l histories of the
Jews and the nations of Europe have proceeded on widely diverging lines,
but these lines have more than once crossed each other and become
interlaced. Thus Aryan elements are at the beginning of both; European
morals have been ineradicably semitized by Christianity, and the Jews
have been Europeans for over a thousand years, during which their
character has been modified and in some respects transformed by the
ecclesiastical and civil polities of the nations among whom they have
made their permanent home. Anti-Semitism is then exclusively a question
of European politics, and its origin is to be found, not in the long
struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the
Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and medieval history, but in
the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of the Jews in the
middle of the 19th century.

If the emancipated Jews were Europeans in virtue of the antiquity of
their western settlements, and of the character impressed upon them by
the circumstances of their European history, they none the less
presented the appearance of a strange people to their Gentile
fellow-countrymen. They had been secluded in their ghettos for
centuries, and had consequently acquired a physical and moral
physiognomy differentiating them in a measure from their former
oppressors. This peculiar physiognomy was, on its moral side, not
essentially Jewish or even Semitic. It was an advanced development of
the main attributes of civilized life, to which Christendom in its
transition from feudalism had as yet only imperfectly adapted itself.
The ghetto, which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard
Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage
chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were
destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe.
In the ghetto, the pastoral Semite, who had been made a wanderer by the
destruction of his nationality, was steadily trained, through centuries,
to become an urban European, with all the parasitic activities of urban
economics, and all the democratic tendencies of occidental
industrialism. Excluded from the army, the land, the trade corporations
and the artisan gilds, this quondam oriental peasant was gradually
transformed into a commercial middleman and a practised dealer in money.
Oppressed by the Church, and persecuted by the State, his theocratic and
monarchic