Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/203

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The Mechanism of Dissolution

Jew-less world is charming indeed, but who will enjoy the actuality? Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And who will have to pay the price of the first embarrassing contact, the first difficult intimacy, Jewish sons-and daughters-in-law, Jewish fathers and mothers-in-law? You yourselves. The prospect is too distant, too hypothetical, to exert any influence. It is much too much like the promise of heaven and the threat of hell.

I have alluded more than once to the fact that Westernization of the Jew is nowhere a guarantee against anti-Semitism. Indeed, conscious modern anti-Semitism, the formulated fear of the Jew as the racial bearer of alien and dangerous ideas, is the result of Westernization. Far from encouraging or tolerating our inter-marriage with you, you do not even relish the results of our Westernization or gentilization. It is an amazing and terrifying paradox: you would like us to be absorbed, but you shrink from the process. The inoculation is painful, even revolting. You are uneasy and unhappy when we swarm

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