The Maccabaean

(Concluded)

harity and good works were the (J comer stones of Jewish life in the exile. But the ideal was the moral hero, the virtuous in heart and intuition, the one of the “thirty-six righteous” who are the salt of the earth and its justification. And the national phantasy has woven many stories around this motive, in which the moral aspiration of the nation re-echoes. In our time the great Jewish poet, Perez, presented to the judgment of the cultured world all those heroic stories and legends in all their poetic glory.

The Messianic hope was a deep consolation and inspiration of life. Messianism, of course, lost its universal and revolutionary character of old times, but it be came a living force for national resistance. It became a moral force in life to overcome the misery of reality.

Even when Judaism lost its creative forces it was, however, inspired by the conviction of its great historical significance. It was not lacking in the will to keep pace with the culture of the time,and tried to live again by delving into its own depths. So it was the task of Maimonides to reconcile Judaism with Aristotolean philosophy and to give it a philosophical color. Judaism which got a philosophical rationalistic foundation, was thus enabled to stand against the cultural influence of the time. Yehuda Halevey went just the other way but he aimed at the same results. He defined and denied the philosophical truths but based the superiority of Judaism on the fact of revelation and manifestation of God in Jewish history. He vindicated Judaism by glorifying its historical elements. Is not Judaism eternal since the Jewish nation is the heart of the nations?

*Owing to a typographical error, Dr. Syrkin's name was spelled Snyder in the last installment of this article.

In the nineteenth century, this peculiar nation entered into the current of modern society and culture and thereby gave rise to the modern Jewish problem, the Jewish tragedy. Under the blows of the FEuro- pean revolution the ancien regime gave way and the ghetto-dwellers came into modern society as equally emancipated. From the ghetto, the Jews brought with them moral virues, peculiar abilities, high intelligence, love of ‘freedom, a critical attitude toward the state, institutions and traditions, The “rights of man” and the triumph of liberalism opened for intelligent and industrious Tews, who belonged to the merchant class, wide possibilities of economical and social progress. But one of the conditions of social and economic ascension in the new favorable surroundings was assimilation. The national Jewish soul had to be sacrificed to the social success of the Jewish bourgoisie in Western Europe. As Heine expressed it in a more metaphoric way, “conversion became for the Jew the passport to European culture.”

Assimilation was not achieved because it was full of inward inconsistencies. It was only a melodramatic episode in Jewish history and was not lacking, of course, in tragic aspects. Assimilation was melodramatic, because the emancipation of the Jews never became a real living fact. Modern history did not want the Jew even with his assimilated physiognomy, and the repulse of the Jew by the non-Jews soon prevailed along the whole line. The great majority of the Jewish nation in Eastern Europe was not "emancipated" at all and did not even make one step toward assimilation. Abstract liberalism was supplanted by the principle of social organization and the combination of groups, and the more the social distinctions