Part 8 of 8
150. See, for example, the Apokalypse of Baruch (lxxii.), a famous Jewish work belonging to the end of the first century after Christ: "The men of all nations shall be subject to Israel, but those who have ruled over you shall be destroyed with the sword " (quoted from Stanton, The Jewish and the Christian Messiah, p. 316). We see how merely national this supposed creator of Heaven and earth has remained. Montefiore also admits this when he writes, "Jehovah had certainly gradually come to be the one God of the world, but this God remained still Jehovah. Though he had become the absolute ruler of the universe, he did not cease to be the God of Israel" (p. 422). Robertson Smith. one of the first authorities of the day in these questions, interprets Isaiah ii. as a prophecy that Jehovah will gradually make himself God of all humanity through the acknowledgment of his virtues as a ruler. Hence we find even in the most sublime phases of the Semitic conception of religion, even where God is spoken of, the predominance of the purely historical, flagrantly anthropomorphic, unconditionally materialistic standpoint.
151. Burckhardt, who lived for years in Arabia, testifies that the mono tony of the desert life and the lack of all occupation lie like an unbearable burden upon the mind and finally quite paralyse it (Beduinen und Wahaby, p. 286).
152. Noten zum Westostlichen Divan (Israel in the Desert).
153. There were more, but the others can be classified under the six great systems.
154. The Sutra's des Vedanta. (Deussens' translation). Who does not here think of the great remark of Goethe: "Animated inquiry into cause does great harm!" (see pp. 230 and 267). Carlyle in his essay on Diderot well remarks, "Every religious faith, which goes back to origins, is fruitless, inefficient and impossible."
155. Richard Garbe: Die Samkhya-Philosophie, p. 121.
156. See p. 400. Spinoza, too, who in each of his thoughts is so thorough a. Jew and anti-Aryan, writes. "Fidei scopus nihil est praeter obedientium et pietatem" (Tract. theol.-pol., chap. xiv.); that religion can be a creative element of life is a conception which remained quite incomprehensible to this brain.
157. Max Muller: Indien in seiner weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung (1884) p. 68.
158. Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft (1869), pp. 77, 55.
159. Cf. Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder, chap. iii.
160. Cf. Harnack: Dogmengeschichte (Grundriss, 2nd ed.), p. 63 f.
161. In the Syrian translation of the oldest text it runs thus, "Everyone who has the power," so that there is no doubt about the meaning. (See Adalbert Merx' translation of the palimpsest, 1897.)
162. Rettung der Juden, 1872. (I quote from Graetz: Volks. Gesch, iii. 578).
163. Langues sematiques, p. 11.
164. Renan: Langues sematiques, p. 7.
165. Even to-day one comes upon fresh graves of this kind in the depths of the woods. Without convulsion or struggle these holy men pass from time into eternity, so that when one sees their corpses one might think that the hand of love had put their limbs aright and closed their eyes. (According to oral communications and sketches from nature.) One can see how living and unchanged, because springing from an inner soil that always remains the same, old Aryan religion even to-day is, from Max Muller's life-history of a holy man of Brahman family who died as recently as 1886, Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1898.
166. Oldenberg (Religion des Veda) testifies that the gods of the Aryan Indians, in contrast to others, were bright, true, friendly forms, without malice, cruelty and perfidy (pp. 30, 92, 302, &c.).
167. Oldenberg, Religion des Veda: "The details of sacrifice appealed to the Hindoos as representing analogous facts in the universe which were united to them by a mystical tie." We find proofs of this on every page of the Satapatha- Brahmana, that remarkable code of sacrificial ceremonies.
168. Cankara: Vedaniasutra's II. 1, 14 (also for the following quotation).
169. Zoroaster gives powerful expression to the Indo-European view in contrast to the Semitic in the following passage: "Secular justice, you miser! you form the whole religion of evil spirits and are the destruction of the religion of God" (Dinkard VII. 4. 14).
