The Maccabaean

The following is the first of a series of articles by Dr. Syrkin on the historical evolution of Judaism.

THE question as to what is the substance of Judaism, its value and significance for the present and future, has become in our days a burning and vital problem. A deep sense of unrest now exists in the different sections of Jewry and a mixed, uncertain sentiment is emerging to the surface of Jewish life. Doubts, perplexities, uncertainties, hopes and yearnings stir the Jewish heart, aggravating this sense of unrest to tragic proportions. All the complicated issues religious, curural and national raised by the different movements which lately came and disappeared, are the signs of this deep sense of unrest. And it is with a sense of tragedy that so many ask themselves: Is Judaism a failure, "a misfortune," as Heine called it, "a forlorn hope, an impossibility", as Zangwill's heroine Esther Ansell concludes?

It is a symptom of a transitory time of unrest, when the national spirit yeaus to become conscious of itself, to attain clearness as to its content and function. The study of its own value and significance rises normally in the critical and therefore, sometimes in the creative, epoch of a nation. And when a nation has the power to master its crisis this investigation of its own spirit and content becomes a source of force and rejuvenation, of historical revival.

In Jewish history, the inquiry into the nature of Judaism rose at various times, although the question arrested

the attention of the nation in different epochs with different degrees of intensity. All great Jewish spirits, from the Prophets in the vague beginnings to the modern Jewish philosophers, tried to define Judaism, to reduce its content to its fundamental elements, to proclaim its everlasting and eternal essence. The more the sense of unrest prevailed in an epoch and the national values needed a revision and new valuation, the more persistent was the trend of the time to become conscious of the essence of Judaism. But all those revisions and interpretations of Judaism were always inspired by the living breath of original creation. That was the way Judaism developed historically. It is the sum and result of centuries of individual effort as well as collective. It is subjective creation, but always in accordance with the historical spirit of the nation. And so Judaism evolved, not as the Judaism of the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Midrash, the Middle Ages, the Reform, but as the substance of all those variations colored by the history of the Jewish nation as a whole.

Judaism is a development ever-continuing, as the Jewish nation survives from age to age, from clime to clime. In every epoch, of course, a peculiar element of Judaism is underlined, and emphasis is put on a special part of its substance, according to the historical situation and need of the time. But after all Judaism is a unity in plurality. All epochs of Jewish history are characterized by a few cardinal features which are similar to one