Why I Am A Jew

131 837

WHY I AM A JEW

BY

EDMOND FLEG

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY

LOUISE WATERMAN WISE

\VITH A FOREWORD BY

STEPHEN S. WISE

NEW YORK

BLOCK PUBLISHING COMPANY

*'Tbe Jewish Book Concern"
*933

BfcOCS FUBLISHiatf COWMAN'S, INC

Ml &n$&$fi righ}* reserved
First Pnntzng, 1929
Printing, 1933

Manufactured in the United States of America

DEDICATED

TO MY GRANDSON
who is not yet born

FOREWORD

From time to time Jewish books come out of
France which arrest the attention of the Jewish
world. Such a book was Darmesteter's Hebrew
Prophets, the richness of the content equalled
by the beauty of the style. Palliere's Unknown
Sanctuary, not written by a Jew, came not very
long ago as a revelation to those who had not heard
of the thrilling quest of a sanctuary by one pre-
paring, as he imagined, for the Catholic priesthood.
Each of these a document of the first importance!
The one an involuntary tribute by one Jewishly self-
exiled, the other the passionately eager song of a
soul finding home at the altar of Judea.

And recently another of the sons of French Jewry,
Edmond Fleg, has renewed the unfading glory of the
Franco- Judean literary tradition, which includes the
immortal name of Rashi of Troyes. This glory
seems to shine most brightly when Jewish life is at
its darkest, for literature meaningful and rich is not
so much the utterance of fullness of life, as the
prophecy of a happier by a poorer age.

Why I am a Jew, by Edmond Fleg, belongs to
vii

viii FOREWORD

a series of little books published under the general
title, "Leurs Raisons." It is a chapter in an auto-
biography which includes "The Child Prophet" and,
strange though this may sound, "The Life of Moses."
For Edmond Fleg is another of the "Shomerim/'
watchmen upon the tower, prophets of an unex-
pected renaissance in one of the oldest and, as it
seemed, least vital of world Jewries, France.

Why I am a Jew is an atypical narrative of a
Jewish experience. The tale, written with Gallic
charm and Hebraic warmth for an unborn grand-
child, is of the life of a Jewish child reared in the
alienative atmosphere of an outwardly Orthodox
but basically unobservant Jewish home.

Comes the environment of secularism in school
and college, which in a dominantly Christian world
is deeply and pervasively Christian, and then
L'Affaire, the testing of France, though France knew
it not, by the Dreyfus trial; to France a test and for
some great Jews, such as Herzl, Nordau and Fleg,
revealing and cleansing. And yet for Fleg this was
not enough, and in the arena of his innermost life
battles remained to be fought, battles of the intel-
lectual life, wars of the spirit with the tempting hosts
of doubt and cynicism. It was not easy to make his
way back to that which in essence lay behind him.
Escape tempted. Freedom beckoned. But the call of

FOREWORD ix

truth was most imperious to his soul. And in the end
he suffered no lesser considerations than those of
truth to govern his decision to take his place once
again with his people. Since his return, he has given
much to his people's cause in a series of books,
which are as vital as his re-born faith and his re-won
loyalty.

While yet a very young man, Fleg became eye-
witness in one of its earlier Congresses of the Zion-
ist, what shall we call it movement or cataclysm.
And Fleg, prepared by much that had gone before,
found therein not so much reason as justification,
not so much proof as prophecy of the ultimate faith
that became his own. There are books which are
called epochal because they give rise to epochs. Why
I am a Jew is epochal in another sense, in sum-
ming up an epoch in the life of Westernized, de-
ghettoized Jews who think as humans, philosophize
as Westerners, feel as Jews. Over and beyond the
closely knit reasoning for the faith that is in Fleg,
his is a lyrical exultation over the faith that, finding
good, he longs to hand on to children's children.
Mystic is his exaltation of a faith, which, because
most simple and free from complexities and subtle-
ties, allows fullest play for that direct, immediate,
unimpeded access to the Truth of Truths, which is
the religion of his people.

x FOREWORD

Aiming to be apologia pro fide sua, Fleg's book is
an exultant witness to the undimmed radiance of
Israel's faith and the unlessened persuasiveness of
Israel's life. It is of the essence of romance, for it
is a tale of nobleness and spiritual suffering, of
chivalry and triumph. And while not untouched by
the inherent pathos of his people's life, the Juden-
schmerz is subordinated to the Hallelujah of a joy-
ously self-affirmant and self-liberated Jew.

STEPHEN S. WISE

New York, June 1929.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD vii

INTRODUCTION xiii

I ISRAEL LOST 1

II. ISRAEL REGAINED 22

III ISRAEL ETERNAL 69

LIST or CITATIONS 99

INTRODUCTION

I am asked why I am a Jew. It is to you, my
grandson who are not yet born, that I would make
my reply.

When will you be old enough to understand me?
My eldest son is nineteen years old My younger son
is fourteen years old. When will you be born? In ten
years, perhaps fifteen. . . . When will you read
what I here set down? About 1950, 1960? Will peo-
ple still read in I960? What form will the world then
take? Will the mechanical have suppressed the spir-
itual? Will the mind have created a new universe for
itself? Will the problems that trouble me to-day
exist for you? Will there be any Jews left?

I believe there will. They have survived the
Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzar, Constantine, Moham-
med; they have survived the inquisition and assimi-
lation; they will survive the automobile.

But you, my child, will you be a Jew? People say
to me: You are a Jew because you were born a Jew.
You did not will to be one; you cannot change that.
Will this explanation suffice for you, if, born a Jew,
you no longer feel that you are a Jew?

XIV INTRODUCTION

I myself, at the age of twenty, thought I had no
further interest in Israel. I was convinced that Is-
rael would disappear, that in twenty years people
would no longer speak of it. Twenty years have
passed, and twelve more, and I am again become a
Jew so obviously that I am asked why I am a
Jew.

That which happened to me may happen to you
also my child. If you believe that the flame of Is-
rael is extinguished within you, pay heed and wait;
some day it will be rekindled. It is a very old story,
which begins anew each century. Israel has had a
thousand opportunities to die; a thousand times it
has been reborn. I want to tell to you how it died and
was reborn in me, so that, if it die in you, you in turn
may experience its rebirth.

Thus I will have brought Israel to you, and you
will bring it to others if you will, if you can. And
we two in our way will have treasured and trans-
mitted the divine behest: "These words which I
command thee shall be upon thy heart and upon
thy soul; bind them as a sign upon thy hand and
let them be as frontlets between thine eyes. Thou
shalt teach them to thy children. . . ."

"We are the heartbeat of a world that wills
To find its noblest self and to fulfill
The law of Justice which it seeks to know;
We are God's people, for we will it so,
The stars our quest and truth our watchword still l"

WHY I AM A JEW

CHAPTER I
ISRAEL LOST

In my childhood I saw things that no doubt you
will never see My father was a Zaddik 1 following
the Scriptures, and my mother the joyous priestess
of her home. At that time religion was mingled with
every act of life, but in so simple a way that I saw
no religion in it.

I found it quite natural that in the morning my
father enveloped himself in a white shawl with black
stripes, and wound bands of leather about his fore-
head and his left arm, while murmuring words which
were not mere words. The blessing after meals
seemed as much of a necessity to me as the meal it-
self, and on Friday night there seemed nothing un-
usual in seeing my mother extend her hands, which
had become transparent, over the wicks flicker-
ing in the oil.

All that governed the kitchen was hierarchically

1 Hebrew word, meaning an utterly righteous person

1

2 WHY I AM A JEW

regulated. One must not eat butter after meat, nor
use a knife to cut the chicken which was to be
used for cheese; two vessels were used, one for meat
and the other for milk-foods, and to confuse them
were a sin.

When a goose arrived from Strassburg it bore
around its neck, upon a red seal, signs which fo-
mented archaeological controversies around the
kitchen sink, because it was important to my mother
and to Lisette the cook, to establish by careful scru-
tiny at what hour of which day the animal had been
bled, and if it were lawful to metamorphose it into
delicious food.

Ham, oysters, crabs, game, had but a nominal ex-
istence; their taste was unknown to me, as were the
color and form of these forbidden foods.

To have entered a tram-car on a Saturday would
have seemed as venturesome as to ascend to the
moon, and to blow out a candle on that day as un-
thinkable as to blow out the sun.

Certain rites but what a ceremonious word for
these familiar acts returned each year as normally
as did the seasons which they accompanied; there
was the waving of the palm with a perfumed citron,
or a row of lights on a board, arranged in decreasing
sizes, which were lighted from the smallest to the
tallest.

ISRAEL LOST 3

Once every year I ate alone at noon, and my broth-
ers, who were old enough to fast, returned from the
Synagogue with wan faces whose pride I admired.

At other times my mother and old Lisette went on
a hunt into all the corners of our home, and into all
the pockets of our clothes searching for crumbs. The
round loaf on the table ceded its place to thin cakes
without leaven. At dinner my father, his hat upon his
head, chanted Hebrew melodies Bitter herbs and
mortar were passed from hand to hand, four cups of
wine were drunk, and the door was left open for
someone who did not enter.

I did not understand what all this meant nor did
I ask about it of others or of myself. I only felt one
thing that the faces of my parents had at these
times a radiant joy and serenity that I have not seen
since, except in the pictures of the greatest of the
saints.

It was not only impure foods that were forbidden;
other inhibitions forbade lying, laziness, gluttony,
coarseness, spitefulness, every manner of evil; and
the spirit of unity, of kindness and of love as ob-
viously held sway as did the customary domestic
acts. Morals were not discussed, rarely mentioned.
They were practised. They were as much a part of
life as were our daily habits. I never heard a word
that was not tender and gentle between my parents.

4 WHY I AM A JEW

To lie before them, to use an ill-sounding or
querulous expression, would have been unthinkable.
A gentle but firm justice punished our faults and re-
warded our will to do well. The example of toil and
of thrift taught us every hour of the day. Pleasure
had its place but was not an end in itself. Charity
was practised as a natural function. My father was
frequently consulted, disputes were submitted to
him, and so much of peace emanated from him that
adversaries who came to consult him left our home
reconciled. Perfect manners, goodness of heart and
highmindedness illumined our very humble home to
which one climbed by ascending a somber staircase.

Then there was God; we lived with God, but His
presence was subconscious, never spoken of. I did
not hear the mention of His name; I only uttered it
during the evening prayer which my mother, or even
Lisette, bade me repeat before tucking me into bed.
It was a very brief prayer; a few words in Hebrew
which I repeated without understanding their mean-
ing, and then a single sentence: "God protect Father,
Mother, and all those I love.' 7 Yes, it was a short
prayer, and yet this it was which caused the undoing
of my respect for the family-worship.

The light having been put out, I remained alone
with the God to whom I had just recited a lesson.
Then I spoke to Him. In what terms? In what Ian-

ISRAEL LOST 5

guage? How can I repeat it to you, my unborn grand-
son? If you in turn know these impulses toward the
invisible, if you feel as I felt, this thrill from beyond,
if you silently respond to this call from within, you
too will find the words which came to me.

I knew God was present, very far away and yet
quite close, all around me and in my heart. I told Him
all my faults and I besought His forgiveness. I
wanted to be better; I could not be without Him. I
promised Him to do better, I implored Him to help
me And He did help me, I am sure of it I rose to
Him. He enveloped me. He held me. I fell asleep in
His arms.

Who taught me to pray in this way? No one. But
what were all the incomprehensible litanies and in-
explicable gestures worth compared with this voice-
less and formless prayer? I will try to write words
which will lend my stammering thought the clarity
it needs I began to feel a contrast between my
prayer when alone, which was close to me, and
the prayer of my father which I did not compre-
hend Or rather, mine only seemed to me to be a
prayer, the other a habit that God did not notice.

My critical sense too began to grow. I did not
write on Saturday at school. That was forbidden But
at college my elder brothers wrote on that day just
as on other days; their studies made it necessary.

6 WHY I AM A JEW

My father went to his office on Saturday after syna-
gogue services. He also wrote, his business made it
necessary. Was therefore the rest on the Sabbath-day
only important for very little boys?

Once I was taken on a journey, and at the hotel
where we dined the fat and the lean were mixed, and
cheese was served after meat, and even ham appeared
on the table. My parents ate and permitted me to
eat of this forbidden dish. Then the food forbidden
at home was no longer forbidden when one was away
from home? The law was law no longer?

Thus like all children of all time, I began despite
myself to scrutinize my parents, and drawing con-
clusions from their inconsistencies I very slowly be-
gan to break their idols.

Others unconsciously became my accomplices. The
first of these was my teacher of religion, the cantor
of the synagogue. He had a beautiful voice, a beauti-
ful beard, a beautiful soul. But as a teacher he puz-
zled me, I was at this time attending college, and
was proud of my Latin. Now this man taught that
the Hebrew had no grammar, which caused me to
feel dubious about that language and what it incul-
cated Then too, his method alone would have dis-
couraged the most inquisitive of minds. I mumbled
prayers which he declared untranslatable. The cate-
chism began with a sentence which amused me:

ISRAEL LOST 7

"Who are you, my child? I am a young Jew or Jew-
ess." As for the sacred history and the Psalter
chanted by my illiterate cantor, how badly it
sounded after my Greek or Roman history.

My father, who read Hebrew in the evenings,
would say to me occasionally: "It is a very beautiful
language." I did not think it was. How could I? Jew-
ish values were poorly presented to me knowledge
gained at college alone counted.

And that which was begun by the ignorance of
the cantor was continued by the cynicism of the
Rabbi. Occasionally he came to visit us in the eve-
ning after dinner, and we took our seats again around
the table, a glass of claret was poured for him, and
we listened as he talked.

He had a shaven lip between his magisterial whis-
kers, and he was an enchanting conversationalist.
The whole town doted upon his wit. Could I divine
that his scepticism concealed his faith, and that he
truly found joy in proclaiming the divine unity. To
judge by the God who spoke to me at night, the
caustic humor of his earthly representative seemed
altogether too human.

