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But he saw that in the home of Haskalah, the Biur, and the Meassefim, apostasy increased, Hebrew was almost forgotten, and Judaism was declining, and he blamed the pellucid water at the source of the stream for the muddy pool at its mouth.
In Philo's day a universal Judaism seemed possible, a Judaism true to the Torah as well as to the Unity of God, spread over the Megalopolis of all peoples; and in the light of this hope Philo welcomed proselytism. The Jews had a clear mission; they were to be the light of the world, because they alone of all peoples had perceived God.
Having visited Jerusalem for the feast, they heard on every hand about the new teacher. They were not so bound to rabbinic traditions as the Jews themselves, they had been drawn by the finer features of Judaism, its high morality and its noble idea of God.
The former, which seems to have been due to the milder nature of Judaism, and which was derived from a happy piece of rabbinic exegesis on Prov. xxxi. 6, consisted in giving to the condemned, immediately before his execution, a draught of wine medicated with some powerful opiate.
The exaggerated idea of a special Providence, the basis of Judaism and Islam, and which Christianity has only corrected through the fund of liberalism inherent in our races, has been definitively vanquished by modern philosophy, the fruit not of abstract speculation, but of constant experience.
That doctrine is the basis of a new set of ideas and practices which we have now to consider, those namely which are contained in the Vendidad, one of the later works of the Persian canon. To pass from the Gathas to the Vendidad is like passing from Isaiah to Leviticus, and the laws of purity of Persian religion bear a strong analogy to those of Judaism.
You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may doubt whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen.
You are to edit the next number." Pinchas's head shot up like a catapult. He bounded to his feet, then bent down again to Raphael's coat-tail and kissed it passionately. "Ah, my benefactor, my benefactor!" he cried, in a joyous frenzy. "Now vill I give it to English Judaism. She is in my power. Oh, my benefactor!" "No, no," said Raphael, disengaging himself. "I have nothing to do with it."
Before Maimonides there had been some inclination towards a creed, but he is the first to put one into set terms. Maimonides was much influenced by Aristotelianism, and this gave him an impulse towards a logical statement of the tenets of Judaism. On the other side, he was deeply concerned by the criticism of Judaism from the side of Mohammedan theologians.
Thinkers who lived in the earlier days of Christianity found so much agreement between the philosophical teachings of Plato and the deeper meaning of the Mosaic writings, that they called Plato a Moses with Attic tongue. Thus Mystery wisdom existed everywhere. In Judaism it acquired a form which it had to assume if it was to become a world-religion. Judaism expected the Messiah.
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