ASPECTS OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

BY A QUARTERLY REVIEWER

WITH A MAP

23

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1902

PREFACE

This book is reprinted, with alterations and considerable additions, from the article on "Zionism and Anti-Semitism," which I contributed to the Quarterly Review, April 1902. I am glad to take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to the editor and to the proprietor of that periodical for the necessary permission which they have kindly conceded.

My chief object in expanding and republishing the essay has been to make an impartial survey of the Jewish question in Europe. All the books and pamphlets—and they are many—which have been written in various languages on the subject err by the common defect of narrowing the outlook. The writer in each instance sets out to prove something, and he selects his facts in order to suit his conclusion. It is natural enough that Jewish writers should seek to justify their race, and it is comprehensible at least

It is obvious that, though these opinions may co-exist, they are not compatible. You cannot assimilate a population which is conspiring with the Turks for a grant of territory in Palestine. You cannot open churches for a people whom you turn back from your ports.

You cannot expect the Jews to develop their best powers peacefully, amid simultaneous shouts of "Be Christians!" "Be Aryans!" "Be Zionists!" and "Be off!"

My belief in the foredoomed failure of neo-Zionism, my objection to its leaders' readiness to "make capital," in Mr Zangwill's words, of the "longing for Palestine" (as if to say that

In preparing this little book for the Press,

I have had the advantage of the help of the Rev. Isidore Harris, M.A., editor of the "Jewish Year Book," in reading the proofs and compiling the bibliography, and I am further indebted to other friends and correspondents for assistance and advice. If the book does something to promote the cause of Jewish progress and reform, which the writer has sincerely at heart, his purpose will be thoroughly fulfilled, and his debt to those who have helped him will be discharged.

London, September 1902.

CONTENTS

ASPECTS OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM AND SOME SOLUTIONS

In the long annals of Israel the calendar is marked with red days and with black. Reddest of the red, for instance, is the glorious Fifteenth of Nissan—the spring festival of liberty—the day of the Redemption from Egypt by the hand of Moses the Deliverer. This, the earliest feast of freedom, is still religiously celebrated by the Jews with the fine old hymn of liberation:

"I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. . . The Lord shall reign for ever and ever."

A black day is the fateful Ninth of Ab (corresponding to a date in August), which the Jews observe as the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Nebuzaradan, chief of the guard to Nebuchadnezzar. The fast appointed for this date is

no longer, we believe, universal in Israel, though the Jew repeats the words of Jeremiah:

"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?... For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets."

Time has added to the record. February the 4th, for instance, is marked in the calendar of English Jews as Resettlement Day—the supposed anniversary of Cromwell's

Time is still adding to the record. The last day marked with black in the almanac of Israel is perhaps the blackest of all because it comes so late in his annals. At the end of the

¹ New York: Funk & Wagnal.

turbulent priest. Stöcker has been unfrocked, and the broadcloth Socialism, which his preachments established, is no longer an engine of much political force. But the mischief was done. Stöcker's influence went to found the party of Christian Socialists, which was to "win the masses of the people to the Conservative programme" by a judicious admixture of socialistic ingredients.

Or take the similar account of the matter from the first supplementary volume to the "Encyclopædia Britannica":—

"Anti-Semitism," declares the writer, "is, then, exclusively a question of European politics, and its origin is to be found not in the long struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and medieval history, but in the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of the Jews in the middle of the 19th century. . . . Towards the end of 1879 it spread with sudden fury over the whole of Germany. This outburst, at a moment when no new financial scandals or other illustrations of Semitic demoralisation and domination were before the public, has never been fully explained. It is impossible to doubt, however, that the secret springs of the new agitation were more or less directly supplied by Prince Bismarck himself. . . . He began to recognise in anti-Semitism a means of 'dishing' the Judaized liberals, and to his creatures who assisted him in his press campaigns he dropped significant hints in this sense (Busch, Bismarck, ii. 453-54; iii. 16).

He even spoke of a new Kulturkampf against the Jews (ibid., ii. p. 484). How these hints were acted upon has not been revealed, but it is sufficiently instructive to note that the final breach with the National Liberals took place in July, 1879, and that it was immediately followed by a violent revival of the anti-Semitic agitation. . . . In October an anti-Semitic league was founded in Berlin and Dresden. . . . The leadership of the agitation was now definitely assumed by a man who combined with social influence, oratorical power, and inexhaustible energy, a definite scheme of social regeneration and an organisation for carrying it out. This man was Adolf Stoecker (born 1835), one of the Court Preachers. . . . The Conservatives supported him, partly to satisfy their old grudges against the Liberal bourgeoisie, and partly because Christian Socialism, with its anti-Semitic appeal to ignorant prejudice, was likely to weaken the hold of the Social Democrats on the lower classes."

To the black days, accordingly, in the memorial calendar of Israel, July the 30th, 1878, is now indelibly added. Twenty years earlier, almost to a day, Baron Rothschild, as we have seen, had taken his seat in the British House of Commons, thus ending, for England at least, the long history of religious disability. And now the interminable cycle was renewed: anti-Semitism was born in Germany. We may minimise the movement as we will, and carefully discriminate between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, between Stöcker's propaganda of

Christian Socialism, involving a boycott of financiers, and Torquemada's programme of Christianisation, involving the burning of heretics; yet the fact remains that at the opening of the twentieth century, as at the opening of the sixteenth, there is antagonism towards the Jews, varying locally in its degree of intensity, from the active, legislative persecution in Roumania, to the Commission on Alien Immigration, demanded by the conditions in this country. From the extreme south-east to the extreme north-west of Europe, the path of religious liberty is crossed by that shadow. In the careful words of the editor of "The Jewish Year Book":

"The dawn of the twentieth century finds the Jews in many countries groaning under disabilities . . . which seem to mock at all ideas of human progress. As one reads of them, one almost fancies that time must have moved backward instead of forward. . . . For the unpleasant truth is forced upon us that a large portion of Europe is still plunged in the darkness of the Middle Ages."

Why is this? Why are the Jews, who still worship the God of their fathers, subject to this terrible fate? Why, when they have been released from their religious ghetto, are they thrust back into a ghetto of racial segregation? Why, when they have hardly relaxed the rigour of their fast for Zion, are synagogues fired to-day

by riotous crowds in Germany, Algeria, and elsewhere? Why, when they still observe the day of emancipation from Pharaoh, has a new Moses arisen with the same promise as of old, to lead them out of the house of bondage into a land flowing with milk and honey, as in the new Zionism, with Dr Herzl as its prophet?

^<sup>1 Hodder & Stoughton, 1900.

this solution is to be is explained with chorybantic touches on page 179:—

The "final and only possible solution" is postponed, it will be observed, to a somewhat indefinite date, and, leaving Mr Baron on his watch-tower, we turn for counsel to Mr Arnold White. It was his lofty purpose, he tells us in publishing "The Modern Jew," "to make the people of England think." They are to think to the following effect:—

"England," he writes, "is in this dilemma: she is either compelled to abandon her secular practice of complacent acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these shores, or to face the certainty of the Jews becoming stronger, richer, and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the Press being captured as it has been captured on the Continent, and the national life stifled by the substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have made the Empire. . . . The conclusion, therefore, seems obvious, that either the situation must be dealt with, i.e. by Europe as a whole, or an alarming outbreak against the race, the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption, will result, and the clock of civilisation will thus be thrown back for a hundred years. . . . The Jewish question, however difficult, is not insoluble."

Here, again, a solution is held possible, and at a date not quite as remote as that selected by Mr Baron. But Mr White reaches his conclusion through a series of premisses which cannot be accepted without demur. The contingencies which he states as certainties, by

^<sup>1 Heineman & Co., 1899.

a common rhetorical device, are, if not fallacious, at least open to argument. Will Jews become "stronger, richer, and vastly more numerous"? Have they "captured the Press on the Continent"? Is the British Press likely to be captured? Do Jews "stifle national life" by introducing "material aims"? And were "the Englishmen who have made the Empire" moved by "unselfish and imperial objects"? Mr White himself, in another journalistic capacity, has something different to say at this point. And all these points, it is to be noted, when it comes to an attack on the Jews, are chosen as unassailable first truths.

