The Maccabaean

THE desert is the cradle of Semitic civilization. Whether that culture had its origin in Arabia as most scholars are inclined to believe, or whether, as some maintain, it first saw the light on North African soil, the one fact which stands out above all else is that the Semitic mind was primarily moulded in the desert. Perhaps in no other place in the world could a greater hardhood of character, a superior steadiness of purpose, a more rigorous view of life be developed. For we must bear in mind that the struggle for existence is nowhere so intense, and the returns life brings to the individual are nowhere so stinted as they are in the dreary wastes of the desert.

It was a wonderful utterance of Renan, spiritual anti-Semite through he was, that "The desert is monotheistic; sublime in its immense uniformity, it brings before the human mind more so than anything else the concept of the Infinite." (Histoire générale des langues Sémitiques, p. 6). Revealed religion confirms the truth of this broad generalization. The account in Exodus distinctly emphasizes that it was in the desert that Moses first recognized the existence of the divine. An environment more favorable and varied would have been unsuited to mould that frame of mind needed to grasp the greatest religious truth the world has yet known.

Monotheism, the belief in one God, is the kernel of Semitic civilization. With due apologies to the higher critics who maintain that even in Judah the concept of one God, infinite and absolute, is to be sought in humbler origins; ascribing to Moses the process of nationalization of the former tribal god of the Kenites, Yahwe, and to the prophets the final act of rendering the "God-idea" universal, we must, nevertheless, contend that the origin of the idea of divine unity is to be found in the Semitic temperament.

For, even outside of Judah, the evidence of the existence of a Semitic pantheon as a product of the Semitic mind, is meagre and controversial. The Babylonian and Assyrian pantheon, from which the later

Phoenician and Aramean cults descend, is most likely Sumerian in origin. At the dawn of civilization in the valley of the Euphrates, at a time when the Semitic Akkadian invaders had yet not wholly assimilated the religion of the native non-Semitic Sumerians, a form of worship was in vogue which some scholars have termed henotheism —i. e., the belief in a local patron deity, not indeed to the exclusion of other gods, but still a decided tendency to hold on to one patron god at one time. Centuries were needed for the Semitic mind to develop to that point where it could swallow an entire pantheon. When Mohammed received his divine call to redeem his brother Arabs from the debased fetish worship into which they had sunk, and to preach the absolute unity of Allah, it was from among the Semitic inhabitants of the desert that he found the most willing auditors and most zealous supporters— men who were destined to conquer one-half the world in the interests of Islam.

Not so with the beginnings of Aryan culture. Whether the Indo-Germans (the latest name for the inhabitants of Europe and India) originally emigrated from Asia as was maintained of old, or whether, as different scholars believe, the southern steppes of Russia, or the dense woodlands of eastern Germany, or even the undulating coast lands of northwestern Germany first gave them life (cf. Hirt, Die Indogermanen, pp. 176-198), one truth is very evident, and that is, that nature bestowed upon the ancestors of European races a more favorable environment than upon the progenitors of the Semitic world. While the proto-Semites were forced to eke out a miserable existence in the nomad life of the desert, the Indo-Germans had already settled down on a small scale as husbandmen. The human mind is moulded by its environment. The Aryan saw life from an entirely different point of view than the Semite. To him life spelled variety, change. In every tree, in every bush, in every bend of a hill, the one principle of dissimilarity, unlikeness, seemed to be reflected. Little wonder that his fancy