BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND

BY-PATHS
IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND

BY
ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, D. D., M. A.
Author of “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages,” “Chapters on Jewish Literature,” etc.

Philadelphia
The Jewish Publication Society of America
1920

Copyright, 1920,
by
The Jewish Publication Society of America

PREFACE

Wayfarers sometimes use by-paths because the highways are closed. In the days of Jael, so the author of Deborah’s Song tells us, circuitous side-tracks were the only accessible routes. In the unsettled condition of Israel those who journeyed were forced to seek their goal by roundabout ways.

But, at other times, though the open road is clear, and there is no obstacle on the way of common trade, the traveller may of choice turn to the by-ways and hedges. Not that he hates the wider track, but he may also love the less frequented, narrower paths, which carry him into nooks and glades, whence, after shorter or longer detours, he reaches the highway again. Not only has he been refreshed, but he has won, by forsaking the main road, a fuller appreciation of its worth.

Originally written in 1913 for serial publication, the papers collected in this volume were designed with some unity of plan. Branching off the main line of Hebraic development, there are many by-paths of the kind referred to above—by-paths leading to pleasant places, where it is a delight to linger for a while. Some of the lesser expressions of the Jewish spirit disport themselves in those out-of-the-way places. Though oft neglected, they do not deserve to be treated as negligible.

None can surely guide another to these places. But the first qualification of a guide, a qualification which may atone for serious defects, is that he himself enjoys the adventure. In the present instance this qualification may be claimed. For the writer has turned his attention chiefly to his own favorites, choosing books or parts of books which appealed to him in a long course of reading, and which came back to him with fragrant memories as he set about reviewing some of the former intimates of his leisure hours. The review is not formal; the method is that of the causerie, not of the essay. Some of the books are of minor value, curiosities rather than masterpieces; in others the Jewish interest is but slight. Yet in all cases the object has been to avoid details, except in so far as details help even the superficial observer to get to the author’s heart, to place him in the history of literature or culture. Not quite all the authors noted in this volume were Jews—the past tense is used because it was felt best to include no writers living when the volume was compiled. It seemed, however, right that certain types of non-Jewish workers in the Hebraic field ought to find a place, partly from a sense of gratitude, partly because, without laboring the point, the writer conceives that as all cultures have many points in common, so it is well to bear in mind that many cultures have contributed their share to produce that complex entity—the Jewish spirit. Complex yet harmonious, influenced from without yet dominated by a strong inner and original power, the Jewish spirit reveals itself in these by-paths as clearly as on the main line.

But, though some such general idea runs through the volume, it was the author’s intention to interest rather than instruct, to suggest the importance of certain authors and books, perhaps to rouse the reader to probe deeper than the writer himself has done into subjects of which here the mere surface is touched. The writer could have added indefinitely to these papers, but this selection is long enough to argue against extending it, at all events for the present.

Having decided to stray into the by-paths, it sometimes became necessary to resist the temptation to turn to the main road. This necessity accounts for another fact. Fewer books are treated of the older period. For the older period is dominated by Bible and Talmud, and these were ex hypothesi outside the range. So, too, the scholastic masterpieces and the greater products of mysticism and law are passed over. Yet, though the writer did not consciously start with such a design, it will be seen that accidentally a great fact or two betray themselves. One is that, in the Jewish variety, technical learning can never be wholly dissociated from what we more commonly name literature. Some books which, at first sight, are merely the expression of scholarly specialism are seen, on investigation, to belong to culture in the æsthetic no less than in the rational or legal sense. Again, there becomes apparent the vital truth that Jewish thought, dependent as it always has been on environment, is also independent. For we see how Jews in the midst of Hellenistic absolutism remained pragmatical, how under the medieval devotion to a stock-taking of the past Jews were to a certain extent creative, and how the modernist tendency to disintegration was resisted by an impulse towards constructiveness.

But, to repeat what has already been indicated, the author had no such grave intentions as these. Many of the papers appeared in a popular weekly, the London Jewish World, the editor of which kindly conceded to the writer the privilege of collecting them into a book. Some, however, were specially written for this volume. All have been considerably revised, in the effort to make them more worthy of the reader’s attention. The writer feels that this effort, despite the valuable help rendered by Dr. Halper while the proofs were under correction, has been imperfectly successful. The papers can have little in them to deserve attention. Nevertheless there is this to be urged. Some of the topics raised are apt to be ignored. Yet it is not only from the outstanding masterpieces of literature that we may learn wisdom and derive pleasure. “A small talent,” said Joubert, “if it keeps within its limits and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a greater one.” This remark may be applied to what may seem to many the minor products of genius or talent. Hence, be they termed minor or major, the books discussed in this volume were worthy of consideration. Beyond doubt most of them belong to the category of the significant and some of them even attain the rank of the epoch-making. And so, without further preface, these papers are offered to those familiar as well as to those unfamiliar with the works themselves. For to both classes may be applied the Latin poet’s invocation: “Now learn ye to love that loved never; and ye that have loved, love anew.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I

Part I
THE STORY OF AHIKAR

We are happily passing out of the critical obsession, under which it was a sign of ignorance to attribute a venerable age to the records of the past. All the old books were written yesterday, or at earliest the day before! Facts, however, are stubborn; and facts, as they come to light, justify and re-affirm our fathers’ faith in the antiquity of the world’s literature. The story of Ahikar is a good illustration.

In the course of the Book of Tobit more than once Achiachar or Ahikar is mentioned. These allusions are verbal only, but in one scene the reference is more precise. The pious Tobit on his death-bed bids his son “consider what Nadab (Nadan) did to Achiachar, who brought him up” (14. 10).

What did Nadan do, and who was Ahikar? It is only within recent years that a complete answer has become possible to these questions. The older commentators on the Apocrypha were much worried by the allusion, and had to be content with the blindest guesses. Some versions of Tobit had, in place of the words quoted above, the following: “Consider how Aman treated Achiachar, who brought him up.” Hence the suggestion arose that the reference was to Haman and Mordecai. But the Book of Esther does not hint that Mordecai had “brought up” Haman, and was then repaid by the latter’s ingratitude.

But in 1880, G. Hoffmann discovered the clue. He recognized that Tobit’s references were paralleled in a story found in Æsop’s Fables and in the Arabian Nights, but much more fully recorded in the Story of Ahikar preserved in several versions, such as Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian. The story, briefly told in those fuller records, is as follows:

The hero is Ahikar. The name probably means something like My Brother is Precious, or A Brother of Preciousness, or possibly (as Dr. Halper suggests) A Man of Honor. He was grand vizier of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. Noted for wisdom as for statesmanship, he rose to a position of the highest dignity and wealth. But he had no son. He, accordingly, adopted his infant nephew Nadan, and reared him with loving care. He furnished him with eight nurses, fed him on honey, clothed him in fine linen and silk, and made him lie on choice carpets. The boy grew big, and shot up like a cedar; whereupon Ahikar started to teach him book-lore and wisdom. Nadan was introduced to the king, who readily agreed to regard the youth as his minister’s son, and made promise of future favors to one in whom his faithful vizier was so much interested. The narrative then breaks off to give in detail the wise maxims which Ahikar sought to instil into Nadan; maxims which have parallels in many literatures, including the rabbinic. Now, Ahikar was grievously mistaken in the character of his nephew. Nadan seemed to listen to his uncle’s wisdom, but all the while considered his monitor a dotard and a bore. The young man began to reveal his true disposition; his cruelties to man and beast were such that Ahikar protested, and offended Nadan by preferring a brother of the latter. Nadan, in revenge, plotted Ahikar’s downfall. By means of forged letters, the old vizier was condemned for treachery, though the executioner, mindful of a similar act of mercy previously shown to himself, secretly spared Ahikar’s life. Nor was the day distant when Sennacherib bewailed the loss of Ahikar’s services. Menacing messages came from Egypt of a kind which it needed an Ahikar to deal with. To the king’s joy, Ahikar was brought out from his hiding-place; he was again taken to court, and despatched to Egypt.

Here, once more, the narrative is interrupted to tell the details of these Egyptian experiences; how Ahikar satisfied the Pharaoh’s plan of “raising a castle betwixt heaven and earth” by placing boys on the backs of eaglets, and how he countered the puzzling questions of the Egyptian sages. Thus, bidden to weave a rope out of sand, he bored five holes in the eastern wall of the palace, and when the sun entered the holes he sprinkled sand in them, and “the sun’s furrow (path) began to appear as if the sand were twined in the holes.” Then, again, the king of Egypt ordered that a broken upper millstone should be brought in. “Ahikar,” said the king, “sew up for us this broken millstone.” Ahikar, who throughout tells his story in the first person, was not daunted. “I went and brought a nether millstone, and cast it down before the king, and said to him: My lord the king, since I am a stranger here, and have not the tools of my craft with me, bid the cobblers cut me strips from this lower millstone which is the fellow of the upper millstone; and forthwith I will sew it together.” The king laughed. Ahikar scored all round, and returned home to Assyria laden with the revenues of Egypt.

The third part of the story relates how Nadan was given over to Ahikar. His uncle bound him with iron chains, and “struck him a thousand blows on the shoulders and a thousand and one on his loins”; and while Nadan was thus imprisoned in the porch of the palace door, living on “bread by weight and water by measure,” being compelled willy-nilly to listen, Ahikar proceeded with further lessons in wisdom. “My son,” he says, “he who does not hear with his ears, they make him to hear with the scruff of his neck.” Then there follow many wonderful parables, which (as with the maxims) are similar to those in many literatures. “Thereat,” ends the tale, “Nadan swelled up like a bag, and died. And to him that doeth good, what is good shall be recompensed; and to him that doeth evil, what is evil shall be rewarded. But he that diggeth a pit for his neighbor, filleth it with his own stature. And to God be glory, and His mercy be upon us. Amen.”

What was the original of this story? Nothing in the romance of its incidents, or in the marvel of the spread of it and its maxims and its incorporated fables throughout the folk-lore of humanity, exceeds the dramatic fact that a large fragment of the tale, in Aramaic, has been found in Egypt among other Jewish papyri of the fifth century before the Christian era! The discovery proves many things, among them two being most significant. First, the Ahikar story is far older than people used to think, and thus the theory that the story of Ahikar was invented to explain the reference in Tobit is once for all disproved. Second, it is at least tenable that the original language was Aramaic and the story Jewish. Here, at all events, we have unquestionable evidence that there must have been among the Jews, nearly 2,400 years ago, an impulse towards that species of popular tale which so deeply affected the literature and poetry of the world. Ahikar, it has even been suggested, is the ultimate source of at least one of the New Testament parables. But, more generally, now that we know that the story of Ahikar was at so early a date current among Jews, we shall be more plausibly able to justify the belief, long ago held by some, that Aesop and other similar collections of fables do truly come from Jewish originals. At any rate, ancient Jewish parallels must have been in circulation.

So much for the main results of the discovery. Small details of interest abound. Tobit bade his son: “Pour out thy bread and thy wine on the graves of the righteous (4. 17).” All sorts of changes have been suggested in the text. But the saying is found in the versions of Ahikar, and may be accepted as genuine. It is not necessarily a pagan rite; it has analogy with the funeral meal which long prevailed (and still prevails) as a Jewish custom. Even more interesting seems another detail (of the Syriac Version), which the writers on the books of Ahikar and Tobit have overlooked. When Tobit’s son starts on his quest, his dog goes with him. This is a remarkable touch. Nowhere else in ancient Jewish literature does the dog appear as man’s companion. Nowhere else? Yes, in one other place—in the story of Ahikar. “My son,” says the vizier to Nadan, “strike with stones the dog that has left his own master and followed after thee.” Here we see the dog regarded as a comrade, to be forcibly discouraged if he show signs of infidelity. There must have been a period, therefore, when the olden Jews considered the dog in a light quite other than that which afterwards became usual.

PHILO ON THE “CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE”

Much depends on the mood of the hour. Maimonides, in his Eight Chapters and in the opening section of his Code, acutely remarks that though excess in any moral direction is vicious, nevertheless it may be necessary for a man to practise an extreme in order to bring himself back from the other extreme into the middle path of virtue. Or, to use another phrase of the same philosopher, it is with the soul as with the body. To adjust the equilibrium it is proper to apply force on the side opposite to that which is over-balanced.

Hence it is not surprising to find Philo speaking, as it were, with two voices on the subject of the ascetic life. In the Alexandria of his day there was at one time prevalent a cult of self-renunciation. This cult had special attraction for the young and fashionable. They joined ascetic societies, and, in the name of religion, abandoned all participation in worldly affairs. Philo denounced these boyish millionaire recluses in fine style. Wealth was not to be abused, true; it was, however, to be used. “Shun not the world, but live well in it,” he cried. Do not avoid the festive board, but behave like gentlemen over your wine. It is all beautifully said, though I have modernized Philo’s terms somewhat. “Be drunk with sobriety” is, however, one of Philo’s very own phrases.

But there is this other side to consider. Alexandria was the very hotbed of luxury and extravagance. People speak about the inequalities of modern civilization, and seem to imagine that it is a new thing for a slum and a palace to exist side by side. But this was exactly the condition in Alexandria at about the beginning of the Christian era. Its busy and gorgeous bazaars, as Mr. F. C. Conybeare has said, blazed with products and wares imported and designed to tickle the palates and adorn the persons of the aristocracy. The same marts had another aspect, narrow and noisy, foul with misery and disease. Wealth and vice rubbed shoulders. Passing through such scenes, Philo might well be driven to see the superiority of asceticism over indulgence. Religion after all is renunciation. Idolatry, said Philo, dwarfs a man’s soul, Judaism enlarges it. Idolatry may be compatible with “strong wine and dainty dishes,” Judaism prefers a meal of bread and hyssop. In speaking thus, Philo reminds us of the Pharisaic saying: “A morsel with salt shalt thou eat, and water drink by measure, thou shalt sleep upon the ground, and live a life of painfulness, the while thou toilest in the Torah” (Pirke Abot 6. 4.). The association of “plain living” with “high thinking” could not be more emphatically expressed.

Few scholars nowadays doubt the Philonean authorship of the treatise “On the Contemplative Life.” Conybeare, Cohn and Wendland have convinced us all, or nearly all, that the work is really Philo’s. At first sight, no doubt, it was easier to suppose that the book was not his. It seems too cordial in its praise of seclusion, and comes too near the monastic spirit. But the Essenes were Jewish enough, and Philo’s Therapeutae are essentially like the Essenes. “Therapeutae” is a Greek word which literally means “Servants,” and was used to denote “Worshippers of God.” The community of Therapeutae, according to Philo’s description, was settled upon a low hill overlooking Lake Mareotis, not far from Alexandria. We need not go into details. These people adopted a severely simple life, each dwelling alone, spending the day in his private “holy room,” passing the hours without food, but occupied with the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. On the Sabbath, however, they abandoned their isolation, and met in common assembly, to listen to discourses. The “common sanctuary” was a double enclosure, divided by a wall of three or four cubits, so as to separate the women from the men. Women formed part of the audience, “having the same zeal and following the same mode of life,” all practising celibacy. Men and women alike, or at least the most zealous of them, well-nigh fasted throughout the week, “having accustomed themselves, as they say the grasshoppers do, to live upon air; for the song of these, I suppose, assuages the feeling of want.” Their Sabbath meal was held in common, for they regarded “the seventh day as in a manner all holy and festal,” and, therefore, “deem it worthy of peculiar dignity.” The diet, however, “comprises nothing expensive, but only cheap bread; and its relish is salt, which the dainty among them prepare with hyssop; and for drink they have water from the spring.” For, continues Philo, “they propitiate the mistresses Hunger and Thirst, which nature has set over mortal creatures, offering nothing that can flatter them, but merely such useful food as life cannot be supported without. For this reason they eat only so as not to be hungry, and drink only so as not to thirst, avoiding all surfeit as dangerous and inimical to body and soul.” There is only one relaxation of this severity. No wine is brought to table, but such of the more aged as are “of a delicate habit of life” are permitted to drink their water hot.

Of course, the main tendency of Judaism has been in another direction. Fascinating though Philo’s picture of the community of Therapeutae is, yet it cannot be felt to be a model for ordinary men and women. From time to time, indeed, Jews (like the disciples of Isaac Luria) followed much the same course of life. But most have been unwilling or unable to accept such an ideal as worthy of imitation. It is not at all certain that Philo meant it to be a model; anyhow, as we have seen, he was not always in the same mood. Judah ha-Levi opens the third part of his Khazari with just this distinction between the ideal circumstances, under which the ascetic life may be admirable, and the normal conditions, under which it is culpable. “When the Divine Presence was still in the Holy Land among the people capable of prophecy, some few persons lived an ascetic life in deserts” with good results. But nowadays, continues Judah ha-Levi, “he who in our time and place and people, ‘whilst no open vision exists’ (I Samuel 3. 1), the desire for study being small, and persons with a natural talent for it absent, would like to retire into ascetic solitude, only courts distress and sickness for soul and body.” The real pietist, he concludes, is not the man who ignores his senses, but the man who rules over them. And this was really the view of Philo also, as we find it in his other works. “The bad man,” he says, “treats pleasure as the summum bonum, the good man as a necessity, for without pleasure nothing happens among mortals.” And so he counsels men to follow the avocations of ordinary life, and not to disdain ambition. “In fine, it is necessary that they who would concern themselves with things divine should, first of all, have discharged the duties of man. It is a great folly to think we can reach a comprehension of the greater when we are unable to overcome the less. Be first known by your excellence in things human, in order that you may apply yourselves to excellence in things divine.” (I take these quotations from C. G. Montefiore’s brilliant Florilegium Philonis, which he ought to reprint.) Philo undoubtedly thought more highly of the contemplative than of the practical life. But in this last passage he gets very near the truth when he treats the former as only noble when it is based on the latter. It is another aspect of the rabbinic truth that “not study but conduct” is the end of virtue. Philo does not contradict this truth; he offers to our inspection the reverse side of the same shield.

One other point remains. The reader of Philo’s eulogy of the Contemplative Life must be struck by the gaiety of these ascetics. Again and again Philo speaks of their joyousness. They “compose songs and hymns to God in divers strains and measures.” There is nothing morose about them. They build up the edifice of virtue on a foundation of continence, but it is a cheerful devotion after all. Above all is the music, the singing. They have “many melodies” to which they sing old songs or newly written poems. One sings in solo, and then they all “give out their voices in unison, all the men and all the women together” joining in “the catches and refrains,” and “a full and harmonious symphony results.” Philo grows ecstatic. “Noble are the thoughts, and noble the words of their hymn, yea, and noble the choristers. But the end and aim of thought and words and choristers alike is holiness.” And this summary ought to be applicable to every form of Jewish life, to those phases particularly which reject the excesses of asceticism. “Serve the Lord with joy,” says the hundredth Psalm. True we must have the joy; but we must also not omit the service.

JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION

“Buffon, the great French naturalist,” as Matthew Arnold reminds us, “imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him.” This attitude of dignified silence has often been commended. In one of his wisest counsels, Epictetus recommended his friends not to defend themselves when attacked. If a man speaks ill of you, said the Stoic, you should only reply: “Good sir, you must be ignorant of many others of my faults, or you would not have mentioned only these.” An older than Epictetus gave similar advice. Sennacherib’s emissary, the Rabshakeh, had insolently assailed Hezekiah; “but the people held their peace, for the king’s commandment was: Answer him not” (II Kings 18. 36). On this last text a fine homily may be found in a printed volume of the late Simeon Singer’s Sermons. Mr. Singer illustrated his counsel of restraint by a reference to Josephus. Apion more than 1,800 years ago had traduced the Jews, and Josephus demolished his slanders in “as powerful a piece of controversial literature as is to be found.” “But,” continued the preacher, “note the irony of the situation. But for Josephus’ reply, Apion would long have been forgotten”; not his name, but certainly the details of his typical anti-Semitism.

This fact, however, does not carry with it the conclusion that Josephus rendered his people an ill-service. There are two orders of Apologetics—the destructive and the constructive. Apologia was originally a legal term which denoted the speech of the defendant against the plaintiff’s charges. As we know abundantly well from the forensic giants of the classical oratory—such as Demosthenes and Cicero—these defences were largely made up of abuse of the other side. Josephus was an apt pupil of these masters. His abuse of Apion leaves nothing to the imagination; everything is formulated, and with scathing particularity. Josephus, it is true, does not seem to have been unjust. Rarely, if ever, has an out-and-out anti-Semite possessed a pleasing personality. Apion was a grammarian of note, but there is much evidence as to his unamiable characteristics. The emperor Tiberius, who knew a braggart when he saw one, called Apion “cymbalum mundi”—a world-drum, making the universe ring with his ostentatious garrulity. Aulus Gellius records his vanity; Pliny accuses him of falsehood and charlatanism. Josephus was, therefore, not going beyond the facts when he describes him as a scurrilous mountebank. It cannot be denied, moreover, that Josephus scores heavily against his opponent, in solid argument as well as in verbal invective. If the Jewish historian made Apion immortal, it was a deathless infamy that he secured for him.

Certainly, too, Josephus successfully rebuts Apion’s specific libels: the most silly of them, however, antedated Apion and survived him. Tacitus, indeed, seems to have gathered his own weapons out of Apion’s armory, and the Roman repeats the Alexandrian’s libel that in Jerusalem an ass was adored. Those who are interested in this legend of ass-worship may turn to a learned article by Dr. S. Krauss in the Jewish Encyclopedia (vol. ii, p. 222). It has been suggested that the charge arose from a confusion between the Jews and certain Egyptian or Dionysian sects. Others believe that at bottom there lies a misunderstanding of the “foundation-stone,” which, according to talmudic tradition, was placed in the ark during the second temple. The upper millstone was called by the Greeks “the ass,” for its tedious turning resembled an ass’s burdensome activity. But, be the explanation what it may, the ignorance of a professed expert such as Apion was inexcusable. Yet, most grimly amusing of all Apion’s charges is his repetition of the ever-recurrent libel that the Jews were haters of their fellow-men. Never was there a more perfect illustration of Æsop’s fable of the wolf and the lamb: the hated transformed into the haters! Apion was a fine type of lover. Off to Rome went he, leading the Alexandrian deputation against the Jews (who were championed by Philo), denouncing them to the Cæsar, and using every artifice to incite the imperial animosity. With a heart bitter with hostility, Apion would be a fitting assailant of the “haters of mankind.” It is one of the curiosities of fate that, apart from what Josephus has told of him, Apion is best remembered as the author or transmitter of the story of Androcles and the lion. Apion was neither the first nor the last to have a kindlier feeling for a wild beast than for a fellow-man.

To all the points adduced by Apion Josephus makes a triumphant answer. But his book, termed rather inaptly Against Apion, would not deserve its repute merely because it demolished a particularly malignant opponent. The book really belongs to Apologetic of the second of the two orders distinguished above. Higher far than the destructive Apologetic is the constructive, which rebuts a falsehood, not by denouncing the liar, but by presenting the truth. “Great is truth, and it will prevail,” is the maxim of an ancient Jewish book (I Esdras 4. 41), a maxim well known in substance to Josephus himself (Antiquities, xi. 3). “Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” asks Milton. If we once give up confidence in the unconquerable power of truth to win in the end, we have already made an end of human hope. Apologetic, then, of the better type attaches itself to this belief in the inherent virtue of truth. It meets the enemy not with weapons similar to his own, but with a shield impervious to all weapons.

