ONE is at first reluctant to single out the Jew from his fellows at college. He seems in no manner different from them. He studies with them, eats with them, plays ball with them. He writes editorials for the college paper; he competes in the oratorical contests. One, for example, is a member of the school orchestra; another, perhaps the son or the grandson of an immigrant from Germany, leads the cheers at the track meet; another, himself an immigrant from Russia, plays on the chess team and is one of the brilliant scholars in his class. This last does, at present, have something of the stranger about him, but before long, no doubt, his speech will have become more smooth, his trousers will have begun to show a crease; he will have become quite an interesting and regular figure at the various reform and ethical club meetings at the university, and he will begin to be seen quite frequently in the company of his gentile classmates—even in the company of his German-Jewish cousin. Wonderful, indeed, the country that can so readily attire its adopted children, and, as the saying goes, make them feel at home; wonderful, perhaps, the race that, through centuries of degradation, has kept alive, though often latent indeed, the potentialities of equal partnership with the most enlightened peoples of a twentieth century civilization.
What though it has no long past, America is the great land of the future. Here let the Jew lay aside his burden of the time that has gone and build anew into the time to come. Shall we regret, then, that the Jewish student has taken on the polite address, the proud carriage, the heartiness and the chuckle of his Yankee comrade? Should he now keep the gabardine of his forefathers, yes, and the credulities and ceremonies of a circumscribed and persecuted people? Why not absorb that wholesome ruddiness, denied him so long, that breathes of open American prairies, fair play, and the Declaration of Independence?
"The Goal of Twenty Centuries of Wandering"
"FOXES have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head." Of whom did the great prophet speak more fittingly than of the children of his own race? Homeless for two thousand years, persecuted, ostracized, their backs have become bent and in the eyes of many they have become a nation of religious fanatics and usurers, wily, unkempt. The Jewish youth of to-day cannot look back upon his history of exile and say, as did Æneas of old after seven long years of wandering: "It will be pleasant to remember"—"forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit"; his trials have been but too real and he has not recovered sufficiently to have any desire to recall them. Blame him not then, if, when others from obscure and semi-civilized quarters of the globe hail with pride their ancestry, he alone, with the proudest traditions in history, will sometimes seek to hide his descent. He still feels, moreover, some of the old "wiliness" and "unkemptness" within himself; he thinks they are of the Jews and of none others—and he wants to get rid of them. He still feels some of the old usury in his bones, the clannishness, the distrust of the world, which the squalid ghetto walls the Middle Ages had built around his fathers have bequeathed to him, and he wants to get rid of those. Shall we look askance at him then, if when the American University welcomes him to her hearth—Ithaca, for example, with her kindly professors and laughing girl students, her ball games, her neat cottages and rolling hills that drink Cayuga's stream beside—in the excess of eagerness he should sometimes break with, yes, even forget his past, and dream new things? (Hills, cottages, home and country; superfluous concepts were these to other men, elementary satisfactions which they are born into and take for granted as their inevitable heritage.) Eagerly, therefore, greedily, perhaps, he sees new things; the goal of twenty centuries of wandering stands revealed before him. The Irish have found a home in America, the Germans, the Italians, the Poles, and why not the neediest of all, the Jews? The American University typifies the ideals of the great democracy where "race, creed and previous conditions" are forgotten. Here all men forget their prejudices. All men become brothers.
But Not Yet Are All Men Brothers
BUT hold, have we not been expressing a wish rather than a fact? We look into our own hearts, and strife and jealousy and racial antagonism are still there. Can we expect that man who has but lately begun to think of brotherhood can already feel it in his blood; that the age-long superstition against the Jew can be obliterated with a new geographical boundary—though that boundary be indeed serene as the all-washing, all-embracing Atlantic? Oh, that "reality does not correspond to our conceptions," exclaims Wilhelm Meister.
For centuries the Jews had a respected and comfortable home in Spain, but then came the fearful Inquisition, and the ninth day of Ab 1492 saw 300,000 of them exiled out of the country they had helped grow to culture and wealth. There was the Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution, but then came the Dreyfus affair a century later. There was science and enlightenment in United Germany, but never was anti-Semitism more pronounced, more scientific than there between 1875 and '80. In 1881 the May Laws were passed in Russia. In 1882 there was a ritual murder trial in Hungary. Our statutes and sciences, after all, are but ways and means, improved ways and means, to what?—often to unimproved ends, it seems. Our learning and knowledge are what?—but channels to educate, to lead out (e-duco) the noble qualities in man? yes; perhaps also his jealousies and hatreds. And thus there comes a time of doubt. The courtesies and learning of this university life, reflects the Jewish student, perhaps but cover up these jealousies and hatreds, make them more polite, and all the more painful therefore. However much he will not, he sees cliques and denominational clubs all about him: Catholic clubs, Lutheran clubs, Jewish clubs; in the lecture room the gentiles form their groups and the Jews form theirs; in the election of class officers the Jews have been slighted; at the class dinner a Jew was insulted; one fellow was refused accommodations at a student rooming-house because he was a Jew; and the sensitive young man begins to feel as though there were but two divisions of people at the University after all: Jews and everybody else.
The Perennial Burden of the Jew
BUT it is unfair and ungrateful to speak thus of the American University. All superstition and prejudice may not have disappeared here; enough it is that they tend to disappear so rapidly. But what of the large country outside the university? What of the growing Jewries in our cities? What of the Jew in the little hamlet carrying his pack of tinware from door to door; he is so eager to earn an honest dollar for a wife, a daughter, perhaps for a son at college; so eager to find him a home like that of the earlier non-Jewish immigrants who buy his wares; yet why must he overstrain his virtues before them, break through the ice, as the saying goes, and clear himself—why? for being a Jew. Evidently, others are taken as good until they prove themselves bad; the Jew is bad until he proves himself good. Should some other Jewish trader come to the same locality and commit some wrong, overcharge a shilling on the price of a kettle, for example, the first Jew must be made to feel ashamed of it, for it was not the other man who did the wrong, but the "Jew in him." Evidently, again, the Jewish problem is not of the individual, but of the race. Must the Wandering Jew bear a perennial burden?
But even if this problem were solved (it is possible for all the Jews in America to be in time regarded on equal terms with their neighbors or even to be assimilated altogether with them), what of the Jews in Russia, in Roumania, in Galicia? How long must we wait for them to assimilate or to become free and equal sons of a fatherland? Surely we shall not suggest that it is well for them to continue forever an alien people in those lands. And even if this problem too were solved, if the Jews of Russia, Roumania, and Galicia were to become free and equal sons of a fatherland, if the Jews all over the world were to be taken in as brothers by their neighbors, is it enough? Are we to be satisfied with this alone? "Hills, cottages, home and country"—is not all this but raiment? What of the body, what of the Jewish soul?