Page:The International Jew - Volume 1.djvu/47

 IV.

HE chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter. There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word “Jew,” or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper. Polite evasions like “Hebrew” and “Semite,” both of which are subject to the criticism of inaccuracy, are timidly essayed, and people pick their way gingerly as if the whole subject were forbidden, until some courageous Jewish thinker comes straight out with the good old word “Jew,” and then the constraint is relieved and the air cleared. The word “Jew” is not an epithet; it is a name, ancient and honorable, with significance for every period of human history, past, present and to come.

There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it in the hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence. Their heritage of tolerance has something to do with their attitude, but perhaps their instinctive sense of the difficulty involved has more to do with it. The principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature, music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult place has been rather neatly negotiated. But nothing is changed thereby. The Jew is not changed. The Gentile is not changed. The Jew still remains the enigma of the world.

Gentile sensitiveness on this point is best expressed by the desire for silence—“Why discuss it at all?” is the attitude. Such an attitude is itself a proof that there is a problem which we would evade if we could.