megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split into castes — the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto — and a coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an undeviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for all Magian nations have been in this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses exactly the same business-power as the Jews in the European- American world and the Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger milieu — witness the Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in East Africa; and that of the Romans in the Early Arabian World. In the last instance, indeed, the conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for the "Jews" of those days were the Romans, and the Armæan felt for them an apocalyptic hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semitism. The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated population of Asia Minor, was a veritable pogrom.
Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which passed from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture itself caught up with the Civilization and the "difference of age," expressed in the way of life and the increasing primacy of intelligence, became smaller. But all this has nothing to do with the silly catchwords "Aryan" and "Semite" that have been borrowed from philology. The "Aryan" Persians and Armenians are in our eyes entirely indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe and the Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation of the Arabian Culture, the result of an immense mission, and up to well within the Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions and secessions en masse.[1] One part of Eastern Jewry conforms in bodily respects to the Christian inhabitants of the Caucasus, another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large portion of Western Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in the West more than any other distinction is the difference between the race-ideal of the Gothic springtime,[2] which has bred its human type, and that of the Sephardic Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West and was likewise the product of a particular spiritual breeding and training under exceedingly hard external conditions — to which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of the land and people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this part of the nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being "different" is the more potent on both sides, the more breed the individual possesses. It is want of race,
