The man who can not make a good argument for the Ghetto lacks imagination.
Gibbon, who was a deist or monotheist and really liked the Jews, intimates that it was lucky for the Christians that Constantine didn't embrace Judaism instead of Christianity, for, if he had, the Jews would have treated the Christians exactly as the Christians have since treated the Jews. Of course, nobody claims that Christianity is the religion of Christ—it is the religious rule of pagan Rome, with the Jewish Christ as a convenient label. Just why Christians should worship a Jew, and pray to a Jewess, and yet despise Jews, is a matter so subtle that it has never been explained. Gibbon in this connection says at least one irrefutable thing, and that is, that the Jewish people are men and women. Christians are men and women, also. All are human beings, and it is quite likely that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth to them all.
I am not sure that Gibbon is right when he says that the Christians were lucky in that Constantine did not turn Jew. To be persecuted is not wholly a calamity, but to persecute is to do that for which Nature affords no compensation. The persecutor dies, but the persecuted lives on forever.
The struggle for existence which the Jew has had to make is the thing that has differentiated him and made him strong. Those first Christians—Primitive Christians—who lived from the time of Paul to that of Constantine, were a simple, direct, sincere and honest people—opinionated no doubt, and obstinately dogmatic, but with virtues that can never be omitted nor waived. They were economical, industrious and filled with the spirit of brotherhood, and they possessed a fine pride concerning their humility, as most ascetics do. Humility is a form of energy. It is simply going after the thing by another route, and deceiving yourself as to the motive.
The Primitive Christians had every characteristic that distinguished the Jew of the Middle Ages—those characteristics which invite persecution and wax strong under it.
Poverty and persecution seem necessary factors in fixing upon a people a distinctive and peculiar religion. Persecution and poverty have no power to stamp out a religion—all they do is to stain it deeper into the hearts of its votaries. Centuries of starvation and repression deepened the religious impulses of the Irish, and it has ever been the same with the Jews.
If the Jew is criticized in America, it is on account of that buttinski bumptiousness upon which he has no monopoly, but which goes with the newly-made rich of any nationality who have little to recommend them beyond the walletoski.
There are no poor Jews natives of America, and it is worth while noting that our richest citizens are not Jews, either. American-born Jews have enough. The poverty-stricken Jews in this country come from Russia, Bulgaria and Roumania; and their children will have money to loan, if not to incinerate, because they possess the virtues that beckon all good things in their direction.
America is the true Judaic Zion. Here there are nearly two million Jews, and their religion is fast taking the form of a healthful Roycroftism.
The downfall of primitive Christianity dates from the day Constantine embraced it, and thereby made it popular. Prosperity is a form of disintegration—a ripening of the fruit. Things succeed only that they may wither. The business of every great religion is to die, and thus fertilize others. The Jew has survived every foe save success. Civilization is now adopting him, and Liberal Judaism is fast becoming a Universal Religion, taught in fact, if not in name, by priests, preachers and muftis of all denominations. The end of the Jew is near—he has ceased to be peculiar.