In her new-found enthusiasm for the Hebrew language she translated much from the medieval poets. But she will always come to one’s mind as the bard of Hanukkah. There she comes nearest to the Idea of which Israel is the missioner. Cheyne, in one of his finest works (The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter, pp. 18, 104), quotes two stanzas from her Feast of Lights as an apt commentary on Psalms 79 and 118, contrasting the desolation of Zion and the re-dedication:
They who had camped within the mountain-pass,
Couched on the rock, and tented ’neath the sky,
Who saw from Mizpah’s heights the tangled grass
Choke the wide Temple-courts, the altar lie
Disfigured and polluted—who had flung
Their faces on the stones, and mourned aloud
And rent their garments, wailing with one tongue,
Crushed as a wind-swept bed of reeds is bowed,
Even they by one voice fired, one heart of flame,
Though broken reeds, had risen, and were men,
They rushed upon the spoiler and o’ercame,
Each arm for freedom had the strength of ten.
Now is their mourning into dancing turned,
Their sackcloth doffed for garments of delight,
Week-long the festive torches shall be burned,
Music and revelry wed day with night.
One could quote much else from Emma Lazarus; her pagan poems written under classic and romantic influences; her renderings of Heine; her historical tragedy, the Dance of Death, dedicated to George Eliot; her prose epistles, in one of which occurs her famous use of a Hebrew grammatical form. In the Hebrew verb there is an intensive voice, and so the Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt. Or again, one might cite her New Ezekiel, her Bar Kochba, her Talmud Legends, her Rashi in Prague, or, better still, her lines from Nahum’s Spring Song:
Now the dreary winter’s over,
Fled with him are grief and pain;
When the trees their bloom recover,
Then the soul is born again!
But her hand is always firmest when her theme is the Maccabæan heroism. This subject gave her the opportunity which her nationalistic mood needed. We have read part of one of her poems on the subject, let us read another in full, though it is perhaps the most familiar of her compositions. Its title is “The Banner of the Jew.” While it repeats the thought and almost the phrases of the Feast of Lights, it has more of the lyric lightness of touch. It runs thus:
Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day
The glorious Maccabean rage,
The sire heroic, hoary-gray,
His five-fold lion-lineage:
The Wise, the Elect, the Help-of-God,
The Burst-of-Spring, the Avenging Rod.
From Mizpeh’s mountain-ridge they saw
Jerusalem’s empty streets, her shrine
Laid waste where Greeks profaned the Law,
With idol and with pagan sign.
Mourners in tattered black were there,
With ashes sprinkled on their hair.
Then, from the stony peak there rang
A blast to ope the graves: down poured
The Maccabean clan, who sang
Their battle-anthem to the Lord.
Five heroes lead, and following, see
Ten thousand rush to victory!
Oh for Jerusalem’s trumpet now,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hand for vengeance—but to save,
A thousand naked swords should wave.
O deem not dead that martial fire,
Say not the mystic flame is spent!
With Moses’ law and David’s lyre,
Your ancient strength remains unbent.
Let but an Ezra rise anew,
To lift the Banner of the Jew!
A rag, a mock at first—erelong
When men have bled and women wept,
To guard its precious folds from wrong,
Even they who shrunk, even they who slept,
Shall leap to bless it, and to save.
Strike! for the brave revere the brave!
This is bold and moving, but the reader cannot fail to observe that the metre and the passion are derived from Byron’s Isles of Greece. The Hebrew’s protest against Greece must, forsooth, owe its form and sentiment to the Saxon’s plea for Greece! The Jewish muse is still in leading strings. The true, full song of Israel’s hope is yet to come. None the less, the genius of Emma Lazarus struck truly the key-note to that song. We hear its echo still.
He used the Bible too much to please some of the continentals. Compare, for instance, Gautier with Conder. The Frenchman employed the Bible to illustrate the country, the Englishman the country to illustrate the Bible. Which procedure is preferable? The answer is another question. Why does every inch of Palestine interest the modern explorer? No Parthenon is to be seen within its boundaries, no Sphinx. Neither is the Attic beautiful there to charm, nor the Egyptian colossal to provide a thrill. When Thomson (in 1859) called his work “The Land and the Book,” he put the seal on the English way of regarding the relation between the geography and the history of the Holy Land. Englishmen have been among the keenest geographers of Palestine because they respond best to its history.
Hence Conder’s defect, as some have termed it, is, in truth, his merit. Apart, however, from the pietism of his motives, he deserved well of all who love Palestine. He gave some of his best years to its survey, and that operation did much to revivify the country. His services must always have a value because he, more than any other modern, put an end to a sort of thing formerly common. I mean the sort of thing which a pious old dame is said once to have remarked: “I knew these places were in the Bible, but I did not know they were in Palestine.” Jews in particular owe a good deal to him. I doubt whether I, for one, would ever have visited Medyeh—probably Modin, the home of the Maccabæans—but for Conder. I think I could quote by heart his description how the ancient road from Jerusalem to Lydda emerged from the rocky Beth-horon defiles and “ran along a mountain spur towards the plain”; how, a mile or so to the north of this main road, the village of Modin was built upon the southern slopes of the valley; how the gentle hills of the lowlands (Shephelah) could be seen from the Modin Knoll, stretching westwards. “At their feet, amid dark groves of olive, lay the white town of Lydda, and behind it the broad plain of Sharon extended to a breadth of ten miles. Furthest of all, the yellow-gleaming sand-dunes bounded the rich arable land, and the waters of the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) shone brightly under the afternoon sun.”
