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At first, the proposal that the ethnicity of authors on San Francisco public school reading lists should reflect the ethnic divisions in the community seemed good for laughs.

If, say, the population of a community is 35 percent Asian, 25 percent Latino and 15 percent African-American, those percentages would then be represented on the reading lists.

But that's not the end of it. The Asian percentages would have to be divided according to the percentages of Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos living in San Francisco. Also, half of each of each of these groupings would have to be female authors. And the percentage of gays living here would also need to be represented.

For the Jews, however, all this is an uneasy laugh. Although such quotas are unlikely to result, the fact that a couple of school board members seriously proposed them is chilling enough, and all kinds of quota-like proposals are still circulating.

Jews have an unhappy history with such quotas. In the period before World War II, there were strict limits on the number of Jews allowed to attend the undergraduate schools of prestigious universities — and even stricter limits at professional schools.

One president of an Ivy League college said that the quotas were necessary. Otherwise, the proportion of smart and educationally ambitious Jews would be overwhelming, unfair to others. But at a time of widespread discrimination against Jews, the only way most could rise was by way of higher education, especially in the professions. As a result, quotas were deadly.

Today those quotas have obviously disappeared. As much as a quarter of the students and faculty at prestigious universities such as Harvard are Jewish. But as the reading-list proposal vividly demonstrates, the concept of quotas remains a danger to American Jews. If jobs, school admissions and political representation are chopped up proportionately according to ancestry, the American Idea is smashed. Then America becomes the Balkans and all American Jews had better go back where they came from — 2,000 years ago.

The American Idea is twofold: All ethnic groups have the right to maintain their separate identities and in the general society, everyone has the right to be rewarded on individual merit, regardless of ethnicity.

On that latter point, the American Idea needed a lot of fixing. Anti-Jewish quotas had to be eliminated. And discrimination against African-Americans had to be remedied. These people had been enslaved and brutally oppressed. They had not even been allowed to prepare to compete.

As Thomas Jefferson once noted, the legacy of slavery would also have eventually smashed the American Idea. Partly for that reason, Jews have been deeply involved in supporting catch-up remedies. Those included not just anti-discrimination laws, but affirmative action programs to encourage and prepare young African-Americans for college. As our president recently documented, notable progress has been made.

But in that furor, something very different also developed: the impulse, especially among some ethnic bureaucrats, to slice the country up into fiefdoms over which they could hold sway. Their view was that rights and rewards would be group-proportionate, rather than based on individual achievement. Most of the quotas now being proposed promote slicing up, not equality, which still needs to be pursued.

That is why it is so chilling to contemplate the proposal of reading-list quotas. Instead of ensuring that some of the brilliant authors from minority groups are included on that list, that ludicrous proposal, like most quota proposals today, would have the effect of promoting disunity. It would not promote equality — and that is why it is not all funny.