Max Reinhardt, whom Asch calls "Ein Dichter im Theater," loves Asch dearly. In his Deutsches Theater, the most artistic and best equipped theatre in the world, he produced Asch's God of Vengeance. This was a marked success and is still a most popular play in Germany, Russia, and in the Yiddish theatres of New York. Asch was only twenty-four years at this time. From this play he made much money and a whole village was made happy an entire summer.

Since then his income from his writings has increased steadily. Much of his work is now translated into Russian and German, but as yet not into English. The income from his translations far exceeds that from his Yiddish publications, and he is able to support his wife and four children in ease and comfort. Although he has been to America a few times during the last six years, it is only several months ago that his wife and children arrived from Poland and he settled here permanently.

* * * * *

AN important happening in the history of Jewish literature occurred in the beginning of April. Perez, the intellectual father of the new movement, died. Asch and Perez were deep friends. Of all living writers Perez has had most influence on Asch, both as writer and as man. When Asch brought him his first story, Perez gave him a volume of his poems. He said of Asch, "A bird is breaking through the shell—who knows, is it an eagle or a crow?" It proved to be an eagle. Perez was a revolutionist, a poet, a dramatist, the defender of the weak, the inspiration of the talented. A little story of his, "Bonchi the Silent," about a Jewish workingman who never complained and who took all his misfortunes as a matter of course, whose desires and hopes were so thoroughly crushed out of him that on reaching Heaven and being asked by God to request what he desired most, he said, "I want a piece of white bread every Friday"—that story, more than any one influence, caused the formation of the "Bund of the Russian Revolution." It made the intelligenzia of Russia feel that it was their duty to teach the workingman to demand the earth.

And now since Perez's death, on Asch's shoulders has fallen the responsibility of being the greatest Jewish writer living to-day. He is assuming the added duty of revolutionist as well as artist. For the serious Jewish writer is a sort of rabbi to his people. Ethically he stands for the old Jewish ideals. To these Asch has added the beauty of paganism and the vision of anarchistic communism.

In Paris once he came to a meeting of Zionists. He spoke against the Zionist idea and was not listened to with great deference. Another writer, Abraham Raisin, coming in shouted, "Hear! Listen to a great Jew." Asch was given the floor and finished the speech.

Asch feels that only now is he beginning to drop his Jewish past as material for his work. He is going out into the future: he is becoming impressed with a vision of the America to be—the ideal democracy. And his work is showing it. He is planning a poetic industrial drama, he is finishing a gripping war play. His deep understanding of the industrial slavery of our times is shown wonderfully in his novel, Motke the Scamp, which is now appearing in serial form in the New York Yiddish Forward. He begins with Motke's infancy. His mother's milk is sold to the rich man's baby; Motke is cheated of everything. Picture after picture of sordid Polish ghetto life follows—intermixed with wood and river sunshine as only Asch can do it. One feels the sun resting eternally over all, while man with his laughter and tenderness and pain struggles toward perfection.

* * * * *

ASCH is becoming an exposer and a prophet, but with great beauty of style and purity of emotion. He is decidedly modern, decidedly Russian, decidedly Hebraic, and eternally universal. He is bringing the message of beauty and freedom to the American Yiddish working man. Asch is not a socialist; he is a real individualist. With a sincere contribution to the happiness of the world he believes that every human being is entitled to all the joy of the world, no matter what form his contribution may assume; shirts, street cleaning, cooking, a painting, dishes, a poem. He does not preach eight hours and a dollar more, he demands joy in labor. He wants people to play—to be happy at their work. He demands freedom in one's personal life and beauty in mind and body. He is an industrialist plus an artist.

Asch has traveled through Russia talking on various subjects to Jewish gatherings, not for money but for love of his race. He has visited Palestine, but with a keen interest in the growth and development of the Jew—not from a nationalistic standpoint but from a world point of view.

And this is why he admires America—because it brings to him a vision of a perfect race, the result of the mixture of all races, perpetuating the fine traits of all. He is immensely interested in the public school. He believes in democracy and thinks we have it in America.

For artists, however, he says this country is not good. The newspapers in Europe, he says, print what Tolstoi eats and how he sleeps. Here Rockefeller is the national hero. The artist here lacks artistic obstinacy; he succumbs to money, he leaves starvation and his Kunst.

* * * * *

ASCH loves Shakespere above all other writers; he is his master. For months he went each night to the Berlin theatres and often, with his eyes shut, would listen to the words and cadences of Shakespere's lines. Hamlet he considers the greatest play ever written. Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet are two of his favorites. From the ghost scene in Hamlet he can trace Maeterlinck and all the modern mystics. He says that Shakespere is universal in his appeal and that his work in translation, when done by a master like Schlegel, takes on the peculiar flavor of the tongue and people into which it is translated and loses none of its intrinsic worth.

He loves Gogol and Tolstoi. Faust is one of his favorite dramas. He loves the old masters Greco and Rembrandt; among the moderns, Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet. In opera he does not care for Wagner, but he is very fond of The Magic Flute, of Madame Butterfly, of Pagliacci. He loves music and the theatre. Asch reads in many languages, German, French, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and a little English. But to everybody he talks in Yiddish. He has no ear for other languages except English, which he says is like his mother tongue!

In the spring Asch goes out to the country and works, in the summer he loafs, in the winter he lives among his friends. He writes all the time, being chock full of energy—for work, for love, for friendship, for happiness. As he says, "I am thankful to God for three things: first that he gave me life, second that he gave me my talent, third for my love for you" (this to whomever the lady happens to be).

Like all the artists he is erratic, original, attractive, all-seeing. But unlike most he has much strength of character and a brilliant logical faculty that makes him check up his personal relations. He has much affection in him and a great honesty and integrity which wins him admiration and respect, and he has many friends among many kinds of people in many parts of the world.

Sholom Asch is a philosopher, a novelist, a poet, and a dramatist. He loves the clouds and the sea, he truly loves mankind. Always through all he writes one feels a deep and elemental strength, an elemental belief in nature and truth. He is not ahead of his time; he is rather an interpreter and inspirer of his own day. This makes him the happy person that he is. He is greatly honored in Russia and in Germany, and by all writers in Europe.

II

ASCH AS A NOVELIST AND SHORT-STORY WRITER

WITH this brief sketch of Sholom Asch the man, I shall turn to a consideration of a few of his most important works. As Sir Walter Raleigh, the eminent English critic, has said, the best way to form a judgment of an author is to quote his good passages. Accordingly I have been as liberal as space would allow in my insertion of translated passages. The most recent works, mentioned in the early part of this essay, I shall not treat, as it was impossible for me to procure them at the time of writing. I shall take up each work individually before making generalizations.

* * * * *

DIE Juengsten is a novel by Asch in which he tries to portray the character and the influences at work on the younger generation of Jews in Russia. The plot can be simply set forth. The younger generation is represented by five characters of three social classes. Mery Lipskaja is the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish manufacturer—in other words, she is of the middle or bourgeois class. She has completed her gymnasium (high-school) education and has absorbed the prevalent ideas about women and emancipation, and a desire for higher education, for a broader life, for St. Petersburg. Kowalski is an artist. He, like Mery, is not interested in the class struggle; all that vitally concerns him is his art and "living." David and Rahel Lazarus are the children of a physician who is giving his life to the people of the "Grube" or ghetto. They have grown up among the suppressed and impoverished Jews and they are filled with the spirit of the revolution; David actively and Rahel passively. Mischa, the cousin of Mery, is a member of the middle class. He has become aware of the conditions in the Grube and his struggle lies between his middle class environmental influence, which includes his love for Mery, and his desire to join the revolution.

At the beginning of the novel Mery has just returned from the gymnasium. She is oppressed and dissatisfied with her provincial surroundings and longs to go to the university at St. Petersburg. Mischa, in love with Mery, has also just completed work at the gymnasium, and they plan to go to St. Petersburg together. The artist Kowalski now comes to the little south Russian village and soon Mery is in love with him. Mischa is much distressed and suffers greatly. Kowalski leaves, promising to meet Mery at St. Petersburg.

The second part of the novel opens with Mischa and Mery in St. Petersburg. The climate does not agree with Mery and Mischa arranges that they go to a Finnish village. Here they grow very dear to each other and Mischa is about to propose when Kowalski melodramatically appears. Kowalski and Mery now give expression to their love. Mischa returns to St. Petersburg but cannot pursue his studies because the revolutionary disturbances have closed the university. Kowalski and Mery return to St. Petersburg soon after and are admitted to the bohemian life there. Kowalski meanwhile has become famous. The lovers gradually grow apart and when the revolution breaks out Mery returns to her home for safety, leaving Kowalski never to see him again. Mischa has returned home also. After a massacre of the Jews in the Grube in which Rahel, the sister of David, is outraged, he sees that in marrying her lies his only means of becoming one of the Jews whom he was so desirous of helping. So despite the fact that he still loves Mery and she is now willing to be his wife, he marries Rahel. Mery after a period of restlessness in the little town returns to St. Petersburg to join the bohemian group there.

* * * * *

THE outstanding excellence of the novel lies in its characterization. The characters live before us and we see the workings of their minds and emotions with remarkable clarity. The mental struggles of Mischa between his love for Mery and his desire to help the oppressed Jews, always inhibited by inherited powerlessness to act; the carefree, art-centered, egotistical Kowalski; the adolescent romanticism and sympathetic insight of Mery; the cynically idealistic and self-sacrificing Dr. Lazarus—these constitute the real substance and artistic worth of the book. The pictures of contemporary Russian Jewish life are of marked interest, especially to the western reader. The following passages are descriptive of the Grube or ghetto and characterize the condition of the poorer Jews in the towns throughout Russia:

"The sun seldom shone into the valley. Old people lost their vision early and the percentage of child mortality was enormous. But even those who remained alive under these conditions were weak, sick, half crippled people; impoverished figures with crooked legs, large heads and weak arms crept through the streets.

