Part 4

AT the University of Berlin I did not have to go far to find traces of the presence of Jewish students. With their far-famed efficiency the Germans have contrived to turn the large university hall into a medium of information more adequate than our University Bulletins and Registers combined. The bulletin boards covering every vacant spot on the walls told me the story of all the phases of Jewish activities in the University, professional, social, vocational and, if you please, also gastronomical, more fully than the frescoed walls of Dido's temple told their story to pious Æneas. In the announcement of courses by the various faculties, well-known Jewish names stand out quite prominently,--none of them above the rank of Honorar-Professor, to be sure, but in popularity and achievement they are among the foremost. Among the long rows of the variegated Wappen of the Korporationen, the Borussias, Teutonias and Germanias, there hang the insignia of the Jewish students' societies, the yellow and white of the Sprevia and the black and gold of the Hasmonea, both announcing the dates of their Kneipe held in their respective places in the students' quarters around Linienstrasse and Charlottenburg. In another nook of the hall, from the midst of a jumble of little slips of paper enumerating in minute detail in microscopic German script what dishes are offered at the paltry sum of so many pfennig in the various "Privat-Mittagtische" and "bürgerliche-Küche" there looms up unblushingly, proud in the clearness of its square characters, the Hebrew word כשר over the notice of a Lebanon restaurant run by a Palestinian Jew. Still further on the wall, students of unmistakably Jewish names offer instruction in almost all the languages spoken, while a German young lady wants to exchange lessons in Russian with an _orthodox Christian_ and one who hails from the mendacious little country, cautiously states, as an inducement to a prospective pupil in the Roumanian tongue, that the would-be instructor is a _true_ Roumanian. Here you have a picture of Jewish life in the Berlin University, in its outer paraphernalia, in its cosmopolitan character, in its relation to the rest of the student body, in its freedom and restriction, as portrayed in the unjaundiced tales of bulletin boards.

_The Opposing Views of Student Societies at Berlin_

OF the two Jewish organizations mentioned above, the Hasmonea is a branch of the inter-varsity K. Z. V. (Kartell Zionistischer Verbindungen), whereas the Sprevia belongs to the K.-C. (Kartell-Convent der Tendenzverbindungen deutscher Studenten jüdischen Glaubens). The former, as the name implies, is Zionistic; the latter is opposed to Zionism. Their relation to each other, however, is not like that between the Menorah and the Zionist societies in American colleges. The Hasmonea and the Sprevia are mutually exclusive, rather than complementary to each other. The German Jewish student does not come to the university with a mind open and free as to Judaism. He comes there with definite views on the subject which have already been crystallized under the influence of early training. Judaism, of whatever shade it may happen to be, is more potent a factor in the domestic life of German Jews and in the bringing up of the young than it is with us here. Jewish boys there evince a keener interest in Judaism than do Jewish boys in America. Their intelligent understanding of Judaism is therefore not necessarily preceded by a period of indifference and lack of knowledge. It steadily grows and develops with them from their early youth. And so by the time they enter the university, at an age somewhat older than that of our average freshman, their Jewish consciousness is mature and fixed. They are able to judge whether they can work for or against Zionism, for to them Zionism is the only vital question in present-day Judaism, a question which they are willing to face squarely and once for all determine their position towards it; and it is on this question of Zionism and the future destiny of the Jews as a nation that the two leading student organizations radically differ.

There is another quite as notable distinction between our Menorah and the Jewish students' organizations in Germany. With us the Menorah is primarily an undergraduate society. When graduate Menorah Societies arise, they may be confederated with the undergraduate organization, but they will of course retain their separate character. In Germany this distinction between undergraduate and graduate does not exist. Matriculation in the University, not the taking of a degree in it, introduces one into the society of the educated with its appellative "intellectual" corresponding to our "high-brow" rather than to our "college grad." Joining the membership of a student organization marks the entrance into that large class of "intellectuals." And once you join such an organization you are a member ever after. In Germany, in fact, nobody graduates from a university in the same sense that we do. There the taking of a degree is merely an episode. If you take it, you will thenceforth be addressed as "Herr Doktor"; if you do not take it, you will keep on printing on your visiting card "Kandidat Philosophie" all the rest of your lifetime, and be addressed by the uninitiate as "Herr Doktor" just the same. Thus the achievements generally ascribed to Jewish students' organizations in Germany are in reality the collective work of all the Jewish men of academic training, and not necessarily of students actually engaged in university studies. Read over the names of contributors to publications issued by what are known as "student organizations," and you will notice how loosely that term is used.

