The Masses
who supply the material for the reactions. And when we Jews want to become part of your world, enjoy its privileges and pleasures, we must accept your standards, speak, as it were, the same language. But just as a word can never mean quite the same thing to two persons, so a common expression does not mean the same emotion.
The fact is that as long as Jews retain their identity there is the same tension between your middle classes and ours as between your genius and ours. Our middle classes, even when thoroughly modernized, retain a certain individuality which is repugnant to you. And though, if forced to a yes-or-no answer to the question above enunciated, I should have to answer: "Yes, there is a difference, difficult to describe, but felt and resented none the less."
Our modernized Jews have done their best to take up your life and become part of it, but despite outward appearances they have failed. There is, first of all, too eager and intense a desire to be gentile. What you do
179
