Editor's note: This lecture was given at a time when the question of the Zionists' dream of a Jewish state in Palestine collided with the preference of other Jews for assimilation into European society. Rudolf Steiner, though not Jewish, clearly favored assimilation. This position was coherent given his concept of a Threefold Society in which the political state is only responsible for human and civil rights, whereas culture and religion is the province of the free spiritual/cultural sphere of society. Thus he considered a Jewish state reactionary.
"The attempt to set up a Jewish State denotes a decidedly reactionary drift, a retrogression that leads nowhere and runs counter to progress."
He did not of course foresee the Nazis and the holocaust.
Question: Have the Jews, as
a people, fulfilled their mission in the evolution of humanity?
Dr.
Steiner: Discussion on this subject is unfortunately all too
apt to lead to propaganda. But what must be said quite
objectively on the subject has nothing whatever to do with
propaganda in any shape or form.
The way in which the development of the Jewish people proceeded
in olden times was a most important preparation for the
subsequent rise of Christianity. Before Christianity came into
the world, the Jews had a deeply spiritual religion but, as I
have told you, it was a religion which took account only of the
spiritual law of nature. — If a Jew were asked: Upon what
does the coming of spring depend? — he said: Upon the will
of Jehovah! — Why is so-and-so an unrighteous man? —
Because Jehovah wills it so! — Why does famine break out in
a country? — Because Jehovah wills it! — Everything
was referred to this one God. And that was why the ancient Jews
did not live at peace with the peoples around them, whom they did
not understand and who did not understand them. The neighbouring
peoples did not worship this one and only God in the same way but
recognised spiritual beings in all the phenomena of nature —
a multiplicity of spiritual beings.
These many spiritual beings are actually present in nature and
anyone who denies their existence denies reality. To deny that
there are spiritual beings in nature is just as if I were to say
now that there is not a single person in this room! — If I
brought in a blind man and you were not laughing loudly enough
for him to hear, he might believe me. Deception in these things
occurs very readily. — Friedrich Nietzsche's sight was very
poor and when he was a professor in Basel only a few dilatory
students came to listen to his lectures although they were
extremely interesting. Nietzsche was always deeply sunk in
thought as he went to the desk and proceeded to deliver his
lectures. He lectured on one occasion when not a single person
was present but because his sight was so bad he only noticed this
when he was going out of the lecture-hall! In the same way a
blind man could be made to think that a room is empty. —
People disbelieve in spiritual forces and influences because they
have been blinded by their education and all that happens in
modern life.
It is important for a person to realise that he has a great deal to
do with these myriad nature-spirits; but there is a power within
him that is mightier than anything wrought by these
nature-spirits. This is the basis of the conception of the one
God, the Moon-God. The Jews came first to the recognition of this
one God and repudiated all other spiritual beings in the
phenomena of nature. They acknowledged the one God, Jahve or
Jehovah. Jahve means, simply: I AM.
Now this has been a very important factor in world-history. Think
of it: veneration of the one and only Godhead is accompanied by
the disavowal of all other spiritual beings Suppose two
nations are at war in spite of the fact that each of them
recognises the one God; only one of the two nations can be
victorious. The victors say: Our God has given us the victory. —
If the other side had gained the victory, the same would have
been said. But if the same God has allowed the one people to be
victorious and the other to be defeated, then this God has
Himself been defeated. If Turks and Christians have the one God
and both pray to this one God to bring them victory, they are
asking the same God to defeat Himself. The real point is that one
cannot, with truth, speak of a single Divine-Spiritual Being. In
daily life, too, it is the same: somebody wants it to rain and
prays for rain; somebody else wants the sun to shine and prays
for this on the selfsame day. Well, it just doesn't make
sense! If people noticed this there would be greater clarity
about such matters — but they do not notice it. In the
great things of life human beings often lapse into a
thoughtlessness which they would not entertain in small things.
Nobody, presumably, will put salt and sugar into his coffee at
the same time; he will put in the one or the other, not both.
Generally speaking, people are very lax about clarity of thought,
and this lies at the root of the many disorders and
confusions in life.