Professor of Comparative Philology at the univer-
sity, he scoffed disdainfully at the small traders of
his community, whom however, upon every possible
occasion he heartily served. If one were to believe

8 WHY I AM A JEW

him, the Jewish tailor, when he passed by his shop,
felt of the cloth at the back of his rabbinic coat be-
cause he had bought it of the Christian tailor, and
the cattle dealer, who sought a good match for his
daughter, declared: "I am not a cattle dealer; I am
a manufacturer of meat." There were some Jewish
tales amusing Jewish tales, over which I laughed
but also blushed a little: the story of the two Jews
who had dined at a restaurant and left the door open
as they went out on a stormy night, and who mut-
tered on hearing themselves abused from within:
"Listen to the anti-semites," or of Moses, playing
icarti with God in Paradise, saying: "Above all,
God, no miracles."

This gallery of portraits and this collection of
stories, pleasant as they were, marred Israel to my
too sensitive soul. And I could not forget these gro-
tesque pictures when I betook myself against my
will to the Synagogue.

I was taken to the Synagogue for the first time
according to custom when I was a very small boy,
to roll up one of the sacred scrolls with a long linen
band covered with colored letters. I wore my velvet
suit with pearl buttons, and was in a state of ela-
tion, for from the height of the gallery my mother was
watching me, and the gold stars painted in the blue
ceiling seemed to me real stars in a real heaven.

ISRAEL LOST 9

But I had come to know the cantor and the Rabbi
too well. They robbed the place of its illusions. And
excepting for the rare moments which the music
transformed, or when the hidden splendor of the
ceremony suddenly burst forth in its manifest beauty,
what boredom I felt in those dull hours, weighed
down the more by the meticulous phrases of an un-
known tongue!

What physical irritation I felt against those per-
sons without breeding who read their newspapers or
conversed aloud; what disgust when I heard the only
words spoken in French, and these, in order to stim-
ulate generosity, announcing under the eye of the
Holy Law the amount given for charity by each
donor.

At the age of thirteen years, when I "made my
first Jewish communion," I could chant very well
before the ark, without sounding a false note in the
Biblical text of which I understood not one word,
and in the evening after the festival I could recite
in one breath the benediction which had remained
Hebrew to me. But when I was alone at night in
my bed, face to face with the God who came to me, I
asked myself quite mystified if indeed He was the
God of Israel.

He was, my child. All those prayers the meaning
of which escaped me, magnificently revealed Him, all

10 WHY I AM A JEW

those ceremonies the emptiness of which gave me a
sense of loneliness, emanated from His presence. But
I knew it not it was badly explained to me, and I
was to wander a long time among men and thoughts
before arriving at the truth.

Ah, you will say, this is a strange way of explain-
ing to you why I am a Jew. But you will not under-
stand why I am a Jew unless you first understand
why I ceased to be a Jew.

In those early years of my adolescence the break
was not yet conscious. But my spirit unconsciously
turned away from the spirit of my people. And I was
soon to discover another world.

n

In my fourteenth year I had overtaxed my
strength. My best friend and classmate at that time,
now a pastor and professor of theology, lived in the
country. I was in need of fresh air; his mother de-
sired to have me visit him. I played the piano and
because of my love of music I was invited to a neigh-
boring home, where I became a daily guest.

An old lady lived there with her daughter and
three sons, two of whom were already grown men.
Widow of a famous writer, she had known "Monsieur
Taine," "Monsieur Renan," "Monsieur Got/' and

ISRAEL LOST 11

had traveled much in Italy. Her conversation was
replete with memories. In my home there was great
respect for intellectual culture; here one enjoyed
familiarity with it.

The quite rustic dwelling faced a large meadow,
which commanded a cliff where the Rhone turns in
a rocky circle My elderly friend helped me to see in
nature that which had never been pointed out to me.
The play of clouds and the drama of light were events
for her; they became events for me.

I did not quite understand just what seemed new
to me in this home, but harmony reigned therein in
a very different way from that I had known. Strange
and tiresome though the religious customs (which
chimed with the days, months, and years for us) had
seemed to me, I never conceived of existence with-
out them. But here were no dietary laws, no impe-
rious rites, no oppressive prohibitions. One went to
services on Sunday; that was all. And yet not quite
all. Work, charity, the kindness which were merely
practised in our home, were here consciously lived
and helped one to achieve a clear conscience. The
moral instinct was enriched and clarified by all the
light that the living word could bring to it.

Then the mother, the brothers, the sister, were so
detached from one another in their own definite in-
terests i If there were a question concerning a walk,

12 WHY I AM A JEW

or blame or praise of any act, of a decision to be
taken, however important, each one of them ex-
pressed his ideas as though it were permissible to
have individual ideas. The ancestral community
spirit which in our home imposed itself upon us
would have hindered such divergencies. And dimly
I felt myself rebelling against it.

I have since understood what was happening to
me then. In Geneva, where I was born, the sects
were strictly separated. I had no life other than the
Jewish life. Our Ghetto was not shut in by chains,
but none the less it was a Ghetto. I had come out of
it for the first time I looked upon free air and a free
sky, and my spirit liberated itself not only from the
rites of the Jewish family but from the family itself.

The following winter a book took me still further
away from Israel the Gospel. It was not my friends
who placed this formidable discovery before my eyes.
Their sense of delicacy would not have permitted
them to do this. But I, whom no one had known how
to interest in the Old Testament, I wanted to know
this Jesus who was preached to them on Sundays. I
still see beneath the trees of the old square, the stand
of the secondhand bookshop, where for a few cen-
times I bought all this revelation of suffering I still
hear my heart cry out at the furtive reading of those
eternal pages. I was the shepherd close to the cradle;

ISRAEL LOST 13

I was the fisherman of Tiberias; I walked with the
paralytic; I again saw the light with the blind; I
again came to life with Lazarus; "Our Father" was
my prayer, the Sermon on the Mount was my ser-
mon; the agony on the cross my agony. But at the
end of my Passion, I did not murmur as did the
Christ: "Forgive them, they know not what they do."
No, I remember that crucified by horror and shame
for my race, quite small and alone in my room I
cried out "Dirty Jews, dirty Jews 1 "

I have told of my anguish at that time in "L'En-
jant Propkbte" 1 I do not wish to go over it again.
But to show you that that story was not merely a
romance and to make clear to you what I dared to
call in those far off days "my religious thought," I
will copy here, without any changes in its poor style,
that which I then wrote in my diary and found last
night among some old papers:

"I am not a believer; it is my old religion
that is at fault, my poor religion, the ruin of
an unfinished building. What care for forms;
those absurd customs! Alas, laws against eat-
ing ham, against tearing paper on Saturday,
the custom of eating bread without leaven for
seven days, have long since caused my soul to

l A recent book by Edmond Fleg

14 WHY I AM A JEW

rebel though I dared not confess it. The read-
ing of the New Testament has finally detached
me from all this. I have wept real tears while
reading about the tortures of Jesus, and I have
felt ashamed of my fathers who sullied them-
selves with the blood of this just man whom
they so treacherously crucified. Yes, I am
ashamed of my people. I have heard it said that
a Jew and a Christian can never live in peace
together. I am not a Jew, oh no!

It may be a despicable thing thus to put the
faith of one's ancestors out of one's heart, but
I do not feel that I must imitate their errors.
My opinions are my own, no one has inculcated
them within me I have read no books concern-
ing them. I have heard it said that Christians
alone can understand their religion, because
their religion is the life of Jesus. It is also
my religion because this life so radiant is the
life that shall be my example; his charity, his
mercy, are the objects of my admiration; these
are what my soul loves and what it finds truly
great.

I understand Jesus, but do not look upon him
as a supernatural being; that is beyond my com-
prehension, and I cannot think him divine by
closing my eyes; that were unworthy of my in-

ISRAEL LOST IS

telligence. But I can better understand Jesus
than I can understand a God, absolute master
and judge of all things. It is not that I am an
atheist, oh no! I say my prayers every night,
but I pray to a God within me who is not a ruler.
I have been told that God is a spirit. Why should
he not be the thought that makes its voice heard
in the conscience of each one of us? Perfect
faith, I admire it, I envy its possession but,
alas, I have it not. I cannot be a Jew. I can be
a Christian. And if I can follow him I have
chosen as my model, if I look upon the good
as God, and if I think he may be the revelation of
an omnipotent God, am I so very blameworthy?
May I be pardoned if I err, may I find mercy
above if I have doubted. God, let thy light enter
within me, reveal thyself to me if thou art/'

Since that time I have reviewed the process of the
trial of Jesus and I hope that you my child, more
correctly informed, will never know the sorrow of
accusing your whole race which was my first sor-
row.

Yet this God of my prayers, the one gift and the
most precious which was left to me of Israel, this
God whom I already so coldly called the Good but
who so vitally dwelt within me that I still addressed

16 WHY I AM A JEW

myself to him as to a living person, even this God
was to forsake me.

It happened a year later and in the most trivial
way. I was eager to become a philosopher, and there
being no class in philosophy at Geneva I trusted
myself without a guide to the thousand pages of a
popular history of philosophy. At last I was to know.
In haste I opened the big volume first of all Re-
ligion How was it that there were such varying
ideas about God, and so many that were contradic-
tory?

Of the God of Israel not one word; is He then un-
important? But I learn that a certain Protagoras
wills to ignore whether there are Gods or not, and
that a certain Critias maintains they were invented
by a legislator as cautious as he was crafty. Socrates,
I am told, revealed the moral God, the God of "civi-
lized nations." Plato placed him in the "realm of
ideas." Aristotle identified him as "the pure act,"
the Stoics confounded his unity with that of the
universe, and Plotinus made of him a trinity. What
was I to believe? Whom was I to follow? I was per-
plexed.

In the middle ages, the same disputations were
translated into scholastic jargon. St. Augustine does
not agree with St. Thomas, Averroes is not in accord
with Scotus. In modern times the warfare continues;

ISRAEL LOST 17

Malebranche against Descartes, Leibnitz against
Spinoza!

Of course, there were many evidences offered, the
familiar evidences of the existence of God. But I
had read too much; the evidences proved nothing to
me. And how triumphant I felt when Kant arrived
with his heavy club and pulverized all these affirma-
tions. Oh, how well he spoke ' How right he was! Yes,
we impose upon things the laws of our own being,
we cannot conceive of them in and of themselves;
we know not the Being nor the Substance nor the
Absolute, nor God.

Then Herbert Spencer came forward like a pres-
tidigitator holding the doctrine of evolution in his
hands. Three turns of his cuffs and I saw the One
producing the Many, and the Simple producing the
Complex, from the humblest atom of matter to the
loftiest creation of the spirit. Twice presto chango,
and by enchantment the vegetable emerged from the
mineral and man from the animal' A little shove,
and from Heredity and the Association of Ideas, sud-
denly these ancient illusions escape, Good, Evil, Free-
dom, God'

Finally Auguste Comte and his Positivism brought
certitude to me. Humanity had evidently passed
through three successive stages: in the theological
period it explained natural phenomena by supernat-

18 WHY I AM A JEW

ural causes; wonders, miracles, were the acts of
God. In the metaphysical period mankind had re-
course to abstractions converted into realities, facul-
ties, essence and accident; in the third period, the
period that still obtains, we happily limit ourselves
to knowledge thru observation and experimentation
in the relationship of phenomena. This last method,
the only one that is of value, has created modern
science and has forever supplanted metaphysics
and theology; there is no other religion than the Re-
ligion of Humanity; the problem is settled.

Upon this discovery of the great void an entire
wall of my inner life collapsed. I should have per-
ished but nothing happened. I was too proud of
being a philosopher to complain of the errors that
encompassed me. My nightly conversations with God
changed in tone. The words, Reveal thyself if thou
art, which I formerly repeated in my agony, were
no longer a prayer; they were a summons. I defied
this God, I blasphemed against Him. Then giving up
the effort to obtain speech from the non-existent, I
abandoned him and his silence.

Far distant as I was at this time from Israel, I
was to take myself still further away. I went to Paris
and entered the higher class of rhetoric, attended the
Sorbonne and was admitted to the Normal School.

ISRAEL LOST 19

Here was material to help me to come to my senses,
but the contrary happened. I wanted to combine for
myself some austerity with much self-indulgence^ but
I must confess to you that toward my twentieth year
I was soaring to a height of pretentiousness from
which in the face of certain facts I was compelled to
descend later on Seeming to be under the spell of
what I chose to call my charm, some of my comrades
amused themselves by forming a small circle about
me, whose loyalty was tempered by raillery. We were
called the Aesthetes, and I have a notion that this was
not a misnomer. I leaned upon Anatole France and
Renan, and had drawn from the pure springs of these
two masters the sophisticated waters of my dilet-
tantism, for we were dilettantes.

One must not take the world too seriously; one
did not even know if it existed, for one left crass certi-
tudes to the common people. Society was not worth
the trouble of mingling with it. Of what importance
to subtle spirits were eternal principles, the Rights of
the Man and the Citizen, the battle of parties or the
form of the state? Ethics also seemed very dull; Good
and Evil were dumbells that one need not trouble
to handle. Art alone counted, not only the art of
words, sounds, forms and colors, accessible after all
to inferior bipeds who could read a book, listen to a

20 WHY I AM A JEW

concert or walk thru a museum, but the art of creat-
ing from moments taken from one's own life an opus
worthy of contemplation.

My chief function then was to admire myself, and
as in the fluid mobility of my self-scrutiny it would
have seemed a poor thing to admire but one person
within myself, I distinguished at least five, each of
which corresponded to one of my friends; there was
Des Grieux who was bored by Tiberge, the Pylades
of an ever bitter Orestes, the Agathon of a modern
Socrates, the satirist who juggled with the shadow
of things, and the romanticist whose piano endured
in turn frenzies and ecstasies.

Could so complex a being inhabit this lowly earth
without peril? Would not life in simplifying him
cause him to perish? It was decided that such a mis-
fortune must be prevented My Socrates was not
terrified by one more hemlock story. He brought me
a vial of seeming poison which however he had filled
with pure water; otherwise you would never have
had a grandfather.

