THE Ghetto* has its reasons that reason often fails to understand. For nearly fifteen hundred years it had no attitude to Christianity and to its founder. The name of Jesus was never mentioned in the Ghetto. In early Rabbinic literature He is sometimes referred to as “The Man” without mentioning His name, and later the learned rabbis would refer to Him as the Nazarene: that, too, occurred but very seldom. In all those fifteen hundred years not a line was written by a representative Jew on Jesus, either in Hebrew or in any other language. From time to time Jewish heretics would voice a strong protest against this attitude toward the Founder of Christianity. Sanchez, the French heretic of the sixteenth century and the actual founder of French agnosticism, as well as Spinoza in the seventeenth century, had something to say about Jesus, but since both were “outsiders” their remarks made no impression on the Jews. In the eighteenth century, the famous German theologian, Lavater, tried to induce Moses Mendelssohn to change his own attitude to the Founder of Christianity and to help bring about a change of attitude on the part of the Jewish masses, but his efforts were in vain. Throughout the nineteenth century, the same conditions obtained. The believers clung to the old belief and the non-believers of the type of Heine, Boerne, Saphir, and many other illustrious Jews who emerged from the Ghetto, to attain worldwide fame as poets and writers, took a somewhat cynical attitude to religion altogether. The enlightened Western European few stood under the spell of French Encyclopedists until a few decades ago. This, of course, loosened the Jewish morale and led to many baptisms. However, the fact is that the more the Jews in Western Europe have adopted Christianity in the course of the nineteenth century—and their number is
This article appeared in the “Jewish Tribune” (New York), and was reprinted in the July issue of “The Dawn” under the title, “The Galilean and the Ghetto,” and is from the pen of Dr S. M. Melamed. It will give our readers some idea of the change of attitude of the Jews towards the Lord Jesus. That attitude is still very far short of the allegiance He claims and shall yet receive from them, but it is an attitude which shows an extraordinary change on their part. Ghetto is the Jews’ quarters in a city.—Editor.
supposed to be about two hundred thousand—the more have the Jews of all shades of opinion clung to the old tradition simply to ignore such a world historic phenomenon as the figure of Jesus. This tradition was based not only on religious but on general historical grounds. That it is not a religious principle with the Jew not to mention the name of Jesus can be seen from the fact that the names of Mohammed and Buddha are often mentioned and discussed even by the most pious Jews. The strained relations between the Synagogue and the Church throughout the Middle Ages have largely contributed toward this Jewish state of mind. Finally, one must bear in mind that just because both religions are so closely related to one another, and just because they have the same landscape as their background, the abyss separating them from one another is unbridgeable.
However, this old, firm Jewish tradition is now melting away like the snow in the sun. To-day Jesus is not only discussed by liberal Jews, but He is a topic of discussion even in the heart of the Ghetto. Only fifteen years ago one of the most learned Hebrew scholars of his time, the late S. I. Hurwitz, editor of a philosophical Hebrew quarterly, was nearly lynched for having published an essay in his journal, in which he took a positive attitude toward the figure of Jesus. Another Hebrew writer, by the name of Lazar, accused him of missionary machinations, and a public trial was held in the city of Lemberg to determine whether or not S. I. Hurwitz acted in good faith. The famous Jewish historian, Dr Simon Bernfeld, of Berlin, was the main witness for the defence. Of course, Hurwitz was acquitted, but the very fact that such an accusation could be levelled against him goes to prove how strongly the tradition referred to was rooted in Jewish life. To-day such an occurrence would be impossible, because nothing is left of that old tradition. The new attitude towards Jesus dates back to the pogrom year of 1906. The effects of these pogroms following the breakdown of the revolutionary energies in Russia were the same upon the Ghetto as those following the butcheries of the Romans in Palestine in the decades preceding the appearance of Jesus. Free thinkers of yesterday became God-Seekers overnight, and a religious revival swept the Eastern Ghetto. Their hopes for freedom shattered, their expectation for redemption gone, they turned toward God. In those years the younger generation of Jewish writers and poets in Eastern Europe discovered the figure of Jesus, and since those
