Now the reasons which bring me to reject this theory are two-fold.
In the first place, I think it exaggerates the contrast between the past and the present. In the second place, I know that in the actual world before me and precisely under those conditions where the fusion, the action of the "melting-pot," ought to be most complete, the most violent reaction against absorption is to be observed.
As to the contrast between the past and the present, I think it is based upon an imperfect apprehension of what our past has been. It comes of that "telescoping up" of history to which I alluded in another connection in my second chapter.
The long story of our race between the Roman occupation of Judæa and the modern local and ephemeral industrial phase of the great modern towns is not divided into two chapters, the strange past and the comprehensible present. It is much of a muchness. The constant developments which astonish us to-day in physical science, for instance, are not more remarkable than the vast new developments in architecture and philosophy which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The disturbance of thought which may be called "modern scepticism" is not anything like so important a spiritual change as that tremendous revolution which we call the conversion of the Roman Empire. The area of scepticism is not larger to-day than it has been in many special periods of the past. The feeling of strong religious emotion which forbids this or that action is still present among us, sometimes attached to its older objects, sometimes (as in the craze for prohibition) to some novel object. The indifference which you will find to the particular religious barrier between Jew and non-Jew is not peculiar to our times. It has come and gone in the past; after a wave of such indifference you have had a wave of the most acute reaction, and I think you are observing a wave of such reaction to-day.
Nor do I see how the rapidity of mere physical communications affects the matter, nor even how the volume of emigration affects the matter. You can get a million Jews from Lithuania to New York--a distance of 5,000 miles--in less time than you could get a million Jews from the Valley of the Rhine into Poland some centuries ago; but the million Jews seem to remain Jews just the same under modern conditions as they did in the past. Indeed, the toleration of Jews, the friendly reception of them, and therefore the opportunities for their absorption were indefinitely greater in mediaeval Poland than they are in modern America. It seems to me that the whole of this part of the argument is based upon that prevalent view of history which comes from reading our little modern text-books: and our little modern text-books are very rubbishy. It is a view which comes from that absurd emphasis upon whatever is contemporary. The modern advance of physical science is regarded as having totally changed the world inwardly as well as outwardly. We have only to look at the modern world and to compare it with any _two_ distant, special periods we know, to discover that the difference between any pair of these three is equally striking. In many ways the modern world is much more like the world of the Antonines than it is like the world of Innocent the Great. In many ways the world of Innocent the Great is much more like the Roman Empire than the modern world. In many ways the world of Innocent the Great and our world have more in common than either has with the pagan Roman Empire. The general lesson is, therefore, that our time, with all its remarkable specialities, is but one specimen out of a great number equally individual, and certainly there is nothing in it either of religious scepticism breaking down old religious barriers or of rapidity of communication, or of any other fundamental factor, which specially suggests the absorption of the Jew.