The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah-religion since the time of Jehuda ben Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded scientific philosophy with an unqualified scepticism, and in the _Kuzari_ (1140) refused to it any rôle save that of handmaid of the orthodox theology. This corresponds exactly to the transition from Middle Stoicism to the later form of the Imperial period, and to the extinction of Chinese speculation under the Western Han Dynasty. Still more significant is the figure of Moses Maimonides,[551] who in 1175 collected the entire dogmatic material of Judaism, as something fixed and complete, in a great work of the type of the Chinese _Li-ki_, entirely regardless of whether the particular items still retained any meaning or not.[552] Neither in this period nor in any other is Judaism unique in religious history, though from the view-point that the Western Culture has taken up on its own ground, it may seem so. Nor is it peculiar to Jewry that, unperceived by those who bear it, its name is for ever changing in meaning, for the same has happened, step by step, in the Persian story.

In their “Merovingian” period--approximately the last five centuries before the birth of Christ--both Jewry and Persia evolve from tribal groups into nations of Magian cast, without land, without unity of origin, and (even so soon) with the characteristic ghetto mode of life that endures unchanged to-day for the Jews of Brooklyn and the Parsees of Bombay alike.

In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this landless Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This was the Jewish Age of Chivalry and its “Gothic” blossoming-time of religious creative-force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also primitive Christianity (which was not cast off till after Trajan’s and Hadrian’s time) are creations of this nation. It is well known that in those days the Jews were peasants, artisans, and dwellers in little towns, and “big business” was in the hands of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans--that is, members of the Classical world.

About 500[553] begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are accustomed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of Spain’s age of glory. The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city-economics and city-science. Tarragona, Toledo, and Granada are predominantly Jewish cities. Jews constitute an essential element in Moorish high society. Their finished forms, their _esprit_, their knightliness, amazed the Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but the diplomacy also, and the war-management and the administration of the Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish aristocracy, which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic. As once in Arabia there had been a Jewish _Minnesang_, so now here there was a high literature of enlightened science. It was under the guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by the hand of Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X’s new work on the planets was prepared (_c._ 1250);[554] in other words, it was an achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world-thought.[555] But Spain and Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of the Jewish Consensus, and even this Consensus itself had not merely a worldly but also (and predominantly) a spiritual significance. In it, too, there occurred a Puritan movement, which rejected the Talmud and tried to get back to the pure Torah. The community of the Qaraites, preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in northern Syria, the selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the Paulician iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam--three Magian tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like the Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy and enlightenment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova and Fez to southern Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared also--an outcome of “Jewish Sufism,” and suggestive in places of Swedenborg--the _chef-d’œuvre_ of rational mysticism, the Yesirah, germane in its Kabbalistic root-ideas to Byzantine image-symbolism and the contemporary magic of Greek “second-degree Christianity,” and equally so to the folk-religion of Islam.

But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world lived in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming) into existence around monasteries and market-places were still many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew’s superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness in “money-thinking.” There was mutual hate and contempt, due not to race-distinction, but to _difference of phase_. Into all the hamlets and country towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially megalopolitan--proletarian--ghettos. The _Judengasse_ is a thousand years in advance of the Gothic town. Just so, in Jesus’s days, the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on the Lake of Genesareth.

But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the idea of a fatherland, and the landless “Consensus,” which was cemented, not by deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly metaphysical impulse--an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its simplest and directest form--appeared to them as something uncanny and incomprehensible. It was in this period that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz--in 1000 the seat of the most important Talmudic seminary of the West--or of Salerno betook himself to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion lay the very idea of the Magian nation[556]--although the contemporary West was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one. This State had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own public life,[557] and despised the surrounding world of the host-peoples as a sort of outland; and it was a veritable treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and Uriel Acosta--an event of which these host-peoples could not possibly grasp the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasidim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.

Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to the open land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain. There were no more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes--the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto--and a coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for _all_ Magian nations have been in this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European-American world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger _milieu_--witness the Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of _the Romans in the Early Arabian World_. In the last instance, indeed, the conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for the “Jews” of those days were the Romans, and the Armæan felt for them an apocalyptic hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semitism. The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated population of Asia Minor, was a veritable _pogrom_.

Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture itself caught up with the Civilization and the “difference of age,” expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the silly catchwords “Aryan” and “Semite” that have been borrowed from philology. The “Aryan” Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense _mission_, and up to well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions and secessions _en masse_.[558] One part of Eastern Jewry conforms in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus, another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more than any other distinction is the difference _between the race-ideal of the Gothic springtime_,[559] which has bred its human type, and that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions--to which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being “different” is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the individual possesses. It is _want_ of race, and nothing else, that makes intellectuals--philosophers, doctrinaires, Utopists--incapable of understanding the depth of this metaphysical hatred, which is the beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable dissonance, a hatred that may become tragic for both, the same hatred as has dominated the Indian Culture in setting the Indian of race against the Sudra. During the Gothic age this difference is deep and religious, and the object of hatred is the Consensus as religion; only with the beginning of the Western Civilization does it become materialist, and begin to attack Jewry on its intellectual and business sides, on which the West suddenly finds itself confronted by an even challenger.

But the deepest element of separation and bitterness has been one of which the full tragedy has been least understood. While Western man, from the days of the Saxon emperors to the present, has (in the most significant sense of the words) _lived_ his history, and lived it with a consciousness of it that no other Culture can parallel, the Jewish Consensus ceased to have a history at all.[560] Its problems were solved, its inner form was complete, conclusive, and unalterable. For it, as for Islam, the Greek Church, and the Parsees, centuries ceased to mean anything, and consequently no one belonging inwardly to the Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history and destiny take decisive turns--the beginning of the Crusades, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation, and each and every turning-point in the existence of the several peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies thirty generations back. Outside him history on the grand style flowed on and past. Epochs succeeded to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human changes, but in the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still. And even when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune--as happened in so many countries in 1914--he lived these experiences, not really as something _his own_, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them as an interested spectator, and hence it is just the deepest meanings of the struggle that must ever remain hidden from him. A Jewish cavalry-general fought in the Thirty Years’ War (he lies buried in the old Jewish cemetery at Prague[561])--but what did the ideas of Luther or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines--near relatives of the Jews--comprehend of the Crusades? Such things are among the tragic necessities of the higher history that consists in the life-courses of individual Cultures, and often have they repeated themselves. The Romans, then an ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what was at issue for the Jews in the trial of Jesus or the rising of Barcochebas.[562] The European-American world has displayed a complete incomprehension of the fellah-revolutions of Turkey (1908) and China (1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples, and consequently, even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in the one, the Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and, therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed up, nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture can be a spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the past, but he can never be a statesman, a man who feels the future working in him. If he does not possess the material power to enable him to act in the cadre of his own Culture, ignoring or manipulating those of the alien (which, of course, may occur, as with the Romans in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless in the midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected the life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament, and democracy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures is ridiculous and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows the history of the present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian Civilization spread over continents and oceans) with the fundamental feelings of Magian mankind, even when he himself is firmly convinced of the Western character of his thought.

As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically unlimited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the _Faustian_ ideas of fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy, constitution, a return from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore burdensome and meaningless) to him towards forms matching with his own nature. Hence the word “international,” whether it be coupled with socialism, pacificism, or capitalism, can excite him to enthusiasm, but what he hears in that word is _the essence of his landless and boundless Consensus_. While for the European-American democracy constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards the Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously realizes) the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself. Even when the force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life of his host-people exercises an outward attraction upon him to the point of an induced patriotism, yet the party that he supports is always that of which the aims are most nearly comparable with the Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in England (like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same misunderstanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese reformers as kindred spirits--that is, as “constitutionalists.” If there is inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness, his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What the Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts of its own type where it has had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitableness of this reciprocal misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech, leads both sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions occur.[563]

This applies also, and above all, to the religiousness of the Faustian world, which feels itself to be threatened, hated, and undermined by an alien metaphysic in its midst. From the reforms of Hugh of Cluny and St. Bernard and the Lateran Council of 1215 to Luther, Calvin, and Puritanism and thence to the Age of Enlightenment, what a tide flowed through our waking-consciousness, when for the Jewish religion history had long ceased altogether! Within the West-European Consensus we see Joseph Qaro in his _Schulehan Arukh_ (1565) restating the Maimonides material in another form, and this could equally well have been done in 1400 or 1800, or for that matter not at all. In the fixity of modern Islam of Byzantine Christianity since the Crusades (and, equally, of the life of Late China and of Late Egypt) all is formal and rolled even, not only the food-prohibitions, the prayer-runes, the phylacteries, but also the Talmudic casuistry, which is fundamentally the same as that applied for centuries to the Vendidad in Bombay and the Koran in Cairo. The mysticism, too, of Jewry (which is _pure Sufism_) has remained, like that of Islam, unaltered since the Crusades; and in the last centuries it has produced three more saints in the sense of Oriental Sufism--though to recognize them as such we have to see through a colour-wash of Western thought-forms. Spinoza, with his thinking in substances instead of forces and his thoroughly Magian dualism, is entirely comparable with the last stragglers of Islamic philosophy such as Murtada and Shirazi. He makes use of the notions of his Western Baroque armoury, living himself into mode of imagination of that _milieu_ so thoroughly as to deceive even himself, but below the surface movements of his soul he remains the unchanged descendant of Maimonides and Avicenna and Talmudic “_more geometrico_” methodology. In Baal Shem, the founder of the Hasidim sect (born in Volhynia about 1698), a true Messiah arose. His wanderings through the world of the Polish ghettos teaching and performing miracles are comparable only with the story of primitive Christianity;[564] here was a movement that had its sources in ancient currents of Magian, Kabbalistic mysticism, that gripped a large part of Eastern Jewry and was undoubtedly a potent fact in the religious history of the Arabian Culture; and yet, running its course as it did in the midst of an alien mankind, it passed practically unnoticed by it. The peaceful battle that Baal Shem waged for God-immanent against the Talmudic pharisees of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth of legends that were rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his disciples--all this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought-processes of Hasidist writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so also is the ritual. In the excitement of the service some fall into convulsions and others begin to dance like the dervishes of Islam.[565] The original teaching of Baal Shem was developed by one of the disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a belief in successive divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity brought salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more with the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the “Light of the Prophet” takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon--of whom a remarkable autobiography exists--stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for Talmudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism is a purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever presented by a Late religiousness.[566] Something of the sort Russians may be able to experience, but neither the Classical nor the Faustian soul is capable of it.

In the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century the Western Culture in turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly, accessible to the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus dumped into the middle of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the remote past of a long-expired Sephardic life-current, were inevitably stirred by echo-feelings, but these echoes were of the _critical and negative side only_, and the tragically unnatural outcome was that a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic progress was swept into the big movement of the host-peoples, which it shook, loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for the Faustian spirit, the Enlightenment was a step forward along its own road--a step over débris, no doubt, but still affirmative at bottom--whereas for Jewry it was destruction and nothing else, the demolition of an alien structure that it did not understand. And this is why we so often see the spectacle--paralleled by the case of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian _milieu_, and by modern Americans in China--of enlightenment, pushed to the point of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien religion, while the fellah-practices of its own folk go on wholly unaffected. There are Socialists who superficially--and yet quite sincerely--combat every sort of religion, and yet in their own case follow the food-prohibitions and routine prayers and phylacteries with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward lapse from the Consensus qua creed--the spectacle that is presented to us by the Indian student who, after an English university-training in Locke and Mill, acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and Western faiths alike and must himself be crushed under the ruins of both. Since the Napoleonic era the old-civilized Consensus has mingled unwelcome with the new-civilized Western “society” of the cities and has taken their economic and scientific methods into use with the cool superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese, also a very old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success. Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear-guard of the Babylonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the Classical Culture was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by surrendering to Late Hellenism[567]--petrified in an end-state in all that concerned religion and art, but far superior to the Greeks and Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.

To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing--not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (_vis-à-vis_ the American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny of Jewry--at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is another problem)--will be accomplished.

Islam has _soil_ under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself.[568] The relic of the Byzantine nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their own land. The relic of the Parsees in India dwells in the midst of the stiffened forms of a yet older and more fellahized Civilization and is thereby secured in its footing. But the West-European-American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghetto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not _in_ the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.