Next, we pass from the special pleader to a book vouched for by the Toynbee Hall mark. Mr James Bryce, who contributes the preface to "The Jew in London," states that one of its authors, "though fair and even friendly, has no special personal ground of sympathy with the Jewish race or religion," and that the other, though a Jew, is "sufficiently detached and independent to perceive the defects of his nation [race?], and sufficiently candid to admit these defects." And the

^"The Jew in London: A Study of Racial Character and Present-day Conditions. Being two essays prepared for the Toynbee trustees by C. Russell, B.A., and H. S. Lewis, M.A., with an Introduction by Canon Barnett, and a Preface by the Right Hon. James Bryce, M.P. With a new Map by Geo. E. Arkell." Fisher Unwin, 1900.

claim to impartiality, which Mr Bryce advances for the volume, is repeated by Canon Barnett, who states in his introduction that "the object of these essays is to assist their readers to a right answer, and therefore to a right policy." The reader may pray with Mr Baron, or he may curse with Mr White; to what emotional or intellectual exercise, we wonder, do the Toynbee essayists invite him, in the solution of the Jewish question and the discovery of the "right answer."

"The Whitechapel problem," declares Mr Russell, "turns out to be European in scope, and it is not much less bewildering in its inner complexity than in the immense range over which it spreads itself. Besides being part of a larger question, it contains a multitude of smaller ones, and opens up a field of inquiry in which racial, industrial, and religious questions are bound up with one another and refuse to be dissociated."

After this exordium, which rather takes away the breath, his conclusion reads a trifle tamely:

"There is only the choice of going forward or backward. . . . Reform and Zionism are the broad alternatives. . . . It is easy to understand the antipathy which the great body of Jews naturally feel towards the prospect of assimilation. They have too much pride of race to relish the idea of complete absorption. But (at least from the Gentile standpoint) it is no less hard to see the

justification than the practicability of a policy of continued separatism. There is doubtless a loss in every departure from historic traditions; but if these traditions have outlived their value and purpose, or even acquired a mischievous tendency, the loss may be more than counterbalanced. It is pitiful also, no doubt, to witness the decay of a religion which has gone far in many lives to transfigure, or at least to render tolerable, the harsh conditions of slum life. . . . On the whole, if the gains and losses of assimilation could be reckoned against one another, there seems little doubt on which side the balance would be found."

Starting from different points, and aiming at different goals, our authors accordingly agree that the Jewish question is international, to be solved by a concert of the Powers acting on the watchword of "Aut disce aut discede!" The Jews are to disappear—by religious conversion, according to Mr Baron; by legislative exclusion, according to Mr White; by social assimilation, according to Mr Russell. But go they must, if England is to be saved.

CHAPTER II

ZIONISM AS A SOLUTION

It is remarkable that a section of the Jews has reached the same conclusion by a different road. In the eyes of non-Jewish writers, whom we need not pursue through the viler alleys of anti-Semitism, the "problem" is that the Jews are at once too rich and too poor. In Jewish eyes, the problem is how to escape persecution. It is just twenty years ago, in September 1882, that an anonymous pamphlet (by Dr Leon Pinsker), since translated into English under the title of "Self-Emancipation," as No. 1 of the "Jewish National Series," laid down as a first principle of faith and practice:—

"The international Jewish question must undergo a national solution. Our national regeneration can take place, of course, only very slowly. But we must take the first step, and our successors will have to follow. . . . The national regeneration of the Jews must be initiated by a congress of Jewish notables. . . . As matters stand, the financial execution of the undertaking does not present unsurmountable difficulties."

its integrity as a fifth-rate buffer State—the wildest notion, to our thinking, which an ambitious journalist has ever based on a neglect of political facts and an indifference to religious belief. For the Herzl variant of Zionism, though it successfully deludes a heterogeneous crowd of foreign enthusiasts, is an unfortunate compromise between two quite opposite ideas.

craft. There is not the least disposition on the part of the great powers of Europe to see the wealth and talent of Israel pass into the hands of the Sultan, nor yet to see the Holy Land invaded by a crowd of Jews, still less to complicate the Eastern question by planting another weak State in that troublesome ward of invalids.

"The departure of the Jews," he writes, in his introduction to the "Jewish State," "will involve no economic disturbances, no crises, no persecutions; in fact, the countries they abandon will revive to a new period of prosperity. There will be an inner migration of Christian citizens into the positions evacuated by Jews. . . . The Jews will leave as honoured friends, and if some of them return, they will receive the same favourable welcome and treatment at the hands of civilised nations as is accorded to all foreign visitors. Their exodus will have no resemblance to a flight, for it will be a well-regulated expedition under control of public opinion."

A flight, accordingly, which is no flight, an abandonment and an evacuation—this is the modern rendering of the Messianic hope; instead of Gentiles coming to the light, Dr Herzl offers the pretty picture of Jews content, like foreign visitors, with a "favourable welcome and treatment." We have called this a travesty of Judaism. But it is worse than satire—it is treason. Dr Herzl and those who think with him are traitors to the history of the Jews, which they misread and misinterpret. They are themselves part-authors of the anti-Semitism which they profess to slay. For how can the European countries which the Jews propose to "abandon" justify their retention of the Jews? and why should civil equality have been won by the strenuous exertion of the Jews, if the Jews themselves are to be the first to "evacuate" their

position, and to claim the bare courtesy of "foreign visitors"? We recall, perforce, the debates in the House of Commons of 1833. Lord Macaulay, speaking in committee on behalf of the removal of disabilities, said:

"Another objection which has been made to this motion is that the Jews look forward to the coming of a great deliverer, to their return to Palestine, to the rebuilding of their temple, to the revival of their ancient worship, and that, therefore, they will always consider England, not their country, but merely as their place of exile. But surely, sir, it would be the grossest ignorance of human nature to imagine that the anticipation of an event which is to happen at some time altogether indefinite . . . can ever occupy the minds of men to such a degree as to make them regardless of what is near and present and certain. . . . Are we to exclude all millenarians from Parliament and office. . . ?"

Fourscore years, a strong man's lifetime, make a short instalment of the Millennium, but if Dr Herzl's plan for the political restoration of the Jews has to be taken into serious account, then Macaulay was wrong, and his "grossly ignorant" opponents were right in their view of human nature.

But the scheme is foredoomed to failure. Dr Herzl has traded—we know no better word—on the resources of prophecy. Zion is a magical name in the ears of the ignorant victims of Russian and Roumanian persecution; and though

their Jews as strangers; and, as to the interviews with the Sultan of Turkey which Dr Herzl has enjoyed, it is already fairly certain that his Majesty has been smiling in his sleeve. But the Congress has been founded, and it is addressed each year by "impassioned rhetoricians," whose structure in the clouds is already beginning to reveal little signs of rifts and flaws. We may be permitted to quote the picturesque account of such a gathering from the reporter's pen of Mr Zangwill, who, as a friend of the movement, if called as a witness on the other side, will give evidence of supreme importance. He writes:

"As no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank-and-file fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions—types that once sought to slough their Jewish skins and mimic, on Darwinian principles, the colours of the environment, but that now, with some tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood in Zion—they are come from many places; from far lands and from near; from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from the great European capitals; thickest from the pales of persecution, in rare units from the free realms of England and America—a strange phantasmagoria of faces,—"

and, it may fairly be added, a strange foundation of a State. Pole, Hungarian, Roumanian, 11.]

Frenchman, Dutchman, German, Russian, Egyptian, Swede—how shall these be welded together into a single republic, pent closely between the desert and the sea? "As an attempt to realise the ideal of Judaism," wrote Mr Oswald John Simon in the Nineteenth Century, September 1898, "the programme formulated at Basle presents the spectacle of the most contemptible, if not the most grotesque, species of idealism which was ever laid before the remnant of the descendants of a great nation."

We need not discuss the financial aspect of this matter, which reposes in the hands of the Jewish Colonial Trust, with a Council overwhelmingly composed of foreign and Oriental names. Affiliated with the Central Committee is an English Zionist Federation, of which Sir Francis Montefiore is President, and which counts more than seventy branches in England and Ireland. But the great bulk of English Jewry has rigidly kept aloof. They, at least, do not subscribe to the objects of the Federation, which are (1) the acquisition of a legally safeguarded home in Palestine for the Jewish people; (2) the fostering of the National Idea in Israel. Or, rather, they do not confuse these two wholly different aims. Legal safeguards, dependent on the goodwill of a Mohammedan prince, form a miserable realisation of a national

idea hugged through centuries of oppression and glowing with fervid imagination. The mission of Israel in exile is the measure of a larger hope than the cleverness of Dr Herzl has compassed.