Josephus can sustain this test. Judged by the constructive standard, the treatise Against Apion is a masterpiece. That the Jews were an ancient people with an age-long record of honor, and not a race of recent and disreputable upstarts, Josephus proves by citations from older writers who, but for these citations, would be even less known than they now are. It is not, however, on such arguments that Josephus chiefly rests his case. The external history of the Jews, their glorious participation in the world’s affairs—these are much. But there is something which is far more. “As for ourselves, we neither inhabit a maritime country, nor delight in commerce, nor in such intercourse with other men as arises from it; but the cities we dwell in are remote from the sea, and as we have a fruitful country to dwell in, we take pains in cultivating it. But our principal care of all is to educate our children well, and to observe the laws, and we think it to be the most necessary business of our whole life to keep that religion that has been handed down to us” (i. 12). This passage is famous both for its denial of the supposed natural bent of Jews to commerce and for its assertion that education is the principal purpose of Jewish endeavor. Josephus, especially in the second book of his Apology, expounds Judaism as life and creed in glowing terms. This exposition is one of our main sources of information for the Judaism of the first century of the Christian era. His picture of life under the Jewish law is a panegyric, but praise is not always partiality. Is it an exaggerated claim that Josephus makes on behalf of Judaism? Surely not. “I make bold to say,” exclaims Josephus in his peroration, “that we are become the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things, and those the most excellent. For what is more excellent than unshakable piety? What is more just than obedience to the laws? And what is more advantageous than mutual love and concord, and neither to be divided by calamities, nor to become injurious and seditious in prosperity, but to despise death when we are in war, and to apply ourselves in peace to arts and agriculture, while we are persuaded that God surveys and directs everything everywhere? If these precepts had either been written before by others, or more exactly observed, we should have owed them thanks as their disciples, but if it is plain that we have made more use of them than other men, and if we have proved that the original invention of them is our own, let the Apions and Molos, and all others who delight in lies and abuse, stand confuted.”

There were grounds on which contemporary Jews had just cause for complaint against Josephus. He lacked patriotism. But only in the political sense. When Judea was invaded, he did not stand firm in resistance to Rome. But when Judaism was calumniated, he was a true patriot. He stands high in the honorable list of those who championed the Jewish cause without thought of self. Or, rather, such self-consciousness as he displays is communal, not personal. When he pleads his people’s cause, his pettinesses vanish, he is every inch a Jew.

CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME

Favorable remarks on Hebrew literature are very rare in the Greek writers. One of the most significant is contained in the ninth section of Longinus’ famous treatise on the Sublime.

This Greek author—it will soon be seen why the name Caecilius and not Longinus appears in the title of this article—analyses sublimity of style into five sources: 1) grandeur of thought; 2) spirited treatment of the passions; 3) figures of thought and speech; 4) dignified expression; 5) majesty of structure. Longinus points out that the first two conditions of sublimity depend mainly on natural endowments, whereas the last three derive assistance from art.

It is when illustrating the first of the five elements that our author refers to the Bible. The most important of all conditions of the Sublime is “a certain lofty cast of mind.” Such sublimity is “the image of greatness of soul.” As he beautifully says: “It is only natural that their words should be full of sublimity, whose thoughts are full of majesty.” Longinus, accordingly, refuses to praise without reserve Homer’s picture of the “Battle of the Gods”:

A trumpet sound
Rang through the air, and shook the Olympian height,
Then terror seized the monarch of the dead,
And, springing from his throne, he cried aloud
With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder
By Neptune’s mighty arm, forthwith reveal
To mortal and immortal eyes those halls
So drear and dank, which e’en the gods abhor.

An impious medley, Longinus terms this, a perfect hurly-burly, terrible in its forcefulness, but overstepping the bounds of decency. (I take these and other phrases from Mr. H. L. Havell’s fine translation). Far to be preferred are those Homeric passages which “exhibit the divine nature in its true light as something spotless, great, and pure.” He instances the lines in the Iliad on Poseidon, though there does not seem much to choose between them and the passage condemned above. But then follows the remarkable paragraph which is the reason why I have chosen Longinus for a place in this gallery: “And thus also the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave it adequate expression in the opening words of his Laws: God said: Let there be light, and there was light; let there be earth, and there was earth.”

Few will dispute that this passage in Genesis belongs to the sublimest order of literature. It is of the utmost interest that Longinus (whoever he was) should have recognized this fact. Whoever he was—whether the true Longinus, or an unknown rhetorician of the first century. Whether it belongs to the age of Augustus or Aurelian, it is equally noteworthy that the Greek writer should have admitted that the sublime might be exhibited by Moses as well as by Homer. It is quite clear, however, that Longinus did not take his quotation from the Hebrew Bible itself or from the Greek translation. Had he known the Bible, he must have made much fuller use of it. Read his analysis of the sublime quoted above. He could, and would, have illustrated every one of his five conditions from the Bible, had he been acquainted with it. Moreover, the quotation from Genesis is inexact. There is no text: God said: Let there be earth, and there was earth. Obviously, as Théodore Reinach points out, the reference is taken from the sense, not the words, of Genesis 1. 9 and 10. Longinus, therefore, either knew it from hearsay, or he had found the quotation in the course of his reading.

This latter suggestion was made as long ago as 1711 by Schurzfleisch—how Matthew Arnold would have jibed at a man with such a name commenting on the Sublime! Longinus quotes a previous treatise on the Sublime by a certain Caecilius. His predecessor, says Longinus, wasted his efforts “in a thousand illustrations of the nature of the Sublime,” while he failed to define the subject. Be that as it may, Longinus quotes Caecilius several times, especially for these very illustrations. It is by no means improbable, then, that Longinus’ reference to Genesis was derived from Caecilius, who may have paraphrased from memory rather than have quoted with the Bible before him. Now, Suidas informs us that Caecilius was reported to be a Jew. Reinach (Revue des Études Juives, vol. xxvi, pp. 36-46) has provided full ground for accepting the information of Suidas, which is now generally adopted as true.

Caecilius belonged to the first century of the current era, and, born in Sicily, the offspring of a slave, he betook himself as a freedman to Rome, where he won considerable note as a writer on rhetoric. The Characters of the Ten Orators was one of his most important books; several histories are ascribed to him; and, as we have seen, he wrote a formal treatise on the Sublime, which gave rise to the better-known work attributed to Longinus. It is not clear whether Caecilius was a born Jew or a proselyte. Probably the theory that best fits the facts is that of Schürer. We may suppose that the rhetorician’s father was brought to Rome as a Jewish slave by Pompey, and was then sold to a Sicilian. In Sicily, the son, who bore the name Archagathos, received a Greek education, and was freed by a Roman of the Caecilius clan. The freedman would drop his own name, and adopt the family name of his benefactor, according to common practice. Schürer offers a very acute, and I think conclusive, argument against the view that Caecilius was a convert to Judaism. A proselyte would have exhibited much more zeal for his new faith. In the works of Caecilius, I may add, his Judaism seems more a reminiscence than a vital factor. It is, on the whole, more likely that he came of Jewish ancestry than that he was himself a new-made Jew. Reinach contends that because he was a proselyte, Caecilius knew the Bible only superficially, and hence arose his misquotation of Genesis. Is that a probable view to take? If we conceive, with Schürer, that the father of Caecilius, a born Jew, had passed through such vicissitudes, being carried a slave from Syria to Rome, transferred into an alien environment in Sicily, we can well understand that the son would possess but a superficial memory of the Bible. On the other hand, a proselyte would have become a devotee to the Scriptures, the beauties of which had burst upon his mind for the first time. He would not misquote. The chief Jewish translators of the Bible into Greek (apart, of course, from the oldest Alexandrian version) were, curiously enough, proselytes to Judaism. Perhaps it would be too far-fetched to suggest that Caecilius had a particular reason to remember the first chapter of Genesis. His original name, Archagathos, is not a bad translation of the Hebrew “very good” (tob meod) which occurs prominently in the story of the Creation.

Unfortunately, none of the works of Caecilius is preserved. We know him only by a few fragments. Plutarch described him as “eminent in all things,” yet neither Schürer in his earlier editions, nor Graetz in any edition, placed him where he ought to be—to use Reinach’s phraseology—in the phalanx of the great Jewish Hellenists, with Aristobulus, Philo, and Josephus. Caecilius was the restorer of Atticism in literature, a piquant rôle for a Jew to play. Yet it is a part the Jew has often filled. An instructive essay could be written on the services rendered by Hebrews to the spread of Hellenism, not merely in the ancient world, but also in the medieval and modern civilizations.

THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS

“The plumage,” writes Herodotus (ii. 73), “is partly red, partly golden, while the general form and size are almost exactly like the eagle.” The Greek historian was describing the phoenix, the fabled bird which lived for five hundred years. According to another version, she then consumed herself in fire, and from the ashes emerged again in youthful freshness. Herodotus likens the phoenix to the eagle, and the reader of some of the Jewish commentaries on the last verse of Isaiah 40 and the fifth verse of Psalm 103 will find references to similar ideas. In particular to be noted is Kimhi’s citation of Sa’adya’s reference to the belief that the eagle acquired new wings every twelve years, and lived a full century. Such fancies easily attached themselves to Isaiah’s phrase and to the psalmist’s words: “Thy youth is renewed like the eagle.” The biblical metaphors, in sober fact, merely allude to the fullness of life, high flight, and vigor of the eagle; there is nothing whatever that is mythical about them.

What passes for one of the most famous descriptions of the phoenix is contained in the well-known Greek drama of the Exodus (or rather Exagogê) written by the Jewish poet, Ezekielos. This writer probably flourished rather more than a century before the Christian era. It is commonly supposed that he lived in the capital of the Ptolemies, in Alexandria; but it has been suggested by Kuiper that his home was not in Egypt, but in Palestine, in Samaria. If that be so, it is a remarkable phenomenon. We should not wonder that a Jew in Alexandria composed Greek dramas on biblical themes, with the twofold object of presenting the history of Israel in attractive form and of providing a substitute for the heathen plays which monopolized the ancient theatre. But that such dramas should be produced soon after the Maccabean age in Palestine would imply an unexpected continuity of the influences of Greek manners in the homeland of the Jews. Ere we could accept the theory of a Palestinian origin for Ezekielos, we should need far stronger arguments than Kuiper adduces (Revue des Études Juives, vol. xlvi, p. 48, seq.).

The drama of the Exodus—which was apparently written to be performed—follows the biblical story with some closeness. We are now, however, interested in a single episode, preserved for us among the fragments of Ezekielos as quoted by Eusebius (Prep. Evangel., ix. 30). A beautiful picture of the twelve springs of Elim and of its seventy palms is followed by a description of the extraordinary bird that appeared there. I take the passage from Gifford’s Eusebius (iii, p. 475). A character of the play, after the Greek manner, is reporting to Moses:

Another living thing we saw, more strange
And marvellous than man e’er saw before,
The noblest eagle scarce was half as large;
His outspread wings with varying colors shone;
The breast was bright with purple, and the legs
With crimson glowed, and on the shapely neck
The golden plumage shone in graceful curves;
The head was like a gentle nestling’s formed;
Bright shone the yellow circlet of the eye
On all around, and wondrous sweet the voice.
The king he seemed of all the winged tribe,
As soon was proved; for birds of every kind
Hovered in fear behind his stately form;
While like a bull, proud leader of the herd,
Foremost he marched with swift and haughty step.

Gifford has no hesitation in accepting the common identification of this bird with the phoenix. Obviously, however, Ezekielos says nothing of the mythical properties of the bird; he merely presents to us a super-eagle of gorgeous plumage and splendid stature, unnatural but not supernatural. Even the magnificence of the superb bird pictured by Ezekielos is less bizarre than we find it in other authors. Ezekielos’ figures sink into insignificance beside those of Lactantius, who tells us that the bird’s monstrous eyes resembled twin hyacinths, from the midst of which flashed and quivered a bright flame. If Ezekielos really refers to the phoenix, how does it come into the drama at all? Gifford has this note: “There is no mention in Exodus of the phoenix or any such bird, but the twelve palm-trees (phoenix) at Elim may have suggested the story of the phoenix to the poet, just as in the poem of Lactantius. Phoenix 70, the tree is said to have been named from the bird.” The word phoenix has, I may add, a romantic history. It means, literally, Phoenician. Now, certain of the Phoenician race were the reputed discoverers and first users of purple-red or crimson dyes. Hence these colors were named after them, Phoenix or Phoenician. The Greek translation, in Isaiah 1. 18, renders “scarlet” by Phoenician. The epithet was applied equally to red cattle, to the bay horse, to the date-palm and its fruit. It was also used of the fabulous bird because of its colorings. Gifford supposes, then, that Ezekielos knowing of the palms reached at Elim in the early wanderings of Israel, introduced the bird into his drama. The palms at Elim are indeed described by this very word (Phoenician) in the Greek translation of the Bible which Ezekielos used (Exodus 15. 27). The lulab is also termed phoenix in the Greek of Leviticus 23. 40.

The explanation seems at first sight as plausible as it is clever. But it involves a serious difficulty. For Ezekielos in a previous passage has already described the Phoenician palm-trees at considerable length. The passage has been partly noted above, but it is musical enough to be worth citing as a whole:

See, my Lord Moses, what a spot is found,
Fanned by sweet airs from yonder shady grove;
For as thyself mayest see, there lies the stream,
And thence at night the fiery pillar shed
Its welcome guiding light. A meadow there
Beside the stream in grateful shadow lies,
And a deep glen in rich abundance pours
From out a single rock twelve sparkling springs.
There, tall and strong, and laden all with fruit,
Stand palms threescore and ten; and plenteous grass,
Well watered, gives sweet pasture to our flocks.

It seems incredible that the poet who thus describes the palms could then have proceeded to confuse the palms with a bird. Ezekielos does not use the epithet Phoenician in his account of the latter. Thus the theory breaks down. How then is the passage to be explained? As it seems to me, in another and simpler way.

“There is no mention in Exodus of the phoenix or any such bird,” says Gifford. He is right as to the phoenix, but is he right as to “any such bird”? My readers will at once remember the forceful metaphor in the nineteenth chapter of Exodus: “And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying: ‘Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto Myself.’” The Mekilta interprets the words to refer to the rapidity with which Israel was assembled for the departure from Egypt, and to the powerful protection which it afterwards enjoyed. But we may also find in the same words the clue to the poet’s fancy. “I bore you on eagles’ wings,” says the Pentateuch. No doubt the phrases of Herodotus, as well as those of Hesiod, were familiar to Ezekielos. With these in mind, he introduced a super-eagle, figuratively mentioned in the book of Exodus, and gave to it substance and life. He personified the metaphor. It would be a perfectly legitimate exercise of poetical license. The description is bizarre. But it is not mythological, and it has little to do with the phoenix of fable.

THE LETTER OF SHERIRA

Though all Israelites are brothers, they do not admit that they are all members of the same family. “Of good genealogy” is the proudest boast of the modern, as it was of the talmudic, Jew. It is, accordingly, not wonderful that we find our notabilities from Hillel to Abarbanel claiming, or having assigned to them, descent from the Davidic line. Of Sherira the same was said. He ruled over the academy in Pumbeditha during the last third of the tenth century. A scion of the royal house of Judah, he was rightful heir to the exilarchy, yet preferred the socially lower, but academically higher, office of Gaon. The Gaon’s sway was religious and scholastic; the exilarch’s secular and political. Sherira’s ancestry might have given him the latter post, but for the former it was intrinsic, personal worth which qualified him and his famous son Hai. Who shall deny that he made a worthy choice?

Sherira’s fame rests less on his general activities as Gaon than on the Letter which he wrote about the year 980, in response to questions formulated by Jacob ben Nissim, of Kairuwan. One of these questions retains, and will ever retain, its fascination, although the answer has now no vital interest. Historically the Letter has other claims to continued study. To quote Dr. L. Ginzberg (Geonica, i, p. 169): “The lasting value of his epistle for us lies in the information Rabbi Sherira gives about the post-Talmudic scholars. On this period he is practically the only source we have.” Without Sherira, the course of the traditional development would be a blank for a long interval after the close of the Talmud. “But,” continues Dr. Ginzberg, “we shall be doing Rabbi Sherira injustice if we thought of him merely as a chronologist.” And this same competent scholar launches out into the following eulogy of the Gaon: “The theories which he unfolds ... regarding the origin of the Mishnah ... and many other points important in the history of the Talmud and its problems, stamp Rabbi Sherira as one of the most distinguished historians, in fact, it is not an exaggeration to say, the most distinguished historian of literature among the Jews, not only of antiquity, but also in the middle ages, and during a large part of modern times.”

This must suffice for the general estimate of Sherira’s work. What is of more striking interest is just the one question, the answer to which does not much matter. As Dr. Neubauer formulated the question put to Sherira, it ran thus: “Was the Mishnah transmitted orally to the doctors of the Mishnah, or was it written down by the compiler himself?” Judah the Prince, we know, compiled the Mishnah, but did he leave it in an oral or a documentary form? Was it memorized or set down in script? The answer does not much matter, as I have said, for sooner or later the Mishnah was written out, and it is not of great consequence whether it was later or sooner. And it is as well that Sherira’s answer matters little, for we do not know for certain what Sherira’s answer was! Most authorities nowadays believe that the Gaon pronounced in favor of the written compilation; but this was not always the case. For Sherira’s Letter was current in two versions which recorded opposite opinions. In the French form the oral alternative was accepted, but the Spanish text adopted the written theory. Which was the genuine view of Sherira? There are many reasons for preferring the Spanish version. As Dr. Neubauer points out, “books, letters, and responsa coming from the East, reached Spain and Italy before they came to France and Germany.” Hence the Spanish text is more likely to be primitive; while, when the Letter was carried further, it might easily have been altered so as to fall in with the talmudic prohibition against putting the traditional laws into writing. It will, again, come as a surprise to some to note another argument used by Dr. Neubauer in favor of the Spanish text. “From the greater consistency of the Aramaic dialect in the Spanish text, a dialect which, as we know from the Responsa of the Geonim, they used in their writings, it may be concluded that this (the Spanish) composition is the genuine one.” The Gaonate was able to maintain a pretty thorough Jewish spirit without insisting on the use of Hebrew as the only medium of salvation. Actually Dr. Neubauer saw in the more consistent Aramaic of the Spanish text an indication of its superior authenticity over what may be called the French text!

But all these points are secondary. The real interest lies in this whole conception of an oral book. Tradition necessarily must be largely oral; ideas, maxims, and even defined rules of conduct not only can be, they must be, transmitted by word of mouth. But is there any possibility that a whole, elaborate book, or rather series of six books, should be put together and then trusted to memory? A new turn to the discussion was given by Prof. Gilbert Murray’s Harvard Lectures on “The Rise of the Greek Epic.” To him the Iliad of Homer appears in the guise of a “traditional book.” No doubt the Mishnah belongs to a period separated from Homer by well-nigh a millennium. But the phrase holds. A book can be the outcome of tradition, can be carried on by it, expanded and elaborated, just as much as an oral code or history or poem. When, then, we speak of a traditional book, it does not necessarily mean that the book was not written down. The written words become precious, and the fact that they are written does not of itself spell finality or stagnation. There never was any danger of such an evil result until the age of printing and stereotyping. Nor can we conceive of a traditional book as the work of one mind. Judah the Prince neither began nor ended the chain of tradition because he wrote the Mishnah. There had been Mishnahs before him, just as there were developments of law after him.

Yet, on the other hand, it is not incredible that Judah the Prince’s traditional book remained an unwritten book. It is improbable, but not at all impossible. A modern lawyer of the first rank must hold in his mind quite as many decisions and principles as are contained in the Mishnah. Macaulay could repeat by heart the whole of the Paradise Lost and much else. Many a Talmudist of the present day must remember vast masses of the traditional Halakah. Before the age of printing, before copies of books became common and easily accessible, scholars must have been compelled to trust to their memory for many things for which we can turn to our reference libraries. When Maimonides compiled his great Code, he must have done a good deal of it from memory. Not that men’s memories are worse now than they were. But we are now able to spare ourselves. It is not a good thing to use the memory unnecessarily. It should be reserved for essentials. What we can always get from books we need not keep in mind. Besides, in olden times men remembered better not because they had better memories, but because they had less to remember.

On the whole, however, it is safer to conclude that Judah the Prince made a contribution to written literature, that he set down at a particular moment (about 200 C.E.) the traditional book which had been writing itself for many decades, partly by the minds of the Rabbis, partly by their pens. He started the book on a new career of humane activity. Sherira and the Geonim were what they were because Judah the Prince was what he was. This is the essential fact about tradition. The more we give of our best to our age, the more chance is there for all future ages to transmit of their best to posterity.

NATHAN OF ROME’S DICTIONARY

A dictionary may seem an intruder in this gallery. The present series of cursory studies clearly is not concerned with works of technical scholarship. But the dictionary by Nathan, son of Jehiel, earns inclusion for two reasons. First, because when one surveys the expressions of the Jewish spirit, it is impossible to draw a line between learning and literature. Secondly, quite apart from this intimate general connection between the scholar and the man of letters, the dictionary of Nathan belongs specially to the course of culture. Among the Christian Humanists who, at the period of the Reformation, promoted the enlightenment of Europe, were not lacking appreciators of the services rendered to enlightenment by Nathan’s Aruk (to give it its Hebrew title).

Nathan (born about 1035 and died in 1106) was an itinerant vendor of linen wares in his youth. He belonged to the family Degli Mansi, an Italian rendering of the Hebrew Anaw or Meek. The latter is still a rare but familiar Jewish surname. Legend has it that the founder of the Degli Mansi house was one of the original settlers introduced into Rome by Titus. At all events, the family had a long record of literary fame. Like many another merchant-traveller of the Middle Ages, Nathan made use of his earlier wanderings (as he did of his later journeys), to sit at the feet of all the Gamaliels of his age. Many and various were his teachers. He abandoned business when he returned to Rome after his father’s death. He tells us how he made the arrangements for the interment, and here straightway we perceive that his Aruk is no ordinary dictionary. For in the poem, which he appends as a kind of retrospective preface, he records how sternly he had ever disapproved of the expenses incurred at Jewish funerals in his time. Protests were vain, but example was more fruitful. In place of the double cerements in common use, he laid his father in his tomb with a single shroud. This, he records, became the model for others to imitate. Death was a frequent visitor in his abode. Of his four sons, none survived the eighth year, one not even his eighth day. Grief did not crush him. “I found sorrow and trouble, then I called on the name of the Lord,” he quotes. He proceeded to erect a house of another kind. Not of flesh and blood, but vital with the spirit of Judaism, his Aruk is a monument more lasting than ten children.

In what, then, does the importance of the dictionary consist? It is, of course, primarily, what Graetz terms it, “a key to the Talmud.” No doubt there were earlier compilations of a similar nature, but Nathan’s book was the most renowned of its own age, and became the basis of every subsequent lexicon to the Talmud. Gentile and Jew, from Buxtorf to Dalman and from Musafia to Jastrow, employed it as the ground-work of their own lexicographical research. Moreover, it was again and again edited and enlarged; but we are not dealing here with bibliographical details. Suffice it to mention the final edition by Alexander Kohut. Kohut began his Aruch Completum while a European Rabbi in 1878, and finished it in New York in 1892. It is remarkable that two of the best modern lexicons to the Talmud (Kohut’s in Hebrew and Jastrow’s in English) both emanate from America.

Besides its value for understanding the text of the Talmud, Nathan’s Aruk has earned other claims to fame. Nathan’s dictionary marks an epoch, says Vogelstein. Consider the situation. The centre of Jewish authority was leaving Babylon. The last of the great literary Geonim—or Excellencies, as the heads of the Babylonian schools were called—died in the year 1038. Europe was replacing Asia as the scene of Jewish life. Was the old tradition to die? At the very moment of the crisis, three men arose to prevent the chain snapping. They were almost contemporaries, and their works supplemented each other. There was the Frenchman Rashi—the commentator; the Spaniard al-Fasi—the codifier; and the Italian Nathan—the lexicographer. Between them they re-established in Europe the tradition of the Gaonate. The Babylonian schools might come and go; they might for a time enjoy hegemony, and then fall into decay; but the Torah must go on forever!

The manner in which this dictionary carried on the tradition is easily told. Much of the lore it contains, explanations of words and of things, must have been orally acquired in direct conversations with those who were personally linked with the older régime. It is again full of quotations of the decisions and customary lore of the Babylonian schools. If on this side the Aruk has almost played out its part for us, it is not because those decisions and customs are less interesting to us than they were to our fathers. But we are now in possession of very many of the gaonic writings in their original. We have recovered several of the sources from which Nathan drew. The Egyptian Genizah—that wonderfully preserved mass of the relics of Hebrew literature—has yielded its richest harvest just in this field. We are getting to know more about the thought and manner of life of the eighth to the eleventh centuries than we know about our own time. But for a long interval men’s knowledge of those centuries was largely derived from the Aruk. As a source of information it is not even now superseded. There still remain authors whose names and works would be lost but for Rabbi Nathan’s quotations.

Another aspect of the book which makes it so valuable for the history of culture among the Jews is the number of languages which Nathan uses. What an array it is! Kohut enumerates (besides Hebrew and Aramaic) Latin, Greek, Arabic, Slavonic dialects, Persian, and Italian and allied speeches. Nathan cannot have known all these languages well. He certainly had little Latin and less Greek, but he repeated what he had heard from others or read in their books. It is remarkable, indeed, how well the sense of Greek words was transmitted by Jewish writers who were ignorant of Greek. They often are not even aware that the words are Greek at all; they suggest the most impossible Semitic derivations; but they very rarely give the meanings incorrectly. This applies less to the Italian than to the German Jewish scholars. I mean that the former had, on the whole, a more intimate acquaintance with the classical idioms. In the case of Nathan’s Aruk the languages cited do imply a wide and varied culture. Most interesting is Nathan’s free use of Italian. Just as we learn from the glosses in Rashi’s commentaries that the Jews of northern France spoke French, so we gather from Nathan’s dictionary that the Jews of Rome must have used Italian as the medium of ordinary intercourse.

Nathan’s Aruk, while, as we have seen, it was a link between the past and his present, was also part of the chain binding his present to the future. Nathan records the tradition as he received it, but he also points forward. Take one of his remarks, which is quoted by Güdemann. There is much in the Talmud on the subject of magic, and Nathan duly explains the terms employed. But he says: “All these statements about magic and amulets, I know neither their meaning nor their origin.” Does the reader appreciate the extraordinary significance of the statement? Nathan, the bearer of tradition, yet sees that the newer order of things also has its claims. Tradition does not consist in the denial of science. And so, though a Gaon like Hai had a pretty considerable belief in demonology, Nathan cautiously expresses his scepticism. Even more emphatically, a little later, Ibn Ezra frankly asserted that he had no belief in demons. It may be questioned whether this enfranchisement from demonological conceptions could be matched in non-Jewish thought of so early a date. The Aruk assuredly points forwards as well as backwards.

And all this we derive from a dictionary! The Aruk obviously belongs to culture as well as to philology—if the two things really can be separated. The study of words is often the study of civilization. Max Müller maintained that if you could only tell the real history of words you would thereby be telling the real history of men. He carried the idea absurdly far; but Nathan’s Aruk is a striking instance of at least the partial truth of the great Sanskrit scholar’s contention.

THE SORROWS OF TATNU

Tatnu has a weird sound. But it is not the title of a fetich; it is not a personal name; it is not even a word at all. It is, indeed, a figure; but the figure it stands for is numerical. The letters which compose the Hebrew combination Tatnu amount to 856 (taw = 400; taw = 400; nun = 50; waw = 6). It represents a date. To transpose it from the era anno mundi to the current era, it is necessary to add 240. This brings us to 1096, the year of the First Crusade.

If Tatnu is no person, neither do its sorrows form a book. They constitute rather a library of narratives, small in size but great in substance. They are hardly literary, yet they belong to the masterpieces of literature. Their story is recorded with few ornaments of style, but their simple, poignant directness is more effective than rhetoric. Martyrdom needs no tricks of the word-artist; it tells its own tale.

The Historical Commission for the History of the Jews in Germany had but a brief career, though it has revived under the newer title of the Gesamtarchiv. The Commission aimed at two ends: to introduce to Jewish notice information about the Jews scattered in Christian sources, and to make accessible to Christians facts about themselves contained in Jewish authorities. From 1887 to 1898, the Commission was actively at work, and among the books it published were two valuable volumes dealing with the martyrologies of the Jews. For the first time, these narratives were adequately edited. The pathetic records of sufferings endured in the Rhine-lands and elsewhere stand, for all time, ready to the hand of the historian.

The first moral to be extracted from these records is the certainty that war is an evil. No one can dispute the noble motives of the crusaders. The unquenchable enthusiasm which led high and low to forsake their homes and engage in eastern adventures, the unflinching courage with which the dangers of battle and the hardships and privations of wearisome campaigns were borne, the transparent singleness of purpose which animated many a soldier of the cross—all these factors tend to cover the sordid truth with a glamor of idealism and chivalry. But the wars of the Crusades were tainted with savagery, and if so what wars can be clean? The barbarities inflicted in Europe on the Jews color with a red and gruesome haze the heroisms performed against Mohammedans in Asia. War, it is said, brings to the fore some of the finest qualities of human nature. Exactly, but the war of man against nature calls for the exercise of the same qualities. The heroism of the coal-mine is as great from every point of view as the heroism of the battlefield. And the battlefield from first to last is the scene of human nature at its lowest as well as at its highest. Nor is the battlefield the whole of war. Those who persuade themselves that war, though an evil, is not an unmixed evil, will find in the Sorrows of Tatnu and allied books a rather useful corrective to their complacency.

When in 1913 I re-read Neubauer and Stern’s volume (1892) and Dr. Salfeld’s magnificent edition of the Nuremberg Martyrology (1898)—it was not long before the outbreak of the European war—I was so moved that I sent a donation to the Peace Society. Quite a nice thing to do, some will urge, but is it worth while, for such an end, to rake up these miserable tales? The whole of this class of literature was long neglected because of a similar feeling. Stobbe, who rendered such conspicuous service to the Jewish cause, was actuated by the identical sentiment, when he wrote that it would be “a grim and a thankless task” to enter fully into the sufferings of the Jews in the medieval period. But the Commission above referred to took another view; it printed the texts and circulated them in the completest detail. Now it depends entirely on the purpose with which such remorseless crimes are as remorselessly dragged to the light of day. If the desire is to revive bitterness, then it is a foul desire which ought to be crushed. And not only if this be the desire, if it prove to be the consequence, if as a result of such re-publication animosity is rekindled, then the re-publication is to be condemned. But in the case of the Sorrows of Tatnu, neither the motive nor the consequence is of this character. Salfeld gave us his edition of these monuments of the Jewish tribulations, “den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre”; to honor the dead, to inspire the living. Neither he nor any other Jewish writer wishes to play the part of Virgil’s Misenus, who was skilled in “setting Mars alight with his song” (Martem accendere cantu). The heroism of the sufferers, not the brutality of the aggressors, is the theme of the Jewish historian who deals with the Sorrows of Tatnu and of many another year; not the lurid glow of the bloodshed, but the white light of the martyrdom; not the pain, but the triumph over it; not the infliction, but the endurance unto and beyond death. These aspects of the story ought, indeed, to be told and retold “to honor the dead, to inspire the living.”

Closely connected with this thought is another. The Commission, be it remembered, was a Jewish body, appointed by the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund in 1885. But Graetz was not appointed a member. (Comp. the Memoir in the Index Volume of Graetz’s History of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1898, p. 78). Why did the leaders of Berlin Jewry ignore Graetz, the man who, above all others, had stirred the conscience of Europe by his vivid pictures of the medieval persecution so poignantly illustrated in the Sorrows of Tatnu? That was the very ground for excluding Graetz. There is no doubt but that Graetz’s method of writing Jewish history was somewhat roughly handled at about the period named. This assault came from two sides. Treitschke, the German and Christian, attacked Graetz as anti-Christian and anti-German, and used citations from Graetz to support his propaganda of academic anti-Semitism. Certain Jews, on the other hand, felt that, though Treitschke was wrong, Graetz was too inclined to regard the world’s history from a partisan and sectarian point of view. Whether or not this was the reason for the exclusion of Graetz from the Commission, what is interesting to note is the fact that the Commission, when it came to grips with the records, produced quite as emphatic an exposure of the medieval persecution as Graetz himself. It is, in brief, impossible for any student of the records to do otherwise.

The Commission included among its members some (conspicuously L. Geiger) who subsequently proved to be the strongest anti-Zionists. The duty and the desire to honor the dead for the inspiration of the living are not restricted to any one section of our community. There is nothing nationalistic or anti-nationalistic in our common sympathy with the Sorrows of Tatnu, in our common impulse to turn those sorrows to vital account in the present. In a soft age it is well to be reminded that Judaism is above all synonymous with hardihood. Thus these memories are cherished because “the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church.” This magnificent thought originated with Tertullian, though the precise phrase is not his. The idea conveyed by these oft-quoted words must be carefully weighed, lest we make of it a half-truth instead of a truth. No institution is founded on its dead, it is its living upholders who alone can support it. We tell these stories of the dead, because, in their day, they, living, recognized that to save themselves men must sometimes sacrifice themselves. To pay, as the price of life, the very thing that makes life worth living is an ignoble and futile bargain. The Sorrows of Tatnu, regarded as the expression of this conviction, are converted from an elegy into a pæan. But the song is discordant unless we, who sing it, are also prepared to act it, in our own way and in our own different circumstances. Den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre.

PART II

Part II
IBN GEBIROL’S “ROYAL CROWN”

Authors are not invariably the best critics of their own work. Was Solomon Ibn Gebirol, who was born in Andalusia, perhaps in Malaga, in the earlier part of the eleventh century, just when he regarded as the crown of all his writings the long poem which he called the “Royal Crown” (Keter Malkut)? Some will always doubt his judgment. Plausibly enough, preference may be felt for several of his shorter poems, particularly “At Dawn I Seek Thee” (which Mrs. R. N. Salaman translated for the Routledge Mahzor) or “Happy the Eye that Saw these Things” (paraphrased by Mrs. Lucas in her Jewish Year).

Ibn Gebirol was, however, sound in his opinion. One line in the “Royal Crown” is the finest that he, or any other neo-Hebraic poet, ever wrote. Should God make visitation as to iniquity, cries Ibn Gebirol, then “from Thee I will flee to Thee.” Nieto interpreted: “I will fly from Thy justice to Thy clemency.” But the line needs no interpretation. In his Confessions (4. 9) Augustine says: “Thee no man loses, but he that lets Thee go. And he that lets Thee go, whither goes he, or whither runs he, but from Thee well pleased back to Thee offended?” A great passage, but Ibn Gebirol’s is greater. It is a sublime thought, and its author was inspired. He must have felt this when he named his poem. For the title comes from the Book of Esther, and the Midrash has it that, when the queen is described as donning the robes of royalty, the Scripture means to tell us that the holy spirit rested on her.

It has been said (among others, by Sachs and Steinschneider) that the “Royal Crown” is substantially a versification of Aristotle’s short treatise “On the World.” This is in a sense true enough. The “Royal Crown” is largely physical, and to modern readers is marred by its long paragraphs of obsolete astronomical conceptions, which go back, through the Ptolemaic system, to Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle, in his treatise cited above, anticipated Ibn Gebirol in the motive with which he directed his ancient readers’ attention to the elements and the planets. “What the pilot is in a ship, the driver in a chariot, the coryphæus in a choir, the general in an army, the lawgiver in a city—that is God in the world” (De Mundo, 6). This saying of Aristotle is indeed Ibn Gebirol’s text. But the Hebrew poet owes nothing else than the skeleton to his Greek exemplar. The style—with its superb application of biblical phrases, a method which in al-Harizi is used to raise a laugh, but in Ibn Gebirol at every turn rouses reverence—is as un-Greek as are the spiritual intensity of thought and the moral optimism of outlook.

Our Sephardic brethren were wiser than the Ashkenazim in their selections for the liturgy. Why the Ashkenazim have neglected Ibn Gebirol and ha-Levi in favor of Kalir will always remain a mystery. The Sephardim did not include all that they might have done from the Spanish poets, but the Ashkenazic Mahzor has suffered by the loss of such masterpieces as Judah ha-Levi’s “Lord! unto Thee are ever manifest my inmost heart’s desires, though unexpressed in spoken words.” But most of all is our loss apparent in the omission of the “Royal Crown” from the Kol Nidre service. In Germany, the Ashkenazim have been better advised. The Rödelheim Mahzor and the Michael Sachs edition both include the poem in their volumes for the Atonement Eve. Sachs (unlike de Sola) omits the astronomical sections in his fine German rendering, and wisely, for the “Royal Crown” notably illustrates the Greek epigram: “part may be greater than the whole.” On the other hand, in his famous Religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien, Sachs includes the omitted cosmology. There is a difference between our attitudes to a poem as a work of literature and to the same poem as an invocation or prayer. Sachs the scholar refused to mutilate the “Royal Crown,” but as a liturgist (though he printed all the Hebrew) he took liberties with it.

Sachs and de Sola were not the only translators of the “Royal Crown.” In fact, to name all who have turned Ibn Gebirol’s work into modern languages would need more space than is here available. In her Jewish Year, Mrs. Lucas—to name the most recent of Ibn Gebirol’s translators—has exquisitely rendered a large part of the poem. I do not propose to quote from it, as Mrs. Lucas’ book is available at a small cost. And we shall, it is to be hoped, not have too long to wait for Mr. Israel Zangwill’s promised rendering.

What is it that appeals to us in Ibn Gebirol’s poetry? Dr. Cowley attributes his charm to “the youthful freshness” of his verses, “in which he may be compared to the romantic school in France and England in the early nineteenth century.” This same feature was also detected by al-Harizi—a better critic than poet. In fact, it was his appreciation of Ibn Gebirol’s “youthful freshness” that led him to assert that the poet died before his thirties had been completed. Al-Harizi treats Ibn Gebirol’s successors as his imitators. There is a large element of truth in this. One fact only need be quoted in evidence. Ibn Gebirol entitled his longest poem the “Royal Crown” (partly, no doubt, because of the frequent comparison of God to the King in the Scriptures). Now, the title “Royal Crown” passed over to designate a type of poem. We find several versifiers who later on wrote “Royal Crowns,” just as we speak of an orator uttering a “Jeremiad” or a “Philippic.” Heine, supreme among the modern Romantics in Germany, recognized this same freshness of inspiration in this freshest of the Spanish Hebrew poets: a pious nightingale singing in the Gothic medieval night, a nightingale whose Rose was God—these are Heine’s phrases.

Gustav Karpeles again and again claims that Ibn Gebirol was the first poet thrilled by “that peculiar ferment characteristic of a modern school”—a ferment which the Germans name Weltschmerz. Clearly, Karpeles made a good point by showing that Schopenhauer—of whom it may be doubted whether he despised women or Jews more heartily—the apostle of Weltschmerz, had as a predecessor, eight centuries before his time, the despised Jew, the “Faust of Saragossa.” This is another of Karpeles’ epithets for Ibn Gebirol, who spent, indeed, some years in Saragossa, but had little of the Faust in him. If, however, we attribute to Ibn Gebirol the feeling of Weltschmerz, we must be cautious before we identify his sense of the “world’s misery” with modern pessimism. Ibn Gebirol’s was, no doubt, a lonely and even melancholy life. But though he often writes sadly, though he would have sympathized with William Allingham’s sentiment:

Sin we have explained away,
Unluckily the sinners stay;

yet the final outcome of his realization of human failings and human pain was hope and not despair. And this I say not because Ibn Gebirol appreciated the humor of life as well as its miseries. It is not his humorous verses on which I should base my belief in his optimism. For I regard as the epitome, or rather, essential motive of the “Royal Crown,” the lines:

Thou God, art the Light
That shall shine in the soul of the pure;
Now Thou art hidden by sin, by sin with its cloud of night.
Now Thou art hidden, but then, as over the height,
Then shall Thy glory break through the clouds that obscure,
And be seen in the mount of the Lord.

It is not pessimism but hope that speaks of the clearer vision to be won hereafter. One need not love this world less because one loves the future world more; belief in continuous growth of the soul is the most optimistic of thoughts. Critics who term Ibn Gebirol a pessimist make the common mistake of confounding despair with earnestness. Your truest optimist may be the most serious of men, just as sorrow may be at its purest, its strongest, in association with hope.

BAR HISDAI’S “PRINCE AND DERVISH”

The “moral” is a tiresome feature about certain types of allegory; we prefer that a story should tell us its own tale. Why end off with a “moral”? As Dr. Joseph Jacobs wrote in his edition of Caxton’s Aesop (p. 148): “It seems absurd to give your allegory, and then, in addition, the truth which you wish to convey. Either your fable makes its point or it does not. If it does, you need not repeat your point; if it does not, you need not give your fable. To add your point is practically to confess the fear that your fable has not put it with sufficient force.”

And yet it seems probable that some of the world’s stories would never have been circulated so widely but for their morals. When, in the thirteenth century, Abraham Bar Hisdai, of Barcelona, produced his Prince and Dervish, his motive was not to tell a tale but to point a moral. He had a poor opinion of his age. Little wonder! Among the delectable episodes which he witnessed was the burning of some of the works of Maimonides by monks, instigated thereto by anti-Maimonist Jews. He made his protest. But it was not this experience that predisposed him to castigate his contemporaries. His language, in the preface to his Prince and Dervish, is vague. The most definite thing is its grim earnestness. His chance had come. An Arabic book had happened to fall under his notice, and it seemed to him the very thing! So he translated it into Hebrew. And beautiful Hebrew it is. Bar Hisdai was a master of the style known as rhymed prose. With him, however, it is hardly prose; it is poetry. It is not nearly so unmetrical in form as is usual in this genre. There is a lilt about his unrhythms, a regularity not so much of syllables as of stressed phrases; and these are marks of verse. Still it is prose, as one clearly perceives when Bar Hisdai, following the rules of the game, introduces snatches which are professedly poetical. Bar Hisdai, perhaps unfortunately, did more than translate. He considered his original badly arranged, he says; so he re-arranged the material. Possibly, then, he added to it stories taken from other sources. A rather piquant problem, for instance, is presented by the inclusion of a version of the parable of the sower, which in Bar Hisdai’s original must have been drawn from the New Testament. Assuredly Bar Hisdai did not derive it from the latter source directly; we are quite uncertain, however, as to the indirect route by which it reached him. This is, I repeat, a little unfortunate, because it complicates the problem as to the nature of the Arabic on which he drew. The gain of the book as a collection of tales carries with it loss from the point of view of literary history.

Now what was the book which he called by the title usually rendered Prince and Dervish? Bar Hisdai names it “King’s Son and Nazirite” (Ben ha-Melek we-ha-Nazir). By Nazirite he means ascetic, and Dervish is a fair reproduction which we owe to W. A. Meisel (1847). A Dervish is not the same as the biblical Nazirite, inasmuch as the former devoted himself to a much wider range of austerities than the latter. But Bar Hisdai undoubtedly intends his Nazirite to be identical with the Dervish type. How comes he to use the word in this extended sense? The answer is easily found. Bar Hisdai was a hero-worshipper, and the object of his cult was David Kimhi, the famous grammarian of Provence. Almost pathetic is Bar Hisdai’s admiration for Kimhi. Now the latter, in his Hebrew dictionary (included in the Miklol) defines the verb nazar as meaning “to abstain from eating and drinking and pleasures” (compare Zechariah 7. 3). This was not a new idea, for the same interpretation is given by Rashi (loc. cit.), and is adumbrated in the talmudic use of the verb. But I doubt whether Bar Hisdai would have employed the noun but for Kimhi’s emphatic definition.

The Hebrew title, which is Bar Hisdai’s own invention, well fits the contents. Briefly, these consist of a framework into which are built a number of fables. An Indian king, fearing that his son will become a devotee of the ascetic life, places him (like Johnson’s Rasselas) in a beautiful palace, where he is kept ignorant of human miseries. But he comes under the influence of a hermit (the Nazirite), who impresses on the prince the vanity of life, and converts him (despite the king’s active hostility) to the new way of thinking. It is in the course of this narrative that the fables and parables are introduced. Obviously, however, Ibn Hisdai was much impressed by the narrative as such. “No king nor king’s son, but a slave of slaves was I until thou didst set me free to understand and obey God’s Law”—thus does Ibn Hisdai’s romance sum up the moral at its close, the speaker being the prince, and the one addressed the Nazirite.

A most significant point to be noted is that India is the scene of the story. In 1850 Steinschneider discovered the truth. And a surprising truth it is. The same story was known to medieval Christians as the Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. But the whole is nothing more or less than an account of the life of Buddha, the great Indian saint, the founder of a religion. Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians revelled in the story without having a notion as to its original significance. Nothing so brings races and creeds together as a good tale. The folk are united by their common interest in the same lore. Mr. Zangwill, in his beautiful poem prefixed to Dr. Jacobs’ edition of Barlaam and Josaphat, looks deeper, and finds in the general admiration for this legend a symbol of the universal identity of men’s aspirations for the ideal.

Was Barlaam truly Josaphat,
And Buddha truly each?
What better parable than that
The unity to preach—
The simple brotherhood of souls
That seek the highest good;
He who in kingly chariot rolls,
Or wears the hermit’s hood!

Bar Hisdai felt nothing of this religious cosmopolitanism. But he realized that devotion to a spiritual ideal was a lesson he might profitably present to his age in the guise of allegory.

If, however, Bar Hisdai chose the story for its moral, his readers we may be certain swallowed the moral because of the story—rather, one should say, the stories. It is remarkable that the Hebrew version is much fuller in its parables, containing, as Dr. Jacobs estimates, no less than ten not found in the other versions. Even Bar Hisdai must, after all, have been drawn to the parables as such, else why add to their number? At all events, so far as his readers went, the Prince and Dervish made its appeal by its stories rather than by its doctrines. And what stories they are! Several of the world’s classics are in Barlaam, the sources of more than one of the best known dramas of later ages, some of the favorite parables of the world, immortal as human life itself. Bar Hisdai omits the caskets, which Shakespeare used in the Merchant of Venice, and the “Three Friends” (wealth, family, good deeds), the last of which alone accompanies a man to the grave, the plot of that famous morality play, Everyman. The omission is curious, for both of these tales are found in the Midrash. But Bar Hisdai gives us the original of King Cophetua—the beggar-maid who weds the king. Bar Hisdai alone gives us the story of “The Robbers’ Nemesis”—the two who plot to rob the traveller, but, envying each the other his share in the spoil, each poisons the other rascal’s food, and the traveller escapes. He also alone tells of the “Greedy Dog,” who, in his anxiety to attend two wedding breakfasts on the same day, misses both. But we cannot go through all. One other, found only in Bar Hisdai, is thus summarized by Dr. Jacobs:

A king, hunting, invites a shepherd to eat with him in the heat of the day:

Shepherd: I cannot eat with thee, for I have already promised another greater than thee.

King: Who is that?

Shepherd: God, who has invited me to fast.

King: But why fast on such a hot day?

Shepherd: I fast for a day still hotter than this.

King: Eat to-day, fast to-morrow.

Shepherd: Yes, if you will guarantee that I shall see to-morrow.

Such stories are sure to see many a to-morrow. And among the best records of them, among the most notable repertoires of the world’s wit and wisdom, Bar Hisdai’s Prince and Dervish has a sure place.

THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH

Sarajevo, scene of the crime which led to the outbreak of the European War, has its more pleasant associations. The place is forever connected with the history of Jewish art, and in particular with the illumination of the Passover Home-Service or Haggadah.

Wonderful in the old sense of the word—that is to say, astonishing—is the fact that, though the Sarajevo Haggadah was printed a good many years ago (in 1898), there have been no imitations. The splendid Russian publication of Stassof and Günzburg certainly came more recently (1905), but it cannot be compared with the Hungarian work of Müller and Von Schlossar. “L’Ornement Hebreu” is scrappy; the “Haggada von Sarajevo,” though it includes many selections from other manuscripts, is a unity. In one point, however, the Russians were right. For a Jewish illuminative art we must look rather to masoretic margins than to full-page pictures. The former must be characteristically Jewish, the latter, though found in Hebrew liturgies and scrolls, are often non-Jewish types. This is clearly shown by the famous picture in the Sarajevo Haggadah wherein is probably depicted the Deity resting after the work of creation. But for all that, the Sarajevo book must remain supreme as an introduction to Jewish art, so long as it continues to be the only completely reproduced Hebrew illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages.

One would like to hope that it will not always retain this unique position. The Crawford Haggadah (now in the Rylands Library, Manchester) is certainly older, and, in my judgment, finer. It is true that the editors of the Sarajevo manuscript claim that theirs is the most ancient illuminated Haggadah extant. They admit that the text of the Crawford Haggadah is older by at least half-a-century, but assert that the full-page pictures belong to the fifteenth century, thus falling two centuries after the text. I altogether contest this statement. But even if it were conceded, nevertheless the beauty of the Crawford Haggadah consists just in the text, in the beautiful margins, full of spirited grotesques and arabesques, no doubt (like the Sarajevo manuscript itself) produced in Spain under strong North French influence. Mr. Frank Haes executed a complete photograph of the Crawford manuscript, and it ought undoubtedly to be published. As I write, I have before me two pages of Mr. Haes’ reproduction—the dayyenu passage; nothing in Jewish illuminated work can approach this, unless it be the rather inferior, but very beautiful, British Museum manuscript of the same type. The editors of the Sarajevo Haggadah were ill-advised in omitting to reproduce the whole of the text of their precious original. It is in the text that the genuine excellence of the Jewish manuscripts is to be found.

But the Sarajevo Haggadah gives us too much that is delightful for us to cavil over what it does not give. Here we have, in the full-page drawings, depicted the history of Israel from the days of the Creation, the patriarchal story, Joseph in Egypt, the coming of Moses, the Egyptian plagues, the exodus, the revelation, the temple that is yet to be. Very interesting is the picture of a synagogue. This late thirteenth (or early fourteenth) century sketch evidently knows nothing of the now most usual ornament of a synagogue—the tablets of the decalogue over the ark. On this subject, however, I have written elsewhere, and as my remarks have been published, I can pass over this point on the present occasion. I have mentioned above the striking attempt to depict the Deity, but it is equally noteworthy that in the revelation picture no such attempt is made. Into Moses’ ear a horn conveys the inspired message; but the artist does not introduce God. At least, one hopes not. We prefer to regard the figure at the top of the mountain as Moses, and it is not difficult to account in that case for the figure standing rather lower up the hill, also holding the tablets. We must assume that this under figure is Aaron, though it is not recorded that he received the tablets from his brother. There is another possibility. In the medieval illuminations it was a frequent device to express various parts of a continuous scene in the same drawing. Thus the Sarajevo artist may have intended to show us Moses in two positions, and though the method lacks perspective, the effect is not devoid of realistic power. That this is probably the true explanation of the Sinai scene is suggested by another—Jacob’s dream. Here we see Jacob asleep (with one angel descending, another higher up ascending the ladder—the artist has not troubled himself with the problem as to how the angels contrived to cross one another). But we also see Jacob awake, on the same picture, for he is anointing the Beth-el stone and converting it into an altar.

Certainly the drawings, sadly though they lack proportion, are realistic. Especially is this true of the portrayal of Lot’s wife transformed into a pillar of salt. Disproportionate in size, for she is taller than Sodom’s loftiest pinnacles, yet the artist has succeeded in suggesting the gradual stiffening of her figure: we see her becoming rigid before our eyes. There is clearly much that modern artists might learn from these medieval gropings towards realism. Some artists have already learned much. It is quite obvious, for instance, that Burne-Jones must have steeped himself in the suggestive mysticism of the Middle Ages before he painted his marvellous Creation series. The parallel between his series and the series in the Sarajevo Haggadah is undeniable. Though he never saw this Haggadah, he was well acquainted with similar work in the Missals. Just as Keats evolved his theory as to the identity of truth and beauty from a Greek vase, so the pre-Raphaelites retold on vases what they read in their moments of communion with the medieval spirit.

And this leads to what must be my last word now on this Hebrew masterpiece. If a Burne-Jones can thus imitate, why not a Solomon or a Lilien? The latter has now produced a series of illustrations to the Bible, but we want something less coldly classic, something more warmly symbolic. It was indicated above, with regret, that Mr. Haes’ photographs of the Crawford Haggadah are still unpublished. But over and above reproductions of extant works, we need new works. Now the Jewish artist who illustrates a Bible ought not to be content to illustrate anything but a Hebrew text. And if a Bible be for several reasons out of the question, why should we not have a new Haggadah, written by a living Jewish artist, who shall, from a close study of olden models, do for us what Burne-Jones did?—that is, extract from the mysticism of a by-gone age those abiding truths which our contemporary age demands of its art.

A PIYYUT BY BAR ABUN

Not every one named Solomon was Ibn Gebirol. The medieval poets often signed their verses by an acrostic. Now, when a poem has the signature of a particular name, the natural tendency has been to ascribe it to the most famous bearer of the name. Of all the poetical Solomons, Ibn Gebirol was, beyond question, the greatest. Zunz was the first who clearly discriminated between the various authors called by the same personal name. The hymn “Judge of all the Earth” (Shofet Kol ha-Arez) was certainly by a Solomon; Zunz identifies him with the Frenchman Solomon, son of Abun. This Solomon is described as “the youth” (ha-Na’ar), perhaps in the sense that there was a “senior” poet of the same name. According to Zunz, again, Solomon bar Abun’s period of active authorship lay presumably between the years 1170 and 1190. (Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie, p. 311.)

Of all his works the piyyut we are considering is by far the most popular. A spirited rendering of the poem, by Mrs. R. N. Salaman, may be found in the Routledge Mahzor so ably edited in part by her father. (See the Day of Atonement, morning service, page 86.) Three stanzas had, however, long before been published by Mrs. Henry Lucas in her Jewish Year (p. 44). Some years ago the same gifted translator completed the whole of the hymn, and her version is now printed here in full. I say “in full,” though there is a longer form of the poem containing six verses. Zunz, however, only assigns five verses to the original, and the sixth verse is probably an unauthorized addition. It repeats the idea of the second verse, and also disturbs the acrostic signature. This piyyut or hymn must have been designed for the New Year. True, in the only “German” Mahzor known to many, the poem is included among the Selihot for the Day of Atonement. Though, however, Solomon bar Abun’s masterpiece is fairly suitable for the Fast, it is not altogether appropriate for that occasion. The “German” rite, accordingly, is well advised when it also employs the piyyut for the day before New Year. Even more to be commended are those liturgies—the Yemenite and some of the “Spanish”—which appoint the poem for the New Year itself. That is obviously its true place. With its opening phrase, “Judge of all the earth,” the hymn declares its character. It was written for the Day of Judgment—that is, for the New Year’s Day. Moreover, these initial words are taken from Abraham’s intercession for the sinners of Sodom (Genesis 18. 25), and this is preceded by the announcement of Isaac’s birth, an incident which one form of the Jewish tradition connects with the New Year. It must be remembered in general that prayers intended originally for one occasion were often transferred to others. Thus the ‘Alenu prayer, now used every day, was at first composed for the New Year Musaf.

Let us now turn to the poem itself, which, as already stated, is reproduced in the version from the hand of Mrs. Lucas.

Judge of the earth, who wilt arraign
The nations at thy judgment seat,
With life and favor bless again
Thy people prostrate at thy feet.
And mayest Thou our morning prayer
Receive, O Lord, as though it were
The offering that was wont to be
Brought day by day continually.
Thou who art clothed with righteousness,
Supreme, exalted over all—
How oft soever we transgress,
Do Thou with pardoning love recall
Those who in Hebron sleep: and let
Their memory live before Thee yet,
Even as the offering unto Thee
Offered of old continually.
O Thou, whose mercy faileth not,
To us Thy heavenly grace accord;
Deal kindly with Thy people’s lot,
And grant them life, our King and Lord.
Let Thou the mark of life appear
Upon their brow from year to year,
As when were daily wont to be
The offerings brought continually.
Restore to Zion once again
Thy favor and the ancient might
And glory of her sacred fane,
And let the son of Jesse’s light
Be set on high, to shine always,
Far shedding its perpetual rays,
Even as of old were wont to be
The offerings brought continually.
Trust in God’s strength, and be ye strong,
My people, and His law obey,
Then will He pardon sin and wrong,
Then mercy will his wrath outweigh;
Seek ye His presence, and implore
His countenance for evermore.
Then shall your prayers accepted be
As offerings brought continually.

When this is sung or declaimed to the appropriate melody (on which the Rev. F. L. Cohen has much of interest to say in the Jewish Encyclopedia, xi, 306), the solemn effect of words and music is profound. The refrain (from Numbers 28. 23), recalls the close association which, even while the sanctuary stood, subsisted between temple sacrifices and synagogue prayers. Since the loss of the shrine, prayer has fulfilled the double function. There are only one or two phrases that need elucidation. In the second stanza the words “Those who in Hebron sleep” refer to those of the patriarchs who were buried in Hebron, in the cave of Machpelah. The appeal is made to the merits of the fathers, a subject on which the reader will do well to consult the Rev. S. Levy’s essay in his volume entitled “Original Virtue.” In the third stanza occurs the phrase “mark of life.” This is derived from the ninth chapter of Ezekiel—those bearing the “mark” are, in the prophet’s vision, to live amid the general destruction. Life—the merciful verdict of the Judge, quite as much as the judgment itself—is the note of the New Year liturgy. This poem strikes both notes with undeniable power.

ISAAC’S LAMP AND JACOB’S WELL

To have one’s Hebrew book turned into the current speech, to have it read part by part in the synagogue by one’s fellows as a substitute for sermons, is not a common experience. Isaac Aboab enjoyed this honor. His Menorat ha-Maor, or Candelabrum of the Light, written in Spain somewhere about the year 1300, according to Zunz, or in France a little before 1400, according to Dr. Efros, became one of the most popular books of the late Middle Ages.

Well it deserved the favor which it won. The Talmud, said Aboab, may be used by the learned in their investigations of law. But for the masses, he felt, it has also a message. Aboab was the first (unless Dr. Efros be right in claiming this honor for Israel Alnaqua) to pick out from the Talmud and Midrash, from the gaonic and even later rabbinic writings, passages of every-day morals, ethical principles, secular and religious wisdom. Aboab’s work was not, however, a mere hap-hazard collection of detached sentences and maxims. Zedner (Catalogue, p. 381), does not hesitate to term it a “System of Moral Laws as explained in the Talmud.” Indeed, the book is surprisingly systematic. The first, or among the first, of its kind, it is also a most conspicuous example of the due ordering of materials.

The very title, also used by Alnaqua, and derived from Numbers 4. 9, was an inspiration. It conveys the idea of “illumination,” than which no idea penetrates deeper into the spiritual life. Fancifully enough, Aboab continues the metaphor into the main divisions of his book. The Menorah (Candelabrum) of the Pentateuch branched out into seven lamps, and so Aboab’s book is divided also into “Seven Lamps.” It is strange that he did not carry the metaphor further. He divides each of his “Lamps” into Parts and Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue to each Lamp. The fourth chapter of Zechariah might have given him “olive-trees” for his Prologues, “bowls” for his Epilogues, and “pipes” for his Parts, while “wicks” might have served instead of Chapters. In point of fact, the “Seven Wicks” was the title chosen by Aboab’s epitomator, Moses Frankfurt, when he constructed a reduced copy of Aboab’s Candelabrum (Amsterdam, 1721).

To return to Aboab’s original work, Lamp I deals with Retribution, Desire, and Passion, Honor, and High-place—the motives and ends of moral conduct. In Lamp II is unfolded the rabbinic teaching on Irreverence, Hypocrisy, Profanation of the Name, Frivolity as distinct from Joy—the causes which impede morality. Then, in Lamp III—the largest Lamp of all the seven—we have morality at work practically, and are instructed as to the worth of religious exercises, charitable life, social and domestic virtue, justice in man’s dealings with his fellows. Next, in Lamp IV, is unfolded the duty and the great reward of studying the Law, as a beautiful corollary to the love and fear of God. Far-reaching in its analysis of the human soul is Lamp V, on Repentance. Lamp VI may be described as presenting the good Rule for body and mind, the amenities of life as shown in character. Or perhaps one might better put it that this section shows us how to be gentlemen, clean, wholesome, considerate. Then Lamp VII completes the whole. It sets out the ideals of Humility and Modesty, virtues which are the end, nay, the beginning also, of the noblest human possibilities, for these virtues are first in those wherein man may imitate God.

Appropriately, Aboab follows up his glorious eulogy of Humility with a full confession of his own shortcomings. He knows that his compilation is imperfect. “Some things I have omitted,” he explains, “because I have never read them; others because I have forgotten them.” “Some passages I left out,” he goes on, “as too abstruse for general reading, others as alien to the purpose of my book, others again because liable to misunderstanding, and liable to do more harm than good.” Wise man! Unfortunately not every imitator of Aboab has displayed the same excellent judgment. The olden Jewish literature is so abundantly full of beauties that it is an ill-service to repeat the few things of lesser value. Aboab’s Candelabrum of the Light is in this respect superior to its great rival, Ibn Habib’s Well of Jacob. Up to half-a-century ago the two books must have run each other very close as regards the number of editions; more recently Ibn Habib’s book (the ‘En Ya’akob) has probably surged ahead. Readers may be reminded of the difference in method. Ibn Habib takes the talmudic tractates one by one, and extracts from each its haggadic elements. There is no attempt at any other order than that of the Talmud. The Well of Jacob, moreover, includes everything, the folk-lore as well as the ethics. To the student, Ibn Habib’s service was greater than Aboab’s; the relation is reversed from the point of view of the man or woman in search of vital religion.

The Well of Jacob, it must be allowed, is in itself almost as good a title as that which Aboab chose. Ibn Habib himself seems to have used the Hebrew word ‘En rather in the sense of “Substance” or “Essence”—his work reproduced the “Essence” of the talmudic Haggadah. But Jacob’s Well, as the Midrash has it, was the source whence was drawn the Holy Spirit. Despite my personal preference for Aboab’s Menorah, it must be freely acknowledged that many generations have quaffed from Ibn Habib’s reservoir fine spiritual draughts. And still quaff. For just as Aboab’s Lamp still shines, so Jacob’s Well has not yet run dry.

Over and above the similarity of contents, with all the dissimilarity of method, there is another reason why one thinks of the works of Aboab and Ibn Habib together. Though Aboab wrote considerably before Ibn Habib, their books appeared for the first time in print almost simultaneously. Ibn Habib’s book came out as the author compiled it; in point of fact it was the son who completed the publication, because Jacob Ibn Habib died while the earlier sections of his work were passing through the press. If, as seems probable, the Lamp was first kindled in 1511, or 1514, and the Well began to pour its fertilizing streams in 1516, Aboab had the start; but these dates are uncertain. All that we can state with confidence is that both books appeared in print quite early in the sixteenth century, not later than 1516. The earliest editions of both books are scarce, and from a simple cause. Few copies have survived because the owners of the copies wore them out. Read and re-read, thumbed by many hands, by “the Jewish woman, the workman, the rank and file of Israel,” the copies were used up by those who treated books as something to hold in the hand and not to keep on a shelf out of reach. My own edition of the Candelabrum, that of Amsterdam (1739), boasts justly of the excellent paper on which it is printed. None the less does this copy, too, show signs of frequent perusal. The best books were the worst preserved, because they were the best treated. What better treatment of a book can there be than to read it so often that its pages no longer hold together, its margins fray, and its title-page suffers mutilation?

“LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN”

Does ridicule kill? If it did, then, as fools are always with us, folly would ever possess the flavor of novelty. And yet to-day’s fool looks and does very much the same as yesterday’s, even though wise men laughed their fill at the latter. Folly, one rather must admit, is immortal. Wise men come and wise men go, but fools go on forever. Wisdom can at most make the fool look foolish for a while.

At rare intervals, however, history offers an example of the slaying power of satire. Idolatry was killed by ridicule. Some people—among them Renan, who ought to have known better—deny to ancient Israel a sense of humor. But who can doubt that the most effective of the attacks on idolatry were Elijah’s sarcastic invective against the Baal of the populace (I Kings 18. 27) and Isaiah’s grim yet droll picture of the carpenter taking some timber and using part of it to bake his bread and the rest to make his god (Isaiah 44. 15)? It is far from our purpose to recite the success, in after ages, of less inspired efforts by satirists. Satire has been termed the “chief refuge of the weak”; it has certainly been a weapon by which one, standing alone, has often equalized the odds against him. It would be delightful to give illustrations of the methods by which the various warriors of the pen have used their sword: to contrast a pagan Juvenal and a Hebrew Kalonymos—both writing in Rome, but with more than a millennium between them—or to revel in the feats of Rabelais’ Gargantua (1534), Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1656), and Voltaire’s eighteenth century Candide. We are now concerned with a work and a group of authors who first made Europe laugh in 1515. Ulrich von Hutten and his associates, in their “Letters of Obscure Men” (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum), did just the right thing at the right moment. What they attempted, what they accomplished, will now be told. Cervantes, tilting against the wearisome nonsense of the later romances of chivalry, Pascal exposing—even though he did it unfairly—the dangers of casuistry, Voltaire plumbing the shallow optimism of Leibnitz, served good ends. But far higher than these was the cause triumphantly upheld by the Letters of Obscure Men. The cause was humanism, another name for intellectual freedom and width of view.

Briefly put, at the crisis in the fortune of the new learning in Europe, when the struggle was at its sharpest between ignorance and enlightenment, the vindication of the Talmud became identified with the overthrow of intellectual bigotry. Pfefferkorn wished to burn the Talmud. He was a shady character, and from his first condition as a bad Jew became, in Erasmus’ phrase, a worse Christian (“ex scelerato Judaeo sceleratissimus Christianus”). Pfefferkorn hurled against his former coreligionists the usual missiles of abuse. Why is it that the converted Jew is so often a bitter assailant of Judaism? Some answer that it is because the renegade must prove that he forsook something execrable. Others would have it that intrinsic vileness of character is responsible. But is it not more probable that apostate virulence is due simply to ignorance? And this is the more obnoxious when the animosity takes the form of an attack on literature. “Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of the first order.” So said Joubert, and the remark can be freely illustrated from the Pfefferkorns. When a real scholar leaves the synagogue, he is rarely among the anti-Semites. Daniel Chwolson and Paul Cassel in their career as Judæo-Christians were champions of the Jewish cause against such very libels as a Pfefferkorn would circulate. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the defence of Judaism was in equally scholarly hands.

But it was not on Jews, whether by race or religion, that reliance was then placed. Reuchlin—as all the world knows—saw no reason why the Talmud should be condemned, and he expressed his opinion in clear terms. Reuchlin, be it remembered, was the most learned German of his age. “By a singular combination of taste and talents this remarkable man excelled at once as a humanist and a man of affairs, as a jurist and a mystic, and, above all, as a pioneer among Orientalists, so that it has been said of him, enthusiastically but not unjustly, that he was the ‘first who opened the gates of the East, unsealed the Word of God, and unveiled the sanctuary of Hebrew wisdom.’” (This sentence is quoted from the Introduction to Mr. Francis Griffin Stokes’ admirable Latin and English edition of the Letters, to which I cordially commend my readers.) Pfefferkorn rallied to his side the whole force of the Dominican organization. The issue was long uncertain.

Truth is usually unable to meet falsehood on equal terms; the genuine, for the most part, cannot soil its hands with the foul ammunition of imposture. Sometimes, however, truth is less squeamish. And so, when Pfefferkorn was engaged in slinging slime at Reuchlin, there was suddenly hurled at his own person an avalanche of mud, under which he and his party sank buried from heel to head. The Letters are remorseless in their personalities. But if it be impossible to deny their cruelty and even their occasional coarseness, yet their fame depends less on these scurrilous incidentals than on the essential truth on which they are based.

