Since I am myself a Jew and the nature of my work constantly involves me in the activities of the Jewish people, I had supposed that the preparation of this paper would occasion me very little trouble. But the more have considered the matter the more I have been forced to the—perhaps salutary—conclusion that really I know very little indeed about my own people.

In the first place we have to ask ourselves the apparently simple but perhaps insoluble question: what is a Jew? It has been truly remarked that a Jew is very easy to recognize and very hard to define.

There are, of course, definitions, but none that seem to me very satisfactory. According to Jewish religious law, a Jew (other than a proselyte) is the child of a Jewish mother—the faith of the father is not an essential factor. The test is, of course, logically indefensible, since we are bound to ask what made the mother Jewish, and to reply that she in turn was the daughter of a Jewish mother who derived her Jewishness from her mother, and so on for ever. We are thus landed in one of those infinite regressions that bedevil all logical argument. The same objection—together with a host of other objections—applied to Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, according to which a Jew was a person, whatever his or her faith, who had one or more Jewish grandparents. That grandparent presumably was Jewish by reason of having the same stain on his or her escutcheon, and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.