By Maurice Samuel
Author of "The Outsider," "Whatever Gods."

Contents

I

The Question

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THESE last ten years and more I have been asking myself, with increasing urgency, a number of questions:

Is there any special significance in the distinction I have so long cherished—the distinction of "Jew-gentile"—not to be found in the class of distinctions implied in "American-Foreigner" or "Englishman-Foreigner"? Is there, between us Jews and you gentiles, that is between the Jew on the one hand and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the American on the other hand, that which transcends all the differences which exist among yourselves, so that, in relation to us, you are gentiles first, and afterwards (and without particular relevance in this connection) Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans?

Or is there nothing more implied in that distinction, Jew-gentile, than (in a general way) in the distinctions Jew-American, American-Englishman, Englishman-Frenchman?

In other words, are we Jews but part of the gentiles, Americans, Englishmen, Jews, Frenchmen, or is there a deeper cleavage between us? Is this Western world divided primarily into two parts—you gentiles; we Jews?

From the outset I shall be asked: "Even if you suspect the existence of such a primal cleavage, beyond the reach of ordinary national or racial classifications, what purpose can you have in urging it upon the attention of the world? Has it any practical application? Does it in any fashion clarify the status of the Jew, or give greater cogency to such claims of his as are still unsatisfied?"

This question will be asked of me by many Jews—but in particular it will be asked with the utmost insistence by those Jews who have based our case for national rights, national

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equality, precisely on this assumption—that we Jews are a people like all other peoples, similar in needs and impulses: that we are Jews, you are Englishmen, you are Italians, you are Americans; that we, the world's races or peoples, are all of us similar in our differences.

Leaving on one side those who deny the existence of any distinctions at all, those, that is, who say that the Jew is either a Frenchman, an American or an Englishman according to the place of his birth, I would answer: "For me the ordinary nationalist or racial classification has not sufficed."

If I have long pondered this question of Jew and gentile it is because I suspected from the first dawning of Jewish self-consciousness that Jew and gentile are two worlds, that between you gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf. Side by side with this belief grew another, which is related to the practical aspect of the distinction.

I do not believe that, situated as we are

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after all, an addition of one unit to scores of similar units? Were these centuries of alternate torture and respite not a disproportionately high price for the right to increase by one page the already overburdened records of the nations?

longings on others. It should cease to exist, it should rid the world of its importunate presence.

Such would be my belief if I saw in ourselves only the replica, with the proper variations, of the rest of the world. But this is not my belief, for I see otherwise. Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides all of you from us.

I am aware that this is a thesis which cannot be supported by diagrams, tables and logarithms. It cannot even be urged with the apparent half-compulsion of social and economic laws. The cogency of what I have to say does not depend on reference to obvious and ineluctable laws, natural processes acknowledged and accepted. I am also aware that the weight of what is called learned opin-

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ion will be thrown against me, that my contention will meet with the ridicule of facile common sense and of scholarship. Nevertheless I set it down clearly that in this Western world there are essentially two peoples as spiritual forces, only two human sections with essential meaning—Jew and gentile.

counter-rush of its companion stars. The law of Einstein works no less truly in the crawling of a snail than in the dizzy vibration of the fastest atomic sub-unit. These laws are more easily observed in the one set of cases than in the other: that is all.

It does no harm to know the history that

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There is no test or guarantee of a man's wisdom or of his reliability beyond what he says about life itself. Life is the touchstone: books must be read and understood in order

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that we may compare our experience in life with the sincere report of the experience of others. But such and such a one, who has read all the books extant on history and art, is of no consequence unless these are to him an indirect commentary on what he feels around him.

stant reference to first principles. No: standardized knowledge is no guarantee of truth. Put down a simple question—a living question, like this: "Should A. have killed B.?" Ask it of ten fools: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." Ask it of ten intelligent men: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." Ask it of ten scholars: five will say "Yes," five will say "Yes," five will say "Yes," five will say "Yes," five will say "Yes," five will say "Yes," five will say "No." The fools will have no reasons for their decision: the intelligent men will have a few reasons for and as many against; the scholars will have more reasons for and against. But where does the truth lie?

What, then, shall be the criterion of a man's reliability?

There is none. You cannot evade your responsibility thus by entrusting your salvation into the hands of a priest-specialist. A simpleton may bring you salvation and a great philosopher may confound you.

And so to life direct, as I have seen it working in others and felt it within myself, I refer the truth of what I say. And to

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books I refer only in so far as they are manifestations of life.

П

der line is not clear. Not all of us Jews are representative of the Jewish life-force: not all of you gentiles are altogether alien to it.

And we, for all our segregation have caught,

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particularly of late, something of your way of life. As a few gentiles have spoken in Jewish tones, so more than one Jew speaks the language of the gentile. Jews live a gentile life here and there, while gentile lives give expression to Jewish emotions.

Yet the cleavage is there, abysmal and undeniable. In the main, we are forever distinct. Ours is one life, yours is another. Such accidental confusions as make some Northerners darker than Southerners does not affect the law that the Southerner is darkerskinned. The law holds none the less for accidental and contradictory cases.

You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forbear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account: they are extreme and irrelevant variations.

And of as little account are the occasional transferences of customs and conventions, taken over in the mass. We may have customs and conventions of yours imposed on

our fundamental way of life—even as you have the surface credo of a Jewish faith imposed on your way of life. But in the end your true nature works itself into the pattern of the borrowed faith, and expresses itself undeniably. So we, borrowing from you, finally assimilate the loan and in time make it essentially ours.

Beyond all these irrelevancies which hide at times but do not change the issue lies that clear and fateful division of life—Jewish and gentile. Because I have mingled intimately with the Jewish world and with the gentile world, I know well how easily exceptions obscure the rule: but I know just as well the unsounded abyss between us. What I have learned in your midst stands in my mind sharply severed from what I have learned in the midst of my people. I listen to your life, to the brilliant chorus which goes up from lands, governments, cities, books, churches, moralities: and in my mind I can no more confuse it with the tone of Jewish life than I could confuse the roaring of a tempest with

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I do not believe that this primal difference between gentile and Jew is reconciliable. You and we may come to an understanding, never to a reconciliation. There will be irritation between us as long as we are in intimate contact. For nature and constitution and vision divide us from all of you forever

Of course it is the frequent theme of editors, of popular professional optimists and of gullible and facile publicists that the path to reconciliation between Jew and gentile is the path of knowledge—or, rather, of information. The more you know concerning our history, our customs, our beliefs, the nearer

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This book, therefore, cannot be presented as an effort to achieve an end which from the outset is declared impossible. I do not propose to combat anti-Semitism. I only wish to present what seems to me its true

explanation in the hope of changing some of its manifestations.

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The Question

That is beyond the reach of conscious effort, certainly beyond the reach of the missionary. Change a man's opinions and his nature will soon learn to express itself through the new medium.

This I preface to my observations on the difference between Jew and gentile because I anticipate the commonplace allusion to the similarity of our creeds, to the identity of source and to the origin of the founder of your religion. Christianity (the reality, not the credo) is not a variant of Judaism, whatever Christ or his chroniclers may have intended. Your nature is the same to-day as it was before the advent of Christianity. Within the framework of another creed your instincts would have woven a similar design.

And if not religious, this difference certainly cannot be in the nature of a philosophy or a Weltanschauung. It is true that a man's nature dictates his philosophy and Weltanschauung, even as it does his religion. But we must also remember that our logic is nearly always at variance with our natures:

Life is fluid and dogmas are fixed: and life, trying to come to terms with dogmas, does not easily break with them, but endows them with almost infinite plasticity. Under the same dogmas a man will kill another or die rather than lift his hand to kill. One gen-

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eration means one thing in a dogma: another generation means another thing. And at last even the elasticity of the dogma will not stand the strain: a sudden wave of emotion comes to reinforce accumulated resentment: there is a revolution and a new religion is founded; new dogmas are accepted. Perhaps they do not answer the need; perhaps they express only a passing fashion; perhaps they are no nearer than the old dogmas to a reconciliation between philosophy and instinct. But they may take root. And the process begins all over again. Instinct endures for glacial ages; religions revolve with civilizations.

Let us differentiate, then, between a religion as a dogma and the same religion as a practised art or way of life. We may compare religion with religion: that is legitimate and fruitful. But let us, in so doing, compare dogma with dogma, practice with practice: and even when we treat of dogma let us be careful to distinguish between the dogma as proclaimed and the dogma as it is transmuted by the emotions.

That primal difference, which I have sensed more and more keenly as I have tasted more and more of life, your life and our life,

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is a difference in the sum totals of our respective emotions under the stimulus of the external world; it is a difference in the essential quality or tone of our mental and spiritual being. Life is to you one thing—to us another. And according to these two essential qualities we make answer to the needs and impulses which are common to both of us.

To you life is a game and a gallant adventure, and all life's enterprises partake of the spirit of the adventurous. To us life is a serious and sober duty pointed to a definite and inescapable task. Your relations to gods and men spring from the joy and rhythm of the temporary comradeship or enmity of spirit. Our relation to God and men is dictated by a somber subjection to some eternal principle. Your way of life, your moralities and codes, are the rules of a game—none the less severe or exacting for that, but not inspired by a sense of fundamental purposefulness. Our way of life, our morality and code, do not refer to temporary rules which govern

a temporary and trivial pastime: they are inspired by a belief (a true belief, a belief which reaches below assertion into instinctive reaction) in the eternal quality of human endeavor. To you morality is "the right thing," to us morality is "right." For all the changing problems of human relationship which rise with changing circumstances you lay down the rules and regulations of the warrior, the sportsman, the gentleman; we refer all problems seriously to eternal law. For you certain acts are "unbecoming" to the pertinent ideal type—whether he be a knight or a "decent fellow." We have no such changing systems of reference—only one command.

And all your moral attributes are only varieties of Queensberry rules. Honor, loyalty, purity—these are sets of regulations. The best of you will not swerve from them: you will die in their defense—like the gallant gentlemen you are. But you will not brook the question whether your system of honor is founded on right, whether loyalty has rela-

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tion to intelligence, whether purity has relation to the state of mind. Honor means but one thing—to do the honorable thing, whether it be honor in dueling, honor among thieves, honor of women; loyalty means the quality of being loyal independent of right or wrong; purity means the chastity of the body or the denial of desire—as such; it is related to the game, not to God.

For us these distinctions do not exist, for we are serious in our intentions. We will not accept your rules because we do not understand them. Right and wrong is the only distinction we are fitted by our nature to appreciate. We are puzzled by your punctilios, your quaint distinctions, your gentleman's comme il fauts. We are amazed when you fight for them; we are struck dumb when you die for them—a song on your lips.

Not that we do not know how to die for a cause. But we must die for a serious cause, for a reason, for right, for God. Not for a slogan without meaning, for a symbol for its own sake, for a rule for its own sake. We

will die for the right—not for "the right thing."

This difference in behavior and reaction springs from something much more earnest and significant than a difference in beliefs: it springs from a difference in our biologic equipment. It does not argue the inferiority of the one or the other. It is a difference in the taking of life which cannot be argued. You have your way of life, we ours. In your system of life we are essentially without "honor." In our system of life you are essentially without morality. In your system of life we must forever appear graceless; to us you must forever appear Godless.

Seen from beyond both of us, there is neither right nor wrong. There is your Western civilization. If your sense of the impermanence of things, the essential sportiness of all effort, the gamesomeness and gameness of life, has blossomed in events and laws like these I have seen around me, it cannot, from an external point of view (neither yours nor

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These are two ways of life, each utterly alien to the other. Each has its place in the

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world—but they cannot flourish in the same soil, they cannot remain in contact without antagonism. Though to life itself each way is a perfect utterance, to each other they are enemies.

II

Sport

THE most amazing thing in your life, the most in contrast with ours, is its sport. By this I do not mean simply your fondness for physical exercise, your physical exuberance, but the psychological and social institutionalization of sport, its organization, its predominant rôle as the outlet and expression of your spiritual energies.

I will not go into the history of sports among you, contrasting it with its absence from our records and emotions. But surely there is something of extraordinary significance in the predominance of sports in your first high civilization, their religious character and their hold on the affection and attention of the masses. That the overwhelming significance of this manifestation of life has been ignored is due essentially to the pomposity of historians, who care for dignity and

Sport

the chief passion not inevitably aroused by the struggle for existence, the chief spiritual passion, was sport: witness the elaborate religious celebration of sporting events built on athletic contests: witness the adulation, the love, that was poured out to athletic prodigies; witness the dedication of the highest, most inspired talents, to their glorification: witness the tremendous mass passions enlisted in sporting events in Athens, in Rome, in Byzantium and elsewhere.

But in this regard, as in most others, history is by far less important than contact with life. I need not study history or read books to know what sport means to you. I have only to feel the emotions around me, read your newspapers, watch the records of your universities. The most certain, the most consistent, the most sustained and intense free emotion in your life is sport. And when here in America (as, indeed, elsewhere too) some of your professors and educationalists deplore and condemn the preponderating rôle of sport in the schools, they fail to understand your

Sport

spirit. Your spirit is sport: particularly your young men, who are not yet absorbed in the struggle for existence, and whose emotions are therefore for the largest part free, must find in sport, in games, in contests, the most satisfactory expression of their instincts.

I do not agree at all with the few critics of your universities who see in this state of affairs the decline of the spirit of the country and of its educators. This state of affairs is not decadence, but the full and vigorous blossoming of your spirit. This is your way of life.

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church, you would be happier, cleaner, stronger.

Sport

sufficient consistency, they will carry into their adult life an ever-immanent sense of right and wrong according to your lights. And no better training could be devised, of course, than that which is associated with your most powerful educational institutions.

And again, seen within itself, sport-morality has as severe a discipline (if not, from our point of view, any spiritual sincerity) as a God-morality. It is as difficult and as exacting to be a gentleman as to be good. In many respects, of course, the two concepts overlap, though they are differently centered. Both call for restraint, for consideration of rules. Both are an advance on moral anarchy.

In thus characterizing your ethical concepts, I have already indicated the essential difference which separates them from ours. There is no touch of sport morality in our way of life, in our problems of human relationship. Our life morality cannot be symbolized in a miniature reproduction. We have no play-presentation of life. Our young, even like our adults, are referred at once to the first source, to the word of God, to the word of the prophet or teacher speaking in the name of God. Or, to secularize this statement, our young, like our adults, are imbued with a feeling of the absolute in their moral

Sport

Robin Hoods and Claude Duvals were nothing but low ruffians, devoid even of chivalry: but their significance is not in what they were, but in what you make of them in worship. The persistence of the types is evident to-day as much as ever, when popular fancy is charmed and youth tempted into emulation by the "Raffles" and "Lupins" of the world of books. At no time have we Jews sympathized with this type. We are insensible to the appeal of "the correct" and the graceful as a substitute for our morality. Knightly or unknightly, courtly or uncourtly, sportsmanlike or the opposite in our real life mean nothing. We only ask: Is it right or is it wrong?

For the rules which you bring into life from the athletic field have no relation to the ultimate moral value of your acts and serve only to give you the moral satisfaction of having obeyed some rule or other while doing exactly what you want to do. Thus, grown and intelligent as you may be, you govern the hunting of animals with the most

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curious and seriously-taken regulations. You must not shoot a pigeon or a rabbit in sport unless such and such regulations are obeyed—it is "unsportsmanlike." You make a great moral to-do about these regulations. But what, in God's name, has this to do with the right or wrong of killing defenseless animals for sport?

You have attempted to infuse into business, which you have made the stark translation into modern social terms of the old kill-and-be-killed chaos, an ineffectual gallantry which will again give you the sense of "playing the game" while giving free course to your worst instincts. I mean that, apart from the necessities of the law, you attempt to bring into the field of business the curious punctilio of the fencing master—courtesies and pretenses, slogans and passwords, which mitigate only in appearance the primal savagery of the struggle. "Service," "the good of the public," "a square deal"—all the catchwords of the advertising schools which give a flavor of gamesome friendliness to a world

A similar division in other essential opinions illustrates the primal difference between

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Nor do we glorify the warrior as a warrior, despite occasional individual defections of ours from that view. If my brother goes mad and attacks me, and I must slay him in self-defense, how can I be happy over it? It is a cruel and miserable business, to be

finished with as soon as possible, to be forgotten as soon as possible. This is essentially the Jewish attitude toward war and warriors. I do not find in the Bible delight in war and warriors. Our exultation in victory was not the glorification of the warrior, but only a fierce joy at having survived. We fought bitterly, vindictively, in order to kill: and our God was a God of war. But however this may be, I know with utter certainty concerning us as we are to-day that the conscious Jew, the Jew steeped in Jewish life, despises the fighter as such, abhors war: and though he can die for his faith as well as any one else, refuses to make a joyous ritual of combat.

For when you gentiles assert that you abhor war, you deceive yourselves. War is the sublimest of the sports and therefore the most deeply worshiped. Do you mourn when you must fight? Is a nation plunged into gloom when a declaration of war arrives? Do you search your hearts closely, cruelly, to discover whether you yourselves are not to blame that this monstrous thing has come to pass? Does

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a tremor of terror go through you—"Perhaps we are guilty"? Do you clamor for the records of the long complications which have ushered in this horror? Do you go to your task of defense or offense darkly, grimly, bitterly? No, you hang out your most gorgeous banners, you play merry music, your blood runs swiftly, happily, your cheeks brighten and your eyes sparkle. A glorious accession of strength marks the throwing down or the acceptance of the gage. From end to end of the land the tidings ring out, and every man and woman of mettle—every "red-blooded" man and woman, itches for a hand in it.

Let me say clearly that I do not think all of you are fighting heroes. I have no doubt that millions of you, in every country, went to war reluctantly. But this does not contradict my contention. It only means that millions of you are not capable of living up to the ideal morality which you cherish. But even the greatest coward, even the most unwilling conscript toys, in his emotions, with

the adventures and triumphs of war. I speak, throughout this book, of the ideals to which you aspire and from which you draw your moral inspiration. And it is certain that war itself, independently of all aims and justifications, is a prime necessity to you: and a declaration of war is the long-awaited signal of release, greeted with extravagant and hysterical joy. It is not love of country which induces this flood of happiness—it is combat, the glory of sport, the game, the magnificence of the greatest of all contests.

Again, they were cleaner-witted, those of you who declared openly and frankly that war is the natural pursuit of noblemen and of kings. The highest and most life-passionate among you, the most exalted, were to be dedicated above all others to your way of life. Conversely, the basest among you were accounted as unworthy of admittance into the splendid company of warriors. The scullion must not dare to aspire to combative distinction. To-day, as of old, you have nothing but contempt (revealed in its true intensity

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in time of war) for the true pacifist. Your nature is to-day what it was a thousand years ago. "In the somber obstinacy of the British worker still survives the tacit rage of the Scandinavian Berserker." And vain and futile and foolish are all these efforts to dam up and to choke the extremest and most cherished outlet of your natural instinct.

But in war, as in all other games of life, you satisfy your morality by means of amazing punctilios. To kill thus leaves you clean: to kill otherwise is ungentlemanly. In a few of these fine points in the conduct of war and of duels there may lurk some true moral significance. But it amazes us that in the exercise of this punctilio you find sufficient right-eousness to ease your conscience altogether.

Were you truly concerned with right and wrong instead of with the sporting "right thing," with honor, what a flood of horror and of pity and of prostration would follow each of your wars: with what frantic haste you would fly to the consolation of each other; with what tremors of moral terror

Sport

But your wars have never ended, since history records them, save with the same outbursts of pride and insolence as began them. Was there ever a Te Deum turned into a cry of Mea culpa? Was ever a war entered in a history book save as a glorious adventure, glorious in victory, glorious in disaster? And even if, after a hundred years, a historian here and there dares tarnish the stainless records of your purposes with a single plausible doubt, was there ever an awakening of guilt a thousandth part as strong as the awakening of pride and happiness which accompanies the recalling of the exploits of any war, however remote?

You have just passed through the wildest and most universal of all wars. Search your memories and your press well. Where was the hushed humility, the awe, the shuddering amazement which should have fallen on the world when the Armistice was declared? Did you not straightway send forth emissaries to bargain and barter, to accuse and to denounce? And above all to maintain your

national dignity! What dignity, pray? What was left of dignity to a single one of you? What was left of decency to any who had joined in the furious and blasphemous revelries of those five years?

You hate war? Nonsense; you enjoy it. If, in the passing tiredness which follows the strenuous exertion, you pause awhile to reflect, you do not dare to think into the root-causes and evils lest indeed you make war impossible. You tinker with a few regulations, gas laws, Flammenwerfer rules, armed and unarmed ships and similarly futile trivialities. You call each other "bad sports"—and a day later you are prepared, if the occasion offers, to embark again on the exhilarating enterprise.

Yet, I say, for all this, you can never be guilty in your own eyes, not one of you. Denunciation can only come from one who does not share your morality. Your conscience cannot be seared, for you have done no wrong. War is the high-mark of your life, the true and triumphant expression of your instincts.

Sport

I cannot undertake, while developing this theme, to answer all of the objections which occur even to me. In part, of course, some of these objections are unanswerable, and are, in my opinion, only overborne by counter-objections. In part they are futile objec-

Sport

like fighting. You gentiles do. Moreover, because you like fighting, you are much more skilful than we in hiding occasional reluctance to fight. Indeed, it is obvious that the more fearful you are of taking a hand in the combat, the more you will glorify and idealize it: while the Jew who is afraid adds actual and overt dislike to his cowardice.

But apart from this, we must not forget that with the schools of the Western world open to our children, your view of things is gradually being imposed on our alien psychology. Of the real and apparent successes of your effort I write elsewhere in this book. But here let me note that the Jewish child in your schools is made to feel that not to like fighting is a sign of complete inferiority. Determined to become your equal, he essays, often with success, to become warlike in his attitude. But it is an artificial success. He does from an imperious sense of duty what you do by instinct. He fights by forcing himself to it. He has not your natural gift and inclination for it.

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Gods

This is the essence of our difference: that we are serious, you are not. The French shading of the word comes nearer my meaning: vous n'êtes pas sérieux. Not as a matter of intent, but as a matter of constitution.

This lack of seriousness, thus uttering itself in your ethics, and governing the character of your relations to each other, must also govern your religion, your symbolized relations with the universe. And I have always felt, in contemplating your religious experiences and declarations, the same alienation from them as from your morality. Your feeling for Godhead partakes of the imaginative and lyrical playfulness which is your essential nature, and whatever may be the formal creed in which your feelings are wrapped their true nature cannot be hidden.

Gods

You gentiles are essentially polytheists and to some extent idol worshippers. We Jews are essentially monotheists. I would assert this even if it were not known that we have been singled out for centuries by our obstinate monotheism. I would assert it on the basis of my observations of the worlds I have known.

Monotheism is a desperate and overwhelming creed. It can be the expression of none but the most serious natures. It is a fundamental creed which engulfs individual and mass in an unfathomable sea of unity. In monotheism there is no room left for individual prides and distinctions, no room for joyful assertiveness. Monotheism means infinite absolutism, the crushing triumph of the One, the crushing annihilation of the ones.

To the serious nature it is inconceivable that this world should be at the changing mercy of opposing and uncontrolled forces: that gods of varying power and purpose should be making a sport of their own with us and themselves. But to the sporting na-

ture the ghastly unity of all life and power, the grim and sempiternal-settled predestination of all effort is, when accessible, an intolerable thought.

We Jews are incapable of polytheism. You gentiles are incapable of monotheism.

Given, in the most explicit terms, the definition of monotheism, which you have tried as sincerely as lies in your power to accept, you still fail to make it your own. If life here is a sport and an heroic epic, the origins of life must be the same. Let the exceptions among you proclaim what they will: I know that the creeds of your masses, as I have heard them expounded from pulpits and in homes, as I have read of them in books and in periodicals, are polytheistic creeds. Of the three-in-one, the three is stressed, the one is the reluctant concession to the dogma.

For where there is the happy and imaginative gentile spirit there cannot be the complete and unconditional prostration of the individual. This utter breakdown of self which is revealed in our prayers before God,

Gods

in our feelings towards him, is an experience which you are too proud to share. Most of our prayers are helpless repetitions of our helplessness, the stammerings of a child overwhelmed, overmastered, by contemplation of the supreme Unity. You cannot pray thus: at no time, even in the presence of the gods, do you lose your self-possession, your dignity. You too pray, but your prayers, compared with ours, are requests. Your offers of service to Christ the God are the offers of a vassal to a powerful superior. Our prayers, too, beg something, but requests of ours are folded in an abasement, a humility which would be revolting to you.

Hence it is that you have never, in these many centuries of Christianity, produced utterances like those of the prophets, of Job and of David. Your inspirations come from other sources, not from the one source. Your gods are essentially gods of the world, not of the universe. The universal aspect of divinity, its attributes of infinity and eternity, its

omnipotence—these find only your formal acknowledgment: but emotionally you are unfitted to give them the true acknowledgment of complete and almost incoherent abasement. That language is alien to your spirit—the terror of the infinite cannot touch you, the eternal you know as it were by symbol and formula—but not by horrified experience. Your very professions of humility are like proud trumpet-blasts, and all your abasements of royalty, your Hapsburg burial ceremonies and anointings by priests are but artistic flourishes which bring into graceful relief the true soldierliness of your character.

I do not remember even having met the exceptions which must exist among you: I do not remember ever having heard a gentile pray with that abandonment, that abjectness, that (as it must seem to you) fulsomeness of homage which characterizes our prayer. Only they who (like us) are broken under the burden of realization of the infinite can pray thus; only they who, in dreams and in waking ecstasies and, above all, in instinct,

Gods

have been touched with the rage of the Undeniable Power can utter such adoration as ours.

Our very anthropomorphisms reflect the difference in our spirit. With our personified God we hold speech such as you would never hold. When we translate infinite extent into infinite individual power, we shadow forth a Being, charged with an intensity of existence, a concentration of life and force, which you are unable to apprehend, being too free in spirit to attribute to any outside force such untrammeled and unapproachable tyranny.

So your gods, too, are playthings, higher powers in the tempestuous game of life. All your mythologies were tales of adventure—for your very gods are not serious. And most fascinating are the tales of those gods which you fashioned when your first brilliant blossoming in Greece started out of your turbulent soil. Who could conceive the mythology of Greece as a product of the Jewish people? That grace, that sunny charm, that adventurousness, that quarrelsomeness—could gods

like these ever have sprung from us? The emptiness of life and space and time brought forth out of your free and bounding imagination a host of beings, which you imaged with infinite loveliness in stone. One god for heaven and one for the bowels of earth and one for the sea, and gods for music and tragedy, gods for commerce and for voyaging—was not this a charming game, a game of children? Can any one say that this was a serious and desperate attempt to become, in concept, one with the universal spirit of life?

