It will be seen from the official table of immigration that the Russian
Jew is only one and not even the largest of the fifty elements that, to
the tune of nearly a million and a half a year, are being fused in the
greatest "Melting Pot" the world has ever known; but if he has been
selected as the typical immigrant, it is because he alone of all the
fifty has no homeland. Some few other races, such as the Armenians, are
almost equally devoid of political power, and, in consequence, equally
obnoxious to massacre; but except the gipsy, whose essence is to be
homeless, there is no other race--black, white, red, or yellow--that has
not remained at least a majority of the population in some area of its
own. There is none, therefore, more in need of a land of liberty, none
to whose future it is more vital that America should preserve that
spirit of William Penn which President Wilson has so nobly
characterised. And there is assuredly none which has more valuable
elements to contribute to the ethnic and psychical amalgam of the people
of to-morrow.
The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple
surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an
all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or
impoverished. Thus the intelligent reader will have remarked how the
somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish
herself in the fourth. Even as to the ultimate language of the United
States, it is unreasonable to suppose that American, though fortunately
protected by English literature, will not bear traces of the fifty
languages now being spoken side by side with it, and of which this play
alone presents scraps in German, French, Russian, Yiddish, Irish,
Hebrew, and Italian.
That in the crucible of love, or even co-citizenship, the most violent
antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity is a truth of
both ethics and observation, and it was in order to present historic
enmities at their extremes that the persecuted Jew of Russia and the
persecuting Russian race have been taken for protagonists--"the fell
incensèd points of mighty opposites."
The Jewish immigrant is, moreover, the toughest of all the white
elements that have been poured into the American crucible, the race
having, by its unique experience of several thousand years of exposure
to alien majorities, developed a salamandrine power of survival. And
this asbestoid fibre is made even more fireproof by the anti-Semitism of
American uncivilisation. Nevertheless, to suppose that America will
remain permanently afflicted by all the old European diseases would be
to despair of humanity, not to mention super-humanity.
III
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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