The Maccabaean

T is customary with the Jews all over I the world to visit the cemeteries on the ninth day of Ab. In southern Russia the Jews on this -occasion scatter garlic on the graves, and in western Russia the boys manufacture little wooden swords and put them together with a bit of garlic on the tombs of their deceased parents or relatives. An odd custoın forsooth, and many a time I have heard Christians mock at it, and even we, who had enjoyed the custom in our early youth, looked with amazement at it when we grew up and became, so to say, enlightened and civilized.. We condemned it as a meaningless custom of our uncultured forefathers that deserved to be ridiculed.

But the time is approaching when our children may pay in the same coin we have paid our forefathers, and will consider us lagging behind the still higher and truer final civilization they have acquired at last. And now, in anticipation of our having to defend our own position, we realize more and more that our forefathers must have surely also had some reason for introducing customs, which, looked at superficially, only seem to be senseless vagaries. We now begin to consider our ancestors no less clever than we are ourselves, nay, even as clever perhaps as our children and grandchildren themselves pretend and will pretend to be.

In looking about to find the meaning oi the above odd customs, I was at first inclined to take it as a survival of an old custom, supposed to have existed among the Jews as among many other old nations, and still exists with some (e.g., the Chinese), to offer donations of food to the manes of the deceased, a supposition based on Deuteronomy 26, 14, “nor given cught thereof for the dead.” But I rejected this suggestion; first, because if the scattering of garlice could to some extent be explained by it, still the puzzle of putting wooden toy swords on the graves remains unsolved, and secondly, if even we

should take the custom as a result of offerings to the manes of the deceased— granting the meaning in Deuteronomy 26, 14 tc be thus rightly understood—we must find an explanation for these donations themselves, for to offer sacrifices to the dead is quite contrary to Jewish religious conceptions. There can be no doubt that it such a custom had existed among the Jews of old, it could only have had a symbolic meaning. I even contend that the Chinese custom of offering food to the manes of their ancestors is merely an act of filial piety, and was introduced only to demonstrate by it their firm belief in an eternal life beyond, and that the souls of their “departed” (as the Chinese call the “deceased”) ancestors are always near them, and by no means are the donations to be regarded as sacrifices to the dead. The Chinese religions being essentially monotheistic, would not allow sacrifices to the dead as an equal sentiment, for sacrifices are offered to Shangeti, the only one God.

I pondered over these strange Jewish customs, and tried to find the idea hidden in strewing garlic and putting toy swords on the graves and why just the ninth day of Ab was appointed as a visiting day to the cemeteries. I did not doubt for a moment that the day chosen and the above customs must be connected and founded on some analogous basis. After examination and deliberation I arrived at the following explanation:

It is admitted as an historical fact that on the ninth day of Ab Jerusalem was twice conquered and the temple twice destroyed. First in 586 B. C. by the Chaldeans and in 70 C. E. by the Romans, and the Jewish nation then lost its independence. But the Jews have never resigned their hopes to see Jerusalem restored, the temple rebuilt again, and the Jewish nation installed anew among the other leading great powers of the world. Further, the Jews believe in the resurrec-