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The Southern Israelite Page 5 WHY ARE JEWS LIKE THAT? By LEWIS BROWNE By Courtesy of 1 he (romll Puhltthinn Company We have been requested by many of our subscribers through this past year for the complete story of “ Why Are Jews Like That” by Lewis Browne, so, through the courtesy of The Crowell Publish ing Co., publishers of The American Magazine, we are herewith reprinting this widely discussed story.—Editors. _ tK WERE trying to make the \V twelve forty-five out of the Pennsylvania Station, and we were findinR the going difficult. The pave- rentJ , of Seventh Avenue were crowd- unpenetrable, and only by walking \ nK the gutters could we possibly n '. tk e anv headway. For it was the ■’inch-hour, and all the thousands of J.rkers in New York’s “cloak-and- t i.eit" were out on the street for an airing. They were ill-clad and ;s V ; and they showed little disposi- t() get out of our way when we N to let us through. They stood • h, re on the pavement in large coagu- at( . masses, shouting to each other in 'trident argument and gesticulating tt .th vehemence. Many shouted in ^ id- |>h. and almost all the rest used an Knglish quite obviously Yiddish in in- „nation. And my friend, who was v hot and angry from long shov- irg* through the horde, turned to me as we hurried along and suddenly de- i a ruled: "Say. Browne: why are Jews like •hat"" [ could not answer him at once. A ,rod in the ribs from some unseen el- txiw had at that precise instant taken the wind out of me. But when, a mo rn’ later, 1 could again command try breathing, 1 yelled back: “Because av can’t help it!” 1 had neither wind nor time for nore than that. Besides, Seventh Ave- riu• during the noon-hour crush seem ed to me no place for a sociological usquisition. So 1 pushed on with all my might, hacking a trail through that human forest with outthrust el- >"'ws and lowered head. And by the mu* we had at last reached the sta- to>n just a minute too late, of course we had both completely forgotten the question. All we could think of was the two-hour wait before the next ram departed for our destination. But during the week-end I got my ■ t-anee to elaborate my abrupt answer " his question. It had not been preju- !ee that had moved my friend to -h"ut that question to me; at least, cuimeious prejudice. He is a man f intelligence and breeding, and anti- •mitism is as foreign to him as any 'her form of vulgar bigotry. Rather had been bewilderment, exasperat- vonder, that had moved him. He ' a : been amazed, perhaps a trifle ap ’d. at the strangeness, the pecul- °f that mob. It had not been at • ike the mob out of a silk factory I assaic, or out of a smelter in u,t ’' or out of a cotton mill in Rome, ' r gia. And its strangeness had lain far more than its Yiddish speech "1 appearance. niy friend made clear to me ARen We recalled the question a day •wo later: “I wasn’t thinking of r ian guage or their beards. Those • g'. I realize, are superficial, and -Ppose they’ll be gone entirely in generation. Nor w T as I thinking of r man ners, either. They, too, will ar ige in a little while. Those fellows, at least their children, will soon .l U ^, ,t - arn that in this country— 1 Heaven alone knows why!— juh con> ’dered bad form to talk out and use gestures. No, it wasn’t their manners that bewildered me, but their manner.” My friend paused a moment, and then, fearing I had not caught his meaning, he explained: “There was a queer light in their eyes, and a sort of tenseness in their bod ies; that was what made me put my question to you. For you, too, show those characteristics to a degree; and so does almost every other Jew I know. You are somehow different from the rest of us. And I’d like to know why.” . . . I spent most of that week-end try ing to tell him why; and because many thousands of other intelligent Gentiles must have posed my friend’s question, the editor of this magazine has asked me to answer it in this article. Now, to begin with, we must keep well in mind my friend’s distinction between manners and manner. I’ve never been able to get much exercised about manners. They are pleasant things, but not of real importance, for they can never be judged by uni versal standards. They can never be either good or bad, right or wrong; they can only be different. For in stance, wielding a soup-spoon with a backhand stroke is in no wise more virtuous, onr even more elegant, than wielding it with the locally less fash ionable—though universally more ad venturous—fronthand stroke. So there is no need to defend the Jews against the charge that they have bad man ners. In the first place, the Jews, as a people, haven’t any manners at all. By that, I mean, of course, that there is no such thing as a