Assimilation of the Jew to his environment, which involves abandonment of the group life, is an individual, not a group response. It attracts individuals in considerable numbers from the extreme right and left wings of American Jewry, from the very wealthy who may adopt Christianity for social distinction, and from the proletarians who adopt an international economic and political theory. It cannot be a group response because if great masses of Jews were to join any other church, or any other national or social grouping, they would do it as Jews still—we would then have churches of Hebrew Christians, or a Jewish wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia), but not the absorption in the environment which the assimilationist considers the solution of the Jewish problem. One point is true in the assimilationist theory—if there were no Jewish group, there would be no anti-Semitism. It is equally true that if there were no groups of human beings, there would be no intolerance. But such a condition is impossible. Man is a social being, and the tradition, the ideals, and the life of his own group hold him too firmly to be escaped except by the smallest minority. [116]Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and the radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Intermarriage, the biological side of assimilation, is actually going on now, but to a much smaller extent among the Jews than among any other immigrant group in America. Drachsler worked out the proportion of intermarriages among 100,000 marriages in New York City of all races, and found that approximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among all white groups, however, the Jews presented the smallest proportion of intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than half of 1 per cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among German Jews, and 6.5 per cent. among French Jews. The age-old tradition against marriage outside of the group, together with the anti-Semitic spirit without, have conspired to prevent this type of assimilation even now. And while the second generation of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages than the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for a more assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews, the difference between first and second generations is much less marked.