The Jewish Student in Our Universities
A Menorah Prize Essay
By Morris J. Escoll
Morris J. Escoll (born in Russia, 1893, came to America in 1896), graduate of Stuyvesant High School, New York (1910), student at Columbia (1910-'12) where he won the Peithologian Medal for a Freshman Essay; worked as farm hand; and since 1914 a student in the Cornell College of Agriculture. The present paper is a somewhat revised version of the Essay with which he won the Cornell Menorah Prize last June.
The remarkable adaptability of the Jew to his environment has been at once his strength and his weakness. His strength, in that it provided a variable cloak to shelter him in storm on the one hand,—on the other, to deck him seasonably, as it were, for the onward journey, when days were fair; his weakness, in that it has often led him to forget that the cloak was but raiment;—"and is not the body more than raiment?" Of strength in storm we have had example enough for twenty centuries—such example as is unique in history; of what is more rare, strength in days of fair weather, we are to expect a supreme example today, and in America, in the American Universities let us say, where the cloak of adaptability is most free and seasonable—a supreme example of strength, or of weakness.
The Cloak of Adaptability
One is at first reluctant to single out the Jew from his fellows at college. He seems in no manner different from them. He studies with them, eats with them, plays ball with them. He writes editorials for the college paper; he competes in the oratorical contests. One, for example, is a member of the school orchestra; another, perhaps the son or the grandson of an immigrant from Germany, leads the cheers at the track meet; another, himself an immigrant from Russia, plays on the chess team and is one of the brilliant scholars in his class. This last does, at present, have something of the stranger about him, but before long, no doubt, his speech will have become more smooth, his trousers will have begun to show a crease; he will have become quite an interesting and regular figure at the various reform and ethical club meetings at the university, and he will begin to be seen quite[218] frequently in the company of his gentile classmates—even in the company of his German-Jewish cousin. Wonderful, indeed, the country that can so readily attire its adopted children, and, as the saying goes, make them feel at home; wonderful, perhaps, the race that, through centuries of degradation, has kept alive, though often latent indeed, the potentialities of equal partnership with the most enlightened peoples of a twentieth century civilization.
What though it has no long past, America is the great land of the future. Here let the Jew lay aside his burden of the time that has gone and build anew into the time to come. Shall we regret, then, that the Jewish student has taken on the polite address, the proud carriage, the heartiness and the chuckle of his Yankee comrade? Should he now keep the gabardine of his forefathers, yes, and the credulities and ceremonies of a circumscribed and persecuted people? Why not absorb that wholesome ruddiness, denied him so long, that breathes of open American prairies, fair play, and the Declaration of Independence?
"The Goal of Twenty Centuries of Wandering"
"Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head." Of whom did the great prophet speak more fittingly than of the children of his own race? Homeless for two thousand years, persecuted, ostracized, their backs have become bent and in the eyes of many they have become a nation of religious fanatics and usurers, wily, unkempt. The Jewish youth of to-day cannot look back upon his history of exile and say, as did Æneas of old after seven long years of wandering: "It will be pleasant to remember"—"forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit"; his trials have been but too real and he has not recovered sufficiently to have any desire to recall them. Blame him not then, if, when others from obscure and semi-civilized quarters of the globe hail with pride their ancestry, he alone, with the proudest traditions in history, will sometimes seek to hide his descent. He still feels, moreover, some of the old "wiliness" and "unkemptness" within himself; he thinks they are of the Jews and of none others—and he wants to get rid of them. He still feels some of the old usury in his bones, the clannishness, the distrust of the world, which the squalid ghetto walls the Middle Ages had built around his fathers have bequeathed to him, and he wants to get rid of those. Shall we look askance at him then, if when the American University welcomes him to her hearth—Ithaca, for example, with her kindly professors and laughing girl students, her ball games, her neat cottages and rolling hills that drink Cayuga's stream beside—in the excess of eagerness he should sometimes break with, yes, even forget his past, and dream new things? (Hills, cottages, home and country; superfluous concepts were[219] these to other men, elementary satisfactions which they are born into and take for granted as their inevitable heritage.) Eagerly, therefore, greedily, perhaps, he sees new things; the goal of twenty centuries of wandering stands revealed before him. The Irish have found a home in America, the Germans, the Italians, the Poles, and why not the neediest of all, the Jews? The American University typifies the ideals of the great democracy where "race, creed and previous conditions" are forgotten. Here all men forget their prejudices. All men become brothers.
