Pertinent and Impertinent

Most women lack a sense for mathematics and anything that has to do with figures is to them an abomination. Still it is true, on the other hand, that figures sometimes tell a story more clearly and impressively than mere words, and it is for the sake of this clearness and impressiveness that I beg my readers to bear with me today when I present them some statistical figures.

In the State Reformatory at Bedford Hills, a corrective institution to which are sent female delinquents between the ages of sixteen and thirty, there is housed at present a population of 203 inmates. Of these inmates, seven are Jewesses.

In the State Prison for Women, formerly at Auburn and now also located at Bedford Hills, one finds 130 female criminals. Of these four are Jewesses.

In both institutions our race contributes about three per cent of the inmates.

Now consider the population for the entire State of New York. The last census count lists about 12,588,000 people of whom 1,903,000 are Jews. This is, as a few minutes with pencil and paper will convince you, about sixteen and one-half per cent.

Compare these sixteen and one-half per cent with the three per cent of female criminals and you will find in these figures a very succinct story, testifying to the respect for the law that is inherent in the Jewish character.

This respect for the law is a racial trait, ingrained in our people from the far-off days when Moses brought down from the Mountain no abstruse and complicated ceremonial, no occult and mystic speculations about the Godhead, but the Law, A law, limpid and crystal clear, full of distinct practical implications, a law insisting, for the first time in the history of mankind, on social and moral obligations toward the neighbor and even the stranger in the midst of the people, a law that after four thousand years has lost nothing in validity and is still the cornerstone of modern legal development.

And because that is so I venture to advise our modern Jewish mother to see to it that her children should not lose this precious racial heritage. The formalism which like an ancient patina has been added to the original commandments we may cherish as an ornament or discard as inessential, but the ethical law itself, that law that is typical of Israel, that is its glorious contribution to the spiritual and intellectual treasures of mankind, this we should guard and keep inviolate for our descendants, letting them never forget that it was the Jew who has first crystalized ethical aspirations into a binding moral law.