The predicates of the first category alone are germane to our subject. Those of the second category are partly inapplicable (political union, political functions), and partly limited in their application, for example, to the sphere of local interests. In this connection attention may be drawn to the fact that the local organization of the Jews is strong and well-marked wherever the state or society drives the Jews, by means of exceptional laws, ostracism or prejudice, to an instinctive or organized self-defence, and is absent only where the Jews enjoy complete emancipation not only in the eyes of the law, but also in the view of public opinion as a whole, and not merely in that of certain of the upper classes which are everywhere more or less privileged.¹ ¹ The desire to remove this sort of separatism was the fundamental idea of the _Alliance Israélite Universelle_. Exceptional laws tend to isolate the Jews; the attacks and accusations directed against them collectively, the differential treatment meted out to them, the anti-Semitic policy, all necessarily contribute to strengthen the walls of the _Ghetto_. Every discrimination made against the Jews, be it only the merest _chicane_, is a stone added to the walls of the _Ghetto_. It is not to the Jews that the erection of a “State within a State” is to be credited; it is the anti-Semitic movement which is responsible for this anomaly. As soon as the Jews are subjected to differential treatment, they must likewise alter their attitude. Whether they will or no, there arises out of these conditions a complex of problems in consequence of the instinct for self-preservation, which acts with the force of an iron law. These problems, which in their origin have nothing to do with the national life and character of the Jews, invest them with the character of a politico-economic nationality, artificially isolated within the State. That is a kind of nationality to which the Jews do not aspire; it is forced on them from without. And it is in such conditions that the majority of the Jews live. It is a superficial method of computation which estimates the condition of the Jews according to the majority of the countries in which they live; the right method is to consider the condition of the majority of the people. That is the decisive factor. A well-known Jewish author has taken the trouble to collect in a book all the laws promulgated against the Jews in Russia under the old régime. These laws numbered more than a thousand, and subsequently they were increased by many hundreds. This code of laws――a kind of anti-Bible――affects half of the Jewish race. The originators of these special laws have consciously or unconsciously bestowed upon the Jews the predicates of a nationality within the domain of the State, but in a negative sense and with (as it were) _inverted_ political rights. A group of men may thus be converted into a nation isolated within the