But Not Yet Are All Men Brothers
But hold, have we not been expressing a wish rather than a fact? We look into our own hearts, and strife and jealousy and racial antagonism are still there. Can we expect that man who has but lately begun to think of brotherhood can already feel it in his blood; that the age-long superstition against the Jew can be obliterated with a new geographical boundary—though that boundary be indeed serene as the all-washing, all-embracing Atlantic? Oh, that "reality does not correspond to our conceptions," exclaims Wilhelm Meister.
For centuries the Jews had a respected and comfortable home in Spain, but then came the fearful Inquisition, and the ninth day of Ab 1492 saw 300,000 of them exiled out of the country they had helped grow to culture and wealth. There was the Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution, but then came the Dreyfus affair a century later. There was science and enlightenment in United Germany, but never was anti-Semitism more pronounced, more scientific than there between 1875 and '80. In 1881 the May Laws were passed in Russia. In 1882 there was a ritual murder trial in Hungary. Our statutes and sciences, after all, are but ways and means, improved ways and means, to what?—often to unimproved ends, it seems. Our learning and knowledge are what?—but channels to educate, to lead out (e-duco) the noble qualities in man? yes; perhaps also his jealousies and hatreds. And thus there comes a time of doubt. The courtesies and learning of this university life, reflects the Jewish student, perhaps but cover up these jealousies and hatreds, make them more polite, and all the more painful therefore. However much he will not, he sees cliques and denominational clubs all about him: Catholic clubs, Lutheran clubs, Jewish clubs; in the lecture room the gentiles form their groups and the Jews form theirs; in the election of class officers the Jews have been slighted; at the class dinner a Jew was insulted; one fellow was refused accommodations at a student rooming-house because he was a Jew; and the sensitive young man begins to feel as though there were but two divisions of people at the University after all: Jews and everybody else.[220]
The Perennial Burden of the Jew
But it is unfair and ungrateful to speak thus of the American University. All superstition and prejudice may not have disappeared here; enough it is that they tend to disappear so rapidly. But what of the large country outside the university? What of the growing Jewries in our cities? What of the Jew in the little hamlet carrying his pack of tinware from door to door; he is so eager to earn an honest dollar for a wife, a daughter, perhaps for a son at college; so eager to find him a home like that of the earlier non-Jewish immigrants who buy his wares; yet why must he overstrain his virtues before them, break through the ice, as the saying goes, and clear himself—why? for being a Jew. Evidently, others are taken as good until they prove themselves bad; the Jew is bad until he proves himself good. Should some other Jewish trader come to the same locality and commit some wrong, overcharge a shilling on the price of a kettle, for example, the first Jew must be made to feel ashamed of it, for it was not the other man who did the wrong, but the "Jew in him." Evidently, again, the Jewish problem is not of the individual, but of the race. Must the Wandering Jew bear a perennial burden?
But even if this problem were solved (it is possible for all the Jews in America to be in time regarded on equal terms with their neighbors or even to be assimilated altogether with them), what of the Jews in Russia, in Roumania, in Galicia? How long must we wait for them to assimilate or to become free and equal sons of a fatherland? Surely we shall not suggest that it is well for them to continue forever an alien people in those lands. And even if this problem too were solved, if the Jews of Russia, Roumania, and Galicia were to become free and equal sons of a fatherland, if the Jews all over the world were to be taken in as brothers by their neighbors, is it enough? Are we to be satisfied with this alone? "Hills, cottages, home and country"—is not all this but raiment? What of the body, what of the Jewish soul?
The Three Types of Jewish Students: (1) The "No-Jew"
With his problems thus put, how shall the Jewish youth face them? Shall he consider body and raiment equally, shall he put body above raiment, or shall he put raiment above body and forget the body? To put it crudely into other words, shall his ready adaptation to American University life tend to make him less of a Jew, more of a Jew, or no Jew at all, and thus tending, to repeat our original thought, wherein will it be for weakness, wherein for strength? Each Jewish student, no doubt, in varying measure, responds to all three of these tendencies; yet, insofar as the response towards one or another of these is more marked in certain individuals[221] than in others, let us group the individuals together accordingly, and for the convenience of our discussion divide them into three separate types.
