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In the United States the Jews were present, till the last few years, in numbers even smaller in proportion to the population than their numbers in France, England and Italy, far smaller than their numbers in what was formerly the German Empire. In the agricultural part of America, which is still, I believe, one half of the population, the Jew was almost unknown. You find him here and there, as a lawyer or a storekeeper, but that world was not familiar with him any more than our English country-sides are familiar with him to-day. With the growth of the great industrial towns, of course, the Jew came, but he was still no "feature in the landscape." There was a certain social prejudice against him among the wealthier classes in the East, and—this is very important—the truth was always told about him. There was in America no convention—the Jew was always recognized as a Jew and there was never any of the nonsense we had over here of pretending that he was something else.
Of that phenomenon of which the history of Europe is full, which is so marked in the eastern counties to-day and which is beginning to rise in the West, there is nothing traceable in the early and middle nineteenth century, nor even till the close of it, in the United States.
Then came the change. It is a change which has taken place in the lifetime of men much younger than myself. It is a change, I am told, most marked since I last visited the United States more than twenty years ago. A regular and organized Jewish emigration began to pour in, especially from the Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms probably a third of the population; it created Ghettoes in most of the large Northern industrial towns, and all the phenomena we associate in