THE FUTURE OF THE JEWS OF EUROPE.
THE Jews have survived the Pharaohs, as Mr. Disraeli has told us ; and the Assyrian, and the Flavii, and the Barbarians; and will survive, we daresay, the Papacy, of which they are fast becoming the most dangerous foes ; but will they survive prosperity ? It is a very wonderful account of fortitude under suffering, of strength increased by persecution, of great qualities developed by injustice, which Mr. Cracroft has recorded in the paper on " The Jews of Western Europe" which he has inserted among those powerful though unequal criticisms of his which he has just reproduced in a book ;* but on the day it reaches us there reaches us also a New York Tribune of the 10th March. That paper, notable among American papers for always containing something other papers omit, devotes half a column to a very eulogistic account, by no means so bad in point of style as such things usually are, of " the Masked Ball of Purim." Imagine the masked ball of Purim ! The Jews of New York, it seems, prosperous, contented, and entirely free from social oppres- sion, are in the habit of celebrating one of the greatest of their festi- vals publicly, have this year asked all New York to a Carnival, and in an extemporized hall of white and gold, fitted up with the Oriental magnificence of taste which, after two thousand years of exile, lingers in their bones, have given an entertainment which seems to have convinced their American friends that the art of reception was one of the things they did understand " down in Judee." The reporter is once or twice so carried away that he loses himself and becomes almost natural, and there seems no doubt that in royal extravagance of luxury, dominated by true though florid and semi-Asiatic sense of the beautiful, New York felt itself for once hopelessly outdone. The affair looks well even in print, as those affairs seldom look ; but what a strange juxtaposition of ideas !—the festival of Purim celebrated by a masked ball, Vashti suggested by the beauty of an American merchant's daughter, Esther dressed as a Parisienne under Louis Quatorze, Mordecai in " pants" and a collar, that wild Assyrian incident, the most truly Oriental story ever told, except the infi- nitely higher idyl of Ruth, commemorated on a continent of which St. Paul never heard, and amid a great people devoted to the Master who overthrew Judaism, by a masked ball ! It is 2,378 years that ceremonial has survived ; it is 500 years older than Christianity, and in the newest capital of earth, amidst the newest of the conquering nations, it ends in a masquerade. A volume might be written on an occurrence so bizarre, so ironical, so utterly at variance with every fixed idea, historical or theologi- cal, in one's head ; but our special point is the inquiry whether the incident is not significant, whether Judaism, which has sur- vived all foes, will survive all friends ; whether the race which defied equally the Caesars and the Inquisition will defy as steadily a warm welcome and thorough emancipation ? This is clearly the new test to which the nation is to be subjected. The Jews still suffer, no doubt, in Russia, though this is passing ; and in the Principalities they would, but for Napoleon, who in this matter is honestly energetic, be murdered, and ravished, and tortured as in ancient days ; but west of the Vistula the sun is shining steadily
• London: Trtibner.
for the Jews. In Germany, in spite of a peasant prejudice, which still lingers, and which we have once or twice heard expressed with passionate credulity, they swarm in Legislatures, and enter Cabinets ; in France the last relic of hostile opinion seems dying away, and they are socially as well as legally the equals of all Frenchmen ; in England they are legally shut out only from the Peers,—a stupid oppression,—and socially only in part from inter- marriage ; and in America, in the home of the future, the descend- ants of the Puritans seek with anxiety tickets to the masked ball of Purim. It is all right, all strictly just, the kinsfolk of Heine, Massena, and Disraeli have won their place unaided, and deserve it ; but will the victory leave them themselves ? Will they remain among nations which no longer hate them or assail them a separate and distinct people, a class apart, among us but not of us, no longer indeed Pariahs, but never forgetting that the security of Brahmins as of well as of Pariahs lies in isolation ?
