RANSOMING THE TIME
CHAPTER VI: THE MYSTERY OF ISRAEL[1]
(141) I SHOULD LIKE to preface the following reflections with some preliminary remarks.
The essay which forms this chapter was written in France in 1937. At that time, certain racist publications of very low quality had already dishonoured the French press, but the eventuality of any anti-Jewish legislation in France seemed impossible. (In fact, the anti-Semitic decrees promulgated later were treason against the French spirit, imposed by the Vichy government, under German pressure, upon a defeated nation.) At that time the vast majority of French people were nauseated by anti-Semitic trends. It was possible then to consider the Jewish problem in a purely philosophical, objective and dispassionate manner. I do not know whether at the present time I could maintain this manner. I do not know whether, in the face of the anti-Semitic nightmare spreading like a mental epidemic even among some groups of democratic people, it is fitting to speak of such questions except to utter our indignation at the iniquity and spiritual wretchedness now assaulting minds and nations.
Yet the publication of these pages, written during a less (142) ominous period, may still be appropriate. We must never despair of intelligence and the healing power of its dispassionate attempt toward understanding. Perhaps I may even hope that some readers who, though in good faith, are more or less affected by anti-Semitic slogans, will be able to perceive that the question does not depend on gossip arguments, anecdotal observations, drawing-room philosophies, old prejudices or instinctive temperamental feelings, but on the crucial principles that direct human history and command the Christian conscience. I wish to emphasize that the independence of judgment shown in this essay regarding what is good and what is bad in the average Jewish behaviour and the average Jewish psychology, supposes and embraces the deepest esteem and love for the Jewish people; and it must be understood as being the normal prerequisite for an examination of the problem carried on "among the mature," as Saint Paul says, and on the plane of the penetrating, arduous insights given to us by Christian wisdom. For in reality the point of view from which this essay was written is neither psychological nor sociological nor ethical, but is primarily metaphysical and religious. I did not seek to characterize the empirical aspect of events, but rather their hidden and sacred meaning. What I tried to explain has significance only if it is taken in its total unity. If any one sentence in this essay were taken out of its context and isolated in order to support or to condemn, as if it were mine, an opinion which is not mine, such a misfortune could spring only from a complete misinterpretation.
If these pages are seen by Jewish readers, I hope they will agree that as a Christian I could only try from a Christian perspective to understand the history of their people. When this essay was published in France, there were some who, guided by their prejudice, tried to see latent intentions of proselytism where only a desire for truth engaged my mind; others took as personal "reproaches" what was only a statement of the (143) consequences of the drama of Calvary regarding the relation of Israel to the world. They were mistaken. I am perfectly aware that before agreeing with the statements proposed in my essay, it is necessary to admit, as a prerequisite, the whole Christian outlook; therefore it would be inconsistent to hope for any agreement from a reader who does not place himself in this perspective. I do not intend to try to convince such a reader, but, for the sake of mutual understanding, I think it would perhaps be interesting for him to know how a Christian philosopher considers this question.
I should like to add that such words as "penalty" or "punishment," which we are obliged to use when we seek to elucidate human matters from the viewpoint of the divine conduct of history, must be deprived of any anthropomorphic connotations, and that they become pitiably inadequate if we fail to do so. In any case, there is no more absurd abuse than to believe it to be the affair of poor creatures to foster their pride and injustice by applying to their neighbours, as if they were the police force of God, "penalties" and "punishments" which concern only the Creator in His intimate dealings of love with those who lave been called by Him.
On the other hand, it is to be noted that in this essay the word "Church" is not used in the common sense that it conveys in the unbeliever's language, where it designates only an administrative organization—or the administrative organizations of various denominations—charged with the dispensation of religious matters. This word is used in the strict sense it conveys in the language of Catholic faith and theology. It designates a reality both visible and invisible, both human and divine, the mystical Body of Christ, which is itself a mystery of faith; which bears in itself the blemishes and sins of its weak members, and yet is, in its very essence, life, and inspiration—which it receives, in so far as a living whole, from its divine Head—without any blemish and rust and contamination of the (144) devil; to which all the baptized, gathered together in Catholic faith and discipline, visibly belong, and to the vivifying soul of which all men in good faith and good will, living by divine grace, invisibly belong.
Finally, I should like to point out that the most impressive Christian formulas concerning the spiritual essence of anti-Semitism may be found in a book recently published by a Jewish writer, who seems himself strangely unaware of their profoundly Christian meaning. I do not know whether Mr. Maurice Samuel shares even in Jewish piety; perhaps he is a God-seeking soul deprived of any definite dogmas, believing himself to be "freed" from any trust in divine revelation, either. of the Old or the New Covenant. The testimony that he brings appears all the more significant. Because prophetic intuitions are all the more striking when they pass through slumbering or stubborn prophets, who perceive only in an obscure way what they convey to us.
"We shall never understand," Mr. Maurice Samuel says, "the maniacal, world-wide seizure of anti-Semitism unless we transpose the terms. It is of Christ that the Nazi-Fascists are afraid; it is in his omnipotence that they believe; it is him that they are determined madly to obliterate. But the names of Christ and Christianity are too overwhelming, and the habit of submission to them is too deeply ingrained after centuries and centuries of teaching. Therefore they must, I repeat, make their assault on those who were responsible for the birth and spread of Christianity. They must spit on the Jews as the 'Christ-killers' because they long to spit on the Jews as the Christ-givers."[2]
The simple fact of feeling no sympathy for the Jews or being more sensitive to their faults than to their virtues is not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is fear, scorn and hate of the Jewish race or people, and a desire to subject them to discriminative (145) measures. There are many forms and degrees of anti-Semitism. Not to speak of the demented forms we are facing at present, it can take the form of a supercilious nationalist and aristocratic bias of pride and prejudice; or a plain desire to rid oneself of competitors; or a routine of vanity fair; or even an- innocent verbal mania. No one is innocent in reality. In each one the seed is hidden, more or less inert or active, of that spiritual disease which today throughout the world is bursting out into a homicidal, myth-making phobia, and the secret soul of which is resentment against the Gospel: "Christophobia."
II
TO UNDERTAKE the study of the origins and modalities of anti-Semitism, it would be necessary to treat the entire problem of Israel's dispersal. Then there would be the opportunity of pointing out that, despite the economic, political and cultural forms which this problem superficially, assumes, it is and remains a mystery of a sacred nature, whose major elements Saint Paul, in a sublime summary, relates in chapters ix, x and xi of his Epistle to the Romans:
"What then shall we say? That the Gentiles who were not seeking after justice have attained to justice, but the justice that is of faith. But Israel, by seeking after the law of justice, is not come unto the law of justice. Why so? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were of works. For they stumbled at the stumbling-stone. As it is written: Behold I lay in Zion a stumbling-stone and a rock of scandal. And whosoever believeth in him shall not be confounded. . .[3]
"But I say: Hath not Israel known? First, Moses saith: I will provoke you to jealousy against that which is not a nation: (146) against a foolish nation I will anger you. But Isaias is bold, and saith: I was found by them that did not seek me. I appeared openly to them that asked not after me. But to Israel he saith: All the day long have I spread my hands to a people that believeth not and contradicteth me. . .[4]
"I say then: Did God cast off his people? God forbid. . . .[5]
"I say then: Have they so stumbled, that they should fall? God forbid! But by their lapse salvation is come to the Gentiles, that they may be emulous of them. Now if the misstep of them is the riches of the world and the diminution of them the riches of the Gentiles: how much more the fulness of them? For I say to you, Gentiles: As indeed the apostle of the Gentiles, I will honour my ministry. If, by any means, I may provoke to emulation them who are my flesh and may save some of them. For if the dispossession of them hath been the reconciliation of the world, what shall the reintegration of them be, but life from the dead? For if the first fruit be holy, so is the lump also: and if the root be holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches be broken and thou, being a wild olive, wert ingrafted among them and with them partakest of the root and of the fatness of the olive tree: boast not against the branches. And if thou boast, still it is not thou that bearest the root, but the root thee. Thou wilt say then: branches were broken off that I might be grafted in. Well: because of unbelief they were broken off. Thou standest by faith. Be not high-minded, but fear. For if God hath not spared the natural branches, fear lest perhaps also he spare not thee. See then the goodness and the severity of God: towards them indeed that are fallen, the severity; but towards thee, the goodness of God, if thou abide in goodness. Otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the wild olive tree, which is natural to thee; and, contrary to nature, wert grafted into the good olive tree: how much more shall they that are the natural branches be grafted into their own olive tree?
