The Maccabaean

The Delusion

BASIL MATHEWS, The Riddle of Nearer Asia,N. Y. George H. Doran Co.

Missionaries have always deluded themselves that at various times in history Israel was ready for conversion. It seems strange, however, at this day to find a serious book prefaced by Viscount Bryce which sets forth the proposition that Israel is now ready for a mass immigration not only into Palestine but into Christianity. Basil Mathews solves the Riddle of Nearer Asia by turning Moslems and Jews into Christians. If the profundity of his knowledge and the power of his reason holds equally well for Islam as it does for Israel, a brief account of the chapters called the Discipline of Israel will sufficiently characterize his ability. It would seem foolish for us to review the book were it not that it probably will have a thoughtful reading circle among Christians who will be deceived by the endorsement of Viscount Bryce into believing it to speak the truth that many of them would like to hear. The author uses as a literary device “a modern young Jew looking forward to the future with the shrewd appraising eyes of his race” who “would best grasp the meaning of the present tendency by looking swiftly over the record of the past. He would see the divine discipline of Israel between the hammer and anvil of the Empires of Egypt and Assyria, Babylon and Greece, Persia and Rome, coming to a climax of severity within half a century of the Crucifixion.”

Within that period this Christian-sighted Jewish youth finds the “ritual-heart of Judaism pierced,” the Jewish State wiped out of existence after the rebellion of Bar Cochba, and Judaism destroyed as a political organism. He finds fugitives fleeing to every known land, fugitives whose Temple having been destroyed and the center of sacrificial worship having been lost, are threatened with the destruction of their religion. This same wise youth now looks “through that great dispersion in the first and second centuries till the end of the 19th century” and finds “the life of the Jews a chequered story of outlawry, social ostracism, political oppression, commercial hostility, and massacre, broken by times of tolerance and protective justice.e He witnesses the gleams of light under the rule of Justinian, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Oliver Cromwell,” and he discovers all of this period of oppression to end in the transformation of the Jew into the usurer. In the 20th century he finds a terrific conflict with “on the one side, the ideals of isolation and of race purity, and on the other, the attractive power of the surrounding life, the tendency to assimilation.”

This peculiar young Jew, says Mr. Mathews,

would begin “to wonder how any people could survive through 2,000 years with no territory, no central government backed by civil authority, no common language, not even in the last analysis a racial unity.” And this young man who evidently has had no Jewish background decides that Judaism survived by complete obedience to what it believed to be “the detailed stated will of God.” “Power of the law was reinforced by the clear ringing dogma of the Unity of God and by the ever-present hope of the coming of the Kingdom of the Messiah. This system welded the Jews into such a unity that, though scattered over the whole earth, they were still one, and the center of the whole system was the Law expounded by the Rabbis and enforced by the fear of the anger of God.”

Then this surprising young person finds the perils of this system, “In Judaism”—says he, “life is largely spent on the flat road of a legalistic formalism which hides the mountain ranges of God’s righteousness and law.” Straightway this modern young Jew clothes Rabbis in strange garb, for says he, “they enforce the law under penalties of divine anger against disobedience creating a cramping tyranny, and in the whole world there is no oppression more dreadful than the despotism of the synagogue among an ignorant people, for it is a tyranny over soul and mind as well as over the body.” This surprising young person who has transferred his own ignorance to his people then reviews the educational system of the Jews and finds that the Jews survived because in the Ghetti they had their own exclusive schools which allowed no light of outside culture, to penetrate, that they were preserved also by persecution; that their isolation has led to a defective view on the part of Christendom as a whole, which thinks of the Jew as a money-lender or a thief or at best as an honest but cringing pedlar or petty tradesman. Yet, says Mr. Mathews, “to the Jews, world civilization owes Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Lombroso, Emin Pasha, Vambery, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Lord Beaconsfield, and in our own day Baron Sonnino, Brandies and Hergson.” If, then, the ramparts of unity have been so powerful in the past, what force (our inquiring modern Jew would ask) can penetrate them? And he’ discovers a movement taking place like the outflow of the waters of a vast lake in remote highlands that blends tributary waters until at last it is lost in the sea. He finds in this river of Jewish Humanity at one end, “the primitive untouched traditional Jew to whom the Talmud is the beginning and end of knowledge. He swarms in Russia, Galicia, Morocco and Asia Minor and is the half of the entire world population of Jews. The son of this Jew moves westward perhaps as

far as New York. He speaks not only jargon but the language of his adopted country and dresses like the rest of his fellow citizens. He attends the synagogue high days and Holidays, and reads the literature of the world around him. His children are swept swiftly down the national river to the third stage. They ignore the ritual but still marry within the Jewish fold. Their children enter the last reach of the river and are lost in the sea of assimilation. They marry Christian wives and husbands, and more frequently than not are baptised. These are the Jews, says our young man, who are in our public schools and universities. Finding his race partly gliding irresistably into the national life of America and Europe our Hacham now asks what is to be the issue? He then discovers that there was in 1869 a conference of Rabbis in Philadelphia who agreed that “The Messianic aim of Israel is not the restoration of the old Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of the earth, but the confession of the unity of God so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures and their call to moral sanctification.” Very wisely the youth finds that along this line Judaism cannot survive assimilation. He then finds that there is a movement which aims at preserving the nation and which is therefore developing colonization in Palestine. He follows those who favor this movement. They do so because they feel that there must be either a Jewish sovereign state or assimilation, and they prefer the Jewish state. He then finds other Jews who consider it blasphemous to move until the Messiah himself comes, and he finds the Jew who resents the thought of a separate state or (what would be to him an exile), the return to Palestine.

In none of these solutions does this modern young Jew (or let us hope he has vanished from the book and left Mr. Mathews) find himself agreed. He sees another vision of progress which, “so far from cutting across the two opposed views of Zionism and Internationalism, fulfils in a greater sense the deepest and most spiritual ideals of each. This new progress would end forever official Judaism, it would liberate the Jewish people from Rabbinical leadership that has led it astray from the days of Isaiah and Jeremiah, the leadership that crucified Christ, stoned Stephen, hounded Paul out of Antioch.” This new movement “would bring the Jews where they belong, standing where Paul stood and kneeling where Paul knelt.”

Then suddenly Mr. Mathews is seized with doubts. Can a race that has resisted through the centuries listen to the Good News today? Ah, says Mr. Mathews, "they never resist the