The Maccabaean

ilies like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, it is almost impossible to discover in occidental countries Jewish families which have remained true to Judaism after having been in the possession of Western culture for so much ac eiohty nr a hundred vweare

NON ND NBD RE RY ML A AMALIE (+. All these evidences of the disintegrating and demoralizing operations of our dispersion on the Jewish morale, of the capitulations to the majority on the part of our ablest and most eminent constitute only one side of the defeats and weakenings due to our minority status; a less striking, but no less unimportant symptom consists in the corrosions, in the devastating inroads upon our cohesion and our numbers, upon our discipline, our solidarity, our firmness of religious conviction and our loyalty of Jewish fellowship, which are constantly being made by our Christian and our secular environment. Here we are not dealing with eminent individuals, with well-known names, but, on the one hand, with countless repetitions of the same process, and, on the other hand, with insidious, gradual, almost universal weakenings and failings of Jewish custom and observance, Jewish phrase and manner. Tewish individuality and Tewish consciousness.

This corrosive process may be observed in country, town and city, among the rich, middle class and poor, with the highly cultured, the people of ordinary advantages and among the dregs. On the whole one might venture the assertion that the loss is greatest at the extreme ends, at top and bottom; at the apex Judaism tapers off into aristocratic unions; in the gutter the mingling is naturally indiscriminate. Similarly the Jew in the small country-town is frequently persuaded to send his children to the Methodist Sunday-School, and the millionaire in the large city is flattered to be received, on toady terms, into high society.

ie =. But there are curious factors in the middle classes, too, which favor intermarriage, with its almost unfailing losses to Judaism. In the large and growing class of small-salaried employees whose problem of living is becoming ever more precarious, as they have to satisfy social standards on incomes of diminishing purchase- power, in that large class some curious factors seem to favor mixed marriages between Jew and Gentile. One of these factors consists in the prevailing conviction, among non-Jewish working-girls, that the Jew makes a safe husband who is devoted to his family, brings home his earnings, is not likely to fall into drinking-habits; a converse factor is the persuasion on the part of the Jewish clerk, that the non-Jewish girl is willing to do her own housework, while the Jewish girl is apt, if only out of pride, to insist on having a servant. Still another factor operates in the same direction, when it is often seen that the Jew, as a rule, is more provident than the non-Jew, in contracting marriage; wherefore a pretty Jewish girl who has no means or who is handicapped by a family that threatens to create future burdens, has better prospects for inducing the non-Jew to take these chances than she has with one of her own people.

All these are, of course, the merest surface-symptoms to show how our dispersion works to the constant, rapid

diminution of our numbers. To be scattered among highly civilized nations does not strengthen a people in its allegiance to racial bonds, family bonds, religious bonds; on the contrary, it steadily and increasingly undermines these bonds. The losses of numbers, from conversion, intermarriage, non-intercourse, these losses constitute the most palpable, obvious and calculable of all kinds of weakening ; but the paling of convictions, the disappearance of Jewish lore, Jewish phrase, Jewish observance, the general fading out of Jewish individuality, the subsidence of Jewish consciousness, all these are heynnd even annrayimate calculation. \

To realize just what have been the effects of dispersion on our religious virility, on our fitness for religious missions, on the originality and force of our religious thinking and feeling, on our real aspirations for (not grandiloquent assumptions of) religious leadership, let us consider our amazing barrenness, during the period of our diaspora, in the realm of religious genius. An argument which enjoys great favor with those who cannot tolerate any other but religious activities for Israel, is to the effect that originality of the highest class, mastery of the first order, creative, path-breaking genius, has been shown by Israel in no other field of activity, except in religion. While there is a certain truth in such a contention as applied to the national part of our career, it should be remembered, on the other hand, that it is just exactly in the field of religious genius that the Jew has the smallest achievements to his credit during the century or two of the dispersion, since he has entered into civilization as an active factor. While in the fields of literature, music, philosophy, socialism, statesmanship, science, finance, exploration, chess, the Jew has stood forth prominently in various countries, he has not one solitary writer, preacher, composer or poet to point to who has attained to any eminence whatever, beyond some local Jewish pale, as the creator of any religious thought, homily, composition, poem that seem destined to maintain life beyond a generation or two, or scope beyond a restricted Jewish public.

If we are not blind and deaf to the testimony of history, if we are honest enough to test fanciful theories by inexorable fact, we must come to the conclusion that whatever religious mission is reserved for Israel, whatever potentiality of religious leadership may be dormant in the Jewish people, dispersion has not favored, but obstructed them; it operates to the constant falling away of large numbers, to the weakening of convictions and ‘the disintegration of morale; it furnishes a soil notoriously unsuited to the blossoming forth of religious genius, where almost every other opportunity for creative enrichment of culture is eagerly seized upon; it is just the very sterility and lack of promise of our religious progress in dispersion which unmistakably point the road to Zion, as the one escape out of moribund conditions which cry for a remedy.