Biting on Granite: A Jewish Rejoinder

‘For let all the peoples walk each one in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.’ — MICAH IV.5

JOSEPHUS in his Antiquities and Wars narrates that Pontius Pilate, on becoming Procurator of Judæa, commanded his troops to carry into Jerusalem the standards or symbols containing the image of the Roman Emperor. It had been an accepted usage to defer to the Jewish observance of the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make any graven image or likeness.’ Thereupon the common people flocked in throngs to Cæsarea, the residence of Pilate, and for five days and nights besought him to withdraw his decree. On the sixth day the exasperated Procurator ordered the people to assemble at the hippodrome, where he had stationed troops in ambush. The Jews continued their pleas, and Pilate, to intimidate them, bade his soldiers make ready their weapons, while he shouted: ‘Whoever will not cease his begging and return to his home shall be put to the sword.’ As one man, however, the multitudes fell on their knees, bared their necks, and proclaimed that they were prepared to die rather than suffer their sacred laws to be violated. At last the despot was impressed by this display of moral courage, and, for the moment at least, he yielded. Forty years later, the Jewish masses were dying by the tens of thousands in a vain defense of their Temple and their nationhood.

Jewish character has not changed throughout the ensuing centuries. Modern Jews are the lineal heirs of the Pharisees whom Christendom has so harshly maligned, but who to-day are being justified in their beliefs and policies through the scholarly studies of R. Travers Herford, the late Professor George Foot Moore of Harvard, Israel Abrahams, and others. We deem the reasons good and sufficient that prompted the Rabbis at the commencement of the Common Era, when they stood ‘at the parting of the roads,’ to turn from the course urged upon them by Paul, Stephen, and Athanasius, and to follow instead in the footsteps of Abraham, Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezra, Mattathias of Modin, Johanan ben Zakkai, Akiba, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, and their successors. A few Jews may consent to pay the ‘price of admission to Western society,’ as Heine caustically described his baptism, but almost all of the sixteen millions of Israel, dispersed among the nations, still ‘maintain their integrity.’

Hence the suggestion of John Cournos that Jews ‘establish the most perfect Jew and the most perfect man among the fully acknowledged hierarchy of their Prophets, their “sons of God,”’ meets with no approval among informed and self-respecting Jews. Mr. Cournos, while of Jewish birth, has no right to speak for Jewry, or even a substantial part of it. He will not meet the fate of a Uriel Acosta which he seems to invite, since the spirit of the Inquisition which infected Amsterdam Jewry in the seventeenth century and impelled it, through fear, to adopt repressive policies is absent from Israel to-day.

Mr. Cournos disqualifies himself as a Jewish spokesman if only because he misrepresents what he calls ‘Mosesism.’ He swallows — hook, line, and sinker — the hoary polemics against Judaism, with its alleged ‘ eye-for-an-eye principles of Moses,’ forgetting that the God whose message Moses preached was a ‘Lord slow to anger and plenteous in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression ’ (Numbers XIV. 18). Had Mr. Cournos consulted any work on Jewish jurisprudence he would have learned that the lex talionis was, when introduced, a decided step forward and beyond the system of group retaliation, of which the Kentucky feuds of to-day are still a reminiscence. Middah ke-neged Middah (‘Measure for measure’) is a concept which, with many refinements, lies at the root of all legal and social organization. Furthermore, ‘eye for eye ’ was interpreted in practice in terms of money compensation.

We Jews repudiate the invitation to purchase immunity from persecution by coming ‘to terms with Christianity’ through accepting Jesus as ‘our greatest prophet, the keystone of our ultimate faith.’ It is an obnoxious bargain; we will have none of it. We know, of course, that as long as Mohammed believed he might win the Jewish tribes of Arabia to Allah and himself he was their friend, but when they resisted he turned to sword and fire. Martin Luther, hoping he might convert the Jews, wrote That Jesus Was Born a Jew, but, later, in rage at his failure, he penned a screed entitled The Jews and Their Lies. It has ever been thus, and in all likelihood, say the Jews, made philosophical by long and bitter experience, it will be thus again.

We also know that Christianized Jews, on accepting Jesus, have not been welcomed into majority fellowship and security. The Chuetas of Majorca were converted to Catholicism five hundred years ago, but they are still an isolated group, a ‘marked people’ of pariahs. The non-Aryan Christians of Nazi Germany are neither ‘fish, nor flesh, nor fowl’; their fidelity to Jesus has not freed them from ostracism and exile, and they decline the warm, sustaining consolations which bona fide Jews in distress receive from their brethren in their own and other lands.

