Belief is everything. It does not matter if a man does not believe in God; let him believe in atheism. But the Jew believes nothing; he does not believe his own belief; he doubts as to his own doubt. He is never absorbed by his own joy, or engrossed by his own sorrow. He never takes himself in earnest, and so never takes any one else in earnest. He is content to be a Jew, and accepts any disadvantages that come from the fact.
We have now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a centre of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him. His want of desire for permanent landed property and his attachment to movable goods are more than symbolical.
The woman believes in the man, in the man outside her, or in the man from whom she takes her inspiration, and in this fashion can take herself in earnest. The Jew takes nothing seriously; he is frivolous, and jests about anything, about the Christian’s Christianity, the Jew’s baptism. He is neither a true realist nor a true empiricist. Here I must state certain limitations to my agreement with Chamberlain’s conclusions. The Jew is not really a convinced empiricist in the fashion of the English philosophers. The empiricist believes in the possibility of reaching a complete system of knowledge on an empirical basis; he hopes for the perfection of science. The Jew does not really believe in knowledge, nor is he a sceptic, for he doubts his own scepticism. On the other hand, a brooding care hovers over the non-metaphysical system of Avenarius, and even in Ernst Mach’s adherence to relativity there are signs of a deeply reverent attitude. The empiricists must not be accused of Judaism because they are shallow.
The Jew is the impious man in the widest sense. Piety is not something near things nor outside things; it is the groundwork of everything. The Jew has been incorrectly called vulgar, simply because he does not concern himself with metaphysics. All true culture that comes from within, all that a man believes to be true and that so is true for him, depend on reverence. Reverence is not limited to the mystic or the religious man; all science and all scepticism, everything that a man truly believes, have reverence as the fundamental quality. Naturally it displays itself in different ways, in high seriousness and sanctity, in earnestness and enthusiasm. The Jew is never either enthusiastic or indifferent, he is neither ecstatic nor cold. He reaches neither the heights nor the depths. His restraint becomes meagreness, his copiousness becomes bombast. Should he venture into the boundless realms of inspired thought, he seldom reaches beyond pathos. And although he cannot embrace the whole world, he is for ever covetous of it.
Discrimination and generalisation, strength and love, science and poetry, every real and deep emotion of the human heart, have reverence as their essential basis. It is not necessary that faith, as in men of genius, should be in relation only to metaphysical entity; it can extend also to the empirical world and appear fully there, and yet none the less be faith in oneself, in worth, in truth, in the absolute, in God.
As the comprehensive view of religion and piety that I have given may lead to misconstruction, I propose to elucidate it further. True piety is not merely the possession of piety, but also the struggle to possess it; it is found equally in the convinced believer in God (Handel or Fechner), and also in the doubting seeker (Lenau and Dürer); it need not be made obvious to the world (as in the case of Bach), it may display itself only in a reverent attitude (Mozart). Nor is piety necessarily connected with the appearance of a Founder; the ancient Greeks were the most reverent people that have lived, and hence their culture was highest; but their religion had no personal Founder.
Religion is the creation of the all; and all that humanity can be is only through religion. So far from the Jew being religious, as has been assumed, he is profoundly irreligious.
Were there need to elaborate my verdict on the Jews I might point out that the Jews, alone of peoples, do not try to make converts to their faith, and that when converts are made they serve as objects of puzzled ridicule to them. Need I refer to the meaningless formality and the repetitions of Jewish prayer? Need I remind readers that the Jewish religion is a mere historical tradition, a memorial of such incidents as the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, with the consequent thanks of cowards to their Saviour; and that it is no guide to the meaning and conduct of life? The Jew is truly irreligious and furthest of mankind from faith. There is no relation between the Jew himself and the universe; he has none of the heroism of faith, just as he has none of the disaster of absolute unbelief.
It is not, then, mysticism that the Jew is without, as Chamberlain maintains, but reverence. If he were only an honest-minded materialist or a frank evolutionist! He is not a critic, but only critical; he is not a sceptic in the Cartesian sense, not a doubter who sets out from doubt towards truth, but an ironist; as, for instance, to take a conspicuous example, Heine.
What, then, is the Jew if he is nothing that a man can be? What goes on within him if he is utterly without finality, if there is no ground in him which the plumb line of psychology may reach?
The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple. There are always before him two or many possibilities, where the Aryan, although he sees as widely, feels himself limited in his choice. I think that the idea of Judaism consists in this want of reality, this absence of any fundamental relation to the thing-in-and-for-itself. He stands, so to speak, outside reality, without ever entering it. He can never make himself one with anything—never enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without zeal; he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is without simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. Internal multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the Aryan.
It might be urged that the Jewish double-mindedness is modern, and is the result of new knowledge struggling with the old orthodoxy. The education of the Jew, however, only accentuates his natural qualities, and the doubting Jew turns with a renewed zeal to money-making, in which only he can find his standard of value. A curious proof of the absence of simplicity in the mind of the Jew is that he seldom sings, not from bashfulness, but because he does not believe in his own singing. Just as the acuteness of Jews has nothing to do with true power of differentiating, so his shyness about singing or even about speaking in clear positive tones has nothing to do with real reserve. It is a kind of inverted pride; having no true sense of his own worth, he fears being made ridiculous by his singing or speech. The embarrassment of the Jew extends to things which have nothing to do with the real ego.
It has been seen how difficult it is to define the Jew. He has neither severity nor tenderness. He is both tenacious and weak. He is neither king nor leader, slave nor vassal. He has no share in enthusiasm, and yet he has little equanimity. Nothing is self-evident to him, and yet he is astonished at nothing. He has no trace of Lohengrin in him, and none of Telramund. He is ridiculous as a member of a students’ corps and he is equally ridiculous as a “philister.” Because he believes in nothing, he takes refuge in materialism; from this arises his avarice, which is simply an attempt to convince himself that something has a permanent value. And yet he is no real tradesman; what is unreal, insecure in German commerce, is the result of the Jewish speculative interest.
The erotics of the Jew are sentimentalism, and their humour is satire. Perhaps examples may help to explain my interpretation of the Jewish character, and I point readily to Ibsen’s King Hakon in the “Pretenders,” and to his Dr. Stockmann in “The Enemy of the People.” These may make clear what is for ever absent in the Jew. Judaism and Christianity form the greatest possible contrasts; the former is bereft of all true faith and of inner identity, the latter is the highest expression of the highest faith. Christianity is heroism at its highest point; Judaism is the extreme of cowardliness.
Chamberlain has said much that is true and striking as to the fearful awe-struck want of understanding that the Jew displays with
