Israel in Europe
9781465683175
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was not without reason that Philo, the famous Graeco Jewish scholar of Alexandria, regarded Aaron’s rod, which “was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds,” as an emblem of his race. Torn from the stem that bore and from the soil that nourished them, and for nearly twenty centuries exposed to the wintry blasts of adversity and persecution, the children of Israel still bud and blossom and provide the world with the perennial problem now known as the Jewish Question—a question than which none possesses a deeper interest for the student of the past, or a stronger fascination for the speculator on the future; a question compared with which the Eastern, the Irish, and all other vexed questions are but things of yesterday; a question which has taxed the ingenuity of European statesmen ever since the dispersion of this Eastern people over the lands of the West. “What to do with the Jew?” This is the question. The manner in which each generation of statesmen, from the legislators of ancient Rome to those of modern Roumania, has attempted to answer it, forming as it does a sure criterion of the material, intellectual and moral conditions which prevailed in each country at each period, might supply the basis for an exceedingly interesting and instructive, if somewhat humiliating, study of European political ethics. Here I will content myself with a lighter labour. I propose to sketch in outline the fortunes of Israel in Europe from the earliest times to the present day. It is a sad tale, and often told; but sufficiently important to bear telling again. My object—in so far as human nature permits—will be neither to excuse nor to deplore; but only to describe and, in some measure, to explain. It is no exaggeration to say that the Jews have been in Europe for a longer period than some of the nations which glory in the title of European. Ages before the ancestors of the modern Hungarians and Slavonians were heard of, the keen features and guttural accents of the Hebrew trader were familiar in the markets of Greece and Italy. As early as the fourth century B.C. we find the Hebrew word for “earnest money” domiciled in the Greek language (ἀρραβών), and as early as the second century in the Latin (arrhabo)—a curious illustration of the Jew’s commercial activity in the Mediterranean even in those days.1And yet, despite the length of their sojourn among the peoples of the West, the majority of the Jews have remained in many essential respects as Oriental as they were in the time of the Patriarchs. A younger race would have yielded to the influence of environment, a weaker race would have succumbed to oppression, a less inflexible or unsympathetic race might have conquered its conquerors. But the Jews, when they first came into contact with Europe, were already too old for assimilation, too strong for extermination, too hardened in their peculiar cult for propagandism. Even after having ceased to exist as a state Israel survived as a nation; forming the one immobile figure in a perpetually moving panorama. The narrow local idea of the ancient Greek state was merged into the broad cosmopolitanism of the Macedonian Empire, and that, in its turn, was absorbed by the broader cosmopolitanism of Imperial Rome. But the Jew remained faithful to his own olden ideal. Monotheism superseded Polytheism, and the cosmopolitanism of the Roman Empire was succeeded by that of the Roman Church. The Jew still continued rooted in the past. Mediaeval cosmopolitanism gave way to the nationalism of modern Europe.
