and the almost universal spread of constitutionalism throughout Europe have told mightily in favour of the Jews. An essential condition of all reform is that the reformer never can say, “Thus far will I go, and no farther.” In sporting parlance, he took off the weight from a dark horse, and the latter is everywhere winning in a canter. The father kept a little shop in the Ghetto; the son has palaces and villas, buys titles, crosses, and other graven images utterly unknown to the Mosaic Law, and intermarries with the historic Christian families of the land. The great, if not the only, danger is that in the outlying parts of Europe, where men are not thoroughly tamed, and where the sword is still familiar to the hand, the Jew advances far too fast; nor is it easy to see how his career can be arrested before it hurries him over the precipice. At this moment Hungary is a case in point. The Magnate, profuse in hospitality, delighting in display, careless of expenditure, and contemptuous of economy, sees all his rich estates, with their flocks and herds, their crops and mines, passing out of his own hands, and contributing to swell the bottomless pocket of the Jewish usurer. But the Magyar is a fiery race; and if this system of legal robbery be allowed to pass a certain point, which, by-the-bye, is not far distant, the Jews must prepare themselves for another disaster right worthy of the Middle Ages. And they will have deserved it.
As regards the restoration of Israel to the Holy Land, that favourite theme of prophecy and poetry, that day-dream of the Jew, at least until he found a country and a home in the far happier regions beyond his ancient seats, no supernatural gift is required to point out the natural course of events. Though the recovery of Jerusalem is the subject of eternal supplication throughout the Jewish world, wealthy and prosperous Jews openly declare that they take no personal interest in the matter. The prayer, in fact, has become a mere formula.[28] Still, with six millions of souls, which will presently become nine, there can be no difficulty in finding volunteers like those who now garrison the four Holy Cities—Jerusalem and Hebron, Tiberias and Safed. A single million of souls would give the Israelite complete command over the Land of Promise in the widest acceptation of the term, and it will not be long before this number can be contributed.
The Jews might readily return to Judæa; but there is a lion in the path. Russia cares little for Constantinople, which will fall to her in the fulness of time when the fruit is ripe. But she will brook no interference with the Holy Land, except for her own benefit. This power, half European and half Asiatic, greatly indebted withal for her success in life to the mixture which she despises, has the immense advantage of a peculiar and homogeneous creed, in which she believes with childish ardour and which she preaches with virile energy. To her, conquest is not mere increase of area, of physical growth. It is extending the field of proselytism, of religion; and this view of national progress and of racial duty is at once her strength and her weakness, her glory and her shame. She finds the headquarters of Christianity necessary to the full development of her religious superiority, and in the ever-increasing weakness of the Latin Church she descries her best opportunity.
Thus, as modern travellers assure us, Russia is quietly absorbing the Holy Places in Syria and Palestine. A bran-new Jerusalem of church, convent, and hospice, which a few days’ work would convert into forts and barracks, has lately risen outside the grey old walls and towers of Jebus, concealing them from the ardent gaze of the pilgrim as he tops the last hill leading to the Jaffa Gate. At Hebron the Muscovite was not allowed to buy building-ground within the settlement; he bought the oak which passes itself off for Abraham’s terebinth, and here again will be a church, convent, and hospice. Jacob’s Well at Shechem has shared the same fate, and even Tiberias is threatened with a fourth church, convent, and hospice. The so-called Greeks,[29] whose Muscovite sympathies are well known, were granted such boons as the monopoly of Mount Tabor, whose classic and Saracenic ruins were ruthlessly pulled down to build a cockney church and convent. This usurpation became so intolerable, that in the summer of 1872 the Latin monks attacked the intruders, seized vi et armis a part of the mountain to which they laid claim, and enclosed their conquest with a wall. On the other hand, when the Latins proved an undoubted right to their ancestral chapel at Kefr Kenna (Cana in Galilee), the Greeks were instructed to set up a rival claim, and both were formally dismissed with the oyster shell, the oyster having been pronounced Wukúf, or mosque endowment.
This Russian pre-emption of the Holy Land is a benefit to the Jew, although the latter may not recognize it. But for this he would hasten to fulfil the prophecy; he would buy up the country, as indeed he is now doing at Jerusalem;[30] he would conquer the people by capital, and he would once more form a nation.
But here the question obtrudes itself: “If Judaism should again prevail—indeed its advocates say it shall prevail universally—how long could it endure?”
Those who know the codes of the Talmud and of the Safed School, which are still, despite certain petty struggles, the life-light of Judaism, will have no trouble in replying. A people whose highest ideas of religious existence are the superstitious sanctification of Sabbath, the washing of hands, the blowing of ram’s horns, the saving rite of circumcision, and the thousand external functions compensating for moral delinquencies, with Abraham sitting at the gate of Hell to keep it closed for Jews; a community which would declare marriage impossible to some twelve millions of Gentiles, forbid them the Sabbath, and sentence to death every “stranger” reading an Old Testament; which would have all the Ger who are not idolaters without religion, whilst forbidding those whom it calls “idolaters” (the Christians) to exercise the commonest feelings of humanity; which would degrade and insult one-half of humanity, the weaker sex, and which would sanction slavery, and at the same time oppress and vilify its slaves by placing them on a level with oxen and asses; a faith which, abounding in heathen practices, would encourage the study of the Black Art, would loosen every moral obligation, would grant dispensations to men’s oaths, and would sanction the murder of the unlearned; a system of injustice, whose Sanhedrins, at once heathenish and unlawful, have distinguished themselves only for force and fraud, for superabundant self-conceit, for cold-blooded cruelty, and for unrelenting enmity to all human nature—such conditions, it is evident, are not calculated to create or to preserve national life. The civilized world would never endure the presence of a creed which says to man, “Hate thy neighbour unless he be one of ye,” or of a code written in blood, not in ink, which visits the least infractions of the Rabbinical laws with exorcism and excommunication, with stoning and flogging to death.[31] A year of such spectacles would more than suffice to excite the wrath and revenge of outraged humanity; the race, cruel, fierce, dogged, and desperate as in the days of Titus and Hadrian, would defend itself to the last; the result would be another siege and capture of Jerusalem, and the “Chosen People” would once more lie prostrate in their blood and be stamped out of the Holy Land.
Briefly, it is evident that nothing but Russian preponderance in Syria and Palestine prevents its being reoccupied by its old intolerant and persecuting owners,[32] and that to these the greatest possible misfortune would be the granting of their daily, weekly, and yearly prayer—
Next year may we meet at Jerusalem.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] In consequence of the accident which occurred to Jacob (Gen. xxxii.) his descendants still abstain from the hind-quarters of the few beasts left to them by Leviticus xv.
[26] Gaon means a learned man: had he not some other name?
[27] [Rabbenu Tam was the most distinguished disciple of the renowned R. Rashi (1040–1105 a.d.).]