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.[1]
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;[2] 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
- ↑ Instances — besides that of Mithradates and the Cyprus massacre (p. 198) quoted above — are the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews, Letts, and other alien peoples against Tsarist Russia.
- ↑ P. Levertoff, Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim (1918), pp. 128, et seq.; M. Buber, Die Legende des Baalschem (1907). [Brief account in J. and J. Tharaud, Petite histoire des Juifs, Ch. vii. — Tr.]
