ABSTRACT
the attitudes examined in the last chapter were typical for the given groups—that is, they were found to be prevalent in a large number of cases. About 5,000 documents were examined for the Jewish group, about 15,000 for the Polish, and fewer for the other groups. But while they were useful as a means of defining heritages and the problem of assimilation, neither an individual nor a group can be characterized by an enumeration of attitudes taken at random. What distinguishes societies and individuals is the predominance of certain attitudes over others, and this predominance depends, as we shall see below, on the type of organization which the group has developed to regulate the expression of the wishes of its members.
