S

ILLINOI __ S
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT IURBANA-CHAMPAIGN

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THE UNIVERSITY
OF ILLINOIS
LIBRARY

B'nai B'rith Library
of Jewish Literature

JEWISH

IDEALS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

JEWISH IDEALS
AND

OTHER ESSAYS

BY

JACOBS

JOSEPH
AUTHOR
SSTUDIES IN JEWISH STATISTICS,"

"THE

OF
JEWS

OF ANGEVIN ENGLAND,"

' AN INQUIRY INTO THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN

AND

SPAIN."

LONDON

DAVID

NUTT,

270-71

STRAND

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN AND CO.

1896

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.

At the Ballantyne Press

To Lady Magnus
DEAR LADY MAGNUS,

You were pleased to be pleased with some
Indeed, it was

of these Essays when they first appeared.

to the earliest of them, my defence of "Daniel Deronda,"
that I owed my first acquaintance with you.

They may,

therefore, be fitly connected with your name now that they
come together between the same boards.

They may serve

as a memorial of a friendship which has been tried and
tested throughout the years during which they have been
written.
On Jewish matters I think it may be said of us, as of
other friends, that we agree in everything except in opinion.
Of all that I have written

and I am beginning, I fear,

to be a rather voluminous writer-my Jewish studies have
been those that have engaged my deepest thought and my
sincerestfeeling.

You, too,-for we arefellow-authors,-

have put most of your large heart into what you have written
on Jewish affairs.

These Essays, then, are offered you

as from friend to friend, as from one Jewish author to
another; I would they were more worthy of your acceptance.
I remain, dear LADY MAGNUS,
Yours very sincerely,
JOSEPH COBS.
JA

PREFACE
THE following Essays have appeared in various periodicals during the past eighteen years. They range over
nearly all the problems which the peculiar position of
Modern Judaism has brought into prominence. The
spiritual walls of the English Ghetto have only fallen
during the present generation. I may lay claim, I
think, to have been almost the first who stepped outside them, and regarded the position of Judaism from
Others have
the standpoint of Modern Thought.
followed, and there is every sign of a rise of a New
Judaism which attempts to combine fidelity to Jewish
history with the requirements of Modern Thought
and Culture. I am hoping that these Essays in their
collected form will contribute something towards the
new movement.
For permission to reproduce them I have to thank
the editors and proprietors of the Nineteenth Century,
Macmillan's Magazine, the Jewish Quarterly Review,
and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as my colleagues of
the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition and the Jewish Historical
Society of England. The last Essay appears here for
the first time in English, though a Spanish version of
it was published in my "Inquiry into the Sources of
the History of the Jews in Spain."

vii

INTRODUCTION
ONE collects a series of essays like these, spreading

over such a long series of years, with mingled feelings
of wonder and dismay. One wonders, " Was it indeed
I who wrote these things ? How much I knew in those
days ! " One is dismayed to find how inadequately one
managed to put one's deepest thoughts.
Self-praise
and self-blame may be summed up in the single
exclamation, " How young I was then ! "
It is a mistake, I consider, to attempt to rewrite the
essays written in youth. One is so different from one's
former self in such a case, that it seems like rewriting
another man's work. I have avoided this mistake in
the present instance.
I thought it would be more
interesting, both to myself and to others, if I were to
summarise here the points on which my views have
changed, or which I would nowadays put otherwise,
with regard to the topics discussed in some of the
following papers.
The essay which I should probably find most difficulty in rewriting nowadays is that entitled "The God
of Israel." This was no less than an attempt to write
the history of European thought from a Jewish standpoint. It is only when one is young that one dares to
tackle so large a theme. Yet boldness has its reward
as well as its dangers. I know more about the subject
now, yet I doubt if I should be able to present as clear
ix

x

INTRODUCTION

a view of the interlaced action and reaction of the
Aryan and the Semitic elements in European culture.
Coming fresh to the subject, I could see more clearly
those broad aspects of it which lie on the surface. " It
is only the superficial," it has been well said, " who do
not judge by what lies on the surface." There are
three stages in any investigation into a complicated
subject. When we first review the field we arrive at
provisional and general results, which, as often as not,
give the outline of the truth so far as it will ever show
itself to us. When we come to closer quarters, and
plunge into details, it is impossible to rise out of them
to any general conception of the subject at all. We
only arrive at this again when we have worked our way
through, and got out on the other side, as it were. I
have never since succeeded in getting outside the subject of Jewish metaphysics ; I doubt if I ever shall. The
" God of Israel" must, therefore, remain for a long time
to come all that I can profitably say about the development of the Jewish conceptions of the Deity. I can only
wish that I had said it in a less priggish and technical
form.
The essay was written and published before the
star of Wellhausen had arisen and caused all the other
planets of Old Testament criticism to pale beside it.
But after all, brilliant as has been the light Wellhausen has thrown on the subject, he only concentrated rays which had been coming for many years
from the Leyden school. I have, therefore, very little
to retract or modify in the first part of my essay. I
am glad also to find that I there adumbrated, and to
some extent applied, the methods of institutional
archoeology to Old Testament problems, of which I

INTRODUCTION

xi

have given more detailed examples in my " Studies in
Biblical Archaeology." I fancy, too, that later research
has justified my protest against the "meteorological"
explanation of mythology in the note on page 29,
though I should be no longer prepared to claim
historic reality for the Patriarchs.
Somewhat more has been done to advance our
knowledge on the various Jewish philosophers of
whom I have spoken in the second part of my essay.
But in the main, my summary outline of the chief
moments in the development of Jewish mediaeval
thought remains accurate and adequate enough for
the special purpose I had in view, that of leading up
to its culmination in Spinoza. The summary I give on
PP. 53, 54, as to the Jewish elements of his thought,
requires now to be supplemented by an allusion to the
influence of Gersonides on Spinoza's views on intellectual immortality, to which Sir Frederic Pollock has
drawn attention in his monograph, p. 291.
The whole essay is a paean in honour of Spinoza,
and represents in my own intellectual development the
profound influence that thinker had upon me while I
was in my metaphysical stage. In later life it is somewhat difficult to understand the passionate eagerness
with which a young man attacks the metaphysical
problems. That burning desire to get at the root of
things, to clutch at reality amid the flux of phenomena,
has its pathetic as well as its amusing side. For us
in later years the curtain of life is the picture. Its
phenomena are the only true reality for us. But there
was a time when one dared to hope to raise the veil of
Isis and pierce to the truth of things sub specie ceternitatis. Of all the prophets that have claimed to raise

INTRODUCTION

xii

that veil, Spinoza speaks to the neophyte in most authoritative accents. Yet when we peer into his Holy of
Holies we shrink back, awed by the vacant gloom.
As the " God of Israel" was written under the influence of Spinoza, so the essay on "Daniel Deronda,"
which follows it here, but was the first thing I ever
wrote, points to the other great influence on my early
intellectual life. It is difficult for those who have
not lived through it to understand the influence that
George Eliot had upon those of us who came to our
intellectual majority in the "seventies." Darwinism
was in the air, and promised, in the suave accents of
Professor Huxley and in the more strident voice of Professor Clifford, to solve all the problems of humanity.
George Eliot's novels were regarded by us not so much
as novels, but rather as applications of Darwinism to
life and art. They were to us Tendenz-Romane, and
we studied them as much for the Tendenz as for the
Roman. Nowadays, when their Tendenz is discredited,
their artistic qualities have been depreciated far below
their just value. But of this I have spoken elsewhere."
In the " seventies," however, she spoke to us with the
combined authority of the artist and the thinker. She
was, in Mr. Myers' memorable phrase, our " Sybil in
the gloom."
I had come under her influence before the appearance
of "Daniel Deronda." When it appeared, I was just
at that stage which comes in the intellectual development of every Jew, I suppose, when he emerges from
the Ghetto, both social and intellectual, in which he
was brought up. He finds the world outside pursuing
a course quite oblivious of the claims of his race and his
1

" Literary Studies," second edition, in the Introduction.

INTRODUCTION

xiii

religion. This oblivion is in itself a tacit condemnation of the claims which justified his former isolation.
He is forced to reconsider them, and the result is,
either that he re-enters the Ghetto never to emerge,
or comes outside never to re-enter. Just as I was at
these cross-paths "Daniel Deronda" appeared, and I
found the thinker for whom I had the greatest reverence justifying from the standpoint of the most
advanced thought the historic claims of the position
of Judaism. I cannot trust myself to say with what
eagerness I read the successive monthly instalments of
"Daniel Deronda" as it appeared during 1876. The
enthusiasm it aroused in me is sufficiently indicated by
the somewhat gushing tone of the review of the book
given in the following pages. On the whole, I am
gratified to find that my enthusiasm did not outstrip the
bounds of reason. Except a single sentence on page 71,
of which I seemed to recognise the boldness even at the
time, there is scarcely a passage to which I would not still
adhere after the lapse of twenty years. It is not every
one who can say that about the first thing he wrote.
George Eliot's influence on me counterbalanced that
of Spinoza, by directing my attention, henceforth, to
the historic development of Judaism. Spinoza envisaged. for me the Jewish ideals in their static form,
George Eliot transferred my attention to them in their
dynamic development. Henceforth I turned to Jewish
history as the key to the Jewish problem, and most of
the remaining essays in this volume deal with various
aspects of that history; while I have, in two separate
works, added a considerable mass of material to our
" Jews of Angevin
of the Jews in Spain."

England ;" " Inquiry into the sources of the History

xiv

INTRODUCTION

knowledge of the Jewish past in England and in
Spain.
These historical essays are, in the main, archaeological.
I have ventured to bring them up to date in point of
facts, so that there is no need for me to dilate upon
them here. They deal chiefly with special points of
interest or difficulty in the early history of the Jews in
this country, and were the direct outcome of the interest
aroused in me on that subject by the Anglo-Jewish
Historical Exhibition, initiated by my friend Mr.
Isidore Spielman, and held in the Royal Albert Hall in
1887. Somewhat to my surprise I found, on looking
into the matter, that vast unused materials existed for
the early history of the Jews in this country, which have
hitherto been passed over both by Jewish and English
historians. I have since done something to utilise
these materials. The three essays here-on the "London
Jewry," "Hugh of Lincoln," and "Aaron Son of the
Devil "-may serve as examples of the new light that
can be obtained from this source.
In the paper on the "London Jewry " I would also
call attention to the method there employed, I believe
for the first time, of ascertaining the boundaries of town
holdings by the parish boundaries, which seem to have
run along the back fences. In the essay on "St. Hugh of
Lincoln " I have endeavoured to ascertain, as impartially
as I could, what amount of complicity can fairly be
attributed to the Jews of Lincoln in the disappearance
of little Hugh. As a folklorist, I am convinced that at
the back of every such tradition there must be at least
some foundation of fact. In the case of little St. Hugh,
I find it in the injudicious conduct of the Jews in
not handing over the body of the lad when they first

INTRODUCTION

xv

discovered it. In some of the reviews of the paper where
it first appeared, I observed a tendency to consider the
charge against the Jews as merely an anti-Semitic concoction. But I regard this as unscientific; that hypothesis will not explain all the facts of the case. The
short paper on "Aaron Son of the Devil" is chiefly
of interest as containing the earliest dated portrait of
the medieval Jew. Since I first drew detailed attention
to the subject, the portrait has been used in the illustrated edition of Green's " Short History," p. 393, and I
have to thank Messrs. Macmillan for lending me their
block, which was more accurate than my rough tracing.
In the " Hugh of Lincoln " study I have endeavoured
to utilise the folklore records contained in the ballads
dealing with the subject, and have shown how tradition
often fills up gaps left in the historical and antiquarian
records. In another of the papers I have dealt with
Jewish contributions to mediaeval folklore, especially to
that part of the subject to which I have especially
directed my attention. I have been unable to find any
traces of the influence of Jews in the spread of folktales from Europe by means of oral tradition. It has
been mainly by their activity as translators and literary
transmitters that they have exercised any influence in
this direction. Since I wrote, Dr. Steinschneider of
Berlin has produced his monumental work on "Jewish
Translators in the Middle Ages," in which this position
is fully confirmed.
The paper on " Jehuda Halivi " deals with the most
fascinating figure in mediaeval Jewry. He sums up
almost all the qualities that make for romance in the
history of Israel in Europe. Even the scoffer Heine
felt his attraction, and it elicited from him one of the

xvi

INTRODUCTION

finest efforts of his muse, which Matthew Arnold recognised as such in his essay on the poet. I have heard it
stated that Matthew Arnold at one time contemplated
translating a selection of Jehuda Hal6vi's poems. I do
not know why the idea was not carried out, but the loss
was a great one for English literature, and still more
for English Judaism. Since his death, Mrs. Lucas has
given some specimens of the poems in her charming
little volume, " Songs of Zion." Perhaps the absence
of an adequate edition of the poet's works may partly
explain the abandonment of Matthew Arnold's intention.
It is satisfactory to know that this reproach to Jewish
scholarship and Jewish patriotism is about to be removed by an edition of the complete poetical works of
Jehuda Hal6vi, about to be issued by a Jewish learned
society in Berlin.
If these essays had appeared anywhere on the Continent, there can be little doubt that many of them
would have dealt with the so-called Jewish Question.
Here in England we are almost absolutely free from
any taint of anti-Semitism. Yet it is impossible for
any Jew who thinks, on the condition of his race in
these days to avoid asking himself why it is that the
Jewish character, with its many fine qualities, fails to
attract. The absence of charm is as distinct a characIn a
teristic of Jews as the presence of capacity.
semi-humorous letter to the Jewish Chronicle some
twelve years ago, I endeavoured to diagnose the former
characteristic. I have thought it worth while to reprint the letter here, as, though ironic in form, it contains my sincere conviction that much of the ill-will
against Jews is due to the over-intellectuality of their
educational and social training. To this should have

INTRODUCTION

xvii

been added their neglect of their own ideals, and the
consequent absence of high sentiment and noble motive
in their corporate and social activity. It would seem,
indeed, as if the age of Jewish chivalry was no more.
It is for this reason that I have given the first and
eponymous position in this volume to the paper in
which I have attempted, so far as I know for the first
time, to extract and expound the fundamental ideals
underlying the Jewish life, and to justify them from
the standpoint of modern thought. Judaism requires
some such justification if it is to continue its existence
as a separate activity amid the world's spiritual forces.
The mere appeal to the Bible and its promises has lost
its force when addressed to modern thought. Jewish
separatism must be put on a rational basis if it is to
continue. The monotheistic ideal has been in substance accepted by the civilised world, Christian and
Moslem. It remains to be seen if the other Jewish
ideals are also acceptable. But to ascertain this they
must become clearly conscious to Jews themselves, and
expounded and promulgated by them. On the other
hand, if these be accepted, there need be no defence
of the separatism of Jews due to their small numbers.
From this we are saved by the comfortable doctrine
of the "Remnant," first preached by the Greater
Prophets, and endorsed by that latter-day prophet,
Matthew Arnold. The Book of Numbers is not the only
gospel, whatever modern democracy may say. To use
its own language, "The future always lies with minorities." It remains to be seen whether the " Remnant"
of Israel has still that future before it which its prophets and sages have claimed for it at the cost of tears
and blood.

xviii

INTRODUCTION

If Israel have no future, man's past has no clue.
Alone among the nations the Jews have preserved
their existence as a separate spiritual entity throughout historic time.
The Catholic Church alone, the
spiritual daughter of Israel, can claim anything like
the same authority of tradition.
But the Catholic
ideals have proved themselves incapable of withstanding the onslaughts of modern reason. Will it be the
same with the Jewish ideals when they are given a full
opportunity of appealing to modern men ? That is for
Jews to say, for Jews to try and avoid. If they fail,
the long travail of Israel through the ages has been
for naught, and man must look back upon his past,
and forward to his future, without seeing the visible
presence of God.

CONTENTS
PAGE

JEWISH IDEALS
THE

.

.

GOD OF ISRAEL:

.

A HISTORY

MORDECAI:

A PROTEST

BROWNING'S

THEOLOGY

THE TRUE,

.

.

.

.

24

CRITICS

.

.

61

.

84

.

THE COMPLETE

SOLUTION

.

.

.

.

96

HALEVI, POET AND PILGRIM

.

.

.

103

JEWISH DIFFUSION
THE LONDON
LITTLE ST.
" AARON

AGAINST THE

THE ONLY, AND

OF THE JEWISH
JEHUDA

.

I

SON

OF FOLK-TALES

JEWRY,

HUGH

QUESTION

1290

JEWISH HISTORY:

ITS AIMS

.

.

135

.

.

OF LINCOLN

OF THE DEVIL"

.

.

.

.

162

.

.

192

.

225

.

234

.

AND METHODS

.

JEWISH IDEALS

1

(" Jewish Queerterly Review," October 1890)

WE are all of us artists in life, and very poor daubs
most of us make of it. If we were to examine into
the causes of this failure, which by universal consent
is more general nowadays than ever before in the
world's history, we should find it, I fancy, in the multiplicity of ideals which are being held up before us as
exemplars. The truth is, we are carrying the principle
of being all things to all men a little too far. We
desire to be ascetic with the Buddhists, and natural
with the Greeks, law-abiding as the Romans, and free
as the French, socialistic like the early Christians, and
individualistic as the modern Briton. Doubtless, in the
millennium, all these diverse ideals will be reconciled
and fused into one perfect ideal of society; but,
Meanwhile the
alas! the millennium is not yet.
presentation of all these ideals in their most attractive colours only produces the effect of making them
all seem equally true and equally false, or, at least,
one-sided.
I may seem to be only helping to make confusion
still more' confounded by proposing this evening to
bring before your notice another set of ideals for your
sympathetic admiration. But I hope to show that this
is not the case. For among the principles of ethical
1

A

1889.

Lecture delivered before the Ethical Society, Sunday, May 12,

2

JEWISH IDEALS

action which seem to me to underlie the Jewish conception of life, that of rigid fidelity to the system of
ideals into which you are born is, perhaps, the most
conspicuous. I say "seem to me," for you must not
take anything I am about to say as authoritative statement of Jewish views of life. I doubt, indeed, whether
there exists any authority competent to speak in the
name of all Jews on the rational basis of Jewish
ideals.
For speaking on such a subject before this
Society, I am debarred from all reference to the theological basis on which Jews found their claim to
live the Jewish life. I believe that life is, to quote
your charter of incorporation, " capable of rational
justification," which is tacitly taken to mean: apart
from theological suppositions.
The justification I
shall offer shall not transgress that proviso, but it
thereby becomes only a personal one, and is only
founded on many years of reflection and observation
of the facts of Jewish life, literature, and history. I
suppose I share, with most members of this Society,
that curious nineteenth-century attitude towards our
ancestral creed, in which we stand, as it were, outside
ourselves, and attempt to look at our ideals and aspirations with the eyes of others. But yet we remain ourselves, and true to ourselves, during the process. And
if we observe any flaws in our ideals, it is as if
we were scanning critically a dear mother, wife, or
daughter.
We may recognise in her some lapse or
deviation from our ideal of perfect beauty, but yet we
love her-but yet we love her.
After these preliminaries, let us to our theme. I
have spoken above of a " system of ideals," and I wish
first to develop that conception as a key to what I
When we examine any specific
am to say further.
system of ethics-say the Buddhist or the Homeric-

JEWISH IDEALS

3

we are struck by the fact that in broad detail it almost
It was no discovery of
exactly resembles our own.
the ancient Hebrews that man must not slay his fellowman, or forswear his faith, or steal what is not his
No civil society could exist in which those
own.
principles were not recognised as binding. And what
applies to the broader principles, applies in a large
measure to the minor moralities. The content of the
ethical code is everywhere among nations who can
claim to be civilised, practically the same. This is
true of Judaism, even in its mediaeval phases, when
the terrible persecutions which Jews underwent might
almost have justified anti-social interpolations. Jewish
apologists have culled from Jewish writings of all time
ethical maxims of the highest moral import, which vie
in loftiness of spirit with those of the most favoured
nations or creeds. A useful collection of these utterances has recently been compiled by a Jewish minister,
the Rev. Morris Joseph, to whose brochure, "Jewish
Ethics,"' I may refer those who doubt their existence,
or who are otherwise interested in Jewish gnomic
wisdom. For myself, I will venture to assume the
practical identity of the contents of Jewish ethics with
those of all the great religions, and am prepared in
turn to grant the same to them.
I am more concerned to claim for Jews that they
have been the first to grant this identity of the ethical
principles adopted by humanity. I can illustrate this
by a quotation from one of the few works written by
Jews during the early middle ages in England, before
Most of you will have read
they were expelled.
Browning's powerful poem, " Rabbi Ben Ezra." Mr.
1 Published at the office of the Jewish Chronicle. It is also included
in the volume on "Religions of the World," published by Messrs. Sonnenschein & Co.

JEWISH IDEALS

4

Browning was probably unaware that the hero of his
poem, Abraham ibn Ezra, a Spanish Jew of great
attainments, an astronomer, grammarian, Biblical critic,
mathematician, and traveller, visited England in I158,
and while here wrote a book on the Foundations of
Religion (Yesod More), in which occurs the following
passage on the Laws of Moses:
"There is a fundamental law which commands us to observe all the
Divine enactments, positive and negative. This precept, ' Ye shall
serve the Lord your God' (Ex. xxiii. 25), includes all the laws to be
kept by heart, word, or deed, whether primary laws or those serving
to record them in memory. ...

Many commands have lost their

force, as that of hyssop (Ex. xii. 22), of the manna (ibid. xix. Ii)...
Some commands are imposed on the whole people, as burnt offering,
shew-bread, libations; others belong to certain distinct families, as
the duties of a prince, of a high priest, and the rest of the priests and
Levites, the number of whose duties is very great. Several precepts
are given to male and female indiscriminately; some to men alone, as
the redemption of the first-born ; others to women alone, as concerning
vows. .

.

. There are many laws relating to a certain time . . . but

many laws depend neither on time nor anything else, and these are
imposed on all, male and female, king, priests, rich and poor, Israelites
and proselytes, whole and sick. There is one law for all, and such
precepts are primary. These primary laws are ingrained in the mind
and were known by the power of the mind before the law was
declared by means of Moses; and there are many of this kind as, e.g.,
those of the Decalogue except the Sabbath: these were only repeated
by Moses . . . There are also commanded certain pious works by which

we are reminded of the primary precepts, as the observance of the
Sabbath in memory of the creation of the world, Passover, unleavened
bread, tabernacles, inscriptions on our doors, phylacteries of hand and
head, fringes of garments .
"All the precepts are

to be referred to three things : (i)

to

piety of the heart, (2) to words, (3) to deeds. And as unity is
contained in every number, so the beginning of every pious act by
deed or word is internal piety, without which all worship is false and
of none avail."

There are two points to which I wish to draw your
The first is, the remarkable
attention in this passage.

JEWISH IDEALS

statement-remarkable, that is, for a medieval writer
-that the primary laws of morality are ingrained in
the human heart, and are not due to revelation, so that
all human beings 'are cognisant of them, and they are
binding on all. This is put more clearly, perhaps, by
Ibn Ezra than any other medieval Jewish thinker; but
it underlies all Jewish thought and practice. Combined
with the principle that salvation rests on works, it leads
at once, and logically, to the dictum, " The pious of all
nations have a part in the world to come "-a sentence
which comes upon most people as a surprise, as emanating from a creed which is supposed to be so exclusive and narrow. It likewise accounts for the absence
of all proselytising zeal, which is characteristic of
Judaism, and comes equally as a surprise to most
persons. The second point I will here only advert to,
and that is the full recognition of the necessary inwardness of morality. That I will refer to later on; but at
present I wish to emphasise the Jewish recognition of
the substantial identity of the ethical code of all nations.
But while we allow that the raw materials of ethics are
the same in all the great creeds or ethical systems, we
are far from asserting that the way in which these
materials are built up into the Jewish and into other
systems of ethics is by any means identical. In the
house of ethics there are many mansions: the bricks
may be the same in each, but the order of architecture
varies vastly. To any system of ethics we may address
numbers of questions which can receive divers answers.
To which of the virtues does it give most prominence ?
What motives does it hold out for the performance of
duty ? How does it propose to inculcate morality on its
adherents ? And, lastly, what general principles does
it posit by which it welds all the elements of morality
into one system of ethics? It is these general prin-

6

JEWISH IDEALS

ciples that I propose to deal with to-night, under the
name of " Jewish Ideals," for want of a better.
The first and most striking of these-the one that
occurs doubtless to most of you as the characteristic
side of Jewish ethics, as you know it in the Old
Testament and in the contests of the New-is the
conception of Morality as Law. This involves the idea
that the details of morality can be expressed verbally,
and codified somewhat in the form of a legal code, and
can be taught as such. The moral life in Jewish conception consists in conformity to such a law: sin consists
in transgression of any of its enactments. Now, this
is at first sight incongruous with much that you have
been accustomed to hear in this Society. Whenever
I have had the pleasure of listening to any of your
lecturers, whatever the theme has been, the central
conception has always been to put forth the ideal of
Morality as Freedom. "The Good consists in the
Good Will, and the Good Will is the Free Will;"
that is the kind of formula with which you are here
familiar. Or to put it in another way, it is the intention that makes the morality of the act, not the
conformity with any moral law imposed from without.
True, to that we are all agreed. You will remember
that Abraham ibn Ezra, in the passage quoted above,
was as emphatic on this point as the most advanced
Kantian can be. But the further question arises:
How are you going to create good intentions in the
human subject? Jewish ethics replies, by inculcating
the practice of good actions in conformity with the
moral law.
Here we come upon one of those differences of
stress which constitute the divergences of various
moral systems.
Jewish ethics and Christian ethics
agree in saying that good acts are desirable, and that

JEWISH IDEALS

7

good intentions are praiseworthy. But each lays stress
on a different member of the pair. Jewish ethics
says: Do good acts, and you will feel good; Christian
ethics says: Feel good, and you will do good. The
contrast is as old as the breach between the two
Churches: you are familiar with it as the contrast
between the Letter and the Spirit, a way of putting
the distinction which scarcely does justice to the
Jewish attitude, as is but natural in polemical
pamphlets. I do not feel called upon to decide between the two contrasting principles of moral training.
In putting before you the Jewish view, I do not
defend, I expound. But I would point out that the
matter in dispute is a question of predagogics: in
inculcating morality we are ex hypothesi dealing with
the young, and I fail to see how else we are to proceed
with them than by training them to acts. Freedom
if you like for adults, but moral law for the growing
spirit.
And the freedom that is ultimately to be
obtained by this means is not absence of all control,
but willing obedience to a law self-imposed-Frei
and eins mit der Gesetz, as Berthold Auerbach put
it. And in developing this relation between Morality
as Freedom and Morality as Law, I fancy I but interpret that saying of the man who first brought out the
contrast: "I come not to annul the Law, but to fulfil
it."
Another great Jew, Spinoza, also founds his
conception of man's freedom on the notion of law.
So far as I understand the fourth and fifth books of his
"Ethics," perhaps the most difficult of all philosophical reading, he bases Freedom on Law, and does not
oppose it to Law. Just at present one of the great
wants of the age is the recognition of this conception
of Morality as Law. A friend of mine even goes so
far as to urge that a distinct Moral Code should be

8

JEWISH IDEALS

drafted for instruction to children. Without entering
into the question how far this is practicable, I would
point out that the idea is eminently a Jewish one.
I would also point out that a large part of morality
is already codified as Law, and there is a distinct
tendency to increase this amount. A few years ago
it was a moral act to inform purchasers that certain
articles were made in Germany; nowadays it is
legally obligatory. I do not mean to infer that all
moral acts should become Acts of Parliament: they
would cease to be moral acts, pure and simple, then.
The truly moral act is that which is not punished by
the law if left undone, and is thus performed for its
own sake; and of this character are the enactments
of the so-called Jewish Law, which has no sanction
but the approval of conscience. There was a kind of
customary morality in England under the old re'gime
which partook of the same character, though it was
not formally codified. This has almost entirely disappeared, and there is nothing taking its place. Now
customary and conventional morality may not be the
highest type of morals, but it is surely better than
nothing at all; and that is practically what the urban
lower classes are coming to, who attend no Church,
and have no recognised authority in any moral problem. The Talmud, with all its casuistic minutiae,
would be better than that state of things.
I have here incidentally touched upon the main charge
that is brought against the'idea of Morality as Law.
There is in it a tendency to degrade moral acts into
mere mechanical custom, as when prayer, the free intercourse between man and his Maker, may degenerate
into a meaningless gabble, or a custom like that of not
eating pork may be raised to the same level as the
moral principle of not telling lies. I will grant at

JEWISH IDEALS

9

once that there is this danger attaching to the Jewish
conception of morality. But we have to reflect that
the majority of men are creatures of habit, and only
susceptible for the most part of a morality of conventions. Judaism accepts this fact, and legislates for this
class without at the same time preventing the rarer
spirits from rising, as occasion serves, into the higher
region of Morality as Freedom. Christianity battles
strenuously against this tendency to convention, which
it calls the World, and enlists on its side the more
enthusiastic spirits who form the noble army of its
martyrs and saints. But it is only enabled to do this
by crippling the free exercise of men's speculative
powers, whereas Judaism leaves these almost entirely
unfettered, and by the very exercise of legal controversy
in moral matters tends to lay an almost exaggerated
stress on intellect and its function in life. Each system,
it will be seen, has its own disadvantages : Christianity
fetters the intellect, and fails to train the masses morally;
Judaism tends to confuse morality, law, and custom.
The morality of the Jew may become merely conventional; the morality of the Christian may only result
in gush.
Before I pass on, I would disabuse your minds of at
least one misconception which clings about the Jewish
idea of Morality as Law ; and that is to regard the Law
under the aspect of a burdensome yoke. As a matter
of fact, this is for the most part utterly erroneous, and
is indeed incongruous with the other charge brought
against Jewish morality of being conventional or customary. The Jewish child grows accustomed to the
yoke, and so it ceases to be burdensome to the Jewish
man. And in so far as the Law does demand some sacrifice from Jewish children, it performs a distinctly moral
function as a training in self-restraint. At almost

JEWISH IDEALS

IO

every moment of its life the Jewish child is taught to
consider life a discipline, in which it has to learn to
give up some of its selfish inclinations for the sake of
a principle. The conception of the Jewish Law as a
yoke is thus a distinctly moral principle.
Meanwhile, we may now direct a somewhat closer
scrutiny at the Law with which morality is identified
in Jewish conceptions. For practical purposes, it was
sufficiently characterised and analysed in the extract
from Abraham ibn Ezra, which has hitherto formed
our text. The Law consists of (I) the primary laws of
morality, (2) customs associated with certain seasons,
and (3) customs commemorative of certain events.
Now we have already seen that it is a characteristic
of the Jewish system of ethics to raise these customs
to the same level as the primary laws of morals. The
grounds adduced for this by Jewish authorities are
theological, and with these we are not at liberty to deal.
But apart from theology, a fair case may be made out
for the worship of
"

Old Use and Custom, sisters grey,"

as Lord Tennyson calls them in a passage that points
to a defence of Custom as a foster-sister of Morality.
The utility of custom in the moral life, it seems to me,
is to create a fund of tender emotion which will be at
the service of the moralities. The abuse of custom, as
we all know, is its tendency to harden into superstition.
The dislocation of custom among the English peasantry
illustrates both. They are less superstitious, but less
considerate for others than they were in older days.
Jewish customs also illustrate both; but I desire to
regard them as illustrating the second great Jewish
ethical principle, which differentiates it from others,
and that is what I should term the Holiness of Home.

JEWISH IDEALS

II

By Holiness, I mean something specific and intimately
connected with those customs of which we have just
been speaking. I mean the association of certain times
and seasons in the Jewish home with certain ceremonial
customs regarded as sacred. These ceremonies become
"object lessons " in religion and in morality. They are
interesting historically in many ways, to two of which
I wish to call your attention. A wicked wit has called
Judaism a "religion of survivals;" and the epigram is
the more biting since it contains the proverbial halftruth, though not in this instance the better half of
truth. The dietary laws have been plausibly explained
as a survival of totemism ; the rite of Abraham is still
practised by a majority of the non-civilised races; the
objection to intermarriage is known elsewhere as the
rule of endogamy, and much of Jewish fidelity to faith
and kindred bears a suspicious resemblance to ancestorworship. The probabilities are that in their origin
these were all savage, or, as we used to term them,
idolatrous customs, and it was the policy of the Mosaic
legislators to raise these to a higher power, to use a
mathematical expression, by connecting them, as they
are now connected, with a purer faith. Just at present,
however, I wish to point out that in the Judaic conception of the Holiness of the Home, there has been raised
to a higher power the most moral and most touching
side of the ancient religions. When we think of the
noble and dignified type of character produced in the
Greek and Roman world, we may be sure that there
was something more in their religion than mere external pageantry and impure idolatry. And that purer
side of their religion was represented by the worship of
the Penates, or ancestral gods, of which we know but
little in detail, but which clearly dominated the whole
home-life of the ancients, and, as has been shown by

12

JEWISH IDEALS

M. Fustel de Coulanges, was made the basis of their
social organisation. Not a meal, not a family meeting
occurred which was not ushered in by a solemn libation
to the spirits of the ancestors, who were conceived to be
present and sanctified the whole of the home. Judaism
preserves this noble trait of the ancient world, with the
difference of regarding the spirit that is present and is
invoked as the spirit of all flesh, the Divine Majesty
of the Universe. It is impossible to describe to those
who have not experienced it, the feeling of holy joy
which is diffused throughout the humblest Hebrew
home by the solemn repetition of acts which in themselves may be regarded as mere customs, without vital
connection with the souls of men. In speaking thus,
I am not thinking of the so-called upper classes of Jews,
who aim at an electro-plate imitation of the manners of
their neighbours, and think it " cultured " to drop these
customs. I refer more particularly to the home-life of
the ordinary Jewish artisan, even of the poor Polish
Jews, who have in other respects been degraded by
ages of persecution, but in this particular possess a
dignity in their homes which is not shared by those of
their neighbours which are quite free from " survivals,"
even of decency.
This aspect of Jewish morality is perhaps more
familiar to you than any other, because it is that in
which English life has been most deeply affected by
Hebraic conceptions, as represented by the Bible. And
the particular institution in which it is embodied most
characteristically, both for Jews and Christians, is that
of the Sabbath. I do not know how it has come about
-or rather, I do know, but cannot linger to discussthat a " Judaic Sabbath" means a day of austere gloom.
As a matter of fact, it is the one bright spot in the
Jewish life. Heine, to the last a Hebrew of the

JEWISH IDEALS

13

Hebrews in his severer moods, has written a beautiful
poem about the Princess Sabbath, in which Israel has
been condemned by a wicked fairy to wander about
during the week as a hound, but on Sabbath is transformed once more into human shape, and resumes his
natural dignity. All is joy and good-humour in the
Jewish home on the Friday night, when Sabbath
" comes in." I would attribute a good deal of the
difference between the Jewish and the Christian
Sabbath to the seemingly mechanical difference, that
the one begins and ends at an hour when its advent
or exit can be solemnised by ceremonial, whereas the
other comes and goes, if I may use the phrase, "as
a thief in the night." Curiously enough, the other
work, written by the Rabbi Ibn Ezra while in England,
was an elaborate defence of the Eastern method of
beginning the day with the eve. It is indeed to the
Sabbath primarily, and the other home ceremonials
which embody the Hebraic conception of the. Holiness
of the Home, that we can trace the remarkable persistence of the Jewish race through the ages. This
is generally spoken of as due to their fidelity to their
faith, and so on; but we have to seek for the social
institutions in which that faith was embodied before
we can adequately understand the attraction it had
for its adherence. Life itself seemed to the Jew little
worth having without the Holiness of Home, to which
he had been accustomed from his early days, and which
kept its attraction even for the arch-scoffer Heine.
We may now pass to a third leading principle that
dominates Jewish ethics, which we may call its Messianic tone, due to the idea of the Mission of Israel.
In speaking of the hallowing of custom, which forms
so large a part of the Jewish discipline, I should have
said that it not only strengthens family love, the nurse

14

JEWVISH

IDEALS

of all the moralities, but it forms a bond of common
custom between family and family, and between Jews
of one country and those of another. But a bond for
what? it may be asked. Is Judaism a mere trades
union designed to promote the benefit of its members
against the competition of others who are not "on
the statement," as the trade phrase runs? It would
seem as if the anti-Semites thought so; and so far as
their criticisms touch Jews who have lost the Messianic
hope, their view might seem to be justified. But these
are just the Jews who are not under the influence of
the bond of custom, which they have mostly thrown
off. The mass of Jews are still influenced by the
Messianic hopes, and keep up their separateness from
others, and their bonds with one another under the
influence of the conviction that there is a Divine
mission for Israel to play in the world's history. The
conviction is somewhat vague and indefinite; some
look forward to a personal Messiah and a political
future, others anticipate a Messianic age and a spread
of Hebraic conceptions and Jewish ideals. But a
hope need not be the less vivid because it cannot be
expressed in a formula, or rather, I would say, the
more clear and definite you make it, the nearer it is
to its last hour. Judaism is here at one with the last
and greatest of the philosophers, Hegel, in regarding
"abstraction" as the least vital form of thinking and
of aspiration. The moment you can reduce your ideal
to a formula, you may prepare for its funeral, or you
may as well nail it at once to your barn-door as a
scarecrow; it has no more vitality left in it; no further
potentialities of development. To come back from
this abstract way of looking at the matter-the very
thing against which I am inveighing-I would remark
that a hope that is vague is one that cannot be disap-

JEWISH IDEALS

I5

pointed, and can therefore live on through all vicissitudes
of fortune, as the Messianic hope has done in Israel.
I feel a difficulty of speaking of this Jewish ideal
under the limits I have imposed upon myself of speaking without reference to any theological conceptions.
But I would remark that there is no reason why a
similar conception could not be adopted by all nations.
What, indeed, is involved in the conception of a nationality, but the profound conviction of its members that
they have developed a special type of character which
peculiarly fits them for some special function in the
development of humanity? Would that England were
more conscious of some Divine mission to perform in
the world's history! Once it was Protestantism that
gave enthusiasm to the majority of Englishmen, the
eradication of slavery has still some of the vitality of
an ideal, and even the latter-day apology for a mission,
" Peace on earth and Free Trade among men," can
still rouse Englishmen's energies on behalf of an ideal.
Even if the mission turn out to be an illusion, I say it
is better for men to have an illusory ideal than none at
all. Puritanism braced up Englishmen's souls, though
its ideals have crumbled away under the assaults of
modern thought and sentiment. Acute observers are
of opinion that the only hope of raising France from
the Slough of Despond is in keeping alive the seemingly futile hope of the Revanche. And reverting to
Israel, one feels that the only thing that idealises the
too often prosaic figure of the modern Jew is the halo
of the Divine promises to which he still clings, and so
justifies his separateness from the rest of mankind.
Consider what dignity is given to the function of
maternity when every Jewish mother may feel the
hope that from her may issue one who will restore
moral peace to mankind.

16

JEWISH IDEALS

Underlying the whole conception, or presenting
another aspect of it, is the fourth Jewish ideal of the
HTallowing of History. Here again I am hampered
by my own bonds, and am prevented from describing
this in the shortest way as the recognition of God in
History. But looking at the matter merely on psychological grounds, this conception is the recognition of
the fact that man is made man by history. It is
history that, as represented by its medium language,
differentiates man from the brute. It is history that
causes the men of the historic nations to be more
civilised than the savage. The Jew recognises practically, if not consciously, that he is made what he is
by the history of his fathers, and feels he is losing his
better self so far as he loses his hold of his past history;
for he regards himself as having gone through the
Many of the customary
vicissitudes of his fathers.
ceremonials which make up the holiness of the Jewish
home are purely history raised into religion. One of
them, the Passover, has passed over into Christianity
as its most sacred function, still retaining survivals of
its historic origin and connections; the wine and wafer
of the Mass (or Communion) representing the wine and
unleavened bread still tasted by Jews at the inaugural
banquet of the Passover Service. At one part of the
ceremonial, which is mainly made up of the story
of the Exodus, it is remarked: "Every Jew should
regard himself as if he had personally come out of
Egypt." That spirit dominates the whole of Jewish
life and ceremonial.
Here, again, I see no reason why the Judaic conception of history should not be adopted and adapted
by all nations that have a history. The idea of giving
history a continued life in ceremonial has altogether
died out among modern nations, and especially among

JEWISH IDEALS

'7

Englishmen, where its only survival is " Guy Fawkes'
Day." A distinct loss of national dignity results from
this, and we may notice that the virtue of patriotism
no longer holds the place it once did in the hierarchy
of English virtues. Some years ago the question was
raised, " Can Jews be patriots ?" implying, Could Jews
feel themselves at once Jews and Englishmen ? The
answer is, that the very reason that makes an English
Jew conscious of his Judaism makes him equally conscious that he is an Englishman. For certain sides of
his character and ideals he feels his indebtedness to
his Jewish parentage and breeding; other sides, his
freedom as a citizen, his language, and the intellectual
acquirements that go with it, he feels he owes to his
position as an English citizen.
Before leaving this side of the subject, I would
remark on certain corollaries on' the Messianic Ideal
and the Hallowing of History that have a characteristic
bearing on Jewish ethics. These have a distinctly
moralising effect by making the ideal of each individual 'something other than himself-in the first
place his co-religionists, and in the final issue
humanity. The unit is the family, which is a permanence; hence the pertinacity and patience with
which Jews have borne the tribulations of ages, buoyed
up by the Messianic hopes. "If not in my time,
at least in that of my children," thinks many a
Jewish parent. This idea has results not so desirable
from an economic point of view in the early marriages of Jews and their all too numerous results. It
concentrates, too, attention on this world as the true
field of the Divine drama.
Jews escape by this
means " other-worldliness," it is true; but I doubt
whether that is so much inferior to "this-worldliness" to which Jews are thereby restricted. There

18

JEWISH IDEALS

is finally involved an optimistic conception of the
world which is in reality involved in every Theistic
conception.
That can be no good God who has
But
made, or who rules, a world radically evil.
here, again, I am trenching on the province of the
theologian.
I have now called your attention to the four chief
principles on which Judaism deals with the material
of ethics, and works them up into a specific Jewish
ethics-the ideas of Morality as Law, the Holiness
of Home, the Mission of Israel, and the Hallowing
of History. If there were time, I might show how
these are interconnected together into an organic
system, and may be ultimately resolved into the
first and last-Morality as Law and the Hallowing
of History. But I prefer to look at the subject from
another point of view, and exhibit the organic
character of Jewish ethics as shown in its subjective
aspects. "We live by admiration," says Wordsworth;
and by the imitation that expresses our admiration,
we may add. By holding up certain ideals before
men's eyes you create certain types of character which
differ morally, not by any difference in the contents
of the moral code, but by emphasis on different parts
in it, and by special selection of the various virtues
by which morality can be realised. Such a type of
character is an organic one; you cannot lop off one
ideal and suppose the rest of the character to remain
the same. You cannot change the relative importance of the characteristic virtues without modifying
the whole system; you cannot get the heart to perform
the functions of the brain. Now each nation and each
religion tends to develop its special type; there is a
distinct English character, and even an ideal of a
specific Christian character, and so there is a special

JEWISH IDEALS

19

Jewish type of character. I suppose if we were to hit
upon the pet virtue of an Englishman, it would be
justice; and, similarly, the most prominent characteristic at which the Jewish character seems to aim is
fidelity to race and religion. In other words, the Jew
stands up for differentiation in character. It is not
his ideal that all men should be alike in character
just at present, and in the practical expression of that
aim he lives and dies.
This is the much abused separateness of the Israelite
which brings down upon him the ill-will of nearly the
whole world. Strangely enough the opposition comes
most strongly from those new-fledged patriots of
Germany and Austria, who insist most strenuously on
the need of living up to a specific German or Austrian
ideal of character. Or rather not strangely, for it is
a necessary element of a specific national character
that it feels opposition to any rival ideal. The interesting point to observe is, that what these gentlemen
object to in the Jewish character is not its too great
narrowness, but its cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it is
generally characteristic of Jews to confound their
accusers in this way. While Christians have preached
humility and forgiveness of enemies for centuries,
Jews have been content to practice those virtues, the
former rather laxly, perhaps, but the latter in all its
fulness. And so while the Austrian is preaching the
necessity of all men becoming brothers (" German
cousins " they really mean), the Austrian Jews have
no more than taken him at his word, in feeling an
interest in the rest of the world, even though it be but
a portion of that remainder.
At the beginning of this lecture I promised you a
"rational justification" for the Jewish ideals which
I was about to present to you, and you may think

20

JEWISH IDEALS

I shall be hard put to it to find a justification from a
universalist standpoint for this one of Jewish separateness. Not at all. That remaining apart of Jews,
while still joining in all the world's work that is
unsectarian and beneficial, is fully justified by the
great danger that begins to loom before us as never
before in the world's history. I refer to a process
which is best exemplified in the Chinese Empire, and
which I would therefore call Chinesisrm. This is the
tendency among huge masses of people to crush individuality, and reduce all its members to one dead
level of mediocrity. The ideals of such a mass are
formed, its type of character fixed, and for it there rests
no more hope of progress, either in elevation of ideal
or ennobling of character.
Its individual members
may live happy lives, but from that mass the world has
nothing to hope for in moral teaching. Something of
this kind is beginning to be noticed in the United
States of America. In Europe, too, there are signs of
the creation of a European type, to which we shall all
conform. One of the outward signs of this, which all
artists lament, is the spread of the chimney-pot hat
and black cloth coat throughout Europe, and even in
joyous Japan, displacing the picturesque and characteristic national dresses. In one hundred years things
will be worse; there will then remain only five or
six types of human character out of which the final
human character can develop. The nationalist movements of this century have been unconscious protests
against this tendency of things. Now, the evil of this
is that whenever a distinct ideal or specific type of
character is crushed out, the resultant human type
that seems so rapidly approaching will be so much the
less rich and varied. This, then, is why the Jews, ay,
or the Irish, or the Japanese, should be allowed, and

JEWISH IDEALS

21

encouraged, to preserve any characteristic they have
which differentiates them from the great masses of
humanity whose characters are becoming ossified.
Suppose for a moment that the whole

100,000

Jews

of Great Britain were made, to-morrow, completely
indistinguishable from the rest of Englishmen, what
advantage would accrue to humanity from the transformation ? Is it not possible that the English
character might have thereby lost the chance of being
enriched at a favourable moment by one or other of
the specific Jewish ideals that I have put before
you?
Of course there are disadvantages connected with
the present state of things-disadvantages, mark you,
which fall upon Jews for the most part, and not on the
peoples among whom they dwell. One of these disadvantages I consider a serious one, though it seems
at first sight somewhat ludicrous. I refer to the vanity
which is almost necessarily involved in keeping alive
the feeling of special mission. I fear, however, that it
is necessary in the present state of human nature. If
you are to believe in your ideals and in your ideal
character, you must believe in yourself, and have the
courage of your self-opinion. I have myself blown a
somewhat loud fantasia on the Hebraic horn, with
variations of my own. Not that I could not have
introduced a few discordant notes. There are lapses
in every ideal, or we should have reached the end of
our tether in idealisation. The cumbrousness of the
Jewish code, the obsolete character of some of its
customs, the theoretical injustice done to women, and
other points, might be adduced. But, with your permission, I prefer putting these, if I have an opportunity,
before my own community. To you it would do no
good to rehearse them. I have preferred putting before

22

JEWISH IDEALS

you those points of Jewish ethics which, in my opinion,
it would be well if they could be adopted into other
national systems.
" If, then, you believe so strongly in your ideals, why
do you not strive to spread them among the nations ?"
is the final retort you will have for me. To that the
reply is, that character ideals and types can only be
spread by living up to them, and thus prompting to
Of course, if
admiration and imitation by others.
Judaism and the Jewish ideals were mere matters of
faith, one could spread them by preaching. Truths
or untruths of the intellect can be spread abroad by
preachments, but not ideals of character. If now and
again a Jewish thinker were to give to an Ethical
Society a rose-coloured picture of the Jewish ideals, I
doubt if the characters of the members, already formed
as they are, would be much modified, unless possibly
in their home life they aimed at adapting the Jewish
ideals for the benefit of those coming after. Character
cannot be passed from person to person in neat little
It is only by
parcels wrapped up in brown paper.
working out your own character to the highest pitch of
which it is capable that you can influence the characters of others, especially of the young. Jewish practice
in this regard has the countenance of two great German
thinkers. Kant, who lived the most non-human life of
any mortal that ever breathed, and by his very detachment from life was enabled to see most clearly and
profoundly into it, declared that you can directly aid a
man's happiness, but he must work out his perfection
for himself. So, too, Goethe, who lived perhaps one of
the most human and natural lives ever passed by men,
gives the same moral in the mystical final scene of his
" Faust." The soul of Faust is handed over to the care
of the spirit of Margaret, who earnestly asks how she is

JEWISH IDEALS

23

to conduct him to the highest peaks. " Go up higher;
he will follow thee," is the response-simple words,
but there is the whole philosophy of human fellowship
in them.
No; I see nothing for it but that each should live up
to the highest that he himself can grasp, trusting that
in the final issue the supreme highest will prevail, and
hoping that his ideal will at least form a part of the
final aim of humanity. Ideals have their life and development, and, as with all life, development depends
on conflict, which subjectively means renunciation.
We should not be disheartened while the conflict goes
on, since the longer it lasts the higher the final stage
of development.
Meanwhile, in the strife of creeds
and ideals, all we can ask for, and give, is a fair field
and no favour. Let each man bear himself as bravely
as he may, and let the battle-cry be, as of old, " God
for us all !"

