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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN NEW RELIGIONS AND ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES

CONTEMPORARY
ALTERNATIVE
SPIRITUALITIES IN
ISRAEL
EDITED BY SHAI FERARO
AND JAMES R. LEWIS
 Palgrave Studies in New Religions
and Alternative Spiritualities

Series Editors

James R. Lewis
University of Tromso – The Arctic University
Tromso, Norway

Henrik Bogdan
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Aim of the Series
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities is an
interdisciplinary­monograph and edited collection series sponsored by the
International Society for the Study of New Religions. The series is devoted
to research on New Religious Movements. In addition to the usual groups
studied under the New Religions label, the series publishes books on such
phenomena as the New Age, communal & utopian groups, Spiritualism,
New Thought, Holistic Medicine, Western esotericism, Contemporary
Paganism, astrology, UFO groups, and new movements within tradi-
tional religions. The Society considers submissions from researchers in any
discipline.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14608
 Shai Feraro • James R. Lewis
Editors

Contemporary
Alternative
Spiritualities in Israel
Editors
Shai Feraro James R. Lewis
Tel Aviv University University of Tromso – The Arctic
Tel Aviv, Israel University
Tromso, Norway

Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities

ISBN 978-1-137-54741-5    ISBN 978-1-137-53913-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53913-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956888

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
 Contents

Part I Jew Age Spirituality1

1 A Sacred Time in the Sacred Land: Authenticating

the Past in New Age Judaism3
Rachel Werczberger

2 Kabbalah Through the Utilitarian Prism: Contemporary

Neo-Kabbalah in Israel as a Form of Consumer Culture21
Tomer Persico

3 Body and Soul in Yemima Avital’s Teachings and in Her

Students’ Testimonies, Philosophies and Practices39
Einat Ramon

4 Individualization of Jewish UnOrthodox (Alternative)

Wedding Rituals in Israel57
Anna Prashizky

Part II New Age Culture in Israel81

5 The Incorporation of Spiritual Care into

Israeli Medical Organizations83
Nurit Zaidman
v
vi Contents

6 Inherent Paradox in Cultural Change: New Age

Rituals as Case Study95
Dalit Simchai

7 The State and New Religious Movements115

Masua Sagiv

Part III Some Popular Currents in the Israeli ‘Scene’133

8 Theosophy and Anthroposophy in Israel:

An Historical Survey135
Isaac Lubelsky

9 Messages for the End: Eschatological Thought

in Twentieth Century Channeling155
Adam Klin-Oron

10 The Menstrual Discourse in Israeli Yoga for Women:

Narrative and Ritual, Agency and Control175
Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar

Part IV On the Fringes197

11 Ritual Adaptations and Celebrations of the Mabon

Sabbat (Autumn Equinox) by Israeli Neopagans199
Orly Salinas Mizrahi

12 Pentecostal Ethiopian Jews and Nigerian Members

of Olumba Olumba: Manifestations of Christianity
in Israel221
Galia Sabar

Erratum toE1

Index 243
 List of Contributors

Adam Klin-Oron is an anthropologist of religion at the Zefat Academic College

and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He has studied vacation culture among the
ultraorthodox, New Age channeling, the attitudes of New Age adherents to Jewish
law, and the reaction of the Israeli state to new religious movements.
Isaac Lubelsky (PhD 2005, School of History, Tel Aviv University) is the aca-
demic coordinator of Genocide Studies at the Open University of Israel. His recent
book, Celestial India (Equinox, 2012) is a comprehensive study of the history of
ideas that evolved as the consequence of East/West encounters during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and deals extensively with the early history of the
Theosophical Society and its contribution to the change of India’s image in
Western eyes and to the birth of India’s nationalist movement.
Tomer Persico has for the last five years lectured at Tel Aviv University’s Program
in Religious Studies. His dissertation dealt with techniques of meditation in the
Jewish tradition, past and present, and analyzed the cultural transformations lead-
ing to the observed shifts in meditative emphasis through the generations. Persico
is an expert on contemporary spirituality, and studies the varied current cultural
phenomena of the New Age, specializing in its intersection, and tension, with the
Jewish tradition in general, and Halakha in particular. He has contributed numer-
ous articles to newspapers and periodicals in Israel, and has five forthcoming arti-
cles on these subjects.
Anna Prashizky received a PhD from the Sociology and Anthropology
Department at Bar-Ilan University. She is a lecturer at Western Galilee Academic
College. Her research interests are in the area of ritual studies, especially new alter-
native rituals in modern Israeli society.

vii
viii List of Contributors

Einat Ramon received her PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University in
2000. Her dissertation (later published as a book in Hebrew) focused on maternal
images and ethics in the religious thought of the Israeli Labor Zionist thinker
A.D. Gordon. Ramon is a senior lecturer in Jewish Thought at the Schechter
Institute of Jewish Studies and the author of numerous academic and theological
articles in the field of modern Jewish Thought. Ramon was among the founders of
spiritual pastoral education and of its professional establishment in Israel. She is
the writer of the standards and an ethical code for Israeli chaplains. Ramon is a
certified Israeli chaplain and a graduate of the Israeli CPE educators’ program, and
the founder of the Marpeh MA Program at the Schechter Institute—the only aca-
demic program for the training of spiritual caregivers in Israel. She is a prolific
writer and researcher in this field.
Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar is a PhD student in the Unit of Folklore Studies,
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa,
Israel. Her dissertation examines women’s journey narratives to India from the
perspective of folk literature poetics. She is interested in questions of New Age
spirituality and gender, literary, historical and psychological constructions of space,
colonialism and post-colonial criticism. Rosen has travelled extensively to India
and subsequently trained as a yoga instructor. She has specialized in yoga instruc-
tion for women, thus combining her theoretical interests in issues of spirituality
and gender with her practical ventures.
Galia Sabar has been researching social and political issues related to Africa and
the African diaspora since 1984. Her publications include five books, two edited
volumes and 30 articles in academic journals. Since 1998, her research has focused
on African labor migrants in Israel with special emphasis on their post-colonial
organizations and their complex relations with Israeli society and politics. Since
2006, her research has focused on African Asylum seekers, mainly from Sudan and
Eritrea, who have entered Israel via its lax border with Egypt. Her research focuses
on a wide range of social, political and religious institutions the asylum seekers
have established in an attempt to improve their daily struggles for survival.
Masua Sagiv is a PhD candidate and a research scholar at the Zvi Meitar Center
for Advanced Legal Studies at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. Her d
­ issertation
explores the endeavors of Israeli religious feminism to promote social change
through the law. Sagiv is also a member of the board of directors in MEIDA—
Israeli Information Center on Contemporary Religions. Her areas of research are
law and religion, law and society, feminism, and family law.
Orly Salinas Mizrahi is a folklorist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
who studies various aspects of the Israeli Neo-pagan community in the course of
her MA and her soon-to-be completed PhD dissertation. Her current research
focuses on solitary and miscellaneous rituals, the Sabbats (seasonal) rituals and life
 List of Contributors  ix

cycle celebrations within this specific Israeli spiritual community. Mizrahi has been
a solitary Wiccan since the late 1970s and a member of the local Neo-pagan com-
munity for the past eight years. She lives in Jerusalem and has two grown sons.
Dalit Simchai attained her PhD at the University of Haifa, and teaches today at
the Tel Hai Academic College. She specializes in the study of subcultures and new
social movements, gender and feminism, as well as attempts to challenge main-
stream Israeli society. Her work on Israeli New Agers focuses on the various para-
doxes faced by these adherents. She has published books on the experiences of
Israeli backpackers in India and on Israeli New Age festivals.
Rachel Werczberger is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department for Jewish
Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a visiting lecturer in the
program for Religious Studies at Tel Aviv University. She received her PhD in
anthropology and sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work
focuses on New Age spirituality, New Age Judaism and the anthropology of con-
temporary Judaism. Together with Prof. Boaz Huss she recently edited a special
issue of Israel Studies Review on “New Age Culture in Israel: Social and Political
Aspects”.
Nurit Zaidman is the Area Head of Strategy and International Management
and Professor in the Department of Business Administration at Ben-­ Gurion
University of the Negev, Israel. She graduated from the Department of
Anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia. Zaidman has published exten-
sively in the area of New Religious Movement and the New Age. Her work has
been published in journals such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,
Journal of Contemporary Religion, Group & Organization Management, and
Organization. Her current research focuses on the incorporation and translation
of the New Age into mainstream organizations.
 Introduction

The study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) developed during the