(147) "For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, of this mystery, (lest you should be wise in your own conceits) that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles should come in. And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written: There shall come out of Zion, he that shall deliver and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob. And this is to them my covenant: when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, indeed they are enemies for your sake: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. For as you also in times past did not believe God, but now have obtained mercy, through their unbelief: So these also have not believed, for your mercy, that they also may obtain mercy. For God hath concluded all in unbelief, that he may have mercy on all."[6]
* * *
The Jews are not a "race" in the biological sense of the word. Actually, in the present state of the world, there are no pure races among groups of people large enough to have any importance, even among such groups as are, from this viewpoint, the most favored. The Jews do not represent an exception; mixtures of blood and ethnic amalgamations have in the course of history been as important for them as for other groups. In the ethico-historical sense, where the word "race" is above all characterized by a community of mental and moral patterns, of ancestral experience, of memories and desires, and where hereditary tendencies, the blood strain and the somatic type play a more or less important part, but only the part of a material foundation—are the Jews a race. As are the Iberians or the Bretons. But they are much more than this.
They are not a "nation" if this word means an historical community of men bound together by a unity of origin or birth (a race or a group of historically associated races, in the (148) ethico-historical sense of "race") and jointly leading or aspiring to lead a political life. Yiddish has not the characteristics of a national language.[7] It is the language of misery and dispersal, the slang of the Holy City scattered into pieces among the nations and trampled by them. A small number of Jews (500,000 in 1940), gathered together in Palestine, constitute a nation, and Hebrew is their national language. They are a special and separate group bearing witness that the other Jews (there are about sixteen millions in the world) are not a nation.
The Jews of the Palestine homeland are not merely a nation; they are tending to become a state (a complete or "perfect" political whole). But the great mass of Israel obeys a totally different law. It does not tend in any way to set up a temporal society. By reason of a deep vocation and by its very essence, Israel is disinclined—at least, so long as it has not brought to completion its mysterious historic mission—to become a nation, and even more, to become a state. The harsh law of exile, of the Galuth, prevents Israel from aspiring toward a common political life.
If the word "people" means simply a multitude gathered together in a determinate geographical area and populating that region of the- earth (Daseingemeinschaft), the Jews are not a "people." To the extent that the word "people" is synonymous with "nation," they are not a "people." To the extent that it is synonymous with "race" (in the ethico-historical sense), they are a people, and more than a people; to the extent that it indicates an historical community characterized, not, as is a nation, by the fact (or desire) of leading a political life, but by the fact of being nourished with the same spiritual and moral tradition and of responding to the same vocation, they (149) are a people, the people of peoples, the people of God. They are a consecrated tribe; they are a house, the house of Israel. Race, People, Tribe—all these words, if they are to designate the Jews, must be made sacred.
* * *
Israel is a mystery. Of the same order as the mystery of the world or the mystery of the Church. Like them, it lies at the heart of the Redemption. A philosophy of history, aware of theology, can attempt to reach some knowledge of this mystery, but the mystery will surpass that knowledge in all directions. Our ideas and our consciousness can be immersed in such things; they cannot circumscribe them.
If Saint Paul is right, we shall have to call the Jewish problem a problem without solution—that is, until the great reintegration foreseen by the apostle, which will be like a "resurrection from the dead." To wish to find, in the pure, simple, decisive sense of the word, a solution of the problem of Israel, is to attempt to stop the movement of history.
What made the rationalist-minded "liberal" position of the nineteenth century intrinsically weak, despite its great historical merit, when it was confronted with this problem, was precisely that it set itself up as a decisive solution.
The solution of a practical problem is the end of tension and conflict, the end of contradiction, peace itself. To assert that there is no solution—in an absolute sense—to the problem of Israel is to ensure the existence of struggle. There are two methods for this: an animalistic method, which is one of violence and hate, of war that is open or covert, prudent or furious, a war of the flesh aimed at the extermination, the riddance, or the enslavement of the Jews, 'a war of the world, of the animalis homo against Israel. This is the anti-Semitic method. The other is the Christian method. It consists in entering through compassion into the sufferings of the Messiah and (150) through the intelligence of charity into a spiritual struggle aimed at accomplishing the work of man's deliverance, the struggle of the Church and of the spiritualis homo for the salvation of the world and the salvation of Israel. This is the Catholic, the Pauline way, which furthermore would have us take part at the temporal level in the constant work of the concrete intelligence which neither definitively resolves nor overcomes antinomies, but at each moment in time discovers whatever is needed to make them bearable and more supple.
III
IT IS DIFFICULT not to be struck by the extraordinary baseness of the leading themes of anti-Semitic propaganda. The men who claim the existence of a world-wide conspiracy of Israel for the enslavement of all nations, the existence of ritual murder, the universal perversion of the Jews effected by the Talmud; or who explain that Jewish hysteria is the cause of all the woes suffered by the blue-eyed dolichocephalic blond (a characteristic of those superior races where brown eyes and brown hair unfortunately are more often met with); or who explain that the Jews are united in a scheme to corrupt morally and to subvert politically all Christendom, as it appears in an 'obviously forged document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; in short, who know that all Jews are excessively rich and that the earth would prosper again if only we could once and for all do away with this monstrous race;—such men seem to prove that it is impossible to hate the Jewish people and at the same time remain an intelligent being. (In this they curiously resemble those who hate priests and cite the Monita secreta of the Jesuits, or the fact, well known in certain isolated districts of the United States, that Catholic priests have cloven hoofs.) To a mind sufficiently alert, this baseness itself seems disquieting: it must have a mystical meaning. Stupidity pushed too far (151) impinges upon mystery and hides the demonic instinct of the shadow world of the irrational.
It has been said that the tragedy of Israel is the tragedy of mankind; and that is why there is no solution to the Jewish problem. Let us state it more precisely: it is the tragedy of man in his struggle with the world And of the world in its struggle with God. Jacob, lame and dreaming, tireless irritant of the world and scapegoat of the world, indispensable to the world and intolerable to the world—so fares the wandering Jew. The persecution of Israel seems like the sign of the moments of crisis in this tragedy, when the play of human history almost stops at obstacles that the distress and moral weakness of nations cannot surmount, and when for a new start it demands some fresh horror. There is a supra-human relation between Israel and the world as there is between the Church and the world. It is only by taking into account these three terms that some idea of the mystery of Israel can, even obscurely, be formulated. A kind of inverted analogy with the Church must serve, I believe, as our guide. Through trying to perceive a mystery of suffering by the light of a mystery of grace, we are led to use in an improper meaning ideas and expressions properly belonging to an altogether different object.
