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THE GENTLEMAN AND THE JEW by Maurice Samuel

THE GENTLEMAN AND THE JEW

By

Pub Date: Sept. 18th, 1950
Publisher: Knopf

An inquiry, ideological and spiritual, into the relationship between Jews and Christians which has its inception in Samuel's own experience as a student in England, and leads up to the meaning and consequences of the establishment of the state of Israel. Of Jewish-Romanian . Samuel had a mixed schooling in England which followed the traditions of his new country and observed the orthodox patterns of his belief. From an early admiration of the contradictory concept of ""the Christian gentleman"" sustained by Shakespeare, Kipling, Tennyson, he turned to the realism of Shaw, Wells, etc. and then later went back to the study of the ancients and particularly the Hebrew prophets. In this study he links the prophets with the Jewish people and their national structure, their temperament; he goes on to show the relationship between the Bible, Judaism and the Zionist movement; and he ends with an analysis of Zionism today, the propagandist and curative values of the ""homeland"", the motives for its creation, the question of double allegiance, the external and internal dangers involved... For a special market, this also has its rather special angles and exacts a more than superficial knowledge, historical, psychological, and to a lesser extent political.