George Croly

ANNOTATIONS

[1]—page 3. The legend of the Wandering Jew first appeared in the thirteenth century, in the chronicle of Matthew of Paris, who professes to have received his information from an Armenian bishop to whom the hero had himself communicated the events. According to this version, he was a servant in the house of Pilate, named Cartaphilus, and gave Christ a blow as He was dragged out of the palace to execution. Another and perhaps more familiar version, probably of the fifteenth century and of German origin, states that he was a shoemaker named Ahasuerus. As Jesus bore His cross along the via dolorosa, staggering with pain and weakness, He leaned for a moment against the doorway of the rude shopkeeper, who, with cursing and bitterness, ordered him to “go on.” The sufferer looked upon him and said: “I go, but tarry thou till I come!” From that awful moment he found life a burden and death an impossibility. From time to time he was able to rejoice in gray hairs and a stooping form, but regularly these indications of the end would vanish, and clothed again in the form of youth, he felt the look and heard in his soul the dread voice bidding him wander on and on forever. All versions agree touching the verdict of Christ, that he should wander on earth till the Second Coming.

In its deepest import, “the tradition is simply a wonderful picture of a people—a people forever suffering and yet undying; forever doomed to wander; without a home or any fixed abiding-place; safe nowhere, and yet immortal; trampled and beaten; robbed and persecuted, and yet, strangely, living and flourishing in spite of all. The most vigorous, virile, and healthful people under the sun; the bravest and most enduring in battle or siege; the most patriotic and loyal of all peoples, they stedfastly, through all their wanderings and sorrows, cling to a land which is but a memory or a dream.”

In this story, Dr. Croly adds to the typical traditions, peculiar features of his own. Having such a hold on popular imagination, the Wandering Jew has figured very largely in fiction, particularly in the works of A. W. Schlegel, Klingemann, BÉranger, Eugene Sue, Hans Christian Andersen, and others.[2]—page 11. The Mount of Corruption lay to the south of Jerusalem, across the Valley of Hinnom. Its summit looks down upon the spot in connection with which the Jewish ideas of the future life of the wicked were formed. The valley, named, according to Dean Stanley, from “some ancient hero, the son of Hinnom,” is first mentioned in Joshua (xv. 8; xviii. 16), in marking out the boundary-line between Judah and Benjamin. Solomon erected high places there for Moloch (1 Kings xi. 7), whose horrid rites were revived by later idolatrous kings. Ahaz and Manassah made their children “pass through the fire” in this valley (2 Kings xvi. 3; 2 Chron. xxviii. 3; xxxiii. 6); and the fiendish custom of sacrificing infants to the fire-gods seems to have been kept up for some time in Tophet, its southeastern extremity (Jer. vii. 31; 2 Kings xxiii. 10). To put an end to these abominations, Josiah polluted the place to render it ceremonially unclean (2 Kings xxiii. 10, 13, 14; 2 Chron. xxxiv. 4, 5), and it became the common cesspool of the city, and the laystall where all the solid filth was collected.[3]—page 16. It is difficult to conceive of the magnificence and the extent of the Temple, as rebuilt by Herod, one of the greatest royal builders that ever lived. Edersheim calls it “a palace, a fortress, a sanctuary of shining marble and glittering gold.” Of it the Jewish tradition ran: “He that has not seen the Temple of Herod, has never known what beauty is.” As the pilgrim ascended the Mount, crested by that symmetrically proportioned building, which could hold within its gigantic girdle not fewer than 210,000 persons, his wonder might well increase at every step. The Mount itself seemed like an island, abruptly rising from out deep valleys, surrounded by a sea of walls, palaces, streets, and houses, and crowned by a mass of snowy marble and glittering gold, rising terrace upon terrace. Altogether it measured a square of about one thousand feet.[4]—page 16. The High Priest was Caiaphas, before whom Jesus had just been on trial. The beginning of the public ministry of Jesus was contemporaneous with the accession of Pontius Pilate to the procuratorship and the appointment of Caiaphas by Pilate to the high priesthood. Under the administration of Pilate, Roman rule reached the deepest depths in “venality, violence, robbery, persecutions, wanton, malicious insults, judicial murders without even the formality of a legal process, and cruelty.” History records of Caiaphas that he was appointed High Priest, not because of his piety—the Talmud describes in terrible language the “gross self-indulgence, violence, luxury, and even public indecency” of the high priests of that day—but because in him was found “a sufficiently submissive instrument of Roman tyranny.” The irreverence here displayed is the natural expression of an utterly godless nature, and the supernatural events that centered in that crucifixion hour could not have failed to call forth such manifest feelings of horror.[5]—page 18. The supernatural events mentioned in the narrative are recorded by the evangelists, and confirmed by tradition and contemporaneous history, as having occurred in connection with the Crucifixion—deep darkness enveloped the earth from the sixth hour to the ninth hour of the day; the veil of the Temple that shut in the Holy of Holies was rent from top to bottom; and a mighty earthquake terrified the multitudes. Lange has well said: “The moment when Christ, the creative Prince, the principle of life to humanity, and the word, expires, convulses the whole physical world.” Dr. Philip Schaff has said: “The darkness was designed to exhibit the amazement of nature, and of the God of nature, at the wickedness of the Crucifixion of Him who is the light of the world and the sun of righteousness.” The horror from such dense darkness is brought out powerfully by Lord Byron in his dream of “Darkness.” The extent and character of the Temple-Veil will account for the fact that it produced so profound an impression when it was seen rent from top to bottom and hanging in two parts from its fastenings above and at the side. The Veils before the most Holy Place were sixty feet long, and thirty wide, of the thickness of the palm of the hand, and wrought in seventy-two squares joined together. They were so heavy that it was said that three hundred priests were needed to manipulate them. The rending was seen to be the work of God’s own hand.[6]—page 23. The description of the priests and their residences would indicate an ideal condition. When the Israelites settled in Canaan, Joshua assigned to the priestly families thirteen cities of residence, with “suburbs” or pasture-grounds for their flocks (Josh. xxi. 13-19). The Levites were scattered over all the country, but the cities of the priests were all near Jerusalem and embraced within the bounds of Judah, Simeon, and Benjamin. When the priests were divided into twenty-four courses, each course officiated a week at a time. The interval of twenty-three weeks, between the successive times of service of a course, was a time for home life and high-priestly pursuits. The opportunities for leisurely culture were undoubtedly very great. In addition to the large number residing at this time in these priestly cities, who took their turn in the courses, there were no less than 24,000 stationed permanently at Jerusalem, and 12,000 at Jericho; so that it was a tradition among the Jews “that it had never fallen to the lot of any priest to offer incense twice.” Their proportion to the number of the people must, therefore, have been much greater than that of the clergy has ever been in any Christian nation. Their leisure and opportunities for culture, especially in the Sacred Books, must have been exceptional. The number of the priestly class was doubtless increased through intermarriage with the other tribes. Salathiel was a priest, and hence a Levite; but he was also connected with the tribe of Naphtali, through marriage of a daughter of that tribe; so that when consciousness returned he found himself being borne, not by his priestly associates to the cities of the priests about Jerusalem, but by his tribal kinsmen to the domain of Naphtali under the shadows of Lebanon.[7]—page 26. Before the Roman conquest, the hatred of the Samaritan for the Jew made Samaria largely a land of brigands, through which a Jew could not safely travel. To Herod the Great belongs the credit of breaking up this brigandage, so far as it was an organized system. Josephus relates that Herod, after taking Sepphoris, the metropolis of Galilee, “hasted away to the robbers that were in the caves, who overran a great part of the country, and did as great mischief to its inhabitants as war itself could have done.” He defeated them with a great slaughter, and drove them out of the land.[8]—page 28. The region through which the caravan was passing not only brought them in view of the scenes of many of the greatest events in Jewish history, individual and national—Mounts Carmel and Gilboa and Tabor and Hermon, and the theater of patriarchal and prophetic activity—but across what has been the battle-field for the armies of the world-empires of three continents as they have crossed and recrossed, from the days of Abraham down through the Crusades. It is aptly designated “a living history of Providence.”[9]—page 33. The “Haphtorah” (Isa. liii.) contains the most graphic Old-Testament picture of Jesus as the rejected, suffering atoning Messiah. It was this that the Ethiopian eunuch of Queen Candace was reading when Philip went up to him in his chariot (Acts viii. 29), and by the explanation of which he was converted to the Christian faith. Through its wonderful picture Eleazar seems already to have been led to look upon Jesus as the Messiah; but his hopes, roused by Salathiel’s renunciation of the priesthood, were dashed in finding that the veil was still over the face of the latter, as it was over the many of Israel.[10]—page 43. Jubal is a typical Israelitish mountaineer, hunter, and warrior in one, combining with a sense of wild freedom a touch of the ancient Jewish enthusiasm. The incident here narrated gives a glimpse of his deeper nature, and his outburst of patriotic exultation at sight of the grave of the hosts of Sisera was one in which every true Israelite could join.[11]—page 47. The life of a whole generation is passed in inactivity after the home is made in Naphtali—an inactivity that served to deepen the shadow of his doom and the remorse for his unspeakable crime. In this period the preparation is being made for the final conflict of Jew with Roman authority, and at the end of it Salathiel is thrust, by a malevolent power, into the leadership in that desperate first struggle, described by Josephus, that promised to sweep the Romans from Judea. His fate, however, pursues him, and he languishes for years in a dungeon—leaving the Jews, now without competent leadership, again under Roman control and oppression.[12]—page 51. Antiochus IV., king of Syria—the son of Antiochus the Great—known in history as Epiphanes the Illustrious, but to many of his contemporaries as Epimanes the Madman—was for ages the chief name of horror to the Jews. His father had conquered Palestine, B.C. 203, and his brother and predecessor, Saleucus Philopator, had plundered the Temple, and Syria had disputed the control of the land with Egypt. Epiphanes conquered Jerusalem, B.C. 169, and held it for three years and a half. The obstinate resistance of the Jews led to the most dreadful deeds of cruelty recorded in history. Those who adhered to Ptolemy were mercilessly butchered. He plundered the city and the Temple. He forbade the Jewish religion, tore up and burned the Sacred Scriptures, put a stop to the daily Sacrifice of expiation, and dedicated the Temple to Zeus Olympios. He compelled the people to keep their infants uncircumcised, and to sacrifice swine’s flesh upon the altar. Kurtz says: “This was the abomination of desolation in the Holy Place, spoken of by Daniel (ch. xi. 31)—a type of another desolation that still belonged to the future (Matt. xxiv. 15)”—before the Second Coming of Christ. Added to all the rest, his system of unspeakable barbarities and horrible tortures at length drove the people to desperation, and led to the successful uprising and heroic struggle for freedom under Judas the Maccabee—truly God’s hammer—and his brothers (recorded in the Apocryphal books bearing that name). Help in understanding the Jewish feeling toward Antiochus may be found in Josephus, Prideaux, Edersheim, etc.[13]—page 61. Eleazar, as he appears in the narrative, is not the real name of a historic leader of the Jews at this time. Josephus, indeed, speaks of a certain Jew “who was called Eleazar, and was born at Saab, in Galilee. This man took up a stone of great size, and threw it down from the wall upon the ram, and this with so great a force that it broke off the head of the engine. He also leaped down and took up the head of the ram from the midst of them, and, without any concern, carried it to the top of the wall, and this, while he stood as a fit mark to be pelted by all his enemies.” Disregarding his many wounds, he showed himself a hero in other daring exploits, like some of those attributed by the author to Salathiel.