The Jews introduced what is known as Monotheism, the belief that
there is but the one God.
I once said to you very briefly that Christianity thinks of three
Divinities: God the Father, living in all the phenomena of
nature; God the Son, working in man's free spiritual activity;
and God the Holy Spirit, who awakens in man the consciousness of
having within him a spirituality that is independent of the body.
Three distinct spheres are pictured. If there were not three
spheres it would have to be assumed that by the same resolve this
one God allows the human being to die and then wakens him to life
again. If there are Three Divine Persons, death belongs to the
sphere of one Godhead, passage through death and beyond to
another, and the awakening in spirit to yet another. Christianity
could not do otherwise than picture the spiritual Godhead in
three Persons. (In three Persons: this is not understood today,
but the original meaning was that of threefoldness, the
Divine manifesting in three forms.)
Now because Judaism conceived only of this one God, it could make
no image of the Godhead but could only grasp the Divine with the
innermost forces of the soul, with the intellect. It is easy to
understand that this led to an intensification of human egoism;
for man becomes remote from what is around him if he sees the
Spiritual only in and through his own person. This has produced a
certain folk-egoism in the Jewish world; there is no
denying that it is so; but for this very reason the Jews are by
nature adapted to assimilate what is not pictorial; they
have less talent for the pictorial. If a Jew becomes a sculptor,
he will not achieve anything very great, because this is not
where his talent lies; he does not possess the gift of pictorial
representation, nor does he readily develop it. But if a Jew
becomes a musician he will generally be a very fine one, because
music is not a pictorial art; it does not take visual form. And
so you will find great musicians among the Jews but — at
the time when the arts were at their prime — hardly ever
great sculptors or painters. The style in which the Jews paint is
quite different from that of Christian or oriental artists. The
actual colour in a picture painted by a Jew has no very great
significance; what it is that is being expressed, what
the painter wishes to say by means of the picture — that is
the essential. Judaism is concerned above all with the
non-pictorial, with bringing into the world that which transpires
within the human “I.”
But to maintain this adherence to the one God is not as easy as
it seems, for if such adherence is not strongly forced upon them,
men readily become pagans. It is among the Jews that this
tendency has been least of all in evidence. Christianity, on the
other hand, tends easily in the direction of paganism. If you
observe closely you will find many indications of this. Think,
for example, of how ceremonies are revered in Christianity. I
have told you that the
monstrance actually depicts the Sun and the Moon. The meaning of
this is no longer known, but people unenlightened in this respect
actually pray to the Monstrance, they pray to something external.
People are easily inclined to pray to something external. And so
in the course of the centuries Christianity has developed many
pagan characteristics, whereas in Judaism the opposite has been
the case.
This is most obvious of all in one particular field.
Fundamentally speaking, Christians of the West — those who
came from Greece, Rome and Central Germany — were almost
incapable of continuing the principle of ancient medicine because
they were no longer able to perceive the spiritual forces
contained in the remedial herbs. But Jews who came from the East,
from Persia and so forth, saw the Spiritual — that is to
say their One Jehovah — everywhere. The Jews played a
tremendously important part in the development of medicine in the
Middle Ages; the Arabs were occupied more with developing the
other sciences. And whatever medical knowledge came through the
Arabs had been elaborated with the help of the Jews. That is why
medicine has become what it is today. Medicine has, it is true,
retained a certain abstract spirituality but it has assumed, so
to speak, a “monotheistic” character. And if you
observe medicine today you will find that with few, very few
exceptions, all kinds of properties are ascribed to every sort of
medicament! The exact effect which a particular medicament will
produce is no longer known with certainty any more than Judaism
knew how the myriad nature-spirits work. The abstract,
Jehovah-influence has made its way into medicine and remains
there to this day.
Now it would be natural if the number of
Jewish doctors in the different countries of Europe were
proportional to the population. I am not for one moment saying —
I beg you not to misunderstand me — that this should be
adjusted by law. It would never
occur to me to say such a thing. But in the natural course one
would expect to find Jewish doctors in proportion to the number
of Jews. This is certainly not the case. In most countries a
relatively far greater number of Jews become doctors. This is a
survival from the Middle Ages. The Jews still feel very drawn to
medicine because it is in keeping with their abstract thinking.
