hose
long lances for?" said the wife of a Jewish professor to a young man
in a cavalry regiment. "_Damit hetzen wir die Juden_," said he, with
the snarl of his kind; and he knew very well that the lady's husband
was a Jew. I have been told a story of a Jewish girl being asked to a
Court ball by the Emperor Frederick, and finding that none of the men
present would consent to dance with her. I have heard of girls who
wished to ask a Jewish schoolmate to a dance, and discovered that
their Christian friends flatly refused to meet anyone of her race. How
any Christians contrive to avoid it I do not understand, for wherever
you go in Germany some of the great scholars, doctors, men of science,
art, and literature, are men of Jewish blood. The press is almost
entirely in their hands, and when there is a scurrilous artist or a
coarse picture your friends explain it by saying that the tone of
that special paper is _juedisch_. The modern campaign against Jews
began nearly thirty years ago, when a Court chaplain called Stoecker
startled the world by the violence of his invective. But the fire he
stirred to flame must have been smouldering. He and his followers gave
the most ingenuous reasons for curtailing Jewish rights and privileges
in Germany, one of which was the provoking fact that Jewish boys did
more brilliantly at school than Christians. The subject bristles with
difficulties, and no one who knows the German Jew intimately will wish
to pose him as a persecuted saint. The Christian certainly makes it
unpleasant for him socially, but in one way or the other he holds his
own. I have seen him vexed and offended by some brutal slight, but his
keen sense of humour helps him over most stiles. So no doubt does his
sense of power. "They will not admit me to their clubs or ask my
daughters to their dances," said a Jewish friend, "but they come to me
for money for their charities." And I knew that half the starving poor
in the town came to his wife for charity, and that she never sent one
empty away.

When a very clever, sensitive, numerically small race has lived for
hundreds of years cheek by jowl with a dense brutal race that has
never ceased to insult and humiliate it, you cannot be surprised if
those clever but highly sensitive ones become imbued in course of time
with a painful undesirable conviction that the brutes are their
superiors. So you have the spectacle in Germany of Jews seeking
Christian society instead of avoiding