could be made for a regulated immigration to Turkish lands, there is no doubt that it would be a lasting one, and that many of these now unhappy people would become prosperous themselves while adding to the wealth and security of the Turkish Empire.
It is not only the Jew who is persecuted in Russia. The Mussulman is also persecuted, and for the same reason—because he believes in the One God; for Russia is determined that there shall be only one faith in her dominions. Year after year thousands of Mussulmans emigrate
from Russia into the Turkish Empire. There is thus a bond of union between the Mussulman and the Jew; and just as in ancient times they had a common father, Abraham, whose two sons, the half-brothers Ismail and Ishaq, played and fought side by side, to-day the descendants of these two are sharing the same privations and persecutions; and they would find their deliverance in the same land and find protection under the same banner—that of the Sultan.
Jehudah Halevi and His Theory of Israel's Inspiration
It is said of Hegel, the great German philosopher, that while the battle of Jena was being waged near the old university, he was writing away at his philosophy in blissful unconsciousness of what was going on about him, so absorbed in his work that the cannonading remained unnoticed. When the smoke of battle had cleared away two things had been accomplished, Napoleon had won another victory, and Hegel had completed his Phenomenologie des Geistes, and when later on with his precious manuscript under his arm, the Professor sauntering out came face to face with the little man who had almost disturbed his studies, it was not Napoleon who was scornful, but the author of that much named work, Die Phenomenologie des Geistes.
I mention this because it seems, on the face of it, to accentuate the oft-observed gap between reality and speculation, between life and thought.
Out in the world, we are apt to say battles are lost and won, men suffer and die, and heroes enact the stern epic of
their lives, but in the realm of speculation your professor shuts himself in, produces a mass of half-intelligible formulas which are to comprehend infinity and eternity, and is blind to the battle men are fighting at his very door.
True, but we must ask ourselves, is there nothing heroic at the source of all these formulas? Is the attempt of finite reason to storm the citadels of the Infinite not itself an epic of the spirit, less picturesque but no less heroic than any that bard ever sang?
Human nature, however, has become so differentiated, that the soul is rare, indeed, which combines both the power of abstract thinking and a warm love for the ideas which are the objects of its thought, and rarer still is the life so consistently lived that it becomes an outward symbol, of the philosopher's thought or the poet's ideals. Jehudah Halevi, however, possessed such a soul, and because of this complete spiritual unity, because his life is so wonderfully controlled by its leading purpose, we can-