Josephus tells also of another Eleazar, who, at the time when the Jews took the fortress of Masada by treachery, was the governor of the Temple. He was the son of Ananias, the High Priest, and was a very bold youth. He “persuaded those that officiated in the divine service to receive no gift or sacrifice from any foreigner. And this,” adds Josephus, “was the true beginning of our war with the Romans; for they rejected the sacrifice of CÆsar on this account.”

The real leader in this early Jewish war was, however, Flavius Josephus, the historian. After the destruction of the army of Cestius Gallus in A.D. 66, the patriots precipitated a revolution, and Josephus was sent to organize the defense of Galilee. He led in the desperate struggle against Vespasian, but fell into the hands of the Romans after the fall of the stronghold of Jotapata and the subsequent massacre there. He saved himself by predicting the future elevation of Vespasian to the imperial throne. He was present in the Roman army at the destruction of Jerusalem, and accompanied Titus to Rome, where he resided for the rest of his life. He was a great leader, and Salathiel in his exploits often seems to personate him.[14]—page 64. Onias is not brought forward as a historical character, but as the representative of a class of Jews who were equally treacherous in their dealings with their patriotic countrymen and with the Romans. He appears as one of the marplots of the history—the personification of hatred and malice—from this council of war until the final catastrophe, when he dies by the hand of Jubal. The speech which the writer puts in his mouth was, however, undoubtedly suggested by the remarkable oration, recorded by Josephus (Bk. II., ch. xvi.), which Agrippa (the same mentioned in the Acts) addressed to the Jews, in the gallery adjoining the Temple and in the presence of his sister Bernice, who was above in the palace of the Asmoneans, and in which he sought to dissuade the people from going to war with their oppressors. In this speech of Agrippa we have “an authentic account of the extent and strength of the Roman empire when the Jewish war began,” from which becomes the more apparent the madness that hurried the Jews to their final destruction.[15]—page 70. In these foreglimpses of national doom, the representative character of Salathiel is brought out and the sense of his own personal doom, as the arch-crucifier of Jesus, deepened.[16]—page 72. It has often been remarked that the selection of Judea as the home of the chosen people bears the marks of divine wisdom. At the point where the three continents of the ancient world meet, surrounded by desert, mountain, and sea, broken by rugged ranges and defiles impassable in the face of even a small opposing force, and filled with a dense population, it was not only unique in character but impregnable to foreign foe so long as Israel remained faithful to its covenant with Jehovah. When the barriers, which at first excluded the people from the outside world in their earlier development, were broken down, it became the one place from which all the world was most accessible for the spread of the Hebrew Theism and of Christianity.[17]—page 74. The Year of Jubilee, recurring every fiftieth year, was a remarkable feature of the Jewish system. It was inaugurated on the Day of Atonement with the blowing of trumpets throughout the land, and by a proclamation of universal liberty. Its main provisions were: (1) The soil was left uncultivated and the chance produce was free to all comers. (2) Every Israelite recovered his right to the land originally allotted to the family to which he belonged, if he, or his ancestor, had parted with it. Houses in walled cities were an exception, altho these were redeemable at any time within a full year of the time of sale. (3) All Israelites who had become slaves, either to their own countrymen or to resident foreigners, were set free in the Jubilee. Josephus states that in his time all debts were remitted in the Year of Jubilee. It was a wonderful provision for preventing the accumulation of inordinate wealth in the hands of the few, and for relieving and giving new opportunity to those whom misfortune or fault had reduced to poverty. (See Smith’s Bible Dictionary.)[18]—page 75. Small as was Judea—no larger than one of our smaller States—it yet has the distinction of embracing within its bounds the temperatures and productions of all climes. Notwithstanding the covenant unfaithfulness of its people and their failure in obedience to Jehovah, it is still true that it bequeathed to mankind all the forms of Theism—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—and with and through them the chief enlightening and power-giving influences since operative among the nations. It is not, then, too much to say that, with faithfulness to God and to its unequaled privileges, “Judea might have changed the earth into a paradise.”[19]—page 79. The elevation of Salathiel to the leadership, as the Prince of Naphtali, in the war now decided upon, seems contrary to the natural order, as he was a priest and allied to the tribe of Naphtali by marriage merely; but the plea that it was a holy war prevailed, and the superhuman qualities that had been manifested in him clearly marked him for the position. The exaltation and exultation were to be simply the prelude to a sharp recall to a deeper sense of the curse that was upon him, and upon all else because of his crime.[20]—page 84. The blow was a critical one for Judea, depriving it of its leader at the moment when that leader was most needed. It likewise dashed the high hopes of the leader and left him a madman, a prey to the wildest imagination that swept him through earth and sky, leaving him at last, for periods beyond all counting, the sleepless, conscious, vivid victim of misery unspeakable.[21]—page 93. The grove known as the Cedars of Lebanon consists of about 400 trees, standing in a depression of the mountain, quite apart from all other trees. The trees are about 6,500 feet above the sea, and 3,000 below the summit. About 37 of these are large and old, the 11 or 12 older ones being of immense size and each spreading itself widely round from several trunks, and reaching back in time 3,500 and more years—beyond Solomon and Abraham. They are naturally looked upon with much reverence by the natives of the region as living records of the glory of Solomon. The Maronite patriarch was formerly accustomed to celebrate there the festival of the Transfiguration at an altar of rough stones. In later years a chapel has been erected on the spot. The references of the author are to an earlier, and usually idolatrous, worship. Bands of robbers, such as that described, naturally sought the vicinity of such gatherings.[22]—page 97. The worship of the robbers at Lebanon illustrates the ease with which the Oriental mind conjoins religion with any form of villainy. This, however, is likely to be a feature of any religion that is a mere superstition.[23]—page 103. These Greek Christian hermits, dwelling apart from men in their rocky cavern, are a fair type of thousands of such bands, driven by the terrible persecutions of the Roman Emperor to take refuge in the bowels of the earth. They were often made up of the noblest and best of souls that most readily responded to the call and the ideal of Christianity. A similar state continued during much of the time until, in the age of Constantine, the Christians became so numerous as to be able to change from a policy of inaction to one of aggressive self-defense.[24]—page 113. History records the facts of Roman corruption and degeneracy during this period. During the absence of Salathiel, the oppression and extortion had maddened the Jews and reached a point beyond endurance. There resulted a succession of partial and premature uprisings. The empire everywhere seemed falling into decay, and preparing for dissolution; the evils and the evil line of rulers culminated in the administration of Gessius Florus.