Jewish thought itself is aware that Israel is in its own way a corpus mysticum.[8] The bond which forms the unity of Israel is not solely the bond of flesh and blood, nor of an ethico-historical society; and yet it is not the bond of the communion of saints, the bond which forms the unity of the Church, through faith in the incarnate God and through the possession of His heritage. (Of course Israel understands the meaning of the communion of saints and longs for it! But if it is true that its Christ came and that Israel failed to recognize Him and thus, on that day, failed in its own faith and in its own mission, so (152) straightway it lost the trust of dispensing to souls, through the signs of the Ancient Law, the grace of the Christ to come, while at the same time it repudiated the office of dispensing to souls, through the efficacy of the New Law, the grace of Christ already come; in other words, it repudiated the bond which would have really made the communion of saints its unity within a mystical body.) The bond of Israel remains a sacred and supra-historical bond, but a bond of promise, not of possession; of nostalgia, not of sanctity. For a Christian who remembers that the promises .of God are without repentance, Israel continues its sacred mission, but in the night of the world which it preferred to God's night. (There are many Jews who prefer God to the world and many Christians who prefer the world to God. But I am referring to the choice which the religious authority of Israel made when it condemned the Son of Man and rejected the gospel.) Blindfolded, the Synagogue still moves forward in the universe of God's plans. It is itself only gropingly aware of this its path in history.
Kingdom of God in the state of pilgrimage and crucifixion—the Church is in the world and is not of the world; and, however much she suffers from the world, she is free of the world and already delivered.
People of God famished for the Kingdom, and who would not have it—Israel is in the world and is not of the world; but it is attached to the world, subject to the world, in bondage to the world. One day Israel stumbled and was caught in a trap; it stumbled against God—and in what an encounter, never to be repeated! Israel did not know what it was doing; but its leaders knew that they were making their choice against God. In one of those acts of free will which involve the destiny of a whole community, the priests of Israel, the bad watchers in the vineyard, the slayers of prophets, with excellent reasons of political prudence, chose the world, and to that choice their whole people was henceforth bound—until it changes of its (153) own accord. A crime of clerical misfeasance, unequalled prototype of all similar crimes.
If the concept of Karma is wrong in that it transfers punishment from the moral to the purely physical order, the Western idea of punishment is too often weighted with a juridical anthropomorphism. Penalty is not the arbitrary contrivance of some wound inflicted from .without upon an unimpaired being to satisfy the law. It is—in the moral order itself—the fruit of the wound inflicted on a being through his own freedom voluntarily at fault, and this natural fruit is the satisfaction of the law. The penalty is the working out of the fault; our punishment is our choice. It is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God, for those hands give to each man what his will has settled on.
The Jews (I do not mean the Jews individually, but the mystical body of Israel at the moment when it struck against the rock) the Jews at a crucial moment chose the world; they have loved it; their penalty is to be held captive by their choice. Prisoners and victims in this world which they love, but of which they are not, will never be, cannot be.
The Church is universal, spread throughout all civilizations and all nations like a transcendent unity or community whereto from the depths of temporal diversity each man and all men may be lifted, in order to be made sons of God's lineage through the vivifying blood of the Son of God. The mystical body of Israel is that of a specific people; its basis is temporal and involves a community of flesh and blood. If it is to spread in the universe, it must do so disjointed from itself, broken and dispersed. The diaspora—already begun before the Christian era—is the earthly and bruised counterpart of the universality of the Church.
The mystical body of Israel is a Church fallen from a high place. It is not a "counter"-Church, any more than there exists a "counter"-God, or a "counter"-Spouse. It is an unfaithful (154) Church, (such is the true meaning of the liturgical phrase, perfidia Judaica, which does not at all mean that the Jews are perfidious).[9] The mystical body of Israel is an unfaithful and a repudiated Church (and that is why Moses had figuratively given forth the libellum repudii)—repudiated as a Church, not as a people. And ever awaited by the Bridegroom, who has never ceased to love her.
* * *
She knows that she is awaited, but knows it obscurely.
The communion of this mystical body is not the communion of saints; it is the communion of earthly hope. Israel passionately hopes for, awaits, wants the advent of God in the world, the kingdom of God here below. It wants, with an eternal will, a supernatural and unreasonable will, justice in time, in nature, and in the community. Greek wisdom has no meaning for Israel: neither its reasonableness nor its felicity in form. The beauty Israel seeks is ineffable, and Israel wants it in this life of the flesh, today.
A faith which would do violence to the seeming plan of the world in order to give a man today, tangibly, the substance for which he hopes and the accomplishment of the desire which God has planted in him, and hence would have him recapture everything spiritual and temporal—such is the faith of Israel. It is such a faith Israel is burning to have, and at the same time doubts it has (for if Israel had it, it would have all justice and (155) plenitude). In modern times this faith has progressively weakened as rationalism has increased. Of such a notion of faith, which seems to me profoundly Jewish, Chestov's philosophy affords us incomparable evidence.
And Jewish charity is also a virtue fallen from a high place. I do not mean in any way that it is a false love. Divine charity can be present in it, as it may be absent from it. Nor is it Lutheran pity, nor Slavic pity. It is an active and, on occasion, a relentless love of the creature as such; it grapples the creature, torments it, never lets it go, so as to oblige it to become aware of its evil and deliver itself from its evil.
Of earthly hope the Jews have an excess; and of this virtue many Christians have not enough. The basic weakness in the mystical communion of Israel is its failure to understand the Cross, its refusal of the Cross, and therefore its refusal of the transfiguration. The aversion to the Cross is typical of that Judaism of the Exile, which does not mean Christianity's first outline and imperfect beginning, as Judaism is by essence, but which indicates the spiritual pattern which shapes Israel's severance from its Messiah. With all Jews in whom grace dwells, as with all souls of good faith and good will, the work of the Cross is present, but veiled and unperceived, and involuntarily experienced. Despite himself, and in an obscuring mist, the pious Jew, the Jew of the spirit, carries the gentle Cross, and thus betrays Judaism without realizing what he does. The moment he begins to be aware of this mystery of forgiveness and of this putting off of self, he finds himself on the road to Christianity.
In Jesus alone and in His mystical Body taken as such, the devil plays no part. He does play his part in Israel, as in the world, but Israel struggles against him. The drama of Israel is to struggle-against the Prince of this world while yet loving the world and being attached to the world; and while knowing better than anyone else the value of the world.
Israel plays a dual part with regard to the history of the world and the salvation of the world. In what directly concerns (156) this salvation, Israel has given the Saviour to the world; and now it remains a witness. It preserves the treasure of the scriptures (it must not be forgotten that the Church took unto herself for her own use the labour of the rabbis and the Masoretes for the establishment of the text of scripture, just as she used the work of the philosophers and of Aristotle for her theology); and Israel is itself, throughout time, a living and indestructible depository of the promises of God.
In what indirectly concerns the salvation of the world, Israel is obedient to a vocation which I think above all deserves emphasis, and which supplies a key for many enigmas. Whereas the Church is assigned the task of the supernatural and supra-temporal saving of the world, to Israel is assigned, in the order of temporal history and its own finalities, the work of the earthly leavening of the world. Israel is here—Israel which is not of the world—at the deepest core of the world, to irritate it, to exasperate it, to move it. Like some foreign substance, like a living yeast mixed into the main body, it gives the world no quiet, it prevents the world from sleeping, it teaches the world to be dissatisfied and restless so long as it has not God, it stimulates the movement of history.
The passion of Israel is not, like that of the Church, a passion of co-redemption, completing what is lacking in the sufferings ' of the Saviour. This passion is not suffered for the eternal salvation of souls, but for the stimulation and emancipation of temporal life. It is the passion of a scapegoat, enmeshed in the earthly destiny of the world and in the ways of the world mixed with sin, a scapegoat against which the impure sufferings of the world strike back, when the world seeks vengeance for the misfortunes of its history upon what activates that history. Israel thus suffers the repercussion of the activation it produces, or which the world feels it is destined to produce.
* * *
(157) Saint Paul assures us that God has imprisoned all men in disobedience, that He may have mercy on all. From this point of view Jews and Christians have inversely corresponding roles. Israel failed in the spiritual and supernatural order; and when, through the breach offered by its fall, "the fullness of the Gentiles should come in," the Church, having reached its third epoch,[10] and exulting in the return of the people of God, will know the fullness of its earthly dimensions and of its heroic pilgrimage.
