The Maccabaean

FROM a religious point of view there seem to be two paths before the Jewish people in America. The one path leads to a Judaism modified to conform to American conditions; the other is the road that leads to orthodoxy.

In the first place, the very essence of conformity to the customs and conditions of alien peoples is repugnant to the genius and the ideal of the Jewish religion. If we can read any thing in the history of the Jewish religion, it is that the Jewish people were chosen to be the disciples of a theory of life which involved the idea of the dedication of that people to the laws laid down by Moses, and elucidated and applied by his followers. The noblest passages in the prophets are those in which the Jewish people are held up to scorn and reproach for their leanings toward alien gods and alien customs. You cannot think of the Jews in their own land, without thinking of a jealous God, who demands of his people an unqualified loyalty. You cannot read of the Jews in the middle ages without a feeling that the ghettos were as well due to the need of the Jews as to the oppression of governments. The ghettos were the material walls that separated the Jews from the heathen; and the Law was the spiritual wall that consciously kept out alien influence.

Judaism was the glorious heritage of the Jewish people, but it was a national conception, and a national devotion was required. All Israel was a brotherhood in the eastern sense, of blood-relationship, and a man or woman was born into the fold, and consequently into the hereditary religion.

If the desire to conform to American conditions and to establish a modified Jewish religion were the outcome of an internal dissatisfaction with the orthodox

view, there might be some justification for it, or some value in it. But reform Judaism is not the expression of a refined sense of religion, of an actual feeling that the universal brotherhood of man must supersede the present limited brotherhood. The reform movement is an adjustment of Judaism to outer pressure. It is a compromise with conditions for material advantages. All genuine reforms are evolutions; they have their basis in the assertion of individuality. Reform Judaism lacks the fire of a Luther, who saw in Catholicism a state of religious decay, which must be arrested by a new enthusiasm for a better conception of religion. It is the reply of the Jews to emancipation; the tribute they are willing to pay those who emancipated them. It is the spirit of the spiritual slave, who, when freed from political bondage, is eager to offer up his household gods as a token of gratitude. It is subjection, not liberation. It's source is not national or religious pride, but national and religious abasement.

Because Judaism reform is the outcome of abasement, it has never been able to present the elements of positive beliefs, for it is subject to the alterations and the improvements in conditions outside. Therefore reform Judaism, in spite of its advantages in being placed in countries comparatively free from persecution, has not been able to state, with any satisfactory clearness, what principles it stands for, what hopes it nurses, what future it intends to make for itself, why it rejects this and accepts that. Reform is a reflex of the various conditions under which its fragments find themselves, and, as a consequence, we find that it means something different, according to the location of the particular prophet who ventures to sound his horn. It has never ventured