Germany's Reaction Against the Jew
Humanity has become wise enough to discuss those forms of physical
sickness over which it formerly drew the veil of shame and secrecy, but
political hygiene is not so far advanced. The main source of the
sickness of the German national body is charged to be the influence of
the Jews, and although this was apparent to acute minds years ago, it is
now said to have gone so far as to be apparent to the least observing.
The eruption has broken out on the surface of the body politic, and no
further concealment of this fact is possible. It is the belief of all
classes of the German people that the collapse which has come since the
armistice, and the revolution from which they are being prevented a
recovery, are the result of Jewish intrigue and purpose. They declare it
with assurance; they offer a mass of facts to confirm it; they believe
that history will provide the fullest proof.
The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a guest of the people; he has
offended by trying to turn himself into the host. There are no stronger
contrasts in the world than the pure Germanic and pure Semitic races;
therefore, there has been no harmony between the two in Germany; the
German has regarded the Jew strictly as a guest, while the Jew,
indignant at not being given the privileges of the nation-family, has
cherished animosity against his host. In other countries the Jew is
permitted to mix more readily with the people, he can amass his control
unchallenged; but in Germany the case was different. Therefore, the Jew
hated the German people; therefore, the countries of the world which
were most dominated by the Jews showed the greatest hatred of Germany
during the recent regrettable war. Jewish hands were in almost exclusive
control of the engines of publicity by which public opinion concerning
the German people was molded. The sole winners of the war were Jews.
But assertion is not enough; proof is wanted; therefore, consider the
evidence. What occurred immediately upon the change from the old regime
to the new? The cabinet composed of six men, which substituted the
Minister of State, was dominated by the Jews Haase and Landsberg. Haase
had control of foreign affairs; his assistant was the Jew Kautsky, a
Czech, who in 1918 was not even a German citizen. Also associated with
Haase were the Jews Cohn and Herzfeld. The Jew Schiffer was Financial
Minister of State, assisted by the Jew Bernstein. The Secretary of the
Interior was the Jew Preuss, with the Jew Dr. Freund for his assistant.
The Jew Fritz Max Cohen, who was correspondent of the Frankfurter
Zeitung in Copenhagen, was made government publicity agent.
The kingdom of Prussia duplicated this condition of affairs. The Jews
Hirsch and Rosenfeld dominated the cabinet, with Rosenfeld controlling
the Department of Justice, and Hirsch in the Department of the Interior.
The Jew Simon was in charge of the Treasury Department. The Prussian
Department of Justice was wholly manned and operated by Jews. The
Director of Education was the Jew Furtran with the assistance of the Jew
Arndt. The Director of the Colonial Office was the Jew Meyer-Gerhard.
The Jew Kastenberg was the director of the Department of Art. The War
Food Supply Department was directed by the Jew Wurm, while in the State
Food Department were the Jews Prof. Dr. Hirsch and the Geheimrat Dr.
Stadthagen. The Soldiers' and Workmen's Committee was directed by the
Jew Cohen, with the Jews Stern, Herz, Lowenberg, Frankel, Israelowicz,
Laubenheim, Seligsohn, Katzenstein, Laufenberg, Heimann, Schlesinger,
Merz and Weyl having control of various activities of that committee.
The Jew Ernst is chief of police at Berlin; in the same office at
Frankfurt is the Jew Sinzheimer; in Munich the Jew Steiner; in Essen the
Jew Levy. It will be remembered that the Jew Eisner was President of
Bavaria, his financial minister being the Jew Jaffe. Bavaria's trade,
commerce and industry were in control of the half-Jew Brentano. The Jews
Lipsinsky and Schwarz were active in the government of Saxony; the Jews
Thalheimer and Heiman in Wurtemberg; the Jew Fulda in Hessen.
Two delegates sent to the Peace Conference were Jews and a third was
notoriously the tool of Jewish purposes. In addition Jews swarmed
through the German delegation as experts and advisors—Max Warburg, Dr.
Von Strauss, Merton, Oskar Oppenheimer, Dr. Jaffe, Deutsch, Brentano,
Bernstein, Struck, Rathenau, Wassermann, and Mendelsohn-Bartholdi.
As to the part which Jews from other countries had in the Peace
Conference, German observers declare that any candid student may
discover by reading the accounts of impartial non-Jewish recorders of
that event. Only the non-Jewish historians seem to have been struck by
the fact; the multitude of Jewish writers apparently judged it wise to
conceal it.
Jewish influence in German affairs came strongly to the front during the
war. It came with all the directness and attack of a flying wedge, as if
previously prepared. The Jews of Germany were not German patriots during
the war, and although this will not appear a crime in the eyes of the
nations who were opposed to Germany, it may throw some light on the
Jew's assertion of patriotic loyalty to the land where he lives.
Thoughtful Germans hold that it is impossible for the Jew to be a
patriot, for reasons which will presently be given.
The point to be considered is the general claim that the persons already
named would not have obtained the positions in which they were found had
it not been for the Revolution, and the Revolution would not have come
had not they brought it. It is true that there were unsatisfactory
conditions in Germany, but they could and would have been adjusted by
the people themselves; the conditions which destroyed the people's
morale and were made impossible of reform were in control of the Jews.
The principal Jewish influences which are charged with bringing about
the downfall of German order may be named under three heads: (a) the
spirit of Bolshevism which masqueraded under the name of German
Socialism; (b) Jewish ownership and control of the Press; (c) Jewish
control of the food supply and the industrial machinery of the country.
There was a fourth, "higher up," but these worked upon the German people
directly.
As it is possible that German conclusions upon this matter may be
received doubtfully by peoples whose public opinion has been shaped by
Jewish influence, it may help to quote George Pitter-Wilson, of the
London Globe, who wrote early in April, 1919, "Bolshevism is the
dispossession of the Christian nations of the world to such an extent
that no capital will remain in the hands of the Christians, that all
Jews may jointly hold the world in their hands and reign wherever they
choose." As early as the second year of the war, German Jews were
preaching that Germany's defeat was necessary to the rise of the
proletariat, at which time Strobel declared, "I openly admit that a full
victory of the country would not be in the interest of the Social
Democrats." Everywhere it was preached that "the exaltation of the
proletariat after a won victory is an impossibility." These instances,
out of many, are cited not to reopen the military question but to show
how the so-called German Jew forgot loyalty to the country in which he
lived and joined the outside Jews in accomplishing the collapse of
Germany, and not merely, as we shall see, to rid Germany of militarism,
which every thoughtful German desired, but to throw the country into
such confusion as to permit them to seize control.
The press of Germany echoed this plan of the Jewish spokesmen, at first
faintly, then boldly. The Berliner Tageblatt and the Munchner Neuester
Nachrichten were during the whole war official and semi-official organs
of the government. They were owned and controlled by Jews, as was also
the Frankfurter Zeitung and a host of smaller papers that were their
spiritual dependents. These papers, it is charged, were really German
editions of the Jew-controlled press of the Allied countries, and their
purpose was the same. One of the great pieces of research that ought to
be undertaken for the purpose of showing the world how its thought is
manufactured for it every day, and for what ulterior purposes, is this
union of the Jewish press, which passes for the Public Press, throughout
the world.
The food and supplies of the people quickly passed into Jewish hands as
soon as the war emergency came, and then began a period of dishonesty
which destroyed the confidence of the bravest. Like all other patriotic
people, the German people knew that war meant sacrifice and suffering,
and like other people they were willing to share the common lot. But
they found themselves preyed upon by a class of Jews who had prepared
everything to make profit out of the common distress. Immediately Jews
appeared in banks, war companies, distribution societies, and the
ministries of supplies—wherever the life of the people could be
speculated in or taxed. Articles that were plentiful disappeared, only
to reappear again at high prices. The war companies were exclusively
Jewish, and although the government attempted to regulate the outgo of
food in the interests of all the people, it became notorious that those
with money could get all of anything they wanted, regardless of the food
cards. The Jews simply trebled the price of the goods they let go
without the cards, and so kept a stream of the nation's gold flowing
into their private treasuries. None of the government's estimates of the
food stocks could be depended on, because of the hidden hoards on which
these speculators drew. This began to disturb the morale of the people,
and complaints were made and prosecutions started; but as soon as the
cases came up it was discovered that the prosecutor appointed to charge
and the commissioner appointed to judge were also Jews, and so the cases
usually wore themselves out without results. When, however, a German
merchant was caught, great noise was made about it, and the penalty
placed upon him was equal to what all the others should have had. Go the
length and breadth of Germany today, say the reports, study the temper
of the people, and you will discover that the abuse of power by the Jews
has burned across Germany's memory like a hot iron.
While these influences were undermining the mass of the people, higher
influences of Jewish origin were operating upon the government. The
advisors of the Bethmann-Hollweg government were the great ship magnate
Ballin, a Jew; Theodor Wolff, of the Berliner Tageblatt and member of
the Pan-Jewish press; Von Gwinner, director of the German Bank who is
connected by marriage with the great Jew bankers, the Speyers; and
Rathenau, the leader of Jewish industrial-financial activities. These
men were at the source of things and were bending the government as the
other influences were bending the people.
The rich German Jew could buy the recognition he desired by acquiring
financial power over those interests which most directly affected the
ruling class of Germany, but how was the poor Jew to gain the
recognition he desired?—for all Jews are actuated by the same desire;
it is in them; they feel the spur to mastery. Having explored the
conquest of the higher circles by Jewish money-power, there is yet to
explore the conquest of the body of the nation by Jews who had no money
except what they could seize in the disorder which they caused. The
analysis that is given, follows:
The Jew is not an anarchist. He is not a destructionist. All this is
true, notwithstanding he is the world's Bolshevist and preeminently
Germany's revolutionist. His anarchy is not ingrain, it is a device
which he uses for a purpose. The rich Jew is not an anarchist, because
he can achieve what he desires by more subtle methods. The poor Jew has
no other recourse. But rich and poor go jointly for a long stretch; the
bond of sympathy between them never breaks; for, if the anarchy is
successful, then the poor Jew shall take his place with the rich Jew;
and if the anarchy is not successful, it has nevertheless served to
break up new fields in which the rich Jew may operate.
In Germany it was possible for the poor Jew to thrust himself up through
the wall of Germanism above him only by breaking it up. In Russia the
same was true. The social system had encrusted around the Jew, keeping
him in a position where, as the nations knew by experience, he would be
less harmful. As nature encysts the harmful foreign element in the
flesh, building a wall around it, so nations have found it expedient to
do with the Jew. In modern times, however, the Jew has found a means of
knocking down the walls and throwing the whole national house into
confusion, and in the darkness and riot that follows, seize the place he
has long coveted. When Russia broke, who came first to light? Kerensky,
who is a Jew. But his plans were not radical enough, and then came
Trotsky, another Jew. Trotsky found the system too strong for him to
break in America—he broke through the weak spot in Russia and would
extend that weakness round the world. Every commissar in Russia today is
a Jew. Publicists are accustomed to speak of Russia as if it were in
disorder. It may be that Russia is, but the Jewish government of Russia
is not. From a mass of underlings, the Jews of Russia came up a perfect
phalanx, a flying wedge through the superinduced disorder, as if every
man's place had been previously prepared for him.
That also is the way it was in Germany. The German ceiling had to be
broken, as it were, before the poor Jews could realize their ambition.
When the break was made they swarmed through and settled in places of
control above the nation.
This may explain why Jews the world over supply the energy of disruptive
movements. It is understood that the young Jews of the United States are
propagandists of an ideal that would practically abolish the United
States. The attack is aimed, of course, against "capitalism," which
means the present government of the world by the Gentile. The true
capitalists of the world are Jews, who are capitalists for capital's
sake. It is hard to believe that they wish to destroy capital; they wish
to obtain sole control of it, and their wish has long been in fair way
to fulfillment.
In Germany, therefore, as in Russia, distinction is made between the
methods of the rich and of the poor Jews, because one method affects the
government and the other the morale of the people, but both converge on
the same objective. It is not only desire to escape oppression that
actuates the lower classes of Jews, but desire to gain control—for the
spirit of mastery pulses strong within them. German convictions on this
question have reached the place where they may be expressed thus:
Revolution is the expression of the Jews' will to power. Parties such as
the socialists, democrats and freethinkers are but tools for the Jewish
plan to power. The so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat" is really
and practically the dictatorship of Jews.
