Quotation from Vladimir Jabotinsky “A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity” — June 1904

Founder of the "revisionist movement", ideological ancestor of the Israeli "right", tutelary figure of the Likud, celebrated in many streets and avenues in Israel. Writing in a Russian publication, he glorifies "ethnic" segregation and a racialist vision of humanity and the "Jewish people".

Author : Thematics :
" We do not believe in spiritual assimilation. It is inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood can become adapted to the spiritual outlooks of a German or a Frenchman. A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He maybe wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. [...] The spiritual assimilation of peoples whose blood is different is impossible of effectuation. It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different from his own. In order to become truly assimilated he must change his body. He must become one of them in blood ... he must bring into the world ... over a period of many scores of years, a great--great-grandson in whose veins only a minute trace of Jewish blood remained ... There can be no assimilation as long as there is no mixed marriage […] An increase in the number of mixed marriages is the only sure and infallible means for the destruction of nationality as such. All the nations that have disappeared (apart from those ... who were massacred ...) were swallowed up in the chasm of mixed marriages [...] autonomy in the Golah [exile] is likely to lead ... to the complete disappearance of the Jewish nation as such from the face of the earth [...] Just imagine ... when our offspring will be living at peace among a strange people ... These conditions will lead naturally and freely to an increase in mixed marriages ... this will mean the inception of complete assimilation [...] Without those physical roots, the spiritual flower is bound to wither ... This will mark the end of the battle waged by the Jewish people for national existence [...] Only those can call themselves "nationalists" who desire to preserve national integrity for the everlasting and at all costs [...]
A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity, and for that purpose we are in need of a territory of our own where our people will constitute the overwhelming majority. If you should ask me in a sense of revolt and outrage: but surely in that case you want segregation at all costs! I would answer that one must not be afraid of words and not of the word "segregation." The poet, the scholar, the thinker ... must cut himself off and remain alone with himself ... No creativeness is possible without segregation ... The nation, too, must create ... a creative nation is in need of segregation ... it will create new values in its segregation ... it will not keep them to itself but will place them on the common international table for the general good, and so its segregation will be looked upon with favor by humanity. "

Vladimir Zhabotinskii, Pismo ob avtonomizme (A Letter on Autonomy) no. 6, june 1904.
Full text in Lenni Brenner, 51 documents, Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Barricade, 2002, pp 7-20.

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