of shame to the truculent German-mediæval,' or Teutsch, pamphleteers and warriors, of which it is not possible to call up the memory without pain and sorrow. 6 Fichte, not an ignoble person, nor by instinct cruel, may be regarded as the father and apostle of that anti-Semite crusade which in our day has grown to such vast proportions. He, more than any one man, roused his 'Teutsch' brethren to the consciousness that they always had hated the Jew, and always meant to hate him. Others less eloquent, but far exceeding him in the venom of their speech, did, indeed, stir up the people—Rühs, and Fries, and Hundt-Radowsky, names now happily forgotten. At Würzburg, Frankfort, Darmstadt, Baireuth, Heidelberg, there were riots, not always unaccompanied by bloodshed, in which the fierce old cry Hep, hep!' was heard once more, and Israel suffered insult and outrage. The rights for which they had given their gold in the Imperial city on the Main were taken from them. Prussia repealed all its enactments in their favour. Austria, with its ingrained dislike for revolutionary principles, had already, on the fall of Napoleon, sent them back to the Ghetto. Saxony was called the Protestant Spain of the Jews,' and not even its king's chivalrous devotion to the French Cyrus could avail aught towards their freedom. Thus, a sharp east wind followed the glowing sunshine in which they had certainly renewed their youth, although at the risk, as orthodox Rabbinism well knew, of having grafted upon their stock the blue flower of romance, nay, the Christian passion-flower itself. That dream and that danger were suddenly dispelled by the rude blast of persecution. Henceforth the Jews would welcome any change that shook the Prussian monarchy, or brought back the days of Napoleon, or smote with a wasting disease that Austria which was the head and front of the Holy Alliance. From 1819 until far on in the century, Judaism, despite its millionaires and its loans to the kings of Europe, served with the left wing of the Revolution. Yes, and its weapons were keen; suffering had sharpened them, and still more a certain apprehension that evil was near at hand. So long as all Governments followed a Conservative policy, the means of warfare must be sought in literature, in journalism, in lectures, in secret societies. These never failed during the next fifty or sixty years, down to the establishment, as we may reckon, of the Third Republic, and of a Liberal constitution in Austria. Jews became Freemasons, Carbonari, Socialists, Anarchists. They first wrote in the newspapers of the world, and then bought them up when occasion offered. They They governed the telegraphic agencies. They manœuvred the Opposition which, as an enlightened Liberal force, would be sure in the moment of victory to decree them their lost privileges once more. They even reformed their Liturgy and admitted into the synagogue German or English hymns and recitations. But in all these varied and never-ceasing enterprises they kept before them one object, one ideal; the progress of mankind was to issue in a Jewish Millennium. Israel must be the Redeemer of the nations in order that he might reign as their king. The voice was the voice of Liberalism, uttering the lesson which Rousseau had taught it; the hands might be those of Saint-Simon, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Félix Pyat, Hertzen, Karl Marx,-nay, of Blanqui or Bakounin,—but the heart was Judaism, the triumph of a people who had been promised the riches, and were to glory in the submission, of the nations, among whom they had been wandering for secular periods. Thus it would be idle to enquire what contributions the Jew has made, either to modern civilization or to progress generally, unless we keep his aim steadily before us. He never has accepted the simple but splendid task proposed to him by Mendelssohn; or that is urged upon him in the vehement pages of Daniel Deronda.' He will not be a fresh chord resounding in the perfect octave which so many enthusiasts would fain set up as the ideal of European harmony. To be one branch, though most honourable, in the olive-tree to which Paul of Tarsus likens the Christian and the Hebrew revelation, will not content him. It is as though he said, 'Master or slave; there is no middle term.' So he brings upon himself (unhappy Ahasuerus) the Fichtes and the Schleiermachers again, with their anti-Semite rages. But he cannot deny that Mendelssohn had an inspiration from above; and he has glimpses, now and then, of a larger Judaism. Meanwhile he sends out to the battle his children,-baptized or unbaptized, they are always his own,-and Ludwig Börne, otherwise Baruch, and Heinrich Heine, the Rhenish meistersinger from Düsseldorf, shall strike with the sword of their pen deep wounds into sleepy Austria and reactionary Prussia. It is a long contest, encircled with flame and smoke in '48, carried hither and thither across the fields of Solferino, Sadowa, Sedan, through the burning Tuileries, and to the gates of Papal Rome in 1870, but ending-if it be truly ended-in the apparition before astonished Europe of a new Germany, France, Italy, and Austria, with the Hebrew's foot upon them all, and his power so great as to seem irresistible. No one can write that history yet; we know it merely in fragments. But, assuredly, it will be be worth writing, when the strange events, and adventurous persons, and dramatic catastrophes which make it up, have been brought into the light of day. When a great idea is working itself out to fulfilment, the men who are possessed by it can seldom-perhaps they never canrealize more than one aspect of its meaning. Thus, neither Heine nor his revolutionary friends in Paris would have admitted that they were Jews first, and democrats only in the second place. Some of them, like Börne, were sincere Christians, with a leaning to the romantic forms of Catholicism; others professed to be cosmopolitan in their sympathies, and did, in fact, preach the doctrine of liberty for all men, from Poles and Italians to West Indian negroes. But they were at the opening stage of a world-movement which, like the wheels beheld by the prophet in vision, went whithersoever the spirit was to go, nor would pause at their command. Herr von Treitschke, who loves not the Jew and has an utter contempt for the Liberal, bids us observe a relation that had probably escaped both of these, between the creed of political equality, as they held it, and the existence of 'movable or floating capital' in proportions never known until the day of railway enterprise and unlimited company-promoting. But if 'Laissez-passer implied that the Jew merchant, pedlar, sweater, horse-dealer, and the whole Beggars' Opera of Posen or Prussia must be free to invade Berlin, or to found an insanitary Ghetto at Whitechapel, the other horn with which this behemoth now thrust the peoples before him was Adam Smith's 'Laissez-faire,' of which Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his five golden sons were the living embodiment. He Heine, indeed, like the enfant terrible which he was in the house of Jacob, had caught a glimpse of the truth. expresses it, amusingly, by the lips of Baron James Rothschild, whom he introduces on his puppet-stage as a speaking-mask. The Baron insists that he, too, is a part of the Revolution; has he not sold up the feudal aristocracy, made genius independent of the soil by furnishing it with stocks and shares, transmuted the old heavy bullion to volatilized gold in the shape of banknotes, and aided that concentration of mind in European capitals which must precede the triumph of pure Reason over the ancien régime? There is a seed of wisdom in these utterances, grotesque as they may sound. But, whether the poet has driven his fancies too far or no, Treitschke has good warrant for connecting, with the acceptance of Rousseau in politics and Ricardo in economics, the sudden upward flight of Hebrew bankers to a pre-eminence in wealth which justified Prince Bismarck Bismarck in fixing on them the name already quoted of the 'Golden International.' The children of Israel, nevertheless, had always found it easier to spoil the Egyptians than to be admitted into the Court of Pharaoh. They were only rich slaves. Nothing short of a democratic principle which overlooked the difference of races, and passed by history as though it were a whited wall, could give them the rank they desired. Hence their passionate love of France, which Heine exulted in as the Promised Land, while Börne pictured it, in words no less vivid than ludicrous, as the great railway-line of freedom and morality.' Hence, also, the long struggle between a journalism inspired by French Radical principles, and the German censorship,-that purblind Inquisition which found itself straying, scissors and ink-horn at its girdle, on all the pathways that led across the Rhine. Frederick William IV. of Prussia, the mystic whose mind at length gave way under his troubles, took upon him to combat this hydra. But when he had cut off one Jewish head, so to speak, another sprang up instantly. His censors were no match for the new Talmudists, with their quick turns, and legal evasions, and utterly reckless and irreverent humour. What could the venerable Bundestag do against this fog which came in at all the windows? To scatter a fog, there must be sunshine ; but neither King nor Councillors had any inheritance in Phœbus Apollo. They could pass laws against Young Germany which no one much observed; they possessed no charm by which to keep young Germans' from believing in their hearts that Napoleon had been the Liberator of Europe, that Mazzini was the noblest of Italian patriots, that Heine's Lyrical Intermezzo' was an argument for the principles of '89, and that only the stupid party' could do sincere homage to the wigs and protocols of Frankfort or Vienna. In the presence of this so-called public opinion, the Governments were powerless except during a state of siege. Metternich complained at Berlin in 1843 that seventeen German newspapers had a staff of Jews. But, in fact, the Jews were at the back of every Liberal magazine, journal, or pamphlet that came out during those years. They displayed precisely the endowments which make journalism a success; for they had at their command writers in every branch of popular activity and amusement. Whether it was the novel, the feuilleton, the play, the opera, the racecourse, the gamingtable; or yet again, the salon, the boulevard, the Chamber of Deputies, and, above all, the Bourse and the market, they could describe all that was going forward in crisp pyrotechnic language, language, making every day yield its dramatic interest to the thousands of readers. Who has ever surpassed the wit, the vehemence, the sparkle of Heine's letters from Paris? But he did not stand alone. Supreme though he confessedly was in the art of mixing all dainties, and giving them a haut goût that tickled every palate, Heine did but represent-he did not exhaust -the Hebrew genius, which in others like Saphir, Jacoby, Weinbarg, Laube,-in Karl Beck, Moritz Hartmann, and Paul Heyse, and by and by in such consummate boulevardiers as Ludovic Halévy and Albert Wolff, showed the same quickness, vivacity, and point, though never, happily, so undiluted a bitterness against the living and the dead. A race of scholars who could descend to be as frivolous as they were skilful in adapting their sacred language to the romance of Victor Hugo and the garbage of Eugène Sue, would hardly suffer defeat for want of cleverness. They wanted, indeed-that is to say, they lacked-self-reverence, and made a boast of having flung behind them self-control. The few exquisite poems of an Erter, the more serious literary acquisitions of a Munk, an Ebers, or a Ludwig Marcus, have by no means atoned for the evil wrought by Jewish journalism during a long half-century. Before all the institutions of Christian Europe, from the Crown to the Hôtel-Dieu, they were mocking and critical; the piety which forbids desecration of what we have loved and looked up to, had no meaning for them, and, like their ancestors in the workshop of the Emperor Frederick II., they were 'masters in unbelief.' 6 But they succeeded in gaining their end. When the Sicilian Revolution broke out in 1848, they had mined all Europe. If Rahel,‘the bacchante of the Zeitgeist,' had been living still, she might have named the very youths fluttering once about her, like brilliant-crested humming-birds, by whom this great overthrow was prepared so far back as the Days of July. The new Prussian laws concerning naturalized Jews' and 'protected Jews' had drawn forth strong rhetoric from a partisan of the • Christian State' who was, in after days, to be more widely known-Otto von Bismarck. But they did not satisfy the aspirations of the race. And one of the chief articles in the new Constitutions which '48 saw springing up, was the complete emancipation of the Jews. In the Prussian Landtag Riesser and Veit took their seats by the side of their hereditary enemies. Austria bowed her neck beneath the yoke of the Mannheimers and the Meissels. In France, too, where Börne had helped to spread the ideas of Raspail, and L'Enfantin's Socialism had for a while attracted |