THE GOD OF ISRAEL:

A HISTORY

(" Nineteenth Century," September I879)

HISTORICAL science is laying its hand on the ark of the
Lord. Undeterred by the fate of the men of Bethshemesh (i Sam. vi. 19), the men of Leyden have
looked into the Bible with reverential, yet critical, eyes
to discover the historical nature of the God of Israel. 2
Abating not a jot of the reverence of their gaze, we
may yet venture to disagree with the critical method
that has directed their vision. They have opposed the
supernaturalists and the doctrine of verbal inspiration,
but, as almost always happens in the history of thought,
they have retained the psychological method of their
opponents. The older science of mind regarded man
as separated from his fellows, and as being much the
same at all stages of the world's history. Supernaturalism, accepting this view, drew a hedge round
the children of Israel, and regarded the Deity as inspiring certain isolated individuals with a conception
of His nature which remained the same throughout
sacred history. The Leyden naturalistic school with1 Professor Kuenen's Religion of Israel and Prophets and Prophecy in
Israel have been translated into English, as well as Knappert's Religion of
Israel, a useful summary of Kuenen's results. It is to be regretted that
Kuenen's Historisch-kritisch Onclerzoek, the critical foundation of his views,
and Professor Tiele's important Vergelijkende Geschiedenis van de Egyptische
en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten (Amsterdam, 1872), still remain buried in
so tribal a tongue as the Dutch.
2 This phrase has been employed throughout as a convenient abbrevia-

tion of the unwieldy expression "the views about the Highest Being held
by the children of Israel."

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

25

draws the hedge, but still regards the inspired ones
as isolated, and chiefly differs from its opponents in
restricting the period of inspiration to the times of
the prophets. Both schools think of history as a collection of disconnected pools, instead of regarding it
as a stream of living waters.
Meanwhile in Germany, the home of history, Professors Steinthal and Lazarus have laid the foundations
of the science of National Psychology (TVolkerpsychologie) as the basis of historical investigation. The
Psychology of Nations has to investigate the traits
which, in addition to his common humanity, make a
man a Greek, a Jew, an Englishman, or a German, and
in doing this it has arrived at the scientific treatment
of the national spirit (Volksgeist) existing in all the
members of a nation, and having its life in the national
history. From this, point of view--and it is the fundamental conception of all German historiography-we
should have to treat gifted individuals as merely the
voice of the national spirit, and not as an isolated
phenomena. Again, in making the nation and not
the individual our starting-point we introduce the idea
of continuity into history, and with it the conception
of development and growth of the national spirit. We
have accordingly to trace in the earlier stages of a
nation's life the germs of later developments of the
national genius. In retaining the individualistic view
of mind and thus neglecting the influence of the social
medium, in overlooking the fact of growth and thus
making no distinction between seed and fruit, the
Leyden critics have left out of account the determining
factors of the problem.
In the following pages an attempt is made to treat
the development of the religious conceptions of the
children of Israel from the new standpoint of historic

26

JEWISH IDEALS

method reached by Professors Steinthal and Lazarus.
Hitherto they had not applied their principles to any
particular history, and it is, no doubt, owing to this
that they have overlooked a most important influence
at work, which will here be termed the cross-fertilisation 1 of national ideas. Given, with the Berlin professors, that each nation has its peculiar mental traits,
the problem remains to be determined how far these
are influenced by communication with the thought
of other nations. In giving due prominence to this
phenomenon we have been led to trace the development to a latter stage of the national life of the Jews
than is usually attempted. Indeed, it was in tracing
the antecedents of Spinozism in Judaism that this
influence was seen to have been at work all down
the line. There has thus been obtained a continuous
development of the religious ideas of the Jews from
the Jehovah 2 of Abraham to the Substantia of Spinoza,
each stage of change being due to some cross-fertilisation by the thought of another nation, the influence
of Greece being specially prominent. Nor, on the other
hand, has the influence of Israel on the world's thought
been unworthy of notice. Christianity is but the most
This cross-fertilising influence of
striking example.
Israel has accordingly been touched upon as forming
episodes in the history of the God of Israel.
1 This metaphor is here introduced as being more definite and suggestive
than the vague term "influence." By the biological analogy suggested
there is implied (I) that the ideas cross-fertilised belong to nearly allied
species of Volksgeist (the ideas of a Hottentot and of a Hindoo cannot
cross-fertilise) ; (2) that the resultant idea is more fitted to survive in the
struggle for spiritual existence.
2 The writer of Ex. vi. 3, who evidently considers that there had been
such a development between the patriarchal age and the times of Moses,
gives " El Shaddai" as the name of the earlier conception, and Semitic
comparative philology seems to confirm his view. " Jehovah" is here
used to indicate the specific Hebraic element.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

27

That history divides itself into two periods which
are of nearly equal length, but which differ greatly in
familiarity to the ordinary reader. The first, which
may be roughly termed the Biblical period, reaching
down to the foundation of Christianity, comprises
that part of the world's spiritual history with which
Englishmen are, or used to be, most familiar. All
that was here necessary was to give a rapid summary
of the chief spiritual movements in Israel, attempting,
more consistently than hitherto has been done, to give
the logical connection of each stage.
More importance is to be attached to the method employed than
the results obtained. The Leyden school, it is here
contended, has not given due attention to the need
of tracing in earlier stages the beginnings of later
movements.
The second period of the national history of the
Jews, from the second century A.D. to the present time,
is practically unknown to the English reader, and has
only lately received adequate attention in Germany.
And notwithstanding the mass of monographs on
separate Jewish thinkers and systems, no complete
history of Jewish thought in its logical development
exists as yet in any language. This is mainly due to
an erroneous conception of the position of Spinoza
in the history of philosophy. Till very recent years
Spinozism has been regarded as merely a more consistent Cartesianism, the outward similarity of method
obscuring the essential difference of spirit in the two
systems. With regard to Spinoza's relation to Judaism, the excommunication of the Beth-Din (ecclesiastical tribunal) of Amsterdam, a purely defensive act,
was held to have settled the question of his connection
with Jewish speculation by a decided negative. But
Dr. M. Joel's researches have conclusively shown that

28

JEWISH IDEALS

the philosopher-martyr took his problem from Jewish
predecessors, and was mainly indebted to Descartesa heavy debt-for the method which he applied to its
solution. And we maintain that the recognition of
Spinoza as the goal of the long line of Jewish thought
gives its history a unity which has been universally
overlooked. In a first attempt like the present, and
with the limited space at disposal, no more could be
done than roughly to map out the ground for future
investigation. This is especially the case with the
latter part of the post-Biblical period, where individual
philosophers come into the foreground, and it becomes
The
difficult to see strictly national movements.
national organism, as it were, had in them differentiated a brain, an organ of self-consciousness; and, on
our historic method, the successive philosophers must
be treated as stages of the Jewish mind in its progress
towards Spinozism. We have, so to speak, to trace
the course of an intellectual tunnel through the
Middle Ages which only comes to the light of day
with Spinoza.
With these necessary words as to plan and method
we may now proceed to our inquiry, viz., the history of
the views of the children of Israel about the Deity-in
short, the history of the God of Israel.

I
At the outset of the inquiry - i.e., the Biblical
period-we are met by a number of preconceptions,
theological and anti-theological, which render the
adoption of a scientific attitude extremely difficult.
Let it be enough if we say here that, in assuming the
Bible to be the work of man, we hold that the assump-

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

29

tion tends rather to dignify man than to degrade the
Bible. But once having assumed the Bible to be a
human production, there follow several prosaic yet
important corollaries, such as that it was composed,
written down, copied, and finally edited. Further, as
the use of writing cannot be regarded as an early mode
of transmission of thought, that portion of the Bible
which relates to the earlier fortunes of the Hebrews
must have been handed down by tradition for many
centuries, subject to the imaginative colouring of the
narrators for that long period. Assuming the mythopceic' tendency of the transmitters, the "personal
equation" of the composers, and finally the antagonistic attitude of the editors towards stages of thought
which the nation had outgrown, we must recognise
that the source of history has become very impure, and
requires a strong solution of psychological criticism
to precipitate the impurities and render the troubled
waters clear. We have consequently to guard against
a fourth source of error-historically, perhaps, the most
important-the inadequate nature of the psychological
apparatus which earlier investigators applied to the
problem.
The origines of Hebraism treated with these precautions can scarcely be settled with even tolerable
certainty, as is proved by the widely divergent recon1 Bernstein and Goldziher would have it that all the earlier history,
reaching down almost to the time of David, is purely mythical. This is,
however, going too far; however much myths may gather round the
stories of national heroes (we have their "survival" in modern scandal),
the heroes have existed, and have done heroic deeds. The personification
of the sun and moon, of the dawn and eve, which the followers of Max

Mtiller would posit in place of actual personalities, appear to the present
writer a most instructive warning against dealing with words instead of
things. Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, may not have done all
the Bible tells of, but they are certainly not different aspects of the sungod or varying forms of the dark and dewy eve.

30

JEWISH IDEALS

structions of the Biblical narrative put forward of late
years. Nor can we place much reliance on the new
science of Comparative Religion. Here, too, national
psychology has to moderate the too sanguine expectations of the Semitic specialists by calling attention to
a radical defect in their method. Granting that all the
Semitic tribes have a number of generic similarities of
character, we must not overlook the co-ordinate fact
that each has its specific differences. And it is extremely probable that the diversities from the Semitic
type form the most important characteristic of so
unique a nation as the Hebrews. The late Salomon
Munk defended with great force the position that the
Hebrews alone of all the Semites rose to monotheism;
and RIenan's brilliant and specious contention for a
Semitic monotheistic instinct is now ruled out of court
by all scholars. We are not enlightened as to the
development of religion among the Hebrews by
guesses as to the gods of Phoenicia, or by ingenious
conjectures as to the pre-Islamite development of the
Arabian conceptions of religion. The comparative
method will find its proper application in the problems
of cross-fertilisation which occur in the history of the
Hebrews, in the determination of the influence of
Egypt, Canaan, Phoenicia, Babylon, and Persia on the
religion of Israel. For the actual development of the
specifically Hebraic conceptions our only source, unsatisfactory as it may be in some respects, is the
Hebrew Bible itself.
Having thus cleared the way, however roughly,
through the mass of obstructions of method which
form the real obstacles to Biblical research, let us
attempt to sketch in very bold outline the development
of the Hebraic conception of the Deity during the
Biblical period. Broadly speaking, that development

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

31

consists in the continual universalising of the national
God Jehovah.' And we must add that the characteristic
of the Hebraic conception, as distinguished from that
of the other Semitic tribes, was the lofty ethical character ascribed to Him. Or rather, we may say that
the views about conduct which the old Hebrews held
in connection with their religious conceptions have
become the moral or ideal views of conduct for the
civilised world. What were once Hebraic opinions on
social conduct, are now the moral instincts of civilised
humanity. The " strictness of conscience" was once
the " spontaneity of [the Hebrew] consciousness," to
apply Mr. Matthew Arnold's attempted distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism in the fourth chapter
of his "Culture and Anarchy." The glory of the
Hebrews is not that they never had a "tribal" God,
but that they held practical opinions in connection
with religion which have become the ideal of civilised
morality. It was in consequence of this, as we shall
see, that they alone rose from the " tribal" conception
of a divine protector of the children of Israel to that of
the one Divine Father of all (Mal. ii. Io). The stages
of development are not clear, but the following may be
put forward as probable.
The HEBREWS were originally a nomad tribe, perhaps in the beginning resident in Mesopotamia, if we
may trust the national tradition of the origin of Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees. As far as we can gather
from later accounts, Jehovah was but a family god,
though even then a just and righteous one (cf. the
1 I use the more familiar form in preference to the possibly more correct Jhwh, Jahveh, or Yahweh, on the same principle which makes us still
speak of Homer and Horace instead of Homeros and Horatius. At the
same time, it expresses dissent from the current hypothesis, first started
by Astruc ('753), of an Elohistic and Jahvistic redaction of the Bible,

which has not yet been established by any complete induction.

32

JEWISH IDEALS

legend of Sodom and Gomorra). From their primeval
home, whether Mesopotamia (Tiele) or North Arabia
(Schrader), they wandered west till they found suitable
pasturage in Lower Egypt. Here they came in contact
with the higher civilisation of an agricultural state of
society. The effects of this cross-fertilisation is one of
the first problems of the comparative method. Here
we can only refer to the conjectured relation between
the N2uk-pu-nuk of Egyptian hierology and the "I am
that I am" of the Hebrew legislator (cf. Ex. vi. 3).
After a stay of uncertain duration, their prosperity
brought upon them the tyranny of the Egyptian king
(Ramses the Second), and in the reign of his successor
they resumed their nomad life, accompanied, it would
seem, by a number of Egyptians. This deliverance
from the "house of bondage" made a profound impression on the national mind, and rendered their attachment to the "tribal" God deep and abiding. But
the more important point to notice is the ethical character of their conception of God.
The Ten Words
are unique in history as a covenant of a nation with its
God to bind itself to righteousness. The importance
attached to the moral law, to social conduct, as distinguished from penal legislation and political life, is a
distinguishing mark of the Hebrews, which they have
carried with them throughout their history. And if we
are to retain our scientific attitude, we must recognise
at least the germ of this in the very beginnings of the
national life. Thus the science of history seems to
confirm the national tradition that Jehovah had been
made known to Israel before the residence in Egypt.
And in the moral attributes of the "tribal" Jehovah
are the elements which ultimately lead to the conception of the God of all. A just God cannot be conceived
as partial to one body of men, unless they have deserved

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

33

it by some service which must be to the rest of mankind. In the conception of a just " tribal " Jehovah
we have the germs of the later conceptions of the God
of all and of Israel as the Messiah of the nations. The
supernaturalists who assert that the Hebrews had as
universal a God as the greater prophets thereby prove
themselves the worshippers of a tribal deity, while the
Leyden critics who deny the existence of a universalistic element in the Hebraic conception of the "tribal"
Jehovah must trace its source from another nation, or
relegate its explanation to the mystics.
The next stage of the national history is the conquest of the tribes of Canaan and the formation of the
ISRAELITE nation out of the nomad tribe of Hebrews.
The latter result was finally consummated under David,
who commenced to centralise at Jerusalem. Throughout this period we have a struggle between the religion
of Canaan and of the Hebrews, and we have here
another instance of cross-fertilisation. Like all other
conquering nations, from the days of Veii to those of
Alsace-Lorraine, the Hebrews could only consolidate
their conquest by permitting the conquered to amalgamate with them.
Along with this political there
went a religious amalgamation. The lower orders of
the Hebrews joined with the Canaanite peregrini (to
borrow a term of Roman law1) in the worship of
the gods of the country, Baal, Asteroth, &c., who
appear, from recent researches, to have had their
original home in Assyria. And even the highest
classes were influenced by the Canaanitish theory of
things, as is natural when a less civilised nomad tribe
conquers a more highly cultured agricultural nation.
1 To the unprejudiced observer, one of the most light-giving books on
the Old Testament which have appeared in late years is Sir H. S. Maine's
"Ancient Law."

34

JEWi7ISH

IDEALS

There seems reason to believe that the Hebrews borrowed their cosmogony from the Canaanites (if it was
not brought later from Assyria) and connected with
it the institution of the Sabbath. But even more
important was the necessary change in their views of
Jehovah: He had to be put in connection with the
"other gods." This relation was naturally one of
superiority as the God of a conquering tribe. And
this superiority was strengthened by the centralisation
carried on by David and his successor, till among the
higher minds the view gained currency that the "other
gods" were as nothing compared with the almighty
Jehovah. With the disruption of the kingdom under
the tyranny of Solomon's son, the centrifugal forces
became very strong, and local divine government
ensued in the worship of Baal, Moloch, and the other
foreign gods. But at this critical moment the national
spirit of the Israelites expressed itself in a series of
men whose thoughts and words have moulded the
religious belief of the civilised world for upwards of
1500 years.
The prophets strove valiantly to uphold
the honour of Jehovah among the people, laying stress
on the ethical elements implicit in the earlier conception in contrast to the cruel and: bloodthirsty gods
of Phoenicia and Canaan. In politics they held fast
to the principle; unique among all political principles,
that the greatness of a nation depended on its righteousness, and endeavoured to oppose seeking for aid
in the struggle between North and South Judaea from
Assyria or Egypt. They were unsuccessful, and both
kingdoms were subdued, and a large body of the
Israelites carried over to Babylon. They were unsuccessful as politicians, but they had succeeded in a
spiritual sense. They had purified the national conception of their God from the ignoble elements which

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

35

form so large a part of the views of their Semitic
kinsmen about their deities. But here again it must
be insisted that these nobler elements had been implicit in the earlier Hebraic conception. For man at
least there is no creation ex nihilo, and the prophets
could only have given back to the Israelites as rain
what they had received from their nation as vapour,
to use Mr. Gladstone's fine metaphor. We contend
against Kuenen and Tiele that the note of righteousness must have been a mark of the Hebraic God from
the very beginning.
The stay in Babylon was productive of changes in the
national mind of world-historic importance. During
this period the chief traits of the character of the
JEWS were permanently formed-their intense historic
consciousness of the national past and passionate regard for the national future, their cosmopolitan
tendencies, their strict theocratic legislation, their
plasticity of intellect, and rigidity of social observance.
All these traits are represented in the redaction of
the Biblical canon which took place on their return.
The Bible, which thus represents the Judaic or mature
phase of the national mind, has ever remained the
centre of the national literature. The literary activity
of the Jews for the next thousand years after the final
settlement of the canon is entirely a development of
the Bible in paraphrase (Targum), codification of the
law (Halacha), or expansion of legend (Hagada,
Midrash). The national character became fixed, and
in its maturity commenced to cross-fertilise the growth
of the world's thought at various intervals.
They
were prepared for this by the assimilation of new
elements. In Babylon they had come in contact with
the noblest Aryan religionuErknian Mazdeism--and
their conception of the Divine nature was heightened

36

JEWISH IDEALS

Jehovah
and broadened by the cross-fertilisation.
was conceived as the Universal Father, inexpressible
by material images, unapproachable by material sacrifices. The tribalism of the earlier conception was
raised to the lofty view that Israel is only His chosen
people in order that through them the nations should
be blessed. The Jews had returned from the captivity
chastened by adversity, and with the national ideal of
spreading among the nations the prophetic conception
of ethical monotheism. The influence of Mazdeismn
is shown in the second Isaiah and possibly in the
Book of Job, where the existence of evil is the first
puzzle disintegrating the older conception of the God
of Righteousness. It indicates the first beginnings of
subjectivity among the Hebrews, the rise of the distinction between the individual and the nation, and
with it the striving after personal immortality. This
remained a mere germ for future fertilisation. The
Jews in their sacred books do not show any signs of
having been influenced by fears or hopes of a future
state in their views of morality; they show no signs
of a clutching "otherworldliness" in their views of
conduct. In adversity each member of a nation loses
his individuality, his subjectivity his ideal is the
public good; and this objectivity was fostered among
the Jews by their conception of the Deity as the just
Jehovah into whose hands each felt he could entrust
his fate.
At the same time that Israel was being tried by
adversity, Greece was in the first flush of victory over
the common enemy.

But the national prosperity of

the Greeks was not without its evil results. There
arose the feeling of a life away from the social life
which we have called above subjectivity, and which
is expressed in history by the rise of the Sophists.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

37

Throughout the ethical thought of Greece, remarks
Mr. Sidgwick, egoism was an implicit assumption.
While Israel was commencing its long career as the
People of Sorrows, the Greeks in their glory were
developing traits which led to the "hungry Greekling" of Juvenal's pages.
Yet we may trace the
spiritual history of the civilised world in the action
and counter-action of the national spirits which were
maturing and becoming fixed in Hellas and Judaea
in the fifth century before the present era.
The
remainder of these remarks will be devoted to the chief
stages in the history of the interlaced development of
Hebraism and Hellenism.
With the conquests of Alexander and the spread of
Hellenism among the barbarians, we have the first
contact of the two influences. The results on the
Jewish mind are to some extent preserved for us in the
Septuagint version. The Greek had risen to the idea
of an intellectual monotheism, a cosmic conception
of a highest principle without emotional or historic
elements. We accordingly find the intensely personal
view of God in many cases toned down in the Greek
version, and the general spirit of the version is naturalistic. Later on, the individualism of Hellenistic culture
vitalised the corresponding germ which had been transplanted from Persian soil, and brought the question of
personal immortality into the foreground, giving rise
to disintegration of the national life into sects. The
Sadducees, the conservative priestly party, held to the
older view or instinct of non-belief; as far as we can
gather from the Talmud, they rather denied the relevancy of the question in the spiritual life than dogmatically denied the possibility of the fact.
The
Pharisees, or liberals, the party of progress, were not
opposed to assimilation of foreign modes of thought,

JEWISH IDEALS

38

and believed in immortality as essential to individualism.
With this rise of freethought there naturally arose a
tendency to mysticism, attempting to solve intellectual problems by emotional conceptions. The sect of
Essenes in Judaea, and the mystic union of Moses and
Plato in the pages of the Alexandrian Philo, are two
instances of this tendency among the many which
might be given. Mysticism, psychologically considered,
may be regarded as the incomplete fusion of new
thought and of emotion or compressed ancestral thought.
It consequently very frequently contains the germs of
new developments, which are to be resultants of new
and old spiritual influences. It is a problem of extreme
complexity, but of extraordinary interest, to trace in the
mysticism of the Apocrypha and Midrash the beginnings of Christianity.
Meanwhile Greece was being moved to higher things
in her fall by a touch of Semitic fervour if not of
Hebraic faith. The new tone of Greek ethical thought
displayed in the rise of Stoicism must have been due,
according to our national psychological standpoint, to
some cross-fertilisation by the ideas of a different race.
And Sir Alexander Grant' has shown that all the eminent Stoics were of Semitic origin. The similarity which
has struck most observers between Stoicism and Christianity receives it explanation from our present standpoint when we remember that both were cross-fertilisations of Hellenism by Semitism. The difference, too,
may be due to the fact that in one case the less intense
Semites were the missionaries while Christianity was
propagated by the fiery zeal of the Jews. The spread
of Stoicism among the Romans cannot but have had
some influence in preparing the way for Christianity.
In approaching the subject of Christianity, we must
1

Aristotle's Ethics (3rd edit.), i. p. 307.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

39

distinguish between two problems. The rise of Christianity among the Jews, it cannot be too often repeated,
will only receive its explanation when the mental and
moral atmosphere of the time is made known to us as
crystallised in the pages of the Talmud. The question
of the originality of Jesus is merely one example of the
general question of the relation of the individual and
his nation. But more important than any question of
origin is that of the spread of Christianity among
persons of different race and different views of the
world. This is the most important problem of crossfertilisation in the history of the world's thought. The
Judaic Deity had to be Indo-Germanised or Hellenised
before He could become the God of Aryan worship.
This transformation, the outcome of the Pharisaic
movement, was the great work of Saul of Tarsus and
of the Alexandrian-pseudo-John. To become fruitful
among another nation than that of its origin, an idea
must conform to the laws of assimilation of the new
nation's mind. Thus in Christianity, the just and
righteous God becomes the God of love; instead of
objective Hebrews, His worshippers are subjective
Hellenists. He appeals to each man separately instead
of to a nation collectively. The egoism of the Hellene
was elevated (for it was elevation) into the "otherworldliness"' of the Christian. Each man became separate from the world, and antagonistic to society. So
far from being universal, Christianity has its logical
outcome in the "twa or aiblins three elec'" of the
Scotch blacksmith. The universal, integrating element
was given by the Church, the spiritual successor of
the Roman Empire. To use logical terminology, the
" God of All" of the Hebrew took the All collectively;
Hellenistic Christianity made the All distributive. At
the same time the moral or practical view of the Semite

40

JEWISH IDEALS

gave way to the metaphysical or speculative view of
the Aryan. Men are made holy by faith, not practice.
The personality of the Deity is analysed and subtilised
into a Trinity.
From our present standpoint this
receives illustration from the analogous Aryan Triune
Deity of post-Buddhistic Brahmanism. That racial
influences were at work is confirmed by the later rejection of Aryan Christology by Semitic Islam.

II
But we must now return to the history of the Divine
idea among the Jews during the post-Biblical period.
Their dispersion after the last heroic stand at Bethar
brought them into contact with the world's thought at
every point. Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, Assyria, all
meet in the pages of the Talmud, which faithfully
represents the incomplete assimilation of multifarious
views of the world. It is useless to attempt to give
any systematic account of Jewish belief from the Talmud : there is no such system. We can only recognise
in it germs of later development.
In the struggle
between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the former,
the progressive and assimilative party, gained the
victory, though not without being influenced by the
conservatism of the Sadducees.
And the Talmud is
the production of the Pharisees, and represents their
cosmopolitan tendencies. In particular, we recognise
the influence of Greek rationalism, Persian dualism,
and by their side the mystic tendency which came
later to a head in the Cabbala. The Talmud is a law
book, and is a pre-eminent example of the practical
social tendency of the Hebraic genius. Thought is
free when it does not come into conflict with social

THE GOD OF ISRAEL
observance.

41

The crystallising touch which was to pre-

cipitate NEO-JUDAISM

from the confused syncretism

of the Talmud was to come from the Arabs, Semitic
kinsmen.
We need not here retell the story of the adoption of
Hebraism by Mahomet, told so well as it has been by
Geiger, Dozy, and Deutsch. We are here rather concerned with the reaction of Islam upon Judaism. The
milder rule of the Moslem gave the Jew a needed
pause in the struggle for existence, and the similarity
of the Semitic genius in both prevented the perceptible
tendency to narrowness, and brought the Jewish mind
again into free contact with the world's thought. To
the Semite, wisdom is the jewel of life: witness the
excellent Talmudic system of education witness, too,
the Semitic ideal of kingship, the wise Solomon, the
wise Haroun-al-Raschid. The first aim of the Caliphs,
after the victory of Islam was assured, was to resuscitate Greek science and philosophy. Translators were
employed to bring forth from their Syriac tombs Aristotle
and Galen. And the Jews at once took part in this
Semitic Renaissance (the counterpart of the later new
birth of the Aryan mind, when the latter was stirred
anew by contact with the great spiritual heritage of
its ancestors). And as the first contact with Hellenism showed its influence in the differentiation of the
national life into the sects of Pharisees and Sadducees,
so this second contact with Semitised Hellenism gave
rise to new sects. The beginnings of Karcism are
involved in much obscurity, but it may be generally
described as a revolt against authority-Jewish Protestantism-a struggle against the fetters which the
Talmudic doctors were placing round Jewish reason.
And the revolt was successful : though Karaism itself
dwindled away into a still narrower traditionalism, it

42

JEWISH IDEALS

forced its opponents, the Rabbinites, to adapt tradition
to the reason of the time, and, in so doing, brought
about a radical change in the Judaic views of the
The history of that change must now be
Deity.
roughly traced.
As the pre-Christian era was characterised by a
continual universalising of the Divine idea, so the
post-Islamite development consisted in a still further
extension of universalism in the depersonalising of the
Divine conception. This was caused by the influence
of the Arabic Aristotle, and the consequent rise of the
inevitable struggle between a philosophical or intellectual and a religious or emotional view of the universe.
Such a struggle is really a conflict between old and
new thought, though the older conceptions have
become embedded in the national mind as feelings.
That process which goes on in the mind of the thinker
till he gets to apply his ideas instinctively, and they
become feelings rather than propositions to him, takes
place also in the history of a nation's mental development. Thus feeling is, as it were, condensed ancestral
thought, and thought is the personal element by which
we increase or alter the wisdom of the ages organically
registered as feeling in our frames-i.e., we feel as our
ancestors thought, and think as our descendants will
feel. And from the standpoint of national psychology,
thought is the blank form of feeling without historic
content. Specifically national emotions cannot accordBut abstract thought being
ingly cross- fertilise.
divested of the historic element is international, and,
therefore, the chief agent in cross-fertilisation. New
thought in a nation, as distinguished from the natural
growth of the specifically national conceptions, may
come from new experience, or by contact with the
experience of other nations. Now, the Jewish mind

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

43
is peculiarly open to this latter influence. Experience
has shown that a man may be an exemplary father of
a family and a respectable member of society while
believing in the eternity of the 7rpcTm ?aX.
And the
practical tendency of the Jewish genius led them to
accept this teaching of experience. How far they were
aided in this toleration by the absence of an established
Church in Judaism is an interesting problem which
we cannot here discuss. At any rate, this assimilative
characteristic of Judaism causes the history of Jewish
philosophy to be one of the most instructive examples
of the cross-fertilisation of national ideas, leading
finally to an organic union of Hellenism and Hebraism
in Spinoza. At first we get a merely mechanical admixture. The two theories of the world lie alongside
each other without commingling. The God of intellect
is conceived in Hellenic forms of thought; the moment
we turn to practice, the Jewish doctors (of law as well
as of divinity) treat of the God of emotion under the
While feeling to the Greek was
older conceptions.
intensely personal, egoistic, his intellect viewed the
To the Hebrew the
universe quite impersonally.
universe was charged with personal conceptions
not thought of except in relation to an ab extra
Creator-while his practical views were altruistic, nonsubjective. There was thus in the objective practical
feeling of the Jew a basis for an impersonal view of
the Deity. Yet this view took centuries to become
a really vital principle in Hebrew thought, owing
probably to the unconscious reaction of Christian and
Moslem thought and the intense veneration for the
Bible. But it gained a nominal victory almost from
the very first. The first stage of Jewish, as of Moslem,
1 I hope one of these days to sketch the Outtlines of the History of Jewi.h
Philosophy down to Spinozc, as a study in national psychology.

44

JEWISHSI

ID>EALS

thought is an attempt to determine the Divine attributes,' to bring the Hebraic Deity under Hellenic
forms of thought-in effect to depersonalise the conception. Along with the question of the Divine attributes, forming indeed the crucial problem between
Hellenism and Hebraism, there was connected the
question of a creation ex wihilo. The relation of
Jehovah to the material universe had been conceived
as exactly similar to that of man and the work of
his hands. God was outside the world, and could
interfere at any moment with its working to produce
miracles. Opposed to this, the Jewish Aristotelians
found their master teaching the eternity of matter, and
with it a conception of the Deity as continuously exercising His influence on the material universe in giving
it form. The difference between the two views is of
vital importance: the first chapter of Genesis strikes
the keynote of Hebraism, especially of its Christian
form, where the relation of the individual and his
Maker is more direct, more charged with subjective
craving for Divine favour than in Judaism, where the
Divine preference is desired more for the race than
the individual. The creation ex nihilo dogma becomes
more and more prominent, and comes into the foreground of Jewish speculation in the second postThroughout the later stage,
Maimonidean stage.
mysticism attempts to assimilate the new conceptions
in emotional forms. Finally, in Spinoza the Hellenic
conceptions are at last thoroughly assimilated as feelings rather than abstract truths, and Hellenic thought
1 See Professor Kaufmann's Geschichte der Attributenlehre in der jiidischen
Religionsphilosophie des Mittelalters von Saadja bis Mlaimdni (Gotha, F. A.
Perthes, 1877), rather the annals than the history of Jewish thought

during that period, but presenting a rich mass of materials nowhere else
accessible.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

45

becomes Hebraic feeling. It might be of interest to
treat of the development more in detail. All that
can be here attempted is roughly to characterise the
Hellenic factor in the thought of each prominent
philosopher: our exposition must, therefore, be taken
as one-sided, though that side was the fruitful one
containing the germs of future development of the
world's thought. The Rabbis themselves would probably have been aghast at the logical results of their
views, and there were not wanting signs of an uneasy
instinct of their tendency.
(i)

During the first period (933-1204) we should

have to take into account the influence of the parallel
line of Arabic philosophy, more especially of the eclectic
cyclopedia of the Graeco-Arabic thought by the Brothers
of Purity. All the works of the Jewish philosophers
of this period were written in Arabic, and imbued with
the philosophic phraseology of the Arabs, itself entirely
derived from the Greek. But the line of thought
taken was somewhat different, owing chiefly to two
causes: the influence of the Bible, and the greater
toleration of free thought. In Islam there was from
the first a continual battle between theology and philosophy, in which theology finally conquered under the
philosophic theologian Al-Ghazzili. Still at first the
distinction between Jewish and Moslem thought was
slight. The most trustworthy exposition of the Kaldm,
or first philosophic movement among the Arabs, is to
be found in a treatise by a Karaite Jew, Josef el Basr.'
His treatise, Al Muaitawi, or the Book of Roots, commences the documentary history of Jewish philosophy
1 See Dr. P. F. Franki, Ein miitazilitischer Kaldn als Beitrag ur Geschichte der lMuslimischen Religionsphilosophie (Wien, Karl Gerold's Sohn,

1872 : reprinted from the Sitzungsberichte of the Royal Vienna Academy
of Science).

46

JEWISH IDEALS

by discussing the specifically Hebraic conceptions of
the Deity. His unity and justice, creation ex nihilo,
and the connected dogma of free will, are proved by
ingenious applications of Greek logic to cosmology.
Opposed to him on the question of the authority of
tradition, but at one with him in results if not in
method, is his Rabbinite contemporary Saadja, the
Gaon or chief of the Theological College at Bagdad
which carried on the tradition of the Talmudic doctors
of the law. Hie sums up and defends the traditional
beliefs in his book on "Dogmas and Opinions" (Emunuth Wedeoth), discussing them with all available
appliances of Greek philosophy. He sees the connection of the incorporeal attributes of the Deity with
the dogma of creation, and accordingly brings all his
logic to bear on the proof of a creation. The next
link in the chain is formed by Bachja ibn Pakuda,'
who proves most elaborately the unity of the Godhead
to be a real substantial unity unlike that of man. Yet
after he has passed through the " Gate of Unity" (the
Hebrew title of book i.) and proceeds to treat of the
subject of his treatise, the "Duties of the Heart"
(Choboth Halebaboth), he returns to the ordinary anthropomorphic modes of expression. He, like the two
preceding, is uncompromising in his adherence to the
dogma of creation ex nihilo. The difficulties of the
latter conception were more clearly perceived by
Salomon ibn Gebirol, one of the greatest poets of the
Synagogue, whom Munk has shown to be the same
as Avicebron, the author of the Fons Vita, the most
original philosophic production written in Arabic. He
attempted to evade in mysticism the dogma of creation, which his profound metaphysical genius felt was
1A
full account of his views has been given by Professor Kaufmann in
the Sitzungsberichte of the Royal Vienna Academy of Science, 1874.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

47

uncongenial with the new thought. In the midst of
Aristotelian diversities of matter and form he places
a mystic Neoplatonic Will as an attribute of the Deity,
which is to explain, or to evade explaining, the creation.
He had not much influence on Jewish thought, but
is quoted with great respect by Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas, and later on his views were adopted
by Giordano Bruno. He is interesting here as the
first who attempted to assimilate the new thought into
a consistent system, whereas previous thinkers had
merely used Greek philosophy as a clothing for their
Hebraic faith. He attempted, at least, to make it the
flesh.
Jehuda Halevi, the sweetest singer of the New
Exile, marks a turning-point in Jewish thought. He
first attempted to check the influence of Greek thought
and its threatened overthrow of the dogma of creation
which he felt to be essential to the old faith. His
poet-soul gave utterance to prophetic warnings with a
meaning something like this :
Go not near the Grecian wisdom 1
It has not fruit, but only blossoms.
For its fruit is that the heavens
And the earth can have no Maker,
The creation no Creator,
And the moon no end to changing.
Follow that delusive doctrine,
Whose foundation is unfounded,
Then your heart is void and bitter,
And your mouth is full of phrases.

He consequently attempted to rival the feat of AlGhazzili, who, within the pale of Islam, had so suc1

Kaufmann, p. 129; Munk, Melanges, 484,

i. Geiger,
;

Divan, 86. The

Talmud (Sot. 49 b; Menach. 64 b) had already said, "Cursed is the man
who allows his son to learn the Grecian wisdom;" but Jehuda Halevi sees
the specially dangerous doctrine of the Greeks.

48

JEWISH IDEALS

cessfully philosophised against philosophy. To support
the probability of a creation, he laid great stress on the
omnipotence of God as the most important attribute.
Yet he owns that the argument against creation is
as weighty as that for (Cusa i, i. 67), and resorts to
Revelation for a solution which reason cannot offer.
He is even still more interesting as a representative of
Jewish national feeling; he it was who said: " Israel
is among the nations as the heart among the limbs."
His intense patriotism has made him a popular philosopher among the Jews, and his chivalrous love for
Jerusalem has inspired Heine's noblest poem. His
fiery zeal for Jews and Judaism led him to base their
claims on a philosophy of history which would be
ludicrous but for its poetic fervour.
But his efforts to repress speculation were unsuccessful, and the question of the Divine Attributes
continued to be discussed by the.Neoplatonic Joseph
ibn Zaddik, and the Peripatetic Abraham ibn Daud.
The former denied that we could have any real knowledge of God, and rejected all attribution. He thus
prepared the way for Moses Maimonides, who marks a
halt in the march of thought, and sums up the speculation of the first period. In the sphere of practical
philosophy he performed the part of a Jewish Bentham,
codifying the "halachic " or legal portions of the Talmud in the fourteen books of his " Strong Hand" ( Yad
Hachazalcka). And in speculative philosophy he brought
about a morganatic union between Greco-Arabic philosophy and Judaic religion. He laid down the principles
of the resultant Neo-Judaism in his " Guide of the
Perplexed" (Moreh Nebuchim), perhaps the most remarkable metaphysical tour de force in the history
of human thought. He attempted to compromise all
the questions at issue between the thought of Greece

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

49

and the feeling of Judea. Thus, with regard to the
question of the Divine attributes, he grants that all
attribution is anthropomorphic, and therefore degrading to God's dignity; yet he denies that we can give
negative attributes to the Deity, and thus brings in the
positive ones by a side wind. The question of creation
he declared to be antinomical: the balance of evidence
is equal. His views on all the great theological questions have a rationalistic tendency, as may be seen in
the restatement of them contained in Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. He commences his treatise
by going through all the anthropomorphic epithets
applied to God in the Bible, explaining them away in
every case. Indeed, the characteristic thing about the
whole of the first movement, from Saadja to Maimonides,
is the increasing theoretic aversion to anthropomorphism, which we can trace back through Targum and
Talmud to the LXX. Yet the Bible had too strong
a hold on the religious life to allow this tendency to
have practical effect except in controversy with Christians, where it gave great advantages.
(2) Maimonides had a great influence on scholasticism. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas own
their indebtedness to him, and it would almost seem
that the Church had added the Doctor Perplexorum
to the Doctor Universalis and Doctor Angelicus as one
of her authorities. By his own co-religionists his views
did not meet with such universal acceptance. Immediately after his death (1204) a fierce struggle took
place as to his orthodoxy, and in the heat of controversy his works were publicly burned. But the antiMaimonites ultimately gave way, and Maimonides
has, since the beginning of the fourteenth century,
been the rallying post of Jewish orthodoxy. Yet the
rationalistic elements in his thought were not allowed
D

JEWISH IDEALS
50
to slumber. Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides), in the
next century after Maimonides' death, showed so much
boldness in his "Wars of the Lord" (Milcharnoth
Adonai), that his opponents called his book the "Wars
In particular he accepted the
against the Lord."
eternity of matter, which answered in those days to
the acceptance of the theory of evolution in these.
Gersonides had no inconsiderable fame as an astronomer; Kepler writes to Johannes Remus for the fifth
or astronomical book of the Milchawoth Adonai, and
we may not unreasonably connect his rejection of the
creation ex nihilo with his training in astronomy.
Cross-fertilisation is as marked a phenomenon in the
history of sciences as in the history of nations, and
theology and cosmology have many points of contact.
It is not without reason that the creative fiat of the
first chapter of Genesis is connected with the old
Assyrian cosmology and its "revolving dish-cover"
theory of the heavens. Astronomy was in the age of
Gersonides gradually emerging from its mythologic
stage of astrology, and accustoming men's minds to a
more impersonal view of the universe and a more extended view of the cosmos. This would naturally lead
to a rejection of the creation ex nihilo hypothesis, and
with its rejection a modification of the conception of
God's relation to the universe. The idea of an ab
extra Deity interfering arbitrarily with the material
universe gave way to the conception of God as continuously manifesting Himself in the natural order.
The impersonal view of the Deity, which was the outcome of the discussion of His attributes during the
first period, must naturally have prepared the way for
the change. Psychologically, it was a change in men's
imaginative view of the world; the function of the
imagination in religion being to bridge over the gap

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

51

between the God of nature and the God of conscience,
the Ruler of the " starry heavens above" and of "the
moral law within." Hence the importance, theologically considered, of the Copernician theory, with its
reversal of the anthropocentric view of the universe.
It is not difficult to see in Gersonides' rejection of
creation ex nihilo the first step towards the Spinozistic
attribution of extension to the Deity. We meet, too,
of Gersonides that scientific mode of thought
in the
which is so marked a characteristic of Spinoza, and
which Sir F. Pollock can only trace to the influence
of Descartes (Mind, No. x.).1
But, as in the first period by Jehuda Halevi, another
attempt was made to stem the progress of Hellenism
in Jewish philosophy by Don Chisdai Creskas, in his
"Light of the Lord" (Or Adonai). He made it his
task to oppose the views of " the Greek [Aristotle] who
in these our days darkens the eyes of Israel," in reality
the Aristotelism of Gersonides. And he attempts to
fight philosophy with its own weapons; he accepts,
e.g., determinism in a most rigid manner. But the
authority of the Maimonidean Aristotle was too firmly
established for Creskas to overcome, and his principal
influence was to lessen the number of fundamental
principles of Judaism, which Maimonides had reduced
to thirteen. In a work on the " Principles " (Ikklarim),
by Creskas' disciple Albo, they are reduced to three.
70o

During this second period (1204-1677) we have a

parallel movement to the rationalising tendencies of the
followers and opponents of Maimonides-the mysticism
of the Cabbala, which is often regarded as the specifically Jewish philosophy. So far from this being the
1 Spinoza quoted Gersonides in one of the marginal notes to his Tractctus. Of him treat Joel in his Beitrdge rur Greschichte der Philosophie, and
J. Weil, Philosophie Religieuse de Le'vi-ben-Gerson (Paris, Ladrange, I868).

52

JEWISH IDEALS

case, it may rather be regarded as heretical, and certainly as unorthodox. Its history is obscured by a
mass of pseudepigraphic writings (one, e.g., attributed
to Adam), but, thanks to Jellinek's researches,' the
origin of the specifically Cabbalistic mysticism has been
discovered in the twelfth century, though mystical elements, may be traced in Jehuda Halevi, Ibn Gebirol,
in the Talmud, Philo, and perhaps in the vision of
Ezechiel. It has an interest as representing a side of
the Jewish mind-the mysticism which seems common
to all Orientals. It presents an interesting example
of a curious psychological trait in the mystical mindthe attraction of mathematical symbols, seen in Pythagoras, Plato, Swedenborg, and cropping up in rank
luxuriance in De Morgan's "Budget of Paradoxes."
Like all mysticism, it is a premature attempt to register
rational thought as feeling by clothing the new abstractions with the old emotions. The Cabbala thus attempts to treat the question of creation, and there
seems every reason to believe that Spinoza was influenced by it in his conception of the relation of God
to the universe, the so-called pantheistic element in his
thought. Emanation led to immanence. The Cabbala
had very great influence on Christendom in the Renaissance period, when men's hearts were craving some
more substantial nutriment than the dry bones of scholasticism.2 When, indeed, we reckon the influence on
1A
useful summary of the principal doctrines of the Cabbala has been
published by Dr. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, Longmans, 1865.
2 A. Stickl in his voluminous Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters
(1862-65) gives the following analysis of the Cabbalistic influence in his
third vol. (Periode der Bekimpfung der Scholastik), vii., Die cabbalistische
Theosophie, pp. 394-608, §§ 87-129 :--() Die pythagoraisch-cabbalistische
Theosophie: (a) Johannes Reuchlin, (b) Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, (c)
Francesco Zorzi. (2) Die c. T. in Verbindung mit der Naturphilosophie
und Arzneikunde: (a) Theophrastus Paracelsus,(b) Hieronymus Cardanus,
(c) Johann-Baptistvon Helmont, (d) Robert Fludd. (3) Die c. T. in dogma-

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

53

scholasticism of Avicebron, Maimonides, and the Jewish
translators of Graco-Arabic philosophy, and the crossfertilisation of Renaissance mysticism by the Cabbala,
we cannot but regret that historians of mediaeval
thought have enclosed their exposition of Jewish philosophy in a sort of ghetto. The development of the
spirit in Christianity and Judaism went through the
same phases during the period 1000-1500 A.D.

Both

in church and synagogue an attempt had been made
to clothe Hebraic faith in the abstract forms of GraecoArabic logic, and in both the harsh result drove men
to mysticism in an attempt to bring home the new
thought to men's hearts. And this mysticism grew
mainly on the soil of Judaism, which gave the Cabbala
to both Jew and Christian. Out of these discordant
elements came the mixed rationalism and mysticism of
Spinoza's Ethica, which thus sums up the whole movement of European thought during the Middle Ages.
The influences that had been at work both in Christendom
and Jewry came to a head in Baruch Spinoza, who thus
forms a landmark in the history of the world's thought.
In him we find the flower and fruit of the crossfertilisation of Hebraism and Hellenism which we
have been tracing in its principal exponents. When
we combine the deanthropomorphised Deity of Maimonides with the eternity of matter of Gersonides, the
determinism of Creskas, and the immanence of Divinity
tischer Form mit altgnostisch-manichaischer Farbung : MARTIN LUTHER
(4) Philosophische Versuche unter der Herrschaft der lutherischen Dogmatik: (a) Philip Melanchthon, (b) Nicholaus Tamnillus. (5) Die c. T.
Mystik unter dem Einfluss der lutherischen Dogmatik: (a) Valentin
Weigel, (b) Jacob Bhihme. To these names we may add those of Raymond
Lully, Pico della Mirandula, Henry More, and the Cambridge Platonists
generally: traces of Cabbala are even to be found in Dante. For the
general influence of the Jews on the Renaissance, see Steinschneider's
Letteratura Italican dei Gindei, and L. Geiger's notes to his edition of J.
Burckhardt's Cultur der Renaissance.

