director, Dr. Frankel, was as enthusiastic as any of his young disciples in its praise.” The writer of the lines just quoted determined to render the book into English. “The work of translation was commenced and carried on in leisure intervals for the next few years. In January, 1874, in conjunction with Mr. A. Herzberg, then of London, brother of the author, a prospectus was issued in England, proposing the publication of the work by subscription. The project was heartily indorsed by the Chief Rabbi and Dr. H. Adler, the latter of whom kindly made valuable suggestions as to omissions and alterations proper in a version to come before average English readers.” One wonders what the author would have said to such “omissions and alterations.” But the matter was not taken up by the Anglo-Jewish public, and Dr. Mendes eventually issued his excellent translation in New York (1875), under the auspices of that American Jewish Publication Society which preceded the present organization bearing the same name.

There must clearly be much significance in a work which has from time to time aroused so much feeling. As a boy, I read it with mingled delight and consternation. Even then, unconsciously, I must have had a premonition of its inner meaning. I promised above to sum up its import in a sentence, and I can do it. Herzberg stands in line with Ahad ha-‘Am. The former does not give a Zionist turn to his exposition, nor does he speak of a Hebrew culture. But he is practically at the same standpoint. Civilization for the Jew must be expressed in Jewish terms. That is the real moral of Herzberg’s work. Now, as of old, I face such an ideal with delight, but also with consternation. It gives us back much we were in danger of losing, but it tends to take away from us much that we had gained.

LONGFELLOW’S “JUDAS MACCABÆUS”

Whenever Handel’s melody falls on one’s ears, it is impossible to miss the musical beauty of the chorus:

See the conquering hero comes,
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums.

But the words make one shudder. They are so turgid, so inappropriate. Judas Maccabæus, of all men, to strut forth to such a welcome—he, who belonged to the first of those who declared:

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us
But unto Thy name give glory!

Tennyson speaks of “perfect music set unto noble words.” Handel’s music may be as perfect as art is capable of, but his librettist betrayed him by supplying words far from noble. They would better have suited Antiochus than Judas. In fact, Handel originally wrote the melody for Joshua who would have approved them as little as the Maccabee.

We still have to wait for a really great drama written round Judas Maccabæus as hero. The most has therefore been made of Longfellow’s attempt, which was turned into Yiddish by Belinson (1882) and into Hebrew by Massel (1900). Judas is not an easy character to draw. He was truculent enough, yet there must have been a fascinating sweetness in him. The key-note is struck in a phrase supplied by the First Book of the Maccabees. He and his brethren “fought with gladness the battle of Israel.” The joyousness of duty is a touch which marks off the Maccabees from the Puritans, and which, developed in Israel’s after-history, helped to form the Jewish character. Longfellow, who wrote his Judas Maccabæus in 1872, when he had passed the zenith of his powers, misses the point altogether.

Yet he realizes other aspects of his hero’s disposition. He partly, though not completely, shares Handel’s mistake of turning Judas into a braggart. But he atones by presenting very fully the sentimentality of the Maccabee. To dub a warrior sentimental may seem contradictory, but the finest soldiers have been just the most sentimental. In Judas, sentimentality shows itself chiefly in his seizing upon associations aroused by local scenery. Wherever he happens to be—so the historians of his age inform us—he recalls past incidents which occurred there. Here, again, we have in Judas a quality which afterwards became a deep-seated characteristic of the Jew, his romanticism. Longfellow was himself a romantic as well as a Puritan, and perfectly presents this side of Judas’s disposition. Thus at Beth-horon Judas recalls how, on the same battlefield, Joshua,

The great captain of the hosts of God,
A slave brought up in the brick-fields of Egypt,
O’ercame the Amorites. There was no day
Like that, before or after it, nor shall be.
The sun stood still, the hammers of the hail
Beat on their harness; and the captains set
Their weary feet upon the necks of kings,
As I will upon thine, Antiochus,
Thou man of blood!—Behold, the rising sun
Strikes on the golden letters of my banner,
Be Elohim Yehovah! Who is like
To thee, O Lord among the gods?—Alas!
I am not Joshua, I cannot say,
“Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou Moon
In Ajalon!” Nor am I one who wastes
The fateful time in useless lamentation:
But one who bears his life upon his hand
To lose it or to save it, as may best
Serve the designs of Him who giveth life.

