Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/16

You Gentiles longings on others. It should cease to exist, it should rid the world of its importunate presence.

Such would be my belief if I saw in ourselves only the replica, with the proper variations, of the rest of the world. But this is not my belief, for I see otherwise. Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divides all of you from us.

I am aware that this is a thesis which cannot be supported by diagrams, tables and logarithms. It cannot even be urged with the apparent half-compulsion of social and economic laws. The cogency of what I have to say does not depend on reference to obvious and ineluctable laws, natural processes acknowledged and accepted. I am also aware that the weight of what is called learned opin- 12