THE JEWISH RACE.                     533

vironment. Indeed Marranoism, both in its major and minor
forms, may be regarded as an exemplification of the Darwin-
ian theory of protective coloring. The pervasive assimilating
force acts even upon the most faithful, undermining more
subtly than persecution the life-conceptions so tenaciously
perpetuated.
  Nor is there anywhere in the Jewish world of to-day any
centripetal force to counteract these universal tendencies to dis-
sipation. The religion is shattered into as many fragments as
the race. After the fall of Jerusalem the Academy of Jabneh
carried on the authoritative tradition of the Sanhedrin. In the
Middle Ages there was the Asefah or Synod to unify under
Judaism. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of
the eighteenth century, the Waad or Council of Four Lands
legislated almost autonomously in those Central European
regions where the mass of the Jews of the world was then con-
gregated. To-day there is no center of authority, whether
religious or political. Reform itself is infinitely individual,
and nothing remains outside a few centers of congestion but
a chaos of dissolving views and dissolving communities, save
from utter disappearance by persecution and racial sympathy.
The notion that Jewish interests are Jesuitically federated or
that Jewish financiers use their power for Jewish ends is one of
the most ironic of myths. No Jewish people or nation now
exists, no Jews even as sectarians of a specific faith with a
specific center of authority such as Catholics or Wesleyans
possess; nothing but a multitude of individuals, a mob hope-
lessly amorphous, divided alike in religion and political des-
tiny. There is no common platform from which the Jews can
be addressed, no common council to which any appeal can be
made. Their only unity is negative--that unity imposed by
the hostile hereditary vision of the obiquitous Haman. They
live in what scientists call symbiosis with every other people,
each group surrendered to its own local fortunes. This habit
of dispersed and dependent existence has become second nature,
and the Jews are the first to doubt whether they could now
form a polity of their own. Like Aunt Judy in "John Bull's




			

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