Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/174

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158
GREAT RUSSIA

volume will be equally convinced of the fact. In the opinion of an eminent Jewish thinker, Bernard Lazare, the Jewish type has not varied less, but has varied more, than any other racial type. And the reason is obvious: as the result of the diaspora, or dispersion, the Jews have been subjected more continuously and more widely than any other nation to different surroundings, and the life of the Jews in such entirely different surroundings as Morocco and the Caucasus, Salonica and London, Jerusalem and New York, must of necessity have resulted, in the course of centuries, in the most divergent racial types.


IV

The truth is that the unity and continuity of the Jew is not physical, it is moral. The Jews are not a race, they are a nation. Wherever they have gone, they have remained a nation. We are too apt to forget that a nation is not a geographical expression. The Poles are a nation, and are not contained within geographical limits. Nor does a nation imply a common origin or blood relationship. The United States and the Russian Empire are made