I should rather ascribe it to the fact that
European art in its best period was mainly devoted to depicting
Christian subjects for Christian churches. At all events several
considerable Jewish names may be cited in contemporary art, and the
Dutch painter who bears the name of Israels is perhaps the greatest
living master of the pathetic in painting. In Western Europe, wherever
public life has been opened to them, Jews have thrown themselves into
almost all the great movements of their time and have distinguished
themselves in nearly all. Cremieux, who was a leading figure in the
French Republic of 1848, was a Jew both by birth and by creed. David
Manin and Leon Gambetta had Jewish blood in their veins. Lassalle and
Marx, the chief names in German socialism, as well as great numbers of
their followers belong to the same race, and more than one English
example of political eminence will occur to the reader. In both German
and Dutch literature Jewish names are frequent and they are nearly
everywhere prominent in journalism. In the army they have been much
less distinguished. Many Jews no doubt serve in the great continental
armies with honour, but the Jew is naturally a pacific being, hating
violence and recoiling with a peculiar horror from blood. The
beneficence of the Jew was for a long time very naturally confined to
his own race, but since the hand of persecution has been withdrawn,
and wherever the Jews have been suffered to mingle freely with the
Christian population, it has taken a wider range and Jewish names are
conspicuous in some of the best forms of unsectarian philanthropy.

It is the evident tendency of modern political life to split up into a
number of distinct groups representing distinct interests or forms of
thought. We find a Catholic party, a Nonconformist party, a Labour
party, a Socialist party, a Temperance party, and many others. But in
spite of the crusade that has arisen in so many countries against the
Jews, we nowhere find a distinct and clearly defined Jewish party. The
tendency of the race is rather to throw themselves ardently into
existing movements, and their power of assimilation is one of their
most remarkable gifts. As M. Leroy-Beaulieu shows by many
illustrations, they are apt in most Western nations even to exaggerate
the national characteristics, though they usually combine with them a
certain flexibility of adaptation and a certain cosmopolitanism of
view which is essentially their