“A plaintive, soulful melody swelled from the harp, and Naphtali’s grand voice was raised in a song of prayer that had descended to the Jewish people from generation to generation. It evoked in the exiles the memory of all they had held dear and lost—home, loved ones, fatherland—and the God of their fathers, from whom many had turned in their waywardness to put their faith in false gods. Tears streamed down the poet’s face as he sang, and when he had finished a great wail burst from the crowd of slaves. Many sank upon their knees and buried their faces in their hands, or raised their arms with hands outspread to the sky. Some fell upon their faces. Some rent their clothes and beat upon their breasts. All manifested their anguish with sobs and loud cries.
“Angered at the spectacle, the overseers laid about them with their whips, lashing indiscriminately and savagely every man, woman and child within the reach of the long thongs.”
We receive one false suggestion in the novel through the medium of a dream, for it leads to the idea that vengeance is a particularly Jewish characteristic. This, however, in no way affects the story. By the power and the greatness of his strength, Naphtali becomes known in Babylon, and after several trials is enabled at length to come into the royal court and play his wonderful harp before Sennacherib, who has made Naphtali’s erstwhile wife his mistress. The wronged Jew takes his revenge and is condemned to death with his servant. She asks for all her sufferings, at the end, nothing but a kiss, and by this embrace at the scaffold administers poison to herself and Naphtali. Thus they avoid the torture, and the spot is known as the Gate of the Kiss.
The novel is not without power, and betrays considerable study of the period, and this is artistically its weakness. The higher art of the romance demands that the local color should be seen through the lightest medium of description.
“The Jew in Fiction,” by Rabbi David Phillipson. New edition revised and enlarged. (Cincinnati, Robert Clarke Pub. Co., 1902.)
We were recently advised by an authority
whom we are bound to respect that it is on the whole unfair to criticise the irresponsible observations from the pulpit. This view cannot, however, hold good when the sermonist descends to print, then as an author he must take scot and lot with those who are without titular prefixes or suffixes. We are led to this observation because these essays have such a religious tone that they often present as much of the sermon as of the literary criticism.
This book has offered us considerable amusement and perchance some little instruction. As long as Dr. Phillipson is upon the old themes, Marlowe’s “Jew” and Shakespeare’s “Shylock,” Cumberland’s “Jew” and Scott’s “Ivanhoe” he is pretty safe, though it is rather curious to read (page 56) “times are changing, the new spirit was abroad. The impersonation of kindness and benevolence was offered in the Jew, and hardness and meanness in the Christian, and yet the drama was favorably received”; this in reference to Cumberland’s effort to right the Jew in the public mind. The next essay is that of Scott’s “Ivanhoe” and the one following on Dickens’s “Fagin.” If the times changed at the end of the eighteenth century, they must have turned back in the first half of the nineteenth. Nothing of the sort, however, took place. Cumberland endeavored to right the Jew in the public mind, and the public in all probability appreciated the play and made no attempt to study the Jew. Nothing seems to us more grotesque than the efforts of writers to single out an individual fact of this character and then indulge in grandiloquent phrases which are defeated by self-contradiction at later stages. What, however, amuses us most in this book is the cocksuredness of the author that the Jewish nation is dead. In the introduction the literary world is grandly admonished: “It is neither legitimate nor truthful to treat the Jews as nationalities are treated. There are no Jewish national traits . . . the Jewish nation ceased to exist over eighteen hundred years ago.”
Neither statement is true. The Jewish nation is not dead, neither did it die as is asserted on page 153: “From the time the Roman legions conquered Jerusalem and the brand held by the Roman soldier fell upon the Temple and started the sacred edifice on fire, the Jewish nationality has ceased.” We do not regret that we have to offer a contra-