MEN I HAVE PAINTED
The Jews are, many of them, supersensitive to that which seems to be implied in their race-name. Recently a Lord Chief Justice of England brought the subject up in open court, when counsel happened to say, "A Jew, I suppose?" The Judge asked, "What does that remark imply?" and followed with a lengthy comment upon the improper prejudice likely to be produced upon the mind of a jury by certain tones of voice and other subtleties of innuendo. Counsel, like a wise and prudent man, bowed to the remarks of the Judge, and agreed to a dictum which, if carried to the extreme, would not only lead to useless embarrassment in the conduct of a case, but to a positive fear of offending a judge by referring derogatively to the nationality of his people, were he Scot, Irish, American, or Jew.
What nation, it may be asked, has escaped the implication of ridicule and contempt conveyed in the intonation of its name? And are Christians spared by the Jew or the Mohammedan? The fact is that every people inhabiting this petty globe come under the lash of the scornful and contemptuous tongue of every other people. To be called an American in a rising inflection of the voice today, when Americans stand as the inheritors of all that is highest and noblest in civilization and purest in religious impulses, is more unexpected and unreasonable than to be called a Jew. When all is considered, what has Israel to complain of? Is not its history the history of the human race? Is not its God the God of all the nations of the earth? Is not the Messiah a direct descendant of Abraham and David? If the acquisitiveness of some of its people has caused resentment in the other peoples, that feeling is not ill-founded.
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