This description comes from one of Conder’s other books, his Judas Maccabæus. But his earlier Tent Work in Palestine (1878) is full of passages just as vivid. It is even more interesting because it shows us the explorer groping for the results, at which he has not yet arrived. Aptly enough, the title-page presents, from a sketch by the author, a theodolite-party at work, for the survey of Western Palestine was conducted on serious trigonometrical methods. That the narrative is so picturesque must not blind us to the truth that the operations were severely scientific. We are now, however, concerned with the pictorial effects. Read, as a parallel to the Modin description, Conder’s account of his first visit to Samaria. Taking the north road from Jerusalem, he passes the ranges about Neby Samuel (probably the ancient Mizpah), and sees the hills of Benjamin, “black against a sky of most delicate blush-rose tint, and the contrast was perhaps the finest in a land where fine effects are common at sunset.” Then he descends into the rough gorge of the Robbers’ Fountain. “The road is not improved by the habit of clearing the stones off the surrounding gardens into the public path.” In the east, roads are often thus made the common dumping-ground for rubbish, and I remember how the walk round the outside of the Jerusalem walls was much spoilt by the heaps of vegetable and other refuse which had been flung over the ramparts. (General Allenby’s campaign has already changed all that for the better.) Proceeding, “the short twilight gave place to almost total darkness as we began to climb the watershed which separates the plain from the valley coming down from Shiloh, and the moon had risen when the great shoulder of Gerizim became dimly visible some ten miles away, with a silvery wreath of cloud on its summit.” The right time to appreciate Palestinian scenes is usually just after sunset. And so, on this night march, Conder describes how, “creeping beneath the shadow of Gerizim, we gained the narrow valley of Shechem, and followed a stony lane between walnut trees under a steep hillside. The barking of dogs was now heard, and the lights in camp came into view. My poor terrier was tired and sleepy, and was set upon at once by Drake’s larger bull-terriers, Jack and Jill, rather a rude reception after a thirty-mile journey.” Mr. C. F. Tyrwhitt Drake—who died soon afterwards—had gone on in advance and had placed the camp close to the beautiful fountain of Ras el-Ain.
Such extended journeys could not be accomplished without paying the price. Thus, after the survey of Samaria, Carmel, and Sharon, operations had to be suspended for a time, simply because the party had reached the limit of endurance. “The fatigue of the campaign had been very great. My eyes were quite pink all over, with the effects of the glare of white chalk, my clothes were in rags, my boots had no soles. The men were no better off, and the horses also were all much exhausted, suffering from soreback, due to the grass diet.” But the spirit was stronger than the flesh. “The rest soon restored our energies, and autumn found us once more impatient to be in the fields.”
Thence Conder was off to Damascus, Baalbek and Hermon, away from Palestine itself. The ascent of the 9,000 feet of mount Hermon was begun at 10.30 a. m., and at 2 o’clock the summit was reached. But we must pass over the glowing description of the panorama that unfolded itself to the gaze of the explorers. After three months in the north, tents were struck, and the party marched out of their pleasant mountain-camp, bound for Jerusalem and the hills of Judah. Of the many pen-pictures which Conder draws, we will stay only to regard one—the description of Bethar, where Bar Cochba made his great effort at recovering Jewish independence (about the year 135 of the present era). Conder locates the fortress at the modern village Bittîr (at which there is now a railway station). It is about thirty-five miles from the sea, and about five from Jerusalem. “On every side, except the south, it is surrounded by deep and rugged gorges, and it is supplied with fresh water from a spring above the village. On the north the position would have been impregnable, as steep cliffs rise from the bottom of the ravine, upon which the houses are perched. The name (Bittîr) exactly represents the Hebrew (Bethar), and the distances agree with those noticed by Eusebius and the Talmud. Nor must the curious title be forgotten, which is applied to a shapeless mass of ruin on the hill, immediately west of Bittîr, for the name Khurbet el Yehûd—Ruin of the Jews—may be well thought to hand down traditionally among the natives of the neighbourhood the memory of the great catastrophe of Bethar.” Whether this place is the true site of Bar Cochba’s Bethar may be seriously questioned, but no other view can claim to be more certain. “The site of Bethar must still be considered doubtful,” says that good authority, S. Krauss, who himself is inclined to the theory which places the fortress much further north, near Sepphoris.
We should like to linger over the rest of Conder’s journey, but the few lines that remain must be devoted to his final remarks. Conder, it must ever be remembered, was one of the first to dispute the then current belief that the Holy Land had lost its old character for fertility, and that changes in climate had induced an irreparable barrenness. He maintained in particular that the supposed dearth of water had been much exaggerated by recent tourists. “With respect to the annual rainfall, it is only necessary to note that, with the old cisterns cleaned and mended, and the beautiful tanks and aqueducts repaired, the ordinary fall would be quite sufficient for the wants of the inhabitants and for irrigation.” (Here, too, recent events have effected an agreeable transformation.) And, in general “the change in productiveness which has really occurred in Palestine, is due to decay of cultivation, to decrease of population, and to bad government. It is Man and not Nature, who has ruined the good land in which was ‘no lack,’ and it is, therefore, within the power of human industry to restore the old country to its old condition of agricultural prosperity.” Construct roads, raise irrigation works, promote afforestation—those were the measures Conder suggested, after the three strenuous years of his survey (1872 to 1875). Such optimistic opinions are now quite common; and, we may hope, are tending towards realization, if only men’s hopes are not set too high. But let us not forget that among the first moderns to formulate such opinions, on the basis of exact knowledge, was the author of Tent Work in Palestine.
