Art. 11. THE JEWS AS A REVOLUTIONARY LEAVEN: A REPLY.

*

THE Count de Soissons' recent article on The Jews as a Revolutionary Leaven' follows two main lines of argument. The one is general in its bearing, and points to the activity of Jews as a natural force of disorder in Europe;

'the Jews (says the writer) are the most radical nation in all departments of life, and their radicalism frequently verges on nihilism' (p. 172). The Jews... possess no country; they are dispersed throughout the States of Europe; and, physically united with and involved in its life, they cannot be passive spectators. Every European tremor acts upon them directly or indirectly. Persecuted and slighted during so many centuries, they now have no feeling but hatred towards Europe; and since, among the factors of culture, the most adverse for them is Christianity, they direct their hatred above all against the religion of Christ' (p. 185).

The other main line is directed to the construction of a particular chain of evidence between Spinoza (and Hegel) at one end, and Marx, Lassalle, and Trotsky at the other. The intervening links in this chain are Heine and Herzen, with Feuerbach's doctrine uniting Hegel with the positivism and materialism of later days' (p. 183).

'There is a certain similarity in the mental development, views and life of Heine and Hercen' (p. 172). The thoughts of the Jew Spinoza, whom Heine ventures to call "the successor of Jesus Christ," produced the most abundant fruits on German soil' (p. 177). 'Hercen took a prominent part in the revolutionary movement of Russia and Europe. . . . Heine, Marx, and Lassalle were united by their Jewish origin, by a common admiration for Hegel, and by the similarity of the revolutionary conclusions . . . which they derived from Hegel and Feuerbach' (p. 183). 'Heine's wish is fulfilled; for, in Russia, Christian blood is being spilt in abundance, and the followers of Trotsky are carrying to unforeseen, but not illogical, conclusions the principles of the Jewish revolutionary writers-Spinoza, Heine, Hercen, Marx, and Lassalle' (p. 187).

This, briefly, is the argument (generally, to Jewish

extreme radicalism and morbid detestation of Christianity; particularly, to the sources of Russian Bolshevism in certain Jewish revolutionary writers) which it seems desirable, as we hope it is possible, to meet and refute, if Jews are to maintain and to extend their place in our common civilisation,* whether spiritually as monotheists or morally as Hebraists, after the recent upheaval.

How far the war itself is responsible for the present phase of the Jewish question is a speculation, however fascinating, which is not quite relevant to our context. In a chapter of 'The Times History of the War,' published at the end of 1917, it was said:

'One after another, the great latent social and national problems of the world were raised by the war, and with the advance of the British forces from Egypt came the turn of Palestine and the Jews.'

Certainly, a part of the emphasis now laid by Count de Soissons and other writers on the racial type and national character of the Jews may be traced to the national activities of Jewish Zionists in respect to Palestine. But to other Jews, as has recently been pointed out in an excellent handbook on the subject, t these activities seem misplaced. They object to Jewish nationalism on several grounds that seem sufficient to them, and particularly because it tends to shift the differentia of a Jew from his religion to his race. They maintain that it is for the sake of the religion that the race has been kept apart, since a majority race would absorb a minority religion; that in all strictly national characteristics the Jew is identified with his fellowcountrymen; and that the admission of non-Jews to

See particularly a posthumous book by Dr Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Contributions to Civilisation: an Estimate'; Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1919; also a passage in S. H. Butcher, 'Some Aspects of the Greek Genius': 'Henceforth it is in the confluence of the Hellenic stream of thought with the waters that flow from Hebrew sources that the main direction of the world's progress is to be sought' (1891).

+ Zionism and the Future of Palestine: The Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism.' By Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D., LL.D. New York; Macmillan, 1919: The claim is made that Zionism is part of the movement for the reassertion of nationalities that form such a striking feature of the political history of Europe in the 19th century. . . . This impression is certainly erroneous and misleading. As a matter of fact, of the Jews settled in Western European countries and in this country [U.S.A.] ... only a very small percentage.. approve of political Zionism.'

Judaism (at marriage, or on other occasions) is a proof of the purely religious test by which the name Jew is properly to be defined. We need not follow this reasoning further here* save to note that it commands the assent, if the author of that handbook is correct, of the large majority of Western Jews, and that, briefly, it may be expressed in the formula: Disraeli is a Jew to the Gentiles and a Gentile to the Jews.

Nor need we pause to discuss merely verbal differences with Count de Soissons. A 'nation' possessing 'no country' is a phenomenon rare enough to justify a somewhat closer scrutiny than is accorded to it in the article under reply. Assuming, then, with the assent of most Jews both in Western Europe and in America, that the Jew is identified with his fellow-countrymen by the habits of national life-patriotic sentiment, language, education, and the culture which he shares and to which he contributes-and is distinguished from them by his Judaism, which imposes, for its self-preservation, an interdict on marriage with a person not professing the Jewish religion, is it not much easier to account for the variety of type among Jews, as among members of other sects, classes, and (political) nations? We might refer at this point to the course of the struggle for Jewish emancipation, which was fought demonstrably in this country on a purely religious basis, and was closed by the victory of the principle of Englishmen of the Jewish religion.' We might refer, again, to the more recent formulation of that principle on the part of the Jews of the British Empire who attended the Peace Conference in Paris. They, too, like their forbears in the last century, placed Judaism first, in pleading for the the rights of their co-religionists in foreign countries.