The “nor shall be” which closes the fourth line of this quotation is a false note. The Maccabee did expect to repeat Joshua’s glory; that expectation of recurrent providences was the basis of Israel’s belief in Providence. Again, even though in his day Hebrew had given way to Aramaic as the national speech (let some of our Hebrew zealots remember that Judas Maccabæus did not talk in Hebrew!), none the less Judas would hardly have been guilty of the error to begin a Hebrew sentence in the middle. Yet Longfellow repeats this curious slip later on, making Judas rush to battle, shouting Be Elohim Yehovah! as though “Among the gods, O Lord” (for that is what the Hebrew words mean) could possibly be a war-cry. No doubt he knew that in one theory the name Maccabee is explained as the initials of the Hebrew text “Who is like unto Thee among the mighty (or the gods), O Lord.” But it was a queer confusion that made him employ the second half of the verse as a signal, and to substitute elohim for the elim of the Song of Moses (Exod. 15. 11). I say nothing of his putting into Judas’ mouth the monstrosity Yehovah—a misspelling (more common in the form Jehovah) which was invented about the year 1520 by the reformers. As is well known, the misspelling arose by reading the vowels of adonai (Lord), as the Name was quite early read, with the consonants of the Name as written in the Hebrew text.

In another aspect Longfellow is perhaps unfairly kind to Judas. Henry V, as Shakespeare drew him, was something of a braggadocio. But the dramatist might almost have been thinking of Judas when he makes his Henry exclaim before Agincourt: “I pray thee, wish not one man more.” Judas, too, knew that much of the glory of victory depended upon the success of the few over the many, “the fewer men the greater share of honour.” Judas, unlike Henry, would have meant the more signal would be the revelation of God’s power, if the human means by which the battle was won were weaker. On the other hand, the Books of the Maccabees do not, so far as one’s memory goes, indicate that Judas, any more than Henry, was chivalrous in the narrower sense. The Jewish exemplar of the chivalrous warrior is David not Judas. Longfellow, however, presents Judas as the chivalrous knight. One hesitates what to think of the third scene in Act III of Longfellow’s play. In “mysterious guise,” Nicanor enters the Jewish camp, a herald “unheralded,” gliding “like a serpent silently” into the very presence of Judas. Nicanor discovers himself.

Judas: Thou art indeed Nicanor. I salute thee.
What brings thee hither to this hostile camp
Thus unattended?

Nicanor: Confidence in thee.
Thou hast the noble virtues of thy race,
Without the failings that attend those virtues.
Thou can’st be strong, and yet not tyrannous,
Can’st righteous be and not intolerant.
Let there be peace between us.

Judas: What is peace?
Is it to bow in silence to our victors?
Is it to see our cities sacked and pillaged?
Our people slain, or sold as slaves, or fleeing
At night-time by the blaze of burning towns;
Jerusalem laid waste; the Holy Temple
Polluted with strange gods? Are these things peace?

This is cleverly conceived. Nicanor’s degrading compliments as well as his false offer of peace are rejected with due scorn. Longfellow probably got the idea for this scene from the story told of Mattathias, to whom the Syrian envoys made overtures, which the dour father of the Maccabee knew how to treat. But what one doubts is whether Nicanor would have trusted himself to the Maccabean camp. The scene ends:

Judas: Go to thy tents.

Nicanor: Shall it be war or peace?

Judas: War, war, and only war. Go to thy tents
That shall be scattered, as by you were scattered
The torn and trampled pages of the Law,
Blown through the windy streets.

Nicanor: Farewell brave foe!

