THE JEWISH RACE.                    537

for the Jew, Neander.  To the Gentile the true Jewish problem
should rather be how to keep the Jew in his midst--this rare
one per cent. of mankind. The elimination of all this genius
and geniality would surely not enhance the gaiety of nations.
Without Disraeli would not England lose her only Saint's
Day?
  But the miracle remains that the Gentile world has never
yet seen a Jew, for behind all these cosmopolitan types which
obsess its vision, stand inexhaustible reserves of Jewish Jews--
and the Talmudic mystic, the Hebrew-speaking sage, remains
as unknown to the Western world as though he were hidden
in the fastnesses of Tibet. A series of great scholars--Geiger,
Zunz, Steinschneider,  Schechter-has studied the immense
Hebrew literature produced from age to age in these obscure
Jewries. But there is a modern Hebrew literature, too, a new
galaxy of poets and novelists, philosophers and humanists
who express in the ancient tongue the subtlest shades of the
thought of to-day. And there is a still more copious literature
in Yiddish, no less rich in men of talent and even genius, whose
names have rarely reached the outside world.
  And if the Jew, with that strange polarity which his his-
torian Graetz remarked in him, displays simultaneously with
the most tenacious preservation of his past the swiftest sur-
render of it that the planet has ever witnessed, if we find him
entering with such passionate patriotism into almost every
life on earth but his own, may not even the Jewish patriot
draw the compensating conclusion that the Jew therein demon-
strates the comparative superficiality of all these human dif-
ferences? Like the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady all these
peoples are the same under their skins--as even Bismarck was
once constrained to remark when he saw Prussians and French-
men lying side by side in the community of death. Could
Jews so readily assimilate to all these types, were these types
fundamentally different? The primitive notion of the abys-
mal separateness of races can scarcely survive under Darwin-
ism. Every race is really akin to every other. Imagine a
Canine Congress debating if all these glaring differences of form,
size and color could possibly consist with an underlying and




			

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