lament that the higher criticism of the Scriptures is irreverent. No one can arise from a reading of Mr. Montefiore's pages without feeling a deeper reverence for the poetic beauties and spiritual truths of the book of Psalms. This, notwithstanding the fact that the author unqualifiedly accepts the conclusion of the critics according to whom, few Psalms reach back before the exile and the latest reach forward to the Maccabæan Era.
The arrangement of the Psalms is excellent. Thus, for example, Psalms of prayer in season of trouble, of Happy Communion with God, of Thanksgiving, of Pilgrimage. An entire chapter is given to the interpretation of Psalm LI, which the writer happily terms "perhaps the noblest penitential hymn in all the world." Mr. Montefiore is at his best in this chapter, which is pervaded by the earnestness and spirituality of the author. Would that many Jewish homes might accept Mr. Montefiore as religious teacher.
The Pride of Race. By B. L. Farjeon.London, Hutchinson and Company.
This is a well-told story of English Jewish life,in which we find but few of traits andcharacteristics usually associated with Jews. Thefather, Moses Mendoza, is a man with a highregard for aristocracy, yet, withal, a very good-natured, shrewd man, who really loves his son.This son is thoroughly English, and as far removed from Jewish influence as his father isfrom the knowledge of the rules of etiquette.It is quite noticeable that in the first half of thestory, in which the early struggles of Mendozaare depicted, one feels warm sympathy for him,but later, when fortune smiles on him, and heacquiesces in all his son's snobocracy and political ambition, the entire situation is changed.There is no more a touch of Jewish life, noteven by allusion; the characters are English.Mendoza is a mere cockney.
What Mr. Farjeon means by Pride of Race is difficult to conceive, unless we take it to refer to the silly pride of the woman Mendoza's son had married. As such, it is of such frailty and based upon so weak an understanding of character, that we would be tempted to class the story with the useless imitations of truth relegated to the dime novel. The alternative of believing that the pride is the pride of the old man Mendoza, gives us good cause for referring to the book in our columns.
Mr Farjeon is a good story teller. The story he tells here is one which saddens the heart, for it shows Jewish life steadily deteriorating in characteristic virtues under the influence of hostile environment.
Menasseh ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell. By Lucien Wolf. Published for the Jewish Historical Society of England by Macmillan & Co, Limited, London. 1901.
Mr. Wolf has done an excellent piece of work in the present volume, the latest results of his researches in Anglo-Jewish history. To the pamphlets and tracts of Menasseh, written to promote the Return of the Jews into England, he has prefixed a valuable and judicious Introduction and added some Notes and an Index.
The Introduction attempts, within brief space, to narrate the history of the Return and of the “Middle Age of Anglo-Jewish’” life, between the Expulsion of 1290 and 1656. It endeavors to show in what respects the commonly-accepted story must be revised, and it is to be hoped that Mr. Wolf will be able to give us that desideratum —a good and authoritative biography of Menasseh, compiled from the material which he has gathered in the preparation of the present work.
Besides a few minor exegetical errors, which can easily be rectified in a second edition, Mr. Wolf seems to have made but one mis-statement, or if the statement be correct, he has not emphasized it so as to convince the incredulous reader. He refers to a Crypto-Jew of Elizabeth's time as "the original of Shakespeare's Shylock." While it may be hypercritical in us to expect that the present work should enter into a thorough-going investigation of this mooted question, it is but reasonable to expect that if Mr. Wolf wishes to change the current of Shakespearean criticism, his arguments should be embodied in a much more cogent form.
But here our disagreement ends, though in another place, Mr. Wolf is compelled to resort to the doubtful expedient of assuming an hypothesis in order to account for the known results from causes but partially disclosed to the historian's view. What is more valuable than this is the side-light thrown on Cromwell's character in connection with the Jews' Return. On page XXIX of his Introduction, Mr. Wolf says:
“... That the Readmission of the Jews to England was one of Cromwell's own schemes— part and parcel of that dream of Imperial expan-