The Question
you will find us to you, the less you will dislike us. But this is futile (and unreliable) amiability. It is by no means even a general rule that the best-informed people are the least accessible to anti-Semitism, that the most backward countries are the most infected. Here is a cult, or at least a feeling, which sits with equal grace on the grossest of your peasantry and the most refined of your aristocracy. In the one case it is fortified by superstition, in the other case by all the information that "scientific" research into philosophy, history, ethnography and anthropology can accumulate. Not that, in my opinion, the aristocrat knows us better than the peasant, the scholar better than the boor. But even if you should understand us—and I offer you this toward that end—we would not find mutual tolerance any easier.
This book, therefore, cannot be presented as an effort to achieve an end which from the outset is declared impossible. I do not propose to combat anti-Semitism. I only wish to present what seems to me its true
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