belief in
Him. Without this identity, what is natural in national descent is of no
value. According to its form of manifestation, Judaism is below the
Greek spirit. It is not beautiful, but rather grotesque. But in its
essence, as the religion of the contradiction between the idea and its
existence, it goes beyond nature, which it perceives to be established
by an absolute, conscious, and reasonable Will; while the Greek
concealed from himself only mythically his dependence on nature, on his
mother-earth. The Jews have been preserved in the midst of all other
culture by the elastic power of the thought of God as One who was free
from the control of nature. The Jews have a patriotism in common with
the Romans. The Maccabees, for example, were not inferior to the Romans
in greatness.

--Abraham is the genuine Jew because he is the genuinely faithful man.
He does not hesitate to obey the horrible and inhuman command of his
God. Circumcision was made the token of the national unity, but the
nation may assimilate members to itself from other nations through this
rite. The condition always lies in belief in a spiritual relation to
which the relation of nationality is secondary. The Jewish nation makes
proselytes, and these are widely different from the _Socii_ of the
Romans or the _Metoeci_ of the Athenians.--

Sec. 228. To the man who knows Nature to be the work of a single,
incomparable, rational Creator, she loses independence. He is negatively
freed from her control, and sees in her only an absolute means. As
opposed to the fanciful sensuous intuitions of Ethnicism, this seems to
be a backward step, but for the emancipation of man it is a progress. He
no longer fears Nature but her Lord, and admires Him so much that prose
rises to the dignity of poetry in his telological contemplation. Since
man stands over and beyond nature, education is directed to morality as
such, and spreads itself out in innumerable limitations, by means of
which the distinction of man from nature is expressly asserted as a
difference. The ceremonial law appears often arbitrary, but in its
prescriptions it gives man the satisfaction of placing himself as will
in relation to will. For example, if he is forbidden to eat any
specified part of an animal, the ground of this command is not merely
natural--it is the will of the Deity. Man learns therefore, in his
obedience to such directions, to free himself from his self-will, from
his natural desires.