A PROTEST AGAINST THE AUTO-DA-FÉ OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1761, LISBON WHAT was their crime? Only that they were WHAT born. They were born Israelites, they celebrated Pesach; that is the only reason that the Portuguese burnt them. Would you believe that while the flames were consuming these innocent victims, the inquisitors and the other savages were chanting our prayers? These pitiless monsters were invoking the God of mercy and kindness, the God of pardon, while committing the most atrocious and barbarous crime, while acting in a way which demons in their rage would not use against their brother demons. Your madness goes so far as to say that we are scattered because our fathers condemned to death him whom you worship. O ye pious tigers, ye fanatical panthers, who despise your sect so much that you have no better way of supporting it than by executioners, cannot you see that it was only the Romans who condemned him? We had not, at that time, the right to inflict death; we were governed by Quirinus, Varus, Pilate. No crucifixion was practised among us. Not a trace of that form of punishment is to be found. Cease, therefore, to punish a whole nation for an event for which it cannot be responsible. Would it be just to go and burn the Pope and all the Monsignori at Rome to-day because the first Romans ravished the Sabines and pillaged the Samnites? O God, who hast created us all, who desirest not the misfortune of Thy creatures, God, Father of all, God of mercy, accomplish Thou that there be no longer on this globe, on this least of all the worlds, either fanatics or persecutors. Amen. F. M. A. VOLTAIRE, in Sermon du Rabin Akib'. THE BIBLE IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND1 Ο No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years of the reign of Elizabeth. England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was read in churches, and it was read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. As a mere literary monument, the English Version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language. But far greater than its effect on literature was the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. Elizabeth might silence or tune the pulpits, but it was impossible for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice, and mercy, and truth, who spoke from the Book which the Lord again opened to the people. The effect of the Bible in this way was simply amazing. The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class. J. R. GREEN, 1874. 1 From A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan & Co.). FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS IN N the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a. thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians, and their poets. What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair? And if, in the course of many centuries, the oppressed descendants of warriors and sages have degenerated from the qualities of their fathers. shall we consider this as a matter of reproach to them? Shall we not rather consider it as matter of shame and remorse to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of the House of Commons. Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees. LORD MACAULAY, 1833. IGNORANCE OF JUDAISM HE had been roused to the consciousness of knowing hardly anything about modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history. The Chosen People have been commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake of somebody else, and their thinking as something (no matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to specialists. But there had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world. GEORGE ELIOT, 1876, in Daniel Deronda'. MOCK on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau! Mock on, mock on! 'tis all in vain : You throw the sand against the wind, And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine; Blown back, they blind the mocking eye, But still in Israel's paths they shine. WILLIAM BLAKE. THEY ARE OUR ELDERS [EXT to the selection that has been in operation NEX for centuries, it is, in my opinion, the antiquity and the continuity of their civilization that throws some light upon the Jews as well as upon the place they occupy in our midst. They were here before us; they are our elders. Their children were taught to read from the scrolls of the Torah before our Latin alphabet had reached its final form, long before Cyrillus and Methodius had given writing to the Slavs, and before the Runic characters were known to the Germans of the North. As compared with the Jews, we are young, we are new-comers; in the matter of civilization they are far ahead of us. It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto. No sooner were their prison gates unbarred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we had opened up without their aid. A. LEROY BEAULIEU, 1893. |