THE JEWISH RACE.                      541

Other peoples are led by their best and strongest. But the
best and strongest in Israel are absorbed by the superior careers
and pleasures of the environment--even in Russia there is a
career for the renegade, even in Roumania for the rich--and the
few who remain to lead for the most part to destroy. If, how-
ever, we are tempted to say, "then let this people agonize as
it deserves," we must remember that the first to suffer are not
the powerful but the poor. It is the masses who bear almost
the entire brunt of Alien Bills and massacres and economic
oppression. While to the philosopher the absorption of the Jews
may be as desirable as their regeneration, in practice the solu-
tion by dissolution presses most heavily upon the weakest.
The dissolution invariably begins from above, leaving the
lower classes denuded of a people's natural defences, the up-
per classes. Moreover, while as already pointed out the Jewish
upper classes are, if anything, inferior to the classes into which
they are absorbed, the marked superiority of the Jewish masses
to their environment, especially in Russia, would render their
absorption a tragic degeneration.
  But if dissolution would bring degeneracy and emancipation
dissolution, the only issue from this dilemma is the creation
of a Jewish State or at least a Jewish land of refuge upon a
basis of local autonomy to which in the course of the centuries
all that was truly Jewish would drift. And if the world has no
ethical duty to take the lead in this creation, it may yet find
its profit in getting rid of the Jewish problem. Many regions
of the New World, whether in America or Australia, would
moreover be enriched and consolidated by the accession of a
great Jewish colony, while to the Old World its political blessing
might be many-sided. A host of political rivalries, perilous
to the world's peace, center round Palestine, while in the still
more dangerous quarter of Mesopotamia, a co-operation of
England and Germany in making a home under the Turkish
flag for the Jew in his original birthplace would reduce Anglo-
German friction, foster world-peace and establish in the heart
of the Old World a bridge of civilization between the East and
the West and a symbol of hope for the future of mankind.
                     ISRAEL ZANGWILL, in the Independent.




			

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