The aim of this little book is to present in brief outline some of the
leading conceptions of the religion familiar since the Christian Era
under the name Judaism.
The word 'Judaism' occurs for the first time at about 100 B.C., in the
Graeco-Jewish literature. In the second book of the Maccabees (ii. 21,
vii . 1), 'Judaism' signifies the religion of the Jews as contrasted with
Hel enism, the religion of the Greeks. In the New Testament (Gal. i. 13)
the same word seems to denote the Pharisaic system as an antithesis to
the Gentile Christianity. In Hebrew the corresponding noun never occurs
in the Bible, and it is rare even in the Rabbinic books. When it does
meet us, _Jahaduth_ implies the monotheism of the Jews as opposed
to the polytheism of the heathen.
Thus the term 'Judaism' did not pass through quite the same transitions
as did the name 'Jew.' Judaism appears from the first as a religion
transcending tribal bounds. The 'Jew,' on the other hand, was originally
a Judaean, a member of the Southern Confederacy cal ed in the Bible
Judah, and by the Greeks and Romans Judaea. Soon, however, 'Jew' came
to include what had earlier been the Northern Confederacy of Israel as
wel , so that in the post-exilic period _Jehudi_ or 'Jew' means an
adherent of Judaism without regard to local nationality.
Judaism, then, is here taken to represent that later development of
the Religion of Israel which began with the reorganisation after the
Babylonian Exile (444 B.C.), and was crystal ised by the Roman Exile
(during the first centuries of the Christian Era). The exact period
which wil be here seized as a starting-point is the moment when the
people of Israel were losing, never so far to regain, their territorial
association with Palestine, and were becoming (what they have ever since
been) a community as distinct from a nation. They remained, it is true,
a distinct race, and this is stil in a sense true. Yet at various
periods a number of proselytes have been admitted, and in other ways
the purity of the race has been affected. At all events territorial
nationality ceased from a date which may be roughly fixed at 135 A.D.,
when the last desperate revolt under Bar-Cochba failed, and Hadrian drew
his Roman plough over the city of Jerusalem and the Temple area. A new
city with a new name arose on the ruins. The ruins afterwards reasserted
themselves, and Aelia Capitolina as a designation of Jerusalem is familiar
only to archaeologists.
But though the name of Hadrian's new city has faded, the effect of
its foundation remained. Aelia Capitolina, with its market-places and
theatre, replaced the olden narrow-streeted town; a House of Venus reared
its stately form in the north, and a Sanctuary to Jupiter covered, in the
east, the site of the former Temple. Heathen colonists were introduced,
and the Jew, who was to become in future centuries an alien everywhere,
was made by Hadrian an alien in his fatherland. For the Roman Emperor
denied to Jews the right of entry into Jerusalem. Thus Hadrian completed
the work of Titus, and Judaism was divorced from its local habitation.
More unreservedly than during the Babylonian Exile, Judaism in the Roman
Exile perforce became the religion of a community and not of a state;
and Israel for the first time constituted a Church. But it was a Church
with no visible home. Christianity for several centuries was to have a
centre at Rome, Islam at Mecca. But Judaism had and has no centre at al .
It wil be obvious that the aim of the present book makes it both
superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with
the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times,
its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion
into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is
merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as
we have defined it. This legacy and the manner in which it was treasured,
enlarged, and administered wil occupy us in the rest of this book.
But this much must be premised. If the Religion of Israel passed through
the stages of totemism, animism, and polydemonism; if it was indebted
to Canaanite, Kenite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and other foreign
influences; if it experienced a stage of monolatry or henotheism (in
which Israel recognised one God, but did not think of that God as the
only God of al men) before ethical monotheism of the universalistic
type was reached; if, further, al these stages and the moral and
religious ideas connected with each left a more or less clear mark in
the sacred literature of Israel; then the legacy which Judaism received
from its past was a syncretism of the whole of the religious experiences
of Israel as interpreted in the light of Israel's latest, highest, most
approved standards. Like the Bourbon, the Jew forgets nothing; but unlike
the Bourbon, the Jew is always learning. The domestic stories of the
Patriarchs were not rejected as unprofitable when Israel became deeply
impregnated with the monogamous teachings of writers like the author
of the last chapter of Proverbs; the character of David was idealised
by the spiritual associations of the Psalter, parts of which tradition
ascribed to him; the earthly life was etherialised and much of the sacred
literature reinterpreted in the light of an added belief in immortality;
God, in the early literature a tribal non-moral deity, was in the later
literature a righteous ruler who with Amos and Hosea loved and demanded
righteousness in man. Judaism took over as one indivisible body of sacred
teachings both the early and the later literature in which these varying
conceptions of God were enshrined; the Law was accepted as the guiding
rule of life, the ritual of ceremony and sacrifice was treasured as a holy
memory, and as a memory not contradictory of the prophetic exaltation of
inward religion but as consistent with that exaltation, as interpreting
it, as but another aspect of Micah's enunciation of the demands of God:
'What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?'
