“Every Jew is, whether he wishes it or not, solidly united with the entire nation.” (p. 163.)
Simply to indicate that we have not been quoting outworn opinions, but the actual beliefs of the most active and influential part of Jewry, we close this sec¬ tion of the testimony with excerpts from a work pub¬ lished in 1920 by the Zionist Organization of America, from the pen of Jessie E. Sampter:
“The name of their national religion, Judaism, is JEWISH TESTIMONY ON “ARE JEWS A NATION?” 23 derived from their national designation. An unre¬ ligious Jew is still a Jew, and he can with difficulty escape his allegiance only by repudiating the name of Jew.” (“Guide to Zionism,” p. 5.)
It will be seen that none of these writers—and their number might be multiplied among both ancients and moderns—can deny that the Jew is exclusively a member of a religion without at the same time asserting that he is, whether he will or not, the member of a nation. Some go so far as to insist that his allegiance is racial in addition to being national. The term “race” is used by important Jewish scholars without reserve, while some, who hold the German-originated view that the Jews are an offshoot of the Semitic race and do not comprise that race, are satisfied with the term “nation.” Biblically, in both the Old Testament and the New, the term “nation” or “people” is em¬ ployed. But the consensus of Jewish opinion is this: the Jews are a separate people, marked off from other races by very distinctive characteristics, both physical and spiritual, and they have both a national history and a national aspiration.
It will be noticed how the testimony on the point of “race” combines the thought of race and nation¬ ality, just as the previous section combined the thought of nationality with religion.