The B'nai B'rith magazine · 1927-07-01 · 10 (7.1927) · p. Seite 426

Versatile Pen By Victor Emanuel Reichert A[Review of "I, The Jew/' by Maurice Samuel, (Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York, 1927) R. MAURICE SAMUEL startled the world a few years ago by shouting a little harshly "You Gentiles" while pointing a menacing finger at it, but now, like old Stylites, he plants himself patiently upon his tall pillar, a martyr to "rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow," crying aloud: "Show me the man who hath suffer'd more than I." Turn, for proof of -this, to "I, The Jew." The fiery jacket of the book at once sommersaults into your face. There is a bit of circus nostalgia about the first half of this evolution of faith of Mr. Samuel. It is not easy reading. Perhaps that is my prejudice. But Mr. Samuel reminds me too much of the jugglers in Barnum that I used to watch when I was a little grasshopper. They always made me very nervous. I was afraid that they would drop something, spoil their act, and have to retire hastily, crimsonfaced. I find it hard to listen in reverence while Mr. Samuel discourses so allusively on biology, chemistry, mathematics, sociology, physics, history, psychology, anthropology, education, religion, philosophy, art, astronomy, photography, bacteriology, philology. I'm sure, like grotesque Punchinello, I've dropped some of those vexatious balls. Then there are those terrifying footnotes with their Italicised compounded German words. It requires a conscience to go through so much slaughter and come up with one's head "bloody but unbowed." You have to have the kind of glorious faith that Henley urges that no matter how charged with punishment the scroll, you are indeed "the master of your fate and the captain of your soul." Never before did I so compellingly realize the sturdy value of wading through the literary ventures of university Freshmen with the mud of the Kentucky hills still on their heels. When we reach page 159, the atmosphere clears. Book II, covering the last hundred and sixteen pages, is infinitely better. It is really too bad that one cannot read this book in good Jewish fashion from right to left. There is poetry and passion here: "Late one night an intermittent glimmer rose below the rim of the faintest stars, ahead of us and to the left, and grew slowly into the regular, alternating flash of a lighthouse. It was Cape St. Vincent, the furthest Atlantic outpost of the Iberian peninsula, known to the ancient Greeks as the Hesperides, the lands of the sunset, to the Hebrews as Sephared, and to us as Spain and Portugal. In the full darkness there was nothing visible but the circling light, which is set there as a warning to ships, but which for me, there and then, shone like a memorial and a sign. For I thought then that Sephared was sunk in the sea, and I remembered the story of hope and disillusionment, of momentary splendor and swift decline, the story which is wholly Spain's and partly ours. All that is strange and stirring and beautiful in the bewildering history of our exile is typified for me in Spain, that double symbol of glory and decay. It was a gallant world we set our hopes on once, made our own, gave our love to—a love which survives to this day to shame the memory of the bitter zealots who, in their little day, drove us forth. Along the shores of the Levant, among inland cities of Greece and Turkey, and even in far-off tumultuous America, the descendants of the despised infidel still speak the tongue of Ferdinand and Isabella, and mothers sing to their children in the language of Torquemada. By this place the spirit had passed hundreds of years ago, here nested a while, to be driven abroad again, still unconquerable. From the first rank—perhaps from the first place—among the nations, Sephared has declined to a subordinate station, and gives no evidence of rising again. The unquenchable vigor of the Jew, outliving the spite and brutality of a score of nations, draws eastward again, builds with a spirit as fresh and eager today as it was three thousand years ago." I rejoice in passages such as these where Samuel, with noble poetic fervor, thrills to this theme of his people and mine,—Israel, most imperishing of the peoples of the earth, with roots deep into antiquity and yet with face-forward, finding its strength and its eternal renascence not only in that Eastern strip of memory-hallowed soil but in that quest after an imperishable Ideal which belongs to the soul-soil of the human heart. Caught between the rapacious claws of one empire after another, knowing the iron heel of conquering and ravaging armies, Israel yet endured, persisted on against pitiless, destructive and ruthless odds. Gone are the nations of antiquity with only conjecturing archaeologists to excavate the ruins of a pomp and a glory which has turned to dust. And yet, Israel endures, a miracle of life among the nations. It alone has known the secret of that rebirth which is Nature's precious alchemy. It alone treasured that elusive spirituality which might be expressed but never frozen in a form or institution. Pharaoh sleeps under the silent, deathy Pyramids along the Nile and knows only the cold resurrection of Egyptologists, the curious gaze of museum visitors. But the Jewish people and the Jewish Ideal live on. For God has touched the heart of Israel, it would seem, with an immortality all His own. And who shall dare to believe that it was not the soul rather than the soil which turned our fathers, with an instinct unique in History, from the eternal slumber to which things material are destined to the eternal renascence which is the buoyant mystery of the spirit. "We shall not quarrel here with Mr. Samuel. Certainly he has a responsive emotional nature and when he boards a steamer bound for Eretz Yisrael, his lungs expand and he writes with clarity and vigor. He lifts his eyes to the hills of Judea and he somehow finds strength. Something of the joy of Yehuda Halevi comes over this essentially poetic nature..... "Beautiful of elevation! Joy of the world!" The Voice of Jerusalem has potency! Under its enchantment, Mr. Samuel forgets all about his difficult formulas. 426