The second stage in the disintegration of national life affects the cultural phase. When the cultural element of a nation is broken up and the latter adopts the culture, i. e., the manner of living and mode of thinking of another people, so that the only remaining tie that binds its individuals together is the ethnological fact of common descent, then the fate of the nation is sealed. For while the consciousness, or more correctly the instinct, of common origin may for some time keep the nation together, it cannot, as a mere brutal fact of nature, form the basis of national endeavors and aspirations or evoke national enthusiasm and loyalty. The third and final stage in the process of disintegration is inevitably bound to follow. The ethnological element loses its hold upon the individuals of the nation in whose value and future they no more believe. They gradually withdraw, by intermarriage and assimilation, from the membership of their people and slip into that of the nation with which they had become politically and culturally identified, and their own nation becomes a memory of the past.
It will thus be seen that both in the genesis and in the decline of a nation the cultural element is the deciding factor; its survival means the survival of the nation, its progress marks the” progress of the nation, its decline and disappearance result in the decline and ultimate disappearance of the nation itself.
II.
The development of the Jewish people during the variegated periods of its existence illustrates in bold relief the threefold process sketched above. At first the Jews appear as an ethnological entity, as the common descendants of the patriarchs. Whether the Jews have in the course of their history experienced an influx of foreign blood or not, it remains a fact that few, if any, races or nations have with such supreme zeal and self-sac- sacrifice guarded and maintained their racial purity as have the Jews. On the substructure of this racial or ethnological element there arises very early a common manner of living and mode of thinking. in other words, a Jewish culture which, in accordance with the fundamental ten- dencv of the Jewish genius, assumes a religious character. Finally comes the political phase to safeguard and to protect the ethnological and the cultural element. This comeeption of the state not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. as a frame and vehicle for the culture of the nation, has nowhere been so clearly conceived anı so boldly carried into reality as in Judaism. The political ideal of the prophets, which, after a bitter struggle of centuries, became the inalienable conviction of the bulk of the Jewish people. is a polity not for purposes of conquest and physical aggrandizement, but a commonwealth which shall vouchsafe the integrity of the spiritual possessions and aspirations of Judaism and shall, regardless of size and material resources, become the center whence “the Law and the Word of the Lord” shall go forth to Israel and the rest of the world. The second Jewish commonwealth founded by Zerubabel and firmly established by Fzra and Nehemiah was an exact copy of this political ideal of the prophets and became in this form the medium through which Judaism became a vital factor in the development of mankind.*
Hence, when the Jewish state was finally destroyed by the Romans, the cultural element almost automatically
stepped into the gap created by the political catastrophe. What the Jews lost in political unity, they made up by the strict maintenance of their cultural and ethnological integrity; and since the geographical dispersion of the Jewish people made a visible uniformity among the scattered members of the nation not only extremely difficult but also absolutely indispensable, that part of Jewish culture which is represented by a common manner of living was particularly emphasized and was finally crystallized in elaborate religious practices which, no less than the common mode of thinking, safeguarded the unity and existence of the Jewish people in the Exile. At the same time the political aspirations survived in the Jewish people in the shape of the Messianic hope which pointed to the restoration in a more or less distant future of the Jewish commonwealth which shall once more become the national frame for their cultural or religious life.
In this wise the Jews, without a state and without a land, scattered and divided to the four corners of the earth, the perpetual lightning rod of the world's hatred and cruelty, survived and even developed as a sharply-marked nationality, distinguished by a uniform manner of living and mode of thinking and linked by the ties of common descent.
The political emancipation of modern Jewry marks the beginning of a period of decline in the history of our people. The desire to join the nations in whose midst they lived made the Jews, or, more correctly, some of their leaders, adopt the ideal of assimilation, i. e. the tendency to become similar to the other nations and, as a necessary prerequisite, to break up the Jewish national separateness in its threefold aspect of ethnological, cultural and political unity. As a first step, the Jewish political aspirations which had survived in the form of the Messianic hope were sacrificed on the altar of emancipation. In its further progress assimilation ddemanded the annihilation of the outward separateness of the Jewish people in the shape of religious ceremonies and practices. Yet even this was not sufficient. "The Hebrew language which had throughout the centuries been the literary medium of the Jewish national culture was the next vietim. But the anxiety to break down the bars that separated the Jews from their neighbors was compelled with the force of a devastating natural phenomenon to affect also the mode of thinking, the sentiments, conceptions and ideals of the Jewish people. All that was left of a highly developed and sharply-marked Jewish culture were a few scanty remains in the form of a few abstract doctrines, such as the unity of God and the brotherhood of Man, which had in the meantime become the possession of the non-Jewish world and, therefore, no more separated the Jews from their environment. Judaism, once a rich and magnificent culture embodying the national life in all its manifestations, was reduced to a lifeless and colorless catechism which was no more able and no more deserved to hold its own in the midst of a hostile world. This is practically the stage which large sections of emancipated Jewry have reached already: a community without political aspirations, without a uniting cultural element. with merely the consciousness or, more correctly,
*I have said more about this in my pamphlet, "The Political Ideal of the Prophets." (Reprint from the Jewish Comment, Baltimore, 1910, No. 23.)