This abstract, Jehovistic medicine fits in with their whole mode
of thinking. Anthroposophy alone, in that it takes account of the
diverse nature-spirits, can recognise the forces of nature in the
different herbs and mineral substances and so again establish
this knowledge on sure foundations. [See:
Spiritual
Science and Medicine.
Twenty lectures given by Rudolf Steiner to doctors and medical
students. Dornach, 21st March to 9th April, 1920. .]
The Jews worshipped the one God Jehovah and humanity was thereby
saved from wholly losing its way in polytheism. A natural
consequence has been that the Jews have always kept themselves
distinct from other people and so too — as always happens
in such a case — have in many respects evoked dislike and
antipathy. The right attitude to take today is that in the times
to come it will not be necessary to segregate any particular
culture in order to prevent its dissipation — as the Jews
have been doing for centuries — but that this practice must
be superseded by spiritual knowledge. The relation between
the single Godhead and the multiplicity of spiritual beings will
then be intelligible to men and no one people need be under the
sway of subconscious impulses.
That is why from the very outset I
was apprehensive when the Jews, not knowing which way to turn,
founded the Zionist movement. The attempt to set up a Jewish
State denotes a decidedly reactionary drift, a retrogression that
leads nowhere and runs counter to progress. A very distinguished
Zionist with whom I was on friendly terms once told me about his
ideal in life, which was to go to Palestine and found a Jewish
kingdom there. He was, and still is, taking a very active part in
the attempt to bring this about and he holds an important
position in Palestine. I said to him: Such a cause is not in
keeping with the times; what the times demand is something with
which every human being can be allied without distinction of
race, nation, class and so forth — that is the only kind of
cause one can whole-heartedly support today. Nobody can expect me
to join the Zionist movement, for there again one portion of
humanity is being separated off from the rest. For this quite
simple, natural reason, such a movement today cannot prosper in
the real sense of the word — it is essentially
retrogressive. The advocates of such movements often use a
remarkable argument. They say: But the course of history has
shown that people do not really want the “human-universal”;
they desire everything to develop on the basis of race.
The conversation of which I have just told you took place before
the Great War of 1914–18. And a factor leading up to that
War was people's refusal to accept the great principle of the
human-universal. The fact that people set their faces against
this principle and wanted to separate from one another, to
develop racial forces and interests, ultimately led to the
outbreak of that War. Thus the greatest disaster of this
twentieth century was due to an urge that is also present in the
Jews. — And so one can say: Since everything that the Jews
have achieved could now be achieved consciously by all human
beings, the Jews would serve their own interests best if they let
themselves be absorbed into the rest of mankind, be merged in the
rest of mankind, so that Judaism, as a race or people, would come
to an end. That would be in the nature of an ideal — but
many Jewish habits and customs, and above all the hatred meted
out to them, still militate against it. These are the kind of
impulses that must be overcome and they will not be overcome if
everything remains the same as it has been in the past. If the
Jews feel hurt when they are told, for example: you have little
talent for sculpture ... they can say to themselves: It is not
necessary for every race of people to be sculptors; with their
own particular faculties they can achieve something in a
different domain! The Jews are not naturally gifted for
sculpture. One of the Ten Commandments decrees: “Thou shalt
make no graven image of thy God ...” it is because the
Jewish people are averse to making any picture or image of the
super-sensible. Now this is bound to lead back to the personal
element.
It is quite easy to understand this. If I make an image
or a picture, even if it is only in the form of a description as
often happens in Spiritual Science, another person may impress it
on his memory, learn from it, see truth in it, think what he
likes about it. But if I make no image, my own personal activity
must be in operation; the thought does not separate itself from
me. For this reason it has a personal character. So it is in
Judaism. Men must learn to perceive the Spiritual in their
fellow-men. The Jewish world is still dominated by the racial
impulse. The Jews marry among themselves, among their own people;
their attention is still focused upon the racial, not upon the
spiritual.