CHAPTER III

THE JEWISH QUESTION IN THE LIGHT OF JEWISH ETHICS AND HISTORY

cui bono argument refutes it. What has the English Jew to gain by keeping up this imperial tie with members of his race in other lands? Or is this unselfish sense of responsibility to the claims of a common race and creed the expression of the "material aims" which Mr White apprehends will corrupt the unselfish imperial Briton?

stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt"—the precept of civil and religious equality is based on the strongest appeal to historical tradition.

The Whites and Russells, who are bewildered by the "inner complexity" and the immense range of the Jewish question, should go back to the origin of Israel and trace his gradual descent. There they might find, to their discomfiture, that the Jew who practises his faith, so far from threatening England with the polysyllabic evils of the political economist's vocabulary, is trained in the principles for which alone the empire is worth preserving; and that, rather than persuade the Jew to intermarry and apostatise, they should exert every effort to induce him by kindness—as in the past by hatred—to maintain the tenets of his religion, and to use them, after centuries of repression, for their original purposes of State.

We have seen that four separate solutions have been proposed for the Jewish problem, with the one feature in common that they mend the Jews of Europe by ending them. A policy of international suppression has been worked out in both camps. Mr Baron would convert the Jews, Mr Russell would absorb them, Mr White would exclude them, and Dr Herzl would lead them out. We believe that each of these four solutions is wrong. They err by their common

neglect of the basis of the Jewish question in Jewish ethics and history. Character is ethics modified by history; and no racial or national policy can succeed which works without reference to character. If the Jew is an exile in the land of his birth, a stranger in the country of his allegiance, as the anti-Semites and the Zionists reiterate, the fault is not his, but theirs. It was Bismarck, we believe, who said, "Every country has the Jews it deserves." The Jew is largely what the Christian has made him. Before his God there are no strangers; and, into whatever language of political or economic science this old religious maxim be translated, it is yet a maxim which should make us pause before we persecute the Jew for practising the principles of Moses.

Thus we begin to pass from the heated controversies of those who would "solve" the Jewish question out of hand into the serener region of the ethics of Judaism, a treatise on which, by Professor Lazarus of Berlin, is before us in its American dress. Mr Arnold White assures us that the quality which he terms "aloofness" "is at the root of everything to which the nations of Christendom can legitimately object"; and he bases that quality of the Jews on a combination of "the pride of race, the teachings of the Talmud, and the consciousness of consecration to the mission

with which they have been entrusted." Mr White's argument in this passage is so curious that we venture to quote it at length. He divides the Jews of England "naturally into four classes":—

"First, there is the Jewish aristocracy, a type unrepresented in America or in Russia. Patrician Jews differ from their Christian peers mostly by more strenuous and uniform patriotism, by more systematic and larger benevolence.

. . . Invitations to the great Jewish houses are eagerly sought; to be included in their circle of friends is in itself a cachet; exclusion or expulsion is a social calamity. There is one feature, however, in the society encountered in Jewish palaces—one never meets a Jew unless it be an aristocrat. The connection maintained between the Hebrew patrician and his co-religionists of the bourgeoisie is either official or philanthropic."

Thus our authority on Anglo-Jewish sociology in connection with the first-grade Jew. We do not wish to be squeamish about the tone that he adopts, but in his exaggerated deference to the Hebrew patricians in their palaces there is at least a touch of Uriah. Moreover, as to the contact between the Jewish upper and middle classes, we fail to see Mr White's point. The bourgeoisie of any religion rises in the social coale precisely by the same means. It is absurd to discuss such a matter as a question of race creed,

"The second class into which the modern Jew naturally falls differs little from the patricians except in their resolute refusal to permit their daughters to intermarry with Englishmen. The pride of race, the teachings of the Talmud, and the consciousness of consecration to the mission with which they have been entrusted, combine to maintain, in highly-educated religious Jews, the aloofness which is at the root of everything to which the nations of Christendom can legitimately object. To this class of Jews belongs the highly-educated and anglicised Hebrew, who has practically relinquished his faith without abandoning the racial characteristics of which I shall speak later on. . . . The whole of the class of which I am speaking are not only notoriously better citizens than the average Englishman, but they are sedulous in the fulfilment of their duties to their poor co-religionists."

Writing with no slight knowledge of the Jewish community in London, we confess that this description perplexes us. What is a "highly educated religious Jew . . . who has practically relinquished his faith"? How can Talmudic lore and missionary zeal operate in the mind of an apostate? Why, if Mr White believes his own conclusion, as to the superior citizenship of the Jews, should he seek to destroy the means by which this class has been developed? And who constitutes Mr White the apologist of Christendom? We omit his third and fourth classes, simply because he seems to think that

the benevolent patrician and the highly-educated bourgeois "growed," like Topsy, in their palaces and homes. That all English Jews were once immigrants, and that the immigrants of to-day may be the aristocrats of to-morrow, dispensers of the "cachet" and of the "calamity" in Mr Arnold White's social scheme, is a sociological truism which escapes his attention. But taking the critic's "legitimate objection" in the form in which he defines it, and remembering Mr White's part in the work of the Alien Immigration Commission, we must examine this quality of "aloofness." There will be little difficulty in showing that the argument is rooted in ignorance, and grafted on an historical fallacy.

We fail to find this "aloofness" in the origins of Israel; and, if the quality is acquired, it is worth while to ask why and when. Judaism, ancient and modern, is a system with the seeds of universalism. This is the first point to note. The system is kept up through the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Talmud with unremitting force. We have quoted part of the evidence for the civil and religious equality of the stranger in the Mosaic code. There was no "aloofness" in that conception. Not even privileges of blood were efficacious against the golden rule: "And if a stranger shall sojourn among you, and will beep the passover unto the Lord; according to

the ordinance of the passover, and according to the manner thereof, so shall he do: ye shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the land." Thus the author of the Book of Numbers, to which we have referred above. The idolatrous and immoral practices of the neighbours of the Jews dictated a foreign policy of the protectionist type; but, as Renan remarks, the idea of the Jewish religion "is universal to the last degree"; and Professor Lazarus acutely adds, "Israel had to be particularistic in order to formulate and hold up the universal ideal."

Even in his joys he shared alike. "Thou shalt rejoice," says the author of Deuteronomy, "in every good thing which the Lord thy God hath given unto thee . . . thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you." In the reconstruction of the fallen fortunes of Israel in the prophetical writings, this idea was more strongly insisted on. Jeremiah was ordained "a prophet unto the nations"; and the new covenant was built, not merely on a national basis, but in the inward parts and in the heart, thus founding the ethical sanction on the common nature of man. God's house, said the second Isaiah, addressing the sons of the stranger, "shall be called an house of prayer for all people"; and the non-Jew was not to say, "The Lord hath utterly separated me from

"And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the

[CHAP.

stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord God." (Ezekiel xlvii. 22, 23.)

The Jews, we must remember, were in the majority, and could have imposed restrictions on property which even modern standards might conceivably condone. But the Jewish codes, as Dollinger notes, "were more favourable to strangers than those of any other people." Professor Lazarus adds, "Whenever the law makes provision for the poor"—and the Jewish poor law, from Moses to the London Board of Guardians, is supreme of its kind—"it includes the stranger."

Ι

So much in this place, though the theme might well be amplified, on the allegation of Jewish "aloofness"—an allegation which betrays complete ignorance of the elementary principles of Judaism. The Jew who lives up to his own principles, the Jew who is permitted to be free, is not in any sense likely to corrupt the "unselfish and imperial Briton." On the contrary, his ethical code, which he asks leave to practise, is based on those virtues. Unselfishness and imperialism are its corner-stones, and upon them is erected that

structure of civic excellence to which Mr Arnold White pays such ready homage. But Israel, the lawgiver to ideal commonwealths, ceased at an early age to be a polity; and we pass at this point to the historical aspect of the race, and to the development of its character and the modification of its ideals under the stress of exile and persecution. The Jews were never in doubt as to their abstract duty towards the land that entertained them. Allegiance might prove difficult in practice, but Jeremiah had clearly provided for the contingency of dispersion; and his precepts have a binding force.

"Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; build ye houses, and dwell in them: and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace." (Jeremiah xxix. 4-7).

In other words, Israel in exile was to identify himself with the country where he made his home and founded his family; and he might well have expected that his own humane atti-

tude towards strangers would be reflected on himself as a stranger. The teachers of national hospitality, though debarred by destiny from its exercise, might hope to enjoy its reciprocal benefit. We bring no reproach against "the nations of Christendom" for whom Mr White claims the merit of a legitimate objection to the "aloofness" of the Jews; but surely the fault of Israel is to be condoned if disillusion and disappointment have sharpened his self-protecting faculties, and engendered those traits of obsequiousness, self-seeking, and want of patriotism which are now laid to his charge as natural, not acquired characteristics. The habits may have become a second nature; but Israel recovers so quickly under kindly treatment that one should hesitate to say that his nature is permanently warped.

We are considering how the nation, whose Lawgiver and Prophets contemplated an independent State, has emerged from a long period of suppression. We shall not omit the defects that have been engendered; the most that we shall propose in that direction is to review them in the perspective of their causes. But before we enumerate Israel's faults, we may obey the teaching of the parable and look first for the beauties of the ghetto. The Jews did not choose to live there: if experience of its rigours has embittered them to some

extent; if they have deteriorated a little from the standard of their own prophetic writings, we should rather be surprised that the Jew who emerges from the ghetto after many generations preserves so much of the excellence of the days before religious persecution, and that, if some evil characteristics have been acquired, there are also further good and fair ones to be accounted to his credit.

to literature. Above the crowd of poets and poetasters who made the literary glory of Spain rises the name of Jehudah Halevi, of whom Graetz has justly said: "If ever Spain could be brought to lay aside its prejudices, and to desist from estimating its great men of history by the standard of the Church, Jehudah Halevi would occupy a place of honour in its Pantheon."

Seven centuries stretch between Halevi and Heine, but we mention them together because the German Jew in Paris was himself so keen an admirer of the Spanish Jew in long-ago Castile.

'Ah! he was the greatest poet,
Torch and starlight to his age,
Beacon light to his people;
Such a mighty and a wondrous
Pillar of poetic fire
Led the caravan of sorrow
Of his people Israel
Thro' the desert of their exile."

Thus Heine of Halevi, and the race to which both poets belonged, by sympathy as well as blood, might well do more to popularise the great Hebrew melodies of the Middle Ages. It is the language difficulty which is supreme, and it recurs again, centuries later (for the genius of the race is immortal) in another branch of literature—racy, vernacular, and peculiarly Jewish — which has sprung up like a flower

^"Zweitausend Jahr, a Kleinigkeit zu sagen!
Zweitausend Jahr gemattert, geschlagen!
Sieben un' siebezig finstere Dores
Gestoppt mit Zores, gefüllt mit Gseercs!
As ich wollt' nehmen derzaehlen jede Gseere,
Wollt' heunt nit gewe'n Ssimchas-Tore!
Nor das darf ich gar nit, es is sehr gut
Bei Jedem eingeschrieben in sein March, in sein Blut

Mir haben All's ausgehalten, All's aweggegeben, Unser Geld, unser Kowed, unser Gesund, un' Leben, Wie a Mal Chane ihre Kinder, die sieben— Far die heilige Tore, auf Parmet geschrieben.

"Un' itzt? Is' schon besser? Last män uns zufrieden? Hat män schon a Mal derkennt, as mir Jüden Senen äuch Menschen aso wie die Andern? Wellen mir nit mehr in der Welt arumwandern? Wet män sich auf uns mehr nit beklagen? Das weiss ich nit, das känn ich euch nit sagen, Eins weiss ich, es lebt noch der alter Gott oben, Die alte Tore unten, un' der alter Gläuben; Drum sorgt nit un' hofft auf Gott dem lieben Un' auf die heilige Tore, auf Parmet geschrieben."

Dr Wiener's prose version of these stanzas runs as follows:—

"Two thousand years, no small matter that! Two thousand years of torture and vexation! Seventy-seven gloomy generations surfeited with sorrows, filled with misfortunes! Were I to begin to tell all the persecutions, we should not have the Rejoicing of the Law to-day; but I need not do that, it is too well written in each man's marrow, in his blood. We have suffered all, given away all—our money, our honour, our health, our lives, as Hannah once her seven children—for the holy Law written upon parchment.

"And now? Is it better? Do they leave us in peace? Have they come to recognise that we Jews are also men like all others? Shall we no longer wander about in the world? Will they no longer complain of us? That I do not know, that I cannot tell you. Thus much I know: there still lives the old God.

above, the old Law below, and the old faith; therefore do not worry, and hope in the kind Lord and in the holy Law written upon parchment." 1

From Halevi to the ghetto poets of to-day Hebrew has been the mother tongue of Israel, and its use is perhaps responsible for the neglect of Jewish men of letters. But many of them have written in the languages of the countries where they happened to reside. Miss Emma Lazarus, Mrs Henry Lucas, Miss Nina Davis, and the late Amy Levy, are among recent writers of Jewish race who have enriched English literature with poetry of no slight merit. And it would be hard, in modern patriotic song, to find genuine patriotism and poetic feeling better combined than in the verses entitled "The Jewish Soldier," which Mrs Lucas published in the dark time of the recent war:—

"Mother England, Mother England, 'mid the thousands
Far beyond the sea to-day,
Doing battle for thy honour, for thy glory,
Is there place for us, a little band of brothers?
England, say!

^<sup>1 Except for the occasional pure or corrupt Hebraisms (Dores, Gseere, Ssimchas-Tore), the language in these verses, it will be seen, is quite as near to the German of Hanover or Berlin as is the dialect of Silesia, for example, as reproduced by Gerhart Hauptmann in his plays. The despised jargon is a literary language.

44 JEWISH ETHICS AND HISTORY [OHAP. 111.

• "Thou hast given us home and freedom, Mother England, Thou hast let us live again,
  • Free and fearless, 'midst thy free and fearless children, Sharing with them, as one people, grief and gladness, Joy and pain.
• "Now we Jews, we English Jews, O Mother England, Ask another boon of thee:
  • Let us share with them the danger and the glory; Where thy best and bravest lead, there let us follow, O'er the sea!
• "For the Jew has heart and hand, O Mother England,
  And they both are thine to-day—
  Thine for life and thine for death, yea, thine for ever!
  Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly?
  England, say!"

CHAPTER IV

PRESENT CONDITIONS

THE verses quoted from Mrs Henry Lucas at the close of the last chapter supply us with a fresh starting-point in our examination of the Jewish question. They state the reciprocal side of the Jewish question:

"Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly? England, say!"

It is the tragedy of Israel that the inhospitality of the nations has been accounted to him for a sin, and that he who knows the heart of a stranger should be charged with the crime of exclusiveness. Liberty, equality, fraternity—this cry is the breath of Jewish life. The ghetto walls were built round them, and the Jews pushed them down; painfully, slowly, brick by brick, muleted of a blood-sacrifice at every stage of their labours, the Jews destroyed the ghetto which their Christian hosts had

British Conservatives, and inspired them with the all-embracing ideal of civic rights for which they fought in South Africa.

"The ghetto," says the writer in the new Encyclopædia Britannica, "which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe."

^"The aloofness, which is at the root of everything to which the nations of Christendom can legitimately object."—Arnold White, "The Modern Jew," p. 6.

To the student of history it is clear that what the Jews have done in England they have still to do in other countries now. To the Jews themselves, we imagine, this obligation is a religious trust; it is a part of the divinely appointed mission which they are fulfilling in exite. For non-Jews, who miss the religious material, the political and historical sense must take its place. A policy of retreat from that

duty—the policy of Dr Herzl and the neo-Zionists—is a policy of cowardice and despair. This seems to us, on the evidence of the facts, the reply of history to Zionism. When the religious motive is superadded, we can conceive no more complete reply to prophets of Dr Herzl's type, who counsel a surrender to illiberalism; "for they prophesy falsely unto you in My name; I have not sent them, saith the Lord." If ever the purpose of history was written in letters that shine, it is written in the debt of England to the Jews, and in the obligation it entails on Jewish residents towards the land of their adoption.