So suddenly have German eyes been opened, so stormfully wrathful has
been the reaction, that the word has gone out through German Judaism to
retire to the second trench. There has been a sudden and concerted
abandonment of office wherever the office made direct contact with the
public; there has, however, been no abandonment of power. What will
happen in Germany is not now known. Some regrettable things have already
happened. But the Germans will doubtless prove themselves equal to the
situation by devising methods of control at once unobjectionable and
effective. But as to Russia, it is hardly doubtful any longer what will
happen there. When Russia turns, a shudder will run through the earth.
How Gentile Germany and Russia look at the entire question may be
summarized as follows:
Judaism is the most closely organized power on earth, even more than the
British Empire. It forms a State whose citizens are unconditionally
loyal wherever they may be and whether rich or poor.
The name which is given in Germany to this State which circulates among
all the states is "All-Judaan."
The means of power of the State of All-Judaan are capital and
journalism, or money and propaganda.
All-Judaan is the only State that exercises world government; all the
other States can and may exercise national government only.
The principal culture of All-Judaan is journalistic; the technical,
scientific, literary performances of the modern Jew are throughout
journalistic performances. They are due to the marvelous talent of the
Jews for receptivity of others' ideas. Capital and Journalism are joined
in the Press to create a political and spiritual medium of Jewish power.
The government of this state of All-Judaan is wonderfully organized.
Paris was its first seat, but has now been moved to third place. Before
the war London was its first, and New York its second capital. It
remains to be seen whether New York will now supplant London—the drift
is toward America.
As All-Judaan is not in a position to have a standing army and navy,
other states supply these for it. Its fleet is the British fleet, which
guards from hindrance the progress of all-Jewish world economy, or that
part of it which depends on the sea. In return, All-Judaan assures
Britain an undisturbed political and territorial world rule. All-Judaan
has added Palestine to British control. Wherever there was an All-Judaan
land force (whatever national uniform it might wear), it worked with the
British navy.
All-Judaan is willing to entrust the government of various strips of the
world to the nationalistic governments; it only asks to control the
governments. Judaism is passionately in favor of perpetuating
nationalistic divisions for the Gentile world. For themselves, Jews
never become assimilated with any nation. They are a separate people,
always were and always will be.
All-Judaan's only quarrel with any nation occurs when that nation makes
it impossible for All-Judaan to control that nation's industrial and
financial profits. It can make war, it can make peace; it can command
anarchy in stubborn cases, it can restore order. It holds the sinews of
world power in its hand and it apportions them among the nations in such
ways as will best support All-Judaan's plan.
Controlling the world's sources of news, All-Judaan can always prepare
the minds of the people for its next move. The greatest exposure yet to
be made is the way that news is manufactured and the way in which the
mind of whole nations is molded for a purpose. When the powerful Jew is
at last traced and his hand revealed, then comes the ready cry of
persecution and it echoes through the world press. The real causes of
the persecution (which is the oppression of the people by the financial
practices of the Jews) are never given publicity.
All-Judaan has its vice-governments in London and New York. Having
wreaked its revenge on Germany it will now go forth to conquer other
nations. Britain it already has. Russia it is struggling for, but the
chances are against it. The United States, with its good-natured
tolerance of all races, offers a promising field. The scene of
operations changes, but the Jew is the same throughout the centuries.
[Issue of May 29, 1920.]
"At first sight it would seem as if the economic system of North America
was the very one that developed independently of the Jews . . . .
Nevertheless I uphold my assertion that the United States (perhaps more
than any other land) are filled to the brim with the Jewish spirit. This
is recognized in many quarters, above all in those best capable of
forming a judgment on the subject . . . .
"In the face of this fact, is there not some justification for the
opinion that the United States owe their very existence to the Jews? And
if this be so, how much more can it be asserted that Jewish influence
made the United States just what they are—that is, American? For what
we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish
spirit distilled."
—Werner Sombart, "The Jews and Modern Capital," pp. 38, 43.
III.
Jewish History in the United States
The story of the Jews in America begins with Christopher Columbus. On
August 2, 1492, more than 300,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, with
which event Spain's prestige began its long decline, and on August 3,
the next day, Columbus set sail for the West, taking a group of Jews
with him. They were not, however, refugees, for the prophetic
navigator's plans had aroused the sympathy of influential Jews for a
long period previously. Columbus himself tells us that he consorted much
with Jews. The first letter he wrote detailing his discoveries was to a
Jew. Indeed, the eventful voyage itself which added to men's knowledge
and wealth "the other half of the earth" was made possible by Jews.
The pleasant story that it was Queen Isabella's jewels which financed
the voyage has disappeared under cool research. There were three Maranos
or "secret Jews" who wielded great influence at the Spanish court: Luis
de Santagel, who was an important merchant of Valencia and who was
"farmer" of the royal taxes; his relative, Gabriel Sanchez, who was the
royal treasurer; and their friend, the royal chamberlain, Juan Cabrero.
These worked unceasingly on Queen Isabella's imagination, picturing to
her the depletion of the royal treasury and the likelihood of Columbus
discovering the fabulous gold of the Indies, until the Queen was ready
to offer her jewels in pawn for the funds. But Santagel craved
permission to advance the money himself, which he did, 17,000 ducats in
all, about $20,000, perhaps equal to $160,000 today. It is probable that
the loan exceeded the expedition's cost.
Associated with Columbus in the voyage were at least five Jews: Luis de
Torres, interpreter; Marco, the surgeon; Bernal, the physician; Alonzo
de la Calle, and Gabriel Sanchez. The astronomical instruments and maps
which the navigators used were of Jewish origin. Luis de Torres was the
first man ashore, the first to discover the use of tobacco; he settled
in Cuba and may be said to be the father of Jewish control of the
tobacco business as it exists today.
Columbus' old patrons, Luis de Santagel and Gabriel Sanchez, received
many privileges for the part they played in the work, but Columbus
himself became the victim of a conspiracy fostered by Bernal, the ship's
doctor, and suffered injustice and imprisonment as his reward.
From that beginning, Jews looked more and more to America as a fruitful
field, and immigration set in strongly toward South America, principally
Brazil. But because of military participation in a disagreement between
the Brazilians and the Dutch, the Jews of Brazil found it necessary to
emigrate, which they did in the direction of the Dutch colony of what is
now New York. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, did not entirely
approve of their settling among his people and ordered them to leave,
but the Jews had evidently taken the precaution to assure their being
received even if not welcomed, because upon revoking the order of
Stuyvesant, the Directors gave as one of the reasons for the Jews being
received, "the large amount of capital which they have invested in the
shares of the Company." Nevertheless they were forbidden to enter public
service and to open retail shops, which had the effect of driving them
into foreign trade in which they were soon exercising all but a monopoly
because of their European connections.
This is only one of the thousand illustrations which can be given of the
resourcefulness of the Jew. Forbid him in one direction, he will excel
in another. When he was forbidden to deal in new clothes, he sold old
clothes—that was the beginning of the organized traffic in secondhand
clothing. When he was forbidden to deal in merchandise, he dealt in
waste—the Jew is the originator of the waste product business of the
world; he was the originator of the salvage system; he found wealth in
the debris of civilization. He taught people how to use old rags, how to
clean old feathers, how to use gall nuts and rabbit skins. He has always
had a taste for the furrier trade, which he now controls, and to him is
due the multitude of common skins which now pass under various alluring
trade names as furs of high origin. The idea of renovation gained
commercial value through the Jew. In the "rag men" who blow tin horns
through our cities and save the old iron, old bottles, old paper and old
fabrics, we have the commercial descendants of those earlier Jews who
turned adversity into success by converting the rubbish of the earth
into material of value.
Unwittingly, old Peter Stuyvesant compelled the Jew to make New York the
principal port of America, and though a majority of New York Jews had
fled to Philadelphia at the time of the American Revolution, most of
them returned to New York at the earliest opportunity, instinct seeming
to make them aware that in New York was to be their principal paradise
of gain. And so it has proved. New York is the greatest center of Jewish
population in the world. It is the gateway where the bulk of American
imports and exports are taxed, and where practically all the business
done in America pays tribute to the masters of money. The very land of
the city is practically the holdings of the Jews. A list of the property
owners of the metropolis reveals only at rare intervals a Gentile name.
No wonder that Jewish writers, viewing this unprecedented prosperity,
this unchecked growth in wealth and power, exclaim enthusiastically that
the United States is the Promised Land foretold by the prophets, and New
York the New Jerusalem. Some have gone even further and described the
peaks of the Rockies as "the mountains of Zion," and with reason, too,
if the mining and coastal wealth of the Jews is considered.
The new waterways proposal, which will make an ocean port of practically
every great city on the Great Lakes and take from New York the prestige
she has maintained by being the gateway toward which the principal
railways narrowed, is being strongly protested at this time. And the
strongest motive in opposing this most obvious betterment is that so
much wealth counted in New York is not wealth at all, but fictitious
values depending solely on New York remaining New York. When anything
comes which will make New York merely a city on the coast, and not the
city where the great taxers sit to levy their tribute, much Jewish
wealth will decrease. It was fabulous before the war. What it is now the
statisticians will hardly undertake to say.
In fifty years the increase in the Jewish population of the United
States has been from 50,000 to more than 3,300,000. In the British Isles
there are only 300,000, in Palestine only 100,000. It is fortunate for
the Jew himself that in Great Britain his numbers are not greater, for
the large and evident control he exercises in great matters would
sometimes make it inconvenient for the poorer Jew, if he were abroad in
England in large numbers. An unusually well-informed Briton says that
anti-Semitism is always ready to break out in England upon sufficient
cause, but it cannot break out against the inaccessible rich Jews who
control in politics and international finance. It us probably true that
the commonest real cause of anti-Semitism is the action of the
international Jew who is often unknown and always secure, but the
innocent victim of it is the poor Jew. Anti-Semitism, however, will be
considered in the next article.
The figures representing Jewish population in Great Britain and the
United States indicate that the colossal power wielded by international
Jewish financiers is neither consequent nor dependent upon their number.
The arresting fact about the Jew is his world-wide unchallenged power,
coupled with comparative numerical inferiority. There are only about
14,000,000 Jews in the world; they are about as numerous as the Koreans.
This comparison of their numbers with the Koreans will illustrate still
more vividly the phenomenon of their power.
In the time of George Washington there were about 4,000 Jews in the
country, most of them well-to-do traders. For the most part they favored
the American side. Haym Salomon helped the Colonies out with the loan of
his entire fortune at a critical moment. But they never assimilated,
they did not take up the usual employments nor farming, they never
seemed to care for the worry of manufacturing things, but only for the
selling of them after they were made.
It is only of recent years the Jew has shown any capacity for
manufacturing, and most of what he now engages in has grown up as an
adjunct to his merchandising plans. By manufacturing, he saves a profit.
The result has not been a decrease in cost to the public, but an
increase. It is characteristic of Jewish business methods that economies
are for the sake of the business, not for the sake of the public. The
commodities in which there have been the most inexcusable and exorbitant
increases in prices to the public, and the lines of business which have
been most quickly frightened into lower prices without any explanatory
change in the general situation, have been those lines in which Jews
exercise the widest control.
Business to the Jewish mind is money; what the successful Jew may do
with the money after he gets it is another matter, but in the getting of
it he never permits "idealistic slush" to interfere with the dollar. His
dollar of profit is never "clipped" by any of the voluntary reforms by
which a few men are trying to ameliorate the condition of the workers.
This is not by any means due to the hardness of the Jewish heart, but to
the hardness of the Jewish view of business. Business is to it a matter
of goods and money, not of people. If you are in distress and suffering,
the Jewish heart would have sympathy for you; but if your house were
involved in the matter, you and your house would be two separate
entities; the Jew would naturally find it difficult, in his theory of
business, to humanize the house; he would deal with it after a manner
which other people would call "hard," but he would not feel the charge
to be just; he would say that it was only "business."
