Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/24

You Gentiles der line is not clear. Not all of us Jews are representative of the Jewish life-force: not all of you gentiles are altogether alien to it.

We have lived for many centuries in close contiguity, if not in intimacy. Our prophetic books, our most characteristic influence, have been read to you for many hundreds of years. Something in these books has developed here and there, among you, a latent individual impulse to our Jewish way of life and thought. Essentially our prophetic books cannot change your gentile nature: but in stray, predestined hearts they bring forth fruit. Your outlook on life, your dominant reactions, are the same to-day as they were two thousand years ago. All that has changed is the instrument of expression. You live the same life under different faiths. But something clings to you here and there resembling the original form of the faith we gave you. Here and there our somber earnestness breaks out on the dazzling kaleidoscope of your history.

And we, for all our segregation have caught, 20