[111]A technique is developed by the group and the individuals in it to meet the situation and retain the self-esteem necessary to life ... the Jewish capacity to trade was developed under a necessity for survival in which trade offered the only possibility. [112]The patriotism of an oppressed people is full of pathological elements. The symptoms vary slightly, but there is always hypersensitiveness and self-consciousness. The classic example is the Jew, and the Jewish problem wherever it exists can never be solved until most of the Jewish characteristics are diagnosed as the pathological result of the experience to which they have been subjected.... A very large portion of the peoples of the world are suffering from present or past experiences of oppression and therefore cannot be expected to act as normal groups. [113]The conspicuousness of the Jew is in large part due to his psychopathic adjustment to his environment. It is further due to the necessary technique for survival. [114]The peculiarity of the Jew is that because he has been made self-conscious by his experience, he has acquired a solidarity which has been kept vivid through adherence to the Law. Besides the pathology of the case, Miller here indicates two modes of adjustment, the success motive and the religious motive. The former can be seen clearly in the Jewish students, who are largely excluded from social and athletic leadership in the colleges, and whose response is to excel wherever possible in scholarship. It appears in the medieval Jew who was placed outside the feudal system and consequently had no feudal loyalties, but established the first international financial connections; or in the Jew of some of the modern hyper-nationalistic countries of Europe, who is excluded from public life and finds his outlet in Zionism. Finally, and most important of all historically, the Jew has found his compensation in his religion. He was the Chosen People, he had the sacred Torah, he kept the festivals, obeyed the commandments of God; in the home and the synagog he was priest and king, whatever might be his beatings or his cringings without. Conversely, the growing indifference to Judaism today is both an adaptation to the new modes of thought the world over, and a relaxing of intensity of Jewish loyalty in the countries where the penalties for that loyalty are themselves relaxed. The religious interpretation of this status is very ancient. The Bible speaks of the Jews as a “peculiar people”; “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” And the Talmud says: God selected as His sacrifices not the pursuer but the pursued; not the lion but the bullock, not the wolf but the lamb, not the eagle but the dove. In the same way Israel, the pursued of all the heathen, the weakest of the nations of the world, is the Chosen People, the fitting sacrifice of the Lord.