o destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with the
new condition brought by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurably
his inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed, survives and multiplies,
exactly because he has been driven by his smaller structure and lesser
physical force to develop those social instincts and those forms of
intelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of life and
valuable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities may be
traced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has been
one long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physically
powerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks under
the lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile among
the willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen hundred years, has been
trampled, tortured, and despised beneath the feet of the more physically
powerful and pugilistic, but not more vital, keen, intelligent, or
persistent races of Europe; has, today, by the slow turning of the
wheel of life, come uppermost. The Egyptian task-master and warrior
have passed; what the Babylonian was we know no more, save for a few mud
tablets and rock inscriptions recording the martial victories; but the
once captive Jew we see today in every city and every street; until at
last, the descendants of those men who spat when they spoke his
name, and forcibly drew his teeth to extract his money from him, wait
patiently behind each other for admission to his offices and palaces;
while nobles solicit his daughters in marriage and kings are proud to be
summoned to his table in hope of golden crumbs, and great questions
of peace and war are often held balanced in the hand of one little
asthmatic Jew. After long ages of disgrace and pariahism, the time has
come, whether for good or for evil, when just those qualities which the
Jew possesses and which subtilely distinguish him from others, are in
demand; while those he has not are sinking into disuse; exactly that
domination of the reflective faculties over the combative, which once
made him slave, also saved him from becoming extinct in wars; and the
intellectual quickness, the far-sighted keenness, the persistent mental
activity and self-control, which could not in those ages save him from
degradation or compensate for his lack of bone and muscle and combative
instinct, are the very qualities the modern world demands and crowns.
The day of Goli