It is probably this way that the Jewish "sweatshops" of New York may be
explained. When the susceptible people of the nation commiserated the
poor Jews of the New York sweatshops, they for the most part did not
know that the inventors and operators of the "sweatshop" method were
themselves Jews. Indeed, while it is the boast of our country that no
race or color or creed is persecuted here, but liberty is insured to
all, still it is a fact which every special investigator has noted that
the only heartless treatment ever accorded the Jew in the United States
came from his own people, his overseers and masters. And yet there is no
evidence that either the "sweater" or the "sweated" ever thought of it
as inhumanity or as "heartless." It was "business." The "sweated" lived
in the hope of having a roomful of people sewing for him or her some
day. Their endlessly vital interest in "business" and their unflagging
ambition to get further up the ladder and become masters in their own
sweatshop, enabled them to work without the slightest sense of
oppression or injustice which, after all, is the sorest thing about
poverty. The Jews never regard work as a calamity, but neither do they
regard subordinate positions as permanently theirs. Thus, they spend
their energies in getting up and out rather than in lamenting the
inconveniences of the place where they are and trying to improve it.
All this is individually excellent but socially harmful. The result is
that, until recently, the lower ranges of employment were wholly
unsupervised, and the higher circles never felt the necessity of
devising industrial reforms and benefits. The record of the great Jews
in charity is very noble; their record in industrial reforms is nil.
With commendable sympathy toward their own people, they will donate a
part of their profits to rectify some of the human need resulting from
the method by which they made their profits, but as for reforming the
method by which they get their profits in order that the resulting need
might be diminished or prevented, apparently it has never occurred to
them. At least, while there are many charitable names among the
wealthier Jews, there are no names that stand for an actual, practical
humanizing of industry, its methods and its returns.
This, of course, is unfortunate; but it is intelligible; more than that,
it is explanatory of many things for which the Jew is blamed by those
who do not understand his nature. The Jew will go part way in sharing
the results of his prosperity; he has not gone any length, save upon
outer compulsion, in sharing the processes, or sharing wealth in the
making. And while the social effect is the same as if this were done out
of cruel insensibility and inhumanity, still it must be said that mostly
it is done not out of such feelings, but out of the Jew's ingrain
conception of the game of business. Some proposals of industrial reform
appear as crazy to him as would a proposal to credit one baseball
batter's hit to his opponent's score, just as a matter of humanity.
The American Jew does not assimilate. This is stated, not to blame him,
but merely as a fact. The Jew could merge with the people of America if
he desired, but he doesn't. If there is any prejudice existing against
him in America, aside from the sense of inquiry which his colossal
success engenders, it is because of his aloofness. The Jew is not
objectionable in his person, creed, or race. His spiritual ideals are
shared by the world. But still he does not assimilate; he cultivates by
his exclusiveness the feeling that he does not "belong." This is his
privilege, and from one point of view it may indicate excellent
judgement, but he must not make it one of the grounds of his complaint
against Gentiles in general, as he has a tendency to do. It is better
that he should make it clear to Gentiles once and for all where true
Jews stand in the matter, as when a young Jew said—"There is all the
difference in the world between an American Jew and a Jewish American. A
Jewish American is a mere amateur Gentile, doomed to be a parasite
forever."
The ghetto is not an American product but the Jews' own importation.
They have separated themselves into a distinct community. Speaking of
this matter the Jewish Encyclopedia says: "The social organization of
the Jews resident in America has differed little from that in other
countries * * * in the main, and without any compulsion, Jews preferred
to live in close proximity to one another, a peculiarity which still
prevails."
To make a list of the lines of business controlled by the Jews of the
United States would be to touch most of the vital industries of the
country—those which are really vital, and those which cultivated habit
has made to seem vital. The theatrical business, of course, as everyone
knows, is exclusively Jewish. Play-producing, booking, theater operation
are all in the hands of Jews. This perhaps accounts for the fact that in
almost every production today can be detected propaganda, sometimes
glaringly commercial advertisement, which does not originate with
playwrights, but with producers.
The motion picture industry.
The sugar industry.
The tobacco industry.
Fifty per cent or more of the meat packing industry.
Upward of 60 per cent of the shoemaking industry.
Men's and women's ready-made clothing.
Most of the musical purveying done in the country.
Jewelry.
Grain.
More recently, cotton.
The Colorado smelting industry.
Magazine authorship.
News distribution.
The liquor business.
The loan business.
These, only to name the industries with national and international
sweep, are in control of the Jews of the United States, either alone or
in association with Jews overseas.
The American people would be vastly surprised if they could see a
line-up of some of the "American business men" who hold up our
commercial prestige overseas. They are mostly Jews. They have a keen
sense of the value of the American name, and when in a foreign port you
stroll up to the office which bears the sign, "American Importing
Company," or "American Commercial Company," or other similarly
non-committal names, hoping to find a countryman, an American, you
usually find a Jew whose sojourn in America appears to have been all too
brief. This may throw a sidelight on the regard in which "American
business methods" are held in some parts of the world. When 30 or 40
different races of people can carry on business under the name
"American," and do it legally, too, it is not surprising that Americans
do not recognize some of the descriptions of American methods which
appear in the foreign press. The Germans long ago complained that the
rest of the world was judging them by the German-speaking Jewish
commercial traveler.
Instances of Jewish prosperity in the United States are commonplace, but
prosperity, the just reward of foresight and application, is not to be
confounded with control. The prosperity of the Jews can be had by anyone
who is willing to pay the price which the Jews pay for it—a very, very
high price, as a rule, all things considered—but it would be impossible
for any Gentile coalition under similar circumstances to attain the
control which the Jews have won, for the reason that there is lacking in
the Gentile a certain quality of working-togetherness, a certain
conspiracy of objective, and the adhesiveness of intense raciality,
which characterizes the Jew. It is nothing to a Gentile that another man
is a Gentile; it is next to everything to a Jew that the man at his door
is another Jew. So, if instances of Jewish prosperity were needed, the
case of the Temple Emmanu-el, New York, might be cited, which in 1846
could scarcely raise $1,520 for its budget, but in 1868, following the
Civil War, raised $708,755 from the rental of 231 pews. And the rise of
the Jewish clothing monopoly as one of the results of the same Civil War
might be cited as an instance of prosperity plus national and
international control.
Indeed, it might be said that the Jew has succeeded in everything he has
attempted in the United States, except farming. The explanation usually
made in Jewish publications is that ordinary farming is far too simple
to engage the Jew's intellect and therefore he is not enough interested
in it to succeed, but that in dairy and cattle farming where the "brain"
is more necessary he has made a success. Numerous attempts have been
made in various parts of the United States to start Jewish farming
colonies, but their story is a series of failures. Some have blamed the
failures on the Jew's lack of knowledge of scientific farming, others on
his distaste for manual labor, others on the lack of the speculative
element in agriculture. In any case, he stands higher in the
non-productive employments than in this basically productive one. Some
students of the question state that the Jew never was a man of the land,
but always a trader, for which assertion one of the proofs offered is
the Jews' selection of Palestine as their country, that strip of land
which formed a gateway between East and West and over which the overland
traffic of the world passed.
[Issue of June 5, 1920.]
"The Jewish Question still exists. It would be useless to deny it . . .
. The Jewish Question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers.
Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their
migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not
persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution . . . . The
unfortunate Jews are now carrying anti-Semitism into England; they have
already introduced it into America."
—Theodore Herzl, "A Jewish State," p. 4.
IV.
The Jewish Question—Fact or Fancy?
The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the
supersensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter.
There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word "Jew," or to
expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper. Polite evasions like
"Hebrew" and "Semite," both of which are subject to the criticism of
inaccuracy, are timidly essayed, and people pick their way gingerly as
if the whole subject were forbidden, until some courageous Jewish
thinker comes straight out with the good old word "Jew," and then the
constraint is relieved and the air cleared. The word "Jew" is not an
epithet; it is a name, ancient and honorable, with significance for
every period of human history, past, present and to come.
There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish
Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it in the
hazy borderlands of their thought, shrouded in silence. Their heritage
of tolerance has something to do with their attitude, but perhaps their
instinctive sense of the difficulty involved has more to do with it. The
principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question are in
the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner
speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature,
music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the
race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult
place has been rather neatly negotiated. But nothing is changed thereby.
The Jew is not changed. The Gentile is not changed. The Jew still
remains the enigma of the world.
Gentile sensitiveness on this point is best expressed by the desire for
silence—"Why discuss it at all?" is the attitude. Such an attitude is
itself a proof that there is a problem which we would evade if we could.
"Why discuss it at all?"—the keen thinker clearly sees in the
implications of such a question, the existence of a problem whose
discussion or suppression will not always be within the choice of
easy-going minds.
Is there a Jewish Question in Russia? Unquestionably, in its most
virulent form. Is it necessary to meet that Question in Russia?
Undoubtedly, meet it from every angle along which light and healing may
come.
Well, the percentage of the Jewish population of Russia is just one per
cent more than it is in the United States. The majority of the Jews
themselves are not less well-behaved in Russia than they are here; they
lived under restrictions which do not exist here; yet in Russia their
genius has enabled them to attain a degree of power which has completely
baffled the Russian mind. Whether you go to Rumania, Russia, Austria or
Germany, or anywhere else that the Jewish Question has come to the
forefront as a vital issue, you will discover that the principal cause
is the outworking of the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control.
Here in the United States it is the fact of this remarkable minority—a
sparse Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a nation of
110,000,000—attaining in 50 years a degree of control that would be
impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race, that creates
the Jewish Question here. Three per cent of any other people would
scarcely occasion comment, because we could not meet with a
representative of them wherever we went in high places—in the innermost
secrecy of the councils of the Big Four at Versailles; in the supreme
court; in the councils of the White House; in the vast dispositions of
world finance—wherever there is power to get or use. Yet we meet the
Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere there is
power. He has the brains, the initiative, the penetrative vision which
almost automatically project him to the top, and as a consequence he is
more marked than any other race.
And that is where the Jewish Question begins. It begins in very simple
terms—How does the Jew so habitually and so resistlessly gravitate to
the highest places? What puts him there? Why is he put there? What does
he do there? What does the fact of his being there mean to the world?
That is the Jewish Question in its origin. From these points it goes on
to others, and whether the trend becomes pro-Jewish or anti-Semitic
depends on the amount of prejudice brought to the inquiry, and whether
it becomes pro-Humanity depends on the amount of insight and
intelligence.
The use of the word Humanity in connection with the word Jew usually
throws a side-meaning which may not be intended. In this connection it
is usually understood that the humanity ought to be shown toward the
Jew. There is just as great an obligation upon the Jew to show his
humanity toward the whole race. The Jew has been too long accustomed to
think of himself as exclusively the claimant on the humanitarianism of
society; society has a large claim against him that he cease his
exclusiveness, that he cease exploiting the world, that he cease making
Jewish groups the end and all of his gains, and that he begin to
fulfill, in a sense his exclusiveness has never yet enabled him to
fulfill, the ancient prophecy that through him all the nations of the
earth should be blessed.
The Jew cannot go on forever filling the role of suppliant for the
world's humanitarianism; he must himself show that quality to a society
which seriously suspects his higher and more powerful groups of
exploiting it with a pitiless rapacity which in its wide-flung and long
drawn-out distress may be described as an economic pogrom against a
rather helpless humanity. For it is true that society is as helpless
before the well-organized extortions of certain financial groups, as
huddled groups of Russian Jews were helpless against the anti-Semitic
mob. And as in Russia, so in America, it is the poor Jew who suffers for
the delinquencies of the rich exploiter of his race.
This series of articles is already being met by an organized barrage by
mail and wire and voice, every single item of which carries the wail of
persecution. One would think that a heartless and horrible attack were
being made on a most pitiable and helpless people—until one looks at
the letterheads of the magnates who write, and at the financial ratings
of those who protest, and at the membership of the organizations whose
responsible heads hysterically demand retraction. And always in the
background there is the threat of boycott, a threat which has
practically sealed up the columns of every publication in America
against even the mildest discussion of the Jewish Question.
