weakened in public opinion, was still honestly taken for granted by some of the Parliamentarians who framed the Treaty, and was certainly felt to be of personal advantage to all: the position that there is no Jewish nation when the admission of it may inconvenience the Jew, but very much of a Jewish nation when it can advantage him.
Those who defended this position did so from various standpoints; but these may all be regarded as so many degrees in a certain way of looking at the Jewish people. It was till lately the attitude of the majority of educated Frenchmen, Englishmen and Italians. It was, so to speak, the official political attitude of Western Europe with its parliamentary governments and other corresponding institutions.
The most extreme form of this opinion was to be found in people who spoke of the Jew as nothing other than a citizen with a particular religion. A state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant, but it would contain smaller religious bodies, eager minorities, for which a place had to be found, side by side with the more or less indifferent majority. Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy Huguenot minority. Protestant England had a seven per cent and poor Catholic minority. Protestant Holland had a large minority—more than a third—of Catholics, and so forth. It had become odious to nineteenth century thought that religious differences (which it regarded as nothing more than shades of doubtfully-held private opinion) should be the concern of the State. A large number of people thought of the Jews, not as a race, but only as a religion; and regarding all religion thus, they concluded that it could involve no diminution of citizenship.
At the other end of the scale you had public men who fully appreciated the ultimate difficulties which would certainly arise from this inconclusive settlement of the matter. These regarded the Jews as a quite distinct nationality, and even as a nationality likely to clash with the national needs of its hosts; they would even (in private) express their