It will be noticed that nothing can be further apart than these ideas of a Reformed Judaism from those put forward by George Eliot in “Daniel Deronda.” Equally remote are they from the crude endeavor to return to a supposed primitive Judaism through the “worship of the letter” of the Old Testament, which was hailed some years ago with premature satisfaction by a certain school of Protestant Christians. See the interesting “History of the Karaite Jews,” by the Rev. W. H. Rule, D.D., 1870. Footnote 18: As an example of this, I can mention the following fact. All the Jewish journals in Germany (amounting to nine out of ten of all the newspapers in the country) support a certain cruel practice. And why? It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with finance, nothing to do with any matter wherein Jews have a different interest from other people. The key to this mystery is simply that seven or eight of the most guilty persons are Jews. This “clandestine manipulation of the press,” and tribe-union for purposes disconnected with tribal interests, constitutes a _cabal_, and necessarily creates antagonism and disgust. Nothing of this kind can be laid at the door of English Jews, and it is much to be wished that they would expostulate with their brethren on its imbittering effects abroad. Footnote 19: I cannot but think that too much has been made, particularly under the influence of the modern mania for “heredity,” of the exceptional character of the Jewish race. Of course, the Jews are a most remarkable people, so vigorous physically as to be able to colonize either India or Greenland, and after a thousand years of Ghetto existence to remain (to the confusion of all sanitation-mongers) the healthiest race in Europe. On the mental side, their multifarious gifts and their indomitable sturdiness are no less admirable. But their fidelity to their race and religion is not unmatched. Not to speak of the miserable Gypsies, the Parsees offer a more singular spectacle; for their members have always been a handful compared to the Jews (not above 150,000 at the utmost), and during the ten ages of their exile they have exhibited a spirit of concession towards the customs of their neighbors which has left the actual dogmas of their religion the sole bond of their national integrity. They worshipped the One good God under the law of Zoroaster three, perhaps four, millenniums ago, and they worship Him faithfully still, though a mere remnant of a race, dwelling in the midst of idolaters, and with no distinctive badgelike circumcision, no haughty disdain of “Gentile” nations, no hope of a restoration to their own land. Their priests have been illiterate and despised, not erudite and honored rabbis. Their sacred books have twice become obsolete in language, and incomprehensible both to clergy and laity. Their Prophet has faded into an abstraction.