Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/194

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You Gentiles


fact will have to be considered again in its relation to the feasibility of this proposal. If we talk of the submergence of the Jew we must not play with words: words alone cannot submerge the Jew. If there is anything in what I have said you cannot make a gentile of a Jew by arguing with him any more than by lynching him. You can make his children half gentile, his grandchildren only a quarter Jewish—and so on till the balance is perfect.

And this truth seems to have worked in the minds of some Westernizing Jews. Reform Judaism, or modernized Judaism, is the halfway house to baptism: or at least to intermarriage. Its very purpose is such, despite the protestations of Reform Jews. It cannot be anything else, for if the desire is to become "like the world around us," then all barriers must go down, and the real barrier, the conservator of all distinctions, is our practice of endogamy.

One thing is quite certain: a Jew is never baptized for the purpose of becoming a Christian; his purpose is to become a gentile. Yet

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