The no-Jew type is common on the campus. His presence pleases us, perhaps even flatters us. He is carefree, boyish. He makes heroes of the gridiron athletes; he delights in the comedy shows that come to town; he joins his non-Jewish friends in outdoor play in that easy laughter of theirs that bubbles over at a trifle;—and we were beginning to think the Jew had forgotten to play and laugh. We saw him after sundown once, single in a canoe, paddling across the wide unruffled lake and far where purple sky and purple water seem to commingle, and we thought we saw the primitive Indian again, the wholesome child of nature plying those waters as of old. Sail on, brave youth, we are glad to see thee still a lover of the wild, the simple, the calm; we are glad there is still in the Jew something of the wholesome child, the adventurer, the savage, shall we call it? We are almost tempted to say we are glad to have him forget his past, to sail thus away, as it were, from his troubled brethren, away across the unruffled lake where purple wave and purple cloud in peace commingle,—so long have we waited for the mind of the Jewish youth to be youthful, for the moist gleam in the eye of a sorrowful children to disappear.
"Neither Fish, Nor Flesh, Nor Fowl"
But not always is this drifting out of Jewish life so comely. There is another individual in this type in whom it appears very much strained. The first merges within the American tradition, the second obtrudes into it; the first unconsciously, the second painfully aware of his effort; the first because he has so much of the tradition within him, the second, we are afraid, because he has so little. The second individual is generally of more recent arrival to this country than the first; he considers his Jewishness a misfortune which must be gotten rid of. Both are, indeed, self-centred, unmindful of their people, but the first is more boyish—and a boy should be self-centred. Both put the raiment above the body, and in this there is weakness; but in the first there is not much of body, the roots of Jewish growth have found no depth or proper sap in him, and if in him there is not strength of body, there is at least grace of raiment; in the second there is neither grace nor strength,—he may acquire the superstructure of American character, but where the foundation to build it on? Where is there strength when it is ever a getting and never a giving?
Judaism weighs most heavily upon this latter individual. He will often deny his race, we regret to say, and play for the affection of members of other races. But they somehow will discover his "misfortune" and despise him all the more for hiding it. All this prejudice, he explains,[222] is due to "those other Jews." If they would only learn modesty from the gentile,—not talk so, not walk so, and not keep hanging around the professor's desk after the lecture with all sorts of fool questions,—why then, there would be no more of "this prejudice thing" and he could devote his time to more important problems. (We half suspect those problems would be superficial ones. We would also perhaps give more heed to his urging us to modesty, if only the urging were more modest.) He may even become eloquent and tell us that the Jews do not appreciate the generosities and liberties of American life, that they ought to forget their old religious superstitions and realize that in free America we don't need any religions, for all men are brothers. (Here again we would perhaps give more heed to his sentiment for its boundless idealism, were we not afraid it was but a cover for boundless egotism.)
And which brotherly organization, which fraternity do you belong to up here? We ask, not to criticize those boyish aristocracies but rather to embarrass him, we confess, for we know he must name a Jewish fraternity or none at all. The other fraternities are indeed fraternal—but not to Jews, not even to those who would get away from Judaism. We speak without malice of this individual; we regret only that he gets so little out of the great American tradition. The raiment becomes him badly. Speaking in slang and following the baseball scores does not make an American. If he sells his birthright let it be for something more than a mess of pottage. Even if he should succeed in assimilating himself with the other races, whether it be by the accumulation of wealth or baptism or successful denial of his origin, yet we doubt whether he can become really happy—for he is neither fish nor flesh nor fowl. Again, what can he receive when he has nothing to give? And thus we must leave him, perhaps even now laughing in the company of his non-Jewish acquaintances at some caricature of the Jew presented for their entertainment—that is of one of "those other Jews"—a type for which we are sorry, a coin that is spurious and does not ring true.
The Second Type: "An American of Jewish Ancestry"
Our second type considers body and raiment as of equal weight; he will make them as one. He will become less of a Jew and more of an American, a better American for being a Jew. Unlike the first type, he sees a little beyond himself. Americanism is good enough for him, but there are other Jews not in America, he realizes, and there are Jews within America who have not reached, perhaps never can reach, his position of comfortable participation in American life, and what of them? There may be more pressing, more important problems in the world, but who else will solve that particular one of the Jew if he doesn't? He therefore will not[223] run away from Judaism; he will try to modify it, of course, to fit in with American progress, but, for the sake of his people, he will stay a Jew, or better an American of Jewish ancestry. This type is the son of the big-hearted givers among Israel. His father subscribes generously to charitable organizations, is a member of a Reform Temple, and owes much indeed to the opportunities of the American republic. The son, therefore, is an American patriot, and what though it seem at times overtaxed, his patriotism, unlike that of the individual under our first type, is genuine, for it is not primarily self-seeking. When he speaks of ideals, it is not to say we have no need of religions at all, but rather that we all in America have more or less the same belief only that we choose to express it differently, each according to his ancestral traditions. The three rings, says Nathan der Weise, may all be true or all be false according to the conduct of those that wear them. "But are there no peculiar values of conduct," we ask him, "bequeathed by the peculiar traditions of the Jew?" "Yes," he answers, "but those values may now be found in the cosmopolitan civilization of America." "We are getting away from peculiar things," he further adds; "we must learn to break down barriers and distinctions and work all together, not as Jews or Americans or anything else, but simply as men. Our only problem is to get the Jews treated everywhere as men." "But aside from that," we go on to ask, "isn't there a something that binds together certain groups of people that have had a common history, a common religion or any such thing in common?" "Yes," he replies, "but that something is the common intellect. The accident of birth does not make us friends; though I must help the Jew in far-off Russia, yet I am more closely identified with my Anglo-Saxon classmate. For me to co-operate with the Jew simply because he is a Jew is as logical as for me to co-operate with a man simply because he has the same shade of brown hair that I have." Words that command our thought—but yet it seems to us the speaker feels better than he knows. Why then did his heart quicken when one Friday night we passed the window of that Galician Jew, the erstwhile butt of many a jest between us, our college second-hand clothes man, and saw the flicker of his Sabbath candles? No flicker within the home of a brown-haired man would move him so. And even while he is speaking to us, though the length of our acquaintanceship is short, we detect an unwonted relaxation in his manner, a confidence that has found understanding and seeks to lay itself bare. Is it not because both of us are Jews?
Be that as it may, the words of this type are sincere. If he forgets his ancestry it is because he thinks of posterity. By blending his thoughts and aspirations with those of free and generous America, he will bequeath to his children a happier heritage than was left him by his forefathers. As for ideals, why call them Jewish rather than American; what though[224] they originated in Judea, cannot they be distributed from America? His Zion therefore will be in Washington. The Jewish soul and the American soul will become as one. He does not deny the soul, then—the raiment has not been put above the body, the flesh above the spirit; and the adaptation of this type to the American environment can therefore make for strength, for a better humanity.
The Third Type: "More, Not Less, of a Jew"
What room have we now for a third type? But there does appear one among his brethren, an extremist, who is not to be satisfied with the promised strength of his fellows of this last type. There may be strength among them, he thinks, but strength not enough. Greater strength is there in becoming not a non-Jew, nor less of a Jew, but simply more of a Jew. Judaism to him is not a mere peculiar thing, but a peculiar great thing, and only by keeping it peculiar can he enhance its greatness. The Jewish genius cannot blend with that of America without loss to its individuality; however much it may borrow from America in outer accoutrement, in "wholesome ruddiness," "fair play," "polite address," and so forth—(and it should borrow what it can to improve its appearance), yet the accoutrement must remain but raiment,—and the body is more than raiment. Apparently he is a very narrow-minded person—and he is; yet he believes with Ahad Ha-'Am that "greatness is not a matter of breadth only, but of depth."
We have found this extremist in the dark-eyed dreamer who came to us but recently from a Russian university, but also in the glad-eyed youth who wears his Americanism most gracefully, it being handed down to him for several generations. Judaism in this case, at any rate, to use a homely expression, does not vary with the length of the nose. This type is small in numbers, but the Jews have never made much of numbers, and even as we observe him we are minded of the words of Joel, "—and in the remnant shall be deliverance." Does he shun the American garment then? No, on the contrary, he evermore seeks it and strives to make it attire him more gracefully. He loves the American tradition; he has much to gather from its sunniness—his fathers had been kept in the dark so long. But, at the breaking of day, when the angel who wrestled with him through the night would let him go, he will say, as did Jacob of old, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me"; America must bless him so that in the light of modern day his people may once again be called "no more Jacob but Israel."