The Jewish Question in America cannot be concealed forever by threats
against publications, nor by the propagandist publication of matter
extremely and invariably favorable to everything Jewish. It is here and
it cannot be twisted into something else by the adroit use of
propaganda, nor can it be forever silenced by threats. The Jews of the
United States can best serve themselves and their fellow-Jews all over
the world by letting drop their far too ready cry of "anti-Semitism," by
adopting a franker tone than that which befits a helpless victim, and by
seeing what the Jewish Question is and how it behooves every Jew who
loves his people to help solve it.
There has been used in this series the term "International Jew." It is
susceptible of two interpretations: one, the Jew wherever he may be; the
other, the Jew who exercises international control. The real contention
of the world is with the latter and his satellites, whether Jew or
Gentile.
Now, this international type of Jew, this grasper after world-control,
this actual possessor and wielder of world-control is a very unfortunate
connection for his race to have. The most unfortunate thing about the
international Jew, from the standpoint of the ordinary Jew, is that the
international type is also a Jew. And the significance of this is that
the type does not grow anywhere else than on a Jewish stem. There is no
other racial nor national type which puts forth this kind of person. It
is not merely that there are a few Jews among international financial
controllers; it is that these world controllers are exclusively Jews.
That is the phenomenon which creates an unfortunate situation for those
Jews who are not and never shall be world-controllers, who are the plain
people of the Jewish race. If world-control were mixed, like the
control, say, of the biscuit business, then the occasional Jews we might
find in those higher financial altitudes would not constitute the
problem at all; the problem would then be limited to the existence of
world-control in the hands of a few men, of whatever race or lineage
they might be. But since world-control is an ambition which has only
been achieved by Jews, and not by any of the methods usually adopted by
would-be world conquerors, it becomes inevitable that the question
should center in that remarkable race.
This brings another difficulty: in discussing this group of
world-controllers under the name of Jews (and they are Jews), it is not
always possible to stop and distinguish the group of Jews that is meant.
The candid reader can usually determine that, but the Jew who is in a
state of mind to be injured is sometimes pained by reading as a charge
against himself what was intended for the upper group. "Then why not
discuss the upper group as financiers and not as Jews?" may be asked.
Because they are Jews. It is not to the point to insist that in any list
of rich men there are more Gentiles than Jews; we are not talking about
merely rich men who have, many of them, gained their riches by serving a
System, we are talking about those who Control—and it is perfectly
apparent that merely to be rich is not to control. The world-controlling
Jew has riches, but he also has something much more powerful than that.
The international Jew, as already defined, rules not because he is rich,
but because in a most marked degree he possesses the commercial and
masterful genius of his race, and avails himself of a racial loyalty and
solidarity the like of which exists in no other human group. In other
words, transfer today the world-control of the international Jew to the
hands of the highest commercially talented group of Gentiles, and the
whole fabric of world-control would eventually fall to pieces, because
the Gentile lacks a certain quality, be it human or divine, be it
natural or acquired, that the Jew possesses.
This, of course, the modern Jew denies. There is a new position taken by
the modernists among the Jews which constitutes a denial that the Jew
differs from any other man except in the matter of religion. "Jew" they
say is not a racial designation, but a religious designation like
"Episcopalian," "Catholic," "Presbyterian." This is the argument used in
newspaper offices in the Jews' protests against giving the Jewish
designation to those of their people who are implicated in crime—"You
don't give the religious classification of other people who are
arrested," the editor is told, "why should you do it with Jews?" The
appeal to religious tolerance always wins, and is sometimes useful in
diverting attention from other things.
Well, if the Jews are only religiously differentiated from the rest of
the world, the phenomenon grows stranger still. For the rest of the
world is interested less in the Jew's religion than in anything else
that concerns him. There is really nothing in his religion to
differentiate the Jew from the rest of mankind, as far as the moral
content of that religion is concerned, and if there were he would have
overcome that by the fact that his Jewish religion supplies the moral
structure for both of the other great religions. Moreover, it is stated
that there are among English speaking nations 2,000,000 Jews who
acknowledge their race and not their religion, while 1,000,000 are
classed as agnostic—are these any less Jews than the others? The world
does not think so. The authoritative students of human differences do
not think so. An Irishman who grows indifferent to the Church is still
an Irishman, and it would seem to be equally true that a Jew who grows
indifferent to the Synagogue is still a Jew. He at least feels that he
is, and so does the non-Jew.
A still more serious challenge would arise if this contention of the
modernists were true, for it would necessitate the explanation of these
world-controlling Jews by their religion. We should have to say, "They
excel through their religion," and then the problem would turn on the
religion whose practice should bring such power and prosperity to its
devotees. But another fact would intervene, namely, that these
world-controlling Jews are not notably religious; and still another fact
would hammer for recognition, namely, the most devout believers and most
obedient followers of the Jewish religion are the poorest among the
Jews. If you want Jewish orthodoxy, the bracing morality of the Old
Testament, you will find it, not among the successful Jews, who have
Unitarianized their religion to the same extent that the Unitarians have
Judaized their Christianity, but among the poor in the side streets who
still sacrifice the Saturday business for their Sabbath keeping.
Certainly their religion has not given them world-control; instead, they
have made their own sacrifices to keep it inviolate against modernism.
Of course, if the Jew differs from the rest of mankind only when he is
in full accord with his religion, the question becomes very simple. Any
criticism of the Jew becomes sheer religious bigotry and nothing else!
And that would be intolerable. But it would be the consensus of
thoughtful opinion that the Jew differs less in his religion than in
anything else. There is more difference between the two great branches
of Christianity, more conscious difference, than between any branch of
Christianity and Judaism.
So that, the contention of certain modernists notwithstanding, the world
will go on thinking of the Jew as a member of a race, a race whose
persistence has defeated the utmost efforts made for its extermination,
a race that has preserved itself in virility and power by the observance
of those natural laws the violation of which has mongrelized so many
nations, a race which has come up out of the past with the two great
moral values which may be reckoned on monotheism and monogamy, a race
which today is before us as the visible sign of an antiquity to which
all our spiritual wealth harks back. Nay, the Jew will go on thinking of
himself as the member of a people, a nation, a race. And all the mixture
and intermixture of thought or faith or custom cannot make it otherwise.
A Jew is a Jew and as long as he remains within his perfectly
unassailable traditions, he will remain a Jew. And he will always have
the right to feel that to be a Jew is to belong to a superior race.
These world-controlling Jews at the top of affairs, then, are there by
virtue of, among other things, certain qualities which are inherent in
their Jewish natures. Every Jew has these qualities even if not in the
supreme sense, just as every Englishman has Shakespeare's tongue but not
in Shakespeare's degree. And thus it is impracticable, if not
impossible, to consider the international Jew without laying the
foundations broadly upon Jewish character and psychology.
We may discount at once the too common libel that this greater form of
Jewish success is built upon dishonesty. It is impossible to indict the
Jewish people or any other people on a wholesale charge. No one knows
better than the Jew how widespread is the notion that Jewish methods of
business are all unscrupulous. There is no doubt a possibility of a
great deal of unscrupulousness existing without actual legal dishonesty,
but it is altogether possible that the reputation the Jewish people have
long borne in this respect may have had other sources than actual and
persistent dishonesty.
We may indicate one of these possible sources. The Jew at a trade is
naturally quicker than most other men. They say there are other races
which are as nimble at a trade as is the Jew, but the Jew does not live
much among them. In this connection one may remember the famous joke
about the Jew who went to Scotland.
Now, it is human nature for the slower man to believe that the quicker
man is too deft by far, and to become suspicious of his deftness.
Everybody suspects the "sharper" even though his sharpness be entirely
honest. The slower mind is likely to conceive that the man who sees so
many legitimate twists and turns to a trade, may also see and use a
convenient number of illegitimate twists and turns. Moreover, there is
always the ready suspicion that the one who gets "the best of the
bargain" gets it by trickery which is not above board. Slow, honest,
plain-spoken and straight-dealing people always have their doubts of the
man who gets the better of it.
The Jews, as the records for centuries show, were a keen people in
trade. They were so keen that many regarded them as crooked. And so the
Jew became disliked for business reasons, not all of which were
creditable to the intelligence or initiative of his enemies.
Take for example, the persecution which Jew merchants once suffered in
England. In older England the merchant class had many easy-going
traditions. One tradition was that a respectable tradesman would never
seek business but wait for it to come to him. Another tradition was that
to decorate one's store window with lights or colors, or to display
one's stock of goods attractively in the view of the public, was a
contemptible and underhanded method of tempting a brother tradesman's
customers away from him. Still another tradition was that it was
strictly unethical and unbusinesslike to handle more than one line of
goods. If one sold tea, it was the best reason in the world why he
should not sell teaspoons. As for advertising, the thing would have been
so brazen and bold that public opinion would have put the advertiser out
of business. The proper demeanor for a merchant was to seem reluctant to
part with his goods.
One may readily imagine what happened when the Jewish merchant bustled
into the midst of this jungle of traditions. He simply broke them all.
In those days tradition had all the force of a divinely promulgated
moral law and in consequence of his initiative the Jew was regarded as a
great offender. A man who would break those trade traditions would stop
at nothing! The Jew was anxious to sell. If he could not sell one
article to a customer, he had another on hand to offer him. The Jews'
stores became bazaars, forerunners of our modern department stores, and
the old English custom of one store for one line of goods was broken up.
The Jew went after trade, pursued it, persuaded it. He was the
originator of "a quick turnover and small profits." He originated the
installment plan. The one state of affairs he could not endure was
business at a standstill, and to start it moving he would do anything.
He was the first advertiser—in a day when even to announce in the
public prints the location of your store was to intimate to the public
that you were in financial difficulties, were about to go to the wall
and were trying the last desperate expedient to which no self-respecting
merchant would stoop.
It was as easy as child's play to connect this energy with dishonesty.
The Jew was not playing the game, at least so the staid English merchant
thought. As a matter of fact he was playing the game to get it all in
his own hands—which he has practically done.
The Jew has shown that same ability ever since. His power of analyzing
the money currents amounts to an instinct. His establishment in one
country represented another base from which the members of his race
could operate. Whether by the natural outworking of innate gifts, or the
deliberate plan of race unity and loyalty, all Jewish trading
communities had relations, and as those trading communities increased in
wealth, prestige and power, as they formed relations with governments
and great interests in the countries where they operated, they simply
put more power into the central community wherever it might be located,
now in Spain, now in Holland, now in England. Whether by intention or
not, they became more closely allied than the branches of one business
could be, because the cement of racial unity, the bond of racial
brotherhood cannot in the very nature of things exist among the Gentiles
as it exists among the Jews. Gentiles never think of themselves as
Gentiles, and never feel that they owe anything to another Gentile as
such. Thus they have been convenient agents of Jewish schemes at times
and in places when it was not expedient that the Jewish controllers
should be publicly known; but they have never been successful
competitors of the Jew in the field of world-control.
From these separated Jewish communities went power to the central
community where the master bankers and the master analysts of conditions
lived. And back from the central community flowed information of an
invaluable character and assistance wherever needed. It is not difficult
to understand how, under such a condition, the nation that did not deal
kindly with the Jews was made to suffer, and the nation that yielded to
them their fullest desire was favored by them. And it is credibly stated
that they have made certain nations feel the power of their displeasure.
This system, if it ever existed, exists in greater power today. It is
today, however, threatened as it has never been. Fifty years ago,
international banking, which was mostly in control of the Jews as the
money brokers of the world, was on top of business. It exercised the
supercontrol of governments and finance everywhere. Then came that new
thing, Industry, which expanded to a degree unguessed by the shrewdest
prophets and analysts. As Industry gathered strength and power it became
a powerful money magnet, drawing the wealth of the world in its train,
not, however, merely for the sake of possessing the money, but of making
it work. Production and profit on production, instead of loans and
interest on loans, became the master method for a time. The war came, in
which the former broker-masters of the world had undoubtedly their large
part. And now the two forces, Industry and Finance, are in a struggle to
see whether Finance is again to become the master, or creative Industry.
This is one of the elements which is bringing the Jewish Question to the
bar of public opinion.