Judas: Ho, there, my captains! Have safe conduct given
Unto Nicanor’s herald through the camp,
And come yourselves to me.—Farewell, Nicanor!

One wonders whether such an end to such a scene were possible? Still, if David would have acted thus generously, why not Judas? We must allow for the insight of genius. Longfellow may have understood the story more truly than his critic. If to the valor, the recklessness of self, the romanticism, the all-pervading joyousness of Judas, we may add the trait of generosity, then is he indeed among the noblest models of chivalry which history can show.

ARTOM’S SERMONS

When, in February, 1873, Haham Artom was pressed to publish a selection of his Sermons, he consented, but with reluctance. For, said he, “I am fully aware of the difficulty of speaking and writing in a language which is not my own ... a language which, some years ago, was unknown to me.” Artom never lost his Italian accent, and the slight survival of his native idiom added grace to his English orations. He was an attractive figure in the pulpit; and as effective as attractive.

He died in 1879. Having frequently heard him preach, having, indeed, been present when many of these very addresses were first given, I have again, after more than forty years, turned to the printed volume. Is any of the fire left? Has all the charm evaporated? His commanding presence, his beautiful voice, his dramatic gestures, his extempore delivery of carefully prepared impromptus—were these mannerisms answerable for the whole of Artom’s power, or was there something forceful and persuasive in the matter? In a word, do the speeches survive the speaker?

Let us remember, first and last, that Artom was an artist. He not only wrote verses, but he composed music; some of his melodies are still sung in the Sephardic synagogues. He was also an artist in prose. This gift sometimes led him astray. The faults of the speaker certainly remain in the speeches. The passages which sounded grotesque in the hearing, strike one in the reading as more grotesque still. For instance, in his sermon (November 7, 1874) against Cremation, he describes in lurid detail the scene at the burning of the body, and then he proceeds: “A sad and repeated crackling is soon heard, the combustion is going on rapidly. But to my ears that crackling seems to be the complaint of the dead person for being treated with such cruelty and disrespect.”

This is sentimentalism at its falsest. Obviously, such faults of the orator endure. Have his merits the same lasting quality? The question may be confidently answered in the affirmative.

He showed true artistry in structure. A preacher must be a builder. He has to construct a work of art. Not merely in the sense of form, but also and chiefly in substance. Judaism is the home beautiful; it fascinates the eye, but it also provides rooms for living. Artom entertained, and he also fed his guests. Out of his sermons you could easily piece together a fine edifice of Judaism. Many of its greatest truths are there, presented very solidly, and for all his decorative art very simply. Artom was not a thinker, he was a believer. Yet, though he never felt a doubt, he always realized that there were people who differed from him. He was thus frequently controversial; he had in mind some other opinions which he was determined to combat. This method impelled him to present religion in relation to the realities of his day. No preacher can be effective, unless he does so; no preacher’s words endure for other times, unless they are first vital for his own.

In another respect, Artom’s method justified itself. I refer to his use of rabbinic quotations. He seldom quoted anything else. Here we have, in part, a mere trick, a mechanical device, artificial rather than artistic. Every sermon is headed by two texts, the one scriptural, the other rabbinic. In those olden Jewish homilies called, from their opening formula, Yelammedenu a similar plan was followed, but the rabbinic passage was legal, involving some problem of Halakah or practical laws. Artom’s citations are always homiletical, and rarely add to the effect of the biblical text. Mechanical, too, is the division of each address into a Prologue, followed by three parts, ending with an Epilogue culminating in a prayer. The whole congregation almost invariably rose at the close of the Haham’s sermons, to join in these prayers, spoken with genuine but never unctious fervor. Such severe divisions of the sermon were long de rigueur on the continent. Nowadays, in the reaction against these fetters, sermons tend to lose form altogether. But where Artom showed himself a master was in his use of Midrash in the body of his addresses. He had nothing like the theological profundity of Jellinek, who employed Midrash to enforce fundamental ideas with subtlety. Nor had he Jellinek’s power of “holding the Midrash in chemical solution.” As Mr. Singer—a greater preacher far than Artom—said in his Memoir of Jellinek, midrashic quotations in a sermon are as a rule “stuck clumsily into the discourse, and leave upon the palate the flavour of undissolved spice or sugar in an ill-prepared Sabbath or Festival dish. In Jellinek the assimilation is perfect. It is the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Whether the Midrash or the preacher’s theme came first, which went the longer way to meet the other, is often as uncertain to determine as the question, in the case of some of the finest songs, whether the music suggested the words, or the words the music.”

