The Jewish people are fully familiar with acts of brutality, with the Red Terror, familiar from long-past experience and from present experience in Bolshevist Russia, together with all the other nations inhabiting that unhappy territory. But the hands of the Jewish masses, of all the classes of the Jewish people, are not stained with this blood. We have not heard, and we believe that we shall never hear, of any act of terror committed by any masses of Jews led either by Jews or by non-Jews.
Let the Jewish Bolsheviki stand accused and condemned of their guilt like their compatriots of other nationalities, but there must be no room for generalization and wholesale accusation when the people as a whole are guiltless and where millions, permeated by a powerful cohesive force of an ancient culture organically foreign to the spirit of violence and vandalism, stand apart from a few individual persons.
Quite similar to the foregoing is a Memorandum addressed by the Council of the Vladivostok Jewish Community to the Russian people. The concluding paragraphs of this address seem to me to be a complete and crushing refutation of the monstrous calumny that is being so assiduously spread among our people:
In the present historic movement the Council of the Jewish Community of Vladivostok deems it its sacred civil duty to come forward with the following protest. The Council declares that: (1) The many millions of the Russian Jewry reject every responsibility for the crimes committed against Russia by a small group of Jewish renegades who have nothing in common with the Jews and have long since broken off all connections with them, such as Bronstein-Trotzky, Nakhamkes-Steklov, Apfelbaum-Zinoviev, Joffe, Kamenev, and others connected with Bolshevism, just as the Russian, Lettish, Polish, Georgian, Armenian, and other nationalities cannot be held to answer for the deeds and misdeeds of Bolshevist leaders who were born in their midst. (2) The Russian Jewry, as a whole, is warmly and sincerely devoted to the interests of Russia, its motherland, and has struggled and is still struggling for the regeneration of the Russian state, and is heartily interested, together with all the other peoples inhabiting Russia, in the speediest overthrowing of Bolshevism and the reconstruction of orderly life in Russia. The Russian Jews have lost over one hundred thousand of their brothers and sons in killed and wounded in the war with Germany. Thousands of Jews are found at present in the ranks of the armies of Admiral Kolchak and of General Denikin. (3) Bolshevism has ruined hundreds of thousands of Jewish merchants, business men, artisans, and men in various enterprises, and has completely destroyed the entire population of the Northwestern Territories. Thousands of Jewish families have been deported from Soviet Russia and are now dragging out a miserable existence as refugees in Siberia, in the Ural region, and in the border cities.
The Soviet government has shot and is still shooting Jewish public men, lawyers, engineers, physicians, and workmen who have participated in the struggle against the Soviet rule. In the near future there will be published documents and irrefutable facts revealing the number of Jewish lives and the billions of Jewish wealth that have perished during the past two years in the struggle with Bolshevism.
The Vladivostok Jewish Community protests to the Russian public opinion and to the honest and independent Russian press against the falsehoods, insinuations, and calumnies directed against the Jewish people in such profusion by the enemies of humanity and the state.
In view of such facts as these, is it reasonable to suppose that Bolshevism is a pro-Jewish conspiracy? Is it less than ridiculous to suggest that the system which has reduced hundreds of thousands of Jews to abject poverty, broken up thousands of Jewish homes and families, confiscated billions of Jewish wealth, imprisoned thousands of prominent Jews, and murdered numerous others, is part of a Jewish conspiracy? Surely, every intelligent person must see that any such conspiracy must necessarily require, as the first condition of its success, a degree of racial solidarity never yet attained by any people at any time in the history of the world. That solidarity could only be obtained by assuring to the Jews their complete exemption from the suffering and oppression imposed upon the non-Jewish population. Had there been any thought of securing the solidarity of the Jewish people of Russia against the non-Jewish population, it would have been effectively thwarted by the imposition of such burdens of poverty and suffering upon the Jews, and their resulting resentment. Not the smallest particle of evidence has ever yet been adduced to show that the Jews in Russia have been exempted from any of the oppressive features of Bolshevism. As Mr. Wells reminds us, the Bolsheviki have suppressed the Hebrew language, the historic language of Judaism, to preserve which Jews in all lands and during many centuries have made such vast sacrifices. Do we need any further evidence?
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The full account of this eyewitness appeared in the Odesskiya Novosti, September 27, 1919.