Status Updates From مختصر دراسة للتاريخ، الجزء ...

To be a Jew is to be a human being whose social environment is Jewry. It is essential for the Jew's individuality that he is an heir to the ancient Jewish tradition. He cannot cut off his Jewishness and cast it from him without self-mutilation; and thus, for the Jew, an emancipation-assimilation contract with a Gentile nation has the same kind of consequence as the legal instrument which turns freeman into slave.

The local responses to the maritime challenge from Scandinavia which were made by the Western Christian Society on the Atlantic slope of the European Continent and in the British Archipelago were literally the making of France and England as we know them today. These responses not only brought the two kingdoms into existence but determined their centers of gravity and assigned them their historic capitals.

Western observers see that the primitive will not and cannot ever join them in running the race of civilization so long as an easy environment continues to shield him from necessity; and they see that they themselves, if they succumb to this insidious state of lethargy and easy circumstances, will cease to run with patience the race that is set before them.

Only an energy as intense as the energy which the breaking-in of New England had called into play could have been sufficient for the Herculean labour of breaking-in a whole continent. The portent of this village in Connecticut, deserted today, explained the miracle of those great cities in Ohio and Illinois and Colorado and California which had sprung into existence overnight.