"And in spite of everything the inhabitants never left their grave (Grube) and made no attempt to find a better, more healthy home. A sort of sick love bound them to their unfortunate homes, and like a curse it rested on each who was born in the valley—that he could not free himself from it and that until the end of his days he must eke out his sad existence there."

After the massacre Mischa walks through the Grube:

"The murmur of prayers re-echoed to his ears. From the little windows of the synagogue came the soft gleam of candles. He entered. Deep as in a cellar, as miserable and abandoned as themselves, lay the little house of prayer of the wretched inhabitants of the Grube. The walls were bare. The Ark of the Covenant was hung with only a piece of coarse linen. In front of the broken 'altar' stood an old man in a torn prayer shawl and prayed before the small penny candles. The room was full of worshippers, all inhabitants of the Grube. Their prayer was a groaning, and sighing, and screaming, out of tormented hearts. It rose up to the low ceiling and hung over them all like a heavy black cloud."

And then Mischa knew his people:

"He felt his strength to bear everything; sorrow and misery and persecution. He saw his people doing the work of servants through the centuries, from the farthest past to the present day. He saw the bare walls of the synagogue, the wretched Ark of the Covenant, he heard the sad melody of their prayers which grew to despairing screams. . . . He had the feeling that he was with his people in a large ship. For eternities this ship was on a voyage of searching. It landed at harbors always new and strange: Egypt, Palestine, Babylon, Arabia, Spain, at Turkey, at Holland and Russia. And to-day is also a test day for the Jews. And also this day will end, and many, many, but the ship will always sail on, will carry them all to new harbors into the farthest future."

* * * * *

BEFORE leaving Die Juengsten, I cannot refrain from translating two passages concerning Kowalski—the first his longing for the open country after his long stay in St. Petersburg, and the other his remarks on clouds:

"St. Petersburg had become sickening to him. For loneliness he longed, for solitude. Solitude, with his brush behind the mountains, in the deep woods. To see every day sun, mountains, and water! The water that pushes blocks of ice before it, and to see the cloud shadows which camp on the wide snow fields. To live again in the little room with his comrade the Lithuanian peasant with whom he studied in the academy! To have no money. To eat bread; much good black bread with honey which his comrade's father would send from the village. For whole days to wander about and paint clouds!"

Mery discovers him at work, and looking at his painting he says:

"Everything is clouds—the warmth that I feel, the warmth— . . . and do you see the pride that such a cloud has, the pride, the formality? 'The cloud is no small thing,' my fat professor used to say. It is no small thing to paint a cloud, for then one must feel eternity. As lovingly as a girl's body must one model a cloud. And warmth and pride must come to expression. To paint a cloud means to step into Heaven, into the middle of Heaven and to see a new world which we do not know here at all. Such a nobody as I wishes to paint a cloud, a Heaven—wishes to have seen God and create Him anew with his little art! That is an impudence, isn't it?

"There you see what I have painted. It is nothing—it is worthless—something is lacking." He looked amusedly at the picture. "Love is lacking. So it is as my professor with the fat belly loved to say, 'To paint a real cloud one must love.' Yes, yes, to be able to create something good one must be in love or—do you know what? Or to feel a great sin in one's soul. Yes, yes, with a burning sin in one's heart one can create big things. When one has entirely fallen. . . ."

* * * * *

BILDER aus dem Ghetto is a series of sketches dealing with Jewish life. Many Jewish characters are pictured in dramatic situations but with very little plot. The characters are all poor; fishmongers, children of the Ghetto, a Jewish farmer, two mothers, an old married couple. A few typical plots follow.

"Ein Eilbotte" is really a prose poem describing a sunrise, a storm, and the reappearing sun—more properly perhaps a series of paintings, of symphonic word canvases. Let me translate the opening passages:

"Behind the town ruin which stands on a small hill like a national monument, flaming and fiery rises the red of the morning and floods with its glow the gray clouds that hang in the horizon. It brings a son of the sun into the world. The day tears itself from the lap of the mother Night.

"In the little town life is beginning to stir. Here and there one sees a peasant wagon on which the dew drops of the night are still hanging. Here and there a Jew, eyes heavy with sleep. The show windows and house doors are for the most part locked. For many of the inhabitants the day has not yet begun. . . . This day shall be like yesterday, like to-morrow."

A storm rushes over the woods. The storm comes like a mighty giant that wishes to swallow the world or it seems as though God himself were spreading out His black mantle: "The end of the world! Neither heaven nor earth, neither beginning nor end! Black, ominous, dull, empty. . . . Suddenly Heaven opens for a second. . . . A blinding light has torn the clouds. Stabbed by a flaming dagger the giant dies—a confused moaning fills the air. It rains." But the storm passes. "The Heaven is clear and blue as if nothing had happened. The air is clearer and purer, the earth washed clean by the water."

* * * * *

"DIE Mutter." It is in a little Hebrew school in a small town in Russia. The rabbi has gone to say the evening prayer, leaving the small boys to study. Instead they begin to talk of various subjects. Mothers are discussed and each boy praised his most highly. One pale little chap with large eyes says, "My mother also . . ." and then stops. One of the boys laughs uncontrolledly and then there is an embarrassing silence. The teacher returns. The little Josek, however, cannot keep his attention on the book:

"The 'crazy Trajna' stands life-like before him. Out there at the well she stands. . . . He sees her plainly. . . . All too well he knows that dirty sun-burned face plowed through by a thousand wrinkles, those great blood-shot eyes with the swollen, sore lids. . . .

"He remembers her, yes, he remembers. . . . He was still a little boy then, when the teacher carried him to school in his arms. He cried then and hung tightly with both hands to the apron of his mother.

"Mother! . . . this woman his mother?"

And so the emotions of the boy are set forth in memories telling us of his mother before she was insane and now, when she is known to all the village as the "crazy Trajna." The time when he found her insane is described. It was raining and he was hurrying home from school. Suddenly he sees his mother near his father's house:

"There at the corner she stands. . . . Trembling for cold she seeks protection under any roof. . . . The boy stands as rooted to the ground, without turning his gaze from her. The water flows in streams from his coat. She has turned her glassy eyes on him. Slowly as though following some inner force she comes closer to him. He is not able to move from the spot; something unspeakable gleams in those glassy eyes. . . .

"Now he feels in her the mother. . . . His heart beats as though to break. Always closer to him she comes. A hot wave of blood flows through all his limbs and rises to his head. He trembles as in fever.

"Suddenly all fear leaves him. He assumes a waiting position and looks directly into her eyes.

"Now she stands close before him. She looks at him. Away! These eyes! this look! He wishes to fall weeping into her arms. . . . To weep, yes, to weep . . . to weep and to kiss.

"He is in the impulse to carry out his purpose when she suddenly takes his hand. With a quick push he tears himself from her embrace and runs away as rapidly as he can.

"It seems as though she ran after him with outstretched arms and blowing hair, always faster and faster, always grasping more heavily. It seemed to him as though he heard her terrible voice, hoarse with weariness, calling 'Joselle,' 'Joselle' . . ."

The father has taken a new wife and the "crazy Trajna" is no longer a member of the household but is driven about the streets. And as he leaves the schoolroom this evening, Josek is consumed with indignation and sorrow and resolves not to flee from his mother the next time he meets her. On his way home he meets her. The tears flow from her eyes; when she embraces him he again runs away. But that evening he steals a plate of meat from his home and brings it to her. That night he does not sleep. The next noon, coming home from school he sees Trajna standing near the well surrounded by street urchins:

"One pulls her bonnet from her head. Another jerks at her apron. A third tears the prayer book from her hand. Some boys cry loudly,

"'Hurrah! The crazy one, the crazy one!'

"She looks at her son in surprise. Josek can stand it no longer; he goes to his mother and with his fists drives away the urchins that torment her.

"They have run away. Without saying a word Josek reaches out both his hands. His face is deathly pale. His eyes gleam with fever. The boys laugh. . . . Their loud calls press themselves to his ears. . . . Another moment and the hands of his mother reach around him as in a cramp.

"The 'crazy one' hugs him, kisses him, now laughing, now crying. Suddenly she clutches him and begins to dance with him. 'Hurrah! Hurrah! The crazy one is dancing with her son!'

"Josek casts a confused glance at the urchins. He draws himself together, tears himself from the embrace of his mother with a quick movement and runs away. He does not even think of the cap which remains in her hand.

"Even from a distance he hears the calls, 'Hurrah! Hurrah! The crazy one dances with her son!'"

* * * * *

"DER Wunderrabbi." He is a very stupid shepherd boy. He will not learn his Hebrew lessons nor prayers. When in the fields he often feels near to God—and whistles. He is taken to the synagogue on a holiday. His parents are ashamed of him. He cannot repeat the prayers from the prayerbook, yet he feels a great desire to praise God. To the consternation of his parents he walks to the altar, and placing two fingers in his mouth he voices his praise in a loud, shrill whistle.

"All stand as though struck by lightning. Who dared to whistle in this holy place? The father is about to grasp the boy and lead him out, the people clench their fists threateningly. But the rabbi turns from his place at the east of the synagogue and asks in a loud voice, 'Where is the saint? Where is the miracle-worker who destroyed the evil forces hanging above us, who bored through heaven that our prayers might easily penetrate the black clouds to the throne of God?'

"There is no sign of the miracle-worker. He has slipped out of the house of prayer and with his shoes and stockings over his shoulder is running as fast as he can toward the village."

* * * * *

"EIN Juedisch Kind." She is about to be married but will not comply with the Talmudic law requiring married women to cut off their hair and wear wigs. She loves her hair and will not part with it. She is married. Weeks go by and her husband is ostracised. He and his wife have become more and more estranged and they speak to each other hardly at all. One day he comes home and with loving words induces her to let him cut off her black braids.

"When Chanele awoke the next morning, she looked at herself in the mirror that hung opposite her bed. Terror seized her and she thought that she had become mad and that she lay in the hospital. On the table near her bed lay the dead braids. The soul that had lived in these braids when they were on her head was dead, and they reminded her of death . . . She hid her face in both her hands and heart-breaking sobs filled the quiet room."

And there are other "Wortbilder" which I shall not treat. This book of sketches shows Asch at his very best. For the form—one without plot dealing with character and nature description—is decidedly fitted to the elemental, passion-laden flow of his style. It is a great wonder to me that these gems of artistic word portraiture have not yet been translated into English. In my opinion they rank equal in worth with the similar work of Daudet, Maupassant, Tchekoff and Turgenieff.

* * * * *

DAS Staedtchen is also a book of sketches. In this, however, the different high points—the Sabbath eve, the holidays, the marriage ceremony and others in Russian Jewish village life, are treated. Character is not emphasized, although one man appears through all the sketches. The book does not come up to Die Bilder aus dem Ghetto.

Asch is essentially a dramatist. In his sketches, in his novels and in his stories, the dramatic point of view is not lost. His plays consequently always move, are always full of action and tense situation. The same elemental strength and purity of emotion that is found in his prose is always present in his dramas. In the concluding part of this essay, I shall touch upon five of his plays in the order of their importance.

EDITORS' NOTE—The third and concluding part of Mr. Shostac's prize essay, dealing with Shalom Asch as a Dramatist, will appear in the next issue.

THOSE of us in England who know how much harshness and injustice the Jews have had to suffer will join in your hopes that after the war some means may be found of permanently ameliorating their lot. You may feel the more sure of our sympathy in this because, as you know, England is the European country in which, since Oliver Cromwell sanctioned their return nearly three centuries ago, the Jews have been best treated, being freely admitted to all posts of power and honor, and not exposed to any sort of social disparagement. They have held places in our Cabinets and been among the most eminent lawyers and judges. Such a one was Sir George Jessel, the famous Master of the Rolls. We have no more patriotic citizens, nor more generous benefactors to works of charity and to public purposes supported by private liberality. With those members of the race who have suffered injustice or violence in other countries, there has always been a warm sympathy in Great Britain.—Viscount Bryce, in a Letter to The Menorah Journal.



Liberalism and the Jews

BY JOSEPH JACOBS



THE eighteenth century was the era of the "benevolent despots," like Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II, who adopted the ruling principle of the Welfare-State—that the object of government should be the good of the people—but considered that it could only be carried out for the people, not by them. The weakness of the principle consisted in the difficulty of securing a heritable succession of capable benevolence, and the collapse of Prussia at Jena and of Joseph II's well-meant but unreflective reforms led, in the nineteenth century, to the triumph of the principle first enunciated in America and carried out in France—of government for the people by the people. The transition to the next stage, from religious toleration to religious liberty, is marked, as regards the Jews, by the tolerance edict of Joseph II, in 1781, which for the first time threw open service in the army to the Jews and placed them to some extent on the same level with other dissenters from the State-Church of Austria.

But this was still toleration and not liberty, and it was soon cast into the background by the full religious liberty granted by the French Revolution in 1791, in imitation of the American constitution of 1787, which entirely separated State and Church. The granting of full religious liberty to the Jews had previously been advocated by Mirabeau, and though Rousseau's influence, which was all-important in the Revolution, still retained a touch of Genevan intolerance, Jews came within his religious requirements for citizenship by their belief in Providence and in future rewards and punishment. It has to be remembered that in spirit, if not in will-power or influence, Louis XVI was of the school of the benevolent despots, and it was he who signed the edict of November 13, 1791, which for the first time in European history placed Jews on the same level as the adherents of all other creeds as regards civil and political qualifications. Holland was appropriately the first country to grant the same religious equality to its Jews.[B]

The French Revolution, from our present standpoint, is the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the only great European movement on which Jews had absolutely no influence, direct or indirect, owing to their inappreciable numbers and insecure position in the chief centers, Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. The Revolution principles spread into the neighboring countries with the advance of the French arms. In Venice, the walls of the original Ghetto, from which all the rest received their name, fell at once on the entry of Napoleon's troops. No wonder they welcomed with fervor the victories of the French troops; we can catch, in Heine, echoes of the enthusiasm with which Napoleon was acclaimed the Liberator.

Napoleon's Recognition of the Jews

NAPOLEON'S own attitude was not so uniformly friendly to Jews. On his way back from Austerlitz in 1805 he learnt at Strassburg of the wide distress caused in Alsace by the exactions of certain Jewish usurers in that province, and on his return to Paris issued edicts directed against the Alsatian Jews, restricting their usurious activity. It is fair to add that these enactments were obviously directed against the usury of the Alsatian Jews, and not against the Jews in general, since they were specifically declared not to apply to the Jews of Bordeaux in the South or Northern Italy, then under Napoleon's control. It would indeed have been against the whole tendency of his career to have made the Jews an exception to that principle of the "carriere ouverte aux talents," which was the key-note of his whole policy, as it is logically to all war-lords. It was by no accident that similar indifference toward the creed of their soldiers, or civil servants, was shown by William the Silent, Wallenstein, Cromwell, William III, and Frederick the Great.

Napoleon's attention having thus been drawn to the Jewish Question, he proceeded with characteristic energy to solve it by summoning to Paris a representative assembly of the Jews of France, Germany and Italy, who should determine on what terms Jews could be admitted into a modern Country-State, which had been freed from the shackles of the medieval Church-State and only recognized a certain prerogative in the Church to which the majority of Frenchmen belonged (the Concordat of 1802). After summoning an assembly of Jewish Notables for a preliminary inquiry, in 1806, a more formal Sanhedrin was summoned in the following year, to which twelve test questions were submitted,—among them, whether the French Jews could regard France as their Fatherland and Frenchmen as their brothers, and the laws of the State as binding upon them. Further points were raised as to polygamy, divorce, and mixed marriages; other questions related to the position of Rabbis and the Jewish laws about usury.

All these problems were decided to the satisfaction of Napoleon, though some of them aroused much searching of heart among the more strictly orthodox. The outcome legally recognized that there was nothing in Jewish law or faith which prevented its adherents from being legitimate and full members of a modern State which, at that time, practically recognized Catholicism as the State-Church. The significance of the decision was far-reaching not alone for the Jews but for the whole European State system; it was a practical recognition that the Country, not the Faith, was the foundation of a nation and thus gave the final blow to the conception of a Church-Empire, which had upheld the contrary principle. It was not without significance that simultaneously the Emperor of Austria agreed to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

Liberalism Draws the Jews to Its Ranks

BUT though the Jews had had no influence on the French Revolution and no share in Napoleon's revolutionary reorganization of West Europe, the benefit they reaped from both movements was second only to that of the serfs. For the Jews and the serfs were the two most oppressed classes under the feudal system still surviving. And so the Jews imbibed with enthusiasm the libertarian principles of the Revolution and the "open career" administration of Napoleon. They threw off with avidity most of the shackles which prevented their joining in general European culture, and Jewish parents of means immediately began giving their sons and, what is more, their daughters, the secular education which would adapt them to the careers now seemingly open to them, as publicists, lawyers, and civil servants. When the reaction came, under the Holy Alliance, with its attempt to revive the Church-State and the closed career of prerogative, Jews everywhere in Western Europe joined the Liberal forces, from whose triumph alone they could hope for a dispersal of the clouds which once more obscured the sun of liberty in which they had basked for a few short years. Jews soon ranked among the intellectual leaders of continental Liberalism, and from 1815 to 1848 exercised an appreciable influence on the course of public opinion. In particular a brilliant band of Jewish litterateurs in Germany helped to mediate between French Liberalism and German public opinion, and practically led the movement known as Young Germany, which opposed the cosmopolitan tendencies of the eighteenth century to the narrow nationalism of the Reaction and advocated the Revolution principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as against the revival of the claims of Authority and Privilege by the Holy Alliance. Boerne and Heine, Hartmann and Saphir, Jacoby and Karl Marx, are recognized by friends and foes alike as among the leading influences which led ultimately to the downfall of Metternich and his school.

