Years of observation and thought have given increasing strength to the belief that we Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts; that this duality is a fundamental, and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared with that which divided all of you from us.

Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf...There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile...I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable...The difference between us is abysmal...You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.

In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew. Is your God an Englishman or an American?

Wherever the Jew is found he is a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him. Ever since he has been scattered in your midst he has had to maintain a continuous struggle for the conservation of his identity.

We belong to the One mastering God: you belong to the republic of playful gods.

You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account; they are extreme and irrelevant variations.

To say that a schlemiel is a luckless person is to touch only the negative side. It is the schlemiel's avocation and profession to miss out on things, to muff opportunities, to be persistently, organically, preposterously and ingeniously out of place. A hungry schlemiel dreams of a plate of hot soup, and hasn't a spoon.