days Jesus is a topic of discussion in the Ghetto. In the New York Ghetto two well-known Yiddish writers have only recently published remarkable treatises dealing with the Jesus problem, one by S. Setzer and one by Dr Chaim Zhitlowsky. Setzer, who is an historian by profession, represents the German point of view: that the figure of Jesus is mythical, and that the real founder of Christianity was St Paul. Dr Chaim Zhitlowsky, who is more liberal and, by the way, less religious, believes in the historicity of Jesus and demands that the Jews revise their attitude to Him and consider Him one of their great prophets. Zhitlowsky’s treatise has created a veritable stir in the New York Ghetto, not because he defends his thesis with vigour, but because of his opinion that the traditional Jewish attitude toward Jesus was based on a miscarriage of justice, and he demands that the historical crime be re-investigated and adjudged with impartiality. At present there circulates in the New York Ghetto a book dealing with the life of Jesus, entitled “Jesus as Others Saw Him.” The author of the book is the late Joseph Jacobs, one of the finest literary minds of American Jewry during the last three decades. In this book is told the life story of the Founder of the Christian religion in the form of a series of epistles giving a contemporary picture of the time in which He lived and suffered, and purporting to have been addressed in the year 54 A.D. to Aglaophonos, a Greek physician, by a famous Jewish scribe of Alexandria. The liberal-minded author wanted the Jewish reader to see the figure of Jesus as the enlightened ancients saw Him, without bias or prejudice. The reception of this peculiar and unique book by the Ghetto would go to show that the name of Jesus is no longer anathema to its dwellers.
But nothing is more indicative of the new view of the Ghetto on Jesus than the fact that the foremost orthodox Hebrew scholar of our time, Dr Joseph Klausner, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has published in the city of Jerusalem a voluminous book dealing with the life of Jesus. The book, written in Hebrew (recently translated into English) and, according to all critics, Jewish and Gentile, a scholarly work of the first magnitude, has created a veritable sensation throughout the Ghetto all over the world. It happens for the first time in nineteen hundred years that a rabbinical Jew has had the courage to discuss the life of Jesus without prejudice, and that instead of continuing the old Jewish tradition he makes an end of it, and goes a step further by representing the Founder
of Christianity as the embodiment of religious and ethical idealism. He does not propose that the Jews accept Jesus as Christ, but he does propose that they accept Him as a great ethical personality. The revolutionary character of this proposal can only be understood and appreciated when one realises that it was made in Jerusalem by the foremost orthodox Jewish scholar of our time, and that innumerable Jewish generations came and went without pronouncing the name of Jesus.
Needless to say, that from the point of view of contemporary religious history, this is an event of the first magnitude. Whatever the attitude of the Ghetto to Jesus will be, the name of Jesus will no longer be anathema and His personality and accomplishments will henceforth be freely discussed in the most orthodox Jewish circles. Dr Joseph Klausner has broken the ice and from now on new thought-currents will move freely.
It is of absorbing interest to watch how the learned element in the Ghetto go about in explaining to the Jews the personality of Jesus. Dr Klausner, for instance, uses the very latest methods of historical writing to establish the historicity of Jesus and the part He played in the spiritual life of the people. All the moving events of the time, all the struggles and conflicts of the various groups and sects are clearly described, and the entire moral, religious, and political background of Jesus can be seen with great clarity. He collected all the sources of the Talmud, the Rabbinic and the non-Jewish literature relative to the life of Jesus, compared them critically, and established many facts which were contested by a great many modern Jesus biographers. He pitilessly destroys the myth that Jesus was a myth only. After establishing His historic identity beyond a shadow of a doubt, he gives a dispassionate description of His life and martyrdom. But Doctor Klausner goes one step further. He tells his readers that they are all wrong in taking a negative or indifferent attitude to Jesus, for His character and His indisputable idealism deserve a positive valuation. Though this new Jewish attitude cannot possibly be that of an orthodox Christian, it should be the perspective of a people that respects the heroic deeds of its sons.
But at present the Ghetto is finding an approach to Jesus, and this, to my thinking, is one of the outstanding phenomena of our time.