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
"Watchmen, what of the night?" Such a blackness fell upon the ancient
Jews when Hadrian passed the plough over Mount Zion. But, turning from
empty apocalyptic visions, they drew in on themselves and created an
inner Jerusalem, which has solaced and safeguarded them ever since.
Such a blackness fell on the ancient Christians when the Huns invaded
Rome, and the young Christian world, robbed of its millennial hopes,
began to wonder if perchance this was not the vengeance of the
discarded gods. But drawing in on themselves, they learned from St.
Augustine to create an inner "City of God." How shall humanity meet
this blackest crisis of all? What new "City of God" can it build on
the tragic wreckage of a thousand years of civilization? Has Israel no
contribution to offer here but the old quarrel with Christianity? But
that quarrel shrinks into comparative concord beside the common peril
from the resurrected gods of paganism, from Thor and Odin and Priapus.
And it was always an exaggerated quarrel--half misunderstanding, like
most quarrels. Neither St. Augustine nor St. Anselm believed God was
other than One. Jesus but applied to himself distributively--as
logicians say--those conceptions of divine sonship and suffering
service which were already assets of Judaism, and but for the theology
of atonement woven by Paul under Greek influences, either of them
might have carried Judaism forward on that path of universalism which
its essential genius demands, and which even without them it only just
missed. Is it not humiliating that Islam, whose Koran expressly
recalls its obligation to our prophets, should have beaten them in the
work of universalization? Maimonides acknowledged the good work done
by Jesus and Mohammed in propagating the Bible. But if the
universalism they achieved held faulty elements, is that any reason
why the purer truth should shrink from universalization? Has Judaism
less future than Buddhism--that religion of negation and
monkery--whose sacred classics enjoin the Bhiksu to camp in and
contemplate a cemetery? Has it less inspiration and optimism than that
apocalyptic vision of the ultimate victory of Good which consoles the
disciples of Zoroaster? If there is anything now discredited in its
ancient Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the
Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of
the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen
maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably
narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent
tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last
word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future
Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement
as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a
stumbling-block rather than a help. Abraham Lincoln being only a plain
man, was not able to juggle with himself like a German theologian, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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