We would not be accused of fatalism, much less of callousness or indifference, in respect to the sufferings of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. We disbelieve in heroic measures of despair, such as the several solutions that we have examined, but we thoroughly believe that some good may be effected by bringing influence to bear on the authority concerned, whether the Emperor Nicholas or King Charles, or the advisers of those monarchs. The Jewish community in England has not been idle in this respect. Taking the Roumanian problem, for example, a sheaf of pamphlets lies before us. Already, in 1872, Mr Israel Davis compiled for the Anglo-Jewish Association a "short statement" of the recent history and the then present

situation of the "Jews in Roumania." We quote a few sentences from this indictment of thirty years ago:—

"By various laws, decisions, and regulations (often in defiance of the constitution, as well as of the already violated convention) Jews were, by the year 1870, excluded from acquiring real property (even houses in towns), from the Roumanian bar, from rank in the army, educational appointments, medical posts, and the power to sell medicines. The area of employments open to them is now still more circumscribed. . . . In 1866 the era of violence began with the destruction of the synagogue at Bucharest by a mob. . . . In 1867 the Jews were violently and illegally arrested, and driven in herds to prison on the charge of vagrancy. . . . In 1869 the expulsion of the Jews from the rural districts (an idea conceived nineteen years before) was ruthlessly carried out. . . . Seven Powers—England, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey—have implicitly promised liberty and security to the Jews of Roumania. . . . And every one of the seven nations which joined in the Convention is bound to see that its promises be kept."

In 1879, when the Treaty of Berlin (1878) had been added to the Paris Convention of 1858, Dr Bluntschli, Privy Councillor, and Professor at the University of Heidelberg, published under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite, a "counsel's opinion" in the form of a pamphlet now before us, on "L'État Roumain et la Situation

légale des Juiss en Roumanie." In his preface to this exposition of the international law, the learned jurist declared:—

"L'histoire du développement général du droit européen m'a convaincu depuis longtemps, et l'étude des traités et des lois concernant la Roumanie m'a confermé dans cette conviction, que l'égalité réclamée ne saurait être légitimement refusée, si la Roumanie veut être entièrement reconnue comme état civilisé européen."

stated by Mr D. F. Schloss in the following terms:—

"To sum up the whole case, we may say briefly this: that the Roumanians treat the Jewish subjects of Roumania as outlaws, entitled to none of the rights, civil or political, of citizens; that the Roumanians have, by forbidding the Jews to engage in nearly every trade and profession, and by imposing the most vexatious restrictions upon the exercise by Jews of the few insignificant industries still left open to them, made it impossible for them to earn a livelihood; have in very many places expelled the Jewish inhabitants from their homes; have, by incessant acts of petty persecution, made the life of the Roumanian Jew a burden to him; and have done everything in their power to drive the Jews out of the country. . . . If the nations of Western Europe do not deem the wrongs and sufferings of oppressed humanity a sufficient ground for their interference, they may still, perhaps, be convinced that their own dignity is compromised when a condition imposed by themselves is violated openly and with impunity."

In 1893 Mr Arthur Cohen, K.C., then President of the Jewish Board of Deputies, and the late Right Hon. Sir Julian Goldsmid, then President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, jointly signed a letter to Lord Rosebery at the Foreign Office, which concluded as follows:—

^"The Roumanian Government have hitherto

contrived, by specious promises and hollow assurances, and by an utterly illusory Naturalisation Act, to evade the performance of the provisions of Article 44 of the Treaty of Berlin. . . . The Jews have waited with exemplary patience for their performance. Instead, however, of being endowed with the rights promised them, they have had fresh disabilities imposed upon them which have made their lives a burden. We venture to submit that the time has now arrived when Roumania should be required to fulfil the engagements which she contracted with the Great Powers. We cannot believe that Great Britain, as one of these Powers, is prepared to abandon the principle of Civil and Religious Liberty."

Lord Rosebery, in reply, transmitted a copy of a report from her late Majesty's Minister at Bucharest, which affirmed the views of the Roumanian Government, well known to the petitioners, and described by them as evasive, hollow, specious, and illusory.

All this is not ancient history. In 1901 Messrs Macmillan published in French a work by M. Edmond Simeons, entitled "Les Juifs en Roumanie depuis le Traité de Berlin jusqu'à ce jour. Les Lois et leurs Conséquences." It is a weighty arraignment of facts, incontrovertible in themselves, and temperately stated, displaying "la situation intolérable qui a été faite aux Juifs roumains par ce même traité qui devait pour toujours assurer leur bonheur." Less

valuable, but not to be overlooked, is the pamphlet (dated February 1902) of M. Bernard Lazare, a French publicist, on "L'Oppression des Juifs dans l'Europe Orientale: Les Juifs en Roumanie." For to-day, in 1902, this burning question of thirty years ago is once more ardently urged on the attention of the Seven Powers. Lord Meath has pleaded the cause in the Times, and Mr Dicey and Mr Montefiore in the Spectator; the Times correspondent in Vienna telegraphed on June 6:—

"The Jews, who constitute about four per cent. of the population, . . . are practically excluded from most of the opportunities of earning a livelihood enjoyed by the Christian population. . . . Independently of the Treaty of Berlin, it is on the ground of pure humanity, and in order that Roumania may not forfeit her good reputation, that the disabilities of the Jews must be abolished, whatever temporary drawbacks such a course may be alleged to entail, and however reluctant the reactionary and Chauvinist element may be to adopt one of the essential principles of modern government—namely, the equality of all citizens before the law."

Finally, in June 1902, there was started in Great Britain the issue of The Roumanian Bulletin, as an irregular medium for the information of the Press. This step was taken in consequence of the last and the worst of the restrictive laws in Roumania (March 1902),

which prohibited the employment of Jewish working-men in any trade or calling; and quite recently an incisive pamphlet has been published by Messrs William Clowes & Sons, entitled Roumanian Finance: Facts and Figures for the Holders of Roumanian Bonds, which strikes at the moral conscience of Roumania through the more sensitive organ of her purse. Our last quotation in this record of a thirty years' war against false dealing and persecution shall be from Roumanian Finance: 1

"From whatever point of view things are considered, there is only one conclusion to be drawn: Roumania has exhausted her credit abroad, and yet a catastrophe is unavoidable if she does not call in outside assistance. This will undoubtedly be granted if the country gives sufficient guarantees that her policy will in future be more prudent, and her financial management more economical and honest. Guarantees will have to be given to this effect. The economic policy of the country will have to be put as much as possible beyond the reach of party interests, and instead of discouraging foreign enterprise and putting fetters on labour, the productiveness of the country will have to be increased. It is a difficult undertaking, to be

^<sup>1 A reply has since been published in the shape of another anonymous pamphlet, called Attacks on Roumanian Finance. In this reply, the "scathing and deprecatory criticism of the present Premier and Minister of Finance" is described with a show of reason, as, "to say the least, premature after a term of office of barely one year."

carried out only in the course of years, but it is by no means impossible, if the true patriots are only successful in restraining the national Chauvinism. In this respect the true interest of the country coincides with the interests of her foreign creditors and her political friends. . . . Should this hope not be realised, then the public in Western Europe will certainly refuse to lend Roumania any money. Capitalists will no longer allow themselves to be blinded by budget estimates and by artificial arrangements of revenue and expenditure. . . Only when Roumania is successful in regaining, by her policy, the confidence of her creditors, and in bringing about a total change in the public opinion of Western Europe, can the country be saved from violent shocks, and the holders of Roumanian bonds be guarded against heavy losses."

It is at this point, if diplomacy is powerless and humanity indifferent, that the Jews of Western Europe will find their pretext to interfere.

Several conclusions ensue. First, Jewish suffering in the East is a real and a serious evil. If further evidence be sought, let the reader consult Sincerus on Roumania, or Professor Errera on "The Russian Jews" (D. Nutt, 1894), or Professor Mandelstamm's leaflet entitled How Jews Live: A Side-light on Alien Immigration (Greenberg & Co., Chancery Lane). We need not elaborate that aspect. Secondly, it important to note how persistent and un-

Baron might convert them, or Mr White exclude them, or Dr Herzl lead them out. The faith that is in them would perish, the gleam that they follow would disappear. But make survival a duty, exalt character to the dignity of a trust, crown the hardships of exile with a missionary claim, and the willow-trees will break into rejoicing, and the waters of Babylon will be sweet. Time is on the side of this solution. It moves with the purpose of history.