1970s as a plethora of non-traditional religious movements were begin-
ning to gain public visibility in the West in the wake of the decline of the
Sixties counterculture. Initially, these movements held the attention of
Western sociologists of religion, primarily due to the disputes that arose as
a reaction to their rapid expansion. Religious studies scholars—who were
then still in the process of establishing their discipline as a legitimate field
of study distinct from theology and traditional biblical studies—for the
most part showed no interest in the phenomenon, and preferred to leave
NRMs to sociologists. This situation began to change in later decades,
however, and presently NRM scholars from religious studies backgrounds
outnumber those who hail from the social sciences; even historians have
now begun to venture into the field.
Three academic journals currently focus on NRMs, Nova Religio, the
International Journal for the Study of New Religions, and the Alternative
Spirituality and Religion Review. There are furthermore at least three
book series dedicated to the study of New Religions, and annual confer-
ences and workshops organized by CESNUR and INFORM have been
held continuously since the 1980s. Recently, an academic association
devoted to the study of NRMs, the International Society for the Study of
New Religions (ISSNR), was formed, and courses on NRMs are popular
offerings in most religious studies programs of any size.
But despite the growth of this field of study, some NRM scholars—at
least in North America—maintain that the longer-range prospects of the
discipline are unfavorable, basing their argument, in part, on the perception

xi
xii Introduction

that relatively few younger scholars are choosing to specialize in the study
of NRMs. Instead, it seems that most new research continues to be pro-
duced by the same scholars who joined the field back in the seventies and
eighties. In Israel, though, the study of NRMs seems to be developing with
gusto, as younger researchers join the field and many graduate students
present new findings from their dissertations yearly.
In recent decades, Israel has become home to a bustling scene of New
Age and alternative spiritualities, ranging from homegrown phenomena
to overseas imports that are either adopted wholly, or adapted in vary-
ing degrees to Israeli Jewish culture. These new forms of spirituality
also differ in their level of penetration into contemporary Israeli society.
Some, as shall be seen below, are the preserve of foreign refugees and
work migrants, and their existence is virtually unknown to most if not all
Israelis. Others—while practiced by Israelis—similarly remain under the
public’s radar, while certain groups and practices (whether imported from
the West or produced locally) have permeated deep into the Israeli main-
stream. In response, three academic journals have dedicated special issues1
to the study of these phenomena in Israeli society, and a short edited vol-
ume has been published in Hebrew (Tavory 2007). The present anthol-
ogy, however, is the first of its kind to have been published in English. One
of its goals, therefore, is to supply scholars with an opportunity to learn
how New Age and alternative spiritualities—produced in Western coun-
tries within a predominantly Protestant or secular culture—transform and
adapt themselves in Israel. Positioned in a strategic location connecting
Europe, Asia and Africa, Israel is an ethno-national state which views itself
as a Western enclave situated at the heart of the Arab Middle East, con-
stantly attempting ‘to reconcile the two conflicting principles of a “Jewish
and democratic state”’ (Ben-Porat and Turner 2011, 1).
Founded in 1948, Israel was built on an overwhelmingly secular vision.
While Orthodox Judaism was (and still is) designated as the state religion,
most Israeli Jews did not identify as religious, and were quite disinterested
in either mainstream or alternative forms of spirituality. This situation
changed in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which substantially
destabilized the secular, modernist Zionist ethos on which the vast major-
ity of Israelis based themselves (Ariel 2010, 4).
During the 1970s, several New Religious Movements were imported
into Israel, and homegrown alternative spiritualities began to form as
well. Masua Sagiv’s Chap. 7 demonstrates, from a Legal Studies point
of view, how the state reacted to NRM phenomena through the actions
 Introduction  xiii

of its legislative, executive and judicial branches. Building on Marianna

Ruah-Midbar’s and Adam Klin-Oron’s work (2013), Sagiv outlines gov-
ernmental attempts to control the activity of NRMs by inter-ministerial
reports examining the ‘phenomenon of cults’. She illustrates the existing
legislation and proposed bills involving NRMs, and describes the judi-
ciary’s approach to NRMs, as reflected in three central criminal law cases
from the last decade. In trying to curtail or control the activities of NRMs
and New Age religiosities, government authorities are obviously fighting
a losing battle. In Chap. 5, Nurit Zaidman analyzes the recent growth of
the spiritual care movement and its incorporation into core institutions of
mainstream Israeli society—hospitals and homes for the elderly. Zaidman
shows how this phenomenon is embedded within New Age spirituality in
Israel, and is shaped by the specific characteristic of Israeli society on the
macro level, as well as by the particular features of specific organizations.
The last 25 years have featured an explosion in both the variety of
different groups and the sheer number of participants. Indeed, each
year dozens of New Age festivals take place, with the primary festi-
val drawing over 50,000 participants (Ruah-Midbar 2006, 144–146),
enough to populate an average Israeli town. Ruah-Midbar and Klin-
Oron (2010) suggested recently that New Age phenomena in Israel are
located along two axes: one ranging from shared global (Western) forms
to homegrown cultural products, while the other focuses on the rela-
tional approaches between New Age spirituality and traditional Jewish
praxis, ranging from indifference and opposition to adaptation and pres-
ervation. Global New Age discourse is thus adapted in many cases into
an Israeli ‘Jew Age’ through the use of Jewish symbols and practices.
This ‘Jew Age’ spirituality is a direct outcome of Israel’s unique and
complicated politics of identity as the nation state of the Jewish people.
A good example of such mingling of New Age alternative spirituality
and Judaism in Israel can be found in Joseph Loss’ (2007) research on
Jewish-Israeli practitioners of Buddhism.
In Chap. 2, Tomer Persico focuses on expressions of Neo-Kabbalah
in Israeli society, and describes the rise of what he terms the ‘Utilitarian
Self’—a social reality which originated in late nineteen-century American
religiosity, and began to play a significant role in Israeli contemporary spir-
ituality in the 1990s. Einat Ramon’s chapter presents the story of Yemima
Avital (1929–1999), a female mystic and student of psychology, who is rec-
ognized today as the leader of a contemporary ‘female – Hassidic’ move-
ment. Avital developed a spiritual discipline known as ‘cognitive thinking’,
xiv Introduction

which she taught in Tel Aviv during the 1990s. She left no manuscripts,
and her teachings were later published by her various students.
Chapter 1, written by Rachel Werczberger, focuses on the ways in
which Jewish history is recovered, reinterpreted and remolded in Israeli
New Age Judaism. New Age Judaism, argues Werczberger, maintains a
spiritual neo-Canaanite narrative of the past by reformulating the biblical
period as a sacred time, distinguished by non-institutionalized forms of
religious experiences, indigenous pagan and nature worship, prophecy, as
well as direct divine revelation. This reconfiguration of the past underpins
New Age Judaism’s radical ideas and provides them with a sense of cul-
tural continuity and authenticity. Its narrative emulates and subverts the
‘classic’ Zionist narrative, and ignores its particularistic and nationalistic
constituents, emphasizing instead a universal spirituality, realized by indig-
enous religions and practices. This strategy caters to the identity needs
of contemporary, non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis. Non-Orthodox forms of
Judaism—which make up the majority of Jews in the USA—are not recog-
nized as legitimate by the State of Israel, which grants Orthodox Judaism
a monopoly in all official matters pertaining to religion in the country.
In Chap. 4, Anna Prashizky deals with an issue that has become highly
contested in Israeli society in recent years—unorthodox wedding ritu-
als. Prashizky explores the central characteristics of these ceremonies in
modern Israeli society from a post-modern and post-secular perspective,
and finds that they combine secular and antireligious components with
religious components of Jewish orthodox rituals, basing their inspiration
on Jewish texts and ritual practices. Her principal claim is that in contrast
to the orthodox wedding rituals, which remain within the province of
the Jewish collective and are replete with collective meanings, alternative
rituals manifest a process of individualization, and mostly focus on the
individual’s biographical memory, which joins or replaces collective Jewish
memory.
To assume that the Israeli ‘enclosure’ remains unaffected by its ‘oth-
ered’ neighborhood would be tragically wrong—as the last 70 years would
attest. Both mainstream (Jewish) religion and alternative spiritualities
generally shy away from engaging with (primarily Muslim and Christian)
practices or beliefs that either originate in the outlining Arab nations or
are maintained by the country’s significant Arab minority. The interest in
Sufism is a notable exception to this rule (Bram 2014). Indeed, while the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is frequently covered by world media, outsiders
generally forget that Israel proper (meaning, if we excluded its contested
 Introduction  xv

hold in large parts of the West Bank) is not a religiously-monolithic state,

and that roughly twenty percent of its population is (predominantly)
Muslim, Christian or Druze. One hundred and thirty thousand adher-
ents of the ethnoreligious and esoteric Druze faith live in Israel and have
maintained a close alliance with the country’s Jewish population since
the foundation of Israel. The Druze, however, do not accept converts
(both in Israel and worldwide), and most Druze do not undergo the ini-
tiation that would entitle them to view the religion’s holy scriptures. It
should also be noted that Haifa—Israel’s third largest city—functions as
the World Centre of the Baha’i faith, though its adherents do not pros-
elytize to Israelis.
In light of the above, we accept that one of the drawbacks of the present
anthology—one that will hopefully be amended by future scholarship—is
its lack of coverage of engagement with alternative forms of spirituality
among Israeli Arabs. This lacuna was caused largely due to a shortage of
available contributions that would be based on original research during our
canvassing stage, but it should be noted that in recent years there has been
some pioneering work done among traditional women healers in Israeli
Arab society, as well as Israeli Arab women who engage in complementary
medicine (Popper-Giveon 2009; Popper-Giveon and Weiner-Levy 2013).
Israeli Arabs, however, generally do not take part in the country’s buffet
of alternative spiritualities. This seems to be due to the fact that Arabs
usually come from a lower socio-economic and relatively traditional back-
ground (Israeli New Age culture appeals mostly to the middle classes), but
also because New Age festivals reflect a Jewish-Israeli sense of belonging.
Dalit Simchai’s study of Israeli New Age festivals, presented in Chap. 6,
attempts to problematize the ways in which the organizers of the Israeli
New Age festival construct their identity as distinct from those whom they
perceive to be part of Israel’s dominant society. They view the festival as
an opportunity to meet with Israeli hegemonic society and influence it
from within, without being limited or influenced by its containment and
exclusion mechanisms. The organizers’ concerns for ‘authenticity’ and the
‘commercialization’ of the festival are also discussed.
Many of the NRMs and alternative forms of spirituality active in Israel
are overseas products, and don’t necessarily adopt Jew Age values and
ideas in order to compete in the local alternative spirituality market.
Space limitations prevent us from devoting specific chapters to most of
them, but individual studies can be found on Israeli Shamans (Yavelberg
2004), Rainbow festival goers (Tavori and Goodman 2010), Neo-pagans
xvi Introduction

(Feraro 2014b) and ISKCON (Zaidman-Dvir and Sharot 1992).

