To Melvin L. Sommer
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 12, 1948
Dear Mr. Sommers,
Many thanks for the photographs; I am sending those you wished autographed back to you in the envelope intended for them.
Many years ago two Frenchmen, brothers, named Doumic (which the profane pronounced De Micks) made an observation which I always remember about nationalities. Germans and British, they said, were races; but France and the United States were milieux. Now my long residence in America having been exclusively in Massachusetts, I might almost say, at Harvard, and my friends a special type of Harvard men, I feel the American essence much more in other Americans, who represent the great milieux or active society of the U.S. with its cordiality and ease; whereas the inhabitants of my corner of Boston, though certainly Americans, had a racial and social quality of their own, American topographically, but not American historically. That is what made me say (was it rude?) But are you “real” Americans? I should have said, “But did you come in the Mayflower in 1632?”
As to feeling a difference in Jews, I feel it I think, only if they do; and then it doesn’t signify a preference or the opposite, but only a diversity. My best pupils were Jews, as was my only modern “master” in philosophy, Spinoza. But many are not happy, and that is a pity.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Melvin L. Sommer.