The Maccabaean

IT seems to have become an accepted article of faith among the learned dissectors of our modern civilization that the latter is a fusion of two principal factors, the one, Hellenic, contributed by the ancient Greeks and embodied in our arts and science, the other, Hebraic, contributed by the Jews and embodied in the doctrines of Christianity. After having thus duly satisfied their Christian conscience, these learned historians, sociologists, etc., very strangely proceed to demolish the edifice they had so carefully reared, by establishing the utterly irreconcilability between Hellenism and Hebraism. And the "dead parallel" that they draw is always to the discomfiture of Hebraism. The Greek mind, they tell us, is broad and liberal; the Hebrew is narrow and bigoted. Greek political life is free and democratic and favors individual self-assertion; Hebrew institutions, like those of other Oriental nations are autocratic and compel the subjection of the individual to the state. Hellenism is dedicated to beauty and the joy of living; Hebraism imposes a stern ethical code that frowns upon the manifestations of the beautiful and the pleasures of life. It would seem that in order to establish this latter thesis, the Jews must no longer be classed among Oriental peoples, for, as such, where would be their Oriental voluptuousness and sensuousness? And so the "dead parallel" proceeds. Our learned dissectors do not seem to be concerned in the least with the radical contradiction between their fusion of Hellenism and Hebraism in their civilization, on the one hand, and the utter irreconcilability of these two elements on the other.

Now, the truth is that there never has been a fusion of these two elements in the life of the modern nations. Even the diluted form of Hebraism which the gentiles received in the compromises of Christianity was too strong a solution for the debilitated Graeco-Roman world and a too radical

restraint for the unharnessed instincts of its barbarian conquerors. For, a new regime of life, in order to be effective, must evolve slowly from the experiences of a people and cannot be grafted on from the outside. Hebraism in our modern civilization has only grazed the undeveloped sense of righteousness of the nations and has led them to pretend sanctimoniously to a fusion of the two opposing forces, but, this prescribed devotion once performed, they immediately slide back to an apotheosis of the sensuous instincts of the brute in man which they dignify with the name of Hellenism, and which, in sooth, do constitute that brand of Hellenism against which the Hebraic spirit has ever waged an unrelenting warfare. And in the vehemence of their apotheosis they do not perceive the contradiction in which they involve themselves, and in many cases anti-semitism adds zest to their fervor until their pure and undefiled Hellenistic color becomes indubitable, until the modern civilized man, the Christian, stands out as a Greek pure and simple. And yet at certain times, he hastily slips on his cowl and prates about the fusion of the Hebraic and the Hellenic. Ibsen makes his hero in Brand say: "During the six weeks days, you haul down God's flag upon the deck, only on the seventh is it visible flying towards Heaven." On Sundays the world becomes Hebraic.

We cannot enter here into an adequate discussion of the respective merits of the two life regimes represented by Hellenism and Hebraism. As was said above, those learned dissectors compare them and find Hebraism wanting, but can any conclusion be more natural for so many Greeks! We, here, will merely point to the fact that the ancient Hellenic nation suffered decay and death, while the ancient Hebraic nation is blossoming into new life; that in its period of decay, when the Graeco-Roman world, so boastful of its freedom and democracy, was rotting to the core because of the prevalence of slavery and class-oppression, of