Study the immigrant to the United States and his descendant,
American born and bred. Compare Irishman and Irish-American,
Russian Jew and his American-born descendant; compare Englishman
and the Anglo-Saxon New England descendant. Here is a race, the
Jew, which in the Ghetto and under circumstances that built up a
tremendously powerful set of traditions and customs developed a
very distinctive type of human being. Poor in physique, with
little physical pugnacity, but worshiping, learning and reaching
out for wealth and power in an unusually successful manner, the
crucible of an adverse and hostile environment rendered him
totally different in manners from his Gentile neighbors. With a
high birth rate and an intensely close and pure family life, the
Ghetto Jew lived and died shut off by the restrictions placed
upon him and his own social heredity from the life of the country
of his birth. Then came immigration to the United States through
one cause or another,--and note the results.
With the old social heredity still at work, another set of
customs, traditions and beliefs comes into open competition with
it in the bosom of the American Jew. Nowhere is the struggle
between the old and the new generations so intense as in the home
of the Orthodox Jew. His descendant is clean-shaven and no longer
observes (or observes only perfunctorily or with many a gross
inconsistency) the dietary and household laws. He is a free
spender and luxurious in his habits as compared with his
economical, ascetic forefathers. He marries late and the birth
rate drops with most astonishing rapidity, so that in one
generation the children of parents who had eight or ten children
have families of one or two or three children. He becomes a
follower of sports, and with his love for scholarship still
strong, as witness his production of scholars and scientists, the
remarkable rise of the Jewish prize fighter stands out as a
divergence from tradition that mocks at theories of inborn racial
characters. And a third generation differs in customs, manners,
ideals, purposes and physique but little from the social class of
Americans in which the individual members move. The names become
Anglicized; gone are the Abrahams and Isaacs and Jacobs, the
Rachels and Leahs and Rebeccas, and in their place are Vernon,
Mortimer, Winthrop, Alice, Helen and Elizabeth. And this change
in name symbolizes the revolution in essential characters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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