Compare with this our own first gropings, our own first clumsy expression of the universal spirit which sought utterance in us. Even as an absolute tribal ruler our God was One, was master, a serious God. And out of that God-unity which we felt even in our primitive limitations, grew at last that concept which touched with undying ecstasy the lips of our prophets and cast over the life of the entire people, for all time, the shadow of omnipresence and omnipotence. Even when

Gods

our God was a jealous God, his jealousy was absolute: he would brook no homage but to him, no acknowledgment but of him. But the jealousies of your gods were only the jealousies of sport. They did not seek universal mastery and exclusiveness—only superiority. To be primus inter pares was the ambition of your gods, with mastery each in his own domain: but our God sought universal dominion in our hearts—such dominion as made all other homage inconceivable.

Your gods gave you loveliness and joy and battle. You liked your gods and served them with alternating loyalties: you pitted one against the other, appealed from one to the other, plotted with one against the other. Your gods were kings and princelings, mightier than you and more splendid. But no god of yours was the King of Kings in your soul. Your gods have never grown up, nor any single one among them. Nor have you grown into your god, but have always remained external, proud and warlike and free, paying homage as of old, but retaining the mastery

over yourselves. You do not know of a God who is ALL, a God in whom you are, a God who has reduced you to the dust, to the infinitesimal, in whom you are a breaking foam—a bubble on an infinite sea—it breaks: and it was born and is gone, for ever and ever.

And so, despite occasional exceptions, which I acknowledge freely, the dedication of all life, all being, to God's will and way, is alien to you. You are not naturally steeped in God. You salute him and bring him homage. Your relations with your gods are occasional, even if inevitable: but you cannot compare that with the immanence and intimacy of God-head in Jewish life. God is a common-place experience in Jewish life. He is the tacit continuous miracle of all our days and nights, thoughts and experience.

We cannot conceive of a duality—religion and life, the sacred and the secular. A Jew is a Jew in everything, not merely in prayers and in synagogue. In the eyes of a pietist, a Jew who does not follow the rules and regulations of the synagogue, who even denies all dogma

Gods

is not a non-Jew: he is a bad Jew, a sinful and rebellious Jew.

In the orthodox world of Jewry, every act and incident is an acknowledged Jewish phenomenon: acknowledged, that is, openly, by prayer. The whole day is saturated with God, or with Jewishness. Our Jewishness is not a creed—it is ourself, our totality.

Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith. For what value has God for you if you do not surrender to him, even formally, all your gifts and faculties, all your skill and emotion? This is an amazing duality of allegiance: one is an Englishman first—and then a Christian! An American first, and then a Baptist! Your most generous loyalties, your readiest sacrifices, are inspired by your nationalism. Your faculties are national: you claim, "This is typically American," "This is typically British," "This is typically French." You cut

this off at once from God, and the best of yourselves you withhold from him.

But in the Jew, nation and people and faculties and culture and God are all one. We do not say: "I am a Jew," meaning, "I am a member of this nationality": the feeling in the Jew, even in the free-thinking Jew like myself, is that to be one with his people is to be thereby admitted to the power of enjoying the infinite. I might say, of ourselves: "We and God grew up together."

To have built up a great nation, millions of human beings—schools, armies, art galleries, books, legislatures, theaters, immense newspapers—is not this the all in all of national achievement, the best and strongest in you?—to have done this without your god as the central idea! Is that taking your religion seriously? No: any nation that takes its religion seriously is a nation of priests.

You will tell me that such things have been among you, that you have had national religions, national gods. I do not believe it: I have certainly seen no evidence in any rec-

Gods

ord which has come to my attention. For we must distinguish between a patron or tutelary god and a national god. The first is an especially assigned power. The second is the complete reflex of the people, a god who is born with the people, who is its raison d'être, without whom the people would not have come into national existence. You have had patron or appropriated gods: we have a national God. In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?

There is no real contradiction between this confessed anthropomorphism and my claim that we Jews alone understand and feel the universality of God. In anthropomorphism we merely symbolize God: we reduce the infinite, temporarily, to tangible proportions: we make it accessible to daily reference. For neither we nor you can carry on the business of ordinary living on the plane of constant abstraction. It is not because of your anthropomorphism that I accuse your religious feelings of being trivial. It is because of the manner of your anthropomorphism, it is be-

cause of what your anthropomorphism produces.

And thus, by natural reaction, we in our anthropomorphism are all the more personal because in our abstraction we are truly abstract. Because we alone are dedicated to the infinite, our God, when anthropomorphized, is our own God. I might say that there is no Jew who does not believe in God. The free-thinking Jews, the agnostic or atheistic Jew like myself, simply does not anthropomorphize him. In his religious emotions the atheist Jew is as different from the atheist gentile as the confessing Jew from the confessing gentile-Christian.

For if gods are the rationalized explanation of religious emotions they differ in acceptance and denial even as these emotions differ. And of course by "religious" emotions we only mean one aspect of all emotions. Your emotions, your life-reactions differ fundamentally from ours—why, I cannot tell. But as in morality you are freer, sporting and

Gods

variegated, so your gods are many, varied and manly. And our gloomy and merciless monotheism, intolerant in abstraction and in personification, is the eternal enemy of your gods.

$\mathbf{IV}$

Utopia

THE dreams of men concerning the latter days are a common index to their ideals of life, for no one will think of the future except as his own. These dreams, like their close kin, the night dream, are extraordinarily difficult of interpretation—much more difficult than the psychoanalyst would have us believe. But on occasions they are presented with unmistakable clarity and directness—by the prophets.

The functions of the prophet as a seer and a foreseer have been confounded for this reason. The true prophet sees into the ultimate longings of his group—longings which may even run counter to the day's desires. These ultimate longings are shifted into the far future—beyond the reach of temporal complications and compromises: and he that unveils

Utopia

a man's inmost longings wins credence as having foreseen the true finality of life.

I have chosen Plato's Republic and our own Hebrew prophets as the basis of contrast between your dreams of the latter days and ours, between your longings for perfection and ours. I have chosen Plato because of all the seers who have sprung up in your midst he is the most universally accepted, and of all Utopias your thinkers refer to his most frequently: that is to say, he comes nearest to your desires. Hence in discussing him, I am discussing you.

I have used the phrase "of all the seers who have sprung up in your midst" because it is true that you still mention the Hebrew prophets more frequently than Plato. But it is of singular and final significance that as soon as you develop free intelligence and desire expression for it, you turn from our prophets to your own. The overwhelming bulk of your intelligent discussion of life and the end of life centers round the free philosophers or seers—and among these you have made Plato

preëminent. Plato's analysis of the ideal life still approaches your dreams most intimately.

Investigating the true nature of morality, Plato bodies forth his ideal of a perfect state, and, with the license of a dream giving free reign to his imagination, unfolds step by step his famous Republic. No considerations of practicality or of feasibility were there to check the career of his fantasy. The Republic is to him life as it should be and as he would like to see it: the apotheosis of human aspiration.

Contrast this with the visions of his almost contemporaries, the Jewish prophets, and in this contrast you will find again the key to our essential difference.

The Republic of Plato is an institution, organized with infinite ingenuity and dedicated to the delights of the body and the mind. It draws its inspiration from the pure joi de vivre of the ideal man of perfect physical and psychic health. You would seek in vain that extraneous compulsion of a God

Utopia

which the Hebrews called inspiration. There is no somber passion driving to creation, no intolerant demands impossible of fulfilment. It is not God creating man in his mold: it is man creating God, or the gods, in his mold: gods that are companionable and comprehensible.

He sets before you a pretty, intriguing little model ("a city not too big to lose the characteristics of a city") which, sundered from universal humanity, untouched by the universal hunger, restricts Supreme Good to the possession of a comfortably secluded group. It is a city for the prosecution of the happy and artistic life; the harmonies and symmetries shall be carefully guarded, the satisfaction of body and of mind wisely and cleverly pursued. Nay, in that supreme human product there shall even be—astounding triviality—a censor!

There is a wealth of ingenuity devoted to these questions: How shall children be initiated into the art of war? How shall cowards and heroes be treated? What about

"Is it not of the greatest moment that the work of war should be well done? . . ." This in a vision of human perfection—for it never occurs to Plato that perfection in humanity precludes the possibility of war.

And treating of God, he says: "Surely God is good in reality, and is to be so represented,"

Utopia

but what can we make of his ultimate good? Is not his good merely "a good thing"—as right is for you "the right thing"? And what can we make of his God when, after talking of the goodness and dignity of God, he goes on to talk of the gods, and of how the poets are to be arraigned for not treating them respectfully in that they make them laugh or portray them in undignified occupations and postures!

Well does he say: "The inquiry we are undertaking is no trivial one, but demands a keen sight." He does not say that it demands the aid of God, or a loving heart, or hunger after righteousness. But the very question of God is a trivial one, for, as one says in this book: "It is urged neither evasion nor violence can succeed with the gods. Well, but if they either do not exist, or do not concern themselves with the affairs of men, why need we concern ourselves to evade their observation?"

This graceful skepticism, which strikes the opening note of the book, sets the tone for the

entire theme. "What is justice?" What indeed? Does any man that loves true justice (not the game) ever ask this question? Can any one truly believe that the subtlest and skilfulest analysis of justice will help one jot in creating love of justice, desire for justice?

Utopia

nations shall flow into it. And many peoples shall come and say: Come, let us go up to the mountains of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways and we will walk in his paths. . . . And he shall judge the nations and shall rebuke many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn any more war."

A vision of the perfection of mankind, with censors and with carefully groomed gods!—the limit of his imagination. But this!—"And the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea." And this!—"And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy: your old men shall dream dreams. Your young men shall see visions. And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit."

And because his world is not God's world, but the world of his self-created gods, he must sit down and argue anxiously, "What is justice?" But he that really loves justice asks no questions: he cries instead: "Seek good and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of Hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken. Hate evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate." And: "Let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream."

And when, baffled by the inadequacy of his human standards, your philosopher refers justice to the "categoric imperative," he betrays the triviality of your world. What is that "categoric imperative," that helpless compromise and confession? What man recognizes it, will bow to it? That phrase itself is its own denial, for he that refers mankind to a "categoric imperative" is himself neither categoric nor imperative. But even the deaf will hear and tremble when the Prophet thunders: "Thus saith the Lord." There is the categoric imperative!

Utopia

For me, conscious of being Jewish and of the meaning of being Jewish, it is impossible to write of this contrast without bias, as if this book were merely an intellectual exercise. Because I am Jewish I look with ultimate aversion on the world which finds supreme and ideal expression in Plato's Republic. And though I may repeat that this is no question of right and wrong in these two worlds, yours and ours, I cannot but feel profoundly and vehemently that ours is the way and the life.

Yet I would pay what tribute I can to the dreams of one like Plato. I have at least touched your world closely enough to have caught some of the beauty of its freedom.

There is a Jewish legend which tells that when God brought the Law, his Law, to the children of Israel assembled at the foot of Sinai, after he had offered it to all the other peoples, only to have it rejected, he left them no choice, but said: Either you take my Law or I will lift up this mountain and crush you beneath it. I attach no psychological signifi-

cance to the fable (the practice of interpreting fables psychologically is, as a rule, a dishonest one), but quote it as a handy illustration. We are not free to choose and to reject, to play, to construct, to refine. We are a dedicated and enslaved people, predestined to an unchangeable relationship. Freedom at large was not and is not a Jewish ideal. Service, love, consecration, these are ideals with us. Freedom means nothing to us: freedom to do what?

Yet in glimpses I understand the charm of your life and sometimes lose myself in the fascination of your Plato's dream. Such a world as he foreshadows, a world of sunlight, exercise, singing, fantasy: a world of graceful and elastic bodies, of keen, flashing minds, of clash and effort, wars and heroes and monuments, a life wheeling and dashing in splendid formations, rejoicing under free and lovely skies: a life without brooding and gloom, without the intolerable burden of this unrelaxing immanence. Man and man's effort, man's love and agonies are ends in them-

Utopia

selves, to be exploited for themselves: the coming and going of men and nations and gods are without ultimate significance, a dance of atoms, a passing ecstasy without thought of the sinister beyond. Beautiful—but not for us! While this dance goes on, while nations and gods enter the game and leave it, we continue through all time, an apparition almost, a dread reminder of infinity.

Your dreams of perfection are only of a piece with your present life—the transient become permanent: the skies will be blue forever, your dance will never end. Your bodies will always be strong, your wits keen, your battles glorious: the game will reach its limit of enjoyment!

But for us this is not an apotheosis: this is not a vision. For us the end is ecstatic unity, the identification of man with God. Your ideal is eternal youth, ours lifts toward an unchanging climax of adult perfection. You would like to play with your gods forever: we will return to God, to the universe. Yours is a sunlit afternoon, with the combatants

swaying forever in a joyous struggle. Ours is a whole world, with the spirit of God poured through all things.

Your ideal is Plato's Republic: ours is God's kingdom.

V

Loyalty

Loyalty

that criminality is so closely allied to anti-Semitism.

denial of it. Hence such plays (except when they become too obvious in their purpose and thus become an overt attack en masse) are tolerated by the censorship and encouraged by the public.

Loyalty

the Jew there is a Union Sacrée of all classes and conditions of men, the prince, the laborer, the professor, the saint, the thief, the prostitute, the soldier, the merchant. There does not seem to be a single country with a history which has not been anti-Semitic at one time or another. There is no country today of which the Jew can say, "In this country anti-Semitism will never become triumphant." Your dislike of us finds uneven and unequal expression, is lulled into rest for a time, at times is overborne by generous impulses, but it is a quality inherent in the nature of things, nor is it conceivable to me that, as long as there are Jews and gentiles, it should ever disappear.