To state this and to prove it may be nothing more than to establish the
superiority of Jewish ability. Certainly it is not a tenable position to
say that the Jew is extraordinarily successful and therefore must be
curbed. It would be equally aside from the truth to say that the
co-ordination of Jewish activity has been, on the whole, a harmful thing
for the world. It may be possible to show that up to this point it has
been useful. Success cannot be attacked nor condemned. If any moral
question arises at all, it must concern the use made of the success
which has been attained. The whole matter centers there, after the
previous fact is established. May the Jew go on as he has gone, or does
his duty to the world require another use of his success?
This inquiry obviously leads to further discussion, as well as a
gathering up of the remaining threads of the present discussion, which
future articles will attempt to do.
[Issue of June 12, 1920.]
"To this end we must organize. Organize, in the first place, so that the
world may have proof of the extent and the intensity of our desire for
liberty. Organize, in the second place, so that our resources may become
known and be made available . . . .
"Organize, organize, organize, until every Jew must stand up and be
counted—counted with us, or prove himself, wittingly or unwittingly, of
the few who are against their own people."
—Louis D. Brandeis, Justice of the United States Supreme Court,
"Zionism," pp. 113, 114.
V.
Anti-Semitism—Will It Appear in the U. S.?
Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish Question in the United States or
anywhere else must be fully prepared to be regarded as an Anti-Semite,
in high-brow language, or in low-brow language, a Jew-baiter. Nor need
encouragement be looked for from people or from press. The people who
are awake to the subject at all prefer to wait and see how it all turns
out; while there is probably not a newspaper in America, and certainly
none of the advertising mediums which are called magazines, which would
have the temerity even to breathe seriously the fact that such a
Question exists. The press in general is open at this time to fulsome
editorials in favor of everything Jewish (specimens of the same being
obtainable almost anywhere), while the Jewish press, which is fairly
numerous in the United States, takes care of the vituperative end.
Of course, the only acceptable explanation of any public discussion at
present of the Jewish Question is that some one—writer, or publisher,
or a related interest—is a Jew-hater. That idea seems to be fixed; it
is fixed in the Jew by inheritance; it is sought to be fixed in the
Gentile by propaganda, that any writing which does not simply cloy and
drip in syrupy sweetness toward things Jewish is born of prejudice and
hatred. It is, therefore, full of lies, insult, insinuation, and
constitutes an instigation to massacre. These terms are culled at random
from Jewish editorial utterances at hand.
It would seem to be necessary for our Jewish citizens to enlarge their
classification of Gentiles to include the class which recognizes the
existence of a Jewish Question and still is not anti-Semitic.
There are four distinct parties traceable among the Jews themselves.
First, those whose passionate purpose is to keep Jewish faith and life
alive at the cost of any sacrifice of popularity or success; second,
those who are willing to make whatever sacrifice may be needed to
preserve Jewish religion, but are not so particular about the
traditional customs of Jewish life; third, those who have no very strong
convictions either way, but are opportunists, and will always swerve in
the direction of success; and, fourth, those who believe and preach that
the only solution of the differences between the Jew and other men is
the complete absorption of the Jewish race by the other races. The
fourth is the weakest, most unpopular and least to be considered of all
the parties.
With the Gentiles there are only two classes, as far as this special
question is concerned: those who dislike Jews, they cannot tell why; and
those who are disposed to fairness, in spite of the accident of
congeniality or uncongeniality, and who recognize the Jewish Question
as, at least, a problem. Both these attitudes, whenever they become
apparent, are subject to the charge of "anti-Semitism."
Anti-Semitism is a term which is bandied about too loosely. It ought to
be reserved to denote the real anti-Jewish temper of violent prejudice.
If used indiscriminately about all who attempt to discuss Jewish
characteristics and Jewish world-power, it may in time arrive at the
estate of respectability and honor.
Anti-Semitism in almost every form is bound to come to the United
States; indeed, it may be said that it is here now, and has been here
for a long time. If it be mislabeled now, the United States will not be
able to work within it the transformation which has been effected upon
so many other ideas that have arrived here in their journey round the
globe.
It may be a serviceable clearing of the ground to define what
anti-Semitism is not:
1. It is not recognition of the Jewish Question. If it were, then it
could be set down that the bulk of the American people are destined to
become anti-Semites, for they are beginning to recognize the existence
of a Jewish Question and will steadily do so in increasing numbers as
the Question is forced upon them from the various practical angles of
their lives. The Question is here. We may be honestly blind to it. We
may be timidly silent about it. We may even make dishonest denial of it.
But it is here. In time all will have to recognize it. In time the
polite "hush, hush" of over-sensitive or intimidated circles will not be
powerful enough to suppress it. But to recognize it will not mean that
we have gone over to a campaign of hatred and enmity against the Jews.
It will only mean that a stream of tendency which has been flowing
through our civilization has at last accumulated bulk and power enough
to challenge attention, to call for some decision with regard to it, to
call for the adoption of a policy which will not repeat the mistakes of
the past and yet will forestall any possible social menace of the
future.
2. Again, the public discussion of the Jewish Question is not
anti-Semitism. Publicity is sanitary. The publicity given the Jewish
Question, or certain aspects of it, in this country has been very
misleading. It has been discussed more fully in the Jewish press than
elsewhere, but not with candor or breadth of vision. The two dominant
notes—they are sounded over and over again with monotonous regularity
in the Jewish press—are Gentile unfairness and Christian prejudice.
These apparently are the two chief aspects of life which impress Jewish
publicists when they look over the line of their own race. It is said in
all soberness that it is fortunate for Jews generally that the Jewish
press does not circulate very widely among Gentiles, for it is probably
the one established agency in the United States which, without altering
its program in the least, could stir up anti-Jewish sentiment by the
simple expedient of a general reading among non-Jews. Jewish writers
writing for Jewish readers present unusual material for the study of
race consciousness and its accompaniment of contempt for other races. It
is true that in the publications referred to, America is constantly
praised, but not America as the land of the American people; America,
rather, as the land of the Jews' opportunity.
On the side of the daily press, there has been no serious discussion at
all. This is neither surprising nor reprehensible. The daily press deals
with matters that have reached the overheated stage. When it mentions
the Jews at all, it has stock phrases for the purpose; the effort
includes a list of the famous Jews of history, and usually closes with
complimentary references to certain local Jews of commendable qualities,
whose advertisements are not infrequently found in another part of the
paper. Summing up, it may be said that the publicity given the question
in this country consists in misrepresentative criticism of the Gentiles
by the Jewish press and misrepresentative praise of the Jews by the
non-Jewish press. An independent effort to give a constructive publicity
cannot, therefore, be laid to anti-Semitism, even when some of the
statements which are made in the course of it arouse the resentment of
Jewish readers.
3. Nor is it anti-Semitism to say that the suspicion is abroad in every
capital of civilization and the certainty is held by a number of
important men that there is active in the world a plan to control the
world, not by territorial acquisition, not by military aggression, nor
by governmental subjection, not even by economic control in the
scientific sense, but by control of the machinery of commerce and
exchange. It is not anti-Semitism to say that, nor to present the
evidence which supports that, nor to bring the proof of that. Those who
could best disprove it if it were not true are the international Jews
themselves, but they have not disproved it. Those who could best prove
it would be those Jews whose ideals include the good of the whole of
humanity on an equality and not the good of one race only, but they have
not proved it. Some day a prophetic Jew may arise who will see that the
promises bestowed upon the Ancient People are not to be fulfilled by
Rothschild methods, and that the promise that all the nations were to be
blessed through Israel is not to be fulfilled by making the nations the
economic vassals of Israel; and when that time comes we may hope for a
redirection of Jewish energy into channels that will drain the present
sources of the Jewish Question. In the meantime, it is not
anti-Semitism, it may even be found to be a world service to the Jew, to
throw light on what purpose motivates certain higher circles.
If the above propositions are true, then the term "anti-Semitic," so
freely bestowed on this series of articles, betrays a worse spirit in
the critics than in the author. But enough of that. There is much yet to
do, and what is done must stand on what merit remains after friend and
foe alike are through with praise and blame.
Anti-Semitism has unquestionably swayed large sections of humanity at
various times, warping the vision, twisting the characters and staining
the hands of its victims, but the most amazing statement that can be
made of it is that it has never accomplished anything in behalf of those
who used it, and it has never taught anything to the Jews against whom
it was used.
The grades of anti-Semitism are fairly numerous, and a few of them may
be cited here:
1. There is first that degree of anti-Semitism, if it may be so
described, which consists in plain dislike of the Jew as a person, no
matter whom he may be. This is often found in people of all grades. It
is found mostly, however, in those whose contact with Jews has been very
limited. It begins sometimes in childhood with an instinctive dislike
for the word "Jew." It is encouraged by the misuse of the word "Jew" as
an epithet, or as an adjective generally descriptive of unpopular
practices. The feeling is not different from that which exists toward
Gentiles, concerning whom the same notions are held, but it differs in
that it is extended to the race of unknown individual Jews instead of
being restricted to known individuals who may justify such a feeling.
Congeniality is not within our choice, but control of the sentiment of
uncongeniality is. Every fair-minded person is compelled at times to
reflect that it is not impossible that the person for whom he feels a
dislike may be as good and possibly a better person than he. Our dislike
merely registers the result of attraction and repulsion as they operate
between another person and oneself; it does not indicate that the
disliked person is unworthy. Of course, wherever intelligence is joined
with this instinctive withdrawal from social contact with members of the
Jewish race, prejudice is forestalled, except, of course, in those
persons who hold that there are no individuals among the Jews worthy of
respect. This is an extreme attitude and is composed of other elements
beside natural dislike. It is possible for people to dislike Jews and
not be anti-Semitic. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon, it grows more
and more common, that intelligent and refined Jews themselves do not
relish the society of their own people except in cases of exceptional
refinement.
This reality calls for some comment on the manners and characteristics
of the ordinary member of the Jewish race, the accidents of behavior
which stand out most obnoxiously and of which Jews themselves are often
the most unsparing critics, but these comments must fall into place
later.
2. A second stage of the spirit of anti-Semitism may be designated as
hatred and enmity. It should be noted that the antipathy referred to
immediately above was not hatred. Dislike is not hatred, nor is it
necessarily enmity. One may dislike sugar in his tea without troubling
to hate sugar. But undoubtedly there are people who because they have
let their dislikes deepen into prejudice, and perhaps also because of
unpleasant experiences with members of the Jewish race (probably a
million Americans have been brought to the verge of becoming Jew-haters
this winter because of contact with Jewish merchants and landlords) may
be classified as, at least, incipient anti-Semites. This is most of all
unfortunate for the persons who harbor these emotions. It is unfortunate
in that it unfits the mind to consider intelligently the facts which
constitute the Jewish Question, and also unfits it to deal with them in
a fair and constructive way. For one's own sake, whatever the
provocation otherwise, it is better not to let passion deflect the
needle of one's mind. Hatred at the wheel means hazard on the course.
Enmity lives in the vicinity of the Jews more than of any other race,
and the reason for this is one of the puzzles of the ages. The Jewish
nature itself, as shown in ancient and modern history, is not without
its own share of enmity, and it either evokes or provokes enmity where
it comes in contact with those Aryan races which follow their natural
impulses unchecked by cultural and ethical influences. This age-long
conflict of the Jew has puzzled the minds of students for generations.
Some explain it Biblically as the curse of Jehovah upon His Chosen
People for their disobedience to the discipline by which He would have
made them the Prophet Nation of the world. If this offense must come, if
it is part of the Jew's heritage, an old saying—Christian and
Scriptural, by the way—would still remain true: "It must needs be that
offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."
3. In some parts of the world at various times this feeling of hatred
has broken into murderous violence, which has roused, as wholesale
physical outrage always does, the horror and resentment of humanity.
This is the extreme form in which anti-Semitism has exhibited itself,
and it is the charge of intending to stimulate it here and elsewhere
which every public discussion of the Jewish Question has to bear. There
is, of course, no excuse for these outbreaks, but there is sufficient
explanation of them. The Jews usually explain them as expressions of
religious prejudice, and the Gentiles as rebellion against an economic
yoke which the Jews have woven for the people. It is an astonishing fact
that, to take one country, the parts of Russia where anti-Semitic
violence has been most marked are the most prosperous parts, so
prosperous indeed and with a prosperity so unquestionably due to Jewish
enterprise that the Jews have openly declared that they have the power
to throw those parts of Russia back into commercial lethargy again by
simply withdrawing. It is utterly idle to throw denials at this
statement. It is confirmed time and time again by men who have gone to
Russia full of resentment against the attitude of the Russians toward
the Jews, as that attitude is represented in the Anglo-Saxon press, and
who have come home with a new light on the cause of these outbreaks,
though not excusing their character. Impartial observers have also found
that some of the outbreaks have been precipitated by the Jews
themselves. A correspondent, known the world over for his trenchant
defense of the Jews under Russian persecution, was always bitterly
attacked by the Jews themselves whenever he stated the truth about this,
notwithstanding his protest to them that if he did not tell the truth
when they were in the wrong the world would not be ready to believe him
when he said they were blameless. To this day, in every country, the
Jews are slow to admit blameworthiness for anything. They must be
excused, whoever else may be accused. It is a trait which will have to
be disciplined before they can be brought to assist, if ever they can,
the removal of those characteristics which arouse the antagonism of
other peoples. Elsewhere in the world, it may be said that out-and-out
enmity to the Jews has an economic basis. This, of course, leads to the
question whether the Jew shall have to become a deliberate failure, or
deny his genius, and forego his just meed of prosperity before he can
win the approval of the other races—a question which will arise for
discussion later.
As to the religious prejudice which the Jews are, as a rule, readiest to
affirm, it is safe to say that it does not exist in the United States.
Yet it is charged up to Americans by Jewish writers just as freely as it
is charged up to Russians. Each non-Jew reader is competent to settle
this for himself. He can easily do so by asking himself whether in all
his life he has ever felt a moment's resentment against the Jew on
account of his religion. In an address recently delivered in a Jewish
lodge and reported in the Jewish press, the speaker, a Jew, stated that
if 100 non-Jews on the street were approached at random and casually
asked what a Jew is, the reply of the majority would be, "He is a
Christ-killer." One of the best known and most highly respected rabbis
in the United States said recently in a sermon that children in
Christian Sunday schools were taught to regard the Jew as a
Christ-killer. He repeated it in a conversation several weeks later.
It would probably be the testimony of Christians generally that they
never heard this term until they heard it in a Jewish complaint, and
certainly themselves never used it. The charge is absurd. Let the
20,000,000 now in the Christian Sunday schools of Canada and the United
States testify as to the instruction given. There is no hesitation in
stating that there is no prejudice whatever in the Christian churches
against the Jew on account of his religion. On the contrary, there is
not only a deep sense of indebtedness, but a feeling of sharing with the
Jew in his religion. The Sunday schools of the Christian churches of the
world are spending six months of this year studying the International
Lessons which are appointed for the Books of the Judges, Ruth, First and
Second Samuel and the Books of the Kings, and every year is devoted in
part to the Old Testament.
Here, however, is something for Jewish religious leaders to consider:
there is more downright bitterness of religious prejudice on the part of
the Jews against Christianity than could ever be possible in the
Christian churches of America. Simply take the church press of America
and compare it with the Jewish press in this regard, and there is no
answer. No Christian editor would think it either Christian or
intelligent to attack the Jewish religion, yet any six months' survey of
the Jewish press would yield a mass of attack and prejudice on the other
side. Moreover, no religious bitterness in America attains within
infinite distances to that bitterness visited upon the Jew who becomes a
Christian in his faith. It amounts almost to a holy vendetta. A
Christian may become a Jewish proselyte and his motives be respected; it
is never so when a Jew becomes a Christian. These statements are true of
both the orthodox and liberal wings of Judaism. It is not his religion
that gives prominence to the Jew today; it is something else. And yet,
with undeviating monotony, it is repeated wherever the Jew takes
cognizance of the feeling toward him that it is on account of three
things, first and most prominent of which is his religion. It may be
comforting to him to think that he is suffering for his faith, but it is
not true. Every intelligent Jew must know it.
Every Jew ought to know also that in every Christian church where the
ancient prophecies are received and studied, there is a great revival of
interest in the future of the Ancient People. It is not forgotten that
certain Promises were made to them regarding their position in the
world, and it is held that these prophecies will be fulfilled. The
future of the Jew, as prophetically outlined, is intimately bound up
with the future of this planet, and the Christian church in large
part—at least by the evangelical wing, which the Jews most
condemn—sees a Restoration of the Chosen People yet to come. If the
mass of the Jews knew how understandingly and sympathetically all the
prophecies concerning them are being studied in the Church, and the
faith that exists that these prophecies will find fulfillment and that
they will result in great Jewish service to society at large, they would
probably regard the Church with another mind. They would at least know
that the Church does not believe that it will be the instrument in the
conversion of the Jews—a point on which Jewish leaders are tragically
misled and which evokes more bitterness than anything else—but that it
depends on quite other instruments and conditions, which it is not the
function of this article to point out except to say that it will be the
Jews' very own Messiah which will accomplish it and not the "wild
olive," or the Gentile.
Curiously enough, there is a phase of anti-Semitism having to do with
religion, but not in the way here discussed. There are those, very few
in number and of atheistical tendencies, who assert that all religion is
a sham, being the invention of Jews for the purpose of enslaving the
minds of the people of the world to an enervating superstition. This
position, however, has had no effect on the main issue. It is a far
extreme.
Now, which of these exhibitions of anti-Semitism will show itself in
America? If certain tendencies continue, as they are certain to do, what
form will the feeling toward the Jew take? Not that of mass violence, we
may be sure. The only mass action visible now is that of the Jewish
agencies themselves against any person or institution that dares bring
the Jewish Question to public attention.
1. Anti-Semitism will come to America because of the habit which
emotions and ideas apparently have of making their way westward around
the world. North of Palestine, where the Jews have been longest settled
and where they are now in great numbers, anti-Semitism is acute and
well-defined. Westward, in Germany, it is clearly defined but, until the
seizure of German revolutionary agencies, was devoid of violence. Still
farther westward, in Great Britain, it is defined, but because of the
comparatively small number of Jews in the British Isles and their
coalition with the ruling class, it is more a feeling than a movement.
In the United States it is not so definite, but shows itself in a
restlessness, a questioning, a sensible friction between the traditional
tendency of the American to fair-mindedness and his respect for the cold
facts.
Because the Question will assume more and more pressure in America it
behooves everyone of foresight to disregard the shortsighted protests of
the Jews themselves and see to it that the Question shall not present
itself among us as it has done among other people, in its most
distressing and confusing forms. It is a public duty to seize this
problem at its beginning and train it up, so to speak; that is, so
prepare for it that it may be handled here in a manner which will form a
model for all other countries, which will indeed supply all other
countries with the essential materials for a permanent solution. And
this can be done only by exposing and recognizing and treating with the
serum of publicity the conditions before which, heretofore, the nations
have helplessly floundered because they lacked either the desire or the
means to get at the great root of the difficulty.
2. Another cause of the Question appearing here will be the great influx
of Jews which is planned for America. There will probably be a million
Jews enter the country this year, increasing our Jewish population to
nearly 4,500,000. This does not mean merely an immigration of persons,
but an immigration of ideas. No Jewish writer has ever told us, in
systematic fashion, just what is the Jews' idea of non-Jews, how they
regard the Gentiles in their private minds. But there are indications of
it, although one would not attempt to reconstruct the Jewish attitude
toward Gentiles. A Jew ought to do this for us, but he would probably be
cast out by his own people if he discharged his task with rigorous
jealousy for the exact fact.
These people are coming here regarding the Gentile as an hereditary
enemy, as perhaps they have good ground for doing, and so believing they
are going to model their behavior in a manner that will show it. Nor
will these Jews be so helpless as they appear. In stricken Poland, where
the Jews are represented as having been stripped of everything during
the war, there are hundreds daily appearing before the consulate to
arrange their passage here. The fact is significant. In spite of their
reputed suffering and poverty, they are able to travel a great distance
and to insist on coming. No other people are financially able to travel
in such numbers. But the Jews are. It will readily be seen that they are
not objects of charity. They have been able to keep afloat in a storm
that has wrecked the other people. They know it and they joy in it, as
is natural. And they will bring here the same thoughts toward the
majority which they have harbored in their present lands of domicile.
They may hail America; they will have their own thoughts about the
majority of the American people. They may be in the lists as Russians or
Poles or what not, but they will be Jews with the full Jewish
consciousness, and they will make themselves felt.
All this is bound to have its effect. And it is not race prejudice to
prepare for it, and to invite American Jews themselves to consider the
fact and contribute to the solution of the problem which it presents.
3. Every idea which has ruled Europe has met with transformation when it
was transplanted in America. It was so with the idea of Liberty, the
idea of Government, the idea of War. It will be so with the idea of
anti-Semitism. The whole problem will center here and if we are wise and
do not shirk it, it will find its solution here. A recent Jewish writer
has said: "Jewry today largely means American Jewry . . . . . . . . . .
all former Jewish centers were demolished during the war and were
shifted to America." The problem will be ours, whether we choose it or
not.
And what course will it take? Much depends on what can be accomplished
before it becomes very strong. It may be said, however, that the first
element to appear will be a show of resentment against certain Jewish
commercial successes, more particularly against the united action by
which they are attained. Our people see the spectacle of a people in the
midst of a people, in a sense which the Mormons never were, and they
will not like it. The Mormons made an Exodus; Israel is going back into
Egypt to subjugate it.
The second element which will undoubtedly appear is prejudice and its
incitement. The majority may always be right, but they are not always
initially reasonable. That prejudice which exists now, and which is
freely admitted by both Jew and Gentile, may become more marked, to the
distress of both parties, for neither the subject nor the object of
prejudice can attain that freedom of mind which is happiness.
Then we may most confidently look for a reaction of Justice. It is here
that the whole matter will begin to bend to the genius of Americanism.
The innate justice of the American mind has come to the aid of every
object that ever roused American resentment. The natural reaction with
us is of very brief duration; the intellectual and ethical reaction
swiftly follows. The American mind will never rest with merely resenting
certain individuals. It will probe deeper. Already this deeper probe has
been begun in Great Britain and America. We characteristically do not
stop with persons when principles are in sight.
And upon this there will be an investigation of materials, part of which
may yet be presented in this series and which may possibly be
disregarded for a time, but which at a future date will be found to be
the clue to the maze. Upon this, the root of all the trouble will be
bared to the light, to die as all roots do when deprived of their
concealment of darkness, and then the Jewish people themselves may be
expected to begin an adjustment to the new order of things, not to lose
their identity or to curtail their energy or to dim their brilliance,
but to turn all into more worthy channels for the benefit of all races,
which alone can justify their claim to superiority. A race that can
achieve in the material realm what the Jews have achieved while
asserting themselves to be spiritually superior, can achieve in a less
sordid, a less society-defying realm also.
The Jews will not be destroyed; neither will they be permitted to
maintain the yoke which they have been so skillful in fastening upon
society. They are the beneficiaries of a system which itself will change
and force them to other and higher devices to justify their proper place
in the world.
[Issue of June 19, 1920.]
"We must force the Gentile governments to adopt measures which will
promote our broadly conceived plan already approaching its triumphal
goal by bringing to bear the pressure of stimulated public opinion which
has in reality been organized by us with the help of the so-called
'great power' of the Press. With few exceptions, not worth considering,
it has already fallen into our hands."
—The Seventh Protocol.
VI.
Jewish Question Breaks Into the Magazines
Once upon a time an American faculty member of an American university
went to Russia on business. He was expert in a very important department
of applied science and a keen observer. He entered Russia with the
average American's feeling about the treatment which the government of
that people accorded the Jew. He lived there three years, came home for
a year, and went back again for a similar period, and upon his second
return to America he thought it was time to give the American public
accurate information about the Jewish Question in Russia. He prepared a
most careful article and sent it to the editor of a magazine of the
first class in the Eastern United States. The editor sent for him, spent
most of two days with him, and was deeply impressed with all he
learned—but he said he could not print the article. The same interest
and examination occurred with several other magazine editors of the
first rank.