170. Robertson Smith (The Prophets of Israel) lays great stress on this (p. 28); see also Wellhausen: Prolegomena.
171. For details see Wellhausen and Robertson Smith (e.g., The Prophets of Israel, pp. 63, 96).
172. The borders of Judah and Judea (to which since David's time Benjamin also belonged) have changed very much in the course of time: the whole southern part was joined to Idumea after the exile; on the other hand, the district was, later, extended somewhat towards the north into the former Ephraimite territory by the annexations of Judas Maccabaeus.
173. Even in the Old Testament in the later time there is a clear distinction between Judah and Israel: "Then I cut asunder mine other staff, even Bands, that I might break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel" (Zechariah xi. 14; see, too, I Sam. xviii.. 16); frequently Israel (that is, the ten tribes besides Judah and Benjamin) is simply called "the house of Joseph" in contrast to the "house of Judah" (thus Zechariah x. 6).
174. Renan says: "Il faut considerer Moise presque comme un Egyptien" (Israel, i. 220); his name is said to be of Egyptian and not Hebrew origin (p. 160). So too Kuenen: National Religions and Universal Religions, 1882, p. 315. According to Egyptian tradition he is a renegade priest from Heliopolis, called Osarsyph (see Maspero: Histoire ancienne ii. 449). To-day, as a reaction from former exaggerations, it is fashionable to deny every Egyptian influence on the Israelite cult; this question can only be settled by specialists, particularly in so far as it affects ceremonial, priestly dress, &c.; but we who are not scholars must be struck by the fact that the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian -- chastity, pity, justice, humility (see Chantepie de la Saussaye: Religionsgeschichte i. 305) -- which do not at all agree with those of the Canaanites, are the very virtues to which the Mosaic law attaches most importance.
175. Wellhausen: Die Komposition des Hexateuchs, 2nd ed. pp. 320, 355.
176. The Prophets of Israel, p. 192. Here in a clear manner we have a summary of what the same scholar and others have elsewhere proved in detail.
177. Goethe: Zwo wichtige, bisher unerorterte biblische Fragen, zum ersten Mal grundlich beantwortet. Erste Frage: Was stund auf den Tafeln des Bundes? [Two important new unerorterte biblical questions answered first normal training. First question: What stood on the tables of the covenant?]
178. See Schechter's Appendix to Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 557.
179. See especially Renan: Israel ii. 282 f.
180. See especially Graetz: Geschichte der Juden i. 113; also Maspero, Histoire ancienne ii. 784.
181. Many modern authorities too (e.g., Cheyne) have since proved that the famous passage "The Lord will roar from Zion" (Amos i. 2) is a late Jewish interpolation.
182. It was only with the help of the Syrians that the Maccabees obtained the chief power, and the princes too who sprang from them and belonged to the Hasmonian house have only acquired now and then an appearance of independence amid the confusion which preceded the supremacy of Rome.
183. See p. 145. note.
184. See Isaiah, chap. xxxvii., particularly the verses 33-37.
185. Cf. Cheyne: Introduction to the Book of Isaiah, p. 231 f. It is interesting to learn from Assyrian accounts that Jerusalem was defended by an army of Arabian mercenaries; Judah had been distinguished from time immemorial for its lack of military capacity.
186. 2 Kings xxii.
187. R. Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. 438. In Deuteronomy the foundation of real Judaism is laid. It forms the central point of the New Testament in its present form: "and that is the standpoint from which we can and must push our inquiries backwards and forwards if we are to have any prospect of rightly understanding the rest," said Reuss many years ago in his fundamental Geschichte des Alten Testaments, § 286.
188. Chapter xxviii. (which is certainly postexilic) contains the blessings, "and thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day," and then the curses, more than a hundred in number, containing all the horrors which a sickly imagination can picture to itself, "for God will rejoice over you to destroy you."
189. With regard to the incalculably great influence of Babylon upon all Jewish thought from the first one finds the fullest information in Eberhard Schrader's book, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 3rd ed., revised by Zimmern and Winckler, 1903; a short summary is found in Winckler's Die politische Entwickelung Babylonien und Assyriens, p. 17 f.
190. Splendidly described in chap. xii. of Duhm's Theologie der Propheten. Eduard Meyer says in the Entstehung des Judentums, p. 219, "Ezekiel was manifestly quite an honest nature, but narrow-minded, and moreover he had grown up in the narrow views of the priesthood, not to be named in the same breath with the great figures, with whom he, by the donning of a very threadbare prophet's mantle, ventured to put himself side by side."
