This delusion has its base in something more fundamental, to which may be accredited perhaps the distrust against which the Jews have been battling for centuries. It is not the stranger who inspires continued suspicion, for he soon ceases to be a stranger, but it is the wanderer and the gypsy. There is imbedded in human nature a distrust of shifting things and a respect for what is long established in any one place, and it is in the wandering class that the Jew is placed in spite of all talk of assimilation. He has had no point of departure and hence no place of arrival. The French have crossed over the Channel and become Englishmen; one would hardly know that the Romans still live on in the Tyrol; but the Jew has always remained Jew, for he has no established place from which to come and whither to return. _"A People Without A Home"_ NOT only have the Jews been looked upon by others as a people without a home; subconsciously they have always regarded themselves as such. To-day a gigantic fund is proposed for the relief of the Jews affected by the present war, by the very ones who have argued most persistently for adaptation and assimilation. Yet this is a relief fund not for Belgian Jews, nor French Jews, nor German Jews, but for all Jews irrespective of the side on which they fight. The Jews are not thinking of themselves in terms of citizens or subjects of this or that country, but only as members of the Jewish race, who have no unity save as members of that race. It is the surest indication that beneath all self-delusion the Jews have subconsciously realized themselves as a homeless people, men without a country. Is it strange that the rest of the world should regard the Jew as alien when he cannot but hold himself as such? It would seem that this argument leads along a straight path towards Zionism as its conclusion. But practical Zionism, like all other programs of reconstruction, must await a time which will admit of reconstruction, and that is not the present. It may be that when this war is concluded, world conditions will have so completely changed that Zionism and its geographic program will no longer be the answer to the problem of Jewry. All that is certain of it now is its uncertainty. But the spirit of which Zionism is the expression, and which has made of it more than a mere experiment in colonization, still remains, emphasized by the self-realization to which the Jews have been brought in the present conflict. _The Persistence of the Jewish Faith_