THE NATURAL TRADITION IN JUDAISM

THE new historical awareness put the people in the centre of the stage. But if it is the people which created its own identity, who is this people and by what force did it create its individuality and shape its history? In a short story, ‘Shem and Japheth on the Train’, published in 1890, the author Mendele Mokher Seforim (Shalom Jacob Abramowitsch, 1835–1917), tells about a trip on a train. In the railway car, the narrator hears from his fellow passenger, Moshe the tailor, the life-stories of two men—a Jew and a Pole—whose fate brought them together when they were deported from Bismarck's Germany back to Poland. During the conversation his companion tells him about the new racial concept that prevails in Germany; a combination of ethnography, racial morphology, and religious and popular prejudices.

'But the Germans think otherwise', said Reb Moshe quietly. ‘The Germans who perform miracles of science, have turned the clock back a thousand generations, so that all of us at this day are living in the time of the Flood. Nowadays they call the Jew “Shem” and the Gentile ‘'Japheth'’. With the return of Shem and Japheth the customs of that far-off age have turned too, and the earth is filled with violence. The non-Semites are hostile towards the Semites …'

Why was the East European Jewish narrator so surprised to hear of these concepts, which divide the peoples into races? To explain that, it is necessary to clarify the difference between ethnic stereotypes and the theory of race.