Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/690

 accomplished, so far as a certain number of the Jews were concerned, by the destruction of the temple. Such was the effect with those who cared little, any way, about this centralization. Thus the alienation of the Pauline Christians from Judaism was powerfully promoted by this event. For the Palestinian Jews, on the other hand, the breach between Judaism and the rest of the world was deepened. By this destruction of its symbol their national-religious exclusiveness was heightened to desperation. Thus the destruction of the group symbol works in two directions upon the persistence of the group: destructively where the integrating reciprocal action of the members is already weak, and constructively where these reciprocal influences are so strong in themselves that they can replace the lost tangible symbol by its spiritualized and idealized representation.

The significance of a material symbol for the persistence of a society is much heightened when the symbol, besides its suggestive use, is a real social possession in itself, that is, when the centralizing functions of the society depend upon it, or are facilitated by it, when the material interests of all the members of the group converge in this symbol. In this case it will be of peculiar importance for the maintenance of the group to secure this common possession against destruction, somewhat as is done in the case of the personal group center by the fiction that the king does not die. The most frequent means to this end is “the dead hand,” the provision that the property of corporations, which as such should be permanent, shall not be alienable. As the transitoriness of the individual is reflected in the destructibility of his property, so the indestructibility of the association is mirrored in its inalienable and non-assignable tenure of possessions. The proprietary qualifications of the ecclesiastical corporations especially resembled the of the lion, which every thing could enter, but from which nothing ever came out. For the church the eternity of her tenure was a symbol of the eternity of the principle in which her coherence was founded. The dead hand secured for such associations an impregnable defense and rallying point, an invaluable means of