What Manasseh understood under “Character of Ancestors” pertains as little to atavism as the modern Jewish national idea. Atavism is something unconscious, it is found even among the dejudaized Jews. But what with the dejudaized is atavism becomes with nationalist Jews the historic basis of their whole life tendency. The comprehension of the past wafts the first breath of life into the present, upon the wreckage of bygone times dawns the premonition of the greatness of each lived moment――and new life blossoms upon the ruins. Therein lies also the power of the national consciousness to create cultural values. What is based upon heredity and tradition is no longer sacrificed to thoughtless recession of self――misconstrued as civilization――but replenished with national love. It is no longer the anarchy of aimless “culture” which wants to link up with the attainments of unfamiliar races so as to become like them, and which as an imitation it can never attain, but it is a strongly rooted culture, which reaches deep down to the national wells of life, and can thereby become equal to all other great and deep-rooted cultures. The individual is the outcome of a nation, its ultimate aim. The nation is the circuitous way of nature to produce an individual. A nation is great, not only when great creative minds arise from its midst, but also when the many live intensively, so that they receive impulses from the few, and return impulses to the few――and when the past lives on in the present. It is this idea of Jewish nationality which Manasseh had forefelt in spite of his mysticism. He was permeated with religious enthusiasm and, at the same time, all aglow with intense national feeling. Therefore, his thoughts and sentiments tended to greatness; he understood that the best means of strengthening and reaffirming the national consciousness of a people about to lose the knowledge of its ethnical individuality, is just that it should be told its history, that its ancestors should be recalled to memory, their great deeds sung and praised, and that pride of the past should be instilled. As he poetised so sublimely he could also accomplish great deeds, because he kept his eye upon Palestine he was also able to achieve great results in the Diaspora. He was the father of post-exilic English Judaism, and this Judaism ought to follow in his footsteps. To conclude, reference should be made to the _Hebrew_ writer Perez Smolenskin, himself a pioneer of modern Zionism, who, though he did not deal with the matter in detail, was guided by a sound intuition when he characterized Manasseh in his _Am Olam_ (1880) as a great pioneer of the national idea. CHAPTER VII. MANASSEH’S CONTEMPORARIES