In Chap. 8, Isaac Lubelsky provides a pioneering survey of Theosophy
and Anthroposophy in Israel. He elaborates on the unique interest that
both doctrines and movements have gained, and summarizes both move-
ments’ current status in Israel. In Chap. 11, Orly Salinas Mizrahi examines
the ways in which Israeli Neo-pagans reinterpret and adapt the Mabon
festival—a Celtic-­inspired seasonal festival developed and celebrated by
British and North American Neo-pagans—into the local Israeli climate
and agricultural setting. Adam Klin-Oron’s research, presented in Chap. 9,
examines eschatological inclinations among Israeli Channelers, while
Chap. 10 features Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar’s research into discourse
about menstruation in Israeli Yoga for Women courses. Rosen claims that
this new discourse attempts to ‘re-enchant’ the menstruation experience
and to ritualize it. Simultaneously, she argues that the Israeli social order
limits this new discourse and shapes it to conform to such principles as fer-
tility and the modern project of self. Rosen’s chapter is also exploratory in
its examination of this important facet of the country’s emerging women’s
spirituality scene. A fuller examination of it remains to be written, but a
short historical description of its development since the early 1990s can be
found in Feraro (2014a).
Finally, Galia Sabar’s Chap. 12 deals with new forms of spiritual-
ity among African labor migrants living in Israel and centered mostly in
Southern Tel Aviv, which takes on a distinct Pentecostal character. This
Afro-Israeli Christian arena, Sabar maintains, has proved to be flexible and
fluid enough to accommodate the majority of its varied members (albeit
within certain limits), juxtaposing global trends with local realities and the
needs of its members. One of the groups on which Sabar concentrates—
the Nigerian-based Brotherhood of the Cross and Star—can arguably be
construed as an NRM.

Shai Feraro
James R. Lewis

Note
1. See Nova Religio (2010), Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review
(2014), and Israel Studies Review (2014).
 Introduction  xvii

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and community in contemporary Israel. Nova Religio, 13(4), 4–21.
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Israeli citizenship. In G. Ben-Porat & B. S. Turner (Eds.), The contradictions of
Israeli citizenship: Land, religion and state (pp. 1–22). London: Routledge.
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 PART I

Jew Age Spirituality

 CHAPTER 1

A Sacred Time in the Sacred Land:

Authenticating the Past in New Age Judaism

Rachel Werczberger

Judaism is ailing. It is lying, dying, right in front of us. Only we can

nurture its recovery. In the linguistic code of Judaism, this malady is
named ‘Exile’. The Kabbalah calls it the ‘Exile of the Shechinah’. What,
however, is the meaning of ‘Exile’? In the tacitly understood code, it rep-
resents the infirmity of Judaism since the destruction of the Second
Temple. As those who eat the bitter fruits of this status, daily, as Jews, and
particularly—and ironically—as Israelis, we should try to better under-
stand it (Ezrahi 2004, 32).

Throughout the centuries, the memory of the Land of Israel has been a
salient component in Jewish identity. In contemporary Israeli society, this
memory reifies and reinforces different discourses regarding the relation
between the Jewish people and the land (Ben-Ari and Bilu 1997). Groups
promoting contrasting national and religious ideologies attempt to use
the historical memory of the Land of Israel as a resource for narrating an
unbroken link with the past, and especially with the biblical past (Boyarin
1997).

R. Werczberger (*)
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel

© The Author(s) 2017 3

S. Feraro, J.R. Lewis (eds.), Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities
in Israel, Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative
Spiritualities, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53913-7_1
4 R. WERCZBERGER

Using the case of New Age Judaism’s (NAJ) narrative of the past, this
chapter aims to shed light on some of the cultural transformations taking
place in contemporary Israeli society and especially on the discursive con-
figuration of the link between Jewish history, contemporary spirituality,
and the land. In using the term spirituality, I follow Roof’s definition. Roof
defines spirituality as ‘the inner life that is bound up with, and embedded
within, religious forms, or … as a search on the part of the individual
for reaching, through some regimen of self-transformation, one’s greatest
potential’ (Roof 2003, 138).
A pastiche of Jewish tradition and New Age spiritual culture, NAJ
attempts to renew Judaism by incorporating New Age thought and practice
into the Jewish tradition (Werczberger 2011). In a manner similar to other
modern endeavors of identity construction, NAJ uses the past as a symbolic
resource to legitimize its claim on the present (Said 2000). By offering new
perspectives on the Jewish history, NAJ attempts to authenticate its own
spiritual vision for Judaism as the original, uncorrupted form of Judaism.
My analysis of the NAJ movement draws on the concepts of the inven-
tion of tradition (Hobsbawm 1983) and reflexive tradition (Mellor 1993).
According to Mellor, the religious traditions of high or late modernity
are characterized by the extensiveness and systematic use of reflexivity
(Mellor1993). If the reflexivity of high modernity is understood as the
continual and organized use of knowledge about social life in order to
reorder and transform it (Giddens 1991), religious actors in high moder-
nity constantly reappraise the knowledge they hold on their own religious
values, systems, and so on and attempt to revise and modify them accord-
ing to their needs (Mellor 1993).
Thus, NAJ’s aspiration for Jewish renewal and its invention of tradition
can also be understood as the reflexive effort for the reappraisal and revi-
sion of Jewish tradition. While this endeavor is realized in NAJ in a number
of ways—for example in ritualistic or discursive ones—this study focuses
on the reflexive transformation of Jewish history through a spiritual New
Age perspective. The resulting narrative should be understood through
the context of contemporary Jewish–Israeli dialectics about Jewish collec-
tive memory and the relation of the Jewish people with the land.
I argue that the NAJ’s alternative narrative of the past is a counter-­
memory (Olick and Robbins 1998) to some of the dominant Israeli histori-
cal narratives, which both differs from and challenges them. NAJ’s narrative
emulates and subverts the ‘classic’ Zionist narrative1 (Zerubavel 1995;
Feige 2002) and presents its own claim for a more accurate representation
 A SACRED TIME IN THE SACRED LAND: AUTHENTICATING THE PAST IN NEW... 5

of history. This narrative ignores the particular and national constituents of

the Zionist narrative and emphasizes instead universal spirituality which is
realized through the adoption of indigenous religions and practices. The
result is what I call a spiritual neo-Canaanite narrative of the past.
The study presented here is based on a fieldwork conducted between
2004 and 2006 in two NAJ communities in Israel: Hamakom (Lit. ‘the
place’; also used as reference to God) and Bayit Chadash (Lit. ‘new-­
home’).2 While the fieldwork involved participant observation, formal and
informal interviews, and textual analysis, the present chapter is primarily
based on an analysis of the writings of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, the founder
and leader of the Hamakom community.

New Age Judaism

As noted above, the development of the NAJ movement in Israel coincides
with the expansion—in the last three decades—of contemporary modes of
spirituality and the New Age in the Western world. Often referred to as
the ‘New Age Movement’ (e.g. Heelas 1996), New Age is not a unified
movement, but rather a segmented network of groups without central
authority or leadership. Scholars of the New Age have identified charac-
teristic themes or common teachings which New Agers share, such as the
anticipation of a spiritual cosmic transformation, the use of meditative and
healing techniques to achieve this transformation, psychological render-
ings of religious notions, and the sanctification of the self (Hanegraaff
1998; Heelas 1996). A notable aspect of New Age spiritualities is its
religious eclecticism. New Age combines a wide range of traditions and
practices derived from Western esoteric, Oriental, Native American, and
pagan cultures, creating a cultural mélange (Huss 2007). In NAJ, these
tendencies are realized in its eclectic assemblage of Jewish traditions and
non-Jewish New-Age practices.
Emerging from the Israeli New Age culture, NAJ is a collective, partially
organized phenomenon that has evolved since the late 1990s. NAJ in Israel
is influenced by the North American Jewish Renewal Movement (Weissler
2008; Magid 2006), yet it remains a distinct local phenomenon. By 2001,
two key figures had emerged in the Israeli NAJ scene: the abovementioned
Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi and Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, who had established two
separate communities. Both communities attracted the typical participants
of New-Age culture in Israel, hailing from a secular, upper-middle class,
Ashkenazi (European) background—the characteristics of Israel’s veteran
élites (Kaplan and Werczberger forthcoming; Kimmerling 2001).
6 R. WERCZBERGER

While NAJ thinkers claim that their ambition to renew Judaism largely
relies on the Jewish mystical traditions, such as Kabbalah and Hassidism,
de facto various New Age elements are embedded in their teachings and
practices (Weissler 2008; Werczberger 2011). These characteristics include
a strong emphasis on a personal relationship with God and on subjective
religious experience; an eclectic tendency and the willingness to integrate
non-Jewish—mostly Eastern mystical—practices into Jewish ritual; and a
stress on personal development and growth. Through the integration of
Kabbalist and Hassidic concepts with New Age values, symbols, and ritu-
als, NAJ aims to transform and revive Judaism, and to offer a spiritual
alternative to existing Jewish denominations. Considering the dominance
of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel, NAJ’s hybrid form of Judaism is clearly
breaking new ground, hence the need to legitimize and authenticate itself.
This is achieved via the reconstruction of Jewish history.
In the following sections, I focus on the writings of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi,
leader of the Hamakom community. Ezrahi is well known for being one of
the clearly articulated voices in Jewish New Age circles. Based on intimate
knowledge of both Jewish and academic texts, his writings illustrate NAJ’s
conscious effort to reinvent the Jewish tradition by reconstructing the past
through the subversion of the ‘classical’ Zionist historical narrative.

Renewing the Present, Reconstructing the Past

In numerous essays, Ezrahi presents his proposal for the renewal of con-
temporary Judaism through the integration of Jewish mysticism with New
Age spirituality. Following the establishment of his community, Hamakom,
in 1999, Ezrahi explicitly stated that:

Hamakom wishes to incorporate methods and philosophies from various

sources into renewed Judaism, many of them from Eastern religions—tech-
niques of bodily movement and meditation methods. One cannot imagine
the benefit that the integration of meditation into our verbal prayers might
have. (Ezrahi 1999)

The key to understanding the need for renewing Judaism, Ezrahi claims,
lies in the Jewish past, more specifically in the period of Exile. The destruc-
tion of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. and the subsequent exile of the
Jewish people from the Land of Israel mark the rupture between people
and land in Jewish history, and the advance of what became known as
 A SACRED TIME IN THE SACRED LAND: AUTHENTICATING THE PAST IN NEW... 7

Rabbinic Judaism—which, he continues, is the source of the contemporary

malaise of Judaism.
In a different essay, Ezrahi juxtaposes the image of Rabbinic or exilic
Judaism with the biblical period and evokes a romantic image of biblical
times—one in which the Jews are depicted as farmers and warriors who
dwell on and are physically attached to the land and to Nature.

