Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JUDAISM—A NATIONAL RELIGION By The Very Rev. Dr. M. Gaster. Many attempts have been made in the past to find a proper definition for Jews and Judaism, but all attempts seem to have failed. The reason is not far to seek. Those who have undertaken this task have been guided by modern conceptions, and have endeavoured to apply notions which fit the existing political and ethnical conditions to Jews and Judaism. But Jews and Judaism are not a modern growth, and do not conform to the conditions which prevail among the nations of Europe. The attempt has been made from different quarters and with different objects; but only on rare occasions have men of science also drawn within the sphere of their investigations the problem of the Jews. As a rule their various theories had to serve a definite purpose. They had to favour the view that the Jews are a nation, or that they are not a nation. Jews have also been studied from the point of view of the relation in which they stand to the other nations in whose midst they live. A conscious and sometimes an unconscious bias has crept into the investigation and coloured the results obtained. Side by side with it went the new conception of nationality, which has become so prominent a feature in modern times. Yet it would be very difficult to define adequately what a nation is or what a race is. Whatever answer might be given to these questions from the study of modern problems, it could not be made to fit the question as it applies to Jews and Judaism, Among the modern criteria of a nation, unity of language is given the first place. The racial differencehas been more and more neglected; nay, modern nations have gone so far as to attempt the obliteration of the racial origin by a policy of forcible unification on the basis of the same langu...