Do not think, my child, that I illuminate the past
for the unique satisfaction of evoking glittering mem-
ories If there be one quality or one defect com-
monly attributed to Israel, it is too great concern for
this earthly existence. Idealist or materialist he clings
to life, be it to exploit or to ennoble it. To turn away

ISRAEL LOST 21

from it, to abdicate before his time, either in con-
templation, in inaction or in death, is not the habit
of the Jew. I had forsaken the rites and the laws of
my people I had rejected their God; and the inmost
voice of my people had grown silent within me.

CHAPTER II
ISRAEL REGAINED

I was in this state of mind when the tidings came
that Captain Dreyfus, banished to Devil's Island as a
traitor in 1894, had been unjustly condemned for
the one and only reason that he was a Jew. At first
the whole matter did not interest me. It was a news-
item which could not disturb my contemplative life,
and with the little thought that I consented to give
it, I believed it unlikely that seven army-officers,
because of mere prejudice could have sent an inno-
cent man to hopeless imprisonment. It was incredible
to me.

However, the agitation increased thruout the
country in favor of the condemned man. Several of
our teachers interested themselves in his case; soon
he had defenders among my comrades in the school,
even among the Aesthetes, and detached as I might
be from worldly affairs, I in my turn was obliged to
descend from my empyrean for him.

ISRAEL REGAINED 23

I had one close friend who was not a student of the
Normal Institute. We had come to know one another
in the last year of college, and were soon bound to-
gether by an affection that still endures. The deep
tenderness which united us was the attraction of an
altogether intellectual sympathy. Our greatest joy
was our mutual understanding, and the formulating
of our ideas in unison. I felt a certain pride in main-
taining this aspect of our friendship I did not want
it to consist of mutual acts of service which seemed
to me the current money of sentiment, nor of that
cheap confidence which expresses itself in the ex-
change of secrets. In fact, a sort of shyness sepa-
rated our souls that were really so close to one an-
other. The Dreyfus affair was to reveal the cause to
me.

He was brought up in an environment foreign to
every reactionary or even conservative tendency;
very sensitive, but of a sensitiveness without any
romanticism, and saturated with the destructive in-
difference which was that of Maurice Barres in his
early years. He was highly intelligent and much more
endowed than was I with the force of logic; (we will
call him the Logician) and had accepted all the con-
clusions of our common nihilism.

If ever there was a loyal and a free spirit, it was
his; he had liberated himself from all philosophical

24 WHY I AM A JEW

illusions; he had broken all social idols; even the
love of fatherland had given way under his analytical
keenness.

His overwhelming scepticism, contrary to mine,
admitted from the beginning that the innocence of
Dreyfus was eminently possible, but in the measure
that the successive disclosures drew me closer to this
hypothesis, to my great astonishment I saw his opin-
ion develop in the contrary direction.

It was soon declared that, in violation of the rights
of the defense, a secret document had been submitted
to the military judges of Dreyfus; that it had de-
termined their verdict, and that neither the accused
nor his lawyer were in a position to disprove it. This
act seemed to me to create a presumption in favor
of the Captain; what need of new secret proofs if
previous ones sufficed? This method of reasoning
did not affect my Logician, except in the domain of
pure abstraction, and one could not tell if it were ap-
plicable to the case in point.

The illegality which was shocking to me, seemed
in itself to justify a revision of the trial. He con-
tended that this illegality might spring from interests
higher than those of the defense, and that a revision
should not be suffered except for more peremptory
reasons.

ISRAEL REGAINED 25

It was known that Dreyfus had been condemned
thru the examination of a memorandum written, it
was claimed, by his hand, and stating the number
of documents delivered to a foreign power. When
this memorandum was published in the press, it was
found that the handwriting was strangely like that of
another officer, Commandant Esterhazy. A large
number of experts affirmed that the handwritings
were identical. The Logician replied: "What do they
know about it? They only worked on facsimiles."

It seemed to me that the motives had never been
clearly set forth, which would have explained the
crime of Dreyfus; on the other hand, Esterhazy was
a gamester, and letters written by him were known
to have expressed the wish that France might meet
a new Sedan. My friend replied that Esterhazy might
be a scoundrel and Dreyfus be none the less guilty.
And then were those much discussed letters authen-
tic?

If Colonel Picquart was to be incriminated in a
forgery or in the use of forgery which showed that
the General Staff shielded Esterhazy, this accusation
presented nothing very strange; but if it could be
proven that Commandant Henry had committed a
forgery in order to prevent revision, this forgery be-
came the patriotic act of a devoted soldier, who,

26 WHY I AM A JEW

knowing of documents which could not be seen with-
out danger, had no other aim than to produce an
equivalent.

What gave me pause in this reasoning was that it
was irrefutable if one admitted the inherent premise
which was nothing else than a tacit vote of confidence
in the military tribunal and the officers of the staff.
But this confidence, so far as my friend was con-
cerned, had in it nothing of superstition; it was, he
said, confidence in the only men who were informed.
On the one side he saw specialists who knew; on the
other side, amateurs who guessed. Between the two
he did not hesitate in making his choice.

For a long time I was hesitant in my choice; then
I was so no longer. For those, whom my Logician
called amateurs, those who, according to his point of
view were guessing, according to my point of view
knew. We discussed every new incident of the af-
fair (every day brought forth new incidents) and we
tried to convince each other. We did not succeed and
I was greatly troubled. I could neither doubt his in-
telligence nor his good faith nor his heart. How was
it that he saw error where I saw truth? In his con-
fidence in certain officers, which could be but a tenta-
tive attitude of the critical mind, did there not enter,
without his being conscious of it, something instinc-
tive and mysterious? And I myself, when my faith

ISRAEL REGAINED 27

went out to those others, could I maintain that noth-
ing within me stood between my judgment and the
facts? What were these subconscious forces which
caused us to oppose each other? Why did I dread
them without defining them? Were they to destroy
our beautiful friendship?

We might well fear it, for all about us old bonds
were being loosened. You may read the story of the
"Affair" in your history-book. That which you will
not find therein is the accent of passion to which it
gave expression. At the Sorbonne the classes resolved
themselves into meetings, and in the salons the eve-
nings ended in pugilistic encounters.

Streets were frequently guarded. Long lines of
civilians or of soldiers kept the crowd in check which
in turn spat upon the villains or the heroes. These
civil discords destroyed happy friendships, and even
the peace of the simplest homes. Whether one were
for Dreyfus or against him, one was always the en-
emy of someone, it might be of one who had been a
friend for fifty years; it might be of a brother
or even of a father. For underneath the drama of the
"Affair," secret and long drawn-out, another drama
was being enacted which combined in hatred two con-
ceptions of society, of life, and of the world.

The most clearly visible aspect of this hidden con-
flict was the battle waged against Israel Dreyfus

28 WHY I AM A JEW

being a Jew, certain anti-Dreyfusards held all Jews
responsible for his crime, and for the disorders in
the country which their determination to exculpate
him provoked. Even if his innocence could be proved,
the Jews were blameworthy in desiring to exonerate
him. The honor of a Jew was as nothing compared
to the safety of a nation. If thoughtful men without
religious affiliation, if some Christians, some Catho-
lics, even priests (and some could be named) enrolled
among his defenders, they were undoubtedly cor-
rupted by Jewish gold or by the Jewish mind.

It was said that an enormous syndicate had been
formed, the Syndicate of Treason, the funds of which
were contributed by Jews thruout the world, to aid
those who plotted to disarm France in order to de-
liver her to her enemies. And this was said not to
be unique in the world's history. Wherever the Jew
had appeared, he had brought about ruin. He had un-
dermined the Roman Empire and was in league with
the barbarians at the time of the great invasions. Be-
cause of him, Spain of the Visigoths had yielded to
the Arabs. Because of him, the Poland of Poniatow-
ski was dismembered. In the Middle Ages, he had
extorted all the gold of earth thru usury, and then
made use of it in 1789 to finance a profitable Revolu-
tion which camouflaged him into a citizen every-
where, and permitted him to realize his dream of

ISRAEL REGAINED 29

villainous domination thruout a debased century,
over the dirty rubbish-heap of a vanished order.
Greedy, sensual, a thief and forger, the Jew was a
traitor by choice and by his very nature, and if
Dreyfus needed a motive for his crime the one fact
that he was a Jew explained his treason.

This philosophy of history in the invective vein
could not affect me. In vain did I search thru the
most secret recesses of my subconscious being. I did
not recognize myself in this portrait of the Jew. I
was quite sure I was not planning any sinister proj-
ect by which the world might be overwhelmed. With-
out feeling myself affected, I was nevertheless un-
nerved. This anti-Semitism was a new experience to
me.

When very young I had heard tell of course of the
massacres of Jews in Russia which followed the as-
sassination of a Czar; of women disemboweled, of
old men buried alive, nursing babes plunged into pe-
troleum and then thrown to the flames. For a time
these memories had haunted my nights, but after a
time they faded away.

Then, too, I had often heard tell of 'rishus.' l This
word, borrowed from the Hebrew jargon of Alsace,
expressed the ill-will of Christians toward Israel.
But I was able more than once to prove that the ef~

iRishus, Judaeo- German term for anti-Semitism.

30 WHY I AM A JEW

fects attributed to this sentiment could be explained
by other causes, and the story of the two Jews at
dinner and the draught, so jocosely related by our
Rabbi, had always seemed to me symbolic in this
regard.

My mother, who was French by birth, had often
told me that Jews were happier in France than in
any other country, and that we must cherish the gen-
erous people who were the first to give them the
rights of citizenship and had honored a Jewish min-
ister, Cremieux, with a national funeral.

Later there was a great sensation over a book, La
France Juive, which in most virulent language at-
tributed all the misfortunes of the country to Israel.
But I was told this was a pamphlet of hate, and so
it remained unimportant in my mind.

Ever since my coming to Paris, because of the
scandalous Panama Affair, certain daily papers had
thrown themselves into a campaign sponsoring this
thesis. But was I reading these papers at that time?
I was living in the country which the clamor of the
outside world did not reach, and such vulgarities
did not seem to me to be worthy of the attention of
a mind occupied with transcendental speculation.
Finally, why should I pay attention to the enemies
of Israel? Was I the guardian of Israel? Was anyone
in my circle interested in Israel? Did my school-

ISRAEL REGAINED 31

companions see any difference between themselves
and me? For them as for me, Jews had ceased to
exist.

Even in my own family which had been so attached
to the old rites and ceremonies, these fell into dis-
use one by one. Without shock, without discussion,
without dramatics, thru the simple pressure of sur-
rounding forces, new exceptions were made from
year to year to the once revered rules. When I re-
turned to Geneva on my vacation, I perceived some
progress each time in the process of disintegration;
the festivals -were less rigorously observed; the cere-
monies were less often repeated; even ham became
an item on the menus, and to the horror of Lisette
the old Catholic cook, who in other days had insisted
on my saying my prayers in Hebrew, and who now
alone preserved respect for dietary laws, the lean and
the fat succeeded each other in reverse order, and
the two dishes finally became one.

Since then at my own patriarchal hearth, Israel
had already become so faint a memory it was bound
to die in others as it had died within me, and there
was nothing left to do but to let it die.

Why then was my irritation against anti-Semitism
increasing day by day? What had I in common with
those who were being attacked? What was it to me
whether these attacks were justified or not?

32 WHY I AM A JEW

Would not this pain be at least a fugitive pain?
Qt; was I to pay heed to the insults of pamphleteers
unequal to a really understanding outlook? I might
perhaps have calmed and contented myself and
shrugged my shoulders after a while, had not my
Logician provided a new surprise for me at this junc-
ture, by stating that without following this contro-
versy to the letter he was less certain than I was of
its unimportance. It is true that his thought reflected
many points of view, but was marked by such sincer-
ity that it compelled me to reflect.

He said to me that the word anti-Semitism served
as a label for the most diverse tendencies, the most
negligible being that which came from Catholicism
as a religion, and that no doubt the most formidable
adversaries of the Israelites on the ground of religion
would be found among the Protestants.

The most popular of possible acts has always been
spoliation of those who held possessions. Some imbe-
ciles and some villains, with the blind assistance of
some most honest people, have always known how
to persuade the masses that all their ills were caused
by the Jews, and that everything that could be done
to hurt them was legitimate, even unto pillage and
massacre. And, he added, one must not forget the
sentiment of a people which sees itself very nearly
governed by a low-type minority, by a race which

ISRAEL REGAINED 33

this people had habitually (why did not matter to-
day) despised for many centuries.

He recognized that Israel had its idealists, its
Utopians, its mystics for whom Jewish interests did
not count, but he saw only in these sublime spirits
poor politicians, for they builded in dreams while we
live in reality. He did not deny that certain Israel-
ites, more intelligent than the average man, might
render greater service, that they might on occasion
prove themselves even greater patriots than other
people But to his way of thinking too many Jews
filled too many places, since the first crisis revealed
the survival of their solidarity and their narrow con-
ception of nationality.

Thus wishing to show confidence in those who were
appointed to the administration of his country, and
to find in them interest in and sympathy for his coun-
try, my dear Logician had not found it illogical in
himself to believe that, without absolutely excluding
Jews from every public function, they were only to be
allowed a voice in the State proportionate to their
numbers in the nation.

I was stupefied. Did Jews really govern France?
Was it indeed necessary to deprive them of the
rights they now had the rights they bad won? Was
it because of their solidarity that Jews believed
Dreyfus to be innocent?

34 WHY I AM A JEW

How could a lucid and passionless intelligence
conceive or accept such hideous conclusions? I could
find no answer and could not divert my mind from
seeking one.

It was a sad night on which I suddenly realized
that accord between my friend and myself was no
longer possible, that our misunderstanding had not
its origin in facts, nor in their interpretation, nor in
the conclusions more or less cogent, which we had
drawn from them, but in a reality which had es-
caped us, more real than we ourselves and very very
ancient. Interested at closer range now in the Drey-
fus battles, I had signed a protest in favor of Pic-
quart which appeared in the daily press. In his ten-
der consideration, my friend had made me feel that
as a stranger or semi-stranger I should have ab-
stained from taking part in this protest. From the
viewpoint of pure logic he was not wrong, but I tried
to persuade him thru a letter to the contrary.

Admit, I wrote him for an instant that all
those who signed the protest had excellent reasons
and that those same reasons were my reasons. Did
I in signing arrogate to myself a right that was not
mine? Do I violate any French law in expressing
my opinion, my personal feeling, my pain and my
indignation? There is no question here of a political
matter but of a judicial matter. I claim that there

ISRAEL REGAINED 35

is an abuse of power and tyranny in the application
of the law. Strangers who live in France are liable
to suffer under such conditions as well as the French
themselves. Will you reply that they can go away?
Yes, if it were the legislation itself which annoyed
them; but, on the contrary, they may remain and
protest in the presence of an illegal act which plunges
them and with them a large number of the French
people into consternation.

Having the right to protest, I added, I made of it
a duty, believing myself obliged to express an opin-
ion publicly that I had not concealed from my com-
rades. That the attitude of the ministry was hostile
toward the school was well known, and if disciplin-
ary measures were to be taken against the protes-
tants, it would have been painful to me to be omitted.

Thus I reasoned after the event, but I did not rea-
son about it while signing the protest. I became a
social being; for the first time I took action, and I
believe that action does not only result from clear
reasoning intellectually developed, but often from a
strange impulse the origin of which may be obscure.
I felt that my dilettantism was only superficial, that
I had need of justice, that those humanitarian in-
terests that I had derided were my very own, that
life would never give me sufficient proofs to the con-
trary to cause me to doubt certain age-old theories,

36 WHY I AM A JEW

though seemingly childish and overstressed and
even voiced by imbeciles.

Was there then mingled with this human solidarity
a Jewish solidarity which made the drama I was liv-
ing thru more tragic? I could no longer doubt it.
But what difference did that make to me ? I could
neither resist the call of the one nor of the other;
both took possession of me as part of my very being.

And I looked upon my friend who seemed so dif-
ferent, so distant' Had we not been in agreement so
long because I had been ignorant of myself so long?
Did the constraint that I so often felt in his presence
reveal a chasm that could never be bridged over?
Must that which had united us be renounced? Gentle
as was his friendly reproof, did it not shut me out
from his country and from his friendship at the same
time?

And, while I was weighing and measuring these
unhappy thoughts, the "Affair" was becoming a per-
sonal challenge to me. My transcendent egotism was
fast disappearing. I awaited the morning papers in
agony. I read them as tho the fate of this man were
bound up with my fate, with the fate of his entire
race, in which, little by little, I discovered my own
place His letters were published. Beneath the poor
declamatory style I heard the cry of tortured inno-
cence. And reaching me across the sea, this cry

ISRAEL REGAINED 37

clutched at my throat and tore at my heart. At night
on my bed I thought of the prisoner. I saw him alone
on that tropic rock encompassed by the malign si-
lence of his guards. He too was abed in the night fet-
tered to a straw pallet by two iron clamps. And with-
out moving he cried out he cried out. And his cry
reawakened other cries I had heard long ago, those
of the far-distant pogrom I had been told of when
a child. They again became present, those vanished
figures; the disemboweled women, the old men bur-
ied alive, the infants thrown naked into the flames.
And I longed to rise and cry out in my turn, to cry
their martyrdom aloud to the whole world.

And when Dreyfus was recalled from the island
by his judges at Rennes and condemned for the sec-
ond time my life stood still I could take no food. I
felt myself banished from the brotherhood of man.
And I asked myself "Jew, what is thy place in the
world?"

The friendship which bound me to my dear Logi-
cian withstood this torture. His tact had proven itself
stronger than my nervousness. Why, said he, should
we quarrel because we differ? Cannot we try to un-
derstand one another without trying to be in per-

38 WHY I AM A JEW

feet agreement? Our conversations shall no longer
be dialogues, but successive monologues Each of us
will express his thought without trying to convert
the other. Perhaps that will be a finer type of unity.
Such friendships have been known. And in fact all
shyness vanished; conscious of our differences we
became friends who could frankly express our
thoughts unreservedly to each other. And in the joy
of our new affection, he confided his new thoughts
to me which helped me to clarify the confusion in my
own mind.

Now having descended as I had from the serene
regions where our dilettantism had flourished, he ad-
mitted that if science is a vain thing, the repetition
of this axiom is vainer still; that if we cannot achieve
certainty concerning the meaning of life or of ethics,
it were more sensible to accept a way, however
arbitrary, than to trust oneself to the more or less
logical caprices of one's personal sensibilities. He as-
pired to lead a social life and was disposed to accept
its demands. Upon what then could so logical a
mind base its action? Unacquainted with revolu-
tionary tradition as with every other tradition, he
could not accept the Evangel of the Rights of Man
proclaimed by the French Revolution, as a demon-
strated truth on which the entire political philosophy
of modern society had been made to rest, Follow-

ISRAEL REGAINED 39

ing the criticism of Comte, Taine, Renan and Barres,
he only found in this philosophy, mystic outpour-
ings towards vague entities, arguments from hy-
potheses that were absurd, and an attitude of pity
which was either barren or productive of hatred.

And that which irritated him particularly in the
"Affair" was that the Dreyfusards drew from this
revolutionary Evangel, supposed to be beyond dis-
cussion, the very substance of their debatable in-
tervention. In one word, humanitarianism seemed
to him to call for an act of faith, which did not de-
mand more of our reasoning faculty than any other
philosophy of life.

What certitude then remained to him? None save
that indefinable heritage from the past which had
become a part of his tastes, of his feelings, of his
nerves, that something I know not what, which
makes a Frenchman feel a closer affinity with a
Frenchman than with a German or even with a
Swiss or Belgian. Unable to find support in any one
principle he harked back to a tradition, to the
tradition closest to him, the form of which was least
foreign to his nature, to that from which he himself
had evolved and which he chose because it was his
very own. In fact, he now adopted with all his
heart the ideal of country which he had formerly
criticized as narrow and vulgar, and which now

40 WHY I AM A JEW

seemed to him more vital, more important than that
of humanity 1 This being granted, there remained
but to reason clearly about the facts of French his-
tory in order to deduce the future grandeur of
France, by applying to the present conditions those
rules of action upon which its past had been built
up.

Rediscovering in this way a whole world basic to
his instincts, my friend in his great goodness moved
me to undertake a parallel task touching the tradi-
tions which I had inherited from my race in order to
regain that inward peace which I had lost. All
things led me to follow his advice. Since the be-
ginning of the Dreyfus Affair, the Jewish question
had seemed to me a living thing. Now it seemed a
tragic thing.

What, then, is Judaism? A danger they tell me to
that Society of which you are a part. What danger?
But to begin with, am I still a Jew? I have for-
saken the Jewish religion. Just the same you are a
Jew. How? Why? What am I to do? Ought I to
commit suicide because I am a Jew?

At times I regretted the narrow and rigid faith of
my forefathers. But, confined in their Ghettos by
contempt and hatred, they at least knew why they
were Jews. I did not know. How was I to know?
Touching Israel I knew nothing. And I regretted

ISRAEL REGAINED 41

my years at college spent in the study of philosophy,
Germanic culture and comparative literature. I
should have studied Hebrew, learned to know my
race, its origins, its beliefs, its role in history, its
place among the human groups of to-day; to at-
tach myself thru it to something that should be I,
and something more than I, to continue thru it
something that others had begun and that others
after me would carry on.

And I said to myself, if I were to make a different
use of my life, if I were to give myself to other
studies, if later in life I were to have a family with-
out being able to leave my children the legacy of an
ideal that had been handed down to me from my
ancestors, I should always feel a dim remorse, the
consciousness of having been faithless to a trust.
And I thought of my father no longer living, and I
reproached myself for not having appreciated that
Jewish wisdom which he commended to me, and
which lived in him. I reproached myself for my
failure to find any bond between Israel's past and
my own empty soul.

It was then that I heard Zionism mentioned for
the first time. You cannot imagine, my child, what
a beacon light that was. Consider that at the time

42 WHY I AM A JEW

of which I write to you, the word Zionism was never
mentioned in my presence. The anti-Semites accused
the Jews of constituting a nation within the nations;
but the Jews, at least those whom I met, denied this.
And now behold, the Jews were declaring: We are
a people as others are; we have a country as others
have. Our country must be given back to us.

I now learned that the Zionist idea had its remote
origin in ancient prophecies; the Bible promised
their return to the Holy Land to the dispersed Jews;
thruout the Middle Ages they lived but by their
faith in this promise; in the XVIIIth and XlXth
centuries great souls, Maurice of Saxony, the Prince
de Ligne, Napoleon, had foreseen the significance
from the philanthropic, political, economic, religious
and moral points of view, that a Jewish re-gathering
in Palestine would have. Since 1873 colonies had
been established and developed there and finally a
new apostle, Theodore Herzl, summoned the Jews
of the whole world to create the Jewish state there.
Was this the solution I sought? It explained many
things. If truly the Jews were only a nation, one
could understand why they were looked upon as
Jews even when they ceased to observe their re-
ligion, and one could also understand why the na-
tions that had sheltered them might accuse them
of not sharing their national interests.

ISRAEL REGAINED 43

The Zionist ideal thrilled me by its loftiness. I
admired in these Jews, and wished I could have ad-
mired in myself, this fidelity to the ancestral soil
which had endured two thousand years; and I was
thrilled by the vision of the exodus which would take
many of them back from their various places of
exile to their regained unity.

My Logician on his part approved of my en-
thusiasm. He saw clearly that my Zionism would,
in the end, be in accord with his growing national-
ism, accepting certain consequences that would be
anti-Semitic. Thus our two minds had in a way trav-
elled in parallel lines, both of us leaving behind us
the vision of humanity for that of country country
for me being the Jewish land. But from the begin-
ning I again felt confusedly that my logic was less
precise than his, and that if I wished to be, accord-
ing to my custom, honest with myself, it would not
be possible for me to accept his entire process of
reasoning in all its harshness.

The third Zionist Congress was about to open at
Basle. I decided to attend it. My knowledge of the
German language made it possible for me to follow
the debates rather closely. Theodore Herzl told of
his efforts to obtain a charter from the Sultan. The
Executive Council reported that one hundred thou-
sand Jews were already enrolled in the movement

44 WHY I AM A JEW

and inferred that at least five hundred thousand
Jews thruout the world were already Zionists. A plan
for Jewish colonization in the Island of Cyprus was
rejected as opposed to the plan of colonization in
Palestine. The thesis of certain opponents of Zion-
ism who saw in the movement a danger to non-
Zionist Jews was refuted.

I heard many gifted men endowed with eloquence
and faith, but I was chiefly an observer. What dif-
ferent types of Jews there were all about me: this
pale Polish Jew with his prominent cheek bones, that
German with spectacles, this Russian with the an-
gelic expression, that bearded Persian, the clean-
shaven American, the Egyptian with his fez, and
that dark phantom, enormous in his great caftan,
with his fur cap, and the blond curls falling
from his temples. And in the midst of all these
strange faces, something happened to me that was
bound to happen; I felt that I was a Jew, essentially
a Jew, but I also felt myself French, a Frenchman
of Geneva, but French.

It was now certain that the Zionist program in no
way implied the return of all Jews to Palestine a
thing numerically impossible, for the Jewish coun-
try only offers itself to those Jews who feel that
they have no other country. French on my mother's
side, my soul and mind were turned towards France,

ISRAEL REGAINED 45

at first when very young thru the gratitude of my
parents as Jews towards that country. Later thru
my own literary aspirations, and thru my prolonged
life in Paris in the midst of college youths and stu-
dents at the Sorbonne and at the Normal Institute
whose friendship and affection had helped me to
be myself; and finally thru the anguish that the
Dreyfus drama caused me because of France which
was lacerated and torn over it.

In my thoughts I could not separate the place of
my birth, Geneva, from the great Fatherland of the
spirit to which Geneva itself in so many ways be-
longed. When then, abandoning the egotism of the
dilettante, I searched, as did my Logician) for a
tradition in the depths of my own being, I found
there, more powerful and more vital than my Jewish
instincts as yet barely awakened, the French tradi-
tion mingled with that of Israel.

What then was Zionism to me? It could arouse
me, as it still does, this great miracle of Israel
which affects all Israel; three million Jews will
speak Hebrew, will live on the soil of the Hebrews.
But for the twelve million Jews who will continue
to be dispersed thruout the world, for all of these
and for me, the question, the tragic question re-
mains: What is Judaism? What ought the Jew to
do? How be a Jew? Why be a Jew?

46 WHY I AM A JEW

in

The reply was slow in coming. I could not invent
it. It must be searched for, searched for thruout
the history of Israel, from the mythical days of the
Bible up to the latest hours of the present time.
This task would demand years, perhaps a lifetime. I
was like Taine when, face to face with the neces-
sity of voting, he found himself constrained to write
his book The Origins of Contemporary France, in
order to arrive at his own conclusions. But I was
not Taine. I lacked courage. I was dominated by
other ambitions which demanded less austerity. Lit-
erature and the theatre attracted me. I could not
resist their appeal. But the unanswered question
came back to me ceaselessly. How be a Jew? Why
be a Jew? And ceaselessly together with it came the
reproach of my conscience to my indolence which had
not made reply. Some years passed. I saw my dear
Logician frequently. Passing from nationalism to roy-
alism, his way of thinking had developed harmo-
niously, and comparing it with my own disordered
way, I suffered. Every morning I read two articles in
a daily paper which still appears; the one set forth
the doctrine of integral nationalism in clear terms

ISRAEL REGAINED 47

and perfect language; the other translated this doc-
trine with prodigious inventiveness into silly in-
sults accompanied by coarse epithets. These insults,
almost all of them, were leveled at Jews, and being
leveled at Jews, they were leveled at me. Each
morning I read this paper; each morning I swore I
would not read it again; each morning, as on the
day before I read it again. And the reading of it
each morning left me in a state of wrath and dis-
tress.