Of Marcus Kalisch’s learned commentaries on the Bible it has been truly said that they are a thorough summary of all that had been written on the subject up to the date when those commentaries were published. He not only knew everything, but he had assimilated it. Nor was it only his learning that placed him among the first among the Jewish scholars of the second part of the nineteenth century. He was original as well; that he “anticipated Wellhausen,” more than one has declared of him, as they have declared of others before Kalisch.
Learning and originality make a fairly strong instrument for drawing out the truth. But another strand is needed to compose the threefold cord that shall not easily be broken. This, too, Kalisch had at his command. It is the strand of sentiment. In his more orthodox days when he produced his Exodus (1855), and in his more rationalistic period when he gave to the world his Balaam and his Jonah (1887-8)—at all stages of his activity he was never the mere philologist. Like Sheridan’s character, he was a man of sentiment; but unlike Joseph Surface, his sentiment was genuine. He was, to put the same truth in other words, an expounder of ideas as well as a critic of words.
It should have surprised no one to meet Kalisch in any situation where the qualities above defined could be exercised. Yet some of those who only thought of him as the Hebrew grammarian must have opened their eyes when the fact was brought to their notice that within a couple of years of printing his Genesis (1858) he issued a small volume on Oliver Goldsmith. In 1860 he spoke the substance of this volume as “two lectures delivered to a village audience.” The theme was treated by him with considerable learning, but with an even more considerable good feeling. I remember particularly two or three sentences in this book. “Forgive his faults, but do not forget them” is one—I quote from memory and may not be verbally exact. Forgiveness not only differs from forgetfulness, but, humanely considered, the two things are scarcely consistent. You really can only forgive when you remember—all that the man was whom you are judging. Another sentence that I recall is this: “You will find Goldsmith’s life again in his writings, and his writings in his life.” This is a notable conception, not original to Kalisch. But the turn he gives to it seems to me quite fresh. Goldsmith, he asserts, was a great writer and—despite the faults aforementioned—a good man. “You see his goodness in his writings and his greatness in his life”—a brilliant epigram, but also a neat description of the ideal man of letters.
But how came it that Marcus Kalisch, a German and a Jew, was addressing village audiences in England at all? Born in Pomerania in 1828, he had come to England fresh from the Universities of Berlin and Halle. Like so many others of various nationalities and creeds, he had played a generous part in the 1848 affair, and felt unsafe after its suppression. Nathan Marcus Adler had settled in London in 1845. The refugee found an asylum with the new chief rabbi: Kalisch served the latter as secretary for five years. His former employer must have felt fairly uncomfortable when Kalisch’s Leviticus appeared (1867-72), for this was a pretty thorough departure from the old-fashioned standpoint. Kalisch, of course, was not without honor in his own community. He had a real, though not an undiscriminating, admirer in the late A. L. Green. We still, however, seem rather far off from solving the riddle: how came Kalisch to be talking to English village audiences on Oliver Goldsmith or on any other subject? The answer is given with the names of the villages. They were Aston Clinton and Mentmore in the county of Buckinghamshire—places long associated with the country homes of the Rothschilds. In 1853 Kalisch was appointed tutor to the sons of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. From that date until Kalisch’s death, in 1885, there was no break in the cordial relations between the Rothschilds and the scholar. They provided the leisure, and he provided the capacity to make worthy use of it. Countless are the honorable incidents in the Rothschild record, but there is none on which a Jewish writer more loves to dwell than on the association of the family with the author of Path and Goal.
The scene of that work is Cordova Lodge, the house of Gabriel de Mondoza, situated in one of the northern suburbs of London. It was “an unpretending structure of moderate dimensions, but adorned with consummate taste and judgment.” The further description of the house rather reminds one of Disraeli’s creations. And this Lodge, “a veritable rus in urbe,” with its Greek busts and “modest conservatories”—there is not lacking even “a diminutive farm”—was, we are told, so located and ordered as to afford “an atmosphere of calm cheerfulness, inviting the mind at once to concentration and intercommunion.” The owner, in whose abode Kalisch represents his characters as gathered, was descended from a distinguished family of Spanish Jews, who had come from Holland to England during Cromwell’s protectorate. His mother was a German, “of an essentially artistic nature.” From his father he derived his love for the Bible, from his mother his admiration for the Classics; and doubtful as to which to prefer, “he clung the more firmly to both, and laboured to weld the conceptions of the Scriptures and of Hellenism into one homogeneous design.”
