The Jewish advance., August 30, 1878, Page 4, Image 4

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Mein Volk, wer lehret dich zu weinen.
Bei Ieiner Armen Ungemach,
Dich um ein Banner zu vereinen,
Menn Unheil trifft des Bruders Dach ?
Wer lehrt dich nösten, Kranke pflcgen,
Mitfühlen Andcrer hcrben Schmerz ?
Mit voller Hand wer spendet Segen?
Es ist ein neues-, jüdisches Herz! \n\n The Jewish Advance.
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HENRY GERSONI, - - Editor,
MAX STERN, Publisher.
Chicago, August 30th, 1878.
NOTES ANI) COMMENTS,
In another column we report the pro
ceeds of the collections hitherto made in
town in behalf of the sufferers in the
South. This is only, so to say, an ex
officio collection. Our Orders, our ladies’
Societies and several of the trades have
instituted collections by themselves and
there is no doubt that large sums will
be realized and forwarded to the proper
places. We have been informed by the
Grand officers of the various Orders that
the work of benevolence to our suffering
fellow-men in the South is pushed on
energetically. The Grand President of
this district of the I. 0. B. B. has tele
graphed to various places for particular
information of their needs, and several
lodges of that Order have appropriated
sums of money to be forwarded to the
supplicants. The Grand Lodge of K.
S. B. has issued an urgent appeal to its
constituent lodges, and the F. S. of I.
will hold a meeting as soon as practi
cable, resolved to act in concert with
the dictates of humanity and with the
pressing demands of the time. There is
no dearth of charitable sentiments, nay,
of a sense of duty to aid our suffering
fellow-men, among our brethren. May
the results of our work bear testimony
of the sterling qualities of the Jewish
heart, that with pride we may repeat
with the poet:
Prejudice will not be eradicated so
soon, and that a goodly portion of it still
exists among the lower classes of society
has been proven by a recent movement
among the Free Masons. Thus reports
the Keystone:
Grand Master. Bro. Richard Parker, of Vir
ginia, being informed by a District Deputy
Grand Master that a member of one of the
most flourishing Lodges, consisting of Chris
tians and Jews, had puplicly and seriously
avowed that no Jew should be admitted within
the Lodge, thereby causing great detriment to
it, and exciting one class of its members
against the other, each threatening to exclude,
by their ballots, every candidate of the oppo
site religious persuasion, very properly held
such conduct to be so grossly unmasonic, that
it should not be overlooked; that no one had
a right to set up his narrow opinions against
one of the fundamental principles of Mason
ry. All it requires on this subject from can
didate for initiation into its mysteries is that
he has a sincere belief and trust in God. Be
yond this, it is not lawful for any Mason, or
body of Masons, to impose any religious test
upon a candidate for admission. If he has the
necessary moral and physical qualifications,
as pi escribed in our Book of Constitutions, the
doors of our Lodges should be as wide open
to a Jew us to a Christian. Moreover, a Lodge
is not compelled to submit to its destruction,
in deference to the willfulness or prejudice of
any one of its members. Whilst the secrecy
of the ballot is not to be interfered with, and
no inquiry is permitted as to how a member
has voted, even though such a vote be injuri
ous to the welfare of the Lodge, it is wholly
different when one seriously avows his pur
pose to use the ballot in order to violate one
of the great principles on which our Institu
tion is founded. Such an avowal deliberately
made, proves the offender to be wanting in
that charity which a Mason must have and
practice. He therefore instructed the District
Deputy Grand Master to warn the offending
Brother that, unless he wholly abandoned this
erroneous principle, and would heartily con
form his conduct to what Masonry requires,
he would be subjected to a trial, and required,
unless he did so abandon it, that the District
Deputy Grand Master should see that charges,
with proper specitication, were proffered.
And as other members had threatened retali
ation (which, though natural, was very un
masonic), Grand Master Parker instructed
him to administer a sharp rebuke to them.
It was by reason and on account of
such prejudices that our secret Orders
have been established. The power which
our secret Orders wield and the munifi
cence which they evince by their works
of charity, seems to be insufficient to
convince the Masonic fraternity that
they have lost in the Jewish element
more than they will ever be able to
bring up among the professors of the
Gore-Religion, satirically denominated
the “religion of love.” For all we know,
Jewish generosity may be something
which the wisdom of the brothers of
Pithagoras cannot well approve of. If
so, our Jewish brethren belonging to the
Masonic Order, act on principles similar
to those of some Jewish individuals in
Germany who subscribe and contribute
largely as patrons of the Wagner’s
musical clubs. We can admire their
self-denial but we could hardly praise
their work.
The biography of Albert Cohn will
from henceforth be printed on the first
page of the Jewish Advance, while
that of Ferdinand Lassalle will be trans
ferred to the second page and published
in only about two columns at a time.
The former contains so many useful
historical notices that we deem it of
greater interest to the general readers
of our journal than the latter, which is
altogether of a highly philosophical pur
port and keen psycological analysis.
The facts and incidents contained in the
biography of xVlbert Cohn, we take from
the “Biographic d’Albert Cohn, par Isi
dor Locb,” which was recently published
at Paris. But as we are compelled to
omit many statements, which are of
mere local or personal interest in France,
and also to change many other items in
order to give them a general bearing, we
cannot call the article “a translation.”
THE YELLOW FEVER.