Jewish code of etiquette which all Israelites accept and try to live up to. Each Jew gets his manners from his environment; so that if he is from Russia he drinks tea out of a glass, and if from Eng land he oats fish with a knife. Conse quently, it is absurd to speak of “Jew ish manners,’ either good, bad, or in different. It is true that many Jews in Amer ica still retain the East-European manners they brought with them from their homelands. But they will not re tain them long; and certainly their children will not inherit them. For those manners are no more inherent in Jews than a rolling gait is inherent in a people whose ancestors were for a while seafarers. Indeed, with immi gration practically at a standstill, a swift doom seems inevitable, not mere ly for such foreign manners, but also for all the rest of those striking ex- oticisms which some people imagine to be characteristically Jewish. More and more of the Yiddish newspapers are introducing English supplements; and fewer and fewer become the Jews who retain their long beards. Within another two generations, Yiddish ac cents and long beards will probably be as rare even in an East-Side syna gogue as they are now in the Cathe dral of St. John the Divine. That does not necessarily mean that we Jews will be improving; we shall be simply changing. And we have al ways been changing in that fashion modifying our mannerisms to suit each new environment. Our way of altering our names is a point in in stance. When we lived in a civilization predominantly Greek, we no longer gave our children good Hebrew names like Jochanan, Joshua, or Miriam, but Greek names, like John, Jesus, and Mary. In Spain the name Solomon was changed to the more fashionable Sal vador, in France to Sulpice, in Ger many to Siegfried, and in America to Seymour. Often we have gone to quite absurd lengths, adopting names be longing even to our worst enemies. Isidore is a good example of this. Originally the name was pagan, being derived from the Greek I niff doron, meaning “Gift of Isis.” Then it be came popular in the early Christian church, and one of the great church fathers, a Bishop of Seville—and in cidentally one of the bitterest detrac tors of the Jews was called Isidore. But after he died, the name was taken up by the Jews, and with such a ven geance that by now it has become al most exclusively Jewish! And we have been no less prone to change our surnames. Wascerwitz in Warsaw becomes Wasserman in Ber lin, Waterman in London, and De La Fontaine in Hollywood. Ambari in an cient Palestine was translated literally to Bernstein in Germany, corrupted to Burnstein in Poland, re-spelled Brownstone in England, and finally shortened to Browne. . . . Our easy willingness to drop our ghetto names is, I know, a little puz zling to most Gentiles. The trait seems to smack of cowardice and ignobility. But you must realize that we Jews did not choose most of those ghetto names in the first place. Goldberg, Rosen thal, Greenbaum—these names and their like were literally forced upon our forebears only a couple of centu ries ago in Central Europe. We used to be reviled then because we persisted in clinging to our Hebrew patrony mics, and edicts were issued to compel us to take surnames similar to those of our neighbors. So now that we are free to choose for ourselves, we feel no compunction about throwing over those names. They sound as foreign to us as they do to you, for our ears have become attuned to a new lan guage. Therefore, we change them freely, even as we have throughout the past changed speech and costume and every other of our manners and customs. But one thing, it must be admitted, we have not changed, and that is what my friend called our manner. One can not easily define that Jewish manner; but neither can one easily deny its reality. It is the one fundamental thing about us that marks us as pe culiar, the one quality that most dis tinguishes us from our neighbors. Were we lacking that distinctive air, were we an ordinary folk, we would not earn one tithe the publicity we get. For, after all, we Jews are ex ceedingly few in numbers; generously estimated, we make up less than three-quarters of one per cent of the population of the world. There are al most as many inhabitants in Burma alone as there are Jews on all five continents! Yet see how much talk there is about us continually: How many songs are sung, lies told, jokes cracked, sermons preached, and arti cles written about us year after year in almost every land on earth. And it has been that way for two thousand years or more. Though never mighty in size, we have always cast a mighty shadow. The patent reason for it is that we are a peculiar lot; we are different. 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