His house was the habitual meeting-place for many native and foreign guests, and during the International Exhibition a specially representative group are found at Cordova Lodge, conducting a “discussion of the elements of civilisation and the conditions of happiness.” This discussion is the substance of the volume entitled Path and Goal. Such symposia go back to Plato, but it was W. H. Mallock who, with his New Republic, re-popularized the genre in England. This appeared in 1877; Kalisch’s Path and Goal followed it in 1880. The disputants in the latter work include Christians of all degrees of high and low Churchiness; a naturalist and a Hellenist; a Reform and an Orthodox Rabbi; a Parsee and a Mohammedan; a Brahman and a Buddhist. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this gathering is Kalisch’s recognition of the importance of the Eastern religions. Sometimes, indeed, those who try to prefigure the future of the world’s religion take account of Islam. But very few remember the beliefs and institutions of India. The learning with which Kalisch discusses the Indian systems would be amazing were one not prepared for it by previous knowledge of his encyclopedic acquirements.
We will not follow out into any detail the course of the conversations at Cordova Lodge. It is cleverly constructed, being based on a discussion of Ecclesiastes. The whole of that biblical book appears in the second chapter of Path and Goal, and it is the text for what follows. What is the object of the interchange of these opinions? “We do not search for that which appertains to one time or to one nation, but those truths which flow from the constitution and wants of human nature, and are on that account universal and unchanging.” No definite result is reached, except, perhaps, the final justification of Mondoza’s suggested “eucrasy”—the “harmony of character which is the perfection of culture.” Here, then, we have the very antithesis to the view expressed in Herzberg’s Jewish Family Papers. Kalisch believed in the possible harmonization of various elements into a perfect culture. But he does not describe as Jewish the resultant harmony. He would not have cared at all about the name; he was chiefly concerned with the thing. And in the light of this—for I think we may not unjustly attribute the host’s sentiments to the host’s author—he regarded the “political community as only an elementary stage”; nationality was at best preparatory for the “universal union” of men; while “the feeling of nationality is a onesidedness to be merged in a genuine and ardent cosmopolitanism.” Cosmopolitanism is the political correlative to a belief in culture. In the end there is a very general agreement among the visitors at Cordova Lodge. “Is this a dream?” cries Mondoza. “It heralds,” said Rabbi Gideon, with a trembling voice, “the approach of the time predicted by our prophets, when ‘the Lord shall be One and His name One’; and when ‘He shall bless the nations saying, Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance.’” (Isaiah 19. 25.) So, after all, Kalisch’s “Goal” is not widely distant from the Goal that may rightly be termed Jewish.
Light and color are the themes of the poet. But they and the flowers attract the theologian also. Franz Delitzsch produced his Studies in Color and Talks on Flowers in 1888 (an English version appearing in the following year). The book gives the lie to the supposition that the technical scholar is so engaged in dissecting things of beauty, that he is blind to the beauty of things. Delitzsch—the student and interpreter of the Bible—assures us that he could not remember the time when he did not muse on the language of colors; while, as for flowers, they ever had heavenly things to tell him; in their perfume he felt “the nearness and breath of the Creator.” Hence he called his book Iris. “The prismatic colours of the rainbow, the brilliant sword-lily, that wonderful part of the eye which gives it its colour, and the messenger of heaven who beams with joy, youth, beauty, and love, are all called Iris.” A pretty notion, this, so to name a book which is occupied largely with the lore of Bible and Talmud.
But the question arises: Did the olden Hebrews and their rabbinic descendants appreciate colors? Here we are face to face with a basic error to which some investigators have succumbed. They rely too much on words. The Hebrew names for colors are vague and few. Does it, however, follow that the ancient people were unable to enjoy the blue of the sky because they had no word for sky-blue? Men do not name everything they know. There is, for instance, no specific Hebrew for volcano, yet there are a score of passages in which volcanic phenomena are forcibly described in the Old Testament. Delitzsch did not belong to the superficial theorists just cited. He points out that, though biblical language has no adjective for blue, it compares the sky to sapphire in the Sinaitic theophany (Exodus 24. 10), as well as in Ezekiel’s vision of the divine throne. “Sapphire-blue is the blue of heaven; the colour of the atmosphere as illumined by the sun, through which shine the dark depths of space, the colour of the finite pervaded by the infinite, the colour taken by that which is most heavenly as it comes down to the earthly, the colour of the covenant between God and man.” So, too, the Midrash says of the blue fringe worn by Israelites on the corners of their garments—a blue of the purple hyacinth hue—that it was reminiscent of the heavens and the Throne of Glory. And blue, continues Delitzsch, passes almost universally as the color of fidelity. He proves this by reference to German and Sanskrit. The Indians would say of a steadfast man that he was “as unchangeable as the indigo flower,” which is as durable as it is lovely. “But in biblical symbolism there is associated with blue the idea of the blue sky, and with the blue sky the idea of the Godhead coming forth from its mysterious dwelling in the unseen world, and graciously condescending to the creature.” Delitzsch, scientific commentator though he was, had something of the darshan in him, and that accounts in part for his charm. The spirit of Midrash rests where it will: it is a happy truth that it sometimes finds itself a home in the hearts of others besides the sons of Israel.
