The American Jewish world. [volume] (Minneapolis ;) 1915-current, 1922-05-26
THE AMERICAN JEWISH WORLD


place. 1t has had a better chance
than any corresponding case can
show, ample time in which to work,
wide dispersion, constant intermar-
riage, long periods of tolerant friend
ship for the Jew and even at times
his ascendancy. If ever there were
conditions under which one might
imagine that the larger body would
absorb the smaller, they were those
of Christendom acting intimately for
centuries in relation with Jewry. Ma
ton after nation has absorbed larger,
intensely hostile minorities: the Irish,
their successive invaders; the British,
the pirates of the fifth and eighth
centuries and the French of three CEN
turtles more; the northern Gauls, their
auxiliaries; the Italians, the Lom-
bards; the Greeks, the Slav; the Da-
clan has absorbed even the Mongol;
but the Jew has remained intact"
"However we explain this" he pro-
ceeds- -mystically or in whatever
other fashion-we cannot deny it's
truth. 1t is true of the Jews and Of
the Jews alone, that they alone have
maintained, whether through the
special action of Providence or
through some general biological or
social law of which we are ignorant,
an unfailing entity and an equally I'M
failing differentiation between them
selves and the society through which
they ceaselessly move. 1t is not true
that conditions in the past differed
from present conditions sufficiently to
account for so strange story. There
have been generations and even CEN
turtles mot co-incident indeed through
out the world, but applying now to
one country, now to another) where
every opportunity for absorption ex-
listed: yet that absorption has never
taken place. There was every chance
in Spain at one moment, in Poland
in another, but there was the best
chance of all in the short but bril-
liant period of Liberal policy which
has dominated Western Europe dur
ing the last three generations. That
policy has had the fullest play; it
has left the Jews not only unab-
sorbed, but more differentiated than
ever, and the political problem they
present more insistent by far than it
was a century ago. The thing might
have come where there was a chaos
of peoples as in pagan Alexandria in
the four centuries from 200 B. G. to
200 A. D. or in modern New York.
It might have come where there was
Il particularly friendly attitude, as in
medieval Poland or modern England.
1t might even have come, paradox
cally, through the very persecution
and strain of times and places where
the Jews suffered the most hostile
treatment; for their absorption might
have been achieved under pressure
though it had failed to be achieved
under attraction. AS a fact it has
never come. The continuous absorp-
ton Of outlying fractions, process
continually going on wherever the
Jewish nation is present, has not af-
fected the mass of the problem at all.
The body as whole has remained
separate, differentiated with strong
identity of it's own under all condi
lions and in all places, and the a
priori reasoning by which men come
to think this solution reasonable is
nullifed by an experience apparent
throughout history. That experience
is wholly against any such solution.
1t cannot be-"
Fvoo+l1, TT cannot ha Is not that