The Mechanism of Dissolution
for forcible inter-marriage, for even when we cease to believe in endogamy, we will practise it because our affections so incline us. It would have to become a sort of principle that in the name of the great ideal of a solution of the Jewish problem, the Jew shall be forbidden (morally, at least) to marry among his own. But it is clear that even if intensive propaganda were to break down (it could not, for reasons I shall return to) our prohibitions against inter-marriage, it would have to work progressively. It would take many generations to carry the change successively through all the strongholds of Jewish life. And when we add to the time thus needed the time needed for actual absorption by intermarriage, we are faced with a task for centuries.
But I will deal with ideal conditions. I will deal with a single large group of Jews determined to abandon their identity and to lose themselves and their children in the surrounding gentile world. We know well that their
children will not yet be assimilated in the full
197
