Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1878 — THE MIRACLE OF CENTURIES. [ARTICLE]

THE MIRACLE OF CENTURIES.

Tlie Jews and Tlieir Remarkable Place in the World’s History. The following striking passage occurs in a paper on “The Gathering of Israel,” read by Bishop Nicholson, of Philadelphia, before the Prophetic Conference : Can the world show anything like it? Twice 1,800 years old,they saw the proud Egyptian perish in the Red sea; they heard the fall of great Babylon’s power; they witnessed the ruins of the Syro-Macedanian conquests. And now they have outlived the Cmsars, and outlived the dark ages. They have been through all civilizations, shared in all convulsions, and have kept pace with the entire progress of discovery and art. And here they stand to-day, as distinct as ever, occupying no country of their own, scattered through all countries, identical in their immemorial physiognomy, earth’s men of destiny, before the venerableness of whose pedigree the proudest escutcheons of mankind are but as trifles of yesterday. But have they suffered severely ? One convulsive groan of agony breathing through eighteen centuries, and heard in every land but our own. At the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, besides the tens of thousands led into captivity, it was as if in a single action of a great war the slain on one side should amount to 1,300,000, and when, the remaining Jews having been ex-, pOiled from their country, they attempted, sixty years afterward, to return, a half million more were slaughtered. For centuries they were forbidden, on pain of death, even to set foot in Jerusalem. Under King John of England, 1,500 were massacred at York in one day. Under Ferdinand and Isabella 800,000, by a single decree, were forced out to sea in boats, and the most of them perished in the waves. They have been fined and fleeced by almost every Government known to history. They have been banished from place; banished and recalled, and banished again. By the code of Justinian, they were incapable of executing wills, of testifying in courts of justice, of having social and public worship. The Koran of Mohammed stigmatizes them as wild dogs; the Romish church excommunicated any one who held intercourse with them; tho Greek church littered anathemas still more severe. They have been forced to dissemble to save their lives, and in Spain and Portugal have even become Bishops, and have governed in convents. In the prophetic words of tho Old Testament, they have been “a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a cursethey have been “taken up in the lips of talkers,” and have been “an infamy of the people and the general estimate of them lias ripened into the intense contempt of that dramatic conception—“ Shylock, the Jew of Venice.” And now, in this nineteenth century they are a suffering people still, but still as indissoluble as ever.

But now all this is not according to the established course of nations. The northern tribes came into Southern Europe, and are now not at all distinguishable. No Englishman can say that he derives from the Britons and not from the Romans, or from the Saxons and not from the Normans. On the contrary, the Jew is a Jew still. Even our own all-appropriating country, which denationalizes Germans, Irish, French, Spaniards, Finns, Swedes, has left untouched this wondrous people. Here they are are, holding fast to the one tell-tale face, keeping up the sacred learning of tlieir traditions, self-con-scious in their isolation, irrepressible in their love of Jerusalem, sublime in their singular patriotism, evermore looking for tlieir Messiah, the same intense individuality as when, lords of the soil, they plucked His fruit from the trees of Judea. And, what is more, those worldwanderers of the centuries, these tribes of the weary foot, have not only survived, but have now risen again as an element of power among mankind. The Jew is the banker of the world; he is among the foremost, whether in science, or literature, or government. In witchery of song, unsurpassed, he efichants the world with some of the sweetest music it ever heard. Surely he is the standing miracle of the world’s current history; the bush of Moses, ever burning, yet never consumed; an ocular demonstration of how God may energize the secret springs of a people’s life, yet without disturbing individual freedom or social characteristic; an unanswerable refutation of that godless philosophy which -would turn the Almighty out of His own universe.