_Intellectual Problems of the German Jewish Youth_

THE Jewish university men in Germany, whom we commonly call Jewish students, take more interest in Jewish life than do our university men in this country. This is chiefly due to the peculiar position of the modern Jews in Germany. German Jewry, by the total disappearance of its laboring class during recent times, has ceased to be a people by itself and has become a part of the middle class of the general German population. Among the native Jews of Germany, if Berlin is to be taken as a typical example of Jewish communities in large cities, there is no organic social body, complete in itself, consisting of various classes, following all imaginable trades, ranging from the chimney-sweep and the cobbler to the merchant prince. Such communities, forming organic wholes in themselves, you may find in Russia, Galicia, Roumania, and in the newer Jewish settlements of England and America. You do not find them in Germany. Higher up in the social scale, Jews are represented everywhere, but lower down you cannot find any native Jew below a shop clerk or master tailor. Being thus interspersed among the middle class of the general population, that part of the population which more than any other sends its children to universities, the number of academically trained men engaged in liberal professions among the German Jews is exceedingly large. These professional Jews encounter greater difficulties in their careers than those engaged in commerce. While the latter are given free range for the development of the native Jewish talents, the former find their road toward recognition blockaded. Consequently they are hurled back upon their Judaism, and their energies not finding vent elsewhere turn into Jewish channels.

The activities of Jewish university men in Germany are chiefly literary and intellectual, for the problem with which they are faced is quite different from that of ours. With us the problem of Americanism and Judaism is in its ultimate analysis the possible conflict between two sets of social duties, in themselves not necessarily contradictory, which can be easily reconciled by a working program adjusting the practical demands of both without curtailing the scope and efficiency of either. For Americanism in the abstract has no existence. The American mind is as yet unknown in its essence; it is only manifest by its functions, of which Jewish activities may form a complementary part. In Germany it is quite different. If Germanism stand for Aryanism and Occidentalism, Judaism must inevitably stand for Semitism and Orientalism,--and can the twain ever meet? That the Jew manifests in his works and actions good practical patriotism does not radically solve the problem; that the Jews are capable of being good patriots is no longer questioned, but can they be genuine ones? Will not the Jews always remain the carriers of an alien culture, unabsorbable and unassimilable, despite their conversion and intermarriage? It is this problem that confronts the Jewish intellectuals in Germany, in the over-hanging shadow of which the "Sorrows of the Jewish Werther" was written, and the martyrdom of Otto Weininger, self-inflicted, was made possible. Hence the great introspective literary activity of the German Jewish youth.

There is, on the one hand, the great, ever-increasing inrush of the Jews into the inmost sanctum of German cultural life, where their Germanic protestations are more vociferous than those of the native Teuton,--and they sometimes have, too, as must be admitted, a false ring. Ludwig Fulda openly proclaims that as to his relation with Judaism there is none: Goethe is his Moses and the German war of liberation is his Exodus; and Jewish "Gymnasium" seniors inundate the columns of the _Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums_ with introspective analyses of their Teutonic souls. On the other hand, there are those who, while quite as good Germans as the others, so far as practical patriotism is concerned, do not renounce the intellectual and spiritual heritage which is their own. Their self-imposed task is therefore the cultivation, enrichment, and modernization of Jewish thought and tradition. Hence the great output of highly meritorious literary works on purely Jewish subjects which, if not as scholarly as those of the German Jewish scientists of the past generation, are far more stimulating and of greater educational value.

(_To be concluded_)

_IT may interest you to know that in this country, during the early years of our leading universities, Hebrew not only formed, a subject of instruction, but also appeared upon the Commencement programs. Upon such grandiloquent occasions you will find that side by side with a poem in Greek there figured a speech in Hebrew. What the Hebrew was like that was poured out there I have difficulty in imagining. But that the instruction was of much use to the student, I have grave reasons to doubt. Will you allow me to read to you a note written in regard to that famous professor of Hebrew at Yale towards the end of the eighteenth century--Ezra Stiles. Stiles was a very learned Christian Hebraist. One of his pupils wrote about him: "For Hebrew he possessed a high veneration. He said one of the Psalms he tried to teach us would be the first we should hear sung in Heaven, and that he should be ashamed that any one of his pupils should be entirely ignorant of that holy language."_--_From a Menorah Address by Professor Richard Gottheil._

The Twilight of Hebraic Culture

_The Transition from Hebraism to Judaism_

BY MAX L. MARGOLIS

[Illustration: _MAX L. MARGOLIS (born in Merecz, Russia, in 1866), one of the leading Biblical scholars of America, received his education in Russia, Germany, and the United States (Columbia Ph.D. 1891). He has held important professorships of Semitics and Biblical Exegesis at the Hebrew Union College and the University of California,--and since 1909 has filled the chair of Biblical Philology in The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate learning. He has been engaged also, as Editor-in-Chief, in the monumental task of the new English translation of the Bible by American Jewish scholars. He is the author of numerous learned papers and books on Biblical lore and theology._]

