(By Our London Correspondent)
The charge that Liberal Judaism is repeating the experience of early Christianity by advocating the abolition of the Abrahamic covenant, was made here by the Chief Rabbi, Dr. J. H. Hertz, in the first of a series of addresses in which he discussed the spiritual conflict between the Fundamentalists and the Modernists in Anglo-Jewry today.
“In England,” the Chief Rabbi declared, “a small group has long been struggling to transplant Liberal Judaism to these shores. After many years of effort, they have erected a stately house of worship. So loud is their rejoicing thereat, that earnest men and women are perplexed by the claims of this movement. They are dazzled by its ephemeral successes; and bewildered by the new shibboleths of its spokesmen. They turn their eyes to the Rabbinate for guidance. This guidance will be given them. I shall examine the attitude of Liberal Judaism to institutions and beliefs that are essential to Israel’s existence, and show whither it is inevitably leading.
“Take a primal commandment like the Abrahamic Covenant. The martyrs in the Maccabean age died for it; also in the times of the Hadrianic persecution, in the dread days of the Inquisition, whenever or wherever tyrants undertook to uproot the Jewish Faith. Even an ex-communicated, semi-apostate like Benedict Spinoza declares: ‘Such great importance do I attach to the sign of the Covenant, that I am persuaded that it is sufficient by itself to maintain the separate existence of the nation forever.’ But the protagonists of Liberal Judaism have everywhere worked for its total abolition. Abraham Geiger, the founder of the whole movement, denounced ‘Meelah’ as far back as 1845. Nearly all the spokesmen of the New Judaism today are in agreement with Geiger. They dispense with the Abrahamic rite in the case of infants, ‘for an indefinite period of transition,’ as the principle founder of the London group carefully phrased it in 1919. ‘For an indefinite period of transition!’ This distinction between proselytes and infants was at first also the rule in the Christian Church; but after ‘Meelah’ was once set aside in the case of proselytes it was not long ‘retained’ even for infants. With open eyes, Liberal Judaism is repeating the experience of early Christianity.
“As for Sabbath and Holy Convocation, Fast and Festival,” the Chief Rabbi continued, “these fare ill at the hands of these moderns. One prominent religious guide advocated that Passover be struck off the Jewish Calendar, and proposed that instead, Christian and Jew should together celebrate Easter as Martyrs’ Day; another argued that Tabernacles was a dying festival, a withered branch that should be cut off from the Tree of Judaism; while still another has arranged in his synagogue that these two fundamentals be celebrated only on the Sunday of the week in which they occur. Many of these ‘rabbis’ declare that fasting on the Day of Atonement is a superstition ; and they practise what they preach.
“Institutions, symbols and observances constitute merely the body of Judaism. The mind and soul of Judaism are the Sacred Scriptures, the Brotherhood of Israel, the Jewish Creed and Outlook. In this world mind exists only in the habitation of a body; and ‘nude souls’ are found only in the imagination of the mediaeval Mystics. No religion, least of all Judaism, can continue without its historic, outward garb.”
PROFESSOR B. SCHATZ, FOUNDER OF BEZALEL ART SCHOOL IN JERUSALEM, HERE
Professor Boris Schatz, founder and director of the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, one of the colorful figures among the Jewish pioneers in Palestine, arrived in the United States.
The purpose of Professor Schatz’s visit to the United States is to arrange an exhibition in New York on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Bazalel Art School. He brought with him forty-seven cases of art objects, paintings, drawings and sculpture, representing the work done at the school.
Professor Schatz was born in the Government of Kovno in 1860. His first work of sculpture, Moses’ Mother, was exhibited in Paris in 1892. In 1896 he completed his work, Matthias the Maccabee.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
