CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW
AN IMPARTIAL MEDIUM FOR THE DISSEMINATION OF JEWISH
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NOVEMBER 16 1923 VOLUME V. NUMBER 3
"HEP, HEP, JUDEN HERAUS!"
Spinoza once wrote, "The heaviest burden that man can lay upon us is not that they persecute us with their hatred and their scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls." These words came to mind when we reflected on some of the statements contained in an editorial on "German anti-Semitism," in the Toronto Globe of last week. One of the statements reads as follows:
"In several countries on the Continent nationalism has taken a strong and anti-Semitic bent and the lot of the Jews has become one of new hardships and insecurities. In part it (anti-Semitism) is the price they pay for their refusal to become assimilated and for their determination to preserve their racial identity in all circumstances."
The same editorial deals with another reason for the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe, namely, "that the Jews ate admittedly the brains of the Communist movement in Germany as in Russia and elsewhere."
There is, on the very surface of these two contentions a self-evident contradiction. On the one hand the Jews are accused of being racialists of the most narrow and unassirailating kind, whilst on the other they are charged with being the most extreme kind of cosmopolites. For that is what Communism implies. Communism is the very antithesis to the distinctions, not alone of economic classes, but of all racial, national and religious differences. Communists are the most radical kind of assimilators. They would merge all the little ponds of mankind into one big ocean of human uniformity and homogenity.
If Jewrs are hated and persecuted because they are the arch type of assimilators, then how can they be charged with "refusing to become assimilated and for their determination to preserve their racial identity in all circumstances." On the other hand, if the latter statement is true, then how is its opposite true, "it is admitted that Jews are the brains of the Communist movement in Germany as in Russia and elsewhere," since these statements are mutually exclusive and contradictory rather than inclusive and synonymous?
Communism and narrow racialism are extreme forms of social philosophy and as such they undoubtedly have adherents among some Jews who are extremists. But the mass of Jews being like the mass of other nationalities are not to be found at either extreme. If people could only learn to think o Jew*, as just human beings, whose fundamental nature is neither better nor worse than other peoples, then the devil myths which are so current about the Jews would have a short existence. It is strange how the world insists on making Jews out to be something that they are not. The mass of Jews, like the mass of other peoples, become very largely what
Canada and the United States, where the Jew i* * free ckuen, he readily assimilates all that ts best as well as all that is worst in his neighbors. In fact the Jew haft a genius for assimilation. Why reiterate what the Jew has contributed to all brancjhea of life: and culture in these countries, when it is already so well known, and so readily available to those who would only open their eyes, and,know?
In countries like Poland and present-day Getmany, where even the native-born Jew, whose ancestors' have lived there longer, iri many instances, than the ancestors of the present inhabitants, is denied the elementary rights of free citizenship, and is hounded and hunted like ari alien beast in a foreign jungle, is there any wonder that the. Jew draws into his shell? It is natural in the animal and human, species for those who are attacked to protect themselves in the manner best known to them; in fact, in the event of a life and death atruggle, the body is known to produce hidden reservoirs of power with which to ward off the blows of the enemy. In central Europe the Jew is fighting for recognition of minority group rights, against the greatest odds, because the Government is so constituted that it recognizes not the individual but the ethnic groups to which he belongs, and every person in the State is entitled to those rights that his group is permitted.
In a sense we have a parallel, though not an identical, situation in Canada, where the law grants to Catholics and French-Canabdians certain privileges, such as the maintenance of separate schools, and recognition of the French language. Would it occur to anyone in this country to say that the insistence on, their rights by French-Canadian Catholics and their refusal to surrender these rights and assimilate with, let us say, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant group, is warrant for pogroms, riots, expulsions, and excesses on the French-Canadian, such as are breaking over the head of Jews in Eastern Europe and now in Germany? Anyone in Canada who dared so bold and erratic a move would be put under lock and bar and judged insane. Yet this very insistence by the Jew in Eastern Europe is regarded as legitimate warrant for anti-Semitic outbreaks.
The anti-Semitic movement in Germany and Eastern Europe and now in the U.S.A. does not have its real cause in the erroneous and lying claims that the Jews refuse to assimilate or that they are Communists. These are only the superficial reasons that are given to throw sand in the eyes of the ignorant masses. The real reasons are to be found firstly in the need of a scapegoat. The utter dis-allusionment and hopelessness that followed from the war has given rise to the need of having someone to blame for the utter fiasco of it all. The masses of people of whom Tennyson so well said, "TheirV not to reason why, their's but to do and die," are awaking out of their war stupor. They know that someone has blundered and they are thirsting for the blood of revenge. Those junkers, royalists and reactionaries responsible in Germany and elsewhere for the war, anxious to save their own skins, are cleverly steering the hungry, enraged masses from their own hearth and pointing to the Jew. The ignorant masses are revenging themselves by crucifying an innocent people who like one of their sons was crucified 1890 years ago; the only difference being that he whom the Christian world worships was crucified only once, whereas his people have been continuously crucified, oftentimes in his name, for 1900 years. The Jews in every era of history, especially in the reaction following every war, have been the world's scapegoats, even as we are that scapegoat to-day.
There is still another motive for present-day anti-Semitism, and that is the economic fear of the Jew because, as the grocer in Galsworthy's Loyalties puts it, IMe gets on so well." The economic success with which Jewish enterprise is meeting is a bone in the throat of the Gentile world, which, because of their unwillingness to swallow, is choking them into a rage of stupid and useless hate and jealousy. As well try to sweep the ocean away with a broom as to hope to kill the Jew by anti-Semitism, and the sooner the Gentile world learns this simple historical lesson, the better for all concerned. And last but not least, the motive par excellence of anti-Semitism is the basic difference in moral, ethical and spiritual outlook between the Jewish and Gentile worlds.
At this time when our people in Germany are passing through the worst forms of anti-Semitism that we have experienced in that country in a century and a half, and our brethren in the United States are' contending with the K.K.KL, we are inclined to agree with Mr. Louis Marshall, who, in his presidential address before the American Jewish Committee, expressed the hope that with the spread of genuine moral enlightenment the Gentile world may experience a change in attitude towards the Jew. It is to say the least comforting so tn IxUif-.ve,