evident that even the literary work of modern Jews can be
understood and appreciated only as an expression of the
characteristics of the Jewish race. In this modern Jewish literature
appears the exuberance, the emotional intensity, and the love of
social justice that were characteristic also of ancient Hebrew
literature as written by prophet, priest, and sage.

_The Role of Israel in Human Emancipation_

Far greater, however, than the work of these three authors, far
greater, indeed, than Israel's literature as a whole, of which they
are a part, is the life of this people, of which their literature is
the record. We speak of a nation's literature as great if it possesses
three or four tragedies that are classics. _Hamlet_, _Othello_,
_Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ would, for example, be sufficient to justify
the title "great" as applied to English literature. What shall we say,
then, as some one has suggested, of this people who for more than
twenty centuries have lived a tragedy more pathetic than any the
world's literature can show? Job has always seemed to me a type of the
Jewish race. We recall that majestic picture in the thirty-first
chapter, where Job stands up on his ash-mound, robbed of his wealth,
bereaved of his children, deserted by his wife, suffering the agonies
of a loathsome and incurable disease, and cast off, as it seems to
him, by the very God in whom he trusted, and yet, in the face of
poverty, and bereavement, and mortal pain, and bewildered isolation,
asserts his own unchanged and unalterable belief that righteousness is
salvation.

Similarly Israel, through the long centuries of its tragic history,
has stood on the ash-mound of its national humiliation. Plundered,
vilified, and persecuted, a nation of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief, from whom men have hid their faces in aversion not concealed,
Israel has yet clung with a grip that nothing could weaken nor
dislodge to the fundamental idea that religion--the right relation of
man to God--was not creed nor ritual, but simply doing justly, loving
mercy, and walking humbly with God.

We have been looking backward at the literary accomplishment of three
Jewish men of genius. It is, I believe, a fault of modern Judaism to
look backward instead of forward, as if the glory of Israel had indeed
departed, and as if nothing were left but to look back with pride and
regret upon what has passed like a dream away. But I believe Jews may
look forward now w