THE JEWISH RACE.                      531

lem is most acute. The Saturday Sabbath imposes economic
limitations even when the State has abolished them. As Shy-
lock pointed out, his race cannot eat or drink with the Gentile.
Indeed social intercourse would lead to intermarriage. Unless
Judaism is reformed it is, in the language of Heine, a misfortune,
and if it is reformed, it cannot logically confine its teachings
to the Hebrew race, which, lacking the normal protection of a
territory, must be swallowed up by its proselytes.
  The comedy and tragedy of Jewish existence to-day derive
primarily from this absence of a territory in which the race
could live its own life. For the religion which has preserved it
through the long dark centuries of dispersion has also pre-
served its territorial traditions in an almost indissoluble amal-
gam of religion and history. Palestine soil clings all about the
roots of the religion, which has, however, only been transplant-
ed at the cost of fossilization. The old agricultural festivals
are observed at seasons with which, in many lands of the Exile,
they have no natural connection. The last national victory
celebrated-that of Judas Maccabaeus-is two thousand years
old, the last popular fast dates from the first century of the
Christian era. The Jew agonizing in the Russian Pale re-
joices automatically in his Passover of Freedom, in his Exodus
from Egypt. Even while the tribal traits had still the potential
fluidity of life, neither Greeks nor Romans could change this
tenacious race. Its dispersion from Palestine merely indurated
its traditions by freeing them from the possibility of common
development. The religious customs defended by Josephus
against Apion are still the rule of the majority. Even new
traits superimposed by their history upon fractions of the race
are conserved with equal tenacity. The Jews expelled from
Spain in 1492 still retain a sub-loyalty to the King of Spain
and speak a Spanish idiom, printed in Hebrew characters, which
preserves in the Orient words vanished from the lips of actual
Spaniards and to be found only in Cervantes.
  This impotency to create afresh--which is the negative
aspect of conversatism-translated itself, after the final re-
volt of Bar-Cochba against the Romans early in the second




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Date:  10/1911