And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file
fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and
novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions--types that
once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian
principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some
tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood
in Zion--they are come from many places; from far lands and from near,
from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from
the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution,
in rare units from the free realms of England and America--a strange
phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones;
a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced
Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark,
Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian,
tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the
prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped,
curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded
Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud
duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in
the University, with a colored band across his shirt-front; a dandy,
smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary
caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth
century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah.
Who speaks of the Jewish type? One can only say negatively that these
faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex
heredity? Is it the brand of suffering? Certainly a stern Congress,
the speeches little lightened by humor, the atmosphere of historic
tragedy too overbrooding for intellectual dalliance. Even the presence
of the gayer sex--for there are a few ladies among the delegates, and
more peep down from the crowded spectators' gallery that runs sideways
along the hall--only makes a few shots of visual brightness in the
sober scene. Seriousness is stamped everywhere; on the broad-bulging
temples of the Russian oculist, on the egg-shaped skull and lank white
hair of the Heidelberg professor, on the open countenance of the
Hungarian architect, on the weak, narrow lineaments of the neurotic
Hebrew poet; it gives dignity to red hair and freckles, tones down the
grossness of too-fleshy cheeks, and lends an added beauty to
finely-cut features.
Superficially, then, they have little in common, and if almost all
speak German--the language of the Congress--it is only because they
are all masters of three or four tongues. Yet some subtle instinct
links them each to each; presage, perhaps, of some brotherhood of
mankind, of which ingathered Israel--or even ubiquitous Israel--may
present the type.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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