It permitted him the
sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition
that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his
descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself
with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as
they spoke.
For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it
had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and
exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew
from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored,
insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life
of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his
gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public
life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of
Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its
terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt with
which it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those
very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently most
sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there
should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender
nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the
thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an
inferior sort; to inhibit any spiritual gesture that might arouse
hostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority
by convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed the
traits generally esteemed.
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