[25]—page 133. It was Gessius Florus who, by his barbarity in governing, finally forced the Jews into war. Josephus, contrasting him with Albinus, pictures Florus as a human monster: “Altho such was the character of Albinus, yet did Gessius Florus, who succeeded him, demonstrate him to have been a most excellent person, upon the comparison; for the former did the greatest part of his rogueries in private, and with a sort of dissimulation; but Gessius did his unjust actions to the harm of the nation after a pompous manner; and as tho he had been sent as an executioner to punish condemned malefactors, he omitted no sort of rapine, or of vexation; where the case was really pitiable he was most barbarous, and in things of the greatest turpitude he was most impudent. Nor could any one outdo him in disguising the truth, nor could any one contrive more subtle ways of deceit than he did. He indeed thought it but a petty offense to get money out of simple persons; so he spoiled whole cities and ruined entire bodies of men at once, and did almost publicly proclaim it all the country over that they had liberty given them to turn robbers, upon this condition: that he might go shares with them in the spoils they got. Accordingly, this, his greediness of gain, was the occasion that entire toparchies were brought to desolation, and a great many of the people left their own country and fled into foreign provinces.”[26]—page 145. In the Prophet Daniel’s vision the Roman world-empire was represented by iron, which dashed and broke in pieces all else. It is the wont to say that Rome had a genius for conquest and empire. Among the nations she represented power and law, as Greece represented culture and Judea religion. The Roman was lacking in the culture and religion needed to refine and control his rugged nature; hence, his drift toward the animal and brutal, and toward the outward show of life. Corruption was already far on its way, and was only delayed for a time by the spread and prevalence of the Christian faith.[27]—page 147. Nero was Emperor from A.D. 54 to A.D. 68. He was a nephew of Caligula, and was adopted by Claudius in A.D. 50. Even his own age, which had borne and nurtured him, regarded him in his later career a monster. He killed those whom he feared, among them his own mother and Britannicus, the son of Claudius, and rightful heir to the throne; those who stood in the way of his whims, as his first two wives, Octavia and PoppÆa Sabina; and at last he killed everybody who attracted his attention. Under him occurred the insurrection of the Jews, put down by Vespasian, in which Josephus so ably led his countrymen. The conflagration in July, 64, in which two-thirds of Rome was destroyed, is believed to have been the work of Nero, who is said to have shown his indifference by playing the “Siege of Troy” on his fiddle while watching the flames from a high tower in his palace. He wantonly accused the Christians of setting it on fire, and sentenced them to be clad in tarred garments, set on fire, and driven as flaming torches through the streets of Rome. A conspiracy formed against him in A.D. 65 failed, and he sacrificed his old instructor, Seneca, and the philosopher’s nephew, the poet Lucan, the author of “Pharsalia”; but one formed in A.D. 68, extending over Gaul, Spain, and Rome itself, overwhelmed the tyrant on his return from a journey in Greece, where he had appeared as a singer on the stage, and drove him to despair and to suicide in June of that year.[28]—page 149. “Married, but not mated,” could not have been said of Nero, at least in the later years of his life. He had early married Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, his adopted father; but afterward became enslaved by the charms of a mistress, Acte, a beautiful freedwoman, who was content to be merely the Emperor’s plaything. In the year 58, PoppÆa Sabina took the place of Acte. The new favorite was not satisfied, however, to be merely the plaything of Nero; she was resolved to be his wife. With consummate skill she set herself at once to remove the obstacles that stood in her way. By playing upon the passions and fears of Nero she accomplished her diabolical purposes. She wrought him up to a passion of hatred against Agrippina, his mother, and she was murdered. The trusted advisers of the Emperor were one by one made way with. Octavia, his wife, daughter of Claudius, now long neglected, was divorced, banished, and barbarously murdered. PoppÆa’s triumph was now complete. “She was formally married to Nero; her head appeared on the coins side by side with his; and her statue appeared in the public places of Rome.” Her career shows her to have been anything but a “dove in a vulture’s talons.” PoppÆa died in the autumn of the year 65, just after the great conflagration, and a little before the great pestilence consequent upon it.[29]—page 160. The dying appeal of the martyr St. Paul—whose name is not mentioned—is depicted with a delicacy rarely if ever seen in the present-day handling of sacred subjects in secular romances.[30]—page 173. The account given by the historian Tacitus, in his “Annals,” of the origin of the Christians, of their persecution, and of the satiating of the popular rage, is of peculiar interest as illustrating this narrative. Of the Christians, Tacitus says:

“This name was derived from one ‘Christus,’ who was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate; and this accursed superstition, for a moment repressed, broke forth again, not only through Judea, the source of evil, but even through the city, whither all things outrageous and shameful flow together and find many adherents. Accordingly those were first arrested who confessed, afterward a vast number upon their information, who were convicted, not so much on the charge of causing the fire, as for their hatred to the human race. To their execution there were added such mockeries as that they were wrapped in the skins of wild beasts and torn in pieces by dogs, or crucified, or set on fire and burnt, when daylight ended, as torches by night. Nero lent his own gardens for the spectacle, and gave a chariot race, at which he mingled freely with the multitude in the garb of a driver or mounted on his chariot. As the result of all, a feeling of compassion arose for the sufferers, tho guilty and deserving of condign punishment, on the ground that they were destroyed not for the common good, but to gratify the cruelty of one man.”

[31]—page 187. “Unconquerable fortresses” proclaimed the name and sway of Herod the Great. Among these were Essebonitis and MachÆrus in PerÆa, and Alexandreian, Herodion, Hyrcania, and Masada in Southeastern Judea, near the shore of the Dead Sea. According to the description of Masada by Josephus:

[32]—page 233. It was in Masada that Herod the Great, when he fled to Rome to appeal to Antony, had left his mother, sister, and children. In later years, after he had been established in the kingdom by order of Rome, he rebuilt, strengthened, and beautified the fortress. Soon after Florus, by his extortion and cruelty, had driven the Jews to rebellion, history records that Masada was taken by surprise, and the Roman garrison put to the sword. This is the historical basis of this chapter of the story.[33]—page 247. Josephus follows his description of the fortress of Masada by an account of Herod’s palace, that justifies the description here given, and reveals the motive of the king in its construction:

[34]—page 253. The record of history at the basis of this part of the narrative is, that immediately after the capture of Masada, “Manahem—a younger son of the celebrated Judas of Galilee, who had perished in a revolt soon after the exile of Archelaus, leaving to a powerful party the watchword, ‘We have no king but God,’—proclaimed himself the leader of the zealots and marched upon Jerusalem. The outworks of the palace were mined and burned, and the garrison capitulated. The Jews and the troops of Agrippa were allowed to depart; the Roman soldiers retired to the three strong towers built by Herod, and all left in the palace were put to death. The success was followed by the execution of the High Priest Ananias and his brother, who were found hidden in an aqueduct; but these and other excesses displeased the people; and when Manahem proceeded to assume the royal diadem, he was put to death by the partizans of Eleazar. In him the insurgents lost the only hope of a competent leader. The Roman soldiers in the towers were soon compelled to surrender on promise of their lives; but they had no sooner piled their arms than they were cut to pieces. This baptism of blood, by which the zealots committed themselves to a war of extermination, which they at the same time deprived of the dignity of a patriotic struggle, was perpetrated on a Sabbath; and on the same day the Jews of CÆsarea were massacred by the Greeks to the number of 20,000. These deeds mark the character of the conflict, not only as an insurrection of Judea against the Romans, but as an internecine struggle of the Jewish and Greek races in Palestine and the neighboring lands.”—Philip Smith, “History of the World.”[35]—page 254. These Mosaic regulations for exemption from war are found in Deut. xx. They are unique and peculiar to the Jewish code.[36]—page 263. The historian records that the capture of Jerusalem brought down the Romans upon the insurgents:

[37]—page 276. It was during this interval, in which the Jews were without competent leadership, that the Romans made and carried forward their plans for conquering Judea. The news of the revolt and the defeat of Cestius reached Nero when he was on his theatrical tour of Greece. He at once entrusted Vespasian (afterward Emperor) with the command of all the forces of Syria and the East. Vespasian immediately “sent his son Titus to Alexandria, to lead the fifteenth legion into Palestine, while he hastened through Asia Minor and Syria, collecting troops and engines as he advanced. In the spring of the following year, three legions, with a large force of allies, were assembled at Ptolemais (Acre). The sense of being committed to so great a conflict, and the six-months’ interval for preparation, had restored some order among the still divided Jews. The avowed friends of Rome had either taken refuge with her armies or been compelled to join the insurgents.” So writes the historian. In the interval the moderate party, who would have been content to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome if their liberties were secured, had, by their numbers and character, obtained the ascendency over the zealots.[38]—page 280. Jubal appears in this strange manner, after two years had been passed in the dungeon, and rehearses the story of the war. The attack of Vespasian fell first upon Galilee, which lay in his way to Jerusalem. The moderate party had placed Joseph, the son of Matthias—better known as the author of “Jewish Antiquities,” and by his Roman name, Flavius Josephus, which he later assumed, as the client of Vespasian in command in Galilee. His account given in “The Jewish War” proves that the horrors of the conflict in Galilee were not overdrawn by Jubal. Josephus, who was undoubtedly possessed of military genius of no mean order, was driven at last to stake the fate of Galilee on the defense of Jotapata. Before it Vespasian was wounded, but the hill-fortress was finally stormed. The story of the marvelous escape of the Jewish leader and of his recapture is related by himself. He was thereafter attached to the suite of Vespasian “in a character between a prisoner and a companion; and, after acting throughout the war as a mediator between his countrymen and the Romans, he was rewarded with a grant of land in Judea, together with a pension and the Roman franchise.” Some of the most interesting features in Dr. Croly’s romance would seem to have been suggested by experiences in the life of Josephus. The horrors of the war were indescribable. Toward the close of the Galilean campaign, Trajan was despatched by Vespasian to seize Joppa, the only port held by the Jews. “Here the unfortunate inhabitants took to their ships, which were dashed to pieces by a storm, and the few survivors killed by the Romans as they gained the land. At the other captured cities (Tiberias, Taricheia, Gamala, Itabyrium, and Gischala) all the elder inhabitants were massacred and the younger sold as slaves. Never was a war marked by greater atrocities on both sides than that which now desolated the Holy Land.”[39]—page 284. The numerous caves, owing to the chalky limestone of which the rocks of Syria and Palestine chiefly consist, are one of the marked features of this region. The Scriptures are full of references to them, as they were used for dwelling-places, burial-places, places of refuge, and other purposes. The bold shores of the Mediterranean, affording as they do so little good harborage, are well suited to furnish caverns, approachable from the sea only, in which the robber band is represented as holding its orgies.[40]—page 291. Such a robber group was not uncommon in that age, made up as it was of such diverse races and dispositions. The corruption of the Roman rule under Nero brought an approach to anarchy in many of the provinces. Owing to the favorable character of its topography and the strange mixture of its population, Palestine, and indeed the whole Syrian shore of the Mediterranean, was at the worst in this regard. Robbery, by sea and by land, was so widely practised as to gather to itself a degree of respectability not usually associated with it. German, Chiote, Syrian, Arab, Egyptian, and Ethiopian, all develop here in the most marked way, under the influence of over-much wine, their national idiosyncrasies and their natural quarrelsomeness.[41]—page 328. This chance meeting with Naomi, the granddaughter of Ananus, the late High Priest, furnishes the key to many of the situations and strange adventures of the closing volume of this romance. It was during the period of Salathiel’s incarceration in the dungeon, and while Vespasian was pushing on to Jerusalem, that the death of Ananus occurred. Josephus represents Ananus, or Annus, as a man who might have saved the nation from destruction. At this time he shared the supreme power in Jerusalem, under the Sanhedrin, with Simon, the son of Garion, the bravest of the zealots, the moderate party being thus the controlling power in the city. Later, however, when the tide of devastation directed by Vespasian had entirely swept over Galilee and Perea, the death of Nero brought a brief respite until Vespasian himself had been chosen Emperor. Meanwhile the efforts of Ananus to make preparation for defense were paralyzed by the zealots. The historian relates how “Jerusalem became the refuge and sink of the fugitives from every quarter. Crowds brought fresh confusion, and added to the fatal power of the zealots. At length John of Giscala arrived, with his panting men and horses, from the fall of the last Galilean fortress. In spite of the tale which their appearance told, the crafty leader announced that the Romans were exhausted, and pointed to the long resistance of the northern cities as a presage of their failure before Jerusalem. His arrival animated the zealots; and the robbers and assassins who had come into the city from every quarter enacted scenes which are only paralleled by the September massacres of Paris in 1792.” Ananus set himself against this sacrilegious reign of terror, but the zealots prevailed, and he was put to death, and his naked corpse “thrown out to the dogs and vultures, in a land where it was a sacred custom to bury even the worst malefactors before sunset. The moderate party was crushed, and the zealots followed up their triumph, first by a series of massacres, in which, says Josephus, ‘they slaughtered the people like a herd of unclean animals,’ to the number of 12,000, and then by murders under the form of law.” Faction then ran riot as the doomed city awaited the coming of Titus, who succeeded his father Vespasian, for its final destruction.[42]—page 347. When Vespasian was made Emperor, he departed for Rome, leaving Titus to work the wrath of God upon the doomed city—doomed because of unfaithfulness to its covenant with Jehovah. Early in the year 70, Titus, having collected his forces at CÆsarea, moved upon Jerusalem with not less than 80,000 men, arriving before the city when, at the last Passover ever celebrated, it was crammed, as Josephus relates, with a million persons keeping that feast and without any provision having been made for their sustenance. The garrison of the Holy City was made up of three principal factions, as ready to fight with one another as with the Roman. Eleazar, the leader of one faction of the zealots, with 2,400 men, held the Temple and four strong towers that had been erected at its corners. John of Giscala, leader of a mediating party, had succeeded to the position of Ananus in the Temple courts and the lower city, and with 6,000 men besieged Eleazar’s forces. Simon, son of Gioras, occupied the hill of Zion with 10,000 Jews and 5,000 Idumeans, and confronted both the other leaders. Titus found these factions carrying on an incessant fight with one another by means of the war-engines left behind by Cestius in his flight. With such a state of things existing, there could be little hope of defense against the conquerors of the world.[43]—page 353. The Prince arrived after Titus had pushed the siege far on toward completion. The historian records that on the first day of the feast, the Jewish leaders for a moment suspended their mutual hostilities to make a combined attack upon the single legion stationed on the Mount of Olives. The Romans, at work on their entrenchments, were suddenly beset by hosts that kept pouring out of the city, and were driven back to the summit of the hill; but by a desperate effort they at last succeeded in beating them back. On the next day, the second of the feast, the factions renewed the internal conflict, and the party of John gained possession of the Temple; and thus the factions were reduced to two.[44]—page 356. The Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem alone formed an exception to the judicial blindness that had fallen upon Israel. Warned by the prophecy of Jesus (Luke xxi. 20, 21), they had departed in a body, before the city was surrounded, to Pella, a village of Decapolis, beyond the Jordan.[45]—page 360. When the siege at length shut in the city, it was no longer possible to furnish the priests or the offerings for the daily sacrifice twice a day for the sins of the people; hence when it ceased, on the 17th of the month Tamuz, the universal horror of a people undone expressing itself in a universal outcry. Concerning the cessation of the daily sacrifice, Whiston, the translator and editor of Josephus, has the following note: “This was a remarkable day indeed, the 17th of Panemus (Tamuz), A.D. 70, when, according to Daniel’s prediction, six hundred and six years before, the Romans, in half a week, caused the sacrifice and oblation to cease (Dan. ix. 27). For from the month of February A.D. 66, about which time Vespasian entered on this war, to this very time, was just three years and a half.”[46]—page 367. The historical record is that, on April 13 A.D. 70, when Titus advanced in person at the head of six hundred cavalry to reconnoiter the city, not a man was to be seen; but as he rode incautiously near the wall, he was suddenly surrounded by a multitude that poured out from a gate behind him. Bareheaded and without a breastplate, he forced his way through the hosts with his horse and sword, amid a storm of darts that transfixed many of his followers, and, tho he escaped unharmed to the camp, the Jews could boast that the first act of the siege was CÆsar’s flight.[47]—page 378. What with faction within and assault from without, the wretchedness of Jerusalem at this time had become almost inconceivable. The historian graphically says:

[48]—page 387. It is to the honor of Titus that he made earnest and repeated efforts to save the Temple as well as to prevent its desecration by the Jews themselves. After the destruction of Antonia and before his final assault upon the defenses of the Temple, he made a last experiment of clemency. According to the historian, many accepted his offer of mercy; and when the rest had fled to Zion and the Temple, he sent to Josephus to offer them free egress if they would come out and fight, rather than see the sanctuary polluted. His words, uttered in their own language, were beginning to make some impression, when his old enemy, John, sternly interrupted him, declaring that he feared not the taking of the city, for God would protect His own: and Josephus narrowly escaped capture. The captives just admitted to quarter, including many of the chief priests, next appeared before the Temple gate to entreat the zealots to save the house of God from ruin; but the merciless John, who had already butchered many of their relatives, answered with a shower of missiles, which—says Josephus—strewed the ground with bodies as thickly as the places where the slaves were thrown out unburied. Titus himself pleaded the inconsistency of filling with arms and blood the courts of the Holy Place, nay, even the Holy of Holies, which they had always guarded with jealousy. “I call on your gods,” said he, “I call on my whole army—I call on the Jews who are with me—I call on yourselves—to witness that I do not force you to this crime. Come forth, and fight in any other place, and no Roman shall violate your sacred edifice.” But the zealots, in their judicial blindness, rejected all offers of mercy, and waited for God to save the Temple by miracle.[49]—page 409. The historian records that the year preceding the final revolt (A.D. 65) was marked by the direst prodigies of impending war and of the desolation of the Temple. During a whole year, a comet shaped like a simitar hung over the city, and many an eye-witness testified to the appearance described by Milton:

Those who witnessed the splendid comet of Donati (A.D. 1858) will at once be able to recognize the form of the flaming sword across the sky.

“The brazen gate of the Temple, which required twenty men to move it on its hinges, flew open of its own accord in the dead of night, as if to let in the advancing armies of the heathen.” (See Philip Smith.)[50]—page 419. The doom of the Holy City had been rendered inevitable by the conduct of the people in forsaking their covenant with Jehovah. The Evangelist Luke (xix. 41-44) represents Jesus as pausing as He approached the city, and shedding bitter tears over the remedilessness of the fate of the city and people. The passage is of interest on account, not only of this weeping, but also of the prophecy so remarkably fulfilled by Titus. The words of the Gospel are as follows:

[51]—page 428. It will be remembered that when Titus gathered his forces at CÆsarea for an advance upon Jerusalem, he drew from Alexandria, Egyptian and Ethiopian troops.[52]—page 446. The loss of life among the Jews during the siege of Jerusalem was almost incredible. Josephus reckoned it at 1,100,000, a number not difficult to credit if we remember that “nearly the whole male population of Judea had been gathered together for the Passover when the city was beleaguered. The prisoners taken in the whole war were 90,000.” Had it not been for the Jews of the dispersion, the nation would have perished with the city. It was due to the compassion of Titus that a movement that might have destroyed even this remnant was stopped almost at its inception. When persecution of the Jews began at Antioch, where several Jews were put to death for an alleged plot to set fire to the city, from which it would probably have spread over the empire, Titus put an end to it by his famous order and rebuke: “The country of the Jews is destroyed, thither they can not return; it would be hard to allow them no home to retreat to; leave them in peace.”[53]—page 459. By his Roman prenomen, Titus, is usually known Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, the eleventh of the twelve CÆsars, Emperor from 79 to 81 A.D. He was in some respects one of the most remarkable of the CÆsars. “Educated in the imperial court, he was thoroughly trained in all elegant accomplishments: he could speak Greek fluently, and could compose verses; he was proficient in music; he could write short-hand, and could imitate handwriting so skilfully that he used to say that he might have been a most successful forger. He was very handsome, with a fine commanding expression and a vigorous frame, well trained in all the exercises of a soldier.” His long and varied military and executive experience, under the guidance of his father Vespasian and especially in the Jewish war, made him a consummate warrior and administrator. For a time, however, after he became formally associated with his father in the government, with the title of CÆsar, and practically controlled the administration during the last nine years of Vespasian’s reign, he developed “the character of being luxurious, self-indulgent, profligate, and cruel,” and seemed to have in himself the promise of being a second Nero. The scandal connecting his name with the shameless beauty Berenice, the sister of the Agrippa of the Acts of the Apostles, outraged public opinion at Rome, but ended in his sending her back to the East.

The death of Vespasian, in 79 A.D., wrought a transformation in Titus, and he became known as the “love and delight of mankind.” “He had the tact to make himself liked by all. He seems to have been thoroughly kindly and good-natured; he delighted in giving splendid presents, and his memorable saying, ‘I have lost a day,’ is said to have been uttered one evening at the dinner-table when he suddenly remembered that he had not bestowed a gift on any one that day.”[54]—page 467. The fine portrait here drawn of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the tenth of the Twelve CÆsars, known in history as Vespasian, is in striking contrast with that previously sketched of his son Titus. The father had little of the princely and imposing personality of the son. He was a thoroughly able soldier, while simple and frugal in his habits; in short, Tacitus says that “but for his avarice he was equal to the generals of old days.” A better judgment, however, would probably attribute the avarice, with which both Tacitus and Suetonius stigmatize him, to “an enlightened economy, which, in the disordered state of the Roman finances, was an absolute necessity.” He could be abundantly “liberal to impoverished senators and knights, to cities and towns desolated by natural calamity, and especially to men of letters and of the professor class, several of whom he pensioned with salaries of as much as £800 a year.” He was a blunt, plain soldier, without distinguished bearing, and perhaps for that very reason a greater favorite with the army and the common people. “By his own example of simplicity of life he put to shame the luxury and extravagance of the Roman nobles, and initiated in many respects a marked improvement in the general tone of society,” while devoting much thought to the spread and promotion of those intellectual tastes with which he was not personally in sympathy.[55]—page 523. The tragic fate of Sabat is a matter of history, tho the story of the dead bride is a legendary attachment. Josephus tells us that he “was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman, who four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles to God in the Temple, and began on a sudden to cry aloud: ‘A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride, and a voice against this whole people.’ This was his cry as he went about by day and by night, in all the lanes of the city.” The efforts of the people and even of the Roman procurator to suppress his cry were unavailing; and when the scourge was applied, at every stroke of the whip his answer was: “Wo, wo to Jerusalem!” “This cry was the loudest at the festivals; and he continued this ditty for seven years and five months, without growing hoarse or being tired therewith, until the very time that he saw his presage in earnest fulfilled in our siege, when it ceased; for as he was going round on the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, ‘Wo, wo to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!’ And just as he added at the last, ‘Wo, wo to myself also!’ there came a stone out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and, as he was uttering the very same presage, he gave up the ghost.”[56]—page 531. Josephus gives a somewhat detailed account of the final struggle and of the burning of the Temple. After sharp conflict and setting fire to the doors and outer courts of the Temple, Titus retired into the tower of Antonia, and “resolved to storm the Temple the next day, early in the morning, with his whole army, and to encamp round about the holy house.” The Jews, however, after a little, attacked the Romans, who drove back those that were quenching the fire in the inner court of the Temple, and those that guarded the holy house, and pursued them as far as the Holy Place itself. The record is that at this time, on the tenth day of the month Ab, the day on which it was formerly burned by the king of Babylon, “one of the soldiers, without staying for any orders, and without any concern or dread upon him at so great an undertaking, and being hurried on by a certain divine fury, snatched somewhat out of the materials that were on fire, and being lifted up by another soldier, he set fire to a golden window or lattice, through which there was a passage to the rooms that were round about the holy house, on the north side of it. As the flames went upward, the Jews made a great clamor, such as so mighty an affliction required, and ran together to prevent it; and now they spared not their lives any longer, nor suffered anything to restrain their force, since that holy house was perishing, for whose sake it was that kept guard about it.”