54
in all things taught by the Cabbala, and cast them
into the mould of Cartesian method, we have the
materials for the so-called Pantheism of Spinoza.'
But it is to be observed that these positions are held
by him as implicit assumptions (I would call them
feelings) rather than as definite propositions; they
have been completely assimilated into his mental
system. He does not disprove creation ex nihilo; he
speaks of extension as an attribute of the Deity; he
does not discuss the personality of the Godhead;
he speaks of God as Substantia. We consequently
find in him a thorough application of the new thought
to ethics. In all previous Jewish thinkers the practical
and speculative spheres had been completely separate;
Aristotle ruled the one, the Bible the other. But in
Spinoza we have an attempt to apply the same objectivity to conduct as to metaphysics. And it is
here that the Hebraism of his nature displayed itself;
he combined the Hebraic objectivity of practice with
the Hellenic objectivity of thought. We find no trace
of ascetic " otherworldliness " in him, no craving for
special grace, except in so far as he had deserved it
In his Ethica we find
from the God of justice.
coincidences with Stoicism," and it is not
remarkable
JEWVISH

ID)EALS

1 Spinoza's indebtedness to his Jewish predecessors has been put beyond
all doubt by Dr. M. Joel's monographs on post-Maimunite Jewish philosophy, now bound together as his Beitrige zur Geschichte der Philosophie
(Breslau, 1876). A somewhat disconnected summary of his results is
given by Sir F. Pollock in Mind, No. x.
2 The following passage from the Thoug/hts of Marcus Aurelius (iv. 23,
Long) gives perhaps the best example of the characteristic tone of both
Stoicism and Spinozism :-" Everything harmonises with me, which is
harmonious to thee, 0 Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late
which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy
seasons bring; O Nature, from thee are all things, in thee are all things,
'
to thee all things return." This is the very voice of the " intellectualis
amor Dei." Cf. Professor Clifford's "Cosnic Emotion," Nineteenth
Century, October 1877.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

55

undeserving of remark that both systems are results
of cross-fertilisation of Semitism and Hellenism. Nor
can the modern world offer any more striking example
of the Stoic ideal than that afforded by the blameless
life of Baruch Spinoza.
The characteristic of his religious emotion (and in
no man was the Divine Spirit so dominant) is happily
hit off in his own phrase, " intellectualis amor Dei."
The Hellenic intellectual conceptions had become
emotions to him; he feels that "cosmic emotion"
which the late Professor Clifford has described. Yet
he is free from the unphilosophic agnosticism of Mr.
Herbert Spencer; his twenty-ninth letter is the best
answer to the latter's doctrine of the unknowable.
We may fairly call his views Cosmic Theism-Hellenic
philosophy filtered through Hebraic faith. Hence his
appeal to all the great thinkers of modern times, and
especially the Spinoza-cultus of the present century;
he is the summation of Hebraism and Hellenism, the
two great factors of civilised life. And the fact that
Hellenism has in him the victory caused the appeal to
the Aryan mind to be more urgent. As Spencer has
been called " the poet's poet," so we may term Spinoza
"the philosopher's philosopher."1
With him ends the history of Jewish philosophy;
later movements in Judaism were directed towards the
attainment of social status, and, when that had been
attained, to raise again the historic consciousness,
both the reflex results of that large sweep of European thought which we may roughly term Democracy.
With him, too, culminates the long series of changes
1 " But what especially riveted me to him," says Goethe, who represents
Spinozism in literature, " was the boundless disinterestedness which shone
forth in every sentence," i.e., what we have above termed his objectivity
both in thought (Hellenic) and practice (Hebraic).

JEWISH IDEALS
56
in the God of Israel. From a family deity it had been
raised into the Divine Father of All, the Creator of
the universe, and under this form had cross-fertilised
Graeco-Roman culture as Christianity.
But "the
whirligig of Time brings in his revenges;" Israel came
in contact with Greek philosophy, and was in its turn
cross-fertilised by Hellenism. Jehovah was gradually
depersonalised, and the world was rendered independent of Him, till, under the influence of mysticism,
He becomes an immanent principle of the universe, as
the Substantia of Spinoza. From an ab extra Deity,
the God of Israel had been changed by cross-fertilisation into a continuous energetic Principle.

If we turn our eyes away from the past and gaze
upon the spiritual conflict of the present, may we not
say that the struggle between religion and science is
really a conflict between the Christian and Spinozistic
developments of the God of Israel?
Among the
Jews the development of thought had been comparatively free; it was far otherwise in Christendom.
The creeds of the Church have crystallised the conception of God as the ab extra Deity of 1500 years
ago, and all the progress of the world's thought has
been made in opposition to the Church, which has
always had an instinct that its theology was bound
up with the older cosmology. Hence its opposition
to Copernicus, Galileo, and science generally. The
period from the rise of Christianity to the Renaissance
was a pause in the development of the West Aryan
mind. It was filled up by an attempt to assimilate
1 On the relation of Spinozism to current scientific speculation, cf. Sir
'
F. Pollock's masterly essay on "The Scientific aspect of Spinoza's Philosophy," Fortnightly Review, May 1873, the most important contribution
on Spinozism that has been made in England.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

59

Hebraic notions of righteousness, which could only
be engrafted by an appeal to Aryan egoism in the
hedonistic conceptions of a future state. The Divin
Commedia has been rightly considered the embodiment
of the mediaval mind, and we can see why the socalled ancients are really nearer in spirit to the postRenaissance thought than the non-Aryan development
of the Middle Ages. The specific Aryan development
passes from 300 B.C. to 1500 A.D. With the Renaissance the souls of kinsmen of olden time came
and released the Aryan mind from the Hebraic armour,
which had become too narrow for it. Yet it must not
be forgotten that the panoply had helped the human
race mightily in its war against evil, and must ever
remain as a relic of heroic battles of the spirit. That
generations of men have held the Bible sacred must
always keep it sacred for us. And indeed it is doubtful whether the Aryan mind has completely assimilated
Hebraic righteousness. Only when it has the instinct
to do right as right, apart from rewards and punishments (this is the true Hebraic objectivity), will the
work of the Bible be done. Even then the Bible may
be as important in the education of the individual as it
has been in the education of the race.
Meanwhile some in these days have thoroughly
assimilated Hebraism, and are ready for new developments of the Aryan (Hellenic) part of their nature.
Their position as individuals answers to the mediaeval
stage of the Jews as a race. And it is natural that
they should approach the position of the Hellenic
Hebraism of Spinoza. Thus we have to-day two conflicting views of the world, each the outcome of the
Judaic spirit.' Thomas a Kempis and Johann WolfIn theology we have the opposing conceptions of an ab extra Deity and
of a continuous energetic Principle.

In cosmology the world is conceived

58

JEWISH IDEALS

gang Goethe are typical examples of the opposing
Weltanschauungen, the old and new faiths. No one
who has watched the spirit of the time can doubt
which of the two ideals is the goal towards which the
mind of man is marching. Cosmic Theism (Spinozism
with an addition to be presently mentioned) is destined
to be the religion of the future.
It is natural to discuss the relation of Judaism to
the two faiths which have sprung from its bosom.
It has always rejected Christianity, which is utterly
alien to the Jewish Volksgeist, but it could clearly,
without loss of historic dignity, advance to the new
faith. Whether it will take the latter course remains
to be seen; it rejected Spinoza, and with him the
history of Jewish thought, qu Jewish, ceases. The
nation turned to the task of gaining a position among
the nations, and withdrew from abstract speculation.
But there was another reason which explains the rejection and neglect of Spinoza by Judaism, and which
points to the main defect in Spinozism. Spinoza was
no true Jew; he had not that historic sense of communion with his people's past which has been the
bond that has kept Judaism alive through the ages.
Judaism is not alone a religion, but a philosophy
of history. And herein we see the main defect of
Spinozism, due to Spinoza's individualistic psychology :
we should see God, not alone in Nature, but also in
History. The Comtist enthusiasm for humanity has
its value in the recognition of this truth. And there
on the one side as out of relation to God and man, and on the other as
one in substance with mankind. In anthropology we have opposed a
statical individualistic conception of man's nature with judgment of
history from a hedonistic standpoint (Optimism or Pessimism) and a
dynamic social conception with a progressive view of history. In ethics
the opposition lies between an egoistic method which seeks for a solution
of the hedonistic calculus in future rewards and punishments, and a perfectionist ideal of self-culture.

THE GOD OF ISRAEL

59

are not wanting signs that the main striving of the
mind of the age is towards the foundation of a philosophy of history. And when the history of the Jews
has been told as it should be, it will then be seen
that they above all others have earned the title of the
chosen people of God. The great question for contemporary Judaism is whether it will continue God's
work or cease to be. "Prophecy is of all errors the
most gratuitous," we are told, but I can see no meaning in history if the richest product of humanity,
which has shared in all the progressive movements in
the history of man, shall not have within it germs of
mighty thoughts and deeds.
NOTE.-A table is here appended summing up the results indicated.
The prehistoric and contemporary stages have been added for the sake
of completeness. Reflected arrows indicate national movements which
had effect on the later history of Judaism. Dates are put rather later
than the appearance of movements in individuals. The numbers refer to
the following remarks :
I. This stage is unique, those who returned from the captivity being of
one mind, and thus there is no spiritual division of the nation.
2. The influence of Stoicism must be reckoned, though not strictly
Jewish.
3. The metaphysical nature of the Christian Deity is here omitted as an
Aryan trait.
4. The Cabbalists apply to the impersonal conception the emotions previously felt towards the personal God of tradition, while the rationalists
remove the emotional element from the latter, and attempt to intellectualise
the conception in terms applicable to the impersonal God of reason. This
is here represented by the crossed lines.

JEWISH IDEALS

60

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MORDECAI
A PROTEST AGAINST THE CRITICS
(" Macmillan's Magazine," June 1877)
"Sephardo, the Jew.
Wise books,
For half the truths they hold are honoured tombs."
-Spanish Gipsy, p. 205.

THE critics have had their say: the recording angels
of literature, more sorrowful than angry, have written
down "Daniel Deronda" a failure. And there seems
to be at least this much of truth in their judgment, that
one of the parts of which the book is composed has
failed to interest or even to reach its audience. For
the least observant reader must have noticed that
"Daniel Deronda" is made up of two almost unconnected parts, either of which can be read without the
other. Every "book" after the first is divided into
two parts, whose only claim to be included under the
same covers is the common action or inaction of the
eponymous hero. One set of characters and interests
centres round the fate and fortunes of Gwendolen
Harleth, and of this part of the book we can surely
say that it has excited as much interest and bitten as
deeply into men's minds as any of the author's previous studies of female character. Indeed, we would
submit that George Eliot's last portrait of female egoism is in many ways her best; her hand has become
more tender, and, because more tender, more true than
when she drew such narrow types as Hetty Sorrel and
Rosamond Vincy, so unnaturally consistent in their
6T

62

JEWISH IDEALS

selfishness. The story of Gwendolen Harleth's purification from egoism is, then, one might say, even a
greater success than the former pictures of girlish
struggles, and displays the author's distinguishing excellences in undiminished brilliancy. But there is
another part of the book with which the English-speaking public and its literary " tasters " have failed to sympathise, and which they have mostly been tempted to
omit on reperusal. The tragedy of Mordecai Cohen's
missionary labours, on which the author has spent
immense labour of invention and research, must
be pronounced to have completely failed in reaching
and exciting the interest and sympathy of the ordinary
reader. Mr. Bagehot has told us that the greatest pain
man can feel is the pain of a new idea, and the readers of
"Daniel Deronda " have refused painfully to assimilate
the new idea of the Mordecai part of the book. This
idea we take to be that Judaism stands on the same
level as Christianity, perhaps even on a higher level, in
point of rationality and capacity to satisfy the wants of
the religious consciousness, "the hitherto neglected
reality," to use the author's own words (ii. 292), " that
Judaism is something still throbbing in human lives,
still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the
world." The difficulty of accepting this new idea comes
out most prominently in the jar most readers must have
felt in the omission of any explanation of the easy
transition of Deronda from the Christianity in which he
was bred to the Judaism into which he had been born.
The present notice proposes to discuss the failure of
this unsuccessful part, from the standpoint of one for
whom this initial difficulty does not exist, and who has
from his childhood seen the world habited in those
Hebrew Old Clothes of which Mr. Carlyle and others
have spoken so slightingly. And the first thing that it

MORDECAI

63

is natural for a Jew to say about " Daniel Deronda " is
some expression of gratitude for the wonderful completeness and accuracy with which George Eliot has
portrayed the Jewish nature. Hitherto the Jew in
English fiction has fared unhappily, being always represented as a monstrosity, most frequently on the side
of malevolence and greed, as in Marlowe's Barabas and
Dickens's Fagin, or sometimes, as in Dickens's Riah,
still more exasperatingly on the side of impossible
benevolence. What we want is truth, not exaggeration, and truth George Eliot has given us with the
large justice of the great artist. The gallery of Jewish
portraits contained in "Daniel Deronda" gives in a
marvellously full and accurate way all the many sides
of our complex national character. The artistic element, with the proper omission of painting and sculpture, in which Jews, though eminent, have not been
pre-eminent, is well represented by Klesmer, Mirah, and
the Alcharisi. Ezra Cohen is a type of the commonplace Jew, the familiar figure of prosperous mercantile
dealing, the best-known trait of Jews to Englishmen; while little Jacob exhibits in a very humorous
form the well-known precocity of Jewish children.
The affectionate relations of Ezra Cohen and his
mother, and the tender respect of Mordecai and Mirah
for the memory of theirs, point to the exceptional influence of the Mother and the Home in the inner life of
Jews. Then in Kalonymos, whom we feel tempted to
call the Wandering Jew, we get the nomadic spirit
which has worked in Israel from times long previous
to the Dispersion, while all must join in the scorn the
author evidently feels for Pash, the Jew who is no Jew.
Yet he is the representative of what might be called
the Heine side of Jewry-the wit and cynicism that
reached their greatest intensity in the poet of Young

64

JEWISH IDEALS

Germany. The more temperate Gideon represents, it
is to be feared, a large proportion of English Jews, one
not ashamed of his race, yet not proud of it, and willing to see the racial and religious distinctions we have
fought for so valiantly die out and perish utterly among
men. Perhaps the most successful of the minor portraits is that of the black sheep Lapidoth, the Jew with
no redeeming love for family, race, or country to preserve him from that sordid egoism-the new name for
wickedness-into which he has sunk. His utter unconsciousness of good and evil is powerfully depicted in
the masterly analysis of his state of mind before purloining Deronda's ring. To some extent the weird
figure of the Alcharisi serves as a sort of companionpicture of female renunciation of racial claims, but
the struggle between her rebellious will and what oldfashioned folk call the Will of God (Professor Clifford
would perhaps name it the Tribal Will) raises her to
a tragic height which makes Deronda's mother perhaps
the most imposing figure in the book. Deronda himself, by the circumstance of his education, is prevented
from typifying any of the social distinctions of a Jew,
yet it is not unlikely that his gravity of manner and
many-sided sympathy were meant by the author to be
taken as hereditary traits.
These, with Ram the bookseller, the English Jew of
the pre-emancipation era, and some minor characters,
give to the reader a most complete picture of Jews and
Jewesses in their habits as they live, of Jews and Jewesses as members of a peculiar people in relation to the
Gentile world. To point the moral of human fallibility, besides some minor slips in ceremonial details,
on which it were ungrateful to dwell,1 we cannot but
1 E.g., Taliths or fringed mantles are not worn on Friday nights (ii. 292300) ; the Kaddish, or prayer in honour of the dead, is only said for eleven

MORDECAI

65

think (a critic is nothing if not critical) that the author
has failed to give in Mirah an adequate type of Jewish
girlhood. Mirah is undoubtedly tame; and tameness,
for those who know them, is the last infirmity of
Jewish girls. Still, even here the sad experience of
Mirah's youth may be held to have somewhat palliated
any want of brightness, and the extra vivacity of Mrs.
Cohen junior perhaps supplies the deficiency.
So much for the outer life of Judaism. The English
reader will find here no idea so startlingly novel as
to raise opposition to its admission, or to disturb his
complacent feeling of superiority over Jews in all but a
certain practical sagacity (he calls it sharpness or cunning), which must be postulated to explain the " differentia of success" characterising the Jewish species of
commercial dealings. One new fact he may indeed profitably learn : from the large group of Jewish characters
in "Daniel Deronda " he may perhaps gather that there
are Jews and Jews, that they are not all Lapidoths, nor
even all Ezra Cohens, as he has been accustomed to think.
But the new idea of which we have spoken is embodied in the person of Mordecai Cohen, the Jew par
excellence of the book, the embodiment of the inner
life of Judaism. The very fact of this recognition of
an inner life, not to speak of the grand personality in
which she has typified it, entitles George Eliot to the
heart-deep gratitude of all Jews; the more so inasmuch as she has hazarded and, at least temporarily,
lost success for her most elaborated production by
endeavouring to battle with the commonplace and
months, not eleven years (iv. 92), and then only by a son.
to be under the same delusion (ii. 306).

Mirah seems

Before breaking the bread (ii.

pronounced a blessing over
356), Cohen should have "made Kiddush," i.e.,
some sacramental wine. It is doubtful whether Cohen would have paid
money and written a pawn-ticket on Sabbath eve, but this may be intentional.

66

JEWISH IDEALS

conventional ideas about Judaism. The present article
aims at striking another blow to convince the English
world of the existence in the present day, and for all past
time, of a spiritual life in Judaism. And we can conceive
of no better point of defence for the position than the
historic probability of the character of Mordecai, which
critics have found so mystic, vague, and impossible.
For those who know anything of the great leaders
of spiritual Judaism will recognise in Mordecai all the
traits that have characterised them. Saul of Tarsus,
Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), Jehuda Halevi, Ibn Ezra,
Maimonides, Abrabanel, Spinoza, Mendelssohn (not to
mention other still more unfamiliar names) were all
men like Mordecai-rich in inward wealth, yet content to earn a scanty livelihood by some handicraft;
ardently spiritual, yet keenly alive to the claims of
home affection; widely erudite, yet profoundly acquainted with human nature; mystics, yet with much
method in their mysticism. The author seems even to
have a bolder application of the historic continuity
of the Hebraic spirit in view: she evidently wishes
Mordecai to be regarded as a " survival" of the prophetic spirit, a kind of Isaiah Redivivus.
Hence a
somewhat unreal effect is produced by his use of
a diction similar to what might be expected from a
" Greater Prophet" stepping out of the pages of the
Authorised Version. Still, it is to be remembered that
we almost always see Mordecai in states of intense
excitement, when his thought would naturally clothe
itself in the forms in which all his literary efforts had
been written. He speaks in a sufficiently prosaic
and unbiblical style when the subject is prosaic, as to
Daniel Deronda at their first meeting (ii. 336): " What
are you disposed to give for it ? " " I believe Mr. Ram
will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir," remarks suf-

MORDECAI

67

ficiently on the level of nineteenth-century conversation
to give Mordecai some community with ordinary folk.
There is yet another quality which Mordecai shares
with the sages and prophets of the past: he is a layman. The natural thing for a writer describing "a
spiritual destiny embraced eagerly in youth," a representative of the religious life of a nation, would be to
describe some young priest ardently striving for the
spiritual enlightenment of his flock, some Mr. Tryan,
some Savonarola ; and it would have been right for all
other religions. But in Judaism the inner development of the Spirit has been carried on almost entirely
by laymen : the Jewish Summa Theologise, "The Guide
to the Perplexed" (Mord Nebouchim) of Maimonides,
was written by a physician. We shall be using more
familiar illustrations when we remind the reader that
Moses and, above all, the prophets were men from
the lay community, not members of an organised
priesthood. This may account for that spirit of Compromise (writers of the New English call it " adaptation
to environment"), which is as marked a characteristic
of the religious history of Jews as of the political
Other religions have had
history of Englishmen.
Judaism has had a synagogue,
churches, bureaucracies;
a representative assembly.
Mordecai shares yet another gift of his predecessors:
he is a poet. The fragment in chapter xxxviii. commencing" Away from me the garment of forgetfulness,
Withering the heart,"

might well be a translation from a Piut of Ibn Gebirol
or a Selicha of Jehuda Halevi, and makes him a fit
dramatispersona of that " national tragedy lasting I 500
years, in which the actors have been also the heroes
and the poets."

68

JEWISH IDEALS

We do not speak without knowledge of the history
of Jews, post-biblical as well as biblical, when we say
that Mordecai Cohen is a lineal successor of those
great leaders of spiritual Judaism who have fought in
the van in that moral warfare which Judaism has
waged and won against the whole world; a fitting
companion of that valiant band which has guarded
through the ages the ark of the Lord intrusted to
Israel's keeping 4000 years ago; a noble representative of that spirit of resistance that has repulsed the
most powerful disintegrating forces ever brought against
a nation or a creed. A "nation of shopkeepers " has
produced a Milton, a Shelley, a Newman; a " nation
of pawnbrokers," if you will, has given birth to a
Jehuda Halevi, a Spinoza, a Mordecai.
To believers in the principle of Heredity this would
be enough to give to Mordecai that possibility which
is sufficient for artistic existence. English critics, however, seem not to believe in hereditary influences: they
have unanimously pronounced him an impossibility.
They require, it would appear, some more tangible
proof of the existence among modern Jews of a character like Mordecai's .than the d priori probability
afforded by the consideration of the historic continuity
of national character. Even this want could be supplied. The present writer was fortunate enough to
discover' traces of a Jew who, allowing for the idealisation which is the privilege of the artist, might well
stand for the prototype of Mordecai. In the Fortnightly Review for April i, 1866, Mr. George Henry
Lewes prefaces an article on Spinoza with an account
of a philosophers' club where he first made acquaintance with the doctrines of the Hebrew thinker, and
1

The discovery was communicated to the Accadlemy of July 29, 1876, by

my friend Mr. McAlister, to whom I had shown it.

MORI)ECAI

69

which resembles in every particular the club at the
" Hand and Banner" in the sixth book of " Daniel
Deronda." The locality, Red Lion Square, near Holborn, is the same; the free and easy method of discussion is the same; the vocations of the frequenters
are the same-a freethinking second-hand bookseller
(Miller), a journeyman watchmaker (Pash), a bootmaker
(Croop), one who " penned a stanza when he should
engross " (Lilly), and so on. But above all, the leading spirit of Mr. Lewes' club was a German Jew
named Cohn or Kohn, whom he describes in words
which might be applied almost without alteration to
Mordecai. Mr. Lewes says of Cohn:
"We all admired him as a man of astonishing
subtlety and logical force, no less than of sweet
personal worth. He remains in my memory as a
type of philosophic dignity. A calm, meditative, amiable man, by trade a journeyman watchmaker, very
poor, with weak eyes and chest, grave and gentle in
demeanour, incorruptible even by the seductions of
vanity; I habitually think of him in connection with
Spinoza almost as much on account of his personal
worth as because to him I owe my first acquaintance
with the Hebrew thinker. My admiration of him was
of that enthusiastic temper which in youth we feel for
our intellectual leaders. I loved his weak eyes and
low voice; I venerated his intellect. He was the
only man I did not contradict in the impatience of
argument. An immense pity and a fervid indignation
filled me as I came away from his attics in one of the
Holborn courts, where I had seen him in the pinching
poverty of his home, with his German wife and two
little black-eyed children; indignantly I railed against
society which could allow so great an intellect to withdraw itself from nobler work and waste the precious

JEWISH IDEALS

yo70

hours in mending watches. But he was wise in his
resignation, thought I in my young indignation. Life
was hard to him, as to all of us; but he was content
to earn a miserable pittance by handicraft, and kept
his soul serene. I learnt to understand him better
when I learnt the story of Spinoza's life.
"Cohn, as may be supposed, early established his
supremacy in our club. A magisterial intellect always
makes itself felt. Even those who differed from him
most widely paid voluntary homage to his power."
Aut Mordecai aut diabolus. Just as Walter Scott
merely idealised Rebecca Gratz, the beloved of Washington Irving, into his Rebecca of York, so George
Eliot, by the force of her genius, has transformed
Kohn into a prophet of the New Exile. Even the
omission of the wife and two children (in whose
stead we get Mrs. Cohen junior, with Jacob and
Adelaide Rebecca) only serves to heighten the isolation which makes the pathos of Mordecai's lot.
But surely the critics had no occasion to doubt the
possibility of a Jew like Mordecai at a time when we
are still mourning the loss of one who laid down his life
for the regeneration of our views of Israel's past, as
Mordecai sacrificed his for the elevation of our hopes of
Israel's future. "I have certain words in my possession," wrote Emanuel Deutsch,' "which have been
given me that they might be said to others, few or
many. .

.

. I know also that I shall not find peace

or rest until I have said my whole say. And yet I
cannot do it. And I yearn for things which I see,
and which might have been mine, and would have
been blessing and sunshine and the cooling dew to
the small germs within me-and yet ! and yet !-"
Would that Mr. Deutsch had lived to convince the
1, The

Literary Remains of the late Emanuel Deutsch " (Murray, 1874), p. xii.

MORDECAI

7I

world in his own burning words that Mordecai is no inert
scarecrow of abstractions, but a warm living reality !
We have laid so much stress upon the artistic
truth of Mordecai's character because, if this be
granted, it is inexplicable that the central incident
of the Jewish part of "Daniel Deronda," the meeting
on the bridge between him and Deronda, should have
failed to strike readers as perhaps the most remarkable
incident in English fiction. If Mordecai has artistic
reality, we contend that the meeting on the bridge
in chapter xl. reaches a tragic intensity which almost
transcends the power of the novel, and would perhaps
require the manifold emotive inlets of the Wagnerian
drama to do it justice-eye, ear, brain, and heart should
all be responsive. We boldly deny greater tragic intensity to any incident in Shakespeare. Nor are there
wanting signs that the author herself, no contemptible
critic of her own productions, sets an equal value on
the incident. In the motto prefixed to chapter xxxviii.,
describing Mordecai's yearnings, she tells us in Brownesque English" There be who hold that the deeper tragedy were a
Prometheus bound, not after, but before, he had well
got the celestial fire into the vpOn, whereby it might
be conveyed to mortals. Thrust by the Kratos and Bia
of instituted methods into a solitude of despised ideas,
fastened in throbbing helplessness by the fatal pressure of poverty and disease-a solitude where many
pass by, but none regard."
In other words, George Eliot considers the circumstances of Mordecai's fate to surpass in tragic pathos
the most colossal monument of Greek dramatic art.
Notice, too, the care with which she leads up to the
incident. In chapter xxxvii. we have Deronda coming
to the Meyricks at Chelsea to announce to Mirah the

72

JEWISH IDEALS

forthcoming visit of Klesmer, and the chapter finishes
as he is leaving Chelsea. The next chapter (xxxviii.)
yearning for
is filled with a description of
a spiritual successor, and give us en passant a fine
picture of the scene of the meeting (iii. I37). We get
here, in short, all we need to understand and sympathise
with the final episode of the "book;" but lest we
should come upon the fulfilment of the prophecy with
too vivid a memory of the author's sublimation of the
idea of prophecy, we have interposed, like a comic
scene in an Elizabethan tragedy, the magnificent
account of Klesmer's visit to the Meyricks in chap.
xxxix., which clearly occurred after the events
described in chapter xl., which takes up the stream
of narrative from chapter xxxvii.
It seems to us clear that all this seemingly inartistic
transposition of events is intended to make the incident
of chapter xl. stand out more sharply into relief. We
have the miracle explained away, it is true - the
modern analytic spirit requires it-but the author
wishes us to forget the explanation, or at least to
relegate the intellectual element of chapter xxxviii.
to the unconscious background, where it may be ready
to assist, though not present to obstruct, emotion. All
this care appears to show the importance attached by
the author to the last chapter of Book v.
And in itself, apart from what the author may think
of it, what a soul-moving incident is there contained !
A representative of an ancient world-important people,
whose royalty of wrongs makes the aristocracies of
Europe appear petty, finds himself clutched by the
gripping hands of want and death before he can
move the world to that vision of the Phoenix-rise of
Israel which the prophetic instincts of his race have
brought up clear before him. Careless of his own

'Mordecai's

MORDECAI

73
comfort, careless of coming death, he desires only to
live anew-as the quasi-Positivist doctrine of the
Cabbala bids him live--in "minds made nobler by
his presence." His prophetic vision pictures to him
the very lineaments of his spiritual alter ego, whom he
pathetically thinks of as differing from himself in all
externals, and, as death draws nigh, the very scene of
their meeting. And in this nineteenth century, in
prosaic London, this inward vision of the poor consumptive Jew is fulfilled to the letter.
Would it be too bold a suggestion if we suspected
the author of having typified in the meeting of Deronda
and Mordecai that
" One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,"

the meeting of Israel and its Redeemer? In personal
characteristics, in majestic gravity (we cannot imagine
Deronda laughing), in width of sympathy and depth
of tenderness, even in outward appearance, Daniel
resembles the great Galilean Pharisee 1 whom all Christendom has accepted as in very truth the Messiah that
will restore Judeea to the Holy People. To say the
least, the author suggests the audacity in her comparison of the two to the figures of Jesus and the Pharisee
in Titian's "''
Tribute Money."

We do not remember a single criticism 2 which has
referred to this magnificent scene, where, to our mind,
George Eliot's power of representing soul speaking
to soul has reached its greatest height. We do not
1 A friend informs me that Pharisee is derived from

rn,

to extend

(the law), not from e, to separate and define it.
2 Professor Dowden's article in the Contemporary Review for Feb. 1877,
which appeared after the above was written, forms an exception with
respect to this as to all the other deficiencies of the critics against which
we here protest.

74
remember a single critic who seemed to think that
Mordecai's fate was in any way more pitiful than that
of any other consumptive workman with mystic and
impossible ideas. What reasons can be given for
this defect of sympathy? In addition to the beforementioned assumption that Mordecai does not possess
artistic reality, there has been the emotional obstruction to sympathy with a Jew, and the intellectual
element of want of knowledge about modern Judaism.
If Mordecai had been an English workman laying down
his life for the foundation of some English International with Deronda for its " Messiah Lassalle," he
would have received more attention from the critics.
But a Jew with views involving issues changing the
"impossible, vague,
future history of Humanity
mystic."
Let us not be misunderstood: the past
generation of Englishmen has been so generous to
Jews, that we should be ungrateful if we accused
cultured Englishmen of the present day of being
consciously repelled by the idea of a poor Jew being
worthy of admiration. But fifteen centuries of hatred
are not to be wiped out by any legislative enactment.
No one can say that the fact of a man's being a Jew
makes no more difference in other men's minds than
if he were (say) a Wesleyan. There yet remains a
deep unconscious undercurrent of prejudice against
the Jew which conscientious Englishmen have often
to fight against as part of that lower nature, a survival of the less perfect development of our ancestors,
which impedes the Ascent of Man.
Along with this unconscious Judaeophobia there
has gone the intellectual element of a tacit assumption
that modern Judaism is a lifeless code of ritual instead
Of course the
of a living body of religious truth.
pathos and tragedy of Mordecai's fate depend in large
JEWISH

IDEALS

MORDECAI

75
measure on the value of the ideas for which he laid
down his life. If he were a crazy believer that the
English nation is descended from the lost Ten Tribes,
his fate would only deserve a smile of contemptuous
pity. Hence the artistic necessity of the philosophic
discussion in chapter xlii., where his ideas are explained and defended. Here again we have to complain of the want of sympathy shown by the critics,
but perhaps still more of their want of knowledge.
Our author devotes the forty-first chapter to a piece
of special pleading (really addressed to the reader,
though supposed to be a philosophic musing of
Deronda's), the outcome of which is that if we
want to tell whether an enthusiast is justified in
his faith, our only test is knowledge of the subjectmatter. And the moral naturally is: study the history
of the Jews. Hegel says somewhere-" The heritage
a great man leaves the world is to force it to explain
him," and we may say the same of a great work of
art. But the critics of "Daniel Deronda" have refused
to pay the heavy probate duty of wading through the
ten volumes or so of Gritz's " Geschichte der Juden" to
see whether Mordecai's ideas have anything in them
or no: the easier plan was to denounce them as
"vague and mystical." If it be contended that the
subject is too unfamiliar for ordinary readers, and
therefore unsuited for a. novel, we may answer that
similar reasoning would exalt an Offenbach over a
Beethoven. George Eliot has endeavoured to raise
the novel to heights where it may treat of subjects
hitherto reserved for the Drama or the Epic; but
instead of encouragement from English critics, she
meets with their neglect.
Apart, however, from the intrinsic value of Mordecai's ideas, the discussion would deserve our admiration

76

JEWISH IDEALS

as a literary tour de force. It was the high praise
of the Greek philosopher that if the gods spoke
Greek they would talk as Plato wrote: may we not
say that if Isaiah had spoken English he would have
prophesied as George Eliot makes Mordecai speak?
We trace in this the influence which the Authorised
Version--with all its inaccuracies, the most living
reproduction of the Hebrew Scriptures-has had on
our principal writers, notably in the case of so unbiblical a writer as Mr. Swinburne.
And what of the ideas which Mordecai clothes with
words as of one whose lips have been touched with coals
of burning fire? What vagueness or mystery is there
in the grand and simple lines of Jewish policy laid
down by Mordecai? Two ideas dominate Mordecai's
arguments throughout the discussion. The resumption
of the soil of Palestine by the Jews, which has often
been proposed by Gentile writers as a solution of
the much-vexed Eastern Question, and, as a consequence, the third and final promulgation of the Jewish
religion to the world, are sufficiently definite ideas,
however large and grand they may be. Even if one
disagree with Mordecai's views, one may at any rate
pay him the respect due to an energetic leader of
opposition, and recognise in him the leader of those
who refuse to believe that Israel's part in history is
played out, and that her future policy should be to
amalgamate with the nations as soon as possible,
letting her glorious past sink into an antiquarian
study, instead of living as a perennial spring of
political action. Mordecai is not of those who hold
that the millennium will come when men shall have
arrived at that nicely balanced mediocrity, that the
"pale abstract" man shall know his brother from
other cosmopolitan beings only by some official badge

MORDECAI

77

necessary for distinction.
He rather holds that in
the world-organism of the nations each nationality
will have its special function, Israel, as the Jewish
poet-philosopher said, being the nations' heart.' The
now-prevailing doctrine of Heredity, and the political
enthusiasm for Panslavism, Panteutonism, Pan-whatnotism, will have nought to urge against these Panjudaic views. And to our minds Mordecai's is the
profounder philosophy of history when he further
thinks that the great quarry of religious truth, whence
two world-religions have been hewn and shaped, but
only into torsos, has yet wherewithal to completely
fashion the religion of the future. The one theologic
dogma of Judaism, the unity of the Godhead (involving, as Mordecai remarks, the unity of mankind), can
meet with no harsh reception from the philosophies
of the day, imbued as they all are with the monism
of the " God-intoxicated Jew."
The rationalism of
Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which has
undermined medieval Christianity, now tottering from
the attack, merely represents the outcome of a long
line of Jewish thought on prophecy, miracles, and
the like, and is, in large measure, derived from our
summa theologize, the Mord Nebouch m of Maimonides.
Again, reverence for law, as marked a trait of the
Jewish spirit as of Roman pride (the Talmud is but a
Corpus Juris), is another characteristic which Judaism
shares with the Zukunfts-religion. The divorce between man and the world, which is the disintegrating
factor in Christianity, nowhere finds a place in Judaism.
Further, the teleologic tendency of the evolution.doctrine must find a reason for the miraculous tenacity
1 Cusari, ii. 36. Mordecai attributes the saying to Jehuda Halevi;
Sephardo in the " Spanish Gypsy," p. 210, to the " Book of Light," the
Cabbalistic book Sohar. It occurs in both. Vide Cassel's note in loco.

JEWISH IDEALS
78
with which Judaism has clung to life. If, as biologists
tell us, life consists in the adaptation of internal forces
to the relations of the environment, Judaism, of all
religions, has most truly lived, and George Eliot has
with due knowledge connected the utterances of
Mordecai on Judaism with the problem of the hour,
"What is progress?" In this connection it were
interesting to contrast the history of the two religions
of civilisation in the ages previous to the Reformation.
While Father after Father was crystallising the freethought of Jesus into stony dogma; while Doctor after
Doctor was riveting still closer the fetters of reason;
Rabbi after Rabbi was adapting tradition to the reason
of the time, each, when his task was done, dying with
the shemah 1 on his lips. Our author has put into the
mouth of a Jew one of her noblest passages, describing
this progress in Judaism. Sephardo, in the " Spanish

Gipsy " (p. 2 I 5), speaks thus of the principles of order

and progress in the Jewish religion' I abide
By that wise spirit of listening reverence
Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.
For truth to us is like a living child,
Born of two parents: if the parents part
And will divide the child, how shall it live ?
Or I will rather say: Two angels guide
The paths of man, both aged and yet young,
As angels are, ripening through endless years.
On one he leans: some call her Memory,
Some Tradition; and her voice is sweet
With deep mysterious accords: the other,
Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
A light divine and searching on the earth,
Compelling eyes and footsteps : Memory yields,
Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew,
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
1 The assertion of the Divine Unity (Deut. vi. 4).

MORDECAI

79

Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked,
But for Tradition: we walk evermore,
To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp."

The pages of that history of rationalism that shall treat
of the progress of Jewish theosophy, culminating in
the epoch-making thought of Spinoza, will fully bear
out the historic truth of the above description. And
surely that represents the spirit with which we may
expect the religion of the future to be informed.
But the new birth of Judaism and its revelation to
the world are, in Mordecai's opinion, indissolubly connected with the new birth of the Jewish race as a
nation. "The effect of our separateness," he says,
" will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of
a nationality." And here, again, history confirms his
views. For the life of Judaism has been connected
with the history of Jews in a way such as has been the
fate of no other religion. The very name of the religion
displays this intimate connection; of all religions,
Judaism alone has been named after the race of its believers. And it is to this that we may perhaps attribute
the peculiar interest that George Eliot has felt for Jews,
which we can trace at least as far back as 1864, when
the first draft of the " Spanish Gipsy " was written. The
two chief interests of the translator of Strauss and
friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer have been the religious
consciousness, which she was the first to use for the
artistic purposes of the novel, and the influence of
hereditary forces, which she first raised into an ethical
creed. And Jews are interesting in both connections,
exhibiting in the greatest known degree what is to her
the highest virtue-fidelity to claims of race. At the
same time, this relation of believers and creed has been
the source of much misconception. No distinction is

So

JEWISH IDEALS

made in the popular mind between the theologic and
ethical doctrines of Judaism and the national customs
of Jews. It is true that in the biblical times and afterwards the social and religious sanctions were not
differentiated, but their r'aison d'etre nowadays, apart
from the sanitary sanction of many of the customs, is
merely the same as that which preserves many family
customs among the aristocracies of Europe. It is our
national boast to have been the first to proclaim the
true God, and the " Swiss Guards of Deism," as Heine
wittily calls us, have clothed themselves with such
customs as with a uniform. These rites and ceremonies
are not essential to the Judaism we have the mission to
preach to the world : for Jews are a missionary, though
not a proselytising people; however our voices may
have hitherto been stifled, we have lived our mission
if we have not been permitted to preach it. Those who
become Jews in religion need not adopt the Mosaic
rites, unless they wish to be naturalised as Jews in race.
Still the religious trust that has kept the national life
throbbing through the centuries has been the conviction that the Messiah who shall spread Judaism to the
four corners of the world will be a Jew by race as well
as in creed. And Mordecai's views of the resumption
of the soil of the Holy Land by the holy people are the
only logical position of a Jew who desires that the long
travail of the ages shall not end in the total disappearance of the race. For from the times of the Judges
periods of prosperity, such as the one upon which the
present generation has entered, have been the most
perilous for our national life : it is the struggle for
national existence that has resulted, we are vain enough
to think, in the survival of the fittest missionaries of the
true religion. The Sages say, " Israel is like the olive,
the more it is pressed, the more copious the oil;" and

MORIDECAI

8sI

it is to be feared that the removal of the pressure will
result in the cessation of the noble deeds that are
typified by the oil. Unless some such project as
Mordecai has in view be carried out in the next three
generations, it is much to be feared that both the
national life of Jews and the religious life of Judaism
will perish utterly from the face of the earth. "A consummation devoutly to be wished," the scoffers may
say; but not, surely, those in whose veins runs the
blood of Israelites, and who have the proud heritage
of God's truth to hand down to their children.
Enough has perhaps been said to show that Mordecai's views about the future of Judaism and of Jews
have all history and much reason on their side, and
display those powers of intellectual intuition of the
future which the psychological system of Maimonides
assigns to the Prophet. And we have perhaps contributed somewhat to an explanation of Deronda's acLike Mordecai,
ceptance of his spiritual inheritance.
Deronda protests against the " blasphemy of the time,"
that men should stand by as spectators of life instead
of living. But before he meets with Mordecai, what
noble work in life has this young and cultured Englishman with his thousands a year ? This age of unfaith
gives no outlet for his deep, spiritual yearnings, nor for
those of thousands like him. The old beliefs are gone;
the world is godless, and Deronda cannot, for all the
critics have said, offer to Gwendolen Grandcourt any
consolation in the higher order of things instead of
the vague platitudes which alone remain to be offered.
Yet there comes to this young ardent soul an angel
of the Lord (albeit in the shape of a poor Jew watchmender) with a burning message, giving a mission in
life as grand as the most far-reaching ideal he could
have formed. Is it strange that his thirsty soul should
F

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JEWISH IDEALS

have swallowed up the soul of Mordecai, in the Cabbalistic way which the latter often refers to? Is it
strange that Deronda should not have refused the
heritage of his race when offered by the hands of
Mirah's brother ? But is it not strange that the literary
leaders of England should have failed to see aught but
unsatisfactory vagueness in all the parts of "Daniel
Deronda" which treat of the relations of the hero with
Mordecai Cohen? Is it possible that they have failed
to see the grandeur and beauty of these incidents because
of the lack of that force of imagination necessary to
pierce to the pathos of a contemporary tragedy, however
powerful their capacity might be to see the romance of
a Rebecca of York, or the pathos of a Baruch Spinoza ?
One possible source of misconception for English
readers may be mentioned. Since the time of Moses
Mendelssohn the home of spiritual Judaism has been
in Germany, and George Eliot, whose pages are informed with the writings of German Jews like Zunz,
Geiger, and Gratz, has, with true historic insight, attributed Mordecai's spiritual birth to the teachings of his
German uncle. English Judaism is without signs of
life: the only working of the spirit, the abortive reform
agitation, was due to a similar movement in Germany.
And English Jews have themselves much to blame
for the neglect that English criticism has shown for
Mordecai.
What we have attempted to show has been that the
adverse criticism on the Mordecai part of " Daniel
Deronda" has been due to lack of sympathy and want
of knowledge on the part of the critics, and hence its
failure is not (if we must use the word) objective. If
a young lady refuses to see any pathos in Othello's fate
because she dislikes dark complexions, we blame the
young lady, not Shakespeare; and if the critics have

MORDECAI

83

refused to see the pathos of Mordecai's fate because he
is a Jew of the present day, so much the worse for the
critics.
We have not attempted to criticise "Daniel Deronda"
as a whole. Whether it errs in the juxtapositions of
two parts appealing to such widely diverse interests,
or in the position of the hero-which seems to partake
of that unstable equilibrium which the proverb assigns
to him that sitteth on two stools-or in the frequent
introduction of psychology couched in Spencerian
phraseology, we have not cared to inquire. We have
only spoken because we have some of the knowledge
and all of the sympathy which alone, we contend,
are needed to make the Mordecai part of "Daniel
Deronda" as great a success as all must acknowledge
to have attended the part relating to Gwendolen Harleth. If this be so, the lovers of English literature
will have the gratification of knowing that the hand
of one of our greatest artists has not lost its cunning
in these last days. Indeed, if a higher subject argued
higher faculties, the successful treatment of a great
world-problem would seem to be an advance on her
previous studies of village life.
One word more of explanation. I have spoken
throughout the above remarks in the plural, as feeling
that most of what I have said would be shared by all
Jews who have the knowledge and sympathy which
enable them to recognise in Mordecai Cohen not only
the finest representative of their religion and race in
all literature, but also the most impressive personality
in English fiction.