Delitzsch, then, may be likened to the darshan: he is equally at home as allegorist. He can use the method of an Abbahu; he can also follow the manner of a Philo. Take, for example, his treatment of the four colors which are found in the priestly vestments—purple-red, purple-blue, scarlet, and white. White, he says, is the sacred color. Light is white and God is white. Dressed in the white of holiness, the priests blessed Israel in the words: “May the Lord make His face shine in light upon thee.” Delitzsch interprets light in the sense of love. This is not quite adequate. He often quotes German university customs in illustration of his views; it is a pity that he forgot the motto of the University of Oxford, Dominus illuminatio mea (“the Lord is my light”), from the first verse of the twenty-seventh Psalm. “God is the author of knowledge as well as the source of love,” comments Mr. C. G. Montefiore. White would stand for mind-service as well as heart-service: illumination, no doubt, is emotional, but it must also be intellectual to be sane and complete. Scarlet, on the other hand, continues Delitzsch in his allegory of the priestly colors, is the contrast to white. Isaiah speaks of sin “red as scarlet”—scarlet is the color of fire, hence of sin and the anger it evokes. “Scarlet with white in the dress of the high priest, therefore, means that he is the servant of that God who is holy not only in His love, but also in His anger.” A fine phrase that, showing deep insight into the Hebrew conception of God. Delitzsch, obviously, is not to be lumped together with those who would make of God all love; there is a holy anger, too, which belongs (inseparably with the love) to the divine nature. With regard to the two purples in the priestly robes, they typify majesty, for the dye was costly and its effects magnificent. Purple-red points to “God’s majesty as the exalted One, and purple-blue to God’s majesty in His condescension. For,” continues Delitzsch, “even taken in itself, the impression produced by purple-red is severe and earnest: whereas purple-blue has a soft tranquillizing effect. And whereas purple-red suggests the God of judgment who, when He frowns in anger, changes the heavens into blackness and the moon into blood, purple-blue suggests the God of peace, who overarches the earth with the blue of heaven, like a tent of peace.” How very fanciful, but how very Philonean, and therefore how very Jewish all this is!
There is much more as good as this in Iris. For instance, one would hardly have looked for poetry in the laws of bedikah—the minute scrutiny of the carcasses of animals as regards symptoms of disease. But just as in Samson’s riddle out of the body of the lion there came forth sweetness, so in Iris the author extracts aesthetics from the bedikah rules, and sees in them evidence of the close observation of colors by the rabbinic legalists. “The colour of the lung especially is subjected to the most careful examination. It is reckoned healthy if it is black like the Eastern eye paint—that is, tending to blueish—or green like leek, or red, or liver-coloured, but it is declared to be unsuitable for eating if the colour is as black as ink, yellowish-green like hops, yellow like the yolk of an egg, yellow like saffron, yellow-red like raw flesh.” And after the recital, Delitzsch exclaims: “Is not this a rich variegated sampler of colours?”
Since the date when Delitzsch wrote there has come about an important change in the opinion of anthropologists. Little more than a quarter of a century has passed, but all anthropological theorists no longer accept (though some still do) one theory on which Delitzsch builds, namely, that primitive peoples were color-blind. Several eminent authorities deny that savages lack the power to discriminate colors. The fact simply is that with advance in culture there enters greater precision in nomenclature; color-language becomes not so much more definite, as of wider range. But why? Surely not because of more accurate observation of natural tints. Culture associates itself with town life, and urbans are far more color-blind than rustics. At least, statistics are said to prove this, though Dr. Maurice Fishberg questions one of the inferences. The discussion has importance owing to the statement often made that Jews are more subject to color-blindness than Gentiles, the suggestion being that, as Jews live predominatingly in towns, they see less green than do those who dwell in the country. Dr. Fishberg, on the other hand, maintains that, while the poor and ill-nourished are always susceptible to color-blindness, Jews of the well-nourished classes are quite as good distinguishers of shades of color as the rest of the population of the same social status.
There remains something else to add. Culture carries with it luxury, and luxury leads to the manufacture of silks and cloths of every variety of shade. It is the mediæval improvement in the art of dyeing that has produced the increase of definition and range in the color vocabulary. And the art of dyeing owed much to Jews. To repeat a well-known fact, wherever he went on his Itinerary in the mid-twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela always found Jewish dyers. Here, however, we must break off, for we seem getting a longish way from Iris. But not really. The book itself makes no attempt to be systematic, and discursiveness is, accordingly, not inappropriate in a causerie on Franz Delitzsch’s masterpiece.
Of Isaac Mayer Wise it is customary to speak as an organizer and nothing more. True, the most significant performance of his long life (1819-1900) was the foundation of institutions for American Reform Judaism. More than any other leader of his age he realized two ideas which are usually regarded as contradictory, but which Wise saw can and must be harmonized. The two ideas are not of equal importance. The basis of a sound Jewish life is the recognition of the congregation as the unit. Wise perceived this, but he also saw that some sort of grouping of the units is necessary to convert the congregations into a community. This he effected by founding the Hebrew Union College as representative of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. The Union devised by Wise differs essentially from the United Synagogue of London. The latter depends on the principle of control, the former on the principle of co-operation. This is not the place to discuss the relative values of the two principles. Suffice it to indicate the distinction.
