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For, despite all the endeavors of the Society to adapt itself to the official point of view, it was regarded with suspicion by the powers that be, having been included by the informer Brafman among the constituent organizations of the dreadful and mysterious "Jewish Kahal." The Russian assimilators, now branded as separatists, found themselves in a tragic conflict.
The Latin-speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the other hand, have proved to be the most successful assimilators of other races that mankind has ever known. Alexandre Dumas is not the least of the glories of France. In a hundred years' time black Africa, west of Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I believe, talk French.
This disillusionment found its early expression in the lamentations of repentant assimilators.
There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own.
It is true that it presented a view of the nature of religion not very different from that held by Buddhism in many respects, yet in others there was a marked divergence, as for instance, in the doctrine of God, of individual sin, and of the nature and method of salvation. The Japanese have thus shown themselves ready assimilators of all these diverse systems of religious expression.
Repelled by this spectacle, Smolenskin decided from the very beginning to fight on two fronts: against the fanatics of orthodoxy in the name of European progress, and against the champions of assimilation in the name of national Jewish culture, and more particularly of the Hebrew language. "You say," Smolenskin exclaims, addressing himself to the assimilators, "let us be like the other nations.
One of these assimilators, writing in the first months of the pogroms, makes the following confession: The cultured Jewish classes have turned their back upon their history, have forgotten their traditions, and have conceived a contempt for everything which might make them realize that they are the members of the "eternal people."
With no definite ideals, dragging their Judaism behind them as a fugitive galley-slave drags his heavy chain, how could these men justify their belonging to the tribe of "Christ-killers" and "exploiters"?... Truly pitiful has become the position of these assimilators, who but yesterday were the champions of national self-effacement. Life demands self-determination.
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