The Mechanism of Dissolution
as a man insisting on watching himself fall asleep. It can be done tacitly only. It can happen, but it cannot be propagated. We might drift out of consciousness, but every effort to accelerate the pace would retard the process. To appeal to Jews to cease to be Jews because they are Jews is to accentuate their Jewishness.
Of course the effort has been made, but with those grotesque and unnatural results which are in part responsible for your aversion to the process. There is nothing more ludicrous and pitiful than the Jew who has made his gentilization a deliberate ideal. His anxious self-repression, his self-disclaimers, his demand to be considered a gentile, his uneasy sense of inferiority, his impotent resentment of all that reminds him of his origin, make him an object of scorn alike to you and to us. There are "assimilated" Jews who hate with an ignoble and consuming hatred the "unassimilated" part of the Jewish people; Jews, who, rousing your secret contempt as renegades and your resentment as intrud-
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