thout the Diaspora_ was equally impossible, because it
lacked the backing of the people as a whole, and was in danger of
becoming a petty and obscure corner in the vast expanse of the Jewish
Dispersion, a sort of Jewish Nigeria.

This synthesis was not a pale cast of thought, the flimsy product of
an imaginative brain. It had its prototype in the actual facts of
history. For during several centuries preceding the dissolution of the
Jewish state, Palestine was the spiritual center of Judaism, in the
sense just indicated. The Jews outside of Palestine were superior, not
only in numbers, but also in wealth and influence, to those of
Palestine. The Jews of Egypt, and the same applies to other countries
of that period, were closely associated with the cultural and material
aspirations of their environment. Philo was one of the most
illustrious representatives of the Hellenic culture of his age; these
Diaspora Jews even found it necessary to translate the Holy Writings
into Greek. Yet they were, at the same time, loyal to Palestine. They
paid their Shekel, they made their annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem,
and looked upon the Holy Land as the spiritual center of all Jewry.

_The Second Issue: Religion vs. Nationalism_

THE other fundamental issue on which Jewish opinion is divided is
closely associated with the preceding one; it hinges on the formula
_Religion versus Nationalism_. From its earliest beginnings down to
the time of modern emancipation, Judaism represented an indissoluble
combination of nationalism and religion. Though ultimately intended to
appeal to the whole of humanity, Judaism was essentially a _national_
religion. Its bearer was a national community which zealously guarded
its racial purity, and its external manifestations assumed the forms
of a national life. Again the Jewish people was, first and foremost, a
_religious_ nation. Its sole reason for existence was, in the belief
of every one of its members, "to know the Lord" and to make Him known
to others. A Jew who did not believe in the fundamentals of the Jewish
creed or who did not observe the fundamentals of the Jewish ceremonial
was as much of a monstrosity as the Jew who denied the common racial
descent of the Jews in the past, or their common national destiny in
the future.

The departure of the Jews from the Ghetto and their entrance into
modern life marked a turning point also in this direction. Filled with
the desire of becoming part of the