For your system of morality is no less a need to you than ours to us. And the incompatibility of the two systems is not passive. You might say: "Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours." But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different. They are opposed in mortal,

${\bf Y}$ ou ${\bf Gentiles}$

though tacit, enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.

No single attribute or virtue shows our mutual enmity more clearly than that of loyalty, which, among all the attributes contributing to your morality, is perhaps the most dearly cherished, the most vehemently advocated. It is impossible for me, in writing of it, to take up a purely analytic attitude; but I believe that the preferences and aversions which I here express will at least serve to make clear the irreconcilable difference between Jewish and gentile morality.

The abstraction, loyalty, is not related to good and bad. Loyalty is preached naked, as a virtue for itself. It is proper and right to be loyal. To do a thing out of loyalty—loyalty to a man, to a group, to an idea—is in itself a sort of justification. To develop a loyalty is in itself commendable.

To the Jew, naked loyalty is an incomprehensible, a bewildering thing. That men should be called upon to keep a quantity of

Loyalty

this virtue on constant tap, to be applied on instruction to this or that relationship, is not merely irrational to us: it is beyond the apprehension of our intelligence.

We can understand love born of a natural relationship. But the quality of love differs essentially from the quality of loyalty. Loyalty is demanded as an independent quality, as a thing in itself; it is cultivated (love cannot be "cultivated"); it is stimulated and forced. It is not demanded, essentially, that you love: it is demanded that you be loyal.

Very often, indeed, loyalty is demanded where a demand for love would be too obviously ludicrous. For the application of loyalty is to you as seemly in the case of an association of shoe salesmen as in the case of country itself.

It is expected, in your world, that a man should be loyal to his country, to his province, to his city, to his section of the city, to his college, to his club, to his business associations, to his fraternity, to every chance group into which events may bring him. In the first

instance, country, the distinction between love and loyalty is startlingly clear. Love of country is a profound spiritual quality: it may go hand in hand with a dangerous and exalted morality. But loyalty merely says: "My country must triumph in all her undertakings, whether they be right or wrong"—or, rather, "There is no such thing as 'my country wrong.'" And in loyalty to king, class, or church, the same distinction or substitution is observed. Loyalty is a rigid code of behavior—not an emotion.

But the real nature of loyalty is only seen in its application to those relationships which are much more fortuitous than those of country, church, class. In these loyalty is clearly revealed as a fictitious and artificial regulation, with no roots in moral conviction. Let us take the case of a young man who is faced with a choice of college. He may have preferences, but there is no compelling association which identifies him with any one institution. The choice is decided finally by some quite irrelevant influence: he goes to any one

Loyalty

convinced of its worthlessness, also expects this of him and considers him rather a cad if he acquiesces in what to them may be obviously true.

This obligation of loyalty must pursue the man to the end of his life. Forty years after he has left his college he will be regarded with suspicion as something less than a gentleman if he should have discovered that his Alma Mater was and is an extremely inferior and uninteresting institution: "It may be all that, you know, but a man's got to be loyal to his college."

What is true of college loyalty is true of other loyalties. A man who joins the army and is assigned to any regiment must have loyalty for his regiment—which means that he must seem to lose the faculty of discrimination and criticism as soon as the regiment he was accidentally assigned to is under consideration. Should he in later life become a member of a fraternity, of a business association, of a poker-club, he must be loyal. He must be loyal even at large, without an organ-

Loyalty

ization to be loyal to. He must be loyal to the paper-manufacturing trade, to the cleaners and dyers, to the transport business. And if he goes down into a factory to earn, by the sweat of his brow and under bitter duress, a bare livelihood, he must at once be loyal to his employers.

colleges in succession, or are attached to a number of regiments in succession? Or change your business, or your fraternity or your poker-club?"

Loyalty

alone can give birth to the concept of loyalty.

In our life, the Jewish life, loyalty is unknown. There is no equivalent for it among our attributes. We understand love, which is serious, profound: which must be treated, therefore, with due dignity. But we do not understand loyalty, which is trivial, gallant, gamesome, conventionalized.

As students, we Jews are accused of lacking the right attitude toward the college. It is perfectly true that we have not the "loyal" attitude—as you have it, or, despite occasional efforts, to the degree in which you have it. We are apt to see the college as an institute of learning: we go there to study under competent teachers. What has loyalty to do with this organization? We may develop love for the place: it may, in later years, become a beloved memory, or it may not. But we cannot attach an immediate combative value to our connection with the college—an instantaneous regimental pride: we cannot attach a moral value to the prescribed set of sporting emotions and thrills

which are supposed to be a proper part of college life. We are unquestionably an alien spirit in your colleges. For your colleges are the most coherent mouthpieces of your morality: and that morality is not ours. Your college is a miniature world in which you first develop the sporting instincts which must accompany you through the real world. We (with our proper exceptions) see the college only as a center of study, and, incidentally, occasionally of valued friendships. The idea of a rivalry with other colleges, in which each student must defend his own college, seems to us childlike. It is not to the purpose at all. It is not serious.

But I have touched on the college only as a single illustration of the predominance of the virtue of loyalty in your concept of the proper human relationship. All your society is divided into "teams"—with a fictitious morality to correspond. It has little to do with direct utilitarianism. One might object, saying: "This morality, like any other, is merely the adjunct of the economic or biologic

Loyalty

Soap Garden City, the Alpha Sigma Mu or the '95 Club, the Progressive Republicans or the Decorators' Association, the United Cigarmakers or the Fascisti. There's good fun in all this; it is exciting, jolly, sporty. It puts rush and gaiety into life. But we Jews are no good at it. Just as we are inaccessible to the meaningless exhilaration of college loyalty, so we are bewildered by the fast and furious games of your general life. We Jews cannot play the game.

Perhaps you will answer that it is you who, taking the chance relationships of life as the all-in-all of existence, are really serious: that it argues seriousness in a man if he gives to every passing association all faculties, all his emotion. Such an argument would be a quibble. A woman may take an absorbing interest in dress—to the exclusion of everything else: one could hardly call her serious. Serious absorption in trivialties is not seriousness. Then you may answer me: "But all life is a triviality"—which would reveal clearly the difference between your outlook and ours.

VT

Discipline

One of the best illustrations wherewith to contrast your adaptability to discipline and our lack of it is to be found in the difference between your behavior in church and our behavior in our own unmodernized synagogue—the orthodox synagogue.

In church all is order and decorum, rhythm and régime. In the synagogue all is chaos. In the church leaders and responses are carefully prepared, carefully followed and observed. It is clean and neat, charming and exact. You behave well. You do as you are told—in mass. You create esprit de corps in the church: there is a suggestive, hypnotizing decency in the trained correctness of your service. In the synagogue all is disorder; we talk during service; we answer out of turn; and when we answer in mass one begins earlier, another ends later;

it is Babel itself; people walk in and out; some take longer than others to get through a certain prayer—and the ones who read more rapidly chat in the interval; part of the congregation is standing, part sitting; some wear prayer shawls, others do not: and the prayer shawls are not all alike; sometimes there is so much babbling that the voice of the cantor or leader cannot be heard. One of you at our services would be amazed: our own young generation, which has picked up your ways, is disgusted: and the last couple of generations has seen Reform synagogues conducted on your models.

Taking this illustration (as one fairly may) of model discipline and lack of it, we may say, as is often said: "You gentiles are disciplined; we Jews are not." And it is not in church and synagogue alone that we find this contrast. It persists, equally clear cut, in all branches of organized life. Compare any gentile institution with an uncorrupted corresponding institution in Jewish life and you will observe it. At your secular public as-

Discipline

semblies the same decency and unified restraint; at ours, the same scrambling irregularity. Jewish meetings never begin on time, never end on time. In your clubs and societies—order and harmony; in ours, noise, disorder and wastage. Your programs are observed with fair strictness; our programs are merely points de départ. In your homes calm and even systematization; in ours boisterous affections, formlessness.

And despite much effort we cannot introduce your rhythmic exercise of discipline into our life—and retain our individuality. We can imitate you—excellently: produce a substitute as good as the original. But the institution then no longer has Jewish spirit: it is a gentile institution artificially maintained by Jews—like our Reform Temples—and in these the Jew gradually learns to present a gentile exterior. But wherever we are unrestrainedly Jewish we shock you by our uncouthness. We lack social grace—the disciplined and distinguished social grace of high society, as well as the mean and spirit-

less punctiliousness of your middle classes. In the colleges, in the street, in the surface cars, in the clubs, in the army, we betray ourselves. Indeed, your very breaches of discipline differ from ours by a certain conscious rebelliousness which is partly homage: our breaches of discipline are off-hand, unconscious, insolent.

And carrying this still further, we Jews, the most clannish of peoples, are helplessly disorganized—we have never achieved comparative unity, not even in a single territory—much less throughout the world. All our organizations are small, but never too small to be unwieldy because of dissension and, worse than dissension, because of unamenability to regular discipline. To those who have known the comparative evenness of your organizations, political, religious, social, commercial, we are an unsightly people: and every effort to impose this sense of form on us only accentuates our formlessness.

This distinction between us again points to the root difference between us—your trivial-

Discipline

For true discipline should always be seen in relation to a purpose. Your discipline is goose-step discipline: it is the hypnotic discipline of imposing rhythms, possible only in the absence of the individual discipline. There is hypnotic charm in your discipline—but it is not effective; as soon as the organization crumbles, the individuals are lost. We have never been the victims of organization.

Your organization-discipline, moreover, is a necessary part of your sport life. Games cannot be conducted without discipline: discipline is the essence of a game: when two perfectly disciplined beings are opposed, the game is at its best. And the same feeling runs through all your manifestations of life: the game of nationalisms, the game of society, the game of commercial success.

The most startling and compelling monuments of your gentile genius are not individual productions—but the productions of mass. Most of the wonders of the ancient world were wonders springing out of great organ-

${\bf D}$ iscipline

ized rhythmic effort and your chief wonders to-day, those which dominate your general life, are like these. Great buildings; great countries; great ships; great wars; the pyramids, the Olympic, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens, the Eiffel Tower and the Woolworth building, the Red Cross, the Catholic church, Babylon, New York, the Daily Mail—these are the distinctive triumphs of your civilizations, the final appeal. And individual ingenuity is subordinated to the production of your mass effects, your discipline-monsters. What single individuals can alone effect plays a very minor role in your way of life. Mass and rhythm and team work—the game: this is your ideal.

It is not ours: and we are impressed only superficially and transiently by these productions. The individual is our climax, as the mass is yours. A hundred thousand men labored for twenty years to build the great pyramid: one man wrote the book of Isaiah. You will answer: "One man also wrote 'Hamlet' and the 'Critique of Pure Reason' and the

'Republic.'" But I ask: Are Plato and Shake-speare and Kant in your life what the Bible, the Talmud, the rabbis are in ours? To our very masses, the Jewish masses, the wonders of the world are Moses, Elijah, the Rambam, the Vilna Gaon, the Dubna Maggid, the chassid in the neighboring village. These actually dominate our life, as governments, mass radio exploits, armies and Woolworths dominate yours. We are the people of the Book. But we were the people of the Book before a million copies could be printed in a single day.

This intractability of ours to your disciplines is one of our chief and (to you) most unpleasant characteristics. It is best noticeable in our new arrivals in Western countries, those who, in Eastern ghettos, have lived a more nearly Jewish life: it is much less noticeable in our modernized types—though here still noticeable; for, despite our clever imitativeness, we do retain our natural character and cannot hide it consistently, but betray ourselves at intervals. In the colleges, in the army (least here, except during the great war,

Discipline

for in peace-time only the Westernized Jews join the army), in business associations, we irritate and disgust you by our obdurate seeming singularity. We don't fit in properly. We don't keep a straight line on the social or public parade; we don't cheer in unison; we don't bow with the waving of the wand. We don't play the game.

This is comprehensibly irritating in the highest degree, and in your irritation you have ascribed these infractions to our savagery. You have said we are not fit for civilization. We have not the ability to subordinate the individual to the community: or, if we have the ability, we have not the desire, not having the ethical impulse. With us, you have said, it is every man for himself. We are too impudent, individually; we cannot behave as gentlemen should—unobtrusively, submissive to the code, tacit, unassertive, regular.

This is what you mean, saying we are undisciplined.

But the fact is that we consciously despise

The drill of your regiments, the drill of your colleges, of your social usages, your

Discipline

clubs, all impress us alike with their triviality. We do not understand it.

Perhaps you will reply that this contempt is merely rationalization. We despise discipline because we lack it and secretly we aspire to acquire it. But in fact it is the most severely disciplined Jew who most heartily despises your disciplines. It is the modernized Jew, who has thrown off the discipline of orthodox Judaism, who comes nearest your spirit. It is the orthodox Jew, the most Jewish Jew, who least understands you.

And it is this orthodox Jew, this ghetto Jew, whose apparent individualism deprives his mass life of all form and discipline, it is this orthodox Jew who seems, of all Jews, to be least accessible to your orderliness, it is this orthodox Jew who nevertheless submits to an amazing discipline unknown to most of you. I have said that the obstinate maintenance of our identity and our religion through eighty generations of oppression bespeaks a rigorous and effective discipline. But what that discipline is in practice you do not real-

Discipline

Much of this religious ritual covers eventualities which you would regard as secular; dietetic laws, sanitary laws, sex laws, social laws: for all life is religion to the Jew, and all life, proceeding from God, must be governed by him. But when the ritual is reduced to what even you would call the religious, it still presents a bulk of tyranny to which you would never submit, a discipline which you are incapable of suffering: a discipline which demands incessant vigilance, lest a prayer be omitted, a discipline the details of which it takes years to acquire and into which one must be trained from child-hood.

