The famous fifty-second chapter of Isaiah with its marvelous conception of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, is again a picture of the Jewish people, persecuted and oppressed, but finding its purpose and its compensation in its religious message, which in the Messianic age was to convince and to overawe the world.
Perhaps I can best summarize this view in the words of Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, whose “Israel among the Nations” some thirty years ago marked a new treatment of the Jewish question by a Christian writer. This book contains a chapter on the Psychology of the Jew, in which he develops the idea of the influence of the milieu on the Jewish character:
[115]The Jew has kept his energy, but he has kept it within him, out of sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and masked beneath humility.... Deprived of the weapons of the strong, he resorted to the devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery and deceit.... Unable to command respect for his frail personality, the Jew took refuge in a collective pride; he was proud of his people, his religion, and his God. Never has he lost faith in the superiority of Israel.... This explains why for centuries they were able to bear such a burden of contempt without breaking down beneath its weight. The mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not broken; it remained intact, ready to be set in motion again on the day of deliverance. Bowed as he was, the Jew was always ready for the time of upraising.
5.
The various theories and groupings of Jewry today may be regarded from the viewpoint of responses to the total environment, of which anti-Semitism is one of the important factors. On this basis neither Zionism nor reform Judaism can be regarded directly as a reply to anti-Semitism, but both are this among other things, for both are modes of response to the environment, with its Jewish and its non-Jewish factors. Two such responses are religious—the orthodox and the reform; two are racial and national—the assimilationist and the Zionist. From another standpoint, two are modes of adjustment to the environment—assimilation and reform; two are modes of resistance to the environment—Zionism and orthodoxy. Or, more precisely, assimilation is a racial adjustment to the non-Jewish environment; reform Judaism a religious adjustment; Zionism is a racial and national resistance to the environment; and orthodoxy a religious resistance. Obviously, the four are not unrelated, but many individuals adopt more than one of them as guides in various fields of thought and behavior.
Assimilation of the Jew to his environment, which involves abandonment of the group life, is an individual, not a group response. It attracts individuals in considerable numbers from the extreme right and left wings of American Jewry, from the very wealthy who may adopt Christianity for social distinction, and from the proletarians who adopt an international economic and political theory. It cannot be a group response because if great masses of Jews were to join any other church, or any other national or social grouping, they would do it as Jews still—we would then have churches of Hebrew Christians, or a Jewish wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia), but not the absorption in the environment which the assimilationist considers the solution of the Jewish problem. One point is true in the assimilationist theory—if there were no Jewish group, there would be no anti-Semitism. It is equally true that if there were no groups of human beings, there would be no intolerance. But such a condition is impossible. Man is a social being, and the tradition, the ideals, and the life of his own group hold him too firmly to be escaped except by the smallest minority.
[116]Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and the radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Intermarriage, the biological side of assimilation, is actually going on now, but to a much smaller extent among the Jews than among any other immigrant group in America. Drachsler worked out the proportion of intermarriages among 100,000 marriages in New York City of all races, and found that approximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among all white groups, however, the Jews presented the smallest proportion of intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than half of 1 per cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among German Jews, and 6.5 per cent. among French Jews. The age-old tradition against marriage outside of the group, together with the anti-Semitic spirit without, have conspired to prevent this type of assimilation even now. And while the second generation of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages than the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for a more assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews, the difference between first and second generations is much less marked.
The directly opposite theory to assimilation is Zionism, the attempt to revive Jewish group life in the ancient homeland of the Jew, to restore the Hebrew tongue, erect a Jewish educational system, Jewish culture, and Jewish agriculture and industry as well. The connection of this movement with anti-Semitism is evident from its origin in the mind of Theodore Herzl, a Viennese correspondent in Paris, directly after he had observed the Dreyfus case, and his whole Weltanshauung was thereby transformed. Zionism is the same answer to the problems of internationalism and civilization that we see in all the new nationalities of Europe, in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland. It has achieved a measure of success that is really astonishing in view of the slight resources and organization behind it. At the same time, it makes no pretension toward furnishing an eventual home for all the Jewish people, especially not for those of the United States and other lands of freedom. Zionism aims to save the persecuted Jews by finding for many of them a shelter; it aims, moreover, to solve the double problem of anti-Semitism and the inferiority complex by giving the Jewry of the world a source of pride in the form of a national home. To many thinkers this seems the only answer under present conditions.
Friedman’s whole thesis is that Zionism is the logical and final solution.
[117]The conflict between the Jew and his environment must be eliminated. By what means may this aim be reached? Either the incongruous elements must be removed or else they must be made compatible. [118]Only in their historic land where the Jews will be in the majority, where they can without fear of peculiarity assert their culture, is a Jewish mode of life possible. [119]Zionism at bottom is an attempt to preserve the remnant of Israel, that will make of Palestine its home. It alone promises to save the Jewish people, when the processes of assimilation, now at work in Western Europe and in the United States, shall extend to a liberalized Eastern Europe. [120]The Jew today is a bundle of conflicts. Not only does he in the present dispersed state suffer from the external, objective and social anti-Semitism, but also from an internal, subjective and psychological slavery. The Zionist insists on the maintenance of Jewish distinctiveness, of Jewish personality.