It was not because the professor could not write—these editors gladly
bought anything he would write on other subjects. But it was impossible
for him to get his article on the Jews accepted or printed in New York.
The Jewish Question, however, has at last broken into a New York
magazine. Rather it is a fragment of a shell hurled from the Jewish camp
at the Jewish Question to demolish, if possible, the Question and thus
make good the assertion that there is no such thing.
Incidentally it is the only kind of article on the Jewish Question that
the big magazines, whose mazes of financial controllers make most
interesting rummaging, would care to print.
Yet, the general public may learn much about the Question even from the
type of article whose purpose is to prove that the Question doesn't
exist.
Mr. William Hard, in the Metropolitan for June, has done as well as
could be expected, considering the use he was supposed to make of such
material as he had at hand. And doubtless the telegraph and letter
brigades, which keep watch over all printed references to the Jews, have
duly congratulated the good editors of the Metropolitan for their
assistance in soothing the public to further sleep.
It is to be hoped, for the sake of the Question, that Mr. Hard's effort
will have a wide reading, for there is very much to be learned from
it—much more than it was anybody's intention should be learned from it.
It may be learned, first, that the Jewish Question exists. Mr. Hard says
it is discussed in the drawing-rooms of London and Paris. Whether the
mention of drawing-rooms was a writer's device to intimate that the
matter was unimportant and frivolous, or merely represented the extent
of Mr. Hard's contact with the Question is not clear. He adds, however,
that a document relating to the Question has "travelled a good bit in
certain official circles in Washington." He also mentions a cable
dispatch to the New York World, concerning the same Question, which that
paper published. His article was probably published too early to note
the review which the London Times made of the first document referred
to. But he has told the reader who is looking for the objective facts in
the article that there is a Jewish Question, and that it does not exist
among the riff-raff either but principally in those circles where the
evidence of Jewish power and control is most abundant. Moreover, the
Question is being discussed. Mr. Hard tells us that much. If he does not
go further and tell us that it is being discussed with great seriousness
in high places and among men of national and international importance,
it is probably because of one of two things, either he does not know, or
he does not consider it consonant with the purpose of the article to
tell.
However, Mr. Hard has already made it clear that there is a Jewish
Question, that it is being discussed, that it is being discussed by
people who are best situated to observe the matter they are talking
about.
The reading of Mr. Hard's article makes it clear also that the Question
always comes to the fore on the note of conspiracy. Of course, Mr. Hard
says he does not believe in conspiracies which involve a large number of
people, and it is with the utmost ease that his avowal of unbelief is
accepted, for there is nothing more ridiculous to the Gentile mind than
a mass conspiracy, because there is nothing more impossible to the
Gentile himself. Mr. Hard, we take it, is of non-Jewish extraction, and
he knows how impossible it would be to band Gentiles together in any
considerable number for any length of time in even the noblest
conspiracy. Gentiles are not built for it. Their conspiracy, whatever it
might be, would fall like a rope of sand. Gentiles have not the basis
either in blood or interest that the Jews have to stand together. The
Gentile does not naturally suspect conspiracy; he will indeed hardly
bring himself to the verge of believing it without the fullest proof.
It is therefore quite easy to understand Mr. Hard's difficulty with
conspiracy; the point is that to write his article at all, he is forced
to recognize at almost every step that whenever the Jewish Question is
discussed, the idea of conspiracy occupies a large part in it. As a
matter of fact, it is the central idea in Mr. Hard's article, and it
completely monopolizes the heading—"Great Jewish Conspiracy."
The search for basic facts in Mr. Hard's article will disclose the
additional information that there are certain documents in existence
which purport to contain the details of the conspiracy, or—to drop a
word that is unpleasant and may be misleading and which has not been
used in this series—the tendency of Jewish power to achieve complete
control. That is about all that the reader learns from Mr. Hard about
the documents, except that he describes one as "strange and horrible."
Here is indeed a regrettable gap in the story, for it is to discredit a
certain document that Mr. Hard writes, and yet he tells next to nothing
about it. Discreditable documents usually discredit themselves. But this
document is not permitted to do that. The reader of the article is left
to take Mr. Hard's word for it. The serious student or critic will feel,
of course, that the documents themselves would have formed a better
basis for an intelligent judgement. But laying that matter aside, Mr.
Hard has made public the fact that there are documents.
And then Mr. Hard does another thing, as well as he can with the
materials at hand, the purpose of the article being what it was, and
that is to show how little the Jews have to do with the control of
affairs by showing who are the Jews that do control certain selected
groups of affairs. The names are all brought forward by Mr. Hard and he
alone is responsible for them, our purpose in referring to them being
merely to show what can be learned from him.
Mr. Hard leans heavily on Russian affairs. Sometimes it would almost
seem as if the Jewish Question were conceived as the Soviet Question,
which it is not, as Mr. Hard very well knows, and although the two have
their plain connections, it is nothing less than well-defined propaganda
to set up Bolshevist fiction and knock it down by Jewish fact for the
purpose of the latter. However, what Mr. Hard offers as fact is very
instructive, quite apart from the conclusion which he draws from it.
Now, take his Russian line-up first. He says that in the cabinet of
Soviet Russia there is only one Jew. But he is Trotsky. There are others
in the government, of course, but Mr. Hard is speaking about the cabinet
now. He is not speaking about the commissars, who are the real rulers of
Russia, nor about the executive troops, who are the real strength of the
Trotsky-Lenin regime. No, just the cabinet. Of course, there was only
one Jew prominent in Hungary, too, but he was Bela Kun. Mr. Hard does
not ask us to believe, however, that it is simply because of Trotsky and
Kun that all Europe believes that Bolshevism has a strong Jewish
element. Else the stupid credibility of the Gentiles would be more
impossible of conception than the idea of a Jewish conspiracy is to Mr.
Hard's mind. Why should it be easier to believe that Gentiles are dunces
than that Jews are clever?
However, it is not too much to say that Trotsky is way up at the top,
sharing the utmost summit of Bolshevism with Lenin, and Trotsky is a
Jew—nobody ever denied that, not even Mr. Braunstein himself (the
latter being Trotsky's St. Louis, U.S.A., name).
But then, says Mr. Hard, the Mensheviks are led by Jews, too! That is a
fact worth putting down beside the others. Trotsky at the head of the
Bolsheviks; at the head of the Mensheviks during their opposition of the
Bolsheviks were Leiber, Martov and Dan—"all Jews," says Mr. Hard.
There is, however, a middle party between these extremes, the Cadets,
which, Mr. Hard says, are or were the strongest bourgeois political
party in Russia. "They now have their headquarters in Paris. Their
chairman is Vinaver—a Jew."
There are the facts as stated by Mr. Hard. He says that Jews, whose
names he gives, head the three great divisions of political opinion in
Russia.
And then he cries, look how the Jews are divided! How can there be
conspiracy among people who thus fight themselves?
But another, looking at the same situation may say, look how the Jews
control every phase of political opinion in Russia! Doesn't there seem
to be some ground for the feeling that they are desirous of ruling
everywhere?
The facts are there. What significance does it bring to the average mind
that the three great parties of Russia are led by Jews?
But that does not exhaust the information which the matter-of-fact
reader may find in Mr. Hard's article. He turns to the United States and
makes several interesting statements.
"There is Otto Kahn," he says. Well, sometimes Otto Kahn is there, and
sometimes he is in Paris on important international matters, and
sometimes he is in London advocating certain alliances between British
and American capital which have to do in a large way with European
political conditions. Mr. Kahn is rated as a conservative, and that may
mean anything. A man is conservative or not according to the angle from
which he is viewed. The most conservative men in America are really the
most radical; their motives and methods go to the very roots of certain
matters; they are radicals in their own field. The men who controlled
the last Republican Convention—if not the last, the most recent—are
styled conservatives by those whose vision is circumscribed by certain
limited economic interests; but they are the most radical of radicals,
they have passed the red stage and are white with it. If it were known
what is in the back of Mr. Kahn's mind, if he should display a chart of
what he is doing and aiming to do, the term which would then most aptly
describe him might be quite different. Anyway, we have it from Mr. Hard,
"There is Mr. Kahn."
"On the other hand," says Mr. Hard, "there is Rose Pastor Stokes." He
adds the name of Morris Hillquit. They are, in Mr. Hard's
classification, radicals. And to offset these names he adds the names of
two Gentiles, Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood and intimates that they
are much more powerful leaders than the first two. Students of modern
influences, of which Mr. Hard has long appeared as one, do not think so.
Neither Debs nor Haywood ever generated in all their lives a fraction of
the intellectual power which Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Hillquit have
generated. Both Debs and Haywood live by the others. To every informed
person, as to Mr. Hard in this article, come the Jewish names to mind
when the social tendencies of the United States are passed under
reflection.
This is most instructive indeed, that in naming the leaders of so-called
conservatism and radicalism, Mr. Hard is driven to use Jewish names. On
his showing the reader is entitled to say that Jews lead both divisions
here in the United States.
But Mr. Hard is not through. "The man who does more than any other
man—the man who does more than any regiment of other men—to keep
American labor anti-radical is a Jew—Samuel Gompers." That is a fact
which the reader will place in his list—American labor is led by a Jew.
Well, then, "the strongest anti-Gompers trade union in the country—The
Amalgamated Clothing Workers—and very strong indeed, and very large—is
led by a Jew—Sidney Hillman."
It is the Russian situation over again. Both ends of the movements, and
the movement which operate within the movement, are under the leadership
of Jews. This, whatever the construction put upon it, is a fact which
Mr. Hard is compelled by the very nature of his task to acknowledge.
And the middle movement, "the Liberal Middle" as Mr. Hard calls it,
which catches all between, produces in this article the names of Mr.
Justice Brandeis, Judge Mack and Felix Frankfurter, gentlemen whose
activities since Armistice Day would make a very interesting story.
For good measure, Mr. Hard produces two other names, "Baron Gunzberg—a
Jew" who is "a faithful official" of the Russian Embassy of Ambassador
Bakhmetev, a repesentative of the modified old regime, while the Russian
Information Bureau, whose literary output appears in many of our
newspapers is conducted by another Jew, so Mr. Hard calls him, whose
name is familiar to newspaper readers, Mr. A. J. Sack.
It is not a complete list by any means, but it is quite impressive. It
seems to reflect importance on the documents which Mr. Hard endeavors to
minimize to a position of ridiculous unimportance. And it leads to the
thought that perhaps the documents are scrutinized as carefully as they
are because the readers of them have observed not only the facts which
Mr. Hard admits but other and more astonishing ones, and have discovered
that the documents confirm and explain the observations. Other readers
who have not had the privilege of learning all that the documents
contain are entitled to have satisfaction given to the interest thus
aroused.
The documents did not create the Jewish Question. If there were nothing
but the documents, Mr. Hard would not have written nor would the
Metropolitan Magazine have printed the article here discussed.
What Mr. Hard has done is to bring confirmation in a most unexpected
place that the Question exists and is pressing for discussion. Someone
felt the pressure when "The Great Jewish Conspiracy" was ordered and
written.
[Issue of June 26, 1920.]
"What are you prating about? As long as we do not have the Press of the
whole world in our hands, everything you may do is vain. We must control
or influence the papers of the whole world in order to blind and deceive
the people."
—Baron Montefiore.
VII.
Arthur Brisbane Leaps to the Help of Jewry
Once more the current of this series on the Modern Jewish Question is
interrupted to give notice of the appearance of the Question in another
quarter, the appearance this time consisting of a more than two-column
"Today" editorial in the Hearst papers of Sunday, June 20, from the pen
of Arthur Brisbane. It would be too much to say that Mr. Brisbane is the
most influential writer in the country, but perhaps he is among the
dozen most widely read. It is, therefore, a confirmation of the
statement that the Question is assuming importance in this country, that
a writer of Mr. Brisbane's prominence should openly discuss it.
Of course, Mr. Brisbane has not studied the Question. He would probably
admit in private conversation—though such an admission would hardly be
in harmony with the tone of certainty he publicly adopts—that he really
knows nothing about it. He knows, however, as a good newspaper man, how
to handle it when the exigencies of the newspaper day throw it up to him
for offhand treatment. Every editorial writer knows how to do that.