And what is most relevant in this connection is that this discipline is a corporate discipline—it is directed to a common purpose outside of the individual, to the perpetuation of a people through its religion. In our religious ideology the selfish salvation of the individual soul is a very minor theme. It is, I believe, an acquired dogma, and its irrelevance is proved by its unimportance. Our

prayers are largely common prayers; we pay little attention to the after life—and even our dreams of an after-life are associated with the Jewish people as a whole. As individuals we sometimes pray for personal benefits—but so infrequently that we could omit these prayers without changing the bulk of our ritual; most of our prayers are prayers of glorification: they link the people as a whole to God. They re-dedicate the people as a whole to God's service; they praise God for the burdens he has placed upon us—and, with passionate iteration, they thank him for having made us different from you.

It does not need a Jewish scholar—it needs only an intelligent Jew who has lived in an orthodox or semi-orthodox environment—to appreciate that all this tyranny of discipline was bent to one end—to our preservation as a distinct and separate people. We feel that we are not merely different from you at points: it is a totality of difference and of separation. We have carried out with us into

Discipline

exile the complete atmosphere of our national life: our holy festivals are largely national, and even in those which are predominantly religious there is the continuous, minor theme of our separate nationalism. One holiday celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from Egypt, another the deliverance of the people from the Asiatic-Greek oppressor, another the confusion of a national enemy, still others celebrate the time of the Palestinian harvest (the irony and tragedy of it!) with appropriate prayers and ceremonies: and even in our "pure" religious festivals the memory of our national institutions, our Temple, our hereditary priesthood, maintains an unbroken background of suggestion.

And with these recurrent climaxes in our religious life dominated by the national consciousness, the general tenor of all our religion repeats this theme from day to day. The discipline of our religion, of our Jewishness, is a corporate discipline, the subjection of the individual to the mass. I repeat this

to remind you that, contrary to your accusation, the intractability of the Jew to your forms of discipline does not spring from individualism or from lack of a social conscience. We are disciplined more bitterly than you, and we bear the discipline without the assistance of narcotic rhythms: we bear our burden like civilized adults.

Nor do I see any contradiction between this fierce insistence on separate national existence and our dedication to a universal ideal. We believe and feel that for such an ideal we alone, as a people, possess the especial aptitude. The orthodox Jew bases it on divine will and choice: others, like myself, know not on what to base it (a special racial psychology, the result of inbreeding, the result of accident)—but believe it none the less. We shall not further that ideal by losing our identity; to mingle with you and be lost in you would mean to destroy the aptitude, for ever. Thus universal ideal and national identity are inextricably bound up. To the maintenance of this high union we have given, consciously,

Discipline

seriously, without kings and courts, without medals and reviews and Orders, without cheering and without drills, a bitter and obstinate devotion more exacting than anything you have known and, in its deliberate effects, more successful.

VII

The Reckoning

I HAVE spoken of Jews and gentiles—in mass. Certain of you will assuredly object: "You cannot deal with masses as with men. 'You cannot indict a nation.'"

The objection is futile—not only has it been the universal practice to indict and to punish masses as if they had personality and to treat nations as such: but you are doing it to-day, everywhere. And I believe that fundamentally, the practice is just, despite the objections of the few whom I shall answer here. Particularly consonant is the practice with your gentile philosophy. Here is your nation: X. It is composed of militarists and pacifists and mobs. The government is militaristic—whether it represent a minority or a majority. And the militaristic government

The Reckoning

engages the whole country in its acts: is responsible for a war, for oppression. How shall we treat that nation? Single out the militarists and pacifists? Go into the workings of it, separate out the constituent elements? You cannot. Every member of that country is a member of the team, must take the good with the bad, must pay the debts contracted by the government. It cannot be a nation otherwise.

This from your point of view. And from the point of view of the workings of justice it happens to be no less defensible. When the whole of a nation reaps reward or punishment, a rough general justice is executed. If it is only the will of a minority which has brought on catastrophe, and the majority must pay, then it pays for having suffered the will of the minority. Had the German masses foreseen defeat and its consequences, Germany would never have gone to war, militarist minority or none. The masses which obeyed their masters, readily or sullenly, must pay for the obedience which gave their mas-

ters strength. . . . And the same is true of every other nation which is guilty.

All extenuation is irrelevant. How shall the majority learn that it must not acquiesce indolently in the will of the minority? Shall it not suffer the consequences of its indolence? A slow, almost impossible process. But assuredly a just one. For the impotent or corrupt acquiescence of the majority made the minority effective.

But if, on the other hand, a nation suffers for the will of its majority, and the minority suffers with the majority, then very clearly effective justice is being wrought, and just as clearly is the payment supposed to alter the will of the nation.

As long as there are nations and groups these laws must hold. And as soon as these laws collapse nations and groups will cease to be.

It is not meaningless to say, "This nation is parsimonious, this nation is treacherous, this nation is cruel." It is irrelevant to answer, "You must judge by the individual, not by

The Reckoning

As for you gentiles and us Jews, we have both acted on the assumption that the mass must be treated by a general law. The instinct of the gentile is to distrust the Jew, of the Jew to distrust the gentile. We only make exceptions. There is nothing inconsistent in the anti-Semite who says: "Some of my best friends are Jews."

I say, therefore, that in the conflict between us you have fought us physically, while our attack on your world has been in the spiritual field. It is the nature of the gentile to fight for his honor, in the nature of the Jew to suffer for his. Whether because we are so inclined by first nature, or whether because we have so become through lack of land and government and army—this is true: you revel in force, we despise it, even where we can and do exert it.

And so, since we have lived among you, you have instinctively appealed to brute force in combating our influence. When the reckoning is drawn up your guilt cries to heaven: whatever have been your relations to each other,

The Reckoning

we Jews have at least been the common denominator of your brutality. Compared with each other, you are gentlemen, warriors, democracies: set side by side with us, you are bullies and cowards and mobs. In vain do your quiescent majorities wash their hands; their quiescence is their effective guilt—I care not that your minorities struck the blow: I should not acquit the majority if I could give judgment and impose punishment.

That you are unable to meet us on the spiritual level is made evident by the following: We are a disturbing influence in your life not through our own fault. First: we are not in your midst by our own will, but through your action; and second (which is more to the point): we do not attack you deliberately. We are unwelcome to you because we are what we are. It is our own positive way of life which clashes with yours. Our attack on you is only incidental to the expression of our way of life. You too have this field open to you. As surely as we are a spiritual discomfort to you, you are a spirit-

ual discomfort to us: as surely as we attack you peacefully, so you waste us peacefully and weaken our numbers. But you do more than this: you bring the attack down to the physical plane, where we are defenseless. You do with us as your animal whims dictate; you rob us, you slay us, you drive us from land to land, and while one of you drives us forth the other shuts the gate in our faces. From the first day of our contact, since the first of our communities in exile, you have made us the sport of your brutality. There is at least one clear note in gentile world-history, one consistent theme: the note of our agony—the theme of your cruelty.

Even from your point of view you have been guilty. On our side at least the fighting has been clean; we have not misrepresented you. On your side the fighting has been dirty. From the dawn of civilization you have lied about us; you have accused us of murdering children that we might use their blood for ritual purposes; you have accused us of

The Reckoning

ing you. And as I hold you all responsible for these lies, so I hold you all responsible for the cruelties in which they issue.

The Reckoning

go through more'n two Germans at a time.") Your women applauded them, your children screamed for blood: democracy vied in bestiality with aristocracy and royalty. How shall we trust you?

If we are willing to forget the past, is not your past your present? Is not the blood libel alive to-day? And its companion viper, "the Elders of Zion"? Will poison work forever in the blood and never break out? Did not hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, read these legends without protesting, without seeking to punish the libelers? Do we not know how easily your morality fits your mood? "Kill the Jews, the Christ-killers," does indeed ring strange these days. But does "a damn good dose of lead for the Jewish Bolsheviks" sound very remote?

And if, arguing from the individual to the mass, your Klans and your Awakening Magyars, your Chestertons and your Daudets shall call us Jews sharks and swindlers, shall we not answer with better warrant, by the

millions of our murdered, by the Inquisition and the Crusades, by the smoking ruins of the Ukraine and the swinging body of Leo Frank: Dastards, murderers, and thieves!

VIII

But as Moderns

Russia you are changing, becoming like us, taking your share in all our activities, sports, civic duties, achievements, arts. You have spoken hitherto in the terms of a world which is fitfully dissolving. You have ignored the liberal Jews, the radical Jews, the modernized Jews, the agnostic Jews, now becoming the dominant element in Jewry, and approaching us, mingling with us, solving the problem without deliberate effort.

"Do not your own radicals renounce their Jewish connections? Will not your modernized Jews be the first to denounce the thesis of this book?"

I have already said, anticipating this objection, that there is the same difference between the Jewish atheist and the gentile atheist as between the orthodox Jew and the believing gentile: I have said or implied that the religion itself is but practical expression of the difference between us, not the cause of it. It is true that the expression of a view serves to strengthen it, as the exercise of a faculty serves to develop it. But expression

But as Moderns

does not create a view nor exercise a faculty. Even conscious adherence to the Jewish people is but partial expression of our Jewishness: it was not the conscious desire to remain a people which gave us the will to endure: it was our unavoidable commonalty of feeling which made us and continued us a people.

Repudiation of the Jewish religion or even of Jewish racial affiliation does not alter the Jew. Some of us Jews may delude ourselves as some of you gentiles do. But in effect modernization seems to have done nothing to decrease the friction between us. The dislike continues: and though your masses may not know why they dislike us, there must be a sufficient reason: it is Germany, the mother of the modernized Jew, that gave birth, with him, to modern anti-Semitism. Where the old ostensible reasons for disliking the Jew collapsed, new ones, more self-conscious, were substituted. When modernization removed the old, superstitious form of expression, the professor replaced the priest, science religion.

We are disliked on "scientific" grounds, as we were disliked on "religious." But both the "scientific" and the "religious" reasons were rationalizations. The true reasons underlay these analyses.

Nor can the revulsion of the war, with its release of primitive instincts, be blamed for this. German anti-Semitism antedates the war. The Higher Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with either conscious religion or localizations, like patriotism. It is true modern anti-Semitism. It is the old dislike of the Jew transvaluated into modern terminology, and it has been evoked by the appearance of that new phenomenon, the Westernized Jew.

For many Jews were fooled by appearances. They took the word of the gentile literally. The gentile said: "We dislike you because you are different from us in religion and in usages; you are separate; you are old-fashioned." And the Jew, believing these charges to mean what they say, abandoned his customs and his usages: took to baptism;

But as Moderns

became, externally, similar to the gentile, thinking thus to evade the issue. It failed. For no sooner had he made this change in himself than the gentile shifted ground, went from the religious to the ethnic.

What happened in Germany is happening elsewhere. As fast as the Jew modernizes, so fast does dislike of him adapt itself to the new situation and find a new excuse. Where the Jew is disliked it is the modern Jew who is disliked equally with the old-fashioned. The Klan, the Consul, the Dearborn Independent, the Dwa Grosse, the Action Française no longer preach the modernization of the Jew as a solution of the Jew problem. No Jew, however modern, or radical, is acceptable to the anti-Semite. It is now a racial question.

But you still have an answer. You say: "These new forms of anti-Semitism are hangovers: we have had anti-Semitism with us
for a long time. It is hard to get rid of. The\neffects linger long after the cause disappears.
But in time..."

The modernized Jew still stands apart from the modern gentile world, and his effective contribution to its life is as disastrously different as if he still put on the phylacteries every morning. The old racial seriousness,

But as Moderns

The astonishing thing is that this took place despite desperate conscious efforts on our part to become like you. We joined your armies and fought in them beyond our numbers: yet Jewish pacifism and Jewish pacifists gave the

We modern Jews of the Western world are in this fundamentally different from you. The occasional in you (revolution against the

But as Moderns

Game) is the dominant in us. Your instinct is truer than you know. The dislike of your modern world for the modern Jew is as relevant as the dislike of your old world for the orthodox Jew.

$\mathbf{IX}$

We, the Destroyers

We, the Destroyers

acter which crosses your intentions and thwarts your personality.

The Jew, whose lack of contact with your world had made him ineffective, becomes effective. The vial is uncorked, the genius is out. His enmity to your way of life was tacit before. To-day it is manifest and active. He cannot help himself: he cannot be different from himself: no more can you. It is futile to tell him: "Hands off!" He is not his own master, but the servant of his lifewill.

For when he brings into your world his passionately earnest, sinisterly earnest right-eousness, absolute righteousness, and, speaking in your languages and through your institutions, scatters distrust of yourselves through the most sensitive of you, he is working against your spirit. You gentiles do not seek or need or understand social justice as an ultimate ideal. This is not your nature. Your world must so be fashioned as to give you the maximum of play, adventure, laughter, animal-lyricism. Your institutions frame

themselves to this end: your countries and ideals flourish most gloriously when they serve this end most freely. All ideas of social justice must be subservient to this consideration: the Game first—then ultimate justice only as it can serve the Game.

I do not believe that we Jews are powerful enough to threaten your way of life seriously. We are only powerful enough to irritate, to disturb your conscience, and to break here and there the rhythmic rush of your ideas. We irritate you as a sardonic and humorless adult irritates young people by laughing at their play. For the real irritation lies in the fact that to our queries regarding your life there is no answer on our level: as to yours regarding our life there is no answer on yours.

