Brought to you By ND-Warez.info & WarezPoets.com

,ANTI-SEMITISM AND ACADEMIC YOUTH 187
pure form, it is uowhere to be found, not even in Judaism,
where the pure doctrine is obscured by much worship of the
letter. Yet Judaism seems to me one of its purest and most
vigorous manifestations. This applies particularly to the fundamental
principle of the sanctification of life.
It is characteristic that the animals were expressly included
in the command to keep holy the Sabbath day, so strong was the
feeling of the ideal solidarity of all living things. The insistence
on the solidarity of all human beings finds still stronger expression,
and it is no mere chance that the demands of Socialism
were for the most part first raised by Jews.
How strongly developed this sense of the sanctity of life is in
the Jewish people is admirably illustrated by a little remark
which Walter Rathenau once made to me in conversation:
"When a Jew says that he's going hunting to amuse himself,
he lies." The Jewish sense of the sanctity of life could not be
more simply expressed.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND ACADEMIC YOUTH
Mein Weltbild, A msterdam: Querida Verlag, 1934.
So long as we lived in the ghetto our Jewish nationality involved
us in material difficulties and sometimes physical danger,
but no social or psychological problems. With emancipation
the position changed, particularly for those Jews who turned to
the intellectual professions.
In school and at the university the young Jew is exposed to
the influence of a society which has a definite national tinge,
which he respects and admires, from which he receives his
mental sustenance, and to which he feels himself to belong;
while on the other hand this society treats him, as one of an
alien race, with a certain contempt and hostility. Driven by the
suggestive influence of this psychological superiority rather than
by utilitarian considerations, he turns his back on his people
and his traditions, and chooses to consider himself as belonging