Even to-day, in spite of a vast increase during our own generation, both in the public appreciation of the problem and in its immediate gravity, there are very many men who still regard absorption as the natural end of the affair. These, though dwindling, are still numerous upon the non-Jewish side; upon the other, the Jewish side, they are, I think, a very small body. For I note that even those Jews who think absorption will come, admit it with regret, and certainly the vast majority would insist with pride upon the certain survival of Israel.
But here again I maintain that we have the index of history against us. In point of fact absorption has not taken place. It has had a better chance than any corresponding case can show: ample time in which to work, wide dispersion, constant intermarriage, long periods of tolerant friendship for the Jew, and even at times his ascendancy. If ever there were conditions under which one might imagine that the larger body would absorb the smaller, they were those of Christendom acting intimately for centuries, in relation with Jewry. Nation after nation has absorbed larger, intensely hostile minorities: the Irish, their successive invaders; the British, the pirates of the fifth and eighth centuries and the French of three centuries more; the northern Gauls, their auxiliaries; the Italians, the Lombards; the Greeks, the Slav; the Dacian has absorbed even the Mongol: but the Jew has remained intact.
However we explain this—mystically or in whatever other fashion—we cannot deny its truth. It is true of the Jews, and of the Jews alone, that they alone have maintained, whether through the special action of Providence or through some general biological or social law of which we are ignorant, an unfailing entity and an equally unfailing differentiation between themselves and the society through which they ceaselessly move.
It is not true that conditions in the past differed from present conditions sufficiently to account for so strange a story. There have been generations and even centuries (not co-incident indeed throughout the world, but