Finally, it manifests consciousness of its future in taking
cognizance of its past, and in turning over the leaves of its
archives, it defines its part and mission in history. The study
of men and facts in the past permits of a sounder appreciation of
recent efforts, of present tendencies; for "humanity is always
composed of more dead than living," and usually "the past is what
is most vital in the present."
No people has greater need than the Jews to steep itself again in
the sources of its existence, and no period more than the present
imposes upon it the duty of bringing its past back to life.
Scattered over the face of the globe, no longer constituting a
body politic, the Jewish people by cultivating its intellectual
patrimony creates for itself an ideal fatherland; and mingled, as
it is, with its neighbors, threatened by absorption into
surrounding nations, it recovers a sort of individuality by the
reverence it pays to men that have given best expression to its
peculiar genius.
But the Jewish people, its national life crushed out of it,
though deprived of all political ambitions, has yet regained a
certain national solidarity through community of faith and
ideals; and it has maintained the cohesion of its framework by
the wholly spiritual bonds of teaching and charity. This is the
picture it presents throughout the middle ages, during the period
which, for Christianity, marked an eclipse of the intellect and,
as it were, an enfeeblement of the reason to such a degree that
the term middle ages becomes synonymous with intellectual
decadence.
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