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Designating Jews As Nation is Error, Says Jacob Wassermann

October 12, 1928
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(J. T. A. Mail Service)

It is a basic error to designate the Jews as a nation, Jacob Wassermarin, the famous German Jewish author, contended in the course of an address which he has delivered here to the German Federation of State Education.

“They are not that,” he said, “they can never again be that. If the Jews succeed today in establishing a state, they will perhaps be a nation, will perhaps be recognized as a people. But they will have ceased to be Jews in the old sense. They will perhaps acquire a state collectiveness, political influence, a place however lowly among the other numerous nationalities, but their historical world mission will be at an end.

“I even go so far as to say that if the Jews were all killed, if their name were expunged from the roll of history, it would be less disastrous to the history of humanity than if the Jews themselves give up the role which they have till now been playing in the history of the world.

“I do not deny the blood stream which flows in me from the great East,” Wassermann concluded. “I am proud of it. I believe that it contains great riches, which I can give to the world.”

Among the twenty-six new King’s Counsel recently created in the Province of Quebec, were two Jewish lawyers from Montreal Nathaniel W. Jacobs and A. W. Muhlstock.

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