The massacres of Podolia—The Marrano Tragedy—Manasseh’s views on the mission of Israel—Dispersion and Restoration—R. Jacob Emden’s annotations—Manasseh’s theory of the Jewish race.
The frightful massacres of the Jewish communities in Podolia, Volhynia, and other provinces of Poland, entirely startled and horrified Jewry all over the world. For months and years the murder of the Jews went on. No language can describe the cruelties and sufferings inflicted upon this unfortunate people from the Dnieper to the Vistula. There was “a kind of chase taking place within an enclosed area.” Some of the aged and prominent Jews were kept as hostages in the hands of the mob, who demanded heavy ransoms from the Jews of other countries. This was the purpose of Carcassone’s mission from Constantinople to Amsterdam. Turkey offered an asylum for the hunted refugees who were fortunate enough to cross the boundary, but only very few succeeded, while thousands of those who tried to escape were murdered, or languished in the galleys and prisons as hostages. Manasseh, himself the son of a refugee and a martyr, felt this tragedy. On the other hand, the news concerning the Inquisition in the country of his birth was still horrifying the world, for Jews were still being burnt alive there. Putting together the brief note in the Nishmath Chayyim regarding the massacres of 1648 with the remarks in De Termino Vitae on the Inquisition, we obtain a terrible picture. In De Termino Manasseh alludes to the emigration of the Marranos.
The Marranos! What a splendid record of noble deeds, of spontaneous, gentle piety, of triumphant suffering, is called to memory at the mere mention of the word! What powerful endurance is described in the history of these Jewish martyrs! What an inspiration to attempt even the impossible in the cause of liberty of conscience! What a great tragedy theirs was—a tragedy illumined by personal deeds of self-sacrifice! Their story is a story of thrilling personal experiences and of sorrow and separation and death.¹
They flock, says Manasseh, in thousands to other countries, and it is useless to attempt to tell in a few words the incalculable loss that Spain and Portugal have sustained in losing wealth, and inhabitants, by the inhuman acts of the Inquisition. Apart from their execrable inhumanity, the utter folly of the atrocities is apparent from the fact that the Inquisition forces the wealth, trade and skill of the country to leave it. Here he speaks as a statesman who knows the countries in question. In Nishmath Chayyim the note is one of sober-minded resignation. He does not inveigh against the Cossacks as he did against the Portuguese; he simply expresses the hope that Carcassone may raise the necessary funds, and that God may send His angel before him. By using this Biblical phrase¹ Manasseh expresses his high appreciation of the importance of the mission. The general situation of the Jews in the Diaspora is described by him in short but plain terms: “If the nations would ask, Why are you in captivity, exposed to outrage and contempt, dispersed and scattered...?” Manasseh clearly rejected the idea that Israel’s mission demands an everlasting dispersion. It seemed to him that the dispersion ought to be made complete, because it must lead to the Restoration. In this respect his views were not only in accordance with Scripture, but the outcome of a train of reasoning. The process of dispersion has to reach its climax, and then the process of restoration will begin. The Hagadic sentence:—
²צדקה עשה הקדוש ברוך הוא בישראל שפזרן לבין האומות. פסחים, פז׃
often quoted by the adherents of the dispersion in support of the Galuth, was interpreted by Manasseh to mean that so long as the Israelites must live dispersed they should live dispersed among several nations, because in this way their complete destruction is more difficult than if they were dependent upon one or two nations. But dispersion is not for him the ideal state of the Jewish nation.
The law of Divine providence with regard to the nation of Israel has ever been that defection is eventually to be followed by dispersion and reconciliation by restoration.
“Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land they defiled it....” (Ezekiel xxxvi. 17).
“... and I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries;...” (Ibid. 19).
“... from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you” (Ibid. 25).
“And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be My people, and I will be your God” (Ibid. 28).
There is not one passage in which the promised restoration is represented as anything other than a distinct proof of reconciliation between God and his ancient People, or dispersion as anything other than a punishment. The People and the Land of Israel are so linked with one another that whatever continuity is ascribed to the one must, on all strict principles of interpretation, be also attributed to the other. In the twenty-sixth chapter of Leviticus we find Moses giving the people, as warning and encouragement, a prophetic outline of their future history, which forms the real basis, and, in fact, makes up the substance of all that is found in the later prophets as regards the people of Israel. It is true that both the judgments there threatened and the mercies there promised are set forth hypothetically, on the supposition of their wickedly departing from the Lord and afterwards repenting—“if ye walk contrary unto Me, and will not hearken unto Me,” on the one hand; “if they shall confess their iniquity” on the other. But since the conditional statements are changed—as they are in other places—into absolute announcements of what is to take place, the hypothetical forms of expression must be regarded as merely the appropriate mode of conveying warnings against defection and an encouragement to repentance:—
“And they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, ... and also that they have walked contrary to Me” (Leviticus xxvi. 40).
“I also will walk contrary unto them, and bring them into the land of their enemies; ... and they shall then be paid the punishment of their iniquity” (Ibid. 41).
“then will I remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land” (Ibid. 42).
