Page:B20442294.djvu/357

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JUDAISM
329

could not have survived, and the hope is that there must be something in Judaism for Judaism; it is the idea of a Messiah, of one who shall save them from Judaism. Every other race has had some special watchword, and, on realising their watchword, they have perished. The Jews have failed to realise their watchword, and so their vitality persists. The Jewish nature has no other metaphysical meaning than to be the spring from which the founders of religion will come. Their tradition to increase and multiply is connected with this vague hope, that out of them shall come the Messiah. The possibility of begetting Christs is the meaning of Judaism.

As in the Jew there are the greatest possibilities, so also in him are the meanest actualities; he is adapted to most things and realises fewest.

Judaism, at the present day, has reached its highest point since the time of Herod. Judaism is the spirit of modern life. Sexuality is accepted, and contemporary ethics sing the praises of pairing. Unhappy Nietzsche must not be made responsible for the shameful doctrines of Wilhelm Bölsche. Nietzsche himself understood asceticism, and perhaps it was only as a revulsion from the evils of his own asceticism that he attached value to the opposite conception. It is the Jew and the woman who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on humanity.

Our age is not only the most Jewish but the most feminine. It is a time when art is content with daubs and seeks its inspiration in the sports of animals; the time of a superficial anarchy, with no feeling for Justice and the State; a time of communistic ethics, of the most foolish of historical views, the materialistic interpretation of history; a time of capitalism and of Marxism; a time when history, life, and science are no more than political economy and technical instruction; a time when genius is supposed to be a form of madness; a time with no great artists and no great philosophers; a time without originality and yet with the most foolish craving for originality; a time when the cult of the Virgin has been replaced by that of the Demi-