is merely an episode. If you take it, you
will thenceforth be addressed as "Herr Doktor"; if you do not take it,
you will keep on printing on your visiting card "Kandidat Philosophie"
all the rest of your lifetime, and be addressed by the uninitiate as
"Herr Doktor" just the same. Thus the achievements generally ascribed
to Jewish students' organizations in Germany are in reality the
collective work of all the Jewish men of academic training, and not
necessarily of students actually engaged in university studies. Read
over the names of contributors to publications issued by what are
known as "student organizations," and you will notice how loosely that
term is used.

_Intellectual Problems of the German Jewish Youth_

THE Jewish university men in Germany, whom we commonly call Jewish
students, take more interest in Jewish life than do our university men
in this country. This is chiefly due to the peculiar position of the
modern Jews in Germany. German Jewry, by the total disappearance of
its laboring class during recent times, has ceased to be a people by
itself and has become a part of the middle class of the general German
population. Among the native Jews of Germany, if Berlin is to be
taken as a typical example of Jewish communities in large cities,
there is no organic social body, complete in itself, consisting of
various classes, following all imaginable trades, ranging from the
chimney-sweep and the cobbler to the merchant prince. Such
communities, forming organic wholes in themselves, you may find in
Russia, Galicia, Roumania, and in the newer Jewish settlements of
England and America. You do not find them in Germany. Higher up in the
social scale, Jews are represented everywhere, but lower down you
cannot find any native Jew below a shop clerk or master tailor. Being
thus interspersed among the middle class of the general population,
that part of the population which more than any other sends its
children to universities, the number of academically trained men
engaged in liberal professions among the German Jews is exceedingly
large. These professional Jews encounter greater difficulties in their
careers than those engaged in commerce. While the latter are given
free range for the development of the native Jewish talents, the
former find their road toward recognition blockaded. Consequently they
are hurled back upon their Judaism, and their energies not finding
vent elsewhere turn into Jewish channels.

T