191. Soon after this, more than four hundred years before Christ, the Hebrew language died out altogether (Paschal: Volkerkunde, 2nd ed. p. 532): its adoption once more many centuries later was artificial and with the object of separating the Jews from their hosts in Europe. In consequence we find such strange things happen, as for instance that the French citizens of "Jewish belief" can only fill their voting papers in Hebrew, an achievement of which Judas Maccabaeus would have been incapable! The absolute lack of feeling for language among the Jews to-day is explained by the fact that they are at home in no language -- for a dead language cannot receive new life by command -- and the Hebrew idiom is just as much abused by them as any other.
192. Law and religion, one should never forget, are to the Jew synonymous (see Moses Mendelssohn).
193. Cf. Wellhausen: Israel. und jud. Geschichte, p. 159. The same author writes in his Prolegomena, p. 28: "From the exile the nation did not return, but a religious sect only."
194. From the standpoint of the philosophy of history we should certainly explain this peculiar preference of the Jews for a more or less parasitic condition, by their long dependence upon Israel. It is at any rate very noteworthy that the Judeans did not wait for the Captivity (still less for the so-called scattering) to show their preference for this life. In a number of cities on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates Israelite seals of older epochs have been found, and already at the time of Sennacherib, i.e., a hundred years before the first destruction of Jerusalem, the greatest banking house in Babylon was Jewish; this firm, "Egibi brothers," is said to have occupied in the East a position similar to that of the Rothschilds in Europe. (Cf. Sayce: Assyria, its Princes, Priests and People, p. 138.) I hope we shall hear no more of the nursery tale that the Jews "by nature" are peasants and only became usurers in spite of themselves during the Middle Ages, because they were cut off from every other occupation; if we read the prophets carefully we shall see how often they complain of usury, which serves the rich as a means of ruining the peasants; we should call to mind the famous passage in the Talmud: "Whoever has 100 Gulden in commerce can eat flesh every day and drink wine; whoever has 100 Gulden in agriculture must eat herbs and vegetables, and also dig, be wakeful and in addition make enemies.... But we are created that we may serve God; is it then not right that we should nourish ourselves without pain?" (Herder, from whom I quote the passage, adds, "Without pain certainly! but not by fraud and cunning," Adrastea v. 7). We should also read Nehemiah, chap. v., and see how, when the Jews neglected everything to build the destroyed temple again, the councillors and priests took advantage of the solemn moment to practise usury and to sweep in the "fields, vineyards, olive-groves and houses" of their poorer comrades among the people. Nothing in the Aryan Medes is so strange to the Jews as the fact that they do not "regard silver nor delight in gold" (Isaiah xiii., 17); and among the most fearful curses with which Jehovah threatens his people in case of disobedience there is one which says (Deut. xxviii): "that the Jew will no longer lend money to the stranger"! We should remember, too, that in the book of Tobias (about a hundred years before Christ) an angel is sent from Heaven to enforce the payment of the gold which is invested in the neighbouring countries at compound interest (chaps. v. and ix.). It should be mentioned in this connection that already at the time of Solomon the Jews were the horse-copers of all Syria (Sayce: Hittites, p. 13).
195. Cf. Montefiore: Ancient Hebrews, p. 315, and for the detailed analytic enumeration, Driver: Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1892), p. 150 (printed in Montefiore's book, p. 354).
196. The old Christians knew very well that the Old Testament was a late and revised piece of work. Thus, for example, in his answer to the twenty-first question of Heloise, Abelard refers to the Church historian Beda, who at the beginning of the eighth century wrote as follows: "Ipse Esdras, qui non solum legem, sed etiam, ut communis majorum fama est, omnem sacrae scripturae seriem, prout sibi videbatur legentibus sufficere, rescripsit ... " Thus the most modern "Biblical criticism," which is so opposed by the Protestant as well as by the Catholic orthodox theologians, has been promoted simply by the scientific confirmation of a fact which a thousand years ago was common property and to which mot even the most pious soul took exception.
