number of students are
admitted to the universities and to the technical schools. But more
than a hundred thousand common soldiers are drafted from the Jews
into the armies and sent to all parts of the gigantic empire, kept
there during the best part of their lives, without any prospect of
promotion, and often going only to die in the defense of territories
which, if they were civilians, they would not be permitted to enter.
The Russian Torquemada, not long ago, openly declared that not a
single Jew should be permitted to settle amongst the peasantry, even
within the Pale, because he would be the only sober man amongst a
population that cannot resist the temptations of strong drink. Strange
spectacle indeed! Men banished from places where they wish to live
because they are too good for their surroundings! forced to remain
where they can hardly eke out a miserable living. The question,
surely, is justified. How did that poverty-stricken mass of oppressed
people succeed in preserving its freedom from a national vice in a
country where its ancestors have dwelt for long generations? Can a
great virtue be maintained by sorcery? The common experience is that
of the poet--

"Misery doth bravest mind abate."

What but their religion made them proof against the arrows of a fate
which, for duration and cruelty, is without a parallel in history!
This conclusion is further corroborated by the fact that the same
virtue of sobriety characterizes them everywhere, and makes them an
object of envy to their non-Jewish neighbors,--nay, forces the honest
temperance advocate to hold them up before his Christian audiences as
examples to shame them into going and doing likewise; rather, let me
say, into staying at home and doing likewise. For one of the
witchcraft mysteries of Judaism is that its home is not in the church,
but that the church is in the home. The Jew's salvation is in nowise
dependent upon rabbi and synagogue, but upon wife and children. They
are his congregation to whom he ministers as priest in fulfilment of
the great charter word of dedication, "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom
of priests and a holy nation." The deepest roots of the Jewish faith
rest and are nourished in the domestic soil. The synagogue has nothing
to offer to the faithful which he cannot find in his own tent. Ten men
gathered together with a Sepher Tora (scroll of the Mosaic law) in
their midst, form a Kahal Hakodesh (sacred body). No man becomes a
dr