ABSTRACT
The relations between Jews and Gentiles are the oldest known and thoroughly documented continuing relations between ethnically and religiously different groups of people, and they remain as problematic and intensely disturbing today as they were in antiquity. In many ways they are the prototype of intercultural relations, any place, any time. But in other respects, they are unique. The religious difference is always there, but unlike the difference between Hindus and Muslims in India, it is not a difference arising from diametrically opposed value systems, but from mutually exclusive claims to one and the same tradition. Another difference arises from the peculiar–although by no means unique–position of the Jews in the social structure, which at times appears sharply accentuated, at other times largely blurred. Linguistic differences are often present, but more frequently non-existent; and it is remarkable that even where linguistic acculturation is complete, other differences between Jews and Gentiles remain unaltered and virulent. Differences in phenotype are pronounced in some countries of Jewish settlement, but in the majority of them insignificant; yet, Jewish facial features and physical characteristics have at times been emphasized, as if they were of the essence; and racial prejudice, from the earliest times to the present moment, has assumed a character indelibilis of the Jews, independent of phenotype, which even conversion could not erase. All of these are elements in a comprehensive theme, the unity of which one must be able to grasp without disregarding the variety of its manifestations. One thing, though, is certain: one can hardly understand the nature of a late manifestation, such as the position of the Jews in contemporary America, if one is not aware of the pattern of history from which such a late and complex manifestation is likely derived. The occupational distribution of American Jews or the incidence 2of intermarriage in America is not the same as the socio-economic structure of the Jewish community in seventeenth-century Poland or the phenomenon of conversion in fourteenth century Spain, but they are variants of permanent traits. They are unique adaptations to changing circumstances; yet, if one compares them to related phenomena in the past, they testify to the durability of human intentions and institutions. To the extent that we are able to demonstrate that durability, we can say that we have provided an explication.
