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No. 49. Vienna, 9 December 1898. Volume 2.

Kindle the Lights!

By Dr. J. Bergmann.

There were two parties in Israel in the time of the Maccabees: Hellenists and Chassidim. Among the Hellenists were counted, above all, the frivolous. Judaism, with its earnest and moral view of the world, stood in the way of their appetites, and they resolved to cast it off. To cast it off at any price. Noble it certainly was not, thus wholly without reverence or forbearance to surrender the dear inheritance of the fathers, for which they had so often bled. But they wished to take part in the Greek games, to intoxicate themselves at the orgies; and so they distorted the body and the soul, that they might not be recognised as Jews. Their Judaism pursued them in the street like a shadow. They therefore shut it away in the lumber-room of the past, of history.

To the Hellenists belonged also those of broken backbone and base slave-soul, who confound reverence and gratitude with servility. Scarcely had the Syrian king commended Greek culture to them — and in all haste they became more Hellenistic than the Hellenes. They never considered that the Jewish view of the world too harbours what is great and sublime, that the national spirit of the Jews is penetrated by deep earnestness and lofty morality. They gave no thought to it, that it is unnatural for a people to become something for which it was not created; they did not weigh that it is impossible for a whole and vital people to breathe out its spirit. No. They resolved forthwith upon the death of the Jewish national spirit and wished the end of Judaism. They themselves are now dead; Judaism has outlived them all.

Is it not, then, far more natural that a people, freely developing its own spirit and rooted in itself, should thus grow great and strong for the good of mankind? The life of society is conditioned by the life of the individual, true altruism only by that egoism which is not at all ignoble. If a man destroys his own life, he withdraws it from society as well. A people fulfils its calling best when it lives within itself, when, not denying itself, it lives for the good of mankind through the deepening of its national life and the unfolding of its national spirit. Has mankind not gained more from the sublime Jewish prophets than from the whole of our Judaeo-Greek literature? How much more intimate and natural to us are the Palestinian Rabbis with their wise, ethical sayings than the allegorising Philo! The Jewish books of morals of the Middle Ages are surely far deeper and purer than the amalgam of Aristotelian philosophy with the Bible which the philosophers of religion so ingeniously contrived. It would be a crime against our fathers, and a sin against mankind as well, were the people to give itself up. The Hellenists desired the death of Judaism; but the people of the Jews desired to live, and might not surrender its national spirit, its view of the world. They themselves are now dead, dead in the history of Judaism for all time, because the people is immortal. Dead are they all. Kindle the lights!

The Chassidim — so the history of the Maccabean age relates — trusted in God, that He would second their inactivity. Their gaze did not reach beyond the walls of the narrow study-house. If only they might devote themselves to the study of the Law, they were willing to bear the Syrian yoke in quiet. What did slavery and banishment from the holy city signify to them, so long as the Jewish national spirit could live on?

The Torah was everything to them, more than Israel; Judaism stood higher with them than the Jews. They were indeed enemies of the Hellenists, because they perceived their harmful thinking and working against Judaism; but they themselves would not see that through the oppression and banishment of the Jews, Judaism also suffers. Was it not for this that Moses first freed his people out of Egyptian slavery, and only then gave them the great teaching, that in freedom they might take it to heart? Did not David first give the people rest again, and only then think of the building of the Temple? Did not Ezra first lead the people home out of banishment, and only then teach it the Law and raise up the national spirit? And later. The great Rabbi Akiba left the study-house in order to fight for his people. How could the teaching unfold itself when the people was harassed and oppressed by the Roman soldiers? Was the wise, great deed of R. Jochanan b. Sakkai, who after the dispersion of the Jews in the study-