lly selected nation or race,
Judaism offers in a sense the sharpest contrasts imaginable, which render
it an enigma to the student of religion and history, and make him often
incapable of impartial judgment. On the one hand, it shows the most
tenacious adherence to forms originally intended to preserve the Jewish
people in its priestly sanctity and separateness, and thereby also to keep
its religious truths pure and free from encroachments. On the other hand,
it manifests a mighty impulse to come into close touch with the various
civilized nations, partly in order to disseminate among them its sublime
truths, appealing alike to mind and heart, partly to clarify and deepen
those truths by assimilating the wisdom and culture of these very nations.
Thus the spirit of separatism and of universalism work in opposite
directions. Still, however hostile the two elements may appear, they
emanate from the same source. For the Jewish people, unlike any other
civilization of antiquity, entered history with the proud claim that it
possessed a truth destined to become some day the property of mankind, and
its three thousand years of history have verified this claim.

Israel's relation to the world thus became a double one. Its priestly
world-mission gave rise to all those laws and customs which were to
separate it from its idolatrous surroundings, and this occasioned the
charge of hostility to the nations. The accusation of Jewish misanthropy
occurred as early as the Balaam and Haman stories. As the separation
continued through the centuries, a deep-seated Jew-hatred sprang up, first
in Alexandria and Rome, then becoming a consuming fire throughout
Christendom, unquenched through the ages and bursting forth anew, even
from the midst of would-be liberals. In contrast to this, Israel's
prophetic ideal of a humanity united in justice and peace gave to history
a new meaning and a larger outlook, kindling in the souls of all truly
great leaders and teachers, seers and sages of mankind a love and longing
for the broadening of humanity which opened new avenues of progress and
liberty. Moreover, by its conception of man as the image of God and its
teaching of righteousness as the true path of life, Israel's Law
established a new standard of human worth and put the imprint of Jewish
idealism upon the entire Aryan civilization.

Owing to these two opposing forces, the one centripetal, the other
centrifugal, Judaism tended now inward, away from