197. Wellhausen: Prolegomena, p. 170. A simple exposition of the growth of the Old Testament, after the manner of Wellhausen's Israel. und jud. Geschichte, is unknown to me. The fundamental work of Eduard Reuss, Gesch, der hl. Schriften alten Testaments, is planned and written for scholars, and Zittel, Die Entstehung der Bibel in Reclam's series does not at all correspond to the title and does not satisfy even modest claims, however much interesting matter the book otherwise contains.
198. Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, P. 111. Bk. 12, Div. 3.
199. Maccabees ii. 41.
200. Ezra brought from the king in money alone £250,000! The authenticity, or at least essential authenticity, of the Persian documents quoted by Ezra has in spite of the views of Wellhausen and others finally been proved by Eduard Meyer: Die Entstehung des Judentums (1896), pp. 1-71. This settles one of the most important questions in history. Anyone who has read the little but very complete book at Meyer will understand his conclusions: "Judaism originated in the name of the Persian king and by the authority of his Empire, and thus the effects of the Empire of the Achemenides extend with great power, as almost nothing else, directly into our present age."
201. Nehemiah xiii. 27. Cf. the beginning of this chapter, p. 333.
202. Israel. u. jud. Gesch., 3rd ed. p. 173.
203. According to the Talmud, Jehovah occupies himself on Sunday with reading the Thora! (Wellhausen: Isr. Gesch., p. 297; Montefiore, p. 461).
204. See Nehemiah, chaps. viii.-x.
205. Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 236.
206. Robertson Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. 424.
207. Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Alten Testaments, § 379.
208. Whoever wishes to form an idea of this should read, in addition to the books of Leviticus, Numbers, &c., the eleven tractates of the sacrificial ordinances (Kodaschim) in the Babylonian Island (the Haggadian portions form the fourth volume of the only reliable translation, that of Wunsche). One cannot assert that the Jews have got rid of this ritual since the destruction of Jerusalem, for they still study it, and certain things, as killing according to their rites, belong to it, for which reason an animal killed by a non-Jew is carrion to the Jew (see Treatise Chullin, fol. 13b).
209. See also xl. 7 and 1, 13.
210. It has been proved that almost all these passages are interpolations of a later time.
211. See Cheyne's Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (1895), and Duhm's Jesaia (1892), for information about the writer of chaps. xl-lv. of the Book of Isaiah, usually designated the Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah, the only one who now and again reminds one of Christ and whose name the Jews, in characteristic fashion, forgot as soon as he died, though in all other cases they follow genealogy till the hundreth generation. The second Isaiah wrote during the second half of the exile, hence a century and a half later than the historical Isaiah. Cheyne is of opinion that chaps. lvi.-lxvi., which are mostly ascribed to the second Isaiah, were really written by a still later author.
212. Duhm: Die Theologie des Propheten, p. 251. Jeremiah's divination of grace disappeared immediately, never to return again; even the noblest, most talented Jews, like Jesus Sirach, teach that "whoever knows the law is virtuous"; God has created man and then "left him to his own counsel"; from this we can logically draw as conclusion the doctrine of absolute freedom of will, destitute of all divine assistance: "Before man stand life and death, he can choose what he will ... if thou wilt, thou canst keep the law" (see, for example, Ecclesiasticus xv. 12-15). The Essenes alone form an exception, for according to Josephus they taught the doctrine of predestination (Jud. Altertumer, 520); this sect, however, was never recognised but persecuted, and presumably counted few real Jews among its number; it is an ephemeral thing without influence.
213. This is still truer of such later phenomena as Jesus Sirach, who, generally speaking, are content with giving very wise, noble rules of life: one must not strive after riches, but generosity, not knowledge, but wisdom, &c. (xxix, xxxi., &c.). The only attempt (and it was owing to Greek influence) on the part of the Jewish spirit to attain to the metaphysical, had a poor ending: the so-called "preacher Solomon" has no better advice to give than that we should think of to-day and enjoy our works -- "all is vanity!"