Moreover, even if conversion were a passport, an open sesame to goodwill, we Jews would still refuse to put ‘safety first.’ Mr. Cournos says that if Jew s accept Jesus they may win recalcitrant Gentiles to follow him in deed as well as in word. The best object lesson we Jews can teach is to instruct Christians to deal with us in justice and brotherliness, even though we do not adopt their interpretation of Jesus, the Christ. Gentiles must learn to regard as a peer even the minority which is ‘stiff-necked’ and tenacious of its faith. ‘Away with toleration,’said a ruler; ‘I know only friendship and love!’ In this spirit Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, where dissenter, Papist, infidel, freethinker, and Jew might have complete liberty of conscience. The only ‘terms’ on which we Jews can attain an understanding with Christians are that we be unmolested in the observance of our ancestral religion. Judaism is adequate for us; its ethics, philosophy, doctrines, ceremonies, and institutions answer our spiritual requirements, for ‘Judaism is not only religion, and it is not only ethics; it is the sum total of all the needs of the nation placed on a religious basis. It is a national world-outlook with an ethico-religious foundation.’ Judaism, in the phrase of Mordecai M. Kaplan, is a ‘civilization,’ supremely suited to the psychology, temperament, and indwelling soul of Jews, yet bearing a universal preachment, as the mother faith of Christianity and Islam.

‘Jewry must make a fresh start,’ says Mr. Cournos. We make a fresh beginning every year on Rosh ha-Shanah, our New Year, and Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, when each individual, through his own prayers rather than through a semi-divine Mediator, achieves his peace with God. ‘What there is left of the Jewish idea [must be] “ liquidated,” ’ says Mr. Cournos. Yet the ‘ Jewish idea’ has stimulated the major reform movements in the Christian Church, whose leaders in all centuries have been accused of ‘Judaizing.’ The ‘Jewish idea’ has given birth not merely to our prophets, rabbis, and philosophers, but within recent times it has also brought forth Israel ben Eliezer, the ‘Master of the Good Name,’founder of Hasidism, one of the greatest mystical movements of the human race.

It is impertinence for Mr. Cournos to say that ‘to-day Israel is faced with spiritual, if not physical, extinction.’ An unbelieving Jew is an anomaly, comparable to the youth who declared, ‘God forgive me, but I am an atheist.’ Never before has the religious zeal of Jewry been more fervent and more intelligent. Theodor Herzl, builder of modern Zionism, summoned his fellow Jews ‘into Judaism through Zionism. ’ Zionists today, however necessary a Jewish militia in Palestine, are striving for a concordat of coöperation with right-minded Arabs on behalf of the restoration of Zion and its hinterland. Despite our repugnance to proselytism, the Jewish people has increased fivefold since 1791, when the French Assembly granted equality of civil rights to the Jewish Community. When Mr. Cournos says, ‘What is left for us to do but try to make money?’ he ignores the commendable activity of Jews in academic, professional, cultural, scientific, and æsthetic pursuits, where personal monetary profit is a remote consideration.

Mr. Cournos has sacrificed truth in order to coin an epigram comparing Karl Marx to ‘Jehovah’ and Lenin to Moses. Judaism is independent of any particular economic or political programme, though democracy furnishes its most congenial environment. It is no accident that on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are inscribed the words ‘Proclaim ye liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof,’taken from Leviticus xxv. 10. Jews qua Jews abhor class and tribal warfare, the resort to strong-arm tactics in industrial disputes or to military violence in international affairs. ‘Come and let us reason together’ is the legacy of the First Isaiah to posterity. President Roosevelt, in his 1936 Madison Square Garden address, aptly illustrated his aims for America with the words of Micah vi. 8: ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.’ No! Judaism is facing no ‘crisis’ to-day; Judaism is not ‘demoralized.’ It is more influential and vital than ever before.

We recognize no ‘great Jewish transgression’ in our unwillingness to centralize our religion in the personality of the young Rabbi of Nazareth. Joseph Klausner in his memorable life of Jesus, translated from the modern Hebrew by Herbert Danby, formerly Episcopal Canon at Jerusalem, declares: —

With Geiger and Graetz, we can aver, without laying ourselves open to the charge of subjectivity, and without any desire to argue in defense of Judaism, that throughout the Gospels there is not one item of ethical teaching which cannot be paralleled either in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, or in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature of the period near to the times of Jesus.

