Page:George Eliot and Judaism.djvu/19

 when he says that we must go many thousand miles indeed to see one Jew, too many of them in the world though there be. This dulness is not universal, however; and a gush of devotion, a feeling of meditative surprise, occasionally comes over an unbiassed mind when it succeeds in vividly realising the fact that the Jewish race still exists, and when it reflects what a vast output of heroic strength and joyous martyrdom must have gone before in order to render that fact a possibility.

It is more, however, by the question of the future of the Jews than by the enigma of their marvellous preservation that public reflection is demanded. Is the end and result of their glorious history to be their fusion and disappearance among the nations of the earth? Why then all this loving care? why these grievous chains? why these streams of blood and tears? Is this despised minority, from whose