It is the highest merit of satire that it shall not be too obvious. Many who read Gulliver’s Travels enjoy it as a tale, and may not even realize that Swift was lampooning the society and institutions of his day. So long as this element in satire is not too subtle, it adds enormously to the merit of the performance. One recalls such stories as the Descent of Man, by Edith Wharton. The hero of that tale is an eminent zoologist, who is moved by the popularity of pseudo-scientific defences of religion to publish an elaborate skit. But he is so successful in concealing his object, that his “Vital Thing” is mistaken for a supreme example of the very type of work he is lashing. The Letters of Obscure Men avoided this danger. They hit the happy mean. They purported to be written by one obscurantist to another, and while the educated at once saw through the dodge, the illiterate (including Pfefferkorn himself) took them seriously. Within a few months of the appearance of the first series of the Letters, Sir Thomas More (in 1616) wrote to Erasmus: “It does one’s heart good to see how delighted everybody is with the ‘Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum’; the learned are tickled by their humor, while the unlearned deem their teachings of serious worth.” The foes of humanism—the new learning—are left to expose themselves, in the confidential correspondence which members of the gang are made to carry on in the most excruciatingly funny dog-Latin. As Bishop Creighton put it, they are made to “tell their own story, to wander round the narrow circle of antiquated prejudices which they mistook for ideas, display their grossness, their vulgarity, their absence of aim, their laborious indolence, their lives unrelieved by any touch of nobility.” No wonder Europe laughed, as it did in the following century at the self-revelation of obscuranists in Pascal’s Provincial Letters, obviously inspired by the work before us. (Compare Stokes, Epistolae, etc., pp. xlvi, xlix). It is not the least amusing feature in the comedy that Richard Steele actually regarded the Letters of Obscure Men as the correspondence between “some profound blockheads” who wrote “in honor of each other, and for their mutual information in each other’s absurdities.” (Stokes, p. viii).

This fate—of being taken seriously—befell, in a particularly amusing way, what is perhaps the most amusing of all the Letters. I refer to the second epistle in the first series. “Magister Johannes Pelzer” sends his greeting to “Magister Ortwin Gratius,” and asks help on a matter which gives him “great searchings of heart.” He tells Ortwin how, being lately at a Frankfort fair, he took off his cap and saluted two men, who seemed reputable and looked like Doctors of Divinity. But his companion then nudged him and cried: “God-a-mercy, what doest thou? Those fellows are Jews.” Magister Pelzer goes on to argue with delicious seriousness as to the nature of his sin, and begs his correspondent’s help to decide whether it was “mortal or venial, episcopal or papal.” Now when Schudt came to compile his farrago of attacks on the Jews, he actually included this Frankfort incident as an authentic example of “Jewish insolence.” It was indeed painful for such as Schudt to be unable to discern any difference between a Jew and a gentleman.

How the authors of the Letters would have chuckled over Steele and Schudt! Reuchlin had struck a decisive blow in behalf of the Jewish contribution to European culture. The Letters drove the blow home. But, after all, the fools were not permanently suppressed. No, ridicule rarely slays folly outright. It scotches the snake, and then in a favorable environment the reptile revives. Just as folly is perennial, so should the lash be kept in constant repair. Anti-Semitism ought not to be allowed to go on its way in our age unscathed by ridicule. We badly need a new Ulrich von Hutten to give us a modern series of Letters of Obscure Men.

DE ROSSI’S “LIGHT OF THE EYES”

Towards dusk, on a mid-November Friday in the year 1570, Azariah de Rossi descended from his own apartments to those of his married daughter. It was in Ferrara, and for some hours past earth-tremblings had made people anxious. Within an hour of his lucky visit to his child De Rossi’s abode was wrecked.

To this earthquake, as Zunz suggested in 1841 (Kerem Hemed, vol. v, p. 135), we owe the first attempt by a Jew to investigate critically, and with the aid of secular research, the history of Jewish literature. De Rossi had a fine command of Latin, and though he was less at home with Greek, he had a good working knowledge of it. After the earthquake, he left his home, and took refuge in a village south of the Po. A Christian scholar, a neighbor in the new settlement, was diverting his mind from the recent disturbing calamities, by perusing the Letter of Aristeas. There is a rare charm in the scene that followed. Finding some difficulties in the Letter, the Christian turned to the Jew, suggesting that they should consult the Hebrew text. But De Rossi was, to his chagrin, compelled to admit that there was no Hebrew text! Such a lamentable deficiency need not, however, continue. In less than three weeks De Rossi had translated the Letter into Hebrew, and with that act the modern study of Jewish records by Jews opens.

Chroniclers were once upon a time fond of contrasting the physique and the intellect of the worthies of former ages. Those were the days, one might almost say, of “kakogenics,” if our own is the era of eugenics. So we read of De Rossi that though “well-born” by ancestry, he was “ill-born” in person. Graetz somewhat overcolors the record when he writes of De Rossi thus: “Feeble, yellow, withered, and afflicted with fever, he crept about like a dying man.” At all events, he was thin and short, and neglectful of his bodily health. Yet he was not quite the weakling Graetz presents, for he lived to the age of sixty-four (1514-1578). Moreover, he assures us, giving full details of the diet and treatment, that he was thoroughly cured of the malaria, of the ravages of which Italian Jews so frequently complain. As to his “family,” that was old enough. The legend ran that four of the families settled by Titus in Rome survived into the Middle Ages; the stock of the De Rossis (min ha-adummim) belonged to one of the famous quartette. The other three were the Mansi, de Pomis, and Adolescentoli groups.

This was the man who created modern Jewish “science”—to use the term so beloved of our Continental brethren. De Rossi’s great work appeared as a quarto in November, 1573 (some date it 1574). It was well printed in the pretty square Hebrew type for which Mantua is famous. The author called it Meor ‘Enayim, that is, “Light of the Eyes.” It was, indeed, an illuminant. Graetz summarily asserts that “the actual results of this historical investigation, for the most part, have proved unsound.” Assuredly many of De Rossi’s statements are no longer accepted. He was the father of criticism, yet he was often himself uncritical. In his chapter on the antiquity of the Hebrew language, for instance, he remarks: “I have seen among many ancient coins, belonging to David Finzi of Mantua, a silver coin on which, on the obverse, is a man’s head round which is inscribed ‘King Solomon’ in Hebrew square letters, while the reverse bears a figure of the temple with the Hebrew legend ‘Temple of Solomon.’” As Zunz observes, this coin must have been a modern fabrication. In many other points De Rossi erred. But some of the “mistakes” for which he is blamed are not his but his critics’. Zunz, like Graetz, had little patience with the Zohar. The literature of the Kabbalah was to both these great scholars “false and corrupt.” At this date we are much more inclined to treat the Kabbalah with respect. De Rossi has been justified by later research. Then, again, Zunz categorically includes among De Rossi’s blunders his acceptance of the Letter of Aristeas as genuine. But in the year 1904 Mr. H. St. J. Thackeray, in the preface to his new English translation of the Letter, asserts “recent criticism has set in the direction of rehabilitating the story, or at any rate part of it.” Here, one can have no hesitation in claiming, De Rossi was right, and his critics wrong.

It is pleasing to be able to make this last assertion. The Letter of Aristeas purports to tell the story how the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made in Alexandria. We are not now concerned with the story itself. But, as we have already seen, it was this Letter which induced De Rossi to write his book. The book, after a short section on the Ferrara earthquake, in which the author collects much Jewish and non-Jewish seismological lore, goes straight to Aristeas. Now, it would be a somewhat unfortunate fact if Jewish criticism began with the acceptance of a forgery, if the father of all our modern scholars (including Zunz himself) had started off with a bad critical mistake. We are spared this anomaly, for though Aristeas may not be as old as it claims (the third century B. C. E.), it is demonstrably older than its assailants made it out to be. De Rossi is far nearer the truth than Graetz. Of course, we do not now turn to De Rossi for our critical nourishment. Though editions of the Meor ‘Enayim continued to appear as late as 1866 (in fact one of the author’s books appeared for the first time in London in 1854), his works are substantially obsolete. For this reason I am not attempting any close account of their contents.

But while it is antiquated in this sense, it is a book of the class that can never become unimportant. For let us realize what De Rossi accomplished. In the first place he directed Jewish attention to the Jewish literature preserved or written in Greek. He re-introduced Philo to Jewish notice; not very accurately, it is true, yet he did re-introduce him. Secondly, he showed how much was to be derived from a study of non-Jewish sources. No one, after De Rossi, has for a moment thought it possible to deal with Jewish history entirely from Jewish records. Every available material must be drawn on if we are to construct a sound edifice. It is a just verdict of Graetz’s that De Rossi’s “power of reconstruction was small.” But he showed subsequent generations how to build. De Rossi, finally, was not one who regarded Jewish literature merely as the subject matter for research. He was intensely interested in it for its own sake. He was a poet as well as a historian. And this he shows both by his whole style and outlook as well as by the Hebrew and Italian verses that he wrote. He was, indeed, known both as Azariah and as Bonajuto, the latter being the Italian equivalent. Let us end with this fact: the same man, who inaugurated modern Jewish criticism, added some notable hymns to the synagogue prayer-book.

GUARINI AND LUZZATTO

An aristocrat all his life, Guarini was out of place in the court life of Ferrara. He spent his vigor in a vain attempt to accommodate himself to the sixteenth century Italian conditions. Then, broken in strength and fortune, he retired to produce his dramatic masterpiece. Not that the Pastor Fido can be truly termed dramatic. It is much more of a lyric. But just as Banquo, himself no king, was the father of kings, so Guarini, of little consequence as a dramatist, begot famous dramas. For the Faithful Shepherd deeply influenced European drama throughout the two centuries which followed its publication in 1590.

The Hebraic muse owed much to Guarini. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-1747) has been the only writer of Hebrew plays whose work counts in the literary sense. Luzzatto derived his whole dramatic inspiration from Guarini. Let no one question this assertion without first comparing La-Yesharim Tehillah and Migdal ‘Oz with the Pastor Fido. The characters and scenes, and even more, the style, are closely alike. Nor is this latter fact wonderful. John Addington Symonds describes Guarini’s work as “a masterpiece of diction, glittering and faultless, like a bas-relief of hard Corinthian bronze.” Luzzatto produces the same effect in his Hebrew imitation, using a similar metre as well as similar dramatic conventions. In imitating, however, he re-interprets. Guarini’s play is sometimes gross, it is never truly rustic. But a Hebrew poet, moved by such models as the Song of Songs, better knew how to be sensuous with purity; grossness must be antipathetic to him. On the other hand, Hebrew poetry is genuinely rustic. The biblical shepherd, whether in scriptural history or romance, is the most beloved of heroes. Some of the great characters of the Bible are shepherds: Abraham, Moses, David, Amos, Shulammith—but why pile up instances? It is obvious that a Hebrew poet, adopting a rural background for a lyrical drama, must inevitably write with sincerity. He could not, at the same time, fail to write with delicacy. Luzzatto took much from Guarini, but he both refined and adorned what he borrowed.

Yet, though it is because of Luzzatto that I am writing of Guarini, nevertheless, Guarini, and not Luzzatto, is my present subject. So I will re-tell for the reader the story of the Pastor Fido. Not that it is an easy task. Guarini, who influenced the late Elizabethans, shared, with the best of the latter, the inordinate fancy for complicated plots. Plot is entangled within plot, until we lose sight of the main theme. Luzzatto—I find it impossible to keep the Hebrew out!—here simplifies. He hardly gives us a story at all; he provides an allegory, eking out Guarini with Midrash. In the process of disentangling Guarini’s intricacies, he somewhat sacrifices the chief merit of his Italian model. Luzzatto’s dramatis personae are almost abstractions; they remind us of the figures in morality plays. A Luzzatto drama more resembles Everyman than it does As You Like it. Of Guarini, on the other hand, it may be said, that though he means his characters to represent types, he draws them as individuals. Silvio, to adopt Mr. Symond’s summaries, is “cold and eager”; Mirtillo “tender and romantic.” Corisca’s “meretricious arts” contrast with and enhance Amarillis’s “pure affection”; Dorinda is “shameless.” The dramatist, however, be he Luzzatto or Guarini, writes with a distinct tendency. His aim is to set up the country life and the country girl as essentially superior to the city varieties. This motive is as old as satire, and as young as the “verses of society.” Austin Dobson’s Phyllida is all that is sweet and natural, she is a foil to the artificiality of the “ladies of St. James’s.” Guarini enjoys the honor not of creating the mood, but of bringing it into new vogue.

But I am still keeping from the story. The scene is Arcadia. Yearly the inhabitants must sacrifice a young maiden to Diana. Diana had suffered through the perfidy of Lucrina; but the Oracle declares:

Your Woes, Arcadians! never shall have End,
Till Love shall two conjoin of heavenly Race,
And till a faithful Shepherd shall amend,
By matchless Zeal, Lucrina’s old Disgrace.

Montano, the priest of Diana, seeks, therefore, to join in marriage his only son, Silvio, to the noble nymph, Amarillis, descended from Pan. But Silvio thought more of hunting than of love. The young shepherd, Mirtillo, becomes enamored of Amarillis, and she of him. The artful Corisca, desiring the shepherd for herself, charges Amarillis with infidelity—she is betrothed, though not wedded, to Silvio. Amarillis is sentenced to death. Mirtillo offers himself, and is accepted, as her substitute. Led to the—fatal, not the bridal—altar, Mirtillo’s identity is discovered. The shepherd is Montano’s son. Let us read the rest in the terms of the “argument” (as given in the 1782 English version): “On which Occasion, the true Father, bewailing that it should fall to his lot to execute the law on his own blood—(for to Montano, as priest, the office of carrying out the sacrificial rite belonged)—is by Tirenio, a blind soothsayer, clearly satisfied by the interpretation of the Oracle itself, that it was not only opposite to the will of the gods that this victim should be sacrificed, but moreover that the happy period (i.e., end) was now come to the woes of Arcadia, which had been predicted by the sacred Voice, and from which, as every circumstance now strongly corresponded, they concluded that Amarillis could not be, nor ought to be, the spouse of any other than Mirtillo. And as a little previous to this, Silvio, thinking to wound a wild beast, had pierced Dorinda, who had been exceedingly distressed by the slight he had shown to her violent passion for him, but whose wonted savageness was changed by this accident and softened into compassion—after her wound was healed, which at first was thought mortal, and after Amarillis was become the spouse of Mirtillo, he too became now enamoured of Dorinda, and married her; by means of these events, so happy and so extraordinary, Corisca is at length convinced of and confesses her guilt, and, having implored pardon and obtained it from the loving couple, her perturbed spirit now pacified and satiated with the Follies of the World, she determines to change her Course of Life.” The play ends with the wedding chorus for the hero and heroine (Luzzatto, too, wrote his plays for marriage celebrations). In words very like those used by Luzzatto, Guarini’s shepherds sing to Mirtillo and Amarillis:

O happy pair!
Who have in Sorrow sown, and reap’d in Joy,
How hath your bitter share of grief’s alloy
Now sweetened and confirmed your present bliss!
And may ye learn from this,
Blind, feeble mortals! to distinguish right
What are true ills, and what is pure delight—
Not all that pleases is substantial good;
Not all which grieves, true ill, well understood—
That, of all joys, must be pronounced the best,
Which virtue’s arduous triumphs yield the breast.

In this story may be perceived the germs both of Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess and of Luzzatto’s Unto the Upright Praise. But while the former seized upon and elaborated the sensuous element in Guarini’s plot, giving us a truly disgusting figure in Chloe, Luzzatto pounced on the finer aspects, and his heroines outshine even Amarillis in purity and beauty of mind, just as his heroes surpass Mirtillo in fidelity to the standards of manhood. That one and the same model should have produced two such varied copies says much for the genius of the original author. To him, it is true, we owe the tragi-comedy of intrigue. But to him also we are indebted for idylls, as full-blooded as those of Theocritus, but far more spiritual.

HAHN’S NOTE BOOK

The Hahn family came to Frankfort-on-the-Main from Nordlingen (Bavaria), whence the Jews were expelled in 1507. Between that date and 1860 Nordlingen could not boast of a synagogue; such Jews as visited the place were admitted for a day at a time to the fairs, or were allowed temporarily to reside in war times. In each case a poll-tax was exacted (see Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 335). In Frankfort, the family dwelt in a house bearing the sign of “The Red Cock” (Zum rothen Hahn). Graetz fully describes the regulations which compelled the Jews of Frankfort to fix shields with various devices and names on their houses. He cites “the garlic,” “the ass,” “green shield,” “red shield” (Rothschild), “dragon.” The Frankfort Jews were forced to name themselves after these shields. Hence, in the Jewish sources, the author with whom we are now concerned is sometimes called Joseph Nordlinger, from his original home, and sometimes Joseph Hahn, from the family house-sign in Frankfort.

He himself was not permitted to live peaceably in Frankfort. Born in the second half of the sixteenth century, he not only had to endure the pitiable restrictions to which the Jews were at normal times subjected, but he suffered in 1614 under the Fettmilch riot, as the result of which, after many of the whole Jewish community had been slain and more injured, the survivors left the town. In March, 1616, the Jews—Joseph Hahn among them—were welcomed back amid public demonstrations of good-will, and the community instituted the Frankfort Purim on Adar 20, the anniversary of the return. Though the trouble thus ended happily, we can understand how insecure the life of the German Jews was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Hence we need not be surprised to find in Hahn’s book Yosif Omez (§ 483) a form of dying confession drawn up in Frankfort to be recited by those undergoing martyrdom. It is a moving composition, simple in its pathos, yet too poignant in its note of sorrow to be cited here in full.

Let it not be thought, however, that the book is a doleful one. Joseph Hahn’s is a warm-hearted Judaism, and there was room in it for a manifold human interest. The work, in a sense, is learned, but it is written so crisply and epigrammatically that its charm surpasses and even disguises its technicalities. It was printed in 1723, but was written a good deal earlier, as we know that the author died in 1637. I have alluded to the manifold interests which occupied Hahn’s mind. Questions of Jewish law and fundamental problems of morality are considered; but so are matters of costume and cookery. How to wear a special dress for synagogue and how to keep a special overcoat for the benediction of the moon, how to rub off ink-stains from the fingers before meals, how “it is a truer penance to eat moderately at ordinary meals than to endure an occasional fast,” how the children should be encouraged to read good books at table, and how, when such a book is finished, there should be a jolly siyyum—these and many another interesting view crowd Joseph Hahn’s delightful pages. He enjoyed a cheerful meal, but he proceeds to denounce in unmeasured terms those who (“and there are many such in our times,” he adds) sing love-songs or tell indecent stories over their wine. “Do not esteem lightly,” he cautions his readers (§ 183), “the advice of our sages,” as to first putting on the right shoe and first removing the left. Joseph Hahn, in truth, is a remarkable mixture of the old and the new; he loves old customs, yet constantly praises new ones, such as the introduction of Psalms and of Lekah Dodi into the Friday night service. We are so familiar with the hymn “Come, O friend, to meet the bride,” that it is startling to be reminded that it dates from the sixteenth century. Joseph Hahn thoroughly entered into the spirit of such lively processions from place to place as accompanied Lekah Dodi, though he held them more suitable for Palestine than Germany. He detested low songs, and objected to games of chance, but he was no kill-joy. Again and again he refers to the synagogue tunes, and revels in hazzanut. His was a thoroughly Jewish synthesis of austerity and joviality.

He has many remarks as to the proper treatment of servants. An employer shall not retain wages in trust for the servant, even at the latter’s desire. He must first pay the wages, and the servant may then ask the employer to save it (§ 361). He had a very loving heart as well as a just mind. Delightful is his custom of saying Sheheheyanu on seeing a friend or beloved relative after an interval of thirty days. On the other hand, he, with equal gravity, tells us (§ 455) how his father, when he left the city, took a little splinter of wood from the gate, and fixed it in his hat-band, as a specific for his safety, or sure return. This is a wide-spread custom. The whole book is a wonderful union of sound sense and quaintness. The author, in the midst of deep ritual problems and of careful philological discussions of liturgical points, will turn aside to warn us against buying the Sabbath fish on Thursday. Fish, he says, must be fresh. In the same breath he has this fine remark: “What you eat profits the body; what you spare for God (that is, give to the poor) profits the soul.” He protests (§ 547) against permitting the poor to go round to beg from house to house; officials must be appointed to carry relief to the needy in their homes. But do not forget to taste your shalet on Friday to test whether it be properly cooked! One of the most characteristically Jewish features of life under the traditional régime was the man’s participation in the kitchen preparations. But Joseph Hahn takes a high view of the woman’s part in the moralization of the domestic life. Just as the husband was not excluded from the kitchen, so the wife was not limited to it. Yet Hahn would not allow women to sing the Zemirot or table hymns.

I have said that our author loves the old, yet has no objection to the new. The latter feature is exemplified by a long song on the Sabbath Light, composed by Joseph Hahn for Friday nights. Each verse is printed in Hebrew (§ 601) with a Yiddish paraphrase. He disliked setting the Zemirot to non-Jewish tunes. There is no sense, he adds, in the argument of those who urge that these non-Jewish tunes were stolen from the temple melodies! The children, we learn, had a special Sabbath cake. A Jewish child, he relates (§ 612), was carried off by robbers, but cried so pitifully for his cake on Friday night, that he was eventually discovered by Jews and ransomed. He protests against the “modern innovation” of introducing a sermon in the morning service; this compels the old and ailing to wait too long for breakfast. The sermon must, as of old, be given after the meal (§ 625). Yet he did not mind himself introducing an innovation, for he instituted a simple haggadic discourse on the afternoons of festivals, so as to attract the people and keep them from frivolous amusements (§ 821). The greater Spinholz on the Saturday before a wedding was still customary in the author’s time. He complains of those people who drink better wine on Sundays than on Saturdays (§ 693). He objects to the practice of the rich to have their daughters taught instrumental music by male instructors (§ 890). But here I must break off, though it is difficult to tear oneself from the book, even the narrowness of which has a historical interest, and the prejudices of which entertain. As a whole, it represents a phase of Jewish life which belongs to the past, yet there runs through it a vein of homely sentiment which is found also in our present.

LEON MODENA’S “RITES”

Said to have been composed at the request of an English nobleman for the delectation of James I, Leon Modena’s account of Jewish ceremonial was certainly intended for Christian readers. Though written in Italian, it first appeared in France (Paris, 1637), through the good offices of the author’s pupil and friend, J. Gaffarel. It was the source of a whole library of similar books. Not only was it translated into several languages, but onwards from Modena’s time, writers, Jewish and Christian, competent and incompetent, devoted themselves to the task of presenting to the world in general the teachings and customs of Judaism. The recent treatise of Oesterley and Box is a lineal descendant of Modena’s Rites.

Of the author it may be said that he was the Admirable Crichton of his age (1571-1648). His range of knowledge and power was extraordinary. As Dr. Johnson said of Oliver Goldsmith, he touched nothing which he did not adorn. Besides writing many books on many subjects, he filled the office of Rabbi at Venice with distinction, his sermons in Italian attracting large audiences. Some of his German critics call him “characterless.” Why? Because he denounced gambling, and yet was a life-long victim to the vice. In his boyhood he produced a pamphlet against card-playing, and in 1631 successfully protested against the excommunication of card-players. But is there lack of character here? Of many another great man could it be said that he saw and approved the better yet followed the worse. And there are things which one dislikes without wishing to put the offenders under a ban. On another occasion, Modena severely attacked Rabbinism, and then published a reply to his own attack. He assuredly was not the only man impelled to refute his own arguments.

Modena was, one might rather say, a man of moods, and therefore of singular openness and width of mind. He suffered not from lack of character, but from an excess of impressionability. A bee has not less character than a caterpillar, because the former flies from flower to flower, while the latter adheres to the same cabbage leaf. Modena, to put the case in yet another way, lived at a transitional period, when Jews were only beginning to acclimatize themselves to modern conditions, and when settled views on many subjects were not only difficult but undesirable. Despite his vagaries, one is rather attracted to him. There must have been solidity as well as versatility in his disposition, or he could not possibly have retained the important rabbinic post he filled for more than half-a-century. Probably the secret was that he not only possessed personal charm, but the real man was best known to those who knew him best. They—or many of them—assuredly admired and loved him.

