m,
Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them.
The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully,
he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of
the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the
peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he
practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could
not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the
traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he
would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics
engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by
its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of
Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic
and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia,
by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that
carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt
through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the
racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found
inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great
price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its
activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually
of his alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him the
sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition
that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his
descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself
with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as
they spoke.

For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it
had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and
exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew
from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored,
insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life
of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his
gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public
life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of
Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its
terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt