The Jewish Position (A Formulation)
HE Jews are a people with a continuous and recorded history of more than three thousand years. This people numbers today over twelve million souls. The greater part of this dispersed people is living in national concentration within a number of countries, in distinct and self contained communities that are kept separate either by the inner pressure of a peculiar way of life or a peculiar emotional character both preserved by religious sanction, or by the outer pressure of preiudice or special leerislation.
The millions of Jews in the world are descendants of the nation in Palestine that was conquered and that was dispersed two thousand years ago. They are as distinct a national element as the Belgian or Polish people, since they have preserved their national individuality. No one can point to a moment of time at which the Jewish people lost their national character.
Besides a purity of race as great as that of any geographical nation, the Jewish people has also preserved at least four of the chief factors of national life, namely, laws, customs, history and language. A fifth national factor, religion, has been the means of preserving by its sanction the other four. Religion has therefore been the chief national asset of the Jew.
Nationalism is the self-consciousness of a people. God-consciousness is the zenith of self-consciousness. It is this God-consciousness that has given to the Jew a nationalism capable of withstanding two thousand years of dispersion.
The Jews Recognized Everywhere to belong to a Distinct People.
Certain portions of the people have lost national will and energy, and it is this fact that has led to the use of the word "race" instead of "nation" or "people" to designate the Jews. It is a degrading term, for it implies that the Jews have kept the body but lost the soul of nationalism. Anti-Semitism is a direct outcome of this weakening of national will, for anti-Semitism is not national or religious hatred but race hatred. It arises as a protest against Jewish efforts to assimilate. The older Jew-hatred and persecutions were directed against his efforts to retain his individuality.
Whether the Jews attempt to preserve their national individuality or to destroy it, they meet the opposition accorded to aliens., The name Jew is the designation of a certain people conquered and driven from their home land. Their national religion bears the same name as their nationality. An unreligious Jew is stilla Jew, and he can with difhculty escape his allegiance only by repudiating the name of Jew. In some countries the Jews are despised as a subject people without citizen rights. But even in most of the countries where they are emancipated and legally are accepted as citizens they are still looked upon as aliens with special privileges. They are always a special economic problem, envied when too successful because they are not actually the people of the land. Any unusual pressure reveals their detachment. such as war.
for instance, which causes them to be specially praised for a loyalty that is taken for granted within a nation.
Though in certain places and ages the Jews may be highly valued as individuals and as small communities, a very large immigration always meets with a partly justifiable resistance. Each nation has a right to its land and its individuality. And too large an immigration may be considered almost an invasion. The Jew is like the beggar "on the town" who has no house. When he is driven from one house, he must perforce seek another. He does not come because he desires it, but because he cannot help himself. His visit is no honor and his welcome must always be precarious.
Neither the high standing of the Jew nor his approach to assimilation, nor yet the enlightenment of the country in which he seeks refuge, nor even liberal laws and emancipation are any adequate defence. One cannot legislate away prejudice and hatred. The Dreyfus case occurred in enlightened France. And in the United States, where the unstable national character, the foreign background of the majority of the people. make the position of the Jew peculiarly favorable at present, we have the agitation against the Negro in the South and the Asiatic in the West to remind us that we cannot depend on American enliehtenment as an unfailine safeguard.
The "haven of refuge" idea must be abandoned. No nation ought to concentrate wholly within another nation. National justice demands that each nation should have its own land.
The conclusion is obvious. The Jew must either reconcile himself to a present and future of calamity and disaster, or he must assimilate and disappear as a separate people, or he must once again become a nation with a land of his own.
The first is innuman. TEven those Jews who believe that all nationalism in itself is evil, the cosmopolitans, must grant that were such a loss of national individuality possible or desirable, it could not come to pass for many generations. No thinking and feeling Jew can say, “until that consummation, let the Jewish tragedy continue.” Furthermore, why should the Jew accept and profess every nationality but his own?
The second is impossible. The whole Jewish population cannot be absorbed. It assimilates at the borders, like all other peoples, but it cannot and it will not disappear in bulk. It reproduces more rapidly than it assimilates, as figures could easily show. Such a process, too, being slow moral suicide, would be degrading beyond words. A people cannot disappear except by degeneration. In the process the Jews would indeed become merely a race, a people different but not distinctive, an anti-climax, a caricature of their former selves, and a blot on their own heroic history. But the Jews are saved from such a fate by their strong will to live and their sense of personal dienity.
By a negative process, a process of elimination, we have reached the conclusion that the only hope for the Jew lies in a land of his own. But the positive reasons are