We Jews are accused of being destroyers: whatever you put up, we tear down. It is true only in a relative sense. We are not iconoclasts deliberately: we are not enemies of your institutions simply because of the dislike between us. We are a homeless mass seeking satisfaction for our constructive in-

We, the Destroyers

stincts. And in your institutions we cannot find satisfaction; they are the play institutions of the splendid children of man—and not of man himself. We try to adapt your institutions to our needs, because while we live we must have expression; and trying to rebuild them for our needs, we unbuild them for yours.

Because your chief institution is the social structure itself, it is in this that we are most manifestly destroyers. We take part in the economic struggle for existence: this necessity we share with you. But our free spiritual energies point away from this struggle, for, unlike you, we have no pleasure in it. You gentiles fight because you like to fight; we fight because we have to—and in order to win. It is not in a spirit of hypocrisy that you have turned your business world into a sporting arena, with joyous flourishes, slogans, pretenses. It is not in a spirit of hypocrisy that you talk of playing the Game while you cut each other's throats in the markets. You mean it. Your advertising-propaganda

books, with their sentimental appeals, are not lies; they are the true evidence of your spirit. It is only when we Jews, too, use these methods that there is hypocrisy. For we see starkly through your life-illusions: yet we are forced to use them in self-defense. But our inmost longings turn from this fierce and clamorously happy struggle: while your inmost longings are part of it. You give your best to it, yourselves, your souls. We give only our cleverness to it. This is why, in spite of the popular delusion to the contrary, there are hardly any Jews among the world's wealthiest men. The greatest financial institutions, as well as the world's greatest businesses, are almost exclusively non-Jewish.

Dislike of the Jew in business springs from the feeling that we regard all your play-conventions with amusement—or even contempt. Our abominable seriousness breaks jarringly into your life-mood. But you feel our disruptive difference most keenly, most resentfully, in our deliberate efforts to change your social system. We dream of a world of utter

We, the Destroyers

justice and God-spirit, a world which would be barren for you, devoid of all nourishment, bleak, unfriendly, unsympathetic. You do not want such a world: you are unapt for it. Seen in the dazzling lights of your desires and needs our ideal is repellently morose.

We do wrong to thrust these ideals upon you, who are not for justice or peace, but for play-living. But we cannot help ourselves: any more than you can help resenting our interference. While we live we must give utterance to our spirit. The most insistent effort on our part will fail to change our nature.

Not that you are untouched by poverty, by human degradation: not that you do not wish at times that these unhappy things could be destroyed. But this is not in the direct line of march of your life. If social injustice were removed together with the Game, you would unquestionably recall both. Life before everything, freedom, joy, adventure.

I talk here of the modern, and not of the orthodox Jew. I talk of the Jew as alien as you to the forms of our orthodox and con-

sciously Jewish life: this is the Jew who forms the backbone both of audience and contributor to your radical and revolutionary organs, the Jew who is the precipitating center of your spasmodic and inconsistent efforts for justice. This man, in your midst, is not to be recognized, on the surface, as a Jew. He himself repudiates—and in all sincerity—his Jewish affiliations. He is a citizen of the world; he is a son of humanity; the progress of all humankind, and not of any single group of it, is in his particular care.

It is to this Jew that liberals among you will point to refute my thesis. And it is precisely this Jew who best illustrates its truth. The unbelieving and radical Jew is as different from the radical gentile as the orthodox Jew from the reactionary gentile. The cosmopolitanism of the radical Jew springs from his feeling (shared by the orthodox Jew) that there is no difference between gentile and gentile. You are all pretty much alike: then why this fussing and fretting and fighting? The Jew is not a cosmopolitan in your sense.

We, the Destroyers

He is not one who feels keenly the difference between national and nation, and overrides it. For him, as for the orthodox Jew, a single temper runs through all of you, whatever your national divisions. The radical Jew (like the orthodox Jew) is a cosmopolitan in a sense which must be irritating to you: for he does not even understand why you make such a fuss about that most obvious of facts—that you are all alike. The Jew is altogether too much of a cosmopolitan—even for your internationalists.

Nor, in the handful of you who, against the desires and instincts of the mass of you, proclaim social justice as the life aim, is the Jew any more truly at home, at one with his milieu, than the old-time Jew in his world. Our very radicalism is of a different temper. Our spur is a natural instinct. We do not have to uproot something in ourselves to become "radicals," dreamers of social justice. We are this by instinct: we do not see it as something revolutionary at all. It is tacit with us. But with you it is an effort and

a wrench. Your very ancestry cries out against it in your blood. . . . And you become silly and enthusiastic about it, with flag-waving, and shouting, and battle-hymns, and all the regular game-psychology proper to your world and way of life. Even of this you make a play.

But such as these radical and international movements are, the modern Jew (the best and most thoughtful modern Jew, that is) is nearer to them than to anything else in your world. He is the only true socialist and cosmopolitan—but in such a true and tacit sense that he is completely distinguished from all of you. It is one of many vital paradoxes—a thing illogical and yet true to life. It is our very cosmopolitanism that gives us our national character. Because we are the only ones who are cosmopolitan by instinct rather than by argument we remain forever ourselves.

In everything we are destroyers—even in the instruments of destruction to which we turn for relief. The very socialism and inter-

We, the Destroyers

ments and in the almost involuntary contempt which springs to the lips of countless intellectuals.

A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of rec-

We, the Destroyers

onciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly.

We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you will do will meet our needs and demands. We will for ever destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that faction lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the enmity between the Game and God. But those of us who fail to understand that truth will always be found in alliance with your rebellious factions, until disillusionment comes. The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.

$\mathbf{X}$

The Games of Science

ILLUSIONS change the instruments of their expression—but they remain the same illusions. Religions change their gods, but remain the same religions. The atheist gentile has made Science his god, but it has not changed his religion.

"In the scientific field," the atheist gentile tells me, "we will find world unity. In science there is no room for the subconscious, and it is the subconscious which dictates the eternal enmities. Place your relations on a conscious basis, and you may have differences to be adjusted—but not enmities.

"The solution of the Jewish-gentile problem, as of every instinct problem, lies in the pursuit of Truth through science. All other problems are not really problems, but purely technical matters, to be settled by the appli-

The Games of Science

cation of mathematics. And as we learn to make this distinction between instinct-problem and technical task, the greater is the discredit into which the former falls, the clearer is the attention which we bring to the latter. The greatest contribution of science to human advance has been the opening of paths to our free intelligence, so that the unconscious and subconscious mind, with its inheritance of the beast, might fall into desuetude. The truth alone will save us—and in science is truth."

I do not wish to go into an examination of the nature of truth; I do not wish to question the validity of scientific truths. I am ready to admit that scientific truths are truths in the accepted sense of this word. Or, if there are mistakes, if this or that scientific theory is wrong, I will not argue that therefore the scientific method is wrong, or that science itself does not go nearest to the truth. My contention is that science, the examination of facts in literal terms, is quite irrelevant to the spiritual problems of man. Science is accurate, but its accuracy is pointless for

spiritual purposes. The truths which are unveiled by the scientific method, and which it is the special aptness of this method to unveil, do not matter to anybody.

I ignore, of course, the obvious advantages

The Games of Science

which are supposed to accrue from the application of these facts—"the conquest of nature" as it is bombastically called: though even these advantages are vitiated by our inability to exploit them decently. It is not to these advantages that the scientist alludes when he talks of the spiritual value of science. He means pure science: the perception of these truths for their own sake or, more accurately, for the sake of the change which they produce in our attitude toward life, the universe, each other.

But science and revelation of scientific truths have no effect on our attitude toward life, the universe and each other. The mood of the mind of man, the temper of his outlook, his essential nature—this totality of spiritual reaction—has nothing to do with the additional number of facts which science reveals. It would not alter the effective mood of civilized man if it happened that light were revealed as the radiation of corpuscles rather than as waves in the ether, whatever that may mean. There may be eighty-eight elements,

For science is a game, a particular systematization, which might well be any other systematization. Indeed, despite the prodigious number of facts which science has unveiled, no new type of spiritual outlook has been evolved. Is the general consciousness or self-consciousness of the modern material-

The Games of Science

ist different in effect from that of the civilized Stoic of more than two thousand years ago? If you substitute "stress in the ether" for the Pneuma, if you substitute the laws of gravitation, or some electro-magnetic formula for each other or for "tension," will that alter your response to the universe?

Science is so far a game, indeed, that, self-confessedly, it deals with symbols only. These are pure abstractions—the ion, Xⁿ, the theory of relativity. We juggle with figures, with symbols, with arrangements; the things or truths or facts which are supposedly represented are utterly beyond our apprehension. To take the simplest illustration: the sun is ninety-two million miles from the earth, the moon a quarter of a million miles. Neither of these distances means anything to any human being: a million, or ten million, or a thousand billion—we have no spiritual reaction to any of these figures. They are symbols or counters in the game; in themselves intelligible to no one.

Or to take the most significant of new sci-

All the effective "spiritual" value of the

The Games of Science

theory of relativity is: "Things are not what they seem." To this suspicion—which is a basic spiritual reaction of man to the universe—the theory of relativity adds nothing. At most the theory of relativity is an additional but superfluous illustration.

But I shall be told by the scientist: "It is not any individual scientific revelation which matters. What matters is the scientific outlook, as such, the conception of the universe as an ordered and harmonious process: the elimination of the providential and accidental: the final and decisive removal of the thaumaturgical. Science means neither the theory of evolution, nor the discovery of the bacillus, nor the theory of relativity. Science means the cancellation of the inherited instinct errors. In brief, science is the substitution of reason for superstition."

But even at that variation I contend that "scientific" pursuit of truth has given nothing to our knowledge of the ultimate secret of things. What the scientist would call the "scientific outlook"—in accordance with the

I referred to the Stoics and said that Stoicism contained as unthaumaturgical an outlook as any that "modern science" claims to have inspired. But even if this were not true I should not change my opinion, for life at

The Games of Science

first hand taught me this view, and what I know of history I used only as an illustration. Life at first hand has taught me that knowledge of science has nothing to do with the superstitious or unsuperstitious, with the thamaturgical or unthaumaturgical, with idealism or materialism. I have known thoroughly "ignorant" men who see life quite rationally, apparently untroubled by unconscious impulses: men who have "the scientific outlook" without knowing or needing science. I have known thoroughly scientific men who are profoundly thaumaturgical, who are saturated with the spirit of superstition.

It is not the knowledge of facts which changes the man. A man may believe in ghosts and yet not be superstitious—he may merely be mistaken. Another man may believe neither in ghosts nor in an anthropomorphic God and yet be essentially of the superstitious type.

It is not even a question of sophistication. I have known simple and primitive peasants, quite illiterate, who were as clearly rationalist

and scientific in outlook as any professor inspired by a complete knowledge of the revealed mechanics of the world. I have known cultured city dwellers, rotten with sophistication, whose surface cynicism could not hide their subjection to the terror of invisible, unrevealable possibilities.

The Games of Science

these mechanics as was known a thousand years ago have come to the same conclusion regarding the nature of the universe.

There is in science a certain naïveté: the belief that facts differ in their nature; the belief that a fact which it is more difficult to unearth is therefore profounder than a fact which is obvious; the belief that a microbe, because it needs a microscope to reveal it, touches truth more deeply than the flea, which can be seen with the naked eye: yet a fact is not more valuable for being difficult of access, any more than a thought is more profound by having been made obscure.

In the end it comes to this: science, which is the accumulation of literal fact, hopes that the accumulation of facts will reveal the nature of fact. Science seems to believe (if I may use these rather clumsy locutions) that some facts are of a different order from other facts, going nearer to the sources of the nature of things. This is untrue. All facts are on the same plane. Facts are not explanatory, but expository, and what they ex-

pose is of the same nature or material as that which we know without science. To expect facts to reveal the nature of facts is to expect the microscope to reveal the nature of the microscope. You can examine one microscope by means of another: but its nature, or secret, is not accessible to this mode of examination. It is of a different order. The chain of facts is everywhere uniform. When you know one inch of this chain, you have learned as much as you can learn from a mile. If the chain of causes and effects, fact related to fact, is infinitely long, any length of it is equally insignificant. A thousand years is not nearer to eternity than a moment of time.

There is, indeed, a certain vulgarity in the appeal to quantity; it is the democratic vulgarity, the belief that one million mediocre people have more spiritual significance than one mediocrity; that size affects quality; that one thousand new facts mean more than a hundred old facts—there is in all this even the vulgarity of provincialism and cockney

The Games of Science

fashionableness, the belief that the latest is the best.

But vulgarity is most patent in the common assertion, that science is of spiritual value because it reveals the wonders of the universe. So marvelous a structure, they say, rouses our astonishment and our reverence—"the glory of God's house" and "the infinite wisdom of his ways," "science leads to religion because it teaches us both our own insignificance and the amazing cleverness of creation."

I hold this view to be patently vulgar because it is an appeal to headlines: recourse to the stimuli of the advertiser for the benefit of a stupid and jaded public. The thinking man needs no scientist to teach him the wonder of creation: he needs neither a telescope nor a microscope in order to see God; nor do formulæ teach him the nature of God. Life itself, being, the staggering wonder of mere existence, fills completely, crams beyond all possibility of addition, the faculty of astonishment and bewilderment in the sensitive

man. Those to whom existence has become commonplace by familiarity—or who have never been smitten prostrate by the riddle of existence—need a crescendo succession of "shockers" to touch their brutish minds. They didn't know the marvel of the universe until they learned of electricity; but now that electricity is as commonplace as sunlight, they need a theory of relativity; and when that is played out as an advertising stunt for the ingenuity of the Almighty, they will need something else.

