This article appears in Der Lutheraner, Vol. 66, No. 24., November 29, 1910, pp. 387-389.
Our mission to the Jews in New York has had little success in the eyes of the people. However, the number of Jews who have heard the proclamation of the Gospel has increased considerably compared to the past. The number of children taught by the missionary in the Saturday and Sunday school varies between 60 and 150, depending on the summer or winter months. Among them are those who have been attending the lessons for years and have learned the prophecies of Christ and their fulfillment excellently. The number of listeners attending our missionary’s sermons rises even in the summer months to 70 to 80, in the winter months to 100 and more, so that often many Jews have not been able to gain admission due to lack of space. The demand for New Testaments is becoming increasingly lively. This is a great thing when one considers that even a visit to our mission premises is viewed with disdain by the Jews and publicly criticized in their newspapers. On June 3rd of this year, a representative of a Jewish newspaper came to the missionary service and, after the service ended, scolded with crude words the Jews present as traitors because they went here instead of to the synagogue.
But it cannot be denied that among these many children and listeners, who are attuned to the word of the Gospel, no such successes are achieved as in the heathen and Negro mission, in which even children and weak women finally confess the Savior publicly and prefer to endure the cruelest persecutions of their fellow tribesmen and their whole family rather than deny the faith they have attained. We should not be surprised at this. “For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” — Romans 10:3. The gospel is an offense to the Jews. They have “a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day” — Romans 11:8. Around Christmas time last year, a widely read Jewish newspaper vilified the Christian religion in the bitterest terms. It portrayed the Lord Jesus, who had first proclaimed peace, as the cruel persecutor who had finally said: “bring them here and slaughter them before me!” [Luke 19:27] It portrayed D. Martin Luther as the man who, as long as he himself was oppressed, called for the humane treatment of the Jews, but later, when he felt safe, incited the tearing down of their synagogues and the burning of their writings. In general, it described the whole of Christianity, which claims to bring light, as a darkening of the world. This was a truly Jewish view of Christmas. If the writer of such blasphemies had to live in the dark continent of Africa among the savages, he would soon learn to think otherwise.
In addition to their self-righteousness and pride in their descent from Abraham, in the nobility of their people and in their circumcision, the Jews also have what Luther calls their “donkey-like ignorance”. More than a million Jews now live in New York. Every fifth inhabitant of this cosmopolitan city is Jewish. On the great Jewish feast days, there are hardly 40 Christian children out of more than 3000 pupils in some large state schools, because the rest stay at home as Jewish children. The large number of these Jewish children, like the large number of so-called Christian children, grow up without any religious instruction. The anarchists and other subversives are recruited from among them, and the crowds of unscrupulous demagogues, fallen women, and others who harm the public good multiply. The smaller number of Jewish children, who still receive some kind of religious instruction in their Sabbath schools, hear only rabbinical fables. The five books of Moses, indeed the entire Old Testament, remain unknown to the Jews, otherwise we could get hold of them more easily. Don’t think this is an exaggeration. In the “Jüdisches Tageblatt“ [Jewish Daily], which is read by more than 50,000 Jews, there was an editorial on September 4th of this year with the headline: “Why have we abandoned the Bible?” The article, printed in the mixed Yiddish language with Hebrew letters, is extremely strange. It reads:
“The whole world reads and studies the old book. Only we reject it. The old Jewish spirit has conquered the world. The Bible has been re-crowned as the greatest creation the world possesses. The British and American Bible Societies, which are engaged in the task of distributing the Bible, have published the accounts of their activities last year. From this we see that the Bible has been sold much more than any other book in the world. These societies have sold seven million Bibles in one year. Some Jews will not realize the importance of these figures. They will say: If the British and American Bible Societies have sold seven million Bibles printed in 400 different languages, what has that got to do with us? After all, these societies are Christian, and they did it to spread Christianity and not Judaism; what is that to us? But while the hands engaged in the work of spreading the Bible may be Christian, the spirit that is being spread is Jewish. The idea of the Bible societies may be to spread the teachings of Jesus, but we know that the spirit that has conquered the world comes from the Jewish Torah (five books of Moses), from the Jewish prophets. We know that the good that Christians possess comes from our Bible. The seven million Bibles that have been sold are seven million witnesses to our greatness, to our unity, to our nobility. Thousands of years have passed since David, the son of Jesse, sang his prayers. The land over which the divine singer ruled has been destroyed. But mankind still seeks comfort and hope in his words. Isaiah lies in his grave for thousands of years, but his words are handed down from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch; they do not grow old, but live forever and retain eternal freshness.
“For thousands of years, right up to the present day, the whole world has been competing with our little Bible book and cannot defeat it. Great and mighty literatures have been created, giants of men have risen to the heavens of poetry and philosophy, but none could reach the heights of the prophets and the sublimity of the ancient Bible. You will search in vain in the great Greek, Roman and modern literature for something that could compete with the old Bible. There are not many things in world literature that have an eternal, lasting value. Currents are born and perish, various trends live out their time and disappear. The Bible, however, is the most eternal of all eternal creations; it is without beginning and without end, it is as constant as the sound of the ocean waves, as the rising and setting of the sun. The greatness of the Bible lies in its simplicity and naturalness, in its pure and profound truth, in its deep penetration of the human soul. The Bible is the same for everyone, just as the beauty of nature is the same for everyone. You don’t need to be a great natural scientist to understand the beauty of the sea, the green forest, the mighty mountain. In the same way, you don’t need to be a great scholar to understand the Bible. The knife of criticism, which cuts and turns great literary works into mere trifles, cannot harm the Bible, for it is higher than all the laws of logic and all the rules of art, higher than all the false musings of philosophy, just as nature is higher than all theory. The Bible needs no explanation. The poor Negro feels the same sweetness in the Psalm as the English lord. All find what they need there, the simple as well as the educated man, because the Bible speaks to the human heart, and because the heart is the same in all men. Man’s sufferings and joys are always the same.
“The Bible is therefore the mirror of the human soul, and that is why the Bible has triumphed even at the time when the temples of religion began to tremble. You can fight doctrines, but you cannot fight the Bible. The attempts that were made against the Bible at the time of crazy radicalism have ended in bankruptcy. The cynical and foolish wisdom of a Voltaire against the Bible has long since lost its last word. All layers of criticism will be forgotten, but the Bible will remain what it was. The world is disillusioned with unbelief and dry scientific materialism. The better classes of civilized countries are seeking refreshment for the soul, a higher sense of faith in the highest sense of the word, and are therefore returning to the Bible. The future of the Bible is great, its influence on the world has been renewed. From the ancient mountains of Judea the voice of the divine prophets can be heard among all the children of men — these are the happy and proud thoughts that occur to a Jew in view of the seven million Bibles that were sold last year.
“But there is another thought, and it is not a happy one, namely this: The whole world is returning to the Bible, all mankind is seeking instruction from our source, and we ourselves are far removed from it. Our Bible is as foreign to us as if we had no connection with it at all. How many Jews read the Bible? How many of our youth approach this book from which we draw our strength to this day? Where can we point to Jewish societies for spreading the Bible among ourselves? Where are our Jewish students who read the Bible and spread it, as one finds such among the Christian youth? Jewish young people are the greatest followers of Gorky and Mäterlinck, but there are no followers of the Bible among them. Few are the Jewish homes in which one hears the voice of the Bible in any language. It is certain that we read our Bible much less than the Christians. How can we justify this disgrace? Even those who teach their children Hebrew exchange the Bible for other textbooks, with the excuse that the Bible is not an educational book. But there is no better educational book than this eternal book. It has educated a people who have fought with a whole world and yet have remained alive. Learn the Bible with your children, however small they may be! Make this book the comrade of youth! For our whole past is built on this book, and on it rests all our hope.” So far the lament of the Jewish newspaper.
With such ignorance, it is no wonder that things happen publicly among the poor Jews here that would make a Christian’s heart break with sorrow. On the Jewish New Year, on which the annual penitential season of the Jews begins, you can see whole crowds of Jews in New York on the bridges and on the banks of the East River, who, after carefully taking out their money, turn their pockets inside out and, with murmurs of prayer, pour their sins out of their pockets into the water, misusing the prophetic passage Micah 7:19: “He will have mercy on us again, and will subdue our iniquities, and will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” — Finally, if we consider how the great mass of nominal Christians behave so heartlessly and spitefully towards the Jews instead of winning them over with pity, and what a difficult position every proselyte has who professes to belong to the Christian Church, both among the Jews, who curse him as an apostate, and among the Christians, who do not really trust him and rarely help his earthly progress, we should not be surprised that Jewish conversions are so rare.
Nevertheless, the Lord also has his chosen ones among them, and he has opened a great door for our mission among them. In the district where our mission is located, the Jews debate in the streets about the truths they have heard; our missionary is overrun by Jews who ask him questions; he is invited into Jewish houses where he holds talks with many; many Bibles and tracts are sought after and read. Our missionary has his hands full with work and carries it out undauntedly and with great faithfulness. There are also always individual souls who receive thorough baptism instruction and are baptized after being examined by the mission commission. At the moment, another young lady is undergoing such instruction. Now it is our Lord Christ’s gracious will to gather His flock from Jews and Gentiles. He has also promised that at all times a remnant of the Jews will be saved. [Romans 9:27, 11:5] He has opened the door to the Jews for us and given us a suitable missionary for this mission. Our mission to the Jews is actually the cheapest of all the missions we carry out. Only crumbs from the collections of our congregations are needed for it to exist. Of course, if even these crumbs are refused, then our Jewish mission must eventually die of hunger. Let us also pray diligently for our Jewish mission, then the crumbs will follow of their own accord, and then God’s blessing and success will follow, which is the most important thing! P. R.