We will now turn to another figure—the first English translator of Modena’s Riti Ebraici. This was Edmund Chilmead, who was born in 1610 and died in 1654. He was a good scholar and an accomplished musician. Up to 1648 he resided in Oxford, but as a result of the troubles between Charles I and the Parliament, he was expelled from the University because of his royalist opinions. Two things, however, speak well for Cromwell’s toleration. Chilmead was not only allowed to live unmolested in London to the day of his death, but had no hesitation, on the title-page of his translation of Modena, to describe himself still as “Chaplain of Christ Church, Oxon.” The date of the translation gives the clue. “The History of the Rites, Customes, and Manner of Life of the Present Jews throughout the World” was printed “for Jo. Martin and Jo. Ridley, at the Castle in Fleet Street, by Ram Alley” in 1650. By that time Cromwell was probably thinking of the Jewish question, and he must have welcomed this first-hand statement on the Jewish religion. Chilmead’s edition, one must confess, is badly printed, and is not very creditable to the printing capacity of the “Castle in Fleet Street.” One might pardon the many misprints in the Hebrew, but it is hard to overlook the numerous faults in the English. It is not wonderful that, in the following century, Ockley thought it necessary to issue a new version.

Modena’s own original was not, as the title suggests, a history. It does not so much give sources as facts. But this circumstance, that it is mainly descriptive, confers on it a permanent value. For it thus becomes a document. It helps us to realize several aspects of the Jewish position at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The author uses the term history in the sense of narrative; as he states in his Prefatory Epistle, he is concerned with the what and not with the why (“Quod sunt,” not “Propter quod sunt,” as he expresses it). He deals with his present, not with the past, and for that very limitation we may be grateful. He claims, too, that he is a “Relater,” not a “Defender.” That being so, it is of peculiar interest to find what we do in his work, arranged in five books, “according to the number of the Books of the Law.”

Several forms of prayer appear for the first time in his pages. Certainly Chilmead is the earliest to give us in English the Prayer for the Government, or a translation of the Thirteen Articles drawn up by Maimonides. Modena, again, tells us that in his day it was customary to “leave about a yard square of the wall of the house unplaistered on which they write either the verse of Psalm 137, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,’ or the words Zecher Lahorban—a Memorial of the Desolation.” He knows only wooden Mezuzahs. Jews in Italy have pictures and images in their houses, “especially if they be not with Relief, or Imbossed work, nor the Bodies at large.” Few, he reports, take heed to the custom of placing the beds north and south; many attach significance to dreams. Jewish men never paint their faces, for the custom is “effeminate”; and “in whatsoever country they are, they (the men) usually affect the long garment, or Gown.” The women dress “in the habite of the countries where they inhabite”; but after marriage wear a perruke to cover their natural hair. The Jews build their synagogues wherever they can, “it being impossible for them now to erect any statelie or sumptuous Fabricks.” Things, as we know, soon after Modena’s time became different, for by the middle of the seventeenth century, several fine synagogues were built in Rome and elsewhere. The women “see whatever is done in the School (thus Chilmead renders scuola or synagogue), though they are themselves unseen of any man.” In the same city there will be places of worship “according to the different customes of the Levantines, Dutch (German), and Italians.” Then, “in their singing, the Dutch far exceed all the rest: the Levantines and Spaniards use a certain singing tone, much after the Turkish manner; and the Italians affect a more plain, and quiet way in their devotions.” The “Favours” of “having a hand” in the acts connected with the reading of the Law “are bought of the Chaunter, and he that biddeth most, shall have a share in them.”

Willingly, did space permit, we would follow the author through his account of the Judaism of his time. The majority of Jews, he says, are poor, yet annually they send “Almes to Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron.” The Jews never “torment, or abuse, or put to any cruel death, any Brute Beast.” Very few Jews are able to speak Hebrew; all learn the language of the countries where they are born. “Onely those of the Morea still retain the Hebrew Tongue also, and use it in their Familiar Letters.” In Italy, he records, the Talmud “continues utterly prohibited,” and copies are not to be found in the country. Jews do not regard “Vowes” as “commendable”; yet “when they are made, they ought to be kept.” Not many now observe the “tradition” against eating “Fish and Flesh together.” He tells us of an arrangement by which, for the Sabbath, some “so ordered the matter aforehand, that the Fire should kindle itself at such and such a time.” The Passover bread is made in “flat cakes of divers forms and shapes.” The “Ceremonie with a Cock,” on the eve of the Day of Atonement, “is now left off both in the East and in Italy, as being a thing both Superstitious and Groundlesse.” But they still, on Purim, “as often as they hear Haman named, beat the ground, and make a great murmuring noise.” Bigamy “is seldome or never used.” Marriages are usually performed before full moon, and the favorite days are Wednesdays and Fridays, with Thursdays for widows. “Little boyes, with lighted torches in their hands,” sing before the bridal couple, who are seated under the canopy. The Ketubah is read at the marriage. Modena mentions the charms against Lilit, and name-changing in case of sickness. He describes how, in Germany, in the case of girls, “the Chaunter goeth home to the Parents house, and lifting the child’s cradle on high, he blesseth it, and so giveth it the Name.” Modena also informs us that the Karaites were, in his time, numerous in Constantinople, Cairo, and Russia.

Modena records that among the Jews “there are many women that are much more devout and pious than the men, and who not only endeavour to bring up their children in all manner of Vertuous Education; but are a means also of restraining their husbands from their Vitious Courses, they would otherwise take, and of inclining them to a more Godly way of Life.” With which handsome and just compliment we will take leave of our author.

PART III

Part III
MENASSEH AND REMBRANDT

On April 25, 1655, six months before starting on his mission to Cromwell, Menasseh ben Israel—visionary about to play the rôle of statesman—completed in Amsterdam the Spanish book which forms the subject of this paper. Duodecimo in size (5¹⁄₄ x 2⁷⁄₈ inches), it consists of 12 + 259 pages, with a list of the author’s works published or projected, and on the last of the unpaginated leaves a Latin version of Psalm 126. In the catalogue of his works appended to the Vindiciæ Judæorum (London, 1656) Menasseh includes “Piedra pretiosa, of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, or the fifth Monarchy.” This was not, however, the real title. The title was, in truth, in Hebrew Eben Yekarah, and in Spanish Piedra Gloriosa, i.e., the “Precious Stone.” The date given above for the completion of the book is fixed by the dedication, which is addressed to Menasseh’s Christian friend, Isaac Vossius.

On a casual glance the book seems a hopeless jumble of incongruities. Nebuchadnezzar’s image, Jacob’s dream, the combat of David and Goliath, the vision of Ezekiel—what have these in common, and what has the title to do with them? The answer to these questions is soon found.

The whole work is Messianic, and in his usual symbolic style, Menasseh seizes on a “Stone” as the central feature for his little treatise. There was the stone, “cut out without hands,” which smote the image seen by the king of Babylon. There was the stone, gathered from the field of Beth-el, on which Jacob laid his weary head to rest when fleeing from his brother. There was the stone, picked smooth from the brook, with which David slew the Philistine. Perhaps the three were one and the same stone, Menasseh seems to imply. Anyhow, he saw in all these incidents a Messianic reference. Nebuchadnezzar’s image, with its feet of clay, typified the Gentiles that were to rise and fall before the great day of the Lord. The ladder of Jacob, with its ascending and descending angels, typified again the rise and fall of nations. David’s victory over Goliath foreshadowed the triumph of the Messiah over the powers of earth. And the whole is rounded off with Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot with its strange beasts and emblems—a chariot which, in the view accepted by Menasseh, typified the Kingdom of the Messiah.

MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL
(From an etching by Rembrandt, in the possession of Mr. Felix Warburg, New York)

Following the dedication to Vossius is an explanatory note to “the Reader.” In this note the author explains that to make his meaning clear he has added four illustrations. He does not name the artist. But we know that he was none other than Menasseh’s neighbor and intimate, Rembrandt. Four etchings, signed by Rembrandt and dated 1654, are possessed by more than one library; probably the fullest sets are to be found in the Fitzwilliam and British Museums. They were originally etched on one plate, which was afterwards cut into four. When all four etchings formed one plate, the arrangement was (as Mr. Middleton explains in his Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Rembrandt, p. 240):

(I) Upper left: Nebuchadnezzar’s Image. Clothed only about the loins; there is a band or fillet about the head, and a short cloak hangs behind. The stone which breaks the legs of the image (the feet are seen falling to the left) has been cast from a roughly shaped rock. The stone is near part of a globe; illustrating the text “And the stone that broke the image became a great mountain, and filed the whole earth” (Daniel 2. 35). The brow is inscribed “Babel,” the right and left arms “Persae” and “Medi,” the waist “Graeci,” the legs “Romani” and “Mahometani.” These names only appear in the fifth “state” of the etching. There’s a proof of the fourth “state” in Paris, which bears the names written in Rembrandt’s own hand.

(II) Upper right: Vision of Ezekiel. The lower part, in the foreground, shows the four creatures of the chariot; above is a “glory,” amid the rays of which is seen the Almighty, surrounded by adoring angels.

(III) Lower left: Jacob’s Ladder. The patriarch, bearded, lies half-way up the ladder, tended by an angel, others are bending down in gaze, while one figure is seen mounting the rungs immediately above.

(IV) Lower right: Combat of David and Goliath. The most spirited drawing of all; in a scene overhung by rocks with warriors looking on, the giant grasps his lance in his left hand and with shield advanced on his right arm is charging David, who has his sling in action over his right shoulder.

The Museum, as already implied, possesses proof of the etchings in various “states”—the artist touched and retouched them, until they assumed the state reproduced by the present writer in 1906, in commemoration of the tercentenary of Rembrandt’s birth. The etchings are beautiful tokens of sympathy between the Rabbi and the painter. The various “states” show, as Mr. I. Solomons has suggested, that Rembrandt took unremitting pains to obtain Menasseh’s approval of his work.

Yet he failed to win this approval. It is pretty certain that the etchings were never used. Mr. Fairfax Murray possessed the Piedra Gloriosa with the etchings, and has now presented the volume to the University Library, Cambridge; another copy is to be seen in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, a copy formerly owned by M. Dutuit of Rouen. But Mr. Solomons seems right in asserting that “the original etchings in the copies of Mr. Murray and M. Dutuit were no doubt inserted after by admirers of Rembrandt’s work, but certainly not with the knowledge and sanction of Menasseh.” Why not? The etchings are good work; they really illustrate their subject, and must have added to the commercial, as well as to the artistic value of Menasseh’s work.

The most curious fact is that, though Rembrandt’s etchings were never used, a set of copper-plate engravings, based, as Mr. Solomons guesses, by the Jewish engraver Salom Italia on Rembrandt but not identical with his work, is found in some copies of Menasseh’s book—copies possessed by Mr. Solomons, M. Didot, and the Levy Collection in Hamburg. These engravings are laterally inverted, the right of Rembrandt’s etchings becomes the left of Salom Italia’s engravings. There are other differences in detail, all calculated to render the pictures more fitted for book illustration, but of all the changes only one is of consequence, and it was Mr. Solomons who detected the real significance of the change.

The change referred to gives the clue to the whole mystery. On comparing the two versions of the Vision of Ezekiel a striking variation is discernible. The figure of the Almighty has been suppressed! Here was the fatal defect in Rembrandt’s work. Menasseh could not possibly use a drawing in which the Deity is represented; he was not the one to repeat the inadvertence of the artist of the Sarajevo Haggadah. Possibly he only detected the fault at the last hour. But a fatality clung to the second set of illustrations also. Several copies of the Piedra Gloriosa are extant without any pictures at all.

LANCELOT ADDISON ON THE BARBARY JEWS

“Justice is done to the private virtues of the Jews of Barbary.” So Mr. Francis Espinasse remarks in his biography of Lancelot Addison. It is an accurate comment. Lancelot, the father of the more famous Joseph Addison—who himself wrote so amiably of the Jews a generation later—spent several years in Africa as English chaplain. Born in 1632, he showed an independent mind at Oxford. He roughly handled some of the University Puritans in 1658, and was promptly compelled to recant his speech on his knees in open Convocation. Tangier came into the possession of Charles II in 1662. Lancelot Addison had officiated in Dunkirk for the previous three years; but when that port was given up to the French, Addison was transferred to Morocco.

Here he kept his eyes open. Several lively volumes came from him on Tangier life, on Mohammedanism, on Moorish politics. The most remarkable of these deals with the Jews. So popular was this volume on their “Present State” that three editions were called for. The first came out in 1675. If one may judge by the British Museum copy, it lacked the awesome frontispiece which may be seen in the edition of 1676. Though superscribed “The Present State of the Jews in Barbary,” the almost naked figure is not meant to represent a child of Israel. The personage depicted wears a gorgeously feathered hat and a short waist-covering, also of feathers. Add to this a spear bigger than its wielder, and you have his full costume. It is less Addison’s than his illustrator’s idea of a typical Moor.

From the very opening paragraph of the dedication we see that Lancelot possessed some of his son’s gift of gentle humor. He had inscribed a former book to Secretary Williamson, and he now repeats the act, “it faring with Scriblers, as with those Votaries who never forsake the Saint they once finde propitious.” As for his account of the Jews, he claims that his is more “particular and true” than other descriptions, “this being,” he says, “the result of Conversation and not of Report.” (“Conversation,” of course, he uses in the old sense of “direct intercourse”). Some of the modern assailants of the Jews who appropriate aristocratic names will hardly like Addison’s justification of his interest. It is because of their clear genealogies and ancient lineage that he in the first instance admires the Jews. And if their ancestry was noble, they were not less happy in their primitive religion. “Now seeing that they have been the channel of so many benefits to the rest of mankind, they ought to be the matter of our thankful Reflection, and not of our obloquy and reproach.”

With fine indignation, he goes on to resent the manner in which the Jews of Barbary were “lorded over by the imperious and haughty Moor.” The Moorish boys beat the Jewish children, and the latter dare not retaliate. “The Moors permit not the Jews the possession of any war-like weapons, unless in point of Trade.” Addison adds that this gratifies the Jews, who are, he asserts, as “destitute of true courage as of good nature.” It is important to remember these severe remarks on the Jewish character, as it shows that when the author praises he does so not from partiality but from conviction. Curiously enough, he has hardly done calling them cowards, when he tells us that the Christians and Moors use the Jews for “sending them upon hazardous messages,” such as “collecting the maritime imposts,” an office which must have needed more than a little hardihood.

Our author contrasts the black caps of the Jews with the red of the Moors, and has other quaint details as to costume. He then calls attention to the religious unanimity of the Jews. “They are signally vigilant to avoid divisions, as looking upon those among Christian Professors, to be an argument against the truth of the things they profess.” This is amusing, coming from a man who, throughout his life, was a rather sturdy opponent of union among the Christian bodies. And what would he think of the unity among Jews if he could see our “present state”? Addison then enters into a eulogy of the sobriety and temperance of the Jews; he terms their conduct “well civilised,” and declares that they “cannot be charged with any of those Debauches which are grown unto reputation with whole nations of Christians.” Then he specifies. “Adultery, Drunkenness, Gluttony, Pride of Apparel, etc., are so far from being in request with them that they are scandalised at their frequent practice in Christians.” Again and again the author laments that he has to praise the Synagogue at the expense of the Church. But he takes it out in firm abuse of the rabbinic theology, information on which he obtained from a local Rabbi, “Aaron Ben-Netas”—a not unlearned man, he says, one who only needed to be a Christian to be thoroughly worthy of esteem.

But we must pass over Addison’s elaborate analysis of the Jewish creed, and of his many curious and mostly accurate details on rites and superstitions. The notable thing is that as soon as he touches fundamental social questions, his eulogy of the Jews reappears. “Orderly and decent” are the adjectives he uses of the Jewish marriage customs. I regret that I am unable to find space for Addison’s allusion to the fashions of dressing the brides for the canopies, or rather “bowers and arbours,” which in Barbary replaced the canopies used in other countries. Thus the custom in some American homes of performing Jewish marriages under a floral bower rather than a canopy has its analogue in the past. Very significant is another statement about marriage. Theoretically he found polygamy defended, but monogamy was the rule of life. “The Jews of whom I now write, though they greatly magnify and extol the concession of polygamy, yet they are not very fond of its practice.” He ascribes this abstinence to policy rather than to religion, and there is more truth in this than Addison saw. For such social institutions are entirely a matter for the social conscience, and “policy” dictates them. So long as social institutions remain within the bounds of such sanctification as religion can approve, religion must be content to follow “policy.” Monogamy is so clearly felt to be the best policy for mankind, under modern conditions, that religion in the West maintains it. “Religion” and “policy” are here at one.

Addison fairly gives his enthusiasm the rein when he discusses Jewish education. “The care of the Jews is very laudable in this particular, there being not many people in the world more watchful to have their children early tinctured with religion than the present Hebrews.” Though they usually speak “Moresco, the Language of their Nativity, and a sort of Spanish which enables them for Traffick,” they learn Hebrew. The children, he informs us, are usually taught the Hebrew for the domestic utensils and “terms of Traffick Negotiation.” The method was quite in accord with modern ideas of teaching a language. “By this Order they furnish the Children with a Nomenclature of Hebrew Words; and all this before they admit them to Syntax and Construction.” Addison pictures the Jewish Sabbath with some charm; he even cites passages from Luria, to whom the home and synagogue rites of the day of rest owe so much. On no subject is our author more interesting than with regard to the Jewish charities. The Jews live “in a more mutual charity of alms than either the Moor or Christians”; and Addison admits, “it cannot be denied that the Jews’ manner of relieving the poor, is regular and commendable.” In his day it was, as it is in ours, the Synagogue’s ideal to relieve its own poor. There were no beggars in the Barbary Jewry. “For though among the Jews of Barbary there is a great store of needy persons, yet they are supplied after a manner which much conceals (as to men of other religions) their poverty.” Obviously Addison would like these people to become Christians. Why do they refuse? The “stiffness of their necks,” on the one hand, and the “naughtiness of our lives,” on the other, cries the author. The “naughtiness” will, let us hope, be more easily removed than the “stiffness.” Lancelot Addison, says Macaulay, “made some figure in the world.” He deserved to do so. His book on the Jews was a credit to his power of observation and his goodness of heart.

THE BODENSCHATZ PICTURES

Johann Christoph Georg Bodenschatz, a priest of Uttenreuth, underwent a triple training for his great work on Jewish Ceremonial. He studied literature, observed facts, and used his hands. The Jewish Encyclopedia remarks that he “is said to have made elaborate models of the Ark of Noah and of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness.” There is no reason for the qualifying words “is said.” In a dedicatory epistle to the Margrave Friederich of Brandenburg, Bodenschatz distinctly informs us that in 1739 he constructed these models, “after the records of Scripture and of Jewish Antiquities.” He adds that the models were preserved in the royal Kunst und Naturaliencabinet. I cannot say whether they still exist; but at the beginning of last century, the Tabernacle was at Bayreuth and the Ark at Nuremberg.

In 1748 Bodenschatz began to issue his work on the Jews; he completed the publication in the next year. In it he dealt with the Jewish religion (Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden, sonderlich derer in Deutschland). He had planned a continuation on the Civil Laws of the Synagogue. But he left it unfinished, though he lived another half-century. Perhaps he had exhausted all his means, for the thirty copper-plates must have been expensive. The very title-page states he paid for them out of his own pocket. These illustrations he introduced with a double object: they were, in part, to serve as an ornament, but chiefly as an elucidation of the text. Both his book and his pictures became very popular, and did much to secure for Judaism a favorable consideration in Germany.

As we know that Bodenschatz possessed some artistic skill, we may safely assume that he inspired and assisted the artists whom he employed. He does not appear, however, to have done any of the drawings with his own hand. Nearly all the pictures are signed. Most of them were designed by Eichler in Erlangen, and engraved by G. Nusbiegel in Nuremberg. Both of these belonged to artistic families; there were three generations of Eichlers, and a Nusbiegel engraved illustrations for Lavater’s works. One of the Bodenschatz pictures was engraved by C. M. Roth; another, among the best of the whole series—the illustration of Shehitah—was drawn by Johann Conrad Müller. It would be interesting to collect the names of those Christian artists and mechanics who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were engaged in illustrating books on Judaism. There was, for instance, the Englishman R. Vaughan who worked at Josephus (Josippon); there was the Frenchman Bernard Picart; and there were very many others, though the exquisite medallions, which adorn the title-pages of all six volumes of Surrenhusius’ Latin Mishnah, were from a Jewish hand.

Bodenschatz made use of his predecessor Picart, whose twenty plates illustrative of the “Ceremonies des Juifs” appeared in Amsterdam in 1723. But what he chiefly owed to Picart was the composition of the groups; the details are mostly original. Similarly he derived his idea for the processions of the bride and the bridegroom, with their musical performers, from Kirchner, but here, again, the details are his own, and the total effect is full of charm. I do not wish, by any means, to depreciate Kirchner, who in his Jüdisches Ceremoniel (1726) has some fine engravings. One of them, depicting the preparation of the Passover bread, is as vigorous as anything in Bodenschatz, though I think that the latter is, on the average, superior to Kirchner. Readers can easily judge the character both of the Bodenschatz and the Kirchner pictures from the specimens so wisely reproduced in the volumes of the Jewish Encyclopedia. No one need complain that the Encyclopedia prints these illustrations too profusely. For—to limit my remarks to Bodenschatz—though copies of that worthy’s book are common enough, many of them are incomplete. From the British Museum example, six of the thirty plates are missing; the Cambridge copy also lacks some of the plates, in particular the marriage ceremony under the canopy, which, however, may be seen in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. vi, p. 504. On the other hand, the Encyclopedia (vol iii, p. 432) somewhat exaggerates the glare of the eyes in the grim realism of Bodenschatz’s picture of an interment.

What is assuredly one of the most interesting of Bodenschatz’s plates does not, so far as I have noticed, appear in the Encyclopedia. I refer to the Pentecost celebrations, where Bodenschatz shows us both the cut flowers and the growing plants in the synagogue decorations of the day. The floral border of this plate is particularly well conceived. Very attractive, too, is the picture of Blessing the New Moon: the outlines of the houses stand out in bold relief. Bodenschatz is careful to inform us that the favorite time for the ceremony is a Saturday night, when the men are still dressed in their Sabbath clothes, and thus make a good show. The Priestly Benediction is also a notable success; the Cohen with his hands to his eyes impresses. More than once Bodenschatz depicts a curious scene, once common now almost unknown. On the front of the synagogue is a star, cut in stone, and after the marriage the husband shatters a vessel by casting it at the star. The glass, where the custom is retained, is now broken under the canopy. By the way, the author also introduces us to the more familiar ceremony of the same nature at the actual wedding or betrothal. Altogether ingenious is the plate on which are diagrammatically represented the various forms of boundaries connected with the Sabbath law.

