ll corners of the Diaspora, and not their problems and
activities in a single country or section of the globe.

_Jewish Life Not Synonymous With Jewish Religion_

AN exposition of Jewish life as it is actually lived in modern times
helps to clarify a much-beclouded situation. It enables the Jew the
better to know himself; it presents to the outside world a clearer
outline of a figure who must ever, to some extent, remain "strange"
and "unknowable." Moreover, the reader's sense of proportion is
adjusted by a work which does not make Jewish life synonymous with
Jewish religion. Whether there is sufficient evidence of a biological
and anthropological character to support the claim of those who look
upon the Jews as a separate race, whether the Jewish people in their
dispersion may properly be considered as a distinct national group in
spite of the absence of a government and a territory of their own, it
is certainly difficult, in all intellectual honesty, to maintain that
the Jews are merely a religious community. One of our brilliant young
philosophers has strikingly said that a Jew can change his religion,
but that he cannot change his grandfather; nor, he might have added
can he destroy his more general antecedents, that complex of customs,
traditions and ideals which have manifested themselves in the course
of thirty-five centuries of recorded history and which create within
him an ineradicable historic consciousness. Jewish solidarity is not
grounded in religion alone, and the distinctiveness of the Jewish
people manifests itself in activities other than religion.

A work which like the present aims to present the Jew in every
important phase of life, which describes the social, political,
economic, and intellectual aspects of Jewish life, as well as the
religious, deserves commendation because of its mere scope and
completeness. But Mr. Cohen has gone further. He has not fallen into
the error of many of the spokesmen for the cultural or historical
unity of Jewry of denying or even minimizing the potency of religion
as a factor in Jewish survival. Indeed, he everywhere recognizes that
the primary or motor force in the organization of the Jewish
community, which is the concrete expression of Jewish solidarity, is
religious, springing from the desire for public worship. But while
religion is the underlying factor, it is not the only factor. There is
a sane coordination of the leading aspects of Jewish life, a clear