This monstrous affirmation is based, I need hardly say, upon what is
called a "scientific" examination of the affair: for that word
"scientific" has come to be associated with every kind of unreason. Men,
especially Jewish men, have been found to affirm most solemnly that they
had measured skulls, taken sections of hair, catalogued the colours of
eyes, established facial angles, analysed blood, and applied I know not
how many other tricks, with the result that no Jewish type could be
discovered! People who can reason thus do not seem to appreciate the
fundamental quarrel between nominalism and realism, or to have heard of
the old philosophic joke on the definition of "a thing."
We know a horse to be a horse, an apple to be an apple, a Chinaman to be
a Chinaman, or a Jew to be a Jew by some process on which philosophers
can debate, but upon the virtue of which no sane man doubts and upon the
right action of which we base all our lives. The chemist may tell me
that the chemical analysis of a lump of coal gives the same result as
the chemical analysis of a diamond, to which any man capable of using
his reason at all will reply that upon a very large number of other
lines of analysis, colour, touch, combustibility, hardness and softness,
economic value, prevalence (and so on indefinitely), the two are _not_
the same. No analysis is complete, and if we had made no conscious
analysis at all, we could still perceive at once that a lump of coal is
not a diamond.
It is just the same with these pseudo-scientific attempts to disprove
obvious truth. They pullulate and they are all equally ridiculous
because they deduce from insufficient data. The existence and
differentiation of the Jewish people as a race ethnically and as a
nation politically is as much a fact as the existence of coal or
diamonds. They are a nation politically because they act as a nation,
because their individual members feel and exercise a corporate function.
We know them to be a separate race because we can see that they are.
When you meet a Jew, whether you are his enemy or his friend, you meet a
Jew. He has a certain expression, a certain manner, certain physical
characteristics which you may not be able to analyse at the moment you
see him, but which give you the impression and the certitude that you
are dealing with a particular thing, to wit, the Jewish race. It is
true, of course, that the type, like all general types, fades off at the
edges, and there will always be cases where you may be in doubt of
whether you are dealing with a Jew or with a non-Jew, but there is a
marked central type round which the Jewish racial type is built up. That
is as certain as that there is a Mongolian type, or a negroid type, and
so forth.
I do not take the objection very seriously. I only note it because it
_has_ been made, and may crop up in the course of any discussion on this
grave political issue.
FOOTNOTE:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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