The utmost efforts of Titus to save the sacred building were utterly vain. “The legionaries either could not or would not hear; they rushed on, trampling each other down in their furious haste, or, stumbling over the crumbling ruins, perished with the enemy. Each exhorted the other, and each hurled his blazing brand into the inner part of the edifice, and then hurried to the work of carnage. The unarmed and defenseless people were slain in thousands; they lay heaped, like sacrifices, round the altar; the steps of the Temple ran with streams of blood, which washed down the bodies which lay upon it.”

JESUS OF NAZARETH FROM THE PRESENT JEWISH POINT OF VIEW

In this age and land, Jew and Christian seem destined at last to give one another the glad hand. The old spirit of misunderstanding and often of hate (which to our shame—more to the shame of the Christian than of the Jew—has now lasted nearly a score of centuries), in this light of noon, now and here, is intolerable. At the dawn of the twentieth century, antisemitism in America, even the feeblest whisper of it, is an anachorism, and an anachronism of the grossest sort.

That spirit was natural enough with the church of the early ages, for the church, nearly all of it, was simply the pagan tiger baptized, and labels changed, but not the nature of the beast. The Christ that was presented to the Jew the Jew did well to hate, for he was a Christ of barbaric cruelty, a monster who drove millions of Jews through fire and starvation, out of the world, and this entire people for ages from their homes and countries. If the Jews had not hated and spit on the very name of that Christ, they had been more or less than human.

Among this people the ties of kinship are especially strong, so that when a wrong is done to one, no other flame is needed to make the blood of all boil. With the million of fires burning to death their martyred brethren, quite naturally the air grew too thick with smoke, and their eyes too sore with weeping, for them to see any of the beauty of the Cross. Talk of the sweetness of that Christ was hideous mockery to them. I too would join with them and spit on such a Christ. But now the smoke is getting out of the air, and the Jew, like the rest of us, is beginning to see the real Jesus of the Gospels, and he also, like the rest of us when we see Him aright, can not but respect, admire, love Him—claim Him as one of his own people, saying, with Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, of Philadelphia, this Jew, Jesus, “is the greatest, noblest rabbi of them all,” and as the famous Jewish writer, Max Nordau, touchingly says, “He is one of us.”

Yes, we are living in a better land and in a better time. Here both Christian and Jew clasp the folds of the same flag and say, Our Country, and both look up to the one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and say, Our Father; and may not both, by and by, look to this Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, and say, Our Brother?

Within the past two years I have written to a number of representative Jews, residing in different parts of the world, asking the question, WHAT IS THE JEWISH THOUGHT TO-DAY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH? The inquiry was accompanied with a copy of the letter from Dr. Kohler, which is here published as the first of the series. There are utterances in some of these published replies that may strike strangely and discordantly on orthodox Christian hearts. It will be well for all such to ponder the following letter, here given as prefatory to the other replies. It is from the pen of Dr. Singer, a well-known Jewish scholar, the originator and now the managing editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia:

A LETTER FROM ISIDORE SINGER, Ph.D.

“It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to me to examine in the original manuscript the letters which are printed on the following pages. They are all from representative Jewish scholars, theologians, historians, and philosophers, well and most favorably known in the scientific world of Europe and America. Where it has been necessary to abbreviate for lack of space, I find that the work has been done in a way that does no injustice to the writer. No one is made to say, by faulty translation, or abridgment, or otherwise, what he does not intend to say. It is my hope and most ardent desire that these utterances may greatly help to make known to the Christian world the real heart and mind of my brethren. I am glad to be permitted to add a thought or two of my own.

“I regard Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew of the Jews, one whom all Jewish people are learning to love. His teaching has been an immense service to the world in bringing Israel’s God to the knowledge of hundreds of millions of mankind.

“The great change in Jewish thought concerning Jesus of Nazareth, I can not better illustrate than by this fact:

“When I was a boy, had my father, who was a very pious man, heard the name of Jesus uttered from the pulpit of our synagog, he and every other man in the congregation would have left the building, and the rabbi would have been dismissed at once.

“Now, it is not strange, in many synagogs, to hear sermons preached eulogistic of this Jesus, and nobody thinks of protesting,—in fact, we are all glad to claim Jesus as one of our people.

“ISIDORE SINGER.”

New York, March 25, 1901.

LETTERS FROM REPRESENTATIVE JEWS

From KAUFMANN KOHLER Ph.D., Rabbi of Temple Beth-El, New York:

The true history of Jesus is so wrapped up in myth, the story of his life told in the gospels so replete with contradictions, that it is rather difficult for the unbiased reader to arrive at the true historical facts. Still the beautiful tales about the things that happened around the lake of Galilee show that there was a spiritual daybreak in that dark corner of Judea of which official Judaism had failed to take sufficient cognizance. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” of a new world.

It is assumed by entire Christendom that the Jews in rejecting Jesus Christ brought upon themselves everlasting doom, the inexorable fate of exile, persecution, and hatred. This view is based upon the crucifixion story in the gospel records, which, while shielding the Romans, maligns the Jews, and is incompatible with the simple facts of the Jewish law, the older Christian tradition, with common sense, and with the established character of Pontius Pilate, a very tiger in human shape. Surely the records of the trial demand a revision.

“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Most assuredly the weird and visionary figure of the dead and rerisen Christ, the crucified Messiah lifted up to the clouds there to become a partaker of God’s nature—a metaphysical or mythological principle of the cosmos—the Jews did reject. They would not, let it cost what it may, surrender the doctrine of the unity and spirituality of God. Jesus, the living man, the teacher and practiser of the tenderest love for God and man, the paragon of piety, humility, and self-surrender, whose very failings were born of overflowing goodness and sympathy with the afflicted, the Jews had no cause to reject. He was one of the best and truest sons of the synagog. Did he not say, “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it”? What reason had the Jews for hating and persecuting him who had nothing of the rigidity of the schoolman, none of the pride of the philosopher and recluse, nor even the implacable zeal of the ancient prophet to excite the popular wrath; who came only to weep with the sorrowing, to lift up the downtrodden, to save and to heal? He was a man of the people; why should the people have raised the cry, “Crucify him!” against him whose only object in life was to bring home the message of God’s love to the humblest of his children? Nor, in fact, was he the only one among the popular preachers of the time who in unsparing language and scathing satire exposed and castigated the abuses of the ruling priesthood, the worldly Sadducees, as well as the hypocrisy and false piety of some of the Pharisean doctors of the law. His whole manner of teaching, the so-called Lord’s Prayer, the Golden Rule, the code of ethics expounded for the elect ones in the Sermon on the Mount, no less than his miraculous cures, show him to have been one of the Essenes, a popular saint.

But he was more than an ordinary teacher and healer of men. He went to the very core of religion and laid bare the depths of the human soul. As a veritable prophet, Jesus, in such striking manner, disclaimed allegiance to any of the Pharisean schools and asked for no authority but that of the living voice within, while passing judgment on the law, in order to raise life to a higher standard. He was a bold religious and social reformer, eager to regenerate Judaism. True, a large number of sayings were attributed to the dead master by his disciples which had been current in the schools. Still, the charm of true originality is felt in these utterances of his when the great realities of life, when the idea of Sabbath, the principle of purity, the value of a human soul, of woman, even of the abject sinner, are touched upon. None can read these parables and verdicts of the Nazarene and not be thrilled with the joy of a truth unspelled before. There is wonderful music in the voice which stays an angry crowd, saying, “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone!” that speaks the words, “Be like children, and you are not far from the kingdom of God!”

“Did the Jews Reject Christ?” Jesus anticipated a reign of perfect love, but centuries of hatred came. Could the Jews, victims of Christian intolerance, look with calmness and admiration upon Jesus, in whose name all the atrocities were perpetrated? Still, the leading thinkers of Judaism willingly recognized that the founder of the Christian Church, as well as that of Islamism, was sent by divine Providence to prepare the pagan world for the Messianic kingdom of truth and righteousness.