Therefore to the question: Have the Jewish people
fulfilled their mission in the evolution of human knowledge?”
the answer is: They have fulfilled their mission, for in earlier
times the existence of a people who brought a certain form of
monotheism into being was a necessity. Today, however, what is
required is spiritual knowledge. The mission of the Jewish
people has been fulfilled. Hence this particular mission is no
longer a necessity in evolution; the only right course is for the
Jews to intermix with the other peoples by merging with them.
Question: Why was it that the Jewish people were destined
to live in exile?
Dr. Steiner: It is important to bear in mind the whole
character of this “exile.” The Jewish people among
whom Christ died were living at that time among people of quite a
different kind, namely, the Romans. And now, suppose that the
Roman conquest of Palestine had been complete; suppose they had
killed everybody they wanted to get rid of and turned out the
rest. Suppose that already at that time the Jews had intended or
felt the urge to intermix with the other peoples, what would have
happened? Well, the Romans would have captured Palestine and a
number of Jews would have been put to death; others would have
been expelled and would have been able to continue their
existence somewhere or other outside Palestine.
But the Jews had neither the intention nor the urge to intermix
with the other peoples; on the contrary, wherever they were, even
when there were only a few of them, they always lived among
themselves. They scattered far and wide; and only because they
lived exclusively among themselves, intermarried among
themselves, had it been noticed that, as Jews, they constitute a
foreign element. The idea of an exile would otherwise not
have arisen. It was this natural urge in the Jews that gave rise
to the idea of their exile. It is all part of the intrinsic
character of Judaism. And posterity is now astonished that the
Jews were dispersed, were obliged to live as strangers. This has
happened nearly everywhere. Other peoples intermixed and so were
unnoticeable. By its very nature, Judaism has held tenaciously
together. In this particular connection one is obliged to say
that because human beings have held together, attention has been
called to things that would not, otherwise, have been noticed.
It is grievous and heartbreaking to read how in the Middle Ages
the Jews lived in the ghettoes, in quarters of the towns where
alone they were permitted to dwell. They were not allowed to go
into the other parts of the towns; the gates of the ghettoes were
locked, and so forth. But these things are talked about because
it was noticed that the Jews in the ghettoes clung tenaciously
together, lived entirely among themselves. Other people have also
had equally terrible things to endure, although in a different
way. The Jews stayed in their ghettoes, clung together there and
people knew that they were not allowed to come out of their
quarters. But just think of it. — Other people who were
forced to work every day from early morning until late evening
could not come into the towns either, although there were no
gates to keep them out. Their sufferings, too, have been great.
It must be admitted, therefore, that such things are often based
solely upon their outer appearance ... they are based, as are
many things in world history, upon outer appearance.
The time has come when these things must be penetrated by the
light of reality. And here we are led to the conception that when
a destiny is fulfilled it is — to use an Eastern expression
— karma, it is inner destiny. The characteristics of
the Jews themselves has helped to give the story of exile the
form it has assumed; the Jews are a tenacious people, they have
held their own in foreign lands; and that is why in later times
this has been so noticeable and is talked about to this day.
On the other side, the natural result of all this is that the
Jews are differentiated from other peoples and they are accused
of all sorts of things of which the causes are not known. It could
happen that if in some district where people are
superstitious a man is murdered by an unknown hand and an
unpopular Jew happens to live there, so the whisper goes round that
at Easter-time the Jews need human blood for their rites —
therefore it is they who have killed the man. The reason why such
things are said is because the Jews are differentiated from the
others; but the Jews themselves have done a great deal to cause
this state of affairs.
In considering these matters to-day it is essential to lay stress
upon the human-universal, in contrast to the racial
principle.
Question: What was the significance in world-history of
the seventy souls of the original family of Israelites?
Dr. Steiner:
Peoples of diverse character have lived on the Earth since
ancient times. From the present age onwards, this diversity
ceases to have real meaning, for as I have said, the
human-universal
must become the essential principle. Nevertheless if we study the
earlier phases of the evolution of mankind we find the population
of the Earth divided into all kinds of different peoples. The
Spiritual is a living reality in the phenomena of nature; the
Spiritual is also a living reality in the peoples of the Earth.
