An act of psychic displacement has taken hold in the Jewish soul, variously leading it to shrink in self-abasement, to retire into the shell of subdued anonymity, to do everything in its power not to call attention to itself, to suffer indignities quietly, to suspect its own motivations and to accept the scriptures of a demonic inquisition. The culmination of these prodigies of self-denial is the well-attested tendency of the insecure and self-doubting Jewish soul to turn about and attack itself, like an immune system gone awry.
Millennia of social and cultural quarantine must have their effect on the sensibility of a people, producing a creature who is always in danger of becoming reflexively disenchanted or of contracting that wasting disease which Ruth Wisse in Jews and Power has called “the veneration of political weakness.”