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY
(From " The Jewish Quarterly Review," April I890)

THERE is at the first blush a superficial resemblance
between a poet and a theologian. Both the one and
the other give formal expression in accurate phraseology to some of our profoundest feelings. The poet,
as well as the theologian, expresses explicitly what we
feel most deeply. The theologian, equally with the
poet, deals with the ideals of life, and especially the
architectonic ideals that organise life and make it, or
should make it, one vast grand poem. A little more
harping on the same string, and especially a little
more mixture of metaphors, and it would not be difficult to make out a good case for calling poet, priest,
and theologian, poet writ large.
But when we come to the mode in which the poet
and the theologian respectively give expression to the
ideal elements within us, all these resemblances vanish
at once. Think for a moment what is implied in the
formal expression which a poet and a theologian respectively would give of the yearning after immortality.
While the artist in words and moods would endeavour
so to express the yearning as to invoke in his reader
the same feeling that moves him with all its nuances
of hope and doubt, rapture and shrinking, the theologian will be thinking under what section of what
chapter of his Treatise on Eschatology the subject
will most logically be introduced. For the theologian

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

85

as such appeals, or at least ought to appeal, solely to
the reason, whereas the poet has the whole diapason
of human nature to work upon.
I seem to have cut away the ground beneath my
own feet, if the thing be possible and the metaphor
allowable, in thus distinguishing so sharply the respective functions of poet and theologian. If they be so
distinct, how treat of Browning's theology, on which
I am to speak a few words from the Jewish point of
view? But Browning, in this as in so many things,
struck out a new line for himself. Regardless of the
canon that a poet cannot be a theologian, he wrote
theological poems, in which the reasoning is at least
as close and certainly as difficult to follow as that of
many professed theologians. It is true they are mostly
in dramatic form; instead of discussing anthropomorphism or fetishism, he gave us "Caliban on Setebos ;" instead of answering Strauss directly, he wrote "Christmas
Eve" and "Easter Day;" instead of writing an essay on
miracles, he pictures for us Karshish's reflections on
the case of Lazarus. It is not, however, so difficult as
one might think to penetrate beneath the mask of the
dramatis personc and gain access to the thoughts of
Robert Browning himself on the higher problems and
obscurest difficulties of life. It is these that constitute
him a theologian in the strict sense of the word, and
should enable us to place the poet in one or other of
the categories into which the theologians of the day
may be divided.
In one case, indeed, Browning drops the mask of
impersonation altogether, and speaks out on a theological subject of great importance. Stirred to the
inmost depths by the sudden death of a friend, he
discusses at some length in La Saisiaz the question
of the immortality of the soul. Interesting as his

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JEWISH IDEALS

treatment is, it scarcely comes within the scope of
these remarks to consider it. For the dogma of immortality is one of natural religion, one common to
all the creeds (except perhaps Buddhism). It is not
more Jewish than Christian, Moslem than Greek; and
in seeking to define Robert Browning's relation to
Judaism, we must deal with the dogmas more distinctive of the creeds, and consider his attitude towards them, and its relation to that of other religious
thinkers of his time.
His opinions show him to have been a member of
the Broad Church School, as represented by Dean
Stanley and the men of "Essays and Reviews." A
certain amount of sympathy is shown with what used
to be Known as German neologism, which in "Christmas
Eve" is regarded as being even one of the ways of
knowing Christ. But at the same time, the inadequateness of the rationalistic attitude towards the Divinity
of Carist is also insisted upon, and the assumption is
left that this, with all its consequences the Incarnation and the Atonement-must be accepted by faith, if
not to be definitely established by reason. Throughout
this poem the figure of Christ appears in such a form
as would be impossible without a thorough faith in
His Divinity. It must, therefore, be owned that so far
as the evidence of his works goes, the jubilation of
the orthodox Christian over the faith of Browning is
to a certain extent justified, and there is little or no
reason to suppose, as some Jewish students of the
poet have thought, that his creed was a pure monotheism, with a rejection of the Incarnation. Browning's
theology was distinctively Christian, and in no way can
be said to approximate to Judaism on the chief point
that separates the two religions.
At the same time, outside "Christmas Eve" very little

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

s87

stress is laid on influence of the Mediator in the
spiritual life, the practical side by which the Divinity
of Christ is made operative in the Christian life. But
herein Browning is only at one with the rest of the
Broad Church, who tend to attenuate the function of
mediation till Christ becomes little more than the
spiritual brother in God, and Christ-worship becomes
practically impossible. Another tendency which he
likewise shares with the school of thought with which
I am identifying him, is the practical disappearance of
the third person of the Trinity from his theology.
Except in such vague form as " God's Spirit" or the
" Spirit of Love," there is scarcely any reference to the
Holy Spirit in his writings.
Speaking generally then, Browning's theology is
that of the Broad Church with all its catholicity, but
also with all its vagueness, and its want of touch with
the practical religious life. So far as Browning's
thought on religious matter seems Jewish, it is because
of its Broad Church tone. In a fuller treatment of
the subject it would be necessary, as it would be
interesting, to discuss from a Jewish point of view the
whole Broad Church movement before determining
how far Browning approximates to the Jewish position.
In many Jewish circles it was thought, and is still
thought, that the Broad Church was a tendency in
This is, however,
Christianity towards Judaism.
erroneous: it is a tendency towards Unitarianism, not
towards Judaism, as indeed both Mr. Voysey and Mr.
Stopford Brooke have practically shown. Now, however much we may differ as to what Judaism is, and
of recent years we have agreed to differ exceedingly,
there is one point on which we are all agreed.
Judaism is differentiated from Unitarianism by an
additional element, which may be called either racial

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JEWISH IDEALS

or historical. The practical recognition of God in
history, and of a divine mission for Israel, is a necessary
part of Judaism according to all schools, however
much they may differ as to the mode of operation of
the Divine Spirit in men's affairs, or as to the exact
character of the function Israel is to play in order to
fulfil the designs of that Spirit. It is this quality that
makes Judaism, which, at first sight, seems so akin to
Unitarianism, on closer investigation turn out to show
a closer kinship with the Roman Catholic Church, as
is after all only natural, as their historical relationship
is really that of mother and daughter.
The Broad Church is singularly unsusceptible to the
claims of history and of development in religion, and
Browning shares in this quality of his school. Indeed,
he extends this unsympathy with the conception of
history as a divine process so far as to limit very much
his general poetic treatment of historic subjects.
For a poet who dealt so much with the past as he
did, there is singularly little of the nationalist point of
view of treating history-I mean the conception that
nations, just as religions, have their main function in
the creation of specific types of human character.
Considering that he lived so much in Italy when her
noblest elements were most deeply imbued with this
conception, considering also that Mrs. Browning had
the deepest sympathy with it, it is curious how very
little there is in Browning that strikes the patriotic or
nationalist note. Here, again, he chimes in with the
general sentiments of his school of religious thought,
who have been cosmopolitan to a fault.
Perhaps the most distinctive point in Browning's
teaching is the view which I have elsewhere ventured
to sum up in the formula "Aspiration is achievement"
(Athencum, December 21, 1889, p. 859).
This, as

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

89

applied to theology, would perhaps lead to one of the
most striking doctrines of the Broad Church in one of
its more recent developments. I refer to Dr. Abbot's
remarkable view of the religious use of illusion as
leading on to higher forms of truth. From a Jewish
point of view, this is of interest, as chiming in with
Maimonides' conception of Christianity and Islam
being two forms of useful illusion that will lead on to
Judaism. But there is no evidence that Browning
shared Dr. Abbot's view, and for this reason I have
affiliated him with the school of Stanley.
Hitherto in regarding Browning as a theologian of
the Broad Church School we have been dealing rather
with the points in which he and his school, or rather
his school and he, differ from the Jewish way of
looking at things religious. But there remains one
other point besides the tendency to Unitarianism
wherein the Broad Church approaches Judaism, as
Jews have every reason to know and be thankful for.
With all its vagueness of doctrine and attenuation of
dogma, the Broad School has been ever honourably
distinguished by its toleration, both in theory and
practice. Both in eschatology and in the doctrine of
sin, Judaism and the Broad Church are at one in
declaring a man's deeds, and not his creed, to be the
criterion of his claims to the higher life, both here
and hereafter. Here universalism and nationalism are
at one.
It is here, of course, that Browning's Jewish poems
come in as part of his general theological attitude, and
it may be of interest to review those that deal most
" Holy Cross Day"
directly with Jewish subjects.
humour the case against conputs with considerable
version in the form of a Roman Jew's soliloquy while
attending, but not listening, to a sermon which the

90o

JEWISH IDEALS

Jews of the Ghetto were forced to endure once a year.
No Jew could wish to have the Apologia pro domo sud
put with more force than in the ringing lines in which
the poet makes his Rabbi address the Christ :
0 thou, if that martyr-gash

Fell on thee coming to take thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the ThroneThou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause ! and not more thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain thee in word, and defy thee in deed.

By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
By the branding tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship,We boast our proof that at least the Jew
Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.

Another less well-known poem of toleration is that
entitled " Filippo Baldunecci on the Privilege of
Burial," telling how a petty-minded painter annoyed
the Jews by putting up a picture of the Virgin overlooking their graveyard, and when he had agreed to
remove it for a consideration, replacing it by one of
the Crucifixion. At last the Jews buy both pictures,
on the plea that they may have them in their possession, just as a Christian would not scruple to have
one of Venus or of Zeus. The scorn of the Jews at
Baldunecci's action, and the meanness shown by it,

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

9I

is heightened by their dignified and lofty rebuke at
being plagued even in their graves.
Death's luxury we now rehearse
While, living, through your streets we fare,
And take your hatred ! nothing worse
Have we, once dead and safe, to bear.

Another slight poem of Browning's, never printed,
I believe, in any of his works-it appeared in The
Keepsake, 1856-expands a well-known saying of the
" Ethics of the Fathers" :BEN KARSHOOK'S WISDOM.
I.
Would a man 'scape the rod,
Rabbi Ben Karshook saith,
" See that he turn to God
The day before his death."
" Ay, could a man inquire
When it shall come ?" I say,
The Rabbi's eye shoots fire,
" Then let him turn to-day !"
II.
Quoth a young Sadducee,
"Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls ?"
" Son, there is no reply !"
The Rabbi bit his beard,
" Certain, a soul have I-We may have none," he sneered.
Thus Karshook, the Hiram's Hammer
The Right-hand Temple-column
Taught babes in grace their grammar
And struck the simple, solemn.

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JEWISH IDEALS

Browning's toleration is shown in even a higher way
than in these direct attacks on intolerance. It cannot
have been by accident that he chose to give two of
the most important summaries of his Weltweisheit by
means of Jewish speakers. "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and
" Jochanan Hakkadosh." "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is by
many considered Browning's most striking poem, and
certainly it yields to none of his in dignity and lucidity.
It is of peculiar interest to English Jews as the eponymous hero is Abraham ibn Ezra, who was himself in
England, "the island of the corner of the earth" (a
pun on Angle terre), as he calls it, in the spring and
summer of I 158. It is scarcely likely that Browning
knew more of him than that he was a distinguished
Rabbi of the Middle Ages. Certainly the poem has
none of those satiric touches with which Abraham ibn
Ezra's name is associated in the mind of the student
of Jewish literature. Nothing can be more dignified
and stoical than the soliloquy of the old Rabbi reviewing life, and seeing that it is very good, both in
youth, with its pleasure, and in age, with its experience.
The image of the Potter and the Wheel,
hackneyed as it has been by the homilists, has never
been more finely utilised than in the concluding
lines of the poem. Man as clay in the making is
thus addressedWhat though the earlier grooves
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press ?
What though, about thy rim,
Skull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress ?
Look thou not down, but up !
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

93

The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow !
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with
earth's wheel ?
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men !
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I, to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily-mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst.
So, take and use Thy work,
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim !
My times be in Thy hand !
Perfect the cup as planned !
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same !

There remain a number of poems which go even
further than toleration of the Jewish life and creed.
They imply a certain sympathy with Jewish ways of
thought and fancy, and a certain acquaintance, though
not a very profound one, with Rabbinic literature.
These are chiefly contained in the volume called
Jocoseria. This contains one of the Midrashic legends
of the Queen of Sheba, though diluted through Arabic
sources, as is indicated by the title, " Solomon and
Balkis." It is scarcely more than a jeu d'esprit.
The most important of these poems is, however, the
legend of " Jochanan Hakkadosh," a sort of Rabbinic
Hagada on the theme " Unless ye be as little children,
ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." The great
Rabbi Jochanan, on the point of dying, has a year of
additional life granted him by the expedient of certain
younger men giving up three months of their lives to
the venerated sage. He lives their life, and thus at
the height of his wisdom is enabled to judge of the
value of their various occupations. " Vanity of Vanity "

94

JEWT;ISH

IDEALS

is the refrain four times in succession, as his disciple
Tsaddik visited Jochanan, after he had lived three
months the life of a married lover, a warrior, a poet,
and a statesman. But by accident some little child
had also pressed upon the sage three months of its
life, and this additional experience harmonises all the
discrepancies of the others, and allows the sage to
depart in peace, and assured that life is not vain.
Attached to " Jochanan Hakkadosh" are three sonnets on the well-known Talmudic Liigenmdrchen, to
use the folklore term, of the legend of Og's bones
and bedstead.
They are said to be from a work
3: :
S
5,1o i which I need scarcely say neither
exists nor could exist under such a title. Much headbreaking has been caused by the bad Hebrew of the
title, but Browning would probably have given the
Johnsonian explanation of " Ignorance, madam, ignorance." As some indication of the slightness of his
acquaintance with Hebrew idiom, I may mention that
he was going to call his Jochanan "Hakkadosh
Jochanan " (= John Saint). Through a common friend
I pointed out the error to the poet, and the adjective
was put in its proper position. The fact seems to be
that Browning could read his Hebrew Bible, and that
was about the extent of his Hebrew learning, though
it was a foible of his to give an impression of recondite
learning.
But it is not in the minutie of Hebrew scholarship
that we are to look for Browning's sympathy with the
Jewish spirit. This comes out in the lines I have been
quoting and in his poems of toleration. That this sympathy was not due to any agreement with the characteristic features of Jewish faith is, I think, undoubted.
All the more honour to the poet who could rise above
differences of creed, and pierce to the human nature

BROWNING'S THEOLOGY

95

which is common to Christian and Jew, because it is

the gift of a Common Father.

NOTE.-The following passages in some recently published correspondence of Browning throw interesting light on his attitude to Jewish questions :-" The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what
is mere fun and invention) being translated amount to-first,' A Collection
of many lies' ; and the second is an old saying, ' From Moses to Moses arose
none like Moses.' .

.

. The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose,

as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the
Old Book, which the Concocters of Novel Schemes of Morality put forth
as discoveries of their own."

THE TRUE, THE ONLY, AND THE COMPLETE
SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION
(From " The fewish Chronicle," October 5, 1883)

SIR,-Last Tuesday night week, meditating on the
past glories and present miseries of our race, I thought
out, alone and unaided, the true, the only, and the
complete solution of the Jewish Question which has
been for many years past agitating and disquieting the
world. I hasten to communicate it to you and your
readers, and speaking to them and to all Israel, I say:
Make fools of your children !
I know this requires some explanation. Permit me
to explain by placing before you the line of thought
which led me to this conclusion. Looking around me
I find that Jews are getting themselves disliked, as
the saying goes, in all the lands of civilisation. Now
unless all the world, except the Jews, is both mad and
bad, there must be something dislikeable in Jews to
cause this universal dislike. What can it be, thought
I to myself. Are the Jews too good? The world does
not like perfection, as witness Aristides and Socrates,
not to speak of examples nearer home. No, Jews are
not perfect, I had to allow to myself, and hastened on
to ask : Is it a matter of religious antipathy? That
can scarcely be, answered my other self, for the world
is getting more tolerant and, to speak truly, more indifferent about religion every day. Is it our wealth ?
I seemed to be getting warmer in the game of hide
g6

SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

97

and seek I was playing. The world envies wealth, and
Jews, or some of them, are undoubtedly wealthy. But
I had to grant that the feeling evinced by anti-Semites
was more like hatred than envy, and that it was displayed as much against poor Jews as rich ones. Then
there is our success but the world worships success,
and it does not worship us.
Disappointed in these directions, I turned to think
of Jews rather than of their possessions, of our character
and qualities rather 'than of our wealth and honours.
I reviewed the long roll of Jewish virtues, and the
short list of Jewish vices. Charity, love of home,
sobriety-here I stopped a moment, for the world
rather likes one who " indulges," but, on the other
hand, it cannot be said to hate the temperate-our
cosmopolitanism (but the world rather admires Matthew
Arnold and Max MUller), our clannishness.-Here I
began to see light, or darkness as I thought, and reflected. Jews hold together and aloof from others, it
is true; but Quakers and Scotchmen are also clannish,
and yet they are not disliked overmuch. Then again,
Jews have been getting less clannish just in the years
when opposition has been waxing more and more.
I turned impatiently to our vices. We play cardsbut only among ourselves. Our wives and daughters
dress showily, but then they dress badly, and we are
saved. Our chutzpah (there is no other word for it)
may make our neighbours wince at the ill-breeding of
it, but after all it is redeemed by a touch of wit now
The world may laugh at it,
and then. Our vanity
I
but hatred cannot coexist with a hearty laugh.
began to despair, and had almost given up my search,
when I remembered that I had broken off suddenly in
enumerating our virtues. So I went back to these,
and recalling to mind the many speeches I have heard

?

G

98

JEWISXH

IDEALS

on prize-days and at inaugurations, I luckily bethought
myself of the special qualities on which we all pride
ourselves-our intelligence, our energy, our patience.
First I thought of them one by one, then I thought
of them two by two, and then I summoned up all my
powers of abstract thinking, and combined the whole
three into one. At that moment the inspiration came
upon me, and I would have cried " Eureka," but that
I never thought of that word till long afterwards.
Here you must allow me to digress for a moment.
Have you ever reflected, sir, on all that is meant and
implied by that expressive phrase, " a Jew's eye ? " I
cannot help thinking that the outer world associates
with it an ever-watchful gaze, keen to perceive, ever
on the move, never relaxing its intensity. Here, then,
we have a most appropriate symbol of intelligence,
energy, and patience rolled into one. Now, admirable
as such an eye and the qualities which it represents
and typifies are in the battle of life, and necessary as
it must have been in the past for a race that lived in
arms, "the Jew's eye" becomes a rather inconvenient
and objectionable organ in the pauses of the struggle.
Life is not all battle, and he that tries to make it so
will not be liked by his more peaceful neighbour.
Putting one's self in the place of a Goy, it must be
somewhat exasperating to think that' in whatever relation you meet the Jew, his eye is for ever unslaked
in brilliancy, and his soul ready for the conflict, and
as a necessary condition of conflict, ready and desirous
to get the better of the fight. To have that eye
upon you at all times, even in moments of relaxation,
is enough to goad the Goy into perpetual irritation.
Thus it was in the combination of our three chief
virtues, as symbolised in "the Jew's eye," that I found
the irritant which has caused such ill-will. To drop

SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

99

symbolism, it is because our intelligence is combined
with energy, and is therefore combative, and because
these two qualities are combined with patience, so that
our combative intelligence is never at rest, that the
world dislikes us. Such was my conclusion as to the
cause of our being disliked by the world.
So far, so good. I had found the cause, as I
thought; now to seek for a remedy. The essence of
the world's opinion of us I took to be that a Jew is
never to be found unarmed. "You can never best
a Jew," is the feeling of les autres. And not alone is
the Jew not to be bested, but he is certain to be the
conqueror in any struggle, not so much by superiority
of power, as by the persistent use of it. And this is
not all. The Jew carries on the conflict of life into
affairs where there should be no conflict. He converses
on politics, the theatre, a friend's character, or what
not; he is never content unless he comes off victor,
or at least has the last word. " If you want to stop
a Jew's talk," a friend once said to me, "agree with
all he says; without the stimulus of conflict he cannot
continue." All this leaves an unpleasant flavour with
it; there is no repose in the relations of Jews to others.
Thus thinking, I saw my way to a remedy. We must
change all this. Let us now and then give way. Let
us be content to be at times second best in a bargain,
a competition, or a conversation; or, still better, let
us cease at times to bargain, compete, or polemicise
at all. We have waged the fight long and bravely;
let us put aside our arms for a while and meet our
whilom enemies in friendly converse. I thought of
proposing a new festival, a kind of All Fools' Day for
Judaism (say Arav Tischa b'Ab), on which every Jew
should try as hard to lose some prize in the battle
of life as he now does to win it. The experiences of a

100

JEWISH IDEALS

few anniversaries would convince Jews of the wisdom
of my advice, and the solution of the Jewish Question
seemed at hand.
And then a vision rose before me of the Reign of
Peace between Jew and Gentile. I saw the Jewish
tradesman content (mark you, content) to make a bad
bargain, or, if that were too much to hope, only a good
bargain, and not the very best bargain that could possibly be made. I saw the Jewish lawyer satisfied now
and then to take an adverse verdict without straining
every technicality of quibble and appeal to wrest a final
victory. I saw the Jewish scholar or scientist turn
aside to some bypath of speculation which would not
tell on the work of his life. I saw the Jewish publicist
refrain from pressing to its last consequences some slight
advantage he had gained in debate. I saw Jews refusing to take advantage of some slight " opening,"

and ceasing to place the obtrusive elbow therein. My
mental eye brought before me a vision of the idol of
Tachlith deposed from its pedestal, and, in the height
of my enthusiasm, I thought that for a moment by its
side I had caught a Jew asleep.
But this beatific vision vanished the moment I turned
the critical rays of reason upon it. How could I expect
a Jew not to take advantage, and that a fair one, when
he sees his way to it ? Everything in him, everything
about him, tells him that success is the be-all and endall of life. From our earliest moment we regard success
as not alone the most desirable thing for ourselves, but
our teachers never cease to point out how we raise our
brethren by succeeding. I saw, then, that what I was
aiming at was that Jews should be satisfied to be made
fools of now and again, and to acquiesce in the operation. Every Jewish instinct would rise in rebellion and
cry " Perish the thought ! " What! we who pride our-

SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

Ioi

selves on our cleverness to allow the world at odd
times to laugh at our folly in good-humoured fellowship. One might as well ask a man of clear vision to
wish a cataract to come over his eye because its brilliance was too overpowering. I saw that I was asking
no less than that Jews should make fools of themselves;
and the hopelessness of any such project stared me in
the face. It was then that I turned, like all ardent
reformers, to the coming generation; and you may now
perhaps understand what I mean when I declare my
honest conviction that the only way for Jews to remove
the world's dislike, and by so doing to solve the Jewish
Question, is to make fools of their children.
Let us Jewish fathers of families set about the task.
We must first of all change the motto of our training.
We have perverted Kingsley's line"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,"

into the unmetrical version" Be clever, my son, and let who will be good,"

not because we love goodness less, but because we prize
cleverness more. This must cease. We must give up
praising our little ones for every act or word of " sharpness" we observe in them. We must check, rather
than encourage, chutzpah and forwardness in them.
We must make our sons foolish enough to think that
there are other ends in life besides success, and that it
is well at times to act without any definite aim at all.
We must teach our daughters to be so foolish as to
regard culture and comfort, rather than splendour and
"respectability," as the ideal of home. Let us rejoice,
rather than feel shame, when we find some of our children dull but kindly, and even encourage the amiable
weakness. Before their eyes let us hold up as an ideal

102

JEWISH IDEALS

life the pursuits of those engaged in art and science
where one man's victory is all men's gain, and let us
even encourage them to be foolish enough to enter such
careers, even though they show no transcendent genius
for them. Let us smile approvingly when we see young
men spending a goodly part of the years of their youth
in pleasures and frolics, being " taken in" and "taken
down " after the manner of their kind; and let us frown
on those who scorn delights and live laborious days
solely to raise a competence into a fortune. I am sure
most Jewish fathers and mothers will agree with me
that if they take my advice they will be making fools
of their children.
But enough. I have explained my plan sufficiently.
I am not saying that the game is worth the candle; but
the Jewish public now know how they can solve the
Jewish Question, if they choose to adopt the remedy.
I enclose my card as a guarantee of good faith, but I
must beg that you will make no use of my name. Sensible as I am convinced my plan is, I know Jews too
I
well to have much hope of its early application.
and " able "
should lose my reputation as a " practical"
man if my congregation knew of my connection with
this proposal, and even my friends would write me
down a fool, though I am only a
MARSHALLIK.
[The " Marshallik" is the licensed wit of the Galician ghetti.]

JEHUDA HALEVI, POET AND PILGRIM'
THERE are some few men in the world's history whose

thoughts and lives seem to rise above the bounds of
space and time, and pass over into the world of ideals
that ever lives anew in the souls of those coming after.
In them the nation that produces them recognises its
best self, in them it sees embodied its typical excellences. Their memory is preserved among their people
with something of the ardour of personal affection, and
with reason; for it is these men that give a people its
rank in the hierarchy of nations. For when a race or
a nation is arraigned at the bar of History and asked
what are its claims to the recognition of humanity, the
answer must be in the last resort that it has produced
men. such as these. And when that question is asked
of Jews, no one will deny that among the representative men of Israel must be numbered the name of
Jehuda Halevi.
When we look into the lives of these men of whom
I have spoken, we find, I think, that they owe their
proud position to a sort of artistic unity in their lives.
Their inner thoughts and outward acts form a harmonious whole that puts to shame the petty inconsistencies
and unfulfilled aspirations that distract the lives of
most of us. Their lives are so rounded off that they
seem to possess a kind of plot which we can follow
with all the interest of a drama. Each act and word
of theirs seem linked together by a bond of consis1 A paper read before the Jews' College Literary Society, March i3, 1887.
103

Io4

JEWISH IDEALS

tency, so that, though we cannot anticipate what they
will do, yet when it is done it seems just the thing we
should have expected them to do. Thus it is that their
lives for the most part are found to be dominated by
one inspiring idea, with which their names are for ever
associated. St. Louis and saintliness, St. Francis and
tenderness, Bayard and chivalry, Nelson and valour,
Gordon and duty, are almost synonymous. And so
with Jehuda Halevi there is a word that gives the
dominant chord which harmonises the music of his
life, and that word is-Jerusalem. I shall best achieve
my task of explaining the magical attraction with
which the name of Jehuda Halevi is connected in the
minds of Jewish scholars if I group what I have to say
about this dominant motive of his life. Much will
have to be left unsaid that might well be worth the
saying, but the best way to show the man Jehuda
Halevi as he was and felt, is to trace the rise and
growth of the master-passion of his life, his love for
the discrowned capital of Judah, and to say how he expressed his love in beautiful words and inspiring deeds.
Let us, however, begin at the beginning and say
something about the clime and time that saw our
hero's birth.
Jehuda ben Samuel Halevi, or, as his
Arabic fellow-countrymen knew him, Abu'l Hassan ibn
Hallawi, was born in Toledo about the year 1085,
fourteen years before the First Crusade. He thus
comes in point of time in the centre of the finest
group of men that Israel has produced since Bible
times. Ibn Gebirol, the poet and philosopher, Rashi,
the exegete, and Alfasi, the jurist, were of the preceding generation; and Moses ibn Ezra, the sweet singer,
and Abraham ibn Ezra, astronomer, wit, rover, and
commentator, were his contemporaries. Maimonides,
the great eagle, and Charisi, the rhymester, came soon

JEHUDA HALEVI

o105

after him, and then the great ones ceased. It was by
no mere accident that all but one of these names were
connected with Arabic Spain. The culture of Islam
was in some respects superior to that of Christendom,
and especially in the tolerance accorded to Jews-that
barometer of civilisation.
And there were special
reasons why the Jews of Spain enjoyed an exceptional
share of toleration, not alone from the Moors, but even
from the Christians of the country. For they held a
position there somewhat analogous to that which they
now hold in the dual empire of Austro-Hungary. In
the conflict of races, their influence, though not paramount owing to their small numbers, was yet considerable enough to extort consideration from both sides in
the struggle that was now going on between the Crescent and the Cross in the Peninsula. The struggle had
reached its turning point just at the birth of Jehuda,
the period of the Cid, Rodrigo Diaz, with whose name
is connected the onward movement of the Christian
hosts.from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, which
never ceased from his days to the final downfall of the
Moors in

1492.

The very city of Jehuda's birth, Toledo, had been
captured by Christian valour about the year when he
was born, 1085, and remained during his lifetime at
once the outpost and the capital of Christian Spain.
It was a fit cradle for a poet's youth, the spot where
Orient and Occident met, where Christian scholars,
like Michael Scot, came to study the learning of the
East, including the black art. There were learned
those Arabic numerals which the Arabs had brought
with them from India. There a college of translators,
many of them Jews, helped to bring philosophy and
science within the reach of Christendom. There, too,
lived descendants of the Khozars, who were to give

io6

JEWISH IDEALS

the historic basis of Jehuda's greatest work. We
can imagine the boy's wonder at these strangers from
the outlandish Crimea, who had brought with them
memories of the remarkable Jewish kingdom that
had flourished for two centuries on the northern shores
of the Black Sea.
Of the lad's education we know little except by the
results of it to be found in his work. But we have
plenty of contemporary evidences of the wide spread
that liberal education took among the Jews of Arabic
Spain. Thus Samuel ibn Abbas gives the following
course of study as usual in his days:-UHebrew grammar,
the Torah and its commentaries, engaged a boy's attention till the age of thirteen, then in the fourteenth year
came Indian arithmetic and astronomy, to be followed
by medicine, Greek mathematics, geometry and algebra,
and the whole curriculum was crowned by the study of
the Talmud, which seemed to have begun at the age of
fifteen. We find traces of these studies in the Kusari,
and may take it that Jehuda's education was somewhat
on these very broad lines. Nowhere north of the Tagus
could such a liberal education have been obtained at
that period.
In this enumeration of his studies one important
branch has been omitted. Verse-making was a favourite
amusement of Arabic cultured society, and the fashion
had been taken up by the Jews of Moslem countries
and applied to the holy tongue, so that a whole art
of rhythm had been developed with elaborate rules
founded on the laws of Arabic versification. Hebrew
poetry thus became one of the branches of Jewish
education in Spain, and it was clearly the part of
Jehuda's education which most attracted him. He
early obtained proficiency in the art, and his fame soon
spread. The earliest glimpse we catch of him gives

JEHUDA HALEVI

I07

perhaps the occasion which brought him to the notice
of the learned circles of Jewish Spain. He had gone,
about i ioo, to Lucena, near Granada, then the centre
of Talmudic study. There he seems to have relieved
the monotony of halachic disputations with some
swallow-flights of song. To whom should he send
these if not to Moses ibn Ezra at Granada, the chief
literary authority of the time, and one of Israel's
sweetest singers of all time ? The elder poet received
the youth's attempts most graciously, and in his reply,
which alone has reached us, expresses his wonder at
Jehuda's early proficiency, in the following words :
" How can a boy so young in years
Bear such a weight of wisdom sage,
Nor 'mongst the greybeards find his peers
While still in the very bloom of age ?"

This interchange of civilities was followed by a close
friendship, which lasted for many years till Moses ibn
Ezra's death in Ii39.

Indeed, Jehuda seems to have

possessed in a special degree the gift of attractiveness,
and his friends include all the most distinguished Jews
of Spain. Joseph ibn Migash at Lucena, Judah ben
Gayath at Granada, the two Jewish viziers, Samuel
Almollam at Seville, and Meir ibn Kamnial at Saragossa, as well as the philosopher Joseph ibn Zaddik at
Cordova, all fell under the charm of his personality.
In this respect he contrasts strongly with Solomon ibn
Gebirol, who seems to have been of a somewhat churlish
disposition. Jehuda, on the other hand, seems to have
possessed an almost magnetic attraction, due to his
bright affectionate nature, that shines forth in all his
poems of his early period, and is echoed in the poems
addressed to him.
He soon became poet-laureate of the Jews of Southern

Io8

JEWISH IDEALS

Spain. No festive occasion was considered complete
that was not celebrated by Jehuda's muse. We have
still extant no less than forty-three marriage odes,
written by our poet with much grace of feeling and
skill in adapting appropriate Biblical passages. If a
distinguished Rabbi was appointed to an important
post, the ceremony of reception would include an ode
of Jehuda. And on more solemn occasions, when Jews
had to mourn the loss of some distinguished man, the
general sorrow found a voice in Jehuda Halevi. Thus
when Alfasi, the great codifier of Jewish law, died,
Jehuda expressed in the hyperboles of the following
lines, the conviction that a second Moses had passed
away from among men :
On Sinai's day the mountains bowed before thee,
Angels of the Lord came forth to greet thee.
Upon the tablets of thy heart they wrote the Law,
Upon thy head they placed the crown of glory.
Even sages cannot learn to stand upright
Unless they have sought for wisdom from thee.

Besides these official epithalamia and epitaphs, Jehuda
contributed to the social gatherings of which he formed
part many short and witty poems, containing riddles,
which were then the fashion. A couple of these may
serve as specimens of these elegant trifles:
WThat is it that's blind with an eye in its head
But the race of mankind its use cannot spare;
Spends all its life in clothing the dead,
But always itself is naked and bare ?
Happy lovers, learn our law,
Be joined in one, as we;
Aught that parts us through we saw,
And again are one, you see.
[suossIO

doI
0

vj]

JEHUDA HALEVI

Io9

'Tis dead and scattered on the earth,
And men bury it all bare;
Yet in the grave to children gives birth,
That start full clothed from their lair.
[Nb

dO

ouv[

NV]

He seems also to have been much in request by
lovers, for many of his poems deal with the tender
passion, whether on his own behalf or for others is
difficult to say. The following quatrain forms a not
ungraceful mnotif for
A SERENADE.
Awake, dear one, from thy slumber arise,
The sight of thee will ease my pain;
If thou dream'st of one that is kissing thine eyes,
Awake, and soon the dream I'll explain.

Or again, another quatrain expresses a pretty fancy.
Once I nursed Love on my knee.
He saw his likeness inmy eye,
He kissed the lids so tenderly,
'Twas his image he kissed, the rogue, not me.

A note of deeper passion is struck in a poem on
separation, which you will be glad to have from the
more skilful hands of Miss Emma Lazarus (" Songs of
a Semite," p. 73), though diluted through Geiger's
German version.
SEPARATION.
And so we twain must part ! Oh, linger yet,
Let me still feed my glance upon thine eyes.
Forget not, love, the days of our delight,
And I our nights of bliss shall ever prize.
In dreams thy shadowy image I shall see,
Oh, even in my dream be kind to me !
Though I were dead, I none the less would hear
Thy step, thy garment rustling on the sand;

IIO

JEWISH IDEALS
And if thou waft me greetings from the grave,
I shall drink deep the breath of that cold land.
Take thou my days, command this life of mine,
If it can lengthen out the space of thine.
No voice I hear from lips death-pale and chill,
Yet deep within my heart it echoes still.
My frame remains-my soul to thee yearns forth.
A shadow I must tarry still on earth.
Back to the body dwelling here in pain,
Return, my soul, make haste and come again !

Or, as a last specimen of the poet's earlier manner,
we may take a literal prose version of a description of
Spring which, at any rate in the original, marks the
highest tide-mark of Jehuda Halevi's powers as a poet
of the salons of Granada.
SPRING.
Yestreen the earth, like a suckling babe, drained the breasts of the
wintry clouds ;
Or, like a bride with soul shut up, yearning for the time of love;
Yearned for the summer of its love when its weary heart is healed;
Or, like a dainty girl, blushing in her new donned robes,
In garments all of golden flowers and broidered work of lilies,
The earth each day its robes renews and wins fresh beauty,
Changing here from lily white to rosy red, and there to emerald
green,
Now turns pale, and now it blushes like a bride kissing her lover.
The beauty of the flowers was surely stolen from the starry skies.
To-day we sought this Paradise with wine that kindles the fire of
love,
Though cold as snow when held in cup, it burns like fire within.
As we pour it into the jewelled beaker, it rises like the sun above
the earthern brim.
Then walk we with Spring as she laughs at the showers;
She rejoices, the raindrops are like tears on her cheek, like jewels
from a broken necklet;
To her the cry of the crane is as new wine, and to the cooing dove
she keeps sweet accord;
She exults amidst the budding leaves like a damsel dancing and
skipping in her new robes.

JEHUDA HALEVI

III

My soul seeks the morning breeze as she scatters her fragrance

around the beloved.
The breeze rustles the myrtle, and its scent is dispersed to join
lovers that are parted.

How, then, one might ask, did Halevi gain such
general fame if his powers only reached the ears of the
learned, as must have been the case with poems written
in Hebrew? A curious anecdote, discovered by the
omniscient Steinschneider, transcribed by the obliging
Neubauer, and published by the indefatigable Kaufmann
(Graetz, Monatsschrift, Feb. 1887), gives us an insight
into the cultured life of the time, and explains in a
measure how Halevi gained his renown. It occurs in an
Arabic commentary of Joseph ibn Aknim on Canticles,
who says : " I will"mention a fine anecdote of our poetphilosopher, Jehuda Halevi, that bears upon our text.
One of the sages of Granada has told us that he used
to meet him at conversaziones and in circles in which
a company of friends, and among them Jehuda Halevi,
used to meet for friendly discussions in one of the most
splendid palaces of the town. ' Once when we were
all praising the wisdom of the Creator, there came in a
lady whose beauty was equalled by the elegance of her
toilet. We all began to admire her beauty, and to
praise God for the perfection of His creatures. Just as
we were noticing her fine features and stately carriage,
she happened to address one of her acquaintances.
Then we observed what a harsh voice she had, and how
badly she spoke. And when Jehuda Halevi noticed
this, he said, "The mouth that caused [the charm] has
broken it." This witty application of the words of the
Mishna (Kethuboth, ii. i) caused the whole company
the most lively amusement.'" Some of the liveliness
of the amusement has vanished for us with the lapse
of centuries, but the whole story gives us at least a

I12

JEWISH IDEALS

lively insight into the mingled pedantry, poetry, and
piety that reigned in the Jewish salons of Granada
some eight centuries ago.
I have perhaps now said enough to leave with you
some impression of the poet's personality in the early
years of his life. Bright, witty, the soul of every circle
he visited, surrounded by bright smiles and gay glances,
we see him enter upon manhood's years under the most
delightful auspices. Yet those are not the conditions
that are likely to make a great poet; and we shall soon
see that Jehuda Halevi, like others, had to learn in
suffering what he taught in song. And here it seems
convenient to discuss for a moment the question which
has been raised in Germany by Professor Lagarde as to
the poetic merits of Jehuda Halevi. Was he really a
great poet . To answer that question, I must ask you
to make with me a distinction between poetic force and
poetic form-a distinction which I can best illustrate
by examples. Thus Mr. Browning has great poetic
force, but little poetic form; Mr. Swinburne great poetic
form, but only slight poetic force. So, too, in German,
Professor Lagarde's friend Rickert has considerable
poetic form, but only moderate poetic force. Or again,
consider how great an amount of poetic force there is
in many of the old ballads, combined with how poor a
quality of poetic form. We all of us have some poetic
force, or else we could not appreciate poetry-the poetry
of deeds as well as that of words; but too few of us, as
I am myself painfully aware, have any power of poetic
form. And so I think we can answer Professor Lagarde's question by saying that Jehuda Halevi had great
poetic force, but that he worked in a medium that did
not admit of great poetic form. Or if you prefer to
put it shorter, we may say he was a great poet, though
his poems are not great. It is necessary to recognise

JEHUDA HALEVI

113

this, because otherwise we shall be adopting a provincial standpoint in judging of New Hebrew poetry.
Jehuda Halevi was the greatest New Hebrew poet,
but New Hebrew poetry was not, could not be, great.
It was essentially a literature of reminiscence, overshadowed by the past, and is thus exactly analogous
to the New Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. This is
especially the case with the religious poetry of New
Hebrew literature. Here the Jewish poet had before
him the Psalms, the grandest religious lyrics of the
world's literature, judging them merely from the literary
standpoint. It was impossible for him to hope to rival
them on their own lines, equally impossible for him to
depart altogether from those lines. Hence the Piyutiz
are full of quotations, popular or otherwise, and most
of them ought to be printed in inverted commas.
Hence the greatest point of skill a Paitan could show
was to wrest a Bible verse out of its true sense, somewhat in the same way as Jehuda Halevi made a new
application of the Mishna text in the anecdote we have
just read. I have had to say this, as I have found it
impossible to present to you any of Jehuda Halevi's
religious poetry which would not lose all point in translation, except the greatest of them all, the Zionide.
Any one that has read the weary, dreary versions given
in the " Treasures of Oxford " will remember how every
other line depends for its effect on the ingenuity with
which 2 Samuel, chapter so and so, verse so and so, had
been misapplied to mean something it could not possibly mean in its own context. That effect cannot be
reproduced in translation.
And there is another quality of New Hebrew poetry
which weakens it in my opinion. The Paitanim borrowed from Arabic poetry a fatal facility of rhyming,
which gives a jingling sound to their verses. And in
H

II4

JEWISH IDEALS

adopting rhyme from the Arabs, the Jewish poets
adapted it to a language much less fitted for it. You
can understand how easy rhyming is in an inflexional
language; it would not be difficult to run off any number of Latin lines ending in is, or Greek ones finishing
with ai. Now, Hebrew being philologically a younger
language than Arabic, has retained many fewer of the
primitive inflections than the sister tongue. It thus
happens that three-fourths of the Hebrew rhymes are
furnished by the endings i ( Yigdal preserves this rhyme
throughout)- -- j and n.

And when poets, to carry

out the Arabic practice, used one of these rhymes right
through a poem of ever so many lines, the result produces a tickling sensation to a Western ear. The only
English poem that I can think of with the same artifice
is Southey's " How the waters come down at Lodore."
It is all very ingenious, I know, but the very ingenuity
produces an air of artificiality that disturbs the impressiveness of the poem. We could not, for example,
imagine a Psalm written in that style. I do not know
whether it was this to which he was referring, but
towards the end of his life Jehuda Halevi is said to
have regretted that he had followed Arabic models in
his poetry. At any rate, the reasons I have given will
be sufficient to explain the inadequate medium which
New Hebrew verse gave for the expression of Jehuda
Halevi's great poetic force.
For by universal consent he was the greatest of the
poets who chose that means of clothing their burning
thoughts. Charisi, critic as well as poet, has expressed
the general opinion of our hero's ability in some lines
of rhymed prose, which I may venture to quote for their
felicity of expression, as well as for the illustration they
give of the inadequate nature of New Hebrew rhyme in
point of form. " Three read verses-the simple, the first

JEHUDA HALEVI

115

is-thinker the second, poet the third-he knows the
might of the word-Thus poets are simple sometimesthe everyday man enjoys their rhymes-again they are
deep and profound-only philosophers their meaning can
sound-or their metre is full of surprises-such as only
a poet surmises. So different poems are for different
people-some they attract and some they repel. But a
poem has these qualities three-is surely the highest
that high can be-and so is Jehuda's poetry-simple,
deep, yet full of fire-with verse that poets can admire
-Solomon ibn Gebirol's song-is very profound and
very long-Moses ibn Ezra is the poet's poet--he
knows his art and how to show it" (Tach, ed. Lagarde,
xviii. 4, 46 seq.). Moses ibn Ezra refers to him as
"the pearl diver and lord of most rare jewels and brilliants in song."
It is thus universally agreed that
Jehuda Halevi is the greatest Jewish poet of the Middle
Ages. Yet Professor Lagarde may ask, " If that be so,
how is it that there is no complete edition of his
poems ?" And I fear that no satisfactory answer could
be given to him. It is with a mixture of shame and
irritation that I reflect upon the unedited condition of
While the most trumpery
Jehuda Halevi's poems.
indifferent commentary is resupercommentary on any
produced with all the honours of further comment, the
finest products of theJewish spirit are allowed to moulder
unedited in the dust of the Bodleian. There was some
excuse while Luzzato lived and contemplated an edition,
but Luzzato has been dead these twenty years, and an
edition of Jehuda Halevi's poems seems as far off as
ever. You will all join with me in the hope that this
reproach to Jewish taste and Jewish scholarship will be
speedily removed.
We have been so long occupied with Halevi's poetry
that we may well imagine Halevi himself to have

II6

JEWISH IDEALS

passed through manhood to middle age in the interim.
Of the outward events of his life we know little. He
married and had an only daughter, who did not marry
Abraham ibn Ezra, as the well-known legend tells,
but who gave him a grandson also named Judah. If
the following epigram were to be taken literally, we
might assume that he had suffered some loss of fortune.
But the epigram was probably only written for the
puns, which form its chief merit. I have endeavoured,
as far as possible, to reproduce them.
As went my money, my man he went with it
With scorn in his looks, saying "To leave thee I'm ready."
Then I asked, " But what is my sin, my son ?"
" Thou art naughty, since thou hast naught," said he.

The same kind of wit is shown in another epigram,
which records a professional experience of Jehuda's.
He was a doctor, and, it would seem, had a very good
practice. It was once his fortune to be called in to
visit some lady patients in a harem. He laughingly
confesses his disappointment that he was only received
on a strictly professional footing:They called me in, but did not call me.
Though among them, I was not of them.
I paid them a visit, though not a visitor.
They desired my art, and not my heart.

It is right for a man to take the pleasures of life
as they pass before him, provided they be innocent
pleasures, and we have seen Jehuda taking the joys
of life with all the zest of youth. But life has duties
as well as joys, and these duties with the nobler spirits
are connected with wider issues than the merely personal lot. There were circumstances of the time that
made Jehuda Halevi feel acutely the lot of his people.
His was the age of the Crusades; Islam and Chris-

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117

tendom were meeting in the struggle which was to
decide the religious future of civilisation for many
long centuries.
In the clash of creeds, religious
animosities, the most irritable of human passions, rose
to fever heat, and the Jews, who were a kind of buffer
between the two opposing hosts, were among the first
victims. It is usually assumed that the lot of Jews
in Moslem countries was free from the intolerance
that characterised Christian usage. But as a matter
of fact, fanaticism on the part of the Christian induced
fanaticism on the part of the Moslem, and from the
beginning of the twelfth century there was little to
choose between the followers of the two creeds.
As early as I107 an attempt was made at forcible
conversion at Lucena, where the Israelites of that
"Jew-town," as the Arabs called it, were asked to
don the turban.
Jehuda Halevi was clear-sighted
enough to see that neither of the two opposing forces
was really tolerant. In one of his poems he says :
A curse on Edom and on Kedar;
Whichever conquers or is conquered,

Always woe is with my people.

If anything, his sympathy was with Christendom.
Perhaps he was influenced by memories of Alphonso
VI. of Castile, who was so favourable to the Jews
that he was called "The King of the Two Creeds,"
and is said to have refused to fight on Saturday for
the sake of the Jewish contingent among his forces.
But though he recognised the failings of Roman
ChristianityThey change the Creator of the earth into an image-

yet he was the first to recognise the propeedeutic value
both of Christianity and of Islam in a passage of his

II8

JEWISH IDEALS

great philosophical dialogue, part of which I will
venture to quote, as it strikes me as one of the most
remarkable passages of that work; the spirit of lofty
toleration was certainly unique in that age of conflicting creeds. The King of the Khosars points out to
the master that Christians and Moslems had passed
through contempt and persecution, but with a triumphant result in the end. To what purpose had Israel
gone through all the travail of the ages ? The master
replies, "You are right to reproach us with the fact
that our banishment has yet borne no fruit. But I
think of the meanest among us who could shake off
this slavery and contempt by a word easily spoken,
and yet speak it not because they wish to remain
true to their faith. .

.

. The wise providence of God

towards us may be compared to the planting of a seed
of corn. It is placed in the earth, where it seems to
be changed into soil and water and filth, and is no
more to be recognised. But in very truth it is the
seed that has changed the earth and water into its
own nature and then raises itself from one stage to
another, transforms the elements, and assuming its
own form, throws out shoots and leaves. .

.

. So, too,

the Law of Moses changes them who come in contact
with it, even though it seems to be cast aside by them.
These peoples are the preparation and preface to the
Messiah we expect, who is the fruit Himself, and whose
fruit they all will be when they acknowledge Him and
all become one mighty tree" (Kus. iv. 23). Remember that these words were spoken when Israel was
being persecuted by both branches of the tree, and its
noble tolerance cannot fail to strike you.
Other points might be given in which Jehuda's
thought shows a certain affinity to Christianity. He
seems to set up an infallible Synagogue against the

JEHUDA HALEVI

II9

infallible Church.
Geiger notices that the divine
development in one line postulated by the Kusari
is a counterpart of the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin. But it was chiefly the crusading spirit of
Christendom that found a sympathetic echo in our
poet's soul. The first Crusade took place when he
was fourteen or fifteen years old, and we can imagine
how the news of the fall of Jerusalem came to an
impressionable lad of his temperament. He must have
felt like the rightful heir when his patrimony is being
disputed for by two other relatives whose claims are
not so close as his, yet he has not the means, or,
worse still, has not the courage to assert his rights.
The Crusades, I have said, worsened the condition
of the Jews both in Christian and in Moslem countries. In many of Jehuda's poems we see the depression brought upon him by the changed condition of
his people, in which he himself shared. At times he
bursts forth in a sort of savage pride in persecution.
" Men insult me," he cries:
Men insult me; fools, they know not
That insults borne for Thy sake are an honour.

At other times he would seem to have withdrawn from
all communion with his fellows in proud isolation of
self-communion.
They say to me, " Canst thou delight thyself without a brother ?"
I answer: " I have that within my soul to delight me;
Thoughts delight my soul within me
My thoughts form an Eden in my heart."

For he had likewise much to sadden him within his
community as without. On looking back on the past
we catch sight chiefly of the more ardent spirits, and
attribute to an age what is special to its choicer minds.
Indifference to religious duty is no prerogative of the

I20

JEWISH IDEALS

nineteenth century. On one occasion Jehuda has to
complain of what we may term an American laxity
on the part of his co-religionists; in Christian Spain
many kept their Sabbath on the Sunday, in Moslem
Spain there were several who kept it on Friday. With
oppression without and indifference within, there was
Even the
enough to make an ardent soul sink.
resources of his art failed him; he lost for a time the
gift of song; the sweet bells were jangled and out of
tune. In the bitterness of his soul he said, Even this
is vanity.
Wisdom is like the mighty sea,
Song but the foam on its surface.