The fault of Christians resides in the temporal order. Obviously I am not thinking of the individual achievements of saints, but of the collective historic responsibilities of Christians. I do not refer to the "worthiness of Christianity," but to the "unworthiness of Christians." By some sort of mysterious indifference to the requirements of the Gospel with regard to earthly society and to temporal history, the collective mass of those called Christian, because it has again and again consented to the accumulated injustice of centuries, has allowed the social and political structures of the world, the body of temporal society, to escape the vivifying law of Jesus Christ, which alone is able to preserve for us human rights and dignity.
And when this historical process shall have reached its fullness, when man shall have reached the ultimate consequences of wishing through himself alone to save himself and the world, it is possible to believe that another reintegration—this time in the temporal order, and relating to the multitudes who seek life far removed from Christ—will coincide with that which we have just considered, and that this reintegration will also be, for the world, a resurrection from the dead; and that Israel reconciled will play therein a major part. We have already said that Israel is charged with activating the history of the world. And also that the abiding mission still assigned (158) to Israel, since through its fault it has left to others the care of the kingdom of heaven, is, under the contrasting forms wherein good and evil are intertwined, the acceleration of the movement of temporal things, and the hastening of the world's business, in view of the account which the world must settle with God. Consider, in this connection, of what richly symbolic value is the famous fondness of the Jews for business, and the fact that, since the Babylonian captivity, commerce is their principal occupation, wherein they do not merely excel, like other oriental peoples, but wherein they find the mental stimulation which they need, and even a sort of spiritual satisfaction[11]
Let us consider once more this strange inter-crossing symmetry which holds our attention. As to Christians, the Church follows her divine vocation, and it is not Christianity, it is Christendom, the Christian world, which has failed (in the temporal order) without being willing to hear the voice of the Church who, while she directs men toward eternal life, also requires them to help the development of life on earth along the lines of the Gospel. For the Jews, it is Israel as a Church, it is Judaism which has failed (in the spiritual order); and it is Israel still as the chosen people, it is "Jewdom" which pursues in history a supernatural (yet ambiguous) vocation.
IV
LIKE THE WORLD and the history of the world, the mystical body of Israel and its activity in the world are ambivalent activities, and what I have already said may permit us to (159) understand that, in the case of Israel, this ambivalence is carried to an extreme. This is what happens with all consecrated people, whose power for good and for evil is supernaturally increased.
The will to attain the absolute in the world can assume all forms. It can,—when it confines itself to what is human and contingent, or when it turns to atheism, at least in practice—create that overgrowth of activity in the handling of the goods of the earth and in money making, which finds in capitalist civilization an appropriate ambience;[12] or it can create that revolutionary impatience and that ceaseless agitation which Bernard Lazare and many other Jews liked to point out. When it becomes feverish from wounded sensibility or resentment, (160) it may create a violent pessimism which makes out of bitterness and anger a singularly powerful instrument of discovery, a detector (itself out of gauge) of the self-deceit involved in the pleasure of enjoying -a noble soul, of enjoying an orderly existence and a clear conscience. Finally, it can produce, when of the flesh but affecting spiritual things, a pharisaic trend of mind, and the blinding refinements of the harsh cult of the letter, a legal purism.
But when it is of the spirit, this will toward the absolute brings to flower seeds of true purity, the purity of soul and of morals preserved in the tradition of so many Jewish families. It produces asceticism and piety, love for the word of God and for its sensitive interpretation, uprightness of heart and subtle innocence, and that burning spirituality exemplified especially by the Hassidic mystics, and which shows us the true visage of Israel "when Israel loves God." And above all, this will finds expression in the zeal for justice and in the love of truth which is the most exalted indication of this people's election. "Behold in truth an Israelite, in whom there is no guile." The Saviour himself gave witness to the true Israel. The true sons of Zion ever feel as they did in the days of the Psalmist and of Isaiah: "How beautiful upon the mountains the footsteps of those who bear peace . . . O, never take from my mouth the word of Truth."
"Viens étancher la soif de to justice pure
et de toi-même, Dieu! ô ma source, ô ma fin!"[13]
The love of truth even unto death, the will for truth, pure, absolute, unattainable since truth is that very One whose Name in ineffable,—this is what the best of the Jews owe to Israel and to the Holy Spirit and this is what makes exultant their song in the fiery furnace.
(161) To recapitulate: Israel's ambivalence and its destiny's ambiguity are most clearly to be seen in the double center of attraction—one illusory, the other real—which divide its existence. To the extent that Israel has quit reality for an illusory image, money (here is one of the most profound themes of Leon Bloy, and certain of Karl Marx's phrases have a similar sound) has for Israel a mystical attraction, for money among the world's most shadowy shadows is the palest and the least real image of the Son of God. Leon Bloy used to say that money is the poor man's blood, the Poor man's blood transmuted into a sign. In that sign and through that sign, and the signs of ,that sign, man serves an inert omnipotence which does everything man wants; he ends up in a kind of cynical theocracy, the ultimate religious temptation of whoever refuses the reality of the gift of God.
But to the extent that Israel is ever beloved and ever relies on the promises without repentance, it is God's justice, as I have just said—and God's justice to be made manifest in this life—which is Israel's other center of attraction. It is real this time, not illusory; where others say a wise man, or a saint, the Jew says a "just" man. It is earthly hope and it is poverty,—no people know better than the Jewish people how to be poor and know better (however little they love it, however much they dislike it) the generating power of poverty.[14] Here by the waters of Babylon is the sighing for the Jerusalem of Justice, here is the cry of the prophets, the expectation and the endless desire for the terrible glory of God.
Thus, in such a complexity, in so mad a discord of typical (162) characteristics and inclinations, there will always be reason to exalt Israel, and reason to debase it. Those who want to hate a people, never lack pretexts; particularly when that people's vocation is extraordinary and its psychology contrasting. Tactlessness, ostentation, self-esteem, an almost artistic feeling for success and a loud bewailing of suffered injury—many defects are charged to this tenacious people and make some of them irritating. Jews are on the average more intelligent and quicker than Gentiles. They profit thereby; they do not know how to make people forgive them their success. The traffic of the money lender or the merchant, the various non-productive businesses and occupations which, indeed, they are not the only ones to practice, but which have become perforce for them an hereditary habit,[15] and at which they are unbeatable—are not designed to attract the favour of people, themselves as eager for gain but less expert.
When they gather in the high places of culture to worship the idols of the nations, Jews become corrupted. And as with other spiritual groups, it is only rarely that the best of them mount the stage of politics and show.
These are pretexts against the Jews; and whenever they would appear to justify hatred or discriminatory measures, such allegations are always unjust. If men could tolerate each (163) other only on condition that no one bear grievance against another, all sections of a country would constantly be at war.
And the Jews have more good qualities than defects. Those who have frequented them enough to have shared in their life know the incomparable quality of Jewish goodness. When a Jew is good, he has a quality and a depth of goodness rarely encountered among people whose natural sharpness has been less matured by suffering. They know of 'what virtues of humanity, of generosity, of friendship the Jewish soul is capable. Péguy, made famous his Jewish friendships. It is among "grasping" Jews that one can meet the most unreasonable examples of that natural propensity for giving, which perhaps comes not so much from the wish to be a benefactor as, from the utter lack of protective boundaries and defenses against pity. Nothing is more disarmed, more tender than Jewish goodness. Jews have done more in the world for Knowledge and Wisdom than for commerce and trade. A very high feeling for the purity of the family and for the virtues which follow in its wake, has long since characterized Jews. They have the fundamental human virtue of patience in work. They have an innate love for independence and liberty, the abiding flame of the ancient prophetic instinct, the intellectual fire, the quickness of intuition and abstraction, the faculty of passionate dedication and devotion to ideas. If it is true, as Psichari dared to say, that God prefers sin to stupidity, then His liking for the Jews (and for some others) becomes understandable. One is never bored with a Jew. Their nostalgia, their energy, the naivete of their finesse, their ingenuity, their knowledge of penury are all rare tonics for the mind. I remember with what joy, in a large city of the United States, after lectures and university gatherings, I, who am a goy, would go to the home of Jewish friends to refresh myself in the vitality of that tireless pathos and the perpetual motion of ideas which vivified for me long centuries of painful refining of the soul and the intelligence.
(164) But it is above all important to note that the various special causes to which an observer may attribute anti-Semitism,[16] from the feeling of hatred for strangers which is natural—too natural—in any social group, to the social dislocations created by large-scale immigration, and to the various grievances I have already described,[17] serve to hide an even deeper root of hatred. If the world hates the Jews, it is because the world is well aware that they will always be supernaturally strangers to it; it is because the world detests their passion for the absolute and the unbearable activation with which this passion stimulates it. It is the vocation of Israel which the world execrates—a hatred which can turn against the race bearing that vocation, or against the various forms of temporal manifestation which outwardly express and mask this vocation. Odium generis humani. Hated by the world, this is their glory, as it is also the glory of those Christians who live by faith. But Christians—by virtue of their Mystical Body—have overcome the world[18] and the Jews have not; that is why for a Jew to become a Christian is a double victory: his people triumphs in him. Woe to the Jew—and to the Christian—who is pleasing to men! And the time is perhaps coming, has already come in certain countries, when the witnessing of the one and the witnessing of the other being alike judged intolerable, both will be hated and persecuted together. And, united in persecution, they will together be brought back to their sources.
The Jew is lost if he settles down, and by settling down I (165) mean a spiritual phenomenon, like the loss of a stimulating disquiet and the failure of a vocation. Assimilation involves an altogether different problem, in the social and political, not spiritual, order. An "assimilated" Jew may be one who is not "settled." Assimilation is not the solution of Israel's problem, any more than is Yiddishism or Zionism; but assimilation, like autonomy and Zionism, is a partial accommodation, a compromise solution, good and desirable to the extent that it is possible. Assimilation took place in the past on a large scale in the Hellenistic and Hispano-Arabic periods. Yet it carries with it a risk—as does also Zionism (as a state)—the risk of the Jews becoming settled, becoming like others (I mean spiritually). It is the risk of losing the vocation of the house of Israel. Their God then strikes them down by the vilest of instruments. Never had there been Jews more assimilated than the German Jews. They were all the more attached to German culture for its having in part been their achievement. They had become totally Germans, which did not make them either more discreet or more humble. They were not only assimilated, but settled _ down, conciliatory and well reconciled with the Prince of this world. Jews who become like others become worse than others. (When a Jew receives Christian grace, he is less than ever like others: he has found his Messiah.)
"The Jews [wrote Charles Péguy[19]] know what is the cost of being the fleshly voice and the temporal body. They know what is the cost of bearing God and his agents, the prophets. His prophets, the prophets. Then, obscurely, they hope that one need not begin anew. . . . They have fled so often, and in so many and such dire flights, that they know how precious a thing it is not to flee. They have pitched their tents, they have entered a little into modern peoples; how much they would (166) like there to find themselves at ease. All the Policy [the political mood] of Israel consists in not making any noise (so much noise has been made in the world), in buying peace by a prudent silence. . . . They are still bleeding from so many lacerations.
"But all the Mystic [the mystical impulsion] of Israel demands that Israel continue in the world its resounding and suffering mission. Hence incredible rendings, hence the most painful internal antagonisms that ever perhaps have existed between a Policy and a Mystic. People of merchants. And at once people of prophets. One quality knows for the other what calamities are. . . .
"I know this people well. On its skin it has no single spot which is not painful, where is not some old bruise, some old contusion, some silent woe, the memory of a silent woe, a scar, a wound, a laceration from Orient or Occident. . . ."
V
I HAVE SPOKEN of the extreme stupidity of the anti-Semitic myths, and I have said that even this stupidity conveys a hidden meaning. The hatred of the Jews and the hatred of the Christians spring from the same source, from the same will of the world which refuses to be wounded either with the wounds of Adam, or with the wounds of the Messiah, or by the spear of Israel for its movement in time, or by the Cross of Jesus for eternal life. Man is well off as he is; he needs no grace, no transfiguration; he will be beatified in his own nature. Here there is no Christian hope in God the Helper, nor Jewish hope in God on earth. Here is the hope of animal life and its deep power, in a certain sense sacred, demonic, whenever it takes possession of the human being who believes himself deceived by those who bear tidings of the absolute.
Tellurian racism is anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. Communist atheism is not anti-Semitic; it is sufficient that it be (167) universally against God.[20] In both, the same absolute naturalism, the same detestation of all asceticism and of everything transcendent comes to light. Enough of God's constraint; let us now try man's,—we shall see whether it is sweeter. No more slave morality—morality of the weak, the suffering, the impotent disguised as the merciful. We shall see if the morality of blood and the morality of sweat are not the moralities of free men. The mystical life of the world will now blossom forth heroically; every corpus mysticum set apart from the world must be rejected as such.
But what has happened ? History has so intoxicated them with Judaeo-Christianity that they cannot help wishing to save the world. The racists remain the debtors of the Old Testament as do the Communists of the New. It is from the Jewish Scriptures that the former have taken—only to corrupt it—the idea of a predestined race; it is from the Gospel that the latter have taken and distorted the idea of a universal emancipation and human brotherhood.
* * *
As much hated by the world as is the Jew, and equally out of his place in the world, but himself grafted into the olive tree of Judah, and member of a mystical body which is the Body of the Messiah of Israel victorious over the world, the Christian alone can assign its proper dimensions to the Jewish tragedy. It is with feelings of brotherly love, and not without fear for himself, that he should look at the men involved in this tragedy. From the one side and from the other, Jews and Christian answer each other. If both of them are pious and good, they know one another, they smile at meeting on the premises of the Prince of this world and on the roads of Jahveh.
(168) The reflections which make up this chapter have as their object the explanation, in some measure, of the pathos of the position of the Jewish people. Perhaps such reflections help us to understand how, often despite itself, and at times manifesting in various ways a materialized Messianism, which is the darkened aspect of its vocation to the absolute, the Jewish people, ardently, intelligently, actively, give witness, at the very heart of man's history, to the supernatural. Whence the conflicts and tensions which, under all kinds of disguises, cannot help but exist between Israel and the nations.
It is an illusion to believe that this tension can disappear (at least before the fulfilment of the prophecies). It is base—one of those specimens of baseness natural to man as an animal (be he an Arab, and himself of the lineage of Shem, or a Slav, or a Latin, or a German . . .) and a baseness of which Christianity alone can, to the degree that it is truly lived, free mankind—to wish to end the matter by anti-Semitic violence, whether it be of open persecution, or politically "mitigated." There is but one way, and that is to accept this state of tension, and to make the best of it in each particular case, not in hatred, but in that concrete intelligence which love requires of each of us, so that we may agree with our companion—with our "adversary" as the gospel says—quickly while we are with him on the way;[21] and in the awareness that "all have sinned 'and have need of the glory of God"—omnes quidem peccauerunt, et egent gloria
"The history of the Jews," said Leon Bloy, "dams the history of the human race as a dike dams a river, in order to raise its level."[22]
(169) This permanent tension appears in two very different manners—one on the spiritual level, the other on the temporal.
