Page:B20442294.djvu/341

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JUDAISM
313

from that quarter as from over-sensitive Judaism itself. Above all, the Aryan desires that the Jew should justify Antisemitism by being baptized. But the danger of this outward acknowledgment of his inward struggles need not trouble the Jew who wishes for liberty within him. He will long to reach the holy baptism of the Spirit, of which that of the body is but the outward symbol.

To reach so important and useful a result as what Jewishness and Judaism really are, would be to solve one of the most difficult problems; Judaism is a much deeper riddle than the many Antisemites believe, and in very truth a certain darkness will always enshroud it. Even the parallel with woman will soon fail us, though now and then it may help us further.

In Christians pride and humility, in Jews haughtiness and cringing, are ever at strife; in the former self-consciousness and contrition, in the latter arrogance and bigotry. In the total lack of humility of the Jew lies his failure to grasp the idea of grace. From his slavish disposition springs his heteronomous code of ethics, the "Decalogue," the most immoral book of laws in the universe, which enjoins on obedient followers, submission to the powerful will of an exterior influence, with the reward of earthly well-being and the conquest of the world. His relations with Jehovah, the abstract Deity, whom he slavishly fears, whose name he never dares to pronounce, characterise the Jew; he, like the woman, requires the rule of an exterior authority. According to the definition of Schopenhauer, the word 'God' indicates a man who made the world. This certainly is a true likeness of the God of the Jew. Of the divine in man, of "the God who in my bosom dwells," the true Jew knows nothing; for what Christ and Plato, Eckhard and Paul, Goethe and Kant, the priests of the Vedas, Fechner, and every Aryan have meant by divine, for what the saying, "I am with you always even to the end of the world"—for the meaning of all these the Jew remains without understanding. For the God in man is the human soul, and the absolute Jew is devoid of a soul.