I married. My son was born to me, he whose son
you are to be my child. And then a strange thing
happened. On the morning on which this son was
born, by chance I did not read that paper. And
since that day I have never read it. Why did the
birth of my son liberate me from this nightmare?
I did not know. But when he was one year old,
something else occurred that was not less surpris-
ing. One of my plays had just been produced with
some success, and there were many reasons for me
to persevere in my work. I abandoned it all and
without cessation for three years I studied Judaism.
I believe that I now understand the power that
spurred me on, and the hour chosen for its exercise.
Even then without a doubt, I was obeying the in-
stinct which to-day dictates this book for you. I
may not teach my children the religious practises of

48 WHY I AM A JEW

my fathers, nevertheless, I would transmit to them
something of Israel.

Is there an ancestral memory? I can no longer
doubt it, because that which I then learned seems
to me not to have been learned at all but to have
been remembered. To begin with Hebrew. I
will never know it as I should wish to know it! But
I know enough of it already to be convinced that
one cannot understand Israel without understanding
Hebrew. Those words which I so often heard pro-
nounced in my childhood, those strange syllables the
meaning of which remained a mystery, suddenly
opened out to me as doors to a treasure house. And it
was not alone their significance which brought me
light but the soul that emanated from them. This
soul reflected a whole world, the world of my father,
my own world, in the evident relation of derivatives
from the same root; in the rudimentary structure
of the phrase, in the illogical incoherence of images;
in the lack of power to express pure abstraction, in
the uncertain contours of the verb hardly distinguish-
ing past, present and future, but which seems to
move in the realm of eternity.

ISRAEL REGAINED 49

I desired to know the religious thought of Israel.
Better than any commentaries could, some notes
written in the course of my studies, will show you
what were my doubts, my surprises, and my joys
upon that discovery:

The chosen people! . . . The mission of Israel!
Israel have a mission and others not have one?
Why?

They want a God all to themselves; the God of
Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, the God of Israel!
He makes a covenant with the Patriarchs! He re-
news it at Sinai with their descendants! A pact
binds the Eternal to these people for eternity!

Who is this God? An idol? A fetich? The
God of a tribe of savages? The God of Israel
alone? . . .

But no. He calls the Egyptians his people. He
calls the Assyrian the work of his hands; the proph-
ets of the Gentiles have knowledge of him, the Tal-
mud forbids the interruption of the idolater at
prayer before his idol because tho he know it not,
it is to this God that he addresses himself. Before
speaking to Israel this God spoke to Noah, gave
commandments to the whole human family. He
created the heavens and the earth. He is the one

SO WHY I AM A JEW

God, the God of all men, the God of the whole world.
Why then the God of Israel?
I do not understand.

And their Torah, that law which separates them
from all other peoples 1 They do not labor as others
do; Moses forbids them to yoke an ass and an ox
together at the same plough; they do not sow as
others do; Moses forbids them to sow two kinds of
seed in the same field; they do not reap nor harvest,
they neither build nor reckon, they neither eat nor
pray as others do; they are different in their ap-
parel, in their head-dress, in the unshaven corners
of their beards, in the badge of the covenant on their
flesh. One people separate from all the rest of hu-
manity. What intolerable pride! And this same Law
is supposed to contain the Eternal Wisdom? To
violate it would be to shake the order of the Uni-
verse? God consulted it when he created the world?
God himself studied the Torah?

I do not understand.

Their sages say: The Bible speaks the language
of man. No doubt they mean by this that God only

ISRAEL REGAINED 51

revealed to the prophets themselves that which they
could understand concerning him, and in language
they could understand. This would explain and
justify in one sentence all the anthropomorphisms
of Holy Scriptures.

Moses at the school of Akiba, what a beautiful
symbol! In the Talmudic tale, God shows Moses
his disciple Akiba before his death, who will live
nearly a century after Jesus. The prophet seats
himself in the last of eight rows in the School of
Akiba, and listens to the Rabbi's lesson. Akiba com-
ments upon the Law of Moses, Moses does not rec-
ognize his own law; none the less it is the Law of
Moses.

Divine revelation which came to the patri-
archs and the prophets will continue thru tradition,
and this continued revelation will only speak to
each century in the language that it can compre-
hend; its mode of utterance will develop as it
purifies itself in harmony with the human con-
science.

The Bible then does not suffice. As the New Testa-
ment does not contain all of Catholicism, the Old
Testament does not contain all of Judaism. I must

52 WHY I AM A JEW

know the two Talmuds, the Zohar, Juda Halevi,
Gabirol, Maimonides, all the great thinkers, all the
great scholars of the Synagogue. If not I shall know
nothing.

I believed this Jewish God inaccessible, envelop-
ing his omnipotence in clouds and thunderbolts in
order to keep mortals at a distance. And in the ten-
der outpourings of the Psalms I find him as close
to me as in the early days of my childish prayers.
The patriarchs speak almost familiarly with him;
Abraham bargains with him, Akiba, Ben Sakkai,
Nahum de Gimso, Rabbi Chanina, Rabbi Meir, all
Israel's sages, live in His immediate presence. Is
there need of a mediator between this God and
Man?

Another arresting thought' Jesus pardons the
sinner who repents, him who knows not what he
does, but he lashes the money-lenders from the tem-
ple with a whip of thongs, and hurls maledictions
at the wicked Pharisees, maledictions that are equal
in vehemence to those of the prophets. The God who
chastises is then not absent from the New Testa-
ment!

ISRAEL REGAINED 53

Will the God who pardons be found in the Old
Testament?

He is there! The God of Israel, the just and
avenging God is also God the Father, the God of
love, the God of forgiveness. He pardons unto the
thousandth generation; His justice is ever tempered
with mercy; He does not punish unless the measure
overflows and chastisement alone can teach repent-
ance penitence; he who brings to him a contrite
heart touches him more deeply than if he brought
all the offerings of earth. And if the history of Is-
rael be that of his chastisements it is also and still
more that of his forgiveness.

"Thou shalt love the Eternal thy God, with all
thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might."
This utterance quoted by Jesus was first spoken by
Moses.

How? The entire Lord's prayer: Our Father who
art in Heaven . . . Hallowed be thy name. . . .
Thy kingdom come. . . . Thy will be done on earth
as it is in Heaven, . . . Give us this day our daily

54 WHY I AM A JEW

bread. . . . Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
them that trespass against us. . . . Lead us not into
temptation. . . . Each one of these sentences
spoken by Jesus when he prayed is a Jewish sen-
tence.

Where then is the difference between Judaism
and Christianity? I have been told it is the love of
one's neighbor. Is this a great Christian discovery?

Certainly not The Hebrew of ancient times was
bound to use well his slave, to liberate him and rec-
ompense him at the end of seven years. Not to
retain the mantle taken as a pledge, over night;
to leave bundles of wheat on his fields for the poor,
the widow and the orphan; to love the stranger as
a brother.

The Jew of the Talmudic period was commanded
to open his door to the poor man as tho he were a
member of his family, to be charitable to Jews and
non-Jews, to honor the aged non-Jew as well as the
aged Jew, to bury the dead non-Jews as well as dead
Jews and to comfort those who mourn for them.

"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." These
words also were spoken by Moses.

ISRAEL REGAINED 55

And then there are these words in the Talmud
on the unity of mankind:

"Whosoever is merciful towards his fellow-
creature is a descendant of Abraham." Why did
God create but one man on the day of the creation?
For the purpose of unity so that no man in later
times might be able to say to another: I am of a
nobler race than thou."

Could then the belief in a future life, in final ret-
ribution; be that which distinguishes the one from
the other of these two religions? That belief which
I do not find in the five books of Moses?

No, for Job proclaims that freed from the flesh
he will see God. Daniel believes that those who
sleep in the dust will reawaken, some to shame and
others to glory. All Jewish prayers are addressed to
the God "who quickens the dead"; all the Jews of
the Apocalypse call upon the Day of the Great
Judgment; all the Jewish sages live in the hope of
the life eternal.

Who then, what then, separates you, Jews and
Christians? . . .

* * *
The Messiah. The Messiah! According to Chris-

56 WHY I AM A JEW

tians the Messiah has come; the Jews still await
his coming!

Who then is he, this promised Messiah? The
Lord's Anointed, the ideal King of Israel, on whom
the spirit of the Eternal will rest He will not judge
according to that which the eye sees; he will not de-
cree according to that which the ear hears; he will
judge the poor with equity and decree in uprightness
for the lowly of earth.

After having suffered as his people suffered
and taken upon himself the sins of the world, he
will regather Israel, dispersed to the ends of
the earth, and assure to it a wholly spiritual do-
minion.

At the end of days the Mountain of Zion shall be
placed at the head of the mountains, and the people
will flock to it and they will say: "Come and let us
go up to the mountain of the Eternal, to the house
of the God of Jacob, and he will show us the path,
and we will walk in his ways, for out of Zion came
forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jeru-
salem."

And all the nations will turn their swords into
ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
And they will never more raise the sword against

ISRAEL REGAINED 57

one another, and they will not learn war any more.
"For the mouth of the Eternal hath spoken it."
Such was the promise. Did Jesus keep it?

He thought the end of the world was at hand. He
said: "Thy kingdom come." And he believed it had
come, this reign of justice, of love and of peace. And
he believed himself to be this Messiah, bringing to
the world peace and love and justice. But Jews
looking about them still saw injustice, war and
hatred, and they continued to wait.

Then, in order to bring their faith into accord
with prophecy, Christians talked of a second ad-
vent of which, however, the prophets had never
spoken; of a return of their Messiah, thru whom all
those things should at last be accomplished.

To await his return, is that not to await his com-
ing?

Poor Jesus crucified, over whom I wept in my
childhood, adorable Jesus whose bleeding image I
could not look upon in the somber .chapels without
trembling, wast^ thou then mistakerr? And was thy
error blasphemy? That Law of which thou thyself
hadst said that not one jot or tittle could be changed,

58 WHY I AM A JEW

that Law that thou didst declare to be holy, did it
condemn thee holily? What then was the crime of
those Jews who, according to thy own word, knew
not what they did, and who rather than salute in
thee the Eternal, submitted to death? Sooner than
believe that the illimitable could limit himself to a
human form, that diety could be a visible Son of
the Invisible God, they were ready to spill the
blood of the purest of their sons, and to let it flow
over them century after century, leaving its stain
for all time.

What a gulf between these Hebrew dreamers and
the Greek thinkers! The Greeks proceeded by subtle
reasoning, the Hebrews by mighty intuitions. At
first sight the reasoning seems more convincing;
an illusion of discursive thought. Does it not also
rest on the disguised intuitions which it takes
as axioms and which in themselves possess no
logical value?

Why then prefer reason to intuition as a matter
of principle and apart from all application?

"Hear, O Israel, the Eternal thy God, the Eter-
nal is One." In the ages when men bowed them-

ISRAEL REGAINED 59

selves before thousands of gods, and though they
saw in nature the action of thoussrdi ot divided
forces of these thousand dhrf '* gods, the ancient
prophets of Israel had the sublime intuition of One
God. And to-day science rediscovers this unity in the
universe and shows us in the structure of the atom
and in that of the solar system one and the same
plan, one and the same thought!

I read in the Talmud that God created man and
that "man is free" and in the Zohar 1 I read that
"the word of man created new heavens."

Creation, liberty; two ideas foreign to Greek
thought which are the substance of Jewish thought.
God, creator and free, creates man in his image;
and man freely created in the image of God, in his
turn freely creates 1

According to these Jews, God is at the same time
outside of the world and in the world. Outside of
the world, transcendant, he is inaccessible to hu-
man thought. Immanent, in the world, he is very
close to us, he is within us. And in the measure in
which it is within us, this divine Presence, this

1 Zohar textbook of the Cabalistic Doctrine.

60 WHY I AM A JEW

Shechinah, as it is called, finds itself united with
the progress of the human conscience The Unity
of God, which was broken by being refracted in
the diversity of human beings and which was divided
in the divisions of mankind, can be restored by
prayer and justice which unite men.

A Talmudic sage relates that in the beginning
of the world the presence of God dwelt on earth.
The sin of Adam caused it to ascend to the first
heaven, that of Cain to the second heaven, with
the generations of Enoch, of the Flood, of Babel,
of Sodom and of Egypt, it rose from heaven to
heaven unto the seventh heaven. But Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, Levi, Kehat, Amram, because of their
virtues caused it to redescend from heaven to
heaven, unto the first heaven and then with Moses
it returned to earth.

According to the Zohar, when man sings the
praises of God on earth, the angels chant them
above; when he sins here, he interrupts the angel
choir, when he proclaims the unity of God on earth,
he makes it a reality throughout the Universe.
Thus man's justice will magnify and fortify the
presence of God on earth. Man collaborates with
God By a new creation he will perfect the world
created by God. His wrongdoing will shatter the

ISRAEL REGAINED 61

divine unity; his good deeds will restore God's
unity.

Herein lies the mysticism of Israel. It is not lack-
ing in grandeur.

Is then this God-hypothesis inadmissible?

I cannot understand the motion of the hands on
the face of my watch without the intelligence which
conceived its mechanism and the will that executed
it, and can I then explain the harmonious complexity
of the universe as the play of chance and blind
forces? Am I not constrained to think that there is
somewhere something akin to an intelligence and a
will infinitely more powerful than that of man, and
by which all things will be made plain ?

A long time ago I gave up the childish atheism,
even the agnosticism of my first philosophic am-
bitions. Neither Spencer nor Kant affects me any
longer. I no longer believe that mind can evolve
from matter even thru evolution, unless matter has
first been endowed with the spirit. I no longer be-
lieve that the real presence must remain utterly
unknowable; to hold it to be unknowable is already
to know it to a degree; and if we can, by thinking it,
give to it the shape of our thought, there must be

62 WHY I AM A JEW

some relation between our minds and the real
presence.

The great scholars of to-day tell us that science
itself is but a vast hypothesis which only provi-
sionally and approximately explains certain aspects
of reality. If the hypothesis of God explains other
aspects to me, ought I to fling it aside because it is
but an hypothesis? The lay-philosophy of Lachelier,
of Boutroux, of Henry Poincare, the philosophy
without God, does it not culminate with Bergson
in the jact of liberty, and the reality of the spirit, in
the idea of a God, free and creative? And is this not
exactly the conception of Israel?