On the spiritual level, the drama of love between Israel and its God, which makes Gentiles participate in the economy of salvation, and which is but one element in the universal mystery of salvation, will be resolved only in the reconciliation of the Synagogue and the Church. In the important text quoted at the beginning of this chapter Saint Paul says to the Gentile Christian: "See, then, the goodness and the severity of God, towards them indeed that are fallen, the severity, but towards thee, the goodness of God: if thou abide in goodness, otherwise thou also shalt be cut off." Considering the condition of the world, and the way in which the nations give witness that they abide in goodness, one is tempted to wonder whether tomorrow will not see the resolution. In any case nothing requires us to think that the resolution will come at the end of human history, rather than at the beginning of a new age for the Church and the world.
* * *
On the temporal level, even if there is no solution in the pure and simple meaning of the word, before the fulfilment of the prophecies,—no truly decisive solution for the problem of Israel, there are nevertheless certain solutions, partial or provisional, particular answers to the problem whose (170) disentanglement is the duty of political wisdom and which it is the task of various historical periods to attempt.
The Middle Ages tried a "sacral" solution, in accordance with the typical structure of the civilization of that time. This solution, which was based on the presupposition that a sacred penalty, inflicted by God, not by men, weighed on the destinies of Israel, and which gave Jews the status of foreigners in the Christian community, the solution of the ghetto,[23] was hard in itself and often iniquitous and bloody in practice. Yet it proceeded from a high concept, and was in any case better than the bestial materialism of the racist laws initiated in our own day by Germany. It was on the religious, not at all on the racial, level. It recognized the privileges of the soul, and the baptized Jews entered as a matter of right into the full fellowship of the Christian community. This mediaeval solution has gone, never to return, like the kind of civilization from whence it sprang.
The emancipation of the Jews, brought about by the French Revolution, is a fact which civilized people, to the extent that they remain such, should consider definitive. If indeed this emancipation was in itself a just and necessary thing (and a thing which corresponded to a Christian aspiration) nevertheless the hopes which the rationalist and bourgeois-optimist way of thinking, forgetful at once of the mystery of Israel and of supra-individual realities, had based upon this emancipation to extinguish the Jewish problem, were soon to prove vain.
It looks as if the time into which we are entering is called upon to try another experiment. The regime of which I am (171) thinking and which far from having been conceived for the particular case of Israel, answers in a general way to the kind of civilization whose historic ideal suits our age, can summarily be described as pluralist and personalist.[24] In utter contrast to the insane Hitlerian parody of the mediaeval way, shamefully accepted by the unhappy rulers of a crushed France, I think of a pluralism founded on the dignity of man, and which, on the basis of a complete equality in civic rights and of effective respect for the liberties of the person in his individual and social life, would accord to the various spiritual families participating in the fellowship of the temporal community a proper ethico-juridical status for the questions described as mixed (impinging on the spiritual and the temporal). Such a pluralism would represent, along with other advantages, for the nations that might be capable of this kind of civilization, an attempt at the organic ordering of the Jewish question best suited to our moment in history. By means-of direct agreements with the Jewish spiritual community—as with the different Christian churches —a community institutionally recognized, such questions as concern this community and the common good of the political whole would be resolved.[25]
(172) The pluralism I have outlined concerns the spiritual families which live together in the same political community. The same regime of organization of liberties in accordance with an order truly "political," and not "despotic," to use Aristotle's words, could and should extend in the countries which include a diversity of national minorities, to those diverse communities living together in the same political community (in the same state). And the horrible oppression suffered in our days by many national minorities seems to demand with a special urgency a solution of this sort. But spiritual family and national community are altogether different things; to a spiritual family one voluntarily gives oneself, to a national community one naturally belongs (although one can renounce it). A pluralist regime of spiritual families is compatible, not only with political fellowship in the State, but with a very complete national assimilation. A pluralist regime of national communities or minorities implies by definition the renouncing of assimilation (although it is in no way repugnant to political fellowship in the State). As far as the Jews are concerned, it is clear that in the countries where there exists a Jewish national community or minority, an inevitable complication would arise, under a pluralist regime, from the necessary distinction between the Jewish national community and the Jewish spiritual family. A man of non-Jewish nationality can become a convert to Judaism; a man belonging to a Jewish national minority can be a Christian or a free-thinker. Jurisdictional tangles of this sort are the price of any organic conception of social life; and moreover, as between the status of the spiritual community and the status of the national community, it is obviously the former which, in the event of a conflict of rights, should be regarded as having greater weight.
As for the Zionist. homeland, or the future Jewish State of Palestine, it is to be feared that, even supposing it much larger than it can actually be, it would never suffice to receive all those (173) who will flee the lands where anti-Semitic persecution rages. This is not the place to examine the question of Zionism, to which no mind aware of the unfolding of prophecy throughout history could be indifferent. Since it may be called upon to become one day the animating centre for all dispersed Jewry, Zionism seems to me to have an historic importance of the first order. But it does not yet represent deliverance from exile: the return to Palestine is but the prelude to such deliverance. No more than individualist liberalism or than the pluralist regime we have been discussing, can the Zionist State do away with the law of the desert and of the Galuth, which is not consubstantial with the Jewish people—this law wild come to an end—but is essential to the mystical body and the vocation of Israel in the state of separation.
VI
IT IS WHEN they obey the spirit of the world, not the spirit of Christianity, that Christians can be anti-Semitic. Much historical confusion, in the works of careless or impasssioned writers, arises on this score from the fact of the intertwining, in mediaeval civilization, of the things of the Church and of the things of a sacrally constituted temporal community, where earthly interests and all the good and all the evil of human social life were steeped in religion. If this confusion is avoided, it is possible to see that in a temporal civilization, where the regime of the ghetto—let alone the drama of the muranos and the Spanish Inquisition—encouraged (above all in the later Middle Ages and in the decay of feudalism) the worst anti-Jewish passions and excesses, the Church herself, apart from certain of her ministers, is not responsible for these excesses. It is well known that the Popes time and again defended the Jews, especially against the absurd accusation of the crime of ritual murder, and that the Jews were ordinarily less unhappy and less ill-treated in the Papal States than elsewhere.
(174) Moreover, as it receded from the Holy Roman Empire and the mediaeval regime, Western civilization, even though deteriorating in other respects, as we well know, freed itself from powerful impurities which that regime in fact carried in its train; and it would be a strange aberration for Christians to wish to come back to these impurities at the very moment when they have lost their historical occasion for existence. Anti-Semitism today is no longer one of the accidental weeds growing in a temp9ral Christendom intermixed with good and evil, but it is rather a disease of the spirit contaminating Christians.[26]
From the point of view of its moral quality in Catholic eyes, and when it spreads among those who call themselves disciples of Jesus Christ, anti-Semitism appears as a pathological phenomenon which reveals an adulteration of the Christian conscience, when it becomes incapable of assuming its own responsibilities in history and of remaining existentially faithful to the high requirements of Christian truth. Instead of recognizing as God's visitation the trials and shocks of history, and of assuming the necessary burdens of justice and charity, man's/ conscience falls back on substitution-phantoms, involving an entire race, to which certain real and fancied pretexts lend verisimilitude. And by giving free rein to feelings of hatred (175) which such a damaged conscience believes justified by religion, it seeks for itself a kind of alibi.
In truth, we are dealing here with a sort of collective "lapse," or with a substitute for an obscure and unconscious passion of anti-clericalism, or even of resentment against God. For, do what we will—or even do what it will—the people of Israel remains the priestly people. The bad Jew is a kind of bad priest; God will have no one raise his hand against either. And even before recognizing Christ, the true Israelite, in whom there is no guile, by virtue of an unbreakable promise, wears the livery of the Messiah.
It is no small thing for a Christian to hate or despise, or to wish to treat in a debasing way, the race whence issued his God and the immaculate Mother of his God. That is why the bitter zeal of anti-Semitism always at the end turns into a bitter zeal against Christianity.
