第20页 The world of security

It was not until much later that I realized that this conception of ``good'' family, which appeared to us boys to be a parody of an artificial pseudo-aristocracy, was one of the most profound and secret tendencies of Jewish life.  It is generally accepted taht getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal.  The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.  Even in the case of Eastern orthodox Jewry, where the weaknesses as well as the merits of the whole race are more intense y manifested, this supremacy of the will to the spiritual over the mere material finds plastic expression.  The holy man, the Bible student, is a thousand times more esteemed within the community than the rich man; even the wealthiest man will prefer to give his daughter in marriage to the poorest intellectual than to a merchant.  This elevation of the intellectual to the highest rank is common to all classes; the poorest beggar who drags his pack through wind and rain will try to single out at least one son to study, no matter at how great a sacrifice, and it is counted a title of honour for the entire family to have someone in their midst, a professor, a savant, or a musician, who plays a role in the intellectual world, as if through his achievements he ennobled them all.  Subconsciously something in the Jew seeks to escape the morally dubious, the distasteful, the petty, the unspiritual, which is attached to all trade, and all that is purely business, and to lift himself up to the moneyless sphere of the intellectual, as if---in the Wagnerian sense---he wished to redeem himself and his entire race from the curse of money.  And that is why among Jews the impulse to wealth is exhausted in two, or at most three, generations within one family, and the mightiest dynasties find their sons unwilling to take over the banks, the factories, the established and secure businesses of their fathers.  It is not chance that a Lord Rothschild became an ornithologist, a Warburg an art historian, a Cassirer a philosopher, a Sasson a poet.  They all obey the same subconscious impluse, to free themselves of cold money-making, that thing that confines Jewry; and perhaps it expresses a secret longing to resolve the merely Jewish---through flight into the intellectual---into humanity at large.  A ``good'' family therefore means more than the purely social aspect which it assigns to itself with this classification; it means a Jewry that has freed itself of all defects and limitations and pettiness which the ghetto has forced upon it, by means of adaptation to a different culture and even possibly a universal culture.  That this flight into the intellectual has become as disastrous for the Jew, because of a disporportionate crowding of the professions, as formerly his confinement in the purely material, simply belongs to the eternal paradoxes of Jewish destiny.