Judaism, in short, included for the Jew all that had gone before. But
for St. Paul's attitude of hostility to the Law, but for the deep-seated
conviction that the Pauline Christianity was a denial of the Jewish
monotheism, the Jew might have accepted much of the teaching of Jesus as
an integral part of Judaism. In the realm of ideas which he conceived as
belonging to his tradition the Jew was not logical; he did not pick and
choose; he absorbed the whole. In the Jewish theology of al ages we find
the most obvious contradictions. There was no attempt at reconciliation
of such contradictions; they were juxtaposed in a mechanical mixture,
there was no chemical compound. The Jew was always a man of moods, and
his religion responded to those varying phases of feeling and belief
and action. Hence such varying judgments have been formed of him and his
religion. If, after the mediaeval philosophy had attempted to systematise
Judaism, the religion remained unsystematic, it is easy to understand
that in the earlier centuries of the Christian Era contradictions
between past and present, between different strata of religious thought,
caused no trouble to the Jew so long as those contradictions could be
fitted into his general scheme of life. Though he was the product of
development, development was an idea foreign to his conception of the
ways of God with man. And to this extent he was right. For though men's
ideas of God change, God Himself is changeless. The Jew transferred the
changelessness of God to men's changing ideas about him. With childlike
naivete he accepted al , he adopted al , and he syncretised it all as best
he could into the loose system on which Pharisaism grafted itself. The
legacy of the past thus was the past.
One element in the legacy was negative. The Temple and the Sacrificial
system were gone for ever. That this must have powerfully affected
Judaism goes without saying. Synagogue replaced Temple, prayer assumed
the function of sacrifice, penitence and not the blood of bul s supplied
the ritual of atonement. Events had prepared the way for this change and
had prevented it attaining the character of an upheaval. For synagogues
had grown up al over the land soon after the fifth century B.C.; regular
services of prayer with instruction in the Scriptures had been established
long before the Christian Era; the inward atonement had been preferred
to, or at least associated with, the outward rite before the outward
rite was torn away. It may be that, as Professor Burkitt has suggested,
the awful experiences of the fal of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
Temple produced within Pharisaism a moral reformation which drove the Jew
within and thus spiritualised Judaism. For undoubtedly the Pharisee of the
Gospels is by no means the Pharisee as we meet him in the Jewish books.
There was always a latent power and tendency in Judaism towards inward
religion; and it may be that this power was intensified, this tendency
encouraged, by the loss of Temple and its Sacrificial rites.
But though the Temple had gone the Covenant remained. Not so much in
name as in essence. We do not hear much of the Covenant in the Rabbinic
books, but its spirit pervades Judaism. Of al the legacy of the past
the Covenant was the most inspiring element. Beginning with Abraham, the
Covenant established a special relation between God and Abraham's seed. 'I
have known him, that he may command his children and his household after
him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and
judgment' (Gen. xvi i. 19). Of this Covenant, the outward sign was the
rite of circumcision. Renewed with Moses, and fol owed in traditional
opinion by the Ten Commandments, the Sinaitic Covenant was a further
link in the bond between God and His people. Of this Mosaic Covenant
the outward sign was the Sabbath. It is of no moment for our present
argument whether Abraham and Moses were historical persons or figments
of tradition. A Gamaliel would have as little doubted their reality as
would a St. Paul. And whatever Criticism may be doing with Abraham, it
is coming more and more to see that behind the eighth-century prophets
there must have towered the figure of a, if not of the traditional,
Moses; behind the prophets a, if not the, Law. Be that as it may, to the
Jew of the Christian Era, Abraham and Moses were real and the Covenant
unalterable. By the syncretism which has been already described Jeremiah's
New Covenant was not regarded as new. Nor was it new; it represented
a change of stress, not of contents. When he said (Jer. xxxi. 33),
'This is the covenant which I wil make with the house of Israel, after
those days, saith the Lord; I will put my law in their inward parts, and
in their heart will I write it,' Jeremiah, it has been held, was making
Christianity possible. But he was also making Judaism possible. Here and
nowhere else is to be found the principle which enabled Judaism to survive
the loss of Temple and nationality. And the New Covenant was in no sense
inconsistent with the Old. For not only does Jeremiah proceed to add in
the self-same verse, 'I will be their God, and they wil be my people,'
but the New Covenant is specifical y made with the house of Judah and of
Israel, and it is associated with the permanence of the seed of Israel
as a separate people and with the Divine rebuilding of Jerusalem. The
Jew had no thought of analysing these verses into the words of the true
Jeremiah and those of his editors. The point is that over and above,
in complementary explanation of, the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants with
their external signs, over and above the Call of the Patriarch and the
Theophany of Sinai, was the Jeremian Covenant written in Israel's heart.
The Covenant conferred a distinction and imposed a duty. It was a bond
between a gracious God and a grateful Israel. It dignified history,
for it interpreted history in terms of providence and purpose; it
transfigured virtue by making virtue service; it was the salt of life,
for how could present degradation demoralise, seeing that God was
in it, to fulfil His part of the bond, to hold Israel as His jewel,
though Rome might despise? The Covenant made the Jew self-confident and
arrogant, but these very faults were needed to save him. It was his only
defence against the world's scorn. He forgot that the correlative of the
Covenant was Isaiah's 'Covenant-People'--missionary to the Gentiles and
the World. He relegated his world-mission (which Christianity and Islam
in part gloriously fulfil ed) to a dim Messianic future, and was content
if in his own present he remained faithful to his mission to himself.
Above al , the legacy from the past came to Judaism hallowed and
humanised by al the experience of redemption and suffering which had
marked Israel's course in ages past, and was to mark his course in
ages to come. The Exodus, the Exile, the Maccabean heroism, the Roman
catastrophe; Prophet, Wise Man, Priest and Scribe,--all had left their
trace. Judaism was a religion based on a book and on a tradition; but
it was also a religion based on a unique experience. The book might
be misread, the tradition encumbered, but the experience was eternally
clear and inspiring. It shone through the Roman Diaspora as it afterwards
il uminated the Roman Ghetto, making the present tolerable by the memory
of the past and the hope of the future.