Naturally a goodly number of the pictures deal with curiosities. The quainter side of Jewish ceremonial obviously appeals to an artist. Thus the waving of the cock before the Day of Atonement, the Lilit inscriptions over the bed of the new-born infant, the Mikweh, the Halizah shoe, make their due appearance. But Bodenschatz does not show these things to ridicule them. He is among the most objective of those who, before our own days, sought to reproduce synagogue scenes. He must have had a very full experience of these scenes; he must have been an eye-witness. It would seem as though he meant us to gather this from one of his Sabbath pictures, of which he has several. I do not refer to the vividness of the touches in his representation of the Friday night at home—though this illustration presupposes personal knowledge. Nor do I refer to his pictures of Sabbath ovens, for these could have been examined in shops. But what I allude to is this. In his picture of the interior of the synagogue, we see the Sabbath service in progress. Standing on the right, looking on, is a hatless observer. Does Bodenschatz mean this for himself, thus suggesting that he had often been a spectator where the rest were participators? It may be so. Anyhow, most of those who have had to steep themselves in literature of this kind have a warm feeling of regard for Bodenschatz. He was not invariably just, but he was never unkind; no mistakes that he made (and he is on the whole conspicuously accurate) were due to prejudice. Any scholar, any artist, would be proud to deserve such a verdict.

LESSING’S FIRST JEWISH PLAY

There are bigger virtues than consistency, and I have spared a good word for that human chameleon Leon Modena. But, undeniably, a great career is all the nobler when through it there runs a consistent purpose. Wordsworth, in a famous poem, asked:

Who is the happy warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?

And the first sentence of his answer runs:

It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought.

If this be so, then Lessing was a happy warrior indeed. For religious tolerance is interwoven with his combative life. It was the ideal of his boyhood and of his age. It is to be seen in his “Nathan,” the masterpiece of his mature genius, and it equally underlay his youthful drama The Jews. Nathan the Wise is Mendelssohn, and was drawn on the basis of experience; but the “Traveller,” who is the hero of Die Juden is no individual, having been drawn by Lessing out of his own good heart. Thirty years separate the two plays (written, respectively, in 1749 and 1779). But they are united in spirit.

Die Juden is a short composition, even though it includes twenty-three scenes. Some of these scenes are very brief. The plot is quite simple. A baron and his daughter are saved by a traveller from robbers; the impression made by the rescuer is so great, that the baron is inclined to find in him a son-in-law. Then the traveller reveals the fact that he is a Jew. Baron and Jew part with mutual esteem. Dramatically, the play is not of much merit. The “Traveller” is not so much a person as a personification. He is the type of virtue, honor, magnanimity. He leaves one cold, not because, as Michaelis objected in 1754, he is impossibly, or at least improbably, perfect, but because he is crudely and mechanically drawn. Mendelssohn completely rebutted the criticism of Michaelis; but, none the less, the “Traveller” possesses little of that human, personal quality which makes “Nathan” so convincing and interesting. On the other hand, the baron is admirably painted. He is not a bigoted Jew-hater; he is simply animated by a conventional dislike of Jews. Lessing, even in his student years, was too good an artist to daub on his colors too glaringly.

The importance of Die Juden is to be found, as we have seen, in its anticipation of Nathan der Weise. Sometimes the identity of thought is strikingly close. In the fourth act of Nathan occurs this dialogue:

Friar: Nathan! Nathan! You are a Christian! By God, you are a Christian! There never was a better Christian!

Nathan: We are of one mind! For that which makes me, in your eyes, a Christian, makes you, in my eyes, a Jew!

Compare (as Niemeyer has done) the exchanges in Die Juden:

Baron: How estimable would the Jews be if they were all like you!

Traveller: And how admirable the Christians, if they all possessed your qualities!

A Tsar is said to have repeated pretty much the baron’s speech to Sir Moses Montefiore. It is not recorded that the latter made the traveller’s reply.

Edmund Burke, in one of his speeches on America, protested that it was impossible to draw up “an indictment against a whole people.” He forgot the frequency with which such indictments are drawn up against the Jews. Now if there was one thing that more than the rest roused Lessing’s anger, it was just this tarring of all Jews with one brush. One can conceive the glee with which Lessing wrote the passage in which the baron commits this very offence, unconscious of his peculiarly unfortunate faux pas, for he has no notion yet that the traveller is a Jew:

Baron: It seems to me that the very faces of the Jews prejudice one against them. You can read in their eyes their maliciousness, deceit, perjury. Why do you turn away from me?

Traveller: I see you are very learned in physiognomies—I am afraid, sir, that mine....

Baron: O, you wrong me! How could you entertain such a suspicion? Without being learned in physiognomies, I must tell you I have never met with a more frank, generous, and pleasing countenance than yours.

Traveller: To tell you the truth, I do not approve of generalizations concerning a whole people.... I should think that among all nations good and wicked are to be found.

These quotations will suffice to convey an idea of the aim of the dramatist and of the manner in which it is carried out. There is a certain amount of comic relief to the gravity of the main plot. The foot-pad and garroter, Martin Krumm, cuts an amusing figure as an assailant of the honesty of the Jews. “A Christian would have given me a kick in the ribs and not a snuff-box,” says Christopher, the traveller’s servant. Christopher is a funny rogue. When his master cannot find him, and naturally complains, the servant replies: “I can only be in one place at one time. Is it my fault that you did not go to that place? You say you have to search for me? Surely you’ll always find me where I am.”

There were a few attempts prior to Lessing to present the Jew in a favorable light on the stage, as Sir Sidney Lee has shown. But between Shylock and Nathan there stretches a lurid desert, broken only by the oasis of Die Juden. To some it may occur that the battle of tolerance fought by Lessing did not end in a permanent victory. Lessing himself would not have been disquieted at that result. As he expressed it, the search for truth rather than the possession of truth is the highest human good. A leading Viennese paper said some few years ago that if Nathan the Wise had been written now, it would have been hissed off the German stage. It is not unlikely. Fortunately, Lessing wrote before 1880! Nathan does not remain unacted. I saw Possart play the title-role in Munich in the nineties. His splendid elocution carried off Nathan’s long speeches with wonderful absence of monotony.

A thing of truth is a boon forever, because it makes further progress in truth-seeking certain. Because there has been one Lessing, there must be others. And if Nathan the Wise be thus a lasting inspiration, let us not forget that the poet was trying his hand, and maturing his powers, by writing the play which has served as the subject of this sketch.

ISAAC PINTO’S PRAYER-BOOK

It was in America that the first English translation of the Synagogue Prayer-Book appeared (1761 and 1766). Often has attention been drawn to the curiosity that this latter volume was published not in London but in New York. The 1761 edition has only recently been discovered by Dr. Pool; with the 1766 work we have long been familiar. According to the Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica (p. 174), “the Mahamad would not allow a translation to be printed in England.” If such a refusal was made, we must at least amend the last words, and read in English for in England. For it was in London, in 1740, that Isaac Nieto’s Spanish rendering of the prayers for New Year and Day of Atonement saw the light of publication.

Indeed, in Isaac Pinto’s preface the point is made quite clear. “In Europe,” he says, “the Spanish and Portuguese Jews have a translation in Spanish, which, as they generally understand, may be sufficient; but that not being the case in the British Dominions in America, has induced me to attempt a translation, not without hope that it may tend to the improvement of many of my brethren in their devotion.” Admittedly, then, Pinto designed his work for American use; at all events, the objection of the Mahamad must have been to the language used by Pinto. We know how resolutely Bevis Marks clung to Spanish, and how reluctantly it abandoned some of the quaint uses made of it in announcements and otherwise.

“Some crudities there are in this translation, but few mistakes, and the style has a genuine devotional ring,” says Mr. Singer. Pinto could not easily go wrong, seeing that he made use of Haham Nieto’s “elegant Spanish translation.” Dr. Gaster remarks that Pinto’s rendering “rests entirely,” as the author declares, on Nieto’s. Pinto’s exact words are: “In justice to the Learned and Reverend H. H. R. Ishac Nieto, I must acknowledge the very great advantage I derived” from Nieto’s work. Mr. G. A. Kohut shares Mr. Singer’s high opinion of Pinto’s style. “The translation,” he asserts, “seems to be totally free from foreign expressions, and is characterized throughout by a dignity and simplicity of diction which is on the whole admirable.” With this favorable judgment all readers of Pinto will unhesitatingly concur. A remarkable feature which Pinto shares with Nieto is this: the translation appears without the Hebrew text. Commenting on the absence of Hebrew, Mr. Singer observes: “This fact would seem to show that there must have been an appreciable number of persons, who, for purposes of private worship at least, and perhaps also while in attendance at synagogue, depended upon English alone in their devotions.” On the other hand, it is possible that, as Hebrew printing must have been costly in London and New York in the eighteenth century, the absence of the Hebrew may be merely due to the desire to avoid expenses. The translations may have been meant for use with copies of the Hebrew text printed in Amsterdam and elsewhere on the continent of Europe.

Pinto’s book was small quarto in shape; it contained 191 pages. There are some peculiarities on the title-page, of which a facsimile may be seen in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, page 55: “Prayers for Shabbath, Rosh-Hashanah, and Kippur, or the Sabbath, the Beginning of the Year, and the Day of Atonements; with the Amidah and Musaph of the Moadim, or solemn seasons. According to the Order of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Translated by Isaac Pinto. And for him printed by John Holt, in New York, A. M. 5526” (= 1766). It will be noted that Pinto indicates the ayin by the use of italics in the words Amidah and Moadim. Also, though he employs the ordinary Sephardic term for the Day of Atonement (Kippur without the prefix of Yom), he does not translate the singular, but the plural, for he renders it the “Day of Atonements,” which is not exactly a blunder (though the Hebrew Kippurim is, of course, really an abstract plural with a singular sense).

But who was Isaac Pinto? It is not at all clear. Some have hastily spoken of him as though he were identical with Joseph Jesurun Pinto, who was sent out by the London Sephardim to New York in 1758. The home authorities, at the request of the New York Congregation Shearith Israel, elected a Hazan, but the chosen candidate, “having since declined going for reasons unknown to us,” writes the London Mahamad, through its treasurer, H. Men. da Costa, “we this day (June 7, 1758) proceeded to a second election, and our chois fell on Mr. Joseph Jesurun Pinto, who was examined by our direction and found very well versed in the reading of the Pentateuch and in the functions of a Hazan.” This Hazan could do more: he was able, as Mr. Kohut shows, to write Hebrew, for in October, 1760, he composed a prayer for recitation on the “General Thanksgiving for the Reducing of Canada to His Majesty’s Dominions.” The prayer was written in Hebrew, but printed in English, being translated by a “Friend of Truth.” A note at the end of the booklet runs thus: “N. B. The foregoing prayer may be seen in Hebrew, at the Composer’s Lodgings.” Mr. Kohut adds: “Apparently original Hebrew scholarship was a curiosity in New York City in 1760.”

A year before, Joseph Jesurun Pinto instituted the keeping of records as to those “entitled to Ashcaboth” (memorial prayers), and drew up a still used table of the times for beginning the Sabbath for the meridian of New York; he must have been a man of various gifts and activities.

What relation Isaac Pinto was to the Hazan we have no means of telling. Joseph’s father was named Isaac, but this can scarcely have been our translator. An Isaac Pinto died in 1791, aged seventy; he may be (as Mr. Kohut suggests) the translator in question; in 1766 he would have been in his forty-fifth year. Steinschneider thought that he was identical with the author of a work against Voltaire (Amsterdam, 1762) and other treatises. “But,” as Mr. Kohut argues, “this versatile author lived at Bordeaux, while our translator was in all probability a resident of New York.” Mr. L. Hühner accepts this identification, and adds the possibility that this same Isaac Pinto was settled in Connecticut as early as 1748. More certain is it that Isaac Pinto is the same who appears in the earliest minute-book of the New York Congregation Shearith Israel as a contributing member and seat-holder (1740, 1747, and 1750).

Isaac Pinto was certainly living in New York in 1773. Ezra Stiles was president of Yale from 1778 till 1795, and in his diary he makes many references to Jews, as is well known from the publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Under date June 14, 1773, Stiles has this entry: “In the forenoon I went to visit the Rabbi (Carigal)—discoursed on Ventriloquism and the Witch of Endor and the Reality of bringing up Samuel. He had not heard of Ventriloquism before and still doubted it. He showed me a Hebrew letter from Isaac Pinto to a Jew in New York, in which Mr. Pinto, who is now reading Aben Ezra, desires R. Carigal’s thoughts upon some Arabic in Aben Ezra.” Prof. Jastrow, from whose essay I cite the last sentence, adds: “As late as April 14, 1790, Stiles refers to a letter received from Pinto, whom he speaks of as ‘a learned Jew in New York,’ regarding a puzzling Hebrew inscription found by Stiles in Kent in the fall of 1789. Unfortunately there is no other reference to this supposed Hebrew inscription, on which Pinto was unable to throw any light.” Stiles does not seem to have provided sufficient data. We would fain know more of this Isaac Pinto. But the glimpses we get of him are enough to satisfy us that he was a man of uncommon personality.

MENDELSSOHN’S “JERUSALEM”

Of a hundred who discuss Moses Mendelssohn’s conception of Judaism, perhaps barely five have read Jerusalem, the book in which that conception is most lucidly expressed. It is a common fate with certain literary masterpieces that they are read in their own day and talked about by posterity. The fame of Mendelssohn, moreover, underwent something like an eclipse during the last generation. To paraphrase what Antony said of Cæsar, but yesterday his word might have stood against the world; now, none so poor as to do him reverence.

The depreciation of Mendelssohn was due to two opposite reasons. For some time, though most Jews were unconscious of it, it was becoming obvious that there were two, and only two, thorough-going solutions of the Jewish problem for the modern age. The one may be termed religious liberalism, the other territorial nationalism. Now, Mendelssohn’s views are in accord with neither of these tendencies. He was so far from being a territorialist—and I use that term in the widest sense—that he has been acclaimed and denounced as the father of assimilation. He was so remote from liberalism, that he has been acclaimed and denounced as the founder of neo-orthodoxy. His theory of life was that the emancipated Jew could and must go on obeying under the new environment the whole of the olden Jewish law. This is not possible! cry both the liberal and the nationalist. Hence the liberal asserts one-half, the nationalist the other half of the Mendelssohnian theory. The liberal would modify the law, the nationalist would change the environment. In other words, instead of holding Mendelssohn in low esteem, both sides ought to recognize that they each derive half their inspiration from him.

And it is fortunate that Jews are, at this juncture, coming to appreciate Mendelssohn all over again. Our German brethren have just initiated a capital series of little books which cost less than a shilling each. The first of these “Monuments of the Jewish Spirit” contains the Jerusalem, and much else of Mendelssohn’s work. Here one reads again the words first penned by the Berlin Socrates in 1783: Judaism knows nothing of a revealed religion, Israel possessed a divine legislation. “Thought is free,” we can hear Mendelssohn thundering—if so harsh a verb can be applied to so gentle a spirit—“let no Government interfere with men’s mode of conceiving God and truth.” State and religion are separated as wide as the poles. Israel has its own code, which in no way conflicts with the State; still less does Israel seek to impose that code on the State. Mendelssohn did not believe that all men were destined to attain to truth by the road of Judaism. “Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of immutable truths indispensable to salvation.” Hence, too, “Judaism has no articles of faith.” It follows that not unbelief was punished under the Jewish régime, but contumacious disobedience. The Jew was never commanded: believe this, disbelieve that; but do this, and leave that undone. Judaism is the Jew’s way of attaining goodness, other people can attain it in other ways. Not consonance but manifoldness is the design and end of Providence. “Religious union is not toleration, it is diametrically opposed to it.” Toleration consists rather in this: “Reward and punish no doctrine; hold out no allurement or bribe for the adoption of theological opinions.” How far in advance of his age Mendelssohn was! It took a full century after his Jerusalem for England to abolish theological tests at the universities, tests which indeed did “reward and punish” doctrines. Mendelssohn goes on: “Let everyone who does not disturb public happiness, who is obedient to the civil government, who acts righteously towards his fellow-man, be allowed to speak as he thinks, to pray to God after his own fashion, or after the fashion of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it.” No one, unless it be that earlier Jewish philosopher Spinoza, had ever put the case for toleration so cogently. Whether Mendelssohn’s own principles are consistent with his further conclusion that once a Jew always a Jew, will ever be doubted. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 44a) had said: An Israelite, though he sin, remains an Israelite. Mendelssohn rather said: An Israelite has no right to sin. True, the world need not accept Judaism, but the Jew may never reject it. “I do not see,” cries Mendelssohn, “how those who were born in the house of Jacob can, in any conscientious manner, disencumber themselves of the law. We are allowed to think about the law, to inquire into its spirit ... but all our fine reasoning cannot exonerate us from the strict obedience we owe to it.” I am not now criticising Mendelssohn. I am trying to expound him. To live under the law of the State and at the same time to remain loyal to the law of Judaism is hard. But Mendelssohn went on: Bear both burdens. That assuredly is a counsel which should be inscribed in golden letters over the portal of Judaism now, even though we may interpret the burdens differently in our different circumstances.

Mendelssohn’s masterpiece includes much else. But what precedes ought to be enough to whet readers’ appetites for the whole meal. On an occasion when I had a long talk with William James, I spoke to him of Mendelssohn, and he admitted that his own Pragmatic theories were paralleled by the Jerusalem. He promised to write on the subject, but death claimed him all too soon. Whether we agree with Mendelssohn or not, let us at least agree in appreciation of his genius. What he did, and what we do not do, is to face unflinchingly the discussion of fundamentals. Reading Mendelssohn is to breathe the fresh air. But there’s the rub! Read Mendelssohn? How, if we know no German? It is deplorable that the Jerusalem is no longer accessible in English. I say no longer, because once it was accessible. And not once only, but twice.

In 1852, Isaac Leeser published an English version in Philadelphia. No wonder our American brothers still hold Leeser in such reverent esteem. He deserved well of the Jewry of his land. But Leeser’s was not the first English translation of Jerusalem. In 1838, M. Samuels issued in two volumes an English version in London; it was dedicated to Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, and contained much besides the Jerusalem. I know nothing of the translator except one thing that he was not, and another thing that he was. He was not a native Englishman, and he was a good scholar. About a dozen years earlier (1825) he had produced a volume, entitled “Memoirs of Moses Mendelsohn” (what a pitfall that double s is to printers! Throughout M. Samuels’ earlier book an s is missing in the name; in the later publication it has been recovered). Samuels asserts himself a “disciple of the leading system of the work”; perhaps this accounts for his enthusiasm, shown in his conscientious annotations, which are fragrant with genuine Jewish thought. With very slight furbishing up, Samuels’ rendering could be reprinted to-day. One of the most urgent needs of our age in English-speaking lands is that Jews should once more become familiar with the thought of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Mendelssohn. Like many another of my generation, I was brought up rather to decry him. I have learned better now, and would fain urge others to a like reconsideration.

HERDER’S ANTHOLOGY

Johann Gottfried von Herder belonged to the school of Rousseau. The latter, from whom the French Revolution derived its philosophy, was enamored of the primitive and the ancient. Nature began far better than she became after man mis-handled her. Herder (1744-1803) plays on the word “simplicity.” He loved the Hebrew poetry because it was so spontaneous, so untainted by artificiality. Herder’s work on the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1772-3) is fairly characterized by Graetz when he terms it epoch-making. Herder was among the first of the moderns to rouse interest in the Bible as literature. What his contemporary Lessing did in Germany for Shakespeare, Herder did for the Psalter.

Now Herder’s treatment of ancient literature rendered a lasting service despite his fundamental misconception. What James Sully calls Herder’s “excessive and sentimental interest in primitive human culture” prepared the way for the “genetic” theories of our time. He thoroughly realized the natural element in national poetry. He explained genius in terms of race. To him is due some part of the conception of a “Jewish culture,” as formulated by present-day Zionists of Ahad ha-‘Am’s school. It is rather curious that while, on the one hand, Herder’s theories helped national anti-Semitism, on the other hand, they gave suggestions to national Judaism. By laying undue stress on the natural, Herder exaggerated the national in the human spirit. In his early manhood Herder had thought of training as a physician. But he abandoned the idea because he could not endure the dissecting-room. When he came to discuss the world’s genius he used the scalpel freely enough. His gorge rose against cutting up the body, but he felt no reluctance to dissect the spirit.

Earlier writers had overlooked the national element in the Bible. Herder saw in the Old Testament nothing but national songs. The thought often led him right. He strongly opposed, for instance, the mystic and allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs. To him it was a love poem, the purest, most delicate love poem of antiquity (“den reinsten und zartesten Liebesdichtung des Altertums”). Hebrew literature was national, but it revealed its nationality under unique conditions, for it was marked by the “poetic consciousness of God.” In all this Herder was magnificently right. But he could not leave well alone. In one of his latest essays he summed up the Hebrew poetry as distinguished indeed by religiosity, but also by simplicity (“kindliche Naivetä, Religiosität, Einfalt”). No term could be worse chosen. Hebrew poetry shows consummate art. If it conveys the sense of simplicity, it is because the poet’s art so thoroughly conceals its workings. Herder made aesthetically the same mistake as Wellhausen perpetrated theologically. According to Wellhausen, the prophets of the eighth century before the Christian era suddenly appeared as an utterly new phenomenon on the Hebraic horizon, whereas, in truth, by the time we reach Amos we have got to a very advanced stage in the religious history of Israel. So, too, is it with the biblical poetry. It is, even in its earliest fragments, such as the Song of Deborah, a highly cultivated form. “Simplicity” is the last word to apply to it. It is powerful, it is sincere, but it is not naive. The Greek athlete who conquered at the Olympic games was robust, but he had gone through a long process of training. Vigor is not synonymous with artlessness. Trench wrote a charming book on the “use of words.” An equally entertaining book could be compiled on the “misuse of words.” In such a book, a front place would be assignable to Herder’s “simplicity.”

What distinguished Hebrew poetry was not that element which it derived from the narrowing fetters of locality and epoch. Why is the Bible the most translatable book? Why has it been found the easiest of the great classics to re-express in the manifold tongues of man? Because it is so independent of the very qualities by which Herder sought to explain it! The poetry of Israel was “natural” and “national” in the sense that it corresponded to human nature, and was susceptible of interpretation in terms of every nationality. Over Herder’s tomb was inscribed the legend “Licht, Liebe, Leben.” Herder might have inscribed these or similar words over certain of the gems of Hebrew literature. “Light, love, life” are a truer characterization than “naiveness, religiosity, simplicity.”

Graetz thought that, though Herder dreamed of the time when Jew and Gentile would understand and appreciate each other, he was ill-disposed to the Jews. He was, it is true, not one of those who fell under the spell of Moses Mendelssohn’s personality. He was disinclined to subject himself to the spell. When Mendelssohn sought Herder’s acquaintance, the latter received the proposal coldly. This was not necessarily due to unkindness. It seems to me that Herder, who much admired Lessing, was rather resentful of the close intimacy between the hero and the author of Nathan the Wise. Herder had no desire to form one of a ménage à trois. As Graetz adds, Mendelssohn and Herder did come closely together after Lessing’s death. Herder, in one of his essays, dated 1781, the very year in which Lessing passed away, pays Mendelssohn a pretty compliment, praising him as an exponent of Jewish ideals.