Such vulgarity in scientists is not a whit different from the vulgarity of city mobs, which crow with astonishment when first they see an electric light, but afterwards smile pityingly at those who manifest astonishment. The man of the mass mistakes impudent familiarity for understanding. Because he uses the electric car, the telephone and the telegraph every day he imagines that he is wiser than the barbarian who has never known of them. If at all, he is less wise, being too impudent to know his own ignorance. The

The Games of Science

fool that saith in his heart there is no God is the city fool to whom nothing is wonderful any more: and those who do not know wonder do not know God.

Can science even add anything to skepti-

The Games of Science

be derived from the correction of unscientific errors?

The world's wonder, the world's doubt, the terror and illusion of life—these things lie patent to the naked eye. Life at first hand teaches everything. The blind cannot see even through a microscope.

What, then, is science, and wherein lies its lure? Why are men drawn to its service, why do the best and ablest give up their lives to its pursuit?

Science, which can be of no ultimate value in bringing us nearer to the roots of life, to Godhead and its secrecies; science is a Game, a convention. The charm of science is the charm of gentile life. The ultimate does not matter: within the system there is the lyric grace of rhythm and harmony.

The scientific development of your Western world is an inevitable consequence of your nature. It is inevitable that you should worship science, because your very skepticism is the substitution of one set of illusions for another, the adoption of one set of conven-

tions in place of another. You are bound to find "spiritual value" in science because you do not want ultimate spiritual value—only the spiritual value of immediate lyric enjoyment. You who worship gods instead of God must naturally worship science. Science is merely idol-worship: for eikons instruments, for incantations formulæ: the palpable, the material, the enjoyable. Science is not a serious pursuit: your grave professors of chemistry, astronomy, physics, your Nobel prizewinners are but bald or bearded schoolboys playing mental football for their own delight and the delight of spectators.

Science, then, is an art, though its technique is of so peculiar a nature as to divide it from all the other arts: but we most easily recognize it as an art because the true scientist takes an artistic delight in science.

And because your science is not serious, we Jews have never achieved in it any peculiar preëminence. We have our few exceptions: we can master as well as you the system and the scheme, but we lack the spiritual urge,

The Games of Science

the driving joy, the illusion that this is the all in all.

We know nothing of science for science's sake—as we know nothing of art for art's sake. We only know of art for God's sake. If there is art or beauty in our supreme production, the Bible, it is not because we sought either. The type of the artist is alien to us, and just as alien is the delight of the artist. The artist is one who seeks beauty, goes out of his way to find her. But the Hebrew prophet, who wrought so beautifully, did not go out of his way to find God. God pursued him and caught him; hunted him out and tortured him so that he cried out. Until this day we have no artists in your sense: such art as we have created has been the byproduct of a fierce moral purpose.

Art and science—this is your gentile world a lovely and ingenious world. Kaleidoscopic graceful, bewilderingly seductive, a world, at its best, of lovely apparitions, banners, struggles, triumphs, gallantries, noble gestures and conventions. But not our world, not for use

Jews. For such Field-of-the-Cloth-of-Gold delights we lack imagination and inventiveness. We are not touched with this vigor of productive playfulness. Under duress we take part in the ringing mêlée, and give an indifferently good account of ourselves. But we have not the heart for this world of yours.

$\mathbf{XI}$

The Masses

It would be absurd to pretend that the Jewish masses are distinguished from your masses by a conscious appreciation of the difference I have described. Indeed, very few even of the thinking Jews understand the nature of the problem. It is certain that the Westernized masses of Jews are doing their best to minimize, or to ignore, the difference between Jew and gentile: they and their leaders assert, frequently and vehemently, that there is no difference. Jew and gentile are alike except in their opinions regarding certain very simple "matters of faith."

You, too, will assert: "Even if we grant this distinction between gentile and Jewish genius, are we to understand that it permeates the masses, that the strain of seriousness is to be found in your hundreds of thousands of

But the question cannot be put so simply. This world is yours, and you are the ones who set the standards. You are the ones

The Masses

who supply the material for the reactions. And when we Jews want to become part of your world, enjoy its privileges and pleasures, we must accept your standards, speak, as it were, the same language. But just as a word can never mean quite the same thing to two persons, so a common expression does not mean the same emotion.

The fact is that as long as Jews retain their identity there is the same tension between your middle classes and ours as between your genius and ours. Our middle classes, even when thoroughly modernized, retain a certain individuality which is repugnant to you. And though, if forced to a yes-or-no answer to the question above enunciated, I should have to answer: "Yes, there is a difference, difficult to describe, but felt and resented none the less."

Our modernized Jews have done their best to take up your life and become part of it, but despite outward appearances they have failed. There is, first of all, too eager and intense a desire to be gentile. What you do

Since you insist, we will measure values with your standards and register the results. But you know, you feel, that the standards

The Masses

are not ours. We betray ourselves, singly and in mass. We haven't the manner. And we haven't the manners—for manners are but a manner with you.

We Jews are lacking in manners because manners, as you have evolved them, are a spirit, a reflex of your play world. Manners cannot be copied: one must have the aptitude for this charming triviality. A single note of insistence spoils it all. And we Jews insist too much.

And just as Jews are without manners, so they are without vulgarity. I have observed that between the vulgar gentile and the so-called vulgar Jew there is a singular and dreadful difference. The vulgar type of gentile is not repellent: there is in him an animal grossness which shocks and braces, but does not horrify: he carries it off by virtue of a natural brutality and brutishness which provide a mitigating consistency to his character. But the lowest type of Jew is extraordinarily revolting. There is in him a suggestion of deliquescent putrefaction. The

gentile can be naturally, healthily vulgar. The Jew corrupts into vulgarity—he has not the gift for it. What is vulgarity in the gentile is obscenity in the Jew. I am able to watch, either with amusement or indifference, a vulgar performance on the gentile stage. On the Jewish stage I find it intolerably loathsome. In the company of low and brutish gentiles "let loose" I may not feel at home, but I can be an unmoved spectator. But when Jews try to imitate this behavior I feel my innermost decency outraged. Well-mannered gentile society rejects us. So does vulgar gentile society.

An individual genius cannot be taken as the higher type of the people which produced him: but in the mass there is an inevitable correspondence between the product of the geniuses of a people and the people itself. Studied actuarially, the people finds utterance in the geniuses. There is an undoubted consistency in all the products of the greatest Jewish minds. Whether we take these statistics laterally, through an age, or vertically,

The Masses

through history, we will obtain a similar result. Whether we begin with the Bible and take the sum total of our work down to Karl Marx, or confine ourselves to a single country and generation (America to-day, for instance—with Untermeyer, Lewisohn, Frank, Hecht) we will find the same appeal to fundamentals, the same passionate rejection of your sport world and its sport morality, the same ultimate seriousness, the same inability to be merely playful, merely romantic, merely lyrical.

It is unthinkable that the masses of a people can mean one thing, its geniuses another. Were this so the utterances of great minds would lose all relevance, would become pointless and impotent. If we symbolize a people as a single organism, its geniuses may be likened to an organ of self-consciousness; and the self-consciousness of a man is not an independent function, but the instrument of all of him: all his body and being thinks—through the brain.

That which genius illuminates is the life

from which it springs. The amorphous is crystallized in it: the confused diffusion is brought to a focus, so that the pattern is made clear. Our geniuses, in the midst of your world, are an alien and destructive element, more clearly revealed as such because they are articulate. They are our spokesmen; or, better said, ourselves in utterance. They, like us, being us, cannot join your game. You say, "Because they lack imagination." In a sense it is true. We are unimaginative, as old people are unimaginative in the presence of young people. We neither play with emotions nor with things; we lack romanticists as we lack inventors—because we lack inventiveness.

Even among the masses, where diffusion confuses, an apt instance points to the truth. Among our simple people you do not find the delight in constructive trifles which is one of your characteristics. Your simple people like to build things, fix this and that in the house, play the handy man; they take pleasure in putting up shelves, looking to the plumbing,

The Masses

adding and altering. We are devoid of this kind of craftsman's pleasure; we do what is necessary, only because it is necessary. And as a man, engaged happily in such pleasant, childlike pursuits, resents the chilling indifference of an unsympathetic onlooker, so your world resents our uncalled-for analysis of your acts and occupations. This is your life and you enjoy it. Why do we disturb you with questions concerning ultimate values?

We lack inventiveness. You will say that this springs from our lack of vitality. Men are lyrical because life sings in them; they are inventive because life is restless in them and drives their fingers to activity. I will not argue the cause of the difference, but, lacking inventiveness, we also lack sympathy for it. In your delight you call inventiveness the conquest of nature. But the boast is, to us, a foolish and a childlike boast. The problem with which man is faced cannot be answered by scientific inventions. The conquest of nature does not lie in evolving keener

sight, swifter motion, larger strength. This is but magnification, which leaves the element of the problem untouched. Can you conquer, not nature, but the nature of things?

The nature of things cannot be solved be-

The Masses

cause we partake of that nature. We can never get round ourselves: we can only turn round. Your world spins in a joyous illusion of progress; we, untouched by that illusion, destructive of your mood, stand aside, static, serious. We will be satisfied with nothing but the absolute.

That aloofness speaks clearly or obscurely in our masses as well as in our geniuses. Dealing with objects, instead of with laws, they betray the same unenthusiastic objectivity in their attitude to your world.

And as long as they retain their Jewish identity, they will, despite denial and effort to the contrary, remain the same.

XII

Solution and Dissolution

Does the situation which I have described constitute a problem? Or is it merely one of the insoluble difficulties of life which, being insoluble, should be understood as such and suffered tacitly? Death is not a problem, being inevitable. Is this struggle between our two worlds as inevitable? Shall we resign ourselves to the struggle and do what we can to mitigate its worst effects, or shall we continue the search for a complete solution?

The one solution which is generally offered as complete and satisfactory is, quite apart from its feasibility, not a solution at all: only a dissolution. The disappearance of the Jewish people by complete submergence in the surrounding world would not, in reality, solve the problem; any more than one solves a

Solution and Dissolution

chess problem by burning chess-board and figures. But it would seem to do the next best thing: it would apparently destroy the situation which creates the problem. The problem, without having been solved, would at any rate cease to exist.

And by the dissolution of the Jewish people can be meant only one thing—the disappearance of Jewish identity in individuals or masses, the complete obliteration of Jewish self-consciousness, down to the very name and recollection. When it will be impossible for any man to say of himself, "I am a Jew," or "My father, or grandfather was a Jew" this consummation will have been achieved.

There is only one instrument to this end: free and unrestrained intermarriage. This act or fact alone will count. The mere changing of names, the substitution of religious forms, the so-called "liberalization" and "modernization" of Judaism is ineffective: it is a matter of common observation that there is no inverse ratio between the Westernization of the Jew and anti-Semitism. And this very

fact will have to be considered again in its relation to the feasibility of this proposal. If we talk of the submergence of the Jew we must not play with words: words alone cannot submerge the Jew. If there is anything in what I have said you cannot make a gentile of a Jew by arguing with him any more than by lynching him. You can make his children half gentile, his grandchildren only a quarter Jewish—and so on till the balance is perfect.

And this truth seems to have worked in the minds of some Westernizing Jews. Reform Judaism, or modernized Judaism, is the halfway house to baptism: or at least to intermarriage. Its very purpose is such, despite the protestations of Reform Jews. It cannot be anything else, for if the desire is to become "like the world around us," then all barriers must go down, and the real barrier, the conservator of all distinctions, is our practice of endogamy.

One thing is quite certain: a Jew is never baptized for the purpose of becoming a Christian; his purpose is to become a gentile. Yet

Solution and Dissolution

obviously you do not make a gentile of a Jew by baptizing him any more than you would make an Aryan of a negro by painting him with ocher. The sole (and sufficient) value in this direction of baptism is the removal of all conscious prohibition against intermarriage.

Of course even baptism is not a necessary preparation. Jews marry gentiles without this preliminary formality. The case is somewhat different here. This is a natural wastage or attrition: individual passion, not policy, is the cause, though the effect is the same—the disappearance of the Jew. And it certainly connotes, even if indirectly, the renunciation first of Judaism and then of Jewish affiliation. A Jew married to a gentile may remain a Jew ostensibly, as he is in fact. His children seldom, if ever, profess Judaism or associate themselves with the Jewish people.

In this case the evasion is even more dishonest than in the first. A man who professes to belong to the Jewish faith and the Jewish people and who nevertheless gives his chil-

dren to the gentiles is making the best of both worlds. He evades the odious name of renegade which attaches to the baptized Jew (also salving his conscience) and at the same time contributes effectively to the dissolution of the Jewish people. It is well to note that the Westernized or "Reform" Jew may deplore the practice, but will not exclude such a man from the Temple. The orthodox Jew considers such a man lost to Judaism: the view, whatever its ethics, is clearer and healthier.

But I want to consider not the accidental, but the deliberate, or politic. Accidental intermarriage, being accidental and therefore uncontrollable, is not a policy. Baptism is a policy: the weakening of Judaism by the removal of its "nationalist" implications, and by its "modernization," is also a policy—the same policy, in fact, but more circumspect and less self-confessed. This policy has as its objective the solution of the Jewish problem by the dissolution of the Jewish people.

Solution and Dissolution

I will consider later whether this policy can obtain this objective. The question here concerns the objective. Will the "dissolution of Jewish identity" by free and prolonged intermarriage resolve the struggle of the two types? Or will the struggle continue in another form, less obvious but equally uncomfortable? Will the struggle center round isolated individuals, recurrent types? Or will the final product be homogeneous and, in relation to this particular struggle, static?

