The Maccabaean

THE word Judaism, in the English language, stands exclusively for a relgion. It is co-ordinate with the word Christianity, the word Buddhism, the word Zoroastrianism, with any word that stands exclusively for a religion. Now in the history of the Jewish people, there was a time when Judaism did not exist, and if I understand the gentlemen who represent the Reform sect correctly, the intention of the Reform movement is a reversion in fact to the religious attitude of the pre-Judaistic period in the history of the religion of the Jewish people. It is “prophetic” or “progressive Judaism” for which they stand, I gather, in contrast with the “Talmudical Judaism,” of the larger orthodox sect. But the period of the great prophets is not the period of Judaism, and strictly speaking, the term Judaism excludes the prophetic element as an active force in Jewish life. This is significant, and to me the significance seems tremendous, for so far as my personal sympathies are concerned they go entirely with the prophetic aspects of Judaism, or better, of Hebraism.

Hebraism and Judaism are words now in the English language and their usage is determined for us entirely by the writers who become authoritative either by their style or through the weight of their opinion, and this usage has given the term Hebraism a meaning such that it stands for the entire spirit of the Jew, not only in religion, but in all that is Jewish; in English the term Hebraism covers the total biography of the Jewish soul, while the term Judaism stands only for a portion of it. Now, the Jewish soul is the important thing, but no one has ever met a soul without a body (at least the people who claim they have met it are still required, for belief, to show evidence more than they have thus far shown) ; generally speaking, soul and body are co-ordinate and mutually imply each other. You cannot have one without the other. This is even more the case when you are dealing not with an individual but with a people. Hence it is the history of the Jewish body-politic with which Hebraism and its components, including Judaism. co-ordinate.

For this reason the gentlemen who stated the object of the society in the constitution of the Harvard Menorah Society were compelled to take into consideration the following historic fact: There was a time in the history of mankind when religion and life were coincident. You know that the prophets were reformers. The orthodox religion which they fought was the religion of the land. They were progressive religionists, just as the gentlemen who are in the Reform sect to-day claim to be progressive religionists. When they established their religion, it became the religion of the whole nationality, for all ancient religion is national religion.

Religion for the Greeks, and religion for the Jews, and religion for the Syrians, and for the Babylonians, and

An address delivered at the Third Menorah Convention, at Cincinnati, December, 1914.

the Romans, was essentially national and political, and the political nationalism of religion in the time of the Roman Empire was the immediate basis for the persecution of the Jews by the Romans. ’T'he latter persecuted the Jews not primarily because they disliked the Jews, but because the Jews were a political danger in their refusal to worship the representative of the State in the shape of the Emperor. But in the development of civilization, religion became detached from the totality of eivilized living. In the progressive division of labor religion became specialized. The priestly group learned to confine itself more and more to the “things of the spirit”—cult, ritual, dogma, while the other elements in civilization loomed larger and larger. Religion remained social, but society was no longer religious. Life was secularized. I think that the representatiyes of the Reform sect, in one of their conferences, declared that America is not a Christian country. In so doing they acknowledged this fact.

Throughout the history of the Jewish people, there is a continuity of spirit which is very different from the continuity of form that attends both the secular and the religious developments of Jewish life. This is the same in both these aspects of Jewish life—in the secular Jewish poetry and thought of the middle ages and up to the present day. Even a Bergson, ostensibly a Frenchman, expresses in his philosophy what is essentially the Hebraic conception of the nature of reality and the destiny of man. From Amos through Job, through the philosophers of the middle ages, to Ahad Ha-‘Am there is a clear and accountable continuity. Finally, there is the development of the whole of the secular life of modern Jewry, in Yiddish and in Hebrew. Yiddish may be unpleasant, but Yiddish is no less the speech of the Jews than English, no less the speech of the Jews than Aramaic, and Arabic and Ladino, and all of these have acquired literary and qualitative characteristics which are identical as expressions of the spirit of the Jew, of the Hebraic spirit.

This may be seen generally in the case of Yiddish alone. Yiddish, as you know, is a German dialect ; it is middle high German in its base, and German is an in- flected language; its rhythms are essentially long, periodic, indeterminate, radically different from the rhythms of Hebrew, involving a different kind of co-ordination and mode. But compare Yiddish with German, and you find quite an antagonistic literary quality. Yiddish reads like the Psalms, and the Bible, and the Talmud; it doesn’t read like German until it is Germanized. The whole genius of the tongue has been altered by Jewish use so that its spiritual quality has taken on the quality of the race that uses the tongue, and its literary kinship has become Hebraic.

Again, there is this whole mass of neo-English, neo-Russian, neo-German literatures which, written by Jews, deals with the life of the Jews, with their interests and character. This is not religious. What is its relation