Part 2

IT is a pleasure to know that a journal is being launched in America for the benefit of thinking Jews, which will stand between the technical journal of the "Quarterly" type and outside of the purlieus of our numerous "Weekly" gossip sheets.

Jewish journalism in America has done little, if anything, to justify the numerous calls which it makes upon the people for support. On the other hand, there is sad need for a journal representative of our best thought, which will be readable and which will represent rather than misrepresent us.

The field of Jewish culture and ideals surely has not been exhausted by our European brethren. No matter what they may have contributed to the exploitation of this field there surely remains ample ground for the American Jew to express himself in the light of the old standards of Jewish conduct and belief.

It goes without saying that your Journal will make its primary appeal to the college man and woman. If successful, it will have saved for Jewry its most valuable elements and enable us to build in the future on a better and broader basis than the purely financial and commercial leadership of the past.

From the far West we join hands with you in the far East and unite in fervent hopes that the new Menorah Journal may grow from strength to strength.

[Illustration: Signature: Martin A. Meyer]

_From Dr. David Philipson_

_Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati_

[Illustration]

SOME seventy years ago the celebrated Jewish scholar, Abraham Geiger, charged the Jewish _intelligenzia_ of his day with indifference towards Judaism and Jewish interests. This accusation of Geiger's has since been repeated frequently. But a rift is appearing in the cloud. To-day as never before our _intelligenzia_ as defined by university training and education is identifying itself more and more with Jewish life and aspiration in our country. And I feel that due credit should be given the Menorah movement in our colleges for this change of attitude of Jewish students and professors. This movement, still young, has accomplished much in bringing together the young men and women who form our intellectual elite into associations for the study of Jewish history and the consideration of Jewish problems. It has awakened an interest in Jewish matters in many who have been lukewarm and indifferent. It has brought as lecturers to our colleges Jewish men of light and leading from many communities, who have voiced their messages and given food for thought to the future leaders now sitting on university benches.

The call of the ages sounds to the intellectual nobility of our day and generation. Learning has been extolled among Jews from earliest times, and the wise man has been the accredited leader, so that it was declared that "the wise man is greater than the prophet." I would have the learned classes come again into their own. I would have our university men in coming years the staunchest Jews in the community through their intelligent interest in everything that makes for its highest welfare.

To achieve this is the task of our university men. The possibility of this achievement I see in such significant signs as the Menorah movement, the institution of student congregations, and the launching of this magazine by the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. What has been called the "Jewish consciousness," a term which has done yeoman's service during the past decade, is being aroused through these agencies to an even greater degree. This aroused Jewish feeling will, I am sure, be translated into active service more and more as the years pass and the present generation of college men carve out their careers in our communities throughout the country. This is the great Jewish opportunity of the present generation; in this will they reverse, such is my hope and my belief, that condition and that attitude of the Jewish _intelligenzia_ in the past (and still largely in the present) which evoked the statement of Abraham Geiger. May this new undertaking prosper so that the young generation whom this magazine represents may be helped toward a realization of its ideals, and become an inspiration to all Jewry throughout the length and breadth of the land.

[Illustration: Signature: David Philipson]

_From Dr. Solomon Schechter_

_President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America_

[Illustration]

I WISH to send my hearty congratulations to the Intercollegiate Menorah Association upon their undertaking the publication of the Menorah Journal, which I have no doubt will prove greatly helpful in promoting the knowledge of Judaism among the Jewish college youth. In a liberal country like ours, with the eagerness of our people for acquiring knowledge, there never was a lack of Jews in our Colleges and Universities. But what the Menorah Association will accomplish with the aid of the Journal is, I hope, to have Judaism also represented in our seats of learning.

[Illustration: Signature: S. Schechter]

_From Jacob H. Schiff_

[Illustration]

IT is with much satisfaction that I learn of the launching of the Menorah Journal, to provide an opportunity for a more general spread of the high ideals of the Menorah Societies among our college youth. When I received some time ago a copy of the publication entitled "The Menorah Movement," I noted with particular pleasure the progress the Menorah Societies had already made. After an attentive perusal of the contents of this publication, I felt as if a copy ought to be placed in the hands of every Jewish college and university student, and I myself distributed a number of copies for propaganda purposes. The Menorah Societies are to be congratulated upon their new venture in issuing the Journal, upon which I wish them every success. It is to be hoped that the Menorah Journal will help the Jewish student to understand what Judaism means and what as Jews we should strive for to become useful and worthy citizens of this country. We shall have to face increasing problems because of the deplorable war in Europe, which so tragically affects our co-religionists there, and it will require much devotion and understanding on our part to properly deal with the conditions which will necessarily arise. The Menorah Journal should freely discuss these conditions, so as to inspire its readers with the desire to aid and the courage needed in the situation which is facing us. Thus, by "spreading light," the Journal can greatly assist the Menorah movement, and render efficient service in and outside of the university. Let me wish Godspeed to your new publication and its managers.