It is impossible to deny that the “remembrance of the covenant” and the “remembrance of the land” here go together. If we allegorize the one, we must allegorize the other as well, and then there is neither land, people, covenant, prophets nor law—an obvious absurdity which at once refutes itself. The fundamental Mosaic principle is clear, plain and positive. The land is to be held in perpetuity by the Jewish nation, provided the conditions of the covenant are fulfilled. The infringement of the covenant subjects the rebel to bondage and makes him an outcast from the land of his inheritance. The promise of redemption is a rescue from the penalties thus incurred. Therefore, he explains, the Agadist did not say heglom, “He drove them out,” which is the usual expression, but pizrom, “He spread, scattered them,” because, so long as the Galuth lasts, they have to live in various countries. Yet it is absurd to think that the state of Galuth, predicted by Moses as a curse, is a blessing. Here we have in short Manasseh’s ideas as to the Galuth and Restoration. We know that he also acted in full accord with these ideas.¹
The constitution established by Moses was a theocracy. The true King of Israel was God, and the constitution was the Law. The priests and Levites were God’s ministers; the prophets were God’s ambassadors, commissioned to convey his instructions not only to the people but to the King himself. The Kingdom was thus emphatically the Kingdom of God, and the King was the earthly viceroy of the invisible Sovereign. He was more limited than a constitutional monarch; he was subject not only to the Law, but also to those who were entitled to explain the Law. Such a state of things never existed in any other nation, either in ancient or in modern times. The Jewish nation regards it as an Ideal State, and looks forward to a future in which this idea will be accepted by the whole world, when God will be the King; but this will take place only after the establishment of this Divine order in Palestine. Therefore Jews pray to God to give them their judges and their counsellors as in ancient times, i.e. to restore their life under God’s order, a life of justice and peace and wisdom; they hope also that this will influence all mankind to recognize the Kingdom of God, i.e. the rule of justice, mercy and love. Then the promise to Abraham will be fulfilled:—
“... and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; ...” (Genesis xxii. 18).
and the blessings and privileges of God’s Kingdom will be offered freely to all mankind. Here the influence of Abrabanel is evident.¹ Another interesting point in Manasseh’s theory is his combination of the idea of the Nefesh Ha’yisraelith with the principle of heredity. He terms this principle Mizgé² Ha’aboth, that is, the particular character of the nationality inherited from the ancestors. This is Jewish nationality, which is part of the Jew’s inheritance at birth.³
This is more than the religious idea of the Z’chuth Aboth (Merits of the Fathers); it is, though mixed up with Cabbalistic notions, an ethnological conception—the real basis of the modern Jewish national idea.
Manasseh’s conception of the character (or particular blood mingling) of ancestors, which lives on in the nation, accords entirely with the mode of thought of a modern national Jew as this finds expression in the best writings of the new Zionistic literature. When the Jew feels the pulse-beat of nature in his heart, then the history of his forefathers comes to life within him. He no longer struggles alone through life, he is sensible of connections between himself and millions who have been and of whose spirit and soul he has received a share in life. The most glorious, invigorating feeling which an old race can offer; the consciousness of individual transitoriness and universal constancy, begins only then to be of value for him because the easily intelligible national future has made comprehensible his own infinite one. This psychic process is the unconscious aim of that which he perceives as national longing. The free individual must become a problematic nature if he cannot force the roots of his spiritual and physical personality into the soil of a soul-related community. The unit goes adrift in the chaos of social struggles when it is not linked by a thousand tender and yet untearable threads with the ethnical community of a nation. This ethnical community is the fount of two infinite perceptions which have become the mightiest supports of human civilization; first of all arises the consciousness of national control which develops into the unnoticed, yea, self-evident foundation of the ethnical unit, the moral consciousness of duty and sense of responsibility. National responsibility finds its complement in the right of recovery of the individual against the community. In the wrestle with other morals and conceptions of life, the individual has often to lean on those who are like-minded because like-born so as not to lose himself. It has been repeatedly experienced in Jewish history that many Jews have not only lost their veriest substance but have voluntarily surrendered it, so that their culture subsisted only through an ingenious system of exquisite imitations of foreign nature and foreign customs.
What Manasseh understood under “Character of Ancestors” pertains as little to atavism as the modern Jewish national idea. Atavism is something unconscious, it is found even among the dejudaized Jews. But what with the dejudaized is atavism becomes with nationalist Jews the historic basis of their whole life tendency. The comprehension of the past wafts the first breath of life into the present, upon the wreckage of bygone times dawns the premonition of the greatness of each lived moment—and new life blossoms upon the ruins. Therein lies also the power of the national consciousness to create cultural values. What is based upon heredity and tradition is no longer sacrificed to thoughtless recession of self—misconstrued as civilization—but replenished with national love. It is no longer the anarchy of aimless “culture” which wants to link up with the attainments of unfamiliar races so as to become like them, and which as an imitation it can never attain, but it is a strongly rooted culture, which reaches deep down to the national wells of life, and can thereby become equal to all other great and deep-rooted cultures.
The individual is the outcome of a nation, its ultimate aim. The nation is the circuitous way of nature to produce an individual. A nation is great, not only when great creative minds arise from its midst, but also when the many live intensively, so that they receive impulses from the few, and return impulses to the few—and when the past lives on in the present. It is this idea of Jewish nationality which Manasseh had forefelt in spite of his mysticism. He was permeated with religious enthusiasm and, at the same time, all aglow with intense national feeling. Therefore, his thoughts and sentiments tended to greatness; he understood that the best means of strengthening and reaffirming the national consciousness of a people about to lose the knowledge of its ethnical individuality, is just that it should be told its history, that its ancestors should be recalled to memory, their great deeds sung and praised, and that pride of the past should be instilled. As he poetised so sublimely he could also accomplish great deeds, because he kept his eye upon Palestine he was also able to achieve great results in the Diaspora. He was the father of post-exilic English Judaism, and this Judaism ought to follow in his footsteps.
To conclude, reference should be made to the Hebrew writer Perez Smolenskin, himself a pioneer of modern Zionism, who, though he did not deal with the matter in detail, was guided by a sound intuition when he characterized Manasseh in his Am Olam (1880) as a great pioneer of the national idea.