We doubt it greatly, though there are circumstances special to the Jews which will tend for years, it may even be for centuries, to preserve their peculiar attitude as men among but not of ordinary mankind. Their special creed will of itself do little to preserve them. Creeds, unless they supply some want of the soul, die out, and Judaism cannot supply the spiritual wants of men of every culture, living under every condition, and subject to every form of intellectual influence. They clung to it while it was persecuted, but the end of persecution is arriving, and Judaism seems to us transforming itself among the educated into one of two faiths— Materialism carried to its logical results, a noble and poetic but wonderfully cold form of Unitarianism. The hope that a Redeemer may be born, and born of Israel, lingered, we seem to perceive, in even Heine ; but the majority of cultivated Hebrews agree, as Mr. Cracroft says, with Mendelssohn , who, when asked to become a Chris- tian because Judaism was untenable, said, "What would you think of a man who because the lower story of his house was on fire escaped into the upper one ?" Even, however, if Judaism lingers it will not necessarily keep its professors apart from their fellow men. Secularists, men of a much more special and separatist creed,—for Judaism under any form still involves the worship of Jehovah and the recognition of a possible Messiah,—is lost in the crowd; and so, as far as itself is concerned, the older belief might be. The modern world is absorbent of creeds, and as a system of belief Judaism would no more stand alone through the ages than Quakerism has done, or Unitarianism. Its protection, if it finds protection, will be in the union of a distinct creed and a distinct race, a union in which it stands alone, unless we except the Parsees, whom civilization is slowly pulverizing, and the Armenians, who show signs of a tendency to merge in the only dominion which has ever been just to them, that of Russia. Separate races and castes keep separate long. The Brahmins are certainly two thousand years old, probably three, and in all that time it is more than probable that no Brahmin woman has borne a child to a non-Brahmin man, yet they have not had the artificial strength which comes of persecution. Aris- tocracies live in prosperity separate a long while, and even races to whom their blood is a curse, like the Gipsies, are slow to fall back unnoticed into the ranks of the people around them. The pride of blood is a strong impulse, and there is no pride of blood like that of the Hebrew, of a race which expects a divine King. See how it flashes out in Mr. Disraeli, though he expects nothing. Ask him what he thinks, when it is convenient to say it, of the pedigree of the nobles who make him such comfortable fauteuils. That pride will do much, and so will the feeling—unknown only to the Anglo-Saxon among the great races of mankind—that a protected life is a pleasant life, that it is well to belong to a united and cosmopolitan caste, to have clansmen in every city, faithful allies in every clime ; to use a language the world knows not, to hold a faith which, at least, liberates one from mental bondage to any other strong enough to make bondage painful. The Greeks feel that, and the Parsees, and their cohesion is to that of the Jews as a sand heap to a block of concrete. And finally, segregation of itself is pleasant, even when it involves suffering. It feeds a lonely pride, gratifies an instinctive desire to be other than other men are— the pride which is the root of the most powerful and most widely spread of human delusions, the pride of pedigree or caste. The separatism of the highest Brahmin,—in his own theory a deity or member of a corporate Godhead—is not stronger than that of a Chundal,—in his own theory living offal.
And yet we question strongly if the Hebrew race will survive many centuries of prosperity. It might, if it were an inferior one ; but it is one of the most competent and active, some observers say the most competent and active, of mankind. It has not been free a hundred years, and already every land in Western Europe is proud of individual Jews. The race is educating itself most carefully, and education, as the Roman Church now recognizes so fully, is fatal, sooner or later, to isolation. It exerts itself in every literature, and literature is cosmopolitan ; in every art, and art is republican ; in every science, and science is th e solvent of the ideas on which separation must be built. How is a Rachel or Grisi, Herschel or Kalisch to believe that an invisible wall separates them from the mankind they charm, or enlighten, or in- struct? Above all, the Hebrew race is at last taking a part, and a leading part, in the grand interests of humanity ; in the interests which have no interest unless humanity is one ; in politics and social life, and that great sequence of movements which we term the progress of civilization. Everywhere the Jews are crowding to the front of political life ; in Germany in such numbers that they excite alarm in Courts; in France, in England, in America, on both sides of the strife which now divides the great Republic. Every- where their passion for politics seems genuine, their convictions, though few, deep. No German Liberals hate the policy of reaction like an Austrian Jew, no man fought more strongly for economy than M. Fould, no Southerner resists the American Liberals more heartily than Mr. Belmont. Everywhere they are compelled to gratify their ambition by relying on the people, and so striving and so relying, it is impossible for them to remain contentedly isolated from mankind. Mania defending Venice must feel as a Venetian, and the mental isolation once ceasing, the personal isolation must also, however slowly, sooner or later disappear. Society exercises as strong an influence as politics, and in the same direction. Active, energetic, and capable of varied interests, fond of luxury, of wit, and of music, so far impressionable that they catch an external impress from every nation,—except perhaps the British, which is essentially as separate a people as their own,—they push forward in society successfully, and natu- rally throw away all that burdens them in the race, their special names, their special habits, sometimes even their speciality of thought. We call them the " unchangeable " people, but did any other people ever fling away polygamy without an effort or a remark ? has any other settled everywhere, in the tropics as in Russia ? has any other or could any other remain separate, yet be more German than Germans, more French than Parisians, more Italian than the nobles of Venice ? So far from being unchangeable, they are the most adaptable of mankind ; and as persecution ceases everywhere, this very quality will tend to merge them in the people among whom they live, and with whom they have at last found that they have sympathies. Should their numbers increase very fast, the process of amalgamation would be slow, as the magnitude of their own community would tend to keep them within it ; but there is no evidence that it will, much that it will not. Had they since the dis- persion multiplied as fast as the Anglo-Saxons or the Irish, earth would be full of them ; but though they can settle anywhere, they do not seem anywhere to have increased much ; not in France, where they are prosperous ; not in Poland, where they are wretchedly poor. They are, we suspect, nearly stationary in numbers; and if stationary, the absence of persecution, the decay of belief, the growth of new ideas and new vivid interests, the assimilating power of the great races to which they are now, for the first time, fully exposed, will gradually fuse them into the general population of the world. Day by day families drop away, intermarry, subside, often half consciously, into the mass, and we see no guarantee that in a couple of centuries more, if the world advances on its course, the Jews will be in any way a separate or a noticeable people, more distinct than Unitarians among ourselves, or Protestants in France, or Catholics in America.
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