When all else fails a man in moments like these,
the daily call of duty is the last solace, the mechanic
iteration dulling pain. Yet even this last comfort was
denied to our poet if we may judge from a letter
written about I130 to one David ben Joseph of Narbonne, who had asked him for a solution of a mathematical problem. In apologising for not giving it (it
was afterwards solved by Abraham ibn Ezra), he writes
as follows :
"And besides, I am very busy almost every hour of
the day and night in the vanities of the art of healing
which has no power to heal. The city is large and its
inhabitants imperious, and they are hard masters. And
how can the slave please his masters except by spending all his days in serving their will and by consuming
his years in healing their infirmities! 'We would have
healed Babylon and she is not healed'" (Jer. i. 9).
Then he bursts out with, " I have sought from my God
and asked Him to find a good opportunity, for He has
many, to hasten the redemption, to call forth liberty
out of captivity, to grant me rest, and remove me to the
fount of living waters."

JEHUDA HALEVI

I21

That last outburst is characteristic of the man. It
is natural that in times of oppression the oppressed
should look for, long for, the time of deliverance. And
the promises of redemption for Israel form as integral
a part of Judaism as the Law itself. Judaism is a
discipline, but it is also a hope. The Bible contains
the Prophets as well as the Law, though both friends
and foes to-day too often forget the fact. And Jehuda's
significance in the history of Israel rests on the fact
that he carries on the work of the Prophets as other
Rabbis like Alfasi and Maimonides and Joseph Karo
carried on the work of the Law. Not that there need
be any antagonism between the two. Jehuda Halevi
is the most orthodox of the orthodox in his theological
treatise, and he has put into some fine verses the sentiment which Berthold Auerbach so finely expressed in
prose when he spoke of a man being Frei and eins nsit
dem Gesetz, " in free subjection to the Law." Jehuda's
lines run :
The servants of Time are servants of servants,
The servant of the Lord is alone free,
When each man seeks his lot in life
My soul exclaims, "The Lord is my lot."

But combined with this willing subjection to the
yoke of the Law, Jehuda has a passionate faith in the
promises of the Prophets. It finds expression on every
occasion. We have just seen it burst from him in a
letter to a stranger. At the end of one of his marriagesongs, the happy union of the lovers is connected with
a wish for the happy union of Israel and the land of
Israel. In speaking of the blessings of the Sabbath
the same wish escapes him, and the passion for redemption, not of his own soul, but of his own people, shines
out at every opportunity.
He was not alone in this passionate desire, though

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JEWISH IDEALS

he was alone in the power with which he gave expression to it. The Jews of the time listened with burning
feelings of mingled dismay and hope to the clash of
Christian sword and Moslem scimitar contending for
the possession of the land that they had never ceased
to regard as theirs, for the city which remained the
symbol of all that was holy for them. And some went
further than mere thoughts about the matter. Maimonides, in his letter to Yemen, in 1172, says: " Fortyfive years ago (i.e., in 1127) a man rose in Fez, who
gave himself out as the herald of the Messiah, pretending that the latter would appear in the same year;
his words, however, were not fulfilled, and the Jews
only suffered fresh sorrows. About ten years before
that a man had arisen in Spain at Cordova, who represented himself as the Messiah, and it wanted but little
that this did not produce the ruin of the Jews." It is
probable that Jehuda was for a time caught by the
enthusiasm for this Jewish Mahdi. For in one of his
poems addressed to the Dove of Israel, a frequent expression of his for the Synagogue, he looks forward to
the return as something near at hand.
Rouse thyself to return to the land of beauty,
And to sadden the plain of Edom and of Ishmael,
Lay waste in wrath the house of the robbers,
And throw open the house of love to thy lovers.

If Akiba could have been misled by Bar Cochba, if
we can call it being misled to attempt to free one's
own land of foreign conquerors, so we can imagine the
fervent zeal of Jehuda Halevi roused by the unknown
enthusiast of I I 17. Thirteen years later, in a powerful
poem, spoilt only by the inverted commatisms of its
concluding lines (which I omit), he gives a vision of
the downfall of Islam in the year I i30 corresponding

JEHUDA HALEVI

123

to the eight hundred and ninetieth year of the fifth
thousand since the Creation (4890).
"Thou has slept and dreamt.

Why rise up trembling ?

What is this dream that thou hast dreamt ?

Perchance thy vision made thy foe appear
As poor and low while thou wert raised ?"
" Say ye to the son of Hagar : Remove thy proud hand
From the son of thy mistress whom thou hast subjected;
I saw thee in dreams fallen and abject :
Perchance on awakening I shall find thee desolate,
And the year 890o will see thy pride broken
And all thy plans put to shame and confounded."

The wish was clearly father to the thought, but neither
thought nor wish were to be realised in Jehuda's days,
which rather saw a revival of Saracen zeal in the Almohades, who brought all the fierce fanaticism of the
Koran into Spain.
But fulfilled or not, Jehuda's aspirations were not
daunted by failure, however long continued. And his
longings for the redemption of the land of Israel concentrated themselves at last in a mighty love that
overcame every other feeling of his soul. It was an
age for such passionate devotion. In Provence the
knights and troubadours held courts of love, in which
minutiae of the tender passion were settled by quasihalachic rules. Knights devoted themselves for years
for the honour of a fair dame whom they had scarcely
seen. Love for love's sake, without the hope of possession, became the ideal of chivalric affection. It was
such a love that now seized Jehuda Halevi.
It
was Heine that suggested the analogy, let him carry
it out.
" And the hero whom we sing,
Judah ben Halevy, too,
Had also his own lady love,
But one of especial sort.

I24

JEWISH IDEALS
She was not like the Laura
Whose eyes of mortal fire,
Kindled in the Minster
That world-renowned flame
No Chatelaine was she,
In the bloom and crown of youth,
Presiding at the tourney, •
Awarding the victor's crown.
No graduate of science gay,
No lady doctrinaire,
Lecturing in the Colleges
Of the courts of Love.

She whom the Rabbi worshipped
Was a woe-begone poor darling,
Desolation's very image,
And her name-Jerusalem."

Heine was somewhat of an authority on the kind of
love to which he alludes, but I should myself have
compared Jehuda Halevi's passion as something more
akin to the thinker's love for his own ideals, or better
still, to the passionate devotion of a saint to his creed.
For Jerusalem was to Jehudah a symbol and a type of
all that was distinctive of the history of his race. It
was an incarnation of its glorious past, a constant
reminder of its woe-begone present; it spurred him on
continually to hopes of a more glorious future. It was
the stirring of the historic consciousness within him
that was at the root of his love for Jerusalem. And
after all, it is that sentiment of the historic continuity
of the race which has given much of its vitality and all
its romantic colouring to the varied fate of Israel. Of
course, I know it has not gone alone: the religious
ideal has been of even greater force. But the religious
ideal has ever gone hand in hand with the political,
and the connection has all the authority of the Prophets on its side. It was the spirit of the Prophets

JEHUDA HALEVI

I2

5

revived again within him that caused Jehuda Halevi's
love for Jerusalem, and the same spirit still inspires
millions of Jews who find themselves in oppression as
he did. For man ever seeks to embody his ideal in
outward symbol, and the stern repression of all imagemaking in Israel has only intensified the tendency to
give a local habitation and a name to Israel's prophetic
ideal. Thus Jerusalem has been for ages the personification of Jewish history, and must continue to be
so while Jewish hearts still beat and care for aught
beyond the needs of the present and the self.
Jehuda Halevi's love for Jerusalem thus becomes
typical, and gives his figure an epic grandeur that
transcends the significance of any other medieval Jew.
Lawgivers, commentators, philosophers, give way to the
claims of the poet in whom his people instinctively felt
that the Prophets lived anew. He gave voice to the
dimly felt longings of his people. This is the greatness of the poet. The lawgiver controls our action,
the thinker interprets our thoughts, but the poet gives
expression to our selves, to what is innermost and
deepest within us. This merit had Jehuda Halevi,
and so his claim to be a true poet is established.
Whether he was a great one, is perhaps for others to
say; for that is, in fact, the question, whether the Jews
of the Middle Ages, whose voice he was, were a great
people. And from this point of view, we may put in
some defence for the choice of poetic form which technically was so much in his way. For it was the same
historic instinct which led him to put his thoughts into
the language of his fathers, which almost ceases to be
a dead tongue in his hands.
But it is time to let the poet give expression to the
feeling of longing. At one time he accounts for his
depression in the following lines :

I26

JEWISH IDEALS
My heart is in the East, but I in the depths of the West;
How can I care for the details of our lives;
How perform my vows, though the Lord's behest,
While Zion's still in Edom's snares, and I in Arab gyves ?
All the beauty of this land of Spain is but vanity at best,
Whilst e'en the very dust of the ruined fane survives.

There is a tone of sincerity about these lines that gives
them almost as much force as the passionate outburst
of the Psalmist, " If I forget thee, O Jerusalem ! may
my right hand forget her cunning," words that might
well stand as the motto of Jehuda's life, and were appropriately prefixed by Heine to his Romanzero. At
another time our poet passionately asks:
Who will give me wings of a dove
That I may fly and dwell there ?
I would abandon both north and south
To drink in the air of Zion.

The poet was soon to show that this was no mere
empty rhetoric. The longing overcame him, and he
determined on his celebrated pilgrimage to Zion, which
gave him his fame, and showed, at any rate, that his
idealism could survive the test of practice. His child
was settled with her husband and child; his wife, of
whom we hear nothing, was probably dead; his best
friend, Moses ibn Ezra, had died in I 139; and about

the following year Jehuda Halevi left his native land
and sought the object of his desire-Jerusalem.
But before he left, he had written as a sort of testament his philosophical masterpiece, the Kusari. It
is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with this
philosophical dialogue after the manner of Plato or
" Iflatun," as the Arabs called him. The historical
groundwork is the conversion of the King of the
Kosars in the Crimea in the eighth century, which
placed a Jewish kingdom in what is now Southern

JEHUDA HALEVI

I27

Russia for over two centuries. Lady Magnus, in her
charming paper on our poet, showed unusual scepticism
about the reality of this Jewish kingdom ; but we have
plenty of evidence from independent observers, such as
Arabic geographers and Greek monks, as to its existence. And plenty of scope is left to the imagination
as to the course of history, and of Jewish history, if
Russia had become Jewish instead of Christian. The
King of the Kosars seeks in turn a philosopher, a
Christian, and a Mohammedan, who each gives an abstract of his creed-and Halevi's abstracts are models
of fairness-and claims superiority over other faiths.
But as all of them grant that while their own creed is
the best, the Jewish faith is the next best, the king
summons a Jewish master, who goes through the whole
of Jewish theology, and at last converts the king. The
fable points to one great strength of mediaeval Judaism,
which must have aided greatly in its hold on the minds
of Jews. For there was a consensus of civilisation as
to the claims of Judaism; every Jew could feel that
both Christian and Mohammedan allowed he was right
so far as he went. The arguments of the book do not
seem very convincing nowadays; our standpoint has
changed, and the perplexities of our times are different.
But the feeling underlying the argument has not become obsolete: thus the polemic against the Karaites
is based on the feeling of historic continuity which is
still powerful among some of us. And it was only one
who was both poet and philosopher who could have
given utterance to that finest of aphorisms :
ISRAEL IS AMONGST THE NATIONS AS THE HEART
AMONG

THE LIMBS.

And thus, too, the abstract arguments of the book are
often influenced by the master feeling of the poet-

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JEWISH IDEALS

philosopher; e.g., he strains all his powers of dialectic
to prove even against Talmudic authority that prophecy
was only possible in the Holy Land, or, as he has to
modify it, about the Holy Land, and he introduces a
couple of dramatic touches which bear upon our immediate subject. When the master expatiates on the
excellences of Palestine, the King of the Khozars very
pertinently asks him why he and all Jews did not go
there. The master answers, " Thou hast shamed me,
O King. Yes, that is why we have not had a complete
fulfilment of the prophecies."
Later on, at the end of
the book, the master shows he has been touched by the
reproof of the king, and announces his intention to go
there, though at the risk of his life, giving many quaint
reasons why it was worth losing one's life in order to
set foot on the land of the glories of old. The reasons
are quaint, but the feeling that inspired them was
not so. Even the greatest of poets and profoundest
of philosophers may fail to account for our deepest
feelings.
What he represented the master as doing, the poet
did himself. He was literally at the extreme end of
the then known world; Jerusalem was in the hands of
the Christians, who had murdered every Jew as they
entered; the sea had its own peculiar terrors yet the
poet made up his mind to dare all in order to fulfil his
longing. This determination roused the greatest possible enthusiasm among his fellow Jews. The whole
of Israel rose at him, to use a theatrical expression.
The man who was known to all of them as the greatest
poet of his time, who had recently added to this the
renown of being its greatest philosopher, was about to
dare what they all wished to have the courage to dare.
He was, as it were, each Jew's best self putting each
man's ideal into practice. There were not wanting

JEHUDA HALEVI

I29

some friends who urged the dangers, and these he
answered in tones of earnest conviction, " Shall a body
of clay stop a soul urged by eagle's wings ?" he asked.
He passed through Cordova, exchanging civilities with
Joseph ibn Zaddik, passed on to Granada, and then
took ship for Alexandria. A wondrous calm had fallen
on him: he writes with a dignity and force that is
often missing in his earlier poems. His muse took a
higher flight, and I may venture to give here a couple
of sea-pictures probably written during the voyage.
The first is the sea in storm, and in my version I have
endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the metre, or
at least the rhyme system, of the original. Its technical name is Mowashech, or " Girdle rhyme," so called
because the last syllable of each stanza in the poem
remains the same, and so forms a girdle for it.
THE STORM.
The waters roar
As their wheels roll o'er,
Becoming less and more
On the face of the sea.
The waters grow black,
Grim lowers the rack,
The breakers rear back
Till the depths you can see.
The cauldron boils o'er
With a hiss and a roar,
And none can restore
Its tranquillity.
And brave men must fear
As the waves disappear,
And a mountain is here,
And there a valley.

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JEWISH

IDEALS

The ship turns like a vane,
Bows and rises again;
And the eye asks in vain,
Where, pilots, are ye ?
And my heart then stands still,
But bows down to His will
Who to Moses gave skill
To divide the Red Sea.
To the Lord I would call,
But to sin I've been thrall,
And I fear to recall
The punishment due.

The last syllable rhymes with other stanzas, and thus
gives a girdle for the whole poem, which has five
stanzas of the same length, each beginning with one
of the letters of the poet's name, so as to form an
acrostic. Even the faultiness of my version cannot
hide the poetic power of the picture, which is certainly remarkable in a mediaeval poet. As a companion picture in a simpler metre, as is appropriate,
we may take
A CALM NIGHT AT SEA.
And when the sun retires to the mansions of the skies,
Where all the hosts of heaven their general await,
The night comes on, an Ethiop queen, her garment all of gold,
Comes here decked with azure and there with pearls ornate.
And the constellations wander through the centre of the sea,
Like pilgrims doomed to linger far from all that's consecrate;
Their twinkling forms and figures their likeness reproduce
In ocean's mirror, and images of flaming fire create.
The visage of the ocean and of the heavens mingle here,
And gather sharp and bright in a pattern complicate.
And the ocean and the firmament commingle in their hue
And form but two oceans that now communicate,
And in the very midst of them my heart another sea contains
With the echoes of its passion-the billows of its fate.

JEHUDA HALEVI

13I

I have selected these two specimens of his muse at
this time, because they seem to me to have least of
the deficiencies of New Hebrew poetry, the naturalness
of the emotion produced by the sea, that fit cradle
of poetic feeling, overcoming the artificiality of the
medium in which they are written.
Arrived in Egypt, the poet was received with no
less enthusiasm than in his native home. The best
houses of Egypt welcomed the famous poet and philosopher with open arms, nor was he unwelcome to the
The temptation which
daughters of these houses.
assailed the youth in " Excelsior," assailed the man of
middle age in Egypt. But after a short stay, broken
by a visit to Arabia, he took up again his pilgrim's staff
and landed at Tyre, and made his way to Damascus,
there to seek a favourable opportunity for approaching
Zion, for the poet did not wish to commit a needless
suicide. It was at Damascus, almost at the gates of
the Paradise for which he yearned, that he is said to
have written the far-famed Zionide, in which all the
passion of that yearning is expressed.

THE ZIONIDE.
Zion, wilt thou not send a greeting to thy captives,
Who greet thee as the remnant of thy flocks ?
From West to East, from North to South, a greeting,
From far and near, take thou on all thy sides.
A greeting sends the captive of desire, who sheds his tears
Like dew on Hermon; would they might fall on thy hills.
When I bewail thy affliction my voice is as the jackal's:
When I dream of thy freedom, I am as a harp for thy songs.
My heart is sorely troubled for Bethel and Peniel,
For Mahanaim, and all the meetings of thy saints.
There the holy Presence is present to thee and thy Maker,
Over 'gainst the gates of Heaven ever opes thy gates.

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JEWISH IDEALS

The glory of the Lord is thy sole light; nor hast thou
Sun nor moon nor stars for thy illumination.
I desire that my soul be poured out in the place where
God's spirit was poured out unto thy saints.
Thou wert house of kings and throne of God ! how comes it then
That slaves ascend the thrones where sat thy rulers ?
Who will grant me to wander around the spots where
Appeared the angels to thy sight and to thy envoys ?
Who will make me wings that I may fly and cause
The ruins of my heart to move amidst thy ruins ?
I will bend my face to thy soil, and I'll hold dear
Thy very stones, and be tender to thy dust.
And then, when I stand at the graves of my fathers,
And at Hebron admire the choicest of thy tombs,
I will pass through thy fields and thy forests and stand
On Gilead and gaze at thy Mountain Abarim,
At Mount Abarim and Mount Heor, where are
The two great luminaries, thy lighters and thy leaders.
Life of the soul is the air of thy earth, and pure myrrh
The grains of thy dust, and honey of the comb thy streams:
It would rejoice my soul to go, even naked and barefoot,
Towards the ruins where once were thy fanes;
To the place where the Ark was treasured, and the spot where
The Cherubim dwelt in the innermost recesses.
I rend and cast hence the beauty of my locks, and curse fate
That in earth contaminate, defiles thy Nazarites.
How can I care for meat or for drink at a time
When I see curs devour the whelps of thy lions ?
Or how can the light of the day be a joy to my eyes
When I see in the maw of the raven the flesh of thy eagles
Cup of sorrow, away ! and cease for a while; for laden
Heavily are my loins and my soul with thy bitterness:
At the hour that I call to mind Ohola I taste of thy poison,
And when I remember Oholiba I drain all thy dregs.
O Zion, perfect of beauty, thou combinest love and grace
From of old and in thee unite the souls of thy companions:

JEHUDA HALEVI

I33

They rejoice in thy prosperity, they are pained
At thy desertion, and they are weeping for thy ruin.
From the depths of the captivity they are longingfor thy presence ;
Each from his place is bowing towards thy gates.
The flocks of thy own host, that are exiled and are spread
Over mountain and o'er plain, yet do not forget thy folds:
They are clinging to the fringes of thy garments, and they hasten
To rise up and to seize the branches of thy palms.
Shinar and Patmos, can they near thee with all their greatness ?
Nay, vanities are they compared with thy Light and thy Right:
To what compare thy anointed, and to what thy seers,
And to what compare thy Levites and thy singers ?
Mutable and transient is the sov'ranty of idols,
Thy power eternal, from age to age thy crown.
Thy God desires thee for His dwelling, and blessed the man
He has chosen to be brought near to dwell in thy court.
Blessed is he that awaits and draws near and sees the rising
Of thy lights and upon him breaks forth thy dawn,
And that sees the welfare of thy saints, and exults in
Thy joy and thy return to the old ways of thy youth.

The poem has the defects of want of concentration
and over-elaboration, but under the old-world phrases
you can hear the human heart-throbs that are of all
time. In power of compressed emotion it comes nearer
to the Psalms than any of the new Hebrew poems. It
is a fitting swan's song for the " captive of desire," as
he calls himself, the lover of Jerusalem.
For at Damascus history loses sight of him. There
are some indications that he was not spared the last
pathos of a disappointment. A poem headed "After
he had seen the Holy City," speaks in terms of disenchantment, but the heading is uncertain, and history
leaves him at Damascus. But if history fails us, legend
supplies the gap, and you all know the story of the
grey-haired poet, pierced with the lance of a passing

I34

JEWISH

IDEALS

Arab, just as his longing eyes had caught sight of the
walls of Jerusalem, and he was reciting the Zionide.
The legend is probably false, as the only authority for
it is Gedalya's "Chain of Tradition," which has been
irreverently but truthfully called " The Chain of Lies."
But the myth may be true, though the fact is not, for
it embodies the thoughts of men as to how such a
man should die. And so having lived an ideal life,
he dies in legend a death that is also ideal. It is this
union of idea and act, of inner conviction and outward
deed, that gives the dramatic unity to Halevi's life,
and makes him, of mediaeval Jews, the typical figure
to which men of Jewish blood still look back with
something akin to personal affection and enthusiastic
reverence. For in all time men will regard those who,
like Jehuda Halevi, have dared greatly because they
loved much, as the patterns and exemplars of human
excellence.

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES'
THE post-biblical history of the Jews may be divided
into two main divisions; the internal development of
Jewish thought and feeling, and the mutual relation
of Jews and their neighbours in all the lands of
civilisation. The outlines of the former are gradually
becoming clear to us, thanks in large measure to the
masterly treatment of Professor Graetz. But the other
branch of Jewish history-the influence of the national
culture of their native country on the Jews of various
lands, and their reaction upon this-is only as yet
in its beginnings. We are only just commencing to
know something of the way in which Hellenistic,
Roman, French, German, Italian, Moslem, or English
culture affected the Jews who came under their
influence in early times, and the light of dawn is
scarcely visible in the even more complicated question,
How far did the Jews influence their neighbours in the
Middle Ages apart from affording them the materials
for an occasional massacre or a perpetual feast of
scorn? I propose this evening to treat one of the
more definite side-issues of this problem, and to discuss the influence of the mediaeval Jews in helping to
spread popular tales among the hearths and homes of
the common folk of European lands. We shall not
esteem it a slight thing, I hope, if it be proved that
Jews have done something on their part to brighten
1 A Lecture delivered before the Jews' College Literary Society, May 27,
1888.
135

136

JEW-ISH

IDEA~ILS

the lives of those who have done the hard work of the
world.
If we were to trust some writers on this subject,
our hands would be more than full with materials.
Attempts have been made at various times to show
that all, or nearly all, folk-tales and fables, all the
phantasmagoria of popular fancy, can be traced to
Jewish sources. I have a lurking sympathy with such
views, as I trust I have with all that is youthful and
enthusiastic. I was young myself in this sense not so
many years ago, and had a tendency to cry " Cherchez
le juif" in all investigations into origins. To see in
all philosophy only the influence of Philo, Ibn Gebirol,
Maimonides, and Spinoza, to trace all mysticism to the
Kabbala, to see in medieval science only the work of
the Jewish translators, and in medikeval exegesis only
the influence of Philo, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kimchithese are the temptations which assail the young
Jewish investigator when he first comes to appreciate
the solid contributions to human knowledge and
insight which must for ever be associated with these
names. But soberer thoughts come with wider knowledge, and we learn to look upon Jews not as monopolists, but as co-operators in the grand work of
building the mighty fabric of human knowledge.
Scientific caution is especially necessary in the
particular branch with which we are at present concerned. At first sight it seems only natural, when we
find a popular tale or superstition first mentioned in a
Jewish source, to trace all other occurrences of it to
this. But both the Jewish and the other may have
been derived from a third and earlier source, and we
may be mistaking the relation of cousinship for that of
paternal affiliation. Thus to take a familiar example.
In Mr. Halliwell's collection of " Nursery Rhymes and

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

37
Tales" the history of " The House that Jack built " is
gravely traced back to the familiar " Chad Gadya" of
the Haggada Service, and Mr. Clouston follows his
lead in his recently issued "Popular Tales and
Fictions," calling the Haggada a part of the Talmud.
Yet it is well known that the " Chad Gadya" itself
was derived from a German "Volklied," and only
appears in later MSS. of the Haggada. Similarly, Dr.
Landsberger several years ago attempted to prove that
Jud&ea was the original home of the fable, and that
the collection known by the name of Esop was derived
from Jewish sources, and he could point to a large
number of beast-fables related in the Talmud and a
still larger number referred to, R. Meir being credited
with no less than 300 fables on the cunning of Brer
Fox, to use "Uncle Remus' " expression. But beastfables are found before Talmudic times, or even before
Biblical times, in Egypt and Assyria, and there is even
a probability that some of the Talmudic ones could be
traced to India, which has been the most prolific home
of these apologues.
We have then to be very careful in tracing any
popular tale to Jewish sources as its original, and
even when we have, there is always a presumption
against the Jewish being the original origin, if we may
so be tautological. For how are such stories spread?
In friendly chat by the fireside, in convivial gatherings,
on occasions of family rejoicing and the like? Alas !
there have been but few periods or places in Jewish
history where Jews could join in these gatherings, and
contribute their quota of instruction and amusement.
Our oral tradition has been almost entirely amongst
ourselves, and in seeking for any traditions which
Jews may have handed on to their neighbours we must
look to books. Though common folk avoided Jewish

138

JEWISH IDEALS

society throughout the Middle Ages, scholars and
students always had a hankering after the "wisdom of
the Hebrews," and in each age some sate at the feet of
the Rabbis. But they chiefly sought them for instruction in theology, and the only folk-tales likely to have
spread in this way were those about the Old Testament
characters. It was, of course, in this direction that
Jewish imagination took its main flight, and many, if
not most, of the legends about Old Testament characters
can be traced directly or indirectly to the Midrashim.
In particular, all the Biblical legends of Mohammed
can be traced to this source, as many scholars have
shown.

If we reflect a little, we shall see why Jews must
have had but few folk-tales of their own apart from
the Hagadic elements of the Talmud, dealing for the
most part with Biblical characters. The school of
Tylor and Lang have proved almost to certainty, in
my opinion, that the bizarre elements of folk and fairy
tales-the transformation of men into beasts, the
speaking birds, the cannibal ogres, and the like-are
"survivals " of savage and idolatrous practices and
beliefs involving the grossest and crassest superstition.
Now it is the proud boast of Israel that the practices
that degraded the other nations of antiquity in this
respect were stamped out for ever by the majestic utterances of the prophets, and died away utterly after the
exile. Folk-tales could not, therefore, flourish in an
atmosphere denuded of nearly all the superstitious
material out of which they are formed.
I may seem to have cut the ground from under my
feet in asserting that Jews, speaking broadly, had no
folk-tales of their own, and if they had any, as the
lawyers say, they had no opportunities of transmitting
them to their neighbours in social intercourse. Yet

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I39

though Jews may have had none of their own, comparatively speaking, except Biblical stories, they may
have adopted such of their neighbours' as they could
get access to in literary form. For Jews have always
taken readily to the literature of the countries in which
they lived, and have adapted and translated in the
sacred tongue such things as took their fancy. And
as regards their transmitting these to the peoples
around them, though they may not have done this in
social intercourse, their books, when written in the
vernacular, would have their fair chance in the struggle
for literary existence. In short, it is in the translating
activity of the medieval Jews that we can look for any
influence of theirs on folk-tales, and it is, in fact,
certain Jewish translations of popular tales to which
I propose mainly to direct your attention.
This subject of Jewish translation is a very wide one,
and forms an important element in the second division
of Jewish history to which I referred at the beginning.
The Jews being scattered everywhere, have translated
from and into every tongue of civilised lands. To
master this enormous territory of literature has been
given to only one man, my good friend Dr. Moritz
Steinschneider, and we are all awaiting with impatience
the appearance of the crowning work of his life on the
Jewish translators of the Middle Ages. You will all
join with me in expressing the hope that it may be
given to this illustrious scholar to see the end of his
laborious years crowned with success. I have referred
to Dr. Steinschneider, as for much of what I shall
have to say I am indebted to his Manna and Volks
Literatur der Juden, though I hope that I have
managed to pick up a few unconsidered trifles that
have escaped even his omniscient eye.
Turning, then, to the Jewish translations of popular

140

JEWISH IDEALS

tales to which we have now narrowed our inquiry we
must distinguish between what I would term, in railway parlance, "termini" and "junctions." When a
collection of folk-tales, after passing through many
hands, comes into those of Jews and is translated by
them, but never emerges again from Hebrew or JtidischDeutsch, I call such cases "termini."
Permit me to
refer to two or three instances of what I mean, though
one could easily fill a whole lecture with examples.
One of the most interesting holy legends of the Middle
Ages was that of Barlaam the sage and Josaphat the
prince. Liebrecht proved that Josaphat was no less
than the great Indian religious reformer Buddha or the
Bodisat, and he showed that owing to this legend
Buddha had been canonised and been made a saint of
the Catholic Church. Well, Steinschneider had shown
that Abraham ibn Chisdai's ,-sm n In (" Prince and
Dervish") is no other than a poetic version of the
Josaphat legend. But it did not pass from the Hebrew
to any other language (till a few years ago, when Dr.
Meisels translated it into German), so that we cannot
attribute to it any influence in spreading the legend
from India to Iceland. It got into Hebrew, and there
it stopped, and for that reason I call it a "terminus."
Or take a case nearer home: one of the best known of
the English romances is that of "Sir Bevis of Southampton," which passed into French, and thence into
Italian, where it was called Bovo c Ancona. This
d'
was translated into Jewish-German as the Bovobach,
and became food for the imagination of Jewish young
ladies in Germany. But it passed no further; it had
reached a "terminus " on that line. Neither of these
cases, nor the many like them, can be adduced as instances of the Jewish diffusion of folk-tales. For that
purpose we must turn finally after these long and, I

jm

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

14

I

fear, wearisome preliminaries to the instances of what
I term "junctions," when the train of tradition passes
through the Jewish station, carrying a few extra passengers perhaps, but practically the same train that
started from the original "terminus."
So far as I can
ascertain, these Jewish "junctions " consist of five
books-(I) Petrus Alphonsi's Disciplina Clericalis;
(2) Simeon Seth's translation of the Alexandreid, if
this " find " of mine be substantiated; (3) the various
Jewish versions of the fables of Bidpai, known by the
name of Kalila and Dimna; (4)R. Joel's Miiishle
Sendabar; and (5) Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst. The
"junction" character of two of these is rather doubtful ;
the first is not very long, and the last is somewhat late.
But the fables of Bidpai are undoubtedly a Jewish
"junction;" they are equally, without doubt, very important, one school of folk-lorists even tracing the
whole corpus of European tales to them.
I have recently been engaged in preparing an edition
of Sir Thomas North's version of Bidpai's Fables, which
will shortly appear, and I may, therefore, be excused if
I devote the greater part of my attention to this collection: its importance deserves it quite apart from my
personal interest in the matter. But I propose dealing
with the others, taking the five books in the order I
have just mentioned.
(i.)
First, as to Petrus Alphonsi's Disciplina Clericalis. Petrus Alphonsi was the Christian name of a
Jew named Moses Sephardi, who changed his name
when he changed his religion in i io6 under the
auspices of Alphonso VI., whose godson he was. He
wrote, like other renegades, against his former coreligionists, but he interests us here as the author of a
collection of thirty-three tales, entitled "A Training
School for the Clergy." The book had remarkable popu-

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JEWISH IDEALS

larity : it was utilised by clergymen for their sermons,
though it is difficult to understand how they could do
so if there were any ladies among the audience. Most
of the stories were adopted into the Gesta Romanorum,
one of the most popular of mediaeval story-books, which
includes others from the remaining "junctions," so that
it might almost be called the Gesta Judceorum. It was
also translated into French, and by a curious chance I
recently discovered that some of the stories formed
part of one of the earliest books printed in England.
Happening to look at Caxton's translation of the fables
of 2Esop, I found at the end thirteen "Fables of
Alfonce," as they were called, and, looking into them a
little more closely, I found that these were a selection
from the DisciplinaClericalis. As I have before hinted,
few of them will bear repetition "in the presence of
Mrs. Boffin," to use a phrase of Dickens, but I found
one which is quite harmless, and you would perhaps
like to have it in Caxton's own words:"The v. Fable is of the faith of three fellowes.
"Oft it happeth yt. the euyl which is procured to other cometh to
him which procureth it, as it appareth by three felowes of the which
twayne were Burgeys and the thirde a Labourer the which assembled
them togither for to goe to ye holy Sepulture, these thre felowes
made so greate prouision of floure to make their pilgrimage in suche
wise that it was al chaufed and consumed, except onely for to make
one lofe.
And when the Burgeys sawe the end of their floure,
they said togither, If we find not the maner and cautele to begile this
Uilayne bicause that he is a right great galaunt we shal dye for
hunger, wherefore we must fynde the maner and facion that we may
have the Lofe which shall be made of al our flour, and therfore they
concluded togither and sayde when the Lofe shal be put in the ouen
we shall goe and lay us for to slepe and he that shall dreme best the
Lofe shal be his. And bicause that wee both be subtill and wise, he
shall not now dreme as wel as we shal, wherfore the Lofe shal be
ours, whereof all they three were well content and all beganne to
sleepe. But when the Labourer knewe and perceyved all their fallace

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

143

and sawe that his two felowes were a sleepe he went and drew the
Lofe out of the ouen and eate it, and after he fayned to be a sleepe
and then one of the Burgeyses rose up and sayd to his felowes, I
have dreamed a wonderful dreame, for two Aungelles have taken and
borne me with greate ioye before the deuyne maiestie. And the
other Burgeys his felowe awoke and sayde, Thy dreame is wonderfull
but I suppose that myne is fairer then thyne is. For I have dreamed
that two Aungelles drew me one hard grounde for to leade me in to
hell, and after they did doo awake, the Uilayne which as dreadfull
sayde, who is there, and they answered we be thy felowes. And he
said to them howe be ye so soon retourned, we departed not yet fro hens.
And he sayd to the, by my faith I have dreamed that the Aungelles
had leade one of you into paradise or heaven and the other into hell.
Wherefore I suppose yt. ye should never have come againe and therfore I arose me fro sleepe and bicause I was hungrie I went and drew
out of the oven the lofe and eate it, for oft it happeth that he which
supposeth to begyle some other is himselve begyled."

The story is also to be found in the Gesta Romanorum, whence it passed into many others quarters (see
Oesterley, Gesta Rom. 106). It is not a very startling
one, and would scarcely be received nowadays in any
of the comic newspapers. But laughs were raised more
easily in the Middle Ages, and the story may interest
us by its antiquity if not for its comicality. At any rate,
it will serve as a specimen of the Disciplina Clericalis.
(2.) We pass on to Simeon Seth's Greek translation
of the Alexandreid from the Persian, if it is his translation, if it is from the Persian, and if it really was the
source of the later European versions. Simeon Seth
was a Jewish physician practising at the Byzantine
Court toward the close of the eleventh century. Both
Warton and Weber state that his Greek version of the
Alexander legend was the source of all the other versions, and if this were so, we should have arrived at a
very important "junction" indeed. For the Alexander
legend was one of the most popular of the mediaeval
romances, and, being one of the earliest, it had great

'44

JEWISH

IDEALLS

influence on the rest. The French version was written
in twelve-syllabled lines, which are called Alexandrines
to this day. You remember Pope's lines'" needless Alexandrine ends the song,
A
Which like a wounded snake drags its slow length along."

But I fear there must be some misunderstanding in
Warton's account, as Zacher traces the Pseudo-Calisthenes back much earlier than Seth. Yet Seth's versions might have been an adaptation, and he would
still be the immediate source in that case. My principal reason for doubt, however, is that I cannot think
that this fact would have escaped the notice of Dr.
Steinschneider or of M. Israel Levi, the latter of whom
has written very learnedly on the subject, and has
edited a Hebrew text of the Alexandreid (which is
another case of a " terminus ").
Still I have thought
it right to mention the claims of Simeon Seth here as,
if substantiated, they would add very considerably to
the proved influence of Jews on the diffusion of folktales. Simeon Seth was, at any rate, certainly connected
with the Greek translation of the fables of Bidpai, to
which we may now turn.
(3.) Before entering into the Jewish details as to the
fables of Bidpai, I think it desirable to give you some
idea of the character of the book itself, and of the very
wide extension it has had in the East and in Europe.
As regards the latter, the bare description of the particular version I have been editing will indicate how
wide a traveller it has been. For it is the English
version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew translation of an
Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian
original. In that bridge of traditions there are two
keystones, the Latin and the Hebrew versions, and

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

145

both were made by Jews. This is only one of the
many lines of tradition. I have drawn up a bibliographical pedigree of the Bidpai literature, from which
it appears that the book has been translated into thirtyeight languages, in I12 different versions, which have
passed into over 180 editions since the invention of
printing. Only the Bible itself surpasses that record
among books. Having sufficiently whetted your curiosity about the fables of Bidpai, I propose to satisfy
it by picking out a specimen of the stories it contains.
But before doing so, we had better settle by what
name we are to call this much translated book. We
might refer to it as the Pantschatantraor the Morall
Philosophie of Doni, or the Exemplario contra los
enganos, or the Homayun Tamah, or the Hitopadesa, or Stephanites kai Ichnilates, or any of the
many names which the stories have borne during
their long travels. My own edition I have entitled
the " Fables of Bidpai," because that is the name
by which the stories are best known from Galland's
French translation of the Turkish version. But speaking before a Jewish audience, I prefer to speak of
them by the name of Calila w'
the title of
the Hebrew version, of the seventh chapter of which
I now propose to read to you from M. Derenbourg's
admirable edition. I can feel some confidence in the
accuracy of my version, as I have been able to check
myself by M. Derenbourg's elegant French translation, though our English tongue, I fancy, permits me
to reproduce the Hebrew turns of expression more
closely.

Dimna,

K

I46

JEWISH IDEALS

CHAPTER SEVEN
AND THIS IS THE CHAPTER OF THE NAZARITE

The king said to the philosopher: "I have understood all that
thou hast told me, how things are lost when their owner knows not
how to preserve them; and now tell me, I pray thee, of him that is
hasty in his acts and does not reflect on them or foresee their results,
and tell me a story thereon." Then said the wise Sendebar : "Every
one who acts as thou sayest and does not foresee consequences, fails
in what he does and repents too late. And it happens to him as it

happened to the Nazarite who killed the dog that had done no harm,
because he did not examine the matter and knew not of it." And
the king said, "How was that ?" The sage replied : " Once upon a
time there was a city of the isles of the sea, and in it lived many
good and upright men, among them a Nazarite good and God-fearing,
and his wife was childless. And after many years she gave promise
of bearing a child, whereat the Nazarite rejoiced and said unto her,
'Rejoice and be glad, for thou wilt bear a son who will rejoice our
souls and please our hearts, and I'll give him a lucky name and a
good education. And God will exalt my name in him, and he will
cause my memory to endure after my death.' The woman said,
'Alas, speak not of what thou knowest nought and what beseems
thee not. How knowest thou that all will go well with me, or
whether the child will be a boy or a girl, or if it will live, or if its
character and conduct will be good ? Let such things alone, and
trust in God, who will give thee according to His will. For a sensible
man does not speak of things he knows not of, and does not prejudge
the acts of the Lord. "There are many devices in a man's heart,
nevertheless the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand " (Prov. xix. 2 I).
For it haps to him that presumes to speak like thee, what happened
to the Nazarite, on whom fell the pot of honey.' He said unto her,
'And how was that ?'
"His wife said to him, 'Once upon a time a Nazarite lived near a
king, who gave him for his daily sustenance a cake and a little pot of
honey. He used to eat the cake, and put the honey away in a little
cruse hanging over his head until the vessel became full. And honey
was very dear in those days, and one day, lying on his bed, he raised
his eyes to the cruse of honey and thought how dear it was, and said
to himself, " When the vessel is full, I will sell the honey for a piece
of gold. And then I will buy ten sheep, and each of them will have

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

147

a lamb, and there will be twenty. After that the flock will increase,
till in less than four years there will be four hundred. I will then
buy a cow and a bull [for every four sheep] as well as a piece of land,
and the cows will give me calves, and I will take the males and work
with them the piece of ground I have bought, and, besides, the
heifers will give me milk. Scarce five years will have passed before
all this will have multiplied, and I shall have a grand fortune in
cattle and grain, and I will build me a great and goodly house, and
buy man-servants and maid-servants, and I will take as wife a beautiful and well-born damsel. And soon she will give me a fine handsome boy, born under a lucky star, and in a propitious hour; he will
be a blessing, and preserve my memory after my death. I will give
him an auspicious name, and will care for his education. Ah ! if he
doesn't obey me, won't I thwack him with this stick !" And with
these words he raised the stick as if he were going to beat him, and
struck the cruse of honey, which broke and poured its contents over
the head and body of the Nazarite.
" ' I have told thee this story, so that thou mayst not speak of what
thou knowest not. And long ago it was said, " Boast not thyself of
to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth"'
(Prove.

xxvii. i).

"The Nazarite hearing these words was silent and stood corrected.
And when her time came she brought forth a fine child, a charming
boy, who caused great joy to the Nazarite. And when the days of
purification were over, she said to her husband, 'Stop with thy son,
I will go purify myself.' And when the father had sat by the cradle
a little while, behold, the king's messenger came after him. He closed
the house and went to the Palace. And there was in the house a dog,
and it saw a serpent come out of a hole and go to kill the child. The
dog seized and killed it, and so soiled its jaws with the blood.

FIGURE OF THE CHILD, AND THE DOG KILLING THE SERPENT

" The Nazarite returned quickly from the Palace, and when he
opened the door, the dog came out to meet him. Seeing his jaws
stained with blood, the Nazarite thought the dog had killed the child,
and he slew it with his stick, without thinking of what he was doing.
But as soon as he entered his room he saw his child alive and the
serpent dead. Then he repented and was sad and mournful, saying,
' Would to God the child had not been born, then I would not have
slain this dog, for I have acted like an ungrateful wretch who does
not recognise the good he has received.' When his wife returned

JEWISH IDEALS

148

and saw the dog and the serpent slain, she asked the reason of this
from her husband, and he told her what had passed. Then she said,
'See the reward of those who act precipitately, without seeing how
things really are. After such deeds you repent and regret in vain,
and without lessening your grief.'"
After .this, Sendebar the Wise said to the king, "Wise and
thoughtful men, thanks to thought and reflection, succeed where
passionate men fail that act hastily. The prudent man ought to
reflect, to observe, and then to act slowly and gently, so as to mark the
object he aims at."
(END

OF THE CHAPTER OF THE NAZARITE).

That chapter will give you some idea of the kind
of book Calila w' Dimna is. And at the same time,
it will give you some impression of the very great
influence of the book in providing materials for popular
literature. For the story of the Nazarite who breaks
the pot of honey is the origin of La Fontaine's Perrette,
who counted her chickens before they were hatched,
as Benfey showed in the introduction to his Pantschatantra,and as Professor Max Miller explained in his
charming lecture on the " Migration of Fables," which
And
was almost entirely devoted to Calila w' Dincn.
the main story of the chapter is no less than the
original of the far-famed one of Llewellyn and his dog
Gellert, which has likewise been traced all over the
world by Benfey, and after him by Mr. Clouston. I
will not deny that I have been cunning enough to pick

out the chapter which best exemplifies the enormous
spread of the stories contained in the book. But
almost all its stories have had some voyage, and many
have had quite as much as Perrette or Gellert. And
even more influential has been the form in which the
stories have been put. You know the method by
which, in the "Arabian Nights," story is introduced
into story much the same way as those Chinese balls
of ivory which have other balls within them, while

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I49

those have others, so that at last you wonder how they
got there. Well, that idea of a frame to hold a number
of stories which is found in Boccacio's " Decameron,"
and from there in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," and
in innumerable other collections, came originally from
the Calil w' Dimna. And in tracing the origin of
this very important idea of a frame, we begin a story
which is much more interesting, to my mind, than that
of Perrette or Gellert or any of the others-and that
is the story of the book itself, in which, as will be seen,
Jews have played so large a part.
The idea of a frame to hold the stories and many
of the stories themselves can be traced back to the
great Indian sage and saint Gautama Sakyamuni,
the Buddha, whom we have already met with in the
,rn p sm. Soon after his death, which has been fixed
i
about 453 B.c., a number of the moral apologues he
had told, and doubtless a number which he had not
told, were collected together as the Jatakas, or Buddhist
Birth Stories. These are tales supposed to be told by
the Buddha, and to be in each case experiences undergone by him,.or witnessed by him, during one of his
former manifestations on earth. These manifestations
of the Buddha were supposed to be sometimes in the
form of animals, and thus many beast fables occur in
the "Jatakas" which are undoubtedly the source of
some of the fables that go by the name of IEsop, and
of all IEsop's fables according to the opinion of some.
It is obvious that this idea of including all the experiences of the Buddha in all his manifestations was
a most ingenious way of combining any number of
stories, and the 500 Jatakas are supposed to contain
nearly 2000 stories, and it is not surprising that some
folk-lorists wish to trace all popular tales back to the
Jatakas. Among them is one that interests us, as it

I50

JEW75ISH

IDEALS

contains an exact analogue of the Judgment of Solomon,
with Buddha as the Solomon, and a Raksha or female
demon as the false mother. Now I think it not impossible that the story was carried out to Ophir by
Solomon's vessels, and thus it would be the earliest
instance of Jewish diffusion of folk-tales, that a Bible
story has thus become part of the Buddha-legend. On
the other hand, when we find Rab declaring that the
false mother must have been a demon in disguise, we
cannot help suspecting that the Indian version had
somehow percolated to Babylon and influenced the
Talmudic doctor. This story has by a curious fate
been translated back into Hebrew (from the English
version of a Cingalese translation of the Pali) ten years
ago, and may be found in Jellinek's Beth Hamidclrash,
Bnd. vi.
The Jatakas were held to be so sacred, that many
of them were sculptured round the sacred Buddhist
shrines, a fact not without importance for the future
inquiry. Some of them from Amaravati may be seen
on the walls of the grand staircase of the British
Museum. And many of the stories can be traced in
the Calila w' Dimna, and must have been in its
Indian original, which was probably named " Karataka
and Damanka." As they are there divorced from all
connection with Buddha, our book must have been
composed when Buddhism was on the wane in India,
say about 300 A.D., and in Brahman circles who sub-

stituted the sage Bidpai for the saintly Buddha. Unfortunately, the Indian original is lost, and is only
represented by later excerpts, as in the Pantschatantra
or Pentateuch, containing five of the original thirteen
books, or the Hitopadesa, which has four of these.
The moment the stories start on their travels from
the Indian peninsula their Jewish interest begins.

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

151

The ordinary account given in most versions of the
book itself is that they were first translated into
Pehlevi or old Persian by order of Khosru NurYet if
shirvan (Chosroes the Great) about 550 A.D.
M. Hal6vy is to be trusted, the name Calila w'
Dimazce occurs in the Talmud in the mouth of Rava,
who flourished under the Sassanide Sapor II. about
350 A.D., or 200 years before the ordinarily accepted date.

In a discussion contained in the Babylonian Talmud
(Sanhedrin, 74b) the question is raised how far a Jew
may legitimately have anything to do even with the
ceremonial of idolatry. Rava lays down the general
principle that a Jew need not suffer martyrdom for
merely accidental connection with idolatrous ceremonies. "For if it were so," he continues, "how
could we give fire to pn4p 41pp," as it is written in the
editions, or

pnon

4pn

p, in the MSS. of Carlsruhe and

Munich, or, as M. Halevy would amend it, 4pany 4p op,
which is sufficiently near the names Karataka and
Damanaka of the original Sanskrit. Yet what meaning can we give to the sentence if we are to adopt
this emendation ? Jewish tradition connects the words
with sacrificial fire-irons which M. Halevy connects with
our story-book by the following links. Karataka and
Damanka are the names of two jackals which figure in
the first chapter of the book. The Jews, according to
M. Hal6vy, called the Zoroastrians jackals, which has
thus come to signify fire-snatchers, and then were
applied to fire-dogs and so to fire-irons. All this is
very ingenious-M. Halevy is never anything but ingenious-but it is not very convincing, and I fear I
must add that M. Hal6vy is generally anything but convincing. The fact of dates is dead against him in this instance. Rava lived about 350 A.D., and Persian tradition,

and the text of the book itself, unanimously attribute its

I52

JEWISH IDEALS

entrance into Persia under Chosroes about 550 A.D.