The Salons of Jewish Women and Their Liberalizing Influence

THEY were aided in their Liberal tendencies by a remarkable group of emancipated Jewesses, who introduced into Germany the vogue of the political Salon after the manner of Madame Roland and Madame de Stael. They were mostly from the Berlin Circle, which had arisen around Moses Mendelssohn, and carried his tendencies towards rationalism and culture to extreme limits. His two daughters Dorothea and Henriette, and their friends Henriette Herz and Rahel Lewin, created salons to which were attracted some of the more liberal spirits of the cultured world of Berlin. Dorothea Mendelssohn ultimately married Friedrich von Schlegel and became one of the Muses of the German Romantic School. Publicists of distinction like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Gentz formed, with Dorothea and others of her circle, a "Bond of Virtue" (Tugendbund) which according to all appearance was named on the principle of locus a non lucendo. Rahel, "the little woman with a great soul," as Goethe called her, was even a more striking personality. She numbered, among her friends, men of such different types as Schelling and Schleiermacher, the Prince de Ligne, and Fichte, Schlegel and Gutzkow, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick the Great's nephew, and Fouque, Gentz, and the Humboldts, and she finally married Varnhagen van Ense. She was the first to appreciate, in its full extent, the multiform genius of Goethe, and helped the rise to fame of Boerne, Heine, and Victor Hugo. She was undoubtedly the most striking personality among the women of her age in Germany, and she is nowadays regarded as one of the chief forerunners of the Feminist movement.[C]

These salons had an air of cultured Bohemianism, which attracted many men of rank in Mid-Europe who were beginning to be repelled by the exactions of social gathering in which all associations were determined by armorial bearings. A similar salon was held in Vienna by Baroness von Arnstein, in whose mansion all the diplomats of the Congress of Vienna met as on neutral ground. Such gatherings, while helping to liberalize good society in Mid-Europe, also brought the position of Jews to the notice of the ruling classes and, in many cases, aroused a determination to repair their wrongs. You cannot accept a man socially yet refuse him the most elementary rights politically.[D]



The Liberal Leadership of Heine and Boerne

THE Revolution of 1830 brought into European prominence the two most brilliant members of Rahel's coterie, Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine. Both had made their mark as litterateurs in the preceding decade, but Boerne's "Letters from Paris" and Heine's "French Conditions" (contributed to the Augsburger Zeitung) drew the attention of all liberal Germany to the new hopes aroused by the downfall of the absolutist monarchy in France. Henceforth they were the dominating voices in arousing among the German Liberals the hope of similar liberty, while in France itself they helped to make known to French culture the deeper currents of German thought and literature. In particular their brilliant wit and incisive sarcasm set the tone for the feuilleton literature of all Mid-Europe. By their very isolation they were enabled to regard men and affairs with a certain detachment, and both wrote with an iridescent insolence which can only be described by the Jewish technical word Chutzpah. Treitschke complained of their frequent irreverences and flippancies but in both respects Heine, "the wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire," was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessor, and Boerne, like Diderot, knew that the most effective weapon against authority is sarcasm.

Under the leadership of Heine and Boerne a whole school of liberal journalists arose in Germany and Austria, many of them Jews like Saphir and Hartmann, and they gave a tone to Mid-European journalism which has lasted to the present day. They thus helped to internationalize Liberalism of the French form, with its rather vague and indefinite strivings after liberty, equality, and fraternity, as contrasted with the Liberalism of the English type dominated by Jeremy Bentham, which aimed at constitutional, economic, and social reforms of a definite character. Young Germany, as represented by Heine and Boerne, left the latter type of Liberalism severely alone.

Yet in the struggle for constitutional liberty, which led to the revolutions of 1848, Jews took a considerable part on the more practical side. Everywhere during that critical year Jews had a hand in the upheaval against absolutism.[E]

Among the Conservatives: Stahl and Disraeli

BUT Jews were not altogether unrepresented among the Conservative forces, counting indeed two of the chief leaders, F. J. Stahl in Prussia and Benjamin Disraeli in England. Disraeli's is the better known name, but it is probable Stahl was equally influential. Stahl is described by Sir A. W. Ward in the Cambridge Modern History, xi. 395, as "the intellectual leader of the conservative aristocratic party and the most remarkable brain in the Upper Chamber. . . . He largely supplied the ruling party with the learning and wealth of ideas on which to found their claims. Their organ was the Kreuzzeitung, and the party was called by its name." Bluntschli calls him, "after Hegel the most important representative of the philosophical theory of the State. He, in many ways, advanced political science by his dialectical and critical ability in founding new points of view." (The Theory of the State, p. 73). But Stahl's historic influence will probably rest on his connection with Bismarck at the formative period of his career, when the future chancellor was also a member of the Kreuzzeitung party.

Disraeli's career and influence is far better known and need not be further adverted to in this place. The fact that both were converts has little significance from our present point of view, since many of the Jewish leaders on the Liberal side had also adopted Christianity. It is more pertinent to remark that one cannot trace their conservatism to their Judaism since there was everything in the Jewish position of their time to range Jews on the Liberal side. Stahl and Disraeli are, therefore, to be regarded merely as examples of Jewish ability. There is nothing specifically Jewish in their influence unless we regard the socialistic strain in Disraeli's conception of "Young England" as a part of the Jewish sympathy with the "under dog," which can be attributed to their own experiences and to the traditions of the Prophets.

The Contribution of the Jews to Socialism

CERTAINLY we find a strong Jewish participation throughout the socialistic movement which, from its inception up to the present day, has been largely dominated by Jewish influences. Although modern socialism can be traced back to St. Simon, the whole movement would have collapsed at the death of the master but for the organizing ability of Olinde Rodrigues and the religious enthusiasm of his brother Eugene. A practical turn was also given by their cousins, Isaac and Jacob Pereire, who, as bankers, had thought out the best means of carrying out the principles of the school into practical life. An extension of the facilities for banking would lower the rate of interest and therefore leave more to be distributed to the workers, while the development of railways would reduce the cost of transportation and thus lower the cost of living and raise real wages. Accordingly the Pereires devoted themselves, with religious enthusiasm, to creating the Credit Foncier, and later the Credit Mobilier, and were the chief agents in developing the railway system of Northern France, incidentally making themselves multi-millionaires in the process, though they never lost their enthusiasm for the socialistic ideals.[F]

Most of these left the St. Simonian Church when it diverged into the sexual vagaries of Enfantin, though one of his creeds was, "I believe that God has raised up Saint Simon to teach the Father (Enfantin) through Rodrigues." Felicien David the musician, however, accompanied Enfantin on his epoch-making journey to Egypt, during which he implanted the idea of the Suez Canal in the minds of Mehemet Ali and Ferdinand de Lesseps, and Gustave d'Eichthal devoted his enthusiasm and energies to creating, out of the ideas of St. Simon and Enfantin, a new religion which should revert to the socialism of the Prophets, while denying or ignoring, like them, any other life than this. It is said that he consulted Heine as to the best means of founding such a religion. "Get crucified and rise again on the third day," was Heine's caustic reply. The socialistic tone of J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, which differentiates it from its Ricardian predecessors, is undoubtedly due in large measure to his intercourse with d'Eichthal. Enfantin's vagaries, while they destroyed any direct practical outcome for St. Simonism, drew wide attention to its views, and Jews helped to spread them throughout Europe, Moritz Veit performing that function in Germany, and M. Parma in Italy. The cosmopolitan position of Jews is seen at its best in such propagandism, and it is not surprising that they should have been attracted by views of which the kernel is in the Prophets of Israel, whom indeed Renan, in his Histoire d'Israel, brilliantly characterized as socialistic preachers.

The later stages of socialism in Europe were, as is well known, dominated by Karl Marx, who based upon Ricardo's "iron law" of wages the imposing edifice of Das Kapital, for long the gospel of advanced socialism. The brilliant Ferdinand Lassalle introduced its principles into German politics, and the most recent stages of German socialism have been controlled by the opportunism of E. Bernstein, while among its most prominent leaders have been V. Adler and Paul Singer.

The Struggle for Political Emancipation

THIS participation of Jewish intellect and sympathies with the Liberal current in European politics made Jewish emancipation a part of the Liberal creed throughout Europe. Jews were fighting for themselves in fighting for the general liberties, and their position in the forefront of the struggle was thus justified by the representative principle at the root of modern Liberalism. Jewish disabilities were the last stronghold of the old Church-State conception, and the struggle on the side of the Reaction to retain this fundamental principle was the more intense. If Jews were granted full civil and political rights it could no longer be contended that Christianity was a fundamental principle of the State (or, as the English obiter dictum put it, "Christianity is a parcel of the common law"). Hence the extreme violence of the defense which seems, at first sight, out of all proportion to the interests or numbers involved. Thus the struggle was as embittered in Switzerland as anywhere, though the Jews there only constituted a handful, and the traditions of the country were in favor of toleration.

From this aspect the fight in England is typical. As soon as the Catholics had obtained emancipation in 1828 (the Jews had stood aside in order not to complicate the question), Jewish emancipation became part of the Liberal creed, and the struggle was waged in Parliament, or rather in the House of Lords, for the ensuing thirty years. England was the home of toleration, and her Toleration Act, passed as early as 1689, formed the third stage in the European progress towards religious liberty. Yet the more conservative elements in English life fought against the removal of Jewish disabilities because it meant the visible proof of the secularization of English politics. It is perhaps characteristic that the Tory resistance was mainly broken down by Disraeli, of Jewish, and by Lord George Bentinck, of Dutch, descent.

The High Tide of Liberalism

WITH Jewish emancipation in England Liberalism reached its acme about 1860. Complete civil and religious liberty was gained for Jews throughout Western Europe during the next decade,—in the German confederation and in Switzerland, 1866, in Austria and Hungary, 1867, and in the German Empire, 1871, while even in Spain the expulsion order was practically repealed and toleration, if not liberty, was given to Jews there in 1869. By that time Liberalism, both in the French sense of liberty and equality before the law and in the English sense of constitutional government and free-trade, had gained its fullest triumph and had spent its force. Its negative work had been most valuable; it had freed the human spirit from intolerable shackles and thrown into the lumber-room the clogging survivals of medieval feudalism. But to the human spirit thus freed it had little instruction to give of a constructive kind; its slogan seemed to be, "Go as you please," or, to use its own formula, "laissez faire, laissez aller." It was rather superficial in its treatment of national and social forces and made no appeal to the more generous imaginative emotions. It was inevitable that a reaction should set in if only to fill the void. Nationalism which had given vitality to France under Napoleon, and in Spain, Russia and Prussia had brought down his downfall, was opposed to Liberal cosmopolitanism. Protection to native industry, which had, only for a moment and in England, lost its hold, replaced free trade, and the strong individualism of "Manchestertum" was drowned in the rising flood of Collectivism, whether in the more formal guise of socialism or in the vaguer tendencies of philanthropy. In none of these currents of opinion had Jews a prominent voice except, as we have seen, in the latter, though there they were mainly effective in opposition and criticism.

