A New Literature
IN order that a Jewish national appeal should be effective in evoking response, it is neccessary that the Jewish Nation should give some thought to the Jewish people as such, in the first place. Apparently, this is a matter which, we are entitled to suppose, is being done wherever Jewry is to be found. This is not altogether so, however. But an effective New Jewish Literature devoted to the delineation of Jewish life and the development of its race-quality would go far to make it so.
In fact, the time has come when it must seem clear that, if the Jewish Race is to realize its historic foreshadowings, it must lift up and put aside the mass of disintegrating alien literatures which is wearing away its independence of outlook and emerge again with its own standards, its own perspective, its own vision as a race-conscious people.
Not so many centuries ago the mass of the Jewish people understood the nature of such a necessity very well. Ardently they studied and developed their literature, realizing that. if only they kept alive the spirit of Judaism and its traditions, outward persecution could not prevail against them. The cossack or inquisitor might rage without; it only made them fix their attention more earnestly on the written testimony of their former glory and of other times to come. In fact, ever since the remote times of the Babylonian Exile, the Jewish People developed a new form of defens‘ve struggle against foreign aggression, a struggle which could be and was carried on beneath the very spears of the enemy; a struggle by means of national, literary activity intimately conjointed with every-day life. There after, with the instinct of a nation to most encourage and honor those that best answer the national need, the people looked intuitively to its men of letters, the Rabbonim or teachers, as the conservers of its national unity in dispersion, while the ignorant, the am ha-aretzim were abhorred as worse than useless in the peculiar national crisis.
So acutely did the people feel the necessity of this form of struggle, that the Rabbis in the Diaspora became the aristocrats or ruling class of the nation in the same way as with a people given to war, the greatest warriors may become established as its nobility. The very mothers crooning to their infants, sang in hope that their boys might attain to the Rabbi-class among the neople.
In the course of time, however, the rising tide of alien intellectuality began to catch up with the isolated heights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. To maintain the national consciousness of the Jewish people thro the medium of archaic Talmudic traditions fast losing its connection with the actual life of the people, became increasingly more difficult and, to-day, has become, manifest as impossible. To-day, Jews cultured and half-cultured, the mass of the literate, in fact, are immersed up to their eyebrows in the waves of literary outpourings of other races. This would be a thing by no means regrettable in itself if Jews were endowed with a great modern literature of their own capable of sustaining their own individuality in this flood. If we were able to dissect the thought- substance of great masses of our reading men and women, however, we would find all the ingredients of the well-known modern writers of all nations, their creations would stalk through their brains quite frequently, but of modern Jewish figures there would hardly be a sign, unless we accept those extraordinary interpretations of Jewish character offered by alien writers.
Thus, Jewish life, finding no adequate expression in modern literature, is often consigned by our numerous Jewish readers of general literature to the dreaded dust-heap which they call Sordidness, and they gaze passionately away and beyond, strangely unconscious of the Jewish world in which they have their being, nevertheless, and must somehow seek their salvation. How then can successful appeal to