eavor undertaken by the
Intercollegiate Menorah Association to arouse the dormant spirit of
self-respect in the academic Jewish youth, to stir in him the ambition
to study and know this matchless history and literature, and to kindle
in his soul anew that idealism which made the Jew throughout all the
ages endure and brave the onslaughts of the empires and churches and
the persecuting mobs, so that even to-day he is as young and as
vigorous as any of the youngest races and nations in the world.

_The Importance of Israel's Religion_

This past, I say, cannot but appeal to every high-minded American,
whether Christian or Jew, and your study of it will certainly meet
with our warmest support and encouragement. Only, in my opinion, one
thing you need, young as your association is, young in years and young
in experience, and that is, a full comprehension and keen realization
of the subject you have in view and a wise and right direction towards
it. No one doubts or questions the sincerity of your motives or the
praiseworthiness of your aims and purposes when you place on your
program the study of Jewish history, culture and problems, and the
advancement of Jewish ideals, but you omit that which is most
essential, which is the all-encompassing force and factor of Jewish
life, the real, peculiar and genuine product of the Jewish
genius--religion. We have got a religion which, as has been put by
Matthew Arnold, has fashioned four-fifths of the world's civilization.
In omitting the idea, as expressed by Matthew Arnold, of the power
that maketh for righteousness, in declaring your movement as being
altogether non-religious, you run the risk of making of your endeavor
an inevitable and certain failure.[G] Let me quote to you from an
address delivered recently before a Jewish society in London on
"Israel and Medicine" by Professor Osler, sentences that are
remarkable and worth repeating. He says:

"In estimating the position of Israel in the human values, one must
remember that the quest for righteousness is Oriental, the quest for
knowledge, Occidental. With the great prophets of the East--Moses,
Isaiah, Mahomet [he might have included Jesus of Nazareth], the word
was 'Thus saith the Lord.' With the seers of the West, from Aristotle
to Darwin, it was 'What says nature?' Modern civilization is the
outcome of the two great movements of the mind of man, who is to-day
ruled in heart and head by Israel and by Greece. From the one