For instance, the Jews mixed much more readily, on a much more equal footing and with far less friction among the Mohammedans at particular periods during the Islamic occupation of Spain than they do even in England to-day. Yet they were not absorbed there, any more than they were absorbed in Poland. They were not absorbed into that older, tolerant, very denationalized pagan Roman world where they so often had full civic rights and where they even manipulated, as they manipulate to-day, the finances of the community.
As for the decay of exclusiveness on their part, I see no sign of it. For this exclusiveness proceeds not so much from a particular observance which may relax at one period and tighten up at another, as from an invariable national tradition which fluctuates in intensity but never sinks so low as to jeopardize the continuance of the people.
If we turn from argument to observation, the falsity of the theory stares us in the face. We have but to take one point, where the metaphor of the "melting-pot" most applies (and to which it was originally applied), the city of New York. What has been the effect of this great influx of Jews into New York, this turning of New York into a city a third Jewish under our eyes and in so short a space of time? As we all know, the effect has been the uprising, in that once indifferent atmosphere, of such a feeling against the Jews as would appal us did we see it in the Old World. It is red hot. It is an intense reaction expressing itself with greater and greater violence every day; and the spirit of that reaction cannot be better expressed than in a phrase which we owe, I think, to Mr. Ford and his famous propaganda against the Jews, through his paper the "Dearborn Independent." "It is all very well to talk of the melting-pot," says he, "but so far from the Jews melting in that pot, it looks as though they wanted to melt the pot itself."
There you have, in New York, if anywhere, an opportunity for the theory of absorption to prove itself. You have present in the field a score of different races, including great masses of a race so utterly different from ours as the negro. You have a certain small proportion of Chinamen and you have of European stocks an indefinite variety—most of them in large numbers. You have not only in local establishments or even only in civic theory, but in actual practice—in enthusiastic practice—a complete equality and a positive pride in the reception of no matter what elements of immigration, in the certitude that all can rapidly be moulded into the American form. Most of these elements were absorbed, and absorbed rapidly; where they were not absorbed there was at least peace between them. Then arrives the Jew and a totally new situation at once appears. A situation of challenge, of provocation, of admitted exclusion, of violent debate and even of clamour: but no sign of absorption. In presence of all the elements that should make for absorption, difference and hatred between Jew and non-Jew is growing in New York with the vitality of a tropical plant.
There is yet another theory which, if it were not widely held and if it had not been advanced by so many Jews themselves, I should leave aside as something comic, something unfit for serious discussion. But it has been advanced and it must be met. It is no less than the theory that there are no such people as the Jews, that the whole thing is illusion.
This monstrous affirmation is based, I need hardly say, upon what is called a "scientific" examination of the affair: for that word "scientific" has come to be associated with every kind of unreason. Men, especially Jewish men, have been found to affirm most solemnly that they had measured skulls, taken sections of hair, catalogued the colours of eyes, established facial angles, analysed blood, and applied I know not how many other tricks, with the result that no Jewish type could be discovered! People who can reason thus do not seem to appreciate the fundamental quarrel between nominalism and realism, or to have heard of the old philosophic joke on the definition of "a thing."
We know a horse to be a horse, an apple to be an apple, a Chinaman to be a Chinaman, or a Jew to be a Jew by some process on which philosophers can debate, but upon the virtue of which no sane man doubts and upon the right action of which we base all our lives. The chemist may tell me that the chemical analysis of a lump of coal gives the same result as the chemical analysis of a diamond, to which any man capable of using his reason at all will reply that upon a very large number of other lines of analysis, colour, touch, combustibility, hardness and softness, economic value, prevalence (and so on indefinitely), the two are not the same. No analysis is complete, and if we had made no conscious analysis at all, we could still perceive at once that a lump of coal is not a diamond.
It is just the same with these pseudo-scientific attempts to disprove obvious truth. They pullulate and they are all equally ridiculous because they deduce from insufficient data. The existence and differentiation of the Jewish people as a race ethnically and as a nation politically is as much a fact as the existence of coal or diamonds. They are a nation politically because they act as a nation, because their individual members feel and exercise a corporate function. We know them to be a separate race because we can see that they are. When you meet a Jew, whether you are his enemy or his friend, you meet a Jew. He has a certain expression, a certain manner, certain physical characteristics which you may not be able to analyse at the moment you see him, but which give you the impression and the certitude that you are dealing with a particular thing, to wit, the Jewish race. It is true, of course, that the type, like all general types, fades off at the edges, and there will always be cases where you may be in doubt of whether you are dealing with a Jew or with a non-Jew, but there is a marked central type round which the Jewish racial type is built up. That is as certain as that there is a Mongolian type, or a negroid type, and so forth.
I do not take the objection very seriously. I only note it because it has been made, and may crop up in the course of any discussion on this grave political issue.