SO long as Jewish psalms are sung in the cathedrals of Christendom and Jewish visions are rehearsed by Christian catechumens, the Synagogue will continue to hold in veneration the chest where reposes its chiefest glory. Surely a book which thrills the religious emotions of civilized mankind cannot but be an object of pride to the people that produced it. Stupendous as the literary output of the Jewish people has been in post-biblical times, the Scriptures stand on a footing of their own. Throughout the era of the dispersion they have held their unique position and have exercised a most potent influence on the Jewish soul. And the modern man taught by Lowth and Herder, and the modern Jew under the spell of Mendelssohn and the Haskalah, have their minds open to the æsthetic side of the "Bible as literature."

To the Jew, however, the Scriptures are possessed of an interest beyond the religious and literary. They are the record of his achievements in the past when his foot rested firm and steady on native soil, of a long history full of vicissitudes from the time when the invaders battled against the kings of Canaan to the days when the last visionary steeled the nation's endurance in its struggle with the heathen. They are the charter of Jewish nobility, linking those of the present to the wanderer from Ur of the Chaldees.

As a finished product the Hebrew Scriptures came after the period of national independence. When canon-making was in its last stage, Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. The canon was the supreme effort of Judæa--throttled by the legions of Rome--withdrawing to its inner defences. The sword was sheathed and deliverance was looked for from the clouds. The Scriptures were to teach the Jew conduct and prayer, and the chidings of the prophets were listened to in a penitential mood, but also joyfully because of the consolations to which they led. The canon-makers had an eye to the steadying of a vanquished people against the enemy without and the foe within. For there arose teachers who proclaimed that the mission of the Jew was fulfilled: free from the fetters of a narrow nationalism, of a religion bound up with the soil, he was now ready to merge his individuality with the large world when once it accepted that measure of his teaching suited to a wider humanity. The temple that was made with hands was destroyed, and another made without hands was building where men might worship in spirit and truth. The dream was fascinating, the danger of absorption was acute, because it was dressed up with the trappings of an ideal to which many believed the Scriptures themselves pointed.

There was a much larger range of writings in Palestine and a still larger in Egypt. The list included historical works carrying on the story of the people's fortunes beyond Alexander the Great; novelistic tales like that of the heroic Judith luring the enemy of her people to destruction, or that exquisite tale of Jewish family life as exemplified by the pious Israelite captive Tobit; books like the wise sayings of Jesus, son of Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, or the Psalms of Solomon, all modelled after patterns in the canon; midrashic expositions of the law, like the Little Genesis; apocalyptic visions going by the name of Enoch and the Twelve Patriarchs and Moses and Isaiah and Esdras, whose prototype may be sought in the canonical Daniel. Over and above the three parts which the Synagogue accepted there were a fourth and fifth; but by an act of exclusion the canon was concentrated upon the three and the others were cast overboard. The canon was the creation of the Pharisaic doctors, who drew a line at a point of their own choosing, and decreed that writings "from that time onward" did not defile the hands.

_The Making of the Canon by the Pharisees_

THE Pharisee held the ground when the nation had politically abdicated. The war with Rome had been brought on by the intransigent hotspurs of Galilee and the commune of Jerusalem. John, son of Zakkai, parleyed with the enemy that Jamnia with its House of Study might go unscathed. There the process began which culminated in the gigantic storehouse of legal lore which was to dominate Jewish life and Jewish literature for centuries, commentary being piled upon commentary and code upon code. For in the sum total of Scriptures the Torah was admittedly to be the chief corner-stone, albeit prophecy and wisdom had not lost their appeal; and in moments of relaxation or when addressing their congregations worn out with the strife of the present, the scholars of the wise brought out of the ancient stock many a legend and quaint saying and even apocalyptic vision, transporting the mourners for Zion into the ecstasies of the future redemption. While official Judaism was committed to the dialectics of the Halakah, in the unofficial Haggadah mysticism exercised a potent influence by underground channels, as it were, issuing in later days in Kabbalah and offsetting the rational philosophies borrowed from Hellas. For the time being, however, the dominant note was legistic, Pharisean.

The Pharisees had been lifted by the national catastrophe into the leading position. They had previously been a party among many parties, and their Judaism one of the many varieties. The Sadducees, their chief opponents, had a literature of their own: the day upon which their "Book of Decrees" was consigned to destruction was made a legal holiday upon which fasting was prohibited. But even writings which were lightly touched by the Sadduccee spirit were frowned upon: the Siracide was barely tolerated on the outside because he made light of individual immortality, and believed in the eternity of Israel and the Zadokite priesthood. The Pharisees had been on the opposition during the latter period of the Maccabeans: so with partisan ruthlessness they excluded from the canon the writings commemorative of the valorous deeds of those priest-warriors who freed the people from foreign overlordship and restored the Davidic boundaries of the realm. Because the apocalyptic visions inclined to teachings not acceptable to the dominant opinion, they were declared not only heterodox, heretical, but worthy of destruction. Had the stricter view prevailed, the sceptical Preacher--now, to quote Renan, lost in the canon like a volume of Voltaire among the folios of a theological library--would have shared the fate of Sirach and Wisdom and the other writings which Egypt cherished after Palestine had discarded them. And there were mutterings heard even against the Song, that beautiful remnant of the Anacreontic muse of Judæa. It was then that Akiba stepped into the breach and by bold allegory saved that precious piece of what may be called the secular literature of the ancient Hebrews.

The process concluded by the Pharisees had begun long before. The Pharisee consummated what the scribe before him had commenced, and the scribe in turn had carried to fruition the work inaugurated by the prophet. Just as the Pharisee decreed what limits were to be imposed upon the third part of the Scriptures, the scribe in his day gave sanction to the second, and at a still earlier period the prophet to the wide range of literature current in his days. Sobered by national disaster, the scribe addressed himself to the task of safeguarding the remnant of Judæa in the land of the fathers. There were schisms in the ranks, and all kinds of heresies, chief among which stood the Samaritan. The nation's history was recast in a spirit showing how through the entire past faithful adherence to Mosaism brought in its wake national stability, and conversely a swaying from legitimacy and law was responsible for disaster. With the Torah as a guide, prophecy was forced into the channels of orthodoxy. Heterodox prophets, the "false prophets," were consigned to oblivion. Their opponents alone were given a hearing. Secular history there was to be none; there was room only for the sacred. We may take it for granted that the "prophets of Baal," as their adversaries triumphantly nicknamed them, had their disciples who collected their writings and recorded the deeds of _their_ spirit. But they were one and all suppressed. The political achievements of mighty dynasts had been recorded by annalists; the pious narrators in the so-called historical books of the canon brush them aside, gloss over them with a scant hint or reference; what is of absorbing interest to them is the activity of an Elijah or an Elisha, or the particular pattern of the altar in the Jerusalem sanctuary. In their iconoclastic warfare upon the abomination of Samaria, the prophets gave a partisanly distorted view of conditions in the North which for a long time had been the scene of Hebrew tradition and Hebrew life.

_The Death-blow to the Old Hebraic Culture_

WHAT these upheavals meant in the history of Hebrew literature and culture can only approximately be gauged. One thing is certain: they all and one dealt the death-blow to the old Hebraic culture. When the excavator sinks his spade beneath the ground of a sleepy Palestinian village, he lays bare to view from under the overlaid strata, Roman and Greek and Jewish and Israelitish, the Canaanite foundation with its mighty walls and marvellous tunnels, its stelæ and statuettes, its entombed infants sacrificed to the abominable Moloch. Similarly if we dig below the surface of the Scriptures, we uncover glimpses of the civilization of the Amorite strong and mighty, which generations of prophets and lawmakers succeeded in destroying root and branch. On the ruins of the Canaanite-Amorite culture rose in the latter days Judaism triumphant; the struggle--prolonged and of varying success--marked the ascendancy of the Hebraic culture which was a midway station between the indigenous Canaanite civilization on the one hand and that mighty spiritual leaven, Mosaism in its beginnings and Judaism in its consummation, on the other. The Hebraic culture was a compromise. It began by absorbing the native civilization. The danger of succumbing to it was there, but it was averted by those whom their adversaries called the disturbers of Israel. And even to the last, when the sway of Judaism was undisputed, the Hebraic culture could not be severed from the soil in which it was rooted. It was part of a world-culture just as it contributed itself thereto.

Whether living in amity or in warfare, nations influence each other to a marked degree. They exchange the products of their soils and their industry--they also give and take spiritual possessions. Culture is a compound product. The factors that are contributory to its make-up are the soil and the racial endowment recoiling against the domination from without which, though not wholly overcome, is resisted with might and main. Cultures are national amidst an international culture. They express themselves in a variety of ways, chiefly in language and literature. For while blood is thicker than water, the pen is mightier than the sword. Out of a mass of myth and legend and worldly wisdom the Hebrews constructed, in accordance with their own bent of mind, their cosmogonies and ballads and collections of proverbs. At every shrine the priests narrated to the throngs of worshippers the marvelous stories of local or national interest.

_The Difference Between Hebraic Culture and Judaism_