e found who volunteered to give him
instruction. None of them was a teacher by profession. One was a
newspaper man; another was a chemist; the third, I believe, was a
tradesman; all were educated men. And throughout five long years these
three men took from their leisure the time necessary to give a
stranger an education.

The three men of Bialystok realized that education was not a thing of
one's own to do with as one pleases--not a personal privilege to be
merely enjoyed by the possessor--but a precious treasure transmitted
upon a sacred trust to be held, used and enjoyed, and if possible
strengthened--then passed on to others upon the same trust. Yet the
treasure which these three men held and the boy received in trust was
much more than an education. It included that combination of qualities
which enabled and impelled these three men to give and the boy to seek
and to acquire an education. These qualities embrace: first,
_intellectual capacity_; second, _an appreciation of the value of
education_; third, _indomitable will_; fourth, _capacity for hard
work_. It was these qualities which enabled the lad not only to
acquire but to so utilize an education that, coming to America,
ignorant of our language and of our institutions, he attained in
comparatively few years the important office he has so honorably
filled.

Now whence comes this combination of qualities of mind, body and
character? These are qualities with which every one is familiar,
singly and in combination; which you find in friends and relatives,
and which others doubtless discover in you. They are qualities
possessed by most Jews who have attained distinction or other success;
and in combination they may properly be called Jewish qualities. For
they have not come to us by accident; they were developed by three
thousand years of civilization, and nearly two thousand years of
persecution; developed through our religion and spiritual life;
through our traditions; and through the social and political
conditions under which our ancestors lived. They are, in short, the
product of Jewish life.

_The Fruit of Three Thousand Years of Civilization_

OUR intellectual capacity was developed by the almost continuous
training of the mind throughout twenty-five centuries. The Torah led
the "People of the Book" to intellectual pursuits at times when most
of the Aryan peoples were illiterate. And religion imposed the use of
the mind upon the Jews, indirectly as we