There is something good in every race, or there have been some notable
individuals in it, or it has played a picturesque part in history—that
is enough for a very readable editorial upon any class of people who may
happen to be represented in the community. The Question, whatever it may
be, need not be studied at all; a certain group of people may be salved
for a few paragraphs, and the job need never be tackled again. Every
newspaper man knows that.
And yet, having lived in New York for a long time, having had financial
dealings of a large and obligating nature with certain interests in this
country, having seen no doubt more or less of the inner workings of the
great trust and banking groups, and being constantly surrounded by
assistants and advisors who are members of the Jewish race, Mr. Brisbane
must have had his thoughts. It is, however, no part of a newspaper man's
business to expose his thoughts about the racial groups of his
community, any more than it is a showman's business to express his
opinion of the patrons of his show. The kinds of offense a newspaper
will give, and the occasions on which it will feel justified in giving
it, are very limited.
So, assuming that Mr. Brisbane had to write at all, it could have been
told beforehand what he would write. The only wonder is that he felt he
had to write. Did he really feel that the Jews are being "persecuted"
when an attempt is made to uncover the extent and causes of their
control in the United States and elsewhere? Did he feel, with good
editorial shrewdness, that here was an opportunity to win the attention
and regard of the most influential group in New York and the nation?
Or—and this seems within the probabilities—was he inclined simply to
pass it over, until secretarial suggestions reached him for a Sunday
editorial, or until some of the bondholders made their wishes known?
This is not at all to impugn Mr. Brisbane's motives, but merely to
indicate on what slender strings such an editorial may depend.
But what is more important—does Mr. Brisbane consider that, having
disposed of the Sunday editorial, he is through with the Question, or
that the Question itself is solved? That is the worst of daily
editorializing; having come safely and inoffensively through with one
editorial, the matter is at an end as far as that particular writer is
concerned—that is, as a usual thing.
It is to be hoped that Mr. Brisbane is not through. He ought not to
leave a big question without contributing something to it, and in his
Sunday editorial he did not contribute anything. He even made mistakes
which he ought to correct by further study. "What about the
Phoenicians?" he asks. He should have looked that up while his mind was
opened receptively toward the subject, and he would not have made so
miserable a blunder as to connect them so closely with the Jews. He
would never find a Jew doing that. It is permissible, however, in Jewish
propaganda intended for Gentile consumption. The Phoenicians themselves
certainly never thought they were connected in any way with the Jews,
and the Jews were equally without light on the subject. If in nothing
else, they differed in their attitude toward the sea. The Phoenicians
not only built boats but manned them; the Jew would rather risk his
investment in a boat than himself. In everything else the differences
between the two peoples were deep and distinct. Mr. Brisbane should have
turned up the Jewish Encyclopedia at that point in his dictation. It is
to be hoped he will resume his study and when he has found something
that is not printed in "simply written" Jewish books will give the world
the benefit of it. It is hardly like the question of the rotundity of
the earth; this Question is not settled and it will be discussed.
Mr. Brisbane is in a position to pursue some investigations of his own
on this subject. He has a large staff, and it is presumed that some of
its members are Gentiles of unbiased minds; he has a world-wide
organization; since his own modification of speech and views following
upon his adventure in the money-making world, he has a "look-in" upon
certain groups of men and certain tendencies of power—why does he not
take the Question as a world problem and go after the facts and the
solution?
It is a task worthy of any newspaper organization. It will assist
America to make the contribution which she must make if this Question is
ever to be turned from the bugbear it has been through all the
centuries. All the talk on earth about "loving our fellow men" will not
serve in lieu of an investigation, because it is asking men to love
those who are rapidly and insidiously gaining the mastery of them.
"What's wrong with the Jew?" is the first question, and then, "What's
wrong with the Gentile to make it possible?"
As in the case of every Gentile writer who appears as the Jew's
good-natured defender, Mr. Brisbane is compelled to state a number of
facts which comprise a part of the very Question whose existence is
denied.
"Every other successful name you see in a great city is a Jewish name,"
says Mr. Brisbane. In his own city the ratio is even higher than that.
"Jews numbering less than one per cent of the earth's population possess
by conquest, enterprise, industry and intelligence 50 per cent of the
world's commercial success," says Mr. Brisbane.
Does it mean anything to Mr. Brisbane? Has he ever thought how it will
all turn out? Is he willing to absolve that "success" from every quality
which humanity has a right to challenge? Is he entirely satisfied with
the way that "success" is used where it is supreme? Would he be willing
to undertake to prove that it is due to those commendable qualities he
has named and nothing less commendable? Speaking of the Jew-financed
Harriman railroad campaign, is Mr. Brisbane ready to write his
endorsement upon that? Did he ever hear of Jewish money backing
railroads that were built for railroad purposes and nothing else?
It would be very easy to suggest to Mr. Brisbane, as editor, a series of
articles which would be most enlightening, both to himself and his
readers, if he would only put unbiased men at work gathering the facts
for them.
One of the articles might be entitled "The Jews at the Peace
Conference." His men should be instructed to learn who were the most
prominent figures at the Peace Conference; who came and went most
constantly and most busily; who were given freest access to the most
important persons and chambers; which race provided the bulk of the
private secretaries to the important personages there; which race
provided most of the sentinels through whom engagements had to be made
with men of note; which race went furthest in the endeavor to turn the
whole proceeding into a festival rout by dances and lavish
entertainment; which civilians of prominence oftenest dined the leading
conferees in private session.
If Mr. Brisbane, with the genius for reporting which his organization
deservedly has, will turn his men loose on that assignment, and then
print what they bring him, he will have a story that will make a mark
even in his remarkable career as an editor.
He might even run a second story on the Peace Conference, entitled,
"Which Program Won at the Peace Conference?" He might instruct his men
to inquire as to the business which brought the Jews in such quality and
quantity to Paris, and how it was put through. Particularly should they
inquire whether any jot or tittle of the Jews' world program was refused
or modified by the Peace Conference. It should also be carefully
inquired whether, after getting what they went after, they did not ask
for still more and get that, too, even though it constituted a
discrimination against the rest of the world. Mr. Brisbane would
doubtless be surprised to learn that of all the programs submitted to
that Conference, not excepting the great program on which humanity hung
so many pathetic hopes, the only program to go through was the Jews'
program. And yet he could learn just that if he inquired. The question
is, having obtained that information, what would Mr. Brisbane do with
it?
There are any number of lines of investigation Mr. Brisbane might enter,
and in any one of them his knowledge of his country and of its relation
to this particular Question would be greatly enlarged.
Does Mr. Brisbane know who owns Alaska? He may have been under the
impression, in common with the rest of us until we learned better, that
it was owned by the United States. No, it is owned by the same people
who are coming rapidly to own the United States.
Is Mr. Brisbane, from the vantage point afforded by his position in
national journalism, even dimly aware that there are elements in our
industrial unrest which neither "capital" nor "labor" accurately define?
Has he ever caught a glimpse of another power which is neither "labor"
nor "capital" in the productive sense, whose purpose and interest it is
to keep labor and capital as far apart as possible, now by provoking
labor, now by provoking capital? In his study of the industrial
situation and its perfectly baffling mystery, Mr. Brisbane must have
caught a flash of something behind the backmost scene. It would be good
journalistic enterprise to find out what it is.
Has Mr. Brisbane ever printed the name of the men who control the sugar
supply of the United States—does he know them—would he like to know
them?
Has he ever looked into the woolen situation in this country, from the
change of ownership in cotton lands, and the deliberate sabotage of
cotton production by banking threats, right on through to the change in
the price of cloth and clothing? And has he ever noted the names of the
men he found on that piece of investigation? Would he like to know how
it is done, and who does it? Mr. Brisbane could find all these things
and give them to the public by using his efficient staff of
investigators and writers on this Question.
Whether Mr. Brisbane would feel free to do this, he himself best knows.
There may be reasons why he would not, private reasons, prudential
reasons.
However that may be, there are no reasons why he should not make a
complete study of the Question—a real study, not a superficial glance
at it with an eye to its "news value"—and arrive at his own considered
conclusion. There would be no intolerance about that. As it is now, Mr.
Brisbane is not qualified to take a stand on either side of the
Question; he simply brushes it aside as troublesome, as the old planters
used brush aside the anti-slavery moralists; and for that reason the
recent defense of the Jew is not a defense at all. It is more like a bid
for favor.
Mr. Brisbane's chief aversion, apparently, is toward what he calls race
prejudice and race hatred. Of course, if any man should fear that the
study of an economic situation would plunge him into these serious
aberrations of mind, he should be advised to avoid that line of study.
There is something wrong either with the investigation or with the
investigator when prejudice and hatred are the result. It is a mighty
poor excuse, however, for an intelligent man to put forward either on
his own behalf or on behalf of those whose minds he has had the
privilege of molding over a course of years.
Prejudice and hatred are the very conditions which a scientific study of
the Jewish Question will forestall and prevent. We prejudge what we do
not know, and we hate what we do not understand; the study of the Jewish
Question will bring knowledge and insight, and not to the Gentile only,
but also to the Jew. The Jew needs this as much, even more than the
Gentile. For if the Jew can be made to see, understand, and deal with
certain matters, then a large part of the Question vanishes in the
solution of ideal common sense. Awaking the Gentile to the facts about
the Jew is only part of the work; awaking the Jew to the facts about the
Question is an indispensable part. The big initial victory to be
achieved is to transform Gentiles from being mere attackers and to
transform Jews from being mere defenders, both of them special pleaders
for partisan views, and to turn them both into investigators. The
investigation will show both Gentile and Jew at fault, and the road will
then be clear for wisdom to work out a result, if there should perchance
be that much wisdom left in the race.
There is a serious snare in all this plea for tolerance. Tolerance is
first a tolerance of the truth. Tolerance is urged today for the sake of
suppression. There can be no tolerance until there is first a full
understanding of what is tolerated. Ignorance, suppression, silence,
collusion—these are not tolerance. The Jew never has been really
tolerated in the higher sense because he has never been understood. Mr.
Brisbane does not assist the understanding of this people by reading a
"simply written" book and flinging a few Jewish names about in a sea of
type. He owes it to his own mind to get into the Question, whether he
makes newspaper use of his discoveries or not.
As to the newspaper angle, it is impossible to report the world even
superficially without coming everywhere against the fact of the Jews,
and the Press gets around that fact by referring to them as Russians,
Letts, Germans, and Englishmen. This mask of names is one of the most
confusing elements in the whole problem. Names that actually name,
statements that actually define are needed for the clarification of the
world's mind.
Mr. Brisbane should study this question for the light such a study would
throw on other matters with which he is concerned. It would be a help to
that study if from time to time he would publish some of his findings,
because such publication would put him in touch with a phase of Judaism
which mere complimentary editorials could not. No doubt Mr. Brisbane has
been deluged by communications which praise him for what he has written;
the real eye-opener would come if he could get several bushels of the
other kind. Nothing that has ever come to him could compare with what
would come to him if he should publish even one of the facts he could
discover by an independent investigation.
Having written about the Jews, Mr. Brisbane will probably have a readier
eye henceforth for other men's pronouncements on the same subject. In
his casual reading he will find more references to the Jew than he has
ever noticed before. Some of them will probably appear in isolated
sentences and paragraphs of his own papers. Sooner or later, every
competent investigator and every honest writer strikes a trail that
leads toward Jewish power in the world. THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT is only
doing with system and detail what other publications have done or are
doing piecemeal.
There is a real fear of the Jew upon the publicity sources of the United
States—a fear which is felt and which ought to be analyzed. Unless it
is a very great mistake, Mr. Brisbane himself has felt this fear, though
it is quite possible he has not scrutinized it. It is not the fear of
doing injustice to a race of people—all of us ought to have that
honorable fear—it is the fear of doing anything at all with reference
to them except unstintedly praising them. An independent investigation
would convince Mr. Brisbane that a considerable modification of praise
in favor of discriminate criticism is a course that is pressing upon
American journalism.
[Issue of July 3, 1920.]