Felix Theilhaber's estimate that before the (First) World War German Jews lost around one thousand of their co-religionists annually because of apostasy and mixed marriages, if correct, suggests that there were at least 30,000 "non Jewish Jews" in Germany... by the end of the Weimar period. This erosion almost certainly increased during the postwar years, giving cause for fears that German Jews would become thoroughly amalgamated within a generation or two. To consider mixed marriages alone, there was a threefold increase between 1901 and 1927, until by the latter year there was at least one mixed marriage for every two marriages involving German Jews. Only about one - quarter of the children of mixed marriages were raised as Jews. "(Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, 1980, pg. 98).

The above comments aptly describe the situation confronting all of assimilated Jewry at the beginning of the Twenty First Century. While conversion to other religions is a relatively rare phenomenon, cultural assimilation and mixed marriage have proceeded apace. Indeed, despite the differences of time and milieu, the general situation of American Jews is in many ways analogous to that of their European brethren and far from unique. The emancipation movements of the early to middle Nineteenth Century freed the Jew from his legal disabilities while at the same time ending Jewry's corporate structure. With the erosion of traditional communal life, individuals found themselves confronted with choices and opportunities without the safety net of a secure folk community. Moses Mendelssohn the Enlightenment "Father" of Jewish Emancipation, lost five of his six children to outmarriage and conversion. While Mendelssohn believed in the continuity of Jewish life, he also stressed the need for cultural accommodation with the surrounding gentile society. His children, reared among the relatively tolerant literary and artistic salons of Berlin, preferred only the latter formulation to the former. This trend continually increased with the passage of time and the subsequent decay of Jewish communal consciousness. With the unification of the German Reich in 1871, Jewish Emancipation was complete. Most remaining legal barriers to social and economic progress were removed; at the same time, more Jews moved to the cities and became part of the anonymous urban mass. As economic ties gradually replaced traditional group loyalties, the lines separating peoples were erased. In fact contrary to the popular opinion that large scale assimilation and intermarriage take place only within a liberal society (such as the US), German anti - Semitism was never a significant factor in preventing said phenomena. Ruth Gay, in her book The Jews of Germany, writes that "It has been estimated that around 1930, perhaps a quarter of all Jewish marriages were to a gentile partner." (1992, pg. 254).

Steven M. Lowenstein states that "Between 1901 and 1905, 8.8 percent of the marriages of Jewish men in Germany were to non Jews, while 7.6 percent of the Jewish women who married, married out of the faith. By the period 1926 - 1930 these percentages had risen to 25.7 and 16.6 respectively." (The Mechanics of Change, pgs. 23-24, 1992).

It must be remembered that these statistics reflect a Germany on the eve of Hitler's ascension to power. Had the German Jewish story not ended in the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust, its eventual merger with, and disappearance in, the host society was a very real possibility. Similar patterns can be found among many other communities as well. In Soviet Russia during the 1920's, the first generation of Jews removed from shtetl life rapidly assimilated to the dominant Slavic culture. There was such a speedy erosion of Jewish identity that Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet president, spoke out against the too rapid fusion of Jew to non - Jew. (Soviet policy at the time was to encourage the separate development of the nation's various ethnic groups). According to Zvi Gittelman, "At the first convention of the Association for Rural Settlement of Jewish Toilers, none other than Mikhail Kalinin, a Russian and the ceremonial head of the Soviet state, deplored Jewish assimilation and marriage to non - Jews. "(A Century of Ambivalence, 1988, pg.150).

The President's pleadings were in vain, however, as the difficulties encountered by the Israeli government in determining the Jewishness of the current "Russian" aliya so amply show. The original Jewish settlers in the US also assimilated to such a point that a Semitic equivalent of the Daughters of The American Revolution would today be an impossibility. The recent Jewish population survey (Which indicated a continuing decline in the American Jewish population since the last survey, in 1990), rather than being merely a cause for alarm, must also serve as a call to action. It is has become necessary for the Jewish community to draw on its vast human and organizational resources to pull itself out of its present morass. A series of national, non - sectarian Jewish parliaments, democratically elected, would be one such solution to the problem. Organization would be regional (North America, Latin America, Euro-Africa and Austral-Asia {including Israel} with a main parliament based in Jerusalem. Each regional grouping would deal exclusively with the problems of its geographical area, with the bi-yearly major body serving as an international forum to coordinate the activities of the various parliaments on a trans-national level.

This "popular front" would include representatives from both the secular and religious worlds; elections would be held at synagogues and JCC's. Only members of the various regional parliaments could be elected to the Jerusalem organ. While today there are numerous Jewish communal bodies ( American Jewish Congress, Anti-Defamation League, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations etc.) they are limited by theological or political considerations. The new organization would create and fund cultural and educational programs with the aim of creating a positive, organic Jewish identity; religious differences would be put aside (not eliminated) in the name of communal unity. Programs geared to all ages would teach Jewish history, languages, music, cookery, and the importance of identity in a rootless world.

The Yiddish author Sholem Asch once wrote a novel entitled Der Weg tsu Zikh (The Way to Oneself). It is time for the Jew to follow the path back to himself, one in which inner identity is not sacrificed to the idol of a vague cosmopolitanism. The road will be difficult; there will be many casualties along the way. However, society has thrown down the gauntlet, the Jews must respond to the challenge. The time is now.