For the Jewish people this realization is peculiarly significant. Though the outlines of the general situation the world over are as yet indistinct, some problems of the Jews have already been brought out into sharp relief. Like the rest of mankind, the Jew has had his eyes cruelly opened, and the clear boundary between truth and delusion which this war has made should be stamped upon his memory, to remain vivid after negative feelings of wrongs and disappointments have been forgotten.
The Delusion of Assimilation
IN the past hundred years, the Jew has had more reason than at any time since the dispersal to consider himself assimilated in all save the Slav countries. Not that anti-Semitism had disappeared; but it had seemed to be, and indeed is, so much less important when viewed against the background of the Jew's positive advance to light and freedom. Explained more recently as a survival of many prejudices which do not die overnight, including the old religious differences, physical and mental antipathies, economic jealousies—the force of anti-Semitism was not only weakened by the increasing breadth of vision, the cosmopolitanism on which the world has plumed itself, but dwarfed by the achievement of the Jew himself. He has come out of his Ghetto; softened by a more liberal attitude on the part of his individual neighbor, he has largely laid aside his resentment and his hostility. There was a feeling that adaptation and assimilation had advanced so far that the Jew, by his own progress and with the consent of his neighbor, had become a citizen of his community, differentiated from the rest, if at all, only by what he chose to keep of his religious belief. Those who have most zealously argued for assimilation as the sole solution of the Jewish problem have had little need of late to push their gospel further; the process seemed to be taking excellent care of itself. But after all, it was not real. A drastic crisis like the present one was required to brand it as delusion. The attitude of the occasional individual was construed as the attitude of the entire community. This has been a double-edged delusion. The Jew has not judged himself as a community in relation to his neighbor, and he has misjudged his individual neighbor as a community in relation to himself.
It takes two sides always to make up the full truth, but from both sides, from the Jew and from his neighbor, there is circumstantial evidence in the events of the past five months that gives abundant support to this conclusion.
In this time of crisis the world has thrown aside its pretense, honest and well-intentioned pretense though it may have been, and revealed its underlying feeling toward the Jewish people. Suddenly, without any absolute change in their status, the Jews are singled out and set apart. Special inducements are held out for their support. The Czar, though this was reported upon dubious authority, addresses his "beloved Jews;" a non-commissioned Jewish officer is recommended for the Order of St. George; Dreyfus is decorated in France, his son made Lieutenant; Austria issues a special appeal to the Jews of Poland; an English Jew voices England's hope of their loyalty; in Germany anti-Semitic newspapers suddenly announce their discontinuance.
The Test of Jewish Patriotism
IT is not a new story. Doubt of the Jew's place in time of war has been continuous. Through the centuries there has been report that he has dodged his war tax wherever he could, that he bought soldiers to fill his place in the ranks, that as financier he offered his gold without scruple to the bitterest foes of his own fatherland. How much of this is based on blind prejudice is beside the point. What is important is the effect that this doubting attitude has had on the Jew's normal impulse to render patriotic service. The Jew to-day who feels most keenly the cause of Germany, or of France, or of England in this war, who most unreservedly throws in his lot with his compatriots, glorying in a privilege long withheld, moved to an intense fervor of patriotism, cannot but be disheartened at the spectacle of his neighbors as in one way or another they give evidence of their lack of faith in him.
Why this feeling of distrust? How has it been engendered, what are its roots? Again the answer is to be found both with the Jew himself and with his neighbor.
As far as the present situation is concerned, the Gentile world has had lying dormant in its subconscious mind the notion that the Jew was inferior, and by its own action it has kept this subconscious notion alive. For while the world has admitted the Jew to its political life, while it has modified much its religious and its economic prejudices and jealousies, it has not broken down every barrier. Without fully realizing its attitude, it has still held the Jew to be different and of lower quality. The Jew's neighbors have had an honest sort of delusion about their attitude toward the Semite; because they had discovered the individual Jew, and taken him, as it were, into the arms of their community life, they have fancied that all prejudice, even toward the Jew as a class, had become obsolete. Here again there is evidence of the fact that feeling toward Jews as individuals has been mistaken for feeling toward the Jews as a race group.
This delusion has its base in something more fundamental, to which may be accredited perhaps the distrust against which the Jews have been battling for centuries. It is not the stranger who inspires continued suspicion, for he soon ceases to be a stranger, but it is the wanderer and the gypsy. There is imbedded in human nature a distrust of shifting things and a respect for what is long established in any one place, and it is in the wandering class that the Jew is placed in spite of all talk of assimilation. He has had no point of departure and hence no place of arrival. The French have crossed over the Channel and become Englishmen; one would hardly know that the Romans still live on in the Tyrol; but the Jew has always remained Jew, for he has no established place from which to come and whither to return.