Before it [Judaism] became a religion of rabbis with hats and modest women
covering every inch of their body, a religion of books blending erudition
and Sabbath cholent [a traditional European one-pot Jewish dish served on
sabbath], Judaism was a tribal culture of warriors and poets, such as King
David, of women bathing naked on the rooftops like Bathsheba, the wife of
Uria the Hittite. Judaism was a religion of peasants who lived on their ances-
tors’ land, like Naboth the Jezreelite; of farmers sleeping on the threshing
floor, like Boaz, and celebrated the vintage with love rituals of Tu-B’ev, like
the daughters of Shilo, who danced in the vineyard under full moonlight,
enticing men to ravish them. It was a religion of shepherds who sometimes
met angels in the field, like Samson’s parents, and saw colorful visions of
God like Ezekiel. (Ezrahi 2007, 180)

Indeed, similar to other modern national and ethnic movements (Friedman

1992; Hobsbawm 1983), NAJ harnesses the past in order to provide itself
with an account of its origins and development, which then allows for its
self-recognition over time (Halbwachs 1980). In his seminal work on col-
lective memory, Halbwachs (1980) argues that the past is a social construc-
tion, which is mainly, if not wholly, shaped by the concerns of the present.
Collective memory is an organic part of social life, which is continuously
transformed in response to society’s changing needs (Zerubavel 1995).
Accordingly, the social concern with collective memory is often related
to the formation of collective identities in times of rapid transformations.
‘Paradoxically’, Hobsbawm (1972, 11) argues, ‘the past remains the most
useful analytical tool for coping with constant change’ (also Friedman 1992;
Hervieu-Le´ger 2000). Referring to Jewish collective memory, Yerushalmi
(1982) argues that the modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins
at a time marked by a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living, which
also entailed a growing decay of Jewish group memory.
At the same time, NAJ’s preoccupation with the past also reflects the
contemporary, late-modern need for temporal anchoring, ‘in the wake of
the information revolution [when] the relationship between the past, pres-
ent and future is being transformed’ (Huyssen 1995, 7). In recent years,
8 R. WERCZBERGER

this tendency has grown so strong that Huyssen deems it to be a cultural

obsession. Conceived, then, as a post-modern phenomenon (Huss 2007),
NAJ’s concern with the past, which it shares with other New Age spiri-
tualities (Hanegraaff 1998; Ruah-Midbar 2006), seems to reinforce the
idea that it may be the result of the ‘post-modern crisis’ (Huyssen 1995).
The articulation of a ‘pre-historical’ narrative of the past by many New
Age groups, including NAJ, may grant these new cultural phenomena
some temporal anchoring, which is absent from their eclectic assemblage
of spiritual beliefs and rituals.
However, in order to fully understand NAJ, we also need to consider
the specific socio-cultural context from which it emerged. Indeed, NAJ’s
reworking of Jewish history is yet another voice in the cacophony of his-
torical narratives and social agendas that is resonating in contemporary
Israeli public space today. The first and foremost among them is the (now)
diminishing ‘classic’ Zionist narrative.
The ‘classical’ Zionist historical narrative relates the greatness of the
Israelite nation in ancient times, and the 2000 years of exile during which
the Jewish people suffered and forfeited its national greatness until the
glorious return to the ancient land (Feige 2002). However, beginning
in the early 1980s, various social, political, and economic dynamics have
led to the erosion of the Zionist cultural–national hegemonic center and
the waning of the Zionist hegemony (Ram 2007). The consequent criti-
cal social thinking was directed at deconstructing basic elements in the
Zionist historical narrative (Kimmerling 2001; Feige 2002).
Moreover, today groups promoting sharply contrasting ideologies have
joined in an attempt to use Jewish history as an ideal model for a Jewish
state. Various groups attempt to construct new ethnic and religious identi-
ties and in doing so construe new narratives of the past (Kimmerling2001).
The radical right-wing Zionist-Religious Jews, for instance, substantiate
their claims for a ‘Greater Land of Israel’ and for settlements in the Israeli-­
occupied West Bank by pointing to the places where the biblical stories
allegedly happened. They thus verify the ‘right’ of the Jewish people over
these places (Aran 1991).
In this sense, the distinctness of the NAJ narrative arises from its New
Age premises and the related universal perceptions. NAJ simultaneously
emulates and transforms the classical Zionist narrative in a way which plays
down its national and particular elements and emphasizes what might be
perceived as universal spirituality. This is primarily achieved by the division
of Jewish history into two periods: The Rabbinic period and the Antiquity.
 A SACRED TIME IN THE SACRED LAND: AUTHENTICATING THE PAST IN NEW... 9

The NAJ’s Narrative of the Past: The Rabbinic

Versus the Biblical Period
As noted, NAJ’s narrative divides Jewish history into two main periods: the
earlier period, the biblical past or Antiquity, comprising the pre-tribal, pre-­
national history of the patriarchs, the Israelite conquest of ancient Canaan,
and the period of the First and Second Temple; and the later or Rabbinic
period, extending roughly from the first century A.D. to the beginning
of the twentieth century. In juxtaposing the two, the NAJ regards the
time of Antiquity as a source of inspiration for the original, authentic spir-
itual Judaism. Its significance lies in the perceived affinity between the
ancient Israelites and the land and nature that supposedly existed at that
time. Conversely, the Rabbinic period is regarded as emblematic of the
decline of Judaism. I now describe the two phases in turn, starting with
the Rabbinic period.
In line with its criticism of contemporary Judaism and Rabbinic cul-
ture, NAJ conceives the Rabbinic era as the period when Judaism declined
and its institutionalization as a text-based religion was initiated. The
­destruction of the Temple and the separation of the people from the land
(the Exile) led to the evanescence of all rituals that connected humankind,
land, and nature, which in turn led to the Orthodox Jewish ‘obsession’
with the ‘correct’ application of textual laws and traditions. As Ezrahi
states:

If we return to the simple origins of Judaism and through them explore the
system of which the Bible [Torah] speaks, we will soon discover that it does
not speak of a world of rabbis who instruct eternal students who marry their
ever-pregnant wives, and not of the Orthodox political parties with their
religious courts, and not of the bookshelves holding the books with tiny
letters, in which you need to burrow in order to discover whether you are
permitted to open the refrigerator on the Shabbat, and what you should do
if, God forbid, you opened it and the light was switched on. No. The Bible
speaks of a people who dwell on their land, people who are warriors and
farmers. (2004, 33)

In an apt metaphor, Ezrahi describes exile Judaism as a ‘take away’ reli-

gion that, like a laptop computer, may be plugged into a power source in
any location. By replacing nature and Temple rituals with texts, Rabbinic
Judaism reconstructed Jewish practice in a manner that allowed its adher-
ents to overcome the geographical specificities and to practice their
10 R. WERCZBERGER

Judaism in exile. The disassociation of practiced Judaism from nature and

the land consequently led to its decline.
While the NAJ cannot entirely disregard the contribution of the
Rabbinic period to Jewish spirituality, namely the importance of Kabbalistic
and Hassidic writings, Ezrahi gives far greater consideration to the biblical
period or Antiquity ending with the destruction of the Second Temple
and the exile from the land of Israel.
In its reconstruction of this period, NAJ focuses on its so-called spiritual
aspects—the pagan traditions that existed alongside Judaism, the agrarian
rituals that took place in the Temple, and prophecy. By accentuating these
dimensions, the NAJ reconstructs Antiquity as a sacred time, a period
distinguished by non-institutionalized forms of religious life, pagan, and
nature worship, as well as direct divine revelation:

Up to the Babylonian Exile which followed the destruction of the First

Temple, the Hebraic faith was powerfully associated with the land and the
temple. The early Israelites were tribal people, who, although reaching this
land after a long journey in the desert, were still conscious of the revelation
of God in heaven and on earth, in the rain and drought, in the desert wind,
the natural springs of water and the wild deer, and consolidated their faith
and rituals accordingly. Many of our traditions, our holidays and festivals
are based on Canaanite traditions which the Israelites, coming to this land,
adopted with slight changes in order to accommodate their faith and cus-
toms to the local traditions. (Ezrahi 2002, 42)

Ezrahi’s conjecture of Canaanite worship draws on earth and nature-­

based spiritualities, such as Neo-paganism (Albanese 1990; Pike 2004;
Taylor 2001). In these earth-based spiritualities, nature is perceived to be
sacred and participants are motivated by their pantheistic and animistic
perceptions (Taylor 2001). Concomitantly, Ezrahi’s effort to reformulate
the pre-Rabbinic Jewish past in spiritual terms entails the ‘re-discovery’
of these spiritual aspects in Jewish history. It also echoes many existing
reconstructions and idealizations of a mythic, pre-Christian past in accord
with New Age spirituality (Hanegraaff 1998; Ruah-Midbar 2006).
In his reconstruction of Jewish history, Ezrahi draws on two textual
resources: academic scholarship and biblical and Talmudic writings.
Drawing on these texts, Ezrahi underscores three aspects in this period
that are regarded as spiritual: pagan rituals—which celebrate the imma-
nence of God in nature; agrarian Temple rituals—which affirm humanity’s
relationship with the cycles of nature; and prophecy—the experience of
unmediated and un-institutionalized divine revelation.
 A SACRED TIME IN THE SACRED LAND: AUTHENTICATING THE PAST IN NEW... 11

