IS JEWRY A NATION?
SIR,—To maintain that the Jews are a nation, Mr. Israel Cohen asserts that besides religion "they have also in common their racial descent, their ancestral language, their literature (of which a part is purely secular), their folklore, their centuries of sufferings, their sense of solidarity, and their hopes for the future." Have they?
r. The native Jews of India, Abyssinia and other similar groups can hardly be said to have the same racial descent as the European Jews ; and even of the European Jews it cannot be said that they all have the same racial ancestry Moreover, the separate nations of Europe which belong to the same race show that common racial ancestry does not mean a common nationality.
2. The ancestral language which Jews have in common is by yo per cent. of them used only in prayer. It is not the language either of their thought or their common speech. It is common to them only by its connection with their religion, so that it can hardly supply an argument for a common nationality.
3. The literature which all Jews have in common is a religious litera- ture. To what does Mr. Cohen refer by the " part (of the literature) which is purely secular "? Surely, he cannot refer to writings in Yiddish which only a fraction of the world's Jews know anything about. If, however, he refers to modern writings in Hebrew, the knowledge of them among Jews generally is even more limited.
4. Is there a folklore common to all Jews? Do Jews of Kochin-China and the Jews of America have the same folktales, folkrhymes, and so on?
5. It is true that Jews have common "hopes for the future," but aS Mr. Lipson's article itself showed, they are not for many Jtws national hopes. The only hopes for the future in which all Jews share are the Messianic hopes for humanity, in other words, the hopes inspired by the Jewish religion.
6. Their sense of solidarity is a fact. But it simply begs the question to give it a national significance. It is in itself just a sense of attachment to the community. The Jews are a community in a real sense. But what kind of a community? Mr. Cohen and those who agree with him want to make it into a national community. Wit it is anticipating their aims to call the Jews a nation now, they do not generally have the feeling of a common nationality. The Zionists themselves have supplied evidence of that fact in diverse ways and especially by their frequent protests against the large number of people who contribute to Zionist funds without understanding, and much less adhering to. Zionist ideology.
The comparatively modern idea of nation does not fit the Jews. No other ordinary group classification fits them exactly. But religious com- munity comes nearest to an adequate description of the corporate life of the Jews, if sufficient emphasis is given to the noun as well as to the adjective. We are a people bound together by religion plus the history and tradition which the religion both formed and includes.—Yours faith.
fully, RABBI DR. I. I. MATTUCK.
28 St. John's Wood Road, N.W.8.
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