Jews survived all the defeats expulsions persecutions and pogroms the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people even the Holocaust itself because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.
In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for after all habit is relative to a stereotyped world and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons things situations seem alike.