national survival, take summary and drastic measures to oppose intermarriage? If Zionism dared to proclaim such a policy, it would not only strengthen the loyalty and intensify the national consciousness of Zionists, but it would also gain an invaluable and large accession of adherents from among those ardent, orthodox Jews who until now have held aloof from the national movement because of its compromises with such fundamental traditions as the non-recognition of intermarriage.
In another way, also, Zionism when regarded only as a nationalist movement favors rather than opposes intermarriage. The one who is a nationalist Jew and who recognizes his afhliation with the Jewish people entirely on nationalist or racial grounds without any regard to religion is indubitably free to marry a member of any other people. The leader of the Jewish Territorial Organization when still a Zionist married a non-Jewish wife and refused to have her made a Jewess by religious ceremony. As a nationalist Jew he argued that as a member of the Jewish people, he was free to marry a woman of the English people, just as a Frenchman is free without prejudice to marry an Italian woman, or a Danish woman may marry a German man without incurring dishonor. This racial argument is unassailable. There is no cogent reason why marriage should not be contracted between members of any two friendly states or nationalities on a similar plane of culture. There is no evidence that such marriages are infertile, and close observation has shown that such marriages are not prejudicial to the next generation. Neither genius nor degeneracy is more likely to spring from such mixed parentage than from homogeneous parentage. So long as the peoples between whom the intermarriage is contracted are on a similar plane of civilization and are of similar ideals and purpose, there can be no possible biological or eugenic objection to the intermarriage. It is therefore clear that Zionism as purely a national movement will fail to check that intermarriage which has weakened and which is weakening Jewry, by the dilution and the draining of Jewish blood.
But Zionism when conjoined with the religious ideal of the Jew gives the brightest promise of successfully coping with the acute problem of intermarriage. We cannot return to the Ghetto, nor would we try to limit freedom of economic and social intercourse between Jew and non-Jew. The religious training of young Jewry is today usually so lacking in quantity, quality and spirit, that standing alone it is often ineffective as a force to stem the tide of intermarriage. But when to this relieious training is added the Zionist consciousness, the
awakened national feeling reinforces the opposition to intermarriage inbred in the Jew by religious training and by the tradition of centuries. By its reawakening of Hebrew culture and its assertion of Jewish individuality in every sphere of life, besides the religious sphere, Zionism gives to our youth that vivid sense of oneness with their people that their religious training has perchance failed to inspire as a moving force, and they learn to recognize that the interests of the whole Jewish people are involved even in so intensely personal a step as marriage. By emphasizing the historic individuality of the Jewish people, as well as the historic religion of the Jewish people, Zionism substitutes for the single religious safeguard against intermarriage the double safeguard of religion and nationalism. Judaism alone is proving itself not fully effective against the tendencies making for intermarriage. Zionism alone is far less able successfully to oppose those tendencies. But Judaism and Zionism together give hope of overcoming the powerful disintegrating forces that culminate in intermarriage. Let us recognize, therefore, that although the effect of non-religious Zionism as a purely national movement may be to hasten rather than to check the dissolution of the Jewish people by intermarriage, Zionism as a national movement coupled with the traditional Jewish ideals of Judaism can work only as an invaluable and unique force for the upbuilding and inward strengthening of Jewry.
It need scarcely be added that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would mean the creation of an immeasurably strong Jewish centripetal force for counteracting centrifugal forces such as intermarriage. It would at once prevent much intermarriage in Golus and lessen the harm to Jewry of such intermarriage as would occur. In our present disorganization in Golus, strange wives or husbands finding no recognizable Jewish people into which they may become incorporated almost always absorb their Jewish mates into their own peoples. Without recognizable national existence, we cannot assimilate into our own midst those who intermarry with us, and we therefore lose our sons and daughters who, as the phrase puts it, "marry out." But when Zionism succeeds in creating a center where the Jewish influence is supreme, and where Jews are organized into a body of recognized Jewishness, it will become more possible for the strange wives or husbands taken by Jews or Jewesses in exile to be incorporated into the Jewish people. In the union of Zionism and Judaism, therefore, rests our hope of preventing or counteracting the destructive solvent of intermarriage.