The Jews are a nation, although they have not retained their full national status. Most non-Jews, whether they are anti-or pro-Jews, regard Judaism as a national tie, and if well-wishers hesitate to express this opinion it is only for fear of hurting the feelings of those Jews who wish to be thought merely a religious community. Delicate natures shrink from incurring the suspicion of anti-Semitism, and comply from conscious or unconscious kindliness with this singular wish of a few Jews. So this minority has contrived to suggest to many Christians a view which, in reality, they do not share at all, and which will not stand careful scrutiny. The best proof of the national quality of a given community is the conviction of the outside world that it is a nation. Whether the Jews are an absolutely pure race or not (absolute purity does not exist, but relatively the Jews are doubtless the purest race among civilized nations), they have a specific past, a peculiar temperament, a special mentality, which persist even when the Jewish religion has long ceased to be a living force, and make the most assimilated Jews a nation. And so it will remain, for, on the whole, the Jews are a tenacious people, and withstand extreme tendencies to assimilation. When some assimilated Jews, who really believe in nothing, call themselves genuine Teutons, Latins, _etc._, of the Jewish faith, it may be psychologically interesting to close observers, but it is in reality only an unconscious impulse on the part of self-despairing Judaism to survive in any shape whatsoever. And these assimilationists have never been――though the Jews have gone through greater and more extensive periods of assimilation than the present――more than a handful. Of course the national force of present-day Judaism is in a latent state, and it can only become manifest when Judaism resumes its history. The Jewish nation has the cultural power to attain that goal, to form a national community, to maintain it and to make it prosper. Its intellectual and ethical aptitudes are denied by none but the malevolent and the envious. One cannot glance into the history of civilized nations, and of civilization itself, without meeting at every point with men of Jewish race who have achieved great things in poetry and science, in economics and politics. “Yours is a mighty genius,” the French statesman Ernest Laharanne wrote in 1860, “and we bow before you. You were strong in the days of antiquity, and strong in the Middle Ages. You have preserved your existence throughout the dispersion, of course not without paying the heavy tax of eighteen centuries of persecution. But the remainder is still strong enough to erect anew the gates of _Jerusalem_. This is your task.”¹ ¹ _La Nouvelle Question d’Orient_, _ibid._