The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and FlowSteiner, Edward Alfred
History
The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow
Steiner, Edward Alfred
United States -- Emigration and immigration
The Jew is heterogeneous in cultural development. There are Orthodox
Jews, wrapped in cabalistic mysticism, who have never moved an inch
along the pathway of progress; to whom not only each word written in the
law of Moses has divine origin and divine meaning, but to whom each word
has as many meanings, as it has letters and dots and dashes. Upon these
Jews, all the fetters of legalism are still rivetted, and to them,
tradition and revelation are one and the same.
There are less Orthodox Jews who have progressed as far as the
philosopher Mendelssohn led them a century ago.
There are nationalistic Jews to whom Zion is beckoning, and who hear the
voice of the prophet bidding them "possess the land" and promising that
"the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion, with songs and
everlasting joy upon their heads" and that then, "sorrow and sighing
shall flee away."
There are modern Jews, who have forsaken the law and the ordinances, the
Sabbath and the full moons, to whom the reformed synagogue is merely a
connecting link with the historic past.
There are rationalistic Jews to whom Karl Marx is the Messiah, and the
Socialistic commonwealth, Jerusalem; and there are just Jews, who eat
Kosher food because they like it, to whom Mammon is the Messiah and
their business the Holy of Holies.
To none of these does Christianity in its historic development appeal
very strongly: First, because becoming a Christian means separation from
the race; for heterogeneous as the Jews are in cultural development, so
homogeneous are they in their racial consciousness. This is something
which baffles analysis; it is the strongest example of race cohesion
which we have. People who have lost national unity, who have diverged
widely in religious beliefs and ceremonial observances, who are as far
apart in culture as Greek and Barbarian, are still one as a race, and
the man is _Anathema_ who breaks the racial tie. It matters not whether
he does it to escape persecution, to gain preferment, or from deep
conviction; to his fellow Jews it is always apostasy.
That the broad-minded Jew may have a race consciousness which breaks
through the ties of blood, they admit; but he must not become a
Christian, even if to him Christianity is the only escape from the
narrow tribal idea and from his own outgrown race consciousness, into
the broader realm where he can say that he is a member of the human
race, and as such is under the obligations of brotherhood to all men.
In the second place, Christianity in its ceremonies, its ecclesiastical
practices and its theology, is repellent to all these Jews, from the
extreme radical to the extremest Orthodox.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account