Jews Facing Critical Period, Says Writer

The present is the most critical period in the history of the Jews as a racial, national, and religious unit, according to the French economist. Jules Welter.

Analyzing the Jewish problem from the historical viewpoint in the Mercure de France of Paris, he divides the history of the Jewish question into three periods; a long, religious era which lasted eighteen centuries; a short, liberal era, and the present, which he calls the nationalist era.

During the religious era, which, he says, began with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. the Jews were persecuted for their religion, because they refused to be merged with the other nations of the world, which were willing to welcome them with open arms provide the Jews would give up their religion. “During this period,” says Welter, “the general tendency was to get rid of the Jews, preferably by wholesale.”

ENJOYED RIGHTS

During the second or liberal or liberal era, which lasted until the World War and began with the French Revolution, “the Jews were no longer pariahs, but human beings enjoying the same rights as all other men.”

Since the war, however, we have entered upon a new era in Jewish history, which the French writer calls the Nationalist era, in which national and racial traditions predominate in contrast to the political ones. Which previously predominated. As a result a novel kind of anti-Semitism has been engendered. The Jew is not baited now for his religion but for his race. “THE new nationalist faith.” claims Welter, “holds that all the citizens of a country must be bound together by ties of blood and not by common laws and customs of a country. Patriotism alone is no longer sufficient. It isn’t enough to be French, German, or American. One must be a ‘true’ German, a ‘good’ Frenchman, or a ‘hundred-per-cent’ American.”

Under these conditions the Jew faces a new situation entirely different from any he ever faced before.