Solution and Dissolution
obviously you do not make a gentile of a Jew by baptizing him any more than you would make an Aryan of a negro by painting him with ocher. The sole (and sufficient) value in this direction of baptism is the removal of all conscious prohibition against intermarriage.
Of course even baptism is not a necessary preparation. Jews marry gentiles without this preliminary formality. The case is somewhat different here. This is a natural wastage or attrition: individual passion, not policy, is the cause, though the effect is the same the disappearance of the Jew. And it certainly connotes, even if indirectly, the renunciation first of Judaism and then of Jewish affiliation. A Jew married to a gentile may remain a Jew ostensibly, as he is in fact. His children seldom, if ever, profess Judaism or associate themselves with the Jewish people.
In this case the evasion is even more dishonest than in the first. A man who professes to belong to the Jewish faith and the Jewish people and who nevertheless gives his chil-
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