The Maccabaean

(Translated from the Russian by Helena Frank)*

BENEATH the phenomena of modern Jewish history we can trace two parallel lines of tendency through the period comprised between 1789 and 1905, or between two revolutions, the first French and the first Russian Revolution. In the nation's political history, civil emancipation, or the struggle to obtain it, alternates with reaction, either general or specifically anti-Semitic. And in its cultural history we find a corresponding alternation, or else a competition, between the two movements of assimilation and of nationalism. These two lines of tendency are interwoven one with another in the chain of happenings in modern history, and shot through with a thousand threads, some visible and others invisible or not discovered as yet, and have their own origin in earlier stages of Jewish historical evolution.

The term "emancipation," which is used for the legal equalization of the Jews with the other citizens of the country, is a product of modern times. Under the old order, when the Jews in every land were in the position, not of a group of citizens, but of a caste outside the limits of citizenship, to which the ruling power granted, by special concession, certain rights or "privileges" of a limited kind—in those days there could only be a talk of "rights," not of "right," only of the adding to or taking from some portion of the conceded "exemptions" of civil equality—never. "Emancipation" could only become a political password from the moment when there came into being the contemporary state, founded on the idea of justice, which replaced the feudal caste-system of the old. In Europe this moment came for France in 1789; for the other Western countries

*From the Introduction to an unpublished hook.

in the course of the nineteenth century, for Russia in the twentieth. The emancipation of the Jews usually comes to pass through a series of stages as the new constitutional edifice gradually gains in solidity, slower or faster, as the case may be. When the new order was first instituted, this emancipation was only tacitly implied, as a necessary consequence of the dogma of civil equality which was laid down in the fundamental laws; see the “Declaration of Rights,” and the first articles of the Middle-European constitutions, etc. But the common formule of civil right proved insufficient for the legal foundations of Jewish equality. Loud voices were heard declaring that the fundamental law of equality ought not to embrace the Jews; and this happened at the very birth of equal civil right, just after the Declaration mentioned above. Then began special parliamentary sittings on the Jewish question in the French National Assembly, 1789-91, in the Frankfort Parliament, and the Vienna Reichstag, 1848; and after some hesitation, the equality of the Jews was formally enacted, by necessity, because it was found impossible to reconcile the disabilities of one part of the population with the newly restored civil structure.

But this special concession of the right to equal treatment was also hampered in its results by two obstacles. On the one hand, after revolution, which had forced the constitutional chart out of the hands of the government, reaction came, and labolished the fundamental laws; while, on the other hand, a Christian society was unable to brook the actual placing of Jews on a level with itself. In the first event, therefore, equality was judicially abrogated, in the second, its realization was, in fact, obstructed. In the first case the governmental reaction is of a temporary nature, the abrogated or mutilated consti-