Even a cursory survey of the position of the Jews throughout the world, and in practically every land of the world, from the most despotic to those where the spirit of democracy is dominant, must reveal the fact that it is somewhat of an anomaly even where the Jews appear happiest and best off. If they are not dwelling in momentary fear of outrage and massacre, then they are victims of political oppression ; if their lives and bare possessions are secure against officially sanctioned outlawry, they are the victims of discriminations, and if they are the grateful beneficiaries of political equality, they are confronted with the necessity of proving that they are not aliens, and are denied social status. In no land’s blessings or curses does the Jew participate, share and share alike, with his fellow-countrymen. His share is either more or less—more of the curses, and less of the blessings. In lands where he enjoys the favor of princes, he incurs the enmity of the proletariat. When a land is in the throes of a political upheaval—as in Russia, for example—the Jew of that land must struggle more and suffer more than all others of that land in order to aid in this revolution, without the certainty, nay, with the assurance, that he will profit less for all his sacrifices than those who, to the “manor born,” suffer less and will profit most. When the Jew is a dweller of a land in which the right to the pursuit of happiness is organic law and basic principle, the Jew is constrained to pursue that happiness through a maze of mental contradictions and conflicts of spirit and the surrender of his human right to self-
*Address delivered before the Yale Stu-
dents’ Zionist Society, New Haven, Conn., April 26, 1906.
expression and self-assertion. In lands where others can be and are what they are, the Jew must be something other than himself. Despite his contributions of blood on the altars of loyalty, he is counted alien in every land, even in those lands for which he toiled and fought generations before the advent of those who deny him citizenship and dub him “foreigner.” Regardless of his contributions to the progress and wealth of the lands where he is everything from the hewer of wood and drawer of water, to the pedagogue, the artist, the scientist, the lawmaker and the “captain of industry;” that he has made two blades of grass to grow where before not even one grew; that he has helped to build the cities and to lay the rails and stretch the wires that span the grass-grown places and unite the cities in whose making he did his share—he is denounced as a parasite, as the cause of economic friction. In the eyes of the capitalist class he looms large as the protagonist of social revolution, and in the eyes of the laboring class he is a monstrous exploiter. Nowhere, in no land, is the Jew’s life the normal life of the land. Throughout the world, wherever Jews find themselves, the Jew’s life is abnormal. Everywhere the Jew is a problem—either he is a problem to the powers that be, and wherever he is such a problem, he is a hated one, or he is true to himself and dares to review the situation in which he and his brethren find themselves.
To my mind this problem of the Jew, this “Jewish Problem,” is in its largest sense sociological. I am not unmindful of