The Jews in the Melting-Pot
On Sunday, October 30, Mr. Jacob de Haas in response to an invitation spoke on Jewish problems to the members of the Bible class of the Pilgrim Congregational Church, Upham's Corner, Dorchester, a part of Boston that has recently been largely settled by Jews. The Rev. Luther Cady, minister of the church, in introducing the speaker referred to the un-Christianlike attitude of the Russian church towards the Jews, and to the debt Christianity owed to the Jews. He had asked Mr. de Haas to speak his mind freely and critically on the American Jew and the Melting-Pot.
ONE of the most endearing terms in Hebrew after those expressive of blood relationship is "neighbor." Historically the Jew has thought more of neighborliness than of relationship and therefore allow me to address you as neighbors.
Fellow neighbors, for I live in this district, I value this opportunity of coming among you and of speaking my mind frankly on Jewish problems. We all know the jest that the world would look very wmiserable if we all spoke the truth continuously, but I am willing to speak to you as frankly as though I were in one of your private homes, sitting down with my knees comfortably crossed, and we had agreed as neighbors to look a life problem squarely in the face, and each was to speak his heart thoughts upon it. Here is my end of that: conversation:
If it were not dangerous to generalize I would be tempted to use the freedom of speech which has been permitted me here, to say that there is no American Jew, and there is no Melting Pot. What I would however have you understand is that there is no one type of American Jew concerning whom one could generalize with any degree of safety, and with freedom from contradiction. We Jews whom you see in the mass, who look all alike to you, perhaps as Chinamen look to us, we examine ourselves, or at least each other, with a microscope. And of all the things that we are agreed upon ’tis that that we differ from each other.
Sometimes we boast, sometimes we lament our excessive individuality, but over‘ against each other I doubt very much. whether we are prepared -to yield an iota of it. The Jew comes from everywhere, anywhere, If he can with justice claim racial blood purity, which makes the physical oneness of the race, each individual‘ has undergone a distinct series of experiences, and is the possessor of a more: or less distinct collection of family and social traditions.
Some one has called the Jews the gypsies of the cities, and in the sense that the world has always forced them to move from city to city, this is true. One Jew barely remembering his grandfather comes from a small Bavarian village. The other the descendant of five generations of: Rabbis, comes from the capital of old Lithuania. One Jew knows no more about himself than his immediate English. born ancestry; another knows of a family tree that begins a century before Columbus: discovered America, spreads its roots. through the whole of Europe, with the final living branch stretching into this city. With so large a diversity of inherited experience and with as large an amount of personal experience you must realize, if you will stop to think, that it is impossible for the Jews in the mass to possess such distinct traits as are ascribed to them particularly by writers who enter the Ghettoes in search of local color.
As religion is only a manifestation of the individual experience, albeit, the-