Part 21

"The law is greater than priesthood and royalty, for royalty is acquired by thirty qualifications, priesthood by four and twenty, but the law by eight and forty, and they are as follows: Study, attention, utterance, understanding, reverence, veneration, modesty, cheerfulness and purity, service of the wise, choice of associates, debate with fellow students, deliberation in study of Bible and Mishnah, a minimum of business, a minimum of worldly pursuits, a minimum of pleasure, a minimum of sleep, a minimum of talk, a minimum of jesting, forbearance, kindliness, faith in the wise, resignation in suffering, knowing one's place, satisfaction with one's lot, bridling one's words, refraining from self-complacency, amiability, loving the Creator, loving His creatures, loving righteousness, loving equity, loving reproof, eschewing worldly honor, not being puffed up by learning nor delighting in laying down the law, helping one's neighbor bear the yoke, inclining toward a favorable judgment of others, steadfast in the truth, steadfast for peace, concentration in study, asking, answering, listening, enlarging, learning with a view to teach, learning with a view to act, enabling one's teacher to become wiser, thoroughly understanding what one hears, and repeating every dictum in the name of him who uttered it." I recommend this list of qualifications to the consideration of modern teachers and students as well as to those who are concerned with the preparation of a code of legal ethics for the profession.

The Jews loved the law and respected it and they honored its expounders and administrators. They do not believe that the world can be made over or made better by any man or by any preaching. They are by instinct conservative, holding on with tenacity to the ideas and institutions that have grown up in past times and that are expressions of the needs of society and of its adjustment to the forces that play upon it. This is why the law, which is the embodiment of these conservative forces, meets with their respect and allegiance, why its study was cultivated with such zeal in the past, and why in our own day it still finds so large a percentage of votaries among the sons of our people.

[Illustration: Signature: D.W. Amram]

The Jewish Genius in Literature

_A Study of Three Modern Men of Letters_

BY EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN

[Illustration: _EDWARD CHAUNCEY BALDWIN (born in Cornwall, Conn., 1870), Assistant Professor of English in the University of Illinois, has taken a special and scholarly interest in the contributions of the Jews to civilization, on which subject he has written a notable book entitled "Our Modern Debt to Israel," besides articles in various periodicals. He is an honorary member of the Illinois Menorah Society, evincing a warm sympathy with the Menorah aims and actively coöperating in the Menorah work._]

A study of great Jewish names in modern literature has impressed me with the fact that every Jewish man of letters has attained his fame by virtue of qualities that are essentially Jewish. In other words, we cannot fully understand the work of even modern Jewish literary men unless we know the fundamental qualities of Jewish genius. To illustrate what is meant by this assertion, we may consider briefly the work of three nineteenth century Jewish authors--Heine, Beaconsfield, and Zangwill. These men are apparently wholly different; and yet they attained literary eminence through qualities or mind and heart which we have learned to associate with the race from which they sprang.

_Heinrich Heine: A Jew at Heart_

Heinrich Heine is the one writer of the first rank that Germany can boast between the death of Goethe in 1832 and the advent of the younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann, Hauptmann, and the rest, sixty years later. To free himself from such a limitation as his Jewish birth seemed to him to be, and with the more specific object, it is said, of securing a government position in Prussia, Heine allowed himself to become a convert to Christianity. "Judaism," he said, "is not a religion; it is a misfortune." His conversion, however, failed to profit him. He lost the fellowship of his own people, and was contemptuously called "the Jew" by his enemies. In a sense, the designation was entirely just. A Jew at heart Heine remained to the day of his death. On his death bed, speaking of the Jews he said: "Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years, weeping always, suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet clinging to him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom, patience, and faith in spite of trial can confer a patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond any other. It would have been absurd and petty if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of being a Jew."

Not only was Heine a Jew in his instinctive racial sympathies, but his work bears the indelible impress of Judaism. It is a distinctively Jewish product. In it appear the buoyancy of spirit which sustained him under suffering that would have crushed a less resilient temper; the intellectual arrogance; the proneness to censure rather than to commend; and especially the excessive self-consciousness;--all these distinctively Jewish traits were in him exaggerated and helped to make his work what it was. It is his self-consciousness, in particular, that made his _Buch der Lieder_ his best production. In that remarkable collection of lyrics Heine appears at his best, because the ability to compose songs that are the spontaneous utterance of emotion, at one and the same time personal and representative, is a Hebrew heritage. The Hebrew genius was essentially lyric, rather than epic or dramatic; and in consequence, the lyrics of ancient Hebrew literature are its chief glory. In proof of this, we have but to recall the dirges and triumph songs, the reflective lyrics, and the liturgical hymns that compose the collection we know as the Psalms. The excellence of both the old Hebrew lyrics and of Heine's Lieder is to be found in the extraordinary subjectivity of the Hebrew temper--the racial fondness for impassioned, yet artistic, self-expression.