The Jew of to-day beholds in Jesus an inspiring ideal of matchless beauty. While he lacks the element of stern justice expressed so forcibly in the law and in the Old-Testament characters, the firmness of self-assertion so necessary to the full development of manhood, all those social qualities which build up the home and society, industry and worldly progress, he is the unique exponent of the principle of redeeming love. His name as helper of the poor, as sympathizing friend of the fallen, as brother of every fellow sufferer, as lover of man and redeemer of woman, has become the inspiration, the symbol, and the watchword for the world’s greatest achievements in the field of benevolence. While continuing the work of the synagog, the Christian Church with the larger means at her disposal created those institutions of charity and redeeming love that accomplished wondrous things. The very sign of the cross has lent a new meaning, a holier pathos to suffering, sickness, and sin, so as to offer new practical solutions for the great problems of evil which fill the human heart with new joys of self-sacrificing love.

All this modern Judaism gladly acknowledges, reclaiming Jesus as one of its greatest sons. But it denies that one single man, or one church, however broad, holds the key to many-sided truth. It waits for the time when all life’s deepest mysteries will have been spelled, and to the ideals of sage and saint that of the seeker of all that is good, beautiful, and true will have been joined; when Jew and Gentile, synagog and church, will merge into the Church universal, into the great city of humanity whose name is “God is there.”

August 23, 1899.

From MORITZ FRIEDLÄNDER, Ph.D., author of “Patristische und Talmudische Studien,” “Das Judenthum in der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt,” etc., Vienna, Austria:

… The synagog of primitive Christianity was the direct offspring of the Jewish synagog. Here, too, the center of sublime, divine service which powerfully influenced the simple and pious souls, was Moses and the prophets, hallowed, in addition, by the splendor of the invisibly ruling Messiah.

In this synagog originated a new Israel, which silently and noiselessly prospered beside “the burden of the law,” which killed the spirit of the Mosaic doctrine and prepared the ossification and dwarfing of Judaism.

This synagog was a true house of God, which made all those who entered it enthusiastic for a pure Mosaism, whose principal doctrine was the love of God and the love of man. Here every one, through teaching and learning, invigorated himself, and even the most simple-minded visitor left the house as an enthusiastic apostle. In short, it was a synagog to which, if it existed to-day, all hearts would be drawn and around which the entire enlightened Judaism of to-day would gather. And Jesus himself, who was the starting-point of the synagog of the Messianic community, who fertilized and rejuvenated it by the sublime Messianic idea, was proclaimed as divine Redeemer because of this rejuvenation, as well as because of the redemption undertaken by him, on the Palestinian soil, from the “unsupportable burdens” which the Pharisee teachers imposed on the people (Matt. xxiii. 4).

Always higher, on to unapproachableness grew his personality, including all that is beautiful, lofty, sublime, and divine, and forcing every one to adoration and self-nobilization. This divine “Son of Man” became the world-ideal, and this sublime ideal has been originated in Judaism, which will ever be remembered as having been predestined by Providence to bring forth such a creation.

November 6, 1899.

From MORRIS JASTROW, Jr., Ph.D., Professor of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.:

From the historic point of view, Jesus is to be regarded as a direct successor of the Hebrew prophets. His teachings are synonymous with the highest spiritual aspirations of the human race. Like the prophets, he lays the chief stress upon pure conduct and moral ideas, but he goes beyond the prophets in his absolute indifference to theological speculations and religious rites. It is commonly said that the Jews rejected Jesus. They did so in the sense in which they rejected the teachings of their earlier prophets, but the question may be pertinently asked, Has Christianity accepted Jesus? Neither our social nor our political system rests upon the principles of love and charity, so prominently put forward by Jesus.

The long hoped-for reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity will come when once the teachings of Jesus shall have become the axioms of human conduct.

November 6, 1899.

From BARON DAVID VON GÜNZBURG, St. Petersburg, Russia:

Jesus of Nazareth sought to regenerate the common people of Galilee by infusing into them the moral teaching of the academies; and to this end he stripped the religious ideal of its scientific garb. Understood perfectly by those who listened to him, his simple language, nevertheless, proved a stumbling-block for those who had not known him, but who desired, after his death, to commune with his apostles. They construed current phrases as predicating actual entities, and having thus created a certain type of Messiah, it therefore devolved upon succeeding ages, under the influence of controversy and in the ardor of religious polemics, to harmonize at once all the genuine traditions, all the ill-understood and ill-reported addresses made by him, all his noble aspirations which later generations failed to comprehend, and to bring them all into accord with the ardent faith of new converts as well as with the Bible texts relative to the Messiah.

September 29, 1899.

From PROF. DAVID CASTELLI, author of “Storia degli Israeliti,” Florence, Italy:

… Jesus in a certain sense fulfilled in his person the prophecies of the Old Testament; they reached in him a height beyond which it is impossible to go. He was not the magnificent worldly king, since there could be no question of a worldly king in Israel again, for whom the Hebrews waited in vain; but he was the great teacher of mankind, spreading among all nations that principle of love and humanity which, until then, had remained confined within the limits of Judaism. His word, and after him that of the Apostles, who, like himself, were born and reared in Judaism, were a powerful means of carrying into effect the yet unfulfilled prophecy of the Old Testament: “The Lord will be King of all the earth; in that day God will be one and his name one.”

September 28, 1899.

From MARCUS JASTROW, Ph.D., Rabbi Emeritus of Rodeph-Shalom Congregation, Philadelphia, Pa., Author of the “Dictionary of the Talmud,” etc.:

The thoughtful Jews of all days, and especially of modern tendency of thought, see in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament, the exponent of a part of the ethics of Judaism, and more especially of its milder side—love and charity. The ethical sayings of Jesus reflect the conception of Judaism in his own period, as it was current among its spiritual leaders, such as Hillel, Rabbi Akiba, Ben Zoma, and others. To a heathen world merged in vice and crime, to a civilization that led the thoughtful among Romans and Greeks toward the abyss of pessimism and despair, Christianity offered the bright prospect of forgiveness and reconciliation with goodness. For the Jews it had no mission, no new gifts to offer. Its ethics appear to the modern Jew one-sided and exaggerated; the sense of justice appears to be pushed into the background in favor of an unrealizable ideal of love.

Judaism prohibits revenge and the bearing of grudge, commands the assistance of an enemy in distress, but “to love one’s enemy” appears to the modern Jew a somewhat morbid philanthropy that could never have been seriously meant. To bear indignities with patience, “to be of the insulted and not of the insulters,” is a Jewish principle, but to offer the right cheek to him who slaps you on the left, to offer the undergarment to him who takes away your cloak—no, we will not and we can not do it. Hence it is that we Jews, of our modern days, speak of Jesus with that respect which all high-minded dreamers of all ages and nations inspire, even though we can not accept all their ideas and ideals, and are mindful of the fact that it is to noble dreamers that humanity is indebted for its most precious possessions.

September 4, 1899.

From ÉMILE LÉVY, Chief Rabbi, Bayonne, France:

Wide as the difference may be in certain essential points between Christianity and Judaism, yet the former approaches the latter through its origin, and a common basis which is love of God and man. In proclaiming the superiority of spirit over matter, and the principle of immortality of the soul and of a future life; in exhorting mankind in a touching and poetical language, ever trying to come nearer the divine example by a charitable, humble, modest, and pure life, Christ has rendered immense services to humanity and to the cause of progress and civilization, for he thus spread the Jewish doctrine, which aims at a continual improvement of the individual and of society, and contributes to the preparation of the Messianic era and of the brotherhood of the nations.

October 24, 1899.

From HENRY BERKOWITZ, D.D., Rabbi of Rodeph Shalom Congregation, Founder and Chancellor of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, Philadelphia, Pa.:

… To me one of the saddest and most tragic facts in history is this, that Jesus, the gentlest and noblest rabbi of them all, should have become lost to his own people by reason of the conduct of those who called themselves his followers. In Jesus there is the very flowering of Judaism. What pathos, then, in the fact that his own people have been made to shun his very name; that even to-day they speak it with bated breath, because it has been made to them a symbol and a synonym of all that is unjewish, unchristian—irreligious.…

November 1, 1899.

From JOSEPH REINACH, Paris, France, formerly Member of the Chamber of Deputies, and editor-in-chief of La RÉpublique FranÇaise; Secretary to Gambetta, and editor of Gambetta’s works:

… The characteristic mark of Jesus’s moral is love, the purest and noblest love that ever existed—love for all human creatures, love for the poor, love for the wicked. Love is joy, and love is duty, and love is life. Humanity, since its first day and to its last day, was and will be thirsty for love, and Jesus is and will remain one of the highest, if not the highest, type of humanity, because his words, and his legend, and his poetry are and will be an eternal source of love.

