Among the Jews _The Melting Pot_, though it has in some instances served
to interpret to each other the old generation and the new, has more
frequently been misunderstood by both. While a distinguished Christian
clergyman wrote that it was "calculated to do for the Jewish race what
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the coloured man," the Jewish pulpits of
America have resounded with denunciation of its supposed solution of the
Jewish problem by dissolution. As if even a play with a purpose could do
more than suggest and interpret! It is true that its leading figure,
David Quixano, advocates absorption in America, but even he is speaking
solely of the American Jews and asks his uncle why, if he objects to the
dissolving process, he did not work for a separate Jewish land. He is
not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable.
But he urges that the conditions offered to the Jew in America are
without parallel throughout the world.
And, in sooth, the Jew is here citizen of a republic without a State
religion--a republic resting, moreover, on the same simple principles of
justice and equal rights as the Mosaic Commonwealth from which the
Puritan Fathers drew their inspiration. In America, therefore, the Jew,
by a roundabout journey from Zion, has come into his own again. It is by
no mere accident that when an inscription was needed for the colossal
statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, that "Mother of Exiles" whose
torch lights the entrance to the New Jerusalem, the best expression of
the spirit of Americanism was found in the sonnet of the Jewess, Emma
Lazarus:
_Give me your tired, your poor,_
_Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,_
_The wretched refuse of your teeming shore._
_Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,_
_I lift my lamp beside the golden door._
And if, alas! passing through the golden door, the Jew finds his New
Jerusalem as much a caricature by the crumbling of its early ideals as
the old became by the fading of the visions of Isaiah and Amos, he may
find his mission in fighting for the preservation of the original
Hebraic pattern. In this fight he will not be alone, and intermarriage
with his fellow-crusaders in the new Land of Promise will naturally
follow wherever, as with David Quixano and Vera Revendal, no theological
differences divide. There will be neither Jew nor Greek. Intermarriage,
wherever there is social intimacy, will follow, even when the parties
stand in opposite religious camps; but this is less advisable as leading
to a house divided against itself and to dissension in the upbringing of
the children. It is only when a common outlook has been reached,
transcending the old doctrinal differences, that intermarriage is
denuded of those latent discords which the instinct of mankind divines,
and which keep even Catholic and Protestant wisely apart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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