214. It is not unimportant to note here how much more insight into the essence of religious need is shown by a Socrates, who taught that not the sacrifice and its costliness pleased the gods, but the innermost feelings of the sacrificer, though he at the same time considered the offering of the usual sacrifices as a duty (Xenophon: Memorabilia i. 3). Similarly Jesus Christ.
215. Treatise Themura, fol. 16a (Wunsche).
216. According to the testimony of a contemporary Jew, Rubens, Der alte und der neue Glaube (Zurich, 1878, p. 79), the Jew who lives according to the ordinances needs "about half the day for religion alone." God wished, says Rabbi Chanania ben Akasiah, to give Israel opportunity to do good service, therefore he imposed on it a mass of rules and observances.
217. In his work Von den Pflichten der Kir chendiener i. 119.
218. Examples teach more than differences of opinion. In regard to the belief in God's almightiness: "Rabbi Janai was so afraid of insects that he placed four vessels with water under the feet of his bed. Once he stretched out his hand and found insects in the bed; then he said with reference to Psalm cxvi. 6: Lift the bed from the vessels, I rely on divine protection" (Terumoth viii. 3, 30a). In regard to Biblical exegesis: "Rabbi Ismael has taught" -- we find it in Leviticus xiv. 9 -- "on the seventh day he shall shave all his hair off his head and beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off"; all his hair, that is general; his head, his beard, his eyebrows, that is special, and his hair, that is again general. In the case of general, special and general the rule is that you can only render that which is like to the special, i.e., as the special is a place which embraces in itself such a collection of hairs" (Kidduschin i. 2, 9a). In regard to the law: "Rabbi Pinchas came to a place where the people complained to him that the mice devoured their grain. He accustomed the mice to listen to his call; they assembled before him and began to squeak. Do you understand, said the Rabbi to the people, what they are saying? No, was their answer. They say, in fact, that you do not give a tithe of their grain. Thereupon the people said, we are grateful to you for leading us into better paths. Since then the mice did no more damage" (Demai i. 3, 3b). In regard to knowledge of nature: "According to Rabbi Judah the thickness of the heavens amounts to a journey of fifty years, and since a man of ordinary strength can go in one day 40 miles and, till the sun breaks through the sky, 4 miles, so one can conclude that the time of the breaking through the sky amounts to the tenth part of a day. But as thick as the sky is also the earth and the abyss. The proof (!) is got from Isaiah x1. 20., Hi. xxii. 14 and Prov. viii. 27" (Berachoth i. 1, 4b). In regard to daily life: "Rabbi bar Huna did not breakfast till he had brought his child to school" (Kidduschin Div. I). That one finds many a fine saying amid the rubbish of the Talmud must, on the other hand, be emphasised, but with the addition that these sayings refer only to morals; these collections do not contain beautiful thoughts, in fact almost nothing that has any family resemblance to a thought. And the fine moral sayings, too, are often like the poems of Heine: the end spoils the beginning. An example: "A man should sow peace with his brothers and relatives and with everyone, even with the stranger upon the street" -- up to this point no minister in the pulpit could give better advice: but now the reason, that is usually the weak point with the Jews (see p. 453): "that we may be beloved in heaven and liked on earth" (Berachoth, fol. 17a). Or again, we read with pleasure, "Let a man take heed of the honour of his wife, for blessing is found in the house of a man only because of his wife" -- in truth not quite correct, but these words testify to a sentiment which we gladly hear expressed; but here again the conclusion: "Honour your wives, that you may become rich!" (Baba Mezia, fol. 59a). However it must also be mentioned that besides the beautiful moral sayings there are very ugly and abominable ones; as, for example, that a Jew cannot transgress the seventh Commandment with a non-Jewess: "For the heathen have no lawfully wedded wife, they are not really their wives" (Sanhedrin, fol. 52b and 82a). I give intentionally only one example, in order that the reader may see the tone, that suffices: ab uno disce omnes. Of course there are Rabbis who dispute this fearful doctrine; but where the Rabbis contradict each other, the Jew can choose for himself, and no casuistry can annul the fact that this contempt for the non-Jew is one of the bases of the Jewish faith; it follows logically from their insane over-estimation of themselves; they represent Jehovah as calling to them "ye are gods" (Psalms lxxxii. 