Chosen Peoples

VII

If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between Judaism and Germanism, it would be the word "Recessional." While the prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. "You only have I known among all the families of the earth," says the message through Amos. "Therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities." The Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. "Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story." Alone among epics, it is out for truth, not high heroics. To flout the Pharisees was not reserved for Jesus. "Behold, ye fast for strife and contention," said Isaiah, "and to smite with the fist of wickedness." While some German writers, not content with the great men Germany has so abundantly produced, vaunt that all others, from Jesus to Dante, from Montaigne to Michael Angelo, are of Teuton blood, Jewish literature unflinchingly exposes the flaws even of a Moses and a David. It is this passion for veracity unknown among other peoples-is even Washington's story told without gloss?-that gives false colour to the legend of Israel's ancient savagery. "The title of a nation to its territory," says Seeley, "is generally to be sought in primitive times and would be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre." The dispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this universal process is sophisticated.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,

the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards-as all missons are put-and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:-

Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,

Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.

It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him: "Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee."

In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded long before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was to reveal himself "first to His Englishmen," added that they "mark not the methods of His counsel and are unworthy."

"Is India free," wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure from actual warfare," sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell the war-whoop." For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a "History of England" in the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes "who loved fields and seized them." But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian Harden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the only real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its most popular work-Lazarus's "Soziale Ethik im Judentum"-published as late as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews-a grave indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly explaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the individual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that what unites individuals separates nations. "The work of justice shall be peace," he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent-indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie des Krieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest and most practical treatise on "Perpetual Peace" came from that other German professor, Kant, the hope is not altogether ausgechlossen that in the internal convulsion that must follow the war, there may be an upheaval of that finer Germanism of which we should be only too proud to say that it is Judaism.