Yet, though Wise owes to his organizing skill his fame as “the most potent factor in the history of Judaism in America,” he was also an author. His contributions to literature were many and varied. He was, above all, an energetic journalist; but he was a novelist and a dramatist as well. A careful study of his writings on religion will convince any unprejudiced reader that Wise was also a theologian of no mean order. In his lifetime it was customary to throw easy jibes at him as an ignoramus. But the charge was false. Not long ago I read for the first time Wise’s most ambitious books, as well as the Selected Writings, edited in 1900 by Drs. Philipson and Grossman. Now Wise, throughout his career, worked consciously with the “aim to reconcile Judaism with the age and its needs.” Every Jewish leader, to whatever school he belongs, does that. With Wise, however, the aim was most consciously felt. Hence his writings were all directed to current problems, to the fashions of the hour; and as a result his books seemed ephemeral. But the strange thing is that, when the fashions have passed, it is seen that the treatment of them has permanent worth. I have been again and again struck by Wise’s learning and originality. He was a pioneer, for instance, in his treatment of Christianity. He held the fantastic theory that Paul was identical with Elisha ben Abuyah, and in other points displays a somewhat perverse ingenuity. But he was a pioneer in trying to separate the supernatural from the natural in the records of the early church. “The God Jesus,” he said, “and the supernatural Paul appear small in the focus of reason. The patriotic and enthusiastic Jesus, and the brave, bold, wise Paul are grand types of humanity.” The epithets applied by Wise are not all well chosen; there is frequently an eccentricity in Wise’s characterizations. But the main distinction which he draws is sound. Again, Wise was a pioneer not so much in laying stress on the prophetic Judaism, because Geiger did the same before him; but where Wise led was in his effort to attach the prophetic ideals to the congregational life. He understood that “social service” ought to be an integral element in every synagogue’s activity. “Whatever a congregation does, it must never neglect the first of all its duties—the Messianic duty of Israel. It must contribute its full share to the elevation of human nature, the redemption of mankind, the sovereignty of truth, and the supremacy of reason, freedom, and virtue.”
ISAAC MAYER WISE
ISAAC MAYER WISE
Wise, however, refused to set the Prophets above the Law. The “Revelation on Mount Sinai” was for him “valid eternally.” It is because of this aspect of his work that I have chosen his Pronaos as the peg on which to hang these thoughts. The book appeared in Cincinnati in 1891, and its full title is “Pronaos to Holy Writ establishing, on documentary evidence, the authorship, date, form, and contents of each of its books, and the Authenticity of the Pentateuch.” The book is among the earliest of the reasoned replies to the Higher Criticism. Wise would have nothing to do with the modern treatment of the Pentateuch. He had as little patience with Graetz as he had with Wellhausen. The Pentateuch is through and through Mosaic. Moses wrote Genesis and Deuteronomy with his own hands; the rest was set down soon after his death from the records which he had left for the purpose. And further: “There exists no solid ground on which to base any doubt in the authenticity of any book of Holy Writ.” With that emphatic assertion the book ends.
Wise, it must be confessed, seemed unaware of the constructive side of criticism. To him criticism seemed entirely negative. Again, he was unable to see that the value of the Bible may continue, even though the older conception of authenticity be modified. But the interest of his Pronaos just lies in the vigor with which he maintains that older conception. His defence is spirited, and in many ways convincing. Criticism was undoubtedly wrong when it treated Judaism as the creation of the prophets, and the Pentateuch as lower in worth than Micah and Isaiah. I do not remember that any predecessor of Wise so thoroughly employed the argument of continuity. There is, he said, an “uninterrupted tradition,” the whole is “a logical organism,” every part in its right place, fulfilling its due function. Now this is the real justification of the Bible. There are variations in the points of view of various inspired writers, but the whole tendency is one, there is consistency of purpose. Wise deserves lasting gratitude for urging this truth so powerfully. Well might he term his book a Pronaos, a “door leading into the interior of the sanctuary.” For a detail, it is significant to find that Wise anticipated the newer, though I think erratic, direction of criticism in our day. He absolutely refused to admit that the different names applied to God (Adonai and Elohim) point to different authors or ages.
Differ though we may with Wise—some of us on account of his rejection of criticism, others because of his elevation of “Mosaism” into a cult, others again because of both of these things—it is not possible to withhold from him the crown of scholarship. In particular, his Pronaos abounds in acute and fresh contributions to the biblical problem. It is, moreover, a striking instance of the ironies of controversy that the most orthodox book on the Pentateuch was written by the leader of American reform! Cincinnati, under the influence of Wise, was certainly much more conservative in biblical exegesis than Breslau was under the influence of Graetz. If in the seventies and eighties a student had desired to work in an environment which acknowledged the older views of biblical inspiration, he would have found himself more at home in the Hebrew Union College than in the Frankel Seminary. In the course of this series of papers, several anomalies have been discussed. But none of them is more remarkable than the contrast between Wise and Graetz. There is another side to it, of course. Graetz took a wider view of tradition than did Wise, who never truly grasped the meaning of tradition. Yet the fact remains that in so far as the question of a tradition concerns the Bible, Wise stood far more firmly in the old paths than did many who pass for champions of tradition.
In the Baedeker Handbook for Palestine and Syria there is a well-known description of the scene at the western wall of the temple. In A. and C. Black’s Guide to Jerusalem, the Wailing Place is included among “Minor Sights,” but Baedeker stars it, thus giving it a testimonial of importance. Not being an inn, the wall could spare this mark. I remember reading a clever story called “The Lost Star.” A visitor to a hotel was dissatisfied with his treatment, and his complaints to the manager were impatiently received. When the guest departed, he simply said: “I am Baedeker. You have lost your star.” The Wailing Place could do without Baedeker’s patronage.
