Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/172

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156
GREAT RUSSIA

ment and assumption that the Jews are a distinct race, one of the few pure races in history. To the Philosemite, they are a superior race. Beaconsfield, in a famous chapter of his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," extols the Jews as the aristocracy of mankind. On the other hand, by the Antisemite, the Jew is branded with irredeemable inferiority. According to Houston Stewart Chamberlain the Jews must ever be an inferior type, and especially are they morally inferior to the Aryan. They can never be assimilated. This idea, systematized in the famous thesis of Gobineau on the "Equality of the Races," has been reduced to absurdity in Chamberlain's striking work "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." The distinguished German Imperialist informs us that the Jews are pre-eminently a servile people, and he draws, amongst many other conclusions, the startling inference that Christ was not a Jew, but an Aryan.

I confess that I have little sympathy with this new fetish of race. It is true that, both through intermarriage and social segregation, the Jews retain certain physical Jewish characteristics, such as the aquiline nose. But mixed marriages with Christians have for generations