some maxims of these teachers on other subjects as well, because they will give you an idea of what Jewish ethical doctrine generally was at a time when morality was not the world's strong point, when, moreover, persecution was doing its best to crush out every noble aspiration from the Jewish soul.

The following is from a work of the eleventh century:1 "Speak the truth; be modest; live on the coarsest fare rather than be dependent on others. Shun evil companions; be not like the flies which swarm in foul places. Rejoice not when thine enemy falls; be not both witness and judge; avoid anger, the heritage of fools." The following maxims are two centuries later: "No crown surpasses humility, no monument a good name, no gain the performance of duty. The good man leads others in the right path, loves his neighbour, gives his charity in secret, does right from pure motives and for God's sake; he indulges in no idle talk, he is free from the lust of the eye; he is reviled yet answers not. He shuts his heart against all envy save that excited by another's virtues; he makes the righteous his example; he deceives no one by word or deed." A book' belonging to nearly the same age contains these aphorisms: "Serve not thy Maker because thou hopest for Paradise, but from pure love of Him and His commands. Give thy life for His service, like a soldier in battle. Deceive no one, neither Jew nor Gentile; quarrel with no one, whatever his creed. If one would borrow of thee, and thou hast doubts of being repaid, do not lie, saying thou hast no money. On him that oppresses the poor or buys

stolen goods, no blessing rests. If a murderer would take refuge with thee, consent not to hide him, yea, though he be a Jew. Honour the virtuous Gentile, not the irreligious Israelite. In morals Jew and Christian, as a rule, are alike. On those that clip the coin, on usurers, on such | as have false weights and measures, or who are in any wise dishonest in business, there is no blessing. The worst failing is ingratitude; it must not be shown even to the brute. More guilty even than those who are cruel to animals are the employers that ill-treat their servants. Pay thy debts before thou givest alms. If one has cheated or injured thee in any way, let not revenge tempt thee to do the same to him." Here again are a few sayings chosen almost at random from various writers: "The alms given in health are gold; in illness, silver; left by will, copper." "Put no one to the blush in public; misuse thy power against no man." "Be ware of drunkenness, and thou wilt not have to repent of shameful behaviour."E "A man's virtues are pearls, and the thread on which they are strung is the fear of God; break the thread, and the pearls are lost one by one. But without morality there can be no real performance of religious duty." And thus we come back to our starting-point: Moral excellence is the essence of religion.

1 "Orchot Chayim," by R. Elieser b. Isaac. "Rokeach," by R. Elasar, of Worms.

"Sepher Chassidim."

*All the foregoing extracts are translated from Zunz: "Zur Geschichte und Literatur."

That Judaism should so persistently have taught this grand truth becomes all the more remarkable when it is remembered that the history of the Jew is an almost unbroken record of suffering. The world seems to have conspired to thrust him back by relentless persecution into the arms of formalism, to restrict the field for the play of his higher instincts to the external rites of religion. Shut out for many a weary century from intercourse with all men save the members of his own race, imprisoned in Ghettos, hunted down, hated, and reviled, it would have been no marvel if he had fixed his thoughts exclusively on the ceremonialism of the "Scribes and the Pharisees," if he had shown no feeling whatever for a lofty ethical ideal, nay, if he had nursed in his heart and practised in his life, sentiments of positive malevolence towards the world that so deeply wronged him. Well, indeed, might he have pleaded human nature as his justification. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is ? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ? " 1

But Shylock is "the Jew that Shakespeare drew." He is not the Jew of real life, even in the Middle Ages, stained as their story is with the hot tears, nay, the very heart's blood, of the martyred race. The medieval Jew did not take vengeance on his cruel foes. Nay, more than this, with a sublime magnanimity which rivals in grandeur, and far surpasses in duration, the noble patience ascribed to Jesus on the Cross, he could actually preach and practise the widest benevolence towards his oppressors. Throughout the Middle Ages, when Jews were daily plundered and tortured and done to death "for the glory of God," not a word was breathed against the morality of the victims. They suffered because they were heretics, because they would not juggle with their conscience, and profess a belief that did not live in their souls. The venerable Dr. Döllinger, a critic whose fairness is beyond cavil, has pointed this out. But Jewish ethics soared to still nobler heights. The Jew preserved his integrity in spite of his suffering; but more than this, he forgave-ay, even blessed-its authors. The Jews hunted out of Spain in 1492, were in turn cruelly expelled from Portugal. Some took refuge on the African coast. Eighty years later the descendants of the men who had committed or allowed these enormities were defeated in Africa, whither they had been led by their king, Don Sebastian. Those who were not slain were offered as slaves at Fez to the descendants of the Jewish exiles from Portugal. "The humbled Portuguese nobles," the historian narrates, were comforted when their purchasers proved to be Jews, for they knew that they had

1 Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, act iii., scene 1.