Herder’s essay was prefixed to his “Anthology from Eastern Poets” (Blumenlese aus morgenländische Dichtern). Few of us remember that the word Anthology corresponds exactly with Blumenlese; it means a “collection of flowers.” (Compare Graetz’s Leket Shoshannim.) Foremost among the floral graces of Herder’s Oriental garland are the famous selections made from the Talmud and Midrash. Here, as elsewhere, Herder was rather too inclined to treat the rabbinical legend and parable as “naive.” He was, moreover, a little patronizing to the Haggadists when he declared that “people laughed at what they did not understand”—referring to the supposed grotesqueness of some of the rabbinic modes of expression. But he was happier when he described vandals like Eisenmenger as men who “rough-handled the butterfly, and who, mangling the beauteous creature between their coarse fingers, wondered that all they found on their hands was a particle of dust.” No one has ever translated rabbinic parables so successfully as Herder. His very love for the unfamiliar stood him in good stead. He does not tell us whence he derived his knowledge of the originals. Probably it was in oral intercourse with Jews. Such a spelling of Lilit as Lilis looks as though he heard it pronounced by a German Jew.

Be that as it may, Herder enters into the spirit of the rabbinic apologues with rare understanding. He chose the subjects with judgment, and executed the renderings with felicity. There could have been nothing but love for Judaism in the man who thus selected and who thus translated. Graetz was unduly hard on him. It was quite possible for a man to be fond of Jews and yet not drawn to Mendelssohn. The last-named fascinated so many that he could afford to find one person antipathetic—if indeed he was so. Long before others took to a cult of the rabbinic wit and wisdom, long before Emanuel Deutsch startled the English world in October, 1867, by his question in the Quarterly Review: “What is the Talmud?”, Herder had introduced the German world to it, and had in part answered Deutsch’s question by anticipation. From several points of view, therefore, Herder is of import for the Jewish student of nineteenth century history.

WALKER’S “THEODORE CYPHON”

Cumberland’s play, The Jew, appeared in 1794, and two years later was published Theodore Cyphon. The author was George Walker, a book-seller of London and a prolific writer of novels. His works are a curious compound of wild melodramatic incident with comments, often shrewd enough, on social and political actualities.

Theodore Cyphon well represents Walker’s method. The main plot is a tiresome story, told in retrospect, of Theodore’s heroism and misfortunes in several walks of life, from the Minories to Arabia. He ends on the scaffold for an offence which was in truth his noblest act of chivalry. In between we have a quite able discussion on the cruelty of inflicting capital punishment in cases of mere robbery. The author concludes his Preface with the fear that readers may exclaim: “Well, it was very tragical; but I am glad the hero is settled at last.” That, at least, is the sentiment of a modern reader.

This novel of Walker’s, however, arrests attention by being set in a Jewish frame. The term frame is used advisedly, since the main narrative is independent of the setting.

The full title of the book is Theodore Cyphon, or the Benevolent Jew. There were two editions of it. The first came out in 1796, the second in 1823. Of the second edition the British Museum possesses a complete copy; of the first edition an imperfect example—consisting of the first of the three volumes—has recently been presented to the University Library, Cambridge. The “benevolent Jew” is one Shechem Bensadi, and he is drawn with more than sympathy. Shechem lends money at exorbitant rates to the improvident aristocracy, and devotes his gains to the relief of deserving unfortunates. Nay, his clients are not always deserving. When robbed, Shechem refuses to prosecute; he showers favors on those who treat him despitefully. His philanthropy is extended to Jew and Gentile alike. There is one remarkable scene in the fifth chapter, in which Shechem is shown in a large storehouse, surrounded by scores of poor Jews to whom he supplies goods, thus enabling them to earn a livelihood. In equally striking chapters Shechem plays the rôle of benefactor and friend to others than his own coreligionists.

The first edition of Theodore Cyphon was obviously suggested by Cumberland’s success. Curiously enough, the sub-title, The Benevolent Jew, is used in the sheet concerning Cumberland’s play printed in vol. vii of the Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, p. 177. It is not improbable that the second edition of Theodore Cyphon was due to the popularity of Scott’s Ivanhoe, which was published in December, 1819. There are not wanting some superficial parallels between Scott’s masterpiece and Walker’s earlier and more moderate production. Eve, Shechem’s daughter, nurses Walker’s hero, just as Isaac’s daughter Rebecca nurses Scott’s hero. The most interesting parallel—perhaps the only real one—is presented in two scenes, one in Ivanhoe, the other in Theodore Cyphon. The first is the occasion on which Rebecca sings her famous hymn. Scott describes his poem as a “translation” of a hymn with which the evening ritual of the Synagogue concluded. It is really an original composition inspired by various scriptural texts, and in its turn may have suggested some great lines in Kipling’s Recessional. Is it possible that Scott’s idea of Rebecca’s hymn was suggested by Walker? For, in the second scene alluded to above, Eve, too, is overheard singing a song to “music wild, yet so soft.”

Walker gives us only the last stanza of Eve’s song, which runs thus (p. 46 of vol. i of the 1796 edition):

The wand’rers of Israel, through nations dispers’d,
Shall again dwell in safety, again rest in peace;
And the harp, that so plaintive our sorrows rehears’d,
Shall thrill with new pleasures, as pleasures increase;
The sweet, spicy shrubs, that wave over the hills,
Untouch’d by the simoom, eternally blow,
Frankincense and myrrh from their bosom distils,
And love shall attend on our path as we go.

Scott, of course, had other models beside Walker. Byron’s Hebrew Melodies came out both with and without Nathan’s musical accompaniment, in 1815, four years before Ivanhoe was written. It is curious, by the way, to note that Rudolf Eric Raspe, the original of the character whom Scott so mercilessly caricatures as Dousterswivel in his novel The Antiquary, was not only the author of Baron Münchausen, but was also the first translator into English of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (London, 1781). Scott does not seem to have been acquainted with Lessing’s play, either in the original or in translation. Scott’s indebtedness to Marlowe, on the other hand, has already been pointed out by the present writer.

Having drawn attention to the parallel between Walker and Scott, it will be useful to note an equally striking contrast. On pages 110-112 of Theodore Cyphon occurs the passage:

“His chief concern was for Eve, whom he saw, notwithstanding Theodore’s supposed engagements, and the restrictions of religion, still encourage sentiments which sapped the foundation of her happiness, and which no expedient offered to remove, but by parting with its object, or suffering their marriage spite of religion and law.

“Though a Jew, skilled in the learning of the Talmud and Mosaic law, he was without those prejudices that attend on superstition. He saw clearly that, when those precepts were first instituted, they were designed as a prevention of communication between the Israelite and Heathen, lest by the influence and interchange of the softer sex, they might be led into the practice of idolatry. Yet now, taking up the argument in a religious way, the danger existed no longer; both Jew and Christian agreeing in the chief article of worship, though divided about what the understanding of neither can comprehend. In a civil light, man was created for the society of man. The distinction of kingdom and people were childish, and fit only to insult the understanding. But whilst he indulged himself in these speculations, he avoided hinting to Eve that there was a possibility she should ever become the wife of Theodore, that the unattainability of the object might blunt or destroy the ardour of hope: for however he might have wished for such a character (so far as observation could judge) as his son-in-law, under the present circumstances he could not have allowed it, had even the affections of Theodore been placed upon her, which he believed was far from the case, as the observation he had made when he entered his chamber abruptly, and the words, ‘O Eliza,’ which his daughter had heard, led him to conclude some prior engagement retained him.”

The sequel shows that Theodore is already married to Eliza. With Walker’s view, however, as to such a marriage, it is fruitful to compare the noble passage, on the same subject, with which Scott concludes the preface to the 1830 edition of Ivanhoe:

“The character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than to the less interesting Rowena. But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such an union almost impossible, the author may, in passing, observe that he thinks a character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit, and it is a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, the most common readers of romance, that rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied with, or adequately rewarded by, the gratification of our passions, or attainment of our wishes. In a word, if a virtuous and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, greatness, rank, or the indulgence of such a rashly-formed or ill-assorted passion as that of Rebecca for Ivanhoe, the reader will be apt to say, Verily, virtue has had its reward. But a glance on the great picture of life will show, that the duties of self-denial, or the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away.”

From the artistic point of view, Walker’s novel has little merit. But it deserves to be better known from the historical point of view. It was another expression of the new attitude towards the Jew, which began to distinguish English letters in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

HORACE SMITH OF THE “REJECTED ADDRESSES”

Horace Smith and his brother James are famous as the joint authors of the most successful parody ever perpetrated. Drury Lane Theatre was re-opened on October 10, 1812, having been rebuilt after the fire which destroyed it some three years previously. The Committee advertised a competition for the best address to be spoken at the re-opening. It is easy to imagine what occurred. Masses of poems were sent in, and in despair all of them were rejected, and Byron was invited to write a prologue. It occurred to the Smiths to produce a series of parodies in the style of the poets of their day. They pretended that all, or most of them, had been candidates for the prize, and on the very day of the re-opening was published the volume of Rejected Addresses, which, conceived, executed, printed, and published within the space of six weeks, continues in the general judgment of critics the finest jeu d’esprit of its kind.

Interesting enough it would be to linger over the general aspects of this book. We must, nevertheless, resist the temptation to recall the marvellous imitations of that genial friend of ours, the author of Ivanhoe—or of that crabbed foe of Jewish emancipation, William Cobbett. Capital, too, is the skit on Thomas Moore. Eve and the apple come into that effusion as a matter of course. To Moore, Eve was as Charles’ head to Mr. Dick. One could compile a fair-sized volume out of the Irish sentimentalist’s allusions to the first pair in Paradise. Moore used the allusion seriously and humorously. In the Lives of the Angels, Adam is driven not from but into Paradise, for as Eve had to go, it would have been the reverse of bliss for him to be left behind in Eden. In another poem, Moore plays on the rabbinic suggestion that woman was made out of the man’s tail, and so, comments the poet, man ever after has followed the original plan, and leaves his wife behind him whenever he can. Again and again, Moore in his poems claims close acquaintance with rabbinic lore, of which, in fact, he knew only a few scraps from second-hand sources.

So we might continue to glean thoughts from Rejected Addresses. It needs gleaning, because the direct references to contemporary Jews are very few. This negative point is not without interest. A dramatic squib nowadays would almost certainly have its hits against Jews. The Smiths only once refer to a Jew—the unfortunate Lyon Levi or Levy, who committed suicide by flinging himself over the London Monument. He was a merchant of Haydon Square, and the newspapers of January 19, 1810, record the event as having occurred on the previous day. It is not surprising that the incident should be fresh in men’s minds when the Smiths wrote three years later. For after an interval of thirty-seven years, we again find an allusion to it in the Ingoldsby Legends. Levi was neither the first nor the last to precipitate himself from the summit of Wren’s column; eventually the top was encaged, to bar others from a similar temptation.

It was remarked above that the Rejected Addresses were absolutely free from anti-Jewish gibes. Impossible would it have been for the Smiths to have acted otherwise. Horace, in particular, was an ardent admirer of Richard Cumberland, writer of The Jew, which at the end of the eighteenth century did so much to rehabilitate the Jews in English good-will. We can see Horace Smith’s tendency, negatively, in one of his other poems. In the “Culprit and the Judge,” he deals with a case of coin-clipping in medieval France. As with all of Horace’s verses, it is full of good points. The judge denounced as profanation the crime of filing the similitude of good King Pepin, and ordered the offender to be punished with decapitation. This is the clever reply of the culprit:

“As to offending powers divine,”
The culprit cried,—“be nothing said:
Yours is a deeper guilt than mine.
I took a portion from the head
Of the King’s image; you, oh fearful odds!
Strike the whole head at once from God’s!”

One wonders whether the author had ever heard of the closely parallel idea of the ancient Rabbi, who denounced the murderer as one who diminished the divine image in which man had been made. Observe, however, how Horace Smith refrains from making cheap capital out of the joke by describing the offender as a Jew. Smith knew the truth too well. He knew that, though some Jews were given to coin-clipping, there were many offenders who were not Jews. It is absolutely characteristic of Horace Smith that he should have refrained from libelling all Jews for the sins of some.

Horace Smith was, as already suggested, actuated in his philo-Semitism by knowledge. And this is the reason why, though his brother James wrote some of the best of the parodies in Rejected Addresses, this present article deals less with him than with Horace. For that the latter knew and understood Judaism can be demonstrated by the clearest evidence. In 1831 he published a prose volume, which ought to be better known to English Jews than it is. The title is “Festivals, Games, and Amusements, Ancient and Modern.” The second chapter deals with the ancient Jews. It reveals an almost perfect insight into the Jewish conception of life. Only one or two passages require amendment to make it quite perfect. I need not expound, it will suffice to quote a single passage:

“It is worthy of remark that the government he (Moses) established, the only one claiming a divine author, was founded on the most democratical and even levelling principles. It was a theocratical commonwealth, having the Deity Himself for its King. Agriculture was the basis of the Mosaic polity; all the husbandsmen were on a footing of perfect equality; riches conferred no permanent preeminence; there was neither peasantry nor nobility, unless the Levites may be considered a sort of priestly aristocracy, for they were entitled by their birth to certain privileges. But this is foreign to our purpose. The most distinguishing features of the government were the vigilant, the most anxious provisions made for the interests, enjoyments, and festivals of the nation; and that enlarged wisdom and profound knowledge of human nature, which led the inspired founder of the Hebrew commonwealth to exalt and sanctify the pleasures of the people by uniting them with religion, while he confirmed and endeared religion by combining it with all the popular gratifications.”

When Sir Walter Scott saw the verses attributed to him in Rejected Addresses, he exclaimed: “I certainly must have written this myself, though I forget on what occasion.” Some of us might say the same of certain of the phrases in the passage just quoted. The joyousness of Judaism has not been asserted with more sureness of touch by any Jewish writer than it was by Horace Smith. In another part of his book, he misconceived the attitude of the Pentateuch to the non-Jew, but otherwise he well understood Moses and the Law.

PART IV

Part IV
BYRON’S “HEBREW MELODIES”

No selection from Byron’s poetry is complete unless it contain some of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Matthew Arnold included five of the twenty-three pieces; Bulwer Lytton adopted them all. Swinburne, it is true, gave us a volume of selections without a Hebrew melody in it, but curiously enough he admits the verses beginning: “They say that Hope is happiness,” which, it would seem, were intended for the melodies, though they do not appear among them. Nathan duly adds the lines to his collection, where they form the last item of the fourth and final “Number.” The musician also includes “Francesca,” and, on the other hand, omits the “Song of Saul before his Last Battle.”

The “Melodies” first came out with settings by the Jewish musician, Isaac Nathan. The tunes, partly derived from the Synagogue, were not well chosen; hence, though the poems have survived, the settings are forgotten. In the same year (1815), John Murray also published the verses without the music. Before consenting to this step, Byron wrote to Nathan for permission to take it. He wished, he said, to oblige Mr. Murray, but “you know, Nathan, it is against all good fashion to give and take back. I therefore cannot grant what is not at my disposal.” Nathan readily consented, and the volume of poems was issued with this Preface: “The subsequent poems were written at the request of the author’s friend, the Hon. D. Kinnaird, for a selection of Hebrew melodies, and have been published with the music arranged by Mr. Braham and Mr. Nathan.” In point of fact, Braham had nothing to do with the musical arrangement. Though his name is associated with Nathan’s on the title page of the original edition, it is removed in the reprints.

TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF BYRON’S “HEBREW MELODIES”

It has been said above that the musical setting has not retained its hold on public taste. The Rev. Francis L. Cohen (in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. ix, p. 179) speaks of it as having “deservedly sunk into oblivion.” I have recently had several of them played over to me, and my verdict is the same as Mr. Cohen’s. In themselves the tunes are sometimes good enough, Maoz Zur appears among them. But the words and the airs rarely fit, and Nathan lost chances by ignoring the Sephardic music. Nathan’s contemporaries had, however, a higher opinion of the work. Perhaps it was because the composer sang his songs so well; Braham does not seem to have included them in his repertoire. But Nathan’s auditors were charmed by his renderings. Byron himself was most moved by “She Walks in Beauty”—to a modern ear Nathan’s is a commonplace and inappropriate setting—and “he would not unfrequently join in its execution.” The verses were really written for the tunes, and the poet often consulted the musician as to the style and metre of the stanzas. Nathan (in his Fugitive Pieces, 1829), records many conversations during the progress of the joint work. He tells us, for instance, how Byron refused to alter the end of “Jephtha’s Daughter.” As Nathan read the Scripture, and as many others also read it, Jephthah’s daughter did not perish as a consequence of her father’s vow; but Byron observed: “Do not seek to exhume the lady.” On another occasion, Nathan was anxious to know what biblical passages were in the poet’s mind when he wrote some of the verses, such as “O snatch’d away in beauty’s bloom!” Byron vaguely answered: “Every mind must make its own reference.” The local color of the poems, besides their substance, is in fact sometimes at fault. “Each flower the dews have lightly wet,” is not a Palestinian touch; the dews there are remarkable for their heaviness.

At this point let us for a moment interrupt Nathan’s reminiscences of Byron himself, and cite what he tells us of another famous poet’s appreciation of the “Melodies.” “When the Hebrew melodies were first published,” says Nathan, “Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, honoured me with a visit at my late residence in Poland Street. I sang several of the melodies to him—he repeated his visit, and requested that I would allow him to introduce his lady and his daughter. They came together, when I had the pleasure of singing to them ‘Jephtha’s Daughter,’ and one or two more of the favourite airs: they entered into the spirit of the music with all the true taste and feeling so peculiar to the Scotch.” Another admirer of Nathan’s singing of the melodies was Lady Caroline Lamb, herself the author of what the conventions of the period would have termed “elegant verses.” Once she wrote to Nathan: “I am, and have been, very ill; it would perhaps cure me if you could come and sing to me ‘Oh Mariamne’—now will you? I entreat you, the moment you have this letter come and see me.” The same lady translated for him a Hebrew elegy which he wrote on the death of his wife. Nathan must obviously have been an amiable companion and a charming renderer of his own music, or he would not have gained the applause of these distinguished judges.

As has been seen from the conversations recorded above, Byron and Nathan became very intimate in the course of their collaboration over the “Hebrew Melodies.” It was this work that brought them together, though they were contemporaries at Cambridge about 1805, Byron being a student at Trinity College, and Nathan a pupil at Solomon Lyon’s Jewish school in Cambridge town. But they naturally did not become acquainted then. Douglas Kinnaird (according to Mr. Prothero) introduced them to one another. Kinnaird was Byron’s banker and Cambridge friend. This mention of Mr. Prothero reminds me that in his edition of Byron’s Letters, he cites a note written by the poet to thank Nathan for a “seasonable bequest” of a parcel of matsos. Byron must have grown very attached to Nathan. An officious friend of the poet exhorted the musician to bring the melodies out in good style, so that his lordship’s name “might not suffer from scantiness in their publication.” Byron overheard the remark, and on the following evening said to Nathan: “Do not suffer that capricious fool to lead you into more expense than is absolutely necessary; bring out the book to your own taste. I have no ambition to gratify, beyond that of proving useful to you.” The poet was, indeed, so indignant that he generously offered to share in the cost of production, an offer which Nathan as generously declined.

Readers of the “Hebrew Melodies” must have been struck by the appearance of two poems based on Psalm 137. Byron first wrote: “We sate down and wept by the waters,” and later on another version beginning: “In the valley of waters we wept.” Byron himself observed the duplication, and wished to suppress the former copy. It is well that he yielded to Nathan’s importunities, for the first version is assuredly the finer. But the incident shows the close connection between the verses and the music. For Byron ended the discussion with these words: “I must confess I give a preference to my second version of this elegy; and since your music differs so widely from the former, I see no reason why it should not also make its public appearance.”

Such being the close bond between poet and musician, it is all the more regrettable that the latter did not make a more competent use of his opportunity. A better fate befell the earlier collaboration which (in 1807) resulted in Thomas Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—a title which suggested that given to Byron’s series. Stevenson served Moore better than Nathan was able to serve Byron. Yet it seems a pity to leave things in this condition. Such poems as those already alluded to—and such others as “Saul,” the “Vision of Belshazzar,” and the “Destruction of Sennacherib”—all bear the clearest marks of their design; they were written to be sung, not merely to be read or recited. Jeffrey spoke of their sweetness; Lytton of their depth of feeling; Nathan himself realized that “Oh! weep for those” reaches the acme of emotional sympathy for persecuted Israel. Here, then, there is a chance for a modern Jewish musician. S. Mandelkern, in 1890, gave us a spirited translation of the verses into the Hebrew language. Let a better artist than Nathan now translate them musically into the Hebrew spirit.

COLERIDGE’S “TABLE TALK”

Coleridge was not master of his genius; his genius was master of him. In one place he speaks of the midrashic fancies about the state of our first parents as “Rabbinic dotages”; in another he laments, with Schelling, that these same rabbinic stories are neglected, and proceeds in his periodical, The Friend, to quote several with obvious approval. Again, he writes in one passage of the “proverbial misanthropy and bigotry” of Pharisaism; then, in another, he asserts, on the authority of Grotius, that the “Lord’s Prayer” was a selection from the liturgy of the Synagogue.

The truth is that a large part of Coleridge’s work is of the nature of table talk. His relative indeed published the poet’s “Table Talk,” but a good deal else in Coleridge belongs to the same category. His thoughts are, for the most part, obiter dicta, stray jottings, often stating profound truths, often expressing sheer nonsense. On the whole, he was not unkind to the Jews. He delivered many lectures on Shakespeare, but he never spoke on the Merchant of Venice. He alludes with contempt to the incident of the pound of flesh. Jacob, it is true, he regards as “a regular Jew” because of his trickiness; but he hastens to take the sting out of the remark by adding: “No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel.”

Throughout we find, in Coleridge’s remarks on the Jews and Judaism, the same mixture of conventional views and original judgments. He notes the theory that the Jews were destined to “remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing out the doctrine of the unity of God,” but spoils the compliment by the comment: “The religion of the Jew is, indeed, a light; but it is the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.” He can see in the Jew only love of money, yet he always found Jews “possessed of a strong national capacity for metaphysical discussions.”

The last remark points to his personal familiarity with Jews. This was actually the case. “I have had,” he says, “a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money from them.” He records several conversations with Jews, and does not hesitate to admit that he mostly got the worst of the argument. He argued with one Jew about conversion, and he cites the Jew’s answer: “Let us convert Jews to Judaism first”—an epigram which has been a good deal repeated in other forms since 1830, when Coleridge first recorded it. On one occasion he accosted an “Old Clothes” man, and in a hectoring tone exclaimed: “Why can’t you pronounce your trade cry clearly, why must you utter such a grunt?” The Jew answered: “Sir, I can say ‘Old Clothes’ as well as you can, but if you had to say it ten times a minute, for an hour, you would say, ‘Ogh clo’’ as I do now,” and so he marched off. Coleridge confesses that he “felt floored.” He was so much confounded by the justice of his retort, that, to cite his own words again: “I followed, and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.”