61 For a wonderful description of the British state of affairs, see G. K. Chesterton, The Return of Don Quixote, which did not appear until 1927 but was “planned and partly written before the War.”

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  1 Although Jews stood out more than other groups in the homogeneous populations of European countries, it does not follow that they are more threatened by discrimination than other groups in America. In fact, up to now, not the Jews but the Negroes—by nature and history the most unequal among the peoples of America—have borne the burden of social and economic discrimination.

  This could change, however, if a political movement ever grew out of this merely social discrimination. Then Jews might very suddenly become the principal objects of hatred for the simple reason that they, alone among all other groups, have themselves, within their history and their religion, expressed a well-known principle of separation. This is not true of the Negroes or Chinese, who are therefore less endangered politically, even though they may differ more from the majority than the Jews.

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  2 This surprisingly apt observation was made by the liberal Protestant theologian H. E. G. Paulus in a valuable little pamphlet, Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831. Paulus, much attacked by Jewish writers of the time, advocated a gradual individual emancipation on the basis of assimilation.

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  3 This attitude is expressed in Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s “Expert Opinion” of 1809: “The state should not exactly teach respect for the Jews, but should abolish an in-human and prejudiced way of thinking etc. . . . ” In lunar Freund, Die Emancipation der luden In Preussen, Berlin, 1912, II, 270.

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  4 J. G. Herder, “Über die politische Bekehrung der Juden” in Adrastea und das 18. Jahrhundert, 1801–03.

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  5 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793–97), 40. Brief.

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  6 Felix Priebatsch, “Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Forschungen und Versuche lur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915, p. 646.

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  7 Lessing himself had no such illusions. His last letter to Moses Mendelssohn expressed most clearly what he wanted: “the shortest and safest way to that European country without either Christians or Jews.” For Lessing’s attitude toward Jews, see Franz Mehring, Die Lessinglegende, 1906.

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  8 See Honorc Q. R. de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, London, 1788.

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  9 J. G. Herder, “Ueber die politische Bekehrung der Juden,” op. cit.

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  10 Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe’s review of Isachar Falkensohn Behr, Gedichte eines polnischen Juden, Mietau and Leipzig, 1772, io Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen.

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  11 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Briefe bei Gelegenheit der politisch theologischen Aufgabe und des Sendschreibens jüdischer Hausväter, 1799, in Werke, 1846, Abt. I, Band V, 34.

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  12 This does not, however, apply to Moses Mendelssohn, who hardly knew the thoughts of Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, and other members of the younger generation. Mendelssohn was revered for his uniqueness. His firm adherence to his Jewish religion made it impossible for him to break ultimately with the Jewish people, which his successors did as a matter of course. He felt he was “a member of an oppressed people who must beg for the good will and protection of the governing nation” (see his “Letter to Lavater,” 1770, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Berlin, 1930); that is, he always knew that the extraordinary esteem for his person paralleled an extraordinary contempt for his people. Since he, unlike Jews of following generations, did not share this contempt, he did not consider himself an exception.

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  13 The Prussia which Lessing had described as “Europe’s most enslaved country” was to Mendelssohn “a state in which one of the wisest princes who ever ruled men has made the arts and sciences flourish, has made national freedom of thought so general that its beneficent effects reach even the lowliest inhabitants of his domain.” Such humble contentment is touching and surprising if one realizes that the “wisest prince” had made it very hard for the Jewish philosopher to get permission to sojourn in Berlin and, at a time when his Münzjuden enjoyed all privileges, did not even grant him the regular status of a “protected Jew.” Mendelssohn was even aware that he, the friend of all educated Germany, would be subject to the same tax levied upon an ox led to the market if ever he decided to visit his friend Lavater in Leipzig, but no political conclusion regarding the improvement of such conditions ever occurred to him. (See the “Letter to Lavater,” op. cit., and his preface to his translation of Menasseh Ben Israel in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. Ill, Leipzig, 1843–45.)

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  14 See Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden im Deutschen Reich, Vol. I, Berlin, 1930.

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  15 C. W. F. Grattenauer’s widely read pamphlet Wider die Juden of 1802 had been preceded as far back as 1791 by another, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden in which the growing influence of the Jews in Berlin was already pointed out. Although the early pamphlet was reviewed in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 1792, Vol. CXII, almost nobody ever read it.

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  16 Clemens Brentano’s Der Philister vor. In und nach der Geschichte was written for and read to the so-called Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft, a famous club of writers and patriots, founded in 1808 for the struggle against Napoleon.

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  17 Thus the Rothschilds in the 1820’s withdrew a large donation from their native community of Frankfurt, in order to counteract the influence of reformers who wanted Jewish children to receive a general education. See Isaak Markus Jost, Neuere Geschichte der lsraeliten, 1846, X, 102.

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  18 Op. cit., IX, 38.—The court Jews and the rich Jewish bankers who followed in their footsteps never wanted to leave the Jewish community. They acted as its representatives and protectors against public authorities; they were frequently granted official power over communities which they ruled from afar so that the old autonomy of Jewish communities was undermined and destroyed from within long before it was abolished by the nation-state. The first court Jew with monarchical aspirations in his own “nation” was a Jew of Prague, a purveyor of supplies to the Elector Maurice of Saxony in the sixteenth century. He demanded that all rabbis and community heads be selected from members of his family. (See Bondy-Dworsky, Geschichte der Juden in Boehmen, Maehren und Schtesien, Prague, 1906, II, 727.) The practice of installing court Jews as dictators in their communities became general in the eighteenth century and was followed by the rule of “notables” in the nineteenth century.

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  19 Johann Jacob Schudt, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten, Frankfurt a.M., 1715–1717› IV, Annex, 48.

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  20 Selma Stern, Jud Suess, Berlin, 1929, pp. 18 f.

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  21 Schudt, op. cit., I, 19.

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  22 Christian Friedrich Ruehs defines the whole Jewish people as a “caste of merchants.” “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” in Zeitschrift für die neueste Geschichte, 1815.

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  23 A remarkable, though little-known, fact is that assimilation as a program led much more frequently to conversion than to mixed marriage. Unfortunately statistics cover up rather than reveal this fact because they consider all unions between converted and nonconverted Jewish partners to be mixed marriages. We know, however, that there were quite a number of families in Germany who had been baptized for generations and yet remained purely Jewish. That the converted Jew only rarely left his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether, accounts for this. The Jewish family, at any rate, proved to be a more conserving force than Jewish religion.

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  24 Briefe aus Paris. 74th Letter, February, 1832.

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  25 Ibid., 72nd Letter.

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  26 The “conscious pariah” (Bernard Lazare) was the only tradition of rebellion which established itself, although those who belonged to it were hardly aware of its existence. See the author’s “The Jew as Pariah. A Hidden Tradition,” in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2 (1944).

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  27 It is not without irony that this excellent formula, which may serve as a motto for Western European assimilation, was propounded by a Russian Jew and first published in Hebrew. It comes from Judah Leib Gordon’s Hebrew poem, Hakitzah ami, 1863. See S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1918, II, 228 f.

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  28 This formulation was made by Karl Kraus around 1912. See Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, 1925.

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  29 The title phrase is taken from a sketch of Disraeli by Sir John Skleton in 1867. See W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, New York, 1929, II, 292–93.

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  30 Morris S. Lazaron, Seed of Abraham, New York, 1930, “Benjamin Disraeli,” pp. 260 ff.

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  31 Horace B. Samuel, “The Psychology of Disraeli,” in Modernities, London, 1914.

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  32 J. A. Froude thus closes his biography of Lord Beaconsfield, 1890: “The aim with which he started in life was to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries, and wild as such an ambition must have appeared, he at last won the stake for which he played so bravely.”

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  33 sir John Skleton, op. cit.

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  34 In his novel Tancred, 1847.

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  35 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.

