Israel Friedlaender traces the racial and national exclusiveness of the Jews from the earliest times, giving as illustrations two Biblical incidents—the Samaritans, “who were half-Jews by race and who were eager to become full Jews by religion,” and their repulse by the Jews, “who were eager to safeguard the racial integrity of the Jews”; also, the demand for genealogical records and for the dissolution of mixed marriages, as recorded in the Book of Ezra. Dr. Friedlaender says that in post-Biblical times “this racial exclusiveness of the Jews became even more accentuated.” Entry into Judaism “never was, as in other religious communities, purely a question of faith. Proselytes were seldom solicited, and even when ultimately admitted into the Jewish fold they were so on the express condition that they surrender their racial individuality.”
“For the purposes of the present inquiry,” says Dr. Friedlaender, “it is enough for us to know that the Jews have always felt themselves as a separate race, sharply marked off from the rest of mankind. Anyone who denies the racial conception of Judaism on the part of the Jews in the past is either ignorant of the facts of Jewish history, or intentionally misrepresents them.”
Elkan N. Adler says: “No serious politician today doubts that our people have a political future.”
This future of political definiteness and power was in the mind of Moses Hess when he wrote in 1862—mark the date!—in the preface of his “Rome and Jerusalem,” these words:
“No nation can be indifferent to the fact that in the coming European struggle for liberty, it may have another people as its friend or foe.”
Hess had just been complaining of the inequalities visited upon the Jews. He was saying that what the individual Jew could not get because he was a Jew, the Jewish Nation would be able to get because it would be a Nation. Evidently he expected that nationhood might arrive before the “coming European struggle,” and he was warning the Gentile nations to be careful, because in that coming struggle there might be another nation in the list, namely, the Jewish Nation, which could be either friend or foe to any nation it chose.
Dr. J. Abelson, of Portsea College, in discussing