Drawing on biblical and archeological works, Ezrahi argues that the

ancient Hebrew religion, as practiced during Antiquity, developed from
direct contact with the local pagan religions. Quoting the works of schol-
ars such as Raphael Patai and Yehezkel Koifman, Ezrahi presumes that dur-
ing Antiquity the Israelites concurrently worshipped Yahweh, the Hebrew
God, and local deities, such as the Canaanite goddess Asherah.3 For
Ezrahi, the significance of this detail is that by accommodating Canaanite
paganism in the monotheistic worship of Yahweh, the Israelites allegedly
acknowledged the immanence of God in nature. From this, he concludes
that the Jewish rituals of that time were pantheistic, with the immanence
of God revealed in the forces of nature and their celebration.
Moreover, by re-reading biblical and Talmudic texts, Ezrahi asserts that
even in the days of the Second Temple, long after Canaanite pagan wor-
ship had disappeared from the area, pagan or pagan-like traditions may
have existed alongside mainstream, monotheistic Temple worship. For
instance, Ezrahi recounts a story from the Talmud according to which an
ancient ceremony took place during the festival of Simchat Beit Hashoeva.
This involved Jews leaving the Temple to draw water from the Shiloh
spring, but, while doing so, they turned their backs to the Temple and
bowed to the sun. According to Ezrahi, this tradition and the fact that the
Jewish sages abolished it later validate the existence of pagan-like rituals
even in the Temple.
Furthermore, in the essay quoted above, Ezrahi reminds his readers
that during biblical times, ecstatic prophecy—the unmediated experience
of God—was common among both the local pagans and the Israelites. He
substantiates this claim by drawing on a description from the first Book
of Samuel. The passage narrates a spontaneous prophecy that occurred
among King David, King Saul, and their men. According to the story,
David the would-be king was hunted and persecuted by King Saul; he hid
in the backyard of the prophet Samuel and his disciples. When Saul’s sol-
diers approached, all those present, including the soldiers and King Saul,
suddenly experienced a spell of ecstatic prophecy.

Competing Narratives of the Past

Given its ideological (re)-appraisal of the past, the explicit periodization
of Jewish history, and the emphasis on the connection between people
and land/nature, NAJ’s historical narrative is analogous to the Zionist
construction of the Jewish past (Zerubavel 1995). Both narratives divide
Jewish history into similar time periods: Antiquity, when the Jewish people
12 R. WERCZBERGER

lived on their land; the period of the Exile, when the Jewish people were
separated from the land and forced to live elsewhere; and the present time.
Furthermore, both regard the earlier period, Antiquity, in favorable terms
and negate the time of exile. For the Zionists, the Exile—which scattered
the Jewish people—undermined the Jews’ shared experience of nation-
hood (Zerubavel 1995); for NAJ, the Exile means the separation of the
people from the land and thus severance from nature and the unmediated
experience of the sacred.
Importantly, though, in term of the appraisal of Antiquity, the Zionist
narrative emphasizes the collective aspects of this period, constructing it as
the national ‘golden age’, when the ancient Hebrew nation flourished and
enjoyed political autonomy (Zerubavel 1995). NAJ, however, shifts the
emphasis from the collective and political to the personal and spiritual. In
this version of the past, Antiquity is a mythological time of genuine Jewish
spirituality, before it was corrupted by the Rabbinic establishment. Here,
the land does not symbolize nationhood but spiritual and personal affinity
with nature. It is only when the Israelites lived on the land, in proximity
to nature, that they could experience the sacred in a personal and unmedi-
ated way.
In other words, while both movements ground their claims in the his-
torical association between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, they
profoundly differ in the way they articulate this relationship. The Zionist
movement accentuated the link between national ambitions and territory,
transforming the idea of the land from the religious myth of the sacred
homeland into a concrete secular and political actuality. The Zionists cel-
ebrated the natural beauty of the Land. Yet, at the same time, they also
aspired to ‘conquer’ it—to develop and transform it for national ends. In
Zionist writings, the land was often referred to as a desolate, unsettled ter-
rain which the Jewish pioneers would cultivate and develop (Schnell 1997).
Formulated at the end of the twentieth century, NAJ’s vision of the ideal
relationship between people, land, and nature negates the Zionist approach
and leans toward environmental awareness. Subverting the Zionist mod-
ern national claim for the ownership of the land, NAJ’s spiritual perspec-
tive advances an eco-centric approach—depicting a non-­hierarchal, holistic
relation between the land, human beings, and nature. Moreover, influ-
enced by New Age and Neo-pagan spiritualities, the land is considered to
be the site of sacred nature and godly immanence (Taylor 2001).
In this sense, NAJ’s historical narrative is both an adaptation and a
subversion of the Zionist narrative. It is constructed on the juxtaposition
 A SACRED TIME IN THE SACRED LAND: AUTHENTICATING THE PAST IN NEW... 13

of Antiquity/Exile and connection with/severance from the land, while

simultaneously subverting the secular–national model and positing a spiri-
tual–religious model in its place. In this nature-centered model, the local
nature religions of the Land of Israel (Canaanite paganism) become a
source of inspiration for authentic Jewish spirituality and for the correct
relation with the land. Playing down the traditional Jewish theme of the
return of the chosen people to the Promised Land, NAJ’s concept of the
land as a site of natural, sacred geography amplifies the significance of the
native place and indigenous pagan cultures.
The transformation of the land from a symbol of nationhood to
a symbol of nature and local indigenous spiritualities coincides with
existing schisms in Israeli identity regarding ‘place’, belonging, and
indigenousness. Gurevitch (1997) points to ambivalence and con-
stant struggle in the Israeli and Zionist idea of the return to the
land—to the place. The Zionist pioneer was the long lost son who
returned to the promised Jewish homeland and also the native of the
land who has chosen to turn his back on history and religion. The
early pioneers and their Israeli successors continuously attempted to
establish a sense of indigenousness and belonging to the land through
many practices, such as the imitation of the native Bedouin dress
or hiking in nature (Almog 2000; Ben-David 1997). This unspo-
ken tension between the new Jew (Almog 2000) and his/her locality
was never more apparent than in the Canaanite ideology of the early
twentieth century.
The Canaanite movement was an intellectual and artistic movement
formed in the 1940s. Its members, among them the poet Yonatan
Ratosh and the authors Aharon Amir and Benjamin Tamuz, opposed
the Zionist model of historical nationality and proposed a native nation-
hood instead. Offering a counter-narrative of the Jewish past, its ide-
ology was based on an interpretation of Jewish history which posited
an ancient entity of peoples known as the Hebrews. This entity, which
supposedly included the Amorites, Moabites, Ammonites, Phoenicians,
and the Israelites, was considered to be the original inhabitant of west-
ern Palestine. The Canaanite movement urged the Zionist settlers of
Palestine to reject the Diaspora Jewish religious civilization, and to re-
establish the ancient Hebrew entity together with the indigenous peo-
ples of the region—to form a new nation exclusively based on territorial
residence (Diamond 1986).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
telegrams protesting against the infliction of the death-penalty on a
woman.
One of the reasons which has been urged for the total abolition of
this penalty is the reluctance of juries to convict women of crimes
punishable by death. The number of wives who murder their
husbands, and of girls who murder their lovers, is a menace to
society. Our sympathetic tolerance of these crimes passionnés, the
sensational scenes in court, and the prompt acquittals which follow,
are a menace to law and justice. Better that their perpetrators should
be sent to prison, and suffer a few years of corrective discipline, until
soft-hearted sentimentalists circulate petitions, and secure their
pardon and release.
The right to be judged as men are judged is perhaps the only form
of equality which feminists fail to demand. Their attitude to their own
errata is well expressed in the solemn warning addressed by Mr.
Louis Untermeyer’s Eve to the Almighty,

“Pause, God, and ponder, ere Thou judgest me!”

The right to be punished is not, and has never been, a popular

prerogative with either sex. There was, indeed, a London baker who
was sentenced in the year 1816 to be whipped and imprisoned for
vagabondage. He served his term; but, whether from clemency or
from oversight, the whipping was never administered. When
released, he promptly brought action against the prison authorities
because he had not been whipped, “according to the statute,” and he
won his case. Whether or not the whipping went with the verdict is
not stated; but it was a curious joke to play with the grim realities of
British law.
American women are no such sticklers for a code. They acquiesce
in their frequent immunity from punishment, and are correspondingly,
and very naturally, indignant when they find themselves no longer
immune. There was a pathetic ring in the explanation offered some
years ago by Mayor Harrison of Chicago, whose policemen were
accused of brutality to female strikers and pickets. “When the women
do anything in violation of the law,” said the Mayor to a delegation of
citizens, “the police arrest them. And then, instead of going along
quietly as men prisoners would, the women sit down on the
sidewalks. What else can the policemen do but lift them up?”
If men “go along quietly,” it is because custom, not choice, has
bowed their necks to the yoke of order and equity. They break the
law without being prepared to defy it. The lawlessness of women
may be due as much to their long exclusion from citizenship,

“Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,”

as to the lenity shown them by men,—a lenity which they stand ever
ready to abuse. We have only to imagine what would have
happened to a group of men who had chosen to air a grievance by
picketing the White House, the speed with which they would have
been arrested, fined, dispersed, and forgotten, to realize the nature
of the tolerance granted to women. For months these female pickets
were unmolested. Money was subscribed to purchase for them
umbrellas and overshoes. The President, whom they were affronting,
sent them out coffee on cold mornings. It was only when their
utterances became treasonable, when they undertook to assure our
Russian visitors that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Root were deceiving Russia,
and to entreat these puzzled foreigners to help them free our nation,
that their sport was suppressed, and they became liable to arrest
and imprisonment.
Much censure was passed upon the unreasonable violence of
these women. The great body of American suffragists repudiated
their action, and the anti-suffragists used them to point stern morals
and adorn vivacious tales. But was it quite fair to permit them in the
beginning a liberty which would not have been accorded to men, and
which led inevitably to licence? Were they not treated as parents
sometimes treat children, allowing them to use bad language
because, “if you pay no attention to them, they will stop it of their
own accord”; and then, when they do not stop it, punishing them for
misbehaving before company? When a sympathetic gentleman
wrote to a not very sympathetic paper to say that the second Liberty
Loan would be more popular if Washington would “call off the dogs
of war on women,” he turned a flashlight upon the fathomless gulf
with which sentimentalism has divided the sexes. No one dreams of
calling policemen and magistrates “dogs of war” because they arrest
and punish men for disturbing the peace. If men claim the privileges
of citizenship, they are permitted to suffer its penalties.
A few years before the war, a rage for compiling useless statistics
swept over Europe and the United States. When it was at its height,
some active minds bethought them that children might be made to
bear their part in the guidance of the human race. Accordingly a
series of questions—some sensible and some foolish—were put to
English, German, and American school-children, and their
enlightening answers were given to the world. One of these
questions read: “Would you rather be a man or a woman, and why?”
Naturally this query was of concern only to little girls. No sane
educator would ask it of a boy. German pedagogues struck it off the
list. They said that to ask a child, “Would you rather be something
you must be, or something you cannot possibly be?” was both
foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice were of value
only when the will was a determining factor.
No such logical inference chilled the examiners’ zeal in this
inquisitive land. The question was asked and was answered. We
discovered, as a result, that a great many little American girls (a
minority, to be sure, but a respectable minority) were well content
with their sex; not because it had its duties and dignities, its
pleasures and exemptions; but because they plainly considered that
they were superior to little American boys, and were destined, when
grown up, to be superior to American men. One small New England
maiden wrote that she would rather be a woman because “Women
are always better than men in morals.” Another, because “Women
are of more use in the world.” A third, because “Women learn things
quicker than men, and have more intelligence.” And so on through
varying degrees of self-sufficiency.
 These little girls, who had no need to echo the Scotchman’s
prayer, “Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’ ourselves!” were old maids in
the making. They had stamped upon them in their tender childhood
the hall-mark of the American spinster. “The most ordinary cause of
a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty, especially in certain self-
pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is reserved for the American
woman to remain unmarried because she feels herself too valuable
to be entrusted to a husband’s keeping. Would it be possible in any
country save our own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining
“Why I am an Old Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the
explanation? Would it be possible in any other country to hear such
a question as “Should the Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked,
and seriously answered? Would it be possible for any sane and
thoughtful woman who was not an American to consider even the
remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a detached class, who
shall form “the intellectual and economic élite of the sex, leaving
marriage and maternity to the less developed woman”? What has
become of the belief, as old as civilization, that marriage and
maternity are developing processes, forcing into flower a woman’s
latent faculties; and that the less-developed woman is inevitably the
woman who has escaped this keen and powerful stimulus? “Never,”
said Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin, young or old, produced a
work of art.” One makes allowance for the Latin point of view. And it
is possible that M. de Goncourt never read “Emma.”
There is a formidable lack of humour in the somewhat
contemptuous attitude of women, whose capabilities have not yet
been tested, toward men who stand responsible for the failures of
the world. It denotes, at home and abroad, a density not far removed
from dulness. In Mr. St. John Ervine’s depressing little drama, “Mixed
Marriage,” which the Dublin actors played in New York some years
ago, an old woman, presumed to be witty and wise, said to her son’s
betrothed: “Sure, I believe the Lord made Eve when He saw that
Adam could not take care of himself”; and the remark reflected
painfully upon the absence of that humorous sense which we used
to think was the birthright of Irishmen. The too obvious retort, which
nobody uttered, but which must have occurred to everybody’s mind,
was that if Eve had been designed as a care-taker, she had made a
shining failure of her job.
That astute Oriental, Sir Rabindranath Tagore, manifested a
wisdom beyond all praise in his recognition of American standards,
when addressing American audiences. As the hour for his departure
drew nigh, he was asked to write, and did write, a “Parting Wish for
the Women of America,” giving graceful expression to the sentiments
he knew he was expected to feel. The skill with which he modified
and popularized an alien point of view revealed the seasoned
lecturer. He told his readers that “God has sent woman to love the
world,” and to build up a “spiritual civilization.” He condoled with
them because they were “passing through great sufferings in this
callous age.” His heart bled for them, seeing that their hearts “are
broken every day, and victims are snatched from their arms to be
thrown under the car of material progress.” The Occidental sentiment
which regards man simply as an offspring, and a fatherless offspring
at that (no woman, says Olive Schreiner, could look upon a battle-
field without thinking, “So many mothers’ sons!”), came as naturally
to Sir Rabindranath as if he had been to the manner born. He was
content to see the passion and pain, the sorrow and heroism of men,
as reflections mirrored in a woman’s soul. The ingenious gentlemen
who dramatize Biblical narratives for the American stage, and who
are hampered at every step by the obtrusive masculinity of the East,
might find a sympathetic supporter in this accomplished and
accommodating Hindu.
The story of Joseph and his Brethren, for example, is perhaps the
best tale ever told the world,—a tale of adventure on a heroic scale,
with conflicting human emotions to give it poignancy and power. It
deals with pastoral simplicities, with the splendours of court, and with
the “high finance” which turned a free landholding people into
tenantry of the crown. It is a story of men, the only lady introduced
being a disedifying dea ex machina, whose popularity in Italian art
has perhaps blinded us to the brevity of her Biblical rôle. But when
this most dramatic narrative was cast into dramatic form, Joseph’s
splendid loyalty to his master, his cold and vigorous chastity, were
nullified by giving him an Egyptian sweetheart. Lawful marriage with
this young lady being his sole solicitude, the advances of Potiphar’s
wife were less of a temptation than an intrusion. The keynote of the
noble old tale was destroyed, to assure to woman her proper place
as the guardian of man’s integrity.
Still more radical was the treatment accorded to the parable of the
“Prodigal Son,” which was expanded into a pageant play, and acted
with a hardy realism permitted only to the strictly ethical drama. The
scriptural setting of the story was preserved, but its patriarchal
character was sacrificed to modern sentiment which refuses to be
interested in the relation of father and son. Therefore we beheld the
prodigal equipped with a mother and a trusting female cousin, who,
between them, put the poor old gentleman out of commission,
reducing him to his proper level of purveyor-in-ordinary to the
household. It was the prodigal’s mother who bade her reluctant
husband give their wilful son his portion. It was the prodigal’s mother
who watched for him from the house-top, and silenced the voice of
censure. It was the prodigal’s mother who welcomed his return, and
persuaded father and brother to receive him into favour. The whole
duty of man in that Syrian household was to obey the impelling word
of woman, and bestow blessings and bags of gold according to her
will.
The expansion of the maternal sentiment until it embraces, or
seeks to embrace, humanity, is the vision of the emotional, as
opposed to the intellectual, feminist. “The Mother State of which we
dream” offers no attraction to many plain and practical workers, and
is a veritable nightmare to others. “Woman,” writes an enthusiast in
the “Forum,” “means to be, not simply the mother of the individual,
but of society, of the State with its man-made institutions, of art and
science, of religion and morals. All life, physical and spiritual,
personal and social, needs to be mothered.”
“Needs to be mothered”! When men proffer this welter of
sentiment in the name of women, how is it possible to say
convincingly that the girl student standing at the gates of knowledge
is as humble-hearted as the boy; that she does not mean to mother
medicine, or architecture, or biology, any more than the girl in the
banker’s office means to mother finance? Her hopes for the future
are founded on the belief that fresh opportunities will meet a sure
response; but she does not, if she be sane, measure her untried
powers by any presumptive scale of valuation. She does not
consider the advantages which will accrue to medicine, biology, or
architecture by her entrance—as a woman—into any one of these
fields. Their need for her maternal ministration concerns her less
than her need for the magnificent heritage they present.
It has been said many times that the craving for material profit is
not instinctive in women. If it is not instinctive, it will be acquired,
because every legitimate incentive has its place in the progress of
the world. The demand that women shall be paid men’s wages for
men’s work may represent a desire for justice rather than a desire for
gain; but money fairly earned is sweet in the hand, and to the heart.
An open field, an even start, no handicap, no favours, and the same
goal for all. This is the worker’s dream of paradise. Women have
long known that lack of citizenship was an obstacle in their path.
Self-love has prompted them to overrate their imposed, and
underrate their inherent, disabilities. “Whenever you see a woman
getting a high salary, make up your mind that she is giving twice the
value received,” writes an irritable correspondent to the “Survey”;
and this pretension paralyzes effort. To be satisfied with ourselves is
to be at the end of our usefulness.
M. Émile Faguet, that most radical and least sentimental of French
feminists, would have opened wide to women every door of which
man holds the key. He would have given them every legal right and
burden which they are physically fitted to enjoy and to bear. He was
as unvexed by doubts as he was uncheered by illusions. He had no
more fear of the downfall of existing institutions than he had hope for
the regeneration of the world. The equality of men and women, as he
saw it, lay, not in their strength, but in their weakness; not in their
intelligence, but in their stupidity; not in their virtues, but in their
perversity. Yet there was no taint of pessimism in his rational refusal
to be deceived. No man saw more clearly, or recognized more justly,
the art with which his countrywomen have cemented and upheld a
social state at once flexible and orderly, enjoyable and inspiriting.
That they have been the allies, and not the rulers, of men in building
this fine fabric of civilization was also plain to his mind. Allies and
equals he held them, but nothing more. “La femme est parfaitement
l’égale de l’homme, mais elle n’est que son égale.”
Naturally to such a man the attitude of Americans toward women
was as unsympathetic as was the attitude of Dahomeyans. He did
not condemn it (possibly he did not condemn the Dahomeyans,
seeing that the civic and social ideals of France and Dahomey are in
no wise comparable); but he explained with careful emphasis that
the French woman, unlike her American sister, is not, and does not
desire to be, “un objet sacro-saint.” The reverence for women in the
United States he assumed to be a national trait, a sort of national
institution among a proud and patriotic people. “L’idolâtrie de la
femme est une chose américaine par excellence.”
The superlative complacency of American women is due largely to
the oratorical adulation of American men,—an adulation that has no
more substance than has the foam on beer. I have heard a
candidate for office tell his female audience that men are weak and
women are strong, that men are foolish and women are wise, that
men are shallow and women are deep, that men are submissive
tools whom women, the leaders of the race, must instruct to vote for
him. He did not believe a word that he said, and his hearers did not
believe that he believed it; yet the grossness of his flattery kept pace
with the hypocrisy of his self-depreciation. The few men present
wore an attitude of dejection, not unlike that of the little boy in
“Punch” who has been told that he is made of

“Snips and snails,

And puppy dogs’ tails,”

and can “hardly believe it.”