"Suppose [wrote Leon Bloy], that people around you should continually speak of your father and your mother with the greatest scorn and treat them only to insults or outrageous sarcasm, how would you feel? Well, that is exactly what happens to Our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to- know, that our God-made-man is a Jew, in nature the Jew of Jews, the Lion of Judah; that His Mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; and finally that our Holy Liturgy is altogether drawn from Jewish books. How, then, can we express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy which lie in vilifying the Jewish race?
"Anti-Semitism . . . is the most horrible slap in the face suffered in the ever-continuing Passion of Our Lord: it is the most stinging and the most unpardonable because He suffers it on His Mother's Face, and at the hands of Christians."[27]
VII
(176) LÉON BLOY also said that the "veil," to which Saint Paul refers and which covers the eyes of Israel, is now passing "from the Jews to the Christians." This statement, which is harsh on the Gentiles and on the Christian distorters of Christianity, helps us understand something of the extensive and violent persecution to which the Jews today are victim, and of the spiritual upheaval which has been going on for years among many of them, denoting deep inward changes, particularly in respect to the person of Christ.
The growing solicitude in Israel's heart for the Just Man crucified through the error of the high priests is a symptom of unquestionable importance. Today in America representative Jewish writers like Sholem Asch and Waldo Frank are trying to reintegrate the gospel into the brotherhood of Israel. While not yet recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, they do recognize Him as the most pure Jewish figure in human history. They themselves would be disturbed to be considered as leaning toward Christianity. Yet while remaining closer than ever to Judaism, they believe that the gospel transcends the Old Testament and consider it a divine flower issuing from the stem of the Patriarchs and the Prophets. Never forgetful of the conflicts of history and of the harsh treatment received by their people, the authors of Salvation and of The New Discovery of America, have long studied and loved mediaeval Christianity and Catholic spiritual life. They agree with Maurice Samuel that "christophobia" is the spiritual essence of the demoniacal racism of our pagan world. Many other signs give evidence that Israel is beginning to open its eyes, whereas the eyes of many self-styled Christians are blinded, darkened by the exhalations of the old pagan blood suddenly, ferociously welling up once more among Gentiles.
"Jesus Christ is in agony until the end of the world," said (177) Pascal. Christ suffers in every innocent man who is persecuted. His agony is heard in the cries of so many human beings humiliated and tortured, in the sufferings of all those images and likenesses of God treated worse than beasts. He has taken all these things upon Himself, He has suffered every wound. "Fear not, my child, I have already travelled that road. On each step of the abominable way I have left for you a drop of my blood and the print of my mercy."
But in the mystical body of the Church, the surplus humanity which Christ finds in each of the members of this His body, is called upon, in so far as each is a part of the whole, to participate in the work of this body, which is the redemption continued throughout time. Through and in the passion of His mystical body, Christ continues actively to perform the task for which he came, He acts as the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind.
I have already said that Israel's passion is not a co-redemptive passion, achieving for the eternal salvation of souls what is lacking (as concerns application, not merits) in the Saviour's suffering. It is suffered for the goading on of the world's temporal life. In itself, it is the passion of a being caught up in the temporal destiny of the world, which both irritates the world and seeks to emancipate it, and on which the world avenges itself for the pangs of its history. This does not mean that Christ is absent from the passion of Israel. Could He forget His people, who are still loved because of their fathers and to whom have been made promises without repentance? Jesus Christ suffers in the passion of Israel. In striking Israel, the anti-Semites strike Him, insult Him and spit on Him. To persecute the house of Israel is to persecute Christ, not in His mystical body as when the Church is persecuted, but in His fleshy lineage and in His forgetful people whom He ceaselessly loves and calls. In the passion of Israel, Christ suffers and acts as the shepherd of Zion and the Messiah of Israel, in order (178) gradually to conform His people to Him. If there are any in the world today—but where are they?—who give heed to the meaning of the great racist persecutions and who try to understand that meaning, they will see Israel as drawn along the road to Calvary, by reason of that very vocation as stimulus of history which I have described, and because the slave merchants will not pardon it for the demands it and its Christ have implanted at the heart of the world's temporal life, demands which will ever cry "no" to the tyranny of force. Despite itself Israel is climbing Calvary, side by side with Christians—whose vocation concerns the Kingdom of God more than the temporal history of the world; and these strange companions are at times surprised to find each other mounting the same path. As in Marc Chagall's beautiful painting, the poor Jews, without understanding it, are swept along in the great tempest of the Crucifixion, around Christ, who is stretched
Across the lost world . . .
At the four corners of the horizon
Fire and Flames
Poor Jews from everywhere are walking
No one claiming them
They have no place on the earth
To rest—not a stone
The wandering Jews. . . .[28]
The central fact, which has its deepest meaning for the philosophy of history and for human destiny—and which no one (179) seems to take into account—is that the passion of Israel today is taking on more and more distinctly the form of the Cross.
Christ crucified extends His arms toward both Jews and Gentiles; He died, Saint Paul says, in order to reconcile the two peoples, and to break down the dividing barrier of enmity between them. "For He is our peace, He that hath made both one, and hath broken down the dividing barrier of enmity. He hath brought to naught in His flesh the law of commandments framed in decrees, that in Himself He might create of the two. one new man, and make peace and reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, slaying by means thereof their enmity."[29]
If the Jewish people did not hear the call made to them by the dying Christ, yet do they remain ever summoned. If the Gentiles indeed heard the call, now racist paganism casts them away from it and from Him who is our peace. Anti-Semitic hatred is a directly anti-Christic frenzy to make vain the blood of Jesus and to make void His death. Reconciliation, breaking down the barrier of enmity—these, which the madness of men prevented love from accomplishing, and the frustration of which is the most refined torment in the sufferings of the Messiah—these agony now is the way of achieving, a universal agony in the likeness of that of the Saviour, both the agony of the racked, abandoned Jews and of the racked, abandoned Christians who live by faith. More than ever, the mystical body of Christ needs the people of God. In the darkness of the present day, that moment seems invisibly to be in preparation, however remote it still may be, when their reintegration, as Saint Thomas puts it, will "call back to life the Gentiles, that is to say the lukewarm faithful, when 'on account of the progress of iniquity, the-charity of a great number shall have waxed cold' (Matt. xxiv:12)."[30]
[1] My study, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (New York, Longmans, 1939), on the trials now suffered by Israel in certain countries, contains material which complements from the historical point of view the considerations of a philosophical nature set forth here.
[2] Maurice Samuel, The Great Hatred, New York, Knopf, 1940.
[3]Rom. ix:30-33. This is taken from the Douay version of Saint Paul's epistles with a few words modified to make the sense clearer. Cf. the remarkable commentary by Erik Peterson in Le Mystère des Juifs et des Gentils dans l'Église, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, Les Iles.
[4] Rom. x:19-21.
[5] Rom. xi:1.
[6] Rom. Xi :11-32.
[7] It might be called a national language in a different sense; in the sense that, like Ladino, it is a criterion of Jewish nationality in several countries. It is well known that Yiddish developed in Southern and Central Germany, in the twelfth century.
[8]Cf. Erich Kahler, Israel unter den Völkern, Humanitas Verlag, Zurich.
[9]Cf. Erik Peterson, Perfidia Judaica, in Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1936. The author shows that in patristic literature the word perfidia is used in the sense of "unbelief" or "infidelity," particularly in connection with the Jews, and that such is the original meaning of the liturgical expression, perfidia Judaica; it is by a subsequent change of meaning that in the Middle Ages this phrase assumed in popular usage the sense of perfidious, at the same time as crept in (ninth century) the omission of the genuflection in the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday. It is to be hoped that an innovation made in the ninth century can be changed again in the future.
[10] Cf. the second commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas.
