that is organically connected with Hebrew, and both are, of course,
opposed to a Hebrew Palestine.
Why these people, who, as we have seen, stand for territorialistic
Judaism instead of universal, should call themselves Jewish
universalists, we are at a loss to understand. The fact that their
notion of God is as colorless and pale as that of the Unitarians, and
the fact that their conception of ethics, especially of Jewish ethics,
is as bloodless and vague as that of the rationalists of the eighteenth
century, gives them scarcely any right to call themselves Jewish
universalists and to assert that they stand for universal Judaism. Our
only consolation is that this sort of territorialistic Judaism that
goes under the false mark of universal Judaism is not the invention
of the Reform rabbis, nor that of the Yiddishists, but is as old as
Judaism itself. All who have carefully paged the history of our people
know that there always was a Jewish minority from time immemorial that
stood for a territorialistic Judaism, and if there is any difference
in principle between the Judeans and Israelites this difference
consists in that the Judeans always stood for universal Judaism, while
the Israelites stood for a territorialistic Judaism. The Judeans
were what the nationalists are today--traditional, conservative and
nationalistic, while the Israelites were reformers, assimilationists
and territorialists. The Judeans advocated a Palestinian and Hebrew
Judaism, while the Israelites always opposed it and were satisfied even
with the Temple outside of Palestine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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