Both the negative and affirmative answers to this question are unsatisfactory. Suppose, on the one hand, the struggle continues? Suppose the Jewish character persists in strains, breaks out in individual atavisms, long after the Jewish name has perished? The problem will be the same: your world will be confronted with recurrent instances of alien and destructive types, all the more dangerous because they are not isolated in a recognized, repudiated group. Their power of destruction will be the greater because they will

work from within. The "Jewish" problem will have disappeared, but the gentile problem would remain as bitter as ever.

Let us examine the negative answer. Suppose there are no "reversions to type." Suppose the Jew is so completely absorbed as to be lost beyond possibility of detection in the surrounding world. Such a consummation, if possible, calls for one inevitable condition; that is, the proportionate Judaization of your world. It is unthinkable that so vivid an element as the Jewish people should be absorbed into your world without producing an appreciable alteration in its constitution. A world that has absorbed the Jews will to that extent be a Jewish world.

And this is precisely the condition which you refuse to admit. You want no tampering with your identity; you want to remain what you are. You have no intention of meeting us at the point of balance. You do not want a world tinged with Jewish blood. You want us to be absorbed in you without leaving a trace. And with the best intentions

Solution and Dissolution

in the world we cannot oblige. We can, in that sense, no more destroy ourselves than we can destroy a single particle of matter.

But I shall show in the following pages that all this talk of dissolution is academic. Even if you should tolerate in prospect both of these alternatives, there are insuperable obstacles which make it highly improbable that you will ever be faced with either.

XIII

The Mechanism of Dissolution

This would be an ideal condition, presumably—the merging together of Jew and gentile, for the production of a world neither wholly gentile nor yet dual with Jew and gentile—but composed of both in certain proportions fixed by our numbers and the laws of heredity. That is, at least, the best solution within view, and if we are to be reasonable—on paper at least—it would be the only one to be considered.

But we must remember that this ideal cannot be realized in one generation or in two, or in five. If we were to assume (the assumption is an absurd one) that within this generation the Jewish world could be won over to this point of view, it would still need four or five generations (probably more) to obliterate our identity. At that it would call

The Mechanism of Dissolution

But I will deal with ideal conditions. I will deal with a single large group of Jews determined to abandon their identity and to lose themselves and their children in the surrounding gentile world. We know well that their children will not yet be assimilated in the full

sense of the word: children of mixed Jewishgentile percentage still carry the Jewish stigma. The child of a half-Jew and complete gentile is in better plight: and a Jewish great-grandfather is hardly any handicap at all. The third generation, as the saying is, produces the gentleman.

It needs at least these three generations of intermediary stage—probably more. It would be absurd to expect absorption in a single generation: it never happens. There is needed a transition period and it is this transition period which you gentiles will not tolerate. Even if you believe (as most of you do) that the best thing that could happen to the Jew would be his complete absorption by inter-marriage, you oppose, tacitly, but not the less obstinately, his steps in that direction. You want us to inter-marry—but you don't want to inter-marry. You want us to produce gentile offspring without having taken your sons and daughters as mates.

In other words, you want an end without permitting the means. The prospect of a

The Mechanism of Dissolution

Jew-less world is charming indeed, but who will enjoy the actuality? Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And who will have to pay the price of the first embarrassing contact, the first difficult intimacy, Jewish sonsand daughters-in-law, Jewish fathers and mothers-in-law? You yourselves. The prospect is too distant, too hypothetical, to exert any influence. It is much too much like the promise of heaven and the threat of hell.

I have alluded more than once to the fact that Westernization of the Jew is nowhere a guarantee against anti-Semitism. Indeed, conscious modern anti-Semitism, the formulated fear of the Jew as the racial bearer of alien and dangerous ideas, is the result of Westernization. Far from encouraging or tolerating our inter-marriage with you, you do not even relish the results of our Westernization or gentilization. It is an amazing and terrifying paradox: you would like us to be absorbed, but you shrink from the process. The inoculation is painful, even revolting. You are uneasy and unhappy when we swarm

into your universities, your professions: the nearer we come to you, the more you dislike us. You dislike us because we are different, and when we make efforts to overcome the difference we are forced into a proximity which rouses your inmost resentment. The Ku Klux Klan, the Awakening Magyars, the Consul, no longer warn you against the religious and secluded Jew, the Ghetto and the Talmud. They warn you against the baptizing Jew, against the assimilating Jew, against the inter-marrying Jew. They warn you, indeed, against that part of the Jewish people which is apparently in the process of realization of that ultimate ideal—the disappearance of the Jewish people.

Another aspect of the mechanics of dissolution makes clear a difficulty somewhat more subtle but even more effective. The death of a people or of a type can be natural only. Race suicide as an ideal is a contradiction, for an ideal is a manifestation of life. Deliberate! 7 to set before ourselves the objective of si f-elimination would be as absurd

The Mechanism of Dissolution

as a man insisting on watching himself fall asleep. It can be done tacitly only. It can happen, but it cannot be propagated. We might drift out of consciousness, but every effort to accelerate the pace would retard the process. To appeal to Jews to cease to be Jews because they are Jews is to accentuate their Jewishness.

Of course the effort has been made, but with those grotesque and unnatural results which are in part responsible for your aversion to the process. There is nothing more ludicrous and pitiful than the Jew who has made his gentilization a deliberate ideal. His anxious self-repression, his self-disclaimers, his demand to be considered a gentile, his uneasy sense of inferiority, his impotent resentment of all that reminds him of his origin, make him an object of scorn alike to you and to us. There are "assimilated" Jews who hate with an ignoble and consuming hatred the "unassimilated" part of the Jewish people; Jews, who, rousing your secret contempt as renegades and your resentment as intrud-

When we examine the mechanism of disso-

The Mechanism of Dissolution

lution in detail and come down to an examination of its working on the individual, we understand better the revolting character of at least its first effects. It is one thing to say that a people in the first stages of dissolution is as horrible a spectacle as a body in the first stages of putrefaction: but this sounds somewhat academic—perhaps even metaphysical. Even so there is little conveyed in the statement that a country is starving: we realize the import of the statement only when we speak of hungry men and women. When we examine the personal reactions of the deliberately assimilating Jew we see more clearly why he is not a pleasant spectacle either to Jew or to gentile.

A Jew who has made the repression of his Jewishness an ideal must be prepared to suffer and to seem to ignore every slight, every rebuff which he encounters. He must not permit an open sneer to sting him into Jewish self-consciousness: such a "weakness" would undo his purpose. He must seem to be unaware of the occasional coolness which

follows the accidental revelation of his origin. He must bear silently with those countless unspoken snubs, half-snubs, unuttered queries, faint Ah-yes astonishments, which will be his lot until the day of his death. He must not feel himself implicated in a general slander of the Jews: he may only protest in a generous, disinterested sort of way, as a fair-minded "gentile." An angry retort or repudiation might be the ruin of him—he would suddenly realize the intolerable nature of his position. . . . It is not an easy thing to kill one's self by degrees.

Such a Jew has the whole way to go. He is not entering a world already made easier for him by an admixture of Jewish blood. He does not move forward to a partly prepared position. All is alien around him. His claims have no precedent. There is something pitifully impotent in his demand: "But I am an Englishman, like you; an American, like you. I have no affiliations outside of this country except those general human affiliations which I share with you. I feel for my

The Mechanism of Dissolution

But his plea falls on skeptical ears. There is that in the very name of Jew which invali-

dates his protestations. And the more vehemently he urges his case, the more suspicious and uneasy you become. For he is urging as an accomplished fact that which is nothing but a hopeless personal aspiration. Your demand is not connected with behavior or with views: neither of these makes the American or the Englishman. It is a question of identity. You want us to be Anglo-Saxons, or Teutons, if you are to call us Englishmen or Germans. And we cannot be that—at best our great-grandchildren can be as nearly that as matters. But we cannot remarry our great-grandparents.

We cannot but exasperate you by such importunate assumptions. That strangers, aliens to your blood, should come to dwell in your midst, is one thing. That they should claim, after a sojourn of a generation or two, complete identity with you, is as absurd as it is insolent. And even if they should dwell in your midst a thousand years, yet should keep apart, neither giving nor taking in marriage, they are not identical with you. In those

The Mechanism of Dissolution

words, "our ancestry," "our forefathers," there are implied the dearest and tenderest of human associations. The love of his forbears and of his posterity is all that man has of earthly immortality; the pride and affection which are the natural counterparts of these concepts are as narrow and as broad, as potent for good and evil, as sexual love, as life itself. Shall we come to you and share your ancestry? Shall we intrude on these exalted recollections, with a "we too"?

You cannot help resenting these claims. They savor at once of ingratiating humility and arrogant blasphemy. Try as you will you cannot make the concession. You are trapped by a vital paradox.

You may ask: What difference is there between a Jew claiming to be an American and an Italian claiming to be one? Is it more humiliating for one than for the other? Is the Italian of our ancestry more than you?

There is some similarity in the plight of all foreigners: and we Jews suffer all that foreigners suffer. But our case is unique because

we are unique. If there is anything in what I have said, the cleft between you, Americans and Italians, Frenchmen and Germans, is but a wide jump as compared with the chasm between us and any one of you. What is true of the gentile foreigner in this regard is ten times true of us.

For our very record testifies against us. The older the past from which we attempt to flee, the closer it pursues us. To you, who share with us the human attribute of pride of ancestry, it seems incredible that, having retained our identity for a hundred generations, we should abandon it in one. It is suspicious—and odious. For you suspect (rightly) that in this tenacity of identity, which has outlived so many nations and civilizations, there is implied a kernel of individuality which is as singular in its nature as in its history.

Among yourselves assimilation is problem enough. The birth and death of nations is attended by wars, pains, humiliations. But what you have done a dozen times over in The Mechanism of Dissolution the last four thousand years we have not done once.

We cannot assimilate: it is so humiliating to us that we become contemptible in submitting to the process: it is so exasperating to you that, even if we were willing to submit, it would avail us nothing.

XIV

Is There Any Hope?

Is There Any Hope?

in thrall. The race is still to the swift and the battle to the strong, and the goal and the prize are what they were ten years ago. What I say, then, is not prompted by the hope that words of mine—or of any one else—can give a new complexion to the general struggle between Jew and gentile: but only by the desire to clarify, for the encouragement of a few, the nature of this struggle, convincing them, perhaps, that behind the sordid stupidity which seems to govern our Jew-gentile relationship there may be found a compensating grain of eternal principle. And my concluding words are addressed less to practical expectations than to the desire for completeness.

What are we Jews prepared to give you which, in my opinion, you should consider sufficient? Obedience to the laws of the State and readiness to defend it (even if against our inmost belief) in time of danger. This constitutes a full payment for the privilege of citizenship and the protection of the laws.

But this offer on the part of the Jew be-

Is There Any Hope?

comes inadequate when the State begins to assume functions which seem to me totally beyond its capacity. What was intended only for the regulation of the external actions of a given group is becoming a growing tyranny against the inmost values of man, an attempted violation of our most inaccessible privileges. And this despite the professions of your statesmen and political thinkers.

It is acknowledged, in principle, that a man's religion is beyond the reach of law, and his God need neither pay taxes nor take out citizenship papers. But the acknowledgment of this principle is gradually becoming meaningless (perhaps it never had any meaning) in the light of the growing spiritual tyranny of the State. Perhaps nothing that you have ever feared from the economic tyranny of Socialism approaches the oppressive spiritual tyranny of your great democracies. These seek to control not only the acts, but the emotions of the individual. They would compel us to love and hate, to admire and despise, as part of our civic duty and, not content with

that part of us which alone affects the wellbeing of government, would also conquer and control that part of us which belongs to no one but to each man and God.

Is There Any Hope?

practise private initiative in the spiritual-Socialistic State! His punishment is not only spiritual, but physical too. And we Jews, the most obstinate and most enduring sinners in this respect, are the best measure of the vindictive fury with which this tyranny is armed.

tably demand the subordination of all human functions to that end.

Is There Any Hope?

For very shame—if you were capable of it—you should give the Jew free immigration everywhere. The irony of it is, of course, that it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany. And the liberal countries which could make room for the hunted Jew, coöperate, despite a few gallant and unsustained gestures, with the most illiberal in the persecution of their common victim. He that refuses asylum to a victim fleeing from a murderer is, before God, a free and willing accomplice in the crime.

And to me it is infinitely strange that, even from your point of view, the sporting point of view, you should be able to reconcile your morality with your acts. If there is anything at all in your professions, you should be filled with admiration and astonishment at the incredible pluckiness of a small people which, in the face of infinite discouragement, has clung with such tenacity to its identity and cult. Without understanding us at all, you

might have paid the homage of warriors to the courage of an unconquerable enemy.

Is There Any Hope?

was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit. The ideal which for a time constituted American nationality disappears now, and in its place emerges again, with atavistic certainty, the race.

It is true that even while the ideal flour-ished, triumphant over race, the seeds of our enmity lay securely imbedded in our natures. But the passing generosity kept the seeds in slumber. It is not the first time that gentile nations, forgetting themselves for a brief period, have offered us friendship and even affection. But the strange and unnatural exaltation passed, and bitter sobriety succeeded. To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly

insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an "inferior" people. Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil instincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by the popular and "scientific" potions, committed the act.

How, then, shall I delude myself into the belief that the considerations covered in this chapter will produce any effect? Have we Jews not known this evil long enough? Should we not have known better, by this time, than to repose hope in any of the nations? Perhaps we were foolish in our overconfidence, but our credulousness does us less dishonor than your cruelty does you. And if it savors again of foolish simplicity to make this plea to you, I am willing to take the risk.

A LAST WORD