ing the model for downtown Jewry or at least for the unthinking portion of it. The sudden change from the Jewish background of Russia or Romania or Hungary or Galicia to a country where the best and most cultured exponents of Judaism (I use the word "cultured" as it is understood by the dazed average emigrant intellect) stand for laxity and utter disregard of the things they have been taught to believe sacred, begets in the majority a quick shirking of religious responsibility and a tendency to complete throwing off of the yoke of the Law hitherto borne bravely enough. In the different countries of Europe from which all our emigrants hail it is not alone the fear of God that keeps the different communities observant of Jewish law, but the fear of man as well. It is shame of one's neighbor, the obloquy that falls upon the family, the stain upon the family escutcheon, as it were, when one of them reveals himself a breaker of the Law. The rich and powerful of the community establish a precedent for the poor and humble by holding high the standard of Jewish scholarship, a virtue imitated by the latter until for all a certain standard is established, and it becomes matter for family pride when a boy evidences an unusual proficiency in the literature of the Bible and Talmud. The Hebrew word "Yichus," a synonym for "caste," defines that higher world of letters, a world into which the purseproud or the newly rich or worldly minded have no place, into which all their wealth can effect no entrance. Such is the aristocracy of Israel, and such an aristocracy is needed here in free America if the higher standard of life and a higher outlook are to be impressed on the Jewish habitant. But note the effect of the present condition of things.
Emigration to America, where apparently neither man nor God threatens; here nothing is feared save the breaking of a law that may land one in prison or penitentiary. The turning aside from laws devised for the highest happiness of man and for the infringement of which nature as surely demands and enforces toll at the hands of the law-breaker—this has no bearing upon the matter in hand, which is how soon and how best can one serve one's own material well-being in a land whose Shibboleth is the Almighty Dollar, where nothing counts save material success, where men are rated according to their standing in Bradstreet or in the realty market or on the marts or exchanges where money alone is Lord. All this is a gradual evolution, whose first beginnings date from their landing in an un-Jewish environment as foreign to the previous life of the foreign Jew as is the Christian life which in any land is an expected and accepted foreign quantity in his existence. The danger is not so much to the older generation, though these, to their shame be it recorded, are too often and easily misled; but to the children of our emigrant brethren. To these the danger is increased tenfold by well-meaning philanthropists, whose desire to impart civic virtues blinds them to the need of implanting other and higher virtues as well. The majority of our well-meaning philanthropists have no religion to speak of. Certainly there is present in their lives no outward manifestations of the faith for which their ancestors have suffered and fought, and for which these transplanted brethren have likewise suffered and fought. It is here again that imitation is the bane of the Jew; not imitation of his Gentile neighbors, for by instinct and education he is forfended against that,