the Indian student who, after an English university-training in Locke and Mill, acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and Western faiths alike and must himself be crushed under the ruins of both. Since the Napoleonic era the old-civilized Consensus has mingled unwelcome with the new-civilized Western "society" of the cities and has taken their economic and scientific methods into use with the cool superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese, also a very old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success. Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear-guard of the Babylonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the Classical Culture was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by surrendering to Late Hellenism[1] — petrified in an end-state in all that concerned religion and art, but far superior to the Greeks and Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.
To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing — not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (vis-à-vis the American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny of Jewry — at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is another problem) — will be accomplished.
Islam has soil under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself.[2] The relic of the Byzantine nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their own land. The relic of the Parsees in India dwells in the midst of the stiffened forms of a yet older and more fellahized Civilization and is thereby secured in its footing. But the West-European-American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghetto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not in the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.