6). Other interpretations, too, of the Ten Commandments show how the idea of morality was only skin-deep in the Semitic Hittites; thus the Rabbis (Sanhedrin. fol. 86a) utter the doctrine: "the words of the eighth Commandment, 'thou shalt not steal,' refer according to the script only to man-stealing"! -- and as another passage quoted by scribes of greater moral sentiment says, "thou shalt not steal" (Leviticus xix. 11), and refers expressly to the Israelites "the one from the other," so in this case, too, the simple moral command leads to an ocean of casuistry; the Talmud does not indeed teach (as far as I could find from the fragments at my disposal) that "thou mayest rob the non-Jew," but it nowhere teaches the opposite. Fearful, too, are the many precepts in the Talmud concerning the persecution and the destruction of the unorthodox Jews: how individuals are to be stoned and the people executed with the sword, and still more frightful are the descriptions of the tortures and executions which this equally dismal and spiritless book expatiates upon with pleasure; here too only one example: "The criminal is placed in dirt up to the knees; a hard cloth is then laid in a soft one and wrapped round his neck; the one witness pulls the one end towards himself and the other the other, till the prisoner opens his mouth. In the meantime the lead is heated and poured into his mouth so that it enters his vitals and burns them up" (Sanhedrin, fol. 52a). Then there are learned discussions about such things in the Talmud, thus the extremely pious Rabbi Jehuda thinks it would be advisable to open the poor man's mouth with pincers and to pour the lead down quickly, otherwise he might die of strangulation and then his soul would not be consumed with his body.
This is what one comes to with "the subjection of the feelings to the reason!"
There is not even yet a complete translation of the Talmud. Many have concluded from this that it must contain things that are fearful and dangerous to the Goyim; it is asserted that it is the Jews who hitherto frustrated every attempt at a complete translation, a suspicion by which they feel themselves greatly flattered. The historian Graetz grows angry with those of his people who "reveal the weaknesses of Judaism to the eyes of Christian readers," and mutters terrible things about certain writings of Spanish Jews, in which the "weaknesses of the Christian articles of faith and sacraments are so openly represented that one cannot venture to explain the purport wherever Christianity is the prevailing religion" (iii. 8). Now we are not so delicate and sensitive; such "revelations" are indifferent to us; if the Jews keep their literary products secret, that is their business; but tragical suspicion is out of place, it is merely a question of a feeling of shame easy to understand. (All the above quoted passages are taken from the only reliable translation, that of Dr. Wunsche, which has been revised by two Rabbis: Der jerusalemische Talmud, Zurich, 1880, and Der babylonische Talmud, Leipzig, 1886- 1889; only the quotation concerning Rabbi bar Huna is from Seligman Grunwald's collection of Talmudic sayings in the Jewish Universal-Bibliothek. Cf., further, Strack, Einleitung in den Talmud, No. 2 of the writings of the Jewish Institute in Berlin, where one will find a complete enumeration of all the fragments translated, p. 106 f. Much clearer and less pedantic is the supplement on the Talmud in the excellent little book of William Rubens, Der alte und der neue Glaube im Judentum, 1878.
219. To this day every orthodox Jew regards the Rabbinical-ordinances as divine and holds fast to the Talmudic sentence: "If the Rabbis call left right and right left, you must believe it" (see the book of the anti-Rabbinical Jew, Dr. William Rubens, p. 79). The close connection with Jesuitism (see next chapter) is here as in many other things very obvious.
220. It is known that Cabal is a Jewish word and a Jewish thing, The impulse common to all men, which in our case leads to mysticism, leads in the case of the Semite to magic. Always and everywhere the rule of blind will!
221. Pp. 229, 244 note, 419. 421 f., 440, &c.
222. Wellhausen (from Montefiore, p. 154).
223. See, for instance, chap. xxxiii.
224. Cheyne: Introduction to Isaiah (ed. 1895), pp. 27 and 53.
225. Cheyne in his Introduction to Robertson Smith: Prophets of Israel, p. xv. f.
226. Luther has "might" by mistake.
227. Wellhausen, Composition des Hexateuchs, pp. 93 and 97, proves that the passage xix. 3-9 is an interpolation of post-Deuteronomic time.
228. Isaiah, the whole of chap. xl. See, too, the postexilic Prophet Haggai, who promises to the Jews "the treasures of all Heathens: "The silver is mine, the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts" (ii. 8, 9).
229. The absurdity of the idea, that this religion is the stem of Christianity, Christianity its blossom, must be manifest to the most prejudiced.
230. The Jewish apologists reply that they obey the law, not "because it is by these means that they are to attain to empire, but because Jehovah commands it; that Jehovah gives the world to the Jews as one sacred people is done to his own honour not theirs." But this seems to me pure contemptible casuistry. A reliable author, Montefiore, says literally, "Beyond question the argument -- 'obey the law, for it will pay you' -- forms the chief and fundamental motive in Deuteronomy" (p. 531). That countless Jews are pious men who fulfil the law and lead a pure noble life, without thinking of reward, only proves that here as elsewhere morals and religion do not go together and that in the whole world there are men who are very much better than their faith. But even to-day fairly free-thinking Jews still write: "The existence of Judaism depends upon the clinging to the Messianic hope" -- the definite expectation of world empire thus still forms the soul of Judaism (cf. above, p. 334).
231. In connection with the borrowing of Zoroastric (half-understood) conceptions by the founders of Judaism, see Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews, pp. 373, 429, 453, &c.
232. Matthew xix. 28; Luke xxii. 30. This utterance put in the mouth of Christ directly contradicts what is said in Matthew xx. 23. The clinging to the twelve tribes also, although for more than five hundred years there were only two, is genuinely Rabbinical. The Rabbis, too, expressly teach the doctrine: "The non-Jews are as such precluded from admission to a future world" (cf. Laible: Jesus Christus im Talmud, p. 53). Concerning the Messianic expectations, see chap. iii. p. 235 note.
233. If we reckon twenty-four years as a generation, which is not exaggerated considering how soon the Jews are mature, the Jew of to-day belongs on an average to the hundredth generation since the return from Babylon and the founding of Judaism. That holds of the male line of descent; an unbroken female line would be in about the one hundred and fiftieth generation.
234. Prophets of Israel, p. 365.
235. A really classical example of this so-called critical but in reality just as uncritical as inappreciative method is seen in Professor Hermann Oldenberg's Religion des Veda, where the symbolism and the mysticism of the Hindoos are represented continuously as priestly swindle!
236. Voltaire in his article Dieu et les hommes gives a detailed calculation, according to which ten million human beings fell victims to the Christian Church doctrine, but everywhere he has reduced the numbers very much, sometimes by half, so as not to be charged with exaggeration.
237. Montefiore: Religion of the Ancient Hebrews, p. 504.
238. Talmud, Treatise Maccoth, Div. 3 (according to Grunwald).
239. Montefiore, p. 530. "The huge number of ceremonial prescriptions is the high privilege of Israel," says the Talmud (Montefiore, p. 535), and in Lamentations (falsely ascribed to Jeremiah) we read: "It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope" (iii. 27, 29). For the opposite view one should read the beautiful remarks in Kant's Anthropologie, § 10 a. concerning religious obligations, in which the great thinker expresses the opinion that nothing is more difficult for a sensible man than "the commands of a bustling do- nothingness (Nichts-ihuerei), such as those which Judaism established."
240. According to the law (see Num. xv, 32-36) she must be punished with death.
241. Thence it is that one of the worst threats against the Jews, if they did not keep Jehovah's commandments, was that "they would have to do their own work, instead of getting it done by others" (Talmud, Treatise Berachoth, chap. vi,. according to Grunwald). The idea that "the sons of the alien shall be the ploughmen and the vine-dressers" is also found (as a prophecy) in Isaiah lxi. 5.
242. As Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason says (in explaining the cosmological idea of freedom): "The real morality of actions (merit and guilt) remains quite concealed from us, even in the case of our own conduct."
243. Adrastea 7, Stuck V., Abschnitt "Fortsetzung."
244. Cf. Dollinger; Akademisch Vortrage i. 8.