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Against this theory the Conjoint Committee strongly and earnestly protest. Emancipated Jews in this country regard themselves primarily as a religious community, and they have always based their claims to political equality with their fellow-citizens of other creeds on this assumption, and on its corollary—that they have no separate national aspirations in a political sense. They hold Judaism to be a religious system with which their political status has no concern; and they maintain that, as citizens of the countries in which they live, they are fully and sincerely identified with the national spirit and interests of those countries. It follows that the establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine founded on this theory of Jewish homelessness must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, and of undermining their hard-won position as citizens and nationals of those lands. Moreover a Jewish political nationality carried to its logical conclusion must in the present circumstances of the world he an anachronism. The Jewish religion being the only certain test of the Jew, a Jewish nationality must he founded on, and limited by, the religion. It cannot he supposed for a moment that any section of Jews would aim at a commonwealth governed by religious tests and limited in the matter of freedom of conscience; but can a religious nationality express itself politically in any other way? The only alternative would he a secular Jewish nationality recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and ethnographic peculiarity; but this would not be Jewish in any spiritual sense, and its establishment in Palestine would be a denial of all the ideals and hopes by which the revival of Jewish life in that country commends itself to the Jewish consciousness and Jewish sympathy. On these grounds the Conjoint Committee deprecate most earnestly the national proposals of the Zionists.

Undesirable privileges.—The second point in the Zionist programme which has aroused the misgivings of the Conjoint Committee is the proposal to invest the Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population, these rights to be embodied in a Charter and administered by a Jewish Chartered Company. Whether it is desirable or not to confide any portion of the administration of Palestine to a Chartered Company need not he discussed; but it is certainly very undesirable that Jews should solicit or accept such a concession on a basis of political privilege and economic preferences. Any such action would prove a veritable calamity for the whole Jewish people. In all the countries in which they live the principle of equal rights