Gerald Friedlander and others have pointed out the Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount. To cite only one instance of the indebtedness of Jesus to his Jewish background, we can point to the words of Hillel (flourished from 30 B.C.E. to 9 C.E.), ‘Judge not thy neighbor till thou stand in his place’ (Ethics of the Fathers, II. 5) as the foundation for ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’ (Matthew VII. 1). Far from accepting Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah, we Jews cannot even regard him as a ‘perfect man.’ We worship no man or woman. No man knoweth to this day the sepulchre of Moses, and so scrupulous were the Rabbis that the name of Moses is not mentioned once in the Haggadah, the charming narrative read in every pious Jewish home at Passover to commemorate the liberation from Egypt. We Jews reject the destructive theories of a Drews or a Smith, stripping Jesus of all historicity, yet we regard him not as the teacher, but as a teacher in Israel. The essence of Christianity, we believe, rests in its history and symbols, and the same yardstick applies to Judaism. ‘Unitarianism denies the Trinity, whereas Judaism affirms the Unity of God.’ The word ‘Christ’ derives, of course, via the Greek, from the Hebrew Mashiach, the ‘Anointed One’ of the House of David. To this royal line the Archbishop of Canterbury linked George VI in the coronation ritual when he anointed him monarch; to this royal line the Gospel writers attempted to link Jesus of Galilee in order to prove by genealogical records that he was of Davidic birth in Bethlehem.

Under the most favorable construction, Jesus is for true Jews ‘a great teacher of morality and an artist in parable’ (Klausner). He is a very fallible and human personality, so intense in his fanaticism that he refuses to be diverted from his mission by the pleadings of his mother and family, whom he openly spurns. Though alleged to be of pacific and mild nature, he makes abundant use of highly vituperative phrases. With a ‘scourge of cords’ Jesus ‘resisted evil’ in active and forceful fashion when he drove from the outer court of the Temple those who sold doves and changed moneys of the Diaspora countries into Judæan coinage for the convenience of pilgrims who came from afar to make their offerings. Is it to be wondered that large sections of the people, hungering for a militant leader who would redeem them from the Roman yoke, turned aside from the young Galilean when, in the dictum ‘Render unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s,’ he gave an unmistakable sign that they could hope for no captaincy at his hands? Despite this, however, the Roman overlords, wishing to have out of the way at Passover time a potential trouble-breeder, crucified in typical Roman fashion this purported ‘King of the Jews.’ To say that Jews are persecuted to-day because one of their number suffered a martyr’s death in Jerusalem 1900 years ago is to denounce all Frenchmen and Englishmen for the guilt of Joan of Arc’s death, all Bohemians and Catholics for the burning of John Huss, and all Presbyterians for the execution of Michael Servetus.

‘Salvation,’ it has been said, ‘is from the Jews.’ We know the Jesus type well, for we have produced many more like him: Moses of Crete, Abraham Abulafia, David Alroy, Solomon Molcho, David Reubeni, Sabbatai Zevi, and numerous other self-professed ‘Messiahs’ whose aspirations have ended in tragedy. In Salonika a tiny sect still exists, known as the Doenmeh, who believe that Sabbatai Zevi of Smyrna, whose career came to its climax in 1666, was the Messiah, even though he was forced to accept Islam. Paul of Tarsus and his collaborators had far greater success in convincing the Mediterranean Gentiles, in quest of a new religion, that a young Jew was the Saviour. The blending of Judaism with non-Jewish features taken from other cults produced Christianity. The presence of a certain element in the preachment of Jesus, accentuated by the pro-Roman editors of the Gospels, made it possible to set the daughter religion against its parent. Not even the heroic sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich or the fortitude of some Protestant pastors in the face of the neopaganism of an Erich von Ludendorff in Hitler’s Germany can suffice to make Judaism and Christianity identically the same.

And why should they be? Why should we try to transform each other into the perfection we imagine we possess? Cannot we ascend the mountain of the Lord by our individual pilgrim paths? Cannot each go his own way, ‘except in opinion, not disagreeing?’ They bite on granite who seek to dragoon or allure us away from our traditions. The Messiah — or better still, the Messianic Age — in Jewish eyes is always to come. With our Rabbis we believe that God has given us something nobler than perfection — namely, the ambition and resolve to attain it. Let Christianity make excellent persons of its adherents, and Judaism of its devotees; we can be sure that these excellent persons, with utmost respect for each other’s differences, will find the road to each other in mutuality and friendship.

It is for us of this generation to discover anew the wisdom of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (the Christian Century to the contrary notwithstanding), that each son, according to Nathan, the Wise, possesses the true, authentic ring of his father if the desire to win it has prompted him to a life of integrity and righteousness.