In every people there is a guiding Folk-Spirit. As I have said in
my book, Theosophy,
“Folk-Spirit” is not merely an abstract term. When
one speaks today of the French people and the rest, what does
this suggest to the materialistic thinking of today? It suggests
an accumulation of some 42 millions of human beings in the West
of Europe — a pure abstraction: the traits and qualities of
the people in question are a very secondary consideration. But it
really is not so! Just as the seed lives in the plant, so
something seed-like exists, which lives in the spirit of a people
and then unfolds. A Spirit, a real Being, lives and works in the
whole people.
I have told you that the mission of the Jews in human history was
to spread the belief in the One Godhead, and it will be
clear to you that it was necessary for them, as a people, to be
prepared for this. Therefore it came about that when the Jewish
people originally came into existence, the several Folk-Spirits,
each of whom worked individually in a particular people, all
concerned themselves with the Jewish people. Thinking of the
different peoples, we say: Indians — Indian Folk-Spirit;
Egyptians — Egyptian Folk-Spirit; then Greek Folk-Spirit,
Roman Folk-Spirit, and so on. Each Folk-Spirit had to do with a
particular people. (Drawing on blackboard.) But if we take
the Jewish people, then, in that corner of the Earth called Syria
where the Jews had their home, the influences and will of all the
Folk-Spirits operated in this one people.
Let me try to make this clear by a simple analogy. —
Imagine that each of you is in your own family circle, attending
to its affairs. Each of you has a particular sphere of activity.
So it was in the case of these Folk-Spirits. — But now,
suppose you want to support, let us say, the cause and interests
of the workers as a body: if that is so you will not remain in
your own circle but you will hold a meeting and discuss among
yourselves what proposal shall be put forward by you all, acting
as a whole. And so we may say: In the peoples other than the
Jews, each of these Folk-Spirits worked in its own sphere; but
what the Folk-Spirits achieved through the Jewish people was the
outcome of a spiritual assembly. This influence worked
with varying strength upon the members of the Jewish people. The
Bible gives an indication of this when it speaks of seventy
Folk-Souls entering into the people of Israel. All the
Folk-Souls were in operation. This strong and potent influence
has in a certain respect made the Jews into a cosmopolitan people
and accounts for the tenacity that has remained characteristic of
them. No matter where they might be, they were always able to
gather together and preserve Judaism, simply because they had
everything within them.
It is very remarkable how Judaism has everything within it. In
Orders or Societies of Freemasons,
Oddfellows and the like, in which there is no new spiritual
knowledge but an antiquated kind of knowledge they themselves no
longer understand, you will find in the very words of the rites,
elements deriving from all kinds of different peoples: Egyptian
rites and words, Assyrian and Babylonian words and signs —
but especially elements from the Jewish Kabbala and so forth.
In this respect Judaism is truly cosmopolitan; it adapts itself
to everything but also preserves its original impulse which is
still alive within it. The same is true of the Hebrew language in
which there is great richness of content, both spiritual and
physical. Every Hebrew word is always full of meaning. It was a
peculiarity with the Jews to write only the consonants; later on,
the vowels were indicated by means of signs. The vowels
themselves were not written; everybody might pronounce them in
his own way, so that one man said: J-e-h-o-v-a ... another said:
J-e-h-e-v-a ... a third said: J-e-h-a-v-e ... a fourth,
J-o-h-a-v-e. — The vowel sounds were pronounced as they
were felt. And that is why such a designation as the name
“Jehova” which had been instituted by the priests in
this particular form, was called the “unutterable Name: because it was not permissible to make arbitrary use of the
vowels.
The very tenacity which characterised Judaism was an indication
of the way in which the several Folk-Souls worked upon this one
people. When you see the Jews in different countries you will
need very keen perception to be able to recognise those Jews who
have really mingled with the other peoples. You know, of course,
that the most important statesman of the nineteenth century was a
Jew. [Probably
Disraeli is meant. Ed.]
Jews who have really merged into the other peoples are no longer
distinguishable from them.
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