Rosenzweig (rose branch), and all the amazing list of beautiful and enviable names which Prussia and Austria glorified you with so long ago.  It is another instance of Europe’s coarse and cruel persecution of your race; not that it was coarse and cruel to outfit it with pretty and poetical names like those, but it was coarse and cruel to make it pay for them or else take such hideous and often indecent names that to-day their owners never use them; or, if they do, only on official papers.  And it was the many, not the few, who got the odious names, they being too poor to bribe the officials to grant them better ones.

Now why was the race renamed?  I have been told that in Prussia it was given to using fictitious names, and often changing them, so as to beat the tax-gatherer, escape military service, and so on; and that finally the idea was hit upon of furnishing all the inmates of a house with one and the same surname, and then holding the house responsible right along for those inmates, and accountable for any disappearances that might occur; it made the Jews keep track of each other, for self-interest’s sake, and saved the Government the trouble[4].

If that explanation of how the Jews of Prussia came to be renamed is correct, if it is true that they fictitiously registered themselves to gain certain advantages, it may possible be true that in America they refrain from registered themselves as Jews to fend off the damaging prejudices of the Christian customer.  I have no way of knowing whether this notion is well founded or not.  There may be other and better ways of explaining why only that poor little 250,000 of our Jews got into the ‘Encyclopaedia’.  I may, of course, be mistaken, but I am strongly of the opinion that we have an immense Jewish population in America.

Point No. 3—­’Can Jews do anything to improve the situation?’

I think so.  If I may make a suggestion without seeming to be trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I will offer it.  In our days we have learned the value of combination.  We apply it everywhere—­in railway systems, in trusts, in trade unions, in Salvation Armies, in minor politics, in major politics, in European Concerts.  Whatever our strength may be, big or little, we organise it.  We have found out that that is the only way to get the most out of it that is in it.  We know the weakness of individual sticks, and the strength of the concentrated faggot.  Suppose you try a scheme like this, for instance.  In England and America put every Jew on the census-book as a Jew (in case you have not been doing that).  Get up volunteer regiments composed of Jews solely, and when the drum beats, fall in and go to the front, so as to remove the reproach that you have few Massenas among you, and that you feed on a country but don’t like to fight for it.  Next, in politics, organise your strength, band together, and deliver the casting-vote where you can, and, where you can’t, compel as good terms as possible.  You huddle to yourselves already in all countries, but you huddle to no sufficient purpose, politically speaking.  You do not seem to be organised, except for your charities.  There you are omnipotent; there you compel your due of recognition—­you do not have to beg for it.  It shows what you can do when you band together for a definite purpose.