BRITISH CITIZENSHIP
BRITISH patriotism is not the mediaeval demand that the citizens of any one country all think alike, that they be of the same blood, or that they even speak the same language. Britain’s mild sovereignty respects the personality of the ethnic groups found within the borders of its world-wide dominion; nay, it fosters the linguistic heritage, the national individuality even, of Irishman and Welshman, of French Canadian and Afrikander Boer, and encourages them all to develop along their own lines. Any one, therefore, who deems that patriotism exacts from him the purposeless sacrifice of his religious tradition and historic memory—that man is an alien in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon genius, and is unworthy of his British citizenship.
J. H. HERTZ, 1915.
THE RUSSIAN JEW[31]
SCIENTISTS tell us that coal is nothing but concentrated sunlight. Primeval forests that for years out of number had been drinking in the rays of the sun, having been buried beneath the ground and excluded from the reviving touch of light and air, were gradually turned into coal—black, rugged, shapeless, yet retaining all its pristine energy, which, when released, provides us with light and heat. The story of the Russian Jew is the story of the coal. Under a surface marred by oppression and persecution he has accumulated immense stores of energy, in which we may find an unlimited supply of light and heat for our minds and our hearts. All we need is to discover the process, long known in the case of coal, of transforming latent strength into living power.
I. FRIEDLANDER, 1915.
YIDDISH[32]
I HAVE never been able to understand how it is that a language spoken by perhaps more than half of the Jewish race should be regarded with such horror, as though it were a crime. Six million speakers are sufficient to give historic dignity to any language! One great writer alone is enough to make it holy and immortal. Take Norwegian. It is the language of only two million people. But it has become immortal through the great literary achievements of Ibsen. And even though Yiddish cannot boast of so great a writer as Ibsen, it has reason to be proud of numerous smaller men—poets, romancers, satirists, dramatists.
The main point is that Yiddish incorporates the essence of a life which is distinctive and unlike any other. There is nothing of holiness in any of the outer expressions of life. The one and only thing holy is the human soul, which is the source and fount of all human effort.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1906.
THERE is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on Yiddish. Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish.
LEO WIENER, 1899.