Bismarck and the Forces of Reaction

ALL these tendencies, which may roughly be summed up as the Counter-Revolution, found a home in victorious Prussia and a voice in Otto von Bismarck, its representative statesman. As we have seen, his views on the nature of the State had been influenced in his formative period by F. J. Stahl, and his socialistic sympathies may possibly have been aroused by Ferdinand Lassalle, but he was of too independent a character to submit much to external influences, and the tendencies he represented, Junkertum and Militarism, were entirely opposed to Jewish Liberalism. For some fifteen years he found it convenient to work with the National Liberal party, to which all German Jews belonged, and among whose leaders the most prominent were two Jews, Eduard Lasker and Ludwig Bamberger. But in 1878 he broke with the party and let loose the forces of "Anti-Semitism" as a means of discrediting them. The movement, thus encouraged by Bismarck, soon spread to Austria and was transformed in Russia into the pogroms of 1881. In France the Royalists and Jesuits conceived hopes of reviving the Church-State and adopted anti-Semitism as a means of discrediting not alone Jews but also Protestants and other opponents of Catholicism. Their adherents, the French nobility, were especially embittered against the Jews by the bankruptcy of the Union Generale, a banking establishment in which all their money had been placed in the hope of wresting the control of French finance from the hands of the Rothschilds. Their chief hope lay in getting control of the General Staff, by filling its posts with young men of noble birth, trained by Jesuits. In order to attain this they schemed to remove all Jews and Protestants from the Staff and thought they had found a rare chance in their perverse persecution of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Their scheme recoiled on their own heads, and the final result of the Dreyfus Affaire was to break the alliance of clericalism and militarism, at least in France.

The Dreyfus Affaire was specially significant as bringing into play, at one time, all the forces that have given vitality to anti-Semitism. The New Nationalism, based not on Country but on Race and fostered by chauvinistic anthropologists as well as historians; the revived Church spirit, which sees in the National Church not so much the guardian of Christian truth as a spiritual bond of national unity; the New Collectivism which sees in capitalism the chief anti-social force, and the revived militaristic spirit which glorifies war as the regenerator of the nation; all these movements combine to regard the Jew—considered as alien, infidel, capitalist, and pacificist—as the representative enemy. All the reactionary forces regard a revival of the medieval Church-State as both the means and the end of their strivings, and naturally find the position of the Jew, both theoretically and practically, one of the chief stumbling-blocks in their way.

Church-State versus Welfare-State

IT remains to be seen whether the ideals of religious and political liberty, which have been gained through so much blood and tears, will be preserved intact against the rising forces of the Reaction and Counter-Revolution which are, at bottom, an attempt at a revival of the Church-Empire. The slogan "One God, one king, one people," has again been raised, and armies that are nations in arms are in movement to the cry. Anti-Semitism is largely the result of this reaction, and while it is dominant in the councils of certain nations Jews must once more take up their role of martyrs to the wider truth. Nowadays however they do not fight alone, and it is scarcely possible that in Western Europe and in lands dominated by Western European ideals they can be reinterned into their ghetti. But the Colossus of the North still retains the medieval ideal of the Church-Empire, and while that controls Russian State policy Jews will have to suffer, in All the Russias, indignities and disabilities from which they have been freed in the lands of true civilization and religious liberty.

The ideal of the unified Church-State has been shattered by the assaults of modern criticism and the growth of true religious liberty. But the conception of all the citizens of a compact territory animated by the same ideals still retains its attraction; only the unification nowadays is with regard to the goal rather than to the roads that lead to it. In other words, the Welfare-State (interpreting Welfare as spiritual as well as material) is taking the place of the Church-State of the Middle Ages and of Reformation times. What then is to become of the separate churches or religious bodies which are found in profusion in modern States? That is the sole ecclesiastical problem which the modern statesman has to face. Except among the extreme parties, such as the Ultramontagnes, the obvious solution would seem to be that given by the modern Federal constitution in which each State (in this case Church) has a corporate life of its own over which it has autonomous control, except in any case where this conflicts with the general Federal ideals. The Jewish Synagogue may rightly claim its place among these churches within the State as having its part in promoting the general welfare.

The Role of the Jews in European Progress

OWING to their medieval disabilities Jews, though sharing as we have seen in the higher life and in the commerce of Europe, were yet kept in a kind of enclave in each of the European nations, and thus acted, both intellectually and economically, as a separate body with distinctive tendencies caused by their isolation and disabilities. Accordingly we are able to estimate roughly the part taken by the Jews as a body in the various movements which have made European civilization what it is to-day. In all these movements (except possibly one, the French Revolution) the Jews have contributed towards European culture while sharing in it themselves. Their monotheistic views and liturgic practices were the foundation of the medieval Church, both in creed and deed. By their connection with their brethren in the East and their tolerated existence, both in Islam and in Christendom, they helped towards that transmission of Oriental thought, science and commerce, which had so large an influence on the Middle Ages and led on to the Renaissance and the Reform, in both of which movements Jews had their direct part to play. So, too, in the struggle for religious liberty and in the different stages of toleration which lay at the root of political liberty, Jews had their part to play, and when freed from their shackles by the French Revolution took a leading role both in Nineteenth Century Liberalism and in the Collectivism which has now replaced it.

But when fully emancipated, Jews no longer acted in the European world of ideas collectively but as individuals, often choosing opposite ideals and in most cases applying the talents thus let free to objects apart from the general political or religious movements of the time. Great as has been the influence of Jews in their collective capacity on the development of European thought and culture up to the present day, it is possible that their influence as individuals, during the past fifty years, has been even more extensive though less discernible, owing to the absence of any general direction to Jewish intellectuality.



FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote B: It is perhaps worth while remarking that one of the most prominent leaders on the Jewish side in Holland, Herz Bromet, had lived as a free Burgher in Surinam for a long time, and that the example of America, especially New York State, was adduced in favor of the movement. (Graetz xi, 230-1).]

[Footnote C: See Ellen Key, "Rahel Lewin."]

[Footnote D: Similar salons were held later by distinguished Jewesses like Countess Waldegrave, in London, and Madame Raffalovitch in Paris; and the Rothschilds have, throughout, made their houses centers of the most cultured influence.]

[Footnote E: No adequate or connected account has yet been given of the part taken by the Jews in the revolution of 1848. Incidentally a good deal of information is contained in the last volume of Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vi, "Young Germany."]

[Footnote F: They got their altruistic tendencies from their family connections. Their uncle Jacob Rodrigues Pereire (1750-80) was the first teacher of deaf mutes.]



[The second in a series of articles on The Meaning of Judaism]

What Is Judaism?

BY MORDECAI M. KAPLAN

WHAT is Judaism if not an ethical monotheism? The answer is that it is not an "ism" at all, despite the last syllable in its name. It is a living soul or consciousness; it is the soul or consciousness of the Jewish people. We are not interested in names, and we should not quibble about terms; it is reality that we are after. We want to know what is involved in being a Jew and living a Jewish life. The main reason for our finding fault with the usual presentation of Judaism is that it does not enlighten or inspire us. If the term Judaism does not direct our minds at once to the living energy that operates in the Jewish people, if it has not the power to launch us upon the stream of Israel's active thought and spiritual striving, then it is a word without content, and had better be deleted from our vocabulary. We did well enough without it until very recently, and should it prove an insuperable obstacle to the solution of our spiritual problems, we shall have to throw it into the scrap-heap of obsolete terminology. We shall begin to call our religion "Jewishness" instead of Judaism. The former designation has at least the advantage of connoting consciousness, and nothing is so important for understanding the essence of any religion as the identification of it with a form or state of consciousness. If Jewishness will mean to us Jewish consciousness and not merely "gefillte fisch" or some other Jewish dish, it will serve our purpose.

Let us not lose sight of the main issue in these discussions. We Jews refuse to have our life quest confined to the satisfaction of our material needs. Our souls are hungry; and whether we call it Jewishness or Judaism, what we want is religion that will help us get our bearings in the world, that will keep down the beast in us and spur us on to worthy endeavor in the field of thought and action. Under normal conditions we should find all this in the faith of our fathers. But, unfortunately, all that most of us know about that faith is what we acquired from some old-fashioned "rabbi" who taught us when we were small children and who made us recite Hebrew by the page. At home our parents would insist upon our conforming to routine observances and ceremonies which meant nothing to us. When we grew older and occasionally asked questions about the Bible, we met with cold and evasive replies. No wonder that later on, when we entered the academic world, we grew accustomed to look upon Judaism as out of touch with the realities of life, and far removed from the elemental needs that agitate the masses of active, enterprising humanity. We could see no connection between the few humble ceremonies in our homes or in our synagogues with the social, political and industrial problems upon which was riveted the attention of the men of light and leading. To most of us the faith of our fathers seemed little more than a medley of needless restraints, other-worldliness, and hostility to all progress.

