All in a Life-time

by Henry Morgenthau; French Strother

“Here I am carrying your letter, and am still giving attention to your scheme.”

I still think that a corporation of that kind would have put Poland on her feet.

The time now approached for our Commission’s departure. Our investigations were ended, our work was done. We considered our final decision.

There was no question whatever but that the Jews had suffered; there had been shocking outrages of at least a sporadic character resulting in many deaths, and still more woundings and robberies, and there was a general disposition, not to say plot, of long standing, the purpose of which was to make the Jews uncomfortable in many ways: there was a deliberate conspiracy to boycott them economically and socially. Yet there was also no question but that some of the Jewish leaders had exaggerated these evils.

There, too, were malevolent, self-seeking mischiefmakers both in the Jewish and Polish press and among the politicians of every stripe. Jews and non-Jews alike started out with the presumption that there could be no reconciliation. Our Commission had to deal with people, most of whom could not conceive of the possibility of disinterested regard for their welfare. Their experiences with the Russian courts had taught them always to over-state the facts and when one realizes that there is a conflict of testimony, and in most of them perjury is committed, it made us quite patient when we found them just a little less truthful than our American litigants.

We found that, among the Jews, there was a thoughtful, ambitious minority, who, sincere in their original motives, intensified the trouble by believing that its solution lay only in official recognition of the Jew as a separate nationality. They had seized on Zionism as a means to establish the Jewish nation. To them, Zionism was national, not religious; when questioned, they admitted that it was a name with which to capture the imagination of their brothers whose tradition bade them pray thrice daily for their return to the Holy Land.

Pilsudski, in a moment of diplomatic aberration, had said that the Jews made a serious error in forcing Article 93; quoting that utterance, these Nationalists now asserted that neither the Polish Government, nor the Roumanian for that matter, ever would carry out the spirit of the Treaty concessions, and so they aimed at nothing short of an autonomous government and a place in the family of nations. Meanwhile, they wanted to join the Polish nation in a federation having a joint parliament where both Yiddish and Polish should be spoken: their favourite way of expressing it was to say that they wanted something like Switzerland where French, German, and Italian cantons work together in harmony.

Unfortunately, they disregarded the facts in the case. In Switzerland, generally speaking, the citizens of French language live in one section, those of German language in another, and so on, whereas these aspiring Nationals, of course, wanted the Jews to continue scattered throughout Poland. They wanted this, and yet wanted them to have a percentage of representation in Parliament equal to their percentage in the entire Polish nation! Finally, they took no account of the desires of the Orthodox Jews, who form about 80 per cent. of their number, who were content to remain in Poland and suffer for their religion if necessary, and whom the Polish politicians were already coddling and beginning to organize politically as a vote against the Nationalist-Zionists.

The leaders of these Nationalist-Zionists were capable and adroit, but they were like walking delegates in the labour unions, who had to continue to agitate in order to maintain their leadership, and their advocacy of a state-within-the-state was naturally resented by all. It was quite evident that one of the deep and obscure causes of the Jewish trouble in Poland was this Nationalist-Zionist leadership that exploited the Old Testament prophecies to capture converts to the Nationalist scheme.

Here, then, was Zionism in action. We had seen it at first hand in Poland. I returned home fearful that, owing to the extensive propaganda of the Zionists, the American people might obtain the erroneous impression that a vast majority of the Jews—and not, as it really was, only a portion of the 150,000 Zionists in the United States—had ceased considering Judaism as a religion and were in danger of conversion to Nationalism.