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  36 Disraeli himself reported: “I was not bred among my race and was nourished in great prejudice against them.” For his family background, see especially Joseph Caro, “Benjamin Disraeli, Juden und Judentum,” in Monalsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1932, Jahrgang 76.

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  37 Lord George Bentinck. A Political Biography, London, 1852, 496.

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  38 Ibid., p. 491.

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  39 Ibid., pp. 497 ff.

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  40 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 1507.

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  41 Horace S. Samuel, op. cit.

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  42 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 147.

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  43 Ibid.

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  44 Robert Cecil’s article appeared in the most authoritative organ of the Tories, the Quarterly Review. See Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., pp. 19–22.

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  45 This happened as late as 1874. Carlyle is reported to have called Disraeli “a cursed Jew,” “the worst man who ever lived.” See Caro, op. cit.

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  46 Lord Salisbury in an article in the Quarterly Review, 1869.

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  47 E. T. Raymond, Disraeli, The Alien Patriot, London, 1925, p. 1.

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  48 H. B. Samuel, op. cit., Disraeli, Tancred, and Lord George Bentinck, respectively.

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  49 In his novel Coningsby, 1844.

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  50 See Lord George Bentinck and the novels Endymion, 1881, and Coningsby.

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  51 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.

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  52 Horace B. Samuel, op. cit.

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  53 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 882.

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  54 Ibid., p. 73. In a letter to Mrs. Brydges Williams of July 21, 1863.

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  55 Lord George Benlinck, p. 497.

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  56 In his novel Loi hair, 1870.

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  57 Lord George Bentinck.

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  58 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit, p. 1470. This excellent biography gives a correct evaluation of Disraeli’s triumph. After having quoted Tennyson’s In Memoriam, canto 64, it continues as follows: “In one respect Disraeli’s success was more striking and complete than that suggested in Tennyson’s lines; he not only scaled, the political ladder to the topmost rung and ‘shaped the whisper of the throne’; he also conquered Society. He dominated the dinner-tables and what we would call the salons of Mayfair . . . and his social triumph, whatever may be thought by philosophers of its intrinsic value, was certainly not less difficult of achievement for a despised outsider than his political, and was perhaps sweeter to his palate” (p. 1506).

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  59 Ibid., Vol. I, Book 3.

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  60 Yves Simon, La Grande Crise de la République Française, Montreal, 1941, p. 20: “The spirit of the French Revolution survived the defeat of Napoleon for more than a century. . . . It triumphed but only to fade unnoticed on November 11, 1918. The French Revolution? Its dates must surely be set at 1789–1918.”

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  61 The fact that certain psychological phenomena did not come out as sharply in German and Austrian Jews, may partly be due to the strong hold of the Zionist movement on Jewish intellectuals in these countries. Zionism in the decade after the first World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its strength not so much to political insight (and did not produce political convictions), as it did to its critical analysis of psychological reactions and sociological facts. Its influence was mainly pedagogical and went far beyond the relatively small circle of actual members of the Zionist movement.

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  62 Compare the interesting remarks on this subject by E. Levinas, “L’Autre dans Proust” in Deucalion, No. 2, 1947.

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  63 J. E. van Praag, “Marcel Proust, Témoin du Judaïsme déjudaizé” in Revue Juive de Genève, 1937, Nos. 48, 49, 50.

  A curious coincidence (or is it more than a coincidence?) occurs in the moving-picture Crossfire which deals with the Jewish question. The story was taken from Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole, in which the murdered Jew of Crossfire was a homosexual.

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  64 For the following see especially Cities of the Plain, Part I, pp. 20–45.

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  65 Cities of the Plain, Part n, chapter iii.

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  66 Ibid.

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  67 Ibid.

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  68 The Guermantes Way, Part I, chapter i.

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  69 Ibid.

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  70 Ibid.

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  71 Within a Budding Grove, Part II, “Placenames: The Place.”

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  72 Ibid.

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  73 Cities o) the Plain. Part II, chapter iii.