Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill — Read

As Joseph Jacobs reminded us in his "Biblical Archaeology" and as Sir / James Frazer is just illustrating afresh, the whole of Hebrew ritual / is permeated by savage survivals, a fact recognized by Maimonides / himself when he declared that Moses adapted idolatrous practices to a / purer worship. Israel was environed by barbarous practices and / gradually rose beyond them. And it was the same with concepts as with / practices. Judaism, which added to the Bible the fruits of centuries / of spiritual evolution in the shape of the Talmud, has passed utterly / beyond the more primitive stages of the Old Testament, even as it has / replaced polygamy by monogamy. That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was / wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes / the angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when My / creatures are perishing? " The very miracles of the Old Testament were / side-tracked by the Rabbinic exposition that they were merely special / creations antecedent to that unchangeable system of nature which went / its course, however fools suffered. Our daily bread, said the sages, / is as miraculous as the division of the Red Sea. And the dry retort of / the soberest of Pharisaic Rabbis, when a voice from heaven interfered / with the voting on a legal point, _en mashgichin be-bathkol_ -- "We / cannot have regard to the Bath Kol, the Torah is for earth, not / heaven" -- was a sign that, for one school of thought at least, reason / and the democratic principle were not to be browbeaten, and that the / era of miracles in Judaism was over. The very incoherence of the / Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking.

Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and / saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from / Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis. But it has / been at once the weakness and the strength of orthodox Judaism never / to have made a breach with its past; possibly out of too great a / reverence for history, possibly out of over-consideration for the / masses, whose mentality would in any case have transformed the new / back again to the old. Thus it has carried its whole lumber piously / forward, even as the human body is, according to evolutionists, "a / veritable museum of relics," or as whales have vestiges of hind legs / with now immovable, muscles. Already in the Persian period Judaism had / begun to evolve "the service of the Synagogue," but it did not shed / the animal sacrifices, and even when these were abruptly ended by the / destruction of the Temple, and Jochanan ben Zaccai must needs / substitute prayer and charity, Judaism still preserved through the / ages the nominal hope of their restoration. So that even were the / Jehovah of the Old Testament the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre of popular / imagination, that tyrant of the heavens whose unfairness in choosing / Israel was only equalled by its bad taste, it would not follow that / Judaism had not silently replaced him by a nobler Deity centuries ago.