THERE was once a man who felt all the distress of being a Jew deep within his soul. Outwardly his circumstances were not unsatisfactory. His income sufficed for his needs, and his vocation was happily chosen, for in it he was able to do that towards which his heart drew him: he was an artist. For a long time his Jewish origin and the faith of his ancestors had meant nothing to him, when suddenly the ancient grudge disguised by a fashionable epithet, again showed itself. With many others our friend shared the belief that the flood would soon subside. But things did not improve; on the contrary, they kept growing worse, and although the attacks were not aimed at him directly, they were a never-ceasing source of new pains for him; so that in the course of time his soul was as a bleeding wound. Now it so happened that through these inner, stifled sorrows he was forced to seek a remedy in their own source—that is, in his Judaism, and then he did something that he would never have thought of in his happier days, (inasmuch as he had been so estranged from Judaism)—he began to love it fervidly. Yet at first he took no definite account of this wonderful inclination, until at length it grew so strong that it changed from shadowy feelings into a clear thought, which he soon formulated in words. It was the thought that there is but one path that leads out of the Jewish difficulty—namely, the return to Judaism.
. When his best friends, who had been surrounded by circumstances similar to his own, heard of this, they shook their heads and thought that their friend's mind had
gone astray. For how could that be a means of escape which pointed only towards the sharpening and intensifying of the evil? He, however, thought that the distress so generally felt at the present was so intense because that balancing weight, which our strong fathers possessed, had ceased to exist for the new Jews. He was made the butt of much merriment; some openly laughed in his face. Still he would not let himself be misled by the foolish remarks fo people whose insight he had never had occasion to value highly, and he bore their jokes calmly. As he did not demean himself foolishly in other respects, he was gradually left alone to give himself over to his "hobby," which, indeed, was branded by some with even a more severe term, such as "mania."
In his patient way the man drew one conclusion after the other from his belief, when once that was determined upon. In this connection he encountered a number of obstacles which did not yield readily—even if he did obstinately conceal them. As a modern man and an artist with modern views he was, of course, accustomed to many un-Jewish usages, and he had assimilated certain ineradicable elements from the national cultures and civilizations through which his course of education had led him. How could all this be reconciled with his return to Judaism? Accordingly there grew up even for him some doubts as to the propriety of his guiding thought, his idee maitresse, as the French thinker calls it. Perhaps the generation that had grown up under the influences of other cultures was no longer capable of the return home