Artom did not reach the perfection of Jellinek, but he never sank to the level of the botcher. What he aimed at he succeeded in attaining. If his rabbinic quotations at the beginning of a discourse were perfunctory, those which he made in the body of the discourse were invariably to the point; they always interpreted. He did not merge Midrash into his own personality as Jellinek did. But he employed it as a certain type of painter does the accessories to a picture, to add color, to relieve the severity of the main idea, to suggest outwardly that which he is not quite able to express inwardly. Hence he usually quoted obvious Midrashim, and used them in an obvious sense. He showed his wisdom in this. If a painter puts in a camel to help me to perceive that he is representing a desert, he must be very careful to make his camel recognizable. It will not do to give me a symbolical “Ship of the Desert,” it must be a camel, palpable and conventional. Within his limitations, he shows himself the better artist the less he tries to make his accessories bizarre or even original.

I trust that no one will suspect me of a desire to “damn with faint praise.” On the contrary, starting with the unquestionable fact that the living Artom was a great preacher, my intention was to indicate what we have to keep in mind if we would admire his printed addresses as they deserve. If we know what to expect from them we shall find it. Take the following paragraph:

“Our sages said that ‘a precious jewel hung around the neck of Abraham.’ It was not a talisman, an amulet, supposed by the superstitious to keep away the consequence of envy, of evil eye; the jewel was the knowledge of the Lord, of the one God, of the Omnipotent Being, that knowledge which Abraham disseminated among men; it was the spiritual jewel which ought to be treasured in the heart of every good man, of every true Israelite. We have inherited that Jewel, we have it still. Oh, let us wear it with pride, for it is the noblest decoration.”

There are a hundred such passages in Artom’s volume. They got home when the orator pronounced them, and they get home still when calmly read as literature. It is perhaps curious that a preacher who in his day was admired for his brilliance, should endure less for the sparkle than for the substance of what he said. That is, however, the common fate of orators. Happy they, if their utterances have worth after the personality behind them has passed away.

SALKINSON’S “OTHELLO”

One of the first writers to combat, on the continent of Europe, Voltaire’s depreciation of Shakespeare was Lessing. But his eulogy was dated 1759. A year earlier (1758) Moses Mendelssohn, in his essay on the Sublime, had anticipated Lessing’s judgment. But his influence did not lead the new-Hebrew school to translate Shakespeare. It was not till near the middle of the nineteenth century that we find Hebrew translations even of such famous soliloquies as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” In 1842 Fabius Mieses and in 1856 N. P. Krassensohn rendered the passage. Both, however, were dependent on Mendelssohn, translating his German rendering. Others, at the same period, turned a few passages, including one of Richard II’s monologues, from German versions into Hebrew.

“To-day we exact our revenge from the English! They took our Bible and made it their own. We, in return, have captured their Shakespeare. Is it not a sweet revenge?” With these words Smolenskin opened his introduction to Salkinson’s Hebrew translation of Othello.

