ir
part of the imperishability of the Jews as a race. That morbid
feeling of national decay and the imminent disappearance of the race,
which had preyed upon the minds of Jewish men in the past generation,
and which is reflected in the literature of that time, has been
everywhere displaced by one of confidence and hope. Desertion from
Judaism, to be sure, may sporadically make its appearance here and
there as a convenient escape from material disadvantages; indifference
towards it may likewise in some quarters still survive as a relic of
the past,--but these are rather unusual and isolated phenomena,
emphasizing all the more the universal fidelity and attachment to all
things Jewish.

The enthusiasm for Judaism, everywhere in a process of growth,
manifests itself in its early stages in study and self-cultivation; it
assumes a more concrete form, in its later stages, of some communal or
social activity; and if that development keeps on uninterruptedly it
finally consummates in Zionism. This development, it must be admitted,
is not a spontaneous and self-directive movement. In no small measure,
it is everywhere stimulated by the growing tendency on the part of
non-Jews in almost every country to appraise the Jew according to his
racial origin, an appraisal which results in a feeling not necessarily
hostile, but in most cases neutral and sometimes even favoring the
racial and cultural peculiarity, indestructible and impermiscible, of
the Jewish element. It is this external stimulus, rather than any
internal impulse, that is responsible for the unfolding of the
national spirit among Jewish students and the assertion of their
selfhood.

None the less, their self-assertion has nowhere reached the extreme of
spiritual alienation from their environment. There is nothing more
remarkable in the character of Jewish youth of the present day, even
among those who were born and raised in East European ghettos, than
the spiritual and intellectual snugness in which they find themselves,
in what should have been expected to remain to them a foreign
environment. The residual estrangement of the Jewish soul from
everything that is non-Jewish, which our forefathers in the past had
figuratively designated with what Jewish mysticism called the
"Captivity of the Shekinah," has totally disappeared. The individual
Jew of to-day, while sharing in the sublimated consciousness of the
race as a whole, does not in any conscious or subliminal way