I find it noteworthy to cite here the, to me, rather pertinent words of Marc Bloch, the well known and ill-fated French historian, from his book Strange Defeat which analyses the causes of France’s WWII rout by the Germans in 1940:
“By birth, I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity which becomes particularly flagrant when attempts are made to apply it, as in this particular case of the Jews, to a group of co-religionists originally brought together from every corner of the Mediterranean, Turco-Khazar and Slav world. I am at pains never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an anti-Semite.”
Towards the end in that same book, Bloch then states:
“When death comes to me, whether in France or abroad, I leave it to my dear wife or, failing her, to my children, to arrange for such burial as may seem best to them. I wish the ceremony to be a civil one only…I have not asked to have read above my body those Jewish prayers to the cadence of which so many of my ancestors, including my father, were laid to rest…I could wish for no better epitaph than these simple words: DILEXIT VERITATEM[1] . That is why I find it impossible, at this moment of my last farewell, when, if ever, a man should be true to himself, to authorize any use of those formulae of an orthodoxy to the beliefs of which I ever refused to subscribe. But I should hate to think that anyone might read into this statement of personal integrity even the remotest approximation to a coward’s denial. I am prepared, therefore, if necessary, to affirm here, in the face of death, that I was born a Jew; that I have never denied it nor even been tempted to do so.”
The ultimate tragedy was that four years after writing the above lines, while fighting as member of the French Resistance, on June 16, 1944, Marc Bloch, after being tortured, fell to the bullets of a Nazi firing-squad.
[1] He loved the truth.
Pedro Lilienfeld 
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