Zionism and Anti-Semitism

by Max Simon Nordau; Gustav Gottheil

"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:—