Firdausi, the great Persian epic poet, thought the
event so important, that he devotes a number of his
precious lines to the subject in his poetical annals of
Persia when he comes to treat of the reign of Khosru
Nurshirvan. We must, therefore, reject M. Hal6vy's
subtleties and allow 4p-r1 4pnp to remain an unknown
quantity till M. Darmesteter or some other Zend scholar
solves the riddle for us.'
From the Pehlevi the fables passed almost immediately into Syriac, in a version which was discovered
under romantic circumstances a few years ago; and
about 750 A.D. the Pehlevi version was translated into

Arabic by Abdullah ibn Almokaffa, a Zoroastrian converted to Islam. But there is another account how
the book got into Arabic which especially interests us.
Dr. Steinschneider published some years ago in the
Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft
an extract from one of Abraham ibn Ezra's astronomical tracts, which I will shortly give you. The learned
doctor was for the time more interested in the astronomical points raised in the quotation, but we need only
take that part of it which relates to Calila w' Dimna.
This runs as follows:
" In olden times there was neither science nor religion among the
sons of Ishmael that dwell in tents till the [author of the] Koran
arose and gave them a new code of religion after his desire . . . till
750 A.D.], arose,
the great king in Ishmael, by name Es-'Saffa'h [fl.

who heard that there were many sciences to be found in India ..
and there came men saying that there was in India a very mighty book
on the secrets of government, in the form of a fable placed in the
mouths of dumb beasts, and in it many illustrations, for the book was
1 The suggestion of Dr. Jastrow that they are corruptions of the Greek
and Latin names of Sunday, Kuriace and Dominica, is equally unconvincing (Revue, viii. 277).-J. J.

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I53

greatly honoured in the eyes of the reader, and the name of the book
was Kalila and Dimna, that is, the Lion and the Ox, because the story
in the first chapter of the book is about them. The aforesaid king fasted
therefore forty days, so that he might perchance see the Angel of dreams,
who might allow him to have the book translated in the Ishmaelitish
tongue. And he saw in his dream according to his wish. Thereupon
he sent for a Jew who knew both languages, and ordered him to
translate this book, for he feared that if an Ishmaelite versed in both
tongues were to translate it he might die. And when he saw that
the contents of the book were extraordinary-as indeed they are--he
desired to know the sciences. He therefore gave a large sum to the
Jew who had translated the above-named book to go to the city Arin
[in Ceylon] which lies under the equator . . . perhaps he might

succeed in bringing one of their sages to the king. The Jew went,
and used many artifices till one of the wise men of Arin determined
for a great sum of money to come to the king. .

.

. Thereupon the

wise man, whose name was Kankah, was brought to the king, and
taught the Ishmaelites the principles of nunber, which consist of nine
figures."

You will observe that according to this account it
was by the mediation of a Jew that the figures which
we call "Arabic numbers," but the Arabs themselves
" Indian signs," were first brought into use in the
West. But what we are more intimately concerned
with is the statement of Ibn Ezra's, that the Jew translated the Calila w' Dimna direct from the Indian.
All the Arabic sources, and most of the MSS., attribute
the translation to Almokaffa, and state that it was
made from the Pehlevi or old Persian. At first sight it
might seem that we could reconcile the two statements
by assuming that Almokaffa employed the Jew as a
" ghost " or " devil," and it would only be natural to
receive two different accounts from the two sides. But
this would negative any direct translation from the
Sanskrit, which is the important point in Ibn Ezra's
account. I fancy I can show that there is some plausibility in the tradition reported by Ibn Ezra, and as the
question is of vital importance in the Bidpai literature,

154

JEW7ISH

IIDEALS

you will perhaps allow me to dilate upon it. The state
of the Arabic text is very unsatisfactory; the partial
edition of Schulten's and De Sacy's complete one were
both made from very poor MSS., as Guidi and Ndldeke
have shown. But it is quite clear from these editions,
and the extracts printed by Guidi, that there are two
distinct families of MSS. Does not this point to two
distinct translations, and so far confirm Ibn Ezra's
account? Again, Benfey is continually pointing that
the Latin translation of John of Capua, and therefore
the Hebrew version of R. Joel, and consequently the
Arabic version from which this was undoubtedly made,
comes much nearer to the Indian original than the
other family of Arabic MSS. represented by De Sacy's
text. On one occasion he even shows that the Latin
text alone of all the versions preserves one of the verses
of the Indian original. Does not this say something for
the other contention of Ibn Ezra's account, that one of
the Arabic versions was derived directly from the Sanskrit ? To test this remarkable hypothesis requires
more linguistic resources than I am able to command.
I have small Arabic and less Sanskrit, and it would
require a master of both to decide authoritatively on the
point. But I trust I have shown enough to cause the
problem to be taken up by competent Orientalists. M.
Derenbourg has given us the best edition of the Hebrew,
he is giving us the best edition of the Latin. I trust
he may still be spared to us to give us an adequate
edition of the Arabic version, and in so doing decide
the question whether our Arabic version was not made
by a Jew directly from the Sanskrit, as Abraham ibn
Ezra relates.
And in deciding this question I fancy I have discovered a test of crucial value which will enable
Arabists to determine with ease the affiliation of MSS.

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I55

I refer to the illustrations which, as we have seen, Ibn
Ezra declared to exist in the Indian text, and was there
probably derived from some such sculptures of the
Jatakas as may now be seen in the British Museum.
Three of De Sacy's MSS. have illustrations, and two
have places where the illustrations ought to be, but are
only mentioned. Now a remarkable discovery which I
have made with regard to the Hebrew text renders it
probable that the illustrations were considered as integral parts of the text, and were passed on from a MS.
of one language into that of another. The unique MS.
of the Hebrew text now at Paris has no illustrations,
unfortunately, but it indicates on almost every page
the place where illustrations ought to be, as you will
remember in the chapter that I read to you. We have
definite proof that there were illustrations in other
copies, for Isaac ibn Sacula, who composed in 1283 a
goody-goody collection of stories, 'npT
,, expressly
as a rival to Calila w' Dimna, put in illustrations so
that his book should be equally attractive. Well, the
Hebrew MS. of the Calila w' Dimzn had illustrations, and on comparing the illustrations referred to
in M. Derenbourg's edition with those actually given in
the editio princeps of the Latin, I become convinced
that John of Capua must have taken into his Latin
translation the illustrations of the Hebrews, or at least
copies of them. You will become equally convinced,
I think, if you will allow me to run through for two or
three chapters the two lists of the illustrations referred
to in the Hebrew, and given in the Latin, German, and
Spanish, who all have the same illustrations, the two
former from the same blocks.

I56

JEWISH IDEALS
P.

Referred to in Hebrew.
Ape on tree and reptile in water.
Animals in water.
Ape on tree and reptile in water.
Lion and ass running away.
Lion seizing ass and fox looking on.

VI
Given in Lat., Germ., Span.
Ape on tree, reptile in water.
Ape and reptile in water.
Lion, ass, man, ape.
Lion seizing ass, ape above.

CHA P. VII

Ascetic striking pot of honey
[ = La Perrette].
Child, dog killing serpent [ = Gellert].

Child and dog killing serpent.

P.VIII
Cat in net, bird on tree, dog and
mouse.
Mouse gnawing net.
Mouse, net, cat in tree, and hunter
going away.
CHAP.

Child killing little bird.
Pinza taking child's eyes out.
King calling Pinza on a mountain.

Cat in net, bird on tree, dog and
man.
Mouse gnawing net.
Mouse, net, cat in tree, and hunter
going away.
IX
Child killing little bird.
Bird like a gryphon [= Pinza]
taking child's eyes out.
King calling Pinza on a mountain.

As the Latin took its illustrations from the Hebrew,
so the Hebrew in all probability took them from the
Arabic; and we ought to be able to see in the Arabic
illustrations which are still intact, some trace of Indian
influences, if Ibn Ezra's account is correct. If that
turns out to be the fact, the same remarkable history
that applies to these stories applies to their illustrations,
which can thus also be traced from India to Spain.
But whether any Jew had any hand in bringing the
fables from India, there is no doubt that it was chiefly
by their instrumentality that Calila w' Dimna was

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I57
brought to Europe. There are four chief channels by
which the Arabic version was brought into Christendom
-the Persian, the Greek, the Hebrew, and the Old
Spanish. Now, the Persian only came to be known in
Europe at the beginning of the last century, and does
not count for much as regards popular diffusion. And
all the other three channels are Jewish; that is certain
for two of them, and I think I can prove it for the third.
The Greek was done about Io8o by Simeon Seth, whom
we have met previously; from this were derived old
Slavonic and Croat versions. The Hebrew was, of
course, by a Jew, whose name was said to have been
Joel. This was translated in Latin about 1270 by a
converted Italian Jew named John of Capua, and from
the Latin version were derived German, Spanish, Dutch,
Danish, and Italian versions, and from the last the
English version I have been editing.
There was
another Hebrew translation by R. Eleazer ben Jacob,
discovered by Steinschneider, and also edited by M.
Derenbourg. This seems to be fragmentary and had
no offshoots, in fact, was what we have termed a " terminus." The third offshoot of the Arabic which influenced Europe was the Old Spanish, which was translated
in 1251. Now the colophon of this reads: "Here
endeth the book of Calyla and Digna, and was done
into Latin from the Arabic and romanced [i.e., put into
Spanish] by command of the Infanta Don Alforso, son
of the very noble King Don Fernando." Now this was
exactly the way in which the Jewish translators used
to work, and we know that this very Alfonso established
a college of Jewish translators at Toledo just about this
time. I therefore suggested some years ago that this
Old Spanish version, from which Raymond of Beziers
made a Latin poem, was, like the other chief offshoots
of the Arabic, the work of a Jewish translator.

158

JEWVISH

IDEFALS

Not alone have Jewish translators done most for the
spread of Calila w' Dimna; Jewish scholars in this
century have done most for the critical investigation of
that spread. The introduction of Benfey to his translation of the Pantschatantrais a marvel of erudition,
even judging it from a German standpoint. And at the
present moment the great master of the Calile literature is M. Derenbourg. I think if this book could be
claimed by any nation besides the one that gave it
birth, we might venture to call Calila w' Dirmna a
characteristic Jewish book, and one of the glories of
Jewish literature.
And the book in itself deserves all the attention that
Jews have bestowed upon it. We should find it, perhaps,
dull compared with the sensational novels of the day.
But its appeal to the mediaeval mind is shown by the
large number of translations it went through. Indeed,
there is a tendency in some quarters to trace all folktales, and especially all beast-fables, to this book. I
have examined these claims with some care and at some
length in my introduction to the English version, and
come to the following results :-As regards folk-tales,
about one-tenth of the European collections can be
traced to this source. And as regards beast fables,
many of the so-called fables of IEsop are derived from
these, and even those of Babrius and Phaedrus were
influenced by the "Jatakas" in the point of putting a
"moral" at the end of the fables, which is a distinctive
Buddhistic feature. I have already pointed out the
influence of the book in the literary device of a framework to hold the stories, which is again Buddhistic,
and I sum up my conclusions as to the origin and influence of the book by stating roundly that the fables of
Bidpai are the fables of Buddha. The book has indeed
had the unique fate of appealing to all the great religions

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

I59

of the world. Originating in Buddhism, it was adopted
by Brahmanism, and passed on to Zoroastrianism, Islam,
and Christendom, chiefly by the mediation of Jews.
(4.) We pass now to the fourth of our "junctions,"
which is known by the name of n~nt~) bv, or " the Seven
This has passed through much the same
Sages."
history as Calila w' Dimna, and is, like that, also a
framework story. I fear I cannot explain the story
before a mixed audience, as it is practically a variant
of the " Mrs. Potiphar formula," as folk-lorists would
say. Nor can I give you an example of the tales, for
the same reason; the few that are not coarse are dull.
Nor am I so certain that the Mishle Sendabar forms
a "junction" in the train of tradition. It is usually
stated that the Latin version which forms the source of
the European variety was derived from this, but I have
seen no very definite proof of this. Dr. Paulus Cassel
has recently produced an elaborate edition of the book,
but he does not enter into this point, and is chiefly concerned in discovering the highly moral tendency of what
seem, to the unsophisticated eye, very immoral stories.
There is a point of connection between the Mishle
Sendabar and the Calila w' Dimna which may
detain us a moment. Both books (in Hebrew) have
been attributed to a rabbi named Joel, and it is likely
enough that the same person should have translated
both. If that is so, we can understand how the name
For the
of Bidpai occurs in Calila as "Sendebar."
Arabic form is Baidaba, and as the difference between B
and Th and I and N only depend on diacritical points,
Joel probably read this as Thindaba, which he thought
a misprint for Sindabar, which in itself is a misreading
for Sindibad. Confusion has often been caused between
the two books by this mistake, and I thought it worth
while to draw your attention to it.

I60o

JEWISH IDEALS

(5.) Finally, we have Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst, the
work of a converted Jew at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was the Joe Miller of Germany, and
passed through over thirty editions. Oesterley had edited
it with elaborate notes showing its wide influence, and
among his references I note some of the Elizabethan
jest-books, so that some of Pauli's jokes may have
tickled Shakespeare. But his collection is more of
sharp answers than of folk-tales, and this notice of him
must suffice. I would, however, remark that the fact of
so many converts being concerned in the diffusion of
folk-tales confirmswhat I have said as to the unlikelihood
of Jews in general coming sufficiently in contact with
their neighbours to transmit to them their own stories.
We have arrived at the last of our "junctions," and
may now make up the way-bill. The importance of the
Calila overshadows all the rest, and the influence of
Jews upon it was so marked, that we might almost sum
up its influences as the total. But that amount is a
very large one, amounting, as we have seen, to onetenth of the whole corpus of European folk-tales. Of
the remaining nine-tenths of folk-tales the origin is
very obscure; and whenever we can trace direct borrowing from one nation to another it is almost invariably
from the Bidpai cycle, so that we may say that, so far
as the European nations share their folk-tales with one
another, they owe this fact to Jewish diffusion.
To some persons this will not seem any great thing
to boast of. They will feel tempted to call all such
inquiries as this by some vigorous name not exactly
They consider nothing of
expressing admiration.
Jewish interest unless it touches upon Jewish theology. In Jewish history they have only a care for the
inner development of Judaism, not for the human
relations between Jews and others to which most

JEWISH DIFFUSION OF FOLK-TALES

161

Jewish historical students are nowadays devoting their
attention. That was the defence in principle of the
Anglo-Jewish Exhibition of last year with which I had
something to do. We looked upon English Jews as
men and not merely as theologians, while recognising
that their theology has had a determining influence on
their relations to their fellow-men. To look upon Jews
merely as theologians and not as men is, I will not say
one-sided, but is bad theology. It has been said that
he who knows only the Bible does not know the Bible,
and similarly, we may say that he who is only a theologian is a bad theologian.
I think that to a wider conception of theology there
is even a point of view from which the subject we have
been studying has its theological interest. I know no
more humanising thought than the idea of all the
workers of the world laughing at the same jokes, and
of little children all over the world repeating the same
stories, the thought that little Hindoos are prattling to
their nurses the same tales as little English men and
women. It is one of those touches of nature which
make the whole world kin. These folk-tales form a
bond not alone between the ages, but between many
races who think they have nothing in common. We
have the highest authority that " out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings has the Lord established strength,"
and surely of all the influences for good in the world,
none is comparable to the lily souls of little children.
That Jews, by their diffusion of folk-tales, have furnished so large an amount of material to the childish
imagination of the civilised world is, to my mind, no
slight thing for Jews to be proud of. Itis one of the
conceptions that make real to us the idea of the
Brotherhood of Man, which, in Jewish minds, is for
ever associated with the Fatherhood of God.
L

THE

LONDON

JEWRY,

1290

(From " Papers of the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition ")

IN the plan' accompanying this paper I have endeavoured to restore the ground plan of the London Jewry
as it was when the Jews of England were expelled by
the harsh decree of Edward I. in I290. My aim has
been to do this with as much exactitude as a surveyor
laying out an estate; and, in fact, as will be seen, the
basis of my reconstruction is the Ordnance Survey of
the City, which is accurate to inches. The method I
have been able to employ is, I believe, novel, and the
ground plan, if successfully plotted out, will be the
first which has ever been drawn with such claims to
accuracy after the lapse of six hundred years without
actual excavations.
I have been enabled to do this owing to the fact that
the boundaries of the City parishes were fixed just
about the time the Jews were expelled. Some time
between the years 1273 and 1294 the boundaries of
the City parishes were settled as we have them at
present marked out on the Ordnance maps. Now, it
is known that the parish boundaries followed the outline of the backs of the houses, and a cursory glance
at the map will show that, in many instances, the
various plots of ground adjoining the boundaries can
be reconstructed. The fronts of the houses are, of
course, given by the lines of the streets, and between
the two we can, I think, restore the outlines of the
1 Reproduced by kind permission of the editor of the Jewish Chronicle,
where it first appeared.
162

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THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

163

plots of ground on which London houses stood when
parish boundaries were fixed. Thus, to take an example, the peculiar configuration of the parish boundary of St. Michael's, Wood Street, at the corner of
Wood Street, can only be explained by supposing it to
be formed of the backs of three houses-two in Wood
Street itself, and the third in the adjoining street,
called Lad Lane at the time of our inquiry, but now
known as part of Gresham Street.
Similarly, the
former configuration of the Hospital of St. Thomas of
Acon is partly defined by the boundary of the parish
of St. Mary Colechurch.
Applying, then, this method, we can obtain, with a
very great degree of certainty, the outline of London
houses about

I29o.

The further step remains of iden-

tifying the owners; and this, in the case of the expelled Jews, was not, after all, such a difficult task.
For their houses escheated to the king on their expulsion, and he immediately issued writs for inquisition
into their value and position, and then proceeded to
distribute them among his faithful followers. The
letters patent containing these grants, with the names
of the Jewish owners and of the Christian grantees,
and indications of the position and value of the houses,
are still extant in the MSS. Department of the British
Museum (Lansd., 860). From this I derive the names
of twenty-two Jewish owners of London property, as in
the accompanying table, and of these I can localise with
some tolerable degree of certainty the exact position
of their holdings. From other sources I have obtained
two other names and localities (Nos. i i and I7).

The positions of these holdings are not laid down
with any great precision; in many cases merely the
street, in some only the parish, is given, but by an
application of the processes of exhaustion we can get

JEWISH IDEALS

164

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THE LONDON JEWRY, I209

165

some sort of precision out of them. Thus, in three
cases, the houses are at the corners of the streets,
Mosse f. Mag. Elie, at the corner of Wood Street (2),
the house which is so clearly defined by the parish
boundary; Sarra Diei (Dyaye it is elsewhere spelt)
at the corner of Aldermanbury (I), and Roesa Anteman
at the corner of Milk Street (6). In the last case
there might be a doubt as to which corner, but I have
found elsewhere (" Hist. MSS. Report," iv. p. 449) that
the south corner was held by another Roesia Truyte,
who is distinctly mentioned as residing "opposite
the church." We have thus both corners of Milk
Street accounted for.
In the case of Aaron fil.
Slemme, whose tenement was in the parish of St.
Olave and in Colechurch Street, the parish boundary
forces us to locate him near the south-west corner of
that street. But there is another tenement, that of
Jorvin Sackerel, with the same description; how can
we determine the relative positions of the two ? Here
another criterion comes in, that of the rental: Aaron's
house let for £2 per annum, Jorvin's for no less a
sum than £3, i8s. 8d., which can only be because
it was on the larger plot. Similarly, Mosseus Crispin's
house in Milk Street must have been a large one,
as his rental was £3 , ios., against Roes' Anteman's
of only I Is. 4d., so that will justify us in allotting him
the plot No. 6 in our plan. The relative positions of
other owners is sometimes given by our knowledge
of the previous history of the houses. Thus taking
Milk Street again, we learn from a Patent Roll of 4
Ed. I., 1276, that Cresse and Elias, sons of Magister
Mosse, were allowed to inherit the house their father
formerly held in Milk Street, and which lay between
the house of Henry de Trowyk on the south, and that
of Bonamy of York on the north. Now, sixteen years

I66

JEWISH IDEALS

afterwards, the date of our plan, we find Muriel, the
daughter of Cresse and Jacob, the son of Bonamy,
holding houses in the same street; and we cannot be
far out in assuming that these were the same houses
that their fathers had held, and therefore we are
justified in placing these two names side by side, with
the Yorkshire Jew to the north of the London Jewess
(9 and Io). In two cases the positions are given
precisely in a document giving the limits of the parish
of St. Stephen, Coleman Street, to which my attention
was called by Mr. C. T. Martin. This enables us to
locate Manser fil. Aaron at the south-west corner of
Basinghall Street (15), and one Elie Fraunceys at the
opposite house (i7); and we learn incidentally that
the same house had been previously held by Elie his
father (of whom he was probably a posthumous child),
and by Simon his grandfather, who had clearly come
from France. Nor are these the only cases where one
can trace the previous history of the houses vacated
at the Expulsion. The block of buildings in Catte
Street, to the east of the church of St. Lawrence, is
especially interesting from this point of view, as well
as from others. We find in I207 that Isaac the Cyrographer, or keeper of the chest in which the Shetaroth
were preserved, was enfeoffed before the Justices of the
Jews of lands in St. Lawrence Jewry which had belonged to Josce de Ebor and Samuel Hoppercol, and
had escheated to the king (Mag. Rot. 7 Joh. Ib).
This Josce of York was the father of Aaron of York,
and the lay head of the York community, and as such
had the honour of being killed last in the magnificent
scene at Clifford's

Tower at York in

II90, where

500 Jews and Jewesses preferred death to change of
faith. Yet his houses escheated to the king because
of his death. In 1220 one Hugo de Nevil sues

THE LONDON JEWRY,

1290

167

Sampson, son of Isaac, for ten years' rent of houses
in St. Lawrence Jewry, and the said Sampson declares
that Hugo had freed his father Isaac for one pound
of cummin seed (Cole "Documents," p. 293).

In 1227

the same Sampson fil.
Isaac pays half a mark for
having inscribed on the Great Roll of the Exchequer
that he has given to Abraham his son, and the son
of Malke his wife, the land which he holds in St.
Lawrence Jewry, which land lies between the property
which was Abraham's fil. Avegaye, on the east, and
Judah of Warwick's, on the west, and extends in
length from the highway to the Synagogue (Brit. Mus.
MSS. Add., 4542).

Here, then, is a hitherto unknown synagogue in the
parish of St. Lawrence, in a street running east and
west, which can only be Catte Street, now Gresham
Street. There is a curious confirmation of this in old
Stow's " Survey of London," which enables us to
identify the house, and what is more, to obtain a
sketch of part of it. In speaking of Basinghall Ward,
Stow remarks (p. Io8, Ed. Thoms), " On the west
side, almost at the south end thereof, is Bakewell Hall,
corruptly called Blakewell Hall, concerning the original whereof I have heard divers opinions, which I
overpass as fables without colour of proof. . . . In

mine opinion, the foundation thereof was first laid
since the conquest of William, Duke of Normandy,
for the same was built upon vaults of stone. .

.

. But

that this house hath been a temple or Jewish synagogue (as some have fantasied), I allow not, seeing
it had no such form of roundness or other likeness."
In his last remark Stow is referring to the general
opinion that the only Jews' synagogues were round,
as tradition declares the round Norman churches at
Cambridge and Nottingham to have been synagogues.

JEWISH IDEALS

I68

Now we have seen a record of a synagogue exactly in
this neighbourhood, given in the document I have
just referred to, and here we have Stow reporting a
tradition of Bakewell Hall having been a synagogue.
The conclusion is almost forced upon us that Bakewell
Hall was once a synagogue or public building of the
London Jews. And if so, I think I can explain its
somewhat enigmatic name.
Bakewell Hall is in all
probability a corruption of Bathwell Hall, the bathingplace or Mikveh of the London Jewesses, where they
used to perform the ritual lavations prescribed by

are!! rte'a"
.

.

TL

EI

S

Rabbinic law. I find exactly the same change of
name in a Derbyshire village now termed Bakewell,
but in the thirteenth century, Bathquell (Palmer,
"Folk Etymology," sub voce). Bakewell Hall stands
clearly in Ralph Aggas' map of London, 1560, and if

my conjecture is right, we have in it a sketch of a
Jewish synagogue of I290, the latest of them, and

yet one of the earliest we can trace, and the only one
that remained throughout in Jewish hands.
The history of the successive fates of the London
synagogues is typical of the history of the community.

THE LONDON JEWRY,

1290
o

I69

St. Stephen's Church was once a synagogue (Stow),
and so was probably St. Mary Colechurch.
These
were confiscated, and devoted to the all-devouring
Church. In 1232 the synagogue was given to the
Friars of St. Anthony, and became afterwards St.
Anthony's Hospital, on the site of the present City
Bank. In 1262 another synagogue was defaced and
partly destroyed; and ten years later the synagogue
at the north-east corner of Old Jewry was given to
the newly founded order of Sackcloth Friars (Fratres
de Sacci), because the howling (ululatio) of the Jews
at prayer disturbed the worthy friars. The building
must have been a fine one, as it subsequently became
the residence of two Lord Mayors of the fifteenth
century. It ultimately subsided into a tavern, the
memory of which is still preserved by Windmill passage. (Seymour, "London," p. 556.)
But, reverting to our synagogue facing St. Lawrence
Church in no friendly fashion, how can we explain
that it is not mentioned as such in the list of buildings escheated to the king. At Lincoln, Norwich,
Canterbury, Nottingham, and Northampton, we find
a "schola" mentioned among the tenements left vacant
by the Jews, and the " schola " was a synagogue, and is
strangely similar to the familiar word "shool" for synagogue, still in common use among English Jews. But
there is not even a " schola" mentioned in the London
Jewry. How is this? The explanation is simple:
Synagogues had been forbidden by Bishop Peckham in
1283 (see Mr. Martin's edition of his Letters, vol. iii.
p. xiv.) to be opened or used publicly anywhere in his
diocese. Yet the question remains whether the synagogue remained in the possession of the London Jews
down to the Expulsion, seven years after Peckham had
issued his decree. We should have supposed that a

170

JEWISH IDEALS

synagogue would be communal property. But that was
not necessarily so, as we find mention of a synagogue in
St. Mary Colechurch, held by Abraham fil. Rabbi, about
the beginning of the thirteenth century, and a synagogue in Catte Street, probably the very one we are
discussing, belonged to Aaron fil. Vives in 1281. If,
then, we are to find any trace of the synagogue, it
could only appear in the ownership of a private person,
and without any name of synagogue or "schola," as
that would be against Peckham's decree. Now, the
average rental of the Jews' houses is about /3 per
annum, equal, probably, to about £I 20 a year nowadays; but one of them has the practically enormous
rental of £12, 17s., equal to about £500 a year; and
this house is in Catte Street, and was in the possession
of Auntlera, the widow of Vives fil. Mossei of Ironmonger Lane. She was probably the mother of Aaron,
the son of Vives, who had settled the property on his
mother, and we are thus enabled, I think, to identify
both the synagogue and the owner of it at the time of
At present the site of Bakewell Hall
the Expulsion.
is occupied by Gresham College, which has even to the
present day connection with English Jews, for it is the
headquarters of one who in old days would have been
called Philippus fil. Magni, Judahus, but is now known
to us all as Sir Philip Magnus.
These details will perhaps be sufficient to convince
you that, in allocating the different plots to various
owners, different lines of reasoning have to be adopted.
In rebuilding the Old Jewry I have had "to collect my
bricks from all possible quarters, and it is possible that
in some cases I have merely been "jerrymandering,"
and the whole structure may come down over my head
under the critical assaults of antiquarians better versed
than I in the minutiae of London topography. I can

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

171

only say that I have had some reason in every case for
fixing upon any particular plot as being inhabited.
And even in the three or four cases where some indication of locality has been given without my being able
to fix it definitely, I have had reasons for not fixing.
Thus Benedict Mayre had a tenement in Catte Street,
and there is a tempting location just opposite St. Lawrence which would fit the case well, but that I happen
to know that it was inhabited by Michael the Arblaster
in 1290. So we must leave Ben. Mayre and two or three
others without a home for the present. The plot next
to it (No. I 2) has some historic interest from its connection with John Wyclif, the great Reformer, who, as
Master of Balliol, had possession of it, but was attacked
in the Law Courts for wrongful possession. In the
pleadings it came out that the house had been built by
Thippe, the widow of Isaac of Southwark, one of the
most important financiers of the time, by whose means
the original St. Thomas' Hospital was built.
I spoke just now of rebuilding Old Jewry, but that is
just what I have not been doing, as must have occurred
to any of you who is in the slightest degree acquainted
with the ordinary ideas about early London topography.
Jewish houses are conspicuous by their absence in the
street which is now called Old Jewry, and is generally
supposed to have been the early home of the London
Ghetto. It has come to me as the greatest surprise of
my researches to find not a single house that can be
definitely located in Old Jewry, and belonging to a Jew
in 1290, when they left. A little reflection and research, however, has enlightened me on the subject.
Jews lived no longer in the Old Jewry in I290 because
their lands and houses there had been, under one pretext or another, taken away from them during the preceding century. Thus, at the south-west of Old Jewry

I72

JEWISH IDEALS

was the house where Thomas Beket was born, and,
after he was canonised, his family established a monastery of St. Thomas of Acon on the ground now covered
by Mercers' Hall and Chapel. In doing this, two Jews
were displaced one named Moses of Canterbury, who
had to make way for Thomas of Canterbury.' What
with this monastery, St. Mary Colechurch near it, St.
Olave's in the centre, with St. Martin Pomary at the
back, and the Penitentiary Friars at the north-east
corner, the space of the Old Jewry was crowded out
with churches. The Church, indeed, seems to have
been specially careful in providing the Old Jewry with
spiritual weapons against the unbeliever. There was
once a synagogue in St. Mary Colechurch, in Ironmonger Lane. This had become the property of the
Earl of Gloucester, after having been that of Abraham
f. Muriel, and previously belonging to Abraham f.
Rabbi." The corner house of Ironmonger Lane was
purchased by the Earl of Lancaster as early as
Richard I. (Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, vi. p. 13 8)
from a Jew. These two houses were convenient to
these great nobles because of their proximity to the
tilting ground, where all the jousts were held. At the
opposite corner of Old Jewry a house at the corner of
Lothbury, belonging to Isaac of Norwich, was granted
by John, in 1214, to the Earl of Derby.3

It is clear from

these instances that the houses of the Jews were of exceptional grandeur, and they have always had the credit
of being the first to build houses entirely of stone, nearly
the earliest instance of such houses used for domestic
purposes still extant being the Jews' house at Lincoln.4
1 Loftie, i. p. 114.
2 Brit. Mus. Harl. Ch. 43, A. 56.
3 Maitland's " London," p. 4 3 8b.
4 H. Turner's " Domestic Architecture," vol. i.

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

173

The characteristic feature of this is the rich tracery of
the window, which is of two lights with shaft between,
the fireplace on the first floor, with a corbelled chimney
running up the side of the room nearest the street.
The dwelling-room would thus seem to have been on
the first floor, and at Moyses' Hall, Edmondsbury, there
is no window at all on the ground floor.' This was
possibly for security.
Though the houses were grand, the inmates had
little certainty of retaining them in their families.
Besides the instances I have already given, there are
several others where Jews' houses were given by the
king to others. Thus, one Bonevie Miltrun, in 1227,
had several houses and much land in no less than three
parishes, almost all the land now surrounding the Guildhall on the south belonging to him. Yet it was all given
away at his death to clients of the king, except one house
in Bassishaw, given to Joce, the priest and bishop.2
When Joce died, in 1252, he left no less than nine
houses, four in the parish of Bassishaw, three in that
of St. Olave's, and two in Coleman Street. These came
into the possession chiefly of his daughter Henna, only
one house in Bassishaw falling to his son Isaac. An
inquisition was made into his property by a mixed jury
of Jews and Christians, and the record of their verdict
is still extant in the Record Office. (Inq. p. m., 36
Hen. III., No. 49.) From this we can gather something of the selling price of property. Thus Isaac's
house had a rental of £2, and the Christian jury adjudged its value at 40, taking twenty years as the
selling price. The Jews, on the other hand, considered
it worth £53, 13s. 4d .,or nearly seven years longer.
This discrepancy occurs throughout the document, for
1

H. Turner's "Domestic Architecture," vol. i.

2 Stow, p.

1o5.

174

JEWVISH

IDEALS

what reason I am unable to conjecture. There is
another inquisition of a similar kind, consequent on
the death of Jacob Crispin, in 1240, who leaves four
houses in Wood Street to his sons Isaac and Mosse,
and three in Ironmonger Lane to his son-in-law, Abraham Cokeman. He was probably an ancestor of the
Moses Crispin who held a house in Milk Street (No. 7
in our plan) at the time of the Expulsion. In these
and similar cases the houses once belonging to the
Jews had evidently gone out of their hands by the
time of the Expulsion, and a third inquisition throws
light on the reason. On the death of Cress, the son of
Moses, in 1270, an inquisition was held on his property,
and it was decided that the king had no right to his
chattels or lands, as he had never transgressed the
laws, but had always acted as a good Jew.' It follows
from this that if any offence could be proved against a
Jew, his property escheated to the king on his death,
and thus a premium was put upon indicting a Jew for
any crime. It was the direct interest of the king's
officials to obtain any sort of conviction against a Jew,
as this would cause him to forfeit his property at his
death. It was, doubtless, by some such means as these
that the Jews were gradually ousted out of Old Jewry.
Indeed, there are long lists in the Record Office of
Jews whose property had thus escheated to the king.
And this leads me to discuss for a moment the tenure
by which Jews could hold land. We here see them in
possession of land in the most valuable part of the City,
and yet it is generally asserted that Jews could not
hold land. A note of Madox, the historian of the
Exchequer, which I found in his MS. collections at the
British Museum,2 will throw some light to the initiated,
though it is couched in language not easily compre1

Tovey, p. 127.

2

Add. MSS. 4542.

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

175

hended of the vulgar: "When Jews were seised of
lands," he says, " they were not seised of them in the
same manner as the king's subjects or homagers were;
the Jews did no homage for theirs pro homagio et servitiis, for a Jew was incapable of being a homager. He
was, therefore, only seised of it as a Gaige gaiged to
him in simple seisin at king's will. They were king's
villeins or serfs." That is, I take it, that if a man
owed a Jew money, he could gaige or pledge his land
to him till he repaid it, during which time the Jew
held the land at the king's pleasure. And this is so
far confirmed, that, though I have found many commissions for an assize of novel disseisin between Jew
and Christian, I have never found one of mort d'ancestor
between Jew and Jew, which would imply that a Jew
succeeded by right to his parents' land, whereas the
other would merely imply that he succeeded to the
debt owed his father, for which the land was a pledge.
A Jew could not be a homager, for paying homage was
a distinctly religious ceremonial, in which both suzerain
and vassal could join, and often implied spiritual benefices. Nor could any one hold as a homager to a
Jew, for the same reason. One of the most striking
incidents in the history of the London Jewry was
when the Jews petitioned, in I270, for liberty to have
the custody of Christian heirs and the advowson of
Christian livings. The Franciscans stormed and raved
against such a proposal, and one of them "manfully
faced the Council," as the chronicle puts it, and
managed to prevent Jews succeeding to the spiritual
rights of land ownership, which were then of such
importance.1
We can now understand how the Jews gradually
lost hold of their possessions in the Old Jewry, which
1 De Antiquis Legibus, p. 234, seq.

I76

JEWISH IDEALS

they held simply at the pleasure of the king. And I
would venture the suggestion that the place was
known as the Old Jewry even before the Expulsion,
for in the Latin document giving the limits of the
parish of St. Stephen's, to which I have before referred,
there is a reference to "veteri Judaismo." This at
once does away with the usual assertion of the historians
of London that the Old Jewry was so named about
1660, to contrast it with the New Jewry, near Aldgate,
where the Jews settled on their readmission.' The
name Jewry may perhaps legitimately detain us a
moment. It is a French collective term, and reminds
us that the London "Jewry" is a daughter of the
Rouen "Juifverie." It is sometimes spelt Giwerie,
Latinised variously as "Judearia" and "Judaismus,"
whence we find a Cambridge parish "in the Judeism,"
and a purely English collective is sometimes used,
"Juhede." It does not necessarily imply a place at
all, but merely a community of persons who were all
responsible for each, as the Jews actually were under
old English law. There is yet another compound of
Jew still preserved in a London street, viz., Jewin
Street, near Cripplegate. This was formerly known
as Jewyn Garden, and was the burial-place of the
London Jewry, and indeed up to I 177 of all the Jews
of England. In the document giving the list of the
Jews' houses escheated at the Expulsion, which forms
the basis of our work, it is termed Lyrestowe, a term
I cannot explain. The word "Jewin" is really an
old plural,2 similar to that in " oxen," "children,"
"brethren," and "rosen," still used in country places
for " roses." Many of the gravestones of Jewin Garden
1

2

Knight's " London," vi., " Old Jewry."

An over-ingenious friend suggests that it is an old dative plural

= Jewina. He forgets that Middle English did not have this inflexion.

THE LONDON JEWRY,

1290

177

were taken in 1215 by the barons to repair Ludgate
with, and one of them was found in Stow's time with
the inscription, ' 'nrpr3n " y n
'I
nT '-1 [n]2n.'
There is said to be yet another Jewry in London previous to the Expulsion. In I238 we read of a Jew, Joce,
and his wife, Henne, being slain in the Jewry of the
Tower ; and in 1279 a writ was issued to the Lord Mayor
to arrest certain apostates from the Catholic Faith who
turned out to be " in Judeism," and so under the jurisdiction of the Constable of the Tower.
It is not quite clear
whether these were converts to Judaism, though we
have several instances mentioned in the records. But
we seem here to have evidences of a Jewry somewhere
near the Tower-tradition says, in St. Catherine's, to
the east of the Tower.2 Some historians of London
have conjured out of this fact the idea of a double
Jewish colony in London, one brought over from
Normandy, and residing near the Tower; the other
already here, in Anglo-Saxon times, residing near the
Cheape. But there is absolutely no evidence of Jews
in England before the Conquest, except in the eyes of
crotchet-mongers; and the presence of an asylum for
Jews near the Tower is sufficiently explained by their
frequent need of protection. The chief resort of the
Jews of London in olden times was where they were
most wanted, near the great market of the City, West
Cheape. You will observe that I have placed no Jews'
or other houses between Ironmonger Lane and Milk
Street. That was because there were no houses there,
1 Stow, p. 15.
There can be little doubt that this was the tombstone of
R Moses b. Isaac, the author of the Sepher Hassoham, the most considerable literary production of English Jews before the Expulsion. He
must, therefore, have died before 1215.
2 Knight's " London," vi. (" Old Jewry "). Dr. Gross doubts any such
Jewry, regarding the above phrases as having regard to jurisdiction of the
Constable of the Tower.
M

178

JEWISH IDEALS

but only booths or sheds, just like a Continental market.
There was the Cheape, or selling-place (cf.the German
Kauf and our "cheapen"), where the various merchants
exposed their wares, after which some of the streets of
the neighbourhood are called Milk Street, Wood Street,
Bread Street, Ironmonger Lane, and the like. We
know that this remained an open place at least up to
I274.
One of the most brilliant chapters of Mr.
Loftie's " History of London " deals with an interesting
struggle between the Corporation and the traders as
to their right to keep their booths fixed. "Cheapside"
is usually interpreted to mean " the side of the Cheap;"
but there is another suggestion that the word means
the "shid or shed of Cheap," the grand stand that
used to be erected to see the jousts that were performed
in the Tilting Ground, which filled the southern part
of Cheap.
Here, in the centre of London's busiest life, the
Jews settled for a time in lordly houses and in general
luxury, varied only by occasional massacres.
They
probably did not do so till close upon the end of the
twelfth century; for in I135 the street of the Jews was

in Haco's Ward-for wards were then named after their
aldermen, a remnant of which practice still remains in
the wards of Farringdon and Basinghall.' The ward
of Haco seems to have been in Broad Street, and the
westward movement of the Jewry may be said to have
continued ever since, with an interruption of some four
centuries, till at present the "Jewries" are as far west
as South Kensington.
The position of the Jewry near the chief market
seems so natural as scarcely to need explanation, and
In
almost all the English Jewries are so situated.
York, it was near the Guildhall, as in London, for the
1 Loftie, "London" (" Historic Towns"), p. 98.

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

179

mayor was the natural protector in both cases.
In
Lincoln, the synagogue adjoined the market ; at Oxford,
the Jewry was just in the centre of the town at Carfax
(or Quatre voies); at Cambridge, at first near the
castle, but afterwards near the market; and the same
holds good of Warwick, Gloucester, and Winchester;
and if at Bristol and Southampton the Jewries were by
the chief quays, it was for the same reason. The only
exceptions to the rule of their being near the market
are at Canterbury and Leicester.
As we are now comparing the various Jewries, we
may attempt some estimate of their comparative importance. We can do this at two dates, about 100
years apart from one another. The names of those who
paid towards the ransom of Richard I. in I 195, when
there are 31 London Jews among 360-a twelfth-and
the houses escheated to the king at the expulsion in
1290, when there are 23 London houses out of 138-

a seventh. In wealth these were out of all proportion.
In 1250 they paid nearly a third of a tallage of 1000ooo
imposed on all the Jews in England. Making the
best estimate I can, I should reckon that in I290 the
London Jews were about one-eighth of the Jews
scattered among some 120 towns and villages of the
country. The exact number of Jews expelled is given
at 15,o60o, a number on which some reliance can be
placed, as exact registers of Jews' names had to be
kept for tallage purposes, especially since 1274, when
a charge of 3 d. per head per annum was charged on
every Jew over twelve. This would make the London
Jews number some 2000, which is exactly the number
mentioned by a Jewish historian, Salomon ibn Vergas.'
It is, however, impossible to believe that these were
lodged in some twenty-five houses, eighty in a house,
1 Shevet Jehuda, ed. Wiener, § 19.

Cf. Evek Habacha, p. 41.

180o

JEWISH IDEALS

though thirty is by no means an unusual proportion in
foreign Ghetii. We must, therefore, conclude that large
numbers of the Jews lived in hired houses. On the
other hand, the plots of ground in one place would
easily hold more than one house, and in one or two
instances I have found a reference to three houses
joined into one.' Again, our list may not exhaust the
number of houses held by Jews, for the simple reason
that the king did not give them all away, but may have
kept some for himself. Thus there is little doubt that
the plot of land between Old Jewry and Ironmonger
Lane, in Gresham Street, was inhabited by Jews, and
that the king built his Wardrobe on the site of their
houses, where it remained till the time of Henry VI.
This is expressly mentioned by Stow (p. Io6). Our
plan cannot, therefore, claim to give all the houses held
or inhabited by Jews at the time of the Expulsion.
We have perhaps lingered long enough over the
mere outside of the London Jewry, and may now venture to say something as to its inhabitants and their
varied fortunes during their stay in England. We can
put this in the shortest, though not, perhaps, the most
elegant form, in the shape of annals,
Io7o. Came from Rouen at the invitation of the Conqueror. They
can, therefore, boast they came over with the Conqueror.
1130. We first hear of the London Jews on occasion of their being
fined

2000, an enormous sum= £8o,ooo, for killing a

sick man. Probably some charge of magic is involved in
the brief record.
I 36. Great fire of London did not spare the Jews' quarter.
I 158. A visit from Abraham ibn Ezra, the celebrated Spanish Jewish
commentator, poet, philosopher, and traveller. He composed here his Epistle on the Sabbath, and a philosophical
work, Yesod .Moreh.
1 E.g., in the inquisition into the property of Joce the priest, already
referred to.

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

8II

II68. A fine of 5000 marks was imposed on them.

I i77. The London Jews were freed from the necessity of keeping a
single graveyard for all the Jews of England, who were
allowed to have ground wherever they had license to settle.
This was a very important concession from a feudal standpoint, because a graveyard must be in absolute possession.
They were fined a quarter of their chattels.

1187.

1188. Tallage of 60,000 marks, or

£40,000.

In

estimating the

value of these sums we should probably have to multiply
by 50, and, at any rate, we should remember that the king's
I

189.

1195.

1204.

2o10.
1 211.

T215.
1218.

I220.

income was only

/65,000.

The massacre at Richard's coronation, September 3rd, due
probably to the rise of the crusading spirit in England.
London Jews contributed /478,
7s. 4 d. out of 5000 marks
contributed to the king's ransom by the Jews of England.
The " Bishops" of the London Jews were Deulesaut, Vives,
Abraham.
An attack was made on them by citizens of London, which
called forth a sharp rebuke of John, addressed to the
mayor.
John imprisoned all the Jews of England, and imposed a
tallage of 60o,oo000o marks. Mahy fled the kingdom.
Joseph b. Baruch visited England, and induced many English
Jews to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. While he
was in England he commissioned Jehuda b. Kardinal to
make a new translation of Jehuda Hal6vi's Kusari.
The barons in revolt against John plundered the London
Jewry, and repaired Ludgate with their gravestones.
All Jews ordered to wear a badge on the upper part of their
garments. Two tablets of the Law in England.
"Bishops " of Jews-Josce, Isaac, Benedictus.

I226.

Tallage of 4000 marks.
1230. Tallage of 6000 marks.

1232. Synagogue given to St. Anthony's Hospital (now City Bank).
1233. Domus Conversorum, for converted Jews, was founded in New
Street (now Chancery Lane) on ground belonging to Jews.
The site is now occupied by the Rolls Court, which only
recently was presided over by an unconverted Jew, Sir
George Jessell. The number of converts in residence was
never more than thirteen. They seemed to have kept up
their old practices, as we find one Nicholas, a convert,
pardoned for recurring to his usurious practices in 1275.

JEWISH IDEALS

182

1236. Seven Jews of Norwich were brought up to London, and
hanged there for circumcising a young lad.
1237. Elyas elected " Episcopus " in place of Aaron of York.
1240. A Jewish parliament was summoned of six of the chief Jews
of each Jewry to consult with the king, chiefly on taxation
and tallage. Members of Parliament for London-Benedictus Crispin, Jacobus Crispin, Aaron f. Abraham, Aaron
le Blund, Elias le Evesk, Leo Blund; Elias Blund was
substituted for Benedictus Crispin.
1241. As a result, a tallage of 20,000 marks was imposed.

1244. A child was found murdered, with marks on his thighs, arms,
and breasts, which a Jewish convert declared to be Hebrew
letters. The body was buried with much pomp in St. Paul's,
and the Jews were mulcted of 60,000 marks (£40,000) on

this pretext.
1249. Another tallage of Io,ooo marks.
1255. Jews sold to Richard of Cornwall for

/5000.

1256. Two hundred and two Jews of Lincoln were lodged in the
Tower for being concerned in the murder of Hugh of Lincoln.
Eighteen were executed; the rest were saved, it is said, by
the intercession of the Franciscans, who otherwise proved
the worst enemies of the Jews.
1257. Bishops of London Jews-Elyas, Jacobus, Solomon. Elyas
deposed.
1259. London Jews pay Henry III. 500 marks for his passage to
France.

