The Maccabaean

THE nineteenth century was essentially the era of emancipation for the Jews, not only of that political emancipation of which so many writers have so misguidedly boasted, but of an emancipation of spirit which far exceeded the limits of formal freedom. The age was ushered in to the ringing notes of theoretic freedom; but practice remained far behind the theory. Constitutional rights in Europe, at least, have been of so little positive use to the Jewish nation, and the period in which the Jews could exercise these rights, without let or hindrance, has been so brief, that the majority of the strong figures, the great human factors that made Jewish life, were dead or spent forces when the tide of that emancipation, whose flood they had forced, was already at its ebb.

From the death of Spinoza to the rise of Mendelssohn, excepting the growth of Chassidism, the history of the Jews was the life-story of narrow and mean streets. A century and a half of record has its elements of interest; but there is nothing in them worthy of the history of such a people as the Jews. The men of the first half of the nineteenth century therefore, all loomed big against the background of the Jewish dark ages. The period itself was an intense one and brought forth men of power. The Ashkenazic Jewry had not had its vitality sapped by prosperity. The Sephardim were still loyal to their ancestral pride. The battle for emancipation, intensified by the Damascus blood accusation, and later by

the Mortara case, produced men who belonged to the world, and still were of the Jews. The Jewish self-pity was still a leit motif of life; the Jewish pride a source of strength in the confusion of conditions. Even those whom we would today call assimilative, like Benjamin Disrael and Heine, belonged to the Jews and 'thought with them, and with Cremieux, Moses Montefiore, Anthony Rothschild, Luzzato, David Solomons, George Jessel, Henry Francis Goldsmith, understood the feeling expressed by the Jews of Holland in 1792—that emancipation would be too dearly bought if the price were to be diminution of Jewishness.

A period of ambiguity followed from 1850 to 1880; the attempt to right the ship of Judaism, to steer Jewish life to an inoffensive course, to a life as colorless as instinct would permit,—to justify, as it were, the emancipation which the Jews had won (though no such justification was needed) gave weak descendants to the generation of the strong. The deepest paradox of Jewish life is, that while the men of '48 were, by the strength of their spirit and determination, out of the Ghetto; their grandchildren, through perplexity, resumed the life and the habits of the crowded lanes of mediaeval history.

Theodor Herzl, whose life we are to set down here, was descended of the strong men who battled in Hungary for civil rights and Jewish emancipation.

When Theodor Herzl approached his manhood, he was in all probability unmoved by the plea for the greater Jew