November 28, 1899.

From CESARE LOMBROSO, Professor of Psychiatry and Criminology, University of Turin, Italy:

In my eyes Jesus is one of the greatest geniuses the world has produced, but he was, like all geniuses, somewhat unbalanced, anticipating by ten centuries the emancipation of the slave, and by twenty centuries socialism and the emancipation of woman. He did not proceed by a precise, systematic demonstration, but through short sentences and by leaps and bounds, so that without the downfall of the Temple, and without the persecutions of the Christians under Nero, his work would have been lost.…

September 29, 1899.

From MAX NORDAU, M.D., critic and philosopher, Paris, France:

… Jesus is soul of our soul, as he is flesh of our flesh. Who, then, could think of excluding him from the people of Israel? St. Peter will remain the only Jew who said of the son of David, “I know not the man.” If the Jews up to the present time have not publicly rendered homage to the sublime moral beauty of the figure of Jesus, it is because their tormentors have always persecuted, tortured, assassinated them in his name. The Jews have drawn their conclusions from the disciples as to the master, which was a wrong, a wrong pardonable in the eternal victims of the implacable, cruel hatred of those who called themselves Christians. Every time that a Jew mounted to the sources and contemplated Christ alone, without his pretended faithful, he cried, with tenderness and admiration: “Putting aside the Messianic mission, this man is ours. He honors our race and we claim him as we claim the Gospels—flowers of Jewish literature and only Jewish.…”

From ISIDORE HARRIS, M.A., Rabbi of West London Synagog of British Jews, London, England:

It seems to me that the truest view of Jesus is that which regards him as a Jewish reformer of a singularly bold type. In his days, Judaism had come to be overlaid with formalism. The mass of rabbinical laws that in the course of centuries had grown round the Torah of Israel threatened to crush out its spirit. Jesus protested against this tendency with all the energy of an enthusiast. Ceremonial can never be anything more than a means to an end—that end being the realization of the higher life of communion with God. The rabbinical doctors of the law were inclined to treat it as an end in itself, and this Jesus saw was a mistake. In taking up this position, he was simply following in the path that had already been marked out centuries before by the Hebrew prophets.

October 17, 1899.

From JECHESKIEL CARO, Ph.D., Chief Rabbi, Lemberg, Austria:

Primitive Christianity, as Jesus of Nazareth taught and preached it, is not at all different from the ethical principles of Judaism. He himself proclaimed that he did not come to destroy the law. In morality and the love of God and man (Deut. vi. 5; Matt. xxii. 37; Lev. xvii. 18; Matt. xxii. 39) are contained the real essence and the categorical imperative of religion.…

October 18, 1899.

From N. PORGES, Ph.D., Rabbi, Leipsic, Germany:

Even the most conscientious Jew may, without hesitation, recognize that in view of the immense effect and success of his life, Jesus has become a figure of the highest order in the history of religion, and that the noble man, the pure character, the mild heart-winning personality, come forth unmistakable even from the mythical cover which surrounds his person. The fact that Jesus was a Jew should, I think, in our eyes, rather help than hinder the acknowledgment of his high significance, and it is completely incomprehensible to me why a Jew should think and speak about Jesus otherwise than with the highest respect, although we, as Jews, repudiate the belief in his Messianic character and his divine humanity with the utmost energy, from innate conviction.

September 28, 1899.

From the late JAMES H. HOFFMAN, Founder and first President of the Hebrew Technical Institute, New York City:

… I revere him (Jesus) for having brought home by his own life and his teachings, to the innermost hearts and souls of mankind, of all times, in every station, the eternal truths as first embodied in the Mosaic code and proclaimed in undying words by the prophets. I recognize in him the blending of the divine and human, the lofty and lowly, showing the path for the dual nature of man, by divine aspirations to gain the victory over the earthly life, tending to draw him downward—the Son of God triumphing over the child of the earth.…

October 6, 1899.

From ADOLF BRUELL, Ph.D., Editor “PopulÄr-Wissenschaftliche MonatsblÜtter,” Frankfort-on-the-Main, Germany:

… In Christianity, as it is represented in the Gospels, the sublime doctrines of Judaism, if we subtract the dogmas, find their most beautiful expression. If we deduct the purely human additions, as well in Judaism where they take the form of observances, as in Christianity, where they crystallize themselves into dogmas, we find that there is no real antagonism between the two. And how could it be otherwise, for did not Jesus stand upon the ground of biblical and prophetical Judaism?

…

The fact that love, the highest religious principle, has not yet fully penetrated Christianity, as is shown by the awful fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the odious anti-Jewish movement of our own time, does not alter the fact that Jesus promulgated a sublime doctrine which is in full harmony with Judaism, and with which Christianity must be entirely imbued before it can be seriously called the religion of Christ.…

Judaism and Christianity both have still to go through a process of purification as to law and dogma, and only after these separating walls have fallen, will Jews and Christians, and with them all humanity, on the terrain of pure morality and the spirit of the prophets, tender one another forever the hand of brotherhood in the noble spirit of reconciliation.

Meanwhile, it would be appropriate that honest and enthusiastic men might form an alliance in order to reconcile Judaism and Christianity, and for this purpose Jesus and the prophets would be rather genial helpers than detractors.

October 10, 1899.

From THÉODORE REINACH, Ph.D., former President of the SociÉtÉ des Etudes Juives, Paris, France:

Although we know very little with certainty concerning the life and teachings of Christ, we know enough of him to believe that, in morals as well as in theology, he was the heir and continuator of the old prophets of Israel. There is no necessary gap between Isaiah and Jesus, but it is the misfortune of both Christianity and Judaism that a gap has been effected by the infiltration of heathen ideas in the one, and the stubborn (only too explainable) reluctance of the other, to admit among its prophets one of its greatest sons. I consider it the duty of both enlightened Christians and Jews to endeavor to bridge over this gap.

December 17, 1899.

From JACOB H. SCHIFF, New York City:

We Jews honor and revere Jesus of Nazareth as we do our own prophets who preceded him. By his martyrdom, his teachings have been emphasized, and these are to this day I believe often better practised by the descendants of the race he sprang from than by those who have become the followers of Christ in name, but not in spirit, else the prejudice practised by the latter against Jews would not exist.…

September 5, 1899.

From M. LAZARUS, Ph.D., late Professor of Philosophy, University of Berlin, author of “Die Ethik des Judenthums,” Meran, Austria:

… I am of the opinion that we should endeavor with all possible zeal to obtain an exact understanding of the great personality of Jesus and to reclaim him for Judaism.

January 24, 1901.

The following questions were sent to a number of Jewish scholars, whose answers are tabulated below:

Question 1. Do you agree with Dr. Kohler that there was a spiritual daybreak on the shores of Galilee nineteen centuries ago, which was not sufficiently recognized by the official Sanhedrin at that time?

Q. 2. Do you esteem Jesus to have been one “sent of God” to reveal the Father more clearly to men?

Q. 3. Do you believe that his mission has been of advantage in making known to the Gentile world the God of Abraham?

Q. 4. Do you consider him to have been a Jewish prophet? If so, would you indicate in what order he would stand, in your judgment, respecting the earlier prophets?

Q. 5. Is there a growing interest among Jews in the study of the sayings and life of Jesus?

Q. 6. Is there a growing willingness in Judaism, as says Dr. Kohler, to reclaim Jesus as one of her greatest sons?

Answers to Questions.

From SIMON WOLF, LL.D., former Consul of the United States to Egypt, Vice-President of Order B’ne B’rith, Washington, D. C.:

I have not had the time nor the desire to investigate the alleged divinity of the Christian Savior. I have, however, recognized the great influence his character and labors have exercised throughout the world. If properly understood and if properly construed, I have no doubt whatsoever that what he aimed at and labored for would prove of great benefit to every human being. I look upon him, in short, as a great teacher and reformer, one who aimed at the uplifting of suffering humanity, whose every motive was kindness, mercy, charity, and justice, and if his wise teaching and example have not always been followed, the blame should not be his, but rather those who have claimed to be his followers. I have the very highest regard for him as a man who reflects in his sayings the divine Spirit, which after all is nothing more or less than a reflex of the Jewish ethics in which he was so well grounded.

October 9, 1899.

From H. WEINSTOCK, Sacramento, Cal. Extract from a letter to Dr. K. Kohler:

[The letter urges reasons why the life and sayings of Jesus should be taught in Jewish Sabbath-schools. Dr. Kohler approves of the suggestion.]