Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/13

The Question equality, precisely on this assumption—that we Jews are a people like all other peoples, similar in needs and impulses: that we are Jews, you are Englishmen, you are Italians, you are Americans; that we, the world's races or peoples, are all of us similar in our differences.

Leaving on one side those who deny the existence of any distinctions at all, those, that is, who say that the Jew is either a Frenchman, an American or an Englishman according to the place of his birth, I would answer: "For me the ordinary nationalist or racial classification has not sufficed."

If I have long pondered this question of Jew and gentile it is because I suspected from the first dawning of Jewish self-consciousness that Jew and gentile are two worlds, that between you gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf. Side by side with this belief grew another, which is related to the practical aspect of the distinction.

I do not believe that, situated as we are 9