Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/206

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You Gentiles

ers, attribute their discomfort, falsely, to those Jews who are most obviously Jewish. For the gentilizing Jew is reluctant to admit that his very gentilization accentuates his Jewishness to you. His only recourse to save the last remnant of his self-respect is to blame the unassimilating Jew: in eager self-vindication he points at the object-lesson of the sufferings of orthodox and national Jewries and associates his own severer sufferings with the same cause. He deliberately ignores the fact that the cradle of the newer anti-Semitism is the country which witnessed the first efforts of the Jew to make a high ideal of assimilation. Germany, which in the nineteenth century offered the classic example of Jewish assimilation, both internal (in adaptation of our own life) and external (in baptism and inter-marriage) also became the country of classic anti-Semitism. Terrified at the infiltration of Jewish blood, the German gentile recast his formulae of Jew-hatred in such wise as to arrest the process.

When we examine the mechanism of disso-

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