RELIGIOUS IDEA IN JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND CONSIDERED IN TWELVE LECTURES ON THE HISTORY AND DELIVERED IN MAGDEBURG, 1847, BY DR. LUDWIG PHILIPPSOHN. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, WITH NOTES, BY ANNA MARIA GOLDSMID. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN AND LONGMANS. 1855. DIVINITY SCHOOL LIBRARY HARVARD UNIVERSIT TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. THE enlightened benevolence with which the author of the following lectures advocated measures for the relief, present and future, of the Jews of Jerusalem, has within the last year made his name almost as familiar to their co-religionists of Great Britain, as it has long been rendered by his able editorship of the 'Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums', to the Israelites of Germany. Two years since, a German acquaintance called my attention to the work, and kindly sent it to me for perusal. From that perusal I rose, with a strong desire that its contents should be placed within reach of all the educated minds of the community to which I belong. The writer, it appeared to me, supplied a long-existing void and very urgent want, in the Jewish polemical literature of the age. Though not wholly concurring with him on some few points, his general deductions were, I thought and felt, as sound and true, as the elaboration of the arguments that led to them was patient and logical. So the wish deepened into a sense of a duty to be accomplished, the duty of placing an English version before all my co-religionists, for whom their non-acquaintance with German renders the original a sealed book. To you then, my dear brothers and sisters in faith and of race, members of all synagogues, natives of all lands spread over the wide surface of our globe, in which the English is the language first lisped by infant lips, I dedicate these pages. Accept them as a labour of good-will and love. To you all, -whether you be of those who by honest reverence for ancient forms, are induced to cling to the exegesis of the Talmud; or whether of such, as a reverence equally honest, leads back to the yet more ancient phase of our common faith, the one presented in the Torah of our inspired legislator, Moses; or whether, perchance, of those finally, who while unendowed with strength of intellect sufficient to enable them to resist the pressure of the time present, that forces them into the path of rationalism, are yet strong enough of heart, to cling to the ties of race, blood and affection ;—to all, I believe, a patient examination of the views presented to us by Dr. Philippsohn On the Development of the Religious Idea' will not be unfruitful in good. To this inquiry I would also invite my countrymen of other creeds, in the confident hope, that by it they would attain to a truer knowledge of the broad and firm basis on which the religion of the Jews rests, and would learn from it, more clearly to comprehend, more duly to respect, the solemn convictions which lie at the root of the Hebrew's enduring fidelity to his God-revealed faith. It will teach us all, as many as we are, Talmudists, Mosaists, Rationalists, Christians, better to understand ourselves and others-better to know and to appreciate, all which we severally and respectively reject, all to which we adhere, more wisely to direct the spiritual tendencies of those, who by circumstances of age or position, are committed to our guidance. Yet more! It will teach us a deeper reverence for that Eternal Wisdom, which out of present evil prepareth future good. The present evil we shall outlive,—we are outliving. May the asperities to which I allude, as having so long marked the relation of Christian to Jew, and as having arisen frequently within our own communities, when practical outward reforms were attempted, be likened with justice to the passing of the harrow over the ground! May they have prepared the mental soil of that community and of all mankind, for the seeds of truth,-the grain which the Almighty has garnered up in unmeasured abundance, and which it is the mission, first of the Jews, then of all the human race, gradually, during countless coming ages, to scatter |