Thirty or forty Jewish families are announced among the 18,478 who are being assisted by the Relief and Aid Society. These are mostly Slavic Jews, because German Jews consider themselves usually as Germans and have become more or less accustomed to regard their religion as a personal household affair and not a national barrier. Jews who have immigrated to Chicago from Germany also consider themselves Germans. The Polish, Hungarian and Bohemian Jews, on the other hand, will surrender themselves to Germanism only if the German-Americans can exert sufficient attraction on this peculiarly tenacious race. It will certainly be more advantageous for the Germans to strengthen their power through such recruiting than to lose, in this country, what they had already gained in Central Europe. It is precisely the wholesale trade which in Chicago is by far too little in German hands, and, if the Jews here feel themselves rebuffed by the Germans, they will educate their children to be Anglo-Americans; the result will be a de facto loss for the German cause.

(This little piece might owe its existence to some polite protest by Dr. Chvonik against the long article on the matter of the forty-three Jewish families on December 23. The emphasis is slightly shifted from the underscoring of differences, to the desire for assimilation. The last sentence seems to plead for inter-marriage, with an argument that Bismarck occasionally used: "Race mixture is not only biologically highly desirable, but, in the case of the daughters of the very rich Jews, financially even more so."