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CHAPTER VI ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS OF CONSERVATION 1. Anti-Semitism: a new type of Jew-hatred-Anti-Semitism directed at economic integration of the Jew-The Jewish renascence a reaction to anti-Semitism-2. Catholicism -The position of the Catholics in the body politic analogous to that of the Jews -Cultural homogeneity which would crowd out Jewish life prevented by Catholicism. I. ANTI-SEMITISM THE forces that make for the conservation of Jewish life are not limited to those which arise from the momentum inherent in the Jewish people. They are to be found also in the environment outside of the Jewish people. The greatest of these is anti-Semitism. This may sound paradoxical, yet it is no more paradoxical than the assertion that the inclemencies of nature which seem bent upon the destruction of man have forced him to develop the very means of his life. Those who are constitutionally frail succumb to the many natural dangers that lurk in the most normal environment. Likewise , Jews who are too remote from Jewish life to see anything in it but.a burden, who have never experienced the magnetism of its memories and ideals, or who are physically or morally too weak to endure the struggle for existence, or the severer struggle for comfort and position, find it too difficult to bear the brunt of anti-Semitism. They try to deny or hide their Jewish origin. Many of them, finding themselves driven to the wall, realize that they will save their self-respect by abandoning the attempt to play the Gentile, so they return to Judaism in the hope of finding in it a spiritual haven. To understand the cause of their return to Judaism, we have to take into account the new type of Jew-hatred which has developed within the last century. There have been many species of Jewhatred , of which anti-Semitism is the last and most virulent. From the days of Apion down to modern times, the Jew was hated because he insisted upon remaining separate. However, as soon as he gave up his separatism and was willing to share all the interests, purposes and enjoyments of his neighbors, he was accepted by them. 70 ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS OF CONSERVATION 71 The ancient Greeks and .Romans resented the separatism of the Jew. They interpreted it as due to pride and a feeling of superiority. The ill will that prevailed against the Jews would, no doubt, have subsided had they mingled freely with their neighbors and participated in their feasts, games and sacrifices. In the Middle Ages, too, if the Jews had accepted the dominant faith, whether Christian or Mohammedan, they would have been accepted by their neighbors on a basis of equality. During the first decades of the emancipation in Austria and Russia, the governments made strenuous efforts to have the Jews surrender their distinctive language, habits and customs in the hope of rendering them eligible for unrestricted amalgamation with the Christian population. They even invited Jewish scholars to help them in the process of dejudaizing the Jews. Christian liberal thinkers and scholars continually urged the Jews to remove the last obstacle to their complete fusion with the general population-their religion.1 Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, resents nothing so much in the Jew as his striving to become like the Gentile. It may forgive the Jew who makes no pretense at being anything else than a Jew,' though it has no compunctions whatever about destroying him. But its bitterest denunciations fall upon the heads of those Jews who have succeeded in eliminating from their Jives the last vestige of whatever is distinctively Jewish. The old form of Jew-hatred was associated with the assumption that it was within the power of the Jew to redeem himself and become a worthy member of society; he needed only to repudiate that which made him different from his neighbors. It was taken for granted that he could easily divest himself of the traits, customs and beliefs that made him a Jew. The very intensity of ~!te ill will against him was due to what his neighbors considered as sheer stubbornness on his part in refusing to perform the rite, or say the word that might have freed him of his Jewishness. Anti-Semitism· takes an entirely different attitude toward the Jew. It regards him as irredeemable. His origin has condemned him to an inferiority which no effort on his part can possibly alter. The slogan of modern anti-Semitism...

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