[11] "They feel happy in an atmosphere of risk and uncertainty, illumined by hope. . . . The Jew never foregoes hope, and it is this which permits him to adapt himself to new conditions. He is not beaten down by reverses, and always expects things to get better. . . . This frame of mind is especially useful in the uncertainties of trade. . . ." Arthur Ruppin, lecturer on Jewish sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Les Juifs dans le Monde Moderne, Paris, Payot, 1934.
[12] Be it a matter of free competition, or of interest on borrowed money, or of price conceived as the result of bargaining, rather than as the expression of the objective value of a thing ("fair price"), these are ideas that fit in with the Jewish economic conceptions (more generally, with the Oriental economic conceptions) which the shift from the mediaeval system of guilds to the capitalist system has made predominant.
I certainly do not think that the Jews alone are responsible for the advent of capitalism. R. H. Tawney, J. B. Kraus, A. Fanfani have corrected the excessive thesis of Werner Sombart. But in this advent the Jews played a part; and whereas the Christian mediaeval economy, with the guild system and the prohibition of lending at interest, was contrary to their conceptions, it has been possible to say that the "commercial practices of the Jews found themselves rehabilitated" by the advent of capitalism, "since the search after profits and free competition became the bases of the capitalist system." (A. Ruppin, op. cit.) "The investment of capital in commercial and industrial enterprises thenceforth took the place of usury," says the same author. In an interesting chapter he shows that the abandonment of free competition, which, before the War of 1914, had been considered as the guiding principle of the capitalist system, dealt a heavy blow to the economic prosperity of the Jews. "There is no more room for the Jew in commerce and industry while a degenerate capitalism is changing into state capitalism, and his condition once more approaches that which it was at the end of the Middle Ages, when the officially approved guild system restrained to his detriment the play of free competition. The birth of capitalism had improved the position of the Jews, its disappearance threatens them anew." "Das Judentum erreicht seinen Höhepunkt in der Vollendung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft," wrote Karl Marx in Zur Judenfrage.
[13] Come, Thou and quench my thirst for Thy pure justice
And for Thyself, O God! O my source, O my end! (Raïssa Maritain, Lettre de Nuit.)
[14] "Yet, writing a book on the Poor Man," Leon Bloy said, "how could I not have spoken of the Jews? What people is as poor as the Jewish people? Ah, I well know, there are the bankers, the money lenders. Legend, tradition demand that all the Jews be usurers. People refuse to believe anything else. And this legend is a lie. For it pertains to the muddy residue of the Jewish world. Those who know the Jew and regard him without prejudice realize that this people possesses quite other aspects and that, bearing the misery of the centuries, it infinitely suffers.
"The teaching of the Church throughout all times indicates that holiness is inherent in this exceptional, unique, and imperishable people, protected by God, preserved as the apple of His eye, in the midst of the destruction of so many peoples, for the accomplishment of His ulterior Purpose. Even the abasement of this race is a divine omen, the very visible omen of the permanence of the Holy Spirit in this so scorned a people, who must rise up in the Glory of the Comforter on the last day." Leon Bloy, Le Vieux de la Montagne, 2 janvier 1910.
[15] Under certain historical conditions they turn preferably to certain kinds of professions, above all the liberal professions. Under different historical conditions they turn elsewhere. The Zionist Colony is only one example, proving a "return to the land" and agriculture is possible for many Jews.
[16] A good sociological analysis of these causes will be found in the already quoted work by Arthur Ruppin.
[17] For the various shallow, half-baked or sophistic arguments commonly used in anti-Semitic propaganda, see my book, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, pp. 3-9.
[18] True Christians have overcome it for eternal life. God's commandments are not grievous, wrote Saint John, "For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and the victory which overcometh the world is our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, if not he who believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" (I John v:4-5).
[19] Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse.
[20] The Soviet régime takes pride in its radical opposition to anti-Semitism. Yet on the religious plane, Judaism has suffered as much in Russia as Christianity, and has offered far less resistance to the anti-religious campaign. Cf. A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question, pp. 44-46.
[21] Matt. v:25.
[22] Léon Bloy, Le Salut par les Juifs. Among Catholic contributions to the study of the problem of Israel, I should like to mention the study by Erik Peterson already cited, Le Mystère des Juifs et des Gentils dans l’Église; and the penetrating pages written by Charles Péguy in Notre Jeunesse and in Note Conjointe sur M. Descartes; also Louis Massignon, Pro Psalmis (Revue Juive, 15 mars, 1925); Jean de Ménasce, Situation du Sionisme and Quand Israel aime Dieu (Le Roseau d'Or); the Rev. Joseph Bonsirven, Sur les ruines du Temple, Juifs et Chrétiens, Les Juifs et Jésus (I hope that the lectures on Judaism given by the same author at the Institut Catholique of Paris in 1938 may one day be published); O. de Ferenzy, Les Juifs et nous chrétiens; the article published in Die Erfüllung (1937) under the title Die Kirche Christi and die Judenfrage and signed by several Catholic writers and teachers (translated in part and published in pamphlet form by National Catholic Welfare Conference, Washington); and the periodicals, La Question d'Israël (a bulletin published by the Fathers of Our Lady of Zion) and La Juste Parole (Paris). See also Rabbi Jacob Kaplan's work, Témoignages sur Israël, Paris, 1935.
[23] The ghetto itself did not become obligatory until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I use this word as the symbol of a certain politico-juridic conception. Concerning this, see P. Browe, S.J., Die Judengesetzgebung Justinians (Analecta Gregoriana, VIII, Rome, 1935). On the doctrinal controversies and mediaeval apologia., see the important work of A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos (A Bird's Eye View of Christian Apologiae until the Renaissance), 1935, Cambridge University Press.
[24] Cf. True Humanism. Chapters IV and V.
[25] It is needless to say that in such a conception which relates to the temporal and socio-political fellowship of various spiritual families in the profane community, it is the spiritual not the racial which differentiates the statuses in question. In becoming Catholic or Protestant, a Jew would thus quit the juridical status of the Jewish spiritual family: which is not to say that he would quit Israel and its vocation.
Inversely, the Zionist homeland or the eventual Jewish State in Palestine being of a profane kind and based on nationality, not on the Israelite religion, it is logical that it makes room for baptized Jews who shall enjoy the full liberty of their religious life and shall be able to found colonies. It is well known that in i933 the "Association of Christian Hebrews" whose headquarters are in London and which is made up of converted Jews, acquired lands in Southern Palestine, with a view to establishing baptized Jews there in agricultural colonies. (A. Ruppin, op. cit., p. 16.) Cf. Simon Marcovici-Cléja, Le Problème juif mondial, Paris, 1938.
[26] Let it not be forgotten that anti-Semitism has been explicitly condemned by the Catholic Church in a document of the Holy Office dated September 5, 1928 (directed against the mistakes of a too zealous "Association of the Friends of Israel"). Racist errors, already denounced in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, have been again and expressly condemned in a document (Letter of the Pontifical Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, April 13, 1938). "Notice that Abraham is called our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the thought and sublime reality expressed in this text. It is a movement in which Christians can have no part whatsoever . . . Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Spiritually we are Semites," said Pope Pius XI in September, 1938. The American Hierarchy has also expressed itself on this matter. See article by Emmanuel Chapman, "The Catholic Church and Anti-Semitism," The Social Frontier, January, 1939.
[27] Leon Bloy, Le Vieux de la Montagne, 2 janvier 1910.
[28] A travers le monde perdu . . .
Aux quatre coins de l'horizon
Feu et Flammes
De pauvres Juifs de partout s'en vont
Personne qui les réclame
Ils n'ont plus de lieu sur la terre
Pour se reposer pas une pierre
Les Juifs errants. . . .
Raïssa Maritain, "Chagall" (Lettre de Nuit, Paris, 1939)
[29] Ephes. ii:14-36 (Westminster Version).
[30] St. Thomas Aquinas, in Ep. ad Romanos, xi, lect. 2.
