The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and FlowSteiner, Edward Alfred
History
The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow
Steiner, Edward Alfred
United States -- Emigration and immigration
"This last noted feature in the contact phenomena of Israelites and
Aryans appears to me a matter of much importance, especially as it
accords with my own experiences and with observations formed long before
I began to devise and criticise theories on this subject. As one of the
Deans of Harvard University, I have been for ten years in a position
where I have to meet from year to year a number of young Hebrews. It has
been evident to me from the first that these youths normally respond
more quickly to my greeting than those of my own race, and that they
divine and act on my state of mind with far greater celerity. They are
in fact so quick that they are often where I am, in my slower way, about
to be, before I am really there. This would make them at times seem
irritating, indeed, presumptious, were it not interesting to me from a
racial point of view. To those who are in nowise concerned with such
questions, this alacrity is naturally exasperating, especially when the
movement is not only one of wits but one of sympathies.
"We all know how disagreeable it is to have the neighbour call on us for
some kind of affectionate response, before we are ready to be moved, and
how certain is such a summons to dry the springs which else might have
yielded abundantly. In our slow, Aryan way, we demand an introductory
process on the part of the fellow man who would successfully appeal to
our emotions. Our orators know this, and provide ample exordiums for
their moving passages; none ventures in the manner of the Hebrew prophet
to assume that his hearers will awaken at a cry.
"In observations made for me by young men, students in Harvard College,
and thus under my own eyes, so to speak, I have confirmation of the
hypothesis that an important part of the difficulty of social contact
between these diverse people is due to the difference in the way their
minds work when they come together. It is an unhappy fact that the last
wave of anti-Semiticism, that which led to the semblance of persecution
in Germany and to the abomination of the Dreyfus incident in France,
swept across the Atlantic and affected to a considerable extent the
social position of the Jews in the United States. They became unwelcome
in clubs, and in hotels; their daughters were not admitted to certain
private schools; and in various ways the unhappy people were made to
feel the ancient burden as in this country it had not come upon them
before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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