Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/196

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You Gentiles

dren to the gentiles is making the best of both worlds. He evades the odious name of renegade which attaches to the baptized Jew (also salving his conscience) and at the same time contributes effectively to the dissolution of the Jewish people. It is well to note that the Westernized or "Reform" Jew may deplore the practice, but will not exclude such a man from the Temple. The orthodox Jew considers such a man lost to Judaism: the view, whatever its ethics, is clearer and healthier.

But I want to consider not the accidental, but the deliberate, or politic. Accidental intermarriage, being accidental and therefore uncontrollable, is not a policy. Baptism is a policy: the weakening of Judaism by the removal of its "nationalist" implications, and by its "modernization," is also a policy—the same policy, in fact, but more circumspect and less self-confessed. This policy has as its objective the solution of the Jewish problem by the dissolution of the Jewish people.

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