This change was brought about both by the Jews themselves, who for the past thirty or forty years have begun to assert their nationality and to claim the right to which every nationality is entitled, namely, a national homeland, and by the peculiar discrepancy between principle and life. The European governments, following a certain principle, refused to consider the Jews a nationality, but in practical life the Jews were always considered a nationality of their own. While the modern state emancipated the Jew on the condition that he emancipate himself from Judaism, modern society, on the other hand, refused to admit him just because he was a Jew, and thus counteracted and opposed the emancipation policy of the government. Modern society is intensely nationalistic and will only recognize those as its true members who belong to it, not only socially and economically, but also nationally and racially. Since the Jews are not Slavs or Teutons or Anglo-Saxons but Jews, they simply were not admitted as full-fledged members in the society of these races and nations, and whenever they made an attempt to penetrate into society by force and _en masse_, they were only too quickly ejected by a wave of anti-Semitism. So that while the states emancipated the Jews, on the condition that they become full-fledged Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Austrians, etc., because it considered the Jewish nationality dead and done for, the nations themselves, being nearer to life and its movements than the bureaucrats of the government chancelleries, felt that the Jews do form a national society of their own and are by no means nationally dead. The official recognition of the Jews as a nationality on the part of a modern state will, we are convinced, put an end to this difference in attitude and policy towards the Jews on the part of the government and of the nation. Besides the national self-assertion of the Jews during the past thirty years, we find that their rôle as intellectual and spiritual factors in history led to the present change of mind of the European governments in regard to Jewish nationality. It is by no means pure accident that two mighty Anglo-Saxon nations and governments, Great Britain and the United States of America, should be the first among the great powers to recognize the right of the Jews to a national homeland of their own and thus to recognize publicly the nationality of the Jews. If the ancient Jewish mind, as it expressed itself in the Bible, ever influenced a great race and helped to shape its destinies and policies, it was the Anglo-Saxon race that it influenced. For the past four hundred years the greatest production of Jewish genius, the Bible, has been a powerful factor in the life of the Anglo-Saxon race, and as soon as the Anglo-Saxons freed themselves from medievalism, they began to treat the Jews living among them with consideration and fairness, even before they were officially emancipated.