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                           JEWISH PORTRAITS




                           JEWISH PORTRAITS

                                  BY

                              LADY MAGNUS

                               AUTHOR OF
             ‘OUTLINES OF JEWISH HISTORY,’ ‘ABOUT THE JEWS
                       SINCE BIBLE TIMES,’ ETC.

                 _Second Revised and Enlarged Edition_

                                LONDON
                        Published by DAVID NUTT
                             in the STRAND
                                 1897




                        ‘THESE, TO HIS MEMORY’

                        FEBRUARY 7: JANUARY 11




PREFACE


The papers which form this volume have already appeared in the pages of
_Good Words_, _Macmillan’s Magazine_, _The National Review_, and _The
Spectator_, and are reprinted with the very kindly given permission of
the editors. The Frontispiece is reproduced through the kindness of the
proprietors of _Good Words_.

I fancy that there is enough of family likeness, and I hope there is
enough of friendly interest, in these Jewish portraits to justify their
re-appearance in a little gallery to themselves.

KATIE MAGNUS.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

JEHUDAH HALEVI,                                                        1

THE STORY OF A STREET,                                                24

HEINRICH HEINE: A PLEA,                                               32

DANIEL DERONDA AND HIS JEWISH CRITICS,                                57

MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL,                                                  68

CHARITY IN TALMUDIC TIMES,                                            90

MOSES MENDELSSOHN,                                                   109

THE NATIONAL IDEA IN JUDAISM,                                        147

THE STORY OF A FALSE PROPHET,                                        158

NOW AND THEN: A COMPOSITE SKETCH,                                    177




JEWISH PORTRAITS




JEHUDAH HALEVI

PHYSICIAN AND POET


In the far-off days, when religion was not a habit, but an emotion,
there lived a little-known poet who solved the pathetic puzzle of how to
sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Minor poets of the period in
plenty had essayed a like task, leaving a literature the very headings
of which are strange to uninstructed ears. ‘_Piyutim_,’ ‘_Selichoth_’:
what meaning do these words convey to most of us? And yet they stand for
songs of exile, sung by patient generations of men who tell a monotonous
tale of mournful times--

    ‘When ancient griefs
     Are closely veiled
     In recent shrouds,’

as one of the anonymous host expresses it. For the writers were of the
race of the traditional Sweet Singer, and their lot was cast in those
picturesquely disappointing Middle Ages, too close to the chivalry of
the time to appreciate its charm. One pictures these comparatively
cultured pariahs, these gaberdined, degenerate descendants of seers and
prophets, looking out from their ghettoes on a world which, for all the
stir and bustle of barbaric life, was to them as desolate and as bare of
promise of safe resting-place as when the waters covered it, and only
the tops of the mountains appeared. One sees them now as victims, and
now as spectators, but never as actors in that strange show, yet always,
we fancy, realising the barbarism, and with that undoubting faith of
theirs in the ultimate dawning of a perfect day, seeming to regard the
long reign of brute force, of priestcraft, and of ignorance as phases of
misrule, which, like unto manifold others, should pass whilst they would
endure.

    ‘A race that has been tested
     And tried through fire and water,
     Is surely prized by Thee,’

cries out a typical bard, with, perhaps, a too-conscious tone of
martyrdom, and a decided tendency to clutch at the halo. The attitude is
altogether a trifle arrogant and stolid and defiant to superficial
criticism, but yet one for which a deeper insight will find excuses.
The complacency is not quite self-complacency, the pride is impersonal,
and so, though provoking, is pathetic too. Something of the old longing
which, with a sort of satisfied negation, claimed ‘honour and glory,’
‘not unto us,’ but unto ‘the Name,’ seems to find expression again in
the unrhymed and often unrhythmical compositions of these patient poets
of the _Selicha_. Their poetry, perhaps, goes some way towards
explaining their patience, for, undoubtedly, there is no doggedness like
that of men who at