Yet Heine's Jewish traits are evident not only in the subjectivity of his lyrics, but in the new and richer character that he gave to the German Lied. This, hitherto vague and dreamy, became in his hands startlingly concrete and definite. And this is true even when he expresses the most subtle feelings. Always the most evanescent _Stimmung_, not less than moods more primitively simple, find expression in metaphors so sensuously material as to recall Solomon's Song. Compare a typical lyric of Heine, such as the following:

Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne Die liebt' ich alle in Liebeswonne, Ich lieb' sie nicht mehr, ich liebe allein Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine; Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne, Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne

with the love lyric sung by one of Israel's nameless singers:

Behold thou art fair, my love; Behold thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves. Behold thou art fair, my beloved Yea, thou art pleasant: And our couch is green. The beams of our house are cedars, And our rafters are firs. I am a rose of Sharon, A lily of the valleys. As a lily among thorns, So is my love among the daughters.[C]

Even so brief a comparison may illustrate, though it may not prove, that for the ultimate source of Heine's Oriental exuberance and materialization, so new to German literature, we must look in Jewish not in European culture.

_The Spiritual Depth of Heine_

Perhaps because Heine was in spirit an Oriental, the Germans never have known exactly what to make of him. Professor Francke says (_History of German Literature_, p. 526) that Heine "produced hardly a single poem which fathoms the depths of life." This assertion seems scarcely defensible in view of such poems as the following:

Wo wird einst des Wandermüden Letzte Ruhestatte sein? Unter Palmen in dem Süden? Unter Linden an dem Rhein?

Werd' ich wo in einer Wüste Eingescharrt von fremder Hand? Oder ruh' ich an der Küste Eines Meeres in dem Sand?

Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben Gotteshimmel, dort wie hier, Und als Todtenlampen schweben Nachts die Sterne über mir.

To find an equally beautiful expression of faith in God as a universal spiritual presence that transcends all space relations, we must go back to the anonymous Jewish poet who wrote the psalm in which occur the lines:

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? And whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, And thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, And the light about me shall be night; Even the darkness hideth me not from thee; But the night shineth as the day. For the darkness and the light are both alike to thee."

As a matter of fact, both poems are to be accounted for as equally the product of a rarely gifted people--a people with a unique genius for religion.[D]

_Disraeli and His Oriental Imagination_

Benjamin Disraeli belonged to a family who left Spain in the fifteenth century to avoid the horrors of the Inquisition. Upon their escape, in gratitude to the God of Jacob who had sustained them through unheard of trials, they adopted the name Disraeli, in order that their race might be forever recognized. Of such a family Benjamin Disraeli was a worthy representative. He never was ashamed of his race. On the contrary, he gloried in it, and lost no opportunity to put forth the claim of his people to be the true aristocracy of the earth. "Has not the Jew the oldest blood and the finest genius of the world?" he asks. And again, in one of his books (_Tancred_, 1847), he says, "The Jews are of the purest race; the chosen people; they are the aristocracy of nature."

It is Disraeli's Jewish characteristics that have bewildered and sometimes offended his critics. He has been charged with insincerity because he was so clever, and because he wrote with a kind of Oriental exuberance that was to him entirely natural and a part of his Jewish heritage. Gilfillan is the only critic, so far as I know, who has recognized that Disraeli's excellences, and his defects as well, were racial rather than individual. Speaking of his Oriental fancy and cleverness, Gilfillan says: "Disraeli has a fine fancy, soaring up at intervals into high imagination, and making him a genuine child of that nation from whom came forth the loftiest, richest, and most impassioned songs the earth has ever witnessed--the nation of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, and Job. He has little humor, but a vast deal of diamond-pointed wit."[E]

_Disraeli's Wit: A Purely Jewish Product_

Disraeli's wit, which made him so many enemies, is a purely Jewish product. It is satiric. Now satire was the form taken by Jewish wit in the Middle Ages as a result of the hard conditions under which the Jews lived. As one modern Jew has said, "The Jews seized the weapon of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other weapon." With every door closed in hostility against them, there was little they could do but laugh with bitter irony at their fate, and with savage satire at their oppressors. Wi