I

We have tried faithfully to render the ideas of the most spiritually-minded Jews as to the meaning of their dispersion, and the mission which they are set to fulfil before the arrival of the Messiah. At the same time we have tried to show how the harsh experience of Israel in exile has affected his natural character; and how, despite the ghettoes and gaberdines from which he has won release, he has yet enriched the world with morality and art. Again, we saw that the emancipated Jew is as good a citizen as his neighbour, and that nothing but neighbourly hate drives him into the arms of the Zionists. As to the attitude of the public mind towards this alien population in our midst, there is a striking discrepancy of

evidence. The views of Mr Russell and Mr White may be cited in parallel columns:—

"The point which gives its chief novelty and interest to the experiment (of 'anglicising' the 'alien immigrants') is the complete absence of anti-Semitic feeling. This is one of the most striking features of the question as it presents itself in Whitechapel; it is considerably truer of the British workman than even of the richer classes. In the higher levels of society there is still, no doubt, a certain amount of racial prejudice. . . . But in the East End there is hardly a trace of this; against the Jew as a Jew there seems to be no sort of hostile feeling. The English Jew . . . is surprisingly popular. And such hostility as does exist towards the foreign element is neither racial nor religious in character."

—C. Russell, "The Jew in London," pp. 41, 42.

"The peculiar characteristics usually associated with the Hebrew community are not religious, but racial.... Of the Jewish aristocrat I do not speak in this book. The advantages reaped by England from the Hebrew aristocracy, not only material but intellectual and artistic, require no comment. They are notorious. It is the presence of this class which has done most to prevent the outbreak of anti-Semitism in England, to allay impatience, and postpone action to restrict the ever-increasing horde of undesirable foreigners who are pouring into this country." And elsewhere Mr White adds: "I should not be surprised to watch unpopularity ripen into jealousy, and even hate, among the common people."—A. White, "The Modern Jew," pp. 4, 5.

Here, then, plainly we have two divergent views, one of which assures us that the popularity of the Jew in Whitechapel prevents anti-Semitism in Mayfair, while the other maintains that the popularity of the Jew in Mayfair prevents anti-Semitism in Whitechapel. We may perhaps omit any further consideration of these mutually destructive opinions, and turn to the actual statistics which bear on immigration and its results.

Mr White speaks of "an ever-increasing horde of undesirable foreigners pouring into this country." It is for the Commissioners to

Next, as to the Jews in general. We may be told that the presence of a Jewish community in England is not yet acutely dangerous because of the smallness of its numbers. But, as a matter of fact, the proportion of Jews to non-Jews is larger in the United Kingdom than in France, for example, where anti-Semitism,

despite its German origin, has recently assumed its most virulent shape and form. The figures, which we borrow from the "Jewish Year Book," are as follows:—

has to be taken into account. Yet the Dutch Jews are completely free from any experience of that kind.

These comparative statistics, dull reading though they may be, are extremely significant of the hollowness of the anti-Semitic movement. Mr Arnold White begs the people of this country to take warning by the example of the French.

"Humanity," he says, "does not change its spirit in a day, a week, or a century; and we English have no right, therefore, to anticipate that when the Jews arrive at the position in Great Britain which they occupy in France to-day, the conduct of the bulk of them will be more humane, enlightened, or unselfish towards us than it has been towards the French."

The oracle is a trifle cryptic; and we fail to see why the position occupied by the Jews in France to-day should be one towards which British Jews aspire. There are twice as many Jews in England as in France; and if they are afflicting France with rods, they should be afflicting England with scorpions. But is it so? or is it the fact that the charge of inhumanity, want of enlightenment, and selfishness recoils on the nation which, with the smaller Jewish community, has yet set an example of Jewbaiting unparalleled in modern history? We give Mr White his Captain Dreyfus, whom he

65

is pleased to patronise as "a hero and a man," adding "one more to the long line of Jewish worthies whose annals adorn the history of the race." The Dreyfus episode is not necessary to turn the point of Mr White's warning. The different aspects of the Jewish problem in England and in France are not due to a difference in the Jews—the evidence of numbers proves it—but to a difference in the non-Jews; and there we may leave the matter.

"The Jewish usurer's rod has been bound by Christians themselves [who excluded the Jews for several centuries from every business except finance]. . . . It can hardly be gainsaid that the Jews are liable to blame at many points, and

With this temperate criticism we may fitly

bring to a close our examination of the Jewish problem, and of the various solutions that are proposed for it. We reject the solutions, severally and collectively. No one of them, in our opinion, is based on an adequate study of the nature of the Jews, and of the restitution due from Christendom to Israel for centuries of bondage and oppression.

CHAPTER V

SPIRITUAL FORCES IN JUDAISM

The search bristles with difficulties. We incur the serious risk of offending a section

not exist. Accordingly, we may refrain from elaborating the obvious. We need not pause to point out that Jewish workers are found in all the learned professions—that a Jew has been Master of the Rolls, a Jew has been Deputy Speaker, a Jew is a Colonial Governor, and so forth, and so forth. This method of defence is hardly less insolent than the method of attack, beloved by men like Mr White, who speaks of a "Jewish island in the sea of English life."

One thing, however, we may be permitted to point out. The term "the Jew" carries with it at least this implication of solidarity, that the fault or folly of one Jew is reflected in popular opinion on the Jews as a whole. Every Jew of evil eminence is taken as a type. A Jewish murder, a Jewish divorce, a Jewish embezzlement, a Jewish case of usury, even a particularly "loud" costume or luxurious equipage, if the property of Jews, is imputed not merely to the sinful agent but to the Jewish community en bloc. There is a merciless argument from the particular instance to the general rule. The unfairness will be obvious to anyone who honestly reflects how liable he is to that form of prejudice.

At the same time it cannot be concealed that in Israel, as elsewhere, the material tends to encroach upon the spiritual—not merely the

This tendency may be alleged in general terms without much fear of contradiction, and without incurring the charge of condemning the many

in Judaism by increasing among Jews the knowledge of their religion, history, and literature;" there is the East London Jewish Communal League, "to promote the religious, intellectual, and social status of Jewish young men and women, and to enlist their sympathies and active co-operation in communal affairs;" there are the Maccabeans who aim at "social intercourse and co-operation, with a view to the promotion of the interests of the Jewish race;" the Union of Jewish Women Workers, the Jewish Congregational Union, the Jewish Religious Union, etc.

Thus, the alleged materialism of Israel is visibly the object of a vigorous attack from inside. But the task of spiritual regeneration is rendered difficult and slow, because the old and the new are at war, and because Jewish piety and Western decorum set such different standards of worship. Sixty years ago a body of Jews in London attempted to reconcile the two by founding the Reform Congregation of British Jews. The feeling in the orthodox Hebrew community against these secessionists was very bitter for some years; Sir Moses Montefiore, for instance, continued to regard them as apostates till nearly the end of his long life. That feeling has died out; and Reform Congregations in Manchester and Bradford are now affiliated to the London Synagogue, all

majority of Jews as an essential condition of survival, but it carries with it no other bar on national self-consciousness, political economy, or social intercourse.

A people should be judged by the height of its aspirations, and not by its lowest achievement. Carlyle praises his Hero-priest because he does what is in him to introduce his ideals into practice, "and wears out, in toil, calumny, contradiction, a noble life, to make a God's Kingdom of this Earth." Is not this an account in epitome of the history of the Jews, the priests by precedence of heroic story, the eternal worshipping the Eternal?