It is not easy to explain how it happened that we had to wait till 1874 for the first Hebrew adaptation of a Shakespearean drama. In fact, with the exception of Salkinson’s Romeo and Juliet (1878), S. L. Gordon’s King Lear (1899), and Isaac Barb’s Macbeth (1883), I know of no Hebrew version of plays by the author of Hamlet, which latter drama so far as I have observed, has not even been printed in Yiddish. (Dr. Halper, however, informs me that Hamlet was translated into Hebrew by H. J. Bornstein, and that his version appeared in the pages of Ha-Zefirah somewhere about 1900). Julius Cæsar appeared in Yiddish in 1886. King Lear has also been printed in the same language, and the Merchant of Venice received the same honor, at the hand of Basil Dahl, in New York, in 1899. I use the words “printed in Yiddish” advisedly, because there are extant in manuscript acting versions of other plays used by Yiddish companies. Of course, select passages from Shakespeare have often been rendered into Hebrew, as, for instance, in that curious publication Young’s Israelitish Gleaner and Biblical Repository, Edinburgh, 1855 (pp. 24, 16). The lack of Hebrew translations may be explained by two considerations. The Merchant of Venice, despite its sympathetic treatment of some aspects of Shylock’s character, dealt so deadly a blow at the Jews, that there could be no enthusiasm with regard to the other works. But more operative was another fact. The available Hebraists for the most part were ignorant of English. The Macbeth mentioned above was translated not from the original, but from Schiller’s German.

There is a further consideration (for after all Schlegel’s fine German version was at hand for those who knew no English). Drama in Hebrew, whether original or translated, has always been spasmodic. Drama needs an audience. Until the Hebrew revival become wider spread, there can never be a sufficiently popular demand for the presentation of Hebrew plays to encourage or cultivate the composition of them. It will no doubt be otherwise in the new Palestine. Indeed we already read of plans, instituted by M. James Rothschild, to organize a Hebrew Drama in Judæa.

Isaac Edward (Eliezer) Salkinson, however, knew English well. He was also gifted with a fine command of Hebrew, which he wrote not only fluently, but in real poetic style. He was born in Wilna, being perhaps the son of Solomon Salkind, himself a writer of meritorious Hebrew verse (Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, p. 651). Unfortunately, a knowledge of Hebrew does not of itself suffice to keep a Jew within the pale of the Synagogue. “As a youth, Salkinson set out for America with the intention of entering a rabbinical seminary there; but while in London he was met by agents of the London Missionary Society, and was persuaded to forsake Judaism.” The Synagogue lost in him one of the most accomplished Hebraists of modern times.

But though he was lost, his work—or some of it—remains to us, and we ought not to let it go. Nahum Slousch makes an admirable remark on the subject in his Renascence of Hebrew Literature (p. 245). Salkinson’s first great translation was not of Shakespeare, but of Milton. In 1871 appeared a delightful Hebrew version of Paradise Lost. It was a masterly rendering, attaining almost to absolute perfection. Take Salkinson’s title. He called it Vayegaresh et ha-adam (“So He drove out the man,” from Genesis 3. 24). How much apter it is for Paradise Lost than Meir Letteris Ben Abuyah for Goethe’s Faust. Salkinson’s version is genuine Milton. “It was a sign of the times,” says Slousch of Salkinson’s rendering of an epic so Christian in character, “that this work of art was enjoyed and appreciated by the educated Hebrew public in due accordance with its literary merits.” It was, in brief, an indication that Jewish readers of Hebrew were discriminating between form and substance. Many who are as old as I am can recall a similar change in feeling with regard to pictures. To go through a great Art Gallery was a tax on one’s forbearance. Madonnas at every turn offended the Jewish consciousness. Now, however, a large number find it quite easy to admire an artist’s talent irrespective of the subject. Yet Josef Israels never painted a Madonna, though he was strongly urged to do so by eminent admirers of his genius.

