The Mechanism of Dissolution
lution in detail and come down to an examination of its working on the individual, we understand better the revolting character of at least its first effects. It is one thing to say that a people in the first stages of dissolution is as horrible a spectacle as a body in the first stages of putrefaction: but this sounds somewhat academic—perhaps even metaphysical. Even so there is little conveyed in the statement that a country is starving: we realize the import of the statement only when we speak of hungry men and women. When we examine the personal reactions of the deliberately assimilating Jew we see more clearly why he is not a pleasant spectacle either to Jew or to gentile.
A Jew who has made the repression of his Jewishness an ideal must be prepared to suffer and to seem to ignore every slight, every
rebuff which he encounters. He must not permit an open sneer to sting him into Jewish self-consciousness: such a "weakness" would undo his purpose. He must seem to be unaware of the occasional coolness which
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