'Zionists (they wrote)† and the Delegations from Eastern Europe insisted on the presentation to the Peace Conference of a demand for the recognition of the Jews in their respective countries as a separate nationality. . . . The Anglo-Jewish

...

* See Zionism and Anti-Semitism,'' Quarterly Review,' April 1902. Report of the Delegation of the Jews of the British Empire on the Treaties of Versailles, St. Germain-en-Laye and Neuilly and the Annexed Minority Treaties'; London, 1920. The Delegation consisted of Sir S. Samuel, Messrs C. G. Montefiore, H. S. Q. Henriques, J. Prag, and Lucien Wolf (Secretary).

Delegates were unable to concur in this proposal, the Alliance Israélite also rejected it.'

and

It was on behalf of members of a religious community that the claim was preferred and vindicated for equal national rights. Thus, while, on the one hand, we demur to Count de Soissons' description of the Jews' as 'countrymen' of Karl Marx, and to his use of the word compatriots' in writing of a religious community, which provides loyal subjects to all countries, on the other hand we venture to suggest that a more openminded attitude towards the Jews would not dwell exclusively on characteristics acquired by certain Jews in environments which have made, and are making, revolutionaries of men and women of any creed or none. Sir John Monash is a Jew as well as Trotsky, Samuel Gompers as well as Lassalle; and the zeal for order and moral righteousness is arguably more purely Jewish in its origin than local vices engendered in a reaction from Prussian militarism or from Russian autocracy.

This seeming neglect of Judaism in the constitution of a Jew, and the apparent concentration of Count de Soissons on qualities developed here and there in Jews exposed to influences contrary or indifferent to Jewish teaching, is at once the lock and the key to our difference from some of his conclusions-the lock, because it debars us from approaching his contention in the same plane as he; the key, because we must use it to explain our own point of view.

In nearly every instance adduced by Count de Soissons to prove his particular inference from 'Jewish revolutionary writers,' we should take, if not higher, at least other ground. We should say, frankly, of Spinoza, that, since he was expelled from the Jewish Church, Jews, adhering to Judaism, are no more entitled to the blame of the revolutionary principle traced by Count de Soissons to his writings than they are entitled to the credit of the praises bestowed upon his philosophy in the past. They will recall that Goethe was impressed by Spinoza's 'boundless unselfishness'; that Coleridge joined him with Bacon and Kant as a writer of one of the three great works since the introduction of Christianity'; that he

6

Biographia Literaria,' ch. x; quoted in 'Spinoza,' by Sir Frederick Pollock, p. 375.

affected Wordsworth through Coleridge; and that Henry Sidgwick said of him, 'Of this [self-development], according to Spinoza, the highest form consists in a clear comprehension of all things in their necessary order as modifications of the one Divine Being, and that willing acceptance of all which springs from this comprehension.'* But they will pass these praises by, on the ground that Spinoza, as a thinker, was cut off from communion with Judaism. Thus, the thoughts of the Jew Spinoza,' to which Count de Soissons ascribes so authoritative a part in the causation of modern revolutionary thought, are found to be akin to the thoughts of Hegel and other begetters, and not to proceed from the Jew,' as such. It may be urged that this view is academic, dialectical, sophistic, or the like, and that Spinoza was not less a Jew, in a common acceptance of the term, because the Synagogue at Amsterdam cast him out. We shall not elaborate the argument, but we submit that, if Jews themselves have seen fit to take the extreme step of denying spiritual communion with a member of their race, whose influence on posterity is of the spirit, it is not unjust to refer his thoughts' to some other part of him than the Jew.' It is a difference which must be felt, not expressed; but if Goethe, as the Count says, 'was a Spinoza in poetry,' the thoughts of the Jew Spinoza would seem not to have been specifically Jewish. .

We stand, we think, on even firmer ground when we come to Alexander Herzen. For Herzen (1812-1870), unlike Spinoza, was not entirely a Jew by race. The name of Herzen is not mentioned in Graetz' History of the Jews.' We have no record that he ever entered a synagogue, that he was acquainted with any rites of Judaism, or that he was even aware of his partly Jewish origin. His real name,' we learn, was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy nobleman, married in Germany, but did not legalise his marriage in Russia, so his children took their mother's name '‡; and the son of a wealthy Russian nobleman, educated at a Russian university, is hardly to be regarded as the final type of Judaism through the

The Methods of Ethics,' p. 90.

† At least not in the index (104 columns) of the English translation. We have not read all five volumes for verification.

Outline of Russian Literature,' by the Hon. Maurice Baring, p. 150.