Thus, Mr Claude Montefiore, whose "Bible for Home Reading" is the children's text-book which is used in most Jewish homes in this country, has written the following passages in the concluding chapter of his second volume:—

"The Biblical doctrines about goodness and God are mixed up with the history of Israel. They are found in a national framework. The Jews stand in some intimate relation to these doctrines. They are their guardians and their propagators. We were not able to accept all that is contained in the Bible about the relation of the Jews to God and to their fellowmen; but the highest doctrine of the Hebrew scripture on these subjects was alike convincing and inspiring. The highest doctrine may be said to include the notion that God is the Father of all men, and that

He cares for all without distinction of race or creed. . . .

vail. 'They shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning - hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they know war any more.' This is the final issue of Israel's work. . . . Such is the exalted hope, ethical and religious in one, world-wide in its range, spiritual in its good, which the highest teachers of the Bible explicitly connect and co-ordinate with the mission and the destiny of Israel. . . . They form, to my thinking, the essence of Judaism."

And while Jewish children are taught a religion of this rare spiritual texture, shall we say with the enemies of the Jews that they "stifle" national life "by the substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have made the Empire"? or shall we not rather say that Jewish unselfishness and imperialism form a part of the composite foundation on which the British Empire rests by virtue of its unique skill in welding all its parts into one whole?

APPENDIX.

I.—STATISTICS OF JEWISH POPULATION.

(a) The following Table, reproduced by permission from the Jewish Year Book, 1902-03, furnishes at a glance the percentage of the Jewish population to the total population in the principal countries of the world. The figures should be studied in connection with the remarks on pages 62-64 above—

STATISTICS OF JEWISH POPULATION—Continued.

(b) A similar Table has been worked out in order to furnish the percentage of the Jewish population to the total population in the principal cities of the world. These figures are in some respects more important than those in the last Table. The Jews tend to city life by habit and taste, as well as by the necessity imposed by their dietary laws and by the facilities of public worship—

STATISTICS OF JEWISH POPULATION-Continued.

II.—STATISTICS OF JEWISH SCHOOL ATTENDANCE.

The following Tables are taken from the Jewish Year Book:— CHILDREN IN JEWISH VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS, 1901-2.

JEWISH CHILDREN in other VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS, 1901-2.

^* The Jewish Religious Education Board holds (or subsidises) classes at this School.

JEWISH CHILDREN in other VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS, 1901-2.

^* No figures available

^† The Jewish Religious Education Board holds classes at this School

JEWISH CHILDREN IN BOARD SCHOOLS, 1901-2.

^* No figures available

The Jewish Religious Education Board holds classes in this School.

JEWISH CHILDREN IN BOARD SCHOOLS, 1901-2.—Continued.

^* No figures available

^† The Jewish Religious Education Board holds classes at this School.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

THE following is a list of books, mainly English or American, bearing upon the Jewish Question. It makes no pretence to completeness, but it will be found to comprise the chief sources and authorities for a study of the subject in its various aspects:—

• Abrahams, Israel. "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages."
  Macmillan.

• Abrahams, I., and Montefiore, C. G. "Aspects of Judaism." Macmillan.

• ABRAHAMS, L. B. "Manual of Jewish History." Eleventh edition. Kegan Paul.

• Adler, Liebman. "Sabbath Hours." Jewish Publication Society of America.

• AGUILAR, Grace. "The Women of Israel." Sixth edition.

  • " "Sabbath Thoughts." 1853. Vallentine.
  • " "The Jewish Faith." Vallentine.
  • " ,, "The Spirit of Judaism." Vallentine.

• Antin, Mary. "From Plotzk to Boston." Preface by I. Zangwill. Clarke, Boston.

• "As Others Saw Him." Heinemann.

  • (An attempt to convey the contemporary impression created by Jesus Christ among the Jews.)

• Artom, B. "Sermons." Trübner.

• BARCLAY, Joseph. "The Talmud." John Murray.

• Baron, David. "The Ancient Scriptures and the Modern Jew." Hodder & Stoughton.

• Beaton, Rev. P. "The Jews in the East." Two vols. Hurst & Blackett.

• Belisario, M. M. "Sabbath Evenings at Home." Vallentine.

• Benisch, A. "Travels of Rabbi Petachia." Trübner.

• Benisch, A. "Judaism Surveyed." 1874.

• BENJAMIN OF TUDELA. "Travels." Translated by A. Asher. Nutt.

• Benjamin, J. J. "Eight Years in Asia and Africa." Vallentine.

• Berkowitz, Henry. "Judaism and the Social Question." Philadelphia.

• Blunt, J. E. "History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England." O.P.

• Box, Rev. G. H. "Christianity and Judaism." Translated from the German of Professor Dalman. Williams & Norgate.

• Briggs, C. A. "Messianic Prophecy." Clark, Edinburgh

• Cassel, D. "Manual of Jewish History and Literature."
  Translated from the German by Mr H. Lucas.
  Macmillan.

• Castro, Adolf De. "History of the Jews in Spain."
  Kirwan.

• CHARLES, R. H. "Jewish and Christian Eschatology."
  Black.

• Cobb, W. F. "Origines Judaicae." Innes-

• CONDER, C. R. "The Jewish Tragedy." Blackwood

• CORNILL, Professor. "History of the People of Israel."
  Kegan Paul.

• CUNNINGHAM, W. "Alien Immigrants to England." Sonnenschein.

• Davis, Nina. "Songs of Exile." American Jewish Publication Society.

• DAY, E. "Social Life of the Hebrews." (The Semitic Series.) Nimmo.

• Demidoff, San Donato, Prince. "The Jewish Question in Russia." Translated by H. Guedalla.

• Deutsch, Emanuel. "Literary Remains." O.P. John Murray.

• D'ISRAELI, Isaac. "The Genius of Judaism."

• Drummond, James. "The Jewish Messiah." Longmans.

• DUFF, A. "Hebrews: Ethics and Religion." Nimmo.

• Dwight, S. E. "The Hebrew Wife, or the Law of Marriage." Glasgow.

• EDERSHEIM, E. W. "Laws and Polity of the Hebrews." R. T. S.

• ELIOT, George. "Daniel Deronda."

• Errera, L. "The Russian Jews." Translated by B. Löwy. Nutt.

• EWALD, H. "History of Israel." Translated from the German. Longmans.

• FARRAR, Dean. "The Herods." Service & Paton.

• FEDERATION OF AMERICAN ZIONISTS:-

  • "The Progress of Zionism." By Herbert Bentwich.
  • "The Aims of Zionism." By Richard Gottheil.
  • "The Epistle to the Hebrews." By Emma Lazarus.
  • "A Zionist Bibliography." By Stephen Wise.

• FINN, James. "History of the Israelites in Poland." Vallentine.

• FINN, James. "History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal." Rivington.

• Flungel, Maurice. "Israel, the Biblical People." Baltinaore.

• Phanulin, Benjamin. "The Glory of Eternity." H. Abrahams.

• Frederic, Harold. "The New Exodus." Heinemann.

• Gaster, Rev. M. "Memorial of the Bicentenary of the Bevis Marks Synagogue."

• GLOVER, A. K. "Jewish Laws and Customs." Wells.

• Goldsmid, A. M. "Persecution of the Jews of Roumania." Translated from the French, 1872.

• Graetz, H. "History of the Jews." Five vols. (The standard history). Nutt.

• Gray, G. B. "Studies in Hebrew Proper Names." Black.

• Groseman, Rev. L. "Judaism and the Science of Religion." Bloch.

• HARRIS, Rev. M. H. "The People of the Book." Third edition. New York.

• HERTZ, Rev. J. H. "Bachya, the Jewish Thomas à Kempis." New York.

• Herzberg, W. "Jüdische Familienpapiere." Third edition. Zürich.

• Herzl, Theodor. "A Jewish State." Translated by S. d'Avigdor. Nutt.

  • (The original scheme on which modern political Zionism has been founded.)

• Hobson, J. A. "Problems of Poverty." Methuen.

• Hosmer, J. K. "The Jews, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern." Fifth edition. (Story of the Nations). Unwin.

• Hudson, E. W. "History of the Jews in Rome." Hodder.

• Huie. "History of the Jews, from the Taking of Jerusalem to the Present Time." 1857.

• JACOBS, Joseph. "An Inquiry into the Sources of the History of the Jews in Spain." Nutt.

• JACOBS, Joseph. "Jewish Ideals." Nutt.

• Jacobs, Joseph, and Wolf, Lucien. "Bibliotheca Anglo Judaica," a Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History. 1888.

• Jacobs, Joseph. "The Jewish Question." Trübner.