Religion Indispensable to the Human Race

BUT a change has come over us. We have begun to realize that Judaism could not have transformed the spiritual history of mankind, as it did, if it were the negligible and insignificant thing we thought it was. We have been unable to discern its true character, because we did not know how to probe beneath the outward and often unattractive surface which it presented to us in the limited circle in which we moved. We have begun to surmise that the Jewish life we are familiar with is nothing more than a devitalized fragment of what, under auspicious circumstances, becomes a life that is spiritually healthful, joyous and invigorating. We have at last learned to take into consideration the inevitable difference in mental scope and outlook that must mark two generations, one of which had its life formed amidst the oppressive atmosphere of Eastern Europe, and the other in the bracing atmosphere of America. This being the case, nothing could be more unreasonable than to expect that the spiritual heritage be transmitted from father to child with ease and naturalness. But who is in a better position to smooth out the roughness and overcome the angularities—father or child? Should we demand of our elders, who are burdened by numerous cares, and whose lives are for the most part hurried and difficult, that they adapt themselves to our attitude of mind? Is it not meet that we, who still retain the plasticity of youth, make advances? Without surrendering an iota of our own individuality we might cultivate that sympathetic insight that would reveal the inestimable worth of our spiritual heritage. Not merely reverence for the past, but a regard for our own future prompts us to achieve a proper understanding of Judaism.

It is well to realize at the outset that the problem of religion is not confined to the Jews alone. Every great world-faith experiences nowadays the throes of transformation and readjustment. Mistaking them for the final struggle, the believer wrings his hands in despair over the impending doom, and the doubter contemplates a religionless future with a great deal of glee. But both will be disappointed in their reckoning. Religion, as we shall see, is entirely too inherent in human life to be dispensable. The belief that it has served its purpose in the evolution of the race, and that it can only survive as a troublesome vestige in the organism of human society, is based upon a misunderstanding of its function. In view of the deeper insight into human nature that has been acquired of late, as a result of the progress made in psychological and social research, there is good reason to believe that a better understanding is not far distant. These investigations have not merely led to new theories about religion, but have essentially changed the method of approach. They have rendered superfluous the subtleties and refinements of metaphysical arguments. A new reservoir in human nature has been tapped, and discovered to be the inexhaustible fount of religion.

The Adaptation of Judaism to Changing Conditions

THIS new way of looking at the problem of religion gives promise of helping us also to get a better comprehension of Judaism. We shall find by means of it that there is much more substantial nourishment to the faith of our fathers than can be obtained from the tabloid form in which the textbooks mete it out to us. The previous article on "What Judaism Is Not"[G] did not argue that Judaism could forego such doctrines as the unity of God, the brotherhood of man and similar principles, or that it should glory in remaining vague and inarticulate. The main objection to the ordinary way of conceiving Judaism was that it lacked the means of preventing its teachings from degenerating into dull platitudes. But if Judaism is essentially the self-consciousness of the Jewish people, these doctrines will be viewed as some of its characteristic expressions. As such they forthwith become instinct with life. To be a religious Jew, accordingly, means not merely to profess the unity of God in cold philosophical fashion, but to live over again by means of thought and symbol the divine intuition, the backslidings, the temptations, the defiance, the threats, the tortures and the final victory implied in the "Shema Yisroel." The Jew who does not thrill with exaltation when he sings the world's most stirring paean, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!" is either ignorant or has the blood of a fish.

Whether Judaism is an ethical monotheism or the consciousness of Israel is not merely an academic question. These two conceptions represent widely divergent ways of dealing with the practical problems of self-adjustment to the novel situation with which Judaism is confronted. Whether the one or the other view shall prevail will make a difference in the fight for existence. We protest that if Judaism will be armed with nothing stronger than the conventional platitudes, it must succumb. By knowing itself for what it really is, Judaism will muster new heart and strength. The need for self-adjustment is not of today; Judaism has been going through that process ever since it saw the light. But during the past hundred and fifty years, Judaism has been wrestling with the problem of self-adaptation which both the redistribution of Jewry and the incursions of materialistic secularism have called into being. In this comparatively short period of a century and a half, Judaism has lived through all that the other religions have experienced within the last three or four centuries. If we were to compare the different stages in the process of Jewish self-adjustment we should find them analogous to those through which European religion in general has passed. These different steps in the process seem to have been unavoidable because they are the concomitant of the natural development of the human spirit. A review of the salient phases in the self-adaptation of religion to the changing conditions of life and thought will throw light upon the significance of that vital method of viewing Judaism which has of late worked its way into Jewish life—for the most part unawares.

The Storm and Stress Period in Religion

WHEN we refer to the self-adjustment of religion to modern conditions, our concern is not with the vast hinterland of ignorance and superstition that is still inhabited by large numbers of the unthinking of all creeds, Jewish as well as Christian. The destiny of religion is, primarily, in the hands of those who are in the vanguard of intellectual progress, and as long as its place in their lives is a problematic one its future is uncertain. Since the days of the Renaissance, religion has practically been busy adjusting itself to the ever enlarging human experience. It was otherwise during the middle ages, when the men of intellect threw the weight of their influence on the side of tradition and authority. They devoted their mental powers to the support of truths that were accepted at their face value without further scrutiny and analysis. All the resources of intellect were spent in interpreting the few facts they had in their possession. Many centuries elapsed before the cry was raised for more facts; but when, at last, the cry was answered, and new knowledge concerning the world in which men lived began to pour in, the foundations of tradition were shaken. Since then the religion of the intellectuals has no longer been marked by the naivete and self-assurance of its earlier years. Its existence has been one of storm and stress. It has resisted all attempts to crowd it out from the new world that man has conquered for himself, and in order to be accorded a place in that world it has submitted to considerable change and self-adjustment. We may note three distinct stages in these efforts of religion to accommodate itself to life, corresponding in a large measure with the great thought movements of the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively.

The first stage in the process was the rationalistic. With Copernicus and Galileo defeated by the Vatican, with Descartes having to defend his orthodoxy, it seemed to the English and French philosophers of the eighteenth century that the only way man could save his spiritual nature from falling a prey to animalism or materialism was by consigning to destruction the special forms in which religion existed in the established faiths. The dreamers and the visionaries of that day, who were moved by a sincere desire to further man's higher life, entertained the hope that natural religion would revive with the downfall of revealed religion. But human events have taken a different turn. Life does not adapt itself to preconceived logical systems. The rationalistic method of adjusting religion to life failed because it was based upon a false reconstruction of the rise and growth of religion. However logical and plausible such a reconstruction might have appeared, the fact that it could not be verified by study and observation of religious phenomena invalidated the practical inferences drawn from it.

The Failure of the Rationalistic School

ALTHOUGH by that time science had made sufficient strides to know how futile it was to reconstruct fact by means of reason, the territory of religion was still considered exempt from the need of resorting to experience. The thinkers of the rationalistic age were to a certain extent still under the dominance of the medieval regard for abstract reasoning, and applied it to man's spiritual existence. They reasoned thus: The human being is naturally gifted with an intuition that enables him to discover for himself the truth about God and his relation to the world. If man had only been left alone and had not had the stream of his ideas muddied by outside interference, he would have continued professing a religion that would have been both pure and simple. But human depravity did not permit the natural religion of primitive life to continue. The fanatics with their delusions and the priests with their love of power distorted man's primitive faith in God. They invented dogmas and practices by means of which they could hold the masses in subjection. In course of time these extraneous elements came to be looked upon as the main content of revealed religion. The various established faiths and revealed religions were little more than wilful fabrications that were bound to crumble before the onslaughts of reason. Thus, by bringing the established cults into disrepute, men like Voltaire and Hume hoped to restore religion to its original state of purity and simplicity, bare of all artificialities of forms and institutions.

However superficial the rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers of one faith from those of another. Rationalism began to lift the curse of intolerance and persecution which lay heavily upon the human race. No one who values the freedom to live his own life in his own way should cast aspersions upon the influence of that school of thought. Though they argued erroneously about the nature and essence of religion, we must not forget that they emancipated the human soul from the shackles of spiritual bondage.

On the other hand, our gratitude to them cannot blind us to their superficiality and inexperience in the matter of religion. Nineteenth century thought, with its emphasis upon historic development, exposed the fallacies and weaknesses of the method they employed to interpret religious phenomena. The distinction between natural and revealed religion was an arbitrary one, and the conception of priestly fabrications a mere figment of the imagination. Historical research has established that all the great world faiths or revealed religions have followed laws of development that have been in accord with the circumstances and mentality of those who professed them, and in that sense have been perfectly natural. Instead of being the product of fraud and wilful deceit, the established religions were seen to be the outcome of a healthy enthusiasm and deep sincerity. The limitations of knowledge and experience, which marked the earlier expressions of religious life, were, from the historical point of view, more than atoned for by the inner worth and sincerity that had prevailed in former days. In fact, so far did the historical conception change men's attitude that, upon finding themselves sophisticated and torn by doubt, they looked back longingly to former ages, when religion had brought inward calm and serenity. As a consequence of this reaction to the disintegrating tendencies of eighteenth century rationalism, a renewed appreciation for the religion of the past made itself felt among the circles of the cultured, particularly those of Germany and England, and the institutions in which the spirit of the past clothed itself were given a new lease of life.

The Historic Method Is Found Wanting

THE adoption by religion of the historic method thus represents the second stage in its process of self-adjustment. It now appealed to man's natural desire not to allow his past to sink into oblivion. Nothing is so humanizing as memory. He that is engrossed only in the future and would make it the only standard of value, he who has no patience with anything that interferes with practical utility—and memory is certainly a source of such interference—lacks the main ingredient of humanity and has something beaverish about him. Thus taught the historical school during the nineteenth century, and the rationalistic ideal that would have destroyed the established faiths no longer held sway.

