He acts in all these things as every one acts instinctively in the
presence of those whom they take for granted to be inferiors, and when
men talk of the "Jewish insolence," or the "Jewish sneer," they imply
that attitude. We are wrong if we take these things as calculated
insult. The action of the Jew, in so far as it proceeds from this sense
of superiority, is no more calculated and no more deliberately hostile
than are our own actions whenever we find ourselves in relations with
those whom we think inferior to ourselves. But we are right to point
them out, to resent them, to reprove them, and, if it became necessary,
to end them.
The Jewish problem will never be solved unless we make allowances for
the sense of superiority, take it for granted as an unavoidable evil,
and restrain our indignation in its presence; but neither will it be
solved if we permit its more and more open expression.
Another consequence of this attitude: The Jew, on account of it, makes
no effort to get into touch with the mass of the race in the midst of
which he may happen to be living. He is content to remain separate from
it, and thinks he cannot help remaining separate from them. And he shows
it. He consents to associate with the _élite_, with those who direct,
with those who have some special sort of function, but it seems to him a
waste of time to attempt communion with the rest. And he shows it. That
is what Renan meant when he said that the Jews were the least democratic
of all people. Renan, who was supported by Jewish money and lived, while
he was doing his best work, dependent on a Jewish publisher; Renan, who
was so fascinated by the history of Israel, and who decided himself to
become a scholar in all Hebraic things, understood the Jew not at all.
His judgments upon them are invariably superficial and to one side of
the truth; the judgments of a foreigner--an admiring foreigner but not a
sympathetic foreigner. And when he said that the Jews were not
democratic he was, instead of passing a judgment upon an intimate
political instinct of the Jewish people, simply noting an external
phenomenon. For the Jews are, as a fact, strongly democratic--no nation
more so--in their national relations among themselves; they only appear
undemocratic to us because they openly look down on us among whom they
live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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