66

"The Jews in Europe," an Address delivered before the Academy of Sciences in Munich, July, 1881.

humane hearts." 1 It is in such incidents that the climax of Jewish morality is reached. If the lifelong anguish of Israel excites the most pro found pity, only admiration can be yielded to that greatness of soul, which is the fairest gem in his crown of martyrdom.

1 Graetz: "Geschichte der Juden," vol. viii. p. 379.

709

SPINOZA.

BY SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK.

SOME twelve years ago I was concerned in a movement for obtaining adherents in this country towards the erection of a monument to Benedict Spinoza at the Hague, where he spent the latter years of his life; and I received a good many interesting letters on that occasion from various persons. One of the shortest, and also one of the most interesting, was from a great man of letters whom this country has lately lost, Matthew Arnold. "After all," he said, "it seems rather absurd to treat Benedict Spinoza as an eminent Dutchman; the right thing to do would be to build him a statue and altar at the top of Pisgah, and to sacrifice on it seven bullocks like Louis Veuillot and seven rams like." I must not say to whom the seven rams were likened, for the name was that of a dignitary of the Church of England still living.

There is another modern testimony I should like to cite, as showing that Spinoza was by no means merely an eminent systematic philosopher. It is the testimony of Flaubert, one of the greatest of recent French writers. Flaubert, writing in 1872 to Georges Sand, tells her what he had been doing lately, and he says, amongst other things:

"I shall get back to work on my "St. Anthony" in a week's time, when I have done with Kant and Hegel, two great men who make me feel stupid. When I take leave of them I fall to, like one famished, on my old Spinoza, who is worth them all. What genius! What a piece of work is his Ethics!"

This is useful for two purposes: to show that Flaubert was not merely a frivolous French novelist; and that in modern France the best people do not find Spinoza by any means obsolete.

It would be altogether out of place to enter here at length on the facts of Spinoza's life, but it may be well to remind you very shortly of what was his origin, and where and how he lived. Spinoza belonged to a family of Spanish Jews, one of the many families driven into exile by the revival of persecution against the Jews which took place in the Spanish Peninsula towards the end of the sixteenth century. It is a matter of general history how the Spaniards, having attained a very great place in the world, set themselves systematically to lose it by driving out of the gountry nearly all the best elements within it. Not content with having

1 See Dr. Martineau's Study of Spinoza, chap. i.

reconquered the part of Spain which had been occupied by the Arabs, they expelled first the Arabs and then the Jews, and having reduced Spain to an admirable standard of orthodoxy, they proceeded to make Spain what she is now, a third-rate power, with no literature to speak of, and with absolutely no influence on European thought. So Spain ultimately had her reward. The immediate effect was that a considerable number of Spanish and Portuguese Jews migrated to the Netherlands-at that time the only country in Europe where free thought could be said really to exist, or where a colony of Jews could hope to settle with tolerable freedom from disturbance. Even there it was an experiment. However, the experiment succeeded. The Israelite colony soon attracted more settlers when it was found that they were sure of an asylum. They became prosperous, and you may see amongst the Rembrandts in the National Gallery his admirable portraits of some of the great Jewish merchants of his own time. In one of these Jewish families of Amsterdam Spinoza was born in the winter of 1632. At a very early age he became learned in the law of his people, and in the theology of the Rabbis, and showed symptoms of beginning to think for himself. The stories that are told of this part of his life are very fragmentary, and not altogether consistent, and we are left a great deal to conjecture as to what really took place. Something he certainly did, perhaps in the way of trying to form a circle of young men like-minded with himself, which caused the authorities of the synagogue to treat him as a dangerous person. It was not merely a matter of specu lative orthodoxy; the Jewish synagogue existed wholly on sufferance in Amsterdam. The leaders of the synagogue evidently thought that they were tolerated only on condition of being as orthodox as it was possible for Jews to be, and that if any sort of heterodoxy were suffered amongst them they might lose the sufferance on which they had so far counted As men of business, they may well have thought rightly enough. result was that Spinoza received strong hints to keep his opinions to himself. It seems he even received offers of substantial reward on those terms. But he was found inflexible, and at length was solemnly excommunicated. This was in 1650, when he was not quite twenty-four years of age.

The

He took the excommunication as a natural and inevitable consequence of his resolution, and having been in this way shut out from obtaining, as he easily might have done, a position of prosperity and honour among his own people, he betook himself to making a living by grinding glasses for optical instruments. His work, it appears, was of special excellence In the year 1670 he removed to the Hague, where he completed his principal works; his greatest work, the Ethics, was in hand, as we know from his letters, during the greater part of his active life, but was printed only after his death.

In 1663 he had a tempting offer of the Chair of Philosophy at Heide berg, and the conditions were such as appeared to give him great liberty