Chosen Peoples

our Bible has checked and blighted all other national inspiration: in his book 'The Soul of America,' he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally 'the claim to spiritual supremacy over all the peoples of the world.'

The recent revelation of racial arrogance in Germany has provided our enemies with a new weapon. 'Germanism is Judaism,' says a writer in the American Bookman. The proposition contains just that dash of truth which is more dangerous than falsehood undiluted; and the saying ascribed to Von Tirpitz in 1915 that the Kaiser spent all his time praying and studying Hebrew may serve to give it colour. 'As he talks to-day at Potsdam and Berlin,' says Verhaeren, in his book 'Belgium's Agony,' 'the Kings of Israel and their prophets talked six thousand years ago at Jerusalem.' The chronology is characteristic of anti-Semitic looseness: six thousand years ago the world by Hebrew reckoning had not been created, and at any rate the then Kings of Jerusalem were not Jewish. But it is undeniable that Germanism, like Judaism, has evolved a doctrine of special election. Spiritual in the teaching of Fichte and Treitschke, the doctrine became gross and narrow in the Deutsche Religion of Friedrich Lange. 'The German people is the elect of God and its enemies are the enemies of the Lord.' And this German God, like the popular idea of Jehovah, is a 'Man of War' who demands 'eye for eye, tooth for tooth,' and cries with savage sublimity:-

I will render vengeance to Mine adversaries,

And will recompense them that hate Me,

I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood,

And my sword shall devour flesh.

Judaism has even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. 'We utterly destroyed every city,' Deuteronomy declares; 'the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of the cities.' David, who is promised of God that his seed shall be enthroned for ever, slew surrendered Moabites in cold blood, and Judas Maccabæus, the other warrior hero of the race, when the neutral city of Ephron refused his army passage, took the city, slew every male in it, and passed across its burning ruins and bleeding bodies. The prophet Isaiah pictures the wealth of nations-the phrase is his, not Adam Smith's-streaming to Zion by argosy and caravan. 'For that nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.... Aliens shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee. Thou shalt suck the milk of nations.' 'The Lord said unto me,' says the second Psalm, 'Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of Me and I will give the nations for thine inheritance.... Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron.'

Nor are such ideas discarded by the synagogue of to-day. Every Saturday night the orthodox Jew repeats the prayer for material prosperity and the promise of ultimate glory: 'Thou shalt lend unto many nations but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee.' 'Our Father, our King,' he prays at the New Year, 'avenge before our eyes the blood of Thy servants that has been spilt.' And at the Passover Seder Service he still repeats the Psalmist's appeal to God to pour out His wrath on the heathen who have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling. 'Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!'

II

Much might, of course, be adduced to mitigate the seeming ferocity or egotism of these passages. It would be indeed strange if Prussia, which Napoleon wittily described as 'hatched from a cannon-ball,' should be found really resembling Judæa, whose national greeting was 'Peace'; whose prophet Ezekiel proclaimed in words of flame and thunder God's judgment upon the great military empires of antiquity; whose mediæval poet Kalir has left in our New Year liturgy what might be almost a contemporary picture of a brazen autocracy 'that planned in secret, performed in daring.' And, as a matter of fact, some of these passages are torn from their context. The pictures of Messianic prosperity, for example, are invariably set in an ethical framework: the all-dominant Israel is also to be all-righteous. The blood that is to be avenged is the blood of martyrs 'who went through fire and water for the sanctification of Thy name.'

But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore-as completely as Jesus did-that the legal penalty of 'eye for eye' had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? 'Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!' When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck over Belgium and not of a mediæval Jew over the desolated home of Jacob, is it not felt as a righteous cry of the heart? Nay, only the other Sunday an Englishwoman in a country drawing-room assured me she would like to kill every German-man or woman-with her own hand!

And here we see the absurdity of judging the Bible outside its historic conditions, or by standards not comparative. Said James Hinton, 'The Bible needs interpreting by Nature even as Nature by it.' And it is by this canon that we must interpret the concept of a Chosen People, and so much else in our Scriptures. It is Life alone that can give us the clue to the Bible. This is the only 'Guide to the Perplexed,' and Maimonides but made confusion worse confounded when by allegations of allegory and other devices of the apologist he laboured to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle. Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that distorted dialectic known as Pilpul. The only true 'Conciliador' is history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere-or rather everywhere. The same method that softened the Oriental amorousness of 'The Song of Solomon' into an allegory of God's love for Israel became, in the hands of Christianity, an allegory of Christ's love for His Church. But if Reason cannot always-as Bachya imagined-confirm tradition, it can explain it historically. It can disentangle the lower strands from the higher in that motley collection of national literature which, extending over many generations of authorship, streaked with strayed fragments of Aramaic, varying from the idyll of Ruth to the apocalyptic dreams of Daniel, and deprived by Job and Ecclesiastes of even a rambling epical unity, is naturally obnoxious to criticism when put forward as one uniform Book, still more when put forward as uniformly divine. For my part I am more lost in wonder over the people that produced and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because occasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths there is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery.

III

As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his 'Biblical Archæology' and as Sir James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and gradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has replaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes the angels who wished to join in the song. 'How can ye sing when My creatures are perishing?' The very miracles of the Old Testament were side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages, is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered with the voting on a legal point, en mashgîchin be-bathkol-'We cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not heaven'-was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking. Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the masses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new back again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, 'a veritable museum of relics,' or as whales have vestiges of hind legs with now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had begun to evolve 'the service of the Synagogue,' but it did not shed the