“Wisdom,” said Ecclesiastes, “is profitable to direct;” and Wisdom would have suggested that it was advisable to consult Jewish opinion before the formation of a Jewish Regiment was proclaimed to the world.  There is probably no race of people about which John Bull has been so much mistaken as he has been about the Jews.  Lord Beaconsfield’s description of Mr. Buggins, with his comments on the Feast of Tabernacles in Houndsditch, is scarcely yet anachronistic.[*] But slowly our manners and our intelligence have improved in this as in other directions; and Lord Derby (who represents John Bull in his more refined development) thought that he would be paying his Jewish fellow-citizens a pretty compliment if he invited them to form a Jewish Regiment.

[Footnote *:  See Tancred, Book V., chapter vi.]

Historically, Lord Derby and those who applauded his scheme had a great deal to say for themselves.  The remote history of Judaism is a history of war.  The Old Testament is full of “the battle of the warrior” and of “garments rolled in blood.”  Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and David are names that sound like trumpets; and the great Maccabean Princes of a later age played an equal part with Romans and Lacedaemonians.  All this is historically true; but it never occurred to Lord Derby and his friends that the idea which underlay their scheme is the opposite of that which animates modern Judaism.  Broadly speaking, the idea of modern Judaism is not Nationality, but Religion.  Mr. Lucien Wolf has lately reminded us that, according to authoritative utterances, “The Jews are neither a nation within a nation, nor cosmopolitan,” but an integral part of the nations among whom they live, claiming the same rights and acknowledging the same duties as are claimed and acknowledged by their fellow-citizens.  It is worth noticing that Macaulay accepted this position as disposing of the last obstacle to the civil and political enfranchisement of the English Jews, and ridiculed the notion that they would regard England, “not as their country, but merely as their place of exile.”  Mr. Wolf thus formulates his faith:  “In the purely religious communities of Western Jewry we have the spiritual heirs of the law-givers, prophets, and teachers who, from the dawn of history, have conceived Israel, not primarily as a political organism, but as a nation of priests, the chosen servants of the Eternal.”

Mr. Claude Montefiore, who is second to none as an interpreter of modern Judaism, has lately been writing in a similar strain.  The Jew is a Jew in respect of his religion; but, for the ordinary functions of patriotism, fighting included, he is a citizen of the country in which he dwells.  A Jewish friend of mine said the other day to a Pacificist who tried to appeal to him on racial grounds:  “I would shoot a Jewish Prussian as readily as a Christian Prussian, if I found him fighting under the German flag.”  Thus, to enrol a regiment of Jews is about as wise as to enrol a regiment of Roman Catholics or of Wesleyan Methodists.  Jews, Romans, and Wesleyans alike hold with laudable tenacity the religious faiths which they respectively profess; but they are well content to fight side by side with Anglicans, or Presbyterians, or Plymouth Brethren.  They need no special standard, no differentiating motto.  They are soldiers of the country to which they belong.