Now, it is not my purpose to discuss the history of praying at the temple wall. Jerome, in the fourth century, speaks pathetically of the Jews “buying their tears,” paying for the privilege of weeping by the wall on the anniversary of the temple’s destruction. But what will concern us now is Baedeker’s account of the liturgy used at the prayers. The Rev. W.T. Gidney (as quoted in Black) asserts that there is used “a kind of liturgy,” the concluding part of which is:
Lord, build; Lord build—
Build Thy house speedily.
In haste! in haste! even in our days.
Build Thy house speedily.
In haste! in haste! even in our days,
Build Thy house speedily.
I do not know whether any Jews actually sing this Passover hymn (Addir hu) on other occasions during the year. Murray’s Palestine Handbook asserts that “the lamentations are taken from the 79th Psalm,” a statement which points to the same source as that relied on by Baedeker. The latter gives two forms, of which the first runs thus:
Leader: For the palace that lies desolate:
Response: We sit in solitude and mourn.
Leader: For the palace that is destroyed:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For the walls that are overthrown:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For our majesty that is departed:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For our great men who lie dead:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For the precious stones that are burned:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For the priests who have stumbled:
Response: We sit, etc.
Leader: For our kings who have despised Him:
Response: We sit, etc.
Whence did the compiler of Baedeker derive this? From the Karaites. If one turns to the fourth volume of the Karaite liturgy, published in Vienna in 1854, page 208, this litany is to be found. It is part of a very long series of prayers (which include, on page 212, the passage which, in Baedeker, follows the one cited above). Psalm 79, referred to in Murray, appears in the same Karaite book on page 206. The selections are a tiny fraction of the whole. The Karaite prayers are always extremely long. Thus, their marriage service fills eleven large, closely printed sides. The Jerusalem prayers are even more elaborate. As the pilgrim starts from home for the Holy City, the congregation turns out to give him a send off, reciting sixteen Psalms as a supplication for his protection, and other fourteen Psalms in praise of Jerusalem. He then proceeds on his way. When he arrives at the city, as far off as the distance at which a man can recognize his fellow, he rends his garments and mourns as for a lost first-born. He then recites parts of the Lamentations, and enough Psalms and Selihot to occupy another ten pages. Some of us complain of the length of our prayers; when we look at the weary mass of the Karaite liturgy, we stand amazed at our own moderation.
Having tracked Baedeker to his source, and restricting ourselves to the pages from which he quotes, it is worth comparing his version with the original. The omissions made are so serious as to spoil the beauty of the whole, for beautiful it assuredly is of its kind. The fault arises from Baedeker only reading down one of the two columns. Now the lines are alphabetical, and must be read across, not down the page. There are other faults; for instance palace in the second line is a mistake for house, but the compiler may have used a slightly different version. In the one before me there is nothing to correspond to For our great men who lie dead. The rest of the lines are the same as in the book I am using. But note how the effect suffers by the loss of the half-lines to which I have referred. Thus Baedeker gives For the priests who have stumbled, but omits the complementary phrase For our studies which were interrupted. Again, Baedeker quotes For the precious stones which are burned, but fails to follow it up with For loving ones that were separated, a fine line which ought to have been retained in any abbreviation, however short.
The only other passage quoted in Baedeker, “another antiphon” or responsive chant, is the following:
Leader: We pray Thee, have mercy on Zion!
Response: Gather the children of Jerusalem.
Leader: Haste, haste, Redeemer of Zion!
Response: Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.
Leader: May beauty and majesty surround Zion!
Response: Ah! turn Thyself mercifully to Jerusalem.
Leader: May the kingdom soon return to Zion!
Response: Comfort those who mourn over Jerusalem.
Leader: May peace and joy abide with Zion!
Response: And the branch (of Jesse) spring up in Jerusalem.
Comparing this with the Hebrew original, there is no such mistake as in the previous case. The summarizer has correctly read the lines across the page. There are certain slips, and more than a half of the whole (which again runs in alphabetical sequence) is left out; but the shortening is here no loss, as the best lines have been selected.
Besides these prayers, the Karaite book includes a large number of hymns. Among them, inappropriately enough, is the piyyut on the offering of Isaac. In the Sephardic service this properly belongs to the New Year; it goes to a swinging melody at Bevis Marks. True, the scene was Moriah, the temple hill. But the Karaite book gives no direction that the shofar is to be sounded. None the less, it finishes this piyyut with the prayer that God will hearken to the shofar sounds and say unto Zion: “The time of salvation has come.” Obviously, this is a fitting prelude to the blowing of the shofar on Rosh ha-Shanah. But it has no right where this Karaite book has transplanted it, although the bulk of the hymn suits well enough the liturgy of the Wailing Place.
Throughout its whole range modern Hebrew literature can offer no poem to rival in popularity Imber’s song. Naphtali Herz Imber was born in 1856, and wrote Ha-Tikwah in his youth in one of his many moods. His disposition was wayward; he had a full share of the artistic self-consciousness. Some of his characteristics are accurately hit off in Melchitsedek Pinchas of Mr. Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto.
