Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and
indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist,--in medieval Christendom,
never. The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish
zeal than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible for
plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to
indiscriminate massacre. The Jew lived on through it all,--lived,
multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew.
Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast
and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror
and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine
unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to
define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought,
without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended,
all human advance is impossible? Is it exaggerating the importance of
the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that,
but for his presence, "scattered and peeled," among all nations, the
Europe we now know could not have been? And this indestructible
nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account--has
it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past?
There seems an impression that the Jew is being absorbed by other races.
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