How many times I discovered myself reasoning
without willing to do so, as tho I subconsciously ad-
mitted the presence in myself of this spirit. How
often some event in my life was made clear to me,
not by those events that had gone before it, but by
those that came after, as tho a hidden providence,
with which I had made myself a voluntary co-
worker, had in my past prepared my future, and
had led me to it thru myself.

If this spirit dwelt in me, and in the world, would
it not also dwell in world-history? In the history of
nations, in the history of Israel? It is conceivable
then that certain geniuses, certain races, felt its
presence more keenly than others, and that the one

ISRAEL REGAINED 63

that felt it most was conscious of the mission to
proclaim it.
Why not?

A Jewish race?

It seems that all the anthropological types are
found in Israel: broad-headed Jews, long-headed
Jews, white Jews, yellow Jews, black Jews. Could
Israel then only be a race in a spiritual sense? Could
these different bloods form but one blood because
there flowed in them but one thought?

The Torah of Israel. I begin to see more clearly.
There are two aspects of the Torah.

I. The moral and religious precepts of justice,
of peace, and of love which form the ideal law of
all human society, and also the law of the universe.
For according to our prophets and our sages, the
order which presides over the harmony of the earth
and the heavens is of the same essence as the moral
order. (And that would explain why: "God while
creating the world read the Torah.") II. The
special law of Israel; which includes the other but
adds to it all the precepts which govern the life of
this people and makes it different from other peoples.

64 WHY I AM A JEW

Between these two aspects of the Torah there is
an underlying unity. In order that at the end of days
the Messiah may reign over the world, with his jus-
tice, his peace and his love, it is necessary that Is-
rael, which is the hope of the Messiah, shall remain
Israel to the end of time. Then its special law must
be eternal as is the universal law.

How unjust I had been concerning those six hun-
dred and thirteen commandments, obedience to
which is exacted of the Israelite! The religious cus-
toms of which I had been critical in my youth were
suddenly made clear to me in a magnificent way.

Those Jews desired to connect God with every
act of life from the loftiest to the lowliest; to make
of each one of them an act of homage to God, thus
even spiritualizing eating and drinking and placing
daily life on a spiritual plane. Thru ceremonials,
thru charity, thru penitence, thru festivals, thru joy,
to create, as the Bible puts it, a people of priests; not
priests withdrawn from the world in prayer or con-
templation, but priests taking part in every phase of
life, in study and in work, in the family and in
society,- and sanctifying every act of this life thru
prayer and contemplation. A people which should

ISRAEL REGAINED 65

consist altogether of men like my father! What a
people!

And this is not all. Israel did not desire to be a
holy people for itself alone, but also because of its
mission. Its mission! Egotism? Pride? Not in the
minds of our prophets nor our sages! Israel seemed
to them a poor and wretched people, full of sin and
ever falling back into sin. God only chose this clay
to reveal what He could do with clay. For this God
of Israel does not belong to Israel He is the God
that Israel, amidst the enmity of the nations, is to
reveal to all men, until the coming of the time when
all nations with it will adore the One God.

In thus charging itself with the burden of His law,
Israel feels itself chosen, not as a master but as a
servant. It only stands aloof from others because
of a duty it has imposed upon itself; it only sep-
arates itself from others for the purpose of uniting
them.

There are two aspects of this mission. To pro-
claim thruout the earth the Name of the One God.
To hope, to wait, and to work toward the end that
with the coming of the Messiah, justice and peace
shall reign on earth.

66 WHY I AM A JEW

Monotheism and Messianism; is there a con-
nection between these two ideas?

I see! I see! I have found it! I understand:
"Love the Lord thy God." "Love thy neighbor as
thyself." It is here that our sages are at one with
Jesus. There are two commandments which resolve
themselves into one: man being the image of God,
to love man is to love God.

"Be ye holy as I am holy/ 7 said God to the He-
brews. Man, created in the image of God, must be
like his creator.

Thus God being One, man must be One. In his
divisiveness here on earth man destroys the Divine
Unity. To proclaim it does not then suffice. The Tal-
mud says: "If you would glorify God, try to be
like unto him." In order that God's reign may come
on earth, man must recreate man created by God,
until the unity of man reflects and recreates the
Unity of God upon this earth.

According to the Talmudic and Cabalistic com-
mentary on Genesis, Adam the image of God was
at first man and woman at the same time; conjugal
love, a return to this unity, thus becomes a return to
the image of the divine unity. Sin multiplied men and
divided them; the love of the family, the love of

ISRAEL REGAINED 67

one's neighbor, social justice, which thru union
create vaster and ever vaster groups of men, also
create more majestic images of the divine unity; and
peace among nations will create the greatest of all.
"The name of God is Peace." When men, free crea-
tors, shall have created Man, "God will be One and
his name will be One."

Faith in the progress of man, creating thru his
progress the Kingdom of God, this is the faith of Is-
rael. The keeping of His law seems to Israel to be
bound up with the coming of the Messiah, and the
coming of the Messiah bound up with the perfect
man. In order to fulfill this promise, he desires to
educate himself, to preserve himself, to make of
himself according to the word of the Talmud "a
cement" between the nations. He would place within
himself, according to the word of Judah Halevi, "the
heart of the world," identifying, alone among all
the other nations, his destiny with the destiny of
all, he would become a nation of priests in order to
become the priest of humanity.

The Unity of Man is, therefore, not a logical en-
tity for Israel but a revealed truth, a divine truth,
which reaches out to the future from the past, of
which the people who proclaim it, in conjunction
with all other peoples, must thruout the centuries
create a human reality.

68 WHY I AM A JEW

The Unity of Man is to the Jew an article of
faith as is the Divine Unity, and when I search the
conscience of my race to find what my duty as a
Jew is, its God makes answer to me: "Thy duty as
a Jew is thy duty as a man."

You see, my child, how far distant I now had
come to be from my Logician; reasoning independ-
ently of the Jewish faith, he seemed to me to op-
pose humanity to his own race; as a Jew I must unite
my race with all humanity.

CHAPTER III
ISRAEL ETERNAL

I did not doubt that these beliefs were good. But
in what measure was I to accept them? They might
be but beautiful chimeras.

But even if my mind retained its critical attitude,
my heart was moved. What perspectives were open-
ing out! What a past and what a future! Perhaps
the dream of this people was an illusion, but what
a position this very illusion has given them in
the world, and what a place it gave to me also as a
descendant of this people!

That which might have left a doubt in the mind
of the philosopher which I no longer was the
imagination of the poet, which I had hoped to be-
come, dared to affirm. I wanted to dedicate to the
memory of my father, who was ever present in my
thoughts, a Jewish epic, a kind of Legende des
Si&cles, which would be the epic of the great mission

69

70 WHY I AM A JEW

from ancient times to the present day. This is why
the poems were written which make up the first
two books entitled "Hear O Israel"

Following the Talmudic tales, I depicted God
considering the future sins and hatreds of men, and
hesitating to create the world; then, in a vision, see-
ing Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the three heroes,
arise without arms or an army and saying for their
sake, "Let there be light." I told of Egypt, its war-
riors and its priests accusing the Hebrews before
Pharaoh, of the River of Sighs, of Moses and the
burning bush, of Moses reaching the Promised
Land, imploring God to permit him to live and enter
into it; and of God showing him another Promised
Land, the Land that is to be, when man shall be
One. And I followed the promise of Samson to
Gideon, of Samuel to David. I built the Temple of
Solomon to peace; I saw Jezebel and Zedekiah,
Elijah and Jeremiah; I again lived with them thru
their sins and thru the forgiveness of their sins. I
saw the chastened people dragging themselves to-
wards the Exile. I saw God placing the yoke around
His neck, and the chain about His hands in order
that He might follow His people on their blood-
stained route towards a united humanity.

And I yearned to sing the songs of the Captives
of Babylon, Ezechiel and Nehemiah, the hope of

ISRAEL ETERNAL 71

returning, when the Great War broke out. Can you
understand, my child, what I was then experienc-
ing? I had just come to understand with my whole
soul all the lyric strain in my race, to live again
thru Israel for Israel and once again, as before
at Basle in the midst of the Zionists, I felt I was a
Jew, intensely Jewish, but also intensely French.
It was an instinctive, sudden, complete revelation.
I was still a citizen of Geneva and I joined the
Foreign Legion and set out for the front. And this
is why, if you are born, you will be born a French-
man, my child.

It was quite a natural thing to do, for thousands
of Jews, more foreign than was I to France, did as
I did, and I would not mention it to you were it
not that this event put a new and most unlooked-
for problem before me: how could I at the same
time feel myself absolutely Jewish and absolutely
French? How was it that without a doubt German
Jews in Germany, Russian Jews in Russia, the Jews
of every country in every land felt exactly what I
was feeling? This is the Jewish enigma of to-day;
I shall not be able to solve it until at a later time.

Be reassured, my child, I will not tell you about
the war; not even my war (which at the end of two

72 WHY I AM A JEW

years took me into the civil service at Paris). But
it is needful for you to know what was the great
human hope that assuaged so many horrors.

We were told: this is the last war. And we hoped,
we believed, that it would be the last war. At times
I dreamed of it while standing in a trench, watch-
ing the distant shells thru the smoke, and the little
space of earth which could be discerned thru the
narrow crevice of an embrasure. I saw with my
mind's eye all the countries, all the continents, and
everywhere people anxious, confident all men hop-
ing, waiting for the end of the last war, for the peace
of the whole world, for the Unity of Man.

And, I said to myself, has not the voice of the
prophets cried aloud in the desert? Has the dream
once dreamed by the dreamers of Judea become the
dream of all mankind? Do all men await Israel's
Messiah? How can this be? By what miracle has
this message reached their ears? The Mission? Will
it be thru the Mission of Israel?

And in my thoughts I already wrote the last chant
of the Jewish Epic, The Watting Wall The Wander-
ing Jew stopped before the ancient wall where the
Jews lamented over the ruins of the Temple; but
they did not bemoan the ruined Temple; they la-
mented the Temple of the Unity of Man, which
man has not yet builded. The Wandering Jew slept,

ISRAEL ETERNAL 73

and in the visions of the night he beheld the whole
war; he died all the deaths of all the soldiers, by
shrapnel, by gas, by submarine, by airplane. All
the mothers of the Great War were weeping for their
sons, all the dead of the Great War were rising from
their graves, lifting their putrid fists, cursing with
their broken lips the anti-Christ who armed their
dead bones for a war of the dead thruout eternity.

But across the dream listen to the distant chant.
Future generations will build the longed-for Temple,
for of fratricide fraternity is born. The wheat for
the bread is being brought from every field; the
grapes for the wine from every vineyard; the table
is set on every mountain, on every plain, on all the
oceans. All the races rise and take their places, the
Holy Communion of Mankind begins; scattered
over the earth, the bones of Adam come together,
the blood of all men flows in his veins; in his heart
all human hearts are beating. As God is One, Hu-
manity is One.

But again there are wailing voices. The Wander-
ing Jew awakens. At the base of the destroyed wall
the Jews still weep; the time has not yet come;
they must still wander on.

* * *
And I also, I awoke from the dream of the Great

74 WHY I AM A JEW

War, the whole world awakened the peace was not
peace; the war continued to be war; men wept;
Jews wept. They had fought for all the nations; all
nations had inscribed in the pages of their glory Jew-
ish loyalty and heroism, and the image of Israel torn
and bleeding became more than ever the image of
humanity. And while my Jewish comrades of the
Legion and their brothers on the Russian front were
dying for the Czar, their parents, their wives, their
children, accused of treason, imprisoned as hostages,
driven out upon the roads in the snow and the night,
knouted, shot to death, hanged, burnt alive, were
dying in Russia by order of the Czar!

After the Bolshevist revolution matters were still
worse. In the silence of the night, I heard not only
the moaning of a degraded captain, on a rock far
out in the sea; the wail that arose to my ears made
me conscious of hundreds of thousands of agonies,
more woeful still than those of the Great War. From
my sleepless couch I saw the counter-revolutionary
armies of Petloura, of Gotschal and of Denikine
advance, shouting: "The Jews are Bolsheviks;
the Bolsheviks are Jews." And throwing them-
selves upon the unarmed Jews, torture and muti-
late and sabre them in the streets and in the cellars,
gouging out the eyes even of nursing babes.
From Germany to Hungary, from Austria to Rou-

ISRAEL ETERNAL 75

mania, the cry was repeated: "The Jews are Bolshe-
viks! The Bolsheviks are Jews! They planned the
terrible war! They signed the terrible peace! Death
to the Jews! Death to the Jews!" And while a new
Exodus of Israel in rags and shrouds traversed the
capitals of Europe and in agony crossed the sea
to find the ports of America closed, all the old
calumnies of anti-Semitism, all those murderous
myths burst upon the world in a flood of printed
pages.

How was this possible? Were all those Jewish
heroes who had died for all their countries then
forgotten? All those bleeding witnesses to patriotism
had then proven nothing? Wherefore did this hatred
of the Jew persist which has existed since the exist-
ence of the Jews and which will, no doubt, endure
as long as they continue to exist?

I wanted to know. I took it upon myself to read
those incriminating books and to confront them with
the history of Israel, which the preparation of my
Jewish Anthology had made more familiar to me.
I resolved to find this seemingly incontrovertible
cause of anti-Semitism. Its discovery might complete
my knowledge of Judaism. I was soon able to con-
fute a number of familiar myths, that of ritual
murder, for example, which was persistently pic-
tured as an authentic custom of Israel, when a

76 WHY I AM A JEW

hundred times the awful thing has been refuted even
by Popes. Then too, the traditional picture of the
rapacious Jew, as Shakespeare pictured him in Shy-
lock, ignoring the fact that in the original legend
the pitiless creditor is not a Jew, and that the right
of claiming a piece of the debtor's flesh dates back
not to the law of Moses, but to the Roman law of
the Twelve Tables.

I left out of account arguments drawn from
certain Talmudic texts, isolated opinions con-
trary to the general thought of the Talmud and of
Judaism itself, and of which it was sought to make
articles of faith involving all Jews.

Finally, I eliminated the so-called Christian anti-
Semitism. Christ commanded that the Jews be for-
given. According to St. Paul, whose doctrine the
Church inherited, their very crime itself had in it
something of sacredness, since the salvation of the
world began with the sacrifice of Jesus, and Jews
must need continue to live to the end of time in
order to fulfill their mission in converting the heathen
unto the end of days by their example. If Chris-
tians have persecuted Jews (and they have hideously
done so, and still do) it is because they neither pos-
sess Christian virtues nor Christian beliefs; they
are still pagans, for one cannot be anti- Jewish with-
out being anti-Christian.

ISRAEL ETERNAL 77

Was Judaism essentially revolutionary? If moral,
social and international progress mean revolution,
yes; but not if revolution implies violence. Karl
Marx, a Jew baptised at the age of six years and
an anti-Semite at the age of reason it is true, formu-
lated the theory of communism, which is allied to
prophetism thru the nobility of its passion for the
disinherited. But as to that which concerns the
revolutionary translation of this sentiment, it is an
easy matter to demonstrate that the historical ma-
terialism essential to Marxism, is the total negation
of the historic spirituality essential to Judaism, and
that communism has its origins in the socialism of
Proudhon, of Louis Blanc, of Saint-Simon, of Babeuf,
who, if they were Jews, concealed that fact well.

In the Mosaic legislation, the soil did not belong
to the state but to God and was inalienable from
Him. According to this conception a piece of ground
could only be sold for a period of time after which it
returned by right to its former holders. This con-
servative measure, which made the continuing in-
equality of fortunes impossible, far from provoking
revolution, tends to prevent it, and no Jewish tradi-
tion commands or permits anything whatsoever to
come to pass thru the violence of revolution.

Is not the Talmud full of conservative teaching?
"Woe to the ship which has lost its pilot, woe to the

78 WHY I AM A JEW

society that has lost its guide." "Always respect
those in authority over thy country." "If the king
command thee to overturn a mountain set thyself
to work without complaint " The tenth command-
ment, which forbids coveting the good fortune of
another, does it not condemn class warfare by the
thought it conveys? Was it not in the Bible that
Bossuet found his "Politique Tiree de L'Ecriture
Saint e," which establishes the divine right of kings?

Did not the Hebrews wait for the consent of
Pharaoh before quitting Egypt and their slavery?
Did not the Jews suffer themselves to be butchered
during eighteen hundred years without revolting,
even without defending themselves? Were they not
almost forced in the end to be nearly dejudaized
before arming themselves against pogroms?

Could Judaism be essentially capitalistic? The
entire Bible, the entire Talmud exalts poverty; Jews
give up trade as soon as they can for the culture
of the mind; everywhere, in all the universities ex-
cept when their doors are closed to them thru in-
iquitous legislation, as in Roumania and Hungary
their number is out of proportion to their popu-
lation in the country. Compared to the great Chris-
tian capitalists the great Jewish capitalists cut an
insignificant figure; the Jewish proletariat is the
most wretched of proletariats.

ISRAEL ETERNAL 79

And, could Judaism be an international organi-
zation destined to conquer the material supremacy
and the empire of the world for the Jews as
promised by some of their sacred books? The per-
secutions endured by so many Jews thruout so many
centuries and even in the century in which we live,
prove the absence of an efficient solidarity and lack
of organization even for defensive purposes. The
empire of the world proclaimed by the prophets must
be accomplished not thru financial conspiracy, but
thru an altogether spiritual struggle which will lead
all of humanity to its highest degree of develop-
ment.

And finally what weight can be attached to
anti-Semitic theses when one sees Henry Ford, the
richest and most independent man on earth, after
having subsidized anti-Semitism for ten years in Eu-
rope and in America, make public retraction, and
publicly ask forgiveness of the Jews.

But how could an honest man make such a mis-
take? Was there no basis for all these contradictory
accusations? Yes, one fact, without justifying them,
explains them all: Jews are Jews; they wish to re-
main Jews; always, in all places, even despite them-
selves they remain Jews.

Then, too, every minority is suspected by the
majority which holds those who make up this mi-

80 WHY I AM A JEW

nority to be like one another and more united than
those of the majority. Must there be a scapegoat
at any cost? It is sought for in the minority which
is held guilty in its entirety; one Jew has com-
mitted treason, all Jews are traitors; one hundred
Jews are Bolsheviks, all Jews are Bolsheviks. Pesti-
lence rages in the Middle Ages the Jews poisoned
the wells. War raged in the XXth century, the
Jews engineered the war.

This phenomenon of collective half-voluntary
illusion is unanswerable: the empoisoning of wells,
the use of human blood, sorcery and magic, all the
accusations leveled against the Jews of the Middle
Ages by Christians who had come to be the major-
ity, are exactly those with which the pagans, ten
centuries earlier, overwhelmed Christians then in
the minority.

Socially, politically, economically, there is no dif-
ference between a Jewish capitalist and a non-
Jewish capitalist: but in fact, or because of his
origin of which some sign ever remains, the Jewish
capitalist is a Jew; he belongs to a minority; he
challenges attention; he crowds out the others;
people notice only him, and desire to notice only
him. If there be a complaint against capitalists,
all capitalists are declared to be Jews. Financiers,
scholars, manufacturers or philosophers, dramatists

ISRAEL ETERNAL 81

or statesmen, conservatives or revolutionists, there
are Jews among them everywhere; they could thus
be accused of everything; they have thus been ac-
cused of everything.

I came to realize that anti-Semitism had only one
seemingly valid ground: the determination of Jews
to remain Jews. And was this determination justi-
fied? By what right had this people been able to
maintain it thruout the centuries and make it
prevail even to this day? To my mind, in order to
deserve this extraordinary favor of remaining a
separate people while mingling with others, Israel
must be needed in order that its mission should
not seem to be but a beautiful dream of the prophets
and a beautiful theme for the poets, but a definite
fact. This mission, of which I had written with
all my heart, was I to believe in it with all my
mind? And if I believed in it, whither would this
faith lead me?

The history of Israel alone could give me a reply.
This history like all other histories takes its
rise in legend, but what am I to think of it, if I find
it as miraculous in its actual development as in its
legendary origins?

* * *

Beside his sleeping flock a shepherd of Chaldea

82 WHY I AM A JEW

dreams beneath the stars. A voice speaks to him
saying: "I am the God of Heaven and Earth. Leave
thy country and thy idolatrous father and go to the
land that I will show thee. I will make of thee a
great people and thou shalt be a blessing to all the
families of men." A race springs from him which
lives in slavery on the banks of the Nile, for it
was necessary for the fulfillment of its mission that
this race should know every sorrow. Moses liberates
it and leads it thru the desert for forty years, gives
it a Law which forbids murder, theft, lying, blas-
phemy, luxury, covetousness which commands the
love of God and of one's neighbor, which regu-
lates life thru justice, peace and charity so that it
may become a holy people.

Then see this horde on the land promised to it.
It has become a nation; it has kings. But Israel is
unworthy of its Law, again and again it falls back
into idolatry, and thereby to the sin, which includes
all sins; for the living faith in one only God, in-
visible and spiritual, is the first of the truths it
owes to the world. Its prophets proclaim that it will
perish if it deny its God; and its God in turn
chastens and pardons, even as it disregards or ob-
serves his Law.

ISRAEL ETERNAL 83

It is divided into two kingdoms; the one debases
itself beyond redemption, with luxuries and idola-
try and carnage; it forgets its God, its God forgets
it, it is conquered and exiled; it disappears from
the world. The other, quite as guilty, goes captive
to Babylon, but its God remains in the hearts of
its prophets; its God and the God of all men, for
ail men were created in his image, and he decrees
that the Messiah shall be born of his people for all
people, the Messiah of his peace and of his justice
who will mould the unity of man after the pattern
of the unity of God.

And see how this repentant people finds its recom-
pense; Cyrus, a pagan king, restores to it the land
of its ancestors; it returns to it purified of idolatry,
and neither Greece with its beauty, nor Rome with
its power can turn it away from its God. But
internecine hatreds destroy it, and it perishes in a
second exile which disperses it to the ends of the
earth. Its first Temple, destroyed in order to destroy
idolatry, was rebuilt for the divine Unity; its sec-
ond Temple, destroyed in order to destroy discord,
must be rebuilt by the Unity of Humankind.

In accordance with the prophets 7 word, the truth
of Israel begins to spread abroad. Jesus, one of the
purest of its sons, said it in most touching language.
He said it, believing that the end of the world was

84 WHY I AM A JEW

at hand and that he himself was the expected Mes-
siah. But justice and peace have not yet come;
Israel still waits. And the Christians deify their
prophet, and the pagans, accustomed to visible gods,
believe they see with their eyes the invisible God
of Israel; and so the Christian truth is only half-
truth for the Jews.

The Roman Empire becomes Christian. It de-
mands of Jews that they become Christians. But
they await their Messiah. The destruction of the
Temple takes from them the center of their religious
life. They reconstruct it in the Synagogue and in
the School and spiritualize it again thru their suf-
fering. Torn from the soil of their own country,
they make an ideal country of their Law, attaching
to the realization of promises it holds for them and
for humanity, the hope of an ultimate return.

And again a new thought springs from the ancient
thought of Israel; Mohammed preaches the God
of Abraham to the Arabs, and while in its Christian
form this God is to conquer the two Americas after
Europe, he conquers Africa and Asia in his Moslem
form as far as the boundaries of China, But Mo-
hammed binds up with it the apparatus of war,
and surrounds it with a sensual paradise in which
the Jews do not recognize the God of Israel. And

ISRAEL ETERNAL 85

even as the truth of Christ, so is that of Islam no
more than a half-truth for them.

And so for centuries, in all places where they
live, the inheritors of Judaism persecute the Jews.
Justinian deprives them of civil equality and reli-
gious liberty. Sisebut the Visigoth, and Dagobert
the Frank, offer them the choice between exile and
baptism. The Crusaders, the Turks, the Moroccans,
the Russians massacre them; they are driven out of
France, out of England, out of Spain; scourged
and tortured they wait for their Messiah.

But great as is their suffering, countless as are
their exiles, in each century a higher Providence
provides a refuge for them. At first it is in Babylon
under the Parthians; they found their academies,
they edit their Talmud. Then it is in Andalusia, in
Sicily, in Castile, in Aragon, at Narbonne, at Car-
cassonne, at Speyer, at Pavia, at Rome; they create
their own poetry and philosophy, they translate
the Greek thinkers for the Christian thinkers, they
counsel kings, they heal popes, they accompany
Columbus across the Atlantic. And then in Holland
modern thought is born of their ancient mysticism.
And in Poland a new mysticism is born of their
ancient religion.

Luther and Calvin had reread the Bible and

86 WHY I AM A JEW

criticism was born. In the century of Jesus the Jews
said: "Jesus is not God," and they waited Twenty
centuries after Jesus, half of the Christian world
will say: "Jesus was not God" and they will return
to the One God of Israel.

Rousseau dreamed, Robespierre spoke, Karl
Marx wrote, Wilson preached. Ten centuries, per-
haps twenty centuries before Jesus, the Hebrews
said: "The oppressed is thy brother; the poor, the
stranger is thy brother, mankind is One like God."
And they waited. Twenty centuries after Jesus, man-
kind is on the march towards its Unity.

But here again the world took only half of the
truth from Israel, for neither Robespierre, nor Karl
Marx, nor Wilson repeats the message of the proph-
ets in its purity. Whole-heartedly as they desire
to approach the ideal of the prophets, they are still
far distant from it because of the terms in which
they express it.

Surely for Israel, the moral and social duties of
the privileged towards the disinherited and of na-
tions towards one another are not optional; they
are absolutely obligatory; the Hebrew word that
has been translated into Charity signifies Justice,
and this justice must govern the acts of individuals
as well as of peoples. And in the same way the moral
code of Israel is one of duties, not one of rights nor

ISRAEL ETERNAL 87

of interests. It says to the oppressor: "Thou must
free the oppressed." It does not say to the oppressed:
"Thou mayest oppress the oppressor." It says to the
rich: "Thou owest thy riches to the poor." It does
not say to the poor: "Thou mayst take his riches
from the rich." It says to the nations: "Turn your
arms into peace," but it also says to them: "Estab-
lish peace between hearts." Israel affirms thruout
the centuries its message of Unity. In the measure in
which Israel asserts it, it becomes a reality but in
the course of becoming a reality it has become
obscure and Israel must make it realizable by re-
peating it over and over again in all its clarity to
the end of time.

Christianity incarnated divinity in the flesh of a
man. Mahommedanism connected it with violence
and indulgence. Both took from it, in order to make
it realizable, something of its spirituality, and in
the same way Jacobinism, Marxism, Wilsonism only
made human unity popular under a still more con-
fused and superficial aspect. These are the halting
places along a road that seeks from the outside to
join the path of Jewish Justice and Peace, but this
Peace and this Justice in their deepest sense cannot
be wholly realized, either thru revolution or by
the warfare of classes, or thru the harmonious in-
terests of the nations. For the achievement of Israel's

88 WHY I AM A JEW

Ideal it is necessary that the inward progress of
man bring men closer to one another.

Is this possible? Has this people given the example
of it? Alas, Israel is not yet a holy people. The
Jew knows his faults and his imperfections; he
. outdoes the caricature in those Jewish tales which he
himself spreads abroad, he laughs over them but
he suffers over them, for nothing is more painful
to him, nothing is so hard for him to forgive as a
stain upon the honor of the House of Israel.

But with all the ugly things so often inherited
from the Ghetto, and which ought to disappear
has he not inherited from the Ghetto itself some
beautiful things which ought to persist? He has
suffered so much hurt, he has suffered so many
injustices, experienced so completely the misery of
life, that commiseration for the poor and the humili-
ated have become natural to him. He has abstained
so long from shedding blood even of animals, even
of the human beasts who have massacred him
that the horror of murder has almost atrophied the
gesture of killing in him. And he has seen at such
close range, in his agonized wanderings, so many
men of all races and of all countries, so many men
different everywhere and everywhere alike, that he

ISRAEL ETERNAL 89

has understood, he has felt in the flesh of his flesh,
that Man is one as God is One. Thus a race was
formed that may have the same vices and the same
virtues as other races, but which is without a doubt
the most human of all races

Look about you, observe: Christian philanthropy
is rarely extended to Jews, Jewish philanthropy is
almost always extended to Jews and to Christians;
if the Jews seem too prominent everywhere, one
finds very few of them in murder statistics. Even
their enemies admit this sense of humaneness, while
they blame him for that, which makes the Jew the
instinctive friend of peace among men.