[Illustration: Signature: Jacob H. Schiff]

_From Dr. Stephen S. Wise_

_Rabbi of the Free Synagogue, New York_

[Illustration]

I REJOICE to learn of the establishment of an organ by the Menorah Association. The Menorah Journal will, I take it, serve the threefold purpose of keeping the various groups of the Menorah throughout the universities of the land in constant touch with one another, of interpreting the ideals of the Menorah to widening circles of the Jewish youth, and of confirming anew, from time to time, the loyalty of the Menorah men to the Menorah ideal.

A truly great Jew said about fifteen years ago that a high self-reverence had transformed _arme Judenjungen_ into _stolze junge Juden_. I believe that the Menorah movement in this land is in part the cause and in other part the token of a transformation among young American Jews to-day parallel to that cited by Theodor Herzl. It marks a sea-change from the self pitying Jewish youth, immeasurably "sorry for himself" because of his exclusion from certain dominantly unfraternal groups, to the Jewish youth self-regarding, in the highest sense of the term, self-knowing, self-revering. That the self-respecting young Jew command the respect of the world without is of minor importance by the side of the outstanding fact that he has ceased to measure himself by the values which he imagined the unfriendly elements of the world without had set upon him.

The Menorah movement is welcome as a proof of a new order in the life of the young college Jew. He has come to see at last that it is comic, in large part, to be shut out from the Greek letter fraternities of the Hellenes and the Barbarians, but that it is tragic, in large part, to shut himself out from the life of his own people. For it is from his own people that he must draw his vision and spiritual sustenance if he is to live a life of self-mastery rather than the life of a contemptible parasite rooted nowhere and chameleonizing everywhere. Time was when their fellow-Jews half excused the college men, who drifted away from the life of Israel, as if the burden of the Jewish bond were too much for the untried and unrobust shoulders of our Jewish college men, as if their intellectual and moral squeamishness led to inevitable revolt against association with their much-despised and wholly misunderstood Jewish fellows. Now we see, and our younger brothers of the Menorah fellowship have caught the vision, that no Jew can be truly cultured who Jewishly uproots himself, that the man who rejects the birthright of inheritance of the traditions of the earliest and virilest of the cultured peoples of earth is impoverishing his very being. The Jew who is a "little Jew" is less of a man.

The Menorah lights the path for the fellowship of young Israel, finely self-reverencing. Long be that rekindled light undimmed!

[Illustration: Signature: Stephen S. Wise]

A Call to the Educated Jew

BY LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

[Illustration: _Louis D. Brandeis (born in Louisville, Ky., in 1856), lawyer and publicist, is a distinguished leader in the voluntary profession of "public servant." His extraordinary record of unselfish, genuine achievement in behalf of the public interest--for shorter hours of labor, savings bank insurance, protection against monopoly, against increase in railroad rates, etc.,--gives peculiar aptness to the appeal for community service made in this article, which Mr. Brandeis has prepared from a recent Menorah address. From the beginning Mr. Brandeis has taken a keen interest in the Menorah movement as a promotive force for the ideals he has at heart._]

WHILE I was in Cleveland a few weeks ago, a young man who has won distinction on the bench told me this incident from his early life. He was born in a little village of Western Russia where the opportunities for schooling were meagre. When he was thirteen his parents sent him to the nearest city in search of an education. There--in Bialystok--were good secondary schools and good high schools; but the Russian law, which limits the percentage of Jewish pupils in any school, barred his admission. The boy's parents lacked the means to pay for private tuition. He had neither relative nor friend in the city. But soon three men were found who volunteered to give him instruction. None of them was a teacher by profession. One was a newspaper man; another was a chemist; the third, I believe, was a tradesman; all were educated men. And throughout five long years these three men took from their leisure the time necessary to give a stranger an education.

