Page:Jewish Encyclopedia Volume 1.pdf/15



WING to their long history and their wide dispersion, the Jews have been connected with most of the important movements in the history of the human race. The great monotheistic religions are based upon the Jewish Bible; medieval philosophy and science are inseparably associated with the Jews as intermediators; and in modern times there has been hardly a phase of human thought and activity in which the participation of Jews may not be discerned. While they have thus played a prominent in the development of human thought and social progress throughout the centuries, there has been no faithful record of their multifarious activity. is intended to supply such a record, utilizing for this purpose all the resources of modern science and scholarship. It endeavors to give, in systematized, comprehensive, and yet succinct form, a full and accurate account of the history and literature, the social and intellectual life, of the Jewish people—of their ethical and religious views, their customs, rites, and traditions in all ages and in all lands. It also offers detailed biographical information concerning representatives of the Jewish race who have achieved distinction in any of the walks of life. It will accordingly cast light upon the successive phases of Judaism, furnish precise information concerning the activities of the Jews in all branches of human endeavor, register their influence upon the manifold development of human intelligence, and describe their mutual relations to surrounding creeds and peoples.

The need of such a work is sufficiently obvious. Jewish history is unique and therefore particularly liable to be misunderstood. The Jews are closely attached to their national traditions, and yet, in their dispersion, are cosmopolitan, both as to their conceptions of world-duty and their participation in the general advancement of mankind. To exhibit both sides of their character has been one of the objects of

The history of the the Jewish people has an absorbing interest for all who are concerned in the development of humanity. Connected in turn with the principal empires of antiquity, and clinging faithfully to their own ideals, the Jews developed a legal system which proved in course of time their bulwark of safety against the destruction, through external forces, of their national life. The Roman code, in its Christian development, assigned an exceptional position to the Jews; and it becomes one of the most interesting problems for the student of European constitutions to reconcile the status thus allotted to the Jew with the constitutional principles of the various Christian states. The struggle of the Jew to emancipate himself from this peculiar position has made him an efficient ally in the heroic endeavors of modern peoples toward the assertion of human rights.

Throughout all the divergences produced by produced by different social environments and intellectual influencers, the Jews have in every generation conserved the twofold character referred to above as representatives of a nation, they have kept alive their Hebrew traditions; and, as cosmopolitans, they have taken part in the social and intellectual life of almost all cultured nations. In the period when Jewish and Hellenic thought came