Jewish Portraits. Lady Katie Magnus

The papers which form this volume have already appeared in the pages of Good Words, Macmillan’s Magazine, The National Review, and The Spectator, and are reprinted with the very kindly given permission of the editors. The Frontispiece is reproduced through the kindness of the proprietors of Good Words.

I fancy that there is enough of family likeness, and I hope there is enough of friendly interest, in these Jewish portraits to justify their re-appearance in a little gallery to themselves.

KATIE MAGNUS.

JEWISH PORTRAITS

Table of Contents

JEHUDAH HALEVI
PHYSICIAN AND POET

Table of Contents

In the far-off days, when religion was not a habit, but an emotion, there lived a little-known poet who solved the pathetic puzzle of how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Minor poets of the period in plenty had essayed a like task, leaving a literature the very headings of which are strange to uninstructed ears. ‘Piyutim,’ ‘Selichoth’: what meaning do these words convey to most of us? And yet they stand for songs of exile, sung by patient generations of men who tell a monotonous tale of mournful times—

‘When ancient griefs

Are closely veiled

In recent shrouds,’

as one of the anonymous host expresses it. For the writers were of the race of the traditional Sweet Singer, and their lot was cast in those picturesquely disappointing Middle Ages, too close to the chivalry of the time to appreciate its charm. One pictures these comparatively cultured pariahs, these gaberdined, degenerate descendants of seers and prophets, looking out from their ghettoes on a world which, for all the stir and bustle of barbaric life, was to them as desolate and as bare of promise of safe resting-place as when the waters covered it, and only the tops of the mountains appeared. One sees them now as victims, and now as spectators, but never as actors in that strange show, yet always, we fancy, realising the barbarism, and with that undoubting faith of theirs in the ultimate dawning of a perfect day, seeming to regard the long reign of brute force, of priestcraft, and of ignorance as phases of misrule, which, like unto manifold others, should pass whilst they would endure.

‘A race that has been tested

And tried through fire and water,

Is surely prized by Thee,’

cries out a typical bard, with, perhaps, a too-conscious tone of martyrdom, and a decided tendency to clutch at the halo. The attitude is altogether a trifle arrogant and stolid and defiant to superficial criticism, but yet one for which a deeper insight will find excuses. The complacency is not quite self-complacency, the pride is impersonal, and so, though provoking, is pathetic too. Something of the old longing which, with a sort of satisfied negation, claimed ‘honour and glory,’ ‘not unto us,’ but unto ‘the Name,’ seems to find expression again in the unrhymed and often unrhythmical compositions of these patient poets of the Selicha. Their poetry, perhaps, goes some way towards explaining their patience, for, undoubtedly, there is no doggedness like that of men who at will, and by virtue of their own thoughts, can soar above circumstances and surroundings. ‘Vulgar minds,’ says a last-century poet, truly enough, ‘refuse or crouch beneath their load,’ and inevitably such will collapse under a pressure which the cultivated will endure, and ‘bear without repining.’ The ills to which flesh is heir will generally be best and most bravely borne by those to whom the flesh is not all in all; as witness Heine, whose voice rose at its sweetest, year after year, from his mattress grave. That there never was a time in all their history when the lusts of the flesh were a whole and satisfying ambition to the Jew, or when the needs of the body bounded his desires, may account in some degree for that marvellous capacity for suffering which the race has evinced.

These rugged Piyutim, for over a thousand years, come in from most parts of the continent of Europe as a running commentary on its laws, suggesting a new reading for the old significant connection between a country’s lays and its legislation, and supplying an illustration to Charles Kingsley’s dictum, that ‘the literature of a nation is its autobiography.’ Selicha (from the Hebrew, סְלִיחָה) means literally forgiveness, and to forgive and to be forgiven is the burden and the refrain of most of the so-called Penitential Poems (Selichoth), whose theme is of sorrows and persecutions past telling, almost past praying about. Piyut (derived from the Greek ποιητἡς) in early Jewish writings stood for the poet himself, and later on it was applied as a generic name for his compositions. From the second to the eighth century there is decidedly more suggestion of martyrdom than of minstrelsy in these often unsigned and always unsingable sonnets of the synagogue, and especially about the contributions from France, and subsequently from Germany, to the liturgical literature of the Middle Ages, there is a far too prevailing note of the swan’s song for cheerful reading. Happier in their circumstances than the rest of their European co-religionists, the Spanish writers sing, for the most part, in clearer and higher strains, and it is they who towards the close of the tenth century, first add something of the grace and charm of metrical versification to the hitherto crude and rough style of composition which had sufficed.

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