JUDAISM IN THE PAST CENTURY
THE first of the Christian era, which witnessed the downfall of the Second Temple and the destruction of the Jewish state, being excepted, the most important epoch in Jewish history, and the most decisive as well, is constituted by the nineteenth and by the dawning twentieth century. In making this statement, I profess myself free from that peculiar subjective illusion aptly donated as "Akrochronism"—a term coined by the late Gumplowicz, (Professor of Sciology at Gracz) to describe the singular conceit that views the period one is living in as the most remarkable and momentous of all the ages. Permit me to outline for you in brief the causes to which I ascribe the significance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a crucial turning point in the destiny of the Jewish people.
Until the close of the eighteenth century, there was nothing at all vague or equivocal about the legal status of the Jews in European countries, or in their relations to the peoples in whose midst they lived. All the world was agreed in holding that they were aliens. As aliens they were regarded by governments and nations, as aliens they regarded themselves. Whether the attitude taken towards them was friendly or hostile, whether they were made welcome or unwelcome, whether hospitality was proffered or toleration denied, they were always and everywhere looked upon as strangers. All of their public and private concerns were regulated by laws for the stranger, and most wretched laws they were, without basis in covenants and reciprocal agreements but evolved rather out of the contemptuous willingness of the strong to comply with traditional usage and to let himself be swayed by sympathy of a sort.
That the Jews were invariably and unalterably considered strangers, even in those instances where they had been domi-
ciled in a country for centuries earlier than the nation that styled them such, was a phenomenon explicable in the light of their history, of prevailing social conditions, the universal "Weltanschauung."
In earlier times, the historical sense was as embryonic as the science of history, and even the scholars (or those who were termed such) held the most fantastic and far-fetched notions concerning the past of their own races, when they concerned themselves with the subject at all. The history of the Jewish people, however, (in its broadest outlines, at least) was fam- ilar to all. There was but one Book in general circulation throughout the civilized and semi-civilized world, —and that was the Bible.
Everyone knew that Book; the clergy and the scholars read it; the masses derived some knowledge of its contents from sermons, from mystery plays and from the pictures and images displayed in convents and churches. The Bible afforded everyone some information as to the destinies of the Jewish people. It was common knowledge that the Jews had once been God's Chosen People, that this people had possessed a land of its own with a glorious capital at Jerusalem and a wonderful holy Temple whence they had been driven at the sword's point, and dispersed all over the world. These misfortunes had come upon the Jews as a punishment for a monstrous and inexplicable crime: their stubborn rejection of redemption and redeemer through an infamous judicial murder of the Son of God, himself one of the units of the threefold Godhead. The Bible was a constant reminder that the Jew had migrated from the distant oriental lands, that they were a conquered people, fugitives burdened with the peculiar curse of homelessness as their eternal doom. Every migration, every invasion into a country, was forgotten in the course of a few generations. The Franks in