against the Talmudic pharisees of his time, his Christlikc 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.[1] 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.[2] 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
