Page:B20442294.djvu/352

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SEX AND CHARACTER

idea of Judaism consists in this want of reality, this absence of any fundamental relation to the thing-in-and-for-itself. He stands, so to speak, outside reality, without ever entering it. He can never make himself one with anything—never enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without zeal; he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is without simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. Internal multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the Aryan.

It might be urged that the Jewish double-mindedness is modern, and is the result of new knowledge struggling with the old orthodoxy. The education of the Jew, however, only accentuates his natural qualities, and the doubting Jew turns with a renewed zeal to money-making, in which only he can find his standard of value. A curious proof of the absence of simplicity in the mind of the Jew is that he seldom sings, not from bashfulness, but because he does not believe in his own singing. Just as the acuteness of Jews has nothing to do with true power of differentiating, so his shyness about singing or even about speaking in clear positive tones has nothing to do with real reserve. It is a kind of inverted pride; having no true sense of his own worth, he fears being made ridiculous by his singing or speech. The embarrassment of the Jew extends to things which have nothing to with the real ego.

It has been seen how difficult it is to define the Jew. He has neither severity nor tenderness. He is both tenacious and weak. He is neither king nor leader, slave nor vassal. He has no share in enthusiasm, and yet he has little equanimity. Nothing is self-evident to him, and yet he is astonished at nothing. He has no trace of Lohengrin in him, and none of Telramund. He is ridiculous as a member of a students' corps and he is equally ridiculous as a "philister." Because he believes in nothing, he takes refuge in materialism; from this arises his avarice, which is simply an attempt to convince himself that something has a permanent value. And yet he is no real tradesman; what