This does not mean that, Christianity, following
Israel, has not desired to spread, and has not
spread, the same virtues. It is false to say that it
has only turned its gaze toward the joys of the be-
yond, as it is false to say that Israel has only kept its
eyes upon the earth. Both the Jew and the Christian
believe that in order to enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven they must establish Heaven on earth; the
Jew awaits the coming of his Messiah; the Christian
awaits the return of his Messiah and, as I have in-
dicated in my book Jmf du Pape, in this expectation
there resides the same hope.

The Unity of Man which Israel proclaims, the
Church has ceaselessly proclaimed. From its incep-

88 WHY I AM A JEW

Ideal it is necessary that the inward progress of
man bring men closer to one another.

Is this possible? Has this people given the example
of it? Alas, Israel is not yet a holy people. The
Jew knows his faults and his imperfections; he
.outdoes the caricature in those Jewish tales which he
himself spreads abroad; he laughs over them but
he suffers over them, for nothing is more painful
to him, nothing is so hard for him to forgive as a
stain upon the honor of the House of Israel.

But with all the ugly things so often inherited
from the Ghetto, and which ought to disappear
has he not inherited from the Ghetto itself some
beautiful things which ought to persist? He has
suffered so much hurt, he has suffered so many
injustices, experienced so completely the misery of
life, that commiseration for the poor and the humili-
ated have become natural to him. He has abstained
so long from shedding blood even of animals, even
of the human beasts who have massacred him
that the horror of murder has almost atrophied the
gesture of killing in him. And he has seen at such
close range, in his agonized wanderings, so many
men of all races and of all countries, so many men
different everywhere and everywhere alike, that he

ISRAEL ETERNAL 89

has understood, he has felt in the flesh of his flesh,
that Man is one as God is One Thus a race was
formed that may have the same vices and the same
virtues as other races, but which is without a doubt
the most human of all races.

Look about you, observe: Christian philanthropy
is rarely extended to Jews, Jewish philanthropy is
almost always extended to Jews and to Christians;
if the Jews seem too prominent everywhere, one
finds very few of them in murder statistics. Even
their enemies admit this sense of humaneness, while
they blame him for that, which makes the Jew the
instinctive friend of peace among men.

This does not mean that, Christianity, following
Israel, has not desired to spread, and has not
spread, the same virtues. It is false to say that it
has only turned its gaze toward the joys of the be-
yond, as it is false to say that Israel has only kept its
eyes upon the earth. Both the Jew and the Christian
believe that in order to enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven they must establish Heaven on earth; the
Jew awaits the coming of his Messiah; the Christian
awaits the return of his Messiah and, as I have in-
dicated in my book Juif du Pape, in this expectation
there resides the same hope.

The Unity of Man which Israel proclaims, the
Church has ceaselessly proclaimed. From its incep-

90 WHY I AM A JEW

tion, the Church baptized the slave and the king
with the same baptism; the Church to-day installs
Chinese bishops while the lay authorities of civi-
lized states refuse civil equality to the yellow in-
habitants of their colonies; it is the Church that
thru the voice of its great thinkers and its great
preachers denounces in the enthroning of national-
ism, a new form of idolatry: it was a Pope in the
Middle Ages who instituted the truce of God in the
midst of battle; it was a Pope, in the XXth century,
who spoke to the world at war, the loftiest words
of peace.

But Israel alone preserved in its pristine purity
the twofold message of divine Unity and human
Unity, and in the path which leads to its ful-
fillment it went beyond other nations by virtue
of its history, and this advance it must guard for
its own sake, as well as for the sake of all peoples.
For while these ancient truths as yet evoke but
feeble response in the many hearts which are still
pagan, they are the very life-blood which causes
the Jewish heart to beat.

At the moment in history when this human sense,
heritage of divine inspiration, so painfully acquired
by Israel, becomes necessary to all nations, it hap-
pens that the Jews, who lived apart so long, are
included as citizens of all nations and bear them-

ISRAEL ETERNAL 91

selves as citizens. They will keep themselves apart
from all peoples; they are the only people to-day
that consist of men of all peoples; they were a
nation among the nations, to-day they are a Society
of Nations, and the pact has written itself in their
blood. Their duty is twofold; and I have come
to understand the two inseparable commands which
dictated my action in 1914: "In every country,
even unto the giving of your life, be men of your
country; and at the same time be Jews; conse-
crate to each one of your countries the human treas-
ure which you have received from Israel; and the
peace of your countries shall be your peace, and
the peace of mankind shall be your peace." Thus
did Jeremiah teach Israel its duty, thus will Israel
fulfill it.

But lost among the nations, will it not risk losing
itself, and with itself lose the ideal which it per-
petuates? And now at the very hour when humanity
begins to feel its oneness, the return of the Jews
to Palestine which, according to the words of the
prophets, is bound up with this miracle of unity,
begins with it. Dispersed everywhere, Jews will be
reunited on the soil of their ancestors, and the soil
that the Zionists recreate there; the language which
they there learn again, all the effort for their resur-
rection will make the forgetting of Israel and its

92 WHY I AM A JEW

ideal impossible for dispersed Jews and for dis-
persed men everywhere.

And now, my child, turn towards the past, look
and bethink yourself. There is but one reproach
made to the Jews, and despite all the lies and all
the martyrdom which accompanies it, this reproach
is justified; they will to remain Jews. Does their
past give them this right? Does it permit them to
be anything else? See the sublime design which is
evident from the beginning and which from century
to century becomes more apparent. Did the Greeks
declare to the world in advance that they would
reveal Beauty? The Romans that they would reveal
Law? See this people, howsoever wretched and im-
pure, proclaiming what their history is to be, even
from the very beginning See them choose the mission
which chose them, and walk with it in the path
which they foretold for themselves. See this people
of ever-renewed sinfulness, twice exiled and surviv-
ing two dispersions, and, as ordained by prophecy,
bringing back from its first exile the divine Unity
and thru the second exile the Unity of mankind.
See it hunted thruout the world, ever nigh to ex-
tinction and ever finding some providential shelter
which saves it from destruction. See it bearing its
truth and, because it wills to keep it pure, spread it
thruout the world in flames of light which kindle

ISRAEL ETERNAL 93

its own funeral pyres. See it incarnating in its own
flesh the two loves which are killing it, even at the
moment when it gives itself with them to all the
nations of earth. See Israel rebuild the flaming
altar of its hope which is the universal hope, so
that it yet may survive itself.

And tell me if in this unique history you do not
feel the eternal presence of a mind and a will that
have ordained its mission to this people and have
made its fulfillment possible, in trying it thru suf-
fering, in saving it thru trials, in guiding it step by
step from its unhappy past to its triumphant future.
As for me, my child, who have so long sought for
the evidence of the existence of God, I have found
it in the existence of Israel.

I am a Jew because born of Israel and having lost
it, I felt it revive within me more alive than I am
myself.

I am a Jew because born of Israel, and having
found it again, I would have it live after me even
more alive than it is within me.

94 WHY I AM A JEW

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel demands
no abdication of my mind.

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel asks every
possible sacrifice of my soul.

I am a Jew because in all places where there are
tears and suffering the Jew weeps.

I am a Jew because in every age when the cry of
despair is heard the Jew hopes.

I am a Jew because the message of Israel is the
most ancient and the most modern.

# * *

I am a Jew because Israel's promise is a universal
promise.

* * *

I am a Jew because for Israel the world is not
finished; men will complete it.

ISRAEL ETERNAL 95

I am a Jew because for Israel man is not yet
created; men are creating him.

I am a Jew because Israel places Man and his
Unity above nations and above Israel itself.

I am a Jew because above Man, image of the
Divine Unity, Israel places the unity which is divine.

At times, my child, when I go thru a museum and
stand before the pictures, statues, furniture, arms,
crystals, mosaics, vestments, ornaments, coins,
jewels, gathered there from all places and all times
to hang upon the walls or to place upon pedestals, to
be ranged behind barriers and panes of glass, classi-
fied, numbered, labeled, I dream that some one
of my ancestors may have seen, touched or admired
some of these things, in the very place, in the very
time, in which they were made for use, for work,
for the sorrows or the joys of man.

That door with the gray nails, between two pop-
lars, in the gilded frame, is the door of the Syna-
gogue of Geneva thru which my father entered to
pray. And there, that bridge of boats on the Rhine

96 WHY I AM A JEW

over which my grandfather in Huningen crossed
the river. And his grandfather, where did he live?
Perhaps while calculating the mystic numbers of
the Kabala in his reveries he saw across the pensive
panes of his window, the sleds glide over the snow
of Germany or of Poland. And the grandfather of
the grandfather of his grandfather? Perhaps he was
that weigher of gold in the Ghetto of Amsterdam
painted by Rembrandt.

One of my ancestors may have drunk from that
wine-cup on returning home after listening to the
teaching of his master Rashi in the School of Troyes
in Champagne; one of my ancestors may have sat
in that armchair studded with jade when a Sultan
bade him feel his pulse; one of my ancestors may
have looked upon a monk in his cowl as he carried
this cross of Castile while leading him to the auto
de fe; one of my ancestors may have seen his chil-
dren crushed beneath the hoofs of the Crusader's
horse, who wore that armor.

These crowns of plumes, were they placed in the
hands of another ancestor by an American savage?
These African ivories, these silks of China, were
they bought by another on the banks of the Congo
or of the Amur, to be resold on the shore of the
Ganges or on the Venetian Lagunes?

ISRAEL ETERNAL 97

One of them tilled the plain of Sharon with that
plough hardened thru fire; one of them ascended
to the Temple to offer his tithe in those woven
baskets When this marble Titus was in the flesh, one
of my ancestors, chained to his chariot, followed him
with bleeding feet in the triumph of the Forum.
This bearded magi, with the fringed garment, be-
tween these two winged bulls with human profiles
one of my ancestors breathed the dust of Babylon
beneath their feet; this Pharaoh of porphyry, with
his two hands on his two flat thighs one of my
ancestors bowed himself before his slightest breath,
before girding his loins and taking his staff in hand
to follow Moses across the Red Sea; and that idol
of Samaria, with spherical eyes and triangular jaws,
perhaps that was the idol that Abraham smashed
when he left his home in Chaldea to follow the
summons of his invisible God.

And I said to myself: from that far distant father
to my very own father, all these fathers have trans-
mitted a truth to me, which ran in their blood,
which runs in my blood; and must I not transmit
it with my blood to those of my blood?

Will you accept it, my child? Will you transmit
it? Perhaps you will want to desert it. Then may it
be for a greater truth if there be one. I could not

98 WHY I AM A JEW

then reproach you. It would be my fault; for I
could not have handed it on to you as I received it.
But whether you abandon it, or whether you treas-
ure it, Israel will march on unto the end of days.

LIST OF CITATIONS

Put my words in thy heart (Deut. XI, 18-19) In- Page

troduction xiv

He calls the Egyptians his people (Isaiah XIX, 25) 49

Moses to the school of Akiba (Menahot 29b) 51

God of Israel, God the Father (Jonah III. IV

Psalm CHI) 53

Thou shalt love the Lord (Deut VI, 5) 53

The Lord's Prayer (The Jewish Origins of the Lord's

Prayer, Paris, 1921) 53

The Hebrew of Ancient Times (cf Edmond Fleg,

Anthologie Juive I, 47-49) 54

The Jew of the Talmudic Period (Ibid I, 237-241) 54

Thou shalt love thy neighbor (Lemt. XIX, 18) 54

Whoever is merciful (Besah 32b) 55

Why, at the creation (Sanhednn IV, 5) 55

Belief in a future life (Jonah XIX, 25-27, Daniel

XII 2, 3, t Book of Enoch XXII, 1-14, Sibylline

Oracles III, 552-711, IV, 1-46, 4th Esdras VI,

11-28, VII, 32-43) 55

The Messiah (Isaiah XI, 1-12, Micah IV, 1-4) 55

Hear O Israel (Deut. VI, 4) 58

Man is free (Kiddushin 3 la) 59

The speech of man creates (Zohar t I, 4b, 5a; II,

217, Ib) 59

God in the world, the Shekinah (Tikkune Zohar,

XIX) 59

In the beginning, the presence of God (Bereshit

Rabba, p. XIX) 60

When man sings here below (Zohar II, 131 a-b) 60

When he proclaims the Unity of God (Ibid II,

133b-134a) 60

99

100 WHY I AM A JEW

Page

A nation of priests (Exodus XIX, 5-6) 64
The Mission of Israel of the prayer (Alenu, An-

thologie Jmve I, 123-124) 65
Be ye holy (Levit XI, 44) 66
Would you praise (Sotah 14a) 66
Adam, image of God (Bereshit Rabba, p VIII, 26) 66
The name of God is Peace (Derek 'Eres, last chap-
ter) 67
God will be One (Zach XIV, 19) 67
A cement between the nations (Bemidbar Rabba,

p II, 32) 67

The heart of the world (Kuzari II, 36) 67
Ritual murder (cf Anthologie Juive, II, 127-128

and Note on Manassah ben Israel, ibid II, 385) 75
Legend of Shylock (cf I Loeb, The Jew of History
and the Jew of Legend, Revise des Etudes Juives,

Act 20, XXXIII, 21, 310) 76
Accusations against the Talmud (see Anthologie

Jmve II, 402-403) 76

111 luck to the vessel (Baba Bathra 91) 77

Always respect (Menahot 98a) 78

If the King (Baba Bathra 3b) 78
Henry Ford, his retraction (cf Paix et Droit, Sept.

1927) 79
Pagan accusations against the Christians (cf. I.

Loeb loc cit ) 80

The two Temples, Idolatry and Discord (Yoma, 9b) 83

Thus taught Jeremiah (Jer. XXIX, 4-7) 91