Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/140

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You Gentiles

Russia you are changing, becoming like us, taking your share in all our activities, sports, civic duties, achievements, arts. You have spoken hitherto in the terms of a world which is fitfully dissolving. You have ignored the liberal Jews, the radical Jews, the modernized Jews, the agnostic Jews, now becoming the dominant element in Jewry, and approaching us, mingling with us, solving the problem without deliberate effort.

"Do not your own radicals renounce their Jewish connections? Will not your modernized Jews be the first to denounce the thesis of this book?"

I have already said, anticipating this objection, that there is the same difference between the Jewish atheist and the gentile atheist as between the orthodox Jew and the believing gentile: I have said or implied that the religion itself is but practical expression of the difference between us, not the cause of it. It is true that the expression of a view serves to strengthen it, as the exercise of a faculty serves to develop it. But expression

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