Judaism in the Past Century
(Concluded)
TRUE to the habit of two thousand years, they took no thought beyond the moment and did not deduce the logical inferences and conclusions implied by their altered situation. Napoleon, however, did for the Jews what they had avoided doing for themselves. He followed out the emancipation idea to its logical conclusion. He understood Jewish citizenship to mean that they must become thorough-going Frenchmen, without reservations of whatever kind. Without reservations, that is to say, wtihout desire or hope of future change in their relations to the fatherland, with no ideals beyond the confines of the French state, with no fostering of the ties of kinship with Jews beyond French borders, without the maintenance of any barriers between themselves and their Christian fellow-countrymen, without even the unconfessed secret wish to resume the life of a separate community within the nation of which they had now become part and parcel. Sternly and suspiciously, the great realist presented to the Jews this problem which they had not faced, or cared to face, and imperiously demanded an unequivocal solution. He convened the Sanhedrin in Paris, and put plain questions, among them the following:
Question No. 3: May a Jewess marry a Christian or a Jew a Christian woman, or does the Jewish law enjoin that Jews marry only among themselves?
No. 4. Are non-Jewish Frenchmen brethren or strangers in the eyes of the Jews?
No. 6. Do Jews, born in France and naturalized there, regard France as their Fatherland? Are they in duty bound to defend it? Are they in duty bound to obey its statutes and its code of civil procedure?
The conference could, in all sincerity and honesty of purpose, answer the fourth and
sixth questions with a joyous affirmative. But the third caused the most acute embarrassment to the legalist Sinzheim, who had to formulate the reply. It was perhaps this question that aroused the Sanhodrin to a realization of the deepest sense and the final significance of the French legislation concerning the Jews. Men like Sinzheim apprehended what was wanted of them and sought in great anguish of soul to escape from their dilemma.
What was demanded of them was, that, for the sake of the new present, they renounce their past and their future. They might no longer remember that they had stood at the foot of Sinai; they might no longer’ believe that a revival of their high destiny was in store for them. They must cease to believe in the Messiah and to long for his coming. They had refused to accept Jesus of’ Nazareth as their Messiah, and had voluntarily suffered the tortures of hell through eighteen centuries in consequence And now they were to find the fulfiiiIment of the Messianic hope in the Revolution and the Empire; and must either confess that through all those eighteen centuries they had awaited this political event in mystic ecstasy, or that they had been the victims of a protracted delusion.
The Messianic belief is not, indeed, the ethical and metaphysical, but rather the historical essence of the Jewish religion. This content withdrawn, the religion is eviscerated, and only a flabby integument remains, that may be variously construed, according to temperamental and individual inclination, as an indefinite theism of unitarian hue, or as a creedless, mystically adorned spiritualism. Pious and scholarly Jews would not concede, if only to themselves, that the object of the emancipation or the design of the Christian legislators had been to uproot the Messianic hope from their hearts. They avoid-