What Mr. Roosevelt called the “lunatic fringe” of every movement
is painfully obtrusive in the great and noble movement which seeks
fair play for women. The “full habit of speech” is never more
regrettable than when the cause is so good that it needs but
temperate championing. “Without the aid of women, England could
not carry on this war,” said Mr. Asquith in the second year of the
great struggle,—an obvious statement, no doubt, but simple, truthful,
and worthy to be spoken. Why should the “New Republic,” in an
article bearing the singularly ill-mannered title, “Thank You For
Nothing!” have heaped scorn upon these words? Why should its
writer have made the angry assertion that the British Empire had
been “deprived of two generations of women’s leadership,” because
only a world’s war could drill a new idea into a statesman’s head?
The war has drilled a great many new ideas into all our heads.
Absence of brain matter could alone have prevented this infusion.
But “leadership” is a large word. It is not what men are asking, and it
is not what women are offering, even at this stage of the game.
Partnership is as far as obligation on the one side and ambition on
the other are prepared to go; and a clear understanding of this truth
has accomplished great results.
Therefore, when we are told that the women of to-day are “giving
their vitality to an anæmic world,” we wonder if the speaker has read
a newspaper for the past half-dozen years. The passionate cruelty
and the passionate heroism of men have soaked the earth with
blood. Never, since it came from its Maker’s hands, has it seen such
shame and glory. There may be some who still believe that this
blood would not have been spilled had women shared in the
citizenship of nations; but the arguments they advance in support of
an undemonstrable theory show a soothing ignorance of events.
“War will pass,” says Olive Schreiner, “when intellectual culture
and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the
control and government of modern national life.” And why? Because
“Arbitration and compensation will naturally occur to her as cheaper
and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in national relationship.”
Strange that this idea never “naturally” occurred to man! Strange
that no delegate to The Hague should have perceived so straight a
path to peace! Strange that when Germany struck her long-planned,
well-prepared blow, this cheap and simple measure failed to stay her
hand! War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless
hope leaves the world.
 That any civilized people should bar women from the practice of
law is to the last degree absurd and unreasonable. There never can
be an adequate cause for such an injurious exclusion. There is, in
fact, no cause at all, only an arbitrary decision on the part of those
who have the authority to decide. Yet nothing is less worth while than
to speculate dizzily on the part women are going to play in any field
from which they are at present debarred. They may be ready to
burnish up “the rusty old social organism,” and make it shine like
new; but this is not the work which lies immediately at hand. A
suffragist who believes that the world needs house-cleaning has
made the terrifying statement that when English women enter the
law courts they will sweep away all “legal frippery,” all the
“accumulated dust and rubbish of centuries.” Latin terms, flowing
gowns and wigs, silly staves and worn-out symbols, all must go, and
with them must go the antiquated processes which confuse and
retard justice. The women barristers of the future will scorn to have
“legal natures like Portia’s,” basing their claims on quibbles and
subterfuges. They will cut all Gordian knots. They will deal with
naked simplicities.
References to Portia are a bit disquieting. Her law was stage law,
good enough for the drama which has always enjoyed a
jurisprudence of its own. We had best leave her out of any serious
discussion. But why should the admission of women to the bar result
in a volcanic upheaval? Women have practised medicine for years,
and have not revolutionized it. Painstaking service, rather than any
brilliant display of originality, has been their contribution to this field.
It is reasonable to suppose that their advance will be resolute and
beneficial. If they ever condescended to their profession, they do so
no longer. If they ever talked about belonging to “the class of real
people,” they have relinquished such flowers of rhetoric. If they have
earnestly desired the franchise, it was because they saw in it justice
to themselves, not the torch which would enlighten the world.
It is conceded theoretically that woman’s sphere is an elastic term,
embracing any work she finds herself able to do,—not necessarily do
well, because most of the world’s work is done badly, but well
enough to save herself from failure. Her advance is unduly heralded
and unduly criticized. She is the target for too much comment from
friend and foe. On the one hand, a keen (but of course perverted)
misogynist like Sir Andrew Macphail, welcomes her entrance into
public life because it will tend to disillusionment. If woman can be
persuaded to reveal her elemental inconsistencies, man, freed in
some measure from her charm—which is the charm of retenue—will
no longer be subject to her rule. On the other hand, that most
feminine of feminists, Miss Jane Addams, predicts that “the dulness
which inheres in both domestic and social affairs when they are
carried on by men alone, will no longer be a necessary attribute of
public life when gracious and grey-haired women become part of it.”
If Sir Andrew is as acid as Schopenhauer, Miss Addams is early
Victorian. Her point of view presupposes a condition of which we had
not been even dimly aware. Granted that domesticity palls on the
solitary male. Housekeeping seldom attracts him. The tea-table and
the friendly cat fail to arrest his roving tendencies. Granted that some
men are polite enough to say that they do not enjoy social events in
which women take no part. They showed no disposition to relinquish
such pastimes until the arid days of prohibition, and even now they
cling forlornly to the ghost of a cheerful past. When they assert,
however, that they would have a much better time if women were
present, no one is wanton enough to contradict them. But public life!
The arena in which whirling ambition sweeps human souls as an
autumn wind sweeps leaves; which resounds with the shouts of the
conquerors and the groans of the conquered; which is degraded by
cupidity and ennobled by achievement; that this field of adventure,
this heated race-track needs to be relieved from dulness by the
presence and participation of elderly ladies is the crowning vision of
sensibility.
“Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête,” said Pascal; and the Michigan
angel is a danger signal. The sentimental and chivalrous attitude of
American men reacts alarmingly when they are brought face to face
with the actual terms and visible consequences of woman’s
enfranchisement. There exists a world-wide and age-long belief that
what women want they get. They must want it hard enough and long
enough to make their desire operative. It is the listless and
preoccupied unconcern of their own sex which bars their progress.
But men will fall into a flutter of admiration because a woman runs a
successful dairy-farm, or becomes the mayor of a little town; and
they will look aghast upon such commonplace headlines as these in
their morning paper: “Women Confess Selling Votes”; “Chicago
Women Arrested for Election Frauds”;—as if there had not always
been, and would not always be, a percentage of unscrupulous voters
in every electorate. No sane woman believes that women, as a body,
will vote more honestly than men; but no sane man believes that
they will vote less honestly. They are neither the “gateway to hell,” as
Tertullian pointed out, nor the builders of Sir Rabindranath Tagore’s
“spiritual civilization.” They are neither the repositories of wisdom,
nor the final word of folly.
It was unwise and unfair to turn a searchlight upon the first woman
in Congress, and exhibit to a gaping world her perfectly natural
limitations. Such limitations are common in our legislative bodies,
and excite no particular comment. They are as inherent in the
average man as in the average woman. They in no way affect the
question of enfranchisement. Give as much and ask no more. Give
no more and ask as much. This is the watchword of equality.
“God help women when they have only their rights!” exclaimed a
brilliant American lawyer; but it is in the “only” that all savour lies.
Rights and privileges are incompatible. Emancipation implies the
sacrifice of immunity, the acceptance of obligation. It heralds the
reign of sober and disillusioning experience. Women, as M. Faguet
reminds us, are only the equals of men; a truth which was simply
phrased in the old Cornish adage, “Lads are as good as wenches
when they are washed.”
 The Strayed Prohibitionist
The image of the prohibition-bred American youth (not this
generation, but the next) straying through the wine-drenched and
ale-drenched pages of English literature captivates the fancy. The
classics, to be sure, are equally bibulous; but with the classics the
American youth has no concern. The advance guard of educators
are busy clearing away the débris of Greek and Latin which has
hitherto clogged his path. There is no danger of his learning from
Homer that “Generous wine gives strength to toiling men,” or from
Socrates that “The potter’s art begins with the wine jar,” or from the
ever-scandalous Horace that “Wine is mighty to inspire hope, and to
drown the bitterness of care.” The professor has conspired with the
prohibitionist to save the undergraduate from such disedifying
sentiments.
As for the Bible, where corn and oil and wine, the three fruits of a
bountiful harvest, are represented as of equal virtue, it will probably
be needful to supply such texts with explanatory and apologetic
footnotes. The sweet and sober counsel of Ecclesiastes: “Forsake
not an old friend, for the new will not be like to him. A new friend is
as new wine; it shall grow old, and thou shalt drink it with pleasure,”
has made its way into the heart of humanity, and has been
embedded in the poetry of every land. But now, like the most lovely
story of the marriage feast at Cana, it has been robbed of the
simplicity of its appeal. I heard a sermon preached upon the
marriage feast which ignored the miracle altogether. The preacher
dwelt upon the dignity and responsibility of the married state,
reprobated divorce, and urged parents to send their children to
Sunday school. It was a perfectly good sermon, filled with perfectly
sound exhortations; but the speaker “strayed.” Sunday schools were
not uppermost in the holy Mother’s mind when she perceived and
pitied the humiliation of her friends.
 The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures,
and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters
which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of
British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now New
England began to print books about the time that men grew restive
as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a “Drinking
Song” to water, which achieved humour without aspiring to it, and Dr.
Holmes wrote a teetotaller’s adaptation of a drinking song, which
aspired to humour without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no
drinking songs, not even the real ones and the good ones which
sparkle in Scotch and English verse, have any illustrative value.
They come under the head of special pleading, and are apt to be a
bit defiant. In them, as in the temperance lecture, “that good sister of
common life, the vine,” becomes an exotic, desirable or
reprehensible according to the point of view, but never simple and
inevitable, like the olive-tree and the sheaves of corn.
American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There
have been books, like Jack London’s “John Barleycorn,” written in
the cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr.
Weir Mitchell’s “Madeira Party,” written to commemorate certain
dignified convivialities which even then were passing silently away;
and there have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley’s vindication
of whisky from the charge of being food: “I wudden’t insult it be
placin’ it on the same low plain as a lobster salad”; and his loving
recollection of his friend Schwartzmeister’s cocktail, which was of
such generous proportions that it “needed only a few noodles to look
like a biled dinner.” But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in
“Pickwick Papers” than in a library of American novels. It is drinking
without bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural
treatment of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivalled among
novelists.
We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbours, having
broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time
deprive us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee.
But tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to
men, are late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the
stately procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and
Alexander and Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener
drank. When the Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon,
when the Cathedral of Chartres grew into beauty, when “Hamlet”
was first played at the Globe Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely
without tobacco, tea, and coffee, but not without wine. Tobacco was
given by the savage to the civilized world. It has an accidental quality
which adds to its charm, but which promises consolation when those
who are better than we want to be have taken it away from us. “I can
understand,” muses Dr. Mitchell, “the discovery of America, and the
invention of printing; but what human want, what instinct, led up to
tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius capturing this noble idea from the
odours of a prairie fire!”
Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a “white
devil.” But it was a persecuted little devil which for years suffered
shameful indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams’s word for it that, as
late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house.
They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like
Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half
a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the
advertising department of a New York store making “Matisse-like
illustrations to some notes on summer suitings,” was told by the
superintendent that the firm gave a “free hand” to its artists, “except
for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking.” To these
last, some customers—even customers of the sex presumably
interested in summer suitings—“strongly objected.”
The new school of English fiction which centres about the tea-
table, and in which, as in the land of the lotus-eaters, it is always
afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily
procurable atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She
waited centuries, kettle on hob and cat purring expectantly by the
fire, for the coming of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the
generous warmth of wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was
too high for her to pay. No risk was too great to keep her from
smuggling the “China drink.” No hearth was too humble to covet it,
and the homeless brewed it by the roadside. Isopel Berners, that
peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten shillings a pound for her tea; and
when she lit her fire in the Dingle, comfort enveloped Lavengro, and
he tasted the delights of domesticity.
But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for
her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these
indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has coloured her
masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy
monotony. Such are the “wine-dark sea” of Greece, and the “nut-
brown ale” of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel’s
tea, gave ale, “the true and proper drink of Englishmen,” to the
wandering tinker and his family. How else, he asks, could he have
befriended these wretched folk? “There is a time for cold water” [this
is a generous admission on the writer’s part], “there is a time for
strong meat, there is a time for advice, and there is a time for ale;
and I have generally found that the time for advice is after a cup of
ale.”
“Lavengro” has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no
English rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never
glancing over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an
accomplished wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He
could order claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a
London inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who
counselled the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with
the Armenian who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup,
though there was nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When,
harried by the spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles
through Spain, he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese
Gipsies, and found that while bread and cheese and olives
comprised their food, there was always a leathern bottle of good
white wine to give zest and spirit to the meal. He offered his brandy-
flask to a Genoese sailor, who emptied it, choking horribly, at a
draught, so as to leave no drop for a shivering Jew who stood by,
hoping for a turn. Rather than see the Christian cavalier’s spirits
poured down a Jewish throat, explained the old boatman piously, he
would have suffocated.
 Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or
canary. The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable
tradition of antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing
barley beer four thousand years ago, and that Herodotus ascribes its
invention to the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred
years before Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman
complimented Isis by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot
the seriousness of life, and we have to-day the record of his
unseemly gaiety. Xenophon, with notable lack of enthusiasm,
describes the barley beer of Armenia as a powerful beverage,
“agreeable to those who were used to it”; and adds that it was drunk
out of a common vessel through hollow reeds,—a commendable
sanitary precaution.
In Thomas Hardy’s story, “The Shepherd’s Christening,” there is a
rare tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-
headed, stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional
“heather ale” of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was
a glorified mead.

