You Gentiles
we are unique. If there is anything in what I have said, the cleft between you, Americans and Italians, Frenchmen and Germans, is but a wide jump as compared with the chasm between us and any one of you. What is true of the gentile foreigner in this regard is ten times true of us.
For our very record testifies against us. The older the past from which we attempt to flee, the closer it pursues us. To you, who share with us the human attribute of pride of ancestry, it seems incredible that, having retained our identity for a hundred generations, we should abandon it in one. It is suspicious —and odious. For you suspect (rightly) that in this tenacity of identity, which has outlived so many nations and civilizations, there is im- plied a kernel of individuality which is as singular in its nature as in its history.
Among yourselves assimilation is problem enough. The birth and death of nations is attended by wars, pains, humiliations. But
what you have done a dozen times over in
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