ter persecuted the Jews not primarily because they
disliked the Jews, but because the Jews were a political danger in
their refusal to worship the representative of the State in the shape
of the Emperor. But in the development of civilization, religion
became detached from the totality of civilized living. In the
progressive division of labor religion became specialized. The
priestly group learned to confine itself more and more to the "things
of the spirit"--cult, ritual, dogma, while the other elements in
civilization loomed larger and larger. Religion remained social, but
society was no longer religious. Life was secularized. I think that
the representatives of the Reform sect, in one of their conferences,
declared that America is not a Christian country. In so doing they
acknowledged this fact.

_Continuity of the Jewish Spirit_

Throughout the history of the Jewish people, there is a continuity of
spirit which is very different from the continuity of form that
attends both the secular and the religious developments of Jewish
life. This is the same in both these aspects of Jewish life--in the
secular Jewish poetry and thought of the middle ages and up to the
present day. Even a Bergson, ostensibly a Frenchman, expresses in his
philosophy what is essentially the Hebraic conception of the nature of
reality and the destiny of man. From Amos through Job, through the
philosophers of the middle ages, to Ahad Ha-'Am there is a clear and
accountable continuity. Finally, there is the development of the whole
of the secular life of modern Jewry, in Yiddish and in Hebrew. Yiddish
may be unpleasant, but Yiddish is no less the speech of the Jews than
English, no less the speech of the Jews than Aramaic, and Arabic and
Ladino, and all of these have acquired literary and qualitative
characteristics which are identical as expressions of the spirit of
the Jew, of the Hebraic spirit.

This may be seen generally in the case of Yiddish alone. Yiddish, as
you know, is a German dialect; it is middle high German in its base,
and German is an inflected language; its rhythms are essentially long,
periodic, indeterminate, radically different from the rhythms of
Hebrew, involving a different kind of co-ordination and mode. But
compare Yiddish with German, and you find quite an antagonistic
literary quality. Yiddish reads like the Psalms, and the Bible, and
the Talmud; it doesn't read like German until it is Germanized. The
whole genius