“Fra’ the bonny bells o’ heather

They brewed a drink lang-syne,
’Twas sweeter far than honey,
’Twas stronger far than wine.”

The story goes that, after the bloody victory of the Scots under
Kenneth MacAlpine, in 860, only two Picts who knew the secret of
the brew survived the general slaughter. Some say they were father
and son, some say they were master and man. When they were
offered their lives in exchange for the recipe, the older captive said
he dared not reveal it while the younger lived, lest he be slain in
revenge. So the Scots tossed the lad into the sea, and waited
expectantly. Then the last of the Picts cried, “I only know!” and
leaped into the ocean and was drowned. It is a brave tale. One
wonders if a man would die to save the secret of making milk-toast.
 From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean
much off-hand information about the wine which the wide world
made and drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the
fashion of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him
encyclopædias, with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of
intrinsic realities. Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a
certain number of papers on “leather drinking-vessels,” and “toasts
of the old Scottish gentry.” But if the youth be one who browses
untethered in the lush fields of English literature, taking prose and
verse, fiction and fact, as he strays merrily along, what will he make
of the hilarious company in which he finds himself? What of Falstaff,
and the rascal, Autolycus, and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded
the fatal query which has been answered in 1919? What of Herrick’s
“joy-sops,” and “capring wine,” and that simple and sincere
“Thanksgiving” hymn which takes cognizance of all mercies?

“Lord, I confess too, when I dine,

The pulse is thine,
The worts, the purslane, and the mess
Of water-cress.
’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth
With guiltless mirth.
And giv’st me wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink.”

The lines sound like an echo of Saint Chrysostom’s wise warning,

spoken twelve hundred years before: “Wine is for mirth, and not for
madness.”
Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, all are set with
traps for the unwary, and all are alike unconscious of offence. Here is
Dr. Johnson, whose name alone is a tonic for the morally debilitated,
saying things about claret, port, and brandy which bring a blush to
the cheek of temperance. Here is Scott, that “great good man” and
true lover of his kind, telling a story about a keg of whisky and a
Liddesdale farmer which one hardly dares to allude to, and certainly
dares not repeat. Here is Charles Lamb, that “frail good man,”
drinking more than is good for him; and here is Henry Crabb
Robinson, a blameless, disillusioned, prudent sort of person,
expressing actual regret when Lamb ceases to drink. “His change of
habit, though it on the whole improves his health, yet, when he is
low-spirited, leaves him without a remedy or relief.”
John Evelyn and Mr. Pepys witnessed the blessed Restoration,
when England went mad with joy, and the fountains of London ran
wine.

“A very merry, dancing, drinking,

Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking”

time it was, until the gilt began to wear off the gingerbread. But
Evelyn, though he feasted as became a loyal gentleman, and
admitted that canary carried to the West Indies and back for the
good of its health was “incomparably fine,” yet followed Saint
Chrysostom’s counsel. He drank, and compelled his household to
drink, with sobriety. There is real annoyance expressed in the diary
when he visits a hospitable neighbour, and his coachman is so well
entertained in the servants’ hall that he falls drunk from the box, and
cannot pick himself up again.
Poor Mr. Pepys was ill fitted by a churlish fate for the simple
pleasures that he craved. To him, as to many another Englishman,
wine was precious only because it promoted lively conversation. His
“debauches” (it pleased him to use that ominous word) were very
modest ones, for he was at all times prudent in his expenditures. But
claret gave him a headache, and Burgundy gave him the stone, and
late suppers, even of bread and butter and botargo, gave him
indigestion. Therefore he was always renouncing the alleviations of
life, only to be lured back by his incorrigible love of companionship.
There is a serio-comic quality in his story of the two bottles of wine
he sent for to give zest to his cousin Angler’s supper at the Rose
Tavern, and which were speedily emptied by his cousin Angler’s
friends: “And I had not the wit to let them know at table that it was I
who paid for them, and so I lost my thanks.”
If the young prohibitionist be light-hearted enough to read Dickens,
or imaginative enough to read Scott, or sardonic enough to read
Thackeray, he will find everybody engaged in the great business of
eating and drinking. It crowds love-making into a corner, being,
indeed, a pleasure which survives all tender dalliance, and restores
to the human mind sanity and content. I am convinced that if Mr.
Galsworthy’s characters ate and drank more, they would be less
obsessed by sex, and I wish they would try dining as a restorative.
The older novelists recognized this most expressive form of
realism, and knew that, to be accurate, they must project their minds
into the minds of their characters. It is because of their sympathy and
sincerity that we recall old Osborne’s eight-shilling Madeira, and Lord
Steyne’s White Hermitage, which Becky gave to Sir Pitt, and the
brandy-bottle clinking under her bed-clothes, and the runlet of canary
which the Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst found secreted conveniently in
his cell, and the choice purl which Dick Swiveller and the
Marchioness drank in Miss Sally Brass’s kitchen. We hear
Warrington’s great voice calling for beer, we smell the fragrant fumes
of burning rum and lemon-peel when Mr. Micawber brews punch, we
see the foam on the “Genuine Stunning” which the child David calls
for at the public house. No writer except Peacock treats his
characters, high and low, as royally as does Dickens; and Peacock,
although British publishers keep issuing his novels in new and
charming editions, is little read on this side of the sea. Moreover, he
is an advocate of strong drink, which is very reprehensible, and
deprives him of candour as completely as if he had been a
teetotaller. We feel and resent the bias of his mind; and although he
describes with humour that pleasant middle period, “after the
Jacquerie were down, and before the march of mind was up,” yet the
only one of his stories which is innocent of speciousness is “The
Misfortunes of Elphin.”
Now to the logically minded “The Misfortunes of Elphin” is a
temperance tract. The disaster which ruins the countryside is the
result of shameful drunkenness. The reproaches levelled by Prince