• Jacobs, Joseph. "Studies in Jewish Statistics." Nutt.

• JACOBS, Joseph. "Statistics of Jewish Population in London, etc., 1873-1893." (Russo-Jewish Committee).

• Jastrow, H. B. "Selected Essays of James Darmesteter."
  Longmans.

• "Jewish Encyclopædia." In twelve vols. (Vols. I. and II.) Funk and Wagnalls. New York.

• Joseph, Rev. Morris. "The Ideal in Judaism." Nutt.

• Josr's "History of the Jews, from the Maccabees to the Present Day." Translated into English. New York, 1848. O.P.

• Karpeles, Gustav. "Jewish Literature, and other Essays."
  American Jewish Publication Society.

• KARPELES, Gustav. "A Sketch of Jewish History." American Jewish Publication Society.

• Kaufmann, David. "George Eliot and Judaism." Translated by J. E. Ferrier. 1897.

• Krauskopf, J. "Evolution and Judaism." Bloch

• Krauskopf, J. "Jewish Converts, Perverts, and Dissenters." Bloch.

• LAZARUS, Emma. "Songs of a Semite." American Hebrew Publishing Company.

• LAZARUS, M. "The Ethics of Judaism." Translated from the German by H. Gzold. Four Parts. American Jewish Publication Society. Macmillan. (Parts I. and II.)

• Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole. "Israel among the Nations." Translated from the French by T. Hellman. Putnam.

• "LES JUIFS DE RUSSIE: Recueil d'Articles et d'Études sur leur situation légale, sociale, et économique." Paris, Léopold Cerf.

• LEVY, Amy. "Reuben Sachs." Macmillan.

• "Light on the Way." Preface by Lady Battersea.
  Wertheimer.

• Lindo, E. H. "History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal." Longmans.

• LOEWE, Dr L. "Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore."
  Griffith & Farran.

• Lucas, Mrs H. "Songs of Zion." Dent.

• Lucas, Mrs H. "The Jewish Year." Macmillan

• Magnus, Lady. "Jewish Portraits." Unwin.

• Magnus, Lady. "Outlines of Jewish History." Third edition. Longmans.

• Magnus, Lady. "About the Jews since Bible Times." Kegan Paul.

• Margoliouth, Rev. M. "The Jews in Great Britain." Nisbet.

• MARKENS, Isaac. "The Hebrews in America." New York.

• Marks, D. W., and Löwy, A. "Memoir of Sir Francis Goldsmid, Bart., Q.C., M.P." Second edition. Kegan Paul.

• MARKS, Rev. D. W. "The Jews of Modern Times."
  Vallentine.

• Marks, Rev. D. W. "Sermons." Three vols. Trübner. O.P.

• McCurdy, J. F. "Hebrews: History and Government." Nimmo.

• McCurdy, J. F. "History, Prophecy, and the Monuments; or, Israel and the Nations." Macmillan.

• Mendes, A. P. "Post-Biblical History of the Jews." 1873.

• Mendes, Dr H. P. "Jewish History Ethically Presented." New York.

• MILMAN, Dean. "History of the Jews." Fourth edition. John Murray.

• Montefiore, C. G. "The Bible for Home Reading." Two vols. Macmillan.

• Morais, H. S. "Eminent Israelites in the Nineteenth Century." Philadelphia.

• Morais, H. S. "The Jews of Philadelphia."

• Morrison, Rev. W. D. "The Jews under Roman Rule." (Story of the Nations.) Unwin.

• Pearlson, Gustav. "Twelve Centuries of Jewish Persecution." 1898. Hull. .

• Pennell, Joseph. "The Jew at Home." Methuen.

• Peters, M. C. "Justice to the Jew." New York.

• Philippsohn, L. "The Development of the Religious Idea." Translated by A. M. Goldsmid. Vallentine.

• Philipson, David. "Old European Jewries." American Jewish Publication Society.

• Philipson, Dr D. "The Jew in English Fiction." Cincinnati.

• Picciotto, J. "Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History." Trübner. Vallentine, O.P.

• PRIDEAUX, H. "The Connection of Sacred and Profane History." Clarendon Press.

• RAPHAEL, M. J. "Post-Biblical History of the Jews."
  Two vols. Vallentine.

• Reeves, John. "The Rothschilds." Sampson Low.

• Remy, Nahida. "Jewish Women." Translated from the German. Cincinnati.

• Rémy, Nahida. "Prayer in Bible and Talmud." Translated from the German by Rev. Henry Cohen. New York

• Renan's "History of the People of Israel." Translated from the French by C. B. Pitman. 1888. Chapman & Hall.

RENAN, E. "Studies in Religious History." Mathieson.

Reports and Periodical Publications:—

Jewish Board of Deputies. Annual.

Anglo-Jewish Association. Annual.

Russo-Jewish Committee. Annual.

Jewish Board of Guardians. Annual.

Board of Trade, Returns and Tables of Emigration and Immigration. Monthly and Annual.

Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System, 1890.

Select Committee of the House of Commons on Immigration and Emigration, 1889.

Board of Trade, on Alien Emigration to America. By John Burnett and D. F. Schloss, 1893.

Jewish Historical Society. Transactions.

The Jewish Year Book. Edited by Joseph Jacobs and Rev. I. Harris. Since 1896. Greenberg.

Jewish Quarterly Review. Edited by I. Abrahams and C. G. Montefiore. Macmillan.

Jewish Chronicle. Weekly.

Jewish World. Weekly.

Riggs, J. S. "History of the Jewish People during the Maccabean and Roman Periods." Smith, Elder.

Rosenfeld, Morris. "Songs from the Ghetto." Second edition. Small Maynard. Boston.

ROTHSCHILD, C. de. "Letters to a Christian Friend on the Fundamental Truths of Judaism." Second edition. Simpkin, Marshall.

ROTHSCHILD, C. and A. de. "History and Literature of the Israelites." Two vols.

Russell, C. and Lewis, H. S. "The Jew in London."
Unwin.

SALAMAN, C. K. "Jews As They Are." Second edition.

Marshall.

Samuel, Sydney. "Jewish Life in the East." Kegan Paul.

• Samuels, M. "Memoirs of Moses Mendelssohn." Vallentine.

• SCHECHTER, S. "Studies in Judaism." Black

• Schreiber, E. "Reformed Judaism and its Pioneers."
  Bloch.

• Schurer, E. "History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ." Five vols. Clark, Edinburgh.

• Schwab, Isaac. "The Sabbath in History." Two vols. Bloch.

• Sharpe, Samuel. "History of the Hebrew Nation and its Literature." Fifth edition. Williams & Norgate.

• SHERWELL, Arthur. "Life in West London." Methuen.

• Simon, Lady. "Records and Reflections." Wertheimer.

• Simon, Lady. "Beside the Still Waters." Greenberg.

• SIMON, O. J. "The Nature of God." Simpkin.

• Sincerus, E. "Les Juifs en Roumanie: Les Lois et leurs Conséquences." Macmillan.

• "Solomon Maimon: an Autobiography." Translated from the German by H. Clark Murray. Gardner, Paisley.

• STANLEY, Dean. "Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church." John Murray.

• Toy, C. H. "Judaism and Christianity." Sampson Low.

• WALDSTEIN, Charles. "The Jewish Question." Second edition. Gay and Bird.

• WHITE, Arnold. "The Modern Jew." Heinemann.

• WHITE, Arnold. "The Destitute Alien in Great Britain." Sonnenschien.

• Wiener, Leo. "History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century." Nimmo.

• WILKINS, W. H. "The Alien Invasion." Methuen.

• Wolf, Hon. Simon. "The Influence of the Jews on the Progress of the World." McGill, Washington.

• Wolf, Lucien. "Resettlement of Jews in England."

• Wolf, Lucien. "Manasseh ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell." Macmillan.

• Wolf, Lucien. "Sir Moses Montefiore: a Centennial Biography." John Murray.

• Wright, C. H. H. "Biblical Essays." Clark, Edinburgh.

• ZANGWILL, I. "The Children of the Ghetto." Heinemann.

• ZIRNDORF, Henry. "Some Jewish Women." American Jewish Publication Society.

APPROXIMATE DENSITY OF THE JEWISH POPULATION.

PRINTED AT THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 & 11 YOUNG STREET.