The three men of Bialystok realized that education was not a thing of one's own to do with as one pleases--not a personal privilege to be merely enjoyed by the possessor--but a precious treasure transmitted upon a sacred trust to be held, used and enjoyed, and if possible strengthened--then passed on to others upon the same trust. Yet the treasure which these three men held and the boy received in trust was much more than an education. It included that combination of qualities which enabled and impelled these three men to give and the boy to seek and to acquire an education. These qualities embrace: first, _intellectual capacity_; second, _an appreciation of the value of education_; third, _indomitable will_; fourth, _capacity for hard work_. It was these qualities which enabled the lad not only to acquire but to so utilize an education that, coming to America, ignorant of our language and of our institutions, he attained in comparatively few years the important office he has so honorably filled.

Now whence comes this combination of qualities of mind, body and character? These are qualities with which every one is familiar, singly and in combination; which you find in friends and relatives, and which others doubtless discover in you. They are qualities possessed by most Jews who have attained distinction or other success; and in combination they may properly be called Jewish qualities. For they have not come to us by accident; they were developed by three thousand years of civilization, and nearly two thousand years of persecution; developed through our religion and spiritual life; through our traditions; and through the social and political conditions under which our ancestors lived. They are, in short, the product of Jewish life.

_The Fruit of Three Thousand Years of Civilization_

OUR intellectual capacity was developed by the almost continuous training of the mind throughout twenty-five centuries. The Torah led the "People of the Book" to intellectual pursuits at times when most of the Aryan peoples were illiterate. And religion imposed the use of the mind upon the Jews, indirectly as well as directly, and demanded of the Jew not merely the love, but the understanding of God. This necessarily involved a study of the Laws. And the conditions under which the Jews were compelled to live during the last two thousand years also promoted study in a people among whom there was already considerable intellectual attainment. Throughout the centuries of persecution practically the only life open to the Jew which could give satisfaction was the intellectual and spiritual life. Other fields of activity and of distinction which divert men from intellectual pursuits were closed to the Jews. Thus they were protected by their privations from the temptations of material things and worldly ambitions. Driven by circumstances to intellectual pursuits, their mental capacity gradually developed. And as men delight in that which they do well, there was an ever widening appreciation of things intellectual.

Is not the Jews' indomitable will--the power which enables them to resist temptation and, fully utilizing their mental capacity, to overcome obstacles--is not that quality also the result of the conditions under which they lived so long? To live a Jew during the centuries of persecution was to lead a constant struggle for existence. That struggle was so severe that only the fittest could survive. Survival was not possible except where there was strong will--a will both to live and to live a Jew. The weaker ones passed either out of Judaism or out of existence.

And finally, the Jewish capacity for hard work is also the product of Jewish life--a life characterized by temperate, moral living continued throughout the ages, and protected by those marvellous sanitary regulations which were enforced through the religious sanctions. Remember, too, that amidst the hardship to which our ancestors were exposed it was only those with endurance who survived.

So let us not imagine that what we call our achievements are wholly or even largely our own. The phrase "self-made man" is most misleading. We have power to mar; but we alone cannot make. The relatively large success achieved by Jews wherever the door of opportunity is opened to them is due, in the main, to this product of Jewish life--to this treasure which we have acquired by inheritance--and which we are in duty bound to transmit unimpaired, if not augmented, to coming generations.

But our inheritance comprises far more than this combination of qualities making for effectiveness. These are but means by which man may earn a living or achieve other success. Our Jewish trust comprises also that which makes the living worthy and success of value. It brings us that body of moral and intellectual perceptions, the point of view and the ideals, which are expressed in the term Jewish spirit; and therein lies our richest inheritance.

_The Kinship of Jewish and American Ideals_

IS it not a striking fact that a people coming from Russia, the most autocratic of countries, to America, the most democratic of countries, comes here, not as to a strange land, but as to a home? The ability of the Russian Jew to adjust himself to America's essentially democratic conditions is not to be explained by Jewish adaptability. The explanation lies mainly in the fact that the twentieth century ideals of America have been the ideals of the Jew for more than twenty centuries. We have inherited these ideals of democracy and of social justice as we have the qualities of mind, body and character to which I referred. We have inherited also that fundamental longing for truth on which all science--and so largely the civilization of the twentieth century--rests; although the servility incident to persistent oppression has in some countries obscured its manifestation.

Among the Jews democracy was not an ideal merely. It was a practice--a practice made possible by the existence among them of certain conditions essential to successful democracy, namely:

First: _An all-pervading sense of the duty in the citizen._ Democratic ideals cannot be attained through emphasis merely upon the rights of man. Even a recognition that every right has a correlative duty will not meet the needs of democracy. Duty must be accepted as the dominant conception in life. Such were the conditions in the early days of the colonies and states of New England, when American democracy reached there its fullest expression; for the Puritans were trained in implicit obedience to stern duty by constant study of the Prophets.