In the case of Shakespeare’s Othello no such problem as this arises. In finding a Hebrew title for it, Salkinson did not seek for any paraphrase. He just searched for a Hebrew name which would sound like “Othello,” and he found it in the biblical “Ithiel,” which may signify “God is with me.” “Ithiel” would thus mean much the same as “Immanuel” (“God is with us”). It cannot be asserted that “Ithiel” fails to correspond in sense with “Othello,” for the simple reason that no one seems to know what “Othello” means; Ruskin suggested the sense careful. On the other hand, “Iago” is probably a variant of “Jacob”; Salkinson calls him Doeg: there is some similarity in character, as in a name, between the false Doeg and the wily Iago. The other names call for little comment. Desdemona becomes Asenath, not a happy choice, for while Desdemona apparently means the “unfortunate,” Asenath is probably the Egyptian for the “Favorite of Neith.” Cassio is Cesed—a mere assonance. On the other hand, the Clown is Lez (the scoffer); this is a reproduction of meaning, not of sound. After all, not the names, but the play is the thing. Salkinson certainly gives us the play. His Hebrew is the real Shakespeare. Often have I found in difficult passages of the English that the Hebrew is a useful help to the understanding of the original. Sometimes a hasty reader of Salkinson may think that the translator erred, as in his rendering of Othello’s last pathetic speech:

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.

Salkinson turns these last two lines into:

Like the despicable Jew, who threw a pearl away
Richer than all the wealth of Israel.

It is no mistake. There is good authority for reading Judean in the English text in place of Indian. The most plausible suggestion is Theobald’s, that Shakespeare was referring to Herod and Mariamne. The whole of this speech is a triumph of literalness combined with beauty of phraseology. If Salkinson had only written this one page he would be famous among modern Hebraists.

Othello was done into Hebrew at the suggestion of Perez Smolenskin, himself, of course, a noted pioneer of the new-Hebrew school. Smolenskin was delighted with Salkinson’s performance. “See,” he cried, “how Shakespeare lends himself to Hebrew. While so many are translating into Hebrew works utterly foreign to the Hebraic spirit, here we have one who has chosen a poem which lies near to that spirit.” There is much truth in this contention. English does very readily lend itself to translation into Hebrew, just as is the case when the relation is reversed. No version of the Hebrew Bible, not even Luther’s, has ever approached the English in its fidelity to the soul of the original. But Smolenskin goes on to use another argument, which is somewhat amusing. He draws a picture of the Jewry of his day, and then exclaims: Lo! here are the very conditions presented to us in Othello. And he bids his contemporaries to draw a moral from the play, to regulate their conduct by it. I should hardly justify an appreciation of Othello on moral grounds. It is a great psychological drama, and it also touches the pinnacle of romanticism. But a moral? Smolenskin seems to have found in it a warning to men to treat women better. Certainly one would prefer that our Othellos should be a little milder towards their Desdemonas in real life.

All this is off the point. Salkinson’s merit lay just in his power to take a work of art, pass it through the crucible of translation, and then bring out the result as a work of art still. Translators are not always traitors. I have said nothing about Salkinson’s Romeo and Juliet, because his Othello came first. But in the former he reveals the same qualities. I do not know whom I would place above Salkinson in the list of the best translators into Hebrew.

“LIFE THOUGHTS” OF MICHAEL HENRY

Michael Henry died in 1875. In the following year a volume of his Life Thoughts was issued. There are twenty-one chapters, all of them reprinted from the series of “Sabbath Readings,” issued by the Jewish Association for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge. The Association, which, I take pride to remember, was founded by my father, was afterwards transformed into the Jewish Religious Education Board. The Association took a broader view of its function than does the Board; at all events, the discontinuance of the tracts called Sabbath Readings was a deplorable but not irremediable error.

The Life Thoughts of Michael Henry corresponded to his life. Their cheery optimism was part of the man’s self. Their philosophy is not profound, their learning is not conspicuous. But they make for happiness. Michael Henry was happy when he made others happy, and he succeeded in his genial ambition. He was only forty-five when his career ended, but he had crowded in that short space many a momentous service, especially to the boys and girls whom he loved as though an elder brother to all of them. It was the Jewish boys and girls who in 1876 presented the first “Michael Henry” to the Royal National Life-boat Institution. The boat was twice replaced by other “Michael Henrys,” and the three boats named after “the scholars’ friend” have saved 136 lives. From time to time appeals are certain to be made for funds to enable further “Michael Henrys” to be launched.

If to bring joy into a life is to save it, then the man Michael Henry saved more lives than all the boats named, or to be named, after him. I have already spoken of his geniality. A word must be added as to his piety. Religion to him was the spring of conduct. Here, again, his optimism reigned supreme. Judaism was the road to good, on earth and in heaven. In his Gossip with Boys he exclaims: “You may be very good Jews and yet very happy ones. Virtue and enjoyment are not incompatible. It is not unmanly to be good. Your right arm will fling a cricket-ball none the less deftly because your left arm has worn the tephillin an hour before you went into the play-ground. Your heart will beat none the less bravely, because it throbs against the four-cornered band of the tsitsith.” These sentences crystallize Michael Henry’s appeal to the young for manliness and confidence.

Virtue is happiness, duty is manliness—these axioms sum up his creed. “The smile of hope” he perceives in the “Psalms of David.” He hears music, he smells perfume in “Home worship.” He tells the “Barmitzvah” that “by imitation of good, great and true men, the work shall be done and triumph crown the toil.” The law and the life which “Moses” proclaimed and led are “both glorious and gracious gifts of heaven to earth.” “Happy we,” he cries in his Elijah, “if when we pass away we leave behind us, like Elijah, a twofold portion of the spirit which those whom we love have every reason to desire of us!” From “Josiah” young and old may learn that “the most manly king of Judah was also the most religious”; so, too, the character of “Nehemiah” was a “combination of manliness and holiness.” “Moses Mendelssohn” enables us to learn to be “good and happy,” and, adds Michael Henry, “it is refreshing to turn from the troubled stories of kings, warriors, and statesmen, to the record of this calm, pure life, in which, as in the religion he followed, peace, love and wisdom are harmoniously combined.” In his Message of Love (Leviticus 19. 18), he quotes with a croon of delight the poet’s thought Seid umschlungen, Millionen (“Millions! be locked in one embrace”).

In his paper on “Peace” he enumerates the practical means by which that end may be advanced, and he continues: “Thus we can promote peace outwardly in the world, and by that effort promote peace inwardly in our hearts; we can spread around us a peace of earth like a sun-picture of the spiritual peace we ask from Heaven for ourselves.” Then, in his paper on “Heaven upon Earth,” he argues that Judaism does not tell us “to strive against the very nature of our being.” There is a not very thickly veiled controversialism in the sentences that follow: “We need not turn the left cheek when stricken on the right, nor impoverish ourselves to enrich the poor, nor let the guilty go free because we are not righteous enough to punish, nor leave the holy charms of family delights to follow the standard of fanatical self-denial. But what we have to do is this: True to the teachings of our faith, we have to take our nature as it is; with all its aims, its passions, its impulses; and, beating the evil from it as the thresher strikes the chaff from the grain, or the smelter frees the dross from the gold, we must shape and trim the pure material into its best form, and work it to its best purpose, drawing from it all that it has of good; giving to all its strength an upward tendency.” But Michael Henry is not at his best when he is arguing. We enjoy him in his unreasoning but fascinating optimism, as when, in The Everlasting Light, after describing the troubles and clouds of life and destiny, he comfortably assures us: “Have faith, and it all seems easy.” We see the real Michael Henry in the three stories or rather parables with which the volume ends, “How we Spoilt our Holiday,” the “Schoolboy and the Angel,” and the “Everlasting Rose.” These three chapters at least would bear reprinting. They express Michael Henry in his most charming aspects of sincerity, clean-heartedness, and unconquerable belief in the ideal.

But there is one chapter missing from the Life Thoughts of Michael Henry. It is a strange omission. No man ever excelled the subject of this article in his power to harmonize his religion with his life. Michael Henry as pietist, as lover of children, as editor of the Jewish Chronicle (from 1868), as agent for patents—under all these aspects the man was one and the same. His Life Thoughts are a torso, unless we draw on his writings as a mechanician. To restrict the selection to his contribution to the “Sabbath Readings” was to misunderstand him. And what a notable chapter could have been added from the source indicated. I have read his Defence of the Present Patent Law (1866). It is an able plea, but though it deals with a severely commercial topic in a business-like spirit, the whole pamphlet is lit up by the writer’s spiritual personality. Another fact revealed is this: It shows Michael Henry to have been possessed of a ready wit, a keen sense of humor. This note is missing from the volume of Life Thoughts.

Even more characteristic is the Inventor’s Almanac, the annual issue of which was begun in 1858. To comprehend Michael Henry it is absolutely necessary to turn over these sheets, a fine set of which (as continued also by Mr. Ernest de Pass) may be seen in the British Museum. Each Almanac consists of a single page, on which are crowded masses of technical information—statistical, practical, and historical. The artistic design is clever. Now, the reason why I am referring to these almanacs is this: From 1862 onwards, the sheets are adorned by quotations as well as pictures. In 1864 Michael Henry quotes from Disraeli: “You have disenthroned force, and placed on her high seat intelligence.” Then the compiler must have been struck by the fact that Disraeli’s remark had a scriptural analogue. In 1865, and in every subsequent year, the Almanac is surmounted by the maxim: “Wisdom is better than strength” (Ecclesiastes). The reference is to chapter 9 verse 16. In 1866 he quotes Gladstone: “There is no honourable, no useful place, upon this busy, teeming earth, for the idle man.” In another issue he uses a passage from that once popular versifier Mackay; union had often been tried by man for purposes of war, why not try it for purposes of peace, so that “construction, industry, and mutual aid,” may “lead from darkness into light.” Naturally enough he revels in Tennyson:

Men our brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new,
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do.

He used that couplet in 1872. Of course, he presents in due course the same poet’s

Let Knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell!

Quite obvious all this, no doubt. Michael Henry was, one must admit, given to the cult of the obvious. Therein lies not blame but praise. Many of us just fail because we do not see what lies simply before us. Tennyson was the incarnation of obviousness, hence he helped his generation to see. Michael Henry had no very keen or far vision. But he saw straight, he saw true. He was not an ocean goer, he hugged the shore within a dozen miles or so. Very like a life-boat, after all! Clearly a “Michael Henry” in good working order will always be the best monument to his memory! And he belongs to the type which ought to be remembered.

THE POEMS OF EMMA LAZARUS

Affixed to the colossal monument, which dominates and ennobles the entrance to New York harbor, is, as all the world knows, a poem by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). It commemorates her and her genius. Liberty, “a mighty woman with a torch,” stands there as the “Mother of Exiles,” crying with silent lips to the older world:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

This sonnet expresses both sides of the writer’s idealism: her devotion to America and her love for the Jews. She wrote much as a Hellenist, but her genuine outbursts were stimulated by two crises: the American War of North and South in the sixties, and the Russian Persecutions in the eighties. In a sense it is unfortunate that the May Laws came so late. Emma Lazarus had but few years to live after the promulgation of the legislation which sent forth, from their country, those myriads of Russian Jews, whose presence has so profoundly altered Jewish conditions in various lands. Her Jewish poems are full indeed of fire, but it is the fire of an immature passion. When she died, she had only begun to find herself as the singer of Israel’s cause.

Even so, however, her songs will not die. For she realized that Israel is “the slave of the Idea.” She did not fully grasp what the Idea was, however. Israel’s migrations—including those from Russia to Texas—were all, she felt, towards a destined end, and that end—Freedom:

Freedom to love the law that Moses brought,
To sing the songs of David, and to think
The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught,
Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink
The universal air—for this they sought
Refuge o’er wave and continent, to link
Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain,
And truth’s perpetual lamp forbid to wane.

Freedom is part of Israel’s Idea; it is not the whole of it.

EMMA LAZARUS