Chosen Peoples: Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter-Passover Sunday, 1918/5678Zangwill, Israel
Religion
Chosen Peoples: Being the First "Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture" delivered before the Jewish Historical Society at University College on Easter-Passover Sunday, 1918/5678
Zangwill, Israel
Jews -- Election, Doctrine of; National characteristics, German
And the fact that Moses himself was married to an Egyptian woman and
that "a mixed multitude" went up with the Jews out of Egypt shows
that the narrow tribalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the regrettable
rejection of the Samaritans, was but a temporary political necessity;
while the subsequent admission into the canon of the book of "Ruth,"
with its moral of the descent of the Messiah himself from a Moabite
woman, is an index that universalism was still unconquered. We have,
in fact, the recurring clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces,
and what assured the persistence and assures the ultimate triumph of
the latter is that the race being one with the religion could not
resist that religion's universal implications. If there were only a
single God, and He a God of justice and the world, how could He be
confined to Israel? The Mission could not but come. The true God,
urges Mr. Wells, has no scorn or hatred for those who seek Him through
idols. That is exactly what Ibn Gabirol said in 1050. But those blind
seekers needed guiding. Religion, in fact, not race, has always been
the governing principle in Jewish history. "I do not know the origin
of the term Jew," says Dion Cassius, born in the second century. "The
name is used, however, to designate all who observe the customs of
this people, even though they be of different race." Where indeed lay
the privilege of the Chosen People when the Talmud defined a
non-idolater as a Jew, and ranked a Gentile learned in the Torah as
greater than the High Priest? Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila
and Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; while
the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless
accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte
Onkelos. The disagreeable references to proselytes in Rabbinic
literature, the difficulties thrown in their way, and the grotesque
conception of their status towards their former families, cannot
counterbalance the fact, established by Radin in his learned work,
"The Jews Among the Greeks and Romans," that there was a carefully
planned effort of propaganda. Does not indeed Jesus tell the
Pharisees: "Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte"? Do not
Juvenal and Horace complain of this Judaising? Were not the Idumeans
proselytised almost by force? "The Sabbath and the Jewish fasts,"
says Lecky, doubtless following Josephus, "became familiar facts in
all the great cities." And Josephus himself in that answer to Apion,
which Judaism has strangely failed to rank as one of its greatest
documents, declares in noble language: "There ought to be but one
Temple for one God ... and this Temple common to all men, because He
is the common God of all men."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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