Second: _Relatively high intellectual attainments._ Democratic ideals cannot be attained by the mentally undeveloped. In a government where everyone is part sovereign, everyone should be competent, if not to govern, at least to understand the problems of government; and to this end education is an essential. The early New Englanders appreciated fully that education is an essential of potential equality. The founding of their common school system was coincident with the founding of the colonies; and even the establishment of institutions for higher education did not lag far behind. Harvard College was founded but six years after the first settlement of Boston.

Third: _Submission to leadership as distinguished from authority._ Democratic ideals can be attained only where those who govern exercise their power not by alleged divine right or inheritance, but by force of character and intelligence. Such a condition implies the attainment by citizens generally of relatively high moral and intellectual standards; and such a condition actually existed among the Jews. These men who were habitually denied rights, and whose province it has been for centuries "to suffer and to think," learned not only to sympathize with their fellows (which is the essence of democracy and social justice), but also to accept voluntarily the leadership of those highly endowed morally and intellectually.

Fourth: _A developed community sense._ The sense of duty to which I have referred was particularly effective in promoting democratic ideals among the Jews, because of their deep-seated community feeling. To describe the Jew as an individualist is to state a most misleading half-truth. He has to a rare degree merged his individuality and his interests in the community of which he forms a part. This is evidenced among other things by his attitude toward immortality. Nearly every other people has reconciled this world of suffering with the idea of a beneficent providence by conceiving of immortality for the individual. The individual sufferer bore present ills by regarding this world as merely the preparation for another, in which those living righteously here would find individual reward hereafter. Of all the nations, Israel "takes precedence in suffering"; but, despite our national tragedy, the doctrine of individual immortality found relatively slight lodgment among us. As Ahad Ha-'Am so beautifully said: "Judaism did not turn heavenward and create in Heaven an eternal habitation of souls. It found 'eternal life' on earth, by strengthening the social feeling in the individual; by making him regard himself not as an isolated being with an existence bounded by birth and death, but as part of a larger whole, as a limb of the social body. This conception shifts the center of gravity not from the flesh to the spirit, but from the individual to the community; and concurrently with this shifting, the problem of life becomes a problem not of individual, but of social life. I live for the sake of the perpetuation and happiness of the community of which I am a member; I die to make room for new individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness as though it were his individual well-being, he finds satisfaction, and no longer feels so keenly the bitterness of his individual existence, because he sees the end for which he lives and suffers." Is not that the very essence of the truly triumphant twentieth-century democracy?

_The Two-fold Command of Noblesse Oblige_

SUCH is our inheritance; such the estate which we hold in trust. And what are the terms of that trust; what the obligations imposed? The short answer is _noblesse oblige_; and its command is two-fold. It imposes duties upon us in respect to our own conduct as individuals; it imposes no less important duties upon us as part of the Jewish community or race. Self-respect demands that each of us lead individually a life worthy of our great inheritance and of the glorious traditions of the race. But this is demanded also by respect for the rights of others. The Jews have not only been ever known as a "peculiar people"; they were and remain a distinctive and minority people. Now it is one of the necessary incidents of a distinctive and minority people that the act of any one is in some degree attributed to the whole group. A single though inconspicuous instance of dishonorable conduct on the part of a Jew in any trade or profession has far-reaching evil effects extending to the many innocent members of the race. Large as this country is, no Jew can behave badly without injuring each of us in the end. Thus the Rosenthal and the white-slave traffic cases, though local to New York, did incalculable harm to the standing of the Jews throughout the country. The prejudice created may be most unjust, but we may not disregard the fact that such is the result. Since the act of each becomes thus the concern of all, we are perforce our brothers' keepers. Each, as co-trustee for all, must exact even from the lowliest the avoidance of things dishonorable; and we may properly brand the guilty as traitor to the race.

But from the educated Jew far more should be exacted. In view of our inheritance and our present opportunities, self-respect demands that we live not only honorably but worthily; and worthily implies nobly. The educated descendants of a people which in its infancy cast aside the Golden Calf and put its faith in the invisible God cannot worthily in its maturity worship worldly distinction and things material. "Two men he honors and no third," says Carlyle--"the toil-worn craftsman who conquers the earth and him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable."