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Title: Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil
Author: Max Simon Nordau
Gustav Gottheil
Release Date: January 7, 2008 [EBook #24186]
Language: English
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ZIONISM
_and_
ANTI-SEMITISM
_Zionism_
AND
_Anti-Semitism_
BY
MAX NORDAU
AND
GUSTAV GOTTHEIL
NEW YORK
FOX, DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1905
_Copyright 1902_
_FREDERICK A. RICHARDSON_
_Copyright 1903_
_SCOTT-THAW COMPANY_
_Copyright 1905_
_By FOX, DUFFIELD & COMPANY_
CONTENTS
PAGE
ZIONISM. _By Max Nordau_ 9
ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE _By Gustav Gottheil._ 47
ZIONISM
BY
MAX NORDAU
ZIONISM
Among the persons of the educated classes who follow with any
attention all the more important movements of the times, it would now
be difficult to find one to whom the word "Zionism" is quite unknown.
People are generally aware that it describes an idea and a movement
that in the last years has found numerous adherents among the Jews of
all countries, but especially among those of the East. Comparatively
few, however, both among the Gentiles and the Jews themselves, have a
perfectly clear notion of the aims and ways of Zionism; the Gentiles,
because they do not care sufficiently for Jewish affairs to take the
trouble to inform themselves at first hand as to the particulars; the
Jews, because they are intentionally led astray by the enemies of
Zionism, by lies and calumnies, or because even among the fervent
Zionists there are not many who have probed the whole Zionist idea to
the bottom, and are willing or able to present it in a clear and
comprehensible fashion, without exaggeration and polemical heat.
I will endeavor to furnish readers of good faith, who are not biased,
and have no other interest than that of gaining authentic information
about a phenomenon in contemporary history, as concisely and soberly
as possible with all the facts, as they really are, not as they are
reflected in muddled brains, or distorted and falsified by
calumniators.
I.
Zionism is a new word for a very old object, in so far as it merely
expresses the yearning of the Jewish people for Zion. Since the
destruction of the second temple by Titus, since the dispersion of the
Jewish nation in all countries, this people has not ceased to long
intensely, and hope fervently, for the return to the lost land of
their fathers. This yearning for, and hope in, Zion on the part of the
Jews was the concrete, I might say, the geographical, aspect of their
Messianic faith, which in its turn forms an essential part of their
religion.
Messianism and Zionism were really, for nearly two thousand years,
identical conceptions, and without caviling and hair-splitting
interpretation, it would not be easy to make a distinction between the
prayers for the appearance of the promised Messiah, and those for the
not less promised return to the historical home,--both of which stand
side by side on every page of the Jewish liturgy. These prayers were,
until a few generations ago, meant literally by every Jew, as they
still are by the simple believing Jews. The Jews had no other idea
than that they were a people which as a punishment for its sins had
lost the land of its forefathers, which was condemned to live as
strangers in strange lands, and whose great sufferings would first
cease when it was again assembled on the consecrated soil of the Holy
Land.
This gradually changed about the middle of the eighteenth century,
when enlightenment first began to find its way into Jewdom, in the
person of its first herald, Moses Mendelssohn, the popular
philosopher. The faith of the Jews became more lukewarm; the educated
classes, where they did not simply convert themselves to Christianism,
began to regard the doctrines of their religion in a rationalist
manner; for them the dispersion of the Jewish people was a final and
unalterable fact; they emptied the conception of the Messiah and of
Zion of every concrete meaning, and arranged for themselves a singular
doctrine, according to which the Zion promised to the Jews was to be
understood only in a spiritual sense, as the setting up of the Jewish
monotheism in the whole world, as the future triumph of Jewish ethics
over the less sublime and less noble moral teaching of the other
nations. An American rabbi reduced this conception to the striking
formula, "Our Zion is in Washington." The Mendelssohn teaching
logically developed in the first half of the nineteenth century into
the "Reform," which deliberately broke with Zionism. For the Reform
Jew, the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion.
He does not feel himself in any diaspora. He denies that there is a
Jewish people and that he is a member of it. He desires only to belong
to the people in whose midst he lives. For him Judaism is a purely
religious conception which has nothing whatever to do with
nationality. The land of his birth is his fatherland, and he will know
of no other. The idea of a return to Palestine excites him either to
indignation or to laughter. He answers it with the well-known, silly,
would-be witticism, "If the Jewish state is again set up in Palestine,
I will ask to be its ambassador in Paris."
The thinking Jew did not fail, however, to perceive, in the course of
time, that Reform Judaism is a half measure, a compromise, which like
every compromise, contains the germ of destruction, as it cannot for
one instant resist logical criticism. Whom shall the Reform Judaism
satisfy? The believing Jew? He rejects it with the greatest
abhorrence. The unbelieving Jew? He despises it as hypocrisy and
phrase-mongering. The Jew who really desires to break with his
national past and to be absorbed by his Christian surroundings? For
that Jew, Reform Judaism does not suffice; he goes a step farther, the
step that leads to the baptismal font. Still less does it satisfy the
Jew who desires to guard Jewdom against destruction and to preserve it
as an ethnical individuality. For to him an openly expressed
abandonment of all national aspirations is synonymous with a
self-condemnation of the Jewish people to a perhaps slow, but sure,
death. Reform Judaism without Zionism, that is to say, without the
wish and the hope for a reassembling of the Jewish people, has no
future. At the best, it can only be regarded as a somewhat crooked
path that leads to Christianity. He who desires to reach that goal can
find straighter and shorter routes.
II.
And so it has come about that the generations which had been under the
influence of the Mendelssohnian rhetoric and enlightenment, of reform
and assimilation, have, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth
century, been followed by a new generation which seeks to take up a
standpoint other than the traditional towards the question of Zion.
These new Jews shrug their shoulders at that twaddle which has been
the fashion among rabbis and _literati_ for the last hundred years,
and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this,
that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in
order to act as their teachers and models of morality, and to educate
them gradually to pure rationalism, to a general brotherhood of
mankind, and to an ideal cosmopolitanism. They declare the mission
swagger to be either presumption or foolishness. They, more modest and
more practical, demand only the right for the Jewish people to live
and to develop itself, according to its abilities, up to the natural
limits of its type. They have become convinced that this is not
possible in dispersion, as, under that condition, prejudice, hatred,
and contempt continually follow and oppress them, and either stint
their development, or force them to an ethnical mimicry which
necessarily makes of them, instead of original types with a right to
existence, mediocre or bad copies of foreign models. They therefore
work methodically with a view to rendering the Jewish people once more
a normal one, which lives on its own soil, and accomplishes all
economical, intellectual, moral, and political functions of a
civilized nation.
The goal cannot be reached at once. It lies in a future more or less
near. It is an ideal, a desire, a hope, as the Messianic Zionism was
and is. The new Zionism, which has been called the political one,
differs, however, from the old, the religious, the Messianic one, in
this,--that it disavows all mysticism, no longer identifies itself
with Messianism, and does not expect the return to Palestine to be
brought about by a miracle, but desires to prepare the way by its own
efforts.
The new Zionism has grown in part only out of the internal impulsions
of Judaism itself, out of the enthusiasm of modern educated Jews for
their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of
their racial qualities, out of their ambition to save the ancient
blood, in view of the farthest possible future, and to add to the
achievements of their forefathers the achievements of their posterity.
On the other hand, Zionism is the effect of two impulses which came
from without,--first, the principle of nationality, which for half a
century ruled thought and feeling in Europe, and governed the politics
of the world; secondly, Anti-Semitism, from which the Jews of all
countries have more or less to suffer.
The principle of nationality has awakened self-consciousness in all
the peoples; it teaches them to regard their peculiarities as
qualities, and gives them a passionate desire for independence. It
could not, therefore, pass over the educated Jews without leaving a
trace. It induced them to remember who and what they are; to feel
themselves, what they had unlearned, a people apart; and to demand for
themselves a normal national destiny. This slow and painful work of
the recovery of their national individuality was rendered easier by
the attitude of the peoples, who eliminated them from among themselves
as a foreign element, and put stress, without consideration or
courtesy, on the real and imaginary contrasts, or at least
differences, between themselves and the Jews.
The principle of nationality has, in its exaggerations, led to
excesses. It has been led astray into Chauvinism, abased to idiotic
hatred of the foreigner, degraded to grotesque self-worship. From this
caricature of itself the Jewish nationalism is safe. The Jewish
nationalist does not suffer from self-inflation; he feels, on the
contrary, that he must make tireless efforts to render the name of Jew
a title of honor. He modestly recognizes the good qualities of other
nations, and seeks diligently to acquire them in so far as they
harmonize with his natural capacities. He knows what terrible harm
centuries of slavery or disability have done to his originally proud
and upright character, and seeks to cure it by means of intense
self-training. If, however, nationalism is on its guard against all
illusions as to itself, this is a natural phase in the process of
development from barbaric selfish individualism to free humanism and
altruism,--a phase the justification and necessity of which can only
be denied by him who has no comprehension whatever of the laws of
organic evolution, and is totally lacking in the historical sense.
Anti-Semitism has also taught many educated Jews the way back to their
people. It has had the effect of a sharp trial which the weak cannot
stand, but from which the strong emerge stronger or more confident in
themselves. It is not correct to say that Zionism is but a "gesture of
truculence" or an act of desperation against Anti-Semitism. It is true
that more than one educated Jew has been moved only by Anti-Semitism
to throw in his lot again with Jewdom, and he would again fall away if
his Christian fellow-countrymen would receive him anew in a friendly
spirit. But, in the case of most Zionists, Anti-Semitism only forced
them to reflect upon their relation to the nations, and their
reflection has led them to conclusions which would remain a lasting
acquirement of their mind and heart, even if Anti-Semitism were to
disappear completely from the world.
Be it well understood; the Zionism analyzed above is that of the
educated and free Jews,--the Jewish élite. The uneducated mass,
clinging to the old traditions, is Zionist without much reflection,
from feeling, from instinct, from distress, and yearning. They suffer
too much from the hardships of life, from the hatred of the peoples,
from legal disabilities, and social outlawry; they feel that they
cannot hope for any lasting amelioration of their situation so long as
they must live as a powerless minority among a hostile majority. They
desire to become a nation, to rejuvenate themselves by close contact
with mother earth, and to become once more the masters of their
destiny. This Zionist mass is still in part not quite free from
mystical tendencies. It allows its Zionism to be pervaded, to a
certain extent, by Messianic reminiscences, and blends it with
religious emotions. They have certainly a clear idea of the aim, the
reassembling of the Jewish nation, but not of the means. Still, even
they have realized already the necessity of themselves making efforts,
and there is a vast difference between their active readiness for
organization and their spirit of sacrifice, and the pious,
prayer-indulging passiveness of the purely religious Messianist.
III.
The new or political Zionism has had here and there forerunners, whose
first appearance dates back to the early half of the nineteenth
century.
In the beginning of the eighties terrible persecutions broke out in
Russia without any apparent reason, persecutions which cost hundreds
of Jews their lives, destroyed the prosperity of thousands more, and
induced tens of thousands to turn their backs on the land of their
birth. This calamity brutally aroused the Jews from their
hundred-year-old illusions and brought them again to a sense of
reality. A Russian Jew, Dr. Pinsker, at that time wrote a small
pamphlet entitled, "Auto-Emancipation," which was already a prelude to
the modern political Zionism, and sketched all its motives without
however developing them symphonically. He, at any rate, it was who
gave its watchword to the whole movement: "The Jews are no mere
religious community, they are a nation. They desire again to live in
their own country as a united people. Their rejuvenation must be at
the same time economical, physical, intellectual, and moral."
The Jewish youth of the middle schools and universities of Russia were
profoundly affected by Pinsker's arguments. They began to found
national Jewish societies. A number of students who studied at foreign
universities became in their new surroundings apostles of Dr. Pinsker's
idea, and found adherents here and there, for the most part among the
young Jews of Vienna. Others preferred action to word, example to
sermon, abandoned their studies, and emigrated to Palestine in order to
become peasants there,--Jewish peasants on historically Jewish soil.
Deeply moved by this idealism of a peculiarly enthusiastic élite,
cooler headed Jews in Russia and Germany began also to form societies
in order to support from a distance the Palestine settlements of the
Jewish pioneers. This took place without any combined plan and with no
clear notion of the aim and the means. The societies were not
conscious of the fact that they felt and acted as Zionists. They did
not perceive the connection between the Jewish colonization of
Palestine and the future of the whole Jewish nation. It was in their
case rather an instinctive movement in which all kinds of obscure
feelings are dimly discernible,--piety, archæological-historical
sentimentality, charity, and pride of pedigree. At any rate, the minds
of the Jews were prepared, the feeling was in the air, Jewdom was ripe
for a change.
As is always the case in such historical moments, the man also
appeared whose mission it was to express clearly the ideas obscurely
felt by many, and to proclaim loudly the word they were waiting to
hear. This man was Dr. Theodor Herzl. He published in the autumn of
1896 a concisely written booklet, "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State),
which proclaimed, with a determination that till then had no
precedent, the fact that the Jews are a people who demand for
themselves all the rights of a people, and who desire to settle in a
country where they can lead a free and complete political existence.
"Der Judenstaat" has become the real starting point of political
Zionism,--the starting point, not the programme. Herzl's book is still
the subjective work of a solitary thinker who speaks in his own name.
Many details in it are literature. It is not easy to draw a sharp
boundary line between the sober earnest of the social politician and
the imagination of the prophetical poet. The real programme had to be
a collective work which was certainly based on Herzl's book, and
inspired by Herzl's visions of the future, but which rid itself of all
fantastic details, and was built up solely from the elements of
reality.
Herzl's book was at once greeted by tens of thousands of Jews, chiefly
the young, as an act of redemption. It was not to remain merely
printed paper, but should be transformed into a practical creation.
New societies were founded everywhere, no longer with a view of the
slow, petty settlement of Palestine by means of groups of Jews
creeping surreptitiously as it were into the country, but by the
preparation for an emigration "en masse" into the Holy Land, based on
a formal treaty with the Turkish Government, guaranteed by the Great
Powers, by which the former should accord the new settlers the right
of self-government.
The premises of political Zionism are that there is a Jewish nation.
This is just the point denied by the assimilation Jews, and the
spiritless, unctuous, prating rabbis in their pay. Dr. Herzl saw that
the first task he had to fulfil was the organizing of a manifestation
which should bring before the world, and the Jewish people itself, in
modern, comprehensible form the fact of its national existence. He
convoked a Zionist congress, which in spite of the most furious
attacks and most unscrupulous acts of violence,--the Jewish community
of Munich where the congress was originally intended to be held
protested against its meeting in that town,--assembled for the first
time in Basel, the end of August, 1897, and consisted of two hundred
and four selected representatives of the Zionist Jews of both
hemispheres.
The first Zionist congress solemnly proclaimed in the face of the
attentive world that the Jews are a nation, and that they do not
desire to be absorbed by other nations. It vowed to work for the
emancipation of that part of the Jewish race which is deprived of all
rights, and which is dragging out its existence in undeserved misery,
and to prepare for it a brighter future. It puts its aims on record in
a programme unanimously adopted with the greatest enthusiasm. This ran
as follows:--
"Zionism works to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine
guaranteed by public law.
"For the reaching of this goal the congress proposes to adopt the
following means:--
"(1.) The well-regulated promotion of the settlement of Palestine by
Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and manufacturers.
"(2.) The organization and knitting together of the whole Jewish
community by means of proper local and general institutions, in
accordance with the law of the different countries.
"(3.) The strengthening of the Jewish self-respect and national
consciousness.
"(4.) Preparatory steps for obtaining the consent of the governments,
which is necessary for the achievement of the aims of Zionism."
IV.
The first congress did not separate without having created a lasting
organization. It elected a "Great Committee of Action," in which all
countries with a somewhat considerable Jewish population are
represented, and which in its turn selected a smaller "permanent
committee" with its headquarters in Vienna, under the presidency of
Dr. Herzl. It was followed in the three ensuing years by three
further congresses, in 1898 and 1899, again in Basel, and in 1900 in
London. The number of the delegates rose in 1898 to two hundred and
eighty, in 1899 to three hundred and seventy, and in 1900 to four
hundred and twenty. At every succeeding congress the regulations for
election were more strictly enforced, the mandates more closely
examined, and at the present moment the congress, which has become a
permanent institution of the Zionist Jewdom, and which met for the
fifth time in December, 1901, again in Basel, can with justice claim
to be the real representative of one hundred and eighty thousand
electors.
He who desires to know what the Jews who have been represented at the
congress have done up to the present time to realize the programme of
Zionism drawn up by the first congress, has only to compare the
various points of this programme with the facts we are going to
record.
"(1.) The well-regulated promotion of the settlement of Palestine by
Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and manufacturers."
Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and
the idea of "sneaking" into Palestine. The Zionists have therefore
devoted themselves preëminently to a zealous and tireless advocacy of
the uniting of the already existing Jewish colonies in Palestine with
those who until now have given them their aid and who of late have
inclined towards the withdrawal of their support from them. The
Zionists have also prepared the way for founding factories in the Holy
Land, which will give employment to the Jewish workmen there, and have
assured, by according a yearly subvention, the future existence of the
model Hebraic school in Jaffa, which was about to close its doors for
want of funds. They take care that the existing and promising
beginnings of a Jewish colonization shall be looked after and
maintained till the movement will be possible on a large scale.
"(2.) The organization and knitting together of the whole Jewish
community by the means of proper local and general institutions in
accordance with the law of the different countries."
The Zionist Jewish community is at present organized in both
hemispheres in about nine hundred societies, which display great
activity. In the matter of organization covering the whole of Jewdom,
Zionism possesses national federations of its societies,--the "great"
and the "smaller committee of action," and the congress which
maintains a permanent secretarial office in Vienna. The cost of this
apparatus is covered by the voluntary yearly offerings of the
Zionists, to which offerings the name of the old Jewish coinage is
applied, and which accordingly are known as "shekels,"--their amount
being in America forty cents, and in Western lands a unit of the
coinage (one mark, one franc, one shilling, etc.). The payment of the
shekel gives the right of vote for the congress. Zionism possesses its
official organ, "Die Welt," published in German in Vienna. Its ideas
are further set forth in about forty other periodicals in the Hebrew,
German, Russian, Polish, Italian, English, French, and Roumanian
languages, and in the Jewish-German and Judeo-Spanish jargons. Its
American organ is the periodical, "The Maccabæan." It has founded
numerous schools, Toynbee Halls, and educational institutes, and has
recently begun to acquire a share in the administration of the Jewish
communities, in order to devote their resources, more than has
heretofore been the case with the anti-national or unthinking leaders,
to the promoting of national Jewish instruction, education, and
culture.
"(3.) Strengthening of the Jewish self-respect and national
consciousness."
The Zionist societies use every effort that the members and the Jewish
masses in general may know the history of their nation, and become
acquainted with the sacred and profane literature in the Hebrew
tongue. They teach the Jews to hold their heads high, to be proud of
their descent, and to despise the Anti-Semitic lies, calumnies, and
insults. They care, in the measure of their strength, for the
amelioration of the hygiene of the Jewish proletariat, for its
economic improvement by means of association and solidarity, for
well-directed education of children, and for the instruction of the
women. They give the young students a goal for their efforts and an
ideal in life. They preach the duty of leading a faultless, spiritual
life, the rejection of a crude materialism, into which the
assimilation Jews, on account of the want of a worthy ideal, are only
too apt to sink, and strict self-control in word and deed. They found
athletic societies in order to promote the long neglected physical
development of the rising generation. They give a new impulse to the
celebration of Jewish historical feasts and memorial days. In many
instances they even make themselves outwardly conspicuous by wearing
insignia. The Zionist regards it as contemptible to conceal his
nationality. He wishes to be recognized as a Jew, and as he always
behaves himself in a natural, unaffected way, plays no comedy of
imitation, wishes to deceive nobody about his extraction and identity,
intrudes upon no one under a false flag, his relations to his
Christian neighbors and fellow-countrymen are sounder, truer, more
frank and dignified than those of the assimilation Jew, who makes
painful and useless efforts, which disgust every Christian possessing
a modicum of good taste, to hide the fact that he is a Jew.
"(4.) Preparatory steps to obtain the consent of the governments
necessary to achieve the aims of Zionism."
Several of the governments whose opinion will eventually be decisive
in the matter have been, by means of memorials, reliably informed of
the aims of Zionism; and there has been no want of very important
encouragements and promising expressions of sympathy with its
tendencies.
For the moment the committee of action is trying to obtain from Turkey
a charter for the colonization of such land in Palestine as can be
disposed of, and which at present is lying waste, and for the opening
of its neglected resources. The exploiting of such a charter is not
possible without considerable sums of money. In order to be armed
financially for the time that Turkey will accord such a charter, the
second Zionist congress (1898) decided to found a national Jewish bank
institute, the "Jewish Colonial Trust," with its headquarters in
London. This resolution was carried out the following year (1899). The
bank has been brought into being. Its capital in shares is two million
pounds sterling. It can, by the statutes, start business when one
eighth of this capital, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds
sterling, has been actually paid up. This has already been done.
Another financial instrument of Zionism is the "National Fund,"
created by the fifth congress (1901), which is raised by voluntary
subscription and which is to amount to two hundred thousand pounds
sterling. The half of this sum is to be devoted to the purchase of
land in Palestine, the other half to remain an intangible common
property of the Jewish people, which will by means of compound
interest and gifts continually increase, so that at important
junctures the interest may be used for great national purposes.
V.
I have taken pains to show, in as brief and as objective a manner as
possible, what Zionism is, what it desires to do, how it came into
being, and how it has developed up to the present. I have also
repeatedly mentioned that its most violent opponents have arisen from
the Jewish community.
Many of them content themselves with libeling and insulting the
leaders of the Zionist movement. This kind of hostility they who are
vilified can afford to despise. Men who, without expecting the
slightest advantage to themselves, out of the purest, most unselfish
love for the unhappy ones of their race, out of reverence for their
forefathers, out of a general spirit of philanthropy, have made the
greatest sacrifices in money, time, strength, and health, in order to
elevate their people and to free millions of innocent, persecuted men
from the bitterest misery, have the right smilingly to shrug their
shoulders when irresponsible fanatics or pitiable paid scribes
reproach them with self-interest or with vanity.
Besides these opponents of a lower type, there are others who do not
merely lie and slander, but also seek to argue. They delight in
comparing the apostles of Zionism with the false Messiahs like the
notorious Sabbathai Levi, who have appeared only too often in Jewish
history, and who have always done the greatest mischief to the Jewish
people they have deceived. To compare Zionism with the vagaries or
impostures of false Messiahs of the Sabbathai Levi kind, presupposes
great foolishness or great bad faith. Zionism is precisely
characterized by the complete absence of any mystical element. It
promises its adherents no miracles; on the contrary, it continually
impresses on them that their emancipation from a situation they find
intolerable can only be the result of their own work, the fruit of
their long, strenuous, and combined efforts.
People declare Zionism to be a dream, and deny that its practical
realization is possible. To objections of this category the Zionists
have a hundred times given a sufficient answer. This simple negative
criticism can be passed over. Its only real refutation is in deeds,
such as the Zionists have already performed and as they intend further
to perform.
The one point which probably forever excludes the possibility of an
understanding between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews is the question of
the Jewish nationality. Whoever maintains and believes that the Jews
are not a nation can indeed be no Zionist; he cannot join a movement
which is only justified when it is admitted that it desires to create
normal conditions of existence for a people living and suffering
under abnormal conditions. He who, on the contrary, is convinced that
the Jews are a people must necessarily become Zionist, as only the
return to their own country can save the everywhere hated, persecuted,
and oppressed Jewish nation from physical and intellectual
destruction.
Many Jews, especially those of the West, have, in their heart of
hearts, completely broken with Judaism, and they will probably soon do
so openly, and if they do not break away, their children or
grandchildren will. These desire to be entirely absorbed by their
Christian fellow-countrymen. They resent it as a great annoyance when
other Jews proclaim that they are a people apart, and desire to bring
about an unequivocal separation between themselves and the other
nations. Their great and constant fear is to be denounced as strangers
in the land of their birth, of which they are free citizens. They fear
that this will be more than ever the case, if a large section of the
Jewish people openly claim for themselves rights as an autonomous
nation, and still worse, if anywhere in the world a political and
intellectual center of Judaism should really be created, in which
millions of Jews would be grouped together, united as a nation.
All these feelings on the part of the assimilation Jews are
comprehensible. From their standpoint they are justified. These Jews,
however, have no right to expect that Zionism should for their sake
commit suicide. The Jews who are happy and contented in the land of
their birth, and who indignantly reject the suggestion of abandoning
it, are about a sixth of the Jewish nation, say two millions out of
twelve. The other five sixths, or ten millions, feel themselves
profoundly unhappy in the countries where they reside, and they have
every reason for doing so. These ten millions cannot be called upon to
submit forever unresistingly to their thraldom, and to renounce every
effort for redemption from their misery, merely in order that the
comfort of two million happy and contented Jews may not be disturbed.
The Zionists are, moreover, firmly convinced that the misgivings of
the assimilation Jews are unfounded. The reassembling of the Jewish
people in Palestine will not have the consequences which they fear.
When there is again a Jewish country, the Jews will have the choice of
emigrating thither, or of remaining in their present home. Many will
doubtless remain, and will prove by their choice that they prefer the
land of their birth to their kindred and to their national soil. It is
barely possible that the Anti-Semites will still throw the scornful
and perfidious "stranger!" in their face. But the real Christians
among their fellow-countrymen, those who think and feel according to
the teaching and examples of the Holy Writ, will be convinced that
they do not regard themselves as strangers in the land of their birth,
and will then rightly comprehend the real meaning of their voluntary
renunciation of a return to a land of the Jews, and of their fidelity
to their homes and to their Christian neighbors.
The Zionists know that they have undertaken a work of unexampled
difficulty. Never before has the effort been made to transplant,
peacefully, in a short space of time, to another soil, several million
people from various countries; never has it been attempted to
transform millions of physically degenerate proletarians, without
trade or profession, into agriculturists and cattle breeders, to bring
townbred hucksters and trades people, agents, and men of sedentary
occupation again into contact with the plough and the mother earth. It
will be necessary to accustom Jews of different origins to one
another, to train them practically to national unity, and at the same
time to overcome the superhuman obstacles of difference of language,
unequal civilization, and of the manners of thought, prejudices,
likes, and dislikes of foreign nations, brought severally from the
lands of their birth.
What gives the Zionists the courage to begin this labor of Hercules is
the conviction that they are doing a necessary and useful work, a
work of love and civilization, a work of justice and wisdom. They
desire to save eight to ten millions of their kindred from intolerable
suffering. They desire to free the nations among whom they now
vegetate from a presence which is considered disagreeable. They wish
to deprive Anti-Semitism--which everywhere lowers public morals and
develops the very worst instincts--of its victim. They wish to make
unquestionable producers out of the Jews at present reproached with
being parasites. They desire to fertilize with their sweat and till
with their hands a country that is to-day a desert, until it is again
the flowering garden it has once been. Thus will Zionism in an equal
degree serve the unhappy Jew and the Christian peoples, civilization
and the economy of the world; and the services which it can render,
and wishes to render, are great enough to justify its hope that the
Christian world, too, will appreciate them, and support the movement
with its active sympathy.
ANTI-SEMITISM
IN EUROPE
BY
DR. GUSTAV GOTTHEIL
THE TRUE NATURE OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE
Anti-Semitism would be simply ridiculous if it were not so terribly in
earnest. People who make that word a war cry upon a whole race ought
to know its meaning, especially if it is to express the chief reason
for their hostility. Before they prefix the "anti" to a word they
should be sure that they understand the "pro," lest they be found to
fight shadows merely, specters of their own creation. But how far is
this the case? How many ever tried to learn the sense of the
designation under which they have enrolled themselves? Suppose we ask,
"What does Semitism mean?" Only this, must be our answer,--that it is
a summing up of the ruling dispositions, habits, mental endowments,
and moral peculiarities of all the races comprised under the name of
Semites, so named from their supposed descent from the eldest of the
three sons of Noah. So ineradicable are these features supposed to be
that, no matter where the races have lived or are now living, no
matter what stage of civilization they have passed through or have
reached now, no matter what influence non-Semitic races have exercised
upon them, they remain essentially the same. What are these features?
Who will formulate the precise standard by which a descendant of Shem
is unfailingly known and set apart from those of Ham or Japhet? When
we consider that we are pointed back for the meaning of Semite to
antediluvian times, that is to say, to one of the oldest myths of the
world, we must admit that it would indeed be the wonder of wonders if
a large section of mankind have a family likeness so clear that they
are marked off from the rest. And this, despite the long ages that
have passed since the supposed separation of the sons of Noah and
their wide dispersion; despite their triumphs and defeats in wars, in
state building, and church formation; despite the wide diversity
between them in their literature, their philosophy, their art, their
trades and industries. Are the Semites still characterized by the same
gifts and tendencies of mind and heart, ruled by the same passions,
subject to the same limitations, as were their ancestors in all their
generations?
Among them there is a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over
vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified
kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in
the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,--are
they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic
features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and
become full-weighted citizens of the state where they pitch their
tents,--offer them what inducements you may,--but must be kept at
arms length and treated as suspects? Has nature lost all her power in
this instance and become faithless to herself? Will the Hebrew child
not love the land of its birth and feel the kinship with the people
whose language and mode of life become its own? But why heap up
improbabilities and impossibilities? The designation fastened upon us
as a stigma was a fraud from the beginning, a conscious fraud and a
malicious invention. It was "conceived in mischief and brought forth
in iniquity." What was meant was not anti-Semitism, but
_anti-Judaism_; but that name had to be avoided because it implies
hostility to a religion and a creed; and that, again, might be
construed as springing from an awakened zeal for the instigator's own
Church; a suspicion they could not permit to rest upon them. No, it is
not the Jew's religion that makes him obnoxious and a danger to the
state, but it is his descent from the eldest son of Noah. True, the
Jews have at no time adopted it as a national name. "Semitic" is of
comparatively recent date, an abstract word intended merely for
scientific classification, never meant for discrimination of any
portion of the Semitic races, or to become a hissing and a byword or a
mask for robbers of human rights and destroyers of human happiness.
The victims of this crusade are not a nameless horde for whom a
designation had to be coined; they are known to history for three
thousand years as Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and they have no mind to
exchange these names for any other. But a new "Hep Hep" was wanted,
and so "Semites" was hauled from the world of books, disfigured, and
fastened upon the Jewish gabardine in noble emulation of the barbarism
of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a
bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of
fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar,
whether of low degree or high degree, worldly or ghostly.
The strangest thing, however, in this learned falsification is that
it should have succeeded so well with people calling themselves
Christians and clinging to that name often after they have given up
all its historic substance. Is Christianity not purely Semitic at the
core? Is it not based upon the Semitic conception of the relation
between man and his Creator? The great efforts to liberalize and
rationalize the Church which the last century witnessed, up to
Professor Harnack's recent attempt to sum up "Das Wesen des
Christenthums,"--what are all these but endeavors to free it from
foreign accretions and envelopments and to bring its Semitic character
into greater prominence?
It is the only Asiatic conception of religion that has subdued Europe
and America, and that still holds undisputed sway over all its diverse
nationalities. The very name which symbolizes to them all that is
noblest, purest, and most blessed, points to that source as
unfailingly as the needle of the compass to the poles. Harnack claims
that Christianity is not one religion amongst others, but _The
Religion_, the only one fulfilling all the conditions of its highest
ideal. The Being in whom that fulness of light was revealed,--was he
not a Semite of the Semites? Did he ever deny his origin? Christianity
means _Messianity_, and the whole idea of a Mashiach,--the anointed,
namely, anointed ruler,--is most intensely national and, therefore,
intensely Semitic,--from which indisputable fact it follows that the
loftiest conception of religion came to the world from that source.
Thence came the Bible,--the book of the world which has been
translated into every living tongue and dialect, and to the
elucidation of which hosts of scholars still devote their lives.
Painting, sculpture, music, poetry, have attempted their highest
flights under its inspiration. From countless pulpits its moral and
religious truths are expounded, week after week, and on every great
occasion of national significance,--in whatever part of Christendom it
may occur,--the Songs of Zion are awakened as the fittest expressions
of the prevailing sentiment. The Psalter is the most wonderful of
existing books,--at home alike in the palace of the king and the
cottage of the peasant, the inexhaustible theme of our masters of
music. Noeldeke, Protestant professor at the University of Strasburg,
one of the great lights of Semitic scholarship, declares that "by the
side of the Psalms all other religious hymns appear as pale imitations
merely." On that field were gathered the sheaves which a master hand
has wound together into the One Universal Prayer, in which all
Churches join with one accord. And the Universal Day of Rest,--that
one sure blessing of the laboring man,--whence did it come? What other
legislator had the divine audacity to make its observance one of the
foundation laws of his constitution, and to give it precedence, even
over all moral enactments?
Professor R.F. Grau of the conservative school of theology writes:--
"God is a living, holy, loving Being. He is not first and foremost to
be scientifically comprehended, but worshipped and revered in the
heart, and because He is such a Being, the Semites had to be chosen as
His apostles to the whole world. For they had a heart for Him in the
beginning.... The Semite has the religion of the Infinite, and as this
is the perfect religion, ... the Church, as the Community of Christ,
has sprung from the Semitic mustard seed, although at present myriads
of Indo-germanics dwell under the branches of the tree."
In the face of admissions like these by men who have a right to be
heard in the matter, and considering that the tree can never change
the nature of the root from which it sprang, the conclusion is not
unwarranted that "anti-Semitic" is a synonym for "anti-Christian."
Its success is due to the still persistent prejudice against the Jews
among so many Christians,--all their professions to the contrary
notwithstanding. And it continues for several reasons. One is its long
duration; it has lasted for ages and is ingrained in their feelings
and ideas. What if it be shown ever so clearly that it is unjust,
unreasonable, yea, even unchristian!--that will not materially change
the temper of the great masses of the people. The common man is rarely
swayed by the force of arguments; the power of a principle, so weighty
with the thinkers, is of no consequence to him. He belongs to the
material world, and to make good his place in it is the aim toward
which all his energies are bent. For things spiritual he has neither
time nor capacity. He is ruled by the sentiments which were implanted
in him in his youth and by his immediate surroundings. All thinking
must be done for him; all new ideas must be presented to him, as it
were, ready made and in tangible form. He does not push himself
forward, but must be led onward by hands that understand him and his
ways. But in this instance, his guides are not particularly anxious to
bring about a change for the better,--even if we suppose that they
consider the liberation from prejudice against the Jews a betterment.
They have their own theological difficulty to contend with. The Jews
are still unconverted, and the missions established and maintained for
the purpose of winning them over can show no better results now than
in the past. The chief controversy between the Church and Israel
stands to-day where it stood when it was first raised at Jerusalem
eighteen centuries ago. A judicial sentence of a court at Jerusalem
has grown into a pivotal point on which, as the Church declares, turns
the salvation of mankind for time and eternity; and if she is right,
the Jews must be wrong. Since that fatal occurrence, Christianity, in
one form or another, has conquered Europe and America, and has planted
outposts in almost every part of the earth, but has not been able to
subdue the Jew. Every conceivable means to make him surrender has been
tried, including that of the jailor and the executioner and all the
horrors that lie between them,--expulsion, pillage, social
degradation, impaling in ghettos, and what not--but in vain. The same
policy is continued to this day as far as the present more civilized
state of the Christians permits; but still in vain. So far are their
persecutors from having brought the Jews to their knees, that the
self-consciousness of the race, as a whole, has deepened; and their
advance in general culture enables them to measure swords,
intellectually, with their accusers and to give a reason for the faith
that is in them.
All the conditions of this interminable conflict are against them. In
numbers they are a vanishing minority, and still more weakened by
their dispersion over the face of the earth, unorganized, without any
ecclesiastical authority in their Church that could direct them or act
in their name. Every individual Jew must face the world's hostility
single-handed, and be, religiously, his own priest, his own pope.
Allies he has none, advocates of his cause are few and far between.
The favors of his friends are often more humiliating than the attacks
of his enemies. Still he holds his own, and if for the last century or
so he has carried on a reformation of his ancient rituals, he has done
so from his own initiative and in his own way, which is not that into
which it has been tried so long to force or to lure him. At the same
time a revival of Jewish literature has taken place which not only has
brought to light the long-forgotten treasures of the past, but has
shown the large part the Jews have in the general progress of mankind.
The ecclesia triumphant has no victory to record in this section of
her battlefields, and it is not in ordinary human nature frankly to
admit a defeat in such an unequal struggle. Only one had a right to
expect that a Church that claims to have regenerated the human race
and to have lifted the slave of his blind instincts into "the glorious
liberty of the children of God" would have risen superior to the
common weakness. Instead of that, almost throughout Christendom, the
crusade against the Jews is being preached and the policy of
repression loudly demanded.
On what ground? It is said that they dominate everywhere--in finance,
in law courts, in politics, in art, in literature, in the press, in
trade and manufacture. But how do they achieve this astounding feat?
How do the Jews succeed in so lording it over the immense majority? By
witchcraft? Is it by magic that a few bankers and brokers keep all
their competitors in subjugation and handle them at their will and to
their own profit? Is it by sorcery that they force their way to the
universities and academies? Are they in possession of secret formulas
by which they can direct the currents of trade at their will?
Recently, loud complaints were raised in several of the German state
parliaments that there were too many Jewish judges and lawyers in
their lands, and the governments were exhorted to put an end to the
scandal. No charges of incompetency or exploitation were raised
against the Hebrews that "handle the law." Only it was declared that
a Christian shrunk from taking an oath at the hand of a Jewish lawyer.
If this be so, how is it that the people go to them in numbers that
excite the envy of their non-Jewish colleagues? All the statements
about the alleged power of the Jews are ridiculous exaggerations,
trumped up to scare the imagination of the thoughtless, as has been
proved over and over again. But even reduced to their true measure,
they prove, not the possession of magic, but of soundness of mind, of
unimpaired energy, and of all the other needful conditions for
success, which the Jews have kept intact despite all the attempts made
to crush the unbelievers into the dust. The outcry against them is
their vindication; people do not fear weaklings, do not raise alarms
against perils which can be pushed aside by an effort of the will. The
few must own inherent sources of strength if the many resort to the
coward's weapon of lies and slander. And in this instance the
admission of the truth is an implied homage to the religion which the
victors in the unequal struggle profess and defend. For it is
indisputable that this is the source to which the formation of the
Jewish mind and heart must be attributed. Let me cite, for one proof,
the admission of the most persistent and most powerful oppressor of
the Jews, the procurator of the Russian synod. Half the number of all
Hebrews are subjects of Russia. They came under her dominion when she
conquered and incorporated the Polish provinces; they are kept there
under the most stringent laws, and life is made to them as burdensome
as possible. "The Pale" is a gigantic ghetto where the oldest form of
rabbinism prevails to this day. Yet the same fear of the superiority
of the Jewish mind haunts the government; it is the alleged reason for
practically closing up all the avenues of the higher education for
them. Only _three per cent_ of the total number of students are
admitted to the universities and to the technical schools. But more
than a hundred thousand common soldiers are drafted from the Jews
into the armies and sent to all parts of the gigantic empire, kept
there during the best part of their lives, without any prospect of
promotion, and often going only to die in the defense of territories
which, if they were civilians, they would not be permitted to enter.
The Russian Torquemada, not long ago, openly declared that not a
single Jew should be permitted to settle amongst the peasantry, even
within the Pale, because he would be the only sober man amongst a
population that cannot resist the temptations of strong drink. Strange
spectacle indeed! Men banished from places where they wish to live
because they are too good for their surroundings! forced to remain
where they can hardly eke out a miserable living. The question,
surely, is justified. How did that poverty-stricken mass of oppressed
people succeed in preserving its freedom from a national vice in a
country where its ancestors have dwelt for long generations? Can a
great virtue be maintained by sorcery? The common experience is that
of the poet--
"Misery doth bravest mind abate."
What but their religion made them proof against the arrows of a fate
which, for duration and cruelty, is without a parallel in history!
This conclusion is further corroborated by the fact that the same
virtue of sobriety characterizes them everywhere, and makes them an
object of envy to their non-Jewish neighbors,--nay, forces the honest
temperance advocate to hold them up before his Christian audiences as
examples to shame them into going and doing likewise; rather, let me
say, into staying at home and doing likewise. For one of the
witchcraft mysteries of Judaism is that its home is not in the church,
but that the church is in the home. The Jew's salvation is in nowise
dependent upon rabbi and synagogue, but upon wife and children. They
are his congregation to whom he ministers as priest in fulfilment of
the great charter word of dedication, "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom
of priests and a holy nation." The deepest roots of the Jewish faith
rest and are nourished in the domestic soil. The synagogue has nothing
to offer to the faithful which he cannot find in his own tent. Ten men
gathered together with a Sepher Tora (scroll of the Mosaic law) in
their midst, form a Kahal Hakodesh (sacred body). No man becomes a
drunkard with wife and children and aged parents near him for guardian
angels. The greatest difficulty the Jewish reformation has to face is
what to substitute for the old ceremonials where they have become
impracticable, and thus to preserve the essentially domestic character
of the ancient faith. Is it thinkable that the Jew would be less
objectionable to his surroundings were he to lose his sturdy horror of
intemperance, and thus "assimilate" more freely with his neighbors of
different faiths? It is not thinkable when we consider the great
efforts made by Christians everywhere to redeem their people from
their bondage to strong drink and the misery resulting from it. The
Jew is the _natural ally of the temperance advocates_; and if he is
not found in their ranks, it is simply because he never knew from
experience the need of that reformation.
And never will he know, as long as his passionate fondness for home
and his longing for family love abide within him. At present, this,
generally speaking, is still the case; the poorest and least
cultivated classes are not excepted; nay, just in that class it is one
of the most noteworthy features. If the uncouth immigrant from Eastern
Europe stoops to the lowest kinds of peddling, or, for a mere
pittance, wastes his life in the stifling sweatshop; if he is not very
scrupulous in his dealings with his transient patrons, and does not
hold city ordinances as inviolable as those of the "Shulchan Aruch"
(code of ceremonials), the central motive is his ever present thought
of his family; even when he has not yet scraped together enough
pennies to pay for their fare to the new home, they are constantly
with him in his mind. This is not offered as a defense for
over-reaching and cannot be allowed by a magistrate as a plea for
law-breaking; but it is offered to the unprejudiced reader in
compliance with Spinoza's golden rule: Human errors must not be
ridiculed and condemned, but _understood_. _Si duo faciunt idem, non
est idem._ This wise caution is the more to be heeded in the present
instance, as, from the same source, devotion to home life, springs
another fine feature of Jewry; go down in the scale as deep as you
may, they are an industrious, toilsome class of people, often turning
their narrow homes into workshops where old and young ply a handicraft
from early morn to the late evening hours. Hundreds of men and women,
arriving in this country after they have passed the middle life, learn
trades and work at them till their trembling hands can hold the tools
no longer or the light fades from their overstrained eyes. Among them
there are not a few that have seen better days at their native places,
or are deeply learned in the Law. They are quick in seizing the
secret of a successful trade of paying manufacture, and not rarely
better the instruction; a skill for which they are hated and despised
by their own aristocracy in the markets, and branded as spoilers of
every good thing as soon as it appears. If this aptitude and eagerness
for trade be a fault, the Christians have themselves to blame for it.
Even a superficial glance at the history of Israel proves that as long
as the people lived on their native soil, and could live out their own
lives, they showed neither skill nor desire for mercantile pursuits;
that their legislation, their religion, their poetry and prophesying,
and their ethical ideas presuppose a nation of shepherds and tillers
of the soil. For the great change in the ruling disposition of the
Jews, since their dispersion, those alone are responsible who now
reproach them for it. The first Christians were Jewish ploughmen and
herdsmen; the Apostles mostly Judæan peasants and fishermen. The
finest parables and similes in the speeches of Jesus are taken from
the peasants' occupation and experience. And even to this day
thousands of the scattered race are ready to seize again the plough
and the spade, if they are given a chance, and not a few have done so
even under the most disheartening conditions. The fact is, the pagan
Mercury proved a more merciful god to the Jews than the Christian
Jesus, as he was taught and practised by the mediæval Church. He
gloated over the sufferings of those who were of his own flesh and
blood. No wonder they sought refuge under the wings of the heathen
deity and became adepts in the art which he symbolized.
But suppose it were true that all the Jews dote on traffic as their
dearest occupation,--what of it? The British have the nickname of "a
nation of shopkeepers" fastened on them; yet they were and are the
greatest benefactors of the human race, carrying the blessings of
civilization to half the peoples of the globe. Commerce has done more
for the peace of the world than all the preaching, praying, and
prophesying taken together. A great railroad, a steamship line, a
cable or a telephone wire, a commercial treaty, a tariff
convention,--these are the modern bonds that hold the remotest parts
of the earth together, and make them equally abhor war and its
ravages. A falling off in the exports, a shrinking of the value of
investments, an unforeseen competitor in the markets of the world,
cause the rulers of the most civilized nations more anxiety than any
adverse political combination. For the former threaten the peace and
welfare of the home life of the people, on whose contentment they rely
for the defense of their claims in all their political intricacies. A
class of people credited with the mastery of the art of buying and
selling should, therefore, be welcome to every country and given the
amplest freedom and encouragement to ply their skill, provided, of
course, they do not carry their hoarded profits out of the country and
enrich other nations by them. But where do the Jews think of such a
thing? Their own country, if Palestine may still be so denominated, is
one of the poorest in the world, and what little revival there has
lately been perceptible is due to the colonies established there by
Jewish peasants who, under most trying conditions, labor to restore
the soil to its ancient fertility, after the long sleep into which it
has sunk. Jewish wealth can be enjoyed, and is being enjoyed, in no
other way than non-Jewish. Its owners are charged by its religious
teachers with being only too willing to imitate the luxuries and
extravagances of their neighbors. The same snares are spread for the
feet of their offspring as for those of Gentile birth; the tempters
that lie in wait for them are liberal enough to ignore distinctions
between the various creeds. I will not stoop to any defense of my race
from the vulgar charge that they are cheaters; that each and all will
always try, right or wrong, to secure the best of any bargain into
which a poor Gentile may enter with them. Those whom the commercial
standing of the Jews, here and elsewhere, has not yet cured of this
slanderous prejudice will not be converted by my pleading. Envy is an
incurable disease; jealousy makes blind, and the common saying is
surely true, that none are so blind as those who will not see. But
neither have I the least desire to hide or gloss over our real
failings and shortcomings. Those who cannot rest on their own real
merits and accept the blame for their undeniable demerits must not
dare to challenge the judgment of the world. The Jew does dare it, and
all he asks of his critics is fairness, impartiality, justice. What I
have said to his praise and for his defense was intended solely to
assist the fairminded reader in forming a just opinion of an agitation
which in Europe embitters, cripples, and darkens thousands of lives,
which, under better treatment, would be spent in contentment and
general usefulness.
It is for this purpose only that I will briefly add two more traits of
the Jews, equally valuable and undeniable. One is their charity; they
care for their poor, their sick, their aged, if destitute, as the
numerous institutions prove, found in every place where they dwell in
sufficient number to maintain them. Ungrudgingly they assume the heavy
burdens which this "exclusiveness" imposes upon them. Blame them for
it who may; the right-minded will not, especially when assured that
this feeling of pity is not the privilege of the well-to-do among them
only. The working classes have always something to spare from their
scanty earnings for "Z'dakah," the religious term in common use for
charity, which, significantly enough, in biblical Hebrew means
"justice." The idea that charity is an essential part of worship has
been bred into them by long tradition, and continues to be regarded as
such, wherever rabbinical Judaism survives in full force. From
childhood every Jew knows the saying of Simon the Just, one of the
last men of the Great Synagogue:--
"The whole world rests on these three pillars;
Law, Worship, and Charity."
The other trait is their zeal in the education of their children.
One of the standard objections to the Hebrews is their "forwardness";
socially, it is a disagreeable and annoying fault, but otherwise a
gift of no little value. Forwardness is the soul of all progress and
advancement. Call it that, call it self-help, call it energy, call it
self-reliance, call it by the popular name of wide-awakeness, and you
transfigure the fault into a merit. How the Jew was able to preserve
it in any one of its forms is one of the many miracles of his history,
seeing that the world has left nothing untried to cast the Jews
backward to the last depth of self-despair. An exhibition of his
forwardness might be seen at the doors of the public schools in the
lower districts of the city, notably at the time of admission of new
pupils. The poorest of the Jewish fathers and mothers would be seen
wrangling for the registration of their little ones, as if it were for
their daily bread. And may this not also serve for a proof that the
parents are willing to surrender their offspring to the influence of
these schools, and see them thoroughly Americanized?
* * * * *
By these signs ye shall know the Jews, wherever ye find them; they
may, therefore, be called racial. In every other respect they are
neither better nor worse than other people of the corresponding stages
of life. Every variety of character is found among them; virtue and
vice are distributed among them. Let Americans not stigmatize them as
"undesirable immigrants," and close their hospitable gate upon them.
They bring with them qualities which are an ample compensation for
their defects, and their well-to-do brethren are not behindhand in
seeing to it that they become no public burden. The American people
have repeatedly shown the door to those who came hither for the
purpose of preaching anti-Semitism, thereby publicly testifying that
they would have none of that disgrace to our age. What exists of it
in social life is not worth arguing against. It will and must
disappear in a country, the civil order of which is based upon the
principle of equal rights to all law-abiding citizens, to whatever
race or religion they may belong. "A fair field and no favor." This
good old saying comprises all our demands.
* * * * *
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Max Simon Nordau and Gustav Gottheil
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