But as Moderns
does not create a view nor exercise a faculty. Even conscious adherence to the Jewish people is but partial expression of our Jewishness: it was not the conscious desire to remain a people which gave us the will to endure: it was our unavoidable commonalty of feeling which made us and continued us a people.
Repudiation of the Jewish religion or even of Jewish racial affiliation does not alter the Jew. Some of us Jews may delude ourselves as some of you gentiles do. But in effect modernization seems to have done nothing to decrease the friction between us. The dislike continues: and though your masses may not know why they dislike us, there must be a sufficient reason: it is Germany, the mother of the modernized Jew, that gave birth, with him, to modern anti-Semitism. Where the old ostensible reasons for disliking the Jew collapsed, new ones, more self-conscious, were substituted. When modernization removed the old, superstitious form of expression, the professor replaced the priest, science religion.
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