But while the historic method stemmed the tide of rationalism, it failed to give back to religion its native vigor. It removed forever the stigma of insincerity that was attached to the origin and development of the dominant faiths; it illumined the past and incorporated it into man's spiritual life; but it was unable to restore to religion its most important function, that of shaping the future. The fundamental paradox which the historic method harbors, and which has prevented it from contributing adequately to the process of adjustment, is the fact that the spiritual experiences of the past, which it asks us to love and revere, were at the time of their enactment not memories, but vital responses to immediate and pressing needs. In the past religion dealt with its own present. That at all times the past did play an important role cannot be denied; but in all effective religion it can only be a means to an end. The historic method, on the other hand, succeeds in nothing but in revitalizing the past for its own sake. It provides no guidance for the future. A religion must not only write history—it must make history. This is why the historic method has been found wanting and has had to be supplemented by a new method of adjustment, which for want of a better term we may designate the socio-psychological.

The New Way—the Social and Psychological Viewpoint

BUT little attention has so far been paid to this new method of self-adjustment. Though it is still inchoate and uncrystallized, it forms the best part of every endeavor that makes for the rehabilitation of religion. The remarkable feature about the new mode of adjustment is that it did not come about directly, through a desire on the part of the teachers of religion to make good the inadequacy of previous methods. It was arrived at indirectly from a source that at first seemed hostile, and to some extent is still considered so, namely, social science. Not alone religion, but government and education, as well as history, economics and psychology, have been revolutionized as a result of the new way of approaching the problems of human life. So recent is the change that we have hardly had time to appraise it. The modern point of view toward human society has worked a change in all our thinking, comparable only to the one which resulted when the true purport of the concept "evolution" became apparent. The human race has lived through the forces generated by social existence without having been aware of them, even as it went on living for thousands of years without knowing the numerous forces that were latent in the earth, air and sea. It will probably take a much longer time for man to estimate at their worth the forces that are at work in social life than it took him to perceive the forces that dominate the physical world.

With all that, it is now generally established that the study of any phase of human life, whether for theoretical or for practical purposes, must be based upon the recognition that man is not merely a social animal, as Aristotle put it, but that his being more than an animal is due entirely to his leading a social life. In opposition to the older point of view, which prevailed in the more materialistic schools of thought during the nineteenth century, social science has proved that the forces that operate in human life are not merely those that are derived from the physical environment, but also those which are of a mental character. These psychical forces operate with a uniformity and power in no way inferior to those of the physical world. Social science is gradually accustoming us to regard human society not merely as an aggregate of individuals but as a psychical entity, as a mind not less but more real than the mind of any of the individuals that constitute it. The perennial source of error has been the fallacy of considering the individual human mind as an entity apart from the social environment. Whatever significance the study of the mind, as detached from its social environment, may have for metaphysical inquiry, it can throw no light upon the practical problems with which the mind has to deal—problems that arise solely from the interaction of the individual with his fellows. The individual human being is as much the product of his social environment as the angle is of the sides that bound it.

This new method of studying mental life both in the race and in the individual has revealed not merely the true significance of religion, but the way in which it functions and the conditions which affect its career. We now know that those phenomena in life which we call religious are primarily the expression of the collective life of a social group, after it has attained a degree of consciousness which is analogous to the self-consciousness of the individual. When a collective life becomes self-knowing we have a religion, which may therefore be considered the flowering stage in the organic growth of the tree of social life. The problem of religious adjustment is at bottom that of maintaining in a social group the psychical or spiritual energy which expresses itself in beliefs, ideals, customs and standards of conduct. Accordingly, when a religion is passing through a crisis, what is really happening is not so much that certain accepted truths or traditional habits are threatened with obsolescence, as that the social group with whose life it has been identified is on the point of dissolution. Whatever interest we have in the cultivation of the spiritual life must go towards conserving this kind of social energy. To have roses we must take care of the tree on which they grow, and not content ourselves with having a bouquet of them put into a vase filled with water. This newer conception of the religious life is fraught with far-reaching consequences, some of which we shall have to point out in a later article.

In Judaism we encounter the same three stages in the process of self-adjustment, though less clearly defined, by reason of much overlapping. What is known as the Haskalah movement represents the application of the rationalistic method to the spiritual problems of Jewish life. Having taken place in Russia, it was bound to be delayed in its coming for nearly a century. It received the first setback in its career when the pogroms broke out in the early "eighties," and the Russian Government inaugurated its policy of hounding and repression. The type which the Haskalah movement produced is the "Maskil," a man who curls his lip at ceremony and tradition, who lacks a sense of history and dabbles in cosmopolitanism. Not having had the courage to be thoroughgoing in his principles, or realizing that it was futile to be so, he tolerated what was distinctively Jewish so long as it was kept indoors and withdrawn from public gaze. In practice, however, "Haskalah" moved in the same direction as eighteenth century rationalism which made for the abrogation of the historic faiths.

Judaism in the Rationalistic and Historic Stages

CONTEMPORANEOUSLY with the rise and development of the Haskalah movement in Russia, Jewry in the German-speaking countries tested the validity both of the rationalistic and of the historic method. The Reform movement was at first, like the Haskalah movement, little more than a diluted cosmopolitanism. A typical case is that of David Friedlander and his friends, who began by reforming the worship in harmony with modern ideas and the changed social position of the Jews, and ended in offering to accept Christianity, if they would not be required to believe in Jesus and could be exempted from the observance of certain ceremonies. Influenced by the general reaction against rationalistic tendencies and by the rise of Jewish Wissenschaft, the Reform movement has had to reckon with the historic method of adjustment. But that influence has not been strong enough to overcome its early rationalistic bias from which it suffers to this very day.

The historic method was applied with far more thoroughness and consistency by the advocates of Historical Judaism. Zunz, Frankel, Graetz, Herzfeld, Luzzatto and Joel drew the line between adaptation and assimilation. They laid down the principle that it was fatuous to speak of a religion adjusting itself when it breaks so completely with the past as to be unrecognizable. In our anxiety to have Judaism conform to the needs of the age, we must take care lest we create an altogether new religion and label it Judaism. Intellectual honesty demands that we give due heed to the principle of identity, so that the sameness in our Judaism and that of our fathers be greater than the difference between them. They therefore applied themselves to the task of reconstructing the past by dint not of logic and phrase-mongering, but of patient, plodding search after facts strewn in the most out-of-the-way by-paths of literature, with the consequence that they discovered an impassable gulf between the Judaism of history and the Judaism of the Reform movement. We shall never be able to discharge fully our debt of gratitude to these Jewish scholars and historians who have given us, in place of a few vague and detached memories, a past rich in content and inspiration. But what they did was only to lay the foundation of the Judaism of the future. A foundation affords poor shelter against the hail and sleet of a bleak wintry day. Of what avail is it to keep on forever hugging the cold foundation stones, when we should be engaged in building the house of Israel?

Judaism and the Jewish Soul

AS soon as we begin to experience the need not merely of giving consent to certain abstract truths or of contemplating the past, but of helping to build the house of Israel as a means to our spiritual well-being, Judaism enters through us upon the third stage in the process of self-adjustment. This is the case with all those who rebel against the pulverizing and granulating tendencies of Judaized Protestantisms which ignore the "Kenneseth-Israel" in the effort to mete out salvation to the individual soul. This is true of all who refuse to allow Judaism to provincialize itself by applying for naturalization papers wherever it finds a habitat. To this class also belong those who see in Zionism not what its opponents make it out to be, a sulking, sullen Chauvinism, but a method of regeneration to which Judaism has been led by divine intuition. Dr. Schechter, who has contributed to Judaism the concept of catholicity, has this to say of Zionism: "While it is constantly winning souls for the present, it is at the same time preparing us for the future, which will be a Jewish future. Only when Judaism has found itself, when the Jewish soul has been redeemed from the Galuth, can Judaism hope to resume its mission in the world." How significant the apposition in which the author places Judaism and the Jewish soul! What a pity to spoil a poetic insight of that kind by applying to it so barbarous a term as socio-psychological. Yet in that insight is echoed the modern conception of religion as the self-consciousness of the group, a conception which the very conditions of life have forced the Jew to adopt. Whatever vitality Judaism still displays may be traced to a general presentiment that it is a social mind and not a system of abstract truths. We should not, however, permit such a principle to remain merely a vague presentiment. The task that devolves upon us is to render articulate both in theory and in practice all that is implied in the intuition that Judaism is the soul of Israel.

EDITORS' NOTE.—Prof. Kaplan will continue to develop his conception of the true meaning of Judaism in articles to appear in subsequent issues.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote G: In The Menorah Journal for October, 1915.]



University Menorah Addresses

The following addresses indicating the attitude of University authorities towards the Menorah movement may be considered as supplementary to the University Addresses printed in Part II of THE MENORAH MOVEMENT (1914) and in the first number (January, 1915) of THE MENORAH JOURNAL.

PROFESSOR ALBERT LEON GUERARD OF THE RICE INSTITUTE

Before the Rice Institute Menorah Society, November 29, 1915

IT is my privilege to welcome the Menorah Society in the name of the non-Jewish element and of the Faculty of the Rice Institute. When I was requested to do so, I accepted at once and with pleasure. I am in hearty sympathy with the purpose of the Menorah Society. I am a teacher of French; but I should consider myself unworthy of my calling if, behind the words of a foreign language, I did not attempt to show the civilization of a people, their soul, their ideal. Now, what I am attempting to do for French, the Menorah plans to do for the traditions, the problems, the aspirations of the Jewish race. And although I believe that the people which gave to the world Saint Louis, Joan of Arc, Calvin, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Pasteur, Victor Hugo has left its imperial imprint upon the whole of modern civilization, yet I cannot but be conscious of the prior and higher claims of that strange family of whose blood Moses, Jesus and Spinoza were born. Judaism and Hellenism, said Renan, are the twin miracles of human history. The artistic and philosophical primacy of the Greeks is not so striking as the religious primacy of the Hebrews. The worship of beauty is a less vital element than the undying quest for righteousness. The whole fabric of our culture rests on those Judeo-Hellenic foundations. And surely a university would be false to its name if it did not include among its courses the study of Jewish literature and Jewish history. The Rice Institute is young, and will not reach its full stature for many a decade; all branches of knowledge cannot be taken up at the same time. But the place which Judaic studies ought by right to have in the curriculum will be at least indicated and kept in mind by your Menorah Society.

I heartily welcome the Menorah because, open to Jews and Gentiles alike, it will help us break down the barrier of prejudices which still separates the two elements. I have seen with my own eyes the tragic effects of such prejudices: I was in Paris at the time of the Dreyfus case; I have seen how they warped the thought of scholarly men, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain; I have read with horror of the Russian pogroms. You, who have suffered for ages under the fierce contempt and hatred of fanatics, you who have at last reached this haven of democracy and justice, let not the lesson of past sufferings be lost; do not forget your brethren still in bondage; and your brethren are those who are persecuted, all the world over, even as you were persecuted. You ought to be foremost among those who labor for equality and freedom. We have a right to count upon you in the fight against all prejudices—prejudices of race and color, of class and country, of caste and religion. The emancipated Jew must be an emancipator.

I welcome the Menorah Society because, though devoted primarily to the tradition of your people, it does not look exclusively towards the past. Be rightly proud of the most unique and entrancing tradition in the history of the world. Cherish it, hold fast to it, as a title of nobility. The world has no respect for the man who does not respect himself in his forefathers. The call to American citizenship does not in the least imply the duty of forgetting that you are Jews: it is the best Jews that will make the best Americans. But do not be hypnotized by your past; be worthy of your ancestors by continuing their spirit rather than aping their habits. Think of the problems of to-day and to-morrow. Apply to human affairs your Biblical test of righteousness. Then you will find that, with a slightly different coloring perhaps, your aspirations are ours; our diverse evolutions, after centuries of estrangement and conflict, tend towards the same goal; and in the Menorah I see a sign of the coming harmony of sects and creeds, each remaining passionately attached to its own past, but all working in common towards the same future.

Finally, I cannot drive away from my thought the shambles of Europe. Your co-religionists are fighting under all the belligerent flags, as bravely, as loyally, as their fellow-citizens of a different creed; and they have suffered more heavily in Poland than even the Belgian martyrs. When one thinks of the carnival of murder to which the idolatry of territorial, political patriotism has led, one cannot but wonder whether the Jewish people throughout the world might not afford an example for all to follow. In Judaism we have tradition, culture and race dissociated from any special habitat or from any political form; and this nation without a land, this nation without a king, is developing, prospering, unconquerable. I wonder whether the territorial state, which has led to such monstrous aberrations, is not a last idol and doomed to disappear as an ethical factor; and whether the future might not belong to universal, interpenetrating communities;—freely expanding, untrammelled by physical boundaries, unable to use force, and free from the fear of force, communities of which Judaism to-day might be the prototype. But I do not want to dwell at any length on a mere hypothesis or perhaps on a flight of fancy. I have said enough, I hope, to convince you of my hearty sympathy with the work of the Menorah Society. May it long prosper—an increasing element of strength in our Institute!

PROFESSOR PHILIP B. KENNEDY, DIRECTOR OF THE DAY DIVISION OF THE SCHOOL OF COMMERCE, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Before the New York University (Washington Square) Menorah Society, November 3, 1915

I AM very glad to be present this morning at the opening meeting of the Menorah Society. I believe that any people should make the most of traditions which they have behind them. Personally, I always feel more confidence in a man of any race when he stands up for the best of his race traditions.

The Hebrew race is a very ancient one and should contribute to the civilization of this country. Students of this race who are in our colleges are the ones who may rightfully take the lead in making these traditions count.

The Menorah Society, I believe, is proceeding along the right lines. I hope to learn more of the work of this Society as it continues its work in the School of Commerce; and I am especially glad to have the opportunity of being with you at the beginning of the year. I trust that the year will be a very successful one. Personally, I shall attempt to back up the Society in every way that I can.

DEAN ALFRED E. BURTON, OF MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Before the M. I. T. Menorah Society, October 22, 1915

THE Menorah Society has appealed to me especially because of its high purpose. We who are not of the Jewish race realize what an important factor the Jews have been in civilization. Jewish culture has played an important part particularly here in the foundation of New England. Puritan life and thought drew its chief inspiration from the Old Testament. From the earliest times Jewish men have, been leaders in science and letters. Among the Americans and the English there is a growing tendency towards a better appreciation of Jewish ideals.

It is important that all Jewish men have pride in their race. If you don't, others will not. Some Jewish students do not seem to realize that they have a great inheritance. Many Jewish students with whom I have talked have been inclined to self-depreciation, and they also felt that everyone was against them. In contrast, Irish students have always impressed me with their self-confidence.

Bring non-Jewish students to your meetings. Try to increase your members. I shall do all I can to foster and promote your work. I would also urgently advocate a joint Menorah banquet between Harvard and Technology. This banquet would not only tend to tie Technology and Harvard students closer together, but would be of great benefit to your Society.

The study of Jewish culture and ideals will help you to think of other things than those immediately connected with your school work, and it will, furthermore, instill in you a feeling of dignity for your heritage.

REV. ANSON PHELPS STOKES, SECRETARY OF YALE UNIVERSITY

Substance of Address before the Yale Menorah Society, October 27, 1915

MR. Stokes spoke of three reasons why Jewish students of the right type were welcome to Yale University:

1. They showed themselves capable of the highest scholarship; the large number of prize awards won by Jewish students was evidence of this. The speaker expressed the hope that some of the Jewish students would go in for scholarly life careers. With so many Jewish students of high scholarship it seemed strange that relatively few pursued graduate studies outside of the various professions.

2. They made their contribution to the life and thought of a democratic American university. A university like Yale is, he said, a melting pot of democracy. One of its main advantages is that it brings together Orient and Occident, North and South, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew, and makes each understand the point of view of the other.

3. The presence of Jewish students at the University tends to attract to Yale gifts in the interest of Semitic studies. The contribution of Judaism to religious and ethical ideals was so important that no university could afford to fail in supplying adequate courses of Semitic instruction. Several recent gifts to the University in the interest of Jewish scholarship from prominent Jewish citizens indicates that they had been impressed with the fair treatment of Jewish boys at Yale. He spoke with appreciation of a recent gift of a rabbinic library of several thousand volumes of large value.

Mr. Stokes spoke with much appreciation of the Menorah Society because of what it was doing in bringing together Jewish students in the interest of high intellectual and ethical ideals, and hoped that it would not forget that its mission was not only to interest Jewish students but also Christian students in Jewish culture.



Intercollegiate Menorah Notes

Fourth Annual Menorah Convention

At the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, December 27, 28, 29 and 30, 1915.

Announcements

All members of Menorah Societies are cordially invited to attend the Convention. Though the right to vote is enjoyed only by duly accredited Representatives and Deputies of constituent Menorah Societies, all Menorah members may be given the privilege of the floor at the business sessions. Graduates also, especially former members of Menorah Societies, are invited to attend.

All business sessions, unless otherwise indicated, will take place at College Hall, University of Pennsylvania.

A reception will be given to the delegates and other Menorah members by a Committee of graduates and leading Jewish men and women of Philadelphia, at the Y. M. H. A., on Monday evening, at 8.

By invitation from the President of the Dropsie College, Dr. Cyrus Adler, one of the meetings, the "Scholars' Evening," will be held at The Dropsie College, corner Broad and York Sts., Philadelphia, on Tuesday evening, December 28, at 8.15 P. M. This meeting will be open to the public.

The Convention Dinner, at the Hotel Adelphia, Philadelphia, on Wednesday evening, December 29, at 6.30 P. M., will be open to Representatives and Deputies, all other Menorah members, all graduates, and invited guests. Menorah members who desire their friends to be invited will please send their names and addresses immediately to the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 600 Madison Avenue, New York. The subscription will be $3.00 a cover.

Program

MONDAY, December 27.

10. A. M. Opening session. Submission of credentials by Representatives and Deputies, and written reports of their respective Menorah Societies (unless previously sent to the Chancellor of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association); payment of Society dues to the Association for 1916; seating of Representatives and Deputies; presentation of the applications of new Menorah Societies for admission into the Association and action thereon.

1. P. M. Informal luncheon to delegates and visiting Menorah members.

2. P. M. Presentation of reports of Intercollegiate Officers for 1915, covering (1) roster of Menorah Societies and census of Menorah members; (2) extension of the Menorah movement during 1915; (3) the Menorah College of Lecturers; (4) Menorah courses of study and syllabi; (5) Menorah Libraries; (6) Menorah Prizes; (7) The Menorah Journal; (8) Menorah Classics; (9) Graduate Menorah Committees; (10) The graduate phase of the movement; (11) Relations of the Menorah with other organizations, etc. Questions regarding the activities of the Association and the policy of the Administration during 1916.