Page:B20442294.djvu/337

Rh the Jewish character is a modern modification with the history of the foundation of the race, given in the Old Testament without any disapprobation of how the patriarch Jacob deceived his dying father, cheated his brother Esau and over-reached his father-in-law, Laban?

The defenders of the Jew have rightly acquitted him of any tendency to heinous crimes, and the legal statistics of different countries confirm this. The Jew is not really anti-moral. But, none the less, he does not represent the highest ethical type. He is rather non-moral, neither very good nor very bad, with nothing in him of either the angel or the devil. Notwithstanding the Book of Job and the story of Eden, it is plain that the conceptions of a Supreme Good and a Supreme Evil are not truly Jewish; I have no wish to enter upon the lengthy and controversial topics of Biblical criticism, but at the least I shall be on sure ground when I say that these conceptions play the least significant part in modern Jewish life. Orthodox or unorthodox, the modern Jew does not concern himself with God and the Devil, with Heaven and Hell. If he does not reach the heights of the Aryan, he is also less inclined to commit murder or other crimes of violence.

So also in the case of the woman; it is easier for her defenders to point to the infrequency of her commission of serious crimes than to prove her intrinsic morality. The homology of Jew and woman becomes closer the further examination goes. There is no female devil, and no female angel; only love, with its blind aversion from actuality, sees in woman a heavenly nature, and only hate sees in her a prodigy of wickedness. Greatness is absent from the nature of the woman and the Jew, the greatness of morality, or the greatness of evil. In the Aryan man, the good and bad principles of Kant's religious philosophy are ever prosent, ever in strife. In the Jew and the woman, good and evil are not distinct from one another.

Jews, then, do not live as free, self-governing individuals, choosing between virtue and vice in the Aryan fashion. They are a mere collection of similar individuals each cast