The following remarks, although too
pessimistic in many perticulars, and
somewhat faulty in logical connection,
contain yet some truths which make
them worthy of notice:
“The yellow fever teaches most loudly
the lesson that man has always short
ened his own life. We are a race of
suicides. Of course Nature made man
mortal, but man has exaggerated his
mortality, and has rendered himself more
perishable than ever cruel Nature de
signed. By his habits of eating and
drinking and toiling and sleeping and
living he hastens his approach to the
end. He builds his cities for commerce,
and not for beauty nor for healthfulness,
and by the compactly located houses he
shuts out light and air and shuts in
every form of miasma. The mortality
of infants in cities discloses the fact
that they are built for commercial pur
poses and are not perfect homes for
man, because fhat is not a true human
home where the little ones must die so
readily in their mother’s arms. And this
mortality of children does not only show
that the modern city is bad for their
early years, but it teaches also this,
that the life of man demands fresh air,
sunlight and pure water, and that what
is killing the young and delicate sud
denly is slowly destroying those in ad
vanced life. The six months which kill
an infant wound an adult.
I he yellow fever is only the general
unreasonableness of city existence. It
is a final outbreak of pent up forces
The human constitution can endure dirt
and bad food and bad air for a time. A
powerful race may resist disease for ten
or twenty years, but at last the stpps
decome feeble and the enemy in the air
and the blood makes the assault. We
call this enemy yellow fever, or small
pox, or cholera, or scurvy, or plague, but
under any of these names it is only the
final shape of unwisdom. Man looks
after his commerce and neglects his
physical laws.
It is probable that London and the
cities of Europe have mastered those
old scourges which come to us in history
under the name of “plague.’’ But the
mastery has not been brought about by
the better prayers of modern times nor
by the more potent medicines of modern
physicians, but by mighty and costly
efforts to make the city as sweet a place
as God’s country. The recent genera
tions have so let in the air and the light
and carted away garbage and built
sewers, that the plague has been shut
up in history, and must be studied in
old books. The parks, the clean streets,
the bath, the better food, the better
drainage, the better public intelligence
of London and Paris, explain the long
absence of the terrible epidemics. Na
ture fully intends to kill all of us at
last, but there is nothing mean or stingy
about Nature. She loves to take away
the old—those who have passed over all
the flowery paths, but she has not the
least desire to slay little children or
young men and maidens. It is with re
luetance she makes a dying-bed of a
cradle. This cruel work she leaves for
man to perform ; and the world shows
that man can so shut out air and light
and can so shut in foul atmosphere that
death among his children shall come
early and often. They are born with
the weakness of the parent, and are
born into a house which soon enlarges
that weakness into death.
New Orleans might be made a fit
home for man. Its yellow fever is the
result of hard times and indolence. It
has not tiie mental vigor to grasp great
sanitary reforms, nor the money to pay
for their prosecution. Drainage, lifting
up the city, general cleanliness, might
render that city healthy as Paris. Put
it is so located that it cannot, like Chi
cago, endure neglect, and even Chicago
does not endure patiently its load of
unreasonableness. The lake winds have
kindly carried away each hour the poi
son from two hundred miles of dirty
streets and the poison of ten thousand
swill-barrels which no scavenger ever
empties, and those winds have without
pay borne away the malaria of the North
Branch, but if one can read nature, and
also the death-rate rightly, those lake
winds are growing tired of helping a city
that will not show any willingness to
help itself. But this must be said : the
times are so hard that Chicago, like
other cities of the land, cannot afford to
be healthy. It is cheaper to let mere
die than to open parks and clean streets,
and men will grumble less at sickness
and death than they will at high taxes.
The city needs men for its business, but
new men are as good as the old.
The real truth is that a city must be
managed by men of brain and of nerve.
They must be honest men, not willing
to steal the people’s money, but they
must be brave men, must open parks
and bath-houses, and must clean streets
and cart away garbage without any re
gard whatever to the compleints of the
tax-payer. The men who live in cities
and amass their fortunes there, should
pay well for the privilege of gain the
pleasure and culture which the city
brings. —I). S. in the Alliance.
Something- About the Proselyte
ancl the Inter-Mariange
Question.
II.
As long as the people of Israel en
joyed political independence, they glo
ried in the multitude of Gentiles join
ing them, and the anticipation of the
triumph of their God over heathenism
dispelled all fear in regal’d to the preser
vation of their faith in its purity. Hence
neither the lawgiver nor the historian
took any offense by Moses’ or David’s
marrying foreign wives. (See supple
ment 1.) The marriage of such was
forbidden only since the danger of se
duction to idolatry stared the zealous
Ezra in the face. The exclusiveness of
the Jewish race and religion did not,
however, prevent them from admitting
proselytes into their fold. On the con
trary, both the Sadducean priests and
the Maccabean rulers delighted in their
swelling the ranks of their people, even
when they were compelled by mere force
to adopt the Jewish faith and undergo’
the rite of circumcision, as it was the
case with the whole tribe of the Edu
means under the reign of John Hyr
canus. So is Abraham the patriarch
praised in the Midrash for having made
converts to his faith, and the Talmud
still takes pride in the famous scholars
who were either themselves proselytes,
or descended from such. The entrance
of the Gentile into a covenant with the
God of Israel was solemnized by the of
fering of a sacrifice of righteousness'T
see Sifre to Deuteron. xxxiii,
IJ—after the rites of circumcision, of
ablution and sprinkling had been duly
performed. From that time he was no
longer a stranger or the client of
a cer
tain house
but the client of di
vnie grace and righteousness
vsee supplement J), and a Jew in every
respect, except for intermarrying with
the children of priests.
I1 rom the moment, however, when
Christianity from a small Jewish sect
turned by its wholesale conversions to
be a ruling missionary church, prose
lytism was disowned and discouraged.
Any one expressing the intention of em
bracing the Jewish faith was dissuaded
from doing so, being confronted with the
gieat hardships awaiting him in conse
quence of both the rigidity of the laws
incumbent upon him, and the trials and
sufferings in store for every member of
the much persecuted Jewish nationality,
And only after having been tested and
proved wholly sincere and unwavering
about his belief in the truths of Juda
ism, was he granted admission. Any