The most important reaction to anti-Semitism is the unconscious mode of response which we call the inferiority complex. Certainly the Jew has such a complex. He alternates boldness and timidity, because he is self-conscious in the presence of the non-Jew and therefore uncertain of himself. Jews change their names from land to land, assuming the Russian “witz” or the Polish “sky” for the previous German “sohn” as a patronymic—for all Jewish names were originally in the Hebrew form of Isaac ben (son of) Abraham; but when they come to the United States the “witz” and “sky” are foreign and many of them are dropped in turn. The Hebrew Moses becomes the German Morris, and then the English Montague. This is partly due to the adoption of the standard of taste of the new environment, partly to the desire not to be too aggressively Jewish in externals. As Friedman shows: [106]The Jew is the underdog of society ... he has acquired a social sympathy and has become spiritually attuned to the harmonies of a juster social order. [107]Anti-Semitism is a challenge to Jewry to revivify its ideals. [108]Danger strengthens family ties. Perhaps the pure and devoted family life for which the Jews have been noted may be due to the fact that they preserved this defensive reaction of a group under persecution. [109]Persecution has left the mark of fear on the psychology of the Jew.... The Jew retired into himself, or to the society of his kind. In the present state of ignorance, I cannot state how much of the Jewish character is hereditary and how much environmental, or how much of the latter is due to the inferiority complex and hence to anti-Semitism. Certainly there must be many traits of this origin. Thomas Babington Macaulay made this discovery in 1833, when he argued in the House of Commons in favor of removing civil disabilities from the Jews of England. ... If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, driven from that ... if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults ... what would be the patriotism of gentlemen with red hair? Ludwig Lewisohn finds exactly such an artificial case in the German-Americans during the World War: [110]I (the German) know exactly now why you (the Jew) and your people are accused of bad manners. How can one’s manners be good when all agreement and social certainties are lacking? Whatever one does will be considered an excess.... So I am beginning to understand the voluntary and yet involuntary segregation of Jewry. To which the Jew retorts: The worst of it is that we are all super-sensitive because we are neurasthenic.... There is scarcely a Jewish family in which there isn’t either madness or genius. Commonly both. Professor Miller generalizes this into a theory of “oppression psychosis,” mentioned above: