animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago. The truth is, however, that it is precisely in the Old Testament that is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for universal salvation, that the more material prophecies-evoked moreover in the bitterness of exile, as Belgian poets are now moved to foretell restoration and glory-are practically swamped. At the worst, we may say there are two conflicting currents of thought, as there are in the bosom of every nation, one primarily self-regarding, and the other setting towards the larger life of humanity. It may help us to understand the paradox of the junction of Israel's glory with God's, if we remember that the most inspired of mortals, those whose life is consecrated to an art, a social reform, a political redemption, are rarely able to separate the success of their mission from their own individual success or at least individual importance. Even Jesus looked forward to his twelve legions of angels and his seat at the right hand of Power. But in no other nation known to history has the balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of idealism. An episode related by Josephus touching Pontius Pilate serves to illuminate the more famous episode in which he figures. When he brought the Roman ensigns with Cæsar's effigies to Jerusalem, the Jews so wearied him with their petitions to remove this defiling deification that at last he surrounded the petitioners with soldiers and menaced them with immediate death unless they ceased to pester and went home. 'But they threw themselves upon the ground and laid their necks bare and said they would take their deaths very willingly rather than the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed.' And Pilate, touched, removed the effigies. Such a story explains at once how the Jews could produce Jesus and why they could not worship him.
'God's witnesses,' 'a light of the nations,' 'a suffering servant,' 'a kingdom of priests'-the old Testament metaphors for Israel's mission are as numerous as they are noble. And the lyrics in which they occur are unparalleled in literature for their fusion of ethical passion with poetical beauty. Take, for example, the forty-second chapter of Isaiah. (I quote as in gratitude bound the accurate Jewish version of the Bible we owe to America.)
Behold My servant whom I uphold;
Mine elect in whom My soul delighteth;
I have put My spirit upon him,
He shall make the right to go forth to the nations:
He shall not fail or be crushed
Till he have set the right on the earth,
And the isles shall wait for his teaching.
Thus saith God the LORD,
He that created the heavens, and stretched them forth,
He that spread forth the earth and that which cometh out of it,
He that giveth bread unto the people upon it,
And spirit to them that walk therein:
I the LORD have called thee in righteousness,
And have taken hold of thy hand,
And kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people,
For a light of the nations;
To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
And them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.
Never was ideal less tribal: it is still the dynamic impulse of all civilization. 'Let justice well up as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.' 'Nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall there be war any more.'
Nor does this mission march always with the pageantry of external triumph. 'Despised and forsaken of men,' Isaiah paints Israel. 'Yet he bore the sin of many. And made intercession for the transgressors ... with his stripes we were healed.'
Happily all that is best in Christendom recognizes, with Kuenen or Matthew Arnold, the grandeur of the Old Testament ideal. But that this ideal penetrated equally to our everyday liturgy is less understood of the world. 'Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast chosen Israel from all peoples and given him the Law.' Here is no choice of a favourite but of a servant, and when it is added that 'from Zion shall the Law go forth' it is obvious what that servant's task is to be. 'What everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of Israel,' says the Evening Prayer. But in what does this love consist? Is it that we have been pampered, cosseted? The contrary. 'A Law, and commandments, statutes and judgments hast Thou taught us.' Before these were thundered from Sinai, the historian of the Exodus records, Israel was explicitly informed that only by obedience to them could he enjoy peculiar favour. 'Now therefore, if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.' A chosen people is really a choosing people. Not idly does Talmudical legend assert that the Law was offered first to all other nations and only Israel accepted the yoke.
How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People postulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr. Lucien Wolf once urged that 'the yoke of the Torah' had fashioned a racial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over average humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperance and family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen. But whether this general superiority-a superiority not inconsistent with grave failings and drawbacks-is due to the rigorous selection of a tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu maintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the people, or the people-precisely because of its greatness-made the Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial election to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic altruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed-when one considers the impress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and imagination of the world-might well be credited with the intuition of genius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the Jews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would have the ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that election is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely for world- service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when fashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the consummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but the symbol. It is with
IV
Israel disappears, too, in whole books of the Old Testament. What has the problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of Ecclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would scarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentially rooted in a race.
In the magnificent cosmic poem of Psalm civ-half Whitman, half St. Francis-not only his fellow-man but all creation comes under the benediction of the Hebrew poet's mood. 'The high hills are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the conies.... The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God ... man goeth forth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening.' Even in a more primitive Hebrew poet the same cosmic universalism reveals itself. To the bard of Genesis the rainbow betokens not merely a covenant between God and man but a 'covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.'
That the myth of the tribalism of the Jewish God should persist in face of such passages can only be explained by the fact that He shares in the unpopularity of His people. Mr. Wells, for example, in his finely felt but intellectually