Ha-Tikwah owes its fame to the directness of its sentiment. What makes for weakness in it as a poem makes for strength in it as a song. The most effective national hymns are not usually the most poetical. “God save the King” is doggerel; “Rule Britannia” is bombast. But both put patriotic thoughts in straightforward terms, both are happily wedded to simple tunes within the range of average voices. Ha-Tikwah satisfies both these tests. The melody is beautiful and easily sung by large masses of people. The opening line of Imber’s refrain: “Our hope has not perished yet” is certainly derived from the National Song, “Poland has not perished yet,” to which the Polish legions marched. So the melody of Ha-Tikwah is said to be a Polish folk-tune, but it closely resembles a favorite melody of the Sephardim. Various settings of the tune differ in detail, and the same is true of the current versions of Imber’s words. It is strange that the versions—all known to me—retain unanimously the ungrammatical second stanza. It would, I admit, be difficult to correct it without destroying the rhythm, and poetical license has worse things to answer for. Indeed the grammatical lapse, to which I refer, is regarded by some authorities as perfectly normal and admissible in the new Hebrew.
The power of Ha-Tikwah, as has just been said, arises from its directness. There is no subtlety in its thought, no changes through its nine verses. Just as few ever sing through “God Save the King,” so few sing all the verses of Ha-Tikwah. The stanzas tend to become monotonous. They all say the same thing; and it is not surprising that the number of verses is curtailed in some printed editions (thus in Idelsohn five of the nine verses complete the song). The burden of all the verses is identical. The hope of a return to the land of Israel will never die, so long as this or that endures. Each verse adds a this or a that to the count. While myriads of Jews go as pilgrims to the sepulchres of the fathers, while a single eye is left to drop its tear over the ruins of the temple, while the waters of the Jordan swell between its banks and fall with a rush through the sea of Kinnereth, while a drop of blood courses through a Jewish vein, while Israel retains his national aspirations, still may he hope for their fulfilment. Some of these appeals are genuinely pathetic, and the final appeal is magnificent in its strength. Only with the end of the Jews will come the end of the hope. This is the only way to write a popular song. There must be no nuances, but just a confident assertion. Imber supplies exactly that; nothing less, and nothing more.
NAPHTALI HERZ IMBER
NAPHTALI HERZ IMBER
Nothing more, for the song is not in any sense a declaration of the end. It deals only with the means, making them into an end. Unquenchable, he cries, is the hope of a return; no one has expressed this hope more vigorously and takingly. But what is to be the result of the return? With what ideals are the patriots filled? Ha-Tikwah is silent on these questions. Imber was not qualified to reply to them. He had no depth of spiritual feeling, and though he was capable of inspiriting, he was incapable of inspiring. Hence the absence of all Messianic thought in Ha-Tikwah. Compare it, for instance, with Leka Dodi; the Friday night hymn is like Ha-Tikwah, a song of the return, but, unlike Ha-Tikwah, it is Messianic, and is also a song of the rebuilding. When the history of the neo-Zionist movement comes to be written, this fact will undoubtedly come into due prominence: namely, that we have been passing through a phase in which the hope of the return has been divorced from the hope of the rebuilding.
It is remarkable that some versions of the refrain remove the only words which possibly can bear a Messianic construction. I have not before me the original words of Imber himself, and I have a notion that Mr. David Yellin is responsible in part for the chorus. Be that as it may, in the last line Jerusalem is described as “the city where David encamped.” The phrase comes from the opening line of the twenty-ninth chapter of Isaiah. “Woe to Ariel, Ariel, city where David encamped”—Ariel is either “Lion of God” or, as the Targum takes it, “Altar-hearth.” The Rabbis combined both senses. Ariel was the altar, yet they saw something lion-shaped in the sanctuary. In Isaiah the passage is one of doom, Ariel is to be humiliated by the Assyrians. Curiously enough, the ancient Greek translation gives also a hostile turn to the words “city where David encamped,” rendering “against which David encamped.” But this is erroneous. The meaning is: the city in which David dwelt, selecting it as the royal capital. David, it is true, did not build the temple, but he brought the ark thither, and offered sacrifices on the occasion, and later on built an altar. Not only, then, is Ariel justly to be termed the city where David encamped, but the use of the phrase in Ha-Tikwah supplies the missing Messianic hope, for David is the type of this hope. In the version of Ha-Tikwah printed by Idelsohn four verses are omitted, and some of those which are retained are set in an inverted order. More culpably, the refrain is weakened into “the city of Zion and Jerusalem,” thus removing the Davidic touch. The change does not merely offend against reason; it also sins against rhyme; thus adding another instance to many others of the destructive tamperings with masterpieces which some editors seem unable to avoid.
One other striking merit of Ha-Tikwah must be observed. Unlike many other poets of Zion, Imber does not denounce. He makes no attack on those who do not share his feelings. He points to the continued existence of the hope for the return, but he refrains from condemning, except by the merest implication, those who have no consciousness of the hope. There is true art here, which I am able to appreciate, far removed as I am from Imber’s nationalism. For, on the one hand, art is best when it pleases some without paining others. Imber pleases those who agree with him without paining the rest. On the other hand, art is strongest when it does not recognize that there are others to be displeased. The confident note is the artistic note. The poet assumes that what he feels is the only thing to feel. To talk of doubters is to throw doubt on himself. A popular song cannot stoop to argument. It is categorical. Thus Imber’s Ha-Tikwah can be enjoyed by those who do not accept its message. And its melody is sung at table, to Psalm 126, by some who never sing the tune to Imber’s words. “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with exultation; then said they among the nations: The Lord hath done great things for them.” Psalm 126, when all is said and done, is the most exquisite Song of the Return ever written. “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” We can all realize the pathos and the hope, even though we are not at one as to the nature of the harvest that is to be reaped.