1262. A riot against them; 700 killed, and the synagogue defaced.
1263. The Jewry burned, May ioth, by the party of Simon de
Montfort.
A tallage of 60,000 marks demanded from them.
1265. King resumes the Jewry recently given to his son.
1267. The council of Vienna orders the horned cap to be worn.
1264.

1267--7I.

Granted freedom from tallage for

ooo000 per annum.

1269. Jews defended the Tower against Earl of Gloucester and the
Disinherited.
1271. Synagogue at north-east of Old Jewry given to Friars " de
Sacc."
1275. Statute against usury passed. Richard of Reading, a monk,
converted to Judaism.

1277.

Tallage of 25,000 marks.

Manser fil. Aaron sues for an inquiry

into some tools for clipping found on the roof of his house
(No. 14 in our plan).

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

I83

1278.

Six hundred and eighty imprisoned in the Tower, and 267
hanged for clipping, and their houses and chattels escheated
to the king.
1279. A boy being found murdered at Northampton, some Jews of
that town brought up to London, dragged at horses' tails,
and hanged. Three Jews of London-Abraham de Derkinge, Moses de Cantuar, and another--pursue a man down
Broad and Catte Streets, and slay him near St. Lawrence's
Church.

1283. Synagogues closed by order of Peckham, Bishop of London.
1287. Fined I2,000 lbs. silver. All Jews imprisoned.
I29o. Banished the nation by October 9 th.

Such are the outward events that constitute the
annals of the London Jewry. Plundered and, let us
confess, plundering, their lives were buffeted between
the passions of the populace and the avarice of the
king. For the reasons of this anomalous state of
things I may refer you to the introduction to the
Catalogue of our Exhibition, with the views of which
I fully agree. While the Jews remained faithful to
their creed, and the Church refused citizenship to one
of another creed, the medieval status of the Jew could
not fail to be anomalous and degrading. Taxation
and massacre sum up the outward history.
As regards their social life we know little, since our
knowledge depends on legal documents, which rarely
afford much insight of this kind. Of their outward
appearance, the badge and horned cap were not peculiar
to England, but were prescripts of the Church common
to all Christendom. Another law of the Church was
that Jews should not eat meat in Lent or on Fridays. 2
An inquiry was once ordered by the Lord Mayor into
the Jewish way of slaughtering meat, and it was
ordered that no Christian should buy meat declared
1

Riley "Memorials," p. 15.

2 " Richard of Hovedene," p. 124.

184

JEWVISH.

IDEALS

unfit by the Jewish butchers who had previously sold
it to the Christians.' The synagogues were used not
only for religious purposes, as writs were issued ordering that proclamations should be made in the Jews'
synagogues for two or three Sabbaths, if any Jew or
Jewess had a claim against so-and-so, they might make
it before the Justiciars. Jews were not so downtrodden as to lose all spirit. We find an instance of
a duel fought by a Jew.2 I may add that no Jew
could come to London until it was ascertained that he
could contribute to the tallage. They were, therefore,
not troubled with the destitute alien problem.
From Jewish sources we learn very little. It is
probable that Jews when " called up" to read the Law
went up uncovered, as their co-religionists in France
did at the time." On 2oth Sivan a fast was held by
the Jews of France, England, and the Rhine, in memory
of the martyrs of Blois in I171.4 Jews came to this
country vid Dieppe, and the vogage took one day.5
Education in Hebrew seems to be very general, judging by the many writers of it we meet in the Shetaroth.
What other means of culture they possessed we do not
know, but there is evidence that they shared in most
of the luxuries of the time.
As regards Hebrew literature in the London Jewry,
I have discovered, I fancy, that this was almost
entirely confined to a single family, who are in many
ways so interesting, that I must ask you to take the
trouble to follow their genealogy on the following
page.
Before I enter into any details, I must interpose a
1 Riley, "Chron.," p.

177.

2 Goldschmidt, Gesch., p. 74.

3 Zunc, Z. G.
4 Id., Ritus, p. 127.
6 Semag, § 25.

THE LONDON JEWRY,

1290

I85

-

-

0

4

"11I

ti

z

C)

CD

H

Cf2
0

1/ 1

&Q0

1I
0-r-

'ea
r-,
c3

c3
C)
r-+
03

Ce O

C)
b11)C.

--

E

wCe

186

JEWISH IDEALS

short excursus on a title that occurs very frequently in
the genealogy, and has been the subject of dispute
between Coke, Prynne, and Tovey, as to whether "le
Evesk," "Episcopus," or " Bishop of the Jews," meant
an ecclesiastical office or not. Tovey decides in favour
of its ecclesiastical character, and dubs those who hold
it " Chief Rabbis." This might do well enough for a
rough translation, but when we find three "Episcopi"
living together at one time, it becomes impossible to
assume that all were Chief Rabbis. The fact that they
are three, and only three, and never less than threefor on one occasion two obtain permission to choose a
third colleague-almost solves the difficulty by itself.'
They were the members of the Beth-Din, or ecclesiastical tribunal composed of three Dayanim or judges,
which had jurisdiction in many civil matters, and made
a curious combination of the two at times, as on one
occasion they received permission from the king to
issue the greater Cherem, or excommunication against
those who would not contribute to the maintenance
of the cemetery (Tovey, p. 127). Thus "Episcopus "
must be translated as Dayan.2
Well, having settled what "Episcopus" is, which
occurs so frequently in this family, we may proceed to
Dr. Berliner has
discuss its literary productions.
published, in honour of the Exhibition, the poems of
our only poet, one Meir ben Elias, of Norwich. 3 In
his preface he points out that the father of Elias was
Moses, which immediately recalled to my mind the
great Magister Elias fil. Mag. Mosse, of whom we shall

1195,

1 See "Annals," supra, in years
1220, 1257.
I find also three
"Evesks" at Lincoln in 1240.
2 It is actually translated -tn in the poems of Meir of Norwich,
Berliner's edit., p. 6, but here as a family name. Cf. M. Paris, Cognomine Episcopus, p. 824, ed. Wats.
3 Hebraische Poesien des Meir ben Elia aus Norwich, Lond. 1887.

THE LONDON JEWRY, 1290

187

hear more presently. Elias himself wrote responses,
and his grandfather, Yomtob, was the author of a
legal treatise, now lost, with the title Sepher Tanaim.
Among the Tosaphists occurs the name of Berachyah
of Nicole, who is identical with the Magister Benedictus fil. Mag. Mossei known in the annals of the
Lincoln Jewry.'
There is a Jacob of London, who translated the
Hagadainto the vernacular for the sake of women and
children.2 I am much mistaken if this is not Jacob le
Evesk. Dr. Neubauer has attributed to Hagin le
Evesk a Hebrew translation of the Image du Monde
on very insufficient grounds, as it seems to me; 3 but if
true, it only adds one more to the literary members of
this family. There remains only one other AngloJewish author of this period, Moses of London, whose
"Book of the Onyx," a grammatical treatise of some
merit, is the most important product of Anglo-Jewish
literature before

1290.

One is greatly tempted to

identify him with the Moses whose descendants we
see here, but unfortunately this is impossible, as the
author of the Sepher Hassoham quotes that very Moses
(p. 37, edit. Collins). But with this exception, important as it is, all the literary products of the London
Jewry were produced by this family, which I venture
to name, as their discoverer, the Hagin family.
They were not alone authors, but good business
men, and their transactions figure very largely in the
records. What we are more concerned with at present
1

On him and his relations, see Mr. M. D. Davis' paper on "The Jews

of Lincoln," which would be invaluable but for its being unprovided with
authorities.
I have omitted Benedict's descendants from the above
genealogy, as they all resided at Lincoln. See succeeding Essay.
2 Zunz, Ritus, p. 63.
3 "Society Heb. Lit. Miscell.," ii. p. 159. The MS. actually gives the
name of the translator David b. Moses.

I88

JEWISH IDEALS

is the traces they have left on the London Jewry. No
less than seven of them held property in the Jewry
at the time of the Expulsion. Leo and Bateman, the
sons of Cresse; Muriel filia Deulecresse; Auntlera,
the widow of Vives or Hagin-for Vives is the French
for Haim, "life," which again is Anglicised as Hagin
Jacobi Clerici;
-Benedict fil. Hagin and Benedict fil.
and last, not least, Elyas le Evesk himself. I have
attached the number of their holdings in my plan to
But the Hagin family
their names in the genealogy.
have left much more permanent traces on the London
Jewry than in my plan, unless I am much mistaken.
The whole land between Wood and Milk Streets was
once Cok Aggyn's,1 who probably got it from his uncle,
Hagin fil. Cresse. Both were Dayanim, and had much
of the business of the Jewry to supervise. Their house
at the corner of Wood Street (No. 2) would be frequently
resorted to and well known, and the fact that a Jew of
the name of Hagin was living there would not escape
the notice of even Christian neighbours. Now, the
lane opposite this house is called Huggin Lane to this
day, and the house itself was held by a cousin of
Hagin at the Expulsion. I do not think it too bold an
assertion that this Huggin Lane preserves traces of the
old London Jewry and one of its chief inhabitants.2
We must not leave this Hagin family without some
1

Record Office, "Tower Misc. Rolls," No. 144.

2

Stow declares, more suo, that Huggin Lane was so called after'" HIugh

in the lane," i.e., the lane was named after the man, and the man after the

lane. His derivation is, however, of some confirmatory value, as showing
a tradition that the lane was named after some person, though Stow had
no knowledge of Hagin le Eveske or his residence in the vicinity.
Another suggestion has been made, that "Huggin Lane" was named after
hogs. But there are two Huggin Lanes, and it is more probable that they
were named after two Hagins (a common name among Christians as well
as Jews) than that there were two quarters where hogs were sold.

the shambles and meat market were then situated near Newgate.

Besides,

THE LONDON JEWRY,

I290

I89

account of its chief ornament, Elyas le Evesk, who was
elected Dayan in 1237, and for nearly forty years was
one of the most striking figures on the London Jewry.
He was, of course, one of the M.P.'s for London
at the Jewish Parliament in I240.

In

I249

he was

allowed to have Abraham fil. Aaron as his associate,
and three years after he had to elect a third on the
Beth Dinz. He early obtained riches, and naturally
attracted the notice of the king, who squeezed out of
him £io,ooo, equal to the tallage of all the Jews of
England, as well as fIoo a year for four years. We
can quite understand the energy with which he spoke
in 1253, when the king's commissioners tried to get
blood out of a stone. I tell the incident in Prynne's
quaint translation of Matthew Paris' vigorous description. It is probable enough that the historian was
present at the scene:
"Elyas, therefore, of London, High Priest to the
Jews, taking counsel with his companions, answered
for them all: 'O noble Lords, we see undoubtedly that
our Lord the King purposeth to destroy us from under
Heaven. We intreat, for God's sake, that he would
give us licence and safe conduct of departing out of his
Kingdom, that we may seek and find a mansion in
some other place under some Prince who bears some
bowels of mercy and some stability of truth and faithfulness. And we will depart, never to return again,
leaving here our household stuff and houses behind us.
How can he love or spare us, miserable Jews, who
destroys his own natural English? He hath people,
yea his own merchants, I say not usurers, who by
usurious contracts heap up infinite heaps of money.
Let the King rely upon them and gape after their
emoluments. Verily they have supplanted us and impoverished us. Which the King, however, dissembles

I9go

JEWISH IDEALS

to know, exacting from us those things we cannot give
him, even though he would put out our eyes or cut our
throats when he had first pulled off our skins.' And
speaking thus, with sighs and tears hindering his
speech, he held his peace, falling almost into an extasy,
ready to die. Which when it came to the knowledge
of the Magistrates, they permitted them not to depart
out of the realm, saying, 'Whither will ye flee, O
wretches? Behold, the King of France hateth and
persecuteth you, and hath condemned you to perpetual
exile. Shunning Charybdis, you desire to be drowned
in Scylla.' "
The same year we find a Hebrew response from him
in a Rabbinical treatise of Mordecai ben Hillel. Two
years afterwards he was cast in prison as a surety for
the tallage of the Jews. His prosperity had gone, and
in 1257 he was deposed from his office, for what reason
we know not. Then comes a tragic incident in his
career. In 1259 Elias cognomine Episcopus was " new
born in the Spirit," Matthew Paris says, i.e., he was
converted, and it was reported that he had confessed
strange doings he had done when ecclesiastical chief of
the Jews poisons he had prepared for English nobles,
and so on. Fancy what a commotion it must have
caused in the London Jewry, this tergiversation of him
who had once been their leader. He seems, however,
to have recanted his errors, and was again treated as a
Jew, for in 1266 the king grants him £50 compensation for losses he had incurred owing to the Barons'
We hear of him again in 1274 and
giving or owing money to the king; and in

War.

1275
1277

as
he

was one of the few Jews to whom were granted the
privilege of becoming merchants, without becoming
members of the Merchants' Guild. And at the Expulsion we find him living still, but gloomily apart, in

THE LONDON JEWRY,

1290

19I

Sporier Street near the Tower, the most conspicuous
figure in the London Jewry, 1290.1
What became of him and his companion-exiles one
would like to know. I can only trace two or three of
them. In a tallage-roll of the Paris Jewry for I294
(Revue des etudes juives, No. i), there are four persons mentioned with the addition of "lenglishe" or
"lenglois" :-Bonami lenglois, Jovin lenglois, Mosse
lenglois et Rose sa femme, and Rose lenglishe. Of
these Jovin was in all probability Jorvin Sackerel, the
tenant at the corner of Colman Street, and Rose may
have been either one of our two Roses at either end of
Milk Street.
I have now exhausted all that the time at my disposal
will allow me to say about the London Jewry of I 290,

its ground plan, its inhabitants, their history and
adventures, and subsequent fate.
1 Most of these items about Elyas are given by Prynne, Demurrer,
Part ii., under the several years. Dr. Gross has pointed out to me

evidence of the death of one Elyas le Eveske in 1271, but he was resident
at Hereford.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN'
RESEARCHES IN HISTORY,

ARCHEOLOGY, AND LEGEND

" O0
yonge Hugh of Lincoln, sleyn also
With cursed Iewes, as it is notable,
For it nis but a litel whyle ago;
Pray eek for vs, we sinful folk vnstable
That of His mercy God so merciable
On vs His grete mercy multiplye,
For reuerence of His mooder Marye.
Amen."

THUS sings and prays

Chaucer at the end of his

" Prioresse's Tale," which is supposed to deal with
This is
the cause celBbre of Hugh of Lincoln.
the fact, since he locates his tale "in Asie in
not
But the invocation to the little
the gret citee."
Hugh at the end, marked as it is with signs of the
most earnest and naive piety, is even more significant
of the general and thorough-going belief in the marAnd indeed
tyrdom of the little lad of Lincoln.
we know from the widespread and popular ballads
devoted to this subject that the case must have
made a profound sensation in England, and remained
as a standing example in the folk-mind of Jewish
cruelty and fanaticism. Such a case as this, therefore,
well deserves the attention of the Jewish Historical
Society of England. We may be tolerably confident
1 The boy martyr is called little St. Hugh to distinguish him from
great St. Hugh of Lincoln, the bishop of that see, who died in I200, and
was curiously enough a friend of the Jews (see Jacobs' "Jews of Angevin
England," p. 207).
192

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

193

at the start of our inquiry that we shall not be so easily
convinced of any specific Jewish cruelty and fanaticism
in the case. On the other hand, as Englishmen, we
shall not be too ready to accuse the Englishmen of the
thirteenth century of any deliberate falsification of evidence, or malversation of justice. They were thinking
and acting under the prejudices of their time, and it
will be part of our inquiry to consider the rise of the
said prejudice. Mathematicians are accustomed to
speak of " pretty problems " requiring special ingenuity
or peculiarly elegant methods for their solution. The
history and legend of Hugh of Lincoln presents in this
sense to the historian and folk-lorist a specially " pretty
It might indeed be easily made into an
problem."
object-lesson of the modern methods of research in
history, archaeology, and legend.
I
Let us take the facts of the case first; and here we
are especially fortunate in having them stated for us as
they presented themselves to the mind of the time by
Matthew Paris, the greatest historian of mediaeval
England. We cannot start our inquiry better than by
giving in English the contents of the Monk Matthew's
by no means inelegant Latinity.'
OF THE BOY HUGH OF LINCOLN.
This year, about the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul [July 27],
the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about eight years
old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber, where they fed him
on milk and other childish food, they sent to almost all the cities of
England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect

1 Matthew Paris, Historia Major, edit. Luard (Rolls Series), v. pp.
516-18, 522, 543 (2).

194

JEWISHXH

IDEALS

from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln, in
contumely and insult of Jesus Christ. For, as they said, they had a
boy concealed for the purpose of being crucified; so a great number
of them assembled at Lincoln, and then they appointed a Jew of
Lincoln judge, to take the place of Pilate, by whose sentence, and
with the concurrence of all, the boy was subjected to various tortures.
They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with
thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced
him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him
with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling
him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in divers
ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear.
When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross,
and for some reason disembowelled it; it is said for the purpose of
their magic arts. The boy's mother, when her son had been missing
several days, sought for him diligently, and the neighbours told her
that they had last seen him playing with some Jewish boys of his
own age, and going into the house of a Jew. So the mother entered
the house suddenly and saw the boy's body lying in a well; the
bailiffs of the city were then cautiously summoned, the body was
found and drawn up. It was a remarkable sight which then presented itself to the people; the mother's cries and lamentations
provoked all the citizens assembled there to tears. There was present
John of Lexington, a man of learning, wise and prudent, who said,
"We have heard sometimes that Jews have dared to attempt such
things in insult of our crucified Lord Jesus Christ;" and then
addressing the Jew whose house the boy had entered whilst at play,
and who, as being for that reason a greater object of suspicion, had
been arrested, " Wretched man, dost thou not know that a speedy
end awaits thee ? All the gold in England would not suffice to
ransom or save thee. Yet unworthy though thou art, I will tell thee
how thou canst save thy life and limb from destruction. Both of
these will I save thee if, without fear or falsehood, thou wilt expose
unto me all that has been done in this matter." Then the Jew,
whose name was Copin, thinking that he had found a way of escape,
answered, "lMy lord John, if thou wilt repay my words with deeds,
I will show wondrous things unto thee." Then when John zealously
urged and encouraged him, the Jew continued: " What the Christians say is true. Almost every year the Jews crucify a boy in injury
and insult to Jesus. But one is not found every year, for they do
this privately and in remote and secret places. This boy, whom they
call Hugh, our Jews crucified without mercy, and after he was dead,

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

195

and they wished to hide his corpse, they could not bury or conceal it.
(This they wished to do, as the body of an innocent boy was considered useless for augury, which was the reason for disembowelling
it.) In the morning, when they thought it was hidden away, the
earth vomited and cast it forth, and there it lay unburied on the
ground to the horror of the Jews. At length they threw it into a
well, but still they could not hide it, for the mother never wearied
in her search, and finding the body, informed the bailiffs." The Jew
was kept in chains, and the body given to the canons of Lincoln, who
had asked for it, and who, after displaying it to an immense number
of people, buried it honourably in the church of Lincoln, as if it had
been that of a precious martyr. The king, when he heard what had
happened, was angry with John for having promised life and limb
to such a wicked being, which he had no right to do; for a blasphemer and murderer such as that man, deserved to die many times
over. Then the guilty man said, "My death is imminent, nor can
John give me any assistance. I will tell the truth to you all.
Nearly all the Jews in England agreed to the death of this boy, and
from nearly every English city where Jews live some were chosen to
be present at this sacrifice as a Paschal offering." Then he was tied
to a horse's tail and dragged to the gallows, where he was delivered
body and soul to the cacodoemens of the air. The other Jews who
shared in the guilt, to the number of ninety-one, were taken to
London, and imprisoned there; and if any Christians pitied them,
they were only dry tears which their rivals the Caursines shed.
OF

A CERTAIN SCANDAL WHICH AROSE IN LONDON
AGAINST THE FRANCISCANS ALTHOUGH THEY WERE
INNOCENT.

At the same time certain Jews notorious for the strange death
of a boy crucified by then at Lincoln, having been condemned to
imprisonment and death on the oaths of twenty-five knights, seventyone of them were being kept in the Tower of London, and were about
to be hanged. But they sent secret messengers to the Franciscans,
as the rivals of these latter affirm, that they might intercede for them
and rescue them from death and imprisonment, though they deserved
a most dishonourable death. And they indeed did rescue those Jews
by their prayers and intercessions from the imprisonment and death
which they merited, being induced thereto by their money, as all the
world believed, if the world can be believed in such a case, or rather,

196

JEWISH IDEALS

as I prefer to believe, led by a spirit of piety; since as long as any
one is on earth because he has free will he can be saved and there is
hope for him, but for the devil and the manifestly damned one must
not either hope or pray because there is no hope for them; for death
and an unavoidable sentence has once for all irrevocably ensnared
them. But the above scandal besmirched them although they were
innocent. But the common people did not help them as before in
their alms, but withheld their hand from them.

JEWS ARE SET FREE WHO WERE DETAINED IN THE

TOWER OF LONDON.
The same year, on the Ides of May, ninety-one Jews were set free

from the Tower of London who were kept there as criminals, bound
hand and foot, for the crucifixion of St. Hugh, the boy of Lincoln.
These Jews, I say, were guilty by the assertion of a Jew who had
been hanged at Lincoln in the first instance.

In this account it will be seen that all turns on the
evidence of Copin, Jew of Lincoln. It was his evidence that gave to the case the character of a ritual
murder connived at by all the Jews of England. It is
clear that his evidence was, in the first instance, extorted from him by the unveiled threats of John of
Lexington. It was Sir John who first suggested that
the little boy's body, found in the pit, had been
murdered; for all the evidence we have before us the
whole case might be one of accident. It was John of
Lexington who started the idea that it was a case of
mock crucifixion. It may be said at once, as a key
to the whole history, that it was the confirmed and
prejudiced belief of all England in the practice of
mock crucifixion by the Jews that gave rise to the
belief in the "martyrdom" of little St. Hugh. We
must first trace this belief to its source before proceeding further.
England, I regret to say, is the
source and origin of the myth concerning the prac-

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

197

tice of ritual murder of young children by Jews in
contempt and derision of crucifixion.'
The myth first arose in connection with the death
or murder of the boy William of Norwich in I 44.
It sprung fully armed from the vile imagination of an
apostate Jew of Cambridge, named after his conversion
Theobald. 2 He, for reasons which we are at present
unable to penetrate, first suggested that Jews were in
the habit of sacrificing little children to gratify their
hatred of the Christian religion. He seems to have
implicated the Jews of the whole world in the crime,
since he suggested that lots were cast each year in
Europe as to the place in which the next sacrifice
should take place. Thus he asserted that the " martyrdom" of William at Norwich had been fixed upon
at a council of Jews in Narbonne. Incalculable has
been the mischief which Theobald's accursed lies have
inflicted upon the Jews. They were published and
obtained credence throughout Europe just at the time
of the second crusade, when men's religious passions
were aroused to fanatical fury, and Jews fell martyrs
all along the track of the Crusaders. Ever since his
time, whenever a little child has been missing about
the Passover, near a Jewish quarter in Europe, it has
been but a chance if the terrible suspicion of ritual
murder has not again been raised.
1 I speak here, of course, of the "blood accusation " in its modern form.
There was no popular belief in it till after the case of William of Norwich.
It is referred to as " fama communis " in 1236 (Strack, Der Blutabergylcube,

p. 154). It is necessary to emphasise this, as the Athenceu m, in reviewing
b
an earlier form of this paper, referred to the murder of a child by some
drunken Jews, mentioned by Socrates, the ecclesiastic historian, as the origin
of the myth. But a myth must live in the minds of men, and there is no
evidence of such a belief till after the case of William of Norwich.
2 We are still awaiting the full account of the martyrdom of William of
Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth. Short abstracts are given in Jacobs,
1.c., 256 58, and Jessopp, The Nineteenth Century, May 1893.
pp.

198

JEWISH IDEALS

I have been surprised to find in conversation with
Christian friends, who have not the slightest taint of
Anti-Semitism, how general is the impression that
there must be something at the bottom of all these
charges, and perhaps for their sakes it may be desirable to point out how impossible it is for Jews as Jews
to use human blood or human sacrifices in any way as
a part of their religious rites. In the first place, contact
with a corpse renders a Jew impure from that moment,
and incapable of performing any religious rite whatever
till he has been purified. For eating any blood or
anything compounded with blood there is the stringent
Biblical prohibition (Lev. xvii.
: " Ye shall eat the
blood of no manner of flesh : for the life of all flesh is
the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut
off." Besides this, human sacrifice has been unknown
in Israel since at least the time of the Judges, and the
Levitical legislation restricted sacrifices of any kind
whatever to the Temple. Since the destruction of the
Temple, therefore, no sacrifice has been performed by
Jews, except by the Samaritans, who still keep up the
Paschal sacrifice to the present day. With the fall of
Jerusalem the Rabbis laid down the fine principle that
Prayer has replaced Sacrifice.
From all this it is
obvious that no Jews who believe in the Bible or
follow the precepts of the Rabbis would ever think
of sacrificing even an animal as part of a ceremony
which they could consider pleasing to God.
But, my friends rejoin, may it not be possible that
some secret sect of Jews exist who disagree with the
general opinions of their fellows, and believe in the
efficacy of human sacrifice ? It is impossible that such
a sect should exist without having left some trace of
their existence in the vast literature of the Jews. This
has been searched by the bitterest enemies of the Jews

14)

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

199

in the hope of finding some such evidence, but in vain.'
That some Jews may have been murderers of little
children during the long course of Jewish history, no
one for a moment would deny; but that they did so for
any religious reason, there is absolutely not a vestige of
evidence to show, except the " confessions " of Jews
extracted under torture, and the original assertion of
the renegade Theobald, with whom the whole story
arises. There remained only the possibility of certain
Jews having indulged in these crimes for magical purposes, but if they did so they must have learnt their
magic elsewhere than from Judaism, and were equally
bad Jews as they were cruel and wicked men. Similar
charges have been brought against all peoples who
have incurred the distrust or hatred of their fellow-men.
They were brought against the early Christians, against
the Cavaliers, against the Templars, against the Franciscans. A writer named Daumer has written a book,
Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums (Hamburg,
1847), to prove that the characteristic of the Christian
religion, from its origin to the end of the Middle Ages,
consisted in human sacrifice and cannibalism, and the
use of human blood. When Thackeray came over
from India, Napoleon was shown to him at St.
Helena; he was told: "That is Bonaparte; he eats
three sheep every day and all the little children he
can put his hands on."
The moment a myth of
that kind arises, who can tell to what length it will
be carried ?
At Gloucester, in I 168, the disappearance of the boy
Harold was attributed to the guile of the Jews. 2 At
1 On the whole subject see the admirable monograph of Professor
Strack, Protestant Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin, and
the leading Conversionist of Germany, Der Blutaberglaube, vierte Auflage
(Munich, 1892).

2 Jacobs, I.c., pp. 45-47-

200

JEWISH IDEALS

Bury St. Edmunds, in

I

18 , the little boy Robert was

,
made into a martyr by the same prejudice; and these
seeming confirmations of the myth must have deepened
the conviction of England as to its truth. We can see
in the case of Hugh how the very existence of the myth
would lead to further complications of it. The moment
the little lad's corpse is found, without any inquiry as
to whether the death had not been the result of accident,
the legend of ritual murder by the Jews immediately
occurs to men's minds, and John of Lexington gives
voice to the suspicion by recalling the myth to the
Mark what he does next
memory of his hearers.
without any further inquiry. Trusting practically to
the truth of the myth, the Jew in whose house, or
probably courtyard, the boy had last been seen to
enter is taken into custody and threatened that unless
he tells the truth he will be torn to pieces. The
"truth " he tells is filled with a mass of impossibilities.
The body of the boy, according to his account, was
supernaturally endowed with a capacity for escaping
from concealment. Buried in the earth, it rises to its
surface again. There is one further touch which connects the whole incident with another set of legends
connecting this disappearance of children with practices of Jewish magic. Copin asserts that the entrails
of the lad had been removed for purposes of " augury."
This is again an English tradition, for in 1222 a deacon
of the English Church was executed on the charge of
having been converted to Judaism, and having been
2articeps crirninis in the evisceration of a Christian
lad for magical purposes.2 It would seem as if the
accusers of the Jews had a second string to their
bow; if they could not prove them guilty of cruci1 Jacobs, l.c., p. 752 Matt. Paris, Hist. Major, iii. 71.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

20I

fixion, they would attempt to convict them upon an
equally terrible charge of magic by evisceration.
How far the confirmation by Copin of these charges
was the result of a mixture of leading questions and
violent threats by John of Lexington we are unable
to determine from Matthew Paris's rather confused
account. Nor does he tell us from what source was
derived the further piece of evidence, that the Jews
had kept and tortured Hugh ten days before his crucifixion. As to the later evidence of Copin, implicating
the whole of the Jews of England in the charge, even
Matthew Paris calls this his ravings (" deliramenta ").
I fancy there was more method in Copin's madness
It was his last
than might at first sight appear.
frantic effort to get his doom postponed. If he could
implicate the whole of the Jews in his guilt, or in the
charge with himself, he might hope to be kept alive as
the chief witness while a long and protracted inquiry
into the matter was being made. The whole of the
Jewish influence would also be enlisted on his side by
his perfidious trick. Perhaps I am doing poor Copin
an injustice, and his motives were less profound and
sinister than I have suggested. He may have been
literally driven mad by fear. Both his original charge
and his final reiteration of it have been but the delirious
ravings of a lunatic. Indeed, Matthew Paris, by calling
them " deliramenta," seems to favour this interpretation
of Copin's action.
There can be little doubt, however, that some confession of some kind must have been extorted, for it
is referred to in another contemporary account in the
annals of the abbey of Burton-on-Trent.' This differs
1 A nnales Monastici, edit. Luard (Roll Series), i. 340, seq. There is
another and shorter account in the "Annals of Waverley," ibid., ii. 346.

This adds the trait that the body was thrown into a drinking-well.

202

JEWISH IDEALS

in several respects from Matthew Paris's account, and on
the whole must be regarded as the superior authority.
The boy is kept alive for twenty-six, instead of ten,
days, with nothing to eat, instead of being pampered
on milk food. His death is decreed by a council of
Jews, who cut off his nose and crucified him. Suspicion is aroused against the Jews by the large number
who had assembled at Lincoln under pretext of attending a grand wedding. The mother starts off to Scotland
to petition the king for an inquisition, and the Jews
then throw the body into a well. When it is drawn
out a blind woman touches it with her hands, and
says, "Sweet little Hugh, alas ! that so it happened,"
and rubbed her eyes with the moisture of the body.
By this means she recovered her sight. Thereupon
the corpse is carried to the Minster, notwithstanding
the protests of the parish priest, who would have liked
to obtain the great prize of a boy martyr for his own
church. The king then arrives at Lincoln and investigates the charges, and orders the Jews to be arrested.
Thereupon a riot occurs, and the houses of the Jews
are stormed. As in Matthew Paris, John of Lexington
promises life to Copin, "the head of the Jews, and
their priest," if he confesses-which he does, but fails
to save his life. Eighteen more were hanged at
London, though the Dominicans (not the Franciscans)
tried to save them. Seventy-one others, the richest
Jews of the land, were saved by Richard of Cornwall.
II
So far we have treated the subject entirely from the
point of view of the materials offered us by the historians. The science of history has nowadays more
means at its command for arriving at the truth than

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

203

its artistic presentment as given by contemporary historians. In England especially we have almost from
the earliest times contemporary records of the Kings'
Courts and Chancery with regard to such charges as
these. When I first commenced my inquiries into this
subject, I was hoping that among the mass of records
preserved in Fetter Lane we should be able to come
across the official account of the trial of the Jews for
the murder of Hugh of Lincoln. For days and days
I have searched the Records with this hope. I have
found much bearing upon the externalities of the trial,
but I regret to say have failed to find the record of the
trial itself. The records of the king's jurisdiction in
Henry III. are still preserved in tolerable fulness.
The trial at Lincoln, if there was a trial, must have
occurred

somewhere about

September

1255,

in the

thirty-ninth year of the king's reign, as we have just
heard from the historian, and shall find confirmed by
the records I have discovered. A further trial seems
to have taken place in London, at the Tower, in
November of the same year-i.e., in the fortieth year
of the reign. I have, therefore, looked through the
Assize Rolls of the Justices Errant in Lincoln, 39
Hen. III., and for the Tower Assize Rolls for 40
Hen. III.; but unfortunately neither of these contain
any reference to the cause cdlebre of the year. I
imagine that the record of the Lincoln trial must have
been sent up to London for use in the trial at the
Tower, and that both that and the record of the
London trial and verdict were kept together in a
special Roll which has disappeared.
We must, therefore, be content with a few items
which occur in the various classes of Rolls. Thus we
can trace the journey of the Jews from Lincoln to
London by three entries on the Close Roll of 39

JEWISH IDEALS

204

Hen. III. The first of these orders the Constable of
Lincoln Castle to deliver the Jews accused of the
crucifixion to the Sheriff of Lincoln, in order that he
may bring them to Westminster.'
The others give
orders to the Sheriffs of Huntingdon and Hertford to
assist him of Lincoln on his way through their counties. These are dated i 4 th of October.2 We then
learn from the legal annals of London that on the
Feast of St. Cecilia-i.e., November 22nd-the Jews,
then imprisoned in the Tower, had been brought to the
number of ninety-two before the king at Westminster,
and eighteen of them had refused to submit themselves
to the verdict of a Christian jury unless there were
Jews upon it. 3 These eighteen were indicted before the
king, and condemned and executed before the close of
the day. Doubtless this condemnation and execution
were legal according to the law of the time, which
regarded refusal to plead as a confession of guilt. But
it was obviously unfair to press this on the present
occasion without at least change of venue, and especially when the charge was practically one of conspiracy,
notoriously one of the most difficult to prove. This
was a severe lesson for the remaining seventy-four,
who, as we shall see, were prepared to submit their
case to a Lincoln jury, notwithstanding the obvious
prejudices which existed against them in the county.
On the 7th of January 1256 the king sends a royal
letter to the Sheriff of Lincoln stating that a certain
number of Jews had thrown themselves upon the
county to take their trial for the alleged murder of
Hugh, son of Beatrice.4 To my mind this is conclusive
Close Roll, 39 Hen. III., m. 2.
2 Ibid., m. 2.
1

3 Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Cam. Soc.), p. 23.
4 Shirley, " Royal Letters of Henry III." (Rolls Series), ii. 46.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

205

evidence against their guilt. We have no record of
the proceedings taken at Lincoln; but two months
afterwards, on March I 2th, they were released from the
Tower, as we learn from Matthew Paris, who attributes
their release to the Franciscans, while the Annals of
Burton credit the Dominicans with having brought
about this act of mercy or of justice.' Whether they
were all released on that date is somewhat doubtful;
for even two years later I find on the Close Rolls an
entry commanding the Constable of the Tower and
other officials to release all the Jews in their custody,
and on the same occasion Haggin and Cresse, Jews of
Lincoln, are commanded to make no distress on the
Jews till further orders.2 But to go back to our
records for the year 1256, we now come upon several
that begin to throw some light on the action of the
king in this matter. At the end of May of that year
the king orders an inquisition to be made into the
value of the houses of the Jews who had been hanged
for the crucifixion of Hugh.
He had previously
ordered the chest of the cyrographers of the Jews of
Lincoln to be sent up to Westminster, obviously for the
purpose of ascertaining what debts had been due to
the condemned Jews, and claiming them for his own.4
About the same time there is also a significant entry
as to a local inquiry to be made as to what Jews were
" of the school of Peitevin the Great, who fled for the
death of the aforesaid boy." 5 We shall meet with this
Peitevin again, but meanwhile I would draw attention
to the evidence here given of the existence of a regular
school at Lincoln at this date. As it is obviously
1 Matt. Paris, v. 552.
2 Close Roll, 42 Hen. III., m. 6 d.
3 Ibid., 40 Hen. III., m. II d.
4 Ibid., 40 Hen. III., m. 16 d.
5 Tovey, Anglis Judaica.

206

JEWISH IDEALS

implied that the scholars might possibly be implicated
in the death of Hugh, it would seem that this school
was grown-up people, and was a sort of Jews' College,
or Beth Hamidrash, of the period.
But to return to the king's plunder. As the result
of the inquisition of May, the king ordered the houses
of Lincoln Jews in London and elsewhere to be sold
on August 20th, 1 while he made his profit even out of
those that were not sold by claiming fines from those
renting the houses. By this means we learn, from entries in the Fine Rolls, the names of five Jews who had
been the victims of the terrible prejudices of the times.
These are: Elyas fil. Jacob, Isaac fil. Jude de Ballio,
Deulacres de Bedford, Samuel gener Leonis, and
Sampson Levy.2 A son of the last-named is mentioned
in the Shetaroth published by Mr. M. D. Davis.3
To understand what all this means we must go back
a little. The king had been fleecing his Jews so unmercifully that only fifteen months before the alleged
martyrdom Elyas of London, the Arch-Presbyter of the
Jews of all England, had in an indignant speech asked
permission for them to leave England and find a dwelling with some prince who had bowels of compassion.'
Next year, in February 1255, they repeated their request
in more pressing and indignant terms.5 This the king
refused, but at that date sold all his rights to his brother
Richard in consideration of a sum of 5000 marks.6
1

Patent Roll, 40 Hen. III., m. 2.

comrn.), ii. 240. Other names,
Aaron fil. Peytevin and Hacce (sic), are given in the Athenceur review of
Hume's monograph on Hugh of Lincoln, 18 ,p. 1271 ; I know not on
49
what authority.
3 M. D. Davis, Shetcaroth, No. 16o, p. 3044 Matt. Paris,
v. 441.
6 lbid., v. 487. This was the striking passage quoted twice in " Papers
2 Rotuli Finium., edit. Roberts (Rec.

1.c.,

of Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition," pp. 50, 266.
6 Matt. Paris, i.c.,488.
v.

Patent Roll, 39 Henry III., m. 13.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

207

In other words, just at the time when the accusation
is raised at Lincoln against the Jews the king, by his
agreement with his brother Richard, had no right to
extract any money from them except by escheat from
condemned criminals. We can now understand his
annoyance with John of Lexington for letting his prey
out of his hands, and the reasons for his taking up
the case again after it had been dropped by the local
courts. Henry, like most weak princes, was cruel to
the Jews; his conduct towards them aroused the
compassion of even Matthew. Even his very religiousness would predispose to believe aught of ill from the
murderers of Christ.
There is no doubt that he
approached the case prejudiced doubly by personal
interest and religious prejudice, even if both motives
were unconscious.
You begin to see how vitally important it would be
for the king to make out of the disappearance of the
boy Hugh a concerted plan of all the Jews, and
especially of all the richest Jews of England, to commit a vile and sacrilegious felony. If it had been
merely a case of a murder by a single Jew, the king's
interest would be confined to the estate of a single
individual; but if by any means it could be shown
that it was a conspiracy of all the Jews, the king
would once more get a terrible hold of them and their
purses. His plan was perfectly successful; not alone
did he obtain the estates of the eighteen Jews who
were hanged, but there can be little doubt that he
received ample compensation for the pardon of the
rest. I deduce this from the fact that while the Franciscans and Dominicans, who could only appeal to his
conscience or his mercy, were unsuccessful in obtaining
"pardon" for the Jews, this was granted them at the
request of Earl Richard, who had the control of the

208

JEWISH IDEALS

purse of the whole Jewry. Thus a close scrutiny of
the historical records, if it does not altogether clear up
the mystery of little Hugh's death or disappearance,
at least enables us to penetrate to the motives which
raised it into a martyrdom, and implicated all the Jews
of England in the alleged sacrilegious crime.
It is worth while inquiring at this point what foundation there was for the statement that most of the
Jews of England had collected together at Lincoln at
this time under the pretext of celebrating a marriage.
It was this fact, combined with Copin's confession,
which lent colour to the supposition that the death of
little Hugh partook of the character of a ritual murder. I think I can suggest an appropriate occasion
Sixteen years
for such a gathering at such time.
later, in I271, we find a deed-perhaps the most interesting one in Mr. Davis' book -- in which Belleassez,
daughter of the Rav Berachyah ben Rav Moshe,
betroths her daughter, Judith, to a young man in
Lincoln, the marriage to take place in four years' time,
showing that little Judith was not yet of marriageable
age, and that her mother, Belleassez, was still a comparatively young woman. I suggest that it was to
attend Belleassez's marriage that the chief Jews of
England were in Lincoln at the end of August 1255.
For her father, Ray Berachyah, was by far the
greatest Jewish scholar living in England at the time
of the tragedy. He is frequently mentioned in the
Tosaphists and Halachic works 2 with great respect
as Berachyah of Nicoll or Lincoln. He was in some
way connected with the trial, for there is in Rymer's
Shetaroth, No. I56, p. 298.
2

Zunz, Zur Geschichte.

(Minchat Jehuda f, 89b., Mordecai Berachot,

124, Shilte, Aboda Sara, c. 2.)

p. 441.

Neubauer-Renani,

Hist. litt. de lac France,

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

209

Foedera a document dated 7th January I256, releasing
Magister Benedict fil.
Mosse de Londres from the
Tower, and declaring his innocence of the alleged
crucifixion.' If he could account for the festivities in
his house as the accompaniment of his daughter's
marriage, the suspicion which might attach to the
rest who had travelled to attend the marriage did
not apply to him, and he was accordingly released
two months before the rest.
I think, too, I can suggest where the marriage of
Belleassez took place. The Jews' House in Lincoln,
at the bottom of the steep hill, is associated with the
name of Bellaset of Wallingford, and it has already
been suggested by Canon Venables of Lincoln 2 that
she is identical with Belleassez, daughter of Rav
Berachyah.
It was probably Berachyah's house at
the time, and became part of Belleassez's dower, or
was left to her at her father's death. It would accordingly be at this house-the finest private residence of
its period still extant in England'-that the chief
Jews of England assembled to do honour to their
greatest scholar, and their rejoicings were turned to
tragic dismay by the discovery of little Hugh's remains.
So much for what history has to say or conjecture as
to the fate of Hugh of Lincoln, and the still worse fate
of the Jews accused of his death. Let us, if we can,
obtain any further light from that handmaid to history,
archaeology, which deals with the physical remains of
man's activity upon the earth. Can we, for example,
1 Rymer, Foedera, ed. I816, i. 346.
Patent Roll, 40. Hen. III., m.
at top.
2 E. Venables, "Walks through the Streets of Lincoln," p. 25.

3

19,

It has been figured several times, e.g., Turner, "Domestic Architecture,"
i. 40; Gardiner, " School History of England." Details in Pugin, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture," plate 2.
0

JEWISH IDEALS

210

find any signs of the existence of Hugh ? For it by
no means follows that in a mediaeval case of this kind,
when a Jew was accused of murder, there should necessarily exist anybody who had been murdered. The late
M. Isidore Loeb, whose loss for Jewish history is
almost irreparable, studied carefully a Spanish case
very analogous to that of Hugh of Lincoln.1 When
I was at Toledo I was struck with a fresco on the
cathedral walls, which I was informed dealt with the
fate of El Nino de la Guardia. The picture represented
a little lad transfixed on a cross, and around him a
crowd of scoffing Jews. Well, M. Loeb went carefully
into this case, of which the records are very voluminous
and detailed, giving an account of the torment and
punishment of several open and secret Jews who were
implicated in the so-called crime. He came to the
conclusion, for which he gives well-founded reasons,
that the little lad of la Guardia never existed at all,
and that the Jews were accused and punished for the
murder of a non-existent corpse.2 Can this possibly
have been the case with Hugh of Lincoln ? and can
English justice in the thirteenth century have been so
hasty and unjust as to punish for crimes without any
evidence of a corpus delicti 2 Here archaeology comes
to our aid, and enables us after a lapse of 650 years
to state that little Hugh of Lincoln was a lad of
about four feet two inches high, and therefore well
grown for his age of eight; that his face was round
rather than long; and that if any violence was done to
him, at least none of his bones were broken. You may
perhaps wonder by what magic archaeology can use a
time telescope of this description. The answer is very
1

I. Loeb, Le Sai)t Enfant de la Guardia in Revue des Etudes juives,

tome xv.
2 Loeb, l.c., p. 32 of tirage apart.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN
simple.

S211

In 1791 some repairs were being made at

Lincoln Cathedral, and beneath a shrine which had
always been traditionally connected with the boy Hugh
was found a stone coffin containing a skeleton which
was obviously that of a lad, and which, there was no
reason for doubting, was actually that of St. Hugh.'
When these bones were thus exhumed, there happened
to be visiting in Lincoln an artist named Grimm, who
took very thorough and accurate drawings of the stone
coffin and its contents for Bishop Kaye, who then held
the see of Lincoln. Kaye's topographical collections
ultimately came into possession of the British Museum,
which attracts such things to itself like the magnetic
mountain of Sindbad. 2
During my researches in connection with the AngloJewish Historical Exhibition of 1887 I came across
these drawings, and thus found that we are practically
able to see with our own eyes the actual bones of the
little martyr. But dead men tell no tales, and dry
bones cannot speak. Though this find of mine is of
interest, even if the interest be perhaps a somewhat
gruesome one, it still fails to solve the question of the
guilt or otherwise of the Jews.
It was indeed stated at the time of their discovery
that no dust was found in the coffin, therefore the story
of the evisceration of the little lad was thereby confirmed. But this is a somewhat imaginative inference
from the facts of the case. The bones, at any rate,
were intact. No very extreme violence could have
been used to the boy; but whether he died by accident
or by malice, by cruelty or by chance, archaeology
telleth not.
There is one part of archaeology which is nowa1 S. Pegge, "Life of Robert Grosseteste," 1793, P. 2.
2 The British Museum reference is Kaye, ii. 363.

212

JEWISH IDEALS

days being more and more utilised for the purposes
pf historic elucidation. The study of topography is
more and more resorted to in order to throw light on
problems like that presented by the disappearance of
little St. Hugh. In his case, as we shall see, a study

of the Lincoln Jewry is absolutely necessary for solution of the problem presented by his death. The
following plan of the neighbourhood of the Steep Hill
of Lincoln, near which the Jews most did congregate
in early days, will place the reader in a position to
realise the locality of Hugh's death.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

213

The ancient Jewry of Lincoln ranged from Aaron of
Lincoln's House at the top of the Steep Hill to the
end of the Straight, just where it enters High Street;
in earlier days there was a gate here known as St.

THE JEWISH QUARTER, LINCOLN.

i. Aaron of Lincoln's House.

40. Bishop's Hostel.

2. Jopin's House.

36. St. Michael's.
37. Bishop's Palace.

3. Bellaset's House.

Dunstan's Lock, but previously as Dernestall's Lock:
it was through this lock, tradition states, that little
Hugh went on to his doom. As you may see from the
plan, he had not far to go. Midway up the Straight,

214

JEWISH IDEALS

on the left-hand side, are the three houses which local
tradition associates with the early Jews of Lincoln.
The open space at the junction of the Straight and
the Steep Hill was, there can be little doubt, the scene
of the tragedy. Nearly opposite Bull Ring Terrace,
so named from the bull-baiting that used to take place
in the open space at the end of it, is the Jews' House
associated with the name of Bellaset of Wallingford.
This is on the left-hand side of the Steep Hill, going
up; next door to this, higher up, is a house which, Mr.
Haes informs me, is said by popular tradition to have
been the old Jewish Synagogue. By this is a lane
still called Jews' Court, and the next house is still
pointed to as the place where little Hugh met his fate:
in this house there still exists a pit or well which was
pointed out to Mr. Haes as the very spot where the
boy's remains were cast. Here archaology passes over
into tradition.

