In New York the line is drawn against the Jews in hotels, resorts, clubs, and private schools, and constantly this line hardens and extends. They cry "Bigotry" but bigotry has little or nothing to do with it. What is disliked in the Jews is not their religion but certain ways and manners. Moreover, the Gentile resents being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader. The line is not yet rigid, for the genial editor of Vorwaerts, Mr. Abram Cahan, tells me that he and his literary brethren from the Pale have never encountered Anti-Semitism in the Americans they meet. Not the socialist Jews but the vulgar upstart parvenus are made to feel the discrimination.
This cruel prejudice—for all lump condemnations are cruel—is no importation, no hang-over from the past. It appears to spring out of contemporary experience and is invading circle after circle of broad-minded. People who give their lives to befriending immigrants shake their heads over the Galician Hebrews. It is astonishing how much of the sympathy that twenty years ago went out to the fugitives from Russian massacres has turned sour. Through fear of retaliation little criticism gets into print; in the open the Philo-semites have it all their way. The situation is: Honey above, gall beneath. If the Czar, by keeping up the pressure which has already rid him of two million undesired subjects, should succeed in driving the bulk of his six million Jews to the United States, we shall see the rise of a Jewish question here, perhaps riots and anti-Jewish legislation. No doubt thirty or forty thousand Hebrews from eastern Europe might be absorbed by this country each year without any marked growth of race prejudice; but when they come in two or three or even four times as fast, the lump outgrows the leaven, and there will be trouble.
America is probably the strongest solvent Jewish separatism has ever encountered. It is not only that here the Jew finds himself a free man and a citizen. That has occurred before, without causing the Jew to merge into the general population. It is that here more than anywhere else in the world the future is expected to be in all respects better than the past. No civilized people ever so belittled the past in the face of the future as we do. This is why tradition withers and dies in our air; and the dogma that the Jews are a "peculiar people" and must shun intermarriage with the Gentiles is only a tradition. The Jewish dietary laws are rapidly going. In New York only one-fourth of the two hundred thousand Jewish workmen keep their Sabbath and only one-fifth of the Jews belong to the synagogue. The neglect of the synagogue is as marked as the falling away of non-Jews from the church. Mixed marriages, although by no means numerous in the centers, are on the increase, and in 1909 the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis resolved that such marriages "are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should therefore be discouraged by the American Rabbinate." Certainly every mixed marriage is, as one rabbi puts it, "a nail in the coffin of Judaism," and free mixing would in time end the Jews as a distinct ethnic strain.
The "hard shell" leaders are urging the Jews in America to cherish their distinctive traditions and to refrain from mingling their blood with Gentiles. But the liberal and radical leaders insist that in this new, ultra-modern environment nothing is gained by holding the Jews within the wall of Orthodox Judaism. As a prominent Hebrew labor leader said to me: "By blending with the American the Jew will gain in physique, and this with its attendant participation in normal labor, sports, athletics, outdoor life, and the like, will lessen the hyper-sensibility and the sensuality of the Jew and make him less vain, unscrupulous and pleasure-loving."
It is too soon yet to foretell whether or not this vast and growing body of Jews from eastern Europe is to melt and disappear in the American population just as numbers of Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French Jews in our early days became blent with the rest of the people. In any case the immigrant Jews are being assimilated outwardly. The long coat, side curls, beard and fringes, the "Wandering Jew" figure, the furtive manner, the stoop, the hunted look, and the martyr air disappear as if by magic after a brief taste of American life. It would seem as if the experience of Russia and America in assimilating the Jews is happily illustrated by the old story of the rivalry of the wind and the sun in trying to strip the traveler of his cloak.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LESSER IMMIGRANT GROUPS
The immigration question is a live wire and whoever handles it may look for tingling surprises. One is a bit startled on realizing that through the "Bravas" from the Cape Verde Islands we are getting a new dash of black from the Senegambian tar-brush. How few are aware that a third of Sicily, from which so many immigrants come, is chiefly Saracen in stock, so that the heredity of the Bedouin tribes of Mohamet's time is to be blent with the heredity of our pioneering breed! Who reflects that, with Chinese and Japanese, Finns and Magyars, Bulgars and Turks, about a half a million more or less Mongolian in blood have cast in their lot with us and will leave their race stamp upon the American people of the future?