What Does Europe Owe the Jews?

#250 "What does Europe owe the Jews? All sorts of things, good and bad, and above all one that is at the same time among the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and grandeur of being worthy of raising moral questions and as a result precisely the most attractive, most awkward, and most exquisite parts of those plays of colours and enticements to life, whose afterglow these days makes the sky of our European culture glow in its evening light perhaps as it burns itself out. Among the spectators and philosophers, we artists are grateful to the Jews for that."