III
Where history, the written record, and archaeology,
the physical remains of man's activity, fail to give a
clue, legend, the oral tradition of men's memories
from age to age and generation to generation, may
possibly come to our aid. I have already pointed out
that the legend of William of Norwich and the superstition as to the use of human entrails for the purposes
of augury by Jews have exercised a shaping influence
on the story of St. Hugh from the day his remains
were discovered. Besides this, in the case of our little
martyr, we are somewhat amply provided with remains
of popular tradition of the so-called "martyrdom."
There is one French and there are several English
and Scotch ballads devoted to the subject. Let us see

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

215

what contribution they can make to the elucidation of
the problem.
The French ballad was published in 1834 by M.
Francisque Michel,' from a manuscript in the Bibliothbque Nationale. From its diction and metre it
was clearly written within a very few years of the
martyrdom. It tells how in Nicole, that rich city, the
boy Huchon was inveigled away by Peitevin, the Jew,
on the eve of the gules of August. His mother sought
in vain for him throughout the whole Jewry, and then
betook herself to Henry the King, to call for justice
on the wicked Jews. This he promises her, but
threatens vengeance if her accusation prove untrue.
Meanwhile, the richest Jews of England collected
together, and the boy was brought before them, bound
by a cord, by Jopin, the Jew, who offers him for thirty
deniers. Agim, the Jew, buys him for that price from
the new Judas, and the boy is then crucified. And
when he expires, after being pierced by the knife of
Agim, " the dear soul of this infant was borne at once
by angels in heaven, chanting together before God allpowerful." The body is buried, but next morning is
found again by the Jews upon the surface of the earth,
anrd wherever they attempt to conceal it, it persists in
rising to the surface-a fine imaginative touch of the
folk-artist who wrote the ballad. They then determine
to take it outside Lincoln and place it near a fountain
in the neighbourhood. A woman finds it next day
and raises the alarm. The body is borne back to
Dernestal, the quarter where his mother lived. Then
1 F. Michel, Hugues de Lincoln, Recueil de ballades Anglo-Normandes et
Ecossoises relatives aCu
meurtre de cot enfant commis par les Juifs en IMCOLV.,
Paris, 1834, pp. ix.-64. It was reprinted in 1849, with a pseudo-archaic
English version by A. Hume. " Sir Hugh of Lincoln ; or, An Examination

of a curious Tradition respecting the Jews, with a Notice of the Popular
Poetry connected with it." 8vo, 54 PP.

216

JEWISH IDEALS

a convert comes along, and seeing the body all besmudged with mire and ordure, suggests that it should
be washed with warm water: "I trow that thus we'll
find how the child came to his death." Then became
evident the treason of the Jews. The body is borne
to the cathedral, and the Jews captured, who say,
"We have been betrayed by Falism." Then comes
Jopin, the Jew, who tells again in ballad fashion the
same story, with the addition that all the Jews of
England knew of the crucifixion, and had decided
upon it in common council. For all reward for his
confession, Jopin is condemned to be torn to pieces
by horses. And they hung him at Canewick, a mile
south of Lincoln town.
In this ballad we get in very vivid form the popular
account of the martyrdom which has much in common
with that represented by Matthew Paris, though Copin
here becomes Jopin. We get two other names of
Jews concerned in the misdeed, Peitevin and Agim,
which is obviously the English form of Chayim. You
may remember that I have shown some years ago
that Huggin Lane, in the City of London, derives its
name from a London Jew of the same prenomen.'
I think I can identify from Hebrew records both these
new personages. In an undated deed, published by
Mr. Davis in his volume of Shetaroth, No. 167, page
309, the Jewish creditor of the abbey of Bardeney
signs himself Peitevin ben Beneit; and as the deed is
also signed by Benedict fil. Mosse, who, as we have
seen above, was implicated in the martyrdom, and
declared innocent by the king, the deed must be about
the date of the martyrdom, and the signatory can
therefore be identified with the Peitevin mentioned in
the French ballad. So, too, in another deed, published
1 " Papers Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition," p. 49.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

21

7

by Mr. Davis, No. 155, the signature occurs of Chayim
de Nicole, who is equally obviously the original of the
Who Falsim, the convert
Agim of the French ballad.'
who betrayed the Jews, was, cannot be at present
ascertained.
It is, at any rate, a curious incident that among the
Jews imprisoned in the Tower for this crime there was
a convert named John, who was pardoned for his share
in it, as we learn from Rymer's Foedera.2 Here, again,
we find the sinister presence of a renegade from the
faith, always a sign of ill omen in cases of this kind.
Besides this contemporary French ballad there are,
as you are doubtless aware, a number of English and
Scotch ballads dealing with the legend of St. Hugh.
Here the scene is altogether changed, and the historic
background fades into the far distance as we can well
understand from the late date in which the ballads
were collected, none of them being earlier than the
last century. Professor Child, in his magnificent
work on the English and Scotch ballads, 3 has collected together no less than eighteen versions of it,
but decides for the priority of that collected by
Jamieson. In this there is no question of conspiracy
of the Jews of England; the tragic interest is deepened
by making the crime the work of a female hand.4 The
Jew's daughter entices little Hugh from his game of
football with the allurement of an apple, and leads
him through nine dark doors, lays him on a dressing1

The French form Agim is nearer to the Hebrew Chayim than the

Hagin of the English records.
2 Ed. I816, i. 333-

1882,

3 Cambridge (Mass.),
seq., pt. v. Professor Child has an elaborate
and instructive introduction to the ballads, which brings together in a
convenient form all that has been hitherto known of the subject from
history and tradition.
4 May we not see here, as Mr. York Powell has suggested to me, some
reminiscence of Belleassez ?

2I8

JEWISH IDEALS

table, and sticks him like a swine.' She then rolls
him in lead and casts him into our Lady's draw-well,
fifty fathoms deep. We then follow the fortunes of
the poor little lad's mother.
" When the bells were rung, and mass was sung,
And a' the bairns came hame,
When every lady gat hame her son,
The Lady Maisry gat nane."

She searches for him at the Jews' castell, at the Jews'
Garden, and at last at the deep draw-well; and at each
place she cries" "Gin ye be there, my sweet Sir Hugh,
I pray you to me speak.'
'Gae hame, gae hame, my mither dear,
Prepare my winding sheet;
And, at the back o' merry Lincoln,
The morn I will you meet.'
Now Lady Maisry is gane hameMade him a winding sheet;
And at the back o' merry Lincoln,
The dead corpse did her meet.
And a' the bells o' merry Lincoln,
Without men's hands were rung;
And a' the books o' merry Lincoln,
Were read without man's tongue;
And ne'er was such a burial
Sin Adam's days begun."

That fine touch of the supernatural ringing of the
church bells is only found in Jamieson's version. But
fine as it is, the ballad has little instruction to give us
on the death of little Hugh, and might celebrate any
murder of any child by any wicked woman. Indeed,
Mr. Newell, an American folk-lorist, found in the
streets of New York a version crooned by a little
negress in which the tale is told of Harry Hughes and
1

Qy. reference to the mysterious evisceration mentioned by Matt. Paris?

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

219I

the Duke's daughter.' Thus the prejudices of the
Middle Ages have begun to die away even in the
memory of the folk. In Lincoln itself, however, the
myth is still alive, and inhabitants of that city pointed
out to Mr. Haes, after the lapse of 65o years, the very
well adjoining Jews' Court into which poor little Hugh
was thrown. Other traditions, however, identify it with
Grantham's well, outside the old walls of Lincoln.

IV
We have now before us all the materials which
history, archaeology, and tradition can afford us with
regard to the death of the poor little Lincoln lad of
the thirteenth century. Do they enable us to arrive at
the exact truth of the matter? I fancy they do, and
would put forth the following hypothetical accountimaginative, I grant, but I trust not altogether imaginary-of what happened at Lincoln during the month
of August 1255. On the eve of first day of that
month,2 a Saturday afternoon, a little boy Hugh, son
of a widow named Beatrice," aged eight years, 4 while
running after a ball at play 5 fell by accident into a
gong or cesspool 6 attached to the house of a Jew

1" Games and Songs of American Children," Boston, 1883. I drew attention to Mr. Newell's interesting version in the Jewoish Chronicle.
2 Gules of August (French ballad), a popular name for the Ist of
August, also called Lammas, This used to be a popular holiday. "'Gules "
occurs transcribed in Hebrew characters in Mr. Davis's Shetaroth, No. 103,
p. 232. The Acta Sanctorum gives the date of Hugh's martyrdom as
July 27 (xxxiii. 494); and Matt. Paris favours that date. The king's
itinerary, as given in Rymer and the Patent Rolls, rather favours the date

of the ballad.
3 Shirley, "Royal Letters," ii. IIo.
5 English ballads.

4 Matt. Paris.

Owing to their late date little confidence can be

placed on this point, but it seems antecedently probable.
6 The French ballad declares that the body was covered with ordure.

220

JEWISH IDEALS

named Jopin,' or Joscefin, 2 two doors off the Jews
House at Lincoln. 3 His body remained in this gong
for some twenty-six days 4 subject to the disintegrating
forces of its nauseous contents. Meanwhile there had
assembled at Lincoln a number of the most important
Jews of England 5 in order to attend the wedding 6 of
Belleassez, daughter of the Rav, or Chief Rabbi of the
town,7 known to his Christian fellow-citizens as Magister Benedict fil. Mosse de Londres, and to his Jewish
flock as Rav Berachyah ben Moses,' known also in
Jewish literature as Berachyah de Nicole, an important
Tosaphist.o He was the greatest Jewish scholar of his
time in England,n and to do honour to him most of
the chief Jews of England attended the wedding. In
the midst of their festivities their joy was turned to
horror and dismay by the discovery on Thursday, the
2
26th of August,1 probably the day after the wedding,"
of the disfigured body of little Hugh, distended by the
gases of corruption, which had risen to the surface of
1 French ballad, Matthew Paris calls him Copin; either name might be
derived from Jacopin, diminutive of Jacob.

2 There was a Josephin living at Lincoln at the time whose son, Chayim,
Davis, Nos. 154, I56.
3 Local tradition reported by Mr. Haes.
4 Annals of Burton. Matt. Paris says ten days, but this is quite discordant with his own date of the martyrdom.
5 Matt. Paris, Annals of Burton, French ballad.

married Bellaset.

6 Annals of Burton.
7 Conjecture derived from date of Shetar. Davis, No. 156.
9 Davis, 1.c.
8 Rymer, Foedera.
10 Zunz, Neubauer, ll.cc.

11 Meir of Norwich, poet, is the other chief name known from this
period.

12Annals of Burton. French ballad allows for a considerable period to
have elapsed between the disappearance of Hugh and the " summoning,"
of the Jews to Lincoln.
13 Wednesday has always been a favourite day for weddings among
Jews, and but little time can have elapsed or the assembly would have
dispersed to their homes elsewhere.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

22I

the gong.' We can imagine the horror of the party
when Joscefin, the father-in-law of the bride,2 broke in
upon the company assembled two doors off3 with the
news of the ghastly discovery. The corruption of the
body burst the walls of the stomach as soon as an
attempt was made to remove it,4 and the entrails were
dissevered from the body. 5 Instead of announcing the
discovery to the proper officials, the Jews, on the
advice of Peitevin, 6 the Dayan 7 and Hagin, s committed
the fatal error 9 of attempting to conceal the body, or,
at any rate, of removing it from the neighbourhood of
the Jewry. 10 They cast it into Grantham's well,1 where
it was discovered after three days, on Sunday, 2 9 th
August,12 by a woman passing by.' 3 Among the crowd
attracted by the discovery was one John of Lexington, 4
5
who was familiar, from tradition and his reading, 1 with
the myth about the ritual murder of boys by Jews. As
1 Conjecture to account for the appearance of the body just after the
wedding.
2 Conjecture (see note 2, p. 220).
3 Local tradition.
4 Conjecture to account for the disembowelling of the body, Matt. Paris.
6 Or, as Mr. York Powell suggests, the entrails were removed by some
Jewish physician when it was decided to remove the body.
6 French ballad. His flight, as recorded by Tovey, seems to argue the
consciousness of complicity.
7 Deduced from reference in Tovey to his school.
8 French ballad.
9 Copin's confession cannot be explained without assuming some connection of the Jews with the matter.
t0 Tradition reports two places in which the body was found, in Jopin's
house and in Grantham's well. The suggestion here made reconciles the
two statements, and at the same time allows for a certain amount of complicity, or at least injudicious concealment, on the part of the Jews.
11 Oulton, "Traveller's Guide," I805, ii. p. 54.
12 Annals of Burton.
13 Annals of Burton. According to Matthew Paris it was the boy's
mother who discovered the corpse; this disagrees with the Burton Annals
and with the French ballad.
14 Matthew Paris.
1 Idem.

222

JEWISH IDEALS

one of the canons of the Minster' he saw the desirability of claiming the body as a further attraction for
the cathedral, 2 and his plan was assisted by the seeming miracle by which a woman in the crowd removed
some obstruction to her eyesight 3 by wiping them
with some of the moisture exuding from Hugh's body.'
The parish priest attempted -to compete with him for
the possession of the precious charge, but the superior
authority of Lexington overcame his protests.5 In a
grand procession, grander than Lincoln ever yet had
seen,' the remains of little Hugh were transferred to
a stone coffin in the South Aisle Choir, 7 in which they
remain undisturbed for over 500 years. 8
Meanwhile Lexington had, by combined threats and
promises,' induced Jopin to make such a confession 10
of the complicity of the Jews as could be twisted into
evidence for making the boy a martyr of the faith. 1
Here he was content to rest, '2 having obtained for his
cathedral an equal attraction to those of Norwich and
Gloucester and the abbey of Edmondsbury.13
But
Beatrice, the mother of the poor little lad, was not
1 Annals of Burton.
2 Conjecture from his remark on discovering the body.
3 Annals of Waverley, French ballad.
4 Annals of Burton.
5 Ibid.
6 French ballad, Scotch ballad (Jamieson). Here is a point which
remained in the folk memory for over five hundred years.
7 E. Venables, "A Walk through Lincoln Minster," p. 41.
8 Pegge, I.c.,
Michel, p. 63.

9 Matt. Paris, Annals of Burton.
Paris, Annals of Burton, French ballad.
11 Without a confession implicating all the Jews little Hugh could not
be raised to the position of a martyr. As a matter of fact, his name was
never formally received into the Roman martyrology. (See Michel, p. 51,
'0

note 23.)
12 Deduced from the fact that Jopin was not even tried till the king
arrived at Lincoln.
13 See Jacobs, 1.c., 45, 75, 256.
pp.

LITTLE ST. HUGH OF LINCOLN

223

content with this,' and hearing that the king was
approaching Lincoln on his way from Scotland,2 went
out to meet him, and laid the case before him.
Henry III. hated the Jews, while making use of
them as sponges to replete his treasury. He had but
six months before 3 lost his power over them by selling
them to his brother Richard. Here he saw his chance
of both gratifying his hatred and replenishing his
treasury. He hurried to Lincoln, seized all the Jews
he could find there,4 silenced the only witness who
could declare the truth by hanging Jopin, after having
caused him to be dragged round the city tied to the
tail of a wild horse,' he brought the rest of the Jews
up to London,' hanged those who refused to trust
themselves to the tender mercies of a Christian jury,7
holding its sitting in Lincoln, now all aflame with
infuriated passions, 8 and only released the remainder
after they had been imprisoned six months, 9 when the
term of his agreement with Earl Richard was over and
he had them again at his mercy. 0 The Franciscans,
who constituted the noblest element in English life at
the time, were on the side of the Jews-significant
testimony to their innocence-but pleaded for them
in vain." The protracted nature of the inquiry, the
1 French ballad.

This would be in October 1255 (see itinerary of Henry III.; as given
in Foedera, the king was at Alnwick 23rd September, at Westminster
18th October).
2

3 24 th February

1255 (Patent Roll, 39 Henry III., m. 13).

4 Matt. Paris.
5 Matt. Paris, Annals of Waverley, Annals of Burton.
6 Close Roll, 39 Henry III.
7 Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Cam. Soc.), p. 23.
8 Annals of Burton.
9 Matt. Paris, v. 552, 12th March 1256.
10 See note 3, above.

11Matt. Paris, v. 546; Annals of Burton attribute the intervention to
the Dominicans.

224

JEWISH IDEALS

severest punishment of the victim, the wide publicity
given to the accusation, caused the martyrdom of Hugh
and the cruelty of the Jews to become a fixed element
of belief in the popular mind of England, which has
retained the memory of the boy martyr down to the
present day. It was a tale above all others likely to
touch the tender human soul of Chaucer, and caused
him to give utterance to the prayer with which I commenced this paper, in which I have endeavoured to
put together, for the first time, into a consistent narrative, all the scattered evidence which history, archaeology, and tradition give as to the fate of little St.
Hugh of Lincoln, boy and martyr.

"AARON

SON OF THE DEVIL"

(From " The Jewish Chronicle")

r a

IN makinog some investigations
into the early history of the Jews
in this country, my attention was
called by a notice in Mr. Walter
Rye's recent " Short History of
Norfolk" to a caricature inscribed
on the Forest Roll of the County
of Essex in the fifth year of
Edward

I.'s reign

(1277).

On

examination at the Record Office,
both the caricature and the record
which accompanies it proved to be
of exceptional interest, and I am
enabled to give a tracing of the
former and a translation of the
latter. For help in transcribing
this unique document I have to thank the skill of Mr.
C. Trice Martin, of the Record Office.
The entry is the record of an offence against the
severe forest laws of the time committed by certain
Jews and Christians of Colchester, whose names are
mentioned, together with the amount of punishment
inflicted. In the case of the Christians this consists
of small fines, the amount of which is written in each
case over the offender's name. I have placed these in
square brackets after the name in the following trans225

p

226

JEWISH IDEALS

lation, in which a little archaic colouring may not
perhaps be amiss:COLCHESTER to wit: By the same it was brought forward that a
certain doe was started in Wildenhaye Wood by the dogs of Sir John
de Burgh, Sen., which doe in her flight came by the top of the City of
Colchester, crossing towards another wood on the other side of that city.
And there issued forth Saunte son of Ursel, Jew of Colchester, Cok
son of Aaron, and Samuel son of the same, Isaac the Jewish chaplain,
Copin and Elias, Jews, and certain Christians of the said city, to wit :
William Scott [2s.], Henry the Gutter [2s.], Henry the Toller [2s.],
and others. And these with a mighty clamour chased the same doe
through the south gate into the aforesaid city, and they so worried
her by their shouting that they forced her to jump over a wall, and
she thus brake her neck, to wit, on Wednesday next after the feast of
St. Nicholas, in the fifty-second year of the reign of King Henry
[7 th December
And there came upon them Walter the Goldsmith, bailiff [half-a-mark], and Robert the Toller [2s.], beadle of the
same city, and others that are dead, and carried thence the game, and
had their will of it. And these came not, nor did their attorneys.
Thereupon it was ordered to the sheriff that he summon the aforesaid Jews from day to day, and a day was set to the bailiffs of Colchester for producing the others mentioned within three weeks from
Easter Day. And the aforesaid Saunte and Isaac put in an appearance, and being convicted were cast into prison. And the aforesaid
Cok stayeth at Lincoln, therefore was it ordered to the Sheriff of
Lincoln to produce him within one month from Easter. And the
aforesaid Saunte being led forth from prison was fined forty shillings
on the surety of Vives of Gipewis [Ipswich], Vives of Clare and
Mosse Panel of Haverhulle, Jews. And the aforesaid Elias came not,
nor was he to be found. Therefore let him be driven forth, &c.
And the aforesaid Isaac being led forth from prison was fined in four
marks on the surety of Joce of Cantuar [Canterbury], Jew, Abraham
son of Aaron, Isaac son of Chera, Jew, Saer son of Radulph of Colchester, and Richard Pruet of the same. And later came forward
the aforesaid Copin and Samuel, and are committed to prison, and
being led forth were fined, that is to say, Copin in two marks on the
surety of Vives son of Coperun and Aaron son of Leo, Jews; and
the aforesaid Samuel in one mark on the surety of Jacob of London
and Saunte son of Ursel of Colchester, Jews. And the Sheriff of
Lincoln answereth nought concerning the aforesaid Cok the Jew, but

1267].

"AARON

SON OF THE DEVILL"

227

contemned the mandate of the Justiciars, &c. Wherefore he is at
mercy one hundred shillings.
And the said Cok who came not ten marks
by taxation of the Justiciars.

The document tells its own story in tolerably plain
language, and sets before us a vivid picture of a hunting scene in the thirteenth century, when hunting had
the additional charm of being a criminal offence little
less than treason. What more concerns us to observe,
however, is the fact that Jew and Christian are equally
seized with that mania for chasing anything that runs,
which has been the characteristic of Englishmen at all
times. And the intimate association of the followers
of the two creeds gives us a truer, and at the same time
a more favourable, impression of the relation of Jew
and Christian than we usually obtain from the ordinary
histories. As we shall see, two Christians stood bail
for one of the Jews who were engaged, and the way
in which the chief actors of the scene are mentioned
seems to imply that the Jews led the way in the chase,
though it is the Christians who eat the game, probably
because venison killed in the way mentioned was not
fitted for Jewish food.
But if in their social relation the Jews seem to have
been on equal terms with the Christians, their position
is quite different before the law. It is the Sheriff of
the County who has to produce the Jews before the
Justiciars; it is only the town-bailiff who is responsible for the others. Again, it is the Sheriff of Lincolnshire who is responsible for the appearance of the
Jew who had escaped to Lincoln. Still more marked
is the contrast in their respective punishments. The
five Christians are only fined in an aggregate sum of
20o at the present
I4s. 8d. (equal probably to about
time), while of the five Jews who receive their punish-

JEWISH IDEALS

228

ment, four are imprisoned and fined £6, I3s. 4d., the
fifth, who evades the legal process, is ultimately fined ten
marks, i.e., also £6, 13s. 4d., while the sixth disappears
and is outlawed, if that be the meaning of " exigatur."
These sums give a very inadequate idea of the intrinsic
value involved in them. We must remember that the
average wages of unskilled labour was one penny a
day, that the price of a sheep was fourpence, and that
the annual rental of some Jews' houses at the time of
the Expulsion was as low as a shilling and half-a-crown.
Under these circumstances the £ I3, 6s. Sd., for which
the five Jews and their ten bails were responsible,
would probably purchase as much of the available
necessities and luxuries of the time as £400 would
nowadays. This is an enormous sum to pay for ten
minutes' chase of a deer, and yet the forest laws had
been considerably lessened in severity by the Forest
Charter of

1217.

Turning from the incident itself to those who were
engaged in it, our attention is first arrested by the
names of the Jews concerned as principals or bails.
Saunte, the first on our list, was not an unfrequent
one among the Jews of the time, at least in its Latin
form of Sanctus; we find a Sanctus of Edmondsbury
fined in 1183 for receiving sacred vessels in pledge.
It was probably introduced, like almost all the Jews'
names of the time, from France; a Santo from Gurnai
is mentioned in I 204. Saunte's father, Ursel, bore a
still more common one. I find Ursels at York, at
Oxford, at Hereford, at Lincoln, at Bedford, and at
Wickford. So popular was it that it was transliterated
directly into Hebrew signatures as 5rinms, under which
form it occurs in a Hebrew Starr at the British Museum
in the signature of an Ursell of Colchester, who was
probably father of the Saunte mentioned in our docu-

" AARON SON OF THE DEVIL"

229

ment. Cok, the next name, is also sufficiently familiar,
and, so far as I know, is distinctive as a Jewish name;
Jews bearing that name occur at Bedford, Northampton, York, Canterbury, Winchester, and Devizes. It
was probably a nickname, as Cok of Devizes is also
known as Solomon, son of Simon. Copin, again, is a
favourite name of the period. We have it at Edmondbury, at Worcester, and at York, while it was the
name of the best-known of Oxford Jews and of the
Jew accused of the murder of Hugh of Lincoln.
Vives is one of the most interesting of the names
borne by the early Jews in this country. It comes
from France, as we find a Vives from Paris, and occurs
in many variants, as Vivon, Vivard, Vivian, and (by a
mistake in printed books) as Vines, n and u being
indistinguishable in old court-hand. Persons bearing
this name occur at London, Norwich, Pontefract, Canterbury, Shrewsbury, and Oxford, besides Clare and
Ipswich, as here. In itself it is nothing more than a
French translation of Dn, the source of the "Hyam"
and " Hyams " of the present day. The Italian form,
Vita, occurred in the name of the grandfather of
Sir Moses Montefiore. But ~"nl is also directly transliterated as Hiam, as in the second name of Sir Moses,
or with the insertion of a guttural, as Hagin or Aggyn,
so that from this Shem-ha-kodesh we have no less than
eight kinnuim. Most of the remaining names are
Biblical, Moses appearing under the form of Mosse
(dissyllable; ss = sh), nearer to the Hebrew than our
Greek form, and Joseph as Joce. Coperun or Coperin
(it might be either) is unique; I cannot find another
example in the 1500 names I have collected. The
use of a family name by Moses Panel is not such a
rarity, Blund, Crespin, Matrin, Parimer, Russel being
among those I have observed.
The last deserving

230

JEWISH IDEALS

notice is doubly interesting.
Chera is the French
chere, " dear," and is the name of a Jewess. Chera of
Winton (Winchester) is mentioned in connection with
some transactions with the Jews of Southampton (see
Jewish Chronicle, No. 700), and two of her sons, Deulebenye and Elias, also occur, so that it is possible Isaac
son of Chera may be a third brother. Why they were
called the sons of their mother is a puzzle which is not
peculiar to this case, but occurs in several others, as
Abraham son of Avegay, David son of Comitissa, Leo
son of Margaret, and the like. It is difficult to account for this curious form of nomenclature in any
way not derogatory to the honour of the persons
concerned.
So much for the names. As for the persons who
bore them, in many cases this is the only time that
history catches a glimpse of them, so far as I can learn.
Saunte's father and Isaac's mother we have already
referred to, but Saunte and Isaac themselves make no
further appearance in the annals of the time. Cok and
Samuel were probably the sons of the Aaron of Colchester who represented Bedford at the Jewish Parliament of 1240, and a Samuel fil. Aaron of Colchester is
also mentioned in a document of 1220. Isaac is termed
" Capellanus Judaeus," a name which is paralleled by a
Sampson le Chapeleyn, who was among the Jews of
Canterbury expelled in I29o. The term probably implies the Chasan or Cantor of the congregation, but
this Isaac seems to have been especially influential; he
is fined the most of all the Jews who give themselves
up, and no less than five persons hold themselves responsible for the payment. Still more interesting is it
to observe that among the bails are two Christians, for
Richard Pruet is evidently no Jew, and Saer (generally
Saher) is a good old Saxon name, the modern repre-

"AARON SON OF THE DEVIL"

231

sentative of which was borne by the most renowned
pugilist of the " sixties." As Isaac was so important a
personage, he may have been the Isaac son of Benedict
who represented Colchester at the Jewish Parliament
of 1240. Or he may also be identical with the R. Isaac,
who signed a deed of a conveyance of a house in
Stockwell Street, Colchester, which' was so ingeniously
deciphered by Dr. Neubauer. Of the others mentioned,
Vives of Ipswich was living in 1290 when his villa "in
the suburbs" escheated to the king. Before leaving
the dranatis personce, attention may be called to the
evidence they afford of the widespread and yet close
connection of the Jews of the time. Here we have
Jews assembled at Colchester from London, Canterbury,
Lincoln, Ipswich, Clare, and Haverhill, the last three
in Suffolk.
The caricature which accompanies the record presents
almost as many points of interest as the document itself.
In the first place, it is scarcely a caricature. Is it not
rather a slightly exaggerated portrait ? Certainly the
scribe who jotted it down while the proceedings were
going on has caught with great skill, though with
equal animus, the characteristic features of the Jewish
face as we find it on the Assyrian monuments and as it
moves among us at the present day. The aquiline nose
with the depressed tip, though here exaggerated, the
thick underlip, the gleaming eye, the strong lines of
the features, even the curly hair on the forehead, all
are characteristic. That they were familiar enough in
England at the time is proved by the fact that the
monks of St. Albans were struck by the Jewish features
("Judaicam faciem ") of a Saracen Emir who visited
them during one of the pauses of the Crusades. If a
portrait, of whom has it preserved the lineaments after
6oo years? The name inscribed above, "Aaron fil.

232

JEWISH IDEALS

Diaboli "-half in jest, half in grim earnest-for were
not. all Jews " sons of the Devil" in the sight of good
Christians, tell us at best only the first name. The
only Aaron mentioned in our record is Aaron son of
Leo or Judah, for in translating their names the Jews
made much use of the animal metaphors in the blessings of Jacob and Moses, and in the former occurs
"Judah is a lion's whelp," and so mw became Leo.
Was it from some confusion of the "sacred" and
"secular" names of Aaron that caused the scribe to
write down in his impatience "son of the-Devil."
But another inquiry is suggested by the probable
occasion of the entry being written. The offence was
committed in 1267; the entry is made in 1277.

Some

delay may have at first occurred owing to the unsettled
state of the Eastern counties, due to the "War of the
Disinherited," that followed the fall of Simon de Montfort. But ten years must have been exceptionally long
for the law's delay even in those days. Now, the last
entry on the roll would only be made when everything
had been settled, and it was probably entered after
negotiation for the return of the truant Cok fil. Aaron
had resulted in the payment by the Sheriff of Lincoln
of a fine of one hundred shillings for not producing
him. After this Cok seems himself to have come back,
and the whole proceedings were closed by his being
fined, the amount being put in in a couple of lines apart
from the original entry. This would give the clerk
time to draw his sketch, and he might well have been
curious about the man who had been absent ten years
from his native town and was willing to pay a sum
equivalent to ,'200 of our money for the privilege of
returning to live amongst his town and kinsfolk. I
am therefore inclined to believe that the sketch represents this Cok fil. Aaron. Whomever it represents, it

"AARON

SON OF THE DEVIL"

233

is the earliest dated portrait of aJew in existence, those
lately figured in the Revue des Etudes Juives being of
the dates 1335 and 1347.

The portrait also gives us some details of the' dress
of Jews of the time. He wears a cowl, and in this case
the cowl does not make the monk, but simply implies
one who does not work much out of doors. In the
Ellesmere MS. of Chaucer both the Clerk and the
Doctor wear similar cowls. Of unique interest, however, is the square patch on the cloak. This is no less
than the distinguishing mark of the Jews, which was
ordained for all Catholic Christendom at the Lateran
Council of 1215 and adopted in England by the patriot
This is not only the
Stephen of Langton in 1222.
earliest representation of it, but it differs in shape from
the seven other examples collected by the industry of
MM. Loeb and Ulysse Robert, which are all in the form
of a quoit. The one before us is in the shape of the
two tables of the Law, as seen to this day in our synagogues, and as imposed by an enactment of 1274, which
had been confirmed in I277, the year in which our
document was written. It was to be of saffron taffety,
six finger breadths long and three broad. It was perhaps an unconscious tribute of Englishmen which made
the distinctive mark of their Jewish fellow-countrymen
to be that Law by which their lives were ruled, for
adhering to which they were called and treated as
"sons of the Devil," and for which so many of them
died a martyr's death.

JEWISH HISTORY : ITS AIMS AND METHODS
(Discourse of Reception delivered to the Royal Academy of History, Madrid)

GENTLEMEN,-Permit me to thank you for the honour

which you have conferred upon me in electing me
Corresponding Member of your body. I cannot flatter
myself I owe this honour to any personal merits of
my own. It is, I take it, only an outward mark of
the interest taken by you in the history of the people
of Israel in Spain, an interest which has been vividly
expressed in your Boletin by the admirable studies on
Hispano - Jewish history by Senores Fidel Fita and
Fernandez y Gonzalez. Indeed, if I mistake not, I
welcome in my election one of the many signs that
Spain has learnt with regard to the Jews, the highest
and most difficult of all moral lessons, to forgive those
we have injured. Spain now recognises that it was
not the Jews, but her treatment of them, that was the
Tizon de Espaia. Permit me to add a few remarks
on the present position of Jewish history, its aims
and problems. In a body which counts among its
members such authorities as Don Fidel Fita and
Senior Fernandez y Gonzalez it would be an impertinence on my part to speak of the r61e of the Jews in
Spanish history; but you may perhaps permit me to
speak of the subject in its relations to Jewish history
in general, of which I have been a loving student
for many years.
The history of Jewish history has gone through
three stages, as it seems to me, and is now entering
234

JEWISH HISTORY

235

upon a fourth. At first we have the picturesque treatment of the subject, in which a series of vivid pictures,
often more vivid than veritable, summed up all that the
historian had to tell of the Jews and their fortunes
(Basnage, &c.). Thus, in this country, the history of
the Jews was summed up in a series of pictures of the
Jews of Toledo delivering up the keys of the town
to the Moors; of Jewish financiers in their countinghouses, and Jewish savants in their studies and laboratories; of murder and violation of Jews for imaginary
crimes, child murder or well poisoning; of rabbis and
monks disputing for the relative merits of Talmud and
Gospel; of St. Vincent Ferrer drawing crowds of
terrified Jews into the folds of the Church with cross
transformed into sword; of Torquemada flinging down
the thirty shekels before the Reyes Catolicos, or, saddest
scene of all, of the San Benito ascending the steps of
the scaffold or the pyre to make a Spanish holiday.
These scenes, often enough mythical in detail, were
held to constitute Hispano-Jewish history, and to many
minds they still form its staple.
While Christian writers described in this manner the
history of the Jews, with a parti pris against the
enemies of their faith, Jewish writers, equally excited by controversial feelings, painted pictures of the
persecutions of Israel experienced at the hands of
Christians (Jehuda ben Verga, Joseph Cohen, Usque,
&c.). The indignation of the Jews answered the prejudice of the Christians, and history was equally absent
from both.
Second Period.-In this period Jewish students
were investigating in the writings of Jews themselves
the inner spirit of their history. With commendable
industry and no small amount of artistic feeling they
devoted themselves to the task of describing the

236

JEWISH IDEALS

history of Judaism as developed by Jewish thinkers
or poets (Jost, Zunz, Graetz). It is scarcely necessary to add that such a manner of treating the history
of Judaism brings it in contact, in many points, with
the history of Spain. For it was from Cordova, Toledo,
Lucena, and Barcelona that many of Israel's deepest
thinkers and most inspired and sweetest singers came
during the Middle Ages. In point of fact, the names
of Avicebron, Abraham ibn Ezra, Jehuda Halevi, and
Maimonides, not to speak of less well-known names,
are, or should be, equally the glory of Judaism and
of Spain.
Of these contributions to the history of the Jews,
especially the memorable work of Graetz, one may say,
" C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'histoire." They
are not history in the true sense of the word, since
they fail to explain the position of the Jews in the
national history of the countries where they dwelt.
Third Period.-The third phase, or period, in the
history of the Hebrews came when Europe, in occupying itself in the study of constitutional problems, could
not fail to treat, if only incidentally, with the constitutional position of the Jews in the Middle Ages.
This aspect of Israelite history was, naturally, for the
most part, treated by Christian writers especially versed
in constitutional history, as Madox and Blunt in England, Stobbe in Germany, and Bedarrides for France
and Italy. Here, in Spain, your own historic activity
has been concentrated so much on the publication of
fueros and other constitutional documents, that it was
not so difficult a task for Amador de los Rios to compile his political history of the Jews in Spain, for,
excellent as it is in this respect, it has little claim to
the other two epithets, "Social and Religious," that
occur in its title.

JEWISH HISTORY

237
Fourth Period.-It is precisely towards the elucidation of this social aspect of Jewish history that the
present, or fourth stage, of investigation is directing
itself. Hitherto, the attempt has been rather to accentuate the differences between the Jews and their neighbours. Nowadays we are attempting to bring out the
resemblances, the common human nature underlying
both. The German proverb, Wie Christelt es sich so
Jildelt es sich (As the Christian, so the Jew) best expresses the tendency of this new departure. Something has been done in this direction for Germany,
France, and Italy by Zunz, Berliner, and Giidemann,
especially the latter; but very much more remains to
be done before an adequate Culturgeschichte, as the
Germans would call it, of the Jews can be written.
For this it is not sufficient to know the Laws, so much
depends on the way they are carried out. And before
the Laws come the Customs, which only rarely are
recorded in written documents. Painters talk of painting atmospheric effects; we have to do very much the
same in dealing with Culturgeschichte. If it is difficult
to come to an understanding about social movements
of our own time, how much more also is it to know
those of times past. Hence there is a certain hesitation in the attitude of Jewish historians, just at present, which may best be described by the French phrase
Elle se recueille pour mieux sauter.
Undoubtedly, for this aspect of social history every
scrap of information may be of importance. A single
phrase in the documents, the form of a proper name, a
difference of date., may throw a flood of light on social
matters. Hence, the fourth stage of Jewish historical
investigation, on which we are now entered, is engaged,
above all, with the collection of materials, which is
the bibliographic, diplomatic, and monographic stage.

238

JEWISH IDEALS

In this connection it is to be remembered that before
determining what MS. sources remain to be searched,
it is first necessary to learn what has already been
printed; in other words, the first step must be bibliographical. Accordingly, in England we have compiled
a volume of over 250 pages, containing merely the
titles of works relating to Anglo-Jewish history
(Bibliotheka Anglo-Judaica, by J. Jacobs and L. Wolf).
More recently an even more extensive work, upon the
same lines, dealing with Russian Jewish history, has
appeared in St. Petersburg. In Germany they have
been for some time engaged in publishing Regesten of
the scattered details relating to the earlier history of
the Jews in that country. And, with regard to the
Iberian Peninsula, I have myself been engaged in compiling a bibliography of the history of the Jews in
Spain, adding to the references of Amador de los Rios
those occurring in works published subsequently to his,
as well as those contained in German and Hebrew
writings, which that distinguished historian omitted to
consult.
But more even than to the summing up of old
information in bibliographies, Jewish science is diligently occupied at the present moment in the search
after new knowledge to be found in manuscript
sources. In connection with this movement societies
or institutions have been formed all over Europe for
the collecting and printing of manuscript materials
dealing with Jewish history. France initiated the
movement by the foundation of the Socie'te des Etudes
Juives. In England an Anglo-Jewish Historical
Exhibition was held in 1887, and the movement thus
begun has been recently accelerated by the formation
of a Jewish Historical Society in Germany. There
has existed for some time a Commission fiir die

JEWISH HISTORY

239

Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, and similar
societies have been founded in Russia, Roumania,
and the United States. Much manuscript material
has been brought to light by these societies, or by
In this conarchivists in connection with them.
nection reference may be made to many articles in
the Revue des Etudes Juives, especially those by that
model investigator Mr. Isidore Loeb; to Les Juifs de
Languedoc, published by M. Saige, with admirable
pieces justificatives; to the volume of Mr. Davis, entitled Shetaroth (Hebrew deeds of English Jews), published by the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition ; to the Quellen
of the German Commission; likewise, Codice diplomatico degli Judei Siciliani, of which the first volume
has been published. It is scarcely necessary to add
that my own researches in Spain were directed towards
this end.
After the bibliographic and diplomatic stages of
historic investigation comes the monographic. Every
fresh document discovered, certainly every series of
documents bearing on a single event, or single aspect
of history, can afford opportunity for monographs.
Already many of these have been written in Graetz's
Monatschrift, in the Revue des Etudes Juives, and in
your own Boletin. In connection with this subject
I have another suggestion to make to those who have
honoured me by associating me with them.
Among the works to which the Academy has given
the stamp of its official approval I observe several
relating to the Moors, but none relating to the Jews
of Spain, who, after all, were not enemies, but only
Spaniards of a different creed. Could not the Academy
stimulate research on the Jewish history of Spain by
proposing rewards for monographs on such subjects
as the following:-

240

JEWISH IDEALS

I. A Corpus inscriptionumz judaico-Hispanicarunm,
towards which Don Fidel Fita has already made such
admirable contributions.
II. The social relations of Jews and Christians, and
of Jews and Moors, in Spain.
III. The r6le of the Jews in the economic and
financial development of Spain.
IV. Marks employed to distinguish Jews in different parts of Spain at different epochs.
V. The historical data contained in Hebrew writings of Spanish Jews, especially the Responsa of important rabbis, like Solomon ben Adret, &c.
Various other subjects could be indicated, some of
them more suitable perhaps for the Spanish Academy;
as, a list of Spanish writers to supplement and complete the obsolete one of De Castro and others which
have more relation with science, as, a comparison of
the characteristics of Spaniards (especially the Chuetas
of Mallorca) with those offered by the Sephardim, or
Spanish Jews. Besides these themes many others of
interest exist which have been treated by eminent
savants, whose learned works have just appeared, or
may be shortly expected to do so. The illustrious
Dr. Steinschneider has recently published a list of
Jewish translations made from the Arabic during the
Middle Ages, a work consecrated in large measure
to the Spanish Jews. The no less distinguished Dr.
Neubauer has passed many years of his life in collecting Hebrew geographical names which occurred in the
Rabbinic writings in mediaeval times, and it is to be
hoped that his work, when it appears, will include a
list of Hebrew names of Spanish places which will
replace, with advantage, the preliminary sketch made
by Zunz.
Finally, Dr. Kayserling has prepared a
Bibliothecajudaico espa~ola containing a list of Jews

JEWISH HISTORY

241

who have written in Castilian. With all this there is
much left to do, and I am convinced that a series of
prizes offered by your Institution would be the best
guarantee for the filling up of the missing information.
I have, besides, the confidence that there will not be
wanting Jewish Maecenates willing to add their forces
to those of the Academy, so that prizes shall correspond to the difficulties of the subject.
This, then, is the fourth stage which Jewish history
has now reached, the bibliographic, diplomatic, and
monographic stage. With regard to the latter, there
still remains the difficult work of comparison between
one country and another; for it is a great mistake to
think that the lot of the Jews was the same in all
countries. There are general similarities, no doubt;
thanks chiefly to the unifying influence of the Church
on the one hand, and of Rabbinic law on the other.
But local circumstances have influenced the lot of the
Jews in various ways, and there still remains the difficult task of comparison between different countries.
It is only after the work of this fourth stage is
finished, on which we Jews are at present engaged,
that we can look to the fifth and last act of Jewish
history. This will take the form of special histories
of the Jews in each country, for with the vast accumulation of material which is now going on it will be
impossible for another Graetz to give a history of
Jews in general. Just as there has been only one
Gibbon, there can only be one Graetz. If any general
attempt is to be made, one may safely prophesy that
it will take the form of a philosophy of Jewish history,
which will form no inconsiderable part of the work for
which all students of history are nowadays preparing
the way. For it is the conviction that history will
one day give the solution of life's problem that susQ

242

JEWISH IDEALS

tains us students of the past in our laborious and often
.dull undertakings. No philosophy of life will ever be
considered adequate if it does not explain the life of
the past as well as the present. History must thus be
the (Edipus that will solve life's riddle. And the history of the Jews will form no unimportant contribution
towards such a solution. It is the conviction of many
others, besides us Jews, that a Divine purpose runs
through the long travail of Israel. Jews alone form
a bridge between ancient and modern times. If their
history does not contain any inner meaning, then the
life of man upon this earth has no rational aim.
It is on account of this general importance of Jewish
history that it may claim special attention from all
students of the past, whether Jews, or Christians, or
free-thinkers. We Jews of Europe look to you historical investigators of Spain for that portion of Jewish
history which is the richest and most interesting of
all, and can only be studied in Spain itself. It is the
earnest hope of many that, in the not distant future,
there may be many who will be able to call themselves
Spaniards as well as Jews. These will then be the
natural guardians and investigators of Hispano-Jewish
history. But till that time arrives, it is upon the
historians of Spain, especially as represented by the
Royal Academy, that the duty revolves of keeping pace
with the rest of Europe in the scientific investigation of
the history of Israel.

Printed by BALLANTYNE,

HANSON & Co.

Edinburgh and London

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

STUDIES IN

BIBLICAL

ARCHAEOLOGY

Crown 8vo, xxiv.-124 pp.

Cloth, 3s. 6d.

CONTENTS
RECENT RESEARCH IN BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY-RECENT RESEARCH
COMPARATIVE RELIGION--JUNIOR RIGHT IN GENESIS-ARE THERE TOTEM CLAIMS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT ?-THE
IN

NETHINIM-THE

-THE

INDIAN ORIGIN

OF THE BOOK OF PROVERBS

REVISED OLD TESTAMENT.

PRESS

NOTICES

ATHENEUM
" Biblical students will be thankful to Mr. Joseph Jacobs for having
reproduced in one volume his genial essays, which have appeared during
the last five years in various periodicals. We are glad to say that nearly
all the articles stand in the form in which they originally appeared. It
is really a phenomenon in Biblical researches that hypotheses should
hold their place for five years in their integrity, for there is now a craze,
among German professors especially, for building up a system of Biblical
interpretation, which is soon demolished by another. Most striking and
original is the essay, which has for subject the

Vetlinim, the iepdbovXot,

or servants of the Temple, who, Mr. Jacobs with much skill contends,
were the offspring of the sacred courtesans maintained in connection
with the Temple of Jerusalem, and could only trace the family descent
from the mother."
Prof. SIEGFRIED, in the Theologische Literaturzeitung
" Enthalt offenbar viel Anregendes und Lesenswerthes, und der Wiederabdruck und die Sammlung dieser zerstreuten Aussitze erscheint gerechtfertigt."
CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW
" Every student of the Old Testament ought to read this little volume."
ACADEMY
" All students of Biblical Archaeology will welcome the republication
of these essays in such a convenient form."
JEWISH WORLD
"We can heartily recommend the volume to every serious student of
subjects that arise out of the study of Hebrew history and literature."
([TURN OVER

An Inquiry into the

History of the Jews in Spain
Demy 8vo, xlvii.-26

PRESS

3

pp.

Cloth, 4s. net.

NOTICES

ACADEMY
"Mr. Jacobs is already favourably known to students of Spanish by
'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' translated from the Spanish of Balthasar
Gracian, in the 'Golden Treasury' series. But the present work is of
higher character, and of far greater value to the historian. It is one of
those books which we feel it almost an impertinence to criticise, so grateful are we to the author for its contents. In the press of publications of
all kinds, when it is impossible to read fully and to judge of all that
gather round even one's special pursuit, works like this of Mr. Jacobs
are peculiarly acceptable: they save us so much time, they serve as a
guide through the labyrinth of printed matter, they enable us to get
at the special documents and MSS. which we need for our particular
purpose. It is indispensable to every student of the history of the Jews
in Spain. It is not exhaustive, because Mr. Jacobs had no time to make
it so: we can only look at with wonder and admiration, and accept with
gratitude, what he accomplished in Spain in the few days at his disposal."
JEWISH CHRONICLE
"Mr. Joseph Jacobs' new work, 'An Inquiry into the Sources of the
History of the Jews in Spain,' is published at so nominal a price (four
shillings !)that no one has an excuse for not buying it. Had the charge
been five times as great, the volume would still have been cheap ; for
its contents add more to our knowledge of the Jews of Spain than any one
thought there remained to know. The indices and bibliographies will
be of immense use to students."
SPECTATOR
" Extremely helpful aid to any future historian of the Jewish people."
ATHENEUM
" The elaborate bibliography he has added, his ample 'index nominum,'
and his lists of Hispano-Jewish writers, and of the authoriti.s for the
history of the Spanish Jews, enhance considerably the va.e of his
volume."
LONDON: DAVIF NUTT,

270-71.

STRAND

This book is a preservation facsimile produced for
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
It is made in compliance with copyright law
and produced on acid-free archival
60# book weight paper
which meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (permanence of paper).
Preservation facsimile printing and binding
by
Northern Micrographics
Brookhaven Bindery
La Crosse, Wisconsin
2012