Page:The International Jew - Volume 2.djvu/31

 derived from their national designation. An unreligious Jew is still a Jew, and he can with difficulty escape his allegiance only by repudiating the name of Jew.” (“Guide to Zionism,” p. 5.)

It will be seen that none of these writers—and their number might be multiplied among both ancients and moderns—can deny that the Jew is exclusively a member of a religion without at the same time asserting that he is, whether he will or not, the member of a nation. Some go so far as to insist that his allegiance is racial in addition to being national. The term “race” is used by important Jewish scholars without reserve, while some, who hold the German-originated view that the Jews are an offshoot of the Semitic race and do not comprise that race, are satisfied with the term “nation.” Biblically, in both the Old Testament and the New, the term “nation” or “people” is employed. But the consensus of Jewish opinion is this: the Jews are a separate people, marked off from other races by very distinctive characteristics, both physical and spiritual, and they have both a national history and a national aspiration.

It will be noticed how the testimony on the point of “race” combines the thought of race and nationality, just as the previous section combined the thought of nationality with religion.

Supreme Justice Brandeis, previously quoted, appears to give a racial basis to the fact of nationality.

He says: “It is no answer to this evidence of nationality to declare that the Jews are not an absolutely pure race. There has, of course, been some intermixture of foreign blood in the three thousand years which constitute our historic period. But, owing to persecution and prejudice, the intermarriages with non-Jews which have occurred have resulted merely in taking away many from the Jewish community. Intermarriage has brought few additions. Therefore the percentage of foreign blood in the Jews of today is very low. Probably no important European race is as pure. But common race is only one of the elements which determine nationality.”

Arthur D. Lewis, a Jewish writer, in his “The Jews a Nation,” also bases nationality on the racial element:

“The Jews were originally a nation, and have retained