The people of the book is Mohammed's description of the Jews. The Arab prophet and lawgiver, though not always friendly to the Jews, thought of them a great deal. It was his firm belief that Jew and scholar are synonomous. And to the present day, the impression prevails everywhere that the Jews are book people and very much devoted to learning. Unfortunately, this is and always was a false impression. The Jews as a people cling to one book, but individual Jews are not devoted to learning and even to Jewish learning, as the Gentile world imagines. The very institution of the rabbinate testifies that we are not so anxious to be learned, and that as individuals at least, we do not deserve the honorable title bestowed upon us by Mohammed, the People of the Book. The rabbinate is not, as most people imagine, a religious institution, but a scholarly one. The word 2 rabbi does not mean priest, pastor or chaplain, but elder, head, scholar. And Smicha does not mean priestly ordaining, but it means graduation, or a scholar's license, a student's diploma, etc. The Jews as a rule cling to one book, the Bible, or broadly speaking, to the Torah. The Torah imposes the duty upon every Jew to study it, but since we have proven to be neglectful in the discharge of this duty, and since we were nearly on the verge of forgetting the Torah altogether because the average individual Jew would not study the Torah, the institution of the rabbinate was established to secure the continuation of Jewish learning and the study of the Torah.

It can be readily seen that the function of the rabbi, in contradistinction to that of the priest, is not to perform religious functions and to discharge religious duties, but to study the word of God, to study the Torah, and to secure the continuity of Jewish scholarship and Jewish learning.

Such was the conception of the rabbinate until the middle of the nineteenth 3century, and was only interrupted by the rise of Reform Judaism, which deformed Judaism by turning the rabbi into a priest, by depriving the rabbi of his main function--the study of the Torah, and by assigning to him artificial religious functions. From the point of view of Jewish history, the Reform rabbi is not a rabbi at all, not only because in many cases he is not a religious Jew, but because he is a priestly creature, and the Jewish priest in the Diaspora is an impossible thing, However, the Reform Jews may maintain that whatever the Jewish rabbinic traditions may be, they--the Reform--have created their own rabbinic traditions, and they mean to live up to them or to enjoy them. They admit that from the point of view of the historicity of the rabbinate, they are wrong, and this being the case, it is useless to argue with them any further.

The Orthodox rabbinate, however, and especially the Orthodox rabbinate in America, is by and by also losing its starting point, is alienating itself from the original rabbinate tradition and is becoming a priesthood. The Orthodox rabbi in America, especially the Orthodox rabbi in Chicago, is 4nearly as much estranged from the book as his Reform colleague, and like the latter, he does not continue his studies but is busy performing religious functions and discharging religious duties, which need not and should not be discharged by a rabbi because they can be discharged by laymen too. Just like the Reform rabbi, the Orthodox rabbi in Chicago can be found everywhere except in his study or in his synagogue. He is to be found at every "wedding," and wherever two people have an affair, he is a third party--whether it is a meeting, or a conference, or a demonstration, or what not. He is helpful to the bride, and bridegroom, and the relatives. He is helpful to the baby who is to be circumcised, he is helpful to the mourner, mourning the death of a relative, he is helpful at the cemetery where he would be instrumental in the dedication of a stone, he is helpful to the political parties, Jewish and non-Jewish, he is helpful in collecting money for real and false institutions; in short, he is of help to everybody except to the Torah. And by so lowering the dignity of the rabbinate, he disgraces the great institution of which he is a representative, and 5makes a jackass of himself individually.

The Reform rabbi may do all these things because he is a priest. A priest has to perform religious duties. But a rabbi is not a priest, and he has no business to do all these things.

We cannot imagine something more disgraceful or more shameful than an Orthodox rabbi "selling" a funeral oration for five dollars, held at a grave where sometimes the remains of an unholy person are laid. We know of Orthodox rabbis in the city of Chicago who sell hespeidim [eulogies] to everybody at a fixed price. Is that Orthodox, and is that rabbinate? It certainly is neither. The real Orthodox rabbi would not sell a hesped for all the money in the world, and he would deliver one only in a great while--if the deceased was actually a great scholar, or a man who has rendered immortal services to the Jewish people. Here, in our beloved Chicago, however, even the widow of a poolroom owner can "buy" a hesped from a rabbi.

We mention this fact to show how low the Orthodox rabbinate in America has fallen. But nowhere is it so deep in the mud as here in Chicago. The Orthodox rabbinate is often enough the last refuge of ignorance, impudence, and nerve.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, there is not much difference between the Orthodox and the Reform rabbi--both do not study. And if there is any difference, it consists in that the Reform rabbi can speak English and can explain the little that he knows to the Jewish youth, while the Orthodox cannot. In most cases he cannot even talk a decent Yiddish. His vernacular is a real linguistic goulash. How can we expect that the Jewish generation, born in this country, respect such a rabbinate and such an Orthodoxy; and how can we expect that the Jewish generation, born in this country, remain with the Orthodox camp? The rabbi as a priest, is the most disgusting and the most repelling type imaginable, and the fact is that those Orthodox rabbis who are aping the Reform rabbis except that they pray three times a 7day and do not eat trefa because they are paid to eat kosher, are the gravediggers of Judaism in America, because these repelled by this sort of rabbinate and this sort of Judaism do not turn Reform or radical, but they leave Judaism altogether and they do so because they are disgusted with it.

This is the plain and naked truth about the American Orthodox rabbinate of the older type. Of course, there are a few exceptions. We need only mention such names as those of Rabbi [Simon] Album or Rabbi [M.] Zevin of Chicago, real great rabbis of the classic type. The average rabbi, however, is a very unedifying type of a rabbi, a man without intellectual and moral qualities, and of poor manners, poor tact, and of great repelling power. And we say that it is this type of rabbi who is poisoning the very well of Judaism in this country.

Our only hope is that the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in New York, headed by Dr. Revel, will produce a modern type of Orthodox rabbi who is both a 8scholar and gentleman, and who will replace the present type of an Orthodox rabbi who is neither a scholar, nor a gentleman, but an uncultured, social worker in the best case, and a parasite in the worst case. The Jewish generation born in America would do well not to judge Orthodox Judaism by its present rabbinic representatives.