"Many and great are the gifts of the gentile world," he tells us, "but that peculiar greatness within the character of the Jews as a people, it has not. Some have called it religion, some morality; perhaps it is the[225] devotion they have evolved to the unity of things, the אחד חוחי; perhaps it is only a certain sadness of suffering, a certain depth of sympathy they have evolved for all suffering and sorrow, but at any rate it is a racial momentum which our ancestors for four thousand years have been forging and refining in the hottest fires;" and whether it be conceit or inspiration, he adds, "and think not that we, to-day, in the comfortable lassitude of American life, can destroy it." The spirit is greater than the man; the Jew may be lost or be assimilated, but the Jewish race, not yet.
A Spiritual Vision and Aspiration
"But consider," we say very plainly to him, "the great bulk of the Jews who seem to have lost that old spirit of religion; they pray in a language they scarce understand as though 'they shall be heard for their much speaking'; when you want the Hebrew Bible, moreover, it seems you must go to the gentiles, and have not these added thereto the sublime teachings of Christ?"
"Yes," replies our Jewish friend, with more of grief than of censure in his voice, "and to-day the Christian world is awarding the Iron Cross for excellence in killing. And our people it has made to loathe the name of Christ, because it was his image that was in the hand of the priest who led the mob to massacre at the Inquisition and at Kishineff; though all the time it was that very persecuted people that was itself living the principles and the martyrdom of its greatest prophet." And he continues, and tells us brusquely how he went once to church with a Methodist young lady and how when he was rapt in the music of a Psalm that was being sung, she whispered giddily to him: "Don't that remind you somewhat of the one-step music?" "No," he tells us he replied, "it reminds me that I am the only Christian in this audience."
And we understand in his reply he was not thinking of himself alone (for extremist though he was, he must have known there was many another devout listener in that audience) but rather of his race, of those very Jews of the bended backs, "wily, unkempt," who were elsewhere chanting that same Psalm in a language, 'tis true, they scarce understood, yet with a spiritual zeal and forgetfulness of the "treasures upon earth" which was the very soul of the teachings of Christ. Could his Methodist friend, could even he, with all his university training and American ruddiness, but have the noble spirit of his unlettered grandmother he remembered weeping so bitterly in the old synagogue on Yom Kippur, as though weeping for the sins of all humanity,—Rachel weeping for her children. No, it was not the religion put on and off with the phylacteries that distinguished his fathers; it was never the raiment, but the body. Even in the darkness of the Middle Ages it was the Malkuth Shaddai, the kingdom of righteousness, that the old Jew prayed for on his sacred days.[226]
Narrow-minded, indeed, is this last type of Jew; but yet when rays are concentrated to a narrow radius, the outlook through the lens may be wide and far-reaching. We understand that he, too, thinks of posterity as does his cousin, but only as mistress within its own household does he believe the Jewish race can bequeath great strength to its posterity and the posterity of the world,—not as intruder into the home of others, nor even as their welcome guest. The Bible was the work of a narrow, provincial Israel; the Talmud their work when scattered among the nations.
"To Make Strong the Spirit of the Prophets"
"We have made too much," concludes our young friend, "of the cosmopolitan likenesses among nations and men; we must promote their differences, and respect for those differences. That is in the path of peace; it is war, as you know, that levels distinctions. The harmony of an autumn sunset is in its many colors. Our own little handful of people does not wish to make itself great in possessions or strong in arms. We have ever been the meekest among men; while many a Christian nation was taking an eye for an eve, it is we that were turning the other cheek. Yes, we think we have outgrown that boyish fascination for brutal brawn a little more than they. Today, Israel wishes but to express its pent-up soul, to make strong the spirit of its prophets and teachers, its Moses, its Isaiah, its Hillel, so that it may be 'for a light to the Gentiles, (and bear) salvation unto the end of the earth.'"
